When you watch Falcon & Winter Soldier you’re not just watching super-powered people punch each other, you’re watching ideologies clash. It’s not political as in democrats and republicans but it’s lower-case ‘p’ political in that two schools of thought are arguing with each other, they’re just doing what your parents always warned you not to do and letting it bear out with fists.
By their very nature, superheroes are political extensions. Batman is a political character because the state isn’t equipped to handle the threats he is. Superman is a political character because he’s a farm-raised immigrant constantly fighting a megalomaniacal billionaire. Everything is political whether you want it to be or not.
That’s part of the reason I find Falcon & Winter Soldier so compelling, because of the politics behind the show’s iconography. There are two things constantly referenced as matters of impressive weight; Cap’s Shield and the implications of a black man being the one to hold it. In the most recent episode we see Sam and Bucky have a real conversation about why Sam gave up the Shield in the first place, and what it meant to Bucky. Here’s a transcript from a part of their conversation because I am notoriously bad at embedding quotes into paragraphs.
Sam: The legacy of that shield is complicated, to say the least
Bucky: When Steve told me what he was planning I don’t think either of us really understood what it felt like for a black man to be handed the shield. How Could we? I owe you an apology. I’m sorry.
Sam: Thank you.
Bucky: Whatever happened with walker wasn’t your fault. I get it. It’s just that shield is the closest thing I’ve got left to a family. So when you retired it, it made me feel like I had nothing left. It made me question everything.
[some time passes]
Sam: this might be a surprise but… it doesn’t matter what Steve thought. You gotta stop looking to other people to tell you who you are.
This is the heart of the show, what it’s really about. These characters don costumes and they become ideals on two legs who can make a difference. They’re not fighting for themselves, they’re fighting for what they believe in. It’s not about Sam winning the day, it’s about good winning the day.
That blurry line between who they are as people and who they are as an ideology is an extension of semiotics, the study of symbols and their meaning. Think about a stop sign. It’s a red octagon with white outlining and the word STOP in giant, white, impact font found at most intersections in the country. Now take away that white outline around the edge of the sign, and you still know what it means.
Now take away the word stop and… you still know what it means.
The symbol is so impossibly ingrained into your brain that you don’t need the flourish of the outline or even the literal message of STOP to tell you that a giant red octagon means you need to stop. Hell, take away the octagon, and you roughly still know what a giant red polygon represents.
The iconography of the movies haven’t reached lizard-brain memetic recall within public conscious, but it’s getting there. Thor’s Hammer, Wonder Woman’s Lasso, Harry Potter’s wand - all of this stuff means something to people, and at the top of the list for the MCU, even above the Infinity Gauntlet and the Arc Reactor in Iron Man’s chest, is Cap’s Shield. It has to be.
You don’t need to see them to know who they are
That Shield means something, but the promise of what that Shield was supposed to be never meant much to Black America. That point is hammered home in the second episode when we meet Isaiah Bradley, the man who should’ve been Captain America in Steve’s absence but instead was reduced to a lab experiment, one who only escaped because a nurse helped him fake his own death. He had to live out the rest of his life in secrecy, betrayed by his country, experimented on by his fellow soldiers. That Shield means nothing but heartache to him. Seeing the way Isaiah was treated, Sam felt justified in giving up the Shield, that a black man couldn’t carry the Shield, because a black man never had…
Until he saw that it’s necessary for him to carry the Shield, entirely because of what John Walker did with it. Dude was deemed worthy of being the new Captain America by Washington and within a week he was using it to collapse someone’s chest into a bloody pulp. That was the imagery of Captain America, his symbol, his ideals, used in a way he never would’ve wanted, drenched in the blood of someone who was, by extension, executed by the state. It was a complete misappropriation of the symbol, and one that Sam couldn’t stand for.
This metaphor is big enough to have its own zip code
The heart of the conflict in Falcon and Winter Soldier is how much the world changed in the 5 years since half the population was snapped away by Thanos. Borders were undone, there was mass-migration by the survivors who moved into new areas and began new lives. Once everyone was returned in Avengers Endgame, people wanted their old lives back, and the tension between those demanding the way things were and those who want the new lives they made for themselves gave way to two distinct groups:
1) The Global Repatriation Council, the group trying to humanely bring back the old world from before the snap and
2) The Flag-Smashers, the group of “anarchists” stealing supplies and food for the refugees that have since been displaced by the returned population
And here’s where semiotics comes back, because there’s a reason the villains on the show are called the Flag-Smashers, and not the Falcon-Smashers. They don’t care about the heroes of the world, they care about what the heroes represent. They’re fighting against the status quo the world is attempting to return to after an alien threat descended upon earth with an army, whooped the avengers’ ass, and used space diamonds to make a wish that killed half the universe. It’s hard to pretend that never happened after it does.
The Flag-Smashers are a perfect villain because they’re fighting iconography, memetics, and symbolism. Falcon and Winter Soldier are individuals with agency and goals but they also represent institutions that extend way beyond what’s on screen, and the Flag-Smashers are a metaphor trying to break down another metaphor, making them more dangerous than most villains that have appeared in the MCU to date. We don’t control language, in this case the shield and what it signifies, it controls us because of its limitations and our limitations to interpret them.
The Smashers are here to redistribute power from the diachronic interpretation of symbols (the implied history/weight of a symbol over time) and that’s literally what defines a superhero. They’re the ultimate iconoclasts, rejecting what comes along with the the Shield (the signifier, the symbol that has meaning) and who they think that Shield is really protecting (the signified, who the symbol’s meaning is for).
Does Sam accept the Shield and the Symbolism it carries? Does that break Isaiah’s heart? Does that open a new door for progress in the MCU? For representation in our world? Do the Flag-Smashers succeed in destroying the GRC and what that organization symbolizes? I dunno, man.
I can’t wait for the final episode tomorrow.