Sunday!
When watching The Winter Soldier (as I was told it was the best of the bunch of the Marvel movies), I found myself saying (over and over!) “this movie is very exciting!” Maribou made the joke “this is like if they made Live Free Or Die Hard into a superhero movie!”
So, on a purely “turn your brain off, have a glass of something, sit back and relax” level, this movie is freaking awesome.
That said, there was an event that happened in the last act of the film and it’s a spoiler. Read the next block of text at your own risk.
It comes out that Gary Shandling’s senator is a member of Team Hydra. In Iron Man, he was portrayed as a bit of a buffoon and a lot of a blowhard… but, as it turns out, nope. He was acting like that deliberately because he was a Nazi. Worse than a Nazi, he was a member of a Nazi splinter group who broke off from the Nazis because they didn’t have a great enough vision.
And with that, the movie gave us a world where we cannot trust those who oppose the heroes. It’s not enough for there to be someone out there who disagrees… they have to be a Nazi. (Fish told me that he and his spouse have had arguments over whether members of Hydra were known to be members of Hydra when they were introduced to us or whether the writers just started picking them on the fly. Why not both?)
Anyway, as I finished the movie, I found myself thinking “what an awful moral!”
Say what you will about religion, but its track record of saying stuff like “life is hard work, sometimes you have to do stuff like forgive, sometimes you have to get back on the horse, you have to love each other (up to and including your enemies)” and so on and so forth is not only imperfect but riddled with atrocities but, and here’s the point, it actually *EXISTS*.
With this movie, Marvel made the point that, hey, sometimes the people who disagree with you do so because they’re Nazis. The introduction of Manichaeism into any given moral argument is not a harbinger of the argument being a particularly sound one.
But I’m going to try to watch the Ultron movie now anyway because I want to see what happens next.
So… what are you reading and/or watching?
(Featured Image is “Edison’s Telephonoscope” by George du Maurier from Punch Almanack for 1879)
Red Skull: Kicked out of the Nazis for being too evil.
Emotionally, I think the point is to dramatize betrayal of trust, which is a thing that happens. And it hits harder because you simply can’t predict who is going to jump in which direction.
I soooo love the scene in the bunker with the computerized version of Dr. Zola – can we call that techromancy?Report
Oh and to make the point that sometimes the disagreements are with your friends, we have Civil War.Report
I haven’t seen Civil War, but isn’t one side of that disagreement actually being manipulated by Nazis? Are there plots where a non-hero (or non-hero organization) is critical of the heroes and does not turn out to be evil?Report
Trizzlor. That was a plot point in the comic book, I think (I never read it). The shape of the conflict is very different in the movie, though.Report
The movie, as a movie, was awesome. I had a blast. Yes, the bunker scene was downright chilling at the same time as being over-the-top goofy. It walked that tightrope impeccably.
I just turned the movie off thinking “man, culture is going to get worse before it gets better”.Report
We saw Captain America: Civil War this week. It was good and I didn’t question the plot much, until of course people on the internet explained the huge plot hole to me. Ugh. To be young and oblivious again…
But the big fight scene with all the Avengers going after each other was awesome and funny in all the ways that the DC movies aren’t. Overall, I give it an A-Report
I felt much the same as Jay did except without the moral angst. Instead, I was focused on the part where they managed to transport the feel of over-the-top-but-terrifying 40s/50s comics to the present day without transforming it much, but *still made it work*. Quite a feat. And yes, the Die Hard vibe was also there.
I finished watching Con Man this week and read a nearly 600 page omnibus of Eddie Campbell’s early work Bacchus, and I forget what all else. Now I am finishing up the 3rd volume of Harley Quinn just in time to bring it back to the library. If Suicide Squad is anything like Conner’s work on this title is, it might actually be *funny* instead of dour. That’d be good.
Oh, and I’ve been reading Paris to the Moon, by Adam Gopnik, which I’m really enjoying so far. And listening to old podcasts from those … uh, I forget the name but they’re two librarians who do a comics podcast. Lots of interviews. If there’s interest I can look up the name of it. Something like In the Library with a Comic Book ?? It’s a fun podcast.Report
I think people miss a major point in the Captain America film series.
HYDRA isn’t really a Nazi organization.
This is less apparent in the first, when they just appear to be a Nazi off-shoot and they share many tactics (human experimentation etc.) The reason HYDRA got kicked out of the Nazi’s wasn’t because they were too evil for them, it was because they weren’t actually supporting the war effort (the Germans appeared to think this was due to incompetence, but it was in fact because the Red Skull was holding back all the good stuff for himself). HYDRA apparently didn’t care to have Germany to win WW2, or to promote the Aryans’ as the master race or exterminate lesser races. HYDRA’s plan in world war 2 was to use their superweapons to take out the Nazi’s same as everyone else to seize power. Apparently HYDRA’s goals and ideals aren’t Nazi goals and ideals but they pursue their own agenda.
What HYDRA’s agenda is was revealed in Zola’s speach in Cap 2. They are committed to a kind of pure authoritarian principle “mankind cannot govern themselves.” Their goal is to impose a HYDRA aristocracy above mankind to better manage the world. Their choosen method to pursue that goal is a top down revolution inacted by infiltrating and subverting powerful organizations. Pre-WW2 their target was the German military-industrial complex, post-WW2 the America government was seen as the best target. This leads to the Alexander Pierce version of HYDRA who, beyond a goal of world domination, doesn’t much resemble the Nazis at all. This version is an American HYDRA, its goals and methods are essentially Pax Americana dialed up to a hundred without any kind of oversight or restraint. Their plan is essentially SHIELD’s plan, just taken to its most extreme logical conclusion and exercised without any morality.
So the overall point wasn’t that the whole thing was at the end of the day a Manichean struggle against the Nazis. SHIELD under Fury was pursuing dubious methods even without HYDRA, which in large part lead to SHIELD and Fury’s fall by the end of the film. In particular, the nature of their organization made them an excellent recruiting ground for HYDRA as SHIELD members would both be a natural part of HYDRA’s rule of the strong aristocracy and HYDRA’s goals ultimately resemble SHIELD’s, just exercised without restraint and in a self-interested manner.Report
So Hydra is merely Nazi-adjacent.
I’m not certain how much better this makes things.Report
I think we know who the real Renegade Jew is now, though.Report
I didn’t take the movie’s theme as being “anyone who disagrees with you is a Nazi”. I took it as being pretty much the opposite – it was geared at saying, “Sometimes the bad guys are the one who seem to be on your side, and you have to judge by their actions rather than by whether they say they’re on your side”. HYDRA and SHIELD aren’t two different things; SHIELD is HYDRA – and SHIELD is an organization who have been treated as the good guys for a half-dozen movies by now.
The movie’s theme is that the idea that it’s fine for a quasi-military organization to have virtually unlimited power and surveillance because they’re “on our side” is incredibly dangerous and wrong. It’s contradictory to say “We need this massive military buildup because I don’t trust people,” because you’re putting that massive military buildup in the hands of people. Who you’ve just said can’t be trusted.
As someone who doesn’t live in the US, I’m pretty happy to see an American movie saying that, especially in a way that incorporates critique of both mass surveillance and drone warfare. On an emotional level – seeing an organization that’s a cross between the CIA and DARPA being the villain of a Captain America movie was just fun. And the bonus pro-Snowden theme was just the icing on the cake.Report