#JUST SAW THE STOP MAKING SENSE RESTORATION IN IMAX

[potatoesandsunshine]

david byrne was so fucking hot holy shit

[natashabarnes]

To preface:  Avengers: Endgame shook me to my core and I needed to find a constructive, healthy way to talk about what I am feeling and this seemed as good a way as any. This is an endeavor seeking emotional intelligence. So I’m here to talk about how media can affect us, honest-to-goodness grief, and yeah sure, my opinions and most importantly, Natasha Romanoff. There will be spoilers, obviously. You’ve been warned.

It’s late afternoon on Friday, May 7th, 2010.  I’m a super-soon-to-be-college-graduate, and I’ve just missed my bus home.  There are few places grimmer than where I currently found myself: the Inter-City Bus Terminal in Reading, Pennsylvania. The good news was that buses from Reading to New York ran roughly every two or three hours most of the day, I was going to be fine. I was going to be late, but I was going to be fine.  At the risk of sounding dramatic, I didn’t know it but I had a date with destiny that evening. Since I couldn’t imagine sitting around and waiting in a bleak af bus terminal, I sought refuge a mere block-and-a-half away at the R/C Reading Movies 11 & IMAX. Lucky for me, I was able to schlep my suitcase and (always) large purse over right in time for a showing of Iron Man 2. I remembered Iron Man (2008) to be a whole lot of fun so I sprung for a movie ticket to be able to watch most of Iron Man 2 before I had to catch my bus.  I knew nothing about this film going in and I was having a good time up until the moment Scarlett Johansson came on screen as Natalie Rushman (who even me, a noob S.H.I.E.L.D./espionage sector of Marvel, knew was actually Natasha Romanoff, aka the Black Widow).  Once she made her entrance into Tony Stark’s personal fitness center, I wasn’t having a good time, I was having a great time…and also a weird time.  I was in complete awe of her; I hung on her every word, her every move.  Everything about her radiated a sense of intelligence, purpose, intention, and most alluring to me, confidence.  Looking back I realize I was seeing the kind of woman I wanted to be; not only did she have every trait I wanted as a person, she seemed to be this unattainable personified perfection.  At the time, I wrote off my fascination with her pretty quickly as the voice in my head said “but you’ll never be like that, you know that, right? You’ll never have those things.” I had to leave to catch my bus just as Rhodey showed up to Justin Hammer’s Stark Expo presentation and at the time that was pretty much that.

Let’s skip ahead.  It’s the evening of Wednesday, April 24th, 2019.  Thanks to the kindness of my best friend/basically sister, I was able to see Avengers: Endgame a day early.  I’m a mess.  I’m soaking wet from the collar bone up and my eye makeup is every place on my face with the exception of my eyes.  I’ve been sitting for over three hours and somehow I’m out of breath, my sweat is cold. My status of Full Blown Mess was credited to the fact that I had to watch Natasha Romanoff die violently, fiercely, and courageously.  The shock I felt that night was all-consuming.  I kept saying to my friend through hard sobs, “I just thought she’d be safe. I really thought she’d be safe.”  So many people I know at this event found me after the fact to check in with me.  Am I okay? Do I need anything?  The only answer I came up with on the fly was “I will be, it hurts now. But I’m just…so proud of her.”  More on that later, but basically, people were so kind and if I had to be a mess, at least I was among people who also cared and understood where I was coming from. While my friend engaged in a last bit of work for the day, I sat waiting, attempting to calm down by staring at costume designer Jany Temime’s recent Instagram post where she selfied with Scarlett expressing excitement about working on the upcoming Black Widow film. I reminded myself that this night was not goodbye, just a very jarring “see ya later.”  Of course the present is not necessarily made easier to bear just because more (and potentially the best) is yet to come.

What a difference nine years made.  I’d gone from casual move-going fan who’d only read Spider-Man comics when I had time to being a hardcore, ride-or-die fan of Marvel Comics and the Marvel Cinematic Universe. My library had grown exponentially, along with my knowledge of these characters, and let’s not overlook my closet’s growth after falling into the deep pit of cosplay. I can’t exactly put my finger on the “when” of it, but at some point I stopped stifling the portion of my heart that belonged to superheroes and let them take over with complete abandon.  I’d always had a heavy habit of trying to be what other people wanted me to be.  Though I may have lived very independently, in retrospect my choices and interests were so often chosen for the satisfaction of other people (I am not assigning blame to anyone but myself on this one). Superheroes serve as a perfect example of a passion of mine I chose to shut down for so long. Once I leaned into that passion, I felt so much more complete.  It’s no surprise that Natasha Romanoff was the character I ended up being most passionate about.  

Natasha is a strong woman who spent a lot of her life in the service of others across moral and political spectrums.  She followed their orders always and has plenty of regrets about her past.  Maybe I was self-projecting, but throughout my dedicated years as an MCU viewer and Black Widow comic reader, I always saw Natasha’s arc as two parts:

1) a woman coming to terms with what she’s been and what she’s done seeking to move forward in a more universally beneficial direction.

2)  a woman learning who she is, what she wants and choosing to act of her own volition.

Obviously the two are deeply connected. While her past experiences may have made her moral compass more grey than that of her peers, she’s a woman who wants the Right Thing To Do to be the choice she makes of her own agency.  There’s a beautiful deleted scene from Captain America: The Winter Soldier where Nat speaks to Nick Fury for the first time in confidence after discovering he faked his death and did not include in on the secret.  “I needed to keep the circle small.  You would have done the same thing,” he says.  “I know,” she replies, “that’s a problem.”  A scene she has with Steve Rogers discussing trust that made the final cut achieves a similar idea.  In past appearances in the MCU, Natasha had expressed a desire to make amends for her past and seemingly had started to do so through her work with S.H.I.E.L.D. and her participation the Battle of New York.  These moments in Cap2, as the fandom frequently refers to it fondly, are less about her outward actions and more about her inward struggles. What she seems to learn by the end of the film is that letting people in is a key part of her goal of a truer sense of self.  By the time we meet her in Captain America: Civil War, within the first hour of the film she delivers one of my favorite quotes as the family around her begins to split apart, “Staying together is more important than how we stay together.”  Nat’s journey continued to be one of finding self-possession, self worth and using that greater sense of self to give back to others, both the found family around her and the innocent she can protect.  

With all of this in mind, Avengers: Endgame is my favorite MCU film and features my favorite Natasha Romanoff content we’ve seen so far.  From the moment the film begins, she is a woman hell-bent on remedying the greatest tragedy in the history of the world.  Long gone is the woman we met in her first two films who did the bidding of an organization and/or focused mainly on giving back to those she felt she owed. In Endgame, Natasha aims to save the world, to bring back everyone lost, to restore families.  We first see this when she agrees to find Thanos with the team and reverse the snap. When that mission fails, we skip ahead five years and that’s when I personally really lost it. In five years, Natasha has never stopped trying to fix the world. Let’s be clear, every other member of the original six Avengers most definitely has stopped trying to find an antidote to The Thanos Problem.  Sure, Steve is trying to fix things in a different, more practical way, but there’s still an acceptance of the circumstances in his actions.  The sight of her alone broke my heart and filled me with a sense of honor.  This is a woman we have always seen in control and put together and when we find her she is a noble, beautiful wreck. She’s abandoned most self care, wearing only her depression clothes, and surviving off hope and peanut butter sandwiches desperately communicating with allies around the universe. These people make time for her but are clearly losing patience with her and her insistence that not only can this be fixed, but that it is all of their responsibility to do so.  And in case it wasn’t obvious enough how much she’s changed, this scene gives us what I believe will be (for now at least) Nat’s most iconic moment on screen.  “I used to have nothing, and then I got this…this job, this family.  And I was better because of it.  And even though they’re gone…I’m still trying to be better.”  Nat sums up her entire character arc in this one delicate and stunning moment showing just how strong allowing herself to be vulnerable has made her.  Loving has only made her braver, caring has only made her more tenacious, and giving has made her unstoppable.  She is, in this moment, the woman she always wanted to become.

Remembering the aforementioned scene is absolutely necessary when absorbing Natasha’s choice later in the movie to sacrifice her life so that her team can get the soul stone.  Her entire life has lead her to this moment. Yes, killing off the only female from your original team is a bold move with a LOT of weight attached to it, and one that can definitely be seen as shortchanging her, but I just can’t see it that way. Natasha Romanoff made the ultimate heroic choice, one that the rest of the film hinges on.  My brain can’t navigate the concept that fans have been robbed of her unnecessarily without also hearing a diminishing of the selfless choice she made and the course she followed in the time we’ve known her and beyond.  It’s only when I think of the alternate concept of Clint dying for the soul stone that I feel completely, hypothetically swindled (though while we’re talking about him let’s also not forget how excellent it was to see a man and a woman with no blood relation platonically love one another unconditionally).  Please don’t misunderstand, if you are angry, I respect that, we all deal with stuff different ways, this is just my take.  Natasha Romanoff earned that moment.  Is it devastating to watch? One thousand percent yes, but what I felt even more deeply than the devastation was pride.  I am so proud of this character that in no way can I bring myself to see this choice as abuse or mistreatment of her character.  In that moment, she was magnificent.  Natasha Romanoff died valiantly, unafraid, and of her own free will so that everyone else could live.  Natasha is a hero of the highest standard, full stop.

Entertainment Weekly recently featured a half-hour interview with the original six Avengers to promote Endgame. I was more than moved to hear Scarlett speak about Nat’s arc and confirm what I’d been absorbing as an audience member for years.  “She’s come into her own as a woman saying ‘who am I and what do I want and what do I need out of my relationships and also out of my own self’ and she’s someone who is understanding her own self worth.”  Without going into deep detail, watching Scarlett’s performance as Natasha has affected me in a way I can only describe as profound.  Every MCU film she appeared in had at least one moment that hit a nerve inside me in ways equally gentle and harsh, but still every nerve was hit with the reassurance of knowing that if she could change, I could too.  Catalysts for personal growth can come from anywhere and at my most lost somehow I remembered that moment sitting in a theatre watching Iron Man 2.  Something in my brain told me to follow that feeling I had watching her, not in an effort to emulate her completely, but to see an example of someone one who is “my own woman–first, last and always.”  Natasha taught me that self love, self worth and opening yourself to others are traits more powerful than lightning, stronger than a suit of armor and they’d protect me more than a shield.  In the years I’ve watched and read this character, my life has changed for the better in every way.  She’s been a gift to me and the gratitude I feel is overwhelming.  I may have saved myself, but Natasha taught me how.  As fans I think we all love having more media to look forward to, especially when that media features an inspirational figure for us.  Before Endgame I’d frequently have passing thoughts reminding me that someday the time of Scarlett’s particular incarnation of Natasha will be over.  Who would I be without this character? After Endgame, I’m less afraid of that future.  No matter what form of this character I will have in my life, I will always follow her example and I will try to be better.