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So where is the little guy from, actually?
I am not sleeping again. This is tiring. Seriously, body. Dinner at M3 was nice, though.
Yesterday was low-key. I worked on my job. I stared at Craigslist. I made noodles and cheese with the last of the New Year's ham. I talked a lot more about Magic: The Gathering than I thought I remembered in comments to one of![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
cucumberseed's latest posts. And in the evening I watched Captain America: The First Avenger (2011) for the first time since it was in theaters, because I had this DVD a mysterious benefactor sent me in July. It's a movie I loved when I saw it; I meant to post about it for a full year, then it seems I lost my notes (which in normal cases hang around my desktop in a mildly guilt-tripping way, I'm looking at you, Canterville Ghost) and failed to use The Avengers (2012) as sufficient impetus for a new set. Tiny Wittgenstein, do I have to get you out of the way every time I review something late?
Until such time as someone films a Mark Ruffalo Hulk and doesn't screw it up, I really think my favorite of the Marvel cycle will remain Captain America. I wasn't expecting that when I saw it. I never had any real affinity with the comics. I'm not sure what I could have told you about the mythos going in. Mostly I knew that I'd seen the trailer on television and against almost all my experience of trailers nowadays, it made me want to see the movie; so I did. And found I wanted to see it again. A lot of it has to do, I think, with the film's intelligent understanding of the ways in which, as Captain America, Steve Rogers is at once a genuine and a manufactured hero, and that in some senses he doesn't become anything at all. Basic training doesn't make him over into the kind of he-man Colonel Phillips believes the Army needs in order to "personally escort Adolf Hitler to the gates of Hell." That isn't what Dr. Erskine took a chance on him for; instead, it's the testing ground for his dedication and the Odysseus-quickness of mind that serves him better than Ajax-strength, confirming the doctor's intuition that what the super-soldier project needs is not "a strong man who has known power all his life," but "a weak man [who] knows the value of strength . . . knows compassion." In the wake of Erskine's assassination, however, and the destruction of his research, Phillips shuts the project down, brutally: "I asked for an army. All I got was you." And it seems that Steve's career as a superhero is over before it's even been field-tested. He's not a soldier, he's a scientific curiosity whose potential in the field is quickly diverted into endless rounds of propaganda, a red-white-and-blue-costumed echo of the flag-raisers of Iwo Jima. There are comic strips, stage shows, a Saturday morning serial; the famed sock to Hitler's jaw that graced the cover of Captain America Comics #1 in his history and ours is repeated nightly for crowds of bond-buying rubes who may or may not realize that the "Star-Spangled Man with a Plan" has never been closer to the European theater than boot camp in New York State. By the time he's doing USO camp shows, Steve can perfectly mimic the media image of a national hero, but he feels even less like the real thing than when he was the ninety-pound weakling with five different 4-F stamps who at least everyone knew was ankle-biting crazy and scrappy enough to take on all comers. The shield is a bit of business, the mask a woollen stocking cap. The civilians love him, but he's a joke to the troops in Italy. Hence I love that the first solo mission of "Captain America" sounds, when summarized, as pulpily over-the-top as any of his heretofore fictitious adventures—disobeying orders to rescue nearly four hundred men and return with enemy secrets, leaving a German base in flames behind him—because it's merely that same outsize courage given a chance at the Bernhardt Line instead of the streets of Brooklyn. He'll end his war the same way, staying on the air with Peggy till the last minute in a poignant homage to Powell and Pressburger's A Matter of Life and Death (1946). The only difference between the superman piloting a deadly payload of god-tech into the freezing waters of the Arctic Ocean and the skinny, uncoordinated kid who throws himself all stick-figure arms and legs onto what he thinks is a live grenade is that one of them has an easier time reaching the controls.
(Like all national myths, there is a fairy-tale component to Captain America: the contrasting examples of Cap and the Red Skull prove that Erskine's formula isn't really a recipe for supermen so much as an amplification of whatever a person is to begin with. Steve is a pint-sized lionheart; what he gains is the strength to back up his convictions. Johann Schmidt is a monster; all he became was a visible one. This seems as good as anywhere else to mention that the movie manages another narrative feat against which I have a lot of automatic skepticism: it uses the trope of Nazis! Even worse than they actually were! without being so historically offensive that I want to throw the story across a room. Possibly this is because it stays away from the historical war almost entirely, focusing on the fringe science madness of Schmidt and HYDRA, whose double-fisted salute is just enough not a Sieg Heil that the plan to annihilate the Allies with Tesseract-derived weapons of mass destruction reads as traditional comic-book megalomania, not an extension of real-world genocide. The script does take some care to distinguish Schmidt's obsessions from the Nazi party line, incidentally providing the excuse for a nice throwaway crossover with Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981): "And the Führer digs for trinkets in the desert." Either way, it avoids the Stross/Meaney problem and I have no problems with Hugo Weaving chewing all the scenery he can reach, with or without his actual face on. I am fond of that man.)
I need to be careful here, because my point is not that the protagonist is a static character, or a simplistic one. That's the danger of this movie, that someone as sweet and honest and stubborn as Steve Rogers will come off as the self-congratulatory ideal of an America that never was—or, worse, in our post-ironic age, uninterestingly unbelievable, too good to be true. Chris Evans doesn't allow it. I don't know if I want to elevate him quite to the ranks of Peter Cushing's Van Helsing, but he's even stronger for me than Chris Hemsworth's Thor, who occupies a similarly risky alignment of lawful good. Steve Rogers isn't a saint. ("Remember when I made you ride the Cyclone at Coney Island?"—"Yeah, and I threw up?"—"This isn't payback, is it?") He doesn't believe he's transcended humanity. He hasn't even really gotten used, emotionally, to the idea that he's now a six-foot pin-up rather than the "before" illustration from a Charles Atlas ad. Challenged once by Dr. Erskine about his motives for enlisting, he answered, "I don't want to kill anyone. I don't like bullies. I don't care where they're from," and if that's a naive statement in hindsight of World War II, it's also an honest one. We watch him grow into his body over the course of Captain America, but we never watch him grow out of his heart—and if that sounds corny, keep in mind that this is a movie that has the Sherman Brothers' "Make Way for Tomorrow Today" playing just offscreen at its fictional 1943 World Exposition of Tomorow. Presumably they couldn't use "It's a Great Big Beautiful Tomorrow" because it wouldn't be written until 1964 and anyway Disney would sue the pants off them. I didn't recognize the director's name from the credits, but I went home in July 2011 and looked up Joe Johnston and said, "Oh," because in many ways Captain America is the perfectly realized period piece The Rocketeer (1991) should have been. It doesn't feel bound to reproduce the stereotypes of its time, but it's not about demolishing the conventions for demolition's sake, either: a best of both worlds. Check your irony at the door.
I retain my feeling that I wanted about three more movies out of the middle section of the film—the adventures of Captain America and the Howling Commandos with Peggy Carter as their strategist and Howard Stark as their Q, hunting HYDRA in the woods of Europe. We get sort of the highlights reel, which is fun and made my mother who saw the movie with me both times wonder if the quick-cuts in the montage were flipping through arcs from the original comics, but the only raid we ever see in full is the Pyrrhic attack on the train that nets Dr. Zola and loses Bucky (in such an unsurvivable-looking fashion that I can only assume he's coming back) and that's not really enough time to differentiate the commandos, although I noticed this time that the theme of thwarting expectations seems to run through even the supporting cast. The apparently Japanese prisoner released with the rest of the 107th is the Nisei Jim Morita, thumbing his dog tags exasperatedly at the fellow-soldier he has to tell he's "from Fresno, ace"; not the British Falsworth, but the African-American Gabe Jones reads German and speaks French, sharing jokes the movie doesn't subtitle with the ex-Resistance fighter Jacques Dernier. Peggy, of course, deals with casual daily sexism on levels even Steve stumbles over, as when he clumsily tries to compliment her in a way she quite correctly calls him on: "I guess I just don't know why you would want to join the army. You're a beautiful dame."—"You have no idea how to talk to a woman, do you?" I love that when she puts down the mouthy recruit at Camp Lehigh who leeringly offers to show her a few wrestling moves, it's not jiu-jitsu or anything close-quarters she uses on him, it's a straight right to the jaw that lays him out. She is never in need of rescue: in fact, when Steve hurls them both out of the path of a speeding car, she's furious because he spoiled her shot. (He apologizes.) I don't believe the script ever specifies which branch of British intelligence she works for, but a female agent on loan to the Strategic Science Reserve in '43? My money's on the SOE. They took the people who were too weird for Bletchley. I have to conjecture this—we never learn even as much about Peggy's backstory as Dr. Erskine's, but I could still watch her all day. I understand that having opened in a modern frame, the movie couldn't just leave itself hanging in flashback; that The Avengers requires a contemporary Captain America and a time-shocked, bewildered Steve turning wildly through the LCD glare of 2011 Times Square is very nearly the equal of the only good image in the fourth Indiana Jones; and that there is no way for Steve to deliver that heartbreaker of a last line unless there are decades of lost time behind it. I still wouldn't have minded taking another movie to get there. I am not accustomed to feeling that way about franchises. Even Pirates of the Caribbean lost me with On Stranger Tides.
(My mother really objected to learning that Peggy Carter and Howard Stark were not Tony's parents, because although she wouldn't use the term, as soon as she saw Captain America she identified Steve/Peggy/Howard as an OT3 and assumed that in Steve's absence at least Peggy and Howard would have stayed together. All through The Avengers, she expected a moment of quasi-parental recognition between Captain America and Iron Man. She also considers it unforgivable that Steve and Peggy were never given a scene together in the present day, no matter how it might have distracted from the Loki plot or how frail ninety-year-old Peggy might have been: she imagined her one of those sharp, vivid old ladies who would remember all her war stories, who did not waste her life pining for Steve and never ceased to love him, either. I wish someone had written either of those things for her.)
So thank you, mysterious benefactor. This movie was a good thing to stare at last night; I'll almost certainly do it again and maybe even not lose my notes this time. It also leaves a person with half a mind to start using "fondue" as a euphemism, but that is probably wrong.
Yesterday was low-key. I worked on my job. I stared at Craigslist. I made noodles and cheese with the last of the New Year's ham. I talked a lot more about Magic: The Gathering than I thought I remembered in comments to one of
cucumberseed's latest posts. And in the evening I watched Captain America: The First Avenger (2011) for the first time since it was in theaters, because I had this DVD a mysterious benefactor sent me in July. It's a movie I loved when I saw it; I meant to post about it for a full year, then it seems I lost my notes (which in normal cases hang around my desktop in a mildly guilt-tripping way, I'm looking at you, Canterville Ghost) and failed to use The Avengers (2012) as sufficient impetus for a new set. Tiny Wittgenstein, do I have to get you out of the way every time I review something late?Until such time as someone films a Mark Ruffalo Hulk and doesn't screw it up, I really think my favorite of the Marvel cycle will remain Captain America. I wasn't expecting that when I saw it. I never had any real affinity with the comics. I'm not sure what I could have told you about the mythos going in. Mostly I knew that I'd seen the trailer on television and against almost all my experience of trailers nowadays, it made me want to see the movie; so I did. And found I wanted to see it again. A lot of it has to do, I think, with the film's intelligent understanding of the ways in which, as Captain America, Steve Rogers is at once a genuine and a manufactured hero, and that in some senses he doesn't become anything at all. Basic training doesn't make him over into the kind of he-man Colonel Phillips believes the Army needs in order to "personally escort Adolf Hitler to the gates of Hell." That isn't what Dr. Erskine took a chance on him for; instead, it's the testing ground for his dedication and the Odysseus-quickness of mind that serves him better than Ajax-strength, confirming the doctor's intuition that what the super-soldier project needs is not "a strong man who has known power all his life," but "a weak man [who] knows the value of strength . . . knows compassion." In the wake of Erskine's assassination, however, and the destruction of his research, Phillips shuts the project down, brutally: "I asked for an army. All I got was you." And it seems that Steve's career as a superhero is over before it's even been field-tested. He's not a soldier, he's a scientific curiosity whose potential in the field is quickly diverted into endless rounds of propaganda, a red-white-and-blue-costumed echo of the flag-raisers of Iwo Jima. There are comic strips, stage shows, a Saturday morning serial; the famed sock to Hitler's jaw that graced the cover of Captain America Comics #1 in his history and ours is repeated nightly for crowds of bond-buying rubes who may or may not realize that the "Star-Spangled Man with a Plan" has never been closer to the European theater than boot camp in New York State. By the time he's doing USO camp shows, Steve can perfectly mimic the media image of a national hero, but he feels even less like the real thing than when he was the ninety-pound weakling with five different 4-F stamps who at least everyone knew was ankle-biting crazy and scrappy enough to take on all comers. The shield is a bit of business, the mask a woollen stocking cap. The civilians love him, but he's a joke to the troops in Italy. Hence I love that the first solo mission of "Captain America" sounds, when summarized, as pulpily over-the-top as any of his heretofore fictitious adventures—disobeying orders to rescue nearly four hundred men and return with enemy secrets, leaving a German base in flames behind him—because it's merely that same outsize courage given a chance at the Bernhardt Line instead of the streets of Brooklyn. He'll end his war the same way, staying on the air with Peggy till the last minute in a poignant homage to Powell and Pressburger's A Matter of Life and Death (1946). The only difference between the superman piloting a deadly payload of god-tech into the freezing waters of the Arctic Ocean and the skinny, uncoordinated kid who throws himself all stick-figure arms and legs onto what he thinks is a live grenade is that one of them has an easier time reaching the controls.
(Like all national myths, there is a fairy-tale component to Captain America: the contrasting examples of Cap and the Red Skull prove that Erskine's formula isn't really a recipe for supermen so much as an amplification of whatever a person is to begin with. Steve is a pint-sized lionheart; what he gains is the strength to back up his convictions. Johann Schmidt is a monster; all he became was a visible one. This seems as good as anywhere else to mention that the movie manages another narrative feat against which I have a lot of automatic skepticism: it uses the trope of Nazis! Even worse than they actually were! without being so historically offensive that I want to throw the story across a room. Possibly this is because it stays away from the historical war almost entirely, focusing on the fringe science madness of Schmidt and HYDRA, whose double-fisted salute is just enough not a Sieg Heil that the plan to annihilate the Allies with Tesseract-derived weapons of mass destruction reads as traditional comic-book megalomania, not an extension of real-world genocide. The script does take some care to distinguish Schmidt's obsessions from the Nazi party line, incidentally providing the excuse for a nice throwaway crossover with Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981): "And the Führer digs for trinkets in the desert." Either way, it avoids the Stross/Meaney problem and I have no problems with Hugo Weaving chewing all the scenery he can reach, with or without his actual face on. I am fond of that man.)
I need to be careful here, because my point is not that the protagonist is a static character, or a simplistic one. That's the danger of this movie, that someone as sweet and honest and stubborn as Steve Rogers will come off as the self-congratulatory ideal of an America that never was—or, worse, in our post-ironic age, uninterestingly unbelievable, too good to be true. Chris Evans doesn't allow it. I don't know if I want to elevate him quite to the ranks of Peter Cushing's Van Helsing, but he's even stronger for me than Chris Hemsworth's Thor, who occupies a similarly risky alignment of lawful good. Steve Rogers isn't a saint. ("Remember when I made you ride the Cyclone at Coney Island?"—"Yeah, and I threw up?"—"This isn't payback, is it?") He doesn't believe he's transcended humanity. He hasn't even really gotten used, emotionally, to the idea that he's now a six-foot pin-up rather than the "before" illustration from a Charles Atlas ad. Challenged once by Dr. Erskine about his motives for enlisting, he answered, "I don't want to kill anyone. I don't like bullies. I don't care where they're from," and if that's a naive statement in hindsight of World War II, it's also an honest one. We watch him grow into his body over the course of Captain America, but we never watch him grow out of his heart—and if that sounds corny, keep in mind that this is a movie that has the Sherman Brothers' "Make Way for Tomorrow Today" playing just offscreen at its fictional 1943 World Exposition of Tomorow. Presumably they couldn't use "It's a Great Big Beautiful Tomorrow" because it wouldn't be written until 1964 and anyway Disney would sue the pants off them. I didn't recognize the director's name from the credits, but I went home in July 2011 and looked up Joe Johnston and said, "Oh," because in many ways Captain America is the perfectly realized period piece The Rocketeer (1991) should have been. It doesn't feel bound to reproduce the stereotypes of its time, but it's not about demolishing the conventions for demolition's sake, either: a best of both worlds. Check your irony at the door.
I retain my feeling that I wanted about three more movies out of the middle section of the film—the adventures of Captain America and the Howling Commandos with Peggy Carter as their strategist and Howard Stark as their Q, hunting HYDRA in the woods of Europe. We get sort of the highlights reel, which is fun and made my mother who saw the movie with me both times wonder if the quick-cuts in the montage were flipping through arcs from the original comics, but the only raid we ever see in full is the Pyrrhic attack on the train that nets Dr. Zola and loses Bucky (in such an unsurvivable-looking fashion that I can only assume he's coming back) and that's not really enough time to differentiate the commandos, although I noticed this time that the theme of thwarting expectations seems to run through even the supporting cast. The apparently Japanese prisoner released with the rest of the 107th is the Nisei Jim Morita, thumbing his dog tags exasperatedly at the fellow-soldier he has to tell he's "from Fresno, ace"; not the British Falsworth, but the African-American Gabe Jones reads German and speaks French, sharing jokes the movie doesn't subtitle with the ex-Resistance fighter Jacques Dernier. Peggy, of course, deals with casual daily sexism on levels even Steve stumbles over, as when he clumsily tries to compliment her in a way she quite correctly calls him on: "I guess I just don't know why you would want to join the army. You're a beautiful dame."—"You have no idea how to talk to a woman, do you?" I love that when she puts down the mouthy recruit at Camp Lehigh who leeringly offers to show her a few wrestling moves, it's not jiu-jitsu or anything close-quarters she uses on him, it's a straight right to the jaw that lays him out. She is never in need of rescue: in fact, when Steve hurls them both out of the path of a speeding car, she's furious because he spoiled her shot. (He apologizes.) I don't believe the script ever specifies which branch of British intelligence she works for, but a female agent on loan to the Strategic Science Reserve in '43? My money's on the SOE. They took the people who were too weird for Bletchley. I have to conjecture this—we never learn even as much about Peggy's backstory as Dr. Erskine's, but I could still watch her all day. I understand that having opened in a modern frame, the movie couldn't just leave itself hanging in flashback; that The Avengers requires a contemporary Captain America and a time-shocked, bewildered Steve turning wildly through the LCD glare of 2011 Times Square is very nearly the equal of the only good image in the fourth Indiana Jones; and that there is no way for Steve to deliver that heartbreaker of a last line unless there are decades of lost time behind it. I still wouldn't have minded taking another movie to get there. I am not accustomed to feeling that way about franchises. Even Pirates of the Caribbean lost me with On Stranger Tides.
(My mother really objected to learning that Peggy Carter and Howard Stark were not Tony's parents, because although she wouldn't use the term, as soon as she saw Captain America she identified Steve/Peggy/Howard as an OT3 and assumed that in Steve's absence at least Peggy and Howard would have stayed together. All through The Avengers, she expected a moment of quasi-parental recognition between Captain America and Iron Man. She also considers it unforgivable that Steve and Peggy were never given a scene together in the present day, no matter how it might have distracted from the Loki plot or how frail ninety-year-old Peggy might have been: she imagined her one of those sharp, vivid old ladies who would remember all her war stories, who did not waste her life pining for Steve and never ceased to love him, either. I wish someone had written either of those things for her.)
So thank you, mysterious benefactor. This movie was a good thing to stare at last night; I'll almost certainly do it again and maybe even not lose my notes this time. It also leaves a person with half a mind to start using "fondue" as a euphemism, but that is probably wrong.
no subject
Oh, just because Judi Dench is tiny!
One way or the other...love all of this, as ever.
Thank you. I really wanted to do this movie justice: it was such an unexpected delight.
You encapsulate so much about Steve that I love passionately, and so many reasons why I can't resent him for wearing a freakin' flag (not least because he never wanted to) or dismiss him as "upright and boring".
Yes. That struck me as even more wrongheaded than some of the internet arguments about whether Peggy was historically unrealistic (no, see Leo Marks and Elizabeth E. Wein, move on). He could have been a flat character, and it would have been very sad. Instead, Captain America turned out to be one of the very rare movies where my favorite character is the protagonist.
(I mean, I also love Dr. Erskine, but nobody should be surprised about that: "What? No! I don't have procedure tomorrow!")
Steve is honorable and pissy, smart and socially awkward, with an artist's interest in everybody around him
I love the glimpses of the sketchbook he keeps on his tours, cartooning himself as a performing monkey; it chimes against the self-portrait Schmidt commissions, of which we only see the many different shades of red on the artist's palette. If Steve sees himself as a hero, it's in terms of responsibilities, never privileges. And how wryly he asks Bucky, "You ready to follow Captain America into the jaws of death?" His friend gives the right answer: "Hell, no. The little guy from Brooklyn who was too dumb to run away from a fight, I'm following him."
Howard for being a rich playboy as much as he was a scientist
Which is something the film notices: Colonel Phillips' comment to Peggy after he thinks Steve has parachuted to a foolhardy death behind enemy lines, that he can't touch Howard because the man has practically every weapons-and-defense contract in the war, but Peggy has no such protection and he can throw all the books he likes at her. He accuses her of getting men killed for a crush. Nobody says that to Howard. And I'm willing to bet he's macking his way through a lot more of the Strategic Science Reserve than she is.
(That said, I really liked the fact that Howard is actually as brilliant a gadgeteer as his reputation and his relationship with Steve is not based on any kind of antagonism over Peggy, hence my mother's take on the situation. And then canon let her down.)
I can't wait for more of complicatedly uncomplicated Steve Rogers absolutely not breaking himself against this great, grey world he's stranded in, this place that's neither as progressive nor as difficult to understand as it thinks it is, where the promise of World War II is constantly both carried forward and negated.
Amen to that!