As a casual nat stan, i feel a little bit weirded out the amount of genuine smiling throughout the snippets i've seen--to the point where i thought it was uncharacteristic. Not that i think nat is incapable of basic human emotions, but i guess i'm used to her being so stoic? Weirdly, her stoicness is what drawn me to her bcs i too am a very guarded person. How do you think the film portray her in this department?
I have been sitting on this one since before the movie came out because I couldn't figure out how to answer it in a way that wasn't spoilery.
Let's gooooo.
I am ALSO seriously into Nat's guardedness. I think that media very rarely knows what to do with women who aren't either great at emotions or complete robots, and in past movies Natasha has given us just enough to show that she's neither. And Nat's reliance on performativity, in particular, has always worked for me; I grew up with the belief that you have to behave in certain ways for people to accept you, and seeing characters get emotional with very little provocation makes me actively uncomfortable as a viewer, like I'm seeing something private I shouldn't.
Nat's emotions in this movie worked for me for a few reasons.
One is one of my favorite details of the movie: Natasha (and Melina) were psychologically conditioned, while Yelena (and the other Widows in her cohort) were brainwashed. The conditioning required the Widows to be extremely carefully controlled, because of the negative consequences if they didn't. The brainwashing removed the ability to control, because it was never their choice. So we see that in Morocco Yelena is extremely controlled, and then right after that we see her expressing emotions far more freely than we ever see from Nat (even ten-year-old Nat) or Melina. She doesn't have the instincts to not.
Another is that in most of the scenes where we see Natasha showing strong emotions, positive or negative, it's with people she was only close with from ages seven or eight to ten or eleven. There's an element of Nat unintentionally regressing and needing to consciously regain her Adult In Control Of The Situation approach, repeatedly; we see it most clearly in the "don't slouch" scene but for me her first scenes with Yelena are that much more telling. She's metaphorically an adult staying in her childhood bedroom at her parents' house and trying to figure out why the bed doesn't feel like she remembers.
A third is one that I didn't actually realize until thinking more about this movie: yes, Natasha is smiling sincerely more here. But she's also angry more. It wasn't until I had seen this movie a few times that I started to think of all the times I've identified Nat as angry in other movies. I still think she HAS been angry, but she's grit her teeth and she's smiled a very tight smile and she has done everything in her power to defuse the situation. (I can't help but think of how Carol's anger got so many fanboys to be like "Why doesn't she smile more?" while Natasha's anger has passed by them entirely unnoticed.) Her smiling, to me, is connected to her ability to express her rage: to try to drown Yelena before offering a truce and drinking together; to yell at Alexei rather than coquettishly convince him to find the Red Room; to call Melina a coward to her face.
Compare it to her conversation with Ross; her tone never wavers. When she has her first conversations with Mason, even though he can tell she's run-down, she's presenting Public-Facing Natasha, who just wants to Get Shit Done. When she thinks Taskmaster is sent by Ross, her ONLY emotional reaction is to say that she's a better shot when she's pissed off. It's only once the Red Room is brought in, and her history is part of things, that her emotions show more on her face.
I don't think Natasha lost all her levels of guardedness in this movie- I think comparing her to Alexei and Yelena is proof of that, as is, frankly, the number of critics who didn't seem to understand what I saw as an extremely clear emotional arc- but I think this movie is a lot closer to the nerve, and as a result we're seeing more get through her mask than we usually would. If that were only positive emotions, I don't think it would work for me. But the film's active choice to give Natasha greater capacity to show her anger made her visible happiness feel more earned, and both parts together made Nat feel like a more complete person to me.
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that post you reblogged about someone keeping all the assassins that are sent after them and 'subtitle: The Clint Barton story' just makes me think that if Clint had been there, 'Winter Soldier' would have been a very different movie
To be fair Steve Rogers has the exact same “Trying to kill me! Friend? :D?” mindset, so probably not THAT different.
Meanwhile, Nat, who has BEEN the adopted assassin, is like “are you aware... murder?”
And her closest people are like “Yes! Murder FRIEND.”
Scarlett can easily be filming flasbacks or scenes from the past. She looks still young, pretty much like before Iron-Man 2. So, no Natasha is not coming suddnely to life no matter what people think. It cheapens her acrifice, maybe few years down the line but not like few months after it happened. I know people are sad for her story to end like this but they're doing a prequel, how she grew up to be an assassin. One set of photos doesn't prove she is back.
Look. Let me start by saying that she’s very likely not brought back to life, or if she is, it’s probably with a caveat- one last thing to do. If I had to bet, I’d go with the idea that this is her in the soul stone, reliving her most important life experiences.
That said. (And I’m assuming you found this from a reblog and aren’t following me, so if I’m wrong, apologies for repeating points.)
(1) ScarJo is certainly still attractive, and she doesn’t look drastically different, but she has absolutely aged in ten years, the way human beings do. She does not look the same as she did 1/3 of her life ago, which is when pre-IM2 would be. Moreover, for the movie to be set in the early 2000s, which is what the original rumors were, she would have been a teenager, which is stretching the bounds of credulity beyond their breaking point.
(2) The articles about the movie’s timeline have shifted from “the movie is entirely a prequel” to “the parts of the movie that are a prequel.” This speculation isn’t coming out of nowhere.
(3) The movie did not remotely provide closure to Natasha’s arc, and when asked about that, MMRR pointed to her movie. It is not unreasonable to think, then, that this movie will, in fact, provide closure to Natasha’s arc, which is not possible to do if it’s entirely not contemporary.
(4) I get the idea that bringing her back could cheapen her sacrifice, but the problem is that the movie itself cheapened her sacrifice, to the point that it was not hers. Clint is the one who got rewarded with the stone, which the movie explicitly said is given to the person who made the sacrifice. Nat was willing to give up her life, but the film is telling us that the sacrifice is Clint’s. I’ve tossed out a lot of ways they could have made her sacrifice about her in a way that would have been rewarding; the filmmakers did not make that call.
(5) I really can’t emphasize enough how gross it is that in the IW/EG duology, the first female Avenger and the first female Guardian were the two characters who weren’t just killed, but had their existence negated. They aren’t just dead; they’re trapped in the soul stone. Tony gets to rest but Natasha and Gamora don’t even have the opportunity for whatever the MCU’s’ version of the afterlife is (which we know has to exist, because we’ve seen the Wakandan spiritual plane). It is not unreasonable to think that the BW movie and GOTG3 will, at absolute minimum, bring them to someplace where they can have peace, because this is fucking horror movie bullshit otherwise.
(6) Look, I realize this is kind of whiny and unreasonable, but just. Could you let us have this? Could you let us have a little bit of hope, a little bit of gloating that there’s evidence she’s not 100% wiped off the map, even if it’s going to get crushed in eleven months? If Nat’s not your character or you’re not invested in her, that’s totally cool, but she was fucked over hard by canon and given how many people are fanwanking the future of basically every other character, I don’t see how it’s out of bounds for us to be excitedly figuring out how this could work to give Nat a future at all.
Love that it's now 100% confirmed canon that Natasha spends her free time watching over the top Cold War era spy fiction/techno-thriller movies like James Bond and WarGames, and she's a gleeful little geek that gets a kick out of quoting the dialogue.
I love so much that we spent years assuming Nat would mock the shitty spycraft in movies, but actually she's enthralled every time. Like, a five-year-old seeing Frozen? That's Natasha any time these movies are on the screen. Yes she's seen them a million times, but when your entire life is dangerous spy hijinks it must be so nice to see stuff that you do in a context where no one you love is in danger at any time.
Also the thing that's so nice about her being a geek is that the movies have tried so hard to make us think she's a badass. And, I mean, she is totally a badass! But "Do you want to play a game?" could have been a one-off thing, a way to tease Steve and integrate Steve and make her own fun while on the run. Instead it's become a running part of her personality, which takes how the Red Room used popular media as indoctrination and turns it into something she can relax with and make into something that's her own.
Like I feel at this point if we found out that Clint used to call Nat every week after Dog Cops finished airing to dissect the plot, it would not feel out of character, and that is beautiful.
I liked getting to see more of Nat's "just for her, not trying to project an image for others" approach to clothing. We got it in Endgame too, but the original implication there was that she cared less about how she looked Post-Snap. BW shows us that it was already a go-to style for her. Of course she still loves a leather jacket, but the overall look is less skin tight & polished, not so obviously gendered, more comfy & practical. Which also connects closer to her tomboyish look as a kid.
One of the things I like most about this movie is that it DOES recontextualize Nat in IW/EG so much. Fitted but comfortable clothing isn't her disregarding standards like Endgame wanted us to think; it's what she likes.
Actually, that's true going all the way back, really. We can reevaluate some of her earlier non-mission outfits, like the leather jacket outfit when she first meets Steve on the helicarrier in Avengers or her on-the-run look in Winter Soldier. Throughout her first seven movies, we've seen Nat putting on different outfits and different roles as the situation demands. What Black Widow does is give us a better sense of which of those were closer to performance and which were Nat as Nat. She likes keeping her hair out of her face; she likes leather jackets and hoodies, she likes form-fitting but comfortable. We know what's best for when she's working- when she has to be undercover, or she has to be in her suit- but now we have enough context that we're not just seeing her choices now, we're realizing her choices in retrospect, the ways she let her self shine through the layers of costuming, and I really kind of love that.
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Kid Natasha stalked away looking upset when Melina was comforting Yelena. What did you make of it? Was she shrinking away from Melina's gentleness? From the always present knowledge it was part of an act, even if it felt so real? Or was she reacting to Yelena's vulnerability, so easily on display, so unacceptable in the Red Room? Was there some resentment that she wasn't treated so kindly at the same age?
I feel like I keep saying this about this movie, but this is another one of those situations that I love because every read is awful but also every read informs Natasha's adulthood differently.
I'm gonna go into detail with each of these, and a few more besides, because it's so bad and that makes it so good.
The one thing I think we 100% get from it is how each of them has adjusted to living as a family: Melina knows how to play her part well (with an asterisk). Yelena accepts this as the norm. And Natasha is in that awful in-between place, where she knows she's living in a lie but everything around her insists it's true and even if she has three years of proof of consistency, she doesn't trust it- which, later that day, she's shown to be right not to trust.
Is Melina a good mom? She definitely plays the part of a good mom. She definitely knows how to put on the performance of being a good mom. I don't know if that's the same thing, and more importantly, don't know if Nat or Yelena would think it is; pretty much everyone i know who has significant trauma struggles to reconcile the facade presented to the world against what really went down, and that has to be even harder when the facade was presented even to them. Alexei and Melina both insist they played their roles to perfection, but they were roles. Part of that seeps in. At the end of the day, Natasha was willing to pick up a gun to protect Yelena, while Melina and Alexei were both just fine putting Nat and Yelena in a plane to be shot at.
How did Melina feel about all of it? We know she couldn't have kids of her own (she's been cycled through 4x); we know she doesn't want to go but not only does so anyway but also tells Yelena they're going "home" (echoed, obviously, later with the pigs- "go home where it's safe" even though the home she took them back to was anything but). Was being a parent an act for Melina the way it was for Alexei? Was she comforting Yelena because she was supposed to? Or was she offering what she'd never gotten but wished she had? Natasha said that what Melina had given them was what got them through the Red Room, but how much was intentional parenting and how much was performing and how much was playing house in between experiments in the SHIELD labs? Melina says she didn't raise them to be weak; how much was involved in that?
(The girls do backbends for fun in the backyard; we know gymnastics and ballet are part of Red Room training for Widows. How much of Melina's parenting was preparing them for the world and how much was preparing them for the Red Room? Was it to help them or because she had to?)
After at least two years in the Red Room (because we know Nat was younger than six when she started and this mission has been three years), it's pretty amazing she's able to respond to gentleness as well as she does. How could it not seem like a trap? Yelena isn't a spy; she's living the life the family set up. But Natasha is old enough to see the cracks and know she has to pretend not to.
And seeing Yelena's vulnerability, as you said, must have been terrifying, because vulnerability came with consequences. We see in Cuba that Nat wants to protect Yelena; it must seem like Yelena, crying just from falling down, is painting a giant glowing neon target on her own back. Or is this the RIGHT way to behave? If being better at undercover means showing weakness, what is a baby Widow supposed to do? And how does this reflect in how Natasha as an adult responds to vulnerability, when she needs to offer it and when she needs to (but often can't) accept it?
There's also the theory that she felt responsible for hurting Yelena- did she not want to get in trouble? Did she not want to deal with her guilt for harming her? Did she just not want to see Yelena hurt? Or was she remembering a time when hurt children did not get kisses and firefly lectures, when girls face off in a ring and snap each other's necks?
I feel like all of these are very real possibilities and all of them are terrible but fascinating to explore, and the only thing they have in common is that Natasha, especially as a kid, has absolutely no sense of what is a logical consequence of any given act. The same things that were unacceptable in one context were encouraged in another. The Red Room clearly got under her skin but then she had to spend three years pretending it didn't, and then get right back into it. I mean, shit. It was, what, twelve hours between being encouraged to call their "mom" about Yelena's scraped knee, and Alexei telling her to not try to protect her sister from being kidnapped to the Red Room, which Nat knows for a fact is an abusive murder factory because she's lived there and doesn't want to go back?
Yeah, there's no read here that doesn't hurt.
And I can absolutely understand people who see this as the text not committing to a single read, but to me, it's the text allowing for all the reads at once. This movie had to straddle the line of being a PG-13 movie about severe child abuse, and it leans heavily on giving us just enough to make any read we could figure out feel horrifying.
I think I might feel differently if Nat had more of a future in the MCU, which- as far as we know at this point and hopefully subject to change- she does not. For me it's a kaleidoscope of pain, and every possible twist reveals new ways for us to interpret Natasha. And if we're not going to get new things to interpret, I like that we have this many lenses to use on what we've already got.
Hey! I saw your awesome meta about the Nat deleted scenes. One thing I've been thinking about lately is that line from the CW junior novel where Nat talks about getting dumped in the middle of siberia with her Red Room classmates. One impression that I think a lot of fans get of the mcu Red Room because of this and also a tweet from the Agent Carter set is that only one girl ends up surviving her Red Room "class". (Yelena most likely wouldn't count bc she's younger than Nat and part of a different class) But in BW we clearly see an entire team of widows that were trained together. Any thoughts?
So I have spent WAY too long thinking about this, and based on what we know from various interview snippets from the past two years I think there’s a way to fanwank it all together. If I’m remembering things correctly. Which, to be fair, I may not be.
This gets long. (CW for brainwashing, indoctrination, and abuse- the usual Red Room and Bucky mixture.)
Didn’t they start the movie discussion with talk about the Red Room being re-created to make the current Widows? That could mean new policies, and honestly, “training 32 girls but only keeping one of them” seems like a much less efficient policy than “train all the girls and use them til they die of their own accord.”
(I mean, the metaphor of only one girl surviving is great, and the girls having to kill each other to survive is a perfect way to use brutality to train away their emotions and attachments, but from an Effective Evil Organization standpoint, it’s an unforced expenditure of resources.)
This would allow both the technically-canon we have to stand (because I’m pretty sure both the novelizations and Agent Carter can be seen as TECHNICALLY not the MCU if they’re directly contradicted; only the movies are 100% canon, and as we know even that can be flexible) and create an army of Widows for Nat and Yelena to fight.
There’s also the possibility that killing the girls off IS a slow lifelong thing, like all the Red Room alums are being useful as long as they can but only the one in each class who survives the longest gets the title of Widow. And I know Black Widow is for the deadly spider but that would also play well into the idea of a widow being the one who outlived her companion(s). So then the scenes like in Agent Carter where preteen girls fought to the death wouldn’t be unheard of but also wouldn’t be the norm; the girls would know it COULD happen at any moment but it would be rare.
I can fanwank that a lot better than I can fully square Agent Carter with what we’ve seen from the trailers of Nat and Yelena. I mean, it makes sense that if they need to go undercover as a family they would take children they already had in the murder factory, but it didn’t seem like Dottie and her cohort were going on missions; they were just training and being indoctrinated 24/7. I think there’s so much that could be so interesting if Nat was subjected to similar- did she have to watch Beauty and the Beast the way Dottie watched Snow White? (someone write that Bruce/Nat right now)- but we can’t ignore that she and Yelena had three years OFF from indoctrination. Working with Melina and Alexei would obviously be considered an honor, but would it set them behind in their murderstudies? “Is it better to be taken out of the Red Room and returned or just left there permanently” is more than just a “is it better to know freedom and lose it or never have it”; did Nat and Yelena always have to play catch-up? How does that impact who they are today?
And how much does Bucky-was-taken-by-Hydra apply now? Like, he still has the red star on his arm and Alexei’s costume is damn similar; can we assume Department X was somewhat involved in Bucky’s training as well as the Red Room’s? Because that would mean that in the decade or so after Dottie’s class was indoctrinated they developed actual brainwashing abilities, and would that have been used on the Widows, or was that considered more expensive and less efficient than the indoctrination, especially if the girls didn’t know any different? Bucky had memories of another world that needed to be wiped away, but we saw Dottie didn’t.
Did Yelena and Natasha getting exposed to three years as normal kids change whether the Red Room thought they needed brainwashing versus indoctrination versus both?
And what is the organizational structure of the Red Room by the time Nat and Yelena are there? In Age of Ultron we had Madame B but here we have Dreykov; do we know if Madame B is even in this? Given how many of the visions in Age of Ultron were symbolic rather than literal memories, are we sure that Madame B was ever real, or was she a construct meant to represent all of the authority figures of the Red Room in Natasha’s psyche? If the heads of the Red Room are men- and we know that Dreykov is a Red Room authority figure and that Melina has been through the Red Room several times herself- why was that symbol a woman? (I mean, yes, I know, it’s Joss, but how do we square this in-universe?)
To be clear all of these are terrible options, every last one of them, but I am so excited at all the different flavors of terrible we will get to explore.
Thinking about Natasha and Wanda in the context of Natasha and Yelena. Yelena and Wanda are even about the same age. Did Wanda make Nat think of Yelena? Did she easily embrace a big sister instict towards Wanda, or was it too complicated and painful and she kept her emotional distance, at least a first?
I feel like the existence of Yelena- both when they were kids, and during the time of the BW movie- recontextualizes a LOT for us, for how Nat interacts with all of the Avengers. We see her so frequently as the Responsible One, joking about "always picking up after you boys" but also frequently put into the position of being the one who has to get shit done while everyone else is allowed their personal hang-ups and distractions. I've always seen it as the role the token girl has in the text, because in all likelihood that was the entirety of the motivation behind it, but I feel like with our current context we can easily reframe that as Nat defaulting to being the big sister no matter how much she tries to pretend that was never who she was, especially given how much we saw that their situation in Ohio basically necessitated her parentification because no matter what roles they played, one else was going to actually protect Yelena.
I think even if the Yelena parallel didn't ping for her with Wanda before Civil War, spending time with Yelena during this movie would have sparked something, and explains why in Infinity War she's at least trying to establish boundaries with Wanda and keep her safe rather than the kind of laissez-faire approach she's had elsewhere. I don't think that their relationship in IW is different enough from AoU/CW that it needed an explanation, but this one works for me nonetheless.
But also, the parallel I kept coming back to was STEVE and Yelena. Blonde, mouthy, formerly tiny but now fully able to defend themselves, more committed to ideals and big gestures than Nat's practicality. Also, steals a car and Nat ribs them for it. No wonder SJ's talked in interviews about seeing Steve as a younger sibling; Natasha in Winter Soldier was at least in part replicating the dynamic she never fully got to have with Yelena.
I want to go back at some point and do a deep dive for how much of Natasha we can see in these terms; how much she was- consciously or subconsciously- trying to fix the wrongs from two decades earlier. I'm not sure I have a strong opinion in any particular direction yet. But I love that this is an option now for how to read them- it gives us so much more to play with.
