Superhero Ethos: How the MCU Reflects America’s Moral Dissonance

On June 7, following overwhelming public protests against police brutality and deeply-ingrained racism, a veto-proof majority of Minneapolis City Council members announced plans to disband the police department.  As countrywide protests continue and additional cities mull sweeping change, a glimmer of hope emerges: meaningful systemic shifts are possible if we fight for them.

This also begs us to consider who shapes the world we inhabit, and how we wrest that power back into the hands of the people.  Can we hold corporations accountable for how they frame the stories we’re told, particularly when they help perpetuate a whitewashing of history that fuels the myth of American Exceptionalism?

I’ve previously criticized Disney with regard to the incredible influence of its intellectual property, and their management’s failure to live up to the responsibility that comes with such power.  Here I focus on the inherent problem of protagonist-centered morality in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, specifically its hesitance to embrace the anti-fascist origins of a character created by Joe Simon and Jack Kirby, both the sons of Jewish immigrants.

Captain America made his first comic appearance in December 1940, exactly a year before the attack on Pearl Harbor.  While the European War raged from the invasion of Poland in 1939, the United States was reticent to join.  Germany borrowed American eugenic ideology (built on white supremacy, forced sterilization, segregation, and marriage restrictions) and referenced our laws to legitimize Adolf Hitler’s genocidal aspirations; at the same time, pro-fascist sentiment was on the rise in America.  The iconic cover image of Captain America Comics #1—its titular hero punching Hitler in the face—caused uproar to the point that police protection took post outside Simon and Kirby’s offices.  In Bradford W. Wright’s Comic Book Nation: The Transformation of Youth Culture in America, Simon stated, “When the first issue came out we got a lot of … threatening letters and hate mail. Some people really opposed what Cap stood for.”

More than a year after the simpering, inane conclusion to Steve Rogers’ arc in AVENGERS: ENDGAME, I was still unable to shake my deep sense of unease over the depoliticization of an unabashedly political character.  My apprehension transcended Steve being put out to pasture in 1950s suburbia; I suspected Disney’s agenda to soften his edges began long before that disastrous choice.  After a re-watch of CAPTAIN AMERICA: THE FIRST AVENGER—the trilogy’s origin film—I was taken aback by certain remarks made in the video commentary track by director Joe Johnston, director of photography Shelly Johnson, and editor Jeffrey Ford.

“Well he’s an interesting character ’cause he’s – he was created and in this film exists mostly in a period of time in America where it’s not Right or Left, who’s right who’s wrong, politically it’s uh, it was about survival and everyone digging deep.”

This is a strange statement considering the virulently racist and fascistic political views brewing in America at that time.  It’s comforting to imagine that the war represented pro-fascism versus anti-fascism—systematic genocide and the fight to topple the regime that enabled it, but reality wasn’t so neatly delineated.  We never examined why our country was a hotbed for far-right radicalism.  Sprouting directly from that environment, Captain America wasn’t created to be an impassive voice of moderation.  He was an artist, an FDR-era socialist, and staunchly opposed the ideology of the Nazi regime.

The commentary’s inadvertent parallel to Trump’s infamous “both sides” remarks made me deeply uncomfortable.  What thought process went into this film; how did they envision its hero?  According to producer Avi Arad:

“The biggest opportunity with Captain America is as a man ‘out of time,’ coming back today, looking at our world though the eyes of someone who thought the perfect world was small-town America. Sixty years go by, and who are we today? Are we better?”  (Source.)

I was flummoxed.  The son of Irish immigrants, born and raised in Brooklyn—a borough of the largest, most diverse city in America—Steve Rogers lived in the epicenter of pro-union rallies and other similar political movements in the thirties.  Social progress over the past sixty years has been slow and painful, but did so thanks to tireless fighters who never fell into complacency nor embraced the status quo.  Without question, these incremental improvements—like the abolishment of Jim Crow laws—were quantifiable to oppressed and marginalized lives.  The battle still rages today.

It became evident how often the creators of CAPTAIN AMERICA: THE FIRST AVENGER side-stepped the reality of the war.  Why didn’t Hydra have swastikas on their uniforms?  Why was it implied, rather than shown, that they were a Nazi paramilitary organization?  Deleted scenes from the film featured Hydra attacking both Nazis and Allied powers—divorcing them from any lingering affiliation with Hitler’s philosophies.

Save for the vague implication that Hydra forced Abraham Erskine, a Jewish man, to develop a eugenic super serum, the film never mentions his people nor the Holocaust.  There isn’t one canonically Jewish character in the MCU, let alone a Jewish hero.

In the comics, Wanda and Pietro Maximoff are the Jewish-Romani children of Magneto; the MCU films erase their ethnicity and parentage.  No longer the offspring of Holocaust survivors, they’re now wayward youths who volunteered to be science experiments, unwittingly recruited by their oppressors.

Principal to the franchise’s inability to directly address Naziism is Swiss Hydra scientist, Dr. Arnim Zola.  The audio commentary for CAPTAIN AMERICA: THE FIRST AVENGER states:

“He [Bucky Barnes] was strapped to that table and Zola did some unspeakable things to him.”

then, later:

“He [Zola] just loves designing these weapons, he’s not really thrilled about using them on people but he loves designing them”.

These contradictory statements are particularly chilling, given how CAPTAIN AMERICA: THE WINTER SOLDIER establishes, in no uncertain terms, that Zola was a plant within S.H.I.E.L.D. (Strategic Homeland Intervention, Enforcement and Logistics Division) from its inception via Operation Paperclip.  It’s unnerving how screenwriters Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely invoked this very real—and morally bankrupt—moment in American history without fully exploring its implications or the complicity of those involved.

Operation Paperclip began in the fall of 1944, a few months after the landings at Normandy.  In order to understand Nazi science, the US Army Counterintelligence Corps rationalized, it was necessary to recruit Nazi scientists.  Everything was done under the guise of strategic acquisition: no longer a question of whom to hang, rather whom to hire.

Thanks to a 600-page Justice Department report released in 2010, we know that these recruited scientists were not only aware of, but fully participated in, the Holocaust’s “final solution”.  The United States government ran a propaganda campaign to obscure their pasts.  It functioned on multiple levels: army intelligence bureaucrats rewrote the dossiers of Nazi scientists; Pentagon generals and their staffers rewrote history in the name of military might.

Operation Bloodstone was a covert operation whereby the CIA enlisted the help of ex-Nazis (like Reinhard Gehlen, whose influence helped shaped our Cold War strategy) in Soviet-controlled areas.  The agency also used CROWCASS—a registry for tracking war crimes suspects—to hunt Nazi fugitives for the purpose of employing them.  U.S. intelligence rebranded fascist leaders as “freedom fighters” enlisted in the crusade against communism.  We allowed Nazis to proliferate within our system after WWII, just as Germany did—77 percent of the officers within its justice ministry in the late 1950s were former members of the Nazi party.

Annie Jacobsen, author of Operation Paperclip: The Secret Intelligence Program That Brought Nazi Scientists to America, detailed how NASA concealed the extent of rocket scientist Wernher von Braun’s past.  The space exploration agency portrayed him as a “reluctant Nazi,” unaware of the extermination camps; for him, “It was all about the science.”

However, as an SS officer, von Braun ran the science division at Buchenwald.  An ardent Nazi, he hand-picked prisoners as slaves for an underground labor camp.  America shielded him from Nuremberg.  Disney would later employ him as a spokesman for three children’s television programs on space travel—the “Man in Space” series.

Dr. Kurt Blome was the leader of a Nazi biological warfare program that utilized human experimentation.  A few years after the war, following his trial for Crimes Against Humanity, the US Army Chemical Corps hired him to conduct more biological weapons research.  Presumably a fictional amalgam of Blome and von Braun, Arnim Zola performed human experiments on Allied prisoners of war.  All but one of his victims died—the aforementioned Bucky Barnes, lifelong friend of Steve Rogers.

This fact was known to S.H.I.E.L.D. founders Howard Stark and Peggy Carter.  After Zola’s recruitment into their agency, he was brought on to continue the same “procedure” he’d attempted to perfect on Barnes: the super soldier serum.  He’d worked with Erskine in its original development.

This is a shocking revelation—never explored, let alone acknowledged.  According to a Justice Department report, American recruitment of Nazis and Gestapo officers was permissible as long as the individual who recruited a Nazi was unaware of specific atrocities committed by that individual.  Stark and Carter saw Barnes as a colleague, yet worked every day with a man who they knew to be his torturer, located in what AVENGERS: ENDGAME refers to as a “quasi-fascistic black site.”

Howard even had a friendly nickname (“Arnie”) for a man who, by all accounts, should’ve been tried at Nuremberg.  Instead, S.H.I.E.L.D. granted Zola free rein despite their leadership’s full awareness of his past.  Why did they never question his allegiance?  Even if U.S. officials forced them to accept Zola among their ranks as a strategic acquisition, why wouldn’t Stark and Carter remain suspicious of his motives?  How could Hydra have grown within their organization right under their noses?  Perhaps, like their real life counterparts, they were tasked with rewriting his dossier and looking the other way.

Only two possibilities remain: either they were complicit, or they were incompetent.

In CAPTAIN AMERICA: THE WINTER SOLDIER, Zola brags of his silent infiltration of S.H.I.E.L.D. which rendered Steve’s sacrifice meaningless: Hydra flourished during his decades under the ice.  In one of the franchise’s most politically radical moments, Steve demands S.H.I.E.L.D.’s complete dismantling.  The system, he argues, is unsalvageable—too broken and corrupt.  Burn it to the ground and start over.

How then, are we to believe that Steve Rogers would ignore director Peggy Carter’s role in permitting her organization’s decay?  She’s a character often embraced as a feminist symbol, yet never fully examined as the leader of an intelligence agency that protected Nazis, or as a white woman who helped the men around her perpetuate a corrupt system.

Whether she’s rendered silent or her morals obfuscated, Peggy’s shallow treatment denies her complexity.  I would’ve preferred a scenario in which Steve realizes that his concept of Peggy was based on limited interactions, a pleasant—albeit superficial—fantasy, as idealized as his memory of the past.  This revelation would be a catalyst for him letting go and moving forward.  Their ethics were too disparate; there are some compromises that Steve Rogers—the unabashed anti-fascist conceived of by Simon and Kirby—would never make.

Instead, the Steve Rogers conceived of by Disney’s board of directors is perhaps more complicit than any other individual in history.  He knew that Hydra slowly and perniciously destabilized Western democracy via the infestation of S.H.I.E.L.D. (an organization he tore down) via the deliberate recruitment—and subsequent neglect—of the war criminal who tortured his best friend.

Steve had foreknowledge of Hydra’s countless atrocities, but still returned to a deeply bigoted era to live a privileged, sheltered, and complacent life with the person who had a direct hand in said neglect.  He buried his head in the sand and rejected political engagement instead of remaining in the present to confront injustices there.  He became the embodiment of Edmund Burke’s cautionary quote:

“All tyranny needs to gain a foothold is for people of good conscience to remain silent.”

When a story frames the protagonist as always being in the right, the world itself skewed to favor their point of view—ignoring all moral dissonance—it becomes a Broken Aesop.  The Marvel Cinematic Universe somehow managed to capture our current zeitgeist in the most twisted way, like a warped fun house mirror that reflects the worst of America, including its history of moral turpitude, back at itself.

No longer symbols that inspire and elevate the human spirit, our heroes were regressed into corporate puppets.  We need inspirational figures who dismantle white supremacy and other oppressive systems, not an interventionist billionaire nor a Captain America who murmurs “hail Hydra” with a self-satisfied smirk and then retreats to the insulation of suburbia.  This stunted concept of heroism is deeply entrenched in our own lack of introspection.  It manifests in the cultural content we consume.  America is due for a reckoning: perhaps it’s time to reevaluate the entire system.

It doesn’t matter what the politicians or the mobs say. It doesn’t matter if the whole country decides that something wrong is something right. Republics are founded on one principle above all else: The requirement that we stand up for what we believe in. no matter the odds or consequences.

When the mob and the press and the whole world tell you to move. Your job is to plant yourself like a tree beside the river of truth and tell the whole world:

“No, you move.” – J. Michael Straczynski