Black Widow

I don’t need to tell any of you that we’ve waited a long time for Black Widow’s origin story. And of all the things laid at COVID-19’s feet, the wait for it is not one. If you had asked me before watching the final product, I’d have said this film should have been a central focus point in Phase One.

But if they’d done that, we wouldn’t have been treated to the same movie. Likely, we would have been witness to a fluff piece where Scarlett Johansson would have been prancing around in heels one second and flats the next. Or maybe they’d have hired a good continuity spotter by then. I doubt it.

Whatever we would have ended up with would certainly not have been the “let the patriarchy burn” flagship. We’d be a lesser fandom because of it.

I know, I know, action movies and deep analysis don’t go together. Except, this one absolutely warrants a deep dive.

And because of that, I am going to issue a spoiler warning. This seems a bit superfluous, but I wouldn’t want anyone to say I didn’t put the warning out there. With that out there for all to see, shall we continue?

The three Widows present in the film, Natasha, Melina, and Yelena, should be ample evidence of the destructive power of the patriarchy, represented by the character of Dreykov. There is plenty of road to travel on for each of the female characters. I find, though, that Alexei (a.k.a The Red Guardian) offers a poignant underscoring of the message.

Alexei should be in the same class as Captain America and Bucky Barnes. He is a Super Soldier. Yet, he is exiled to live in a remote prison, forced to bask daily in his meager accomplishments- some of which are an invention of imaginary necessity. A far cry from the shaken yet in control Ohioan at the beginning of the film.

He is acting on orders from Dreykov and the Red Room during that mission, but he is not entrenched in the patriarchy. In recounting the assignment to his adoptive daughters, Alexei admits Melina was the true leader of the operation. She was the brains of the operation, were his own words. He rails about how awful the experience was, but that rings more false than his Captain America tall tales.

As the audience, we do not see her in complete control. Melina and Alexei demonstrate a true partnership instead of a military-style power structure. She even looks to Alexei to steel her resolve when they are about to leave their fictional lives. He has the autonomy to be in that position of power in the matriarchal society they formed in Ohio.

It is almost immediately apparent that Alexei had sacrificed a world where he wouldn’t have been the butt of all jokes in returning to the Red Room fold. A Super Soldier has never had more in common with a My Little Pony than on that tarmac in Cuba. Truth be told, I expected there to have been a tattoo of the purple pony mixed into his mural somewhere.

What’s worse is that he is acutely aware of how the system has abused and used him. It’s not just the prison sentence. The prison guards snickering at him, calling him a has-been. His adoptive daughters looking at him with a mix of disgust and pity. The hits to his pride and legacy just keep on coming, yet he still clings to the hope he can be put back into his place as The Red Guardian.

His grip on this dim hope diminishes as the movie hurtles toward its close. The scene between Alexei and Yelena being the point where he finally let it go. Through song, he finally admits the three years he spent in Ohio with the three women was not the horror story he made it out to be. Those years were the ones he was keeping for himself to cherish. The tone-deaf lament was an admission he should have broken out of the destructive cycle in Cuba or even in Ohio. Whatever it took to keep the band together, as it were.