I think it's time to have another
discussion about the Black Widow character from the Marvel Cinematic
Universe, and some uncomfortable truths she reveals about the more
progressive side of geek culture. (Possible Avengers 2 spoilers
below.)
Now anyone who follows my internet
persona AT ALL knows that I am a pretty darn big fan of the entire
media experiment known as the MCU, and that has always included
Scarlett Johanssen's portrayal of Natasha Romanov. Like Hawkeye,
Black Widow represents what seems to be an anomaly, a highly trained,
but still undeniably human, member of a team that includes a super
soldier, a rage monster, super-high tech armor, and an actual god.
But unlike Jeremy Renner's Hawkeye, Black Widow also is an anomaly in
another way as the only woman on the team. This was naturally always
going to make hers a character that would be placed under the
microscope of pop culture scrutiny, but sometimes I wonder if that
same scrutiny doesn't sometimes say more about us than it does what
her character represents.
Now before I get started I do want to
point out that this is NOT some kind of “oh, don't point that
critical lens at things I like!” rant. The MCU has some definite
problems, with a glaring lack of diversity being at the top of the
list. However, I do sometimes worry if our habit of dissecting more
diverse characters doesn't add to the problem, and it's something we
should really think about as both DC and Marvel prepare to broaden
their cast lists with Wonder Woman, Captain Marvel, and Black Panther
all about to make their debuts.
Ok, so back to Natasha. She's up
against a LOT in these movies, and I'm not just talking about
Chitauri bad guys. With no powers to speak of beyond expert level
assassin training (more on that later) and all the above mentioned
super-powered teammates she has, it would have been ridiculously easy
for her to fall into the role of victim in waiting, or to even vanish
from the movie. She is also played by Scarlett Johannsen, a
legendarily beautiful woman even by Hollywood standards. While this
is no doubt an aid in gaining roles, there is also a flip side of
that coin, with many people refusing to take her seriously simply
because she IS beautiful, and historically we have known that in a
big budget action piece like Avengers, a beautiful woman is almost
certain to play the role of damsel/eye-candy.
The fact that she HASN'T fallen into
that cliché makes her all the more interesting. In each of her
outings it is made more and more clear that any sexual behavior on
the part of Romanov is a stunt, designed to get men to be a bit more
stupid so she can do what she needs to do, and with each movie that
comes out she has been sexualized less, as we her less and less from
the perspective of those she is conning to the perspective of
teammates and friends. In fact, based on revelations from the second
Avengers movie I am starting to think that she may actually be
asexual. We'll get back to that.
So how has she done under the
scrutiny of the modern movie watching audience? Not too badly, as it
turns out, all the way up until Avengers 2. It's taken awhile for the
MCU to seriously turn up on the non-geek critical radar, but after
the mega-hit that was the Avengers and the surprise thoughtfulness of
Captain America 2 (both which starred Scarjo as BW in HIGHLY
important roles) the shield of “just Summer Schlock” has passed,
and the sole important female superhero (you're not there yet,
Scarlet Witch) currently in the cinema was bound to get more than a
once-over.
These are the things that our more
progressive critics have revealed about themselves in discussions of
Avengers 2 in general, and BW's character in it in particular.
1- We don't always watch the movies.
I
suppose we should have seen this coming. People who have managed not
to be particularly aware of the MCU up to this point are likely those
for whom it was never going to appeal for reasons having more to do
with taste than the treatment of women within them. And yet, I read
one review (linked, at least for a time, on the film's wikipedia
page) deriding the movie as just “action and boobs.”
Now,
as a pretty darn hetero guy it isn't exactly a point of pride to say
that had their been any gratuitous viewing of boobs or even cleavage
in the movie I probably would noticed. I honestly can't recall any.
Like I said above, the sexualization of the BW character has grown
progressively less with each movie. There is no “just out of the
shower” scene, no “pulling on the tight jeans” moment. (If you
want one, there is one, but it belongs to Chris Hemsworth's Thor
character, whose adonis like physique will show up like clockwork in
nearly any appearance.)
This was a weak attempt at
sight-unseen criticism. And to be fair, in most action movies with an
actress like Scarjo, likely a fair assumption to make. But as anyone
who has watched her character progression as the MCU has gone on can
tell you, Black Widow seems to be the exception to the rule.
2-
We focus on buzz words, not context.
We all have seen the uproar about the
comments of Chris Evans and Jeremy Renner on the press junket tour,
where they supposedly “slut-shamed” the BW character for sleeping
with yet another Avenger. And yeah, out of context, WHEW! Those are
some crazy bad statements. At first I just figured it was the long
press-junket tour wearing on them, but the more I think about it, the
more I think they were trolling their interviewers.
Yeah, BW
has appeared in many of these movies and developed relationships with
Iron Man, Captain America, Hawkeye and now Bruce Banner. But as
anyone who has watched the films can attest, not a single one of
those relationships were sexual in nature, and up until Banner none
were even romantic. She was spying on Tony Stark, a friendly ally to
Steve Rogers (even repeatedly trying to set him up on dates) and a
close friend with Hawkeye (even having one of his children named for
her.)
And yet, in every movie where she stars, what do
reporters and geek bloggers ask about her? Are they dating? Do they
kiss? Who does she love more and why? You can see hours worth of
these interviews and the script never seems to change. It's like
Renner and Evans are a couple of guys going; “For crying out loud,
how many times do we have to say that WE ARE JUST FRIENDS!” and
finally deciding to troll the questions when they're asked. Given how
tight the cast reportedly is, it wouldn't surprise me, in the least,
if they were irritated on her behalf.
But they used the word
“Slut.” And our reaction was predictable, despite the fact that,
given every available ounce of context, the word had to be sarcastic.
Because if truly meant, it's WILDLY inaccurate. This was a
condemnation of the way these movies are reported when a woman like
Scarlett Johanssen is involved, and rather than joining them in that
condemnation, we jumped on the buzz word.
3- We build up new heroes by tearing down old ones, even when old ones are in short supply.
A great example of this exists in another Disney property... the Princess Franchise. Remember when Frozen came out? Suddenly Tumblr, Pinterest, and the whole blogosphere were all awash with what an "empowered woman" Elsa was. But that wasn't enough. She had to be the "first" empowered Disney woman, for some reason, and suddenly every other "princess" was held up, scrutinized, and found wanting. Here was the REAL woman to look up to! Thing is... why? Ariel was pretty tough in her movie, even if she was boy crazy. Don't even get me started on Mulan and Merida. And yet, for some reason, for Elsa to be the true empowered woman, we felt the need to tear down those she would be compared to.
I adored Agent Carter as did most who watched it. And yeah, she's a game changer for the series. Hopefully Jessica Jones will follow suit in her new series. But it sometimes seems like the first person they have defeat is not their rogues gallery, but Black Widow. And since we want them to be great, the best, we tear her down.
In a time of High Superhero saturation in culture, there is a depressing lack of female heroes. But unless we can learn to value the new ones in ways other than lining them up in continuous comparison to their forebears, there will always seem like there was only one. It's okay to like someone more than Black Widow, obviously. But that doesn't mean you have to say she was just a sex symbol in order to do so.
4- We say we want complex female
characters. When given them, we freak out.
Let's get to the big one, shall we? In
Avengers 2, Black Widow exhibits a strong romantic attraction to
Bruce Banner/Hulk, a feeling that is, apparently, reciprocated. And
at one point in the movie Banner is there to rescue her from
captivity. The buzzword police were set off again and the shouts of a
strong character being “destroyed” began.
But was she? Black Widow has, to this
point, been the most functionally invincible of the Avengers. She
lacks the powers of some of her teammates, but choose a SINGLE
opponent she has gone up against and been found wanting. In Iron Man
2 she cons a super genius with little difficulty, and finds said
genius' rival and hacks into his systems with no apparent difficulty.
In Avengers she takes out a squad of Russian Gangsters while tied up,
goes head to head with the Viking God of Mischief in a battle of wits
and wins, takes out Hawkeye in a straight up fight, and is the one
who figures out a way to actually stop the infinite army coming out
of the portal. She takes on the Winter Soldier in Captain America 2
with zero hesitation and pulls a called draw, holding him off for
about as long as Captain America himself does. She's tough, she's
capable, she's badass.
But as an another article pointed out,
“strong and capable” is not a character, it's an archtype. A
cutout. Every other Avenger, at some point, gets knocked down and is
unable to get up on their own, and these are the true character
moments for characters defined by their strength. Eventually, in
order to really be a character, Natasha was going to meet something
she couldn't just handle on her own. She's never helpless (even when
imprisoned by Ultron, she manages to let the team know where she is
and, in so doing, where Ultron is) but in the end someone was going
to have to open her cage, and that someone got to be Bruce Banner.
Can we talk about that relationship for
a second? Of all the available Avengers (a bunch of darn good looking
guys, you might notice) she goes for the quieter of the geniuses and,
also, the one who can't have sex. (Did you forget that part? In the
Incredible Hulk, Banner starts to have sex with old flame Betty Ross
when his heartrate jumps and he has to stop for fear of Hulking right
then and there.)
She also, when making herself vulnerable to
Banner, reveals her biggest personal shame. Not that she murdered a
helpless person as a young girl, not the violence that has defined
her entire life, but that, in order to graduate her training, she
“volunteered” to have her uterus removed. This choice haunts her,
makes her wonder if she is even a real person anymore. Again, it's not her infertility that haunts her, but that she CHOSE it for the right to murder people. It was a
beautiful, moving, and painful character moment, a moment involving
regret of a woman who, as a rule, regrets nothing. A moment roundly panned both for her
being “damseled” by Banner and for not representing a proud push
forward for fertility rights. BW's writers finally assumed that they
had established her competence sufficiently to allow her to be a real
character. And apparently they were wrong.
Do you see why this is frustrating to
me? It's also worrying, because with the coming Wonder Woman,
Captain Marvel, and Black Panther movies, the world of comic book
movies will be attempting more diversity than they ever have before
in such a short time frame. I am as worried as anyone else that they
won't be handled well... there are a LOT of mistakes to be made in
the handling of such characters. But I also worry about the other
side.
What if we are presented with powerful,
flawed characters, but get too antsy with our progressive microscope
and nitpick them to death? No one complained that Iron Man's
character was destroyed when he was unequivocally saved from death by
the Hulk in the first Avengers. No one felt the need to put a
definitive status on Steve Rogers ambiguous love life outside of the
movies.
So what happens when movies who are
riding on characters that break that white guy mold are put up to the
same scrutiny? If they are done well, but still get panned by critics
who were too lazy, too buzz word driven, or too reactionary to
realize it, do the movie producers then say, “Well, crap, we tried
to make that crowd happy, and see where it got us? Back to the safe
white guy stuff.”
The Marvel Cinematic Universe is perhaps
the most social savvy product of our day, built around fan obsession
and reaction. Our opinions matter. Should these movies be solid
outings, then we need for them to succeed so that we will get more.
Make no mistake, the entertainment world will be watching, waiting to
see if the world of characters from pulp stands can be among the
first to truly offer a diverse view of the world, not just in terms
of gender but of race, nationality, and perhaps even sexuality.
I even think they have a good chance of sticking the landing. The MCU has its stumbles, but it's treatment of women from Black Widow to Agent Carter has been pretty darned solid. I just worry that even if they do
succeed, despite all the history that says they won't, the same media
that should be celebrating it will be too busy nit-picking to notice.
