Captain America, the Problems With Nostalgia and the Search For a Hero

American politics are profoundly lacking in heroes at the moment.

The debt ceiling debate seems to have exposed every last failing in each side, from spinelessness to venality to intransigence; meanwhile reports of violence are everywhere, the latest being an attack from a right-wing terrorist in Norway that left some 76 people dead at latest estimate.

No wonder we're looking for heroes on the big screen.

Captain America is a decent, uncomplicated superhero movie set in a time most Americans look back on fondly as a decent, uncomplicated time in our history. The Nazis were evil, America was good, we fought them, we won.

Even in this film, though, there are hints that not even that era was as decent or as uncomplicated as we thought—and our own time, where Cap winds up, certainly isn't.

Captain America is the fourth big superhero flick of the summer, following Thor, X-Men First Class and Green Lantern into cinemas packed with moviegoers seeking cinematic relief from the stresses of everyday life during the Great Recession. It's a stylistic as well as literal throwback to the films of the 1940s, shot in beautiful soft focus, sweet and naïve rather than deep and nuanced.

When I say sweet and naïve, I mean there's a scene where young Steve Rogers (Chris Evans), the skinny short kid who's been rejected five times for military service before being accepted as a lab rat by a nice fatherly and yes, German scientist (Stanley Tucci), basically admits to being a virgin while sitting in a car with the fierce British lady spy/love interest (Hayley Atwell). I mean that the gruff commander (Tommy Lee Jones) has a heart of gold and the best friends really do have each other's back. I mean that there are no double crosses, no red herrings, no wild plot twists or big reveals. There's just a good guy who triumphs over adversity, who then faces more adversity, and finally goes down with the plane rather than save himself. Except that since we've seen from the beginning, he's not actually gone.

It's too much to say that in World War II America was actually the skinny sweet kid willing to wheeze along at the back of the pack and throw ourselves onto a grenade to save others, and now we're more like the Red Skull (Hugo Weaving). The super-soldier serum went wrong somewhere and left us not the world's heroes but the grinning death's head face of Empire in all too many corners of the world. Still, there's something compelling about the image of pre-Captain America Steve puffing himself up to his full size when asked if he wants to kill Nazis and saying, “I don't want to kill anyone, sir. I just don't like bullies.”

The irony, when you think about it, hurts.

In both of the superhero movies I've seen this summer, Nazis figure prominently as the villains, and yet they are in a way supra-Nazis—in X-Men First Class, Sebastian Shaw is posing as a Nazi scientist in order to get access to mutant kids like young Magneto, but he has no interest in the cause; in Captain America, the Red Skull's Hydra uses Hitler's occult obsessions to finance its research and then moves to supplant the Nazis as its own, even more nihilistic Reich.

How desperate for villains are we when we have villains who are actually worse than the Nazis?

Except that Hydra aren't really worse than Nazis. In this movie they become instead a way to skirt the issue, to confront us with a simple bad guy who can be simply vanquished. The Red Skull was the first test subject of the super-soldier serum and he's been driven off the deep end by its failure (and also given that creepy red skull for a head), gone across the world searching for a mystical object that gives him the power to make weapons that simply zap people out of existence, thereby eliminating the need for blood and guts and a possible R rating. Keeping the movie sweet and naïve.