[It’s been another year, that’s for sure. So for my annual Year in Review series, I wanted to highlight a handful of things that have made me happy this year—and, yes, to complicate and analyze them, because I yam what I yam. I’d love to hear your year highlights and takeaways as well!]
On two
strikingly and importantly thoughtful layers to the hit Marvel show.
As part of
October’s SitcomStudying series I wrote this
post about Wandavision, perhaps
the best (in terms of consistent quality from start to finish, anyway) and
certainly the most
thought-provoking of the three Marvel TV shows to drop in the last
year-plus. The boys and I also enjoyed the hell out of Loki as it aired this past summer, and I would gladly ride or die for Alligator
Loki. But when it comes to AmericanStudying, there’s no question that the
third of those three shows, The Falcon
and the Winter Soldier, has the most to say about American history and identity.
Indeed, for a show created by a company and brand so committed to global
relevance (and domination), and of course one now owned by the corporate
juggernaut that is Disney to boot, I was really pleasantly surprised by
just how deeply Falcon connects to a
number of AmericanStudies threads and questions. Here I’ll highlight the pair
of such threads that most stood out to this AmericanStudiesViewer.
The more obvious
such thread, but still a surprisingly central and nuanced one, were the show’s
interconnected themes of race, American history, and heroism. Of course those
questions were linked to African American actor Anthony Mackie’s titular
Falcon (the superhero alter ego of Sam Wilson), particularly through the
lens of the character’s (and
actor’s) potential adoption of the Captain America role after the passing
of Steve Rogers. But even more complicatedly and crucially connected to those
themes was an unexpected character, Isaiah Bradley (played pitch-perfectly by Carl
Lumbly), an African American Korean War veteran turned supersoldier who was
in line to be the second Captain America until racism not only took away that
opportunity but turned him into an imprisoned and abused lab
experiment instead. Bradley asked some very tough questions not only of Sam
but of the audience as well, forcing us all to take a long look at whether and
how our superhero stories (like our narratives of heroism overall) have had and
continue to have room for Americans of color—and leading to a very well-earned and moving final scene in the show’s concluding moments.
That was the
best stuff from Falcon, and the main
reason why I’m writing about it in this week’s series to be sure. But the show
featured another contender
for the title of Captain America, former Marine turned complex hero John
Walker (played with impressive nuance by Wyatt Russell),
and that character likewise raised a series of compelling and
not-easily-answered questions for the show’s characters and audiences alike. Those
questions unquestionably connected to the threads about race, as the white
Walker was presented as the U.S. government’s clear preference for the second Cap
instead of the Black Sam Wilson (and, through the historical comparison, the black
Isaiah Bradley as well). But Walker’s ultimately flawed and failed Captain
America also raised questions about one of my favorite
current topics, patriotism: what it means to have an individual symbolize a
nation, what political as well as cultural work such symbols can and should
(and shouldn’t) do, and what happens when the realities fall short of the ideals.
Pretty heady stuff for a superhero show, and one more reason why The Falcon and the Winter Soldier is
well worth AmericanStudying.
Next review post
tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you
think? 2021 stories you’d highlight?
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