From my seat on teh Interwebs, I’ve been hearing that Natasha is both a major stride forward for women in film and yet at the same time some sort of failure of feminism, because she has no powers and gets scared and runs errands. Or something. (You can guess where I fall in this spectrum.)
And this isn’t all from men! A large portion of this second viewpoint comes to me from outspokenly feminist sources, people who care about gender roles and social justice in general. Some of them are disenchanted with Whedon’s record regarding POCs, which is completely valid but I feel is irrelevant to this discussion aside from saying this:
If you expect any female character — or any character who belongs to a group chronically under-represented in mainstream media — to perfectly represent your ideal of that group, she has already fallen victim to tokenism.
We see this all the time with characters who are POC. If they have flaws, they’re caricatures; if they don’t, they’re unrealistic, or worse, unsympathetic. No white male character is subjected to this level of scrutiny because he is automatically assumed to be an individual, not a representative. We’ve been trained by seeing white male characters everywhere to think this way, and until women and POC become commonplace we have to do the heavy lifting ourselves.
So bend from the knees, people, not from the waist.
Natasha is a person. She’s a remarkable person, because more than possibly any superhero in Marvel or DC, she knows one essential truth:
The Black Widow uses everything she has at her disposal: her brains, her body, her past, and all the things that people will assume about her. That last one especially.
Whedon does a great job of demonstrating this simply through her introduction in the film. We see a beautiful woman tied to a chair being interrogated by smug, thuggish-looking men, and we assume we’re looking at a plan gone awry. Natasha’s nonchalant replies to their threats turn out to be more than mere bravado when she’s forced to drop the ruse and we discover that this was the plan, and she is far from helpless. (I think it says a lot to have Agent Coulson waiting calmly on the line; he knows she’ll be back in just a moment.)
This is why I think she is fantastic.
But if you’re looking for an empathetic character, a outwardly kind character, an expressive and affectionate and warm and honest and open character, do not look to Natasha. That is not what she does. That is not who she is. She’s a spy, and spies sneak and steal and cheat and lie. Love her for that or hate her for it, just don’t expect her to fulfill some romantic notion of what a feminist heroine should be.
Agreeing with everything here, just adding some stuff.
I thought Natasha was perfect. She was strong but had vulnerabilities and, most importantly, used those vulnerabilities to her advantage.
And of course, she gets scared! People get scared. I don’t understand why she can’t show fear just because we want a strong heroine. Who wouldn’t tremble in fear when faced with the Hulk for the first time? She’s not a god. Natasha ran and hid because it was the only way she could think to survive. But when she got the call about Clint while she was hiding from the giant green monster who could rip her in half without skipping a beat, she ran out to help him because she knew she was the only one who could. She overcame her fear to do a job that only she could do. That makes her a stronger heroine than any unflinching super-powered character in my book.
Natasha is a feminist heroine because she’s a person, not a caricature.
Jesus if being scared of The Hulk is grounds for doubting her status as a feminist icon then I suppose feminist icons aren’t allowed to have survival instincts? Because for God’s sake if anyone were faced with an angry humongous green monster who can probably kill you with a rightly placed punch I’m pretty sure all their survival instincts would kick in and trust me, in that situation flight really is better than fight.
