That Captain America Show Was Weird

[00:00] In a memorable scene from The Dark Knight, the mob is arguing about what to do about the police trying to seize all of their money, Lau comes up with this plan to have the mob give him all

[00:13] because the Chinese will never extranet a national putting But then the Joker says. An ad for the televisions, so-called plan.

[00:27] The Joker's prediction turns out to be accurate. but Batman can do whatever he wants. batman has jurisdiction everywhere.

[00:41] a statement about Bush-era Foreign Policy. The film constructs the scenario where Batman needs to rendition someone from

[00:53] another country in order to keep Gotham/America safe, a scenario that comments on the Bush administration's use of that technique. reach the American government should have in world affairs.

[01:07] It's saying, maybe doing things by the book isn't enough, and we need someone to go beyond what we consider ethical to get the job done, the recently released Falcon and The Winter Soldier TV series.

[01:22] Take it easy. You might want to fight Bucky before you tangle with The Dora Milaje. For the first time ever,

[01:36] Now I'm going to do what any self-respecting YouTuber would do in this moment, detail what was more or less self-evident in a single sentence,

[01:48] the reason I want to do this is that the tweet got to dip a toe into American imperialism that could use a little more explanation.

[02:01] this video is that you should be following me on Twitter. three different factions are arguing over what will happen to Baron Zemo. help with their current investigation, but John Walker,

[02:17] wants to have him arrested while The Dora Milaje, want to take him into their own custody. which is when this exchange happens.

[02:33] The Dora Milaje have jurisdiction whenever The Dora Milaje find themselves to be. The first of which is, do you have jurisdiction here, Captain America?

[02:48] yes, technically, I suppose. the world is reeling from a few extremely disruptive events. Five years earlier, half of the human population disappeared in a puff

[03:00] of smoke and were then magically popped back into existence. bureaucratic and humanitarian nightmares that this show is exploring the Followed up. Lots of people lost their homes or were stranded and countries they didn't belong to,

[03:14] Sam can't get a loan for a business because he hasn't had any income for five years because he didn't exist. There are huge refugee camps filled with people affected by all of this,

[03:26] The stated purpose of the GRC is extensively to get everything sorted, It's an international organization and has given wide-reaching powers

[03:40] across the globe that are only ever vaguely defined in the show. isn't just representing the American government, the text justifies why he has jurisdiction when he is standing in Latvia.

[03:57] Everything he does is going to carry not just some fictional organization that doesn't have a real-world parallel.

[04:09] matter to him if he didn't have legal jurisdiction to be here, This very episode ends with him murdering an unarmed man in the street.

[04:22] From that perspective, the critique of American foreign policy is pretty clear. America's jurisdiction is everywhere. a history of the greater United States,

[04:37] the world that America has conquered or acquired in some way, were never fully incorporated into For Immerwahr, the existence of these places defines America as an empire.

[04:55] Other empires have no issue identifying themselves as empires, but it is important to America that it never calls itself one explicitly. America has fought empires throughout its history,

[05:07] and its most popular fictional universe is all about defeating an empire. which is supposed to be morally superior to an empire. In a republic, the people are supposed to be free and enfranchised.

[05:20] They have some mechanism to shape their own government rather than simply being ruled. like Guam, Puerto Rico, or the Philippines, within the American empire at different points of history.

[05:36] The reason for their exclusion is clear. barring millions of non-white people from having voting rights.

[05:48] but there was a shift in how America handled overseas expansion after World War II. the occupation of some countries like Japan didn't lead to colonization.

[06:03] Rather than trying to control them outright or annexing them, America began maintaining a network of military bases across the globe, which is why Immerwahr has described America as a pointillist empire.

[06:18] you'd see the familiar shape of the 50 states and In this video by Johnny Harris, where he tries to map every known US military base,

[06:32] America exerts enormous military and economic influence almost everywhere through these bases and far beyond the capabilities of any other country. Russia has nine in various other countries have one.

[06:49] In all, there are probably 30 overseas bases owned by non-US countries. has roughly 800 plus agreements granting it access to still other foreign sites. those that refuse are nevertheless surrounded by them.

[07:05] in other words, is everyone's backyard. America's presence in these places hasn't been unanimously welcome to either. They are a key part of America's global power.

[07:21] With all of that, let's look back at our friend, John Walker. it is precisely because Captain America has legal jurisdiction here, and it should make us question why?

[07:38] Why is it given to an American? In what ways is this coerced because of America's military predominance? natural and obvious that he has the power of the law on his side,

[07:53] Why have we passively accepted it as natural? The Dora Milaje don't have jurisdiction here. Jurisdiction wherever the Dora Milaje find themselves to be.

[08:08] Why are you the only one that gets to play at being world police? It's also not just the scene that is hinting at a critique of American imperialism, His purpose in the story is to make Sam and the audience question

[08:24] what they believe the symbol of Captain America and by extension, Steve Rogers was always presented as the moral center of the Marvel Universe. the story always considered it morally correct.

[08:38] He stands in for everything that America as a country aspires to be, John Walker is a mockery of this. and the desire to dominate more than by the desire to protect.

[08:52] He's short-tempered, self-righteous, and needlessly violent. reflect on America's place on the world stage. This is a somewhat surprising turn for the Marvel Cinematic Universe.

[09:06] the cozy relationship the MCU has had with the Pentagon. Essentially, if you want to make a movie that features the American military in any way, to make the movie without access to their official uniforms and equipment.

[09:23] This operates as a soft sensor on the movies Hollywood can produce and the critiques it can make about American foreign policy and the military. It also means that a lot of movies have functioned as recruitment ads.

[09:35] Since Falcon and the Winter Soldier begins with it's likely the scripts passed through the lens of the Pentagon. I can't say that for certain as I don't have a primary source for that at the moment.

[09:50] I can say that it's likely the case. American world policing be lightly critique like this in a Marvel story. John Walker's extremely rushed redemption arc that has him clipping with the heroes,

[10:08] not two episodes after the murders a guy in the street while the world watches, see. I'd be extremely curious to know whether his arc was in any way shaped by the Pentagon or if his arc is meant as a critique of the Pentagon.

[10:21] The fact that he faces minimal consequences for murdering someone in another country. To me, this raises an interesting question about how these stories handle their politics. Karli Morgenthau and Marvel's new villain problem.

[10:36] A few years ago, one of the most common criticisms against Many of them were uncharismatic and forgettable. Marvel has a new villainous archetype,

[10:50] This is going to be my most self-referential video ever. I made this video praising a particular aspect of the show,

[11:02] which I have since soured on to a degree, have coherent ideologies that the hero has to learn from. Amon is a fraud,

[11:17] political power leads to them being enfranchised in the following seasons. For example, Marvel has started writing characters like this in Spider-Man: Homecoming,

[11:29] right to be angry at the rich and powerful people of the world. Killmonger in Black Panther is a black liberationist who wants to empower the oppressed.

[11:41] Now Karli Morgenthau is an anti-nationalist, anti-capitalist revolutionary. find ways to question whether their ideas are wrong.

[11:53] Instead, the villains are automatically wrong because they embrace violence. There's still people in there. They're all this guy from Rick and Morty.

[12:05] animals, old people doesn't matter. I just love killing. First, in Black Panther, He believes in the traditions of Wakanda and Killmonger challenges those beliefs.

[12:24] This isn't the case in Falcon and the Winter Soldier, where Sam doesn't really have beliefs as far as the main political conflict goes, His arc is an internal one about living up to the mantle of Captain America.

[12:38] whereas Karli represents another. Instead, Sam just knows that violence is bad, I agree with your fight.

[12:54] At the end of each of these stories, the hero embraces the villains ideology just without the killing part. But in Black Panther, the heroes actually did have something practical to do about

[13:07] the problems posed by the movie and commit descending aid to other countries. it's some West Wing style nonsense about giving utterly abandoning the thing that benefits them and somehow

[13:20] Sam tells the elites of the world to do better and then he goes and barbecues while all of the problems in the story are left to linger unanswered. that seems to do the very opposite of what it wanted to say.

[13:36] The ideologies and practices that the story implicitly condemns like imperialism are in the end treated as harmless and welcomed back into the fold. presented as irrationally violent for most of the time that they are on screen.

[13:51] the show ends before depicting the positives of that ideology and letting the extremist version of it linger longer in the viewers memory. It's not that it's bad exactly.

[14:05] I've just seen it one too many times and I don't find it very interesting if the only lesson to be learned is violence bad actually. The political conflicts and stories like this can be more nuanced than that.

[14:19] want to see in the world in giving us stories that justify an action. following me on twitter.com @SageHyden.