[Wednesday would have been Charles Bronson’s 100th birthday. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy Bronson and other action film stars and characters. Share your own thoughts on these and all other action figures and films for a popcorn-popping crowd-sourced weekend blockbuster!]
On how the
recent Marvel film echoes a frustrating longstanding trope, and two ways it
revises it.
Perhaps more
than any other cinematic genre (although horror
films are in the conversation), action movies often depend for their
success on audience awareness of established tropes. There are thus lots of
such tropes, from what Roger
Ebert named the “Fallacy of the Talking Villain” to what my favorite
current film
critic Outlaw Vern has called his “Theory of Badass Juxtaposition.” But one
of the most strikingly consistent across decades of action films and multiple
cultures/cinema traditions involves female action heroes in particular: the
trope of a young girl raised from childhood by an older (almost always
male) mentor to become an assassin and/or spy. That hyperlinked list isn’t even
overtly about characters who fit that trope (it focuses on female assassin
characters overall), yet I would argue that every character on the list does
so, whether overtly (ie, we see them as children in
the course of the film) or implicitly (ie, we hear about those origins and/or meet older male characters
who clearly served as their mentors). Out in theaters as I draft this post is
another film that follows this trope closely, The Protégé,
starring Maggie Q as the assassin and Samuel L. Jackson as the mentor.
One of the
biggest films of the year to date, the Marvel superhero action thriller Black Widow,
likewise used and indeed amplified this longstanding trope. Natasha
Romanoff, the Russian spy turned Avenger known as Black Widow and played
pitch-perfectly in the MCU films
by Scarlett Johansson, wasn’t (at least in this cinematic adaptation—I haven’t
read any Black Widow comics so can’t speak to them) just raised from childhood
to be an individual assassin. She was part of a huge cohort of such youthful female
assassins (all apparently known as Widows), raised in a mysterious environment
known as the
Red Room to become a fearful and formidable fighting force the world over. Even
before that period, as we see in the film’s flashback prologue (another scene
set when its female action hero is a small child), she was part of a fake
family designed to begin her training, this time one featuring not only a male
mentor (David
Harbour’s Alexei, himself a superhero known as the Red Guardian) but a female
one as well (Rachel
Weisz’s Melina). That two-part childhood seems only to double down on this
well-established trope of the youthful female assassin in training.
But at the same
time, it’s possible to see this amplification as a way to comment upon the
trope itself, and I’d say that particular details of both those threads in Black Widow (SPOILERS in this paragraph
in particular) do serve to critique and ultimately revise the trope. More
overtly and centrally, while the mentor characters in these stories and films
are generally portrayed as good guys (if complicated ones to be sure), the Red Room’s
most explicit mentor figure, Ray Winstone’s Dreykov,
is the film’s villain and a truly despicable person, and his role in the lives
of the Widows is blatantly portrayed as both child abuse and a form of sexual
violence. I’m not suggesting that this shift forces to revisit all the prior
mentor figures and consider them in the same way, necessarily—but it makes us
ask the question at the very least. Secondly, and more complicatedly, Romanoff’s
fake family, including Alexei and Melina but also her faux-sister Yelena
(played wonderfully by
Florence Pugh), becomes not only the closest thing she has to an actual family,
but a unit that by the film’s end functions directly to oppose and take down
the Red Room and short-circuit any plans for future child assassins. Natasha
and Yelena are still badass assassins at the film’s end to be sure—but ones who
operate quite literally counter to the narratives at the heart of this
longstanding trope.
Crowd-sourced
post this weekend,
Ben
PS. So one more
time: what do you think? Thoughts on these figures and films, or others you’d
add to the mix?
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