Captain America: The Winter Soldier (2014)

directed by Joe Russo & Anthony Russo

Micah Smith

Never has a movie so clearly projected the air of a spy action film while so completely succeeding and failing at that aim. When I first watched Marvel’s Captain America: The Winter Soldier, the second film in the Captain America trilogy, I was 13 and realizing my own place in the world, looking ahead to a future past eighth grade for the first time in my life. With choosing a high school, leaving my few friends behind, dreams of college, getting my first job, and future ambitions, there was a lot on my mind. I was also, looking back, coming to terms with my “weirdness,” which I would later understand to be my identity as a queer and trans person. However, at the moment, I was focused on the premiere of Captain America: The Winter Soldier, and how it somehow wasn’t fanfiction. This was canon, playing on the big screen, and really, really queer. Like, absurdly so. To the point that every conversation I’ve ever had about it has never been under the assumption that Steve Rogers and Bucky Barnes are anything less than soulmates spread across time.

It is a very uniquely positioned movie, as it is suspended in a political conversation that will never not be relevant—what safety and “freedom” really mean under an all-encompassing authority that insists on surveillance as a way to maintain weird blind trust in the government—but it is also grounded in the consistent struggle between the different parts of yourself. This is best seen through Steve Rogers, since he is constantly performing two selves. He has parasocial relationships with almost the entire country through his political self, Captain America, the man, the myth, the legend, but he is also just a man who is struggling to figure out who he is outside of that role. He is both the outsider looking in and the “in”. This performance ultimately makes him a site of political contestation. Political contestation is, according to Georges Lavau, “an action of strong protest [which] scorns the use of institutionalized methods of political opposition [and] criticizes opposition for in fact contributing to the survival of a repressive social and political system. [It also] denies the legitimacy of the most deep-seated and most tacitly accepted cultural models in the social system, and seeks to expose their true oppressive nature. It aims finally, to bring about….complete emancipation of man’s social being” (van Putten 785). However, this is a long definition, and to truly understand what it even means for Steve and, more importantly, his relationship with Bucky, we have to break it down into pieces first.

So, if you haven’t seen the movie in a while, we essentially have Steve realizing that S.H.I.E.L.D.—the Strategic Homeland Intervention, Enforcement, and Logistics Division of the government, where the Avengers were assembled by Nick Fury, among other things—isn’t what it seems, and HYDRA—yes, the premiere Nazi scientist group started back in World War 2 that Captain America fought and thought he defeated—comes back with sleeper agents inside of S.H.I.E.L.D., creating Project Insight. Project Insight is essentially a program of three helicarriers with a bunch of super-complicated mechanisms that will essentially kill thousands of people in the name of “safety.” What’s worse, HYDRA comes prepared with Rogers’s only other weakness besides government corruption: his dead love of his life best friend coming back to kill him. High stakes all around. However, we need to get this strong action of protest. The ultimate climax of The Winter Soldier happens in the general context of the major visible action: the destruction of the helicarriers and successfully stopping Project Insight. However, when considering this idea of political contestation and the idea of self performances, there are four actions of protest, two on either side of the eventual destruction of the helicarriers. One for Steve, one for Bucky. First, it is important to understand their roles as characters: opposition.

In a lot of ways, we are supposed to see the Winter Soldier as the anti-Captain America, which ultimately paints Bucky as the anti-Steve Rogers. Steve’s backstory is well-explored at this point—he did have an entire film before this one, and The Avengers in 2012 goes into it a little. However, we have been introduced to Bucky Barnes again, after his death, stripped of his social and personal self. He is now the Winter Soldier, reminiscent of the Cold War perception of the USSR and remnants of Nazi Germany, which sets up Captain America as the man who has to take down the evil, embodying all the light and greatness and savior-ness of the United States. All of the things that mattered and were believed to be true when Steve was being raised in the ‘40s, and when he became Captain America. Even the conflict is taking place in a weird middle ground between the past and present. We have those political selves, fighting with ideologies in hand, and then their true selves, two men who were once closer than close, now ghosts brought back into the present and forced to reckon with the past in this context. In this way, they work both in opposition and in tandem. For the most part, neither of them have come back from the war.

As we know from the first film, Steve intended to die when he crashed the plane into the Arctic and was essentially resurrected into another war, this time in a different century and with aliens. This cognitive dissonance is emphasized over and over in the movie, from the very start when Sam immediately clocks his discomfort in “normal life” and not knowing what he’ll do outside of the war, and later on the scene of him standing in front of his exhibit in the Smithsonian, yet another emphasis on his out-of-place-ness in the world. He is meant to stand for these old ideals of what “greatness” America, its government, and Peggy’s pet project S.H.I.E.L.D. stands for, and as his understanding of the world becomes more muddled and complicated, that ideal falls apart at the same time. We see this paralleled with Bucky’s journey in the film, once he is introduced in the second act.

Bucky effectively died with that fall from the train in the first movie. It was not a suicide, like Steve’s death, but it is clear from various previous points that he always was willing to die for Steve. Not Captain America, but that little guy who was too dumb to run away from a fight. Yet he is still dragged from the grave against his will by scientists who see him as useful. The HYDRA scientists make him their tool, their perfect soldier, frozen and brainwashed and literally programmed for 70 years until he is no longer perceived as a person. However, seeing Steve and fighting him in the first major fight scene in The Winter Soldier, on the bridge, begins to create the dissonance that we already saw in Steve. In his first scene returning to the base to be reprogrammed, he already remembers Steve. While this is shoved down in the process of essentially doing a hard reset on the Winter Soldier, the instances of Bucky’s memory coming back and developing more of a cognitive dissonance continue and Steve’s “emancipation” between his social and political self continues to progress. This is where we get to the four actions of protest.

First, we have Steve’s act of protest within his political existence. He makes a speech to everyone in S.H.I.E.L.D., explaining that HYDRA has infiltrated the division and that Project Insight needs to be stopped. This is an open rebellion from his “perfect soldier” role, who is supposed to be a pawn of S.H.I.E.L.D. and was never supposed to figure out that he was actually working with HYDRA. This is only his surface-level protest, since it is still ultimately in line with the truth of what he is supposed to stand for. It is against his moral compass to allow this to continue, so he doesn’t. However, having done this, it allows him to finally start to separate his social self—Steve Rogers, the friend, the ex-soldier, the man who runs accidental marathons as a casual jog, and the man with PTSD he refuses to acknowledge—from his political self, his existence as a site, as Captain America. This is most visibly signaled in his second act of protest when Steve lets go of his shield right before the helicarrier falls apart, as he surrenders to let Bucky kill him. He relinquishes the shield because he designates his connection and promise to Bucky, to be with him ‘til the end of the line, to be more important and ultimately the thing he cares the most about. He fulfilled his political role by successfully taking down the helicarriers, and this is how he plans to fulfill his social role and emancipate himself from the limbo in time in which he exists. 

Bucky’s acts of protest are, as should be expected, a lot more muted but also more impactful for his character development. His first one is the internal struggle he is having throughout the fight on the helicarrier which, thanks to Sebastian Stan’s excellent acting, becomes much more visible on his face as it nears an end. He even goes so far as to verbally deny Steve’s statement of acknowledging that they know each other, that it’s Steve, that they’re friends, instead cementing what he was told, that Steve Rogers is just Captain America, who is his mission. However, as Steve lets go of his shield, Bucky stops fighting. This moment signals the beginning of his true emancipation. The last act of protest Bucky takes is what proves that he is still James Buchanan Barnes, the friend, the ex-soldier, the man who chose to follow Steve ‘till the end of the line, the man who died, and not just the Winter Soldier: saving Steve from the Potomac. He saves the life of his “mission,” walking away and defecting from his handlers. His growth even begins to parallel Steve’s at the beginning of the film, when he is shown in the end credits scene at the very same Smithsonian exhibit.

This film is a cinematic masterpiece, in cinematography, plot, and character development. It functions as what it was supposed to be, an action film meant for the Marvel Cinematic Universe that takes on a spy angle, while also taking on a different meaning for much of the MCU’s queer fanbase. As I came to realize my own queer and trans identities, I returned to this movie again and again, seeking comfort in the complicated ways it comes at the heavy topic that is identity. The complex relationship to personhood that both Steve and Bucky deal with in this movie relates to the struggles I continue to have as I reckon with the fact that I have occupied space as two entirely different people in my life. To have an identity that is formed around a separation from a predetermined route of life is a very queer experience, and it is one that I see in Steve and Bucky’s respective journeys, separately and together. Captain America: The Winter Soldier was and still is my favorite movie in the MCU and, in my opinion, the best one. It is endlessly rewatchable, and there’s so much there to analyze, especially in relation to the other films and what this movie means for Steve and Bucky’s characters throughout the rest of the MCU.

Van Putten, Jan. “POLITICAL CONTESTATION AND POLITICAL PROTEST.” Il Politico, vol. 35, no. 4, 1970, pp. 785–798. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/43207309. Accessed 10 Dec. 2020. https://www.jstor.org/stable/43207309?seq=1#metadata_info_tab_contents 

Micah Smith (they/them and he/him), born and raised in Chicago, Illinois, is currently residing in Ohio as a junior at Kenyon College. They are majoring in Anthropology and minoring in Japanese, with the intent to pursue further research on media anthropology.