How Captain America shifted the dial on Marvel’s… | Little White Lies

How Cap­tain Amer­i­ca shift­ed the dial on Marvel’s polit­i­cal compass

26 Mar 2014

Words by Ivan Radford

A soldier wearing a patriotic uniform with the American flag design on the back, standing in a forest setting amongst other soldiers.
A soldier wearing a patriotic uniform with the American flag design on the back, standing in a forest setting amongst other soldiers.
The first Avenger is a patri­ot­ic sym­bol of Us vs Them pol­i­tics in the Mar­vel Cin­e­mat­ic Universe.

Who’s strong and brave, here to save the Amer­i­can Way?” That’s how Joe John­ston intro­duces Cap­tain Amer­i­ca in Steve Rogers’ first major screen adap­ta­tion. It’s a big moment for the mod­ern super­hero movie, not because it helps to pave the way for Avengers Assem­ble, but because it fore­grounds the pol­i­tics of the genre.

Cap­tain Amer­i­ca, a patri­ot­ic sym­bol fea­tured in comics for over 70 years, is pre­sent­ed as just that: pro­pa­gan­da used by the US to win over chil­dren, sol­diers and the pub­lic. In Johnston’s movie, the graph­ic nov­els are part of the PR machine. So are the films about him. Every­thing is political.

Of course, super-serumed Steve is also the ulti­mate sol­dier for the war against the Nazis, whose pin­na­cle of phys­i­cal­i­ty match­es the puri­ty of his ideals. It’s right there, embla­zoned on his beefed-up body: he’s a pro-US fig­ure will­ing to fol­low orders to pro­tect Amer­i­ca at home and abroad. Cap­tain Amer­i­ca: The Win­ter Sol­dier undoes all of that.

A phrase com­mon­ly used to describe the sequel, direct­ed by Antho­ny Rus­so and Joe Rus­so, is 1970s thriller’. Why? Para­noia. That sen­ti­ment, so rife in the 70s, seems to be present in much of action cin­e­ma today, typ­i­fied by the Bourne fran­chise or even the block­bust­ing Hunger Games; Water­gate and Viet­nam have been replaced by the Iraq War in a post‑9/​11 era of whistle­blow­ing and WikiLeaks.

In the face of this cyn­i­cism, super­heroes have con­tin­ued to fight the good fight. Peo­ple may not have con­fi­dence in author­i­ties, but they can believe in some­thing else: incor­rupt­ible icons, which exist inde­pen­dent­ly to the sys­tem, untaint­ed by gov­ern­ment acts. For some heroes, such as the X‑Men, they exist so far away from the sys­tem that they are a mar­gin­alised minor­i­ty. For oth­ers, that sta­tus becomes a pos­i­tive rein­force­ment of the Amer­i­can Dream: Super­man is an immi­grant who active­ly choos­es, out of all of the coun­tries and plan­ets, to define him­self as an Amer­i­can; he spends more time adopt­ing the iden­ti­ty of Clark Kent than fly­ing about in red pants.

The most suc­cess­ful, though, in terms of box office, are home­grown heroes, par­tic­u­lar­ly Bat­man and Iron Man. Audi­ences, it seems, like masked men who beat exter­nal forces that threat­en the way things are. Bat­man and Iron Man are the genre’s most com­plex polit­i­cal fig­ures; out­siders yet insid­ers. The Caped Cru­sad­er is a cap­i­tal­ist turned vig­i­lante who expos­es the cor­rup­tion at the heart of Gotham. Christo­pher Nolan’s mod­ern Dark Knight arc puts that strug­gle front and cen­tre: He’s the hero Gotham deserves, but not the one it needs right now,” sums up Gary Oldman’s Com­mis­sion­er Gor­don. Gotham may have gone to the dogs, but its cit­i­zens show com­pas­sion at the end of the 2008 sequel; they deserve to be saved, even if it requires a guardian who can break the rules.

The Dark Knight Ris­es, though, sug­gests anoth­er polit­i­cal truth. While Bruce Wayne’s loy­al but­ler says it’s the busi­ness­man who can best save Gotham from the Marx­ist rev­o­lu­tion of Bane, Gor­don argues it’s the oth­er way around: The Bat­man,” he groans from his sickbed, has to come back.” Bat­man, implies the con­clud­ing part of Nolan’s tril­o­gy, is the hero Gotham needs to defeat the upris­ing – not to save the cit­i­zens, per se, but to pre­serve the cor­rupt state.

Tony Stark is sim­i­lar­ly con­flict­ed when he realis­es his weapons are being sold to ter­ror­ists. His response? To go rogue and seek jus­tice. How? With his mil­i­tary arse­nal: an anti-estab­lish­ment fig­ure using clas­sic Uncle Sam meth­ods. Iron Man goes on to bat­tle a Russ­ian and The Man­darin, both appar­ent ene­mies from over­seas: like Bane, agents for the polit­i­cal oth­er endan­ger­ing the sta­tus quo. Stark even does con­sul­tan­cy work for SHIELD, Marvel’s go-to law enforce­ment guys.

The more we see of SHIELD, the more Marvel’s Cin­e­mat­ic Uni­verse hints at the grey area they inhab­it. Avengers is where most of that uncer­tain­ty is fos­tered. When I woke up, they said we won – they didn’t say what we lost,” Rogers laments to SHIELD Direc­tor Nick Fury. We made some mis­takes,” admits the secre­tive one-eyed boss.

Nonethe­less, Rogers helps to stop the Chi­tau­ri inva­sion of Earth. While the Avengers ward off for­eign intrud­ers, Bat­man is putting down the revolt in Gotham: punch­ing peo­ple who, in an extreme ver­sion of the Occu­py move­ment, rep­re­sent polit­i­cal change. Even when our heroes are aware the sys­tem is dodgy, they tend to main­tain it: they are, in a sense, super-con­ser­v­a­tive. The Win­ter Sol­dier, there­fore, feels like a big step: rather than work­ing with SHIELD, the Cap­tain begins to ques­tion them, in true 70s style. The appear­ance of Robert Red­ford only adds to the air of suspicion.

That’s not free­dom, that’s fear,” he observes of the group’s plan to turn con­fis­cat­ed HYDRA weapons into America’s own defence. If any oth­er hero said it, it would be an inter­est­ing crit­i­cism. Rogers, though, rep­re­sents more than that. He’s not com­plex. He’s sim­ple; a piece of pro­pa­gan­da. He knocked out Adolf Hitler 280 times.

Johnston’s orig­i­nal movie estab­lished Rogers as the most overt­ly polit­i­cal Mar­vel fig­ure – summed up by that camp cos­tume and rous­ing song. The Win­ter Sol­dier direct­ly con­trasts his 1940s val­ues with the mod­ern, skep­ti­cal atti­tude towards author­i­ty. It’s telling that he begins the movie wear­ing black, rather than his tra­di­tion­al patri­ot­ic tights. Even when he does revert to uni­form, he choos­es the old World War Two get-up, a dis­tinct iden­ti­ty from the mod­ern SHIELD offi­cer show­cased in Avengers Assem­ble. (It’s worth not­ing these are not new themes and sto­ries – the film cred­its Ed Brubaker’s post-2004 run of Mar­vel comics. But each mod­ern super­hero movie choos­es an exist­ing nar­ra­tive to adapt, an act that inevitably reflects the soci­ety in which the film exists.)

Amid the uncer­tain­ty, Antho­ny Mackie’s side­kick rep­re­sents a typ­i­cal sol­dier who will fol­low his supe­ri­ors – in his case, Cap­tain Amer­i­ca. Sam’s obe­di­ence ver­sus Steve’s hon­esty high­lights the ide­o­log­i­cal shift that has tak­en place. Pre­vi­ous­ly, Steve sup­port­ed bor­der­line shady author­i­ties as a nec­es­sary force for good. Now, The Win­ter Soldier’s revi­sion­ist approach sees the dis­trust of the 21st cen­tu­ry infil­trate Marvel’s uni­verse. It’s a deci­sion that has major reper­cus­sions for future movies, let alone TV series Agents of SHIELD.

Can Mar­vel movies con­tin­ue in the same vein as they once did? Can their infal­li­ble heroes still stand up for our fal­li­ble coun­tries? Are their val­ues con­demned, like Rogers’ tights, to the past? Who’s strong and brave, here to save the Amer­i­can Way?’ trills the theme tune. For the first time, though, the answer isn’t Cap­tain America.

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