You’re going to lose. It’s in your nature… You lack conviction.”
— Agent Phil Coulson
Heroes as iconic as The Avengers always participate in discourses of power. They model, and therefore advocate, notions of strength, value, money, power, good, bad, right, wrong, identity and behavior, and the way we look at heroes affects and reflects our politics. In The Avengers, this discourse is all about the heroes finding what drives them forward despite what holds them back, and making a case for the former.
Agent Phil Coulson hands us that key to the movie shortly before he dies. He says to Loki, “You’re going to lose. It’s in your nature… You lack conviction.” Each Avenger and the Avengers as a group resonate with convictions — attitudes that resist dissuasion and compel action. Some of these attitudes are based in abstract concepts, some in psychological or physiological states, some in archetypes, some in life experiences.
Today, rather than pick apart each Avenger, I want to focus on Black Widow, whom I see as an attempt by Whedon (and of course Scarlett Johansson and all the other major collaborators on the project as well as its collective body of readership – the author is dead and all that) to advance heroic symbolism and political discourse around survivors of sexual violence.
Take my love, take my land…
While there is plenty of nostalgia and a surprising amount of sincere conservatism in the film, the core conversations in The Avengers are as progressive as would be expected from the auteur of Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Firefly. We all know Joss Whedon subverts his teenage-boy-friendly fantasies with strong female characters; type-cracking men; and explorations of the warlock queerscape. Doing that while keeping things light enough to lift, energetic and faithful to the spirit of the genre is kind of his thing, even more than banter. And the man loves banter.
Black Widow in her pre-Whedonesque days.
In this regard Black Widow is as Whedonesque as River Tam on prom night. Just as Buffy makes the horror genre about her experiences as a high school teenager, Black Widow makes being a superspy working among volatile superhumans about the invisible life of the global rape crisis. I would normally default to saying “American,” as it seems wise to apply one’s inevitably reductive judgements to a slightly smaller absurdly large subset of humanity when possible, but Black Widow is a transnational character and The Avengers is a worldwide movie, and it’s certainly a worldwide problem, so might as well go global with it.
I won’t waste time in this article making the case for the statistics or engaging in the various endless arguments that are among the unhappiest things on the Internet (after this we can all go to reddit and argue about it, then we can hit each other in the face with bricks — the two are equally fun and affirming of humanity). Suffice it to say that at Scarlett Johansson’s own age of 27, it’s a relatively fair guess that a third to a half of Black Widow’s female peers have been victims of sexual violence at some point in their lives — and the overwhelming majority of them haven’t told too many people about it or seen meaningful redress. It’s present in Black Widow’s life as a looming threat and cultural norm — invisible in plain sight — just as it is in the lives of most women.
Joss Whedon knows this crisis exists; it’s all over Buffy. And Scalett Johansson almost certainly knows it exists because, well, she’s on the knowing side of the social information asymmetry (sorry boys), which is pretty much the euphemisticalliest euphemism I’ve ever euphemed. Oh, and because she talks about it in Ghost World 11 years ago, and, um, it hasn’t been fixed or anything.
Aaanyway, even if we drop the reality of the crisis in the real world and just look at The Avengers, sexual assault is a constant presence in Black Widow’s world. Heck, it comes after her several times during the movie. At the beginning, we find her tied to a chair in a low-cut cocktail dress, no doubt about to be raped and murdered by Russian mobsters — Or so they think! Spinning Sumo Chair Attack!
Sure, Black Widow is never in any actual danger, and sure, there is no actual sexual contact, but the mobsters don’t know that’s in the cards. They have every intention of exploiting, dominating and abusing her, and every reason to believe it will work and won’t be traced back to them. The representation here is pretty clear — Black Widow knows what the bad guys intend to do, and she knows the bad guys think they will get away with it, so she takes advantage of that knowledge and arrogance to extract information from them. She stays unscathed, because she has the power to take care of herself better than they think she can.
Yes, this character's arc is about sexuality. You might even say it's "tied" to it.
While her strength and agility are useful, her main weapon is that she knows what is happening, and she knows who the bad guys are — and thus can anticipate dealing with them. In her case, it’s literal — she has dossiers on them and is targeting them for intelligence gathering. In her real-world analogue — the metaphorical tenor for which she is the vehicle, the correspondent reality that she symbolizes — she knows assault is the fault of those who assault, and fights to resist the societal pressure to blame herself or her trauma or her shame for the things that people have done or are trying to do to her.
This is the big interaction with the broader discourse of power — the true weakness of rapists and those who commit sexual assault is that people will figure out they are the bad guys. If that happens, they can’t hide among their peers anymore. In practical terms, the vast majority of them are protected by societal, political or discursive barriers, as well as the circles they run in — that guilt or shame their victims from identifying them, protect them from public accusation with social support, and prompt society to look the other way.
But Black Widow is a superspy who looks past these shrouds and finds out the truth, which if you ask me is a very cool way to turn a very bad experience into a superpower. The way in which her own guilt and shame over past experience compels her to do this her Agent Coulson-style “conviction” — a conviction shared by many people who have been victimized by sexual violence, who dedicate themselves to spreading intelligence on it, exposing it and deconstructing and disarming the social constructs that allow it to continue on such a large scale in obscurity.
This is not an accidental insight, based off one scene, and it is only half the ledger, so to speak. Black Widow encounters situations that map onto this experience a bunch of times through The Avengers. The few key instances that draw it out clearly for me:
- The two “Hulk Trigger Warning” scenes
- Her prison interrogation of Loki
- Her relationship with Hawkeye and the Budapest incident
The Male Smash
She spends much of this scene literally pinned to the ground.
Black Widow’s first two encounters with The Hulk in full force show how scared she is of being overpowered and victimize and pull back the curtain on her calm persona showing responses with the intensity and emotional edge of somebody being triggered by past traumatic experiences. The first one is fairly harmless, but still presents the Hulk as a looming, pseduosexual menace (how Whedon/Ruffalo’s Hulk arcs throughout the movie is another story for another article — suffice it to say that Hulk turns out to very much not be a bad guy, but at this point in the story Black Widow thinks he might be, so we get to see how she reacts to a violent, aggressive masculine presence, gaining some insight into how she might have experienced them the past):
The most important thing we learn from this scene is that Black Widow is not naive to the threat Hulk represents here. This is character development for the Black Widow — she’s been through some rough stuff, and it’s definitely affected her psychologically.
The second scene is much darker and more violent, where, though Loki’s machinations, Hulk goes on an uncontrolled rampage through the U.S.S. Impossible Physics, spending a lot of that time chasing Black Widow. The way the sequence is shot — with Black Widow cowering in a corner in tears and the Hulk snarling at her, breaking things, and looking to scare her and toy with her as much as smash her, strongly suggests that Hulk is representing sexual abuse and Black Widow is representing the psychological affects of sexual abuse.
In an interview back in March, Whedon described his vision of the Hulk as, among other things, “A Hulk who feels dangerous, who might hurt somebody we care about, who belongs in a classic horror film.” So I’m not making up this dynamic.
Pass the Bud, and Stay Loki
Don't base your self-worth on the opinions of guys like this.
In the scene where Black Widow interrogates Loki inside the Hulk cage, we learn about the “red on her ledger” — referring to past crimes, presumably murders, Black Widow committed in her previous life of crime before turning into a good guy superspy. Red on ledgers of course represent resources or liabilities — differences between the sides of the ledgers that must be transferred or otherwise compensated for in order to even out the account. If there is nothing to offset that red ink, it becomes a loss.
Loki attempts to gain dominance and control over Black Widow by shaming her over her “red ink” — especially with regards to her relationship with Hawkeye, which has romantic undertones. And Black Widow seems affected, to a degree, even if she is feigning some of her hurt and outrage into order to trick Loki into revealing why he allowed himself to be captured.
It might seem a stretch to associate this red ink with specifically sexual shame — the sort of shame that so often forces victims of sexual violence into silence. But the use of red ink can’t be coincidental. Red stains in English literature are intimately and indelibly associated with female sexuality and particularly the loss of sexual innocence — due to the longstanding European tradition of publicly displaying a sheet with a red stain on it the day after a wedding to prove the loss of a wife’s virginity during a wedding night (and, by extension, demonstrating her “virtue” beforehand).
This symbol plays heavily in Shakespeare in particular, also giving rise to the famous “damned spot” of Lady Macbeth — a bloodstain that marks the guilt of murder in such a way that Lady Macbeth virtually goes mad with her inability to ever clean it again. The spot and the irreversible guilt felt by Lady Macbeth is connected through the symbol of the red spot with the less of female virginity and social “virtue” in a horrifying way. Here is Dame Judy Dench, whom you may know as the Elemental from The Chronicles of Riddick (As well as many other more respected if marginally less see-in-the-dark-space-armada-ish works, great and small), performing the famous Act V Scene I of Macbeth:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C4o1r2noI3s
Black Widow’s story arc in The Avengers is built around this “red ink” and whether it will lessen the conviction she needs to be an Avenger (spoiler: it doesn’t).
Slings and Arrows
Learning to relate to one another again.
The place where Black Widow’s guilt and conviction reach their synthesis is in her relationship with Hawkeye, who has been mind-controlled by Loki for much of the film, but comes around after a blow to the head. At some point in the past, Hawkeye, himself not an especially good dude for quite a while, spared Black Widow’s life. While Loki claims that Black Widow cannot ever truly pay back the debt represented by the “red on her ledger,” Black Widow resolves to save Hawkeye, and they bond over their shared experience and the guilt they both share over the things they have done.
The Avengers is smart in creating this symbol for female sex/violence guilt (the red ink) and giving Black Widow a legitimate cause to believe it is her fault — she cannot simply wake up one day and not feel this guilt anymore. She must instead find her power and conviction to do what is important despite the guilt.
One of my favorite exchanges in The Avengers is right around where I see Black Widow and Hawkeye moving past this problem.
Black Widow: Just like Budapest all over again.
Hawkeye: You and I remember Budapest very differently.”
It turns out that Black Widow and Hawkeye don’t really aim to get rid of the “red ink” on the ledger — they want to move forward and work together — both with The Avengers and with each other, despite it, because their conviction to do what they value is more important than the power their red ink has to shame or limit them.
And there it ties into discourses of power and behavior modeling — heroes with relationship baggage.
Scratch what I said earlier: Banter isn’t the most Whedonesque thing there is. That’d be heroes with relationship baggage. He loves that stuff even more than witty one-liners and pop culture references.
Assemble!
In the end, The Avengers is among the rare popcorn action flicks (along with, for example, Terminator 2: Judgment Day) that not only resists perpetuating the discourses of power that sustain pandemic sexual violence, but that advances discourses of power that provide an alternate model with the potential to changing the narratives that shape behavior in a positive way.
Of course I am highly skeptical of attributing praise or blame for the aggravation or alleviation of broad social problems to individual pieces of art, and I am especially reluctant to do so in this case — so think of this as one person’s reading as it relates to one interpretation of the current crisis, and leave your thoughts on your own reading below.
And for more analysis of the Coulsian “convictions” that either arise from us or reach out to us and drive the Avengers, keep tabs on Overthinking It. We love this stuff.