Why Captain America Is Important

Submitted by Noah Brand on Tue, 2017-02-07 13:18
I'll overcome him with leverage!

As of this writing, actual fascism is having quite a resurgence in the United States, and as expected, it’s wrapped in the flag and carrying a cross. In these times, many people are turning to one of our great anti-fascist symbols: Captain America.

He’s having a resurgence in prominence lately as well, thanks to his superb portrayal by Chris Evans in some wildly popular films. I find that oddly validating, as I was a Captain America fan when it was actively uncool. Back when comic books were for losers, and even the other losers looked down on Cap, preferring the adventures of the Punisher and Youngblood. I still have the 50th anniversary issue, from the now-quaint-sounding year of 1991. (Mark Gruenwald on script, Ron Lim on artwork.) I mention this because it’s fair to say I’m more familiar with the character and his history than most people, so when I say he’s absolutely the right hero for our times, I know what I’m talking about.

Comics continuity is tangled and contradictory, so for clarity I’ll specify that I’m referring here to Steve Rogers rather than any of the others who’ve taken on the role. And Steve Rogers is the Captain America we need to believe in as we face a very dark time for our nation, because he has no superpowers.

This is a somewhat contentious point: a few comics seem to contradict it, mostly by writers not familiar with the character. A vague impression that Captain America has superhuman strength or speed is widely held. However, most of the comics hew to the classic line: the super-soldier serum gave Steve Rogers peak human physical abilities. He is as strong, fast, and agile as a man can possibly be, the limit of human potential. A common theme in the comics is Cap having to fight an opponent who has superpowers, but overcoming them anyway. Villains are always saying “Captain America? He’s just an ordinary man, how could he possibly stop us?” and then learning that question isn’t rhetorical.

Then there’s the issue of symbolism. Cap represents the American Dream, our highest ideals, the best of what we can be as a nation. He embodies the freedom and opportunity and justice that the country itself falls short of, but that at our best we strive toward. This means he’s always been a political figure; his very first issue famously drew controversy with a cover showing him punching Adolf Hitler in the face, almost a year before America entered WWII. The “America First” crowd was sending Jack Kirby some pretty ugly threats over that, you can believe.

Since then, most of his best storylines have been about how his ideals conflict with the troubled, compromised America around him, often in unexpected ways. After his Watergate-metaphor story in the early 70s (the president turned out to be an actual supervillain), he found his faith in America shaken, as did many people. In the 80s, he gave up his identity rather than be a government tool, and was replaced with a Reaganite superpatriot who, it turned out, wasn’t up to the job. He’s frequently been turned into a Nazi, via the usual time-travel and mind-control shenanigans, but the strength of his ideals always wins out in the end.

He always wins, and that’s important too. No matter how outnumbered or outmatched he is, no matter how hopeless it looks, he finds a way to triumph over impossible odds. Without superpowers.

I harp on the lack of superpowers because that symbolism matters even more. Peak human potential means that he doesn’t just represent the best our nation can aspire to, he represents the best each of us can be. The potential to be Captain America is inside each of us, as memorably phrased in what may be my favorite line about him:

"...people could do a lot of stuff he does. If we cared as much. And tried as hard."

That’s why he’s the hero we need as we confront dark times. Captain America is a statement of faith that what is best in us, and what is best in our country, will ultimately win. We need that faith because without it, we have no chance of making it true. We can defeat the forces that threaten our country, if we can find our inner Steve Rogers. If we care as much. And if we try as hard.

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Oscar Project articles

Wings (1927)

Submitted by Noah Brand on Mon, 2016-02-22 12:00

It’s hard to remember now just how amazing airplanes were in the 1920s. Barnstormers used to cruise from one small town to another, charging impressive fees just to show off their miraculous flying machines. That sense of wonder deeply informs Wings, in a way that’s hard to understand from here in the miracle-jaded future. The story of two young pilots and their service in WWI is nothing new even for the time, but the flying shots are spectacular, and in 1927 they might as well have been magic.

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The Broadway Melody (1929)

Submitted by Noah Brand on Mon, 2016-02-29 12:00

I hated this movie. Hated it. Hated it in a way that started to feel weirdly personal after a while. The title song is repeated every five minutes by someone or other, which would be tolerable if it were a good song, but it’s not. There’s not a single likable character in this movie, which is a serious problem since we’re supposed to find them all charming. It’s about various people trying to achieve true love and showbiz stardom, but I didn’t want anything good to happen to any of them.

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All Quiet On The Western Front (1930)

Submitted by Noah Brand on Mon, 2016-03-07 12:00

This is the earliest Best Picture winner that doesn’t require any apology or explanation before showing it to contemporary friends. It holds up perfectly, a stark and even angry look at the pointless, brutal cost of war. Its characters join the German army as teenagers full of idealism and hope and all that dulce et decorum est crap, and everything goes downhill for them from there.

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Cimarron (1931)

Submitted by Noah Brand on Mon, 2016-03-14 12:00

This is one of those movies that has to be taken in context. It traces the history of the development of the American West through the life of one man, from the first Oklahoma Land Rush up through the present day. Thus, the first piece of context that must be taken into account is that “the present day” means “the Hoover administration”.

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Grand Hotel (1932)

Submitted by Noah Brand on Mon, 2016-03-21 12:00

Watching Grand Hotel, the 5th-ever Best Picture winner, it struck me how rapidly I was seeing the art of filmmaking develop. An audacious plotline-juggling comedy, this movie makes remarkable use of the camera in ways that haven’t shown up in previous films, but will continue showing up in subsequent ones. (Except for the fact that Greta Garbo has a proprietary lighting system that exists only for her character, as though she’s in a whole different movie by herself. That one’s all Garbo.)

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Cavalcade (1933)

Submitted by Noah Brand on Mon, 2016-03-28 12:00

This was based on a play by Noël Coward, and the nicest thing I can say is that maybe it worked better on stage. On film, it’s a godawful tedious slog through two generations of affluent London life, showing the great upheavals of the 1899-1933 period via a bunch of colorless, unlikable characters who mostly die, but not soon enough to suit me.

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It Happened One Night (1934)

Submitted by Noah Brand on Mon, 2016-04-04 12:00

This movie feels like the beginning of an era. Clark Gable, Claudette Colbert, Frank Capra directing, and a romantic-comedy plotline we’re still using today. These are all elements that became dominant over the coming years, but here they all still had that new-star smell. The storyline’s nothing new, your basic fall-in-love-over-an-involuntary-journey bit, but the journey in this case provides a wonderful look at 1930s Americana, all the little motel cabins and logistical weirdness that made up a pre-freeway road trip.

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Mutiny On The Bounty (1935)

Submitted by Noah Brand on Mon, 2016-06-20 12:00

A scene I’m 100% sure took place in Irving Thalberg’s office at MGM one day in 1935:

“So, last year Gable took his shirt off in It Happened One Night, and we made… how much money again?”

“All of it, sir. All the money.”

“Oh yeah. That was great. We also won enough Oscars that I had to have my mantelpiece reinforced. Anyway, having said that, what’ve we got this year?”

“We’ve got a picture where Clark Gable is shirtless for literally half the running time.”

“Good start. What’s he wearing the rest of the time?”

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The Great Ziegfeld (1936)

Submitted by Noah Brand on Mon, 2016-06-27 12:00

Do you like long, slow musical numbers that involve almost nothing but looking at showgirls’ legs? No? Well, tough shit, because you’re in for a LOT of them. Get comfy.

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The Life of Emile Zola (1937)

Submitted by Noah Brand on Mon, 2016-07-04 12:00

This is what you call surefire Oscar bait: a period biopic that talks about an Important Social Issue. The Life of Emile Zola is a weirdly-paced story with a strange two-part structure. First, we have your conventional biopic. Zola starts out penniless and living in a garret, but perseveres and works hard and finds success with Nana, because it turns out sex sells. He raises a family, yadda yadda yadda, and his career and the film are both slowing down by the halfway mark.

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You Can't Take It With You (1938)

Submitted by Noah Brand on Fri, 2016-11-18 13:32

Of the various films in the genre of “Frank Capra directs Jimmy Stewart and several other stars in a surprisingly funny drama about socioeconomic injustice”, You Can’t Take It With You may be the least of them. Adapted from a George S. Kaufman play, it feels stagebound and claustrophobic, lacking a strong sense of visual expression. The story is just about a rich guy meeting a houseful of Manic Pixie Dream Anarchists, and some of the jokes don’t really work in the 21st century.

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Gone With The Wind (1939)

Submitted by Noah Brand on Thu, 2017-01-19 14:54

Gone With The Wind is a serious problem for me.

On the one hand, as a movie, it’s pretty good. The cinematography’s great, the actors are gorgeous, the sense of an epic is powerful and heartfelt, and the score is top-notch.

On the other hand, most of that is also true of Triumph of the Will, and it’s hard to escape the comparison.

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Rebecca (1940)

Submitted by Noah Brand on Fri, 2017-01-27 12:00

In beginning this review, I had to double-check the date. Rebecca was seriously released in 1940? Weird. It feels later than that, like maybe 1950, give or take a couple years. The product of another ten years of the development of film as a storytelling medium, in other words. That may have been what tipped it over to victory; it’s not just emotionally compelling and visually gorgeous, it has a level of nuance and emotion in the structure of every shot and scene that one just doesn’t see in other films from that year.

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How Green Was My Valley (1941)

Submitted by Noah Brand on Fri, 2017-02-10 15:09

Let’s just get this out of the way right now: nobody actually thinks this was the best movie made in 1941. Nobody thought it back then either. It is a truth universally acknowledged that Citizen Kane is better than How Green Was My Valley, but that William Randolph Hearst was a vindictive sonofabitch who owned half the newspapers in the country and had Louella Parsons on permanent payroll. It simply wasn’t safe for voting members of the Academy to support Kane, so they went with a safety.

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Mrs. Miniver (1942)

Submitted by Noah Brand on Sat, 2020-01-11 12:00

This film is part of a brief, awkward period in Oscar history: the two years following Hitler's invasion of Poland and preceding Japan's attack on Pearl Harbor. From 1939-41, there was a very strong "America First" movement in the U.S., which opposed America's entry into the war, often because they were outright Nazi sympathizers. This demographic was not well-represented in the film industry, because many of Hollywood's leading figures, like Lubitsch, Wilder, Dietrich, and others, were German by birth.

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Casablanca (1943)

Submitted by Noah Brand on Tue, 2020-01-14 16:11

Casablanca. What can I, or anyone, write about this movie that hasn't been written a hundred times? That it's awful darn good? It is. You may have heard this is a very good motion picture. I must inform you that you heard correctly. Glad we had this talk.

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