Captain America is a weird one to include. Not denying it’s probaganda, everything is, but throwing Cap in with copaganda is such a serface level take. He’s probaganda for American exceptionalism sure, but also embodies it in an old school New Deal way. The character has been consistently anti-facist over the years.
Imo Iron Man is the much more harmful propaganda. You can pretty much draw a direct line between the characters rise in popularity thanks to the MCU and the rise of Elon Musk.
Fuck America and its Captain. All MCU shit is propaganda to brainwash yanks to believe in their inherent goodness and exceptionalism.
Any superhero movie is problematic. They all say that only a few special people can save the country and the world. The rest of the population just has to hold tight and let the important people do their thing. It’s just a small step by replacing powers with wealth to give the rich carte blanche to do as they please.
Oh I agree completely. There is a fascist aspect inherent to Superheroes. Cap is just one lf the less egregious ones.
I mean, I’ve definitely seen Cap used to represent the Ugly American in comics, especially during that period post-9/11.
He’s definitely not fully anti-fascist coded, because he represents the US, and the US while ostensibly being democratic, is in many ways deeply fascist and always has been. Hitler was inspired by our Jim Crow laws.
There’s some smart people who understand that America never actually stood for any of that stuff and they write Cap to be the same.
It’s deeper than that. It’s about defense of the Status Quo. No superhero looks around at the parts of society that we just accept without thinking about and says this needs to change.
Not those scenes in Spider-Man where New York throws random objects at the villain until they relent. Hell yeah solidarity.
Thanks for putting this into words. I’ve had a vague discontent and disgruntlement with superhero crap for a long time. While this isn’t the only reason I dislike superhero movies, this is a big part of it.
I do still like The Punisher movie with Jain, Dredd, The Crow, and a few others. Antiheros in general. They’re also more human and not as one dimensional.
I wonder if that’s a limit of storytelling. Grand social change is hard to film. Even team effort cohesion requires a lot of actors and writing to pull off.
No matter how sound the morals and story, if it’s not entertaining, it might fail as mass media.
I think part of it’s that not all propaganda is bad.
There’s probably a term for it, but I’d draw a distinction between “opinion” propaganda and “aspirational” propaganda.
One tries to change your opinion of something, like “cops are good noble and always do the right thing”.
The other encourages the viewer to live up to some ideal. It’s entirely possible for that ideal to also not be great, but even then “I should be” is better than “they are”.
A lot of PSAs and things from the ad council fall in the later category. Like the billboards that basically say “real men are present and emotionally available fathers to their children” or "good parents teach their kids healthy diet and exercise by example”.
They’re openly cases of the government trying to change public opinions or attitudes (which arguably makes them better examples of propaganda than a lot of commercial television), but they don’t feel as objectionable.
“This honest and kind man who always tries to do good and help those around him to the point that it overshadows him being a physically perfect human is the embodiment of the emblematic American man” is more in that aspirational category.
Kind of what the whole thing in civil war was. Tony was looking to absolve his guilt over the people they failed to save while looking for more and more authoritarian methods of keeping the world “safe”.
Cap was much more for freedom and while the idea that the avengers should have absolutely no oversight is absurd, the question of who should be the oversight was important and much of what the avengers did could not wait on a committee to decide to act (also, the last time a committee did act they decided to nuke New York)
People kept calling Musk – Stark because they thought he was a scientist/genius. Like the MCU fake tech was gonna be birthed out of this immature edge lord that steals people’s idea with stolen money.
Yeah I kinda disagree with Cap as well. He also explicitly refutes the government to stand up what he believes is right in Civil War too.
He’s propaganda for American exceptionalism sure, but also embodies it in an old school New Deal way. The character has been consistently anti-facist over the years.
Pretending that America isn’t only already fascist, but inspired the fascists they are supposedly against is American exceptionalism, and you’re eating it right up.
