Falcon and the Winter Soldier and the Bad Guy Problem
"Those who build walls are their own prisoners. I'm going to go fulfil my proper function in the social organism. I'm going to go unbuild walls.” – Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed
It's anarchists again, isn't it?
The Falcon and the Winter Soldier debuted this month, and while we know that Zemo is going to be the primary villain, the threat thus far has been a group dubbed the Flag Smashers, about which we know almost nothing except 1) for some reason they think the world was better during "the Blip," the five-year period in which the world population was cut in half by Thanos's finger snap, and 2) they want a unified, borderless world.
A unified world?!? Those MONSTERS!
When the Flag Smashers do show up, they're semiotically linked to both Anonymous (handing out a bunch of identical masks to people in one location, like the Guy Fawkes masks, themselves taken from the V for Vendetta movie/comics) and to Antifa/Black Bloc tactics (both the masks and the black and red colour scheme links the Flag Smashers to anarchism). The bank robbery is… because comics?
I feel pretty safe in saying that the Flag Smashers will be used as a counterweight to the new Captain America, who's been identified as John Walker – in the comics a right-wing ideologue. In the end, Falcon and Bucky will have to chart a path of "moderation" between violent opponents of all nationalism, and a faux-Cap who takes patriotism "too far," one or both will be secretly manipulated or controlled by Zemo, and uuuuuggggghhhhhh I'm already tired, this is sad.
I don't think I really expected better of the MCU, a giant franchise that already has a rep for boring villains. But it looks like The Falcon and the Winter Soldier is going to cram every bad tendency of the last 25 years of action movies into a six-part series.
This is the Action Movie Villain Problem writ large.
Here's the issue – in an increasingly globalized, ostensibly anti-racist culture, there's no single political/ethnic group that can be plugged into the "bad guy" role without pissing off a big segment of your audience. (I mean, racism is bad for its own sake, but from a Hollywood point of view, it's mostly bad if it alienates a significant fraction of your potential customers, which is why Falcon and Bucky aren't rescuing Uyghurs from concentration camps.)
Yet the action-adventure-espionage genre, from which the Captain America/Falcon/Winter Soldier/Black Widow/Nick Fury branch of the MCU draws its influences, has been based on national/ethnic bad guys since its inception.
The modern espionage/adventure genre started off in literature with Erskine Childers' 1903 novel The Riddle of the Sands, which was one of the first and most successful literary spy thrillers. Imperial Germany was the bad guy, patriotic Britons the good guys. Approximately a billion novels copied this formula, subbing in Nazi Germany or Soviet Russia as time moved on. Sax Rohmer's 1913 The Mystery of Dr. Fu-Manchu was the most important text in feeding into the existing anti-Asian Yellow Peril hysteria and weaving that into pop culture. All of this was against a backdrop of rampant nationalism in Europe and North America, and widespread racist legislation, like Canada's Chinese "head tax" laws, the Komagata Maru incident, the Vancouver anti-asiatic riots, I could keep going just with examples from my country but this is depressing…
Post-Second World War, while the old racist tropes certainly continued, there was a safer enemy in the Soviet Union. You could fly the Star Spangled Banner/Union Jack/various less familiar NATO nation flags in fiction while protagonists bravely opposed the Russian Bear. When that got boring, you could have your super spies face off against a gold fetishist with a nuke, or a space eugenicist, or a laser-hobbyist with a fortress built into a tropical volcanic island.
Super hero comics freely pulled tropes from James Bond and the older pulp espionage tradition to mix in with their usual masked bank robbers, killer robots, and would-be world conquerers.
But the end of the Cold War in 1991 and the rise of globalized film distribution over the following decade left the modern action blockbuster seriously short of villains. You can watch the major action franchises flail about in search of a new Designated Bad Guy – Russian reactionaries, inspired by Vladimir Zhirinovsky, were popular for a time, and the IRA popped up more than once. Middle Eastern terrorists, updating the old racist Arab tropes, had a resurgence in blockbusters like True Lies.
But eventually, it became clear that overtly racist depictions were going to generate bad publicity, the IRA signed the Good Friday Accords, and both Russia and China became too important as markets to keep using their governments/nationals as villains.
The popular fallbacks – environmentalist extremists (sigh…) and drug lords could quickly get played out. The Austin Powers movies put the final nail of satire in the coffin of the Nehru-suited space-laser villains. Who was Tom Cruise going to punch in the face to make Hollywood $750 million next summer!?!
So Hollywood took a forking path.
On the one hand, Western intelligence agencies themselves provided a convenient villain.
The Bourne Identity series went back to the well of the paranoid 1970s quasi-counter-culture spy thriller, in which CIA is both evil and competent, and added in a whole lot of action and shaky-cam. The Daniel Craig James Bond films picked up on this tendency – while the new SPECTRE is an amorphous organized crime/big business/espionage conspiracy, the villains, particularly Silva in Skyfall, are often rogue former intelligence service agents, serving as mirrors to Bond. The HYDRA-infiltrates-SHIELD plot of Captain America: Winter Soldier plays on the same tropes.
The important part of these stories is that the eeeeevil CIA/MI6/SHIELD operatives are always either infiltrators or zealots who have gone too far. The only people who can stop them are the heroes, who uphold the true values of the (secretive, unaccountable) organization and must purge and purify it. Don't stop to think too hard about any of this, it'll distract you from the explosions.
On the other hand, there's anarchists.
Anarchists have been a surprisingly durable villain for more than a century in the same sort of espionage/thriller stories that birthed James Bond. The reason for this is… um, well, back in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, some anarchists (insurrectionary anarchists, there's like 700 kinds of anarchism, jeez it's like they don't have any central leadership to tell them what to do or something) decided that the best way to spark the revolution to overturn the state and capitalism was to assassinate prominent politicians or industrialists. Anarchist and anarchism-influenced assassins managed to kill several leaders, including Russian Czar Alexander II, French president Sadi Carnot, and Empress Elizabeth of Austria-Hungary. The image of the bomb-throwing anarchist immediately entered popular culture and stuck there.
What didn't stick was any idea of what anarchists do or want. between about 1870 and the 1930s, anarchism was a fairly widespread political tendency, with millions of supporters, particularly in Spain, Italy, and Russia. The Spanish Civil War, Russian Revolution, the rise of Fascism in Germany and Italy, and the Second World War wiped it out as a political force for a generation; many prominent anarchists were killed or thrown into gulags. While it had a resurgence starting in the 1960s, it remains a relatively minor force, and a good number of people will simply define anarchism as "chaos." (Which, no.)
But that's a feature, not a bug, for Hollywood screenwriters! They can just slap the label "anarchist" on a character, excusing almost any excess or fanaticism. Hey, if 99% of your audience doesn't know anything about anarchism, that's a plus, right?
You might think that the rise in anarchist villains in western action movies has come along since Antifa (which as a movement and tactic includes a lot of anarchists) rose to prominence battling the alt-right during the Trump era, but it goes back well before that, and the trope pops up in the weirdest places – from the 2002 Vin Diesel movie xXx, to Zaheer in The Legend of Korra, to (very much on the "chaos" side) the Heath Ledger Joker.
But the biggest franchise to embrace anarchism-for-villainy has been the Mission: Impossible series, which beginning with Rogue Nation and continuing into Fallout used the term to describe the villains known as The Syndicate. (Are they… syndicalists? 'Cause that's a whole thing…)
M:I villain Solomon Lane and the other Syndicate characters have some vaguely described goals of world-peace-through-catastrophic-terrorism, but they're also all rogue former agents – neatly combining this trope with the "CIA is the villain" plot.
The reason the use of both of these villainous types disappoints me is because it doubles down on the "villains act, heroes react" dynamic that's present across comics and action films.
Both overzealous government agencies and border-smashing anarchists exist to create a space where the status quo, defended by the heroes, appears as the only sensible choice. Obviously, you can't let virulent eugenicist science-Nazis like HYDRA take over! And likewise, you can't let those dastardly anarchists burn the flag and, presumably, ban apple pie and throw our moms into anarcho-commie gulags! (That's what they want, right? I saw something on Twitter that said that's what they want!)
It's a false dichotomy, one created by the fact that Hollywood marketers are so afraid of alienating anyone, from the left or right of the American political spectrum that they can't have their characters stand for anything. Even the villains aren't defined by their ideology, and whether it might be bad or good for society. Both anarchists and reactionaries will only be condemned because of their violent actions, which will be extreme, to make obvious their bad evil badness.
This cowardice in the face of ideology is ubiquitous in modern sci-fi action-adventure film and TV – with one major exception.
There's this little TV/movie franchise, don't know if you've heard of it, that posited a future without borders or nation states, where all humans and many other races lived together in harmony, in a kind of united federation? A bunch of anti-capitalist freaks who don't even use money anymore and refuse to interfere in the development of other cultures? Obviously, they're filthy socialists.
I kid, but imagine if DisneyMarvelFoxCo tried to create something today with any kind of coherent ideology, like Star Trek had back in the 1960s. Imagine if Cap had come out and said "The Second Amendment doesn't guarantee private ownership of assault rifles" or Captain Marvel said "I believe in a woman's right to choose." Disney execs would sprain something lunging for the edit bays to cut out anything resembling a firm policy view.
The post-Kennedy era, UN-influenced soft internationalism of Star Trek shows that you can put forward a specific political agenda with a ray-guns-and-spaceships TV show – or you could, once. When you're dealing with the holy idol of "valuable IP," it isn't going to happen.
And that pisses me off. If you can't have your main characters take a stand firmer than "nuking people is bad," you're never going to say anything worth listening to.
If I'm wrong about The Falcon and the Winter Soldier, I guess I owe you guys a Coke, but I'm pretty sure I know where it's not going, and that's anywhere interesting.