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 the Greatest Generation. Steve Rogers is small and sickly, but possessed of backbone and keen lateral thinking. Taken under the wing of German super scientist Abraham Erskine, Rogers is involved in an army run mensch program designed to stress the kind of post-identity idealism required to become a 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 Dr Erskine's sun lamps. Instead, he's the exact same grafter he's always been. Rogers still fumbles around women, he oozes discomfort around actual soldiers. He carries no bitterness, or self-pity, even when the super soldier program blackballs and Rogers finds himself lost in vaudeville and propaganda. He grits his teeth and jobs.
Rogers doesn't abuse his abilities, instead he locates the task and knuckles down. He never cats about with his dancers, or re-visits a bully for a settler either. He 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.
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.
ReplyDeleteThat'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.
ReplyDeleteBe 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.