Hero Making: A Quick Note on History and Captain America

Ricardo A. Serrano Denis

      Much of the history of the Second World War rests on the idea that goodness prevailed as its moral drive. It came naturally, part of the political package that guided American soldiers to the beaches of Normandy and the treacherous geography of Japan. Rooting out evil was the main objective—evil being the exact opposite of what America stood for. In a sense, the Second World War became a mirror through which Americans could see themselves reflected as the fairest nation of them all. Sure, historical accuracy calls for a reexamination of the Great Depression as the official instigator of intervention in foreign affairs (sometimes overriding Pearl Harbor as the obvious spark to that war), but pick any popular history book on World War II and you’ll be hard pressed to think of any other reason for America stepping up to the Germans other than pure goodness.

      It is of no wonder (and up to this point a meek point to think otherwise) that comic book readers became enamored with superheroes baptized in the fires of World War II as the supreme representatives of their fantastic alternate realities. Of the many that came, it was the one dressed in the colors of the American flag that captured the imagination of readers, Captain America. If we accept the Second World War as iconic in scope regarding World History then we must recognize that it also has the capacity to create icons and legends in its own right, both real and fictional.

     Captain America came out of that war as such an icon. He punched Hitler square in the jaw and might just have well sealed the victory for those who escaped to the pulpy pages of the comic book to find the endings they so intensely desired. Captain America’s war with the Germans was quick, clean, and righteous. But what really made a mark on comic book history was that Captain America set the standard on what heroism should actually be. Most importantly (and most dangerously), it made war experience the absolute standard on what makes a hero, well, a hero.

      It is perhaps in Jason Aaron’s Ultimate Captain America #2 that we get a true look at the psyche of the hero that made war the event that turned men into heroes. Deep inside the jungles of Vietnam, Captain America looks for Frank Simpson, the Captain America of the Vietnam War. Simpson was turned super-soldier for Vietnam in the absence of Steve Rogers (Captain America’s civilian name). But like many, he receded into the madness of his war. He deserts only to resurface as an enemy of the state in 21st century, carrying the full weight of his war to the present.

     The mission becomes an opportunity for introspection, for making sense of a war Rogers did not participate in. Contemplating the jungle and its complicity in keeping Americans away from victory, Captain America dwells on what his country should mean for the men that fight for it. He says:

Looking around this godforsaken place, I could almost understand if Simpson had just snapped. I saw plenty during the war. Good men who just reached their breaking point. I’ve been there myself. I’ve looked that fear in the face. I remember 1944, waking up one morning in the Ardennes forest, freezing cold, knowing we were surrounded on all sides by Nazi Tiger tanks, and I couldn’t move. It took me hours to get out of bed. I could’ve broken then. Like the men I saw eat bullets from their own guns. At the time, I felt like I could almost understand why they were doing it. But flipping sides…Frank Simpson betrayed his country. He said he wanted to show me what America really stands for. But he’s the one who’ll be getting the lesson. America doesn’t stand for cowards and turncoats. Not my America. The America I know’s always been worth fighting for. Even dying for. And sometimes killing for.

      It is brilliantly simple and easy to digest. Captain America lays the blueprint for heroism in pure black and white. It is devotion, with honor, to one’s country and the disposition to kill and die for its safety that makes men heroes. Stray from these guidelines and you will most probably end up being an enemy, a lost citizen fallen from the grace of his country’s innate disposition for goodness. This is but a simple metaphor for how the history of war is digested in popular culture.

     In History, we fight and debate over the origins of war, on the degrees of justness and righteousness in them. We forget that the men that fight them, the ones that become heroes, sacrifice so much that only outsiders get to enjoy the excitement of their heroics in the aftermath. Tom Brokaw’s oral history The Greatest Generation, for example, proves this by going to such lengths as too delve straight into hero making. Brokaw will say the Second World War bred the greatest generation of Americans the history of the country had ever seen. And probably will see, if Brokaw is concerned. The sacrifices of the soldier are secondary to the story because, in the end, they were heroes. Spielberg adds his line with Saving Private Ryan and many other directors, authors, comic book writers and artists followed suit.

 
     And so it goes with history. We seem to unconsciously regard war and its heroics as if they were mythical feats of greatness. They become innocent rites of passage that turn men into Captain Americas. Scars are expected while ugliness and extreme violence are accepted as realities that make men heroes. History, then, becomes the notary. An entity with the authority to make official the transformation of men into heroes. But it also becomes the thing men at war strive to. There is no force as powerful as a people’s expectations. There may be warnings on the dangers of history repeating itself, but that is precisely what people seem to want most of the time. We want more wars because we want more heroes. We want to imagine a world of Captain Americas because without them, well, what’s the point of history?

Negotiating the Past: The Rise of History as a Pop Culture Phenomenon

By: Ricardo A. Serrano Denis

            History has often been accused of being footnoted fiction. It has been the subject of cross-disciplinary name calling that ends in inconsequential academic ramblings that do not further serious debates on the nature, meaning, and consequence of studying the past. One is easily jaded by such accusations in that they keep with a narrow frame of thought that restrains knowledge from evolving into an agent of human understanding. Instead, they make the production of knowledge a process of exclusive infighting amongst professional thinkers (meaning men and women trained for the academic world) that deviate from the original purpose of knowledge creation, making sense out of humanity. And this brings up questions.

            If History is fiction, then why is it not consistently studied in Literature courses as legitimate works of fiction? Why reduce the impact of its findings by relegating such works to the space of interpretation (a dirty word in the world of classic academia)? When did cataloguing something as fiction demean the subject matter of any kind of study? It is here that the whole point of pedagogical research collapses. History is nothing more than one of many outlets that produce information, in league with Sociology, Anthropology, Biology, Physics, Psychology, and many other disciplines tasked with the same thing. History produces information on a debatable platform (and I mean this in the most pedagogically productive of ways), subject to any and all kinds of discussion so long as its purpose stays within the sphere of understanding what it means, and has meant, to be human. Now, if anything, if we are to consider History fiction, then it should be feared as an academic phenomenon, and here’s why: History can be the most dangerous kind of fiction in the written world.

            The year 2012 saw America threatened by two atomic bombings, a violent middle-class revolution, and a foreign invasion dooming the city of New York to a repeat of 9/11-like destruction. These threats have two very distinctive things in common. First, they are conceptually configured in a language very much rooted in historical discourse. Revolution screams 19^th century French history and Cold War fears of Soviet dominion on a global scale; foreign invasion jettisons the sounds of revolution with a clash of ideologies and ways of life again rooted in Cold War bursts of paranoia; and atom bombs cloud reason by ringing the bells of past fears not lost but rescued for further political terror. And secondly, they were all represented as legitimate 21^st century dangers through superhero films.

             
            In The Dark Knight Rises, Batman faces his toughest challenge yet: a popular uprising of Gotham City’s people against the city of Gotham itself. This, of course, set upon the imminent danger of atomic destruction through an unstable reactor politically infused with meaning by Bane, the 99% personified in a man with a scary mask. Revolution, here, is framed as stable as history permits it to be, which means it is pretty unstable. Its disorganized structure resonates with mid-20^th century stereotypes of revolution painted Soviet red. The Dark Knight Rises updates said stereotype with contemporary imagery, positing the now infamous Occupy movement as a ‘natural’ continuation of an historic tradition (see Soviet Communism) already vanquished in what is slowly being considered ‘a long ago’ (back when history ended in 1991, according to Francis Fukuyama. The Free World had won and, hence, history reached its apex). This gives ‘Recent History’ a whole new meaning. The contemporary merges with the past in an attempt to establish continuity in humanity’s political struggle.

            Marvel’s The Avengers, on the other hand, rescues recent despair in an attempt at redeeming the past through current American foreign policy. As a race of space aliens threaten New York with their own brand of 9/11, Captain America (a World War II vet) leads a unit of heavily militarized superheroes ever watchful for enemy infiltrations inherently bent on disrupting the American way of life first, and later the world by consequence of the first objective. The Avengers rescues the ‘sleeping giant’ metaphor made famous by the Pearl Harbor incident of 1941 and inserts it into the American military experience of the 21^st century (this metaphor supposes the argument that the United State fell asleep on the war intelligence job and that it could have intercepted the Japanese surprise attack). The Avengers fend of the alien invasion but with heavy casualties. New York City, the film’s set piece battleground, is forcefully thrust into the still fresh echo of 9/11 in spectacular glory. In a sudden twist of fate, America’s heroes avert the invasion by saving the city from a prematurely launched atomic missile diverted by Iron Man into the alien ship that coordinates the original invasion, avenging heavy loss and giving America military triumph. The atom bomb, a Cold War symbol of fear, is revived as a supporting character in a grander narrative looking to make war make sense in the 21^st century. It evidently needs the past for that.

            And so, we are subjected to a revival of History through an effort rooted in fiction. A negotiation of past meanings is taking place in that the present looks to acquire new meaning in old symbols of fear and action. Popular culture is rapidly becoming a primary supplier of informational authority in all things considered political and historical. As a result, the validation of information is exponentially relying on its exposure on silver screens, video games, and comic books. Alan Moore (the author of Watchmen, and V for Vendetta) once wrote:

            History, unendingly revised and reinterpreted, is seen upon examination as merely a different class of fiction; becomes hazardous if viewed as having any innate truth beyond this. Still, it is a fiction we must inhabit. Lacking any territory that is not subjective, we can only live upon the map. All that remains in question is whose map we choose, whether we live within the world’s insistent texts or else replace them with a strong language of our own. (After the Fire, 1996)

            In calling History the most dangerous kind of fiction, we must acknowledge that it is dangerous precisely because it wears the cowl of ‘truth’, one which historians insist on wearing forevermore. We must remember that what historians consider secondary sources can quickly become primary sources for the general public. This is why I comment on superhero narratives, because the history that travels through them can end up teaching audiences more about the past than history books in general. A serious attempt at lighting History under continued debate can help by lessening the weight authority bears upon the discipline. It may lead researchers and thinkers to the realization that classifications only dampen the labor of information production, to the point of keeping knowledge bound to the chains of exclusivity. In the end, it doesn’t really matter if History is fiction or not. Either way, History continues to walk down the path of a regulator, trying to keep facts in check, even if fiction ends being more convincing in doing so.