Film, Comics
The Falcon and the Winter Soldier Almost Critiques America
Marvel’s Latest on Disney+ Explores Metaphors for US Foreign Policy
“Is Marvel trying to say something about America?”
At the end of Episode 4 of The Falcon and the Winter Soldier, John Walker, the hotheaded replacement for Steve Rogers’ Captain America, murders a man in broad daylight. The iconic shield comes up and down, over and over again, until its pristine edge is stained with gore.
While watching this jarring sequence play out, I could not help but wonder, “Is Marvel trying to say something about America?”
It would be the first time. The United States military has been deeply involved in the production of the MCU, from editing the Iron Man script to actually filming commercials timed with the release of Captain Marvel. The entire plot of Captain America: Civil War revolves around the idea that it’s somehow a miscarriage of justice for the Avengers (and by proxy, the United States) to face international oversight. Hell, TFATWS opens with Sam Wilson flying missions for the Air Force. So when I saw John Walker carry out an act of violence that is more consistent with the rest of the world’s understanding of America, I was genuinely surprised.
Walker is presented as an antagonist from his introduction, a pretender who could never fill the boots of that Nazi-fighting kid from Brooklyn we all know and love. Despite the fact that the audience is supposed to view him with skepticism, I found many aspects of his character to be fitting metaphors for actual US foreign policy.
In his introduction, we learn Walker is a high school football star and three-time Medal of Honor winner, MIT-certified as genetically superior to the average Joe. He talks about being a regular guy without superpowers but a lot of “guts,” who just wants to make people feel safe.
That facade of respectability, courage, and love of whatever American family values belies Walker’s actual character. As we see in his interactions with Sam Wilson and Bucky Barnes, Walker cannot hold up the mask of civility for any extended period of time before he becomes brash, cocky, and single-minded in pursuit of his agenda. Walker would rather punch first and ask questions later, and becomes so consumed with the hunt for anarchist straw-villain Karli Morgenthau that he’d rather pick a fight with a squad of super-soldiers than let Wilson talk the girl down for ten minutes. This fight results in the aforementioned shield-murdering, which is a pretty accurate representation of what happens when America doesn’t get its way overseas.
The United States has a long history of intervention in foreign conflicts for reasons ranging from resisting communism to baldfaced opportunism. Whether it is suppressing Philippine revolutionaries, propping up a colonial state in Vietnam, or selling cluster bombs to Saudi Arabia, America never misses an opportunity to dip its red, white, and blue fingers into popular uprisings or rebellions. There is no shortage of atrocities to compare: the fact of the matter is that Walker’s heinous attack is just a microcosm of the instances in which the United States has openly slaughtered thousands without remorse.
Contrasted with Walker’s brutality are characters who represent the people whom America has harmed over the years. The Flag Smashers, a group of anti-border refugees who have taken up arms against the fascist Global Repatriation Council, can cleanly map onto any group of immigrants being forcibly relocated by state actors. The show does have them bomb a building full of GRC stormtroopers just so the audience knows they’re not too sympathetic, but they are generally portrayed as a team of young people just trying to survive against a highly militarized police force backed up by ultra-commandos with cool names.
Furthermore, the introduction of Isaiah Bradley, a Korean War veteran who received an untested variation of the super-soldier serum given to Steve Rogers, very nearly addressed America’s exploitation of its Black citizens, especially in the military.
From the horrendous casualties of the 54th Massachusetts, to the non-consensual harvesting of Henrietta Lacks’ cells, to the purposeful neglect of the subjects of the Tuskegee Syphilis Study (an image specifically evoked by Bradley’s retelling of the experiment that gave him his powers), Black Americans have suffered and died for centuries in exchange for some nebulous greater good of the nation that systematically abuses them. And as I watched Isaiah Bradley say that bringing his torture to light would get him assassinated, because if there’s one thing white supremacy is good at, it’s mopping up the blood it has spilled, I was pleased and impressed that Marvel had the guts (as Walker would call it) to put America’s atrocities on display.
Then the final episode dropped.
I’d never felt my opinion of a media property curdle faster than when the orchestra swelled to reveal John Walker saving a bunch of government types from falling to their deaths. What’s the purpose of giving an unrepentant murderer a redemption scene? God forbid a Medal of Honor winner be a bad guy. And after Morgenthau is shot to death by a former CIA agent, we hear Sam Wilson’s well-intentioned but substantively empty call for governments to do better by those they disenfranchise, dressing down a senator as if we haven’t already seen that the heart of the American authoritarian movement is entirely built on bad faith and false promises.
Lastly, the most embarrassing slap in the face of the interesting narrative the show worked to build, we see Wilson take Isaiah Bradley and his grandson to the Captain America exhibit seen in The Winter Soldier, where he proudly reveals a bronze statue and informational plaque honoring Bradley’s decades of suffering. It is borderline comical that a program daring to criticize America’s historical abuses against both the marginalized across the globe and within its own borders ends with a statue and a speech. Sadly, considering the United States’ track record on actual, material reparations, it is the most realistic conclusion.
It was foolish of me to expect a radical narrative out of a company whose success is so deeply entrenched in the American status quo as Marvel. But I couldn’t help myself. It is clear that the writers of TFATWS are interested in at least asking why America has so many enemies and giving a sympathetic voice to the people using violence to resist its influence. Those glimmers of substance, of pointed critiques with no easy answers, they gave me hope that our current monopoly-dominated media sphere could still produce the imaginative and difficult stories our current moment calls for.
Maybe in another decade, we’ll get a movie about a group of supervillains trying to strengthen antitrust laws. I can only hope they don’t get their skulls caved in.
Interstellar Flight Magazine publishes essays on what’s new in the world of speculative genres. In the words of Ursula K. Le Guin, we need “writers who can see alternatives to how we live now, can see through our fear-stricken society and its obsessive technologies to other ways of being, and even imagine real grounds for hope.” We use affiliate links and Patreon to pay our writers. Follow us on Twitter, Facebook, or Instagram.
