Today we’re gonna do something we’ve never done on this channel before, we’re gonna
look at something out of the MCU. A big part of the reason I’ve avoided talking about
Marvel movies is honestly just that I think they often have very little to say, and what
they do have to say is usually a very disinterested endorsement of the current status quo framed
in such a broad way that almost anybody could watch it and not feel like their worldview
is being challenged. That’s probably how you turn the box office charts into this in
just a few years.
But there’s a show on Disney+ that perfectly encapsulates all the most disturbing ideas
that are regularly and uncritically reproduced in the MCU and in super hero fiction more
broadly. Partially due to worse than usual writing it wears these ideas on its sleeve
in a really unique way that just begs us to ask what kind of ideas this massive media
empire is putting out into the collective psyche of millions of viewers. So today we’re
going to look at the ideology of Falcon And The Winter Soldier.
One of the central conflicts in this story is Sam Wilson aka Falconman grappling with
whether or not to accept the mantle of Captain America. The show plays a little coy with
why exactly Sam is so hesitant to do so, initially he seems to feel that he can’t fill the
shoes of Steve Rogers or maybe that he doesn’t think anyone should be TRYING to fill his
shoes. But as the episodes go on it becomes clear that there’s more to it than that,
Sam is struggling with what it means to be a black man and become the poster boy for
America, a country that has historically enslaved, segregated, and dehumanised black people and
in which he is still subject to racism, in one scene he’s saved from a potentially
dangerous run-in with a cop because he recognizes him as a celebrity super hero, a member of
the Avengers. The implication is that without his status, this could have gone very differently.
MCU movies often shy away from more substantial political commentary like this so the premise
of Sam trying to reconcile America’s past and present racism with the possibility of
becoming Captain America is really interesting. It gets even more interesting when Sam meets
Isaiah Bradley.
Isaiah is an exploration of what Captain America’s origin story might have looked like if he
wasn’t white but was instead a black man in Jim Crow America. While Rogers was informed
of the risks of taking the experimental super serum, Isaiah and 500 other black soldiers
were given the serum without their consent. They were told it was a vaccine. Bradley became
a super soldier in the 50s working for the US military but his service in a world that
had recently lost their Captain America didn’t result in him becoming the new Captain, it
resulted in him being imprisoned, experimented on, and tortured by the state for 30 years.
Isaiah explains all of this to Sam in the best and possibly only good scene in this
entire show. He ends by telling him: “They will never let a Black man be Captain America.
And even if they did, no self-respecting Black man would ever want to be.”
This is honestly a really significant question that’s being posed here, especially for
a comic book show for babies. As a member of a group who have been so mistreated by
America, should you accept an opportunity to secure yourself a higher standing within
that system that is doing so much harm to people like you or do you have some responsibility
to oppose that system entirely? Isaiah strongly endorses the position held by many significant
black radicals throughout history, that the liberation of oppressed people as a whole
cannot be achieved by, and may even be antithetical to individuals from oppressed groups gaining
relative wealth or power for themselves. Don’t take it from me though, I’ve included a
small reading list in the description of this video ranging from Huey Newton to Franz Fanon
exploring this question and the history behind it far better than I can here.
Isaiah’s words seem to really resonate with Sam and he’s posed a challenge that brings
Sam’s worldview into question. How does he navigate the contradiction of becoming
a figurehead of the state that wouldn’t even have let him vote a few generations ago?
I’ll tell you how, in the next scene he just shrugs and says “sucks to be that guy
but I’m built different”.
Alright he does give a reason it’s just amazing how quickly he dismisses what Isaiah
had to say. Sam says “all the work we did would be for nothing if I don’t do this”,
presumably he’s referring to the civil rights movement and everyone who fought for the liberation
of black Americans before and after them. In other words he’s asserting that all of
those struggles against the state, against white supremacy were struggles that are continued
by Sam taking up the shield and becoming Captain America. Those struggles for liberation, in
Birdo And The Iceman, become reimagined as struggles for assimilation, not of an opposition
to America as it exists, but of a wish to be included in America as it exists.
I’m reminded of the optimism a lot of people had that Obama’s presidency would mark a
turning point in the struggle to end racism in America. I think we all remember how that
worked out. Isaiah’s pain is treated as real, and justified, but his worldview is
ultimately relegated to that of a bitter old man stuck in the past, while Sam’s belief
that the system can be improved from within is presented as the progressive way forward.
Being subsumed by the institutions of the state becomes liberation, keep that theme
in mind because it’ll come up again later.
So despite everything we’ve covered so far the American state is not in fact the main
antagonist of this show. This is where things REALLY go off the rails. Our would-be Captain
America and this guy who people keep telling me is a main character in this show but I’m
not seeing it, they team up to stop a group of anarchists who dress in a way clearly intended
to invoke masked antifascist protesters, and they are called… The Flag Smashers. That
is not a joke.
Now when I say “anarchist” I do so knowing that the word is often used in fiction to
just describe people doing crimes and causing trouble but the Flag Smashers do have ideological
positions that are drawn from actual anarchist ideas, kind of. They don’t have much to
say about the state in general but they are primarily concerned with borders which of
course are enforced by states. This is relevant because the events of this show coincide with
a refugee crisis caused by half of the world’s population suddenly returning from non-existence
after 5 years due to Thanos doing his whole mass murder thing.
And this is where anything even resembling a coherent ideology comes to an end because
the thing about the Flag Smashers is they think the world was better during the blip,
the 5 year period in which half of all life on Earth was gone. Their reasoning for this
is based on the fact that after immediately losing half of their population many rich
western countries fully opened their borders in an effort to replace their lost workforce,
effectively creating a borderless world in which people could move freely. Nobody really
mentions the economic consequences this must have had on poorer countries who also lost
half their population and then had a mass exodus of workers hoping to get better pay
in places like the US but who cares right?
Wanting open borders is one thing, but by specifically framing it as “we want to go
back to how things were during the blip, things were better during the blip” this show has
created a situation where The Flag Smashers are telling us… Thanos was right.
This is a problem because throughout those two very long movies in which Thanos walks
around making Reddit posts about how it’ll totally fix all our problems if he just kills
half of all life in the universe, nobody ever really makes a substantial critique of his
plan. People call him crazy and evil and it’s generally understood that it will be bad if
this happens, and after it happens Captain Marvel suggests there’s been tons of instability
throughout the galaxy because of this, Earth is at least looking kinda worse for wear after
the blip. But nobody ever really engages with Thanos’ ideological position, nobody ever
says hey the number of people isn’t the problem, it’s how society is organised.
And btw the infinity stones would allow you to solve these problems in a million different
ways that don’t involve killing billions so what the fuck.
But likewise nobody except Thanos ever really argues FOR his plan, you never get the feeling
anyone aside from people who already serve him is hearing his ideas and going “oh yeah
that’ll work!”. And the people who live through the blip pretty consistently do not
describe it as a good time. Except… for the flag smashers. The anarchists are the
only people in the MCU who are explicitly telling us that what Thanos did actually made
things better in some way. So again: what the fuck?
This is especially bizarre because the flag smashers are ultimately advocating for something
pretty inoffensive, they don’t want to re-murder half the people on Earth, they just want to
go back to having open borders like they did before. So at this point we’re really struggling
to see these guys as villains. The MCU often struggles with this so they’ve developed
a handy trick of “having a villain with a valid point and even good ideas but they
use violence so sadly we must disregard it”. Or HAVWAVPAEGIBTUVSSWMDI for short.
So right on schedule the leader of the Flag Smashers (you guys know how much anarchists
love leaders and hierarchical structures right?) well she has to do something villainous enough
for we the audience to see her as… you know, a bad guy. So they have her blow up a building
full of civilians… for no reason. Seriously, no reason. Another Flag Smasher asks her why
she did it and she says “it’s the only language they understand”. Who the fuck
is THEY? The state? Those were just random people what are you talking about? Anarchists
are one of the few groups you can name who DON’T go around murdering random civilians.
This is where the already bad writing in this show is at its worst because they clearly
KNEW they needed to have that story beat at that point because their antagonists weren’t
really doing anything that bad, they’re mostly just robbing banks which is… who
cares fuck banks and trying to get the government to open their borders for refugees so it was
time for them to do something cartoonishly evil so that when our protagonist in the employ
of the American state takes them down we don’t get any… confusing feelings that lead us
to ask questions.
In a short essay by Tom Frome this trend in fiction is referred to as “The Swerve”.
“There’s a common trope in media where it’s revealed, most often near the end of
the story (but sometimes right off the bat), that trying too hard to do good makes you
evil.” “The message is unequivocal: “Having good
politics doesn’t make you fit to rule! Having no politics does! The restoration of the status
quo is the best we can hope for.””
This can be seen all throughout popular culture and especially in super hero fictions, take
Black Panther’s Killmonger and his justified criticism of Wakanda for standing by and doing
nothing throughout centuries of slavery and colonialism as well as his plan to arm colonised
people around the globe to defend themselves, but then he’s inexplicably violent towards
women and goes oh by the way I’m going to be the king of this decolonised world basically
defeating the whole purpose. Not because violence against women or world domination are genuine
shortcomings of the ideas Killmonger represents but because the writers need to include SOMETHING
so that when a hereditary monarch in collaboration with the literal CIA kills him we don’t
feel like maybe we’re being asked to root for the bad guys. You can see this exact same
dynamic repeated beat for beat throughout fiction.
And again, Falcor And King Cold stands out as a particularly egregious example of this
because all we’re really given is “they kill people” which is like… okay, thank
god our protagonist isn’t signing up to be the poster-child of the largest military
on the planet or anything like that or this would feel pretty silly!
See, the Flag Smashers aside from being pretty incoherent and bizarrely cool with Thanos
wiping out billions of humans, are also a very shallow depiction of anarchist beliefs.
Sure anarchists oppose the borders that states enforce but there’s a lot of other issues
they take with states, things like having a monopoly on the legitimate use of force.
That’s an interesting one because despite the show expecting us to believe that Sam
is struggling with whether he can or should represent America as a black man he sure never
had any problem fighting for America as a black man, seems like he’s had that one
figured out for a long time. The first episode features the US military using Sam to break
international law by illegally entering Libyan air space with his special wings which by
the way are American manufactured military weapons.
This never really comes up again and isn’t depicted as bad in any way because the things
that the US does militarily aren’t up for debate, those are facts, those are neutral
factors, what this show takes aim at as the Real Problems are individual actors making
Bad Decisions. Sam has no beef with the US military but when the Head… Flag Smasher
kills a few people they simply have to be stopped because they are not representing
a state, they do not have permission to carry out violence, the show takes that as a given
in a way that does far more to bolster the arguments of real world anarchists than it
does to refute them.
But the focus on individual actors gets far worse than that. After defeating the Flag
Smooshers Sam approaches a group of senators who had been shown endlessly debating how
to respond to the refugee crisis caused by the blip’d people returning and he just…
he just tells them to Be Better and that’s it. No, seriously. He tells them that they
aren’t listening to marginalized people enough which is why they are making Bad Decisions.
Not out of malice, not out of class interest, not because they are subject to economic and
political institutions way beyond their control, but innocent ignorance. What’s being very
aggressively stated here is that the solution to our problems is not any kind of systemic
change, it’s just a matter of our leaders needing to hear the right voices so they can
Do Better. Who knew it would be so easy to solve a refugee crisis. Why haven’t we thought
of giving our leaders a good talking to? We should develop an entire genre of tv shows
who just try to do that I’m sure that’ll fix things.
Not long after Frosty And the Snowman came out the CIA released a recruitment ad that
featured a woman who described herself as a daughter of immigrants, a woman of colour,
and an intersectional millennial with an anxiety disorder talking about how inclusive and great
the CIA is.
Do you see the ideological position we’re being primed to accept? The US military isn’t
bad, the CIA isn’t bad, the state and capitalism are not bad, they’ve just been run by privileged
people, by white men who won’t listen to the voices of the marginalised, that’s all!
This means that all it takes to make these institutions good and solve our biggest problems
as a society is for marginalised people to be heard. To be seen.
That’s right, come join the CIA and you too can orchestrate inclusive coups in South
America or maybe you can work as a torturer at a black site running illegal human experiments
on someone just like Isaiah Bradley from hit show Falcon And The Winter Soldier now available
on Disney+. And if you’re unlucky enough to be in one of those bad countries that’s
standing between American capital and resources they want to exploit, don’t worry, when
you and your family are killed by a drone strike you can pass into the next world comforted
by your knowledge that a woman of colour pulled the trigger!
There’s a scene right at the end of the last episode where Sam brings Isaiah to the
museum we’ve seen a couple times with the big Captain America installation. Sam shows
Isaiah that he’s had a statue of him installed that tells his story. There’s tears in Isaiah’s
eyes as if this was some reconciliation, some closure after having his life destroyed. The
ideology of this show is that politics is not change, politics is not solving problems,
politics is gestures. Saying the right things, making sure the right people feel seen and
heard. Every now and then America can raise a statue to show that it cares while it destroys
black lives at home and abroad every day.
But they had to have that scene didn’t they, otherwise we might find ourselves walking
away from Falcon And The Winter Soldier with… confusing feelings that lead us to ask questions.