On yet another rewatch of the first Captain America movie in the mcu collection, I'm struck by how much Steve's violent responses to conflict are valorized. I'm not talking within the context of war, I'm talking at the movie theater

Like he's talking to Peggy about all the places he got beat up and it's meant to be this "he's so good he never backs down from a fight" but within the context of Cap as a symbol of American values it becomes really iffy

Captain America is a bizarre movie anyway because it plays to nostalgia for a world that never existed

It's this bizarre mashup of ideas where the 1940s army isn't deeply segregated and racist but it still wants to feel like the forties

And given their centrality to his creation and what we think of when we think of ww2, it's odd that Jewish people are so absent from the first Cap movie

Before someone tells me Cap is Jewish, the first movie is pretty ambiguous on this. I don't believe that the comics really count in critique of the films because the comics are not consumed by as large of an audience

So basically if the audience has to dig it up in a wiki, I don't consider it to be part of the broadly understood text of the film

And I'm less curious what the film is trying to say as I am interested in what the audience is hearing if that makes sense

I more meant generally when I bring up a criticism of one of the films people tend to counter with knowledge that's pretty much only in the comics and doesn't appear in the films, which frustrates me sometimes https://twitter.com/Joshy206/status/1198470965878874112

Because I don't think that most moviegoers are deeply educated about the characters and their lore, and I think to the average moviegoer the characters function more as broad mythological figures than anything but that's a whole other thread lol

Well okay maybe that does fit in here but let's just pin it for now

Anyway I'm struck by this moment in the film where Red Skull says he no longer reflects Hitler's vision of Aryan superiority or perfection or something. Let me find my note

Nazi: “He gave you this facility as a reward for your injuries!”

Red Skull: “Reward? Call it what it is. Exile. I no longer reflect his image of Aryan perfection.”

Nazi: “You think this is about appearances?”

I think about this a lot lol because it's saying A LOT

Frankly as a fat trans guy who doesn't like imperialism, I'm always interested in what bodies are acceptable for service and why, because that says a lot about who is considered acceptable to the government

When trans people are worried about military bans, for instance, I for one am less worried on if I can serve as I am worried what that stripping of subjective citizenship will be followed by

Cap is interesting because his ideals, which tend to line up with Brannon's facets of masculinity, are so powerful and pure that he transforms into the ideal physical form to reflect that

Erskine, who is Jewish but strangely doesn't address antisemitism he faced before coming to America, even says that it's what inside that matters to the transformation. But this made me curious of what we see Cap do pre transformation and what that says

Let's talk Robert Brannon, who discussed four aspects of the male gender role in 1976

So aspect one is no sissy stuff (antifemininity) which I wanted to say Cap doesn't express in the first movie but there's the line about wanting to be overseas but he's having to do it in tights so, we ticked that box

Two is "be a sturdy oak" which is inexpressiveness and independence which Steve ticks in spades. Steve doesn't want Bucky's help in fights and rankles at the suggestion he should be afraid. Oddly, this inexpressiveness is further valorized in the film

Though Steve experiences tragedy he often masks this. Even approaching his own self sacrifice at the end, he hides this behind a mask in his conversation with Peggy. We see it as brave but it's actually a very tragic consequence of patriarchy

Three is "give em hell" which is adventurousness and aggression which

Come on do I need to explain how we ticked that box?

And four is be a big wheel, which is status and achievement. I think Steve's obsession with being a soldier specifically and his drive toward heroic sacrifice are both toxic examples of this aspect

Steve as a character adheres to Brannon's 1976 masculine ideal as discussed in Prohaska and Gailey's 2009 study on hogging in the fat studies reader

I'm sorry. I'm basically threading through writer's block

If you want to coffee me through writer's block I'd be grateful but I understand if you can't

I was going to give you some background on the moral panic of the weak/fat/sick soldier body as a threat to national security but they've taken the 2003 interview with the surgeon general where he says fatness is a greater threat than terrorism out of the morning edition archives

Thankfully I've still got JFK's 1960 Sports Illustrated article which says basically the same thing