Captain America Against the Dark Ghosts of the US

We’re at the movies, and it’s the second chapter for the Marvel hero who has Chris Evans’s muscles. But the movie has a political subtext about the state of democracy in the United States.

Captain America makes an entrance into the world of comics in December 1940, delivering a lethal punch to Adolf Hitler’s jawbone. It was published by Timely Comics, which only later would become Marvel, as everyone knows it now. The character, created by Joe Simon and Jack Kirby, both Jewish, was the visceral and visionary reaction to the devastation Nazi Germany had caused in Europe. Meeting extraordinary public success, “The Sentinel of Liberty” became part of Marvel’s superhero universe only in March 1964, in the fourth volume of the “Avengers.”

The historical and political gap following the character’s decline takes him to the lead of the Avengers through a narrative vehicle: The captain’s body, having turned up hibernating in the ice, finds itself living in a world that is not his own. But he injects it with his tireless Rooseveltian idealism. Always at the intersection of political tensions as interpreted by Marvel, Captain America (the signature of the historic “Editoriale Corno” by Luciano Secchi) represents the character who has best embodied and lived the contradictions and hopes of the 1960s — together with Spiderman — even giving up his costume of stars and stripes and becoming … Nomad.

It was inevitable that Marvel’s best screenwriters would soon feel the influence of the character’s charm. A man who stood outside of time, condemned to eternal youth, bound to his country by an oft-betrayed love, and because of this, often seen as anti-American, Captain America is only equal to Superman in complexity.

Therefore, intertwining the “Ultimate” timeline — which is more hardboiled — as the writer Mark Millar had originally conceived it, with the traditional “Marvel” continuity, namely the temporary flux in which all the superheroes of the house of ideas live and interact, Marvel’s cinematographic universe offers itself up de facto as a third vehicle for its narratives. A composite narrative universe, although easily at hand even for those finding themselves at a loss among the plots and temporal paradoxes devised over decades by Stan Lee and his disciples and descendants, the second chapter of Captain America’s cinematographic adventures gets its momentum from a saga written by Ed Brubaker, among the most famous screenwriters of the last decade — together with Brian M. Bendis, Kieron Gillen, Jonathan Hickman — who envisions a mysterious supercriminal gifted with an arm of steel at the center of the action. The readers of the comics obviously already know who hides behind the mask of the super-agile and taciturn mercenary, but this does not deprive the film of its great entertainment factor, and whose subtext has more than a few interesting points of departure.

Up against the obsession with security that Nick Fury — who firmly believes in pre-emptive aggression to manage the so-called free world — embodies, Captain America actually exists in opposition to a Frank Capra-esque libertarian idealism. In the overthrow of S.H.I.E.L.D., which Hydra infiltrates, we can find once again not only the conspiracy theories about 9/11, but also the strong concern about the health of the American democracy. In sum, we are still fully … post-Watergate.

Giorgio Agamben demonstrates as much super simply but effectively in his writings on the obsession with security and democracy: “It’s only after a crime has been committed that the state can intervene.”*

*Editor’s note: Accurately translated, this quotation could not be verified.

*Translator’s note: Also, the author seems to be referring to a specific text by Agamben, but this is also unverifiable.