Militarism, Nationalism, and Honor: The Changing Faces of MCU’s Captain America

• In Event: Democracy, Race, Education, Resistance (Virtual Session)

Abstract

In recent years, the Marvel Cinematic Universe has both revived and created a tremendous appetite for superheroes. There have been several blockbuster films, a subscription channel (Disney Plus), whose primary appeal is its MCU catalog, and a genuine sense of the “event” around the release of these films. It suggests something significant is at work in the myth-making role that superheroes play in contemporary political life and the outsize role they exert on the popular imagination. This essay will explore this phenomenon through an analysis of the connections between militarism, nationalism, and honor and the construction of the American monomyth through the First Avenger himself, Captain America. From his origin story as Steve Rogers in the Second World War in the MCU until Avengers: Endgame, this will argue that Captain America operates consistently at the intersection of militarism, mythmaking and honor through the various twists and turns his character takes from hero to anti-hero (but always in super-heroic form). He consistently weaves multiple pasts into the complex and fragmented present, responding to and calibrating his code of honor to adjust to modern audiences. This essay will further explore how the representation of the American monomyth via MCU’s Captain America films, with its emphasis on militarism, nationalism, and honor and how this construction changes and evolves over time. It will also pay particular attention to the new Disney Plus series, The Falcon and the Winter Soldier, which lays out the latest MCU version of the honorable Avenger, once the shield has both literally and figuratively passed from the iconic Steve Rogers to Sam Wilson’s Falcon. This new series brings questions of honor and duty and their intersection with race in American politics explicitly to the forefront when Sam Wilson, a Black man, struggles with the duty and the burden of the Captain America shield and the erasures of the contributions of the Black super soldiers that helped forge its mythic status. In doing so, it raises significant questions of representation, structural racism, and the burden of history, and complicates the meaning of patriotic duty in the popular imaginary. In order to explore the changing faces of Captain America and their shifting role in political and popular culture, this essay will analyze several MCU films and the Disney Plus series and place them in conversation with key texts in contemporary political theory, including Danielle Allen and Melvin Rogers’ work on race and American political theory, the politics of honor as conceptualized by Anthony Appiah and Sharon Krause, and the popular culture literature on superheroes, the Hollywood War Machine, and the American monomyth.

Author

• Smita A. Rahman, DePauw University