septembriseur:wintersoldeirs:As if anyone could really forget the most quoted line in “The Avengers”

septembriseur:wintersoldeirs:As if anyone could really forget the most quoted line in “The Avengers” — “I’ve got red in my ledger; I’d like to wipe it out” — it helps to have that line fresh in your mind when deconstructing what Widow does in the final act of what’s billed as a Captain America movie. Black Widow doesn’t wipe out the red in her ledger. No, she blasts her ledger out to the world, like it was the grisliest email forward of all time. We know from her heart to heart with Hawkeye that the shame she feels about what she’s done is real, and she hesitates when she realizes that taking down the bad guys means revealing her secrets. But she does it anyway, because she’s not just a spy anymore; she’s a super hero, and she makes a super hero’s sacrifice. (x)I can’t help thinking also that such a major theme of this movie is secrecy: how dangerous it is to do things in the dark, because if you don’t have to confess to what you’re doing, you never really have to own it. You don’t have to own your acts, or the consequences of your acts. No one can hold you responsible. In Natasha’s case, shining a light into the dark exposes both the secret things that she’s done and the secret things that have been done to her— most of which are intimately connected. To expose herself means exposing herself both as perpetrator and victim, not only as someone who has done terrible things, but also as someone who has been vulnerable in terrible ways. For Natasha, that is a very major sacrifice. But at the same time, it’s an act of strength: a statement that she is strong enough, and enough at peace, to own herself, to contain her history. That, to me, is an arc of the movie that’s almost unspoken: from Natasha’s devotion to Fury, which hints at a past in which he has helped her grow towards that peace, to her interactions with Steve, which seem like a kind of self-test: if this person, this fundamentally decent and loving person, can trust her, then maybe…? And this is the climax of that arc, the point at which she herself has to judge whether she is someone who can be seen without shame. Someone who can stand up under that scrutiny. And she does. And that takes unbelievable courage. -- source link

More pics about