Thoughts on Black Widow

Spoilers below the cut

I saw Black Widow last night, and with the distance of years and dollars from the strongest specifically female-coded traumas I have experienced – namely being used as an emotions-dumpster by my parents because girls are good at that sort of thing and domestic violence, being afraid for my life and health for a short but very intense time, and enduring hunger and widespread ridicule in my existing social circles due to just, like, leaving an abuser, and the general female trauma of being Catholic at all which I was for 30 years – I am at a point now where I can let myself cry when something makes me want to cry, and I can protect my right to grieve in these little bitty shards which is what happens when your trauma is “mild” but woven like a thread through every memory you have.

I was one step past ugly crying by the time the beginning credits montage faded to the more “present day” storytelling. Obviously, I have never been a trained assassin under a mind-control scheme by a big selfish narcissistic windbag who loves seeing women unable to make their own decisions, but that’s just because I’ve never been trained to physically kill anyone. Every other part of it is true and accurate and real.

The “gather everything you need right now and get in the car and let’s get out of here before they find us” thing is also a tiny, encapsulated, but again very intense memory, as that is the way I left my abusive marriage – in secret, carefully timed based on observing his daily habits, with my two kids, and with everything I had in the world in a laundry basket snuck out to the back of the car.

Being made to handle things that were well above my paygrade as a 10-12 year old girl, with no room to learn or make mistakes - check.

Being trained to take abuse by people who were born into abuse as well and didn’t see their way out of it - check.

Being parented by people who were so stuck in their own pasts that they couldn’t see anything in front of them - check.

Childhood stolen early because nobody bothered to keep it safe - check.

But most of all the thing that hit me in the gut when I watched this movie is that we are actually seeing – on screen and without bouncing titties – a woman who has endured trauma the way so many women actually do. We have all seen the female villains who were treated so cruelly that they become soulless robots. We see women who were born sociopaths and use that to enact villainous plans. We see women who dissolve into tears and screaming and begging the first time anything challenging appears in their way, and women who endure trauma and then become essentially catatonic. Madwomen in the attic.

But in Black Widow we see – in Natasha and her “sister” specifically – women who get through it the way that women really do, in actual practice. The way I did. By becoming pathologically capable. By never, ever messing up. By waking up every day, ready to die. By taking blow after blow after blow, wiping the blood from our mouths, and smiling. By maintaining a softness toward others, and being harsh and ruthless only to ourselves. Defending others to prevent them from enduring what we have.

I think it’s fitting that we met Natasha as a generic Super Sexy Strong As A Man character with Jumbo Tits, there to show us that Tony Stark is an eternal playboy, and that it’s only now that we get to know her as she really is and was, which is multifaceted, very hurt, and insanely smart and capable, even to her own detriment. This is a woman who probably can’t relax, ever. For whom vacations are useless. A woman who always knows where the exits are. A woman who recognizes and processes her feelings in the dark where no one else can see, then wipes her eyes, cocks her gun, and takes care of whoever is after her today. A woman who has had to sever parts of herself in order to save herself and others on a larger scale.

I had just put my mask on in the theater because the man beside me started coughing – I know at that point it probably wouldn’t have prevented anything, but it made me feel better. With that protection, I was able to cry with my face twisted and ugly, tears running the half inch between my eyes and the top of the super absorbent KN95, nearly invisible, and let out a piece of the grief I felt at seeing myself on the screen, in many ways.

I’m not ashamed of my tears, because to me, being able to identify with and cry for my grief makes me more human and more able to heal. Black Widow has a quality that women gain by letting their emotions out when there is an opportunity – resiliency. She isn’t a silent, stubborn monolith demanding that the world change for her. She’s a changemaker who rolls with the punches and stays on track with her larger goals.

Allowing someone their grief is a way of validating their experience, and Hollywood has not done this for me or the many like me many times, if ever, before (Maybe in Mad Max?). For me, Black Widow looked at me and said “I see you.” And now we finally see her, too.