Marvel Cinematic Universality

Abstract

Captain America: The Winter Soldier (Anthony Russo and Joe Russo US 2014). Walt Disney Studios Home Entertainment 2014. Region 1. 2.40:1 widescreen. US$14.99.In the opening scene of Captain America: The Winter Soldier (hereafter CA: TWS), genetically enhanced Ubermensch Steve Rogers (Chris Evans) opens his notebook to a page filled with cultural references from the years since he was frozen in ice in 1945. The list is categorically random, throwing yuppie fetish objects ('Thai Food') and 1990s alt-rock ('Nirvana') in with the more expected triumphs of the free world ('The Moon Landing', 'Berlin Wall up+down'). As discussed in a DVD featurette as well as numerous interviews, the list was fan-selected and customised for different regional audiences - slightly different lists were seen in the UK, France, South Korea, Mexico and other countries. History is represented here as the result of targeted marketing. CA: TWS has been lauded by many popular critics for its progressivism, mainly expressed via nods to 1970s left-wing conspiracy thrillers and an implicit critique of the American security state. However, the politics of the film are more clearly understood through an analysis of how it integrates its ostensibly US-centric, 'critical' premise into the ever-expanding global entertainment franchise that is the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU).Captain America is a problematic figure in the MCU for two main reasons. His status as an obvious anachronism keeps the films' setting from being wholly reduced to the nonspecific yet obliquely topical present that characterises the rest of the shared universe. Secondly, for a global franchise, a character as overtly tied to American nationalism as Captain America presents challenges to mass appeal and relatability. In Captain America: The First Avenger (Johnston US 2011, crucially marketed as simply The First Avenger in some countries), both problems are solved through the treatment of the series' main antagonists. Though the Nazis reprise their traditional role in American film as avatars of transcendent evil, the singularity of that evil is undercut at every turn. Not only is the Holocaust never mentioned - Cap is put on ice mere months before the Allied liberation of Dachau - neither is anti-Semitism. The closest we get is the character of Abraham Erskine (Stanley Tucci), exiled German scientist and inventor of the super soldier serum that gives Rogers his powers. Identified as Jewish in the comic What If? Vol. 2 #29 (1991), he is ambiguously played by Tucci, a (non-Jewish) character actor whose past roles include a Woody Allen double (Deconstructing Harry (Allen US 1997)) and Eichmann himself (Conspiracy (Pierson UK/USA 2001)). Just as racial segregation in the US is ignored and the civil rights struggle skipped over in the transition to the sequel, these Nazis have a concept of superiority that seems to lack a racial component. An idealised America is set off against a sanitised Nazi party; American exceptionalism is asserted without ever being explicitly justified in historical terms. This has the effect of making the greatness of American culture a matter of common sense while leaving the door open for CA: TWS's ambivalent treatment of the American state.Like all Marvel movies, the plot of CA: TWS is both extremely complicated and childishly simple. It begins with Cap and Black Widow (an affectless Scarlett Johansson) on a mission to rescue hostages from a French kickboxer (UFC champ Georges St-Pierre). This somehow leads to the revelation that S.H.I.E.L.D., the top-secret international agency headed by Nick Fury (Samuel L. Jackson) and manager of super-team the Avengers, is about to launch a global surveillance operation called Project Insight, which aims to compile data on millions of potential security threats and aim remote-controlled warheads at them. The project is headed by former US Secretary of Defense Alexander Pierce (Robert Redford, in a nice bit of legacy casting), who also happens to be a member of the Illuminati-like World Security Council, a shadowy cabal with ultimate oversight over S. …