When will audiences finally suffocate on the action. When will, in a moment of infinite jest, audiences bleed from the eyes, the ears, and the nose, as their brains turns to mush from the bellow of the speakers and the rumble of their over-priced seats, perishing to the sound of collapsing buildings, exploding vehicles, and billion dollar, extra-ordinary, gravity defying ships plummeting into innocent civilization below.
I guess I am complicit in the apacolypse I name. Not only did I watch another action-junkie’s movie, but I am writing about it. There is truth in the theory that you’re always already incorporated into the system. As well, such is free press for the Entertainment Industry–but I can’t simply contain my thoughts. It’s just as likely they’ll burst from the back of my skull like a suicide-shotgun blast as the action-fogged movie will unravel my brain’s neurones.
Captain America: The Winter Soldier has merit. It is a step above the awful CGI-vomit movie that was Thor 2. Marvel seemed to have retained some of its “story telling” integrity as we see Captain America face a world where his ideals have evaporated in favour of war machines. He also managed to stay single, which is a bonus. In Hollywood, the male hero typically falls for a women, saves her, and kisses her. The women is the reward, the chalice, the nerdy boy fantasy that needs fulfilling. Well, it still happened in a lesser form: Black Widow gave the Cap a plutonic kiss on the cheek in the final frame. But, progress…
Where Captain America creeps forward in the department of heteronormative storytelling, it departs in it’s attempt at engaging with contemporary social and economic issues.
On the one hand, Captain America is aware of the current tension between freedom and security our world faces as national governments create terrorist narratives (which the movie and video game industry, amazingly enough, uses to attract an audience and turn a profit), then spin them to justify controversial legislature. On the other, Marvel’s contemporary setting brings me back to an earlier point I made: the always already incorporation into the system. Specifically, Captain America’s plot does not serve as a witty critique of contemporary issues of dwindling liberty, but rather trivializes it–distances the audience from the real world problem.
The fact that a super-hero rectifies (to a limited extent) the government’s out-of-control propaganda and “freedom” machine at the end of the plot is case in point. Instead of the threat that Governments pose–when they data mine it’s citizens’ personal information such as phone call records, email transcripts, and so on and so forth–being exposed and critically engaged with, it is solved. As a result, the audience feels good–they disengage from the critique. The threat has been quelled. We can sleep soundly. Yet, in the “real world” the tension is still growing.
All that has occurred in this movie–and only for ill–is the questions, in terms of government, how far is too far? who does the government serve? do the people serve the government? have been commodified. Serious, controversial, critical, debatable question have been packaged in glossy wrap and sold to audiences world-wide. And in doing so, the problems have been mythologized. Raise them to the pop-corn muncher in the seat next to you, and she will reply–a mouth full of crunched pop-corn–wasn’t that the plot of Captain America?