The red death: American exceptionalism and U.S.S.R. representations in Marvel’s Black Widow

Abstract

The purpose of this study is to analyse U.S.S.R. representations in Marvel’s film Black Widow (Feige & Shortland, 2021). This object has been chosen because it provides us with a U.S.A. perspective upon a Soviet protagonist – who is here given a chance of telling ‘her’ story. More specifically, even though Natasha Romanoff’s (the Black Widow) narrative is the centre of the story, the analytical focus is on another character: Alexi Alanovich Shostakov, the Red Guardian (the Soviet Union’s version of Captain America). That is, although the protagonist as long as other issues related to her story are addressed by the study here and then, Alexi’s story is put in the spotlight for he emerges as a vintage token of the ideological war between U.S.A. and U.S.S.R. The enemy of the world, for a long time now, is, for some reason, still the red threat. Maybe more than never, everything that goes against the status quo is taken as a communist idea. Therefore, more broadly, this study investigates if and how such anti-communism, deriving from the Cold War, has also been spread through the construction of Marvel superheroes and their adversaries.