Marvel’s Sam Wilson, or how liberalism is going to get us all killed Part 01
I hadn’t intended to write this review of Disney / Marvel’s Falcon and the Winter Soldier, at least not one in the vein of my previous review of WandaVision. For Marvel Studios’ second television outing, I had very little overt feelings towards the series. The action is fine, the writing and plotting barely justifies its six-hour runtime or the weekly release model. Whereas WandaVision built a compelling mystery around two characters who had, previously, been tertiary to the world of the Avengers, and allowed them down time to breath and see facets of their personalities we hadn’t seen before, Falcon and the Winter Soldier doesn’t really give us anything new with our two leads.
If anything, we see more compelling sides of characters like Zemo, Sharon Carter, even the living embodiment of white male audacity, John Walker.
It’s fine, honestly. As far as shows go, it’s not terrible, the action is fairly good and a some of the pay offs are well earned, at least by the rules and set ups of the world these characters inhabit.
But what stuck with me, every Friday, was how the show’s central themes of race, American history, whiteness and, especially radicalism, repeated so much of the superhero propaganda we’ve been gorging on for decades, without a hint of irony.
At its core, Falcon and the Winter Soldier is a baby’s first-politics style fan fiction wherein active demands for a better world are petty, childish and above all else, dangerous. Good people, the show posits, simply talk and wait their turn for material benefits and if a person or persons should ever deign to “skip the line”, it’s the role of a select group of “good people” to use all manner of violence to suppress and even kill those who get out of hand.
SPOILERS AHEAD FOR FALCON AND THE WINTER SOLDIER
Sam Wilson’s arc through Falcon and the Winter Soldier is all about how to be a good little liberal. He experiences racism and hardships, but he never really groans or complains about it. He doesn’t really oppose legitimate sources of power, despite knowing the oppression and exploitation that can and has occurred throughout history.
We see Sam stoically accept the hardships and reality of racism —the man can’t even get a bank loan, despite being famous — cops immediately descend upon him when he raises his voice. All the while, Sam remains silent. He bears the burden, for some strange reason.
This, the show wants us to believe, is Sam’s real super power — the absurd ability to mitigate the opposing egos around him to achieve a “common goal”. He won’t directly respond to racism because, if he were to, he’d have an ego, something that would prevent him from connecting with even the most irredeemable person. Instead, Sam’s power is in his powerlessness — the acknowledgement that he’s so incapable of making legitimate, material change he has no choice but to make repeated, impassioned pleas to the powerful to give any kind of concession. If they won’t, they’ll at least hear him.
In the show’s narrative, Sam is the embodiment of the NGO, Diversity & Inclusion Training liberal, someone who won’t destabilize the system, they just want it to work “as intended”. He’s a servant to power, someone who will speak truth to power insofar as the structures of power aren’t disturbed. And as long as the structures appear to hear him, to take his words into account, Sam can hold his head up high.
We see this through Sam’s positioning with the various character’s of the show, each one with a specific position informed by their ego and pain:
Karli Morgenthau aka Flag Smasher, John Walker aka Captain America II, Baron Helmut Zemo, and Isaiah Bradley, the first Black Captain America. Through the six episodes of the series, Sam butts head with each of these people, and reaches out to all of them separately, and retains an ability to absorb their perspectives while resisting their influence.
Sam’s silent resignation and acceptance of a racist reality is juxtaposed against Karli’s righteous anger at a system oppressing her and her communities. His Blackness and matyr-like resistance to taking up Steve Roger’s shield is juxtaposed against John Walker’s frat boy enthusiasm to derive personal meaning and worth from the shield. His status as a non-powered Avenger juxtaposes Zemo’s simmering hatred of all super-soldier and super-powered people. Sam’s coonery — I mean, naivety — juxtaposes Isaiah Bradley’s defeated and oppressed reality.
At the end of Episode 6, we’re supposed to get the sense that Sam Wilson works best as Captain America because, as opposed to all these different ideologies and egos, Sam calmly listens to each one, taking the best parts and discarding the rest. While everyone else is trying to talk over each other, skip the line, or remove themselves from the fight entirely, Sam is committed to staying “in the fight” the right way. Sam is firmly in the middle.
Yet, in the end, Karli Morgenthau is dead, shot by the Power Broker, Sharon Carter, a literal CIA agent turned information runner. Isaiah Bradley gets a shitty statue in the Captain America museum — decades of torture, fear, bodily harm and racism, and Isaiah’s reward is a statue, in a white man’s museum, so that people will, “never forget the story”. Stories, acknowledgement of hardship, is good enough for Falcon and the Winter Soldier.
John Walker, meanwhile, for all his outbursts and violence and extrajudicial murder, is free to continue operating under the guise of US Agent. The revolutionary has to be killed by the CIA agent, the victim of systemic violence gets a statue and is allowed to come out of his house for the first time in years, but the white US soldier will more than likely continue on, with a new costume, new name, free from obstructive bureaucracy. Propaganda at its finest.
And after Sam holds Karli’s lifeless body, an actual literal prop, he espouses a speech about how she shouldn’t be called a “terrorist” or a “thug”. The Flag Smashers, he warns the mostly white people in suits, had good ideas just bad methods.
But the show wanted us to see Karli as a terrorist — someone whose lethal actions undermine and immediately discount the work and perspectives she held dear. Because Karli killed, the show is telling the audience that revolutionaries, no matter how well-intentioned, disrupt the status quo and there’s nothing more dangerous than that. The revolutionaries should be killed, watered-down versions of their beliefs should be taken by others to preserve the system that so clearly isn’t working.
Sam’s speech in Episode 6 is grating. It’s not good, and the writers want us to believe that Sam’s experiences with all these different viewpoints has changed him, somehow. What’s actually happening is that all these different perspectives are forwarded to strengthen and support an inherently flawed and monstrous system. Sam, a Black man draped in the Stars and Stripes, repatriates the image of US while changing absolutely nothing.
The show doesn’t really give us an opportunity to see the new world order take the Flag Smasher’s words into account. There’s talk about soldiers leaving various displaced communities across the world, but the material reality of those displaced communities isn’t expanded on. Have world governments committed to providing displaced communities with employment, medicine, food? It’s not important in the slightest. Is Sam going to use his position to attack the powerful? No, he’s going to attack those whose violence is “illegitimate”.
It would be one thing if Sam took up the charge of the Flag Smashers, becoming radicalized to see the world for what it truly is — the playground of the powerful and the rich at the expense of the powerless. Sam has seen first hand how truly evil the systems at play are, he’s not ignorant.
Sam’s the liberal gatekeeper — the Wells Fargo funded social activist who takes the language of the radical, but not the spirit of the radical. Sam will stand in opposition to the radical mentality, because the true charge of the radical is to build a new system. Black bystanders cheer on as Sam saves a group of police officers, an image that is incredibly disgusting given the proximity to police violence.
Sam Wilson’s superpower is that he has no imagination to think of anything better, no ability to perceive a future that is fundamentally different than the now, no matter how much pain and suffering people experience.
Pain and suffering has to mean something, he discusses at one point with Isaiah Bradley. The suffering of the people is the currency Black people and other oppressed individuals (not communities) must pay to involve themselves in the US project. Because any other pathway would mean that Sam would be radical, and other characters would be sent to kill him.
It’s not lost on me that this show so heavily centers a cishet Black male perspective of race in a contemporary United States. Sam’s sister, Sarah, isn’t allowed a political perspective that Sam draws on and when Sam debuts as the new Captain America, it’s Black men who cheer him on. This is fine, considering Sam is a cishet Black man, his experiences are central, but it is interesting in that the primary antagonist of the series is a younger, mixed-race Karli Morgenthau and all the Flag Smashers are diverse in terms of race and age. If the audience is to view Sam as the answer to these problems, what does that say about the next generation of revolutionary thinkers and activists? What do the writers want young radicals to take away about the role of older, Black men and their relationship to movements in these turbulent times, when the sole radical character ends the series dead and their murderer is directly aided by said Black man?
This is a particular and troubling trend of the superhero genre as of late — cishet Black men running defense for the US and the American project against overt white supremacy, yes, but also standing in opposition to young radicals, particularly young radical women who make attempts to corrupt the protagonist or who end up dead, their anger being used to transform the Black male hero.
Radical women, in these projects, are ingredients for the growth of liberal Black men to be better liberals, while offering them only judgment, pity, and regret. This will be further explored in Part 02 of this kind-of review.
