The Sadness of Black Widow (2 0r 3 Thoughts)

Last night, I went to the theater to see Black Widow.

Prior to 2020, I had seen only two Marvel movies. Ant-Man because my dad was so obsessed with it that he would watch it anytime it was on TV. By the time I sat down to watch it on DVD, I had already seen all but one scene, I believe. Black Panther I saw because the people I was renting a room from were watching it on TV and asked me to join them. Unlike my family and a lot of my friends, I had no real interest in watching Marvel movies. At the start of 2020, I was on a Chris Pratt kick, watching Parks and Rec and preparing to see Onward. I decided to watch Guardians of the Galaxy, just because. Then the lockdowns came. Living alone and having access to all the streaming services that were carrying Marvel films at the time, I figured I ought to watch all twenty-three movies. Some of them blur together in my mind since I went through them so fast. I think I watched all 6 movies from Phase 2 in one weekend. I thoroughly enjoyed them, though watching Marvel movies during a worldwide lockdown certainly tunes you into the political and social aspects of the stories. That being said, I don’t have quite the attachment to Marvel films that many who watched them as they came out over the course of many years do.

I do however recognize the emotional impact of the Marvel stories.

Guardians of the Galaxy 2 was the first one to make me cry, thanks to someone sacrificing his life for someone who was not family by blood, but rather by love. WandaVision also laid heavy, in it’s unusual sitcom style, as we see how deeply grief can impact us. And of course Infinity War and Endgame were gut-wrenching as viewers saw characters they had loved for so long die to save the world they loved. But if we only count the standalone character movies…

I think Black Widow was the saddest.

No spoilers here. If you haven’t already seen Black Widow, you still know the premise of the story, as it deals with Natasha Romanoff’s origin story, at least to some extent. And we already knew that she was brainwashed and controlled in assassin training. This film gets deeper into that backstory. The movie starts with Black Widow on the run and in hiding due to breaking the Sokovia Accords, which only makes her quest seem even sadder and isolated, in spite of those she shares it with. The whole movie felt like a story of human trafficking and the fallout of either having your life destroyed by it, or being a part of supporting it, perhaps without knowing what you were supporting. That may sound drastic, but Merriam Webster defines human trafficking as “organized criminal activity in which human beings are treated as possessions to be controlled and exploited (as by being forced into prostitution or involuntary labor)”. Doesn’t brainwashing a young girl to be an assassin seem to fit that definition? And isn’t that immensely sad? Each of the main characters in Black Widow has to deal with his or her part in the KGB schemes they were involved in, whether voluntary or coerced through the brainwashing. Watching a parent try to resume contact with a child normally, while completely unaware of the pain and trauma they allowed the child to go through, is agonizing. Add to that, the brainwashing to think that what happened to that child is okay, since it served a purpose?! Each of the main characters finds redemption and perhaps a bit of healing in their own way, as they ultimately come together to destroy the very thing that destroyed them. But the heartache was still there when I left the theater, due to the depth of darkness that the movie dealt with.

As to the other aspects of the movie,

I skimmed reviews last night and this morning after seeing the movie. There was some talk about women standing up to the patriarchy. I didn’t see that in the movie. At least not in a rammed down our throats sort of way. I just saw some of the natural reactions of humans to escaping the evils of brainwashing, control, and abuse. As to the flow of the movie, it seemed slow to me at points, at least in comparison to other Marvel movies. And while Marvel films generally stretch the limits of believability, there were a few scenes in this that seemed even more stretched to me. Characters in other Marvel films are gods, chemically enhanced super soldiers, etc. The main characters in this film (excepting Red Guardian) are not and that makes scenes like the airplane escape early on in the movie, or surviving multiple car flips and explosions, a little hard to believe even in a fictional world. Of course that’s just my opinion and I am definitely not a movie critic. The music definitely added to the sadness of the movie and enhanced the emotions felt while watching a family try to make right in spite of all that could hold them apart.

Have you seen Black Widow yet?

If you have, feel free to share your thoughts in the comments (spoiler free for 2 weeks please). If you haven’t, don’t just take my thoughts or any other review and leave it at that. Go see it. In the theater please. Not on Disney+. Support your local theater and make a statement to Disney that they can’t leave theaters in the dust while forcing us all to have streaming services.

A side note.

Brainwashing and studies on mind control do exist. The KGB and the CIA were both involved in research during the 1900’s. It’s both fascinating and terrifying.

“Where does fiction end and reality begin?” Dean Koontz (from False Memory)

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/human%20trafficking (definition from above)

https://www.outoftimeandlinemillennialgirl.com/about-me/welcome/ More about the author and the blog.