#nightsgrow

So the thing is. I legit enjoy IM2. It’s possibly my second-most-rewatched MCU movie and I once got into a 30-minute argument with a dude at a con over its honor. But I only ever saw it after seeing Avengers, and my character love was already established, so I was largely watching for Black Widow and always knew Nat was undercover.

Despite Jon Favreau’s hurt denials at the Endgame press conferences, the MCU braintrusts decided the best way to introduce Nat as an undercover spy was to have her playing a sexy secretary who the audience would think was trying to seduce Tony away from Pepper. Watsonianly, it absolutely works- the movie is designed around it. Doylistically, though, it’s a way for the audience to ogle Scarlett as both under- and over-powered in the same film. Despite IM2 being a movie about a Russian defector, we don’t learn anything about Natasha’s background, and we don’t see any aspect of Nat’s emotional journey through the film. There’s no sense of what she’s going through. I’ve never seen IM2 in a vacuum, so I can’t say this for sure, but while it gives a lot of things I really like and a lot that I play with in meta and milk for headcanons, it doesn’t provide a ton of development for her in the text itself.

That Avengers is a really flawed movie doesn’t change the fact that it’s also outrageously successful in many ways, and one of those successes is giving Natasha enough layers that she comes across as a more fleshed-out character. She of course plays in to so many of Joss’s favorite tropes- she’s a small woman who can take down huge bad guys who has a history of brainwashing and ballet, it’s like he built her in a lab- and of course it’s Joss so everyone’s voice is a little too similar, but Avengers starts giving us Natasha as Natasha, rather than both “Natalie Rushman” and Natasha through the lens of both Tony Stark’s perspective. I know every MCU movie Natasha has appeared in has been directed by white men, and pretty much all of them have grossly objectifying shots, but IM2 does it way more than the others.

IM2 essentially introduces us to Natalie/Natasha as construct, and the successive films are attempting to peel back the layers of artificiality to see her as a person. (Some accomplish that better than others.) I think that for us, watching now, it’s very possible to make the argument that that artifice was necessary, or at least useful, for us to be able to understand what getting underneath it means, but when they made IM2, no one actually knew that the MCU would gain steam the way it did. It’s one thing to sign a multi-movie contract, but like, the cast of the live-action Last Airbender did too; there’s no reason to believe it’s actually going to work.

I also think this ties in to the sense I’m getting from this press junket that Scarlett feels Joss is the one who made Natasha who she is, because he was the one with the cache to decide to give her a bigger role despite Ike Perlmutter, and the one to write/direct the first movie that didn’t have her spend half the time in leopard print being flirtatious just because it was in her cover’s character. And I’m torn, because on the one hand, we can all see how much Joss is very much not a feminist hero, and crediting the guy who wrote THAT Wonder Woman script with helping female representation is nauseating, but on the other, he actually DID move things forward. I am in no way trying to justify the bigotry in his work, but his steps forward moved Marvel’s window enough that they hired progressive filmmakers to make much more forward-thinking films.