Source: fuckyeahblackwidowSo something on the internet happened and George R. R. Martin had an opinion about the Avengers movie. He liked it (he wouldn’t say he loved it) but he had some problems and those problems were codenamed Hawkeye and Black Widow.
Same’s true of the Black Widow. Scarlett Johanssen looked great in that outfit, but she seemed to be there only as eye candy. The shot in the middle of the battle where she pulls out a pistol was silly. I don’t know who this Black Widow was, and I don’t think the screenwriter did either. She wasn’t the original comic Black Widow, the Russian femme fatale who seduces Hawkeye into trying to kill Iron Man. She wasn’t the later comic book Black Widow, who dons a costume, comes over to the good guys, and teams with first Hawkeye and then Daredevil. She was just… there.To me the idea that all Black Widow did was “look good in that outfit” is so absurd it doesn’t even warrant analysis— though if you’re fishing for that kind of thing see here. But the idea that there are two comic book Black Widows, the original villain version and then the later character whose defining trait was teaming up with Daredevil, I guess, is really interesting to me. All comic book characters have different iterations that reflect shifting cultural values: compare 1940s Captain America with Nixon-era Steve Rogers, for instance. And it’s true that female characters in the good old days were not allowed to be physically formidable— they were not shown to have super strength or martial arts moxie. It’s true again that Silver Age Iron Man was especially informed by a freedom-good-commies-bad Cold War mentality.
But the hero character of 1966 picked up directly from the villain of 1964. Natasha’s super-villain career was short and hardly iconic, but it does inform her later persona. We’re introduced to a liar’s liar, and the twist is that the cold Black Widow persona is itself a lie. Four issues in, and she’s given a tragic impetus and real feelings of love and remorse. Her Silver Age character arc ends with the reveal of her origin story. And then we understand what drove her to her past misdeeds and why she fights to atone for them. These were all Stan Lee era plotlines, following in sequence somewhat jerkily, but following in sequence none the less. And Natasha’s original twist remains her fundamental twist— not that she’s villainous, but that she’s heroic.
One of my favorite Black Widow stories is Tales of Suspense #53, which is generally a silly dispensable Iron Man story fraught with communist stereotypes and the patented Stan Lee melodramatic love triangle. This is Natasha’s second issue and her first as the Big Bad. She knows she can’t seduce Tony Stark, but she rightly figures she can play on his sympathies. Last issue he let her escape because she was “just a girl”, per his own inner monologue. This issue she returns, knocks him out, and steals his latest miracle technology. She proceeds to wreck all sorts of havoc with the thing, outwitting Iron Man at every turn. I just wanna emphasize: in the middle of the story she is winning, and it’s because she is cunning and smart and not because she has lovely eyes.
But then her (male) superiors come calling and they force her to team up with (male) goons, to take on an overambitious mission she doesn’t want but her duty compels her to try. And she comes up with a brilliant and totally nuts criminal mastermind plan anyway. It would have worked, too, except those same goons she didn’t want to be saddled with aren’t half as competent or half as smart as she is. They screw up Natasha’s plan and then abandon her. She gets away, but not without wondering briefly who she is fighting, and why.
Natasha: Stansky! You fool! Give it back to me! You have neither the skill, nor the intelligence!! No!!
Stansky: Silence, woman!This isn’t like, a feminist text, or anything. It’s a Stan Lee comic from 1964, all the disclaimers. And I came to it as a reluctantly adult woman almost fifty years later, and I definitely saw things there that the ten year old boys it was written for didn’t. But I did see a terrifyingly smart woman written off repeatedly because of her gender, who used that sexist framework to her own advantage as best she could but was still ultimately undone by assumptions and personal loyalties. Personal loyalties that, incidentally, would ultimately function as her redemption, even as dudes continued to assume she was just there as eye-candy.
So, not like the movie at all.
I have no regrets making this