No./8 Why Marvel toughened up
Director Cate Shortland on the unusually dark tone of BLACK WIDOW — part of a newly grown-up MCU
IT WAS ALWAYS going to be different. We knew that Scarlett Johansson’s Natasha Romanoff, the character who famously admitted having “red in her ledger” in the first Avengers film, had a dark past; her long-awaited solo film was sure to reflect that. Still, for the famously bright and sunny Marvel Cinematic Universe, this sharp, savage tone feels new. For Black Widow director Cate Shortland, it was the only way to do the character justice.
“I think that’s what people would want to see in Natasha Romanoff,” Shortland says. “Because unfortunately, she can’t always be this happy, shiny person. That’s not how she was created [in the comics].” Shortland notes that the moral ambiguity was built into Natasha from the start: created as a Cold War-era Russian spy, she was originally a villain in the ‘femme fatale’ mould. “Her body is a site of fear and terror, as well as desire,” says Shortland. “So there’s a dichotomy within her as a comic-book character.”
Still, the level of violence and adult themes in the film — from the savage first-act killing performed by a mind-controlled Yelena (Florence Pugh), to Natasha’s self-adminstered broken nose — was fairly shocking to anyone used to a normally family-friendly (and bloodless) superhero scrap. Shortland was keen to ensure the violence was as “visceral and as truthful as it can be within a Marvel film”, but was as interested in how these characters deal with the trauma of their actions as the actions themselves. “Rather than them being like Superman, they are dealing with their past in a way that we all do,” she says. “We’re all the sum of our past and our experience. And so these people reflect back the complexity of the world in a way that we see it.”
It’s reflective, too, of a wider trend in the franchise: after the relative slate-clean of Avengers: Endgame, the studio seems braver in taking on adult themes for a new era. “Kevin’s [Feige] talked about Phase Four as characters under the microscope [that] are far more ambiguous characters,” Shortland explains. “I think it’s interesting that we’re watching people who we see as heroes, but at times, they’ve also been perpetrators.”
And it’s true: alongside Romanoff, the current slate of Marvel heroes include a witch with chaos magic and a mind-control prison (Wandavision); the estranged child of a master criminal (Shang-chi); and an only-slightlyreformed supervillain (Loki). Don’t expect them to go ‘full DC’, but Black Widow is the clearest sign yet that Marvel is not afraid to add a bit of red to its own ledger.