The best defence: Captain America—played by Chris Evans in the new film—has been an icon for US soldiers since he first appeared in 1941
This year will be a festival of hero movies, and I’ll be watching every single one. And so should you, even if they’re not usually your kind of thing. Why? Because they’re more than primary-coloured stories for kids (though no doubt that is what the studio bosses are hoping to turn out). These movies are a struggle to understand what it means to be a hero—or just a good guy.
July will see the release of Captain America: The First Avenger, featuring the comic-book hero created 70 years ago. Marvel’s literal standard-bearer will join a slew of superhero characters who have made the journey to the cinema in recent years: Tony Stark, the unruly bad-boy millionaire played by Robert Downey Jnr with a truckload of quirk in Iron Man; Bruce Banner, whose rage turns him into the musclebound, indestructible Hulk; and the awkward, geeky Peter Parker, transformed by the bite of a radioactive spider into—of course—Spiderman. Also out in 2011 is the latest film featuring the X-Men, whose mutant powers arrive at puberty (X- Men: First Class, June), and the big-screen debut of Marvel’s character Thor in May.
We don’t have superheroes in Britain the way they do in the US. John Constantine, the brutal magus anti-hero of DC Comics’ Hellblazer, once observed that Britain is a country where no one would have the nerve to wear a cape in public, even if they did have powers far beyond those of mortal men. We love US imports, but they don’t have the same resonance here as they do in their home country.
That is because America is a narrative nation. Spoken into existence by the founders and sustained by an act of continuous creation ever since, the US represents a collective decision which must be re-envisioned and reinterpreted by each successive generation, and for each part of its extraordinary patchwork. That narrative has been sorely tested over the last decade. September 11th was an appalling moment that was also devastating because an alien hand reached into the great American narrative and reshaped it. The response in the real world was disturbing, and horrified many Americans—the creation of Guantánamo Bay and its even more secretive camps at Bagram and in the Horn of Africa. But in the world of superheroes, the dream became even more nightmarish. In the Marvel Universe storyline over the last decade, Captain America was beset by shapeshifting enemies who could look like his friends, and then by the establishment of a police state. He took a stand—against his own government—and became the leader of the heroic opposition. Eventually, in 2007, he was shot and killed on the steps of a courthouse. In the heart of the justice system, under the eye of the security services and the press, Captain America died.
“It’s a hell of a time for him to go,” co-creator Joe Simon said at the time, “we really need him now.” He wasn’t kidding. It’s hard to overstate how central “Cap” is to some. Captain America is the alter ego of Steve Rogers, a rejected second world war volunteer who was given an experimental supersoldier drug and became a perfect human. Captain America punched out Hitler in his first print appearance in 1941 and was a sort of patron saint to US servicemen from then on. When a recent issue of the comic made unfavourable reference to the Tea Party, series writer Ed Brubaker received death threats: Captain America wears the flag. In a way, he is the flag. But what he stands for—and by extension, what the flag stands for—is different to different people. Brubaker observed in 2007: “What I found is that all the really hard-core left-wing fans want Cap to be standing out on and giving speeches on the street corner against the Bush administration, and all the really right-wing [fans] all want him to be over in the streets of Baghdad, punching out Saddam.”
The coming feast of comic-book adaptations, then, is more than just a quest for box-office takings. It’s a search for a formula of right action that resonates across a very bothered and bewildered nation.
*****
The idea of going beyond the law has always been one strand of American heroism. The depiction of the American identity in cinema—in the work of Frank Capra, for instance—has two classic aspects. There is the intellectual, vested in the founding documents and the architecture of Washington DC, which have an almost magical power to bring understanding of the nation’s ideals to the sceptical, and determination to the weary. And there is the soulful, found in the farm belt and the prairies, which have a similar property of renewing faith and mending hearts broken by bureaucracy and indifference. The law must be modified by mercy and understanding, or it becomes tyrannical; the heart must be bounded by rules, or it creates chaos. Learning to balance these imperatives is often a part of the hero’s journey, and it is certainly part of the US governmental and legal apparatus’s constant self-modification.
The hero of the just-released Green Hornet film looks to take rather more joy in chaos than in law and order. But he most probably will also have to come to terms with Spiderman’s mantra: with great power comes great responsibility. Responsibilities are at the heart of these stories. Hal Jordan, in the upcoming Green Lantern movie (out in June), is picked out to protect the universe from evil. In order to do so, and to fulfil himself, he must overcome fear. Likewise, Peter Parker is driven, despite the personal cost, to do what he can to help his fellows. Iron Man’s Tony Stark discovers his conscience when he finds his company’s technologies in the hands of terrorists, which makes him question the capitalist system. Fundamentally, these characters are identity questions made flesh, given relevant powers. Everything they are is a riddle they must answer by doing the right thing, and in order to survive they must determine what that is.
*****
Robert Warshow, the American cultural critic, wrote in the 1950s that the cowboy in movies was essentially the expression of an idea. The cowboy’s honour, his self, was bound up in his way of life: drifting, leisurely, self-sufficient, and guided by a code of obligation and natural justice. Even death didn’t really change him so long as he kept to his code, which included a notion of non-aggression. The cowboy would not shoot first. He often put himself in the way of trouble, but he would not initiate hostility unless natural justice was infringed. This could be the template for many comic book heroes, and for their movie incarnations, where many of the rough edges in comics are smoothed away. Captain America carries, after all, not a sword but a shield. Before anything else he is the defender of a people and of an idea.
Contrast that with the 2010 movie, The Expendables, written, directed and starring Sylvester Stallone. It’s a gore-drenched festival of pre-emptive violence which tries too hard to enjoy itself. Stallone’s character may not wear a cape, but he’s super-quick on the draw and—along with the rest of his crew—preternatually immune to being shot.
The Expendables are a freelance special forces team who find themselves saving a small island nation from exploitation by a CIA front-company. There is, inevitably, a (token) girl involved. It’s a shock-and-awe movie, with a gun which can kill entire armies deployed in a small tunnel, and property damage like you’ve never seen. Not a building is left standing, and little or nothing is changed by the intervention of the gang. The girl—daughter to the outgoing ruler—is left to salvage what she can from the rubble, prey to whatever monster comes along next.
It’s the weirdest action movie experience I’ve ever had; part Rambo in excelsis, part nihilistic meditation on the futility of armed intervention. There’s a soliloquy from Mickey Rourke which rips the guts out of the action genre and leaves them hanging on a fence. If this is a self-image the US is comfortable with, we should all be alarmed. The Expendables is far more anti-war in its way than Peckinpah’s Cross of Iron, challenging not the enjoyment of battle but the nobility and efficacy of the men who fight.
The gun, of course, is the elephant in the room in all superhero stories. Despite— and because of—the central position occupied by guns in American culture, superheroes exist in a space where conventional firearms are the tool of lesser men. Superman simply ignores them—in the latest movie, a bullet impacts with the lens of his eye and shatters—and Batman is so adept in his control of situations and martial artistry that he is immune. Iron Man’s armour is impervious, likewise Captain America’s shield, Green Lantern’s ring, the car in Green Hornet. X-Men’s Wolverine heals instantly and has an indestructible skeleton. Their refusal to take up the gun shows their superhuman natures, and sanctions their non-lethal actions. If Batman is going to disadvantage himself in this way, it’s only fair that he break a few arms and legs. Mundane concerns melt away, leaving only extraordinary ones, which are vehicles for questions of identity and about what such power means.
These are the same questions, of course, that have arisen in the wake of 11th September, as the US moved away from its post-second world war embrace of the international rule of law towards a self-perception in which wrongs were answered with overwhelming force and godlike wrath. Reading Matthew Alexander’s 2008 book How to Break a Terrorist, it’s hard not to feel that the interrogation techniques approved after 9/11 were all about the establishment of mastery. This response, as lawyer Philippe Sands discovered when he was researching his book, Torture Team (2008), echoed Hollywood themes. Jack Bauer, hero of the television series 24, became the template for a new, more flexible attitude to law in the context of the war on terror.
In many ways, superheroes exist to set boundaries on human behaviour. General Wesley Clark said that his job in Bosnia was to edit the set of actions which people and states could perform in order to prevent the possibility of ethnic cleansing. Batman, Captain America and the rest are attempting the same thing: by being who they are, they assert a way of being which acknowledges some actions as legitimate and necessary, and makes others unthinkable. Waterboarding was once firmly in the latter category; then it wasn’t. These films will tell us, broadly, how far America feels it is permissible to go in the pursuit of a perceived good—or, perhaps, define the limits of that journey.
*****
Which leaves the question of which of these movies will be any fun, or indeed any good. Green Hornet looks like a barrel of laughs, so long as it can maintain a Charlie’s Angels-like sense of mayhem and bring the story home. I don’t dare hope for much from Thor—the premise of a Norse god hammering his way through villainy doesn’t sparkle but, on the other hand, Kenneth Branagh directs. X-Men has a lot of ground to make up after the Wolverine prequel, but is one of the most interesting franchises. Green Lantern—from Marvel’s rival, DC Comics—takes test pilot Hal Jordan as the central character, and the trailer hints at a pretty unexamined conventional plot.
Captain America is the big one. If it has even a whisper of the upheavals in the life of the comic-book hero, it could be quite a story, and a genuine pop-culture examination of America’s recent painful experiences. It’s futile—though tempting—to hope for a film in the devastating tradition of reassessment which yielded Clint Eastwood’s requiem to the cowboy movie, Unforgiven. Hollywood hasn’t been able to bring itself to adapt Frank Miller’s Dark Knight Returns, which features a 60-year-old Batman returning to the streets to save Gotham from a new wave of urban predators, and ends up in a showdown with a very familiar government super-enforcer. Captain America will not be allowed to travel that far down the arthouse road.
The crucial factor will probably be how they treat the villain. Heroes stand or fall by their enemies. In the Batman films, Jack Nicholson and Heath Ledger both made the Joker’s appalling good humour real, and the results were superb. The decision to make the movie in Cap’s original second world war context makes it potentially morally unambiguous—almost no one objects to bashing a Nazi these days—and the evil Red Skull may well end up as a gurning nitwit. But the choice of Hugo Weaving to play him is encouraging—Weaving’s brooding menace as Agent Smith in The Matrix lent Keanu Reeves’ Neo more depth than he otherwise would have had. The question is whether the conflicted, fragile nature of post-depression America will be airbrushed out—in which case I fear the film will be soporific—or whether it will be allowed to filter through into the action, so that Cap can confront the same ambiguities real Americans deal with today. Captain America is the perfect patriot: head and heart in balance, pride tempered with humility and compassion. So what happens when he no longer believes in his government? When he feels the administration has abandoned the spirit of the nation?
These are questions the comic industry has faced up to. If Hollywood does as well, we’ll get a great movie and a great public dialogue. If not, the film may well be a meaningless romp through inadequate minions and bland caricatures—and an embarrassing flop. Or not: perhaps the story of a perfect man fighting a just war against a clear-cut enemy is exactly what the American public wants, to gloss over the confusion the past decade has created.
One way or another, Captain America will present the US audience with a choice between nostalgia for a non-existent simplicity and a genuine engagement. Which they favour will tell us as much about the state of the country as any poll. The only way to understand the answer, though, is to watch the movie.
This year will be a festival of hero movies, and I’ll be watching every single one. And so should you, even if they’re not usually your kind of thing. Why? Because they’re more than primary-coloured stories for kids (though no doubt that is what the studio bosses are hoping to turn out). These movies are a struggle to understand what it means to be a hero—or just a good guy.
July will see the release of Captain America: The First Avenger, featuring the comic-book hero created 70 years ago. Marvel’s literal standard-bearer will join a slew of superhero characters who have made the journey to the cinema in recent years: Tony Stark, the unruly bad-boy millionaire played by Robert Downey Jnr with a truckload of quirk in Iron Man; Bruce Banner, whose rage turns him into the musclebound, indestructible Hulk; and the awkward, geeky Peter Parker, transformed by the bite of a radioactive spider into—of course—Spiderman. Also out in 2011 is the latest film featuring the X-Men, whose mutant powers arrive at puberty (X- Men: First Class, June), and the big-screen debut of Marvel’s character Thor in May.
We don’t have superheroes in Britain the way they do in the US. John Constantine, the brutal magus anti-hero of DC Comics’ Hellblazer, once observed that Britain is a country where no one would have the nerve to wear a cape in public, even if they did have powers far beyond those of mortal men. We love US imports, but they don’t have the same resonance here as they do in their home country.
That is because America is a narrative nation. Spoken into existence by the founders and sustained by an act of continuous creation ever since, the US represents a collective decision which must be re-envisioned and reinterpreted by each successive generation, and for each part of its extraordinary patchwork. That narrative has been sorely tested over the last decade. September 11th was an appalling moment that was also devastating because an alien hand reached into the great American narrative and reshaped it. The response in the real world was disturbing, and horrified many Americans—the creation of Guantánamo Bay and its even more secretive camps at Bagram and in the Horn of Africa. But in the world of superheroes, the dream became even more nightmarish. In the Marvel Universe storyline over the last decade, Captain America was beset by shapeshifting enemies who could look like his friends, and then by the establishment of a police state. He took a stand—against his own government—and became the leader of the heroic opposition. Eventually, in 2007, he was shot and killed on the steps of a courthouse. In the heart of the justice system, under the eye of the security services and the press, Captain America died.
“It’s a hell of a time for him to go,” co-creator Joe Simon said at the time, “we really need him now.” He wasn’t kidding. It’s hard to overstate how central “Cap” is to some. Captain America is the alter ego of Steve Rogers, a rejected second world war volunteer who was given an experimental supersoldier drug and became a perfect human. Captain America punched out Hitler in his first print appearance in 1941 and was a sort of patron saint to US servicemen from then on. When a recent issue of the comic made unfavourable reference to the Tea Party, series writer Ed Brubaker received death threats: Captain America wears the flag. In a way, he is the flag. But what he stands for—and by extension, what the flag stands for—is different to different people. Brubaker observed in 2007: “What I found is that all the really hard-core left-wing fans want Cap to be standing out on and giving speeches on the street corner against the Bush administration, and all the really right-wing [fans] all want him to be over in the streets of Baghdad, punching out Saddam.”
The coming feast of comic-book adaptations, then, is more than just a quest for box-office takings. It’s a search for a formula of right action that resonates across a very bothered and bewildered nation.
*****
The idea of going beyond the law has always been one strand of American heroism. The depiction of the American identity in cinema—in the work of Frank Capra, for instance—has two classic aspects. There is the intellectual, vested in the founding documents and the architecture of Washington DC, which have an almost magical power to bring understanding of the nation’s ideals to the sceptical, and determination to the weary. And there is the soulful, found in the farm belt and the prairies, which have a similar property of renewing faith and mending hearts broken by bureaucracy and indifference. The law must be modified by mercy and understanding, or it becomes tyrannical; the heart must be bounded by rules, or it creates chaos. Learning to balance these imperatives is often a part of the hero’s journey, and it is certainly part of the US governmental and legal apparatus’s constant self-modification.
The hero of the just-released Green Hornet film looks to take rather more joy in chaos than in law and order. But he most probably will also have to come to terms with Spiderman’s mantra: with great power comes great responsibility. Responsibilities are at the heart of these stories. Hal Jordan, in the upcoming Green Lantern movie (out in June), is picked out to protect the universe from evil. In order to do so, and to fulfil himself, he must overcome fear. Likewise, Peter Parker is driven, despite the personal cost, to do what he can to help his fellows. Iron Man’s Tony Stark discovers his conscience when he finds his company’s technologies in the hands of terrorists, which makes him question the capitalist system. Fundamentally, these characters are identity questions made flesh, given relevant powers. Everything they are is a riddle they must answer by doing the right thing, and in order to survive they must determine what that is.
*****
Robert Warshow, the American cultural critic, wrote in the 1950s that the cowboy in movies was essentially the expression of an idea. The cowboy’s honour, his self, was bound up in his way of life: drifting, leisurely, self-sufficient, and guided by a code of obligation and natural justice. Even death didn’t really change him so long as he kept to his code, which included a notion of non-aggression. The cowboy would not shoot first. He often put himself in the way of trouble, but he would not initiate hostility unless natural justice was infringed. This could be the template for many comic book heroes, and for their movie incarnations, where many of the rough edges in comics are smoothed away. Captain America carries, after all, not a sword but a shield. Before anything else he is the defender of a people and of an idea.
Contrast that with the 2010 movie, The Expendables, written, directed and starring Sylvester Stallone. It’s a gore-drenched festival of pre-emptive violence which tries too hard to enjoy itself. Stallone’s character may not wear a cape, but he’s super-quick on the draw and—along with the rest of his crew—preternatually immune to being shot.
The Expendables are a freelance special forces team who find themselves saving a small island nation from exploitation by a CIA front-company. There is, inevitably, a (token) girl involved. It’s a shock-and-awe movie, with a gun which can kill entire armies deployed in a small tunnel, and property damage like you’ve never seen. Not a building is left standing, and little or nothing is changed by the intervention of the gang. The girl—daughter to the outgoing ruler—is left to salvage what she can from the rubble, prey to whatever monster comes along next.
It’s the weirdest action movie experience I’ve ever had; part Rambo in excelsis, part nihilistic meditation on the futility of armed intervention. There’s a soliloquy from Mickey Rourke which rips the guts out of the action genre and leaves them hanging on a fence. If this is a self-image the US is comfortable with, we should all be alarmed. The Expendables is far more anti-war in its way than Peckinpah’s Cross of Iron, challenging not the enjoyment of battle but the nobility and efficacy of the men who fight.
The gun, of course, is the elephant in the room in all superhero stories. Despite— and because of—the central position occupied by guns in American culture, superheroes exist in a space where conventional firearms are the tool of lesser men. Superman simply ignores them—in the latest movie, a bullet impacts with the lens of his eye and shatters—and Batman is so adept in his control of situations and martial artistry that he is immune. Iron Man’s armour is impervious, likewise Captain America’s shield, Green Lantern’s ring, the car in Green Hornet. X-Men’s Wolverine heals instantly and has an indestructible skeleton. Their refusal to take up the gun shows their superhuman natures, and sanctions their non-lethal actions. If Batman is going to disadvantage himself in this way, it’s only fair that he break a few arms and legs. Mundane concerns melt away, leaving only extraordinary ones, which are vehicles for questions of identity and about what such power means.
These are the same questions, of course, that have arisen in the wake of 11th September, as the US moved away from its post-second world war embrace of the international rule of law towards a self-perception in which wrongs were answered with overwhelming force and godlike wrath. Reading Matthew Alexander’s 2008 book How to Break a Terrorist, it’s hard not to feel that the interrogation techniques approved after 9/11 were all about the establishment of mastery. This response, as lawyer Philippe Sands discovered when he was researching his book, Torture Team (2008), echoed Hollywood themes. Jack Bauer, hero of the television series 24, became the template for a new, more flexible attitude to law in the context of the war on terror.
In many ways, superheroes exist to set boundaries on human behaviour. General Wesley Clark said that his job in Bosnia was to edit the set of actions which people and states could perform in order to prevent the possibility of ethnic cleansing. Batman, Captain America and the rest are attempting the same thing: by being who they are, they assert a way of being which acknowledges some actions as legitimate and necessary, and makes others unthinkable. Waterboarding was once firmly in the latter category; then it wasn’t. These films will tell us, broadly, how far America feels it is permissible to go in the pursuit of a perceived good—or, perhaps, define the limits of that journey.
*****
Which leaves the question of which of these movies will be any fun, or indeed any good. Green Hornet looks like a barrel of laughs, so long as it can maintain a Charlie’s Angels-like sense of mayhem and bring the story home. I don’t dare hope for much from Thor—the premise of a Norse god hammering his way through villainy doesn’t sparkle but, on the other hand, Kenneth Branagh directs. X-Men has a lot of ground to make up after the Wolverine prequel, but is one of the most interesting franchises. Green Lantern—from Marvel’s rival, DC Comics—takes test pilot Hal Jordan as the central character, and the trailer hints at a pretty unexamined conventional plot.
Captain America is the big one. If it has even a whisper of the upheavals in the life of the comic-book hero, it could be quite a story, and a genuine pop-culture examination of America’s recent painful experiences. It’s futile—though tempting—to hope for a film in the devastating tradition of reassessment which yielded Clint Eastwood’s requiem to the cowboy movie, Unforgiven. Hollywood hasn’t been able to bring itself to adapt Frank Miller’s Dark Knight Returns, which features a 60-year-old Batman returning to the streets to save Gotham from a new wave of urban predators, and ends up in a showdown with a very familiar government super-enforcer. Captain America will not be allowed to travel that far down the arthouse road.
The crucial factor will probably be how they treat the villain. Heroes stand or fall by their enemies. In the Batman films, Jack Nicholson and Heath Ledger both made the Joker’s appalling good humour real, and the results were superb. The decision to make the movie in Cap’s original second world war context makes it potentially morally unambiguous—almost no one objects to bashing a Nazi these days—and the evil Red Skull may well end up as a gurning nitwit. But the choice of Hugo Weaving to play him is encouraging—Weaving’s brooding menace as Agent Smith in The Matrix lent Keanu Reeves’ Neo more depth than he otherwise would have had. The question is whether the conflicted, fragile nature of post-depression America will be airbrushed out—in which case I fear the film will be soporific—or whether it will be allowed to filter through into the action, so that Cap can confront the same ambiguities real Americans deal with today. Captain America is the perfect patriot: head and heart in balance, pride tempered with humility and compassion. So what happens when he no longer believes in his government? When he feels the administration has abandoned the spirit of the nation?
These are questions the comic industry has faced up to. If Hollywood does as well, we’ll get a great movie and a great public dialogue. If not, the film may well be a meaningless romp through inadequate minions and bland caricatures—and an embarrassing flop. Or not: perhaps the story of a perfect man fighting a just war against a clear-cut enemy is exactly what the American public wants, to gloss over the confusion the past decade has created.
One way or another, Captain America will present the US audience with a choice between nostalgia for a non-existent simplicity and a genuine engagement. Which they favour will tell us as much about the state of the country as any poll. The only way to understand the answer, though, is to watch the movie.
