Well, this is kind of a bummer. Apparently Joss Whedon was going to have Captain America give a speech in The Avengers that would have been partially about the loss of the social safety net, but he decided to cut the scene:

One of the best scenes that I wrote was the beautiful and poignant scene between Steve and Peggy [Carter] that takes place in the present. And I was the one who was like, ‘Guys, we need to lose this.’ It was killing the rhythm of the thing. And we did have a lot of Cap, because he really was the in for me. I really do feel a sense of loss about what’s happening in our culture, loss of the idea of community, loss of health care and welfare and all sorts of things. I was spending a lot of time having him say it, and then I cut that.

The timing and the platform would have been amazing, the purest representative of American power in the superhero pantheon standing in for Solicitor General Donald Verrilli in the biggest tentpole of the summer, a month and a half before the Supreme Court’s likely to issue its ruling that will determine the future of the Affordable Care Act. It also would have also created a political firestorm around the movie, something the cheerful blandness of Captain America was careful to avoid. Whedon may have been entirely right that the scene would have interrupted the flow of the movie. But with The Avengers tracking for an absolutely ginormous opening, he also may not have wanted to futz with the prospects of an enormously high-profile opening.

I’m glad to see a conservative group agrees with me that by a broad definition, Hollywood is a pretty patriotic place, comfortable making movies that embrace American values and seeing them do well at the box office. That said, the idea that it’s conservative to want “good to conquer evil, truth to triumph over falsehood, justice to prevail over injustice and true beauty to overcome ugliness,” as Movieguide says this year strikes me as a bit of an overreach. In case there was a question about it, just because I’m a professional progressive doesn’t mean that I don’t want to see Walter White end up dead or in the pokey; that I sit around in cahoots with that schemer Satan thinking about how to get inaccurate information about everything from the demographics of the United States to clean energy into popular entertainment; or that I’m dedicated to seeing brutalist architecture dominate movie sets or something.

More to the point, Dr. Ted Baehr, who founded Movieguide, says that “Moviegoers and TV viewers prefer movies and television programs that celebrate traditional American values like liberty, private property, the free market, patriotism, and limited government.” But is that actually what’s reflected in their nominees for top movies? Captain America: The First Avenger is about a wildly expanded federal government that, among other things, performs dodgy experiments on the troops. Thor is part of a larger story that sees entrepreneurial superheroes brought together and brought to heel but government bureaucracy. You could maaaaybe stretch and say that Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides is about an enterprising small businessman, but mostly, I think it’s about the boats that shoot things at each other and the zombies and the mermaids and Johnny Depp playing pretty gay. Thor is all about how unmarried lady scientists should fall for dreamy pagan gods and how science validates a non-Christian view of the world. And yes, I’m totally glad to see someone say that the Twilight movies represent“fringe worldviews,” but you know what? Americans love those fringe worldviews if they involve who want to have premarital sex with vampires but who wait because those vampires are just so darn oriented towards family values.

Look, I totally understand the desire to believe that America is secretly hankering after movies and television that reflect a certain set of values and if that darn Hollywood machine would only cooperate, the market would reap rewards and the right priorities would spread throughout the land. But I don’t think there’s conclusive evidence, in either direct, that that’s the case. And if conservatives really want to sell the idea that their values make for better storytelling, they’re going to need more coherent ideas than these, and a more compelling spokesman than, say, Dean Cain. This is a conversation worth having and hashing out—I think someone should do a big, comprehensive study of the ideas and values audiences report taking away from their favorite entertainment. But trying to claim American movies for conservativism, box office evidence to the contrary, isn’t the place to start it.

This is a standard, but silly, argument from Big Hollywood about how the entertainment industry hates the troops:

But patriotism doesn’t sell, right? If it did, Hollywood would be inundating movie theaters with pro-troop films and other tales of American soldiers in heroic action.
“Red Tails” also slices into another depressing Hollywood meme…An even better patriotism test comes next month when “Act of Valor,” a film which boldly toasts American soldiers as heroes, hits theaters. A “Valor” take down of the film competition may open the floodgates for more pro-troop features, assuming the appropriate bean counters are taking notes. Or, will Hollywood executives ignore the numbers and retreat to projects depicting U.S. soldiers in unflattering light? Is there a better chance we’ll see a new installment of “In the Valley of Elah” or “Redacted,” films showing the darker side of the modern soldier, than a “Red Tails” sequel?

I don’t want to spend time explaining why patriotism and unqualified support for the members and actions of the armed forces no matter what they do aren’t the same thing, because I think it’s obvious to everyone here and everyone reasonable why that’s the case. But I think there’s something fundamentally silly about the idea that Hollywood is unaware of the fact that patriotism sells.

In the last 10 years, the following movies with patriotic themes were among the top-10 grossing movies of the year. Last year, one of the top-selling superheroes of the year was Captain America, up there with Pixar’s most middle-American offering, Cars 2. In 2010, Iron Man 2 kept stumbling drunkenly towards public service. 2009 was ruled by Michael Bay’s military Valentine, Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen, along with the paen to charity and football as mainstreaming experiences, The Blind Side. In 2008, Tony Stark discovered service of country instead of himself in Iron Man. In 2007, Spider-Man 3, the latest installment about the webslinger who became a representative of post-9/11 New York, topped the box office list; the uber-pro-military franchise Transformers made its bow; Jason Bourne kept the idea of an intelligence community with integrity alive in The Bourne Ultimatum; and Will Smith saved human society in I Am Legend. The previous year, Clark Kent resurfaced to keep an eye on Metropolis in Superman Returns, and Hollywood affirmed a kinder, gentler American consumerism in Talladega Nights. 2005 had less obvious themes, though America obviously beats the Martians in War of the Worlds. 2004 reinforced Spider-Man’s ties to New York in that incredible subway scene. 2002 had Spider-Man topping the charts again, a celebration of the immigrant experience in My Big Fat Greek Wedding, and more Americans v. the Aliens in Men in Black 2. 2001 was the last year a World War II movie cleaned up at the box office, but no one could accuse Pearl Harbor of being anything less than a big, old-fashioned patriotic weepie.

Even by the standards of military-worshipping conservatism, Hollywood is deeply committed to making movies that both reflect and make bank off that particular strand of patriotism. And if you’re thoughtful enough to have a broader understanding of love and country, there’s even more out there for you.

Someone who knows more than me about this may think differently, but is it really that surprising that Captain America made slightly more money overseas than it did in the United States? America has roughly 4.5 percent of the world’s population. American movies tend to make a lot of money abroad, particularly superhero movies. Iron Man, a movie about a decadent Western arms dealer who helps blow up a bunch of Afghanistan before having a conversion experience, made $582,443,126 at the international box office. Spider-Man 2, which is in some ways an explicit response to September 11, made $410,180,516. Compared to that, beating the Nazis is about as uncontroversial a plot as a movie can have.

And even if the uber-American branding of the main character was the first thing people considered before the plot, there’s not any evidence that America is so despised that people would stay away from a nifty-lookin’ diversion just because the hero is not just American, but an embodiment of American power. In the latest Pew Global Attitudes Survey, countries that are big potential U.S. markets all had reasonably favorable attitudes of the U.S.: in Britain, the U.S.’s favorability rating is 61 percent, in France it’s 75 percent, in Brazil it’s 62 percent, in Japan it’s 85 percent, and even in places like China (44 percent) and Mexico (52 percent), it’s not as if the U.S. is uniformly reviled. We’re in less good shape in Turkey (10 percent), Pakistan (12 percent), and the Palestinian territories (18 percent) but these are much bigger concerns for our foreign policy and national security than for our trade policy, including movies. As long as American superheroes don’t behave in totally geopolitically offensive ways, they’re probably going to do pretty well, here and abroad.

As usual, the bridge is yours.

-Have we really not figured out how to keep stages from collapsing?

-I will only watch The Playboy Club if there’s a Rahm Emanuel analogue among the show’s politicians.

-I’m not shocked that a barbarian movie doesn’t have strong female characters.

-It would be nice to see the Falcon in Captain America 2.

-I’m reading Jane McGonigal’s Reality Is Broken right now: this is a cool interview with her.

-I don’t really think that single-player gaming will be dead in three years. At least I hope it won’t! I still have so much to learn!

-Sometimes it takes litigation to make Google not be evil.

-Stephen Soderbergh: secretly filming a chick flick.

-Spoilery footage of The Avengers shooting a fight scene.

-I think I’d be looking forward to this more if it was about how Captain America reacts to being unfrozen. Otherwise, it looks like just another Quirky Lawyer Drama:

-London’s riots claim a major record distribution warehouse.

-I’m going to miss Eureka.

-White men can’t jump.

-Here are all of your television premieres this fall.

-Captain America testifies on his steroid abuse:

io9 reports that Marvel has picked Doctor Strange as the next superhero slated for a movie franchise—or at least a movie. If they’re going to do that, Marvel should just make an adaptation of Neil Gaiman’s 1602, the eight-issue story he wrote in 2003 that transplanted the Marvel pantheon back to Queen Elizabeth’s court.

It wouldn’t be as farfetched as it sounds. 1602 is an independent continuity, sure, and it’s an elaborate period piece. But the two best superhero movies of the summer were reasonably elaborate period pieces. And because Doctor Strange’s powers are openly acknowledged to be magical and mystic, instead of merely a kind of science so sophisticated and futuristic that it seems like magic, in a way he’s a much better fit for a world where magic vied equally with science for predominance. I’ve always been sort of entertained by the idea that Doctor Strange ended up in Greenwich Village in the 1970s—San Francisco or Portland might have been a better option, but I do appreciate the effort to find a magician a place where he might plausibly feel at home in the twentieth century.

And it’s not just that Stephen Strange fits better in an earlier century. 1602 is a nice little experiment in exactly how many circumstances superhero concepts can be resonant in. For the X-Men, the struggle between Professor Xavier and Magneto is as applicable to the inquisition as it is to black liberation or gay rights; men like Nick Fury will find hire in any generation; it’s got one of the most distinct and thoughtful Thor stories on record; and the power of the American idea doesn’t acquire its magic with the Shot Heard Round the World. That last point is particularly important: I’m not sure Gaiman has a distinct American idea in America Gods, but he manages to conjure up something akin to an originary American blessing and tragedy in 1602, a sense of chosenness for the land. And now that we’ve met all of these characters, or at least, most of them, you could just tell the story without worrying about spending a lot of time on origins. It would even redeem the Fantastic Four, and force folks to start over given that Chris Evans is Captain America now.

It’ll never happen, of course. It’s too weird. It doesn’t lend itself to an ongoing storyline because it has a central, resolvable mystery. It would be confusing for audiences who don’t follow comic books and aren’t used to juggling between multiple continuities at once. But Marvel has these people signed for nine-movie contracts. If it’s going to wring every last drop of potential profit out of them, it’d be fun if towards the end, they did something weird and brilliant, and more intensely engaged with the American idea as a whole than most of the stories it’s putting on-screen now.

Adam Serwer thinks that I’m wrong on Captain America: The First Avenger‘s optimism about American institutions because Peggy Carter, Cap’s girl, has been rejected elsewhere*:

Peggy Carter, Cap’s love interest, alludes to institutional sexism briefly in one of her first conversations with Steve Rogers, saying that she knows what it’s like to have “doors slammed in her face.” It’s easy to see how a similar scene could be constructed to explain the presence of Gabe Jones in Cap’s elite unit, something along the lines of Cap insisting that he be included because he knows what it’s like to have “doors slammed in his face,” alluding to his earlier conversation with Carter. That would be entirely in keeping with the narrative context of the movie itself, and even Cap’s character, without requiring a lengthy tangent on segregation in the armed forces during World War II.

My assumption was those doors were British ones — Peggy is, after all, a U.K. transplant to an American unit. And it’s true that Col. Chester Phillips can be skeptical of Peggy’s judgement out in the field as part of a larger skepticism of what Cap, who up until his arrival in Europe has been a war bond-shilling show pony, can actually accomplish that’s of military value. But she’s entirely accepted as a partner by Howard Stark and Dr. Abraham Erskine, and she gets to shuck that pencil skirt and put on some pants to fight Hydra on the ground. (Erskine’s top secret lab is guarded by a lady with a shotgun, too.)

In a sense, that fact that Peggy gets to hit the front lines and defend her man is just as cheery and dismissive of actual history as the suggestion that World War II units were racially integrated. Women in both the WACS and the WAVES were kept out of combat (something that actually occasioned prejudice from men who thought they’d be taken out of combat and sent to the front lines), and the WAVES were confined to the continental U.S. and Hawaii. The names of both units signaled that they were meant to be temporary units rather than to pave the way for women’s long-term service in the military. Somebody may have shut a door on Peggy Carter somewhere, but in Captain America, it sure wasn’t the U.S. Army.

*He also notes that the Marvel universe as a whole has some nicely skeptical storylines about the American government. This is indisputably true. But they have chosen a more optimistic story for their major movie venture, leaving Sony to produce the more pessimistic X-Men arc. That was all I meant.

Captain America: The First Avenger is a totally delightful facsimile of a ’40s movie, the kind of thing where canvas truck coverings are thumped vigorously and bad guys are chucked out the back; where plucky kids tossed in the river urge the hero to focus on the villain rather than on fishing them out because they can swim just fine; where wartime romances are no less tragic just because one lover’s frozen in the Antarctic while the other succumbs to the ravages of time, rather than someone dying on Omaha Beach or Iwo Jima. The most important thing about it, though, is that it demonstrates that there’s an actual narrative plan behind what A.O. Scott memorably described as Marvel’s Ponzi scheme with the multiple movies leading up to The Avengers. Whether it’s Tony Stark’s father hanging around with Captain America’s crew, womanizing (a running joke about fondue is one of the funniest recreations of forties humor) and tinkering; the appearance of the Cosmic Cube in Norway, and then in the Red Skull’s arsenal; or continuing to see Nick Fury wrangling a set of very talented men in very idiosyncratic circumstances, I can finally see how the personality clashes and the larger narrative are going to be fun (worth it remains to be seen) when they come together in a single movie.

But what really interests me most about Captain America: The First Avenger, and Marvel’s project in The Avengers more generally is how sharp the contrast between that franchise’s faith in the annealing power of America to bind together different people and to make them individually and collectively better, and the X-Men movies’ increasing skepticism about how far America’s stated commitment to diversity actually accommodates difference. It’s not as if these divergent storylines are a shock, or anything — Captain America is a concentrated expression of American patriotism (one that’s been usefully complicated by writers like Robert Morales) where the X-Men are the Swiss Army Knife of oppression metaphors. But it’s still striking to see these stories unfold next to each other, as they are this summer.

One of the things that struck me most about Captain America: The First Avenger was the movie’s insistence on the military as a meritocracy that transforms the people who join it for the better. When Bucky and Cap reunite after the former 90-pound weakling rescues his friend from a Hydra base, Bucky, reckoning with Cap’s transformation asks, “What happened to you?” “I joined the army,” Cap tells him. In the middle of that same rescue, when a white POW comes face-to-face with an Asian-American one and asks “What, we taking everyone?” the guy gives him a spectacular side-eye, thumbs his dog tags out from under his shirt, and tells his fellow prisoner, “I’m from Fresno, ace,” after which he’s fully accepted as a member of the team, and nobody thinks to voice any anti-Japanese sentiments. The movie even portrays Captain America’s division, the 107th, as an integrated one (Derek Luke, once again underused: can we please find something wonderful for him to do? Please?), even though General Eisenhower didn’t voluntarily let black troops serve alongside white ones until the Battle of the Bulge in 1944, and the military wasn’t formally desegregated until President Truman’s executive order in 1948. What really drives the Red Skull nuts is the idea that it’s not that Captain America is great, but the institutions that made him and the things he stands for. “Arrogance may not be a uniquely American trait, but I must say, you do it better than anyone,” he says, demanding, “What makes you so special?” expecting an answer he can laugh at or bat away. “Nothing, I’m just a kid from Brooklyn,” Rogers tells him, provoking an attack. And when Steve Rogers wakes up in an altered America 70 years later, a governmental institution’s there for him again, Nick Fury showing some mercy and sensitivity as he tries to acclimate the latest member of his team to a drastically changed world.
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