Cloudy early summer days are best for blockbusters. On a day just like that in 2018, friends of mine asked me if I would like to go see Avengers: Infinity War with them in the theater. Armed with a very minimal amount of information concerning the whole span of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, I saw the film with them. I only went back to Marvel when, bored during the pandemic, I embarked upon a movie marathon of all of the movies that make up this superhero-infused universe. In addition to the brightness, the loudness, and the one-liners of the films, I also found that most of the MCU’s films were filled with modern matters, using the superheroes and their quests as reflections on our hero-deprived real world. For example, the 1940s setting of Captain America: The First Avenger (2011) expressed the overwhelming sentiment of patriotism at the core of a majority of people that would see themselves in Steve Rogers. Later on, Black Panther (2018) broke the conventions of the superhero genre by putting forward a Black hero in a type of film that has traditionally excluded people of color at the height of the Black Lives Matter movement.
Cate Shortland’s Black Widow is no exception. With all of its imperfections and contradictions, this Scarlett Johansson vehicle offered a film concerned almost singularly on female trauma, most of it induced by men. This vision of the world feels particularly relevant now, as the film digests ideas crucial to the feminist movement, particularly in the years following the watershed moments of the #MeToo movement. As the second only film in the MCU to be led by a superheroine — and the second to be directed by a woman, with Shortland becoming the first to single-handedly do so — Black Widow would not have been effective as yet another good versus pure evil, action-driven film.
The origin story of Black Widow (Johansson) had, I believe, to be concerned not only with Natasha Romanoff’s past, but with her role as a trailblazing hero as well. At her core, the only original female Avenger is a traumatized young girl with too much red on her ledger, broken by the actions of predatory men. As such, Black Widow’s main antagonist, General Dreykov (Ray Winstone), is born out of that exact vein of prey-seeking, power-hungry men. Dreykov’s ways, discourse, and narrative emulate that of real-life quotidian frontline names such as Jeffrey Epstein, Harvey Weinstein, as well as other magnates and sordid cult leaders. He becomes the perfect antagonist for the recent Black Widow film, as he allows Natasha to take her place as the feminist hero Marvel movies need but hadn’t yet let flourish.
Shortland’s film centers on these themes by mainly focusing the film on the dynamics between four characters that are key figures of the ominous Red Room: Natasha, her estranged adoptive sister and mother Yelena (Florence Pugh) and Melina (Rachel Weisz), as well as the organisation’s director, Dreykov. As defrocked Widows, Natasha and Yelena position themselves as Dreykov’s main opposition. Before emulating them, Melina stands as one of the Red Room’s most valuable assets. Dreykov, for his part, is imposed as the predatory figure who entitles himself with the power of raising the Widows to his liking, using them for his schemes, and disposing of them when he sees fit.
Throughout the film, Dreykov’s prevailing disgust towards his own trainees becomes obvious and rears the promise of insidious consequences. During Dreykov and Natasha’s inevitable final head-to-head, the General expresses his contempt towards the Widows, despite their inherent value as assets to him. He considers them as disposable trash that he has “recycled” into productive assassins whose only purpose is allegiance to him. Dreykov shows his commitment to this idea through his words and his actions, as it is shown very early in the film when the General decides to kill a Widow who was about to compromise him. Because of the sheer number of his army, this particular Widow was more useful to him dead than alive; she is dumped like a bad investment.
“Using the natural only resource the world has too much of: girls,” says Dreykov in an almost too on-the-nose tirade, expressing his disdain for the women he’s groomed to be at his beck and call. The Red Room’s director acts like a man who is repulsed by the very thing he created, by the nature of something he prompted, encouraged, and fought to build.
The parallel between Dreykov and men like Epstein or NXIVM cult leader Keith Raniere — both accused or convicted of sex trafficking — becomes almost too obvious to ignore, as the Red Room’s operations closely resemble sex trafficking in itself. Just as men like Epstein have groomed young girls to become profitable and productive sex objects to please themselves or others, Dreykov has groomed the Widows to be ruthless assassins and productive seductresses, allowing him to start wars and worldwide crises. The girls Epstein would traffic allowed him to solidify his bonds with powerful men in high places, just as the Widows permitted Dreykov to access the great men who answer to him due to the Widows’ actions.
Like actual predators, Dreykov is not preying on just any girls. Apart from an almost essential vulnerability in their victims, the Red Room seeks to train young girls who already have the right characteristics to become Widows. The future Widows are selected by a program that “assesse[s] the genetic potential in infants,” as Natasha learns. Black Widow — who had believed she had been abandoned her whole life, leading to an inherent vulnerability that allowed her to pour herself into training — was in fact selected for her predisposition to become lethal after rigorous training. These eugenics-like methods were employed by the Red Room league Dreykov again with predators such as Epstein, who studied transhumanism and who was reported to have been obsessed with the idea of propagating his DNA by inseminating women to create what he deemed would be superior humans. Dreykov, similarly, sees the Widows as a superior class of humans he discovered, recycled, and raised but credits himself with this work, rather than the women themselves. They are stronger and more powerful than him but he sees them as his Widows exclusively, his creation, the strangely despised fruits of his labor.
Speaking of the act of all-powerful creation, Dreykov prides himself on having saved his daughter Antonia (Olga Kurylenko) from death by turning her into a pernicious killing machine. He seems convinced that Antonia is better off as a suffering super-robot animated only by the murderous will of her father. What we are meant to decipher here is that she is more useful alive than dead. As he does with his Widows, he grants himself the power of life and death over his daughter. Antonia is another pawn in Dreykov’s hunt for domination, and he crucially values her as a tool more than as a daughter. She, under the identity of the Taskmaster, becomes the masked face of the villainous Red Room, although she acts only as a brainwashed proxy for her father, who seems unable to act upon his schemes for himself.
Another one of Dreykov’s proxies in the film is Melina. The film constructs her character as a complicit female acolyte, who has effectively trafficked her daughters to Dreykov. In her position, she has developed tools to keep the Widows under the Red Room’s control, facilitated their enslavement, and benefited from it. However, she is dually framed as a Ghislaine Maxwell or Allison Mack figure, as she has betrayed other women by voluntarily allying herself with the Red Room, and as a victim of the organisation that employs her. Indeed, as Melina works alongside Dreykov, she is also compelled, both through true physical persuasion and mental manipulation, to remain by his side. She breaks this pattern when she sacrifices her comfort and her position for the Widows’ sake.
Melina’s nuanced role in the organisation further plays into the sense we get of Dreykov’s character and predatory stance. As Natasha remarks, Dreykov is powerless without the women that have made his success possible. In this context, he needs them to refrain from revolting against him or harming him in any way. To achieve this, he brainwashes and physically alters quite literally helpless young girls. In the climax of their confrontation, Natasha discovers that she cannot hurt Dreykov in any way because each Widow has been programmed to be rendered incapable of committing any violence against Dreykov when they smell his pheromone. The Widows are also brainwashed into obeying Dreykov’s will. The mind control is putting the Widows in a trance-like state, in which they do not think for themselves, but rather follow blindly the purpose they have been given.
This “pheromonal lock” paired with the “chemical subjugation” are effective metaphors for the emotional and physical hold predatory men have on their victims. Weinstein’s victims, for example, would not come forward about the abuse they suffered because of his power and influence, afraid he could ruin their often blossoming Hollywood careers. Epstein, similarly, was accused of trafficking multiple times before being formally convicted. Who would believe an anonymous girl over a rich white American financier? In a parallel way, ex-members of cults often describe the ways they would forsake their relationships and goals from outside of the cult, blinded by a charismatic leader who would convince them to remain faithful to the organisation exclusively. Likewise, the Widows cannot act against their thralldom — or even realize that they are victims of it — because they are physically and mentally unable to.
Natasha finds an ingenious, although rather violent, solution to this incapacity to hurt her former captor — and therefore liberating her old comrades — by imposing violence on her own body. She slams her nose against Dreykov’s desk and severs her olfactory nerve, rendering this pheromonal lock useless against her. The power dynamic shifts as the General loses his heavily masculine connotated edge against Natasha. This could imply that one of the only ways to defeat a predator is by hurting oneself to defeat him.
The film, however, presents an alternative to the use of self-inflicted physical or mental violence to survive. The film makes the case for allyship between women as the most potent tool against predators. The gas that allows the Widows to regain their sense of self, and the woman who administers it, is presented as a genuine way in which women can help others escape trauma and those who afflict it. As Yelena liberates the gas in the Red Room, the Widows awake from the long slumber they have been forced into, regaining their agency and their capacity to fight back. This is analogous to the patterns we have observed at the height of the #MeToo movement, in which one survivor of abuse coming forward often encouraged many others to denounce their tormentor. The film makes a strong case for women supporting each other to escape a cycle of trauma, which is central to Black Widow’s narrative.
Through its compelling cast of nuanced, scarred, hurt, and superhero-like women, Black Widow marks the beginning of a new era for a particular brand of blockbuster feminism, allowing Natasha to be what she is at her core, a hurt child who has overcome trauma to become an avenging Widow. She, along with Yelena — whose future in the Marvel Cinematic Universe is bound to be cut from the same cloth as her sister’s — becomes a symbol for women, by helping her consorts assert the control and agency they should have never lost over their own life. These women who were considered disposable trash their entire life, through the help they give each other, succeed in defeating their literal demons to free themselves of their shackles.
