 |
| It's a fucking snakeskin turban, people. And no, Mom, she doesn't "just look that way" and those aren't her real cheekbones. Gah, we argued so much about this dumb movie. |
through high school and college, I was ever so tapped in to Hollywood (and beyond). The steep drop in my consumption of film--at least current film--coincides quite noticeably with the absence of any disposable income to speak of. Ah, how culture eludes the impoverished! I graduated six years ago in the spring and I've reduced myself to what I can steal from the internet, my streaming-only Netflix subscription, and movies related to my chosen field,
Giving Me a Number, Taking Away My Name
More than the snobbish angst of having not enjoyed any high art at the multiplex this year--and that's being generous in assuming some was made, I'm a cynical snob--is that I have no brevity in my nature. My articles on Watchmen and The Hunger Games are more akin to essays, and between tracking down images, writing and editing, they took days of time to produce. This is a hurdle, more than a flaw, I'd say: It's the way I tend to rant articulately about my opinions to a few people, promise myself and others that I'll write down my thinking and then never do that is the real, real problem. But, since I'm a deli-slicer extraordinaire these days (we don't give out numbers, actually), I might as well do as Devo commands and get up off my ass.
I've Got One Hell of a Job
This is a challenge all writers face: Not writing and feeling bad about it. Let's remember to work with what we've got, draw inspiration from whatever truly does inspire us, and just keep trying to write it down. I did see some movies that were in release this year. I do have opinions about them, discerning critiques as a writer, a filmgoer and a scholar of the silver screen. Let's get nitty and gritty, let's think critically about mass-audience entertainment, let's commit to following through on our promise to ourselves and each other and elevate even the lowest common experiences to the level of intelligence befitting discourse! Or, at least let's delve into a very long exploration of Captain America 2: The Winter Soldier, like I fucking said I would when I saw it in April. Yeehaw!
After this point, there are mega-spoilers, not that I probably need to warn anyone about a movie this old and some triggering things like descriptions of violence. Oh, and hereafter, there will be no more references to "Secret Agent Man" by Devo, in part because Steve Rogers makes the worst secret agent ever.
This all began some time ago, when I watched the first CA movie, The First Avenger, on Netflix. I'd heard it was made out of montages and sort of meh, but The Avengers was coming out and I'd seen all the Hulk and Iron Man movies, and I was already paying for it, so... now it's my favorite superhero movie and I will tell you why.
The cast is just about too much fun - Cheesy accents for some of my favorite character actors; a bold female lead, written with not a single cringe-worthy moment; Chris Evans, who has filled out very nicely over the years, and beefed up his acting chops to boot.
 |
| A private moment--no action, just exposure. |
The love plotline is feminist - It's about flipping time. The scene in the car between Steve and Agent Carter is one of the most credible reasons for two characters to be attracted to each other that I've seen done in shorthand. It has nothing to do with her being the contrast to an emasculated man as in Hunger Games, nor does it set her up as needing to be softened by the hyper-masculinity we see shortly thereafter. It has to do with how difference is vulnerability, and being vulnerable to the right person is love.
 |
| Crack it open if you want to make super-magic-Nazis into a (bigger) joke. |
The film itself is modest - Just like the way we romanticize the time period sans supersoldiers, The First Avenger is barely beyond our rosy version of what really happened. Hydra isn't so much more sinister than actual Nazis--in fact, they kill, umm, millions and millions fewer people, whatever their intentions. There are explosions and tanks and motorcycles; there's a big car and a big airplane and a very big Captain America, but really those things are hardly more than mundane. It's not as witty as Whedon, but it's warm. It's got a can-can line and a chipper song in it, and yes, a couple spinning newspaper montages. For some reason at the end, after a dogfight and a fist fight, Cap crashes into the arctic in his homemade costume. It's sweet and just self-serious enough to deny us permission to roll our eyes.
And that's what makes it so special. It's gentle, a bit of a romp without being too silly, driven by its characters who are all about essential goodness and courage. Internal conflicts are resolved by doing what's right in one of America's few righteous wars, and doing it with genuine humility. Like Bradbury's and Vonnegut's, I find the characters lose their naivety without surrendering their innocence. At his lowest moment, Cap can't get trashed, but he can still cry.
It interested me in a character I'd not read much about, converted me from a blind adoration of Batman's "edginess" (yes, those are disdainful quotation marks, I ain't got time for no Bat-bashing, at the moment) to a curiosity about a a much rarer archetype at this day in age: A hero.
It Can Only Take It Away
And we all know where this is going. He wakes up in 2014 and the dream goes poof and who the hell is he? Which is right where it should go. It would an be intense shock to say the least--just looking back on a movie about the 1940s and looking at this one is making my head spin a little. Unfortunately, the film's biggest veer off-course is in the matter of heart. It's almost preposterous, the comparison, as if a movie about Then can be all the things I said above, can be driven by character, and one about Now cannot be. Steve's grief, his outsidership, his battle with resurrection and all its implications are cast aside, a blurry subtext, out of sight and out of run-time.
 |
| Fun fact: Different countries released different shots of his list of things to catch up on. This one's from Russia. |
The way its played for humor is fine with me. I am often accused of a disinterest in anything but tragedy. The gags coming back to life are few enough and simple enough to be playful: He doesn't seem like a rube, he's owning it. It's cute. All the guys from his barbershop quartet are dead, as he jokes. And they are. Everyone he knew is dead, but his character is written consistently such that even the most gallows of the humorous references to his situation, are delivered with a humble smile. In short, it's fine that The Winter Solider isn't about an essential person struggling with an existential crisis. It's an American kung fu movie and that's okay. It would stand alone, by which I mean without context, as a mediocre action movie. It wouldn't have intrigued me about a character I'd little familiarity with and it wouldn't have garnered this article. It isn't my favorite.
It so happens that it isn't humor that I have a problem with, it isn't levity. It's the feeling that the meat of a story is being obscured by it. I like reality, I like tough choices. I like telling the story you've written yourself toward, or not writing yourself toward it, if it isn't the story you want to tell. If the sequel was made in the same vein as the first film, it would have been about bigger questions--not just hot button issues. But the could-have-been should follow the actual, so let's move to the story that was told, and more importantly, who was telling it to us.
What is it Good For?
 |
| Disney, the answer is Disney, everybody. Oh, for an Air Pirates take on TWS... |
Marvel Films is owned by one of the largest media conglomerates in the world; the hegemon of our childhood perception of gender dynamics, of heroes. It's highly concerned with protecting the ideas it has manufactured and acquired as property. Every time copyright law would allow Mickey Mouse to become publicly available, Disney makes sure that the law is changed. That the ideas of the long-dead are not ever rendered the possession of their fans and critics, because they are lucrative commodities. Ideas are property. So. Onto our story, already in progress.
 |
| The obscured costume is extremely telling: That is about as super as he needs to be. |
There is no divide between these two films, as far as ownership of Marvel goes. It's not that simple. It's not like Disney took the reigns and it lost the heart. And I mean hey, we can all get behind the idea that fighting Nazis is good, right? Okay, except maybe Walt Disney, but who's counting. The First Avenger, in addition to covering Cap's origin (and I do mean in addition, the plot outside the character development is very simple), sets up a key object for the associated franchises and establishes that worse than actual Nazis is Hydra. None of the ravages of the Holocaust nor any of the other agonies of the Second World War are particularly forward.
We're not getting the gruesome and the conflict is scaled to achievable for one star-spangled man's plan: He only has to pretend to punch Hitler, and winning the war, even liberating a concentration camp, is not set on his shoulders. Hydra, therefore, exists to facilitate this scaling. Sure, Red Skull's goals are beyond the pale, but the actual damage is relatively negligible, the fighting reasonable at the level of fisticuffs and foot chases. Such is the way of magic Nazis--the loftier and more occult their ambitions, the less effective they are. But in a story both for and about 2014, the concept of scaling takes on a whole new meaning.
 |
| Bureaucracy: Millions of dead. Hydra: Bucky? |
The Winter Soldier's big reveal is that Hydra has not only infiltrated SHIELD, it was in fact, its founding body. The post-9/11 blue chip terrors abound--not to trivialize, they are very real: Privacy invasion, the automation of warfare, the cataclysmic amount of power in the hands of the very few. In essence these threats are personally relevant, unlike the Holocaust, while indicating a similarity in the dangers of profiling, the modern nod to genocide. It is in this aspect that the film betrays us, that the tellers of this story become so critically important to scrutinize.
 |
| Evil is bad. |
Other than in its penetrating devotion to establishing character and setting, the first film is virtually message-less. Its sequel, however, is heavily loaded. It is frightening. Unlike the context of WWII, we don't know how these modern fears and violations will be resolved, or even if they will be. Unless, of course, we swallow our spoonfeeding, as Disney would have us. When Black Widow promises that the purge of Hydra has worked, her solution is to give all remaining power to an even smaller group of this-time-for-sure infallible watchdogs. This is no kind of solution, other than a lie. The owners of the property--an apt term, since these characters the privileged have secured the legal control over are worked liked tracts of farmland to turn profit--do not speak for us. They tell us stories about our heroes, either as their mouthpieces, or more insidiously, as pacifying fictions that deflect from the truth. The key difference in the second film is that Hydra is not a scaling of a conflict to suit our hero. It is a scaling of evil to distract the audience. From the top floor of the building, it was not the bastion of corporate and creative conservatism (the order the film purports to villainize!) that looked down, no. It was Nazis! Because only the ultimate straw man could perpetrate such criminal and amoral acts, right? The subplot involving the smartphone and the dangers of being tracked is a cardinal example. We are expected to believe that it would take a secretly sinister shadow government with technopowers to locate someone using an AT&T cellphone, as if we have been asleep for the last seventy years. We are implicitly instructed that there is something much worse at work than we imagined, when in reality, super-Nazis don't have anything to do with the ways Disney strangles the world we know.
Captain America is our moral compass, but do we need him to tell us that murder satellites are bad? No. We need him not to question the film's ultimate message: The more absolute the power, the more we must trust in the few, the far-better-than-average of us, unsusceptible to corruption. Ubermenches, if you will. The first film has the same utter lack of questioning, but in a situation where we would never question anyway. To mistake them for being on the same continuum is both easy and dangerous. Ironically, it was World War Two and is accompanying newsreels that paved the way for the acceptance of violence in fiction cinema, for film noir. Seeing The First Avenger set in the 1940s can't help but recall films from that period. But The Winter Solider repackages war uncritically as fantasy entertainment, puts fake carnage into an approximation of the real world and then asks us to pretend that, like train zipline incursions, urban combat doesn't happen.
 |
| He is...covered in guns. And that being the case, he is fighting Black Widow, who has equivalent gun powers. |
Frankly, I found this aspect of it traumatizing. Armed men stalking the freeway, firing into crowds of panicked civilians; soldiers like Falcon trained, as soldiers are, to efficiently gun people down, killing with impunity that bordered on the indiscriminate. How can we sit in a theater and watch such images, served up for our amusement as if the violence was not just unaffecting, but not even based in reality? Because there's a guy in a helmet running around, we have a license to pretend that there is something fantastical going on? As I mentioned above, I'm not opposed to action movies nor am I horrified by violence. I understand the commercial needs for the shift in tone between these two films, and I believe, the assumption that the change in setting all but demands an escalation, a hardening of the heart. But I feel like instead of starting at Movie A and getting Movie B, I got Movie Q.
Bitter, Mean and Disabled
More than our own struggle with the expectation of complacency, how can we believe that Cap himself would be inured to the difference in the spirit of war? The way the character is written is practically timeless, it is so consistent. And the notion of scaling conflict comes into play again. The sequel offers only the angst, the fearful modern condition in an era of drones and suitcase bombs, but we do see an effort made to give Captain America a fight he can handle.
 |
| Biff! Pow! |
The body count, the gun deaths (the opening scene on the ship involves Cap's gratitude over Rumlow shooting an enemy in the head at close range) the urban warfare all spring up around him, trappings of a troubled time. But he scarcely interfaces with them, instead taking on the challenge engineered to fit him. While Falcon is pumping controlled bursts of automatic weapon fire into nests of enemies, Captain Rogers is...having a fistfight with his literally tailor-made nemesis. Tellingly, a cursory exploration of the promotional materials for The Winter Soldier invariably shows TWS armed with his signature rifle, a weapon he's stripped of whenever close quarters are called for, keeping Cap from being out-gunned. The other posters complete the trend, his teammates dressed in blacks, strapped with firearms, he with his cerulean suit and nothing but a shield and a look of resolve. It's a clear indicator as to his qualification as a judge, if we were hoping to find one who wasn't a shill for the film's conformist message.
PTSD is brought up in the film, too, referenced both overtly by Falcon's work with the VA and symbolically in the personage of The Winter Soldier, Mr. Bucky Barnes himself. The tension of memory, the repeated reliving so associated with shellshock is the sum total of his life. But it is the Alzheimer's scene with Agent Carter that makes the closest resonance for most of our lives, played sorrowfully but with no lasting effect on Steve. Nothing touches Captain America, as though the trauma of mundane combat and superscientific resurrection alike are deflected to allow for his purity, his innocence.
Based on the overwhelming dichotomies, this must have been the only way to keep from soliciting a true choice from the movie's protagonist. Our hero has no comment until the plot forces one, and how can he? At every turn he is left outside the most severe pain, the toughest situations: He's certainly not the one risking shooting friendlies, and through the magic of cinema, there's very little blood to dirty his hands, or say, splatter chunkily all over his face.
 |
| That is the way you'd fight your friend... If you were ten. |
Don't let me imply that I want to see Cap broken by slaughter, drowned in gore. There is a sense of glory that those savage images interfere with. My problem with The Winter Soldier is that they felt the need to put the gun on stage, as it were. Why build such incongruities of scale, such overt conflicts of setting versus a character established recently and well--a character who I strongly feel does not react believably--into the plot of your film? Why make Movie Q, when you could make Movie B instead?
Lord, There's Got to be a Better Way
By the end of The Winter Soldier (which is one of the most alluring titles I've heard in a while), I found myself wondering how and why Captain America would still consider himself a soldier at all. I'm not talking about an arc of self-doubt--I was very, very happy there was no time wasted on a without-lasting-impact-by-necessity filler story about wallowing. I'm talking about handling things the way Cap would: Leading by example in the direction of his heart. There's a difference between violence and strength, between power and leadership. Fighting the actual Nazis was one of the most righteous things a guy could do in 1945. That doesn't necessarily mean that being a soldier is the best way to be righteous now. The world has changed (as the movie perfunctorily mentions, and fails to back up with meaniful character change until later instigated by the plot). How about Captain America 2: Innercity School Teacher? It could be like The Wire meets Stand and Deliver.
That's about as much of a Movie Q as this turned out to be, though. In order to argue the case for Movie B, it's got to hit all the same marks. Those being:
- SHIELD=Hydra There's no need for gun ships or anything like that. This could be a straight up spy flick, smaller slips and misdirections working directly on BW and CA, manipulating or frustrating them as befits the master plan, not to do megaevil, but to experiment, flexing Hydra's power and their assets. Webs of banal evil are much more thematically appropriate to this villainous institution, anyway, and are much less likely to topple by crashing some planes (Didn't they learn their lesson back in the day? Cap will die to crash your evil plane, no doubt).
- Bucky=The Winter Soldier Up the comparison between Bucky and Steve, two assets too precious to expend. The only veterans of their experience, arrested, destinies locked together. This is the biggest chance to make The Winter Soldier about who the characters are, not the challenges of what they must do. Oh, and do the audience the favor of letting the actors with the best chemistry talk more and fight less.
- Nick Fury=
deadnot dead Easily doable under a number of circumstances. So easy in fact, that I included it here even though it isn't plot necessary at all. - Falcon Another effortless addition. He's retired, and works with the VA and used to be a pararescuer. I think there's more here than just guns blazin' with a jetpack. How about a more sincere man-to-man at some point, not about bed anecdotes or watching other people talk about their unhealed struggles. And was the Marvin Gaye thing a little stereotypical for anyone else's taste?
- Black Widow=friendzone I saved this one for last, so that I might expound a bit without too badly damaging mah flow. They make a good duo, he the outsider and she the jaded veteran. There's no need for them to kiss, or go to the mall together. There's just not. It's interesting that other than Iron Man, I believe Black Widow is the oldest consistently cast character in the Marvel films, dating back to Iron Man 2, and yet we know the least about her. Far from coming off as mysterious, she just seems empty (even asking Cap "Who do you want me to be?"), awaiting a relationship good enough to redeem/undo those years of questionable morality we're always vaguely hearing something about. Which, although it's a degrading and sexist notion that she can't redeem herself, is a story with a natural role for CA. After all, he's the embodiment of essential goodness. Instead, TWS features some of the flimsiest sexual tension I've ever seen. They just don't seem romantically interested in each other, and the body language during their totally passionless kiss says it all. There was no effort made to add a will-they-won't-they dimension, nor much spent on really developing a friendship full of contrast and nuance (after asking him to label her, when he chooses "friend" she rebuffs him by telling him he's "in the wrong line of work." until he tells her what a good person he thinks she is and she believes him, in spite of her own doubts. Ugh). Also, the mall? Seriously? Not exactly where I'd go to avoid being seen, if I were a conspicuously built, famous hero. But I digress.
 |
| "I don't have to kiss him til later, right?" |
 |
| Real-life conspicuously built, famous Chris Evans cannot fetch take-out food without someone taking his picture and putting it on the internet. |
None of these plot points relies on the scale of conflict being large. In fact, they could be carried off quite intimately, interactions that can allow for the drama of themes like whether or not humanity requires the ability to die, the nature of memory in relation to the soul, the anger at being used and the selfless outrage at seeing the same injustice perpetrated against others. There could be pathos and righteousness, self-searching that brooks the same hope and resilience as it did in The First Avenger. Bottom line, the whole world can be scaled to fit, resulting an a coherent, satisfying product--better than just letting Cap be Cap, a narrative where he can address the conundrums of his character without breaking his mold hangs within easy reach. I don't want him to have to exist in a world where it makes more sense for him to quit his commission than it does to keep on keeping on, and there's no reason I can see that he should have to.
Good God, Ya'll!
Last but not least is the metacommentary, an ironic one, and considering Movie Q was made instead of Movie B, one unintentionally so. A little more emphasis on the iteration of the self in the era of resurrection and we'd have ourselves a knock out punch of synergized drama, action and character when Captain America, the only character to, for all intents and purposes, be an immortal human, dies.
 |
| Looks like Ultron's gonna get 'im. |
As things stand, what we're facing is the inevitability for what they've done with his arc: How long could he go on untouched by the trauma, unangered by the fool science has made of him in his grief, before needing a hard reset. There's been some handwaving about killing off a franchise. I'll believe a permanent death when I see it. He comes back in the comics, and if box office demand picks up, I have a feeling he won't be dead for keeps. At what point does Cap become suicidally reckless, knowing that his ultimate sacrifice is likely ultimate -1? Or not caring whether it is or it isn't?
This led me to an interesting conclusion about franchise media in general. Isn't this the reason we love reboots? There's always the same amount of potential creative energy when a new iteration comes around. Then there's the sequel, when we remember that no matter what you put them through, these characters will never truly deviate from what's expected of them. Then they die. And we hope again when it all starts over. But how many times? How often can we trust in death to be rebirth? And what does it mean that we write our most ennobling stories under the ambivalent assumption that come whatever war, whatever sacrifice, nothing is ever final? No bad decisions cannot be fixed by throwing more money at them, no good ideas cannot be mired in the status quo. Where will we find the creative fortitude not just to match the integrity of our superheroes, but to imbue them with some in the first place?
At what point do we realize that not being able to give your life--when you must, with all your heart--means that we glorify something less than honorable, something less than human? That our heroes are less than soldiers, than citizens, less and less and less.
No comments:
Post a Comment