Captain America: The First Avenger takes a character that could be perceived as a jingoistic brute and presents him as the earnest, physical manifestation of America's Greatest Generation. Chris Evans' Steve Rogers may be (at least initially) small and sickly, but he's also possessed of backbone and keen lateral thinking. Taken under the wing of German super scientist, Stanley Tucci's Abraham Erskine, Rogers is involved in an army run mensch program designed to stress the kind of post-identity idealism required to become a bright, blaring symbol. This is were the film excels. Rogers, as Captain America, isn't written to be a downtrodden jerk enjoying the newfound power or status gifted to him by phenomenally powerful sun lamps. Instead, he's the exact same grafter he's always been.
Rogers still fumbles his way around women; he oozes discomfort when he finds himself around actual soldiers too. He carries no bitterness though. No sense of navel-gazing self-pity, even when the super soldier program he exemplifies is suddenly blackballed and Rogers finds himself lost in the vaudeville and propaganda of USO shows. Instead, he grits his teeth and gets to work, bopping The Fuhrer on the nose ever night. Rogers doesn't abuse his new-found abilities, preferring to locate the task at hand then knuckle down on it. He never cats about with his dancers, or re-visits a bully for a settler either. This Captain America seems to understand himself in the abstract - the human embodiment of the kind of virtues essential to the population of any country locked into an extinction war. Rogers excels as Captain America, first as a song and dance man shilling for war bonds; eventually as a one-man answer to Hitler's Satanic science division.
2 comments:
Sounds like the film-makers have grasped the metaphysical levels of the 616 Cap. He's the American Dream, the myth the USA chooses to believe in. In the comics, the character has often been written to seem somewhere to the left of Paul Robeson. Miller's reactionary, bullying Ultimate Cap was more the American Reality of the Bush Jnr years.
That's absolutely the vibe I got. Film felt very informed by Jack Kirby The Man too - that work ethic, the kind of romantic, humanistic morality that was all over his comics.
Be interested to see if that was intentional by the filmmakers, or just that Kirby personally embodies a lot of the qualities that I associate with the generation that lived through the second world war.
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