Just a Sci-Fi Kid Like Me

 The Power of a Skeptical Captain America by Sophie Gilbert

Snip:

From the first episode, in which Sam’s bank manager tried to place where he knew this telegenic Black man from (“Did you used to play for LSU?”), to the end, The Falcon and the Winter Soldier has wrestled with an idea: Who are superheroes for? And can a nationalist symbol be reclaimed by someone whom that nation has consistently and historically rejected?"

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But The Falcon and the Winter Soldier also presents an opportunity to see what might be coming in the next phase of storytelling in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, as well as how far things have come. Only six years ago the MCU was still being overseen by Ike Perlmutter, the longtime Marvel CEO best known for reportedly stalling Black Panther and Captain Marvel because he didn’t think tentpole movies framed around a Black character and a woman would attract audiences. (Perlmutter is also known for allegedly scaling back production of Black Widow merchandise in 2015 because he didn’t think girls cared about superheroes, and for donating $360,600 in 2019 to the Trump Victory committee funding the former president’s reelection efforts).

There's A LOT to be broken down in Marvel generally and MCU specifically going back and forth between progressivism and reactionaryism. (Also I pointed out recently in convo when Bucky became Cap in 2007 there was a chonk of pushback because the ideal Cap was not supposed to carry a gun, vs. the pushback of Sam becoming Cap in 2015 which was very much about pushback to a Black Cap that the show was getting at.

I have more thoughts but they are still jumbled, but generally I ADORE how the show has been so bluntly political and have thoughts on that. But in the meantime the scene I can't get out of my head is Sam going full angelic pieta.

I wish Captain America were real.

I wish Captain America were real and that he would go to Ferguson and tell the cops to stand the fuck down, and they would listen.

And things would start to look better (like they do), and then (like happens)--one of them would shoot Cap. Accidentally or on purpose, either way, he's down, and everyone loses their fucking minds.

The news media goes apeshit, even Fox News.

The President has to fucking say something.

Steve wakes up in the hospital, because serum.

Sam shakes his head and is like, "You know, on the one hand I absolutely resent your inadvertent white savior thing going on, on the other hand, way to underline how to not be killed by cops in this country is to be a white dude."

And Cap smiles that too bright smile he has when his heart is fucking breaking. Not because of Sam's words--because one of the things he values most highly and loves most about Sam is how he speaks the truth--but because Sam is right.

Steve Rogers Isn’t Just Any Hero

But the real reason I had to chime in was that Steve Rogers is my favorite superhero. Why? Because unlike other patriotism-themed characters, Steve Rogers doesn’t represent a genericized America but rather a very specific time and place – 1930’s New York City. We know he was born July 4, 1920 (not kidding about the 4th of July) to a working-class family of Irish Catholic immigrants who lived in New York’s Lower East Side.[1] This biographical detail has political meaning: given the era he was born in and his class and religious/ethnic background, there is no way in hell Steve Rogers didn’t grow up as a Democrat, and a New Deal Democrat at that, complete with a picture of FDR on the wall.

Steve Rogers grew up poor in the Great Depression, the son of a single mother who insisted he stayed in school despite the trend of the time (his father died when he was a child; in some versions, his father is a brave WWI veteran, in others an alcoholic, either or both of which would be appropriate given what happened to WWI veterans in the Great Depression) and then orphaned in his late teens when his mother died of TB.[2] And he came of age in New York City at a time when the New Deal was in full swing, Fiorello LaGuardia was mayor, the American Labor Party was a major force in city politics, labor unions were on the move, the Abraham Lincoln Brigade was organizing to fight fascism in Spain in the name of the Popular Front, and a militant anti-racist movement was growing that equated segregation at home with Nazism abroad that will eventually feed into the “Double V” campaign.

Then he became a fine arts student. To be an artist in New York City in the 1930s was to be surrounded by the “Cultural Front.” We’re talking the WPA Arts and Theater Projects, Diego Rivera painting socialist murals in Rockefeller Center, Orson Welles turning Julius Caesar into an anti-fascist play and running an all-black Macbeth and “The Cradle Will Rock,” Paul Robeson was a major star, and so on. You couldn’t really be an artist and have escaped left-wing politics. And if a poor kid like Steve Rogers was going to college as a fine arts student, odds are very good that he was going to the City College of New York at a time when an 80% Jewish student body is organizing student trade unions, anti-fascist rallies, and the “New York Intellectuals” were busily debating Trotskyism vs. Stalinism vs. Norman Thomas Socialism vs. the New Deal in the dining halls and study carrels.

And this Steve Rogers, who’s been exposed to all of what New York City has to offer, becomes an explicit anti-fascist. In the fall of 1940, over a year before Pearl Harbor, he first volunteers to join the army to fight the Nazis specifically. This isn’t an apolitical patriotism forged out of a sense that the U.S has been attacked; rather, Steve Rogers had come to believe that Nazism posed an existential threat to the America he believed in. New Deal America.

I was particularly struck by this quote:

However, even in these versions, some of the political edge of the character is left out. Joe Johnson’s Captain America spends a lot of time punching Hitlers for the USO, but not so much hunting down corporate tax evaders or the German-American Bund, because that might raise uncomfortable questions. Likewise, when it came time to bring Steve Rogers into the Avengers, Joss Whedon describes that “One of the best scenes that I wrote [for the Avengers] was the beautiful and poignant scene between Steve and Peggy [Carter] that takes place in the present,” in which Captain America “talks about the loss of the social safety net that existed in his time, including the need for affordable healthcare for everyone.”[11] It’s good to know that Joss Whedon was thinking about “a sense of loss about what’s happening in our culture, loss of the idea of community, loss of health care and welfare and all sorts of things,” but it really is a shame that the element of Steve Rogers that most challenges modern America with the question of whether we’ve lived up to the ideals of the “Greatest Generation” was left on the cutting room floor.


Every review of Black Widow in 'Captain America' is wrong

In the Independent, Black Widow is a “sultry femme fatale,” although the Telegraph gives her the inaccurate but far more positive rating of “the most (the first?) complex female role in the Avengers franchise to date.” Apparently he failed to notice Pepper Potts (40-year-old tech company CEO), the four central female characters of the Thor movies, Peggy Carter (World War II intelligence agent), Maria Hill (deputy director of an international spy agency), and half the main cast of Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.

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If you feel like playing film critic misogyny bingo when America’s first round of Winter Soldier reviews are published this week, I recommend looking out for the phrases “leather-clad” and “ass-kicker.” These are an easy way to weed out any reviewers who weren’t paying attention to the movie, because neither phrase describes Black Widow’s actual role.

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There really needs to be some more commentary on the Falcon out there. I've watched several of Mackie's interviews where he is thoughtful and adorable (I could roll around in all the feels from that interview where he discomfits Bill O'Reilly just by BEING HIS UNAPOLOGETICALLY ADORABLE SELF) but there's no real analysis I've found yet on Falcon's role as the first African-American superhero, what it *means* when you have two heroes IN THE 70S AND ONWARDS having a regular book where they talk about progressive politics and idealism in America, just, gah, NEED ORE!

So the MCU is updating Sam Wilson/The Falcon's backstory from social worker to veterans' counselor specializing in PTSD.

OH MY GOD I LOVE THIS SO MUCH.

Apparently in the new movie Cap will be living in DC. I'm not sure how I feel about this, because as much as I love DC, I think Steve would hate it. Too many hipsters. (OTOH he would probably have the same problem back in Brooklyn.) I've been trying to figure out what neighborhood he'd probably live in, because I'm a dork. I've narrowed it down to the U St. Corridor (my personal headcanon has Gabe Jones taking the Howlers to Ben's Chili Bowl on leave in the 1940s; the area is historically African-American and has a long and storied history with the Civil Rights movement throughout the 20th c.) and Q St. (as unpretentious a working/middle-class inner-city area as it gets in DC). I think he would be really discomfited by the Cleveland Park/Friendship Heights/Bethesda areas (so disconcertingly white and monied compared to other areas). But I totally bet he spends tons of his off-hours at the Hirsshorn Gallery taking in modern art and sketching.

Damn. Now I just want to write about Steve and Sam being bros in DC and talking about psychology and civil rights and stuff. DAMMIT.

Oh, and DC currently has a campaign to promote trans-people and I just want to see Steve being fascinated with that.

I've mentioned previously my mental head!canon for Steve Rogers's art portfolio. Just happened to find this image today:



Bucky: "Geez, ya HAD to draw me with an eel? What the heck, ya punk?"
Steve: "Hey, I'm in there too!"
Bucky: "Yeah, I saw. We need ta talk about some of what goes through your brain, punk."
Steve: "Jerk."