THE FALCON AND THE WINTER SOLDIER (2021)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *poor*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *adventure*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *sociological*

Let’s get the positive stuff out of the way first. Though this streaming series consists of just six episodes of over an hour each, the production values look as good as any of the movies, with the plus that there’s far less intrusive CGI.

However, there’s much more bad than good about FALCON—and despite the Winter Soldier’s co-billing, the show is really about Sam “Falcon” Wilson— in that the show offers its viewers a dense, muddled plotline full of international intrigue, lots of virtue signaling, and an almost total absence of the clever (if superficial) humor that informs most of the MCU theater-films.

In AVENGERS ENDGAME, all the MCU heroes team up to undo the effects of Thanos’s “Snap,” which eradicated half of the population in the universe. The mission succeeds, and the millions of people—including the Falcon and some of the other major heroes—are brought back to life, albeit five years after they disappeared. But the MCU’s showrunner Kevin Feige pursued his own “eradication” scheme in finding reasons to eliminate or marginalize the “big-name” heroes on whose reps the MCU had been built. In the case of Captain America, he implicitly passed on the mantle of his iconic identity to his partner-of-sorts, the Falcon (a development mimicking an unsuccessful plotline in Marvel Comics).

FALCON’s showrunner Malcolm Spellman sought to form a connection between Sam Wilson’s personal chaos—his doubts about accepting the role of Captain America—with the societal chaos brought about by the return of millions of people from non-existence. Large-scale war has often brought about the distress of numerous “displaced persons.” However, in the real world, the displaced don’t just vanish into nothingness, which might logically give survivors the idea that all the missing people are dead. During the five years between the Snap and its undoing, the property of the “deceased” has inevitably changed hands, thus setting up a conflict between the new owners and the old ones. Spellman provides scant details as to what’s been going on in the six months separating ENDGAME from FALCON, and I couldn’t figure out which group was getting the short end of the stick. It would be logical to assume that the former owners’ legal status would be debatable, and that they might remain in a displaced status. Yet, a new terrorist group, “the Flag Smashers,” shows up with the avowed goal of returning the world’s civilization to the less populous, more united conditions that prevailed during the Snap. That seems to imply that it’s the “new owners” who somehow got dispossessed, since the “old owners” would have no memory of the Snap-era.

In essence, though, I suspect that Spellman didn’t care that much about the Flag Smashers’ motives, for FALCON’s scripts fairly bleed unconditional love for all activists, even though the Smashers, who kill people and blow up buildings, are not even close to being “peaceful protesters.” Falcon is the spokesman for the unqualified view that the Smashers are more sinned against than sinning, because they’ve been done wrong by their governments, who haven’t managed to re-position all the displaced millions within the period of six months. Since most of the series’ action takes place in Europe, the viewer largely sees only irresponsible white Euro-leaders criticized for their failures, though logically the same restoration problems ought to affect even the wonderland of Wakanda. In addition, the Flag Smashers seem to be largely a European phenomenon, partly because it’s a European scientist who re-creates the famed “super soldier serum,” and several key Smashers dose themselves with it. Thus, the potion that created the ultimate symbol of the American flag falls into the hands of fanatics dedicated to some vaguely defined goal of “open borders” for the world.

Falcon, as I noted, deeply sympathizes with the activists, but he’s willing to fight against the “radicalized” group. So, he teams up with another former associate of Captain America, Bucky “Winter Soldier” Barnes. The two characters didn’t like each other in CAPTAIN AMERICA CIVIL WAR, but apparently since then they’ve bonded over their mutual respect for the Captain. It’s much more likely, though, that Kevin Feige has some involved plans for Winter Soldier, and that including the Soldier character in FALCON was just a way of advancing those plans somewhat. One such plot-thread—in which Bucky Barnes was shoehorned into a role in the BLACK PANTHER cosmos—makes it possible (though not plausible) for FALCON to feature a guest-starring appearance by two badass spear-ladies from Wakanda. As far as I could tell the two spear-carriers had nothing to do with the Flag Smasher storyline, but since the women manage to defeat three skilled male fighters, their appearance makes for some feminist virtue-signaling.)

In addition, Falcon’s Cap-conflict is exacerbated when the American government confers the star-spangled identity upon career soldier John Walker, and “New Cap” also starts messing around in Europe, looking for both the Smashers and their super-soldier serum. Falcon, Soldier and New Cap all get trounced in battle with the super-strong terrorists. Needing a guide to Euro-intrigue, Falcon seeks out a master of the art: Baron Zemo, the devious plotter who brought about the Civil War that almost destroyed the Avengers team. Though Zemo’s agenda is different from that of the Smashers, he also gets more than his fair share of validation. In one speech, he rails against the tendency of the serum to foster “supremacist” ideas in those who take the stuff. Though the word “white” never precedes “supremacist,” there’s no chance that Spellman has any other connotation, since Zemo draws comparisons between super soldiers and the Nazi ideal of the superman—an accusation often aimed at blonde, blue-eyed Steve Rogers. Both Falcon and Soldier listen to Zemo’s tripe but can muster no more than token opposition.

When Falcon gets a spare moment from scouring the European continent in search of terrorists, he jets back to the States. This leads to the introduction of Sam Wilson’s family, probably so that they can return in future episodes. In addition, Falcon meets Isaiah, a black man from the WWII era who suffered terrible mistreatment when the U.S. government experimented on him as part of their attempts to re-create the super-soldier serum. This sequence draws upon a continuity from Marvel Comics, and Spellman uses the sequence to slant the story more in the direction of the “systemic racism” narrative. At least the Isaiah sequence has some dramatic intensity, which is more than I can say for a fatuous scene in which two white cops hassle Sam Wilson for standing around talking to Bucky Barnes in the street.

Though politically I oppose the narrative of systemic racism, I’d concede that it’s possible for a book or movie to make an intelligent argument for that position. Possibly a straight adaptation of the original comics-story about the WWII experiments, all by itself, would have proved sufficient to dramatize Falcon’s ambivalence about accepting the mantle of the shield-tossing Avenger. But this argument gets lost in the milieu of this frenetic political thriller, which is burdened with too many characters and too much counter-intrigue. Inevitably, Falcon does accept the role of Black Captain America. But by the time he does, I for one no longer believed that he would fulfill the ideal of the superhero, to oppose injustice in any form. He seemed to assume the role simply so that he, a black man, could be in a position to keep watch over the activities of all those toxic white people.