Face
front, true believers! Plot spoilers below!
“On
your left.”
Granted,
Captain America's opening line is more likely intended literally than
as some kind of political metaphor. But as Peter Bradshaw wrote in the Guardian “advocates
of the 'liberal Hollywood' conspiracy will find plenty of ammunition
here.” It's much closer to the 'Dark Knight Rises'
that the fulminating Tea Party thought they were watching than
anything that actually happened in that film. The conceit, as set up
at the end of the previous instalment, is that a handy plot device
transports Cap from the clear-cut square-jawed Forties to today's
sinkhole of moral ambiguity. And finds it wanting.
As co-director Anthony Russo states “We were all reading the
articles that were coming out questioning drone strikes, pre-emptive
strikes, civil liberties — Obama talking about who they would
kill... We wanted to put all of that into the film because it would
be a contrast to [Cap]'s greatest-generation [way of thinking]."
It could almost carry a screen
credit “based on an original idea leaked by Edward Snowden”.
How
come? How did the most straight-laced Marvel hero, the one with a
military title embedded in his name, the one who made his costume out
of the American flag, get first billing in a superhero movie that
overtakes the others from the left? Actually, to those of us who know
our comics history, its not so surprising. As Tony Keen argued in 'Captain America: Sentinel of Liberalism', Cap was created not to represent a white-faced
conformist America but a liberal, inclusive one. The little guy who
got beefed up by that super-serum never forgot the other little guys.
His brief McCarthyite existence as 'Captain America Commie
Smasher' has since been retconned out of existence. It's
scarcely a co-incidence that his chief allies here are a black guy
and a woman.
The
plotline of course echoes the original comics, where wartime Cap woke
up one day in the Sixties. Except the 'current day' here owes as much
to the film world of the Seventies as to news articles. Producer Kevin Feige has stated “we
really want to make a '70s political thriller masquerading as a big
superhero movie,” citing films such as
'Three
Days of the Condor', 'The Parallax View' and 'Marathon
Man.'
Casting Robert Redford, who starred in 'Condor'
and 'All the President's Men', who is almost the
poster boy of Hollywood liberalism, seems a deliberate tip to the
audience to look in that direction. And casting him
counter-intuitively as turncoat bad guy Alexander Pierce... well,
we'll get to that.
Of
course it references those political thrillers the way pop songs
sometimes filch from symphonies, it takes the big thumping themes but
leaves behind the complex structures and counter-melodies. It's all
summed up in one exchange - “How do we tell the good guys from the
bad guys?” “If they're shooting at you, they're bad.” There's a
memorable scene in a lift at SHIELD's corporate-looking HQ, finding
tension and paranoia in tiny details. Then as soon as the slugfest
starts they could be fighting anywhere over anything.
A
classic example of the need for jeopardy rigging the debate is when
the big guns of the Helicarriers get locked and loaded. Its implied
they're trained on actual or nascent superheroes, without any
corresponding suggestion they might be taking in any super-villains.
(Let alone your actual common-or-garden terrorists.) To the fan those
guns don't represent a pointed debate between security and liberty,
they threaten something more fundamental – preventing the making of
any more superhero films. Yet even a dyed-in-the-wool state-hatin'
civil liberties champion like me would concede that terrorists exist.
Many of them are already in government, true. But not all. And I
don't really want to get blown up on the London tube.
This
structure also resides on the quaint notion that the Allies fought
the War adhering rigidly to the Hayes code, and black ops are some
recent arrival on the American landscape. That atom bomb was
presumably dropped by someone else, then. The closest this comes to a
head is where Cap admits to Fury they may have bent the rules back
then, but “we
never struck, until someone hit us first”.
In other words the simplistic 'clear blue sky' myth that still hangs
over Pearl Harbour.
You're
probably better off not thinking of any of that. You're probably
better off imagining some 'Purple Rose of Cairo'
scenario, in which Cap steps not out of an actual past but down from
one of those propaganda images on show at the Smithsonian – with
their peculiar blend of primary colours and sepia. Which was more the
way Marvel first brought him back. He'd then been out of the comic
pages for more than a decade. Combined with the general young age of
the readership, that effectively made him a long-lost figure from
history, rather than from another film we all went to see a couple of
years ago.
But
there's a deeper structural flaw. How did SHIELD get warped into a
sword? There's a moment in the end credits where its emblem is
reflected as Hydra's, effectively encapsulating the plot. Hydra's
infiltration of SHIELD is clearly meant to
represent corruption at SHIELD. We became the
people we fought. Yet language can be slippery stuff. The signified
needs a signifier by definition, but then sometimes that signifier
can just plain get in the way. At one point Rogers spits at Fury
“You're not part of Hydra, but you had the same ideas as they did!”
Which most likely represents the film's intent. But it often slips
into implying that all of SHIELD's problems were external. There
wasn't an excess of power, it just fell into the wrong hands.
Pierce's plan, at root, seems to be to create a climate of fear which
will allow him to rule more easily. If he'd genuinely believed his
own rhetoric about assuring security, the film may well have been
bolder and richer.
This
is all pretty much summed up by the film's treatment of Nick Fury.
The most radical idea it comes up with is that Fury himself might
somehow be implicated. But this notion is only really flirted with,
and it soon becomes obvious the bad guys' plot centres around bumping
Fury off. Their failure to achieve this becomes their overall
failure. Yet the comics were, after all, called 'Nick Fury,
Agent of SHIELD'. Nick Fury is SHIELD as
far as we the viewers are concerned. They're the guy with the
eyepatch plus his mates. If he was never corrupted then SHIELD never
really was.
The
dichotomy between Fury and Pierce also suggests that the split lies
between the 'suits' and the 'agents' – those who make Powerpoint
slideshows of strategic directions and those who do the actual work.
Fury partly defeats Pierce through using the imprint of his bad eye,
which of course he got in battle.
Having
previously complained that Jane Foster got little to do in 'Thor', and that the Black Widow was somewhat under-used in 'The Avengers', my happier task
here is to tell you that the Black Widow plays quite an integral
role. Peter Bradshaw goes as far as to say that she “at least gets
to be an actual character
this time.”
If
she was paired up much with Cap in the comics, it was after my
mainstream-reading days. But she makes a good foil for him, to quote
Bradshaw again, “chipping away at [his] old-school earnestness and
trying to fix him up with a date.” Some of this is schematic. (Cap
won't push a bad guy off a roof to make him talk. But she will
because she's, like, a badass herself, yeah?) And this date-pushing
business is doubtless only going one way. But there's genuine sparks
in the scenes between them. And they're pretty much fired by her to
his straight man.
Now
the alert reader may already have noticed my talking about this
relationship rather one-directionally – what she does for Cap. He's
certainly the moral centre of the film, around whom all the other
characters need to reorient themselves. (While he just needs to catch
up on modern cuisine and Marvin Gaye.) Her reformed criminal role is
not only repeatedly referred to, but in many ways reprised. The film
is bookend by scenes of her uploading data. The first time she's
uploading from, going off-mission to rescue info
rather than people and consequently raising Cap's ire. But then she
uploads to, to the people, spilling those black op
beans like a one-woman Wikileaks.
But
she's so much like Selina Kyle from 'Dark Knight Rises'
I could almost cut and paste what I said back then about her. While you probably don't want to
picture me sporting the costume, I would rather be
the Black Widow than the pious, serious-minded Cap any day of the
week. Unsurprisingly, she's sexy. But she's also smart, sassy and
just enough on the right side to not be goody-goody. And it's not
just me who things so. In his review at the FA site, Will Morgan comments: “in
comic stores, or at least the one I run, we had numerous girls and
young women coming into the shop asking for 'Black Widow' comics, because they’d finally seen an on-screen Marvel heroine who
wasn’t insipid, leaden or flat-out embarrassing.”
Superhero
films commonly suffer from overcrowding, and its true the two-way
banter between Cap and the Widow leave the Falcon as something of a
gooseberry. Look at his comparatively minor contribution to winning
the final battle. At one point he even points to Cap and says “don't
look at me. I do what he does - just slower.” And it's funny
because it's true. At times
you feel he's there so there can be a black character for Cap to be
racially inclusive to.
Which
is perhaps true to the comics. For most of the Seventies the cover
was double-billed 'Captain America and the Falcon'
('71 to '78). While Marvel comics in many ways pioneered black
characters in mainstream comics and often ran overtly anti-racist
storylines, there was also a tendency to pair them with a more
suburban-friendly white face when it came time to sell the unit.
There was also 'Power Man and Iron Fist' ('78 to
'86). (Disclaimer: Power Man started out with sole billing, and the
Black Panther had his own title from time to time.)
But it's the other double-biller, the Winter Solider, who really feels double-booked. You could easily imagine the plot running without him, suggesting he was spliced in at some stage or other. It might have been better to hold him back more in this film, perhaps just hinting at his actual identity, then give him more screen space in the third instalment. (A mid-credits teaser tells us he's returning.)
It
would, its true, be fairly easy to come up on this film's left. But
in a way, it would be too easy. If, ultimately, it's not terribly
radical its coming up on those other blockbusters' left still seems
notable. Could you ask for more than this? Yes, of course you could.
But we're not used to blockbuster films even having an agenda.
Normally they're stewed by too many cooks and too wary of alienating
any sections of the audience, the ellipses and caveats effectively
driving 'Dark Knight Rises' into incoherence.
Perhaps it could be taken of an indicator of the way the Snowdon
revelations have been taken more seriously in the States than here in
the UK. Even baby steps in the right direction might bode well.
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ReplyDeleteI love Cap and the way he changed to be a great hero! Thank you review so much!
ReplyDeleteYou're welcome, Cap!
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