Supplemental Post #3

 

Media in general is not kind towards anarchists. At its best, depictions of anarchists tend to portray them as innocents who don’t know what is best for them. Other times, anarchists follow normal societal structures but loudly proclaim their antipathy towards the state. In The Expanse, the government-less Belters who dwell on the spaceships, moons, and asteroids around the Solar system are a fairly good depiction, but their anarchy is still bound by this militarized, naval sensibility of ranked hierarchies that pervades science fiction. (I had a short conversation with Anita Sarkeesian about this on Twitter, which I tried really hard to humblebrag about as an introductory anecdote for this post, but I couldn’t figure out how to make it work so now it’s a parenthetical normal brag).

Elsewhere, however, anarchists are a shorthand for a type of violent nihilism that demands no explanation or justification. Enter Marvel’s Falcon and the Winter Soldier, a superlative distillation of superheroic neoliberalism. In FatWS, a world struggling to pull itself out of the chaos of the events of the Avengers films, finds itself facing a new threat – a popular-supported underground group of anarchists called the “Flag-Smashers,” whose villainy at first consists of stealing food, vaccines, and other critical supplies from governmental storage and distributing them to a disaffected populace.  However, the political sensibility of the show cannot allow them to merely remain thus: they become increasingly violent as the show progresses, with murders and bombings that are both ideological non-sequiturs to their stated objectives, and inconsistent with established characterizations. Meanwhile, the US government has created a new “perfect soldier” in a new Captain America, named Walker (the default military name). However, this isn’t a review, so I’ll remain light on the evaluations.

Ultimately, Falcon and the Winter Soldier is concerned with power: who gets to wield power, and what should they do with it. The titular characters, Falcon and Bucky, the Winter Soldier, both struggle to assume the responsibility left by Steve Rogers, the former Captain America. The show has a clear hierarchy of who deserves power, which in this case is represented by the super-soldier serum that bequeaths its imbiber with superhuman abilities. At the top is the dead Steve Rogers, who was Morale, Humble, and Good. Rogers fought the people who were threats to the status quo and did little other than react to villains. Falcon and Bucky aspire to maintain those ideals, and so are also deserving of the power. The fascist Captain Walker misuses his power by committing murders on behalf of the government, but is ultimately redeemable because he too fights for the continuity of global and domestic capitalism – his fascist tendencies are an unfortunate affectation, an uncouth mannerism that needs correction. Finally, Karli Morgenthau, the leader of the Flag-Smashers, is the real threat to the systems that the other characters represent. She presents a possible future without a corrupt and overbearing state, a world in which ordinary people are empowered to take care of themselves. For that, she must be punished. The show culminates with her death, but Falcon and the Winter Soldier is not content with just killing the character: her ideology itself must be attacked, and its method for doing this a clumsy twisting of plot and contrivance. After stealing trucks of food and medical supplies, Karli blows up a building full of hostages, before turning to her partner and saying “This is the only message they’ll understand”. Who is they? What was the message? The show isn’t particularly interested in those questions, it is only interested in reconciling its new Captain America as being as unambiguously good as possible in a world in which global distrust of police and government is steadily increasing.