Captain America: The Winter Soldier / Some thoughts on Retro-Futuristic Cyberpunk & Characters Sticking to Their Alignments

I'd give it three and a half stars, and I'll explain why, but what I really want to do is talk about a few aspects of the movie beyond just reviewing it. So here's my quick and dirty review:

I went to this movie hoping there was some way that it would be a dieselpunk movie like Captain America: The First Avenger. I always avoid all trailers of movies I intend to see because I cannot abide having any part of a movie spoiled for me. The downside of this is that sometimes I go into a movie with expectations which are not met. Captain America: The Winter Soldier is not a dieselpunk movie. So in that, I was disappointed. This was exacerbated by the fact that two of my husband's students told him the movie dealt with the World's Fair. There's an explanation for this; the short version is they were probably pranking him. He teaches history and uses The First Avenger as a way to address the World's Fairs and a lot of other aspects of history in the early 20th century. Anyway, so I went into this movie thinking they were going to have some kind of time travel happen or something. Nothing like that happens. The closest thing to dieselpunk is a scene in a bunker (?). It isn't dieselpunk in any way, though, it's actually a strange type of cyberpunk, and I'm going to talk about that in detail below. So really, this is a pretty basic action flick. It's biggest redeeming quality is the general morality of the story as well as the morality of the lead character, Steve Rogers, AKA Captain America. (Minor) SPOILER ALERT: When he talks to Nick Fury after getting a tour of a top secret operation, I had a hell yeah moment. At the start of the tour the camera lovingly reveals these huge weapons one after another. I know I come to this kind of movie with a different sort of mindset than most people do, so I had this icky feeling as I thought, "Yetch, are we supposed to be happy about this?" And then, basically, no, we're not. Rogers utters every objection that was going through my mind when I saw the big guns. So that was cool. (Much bigger) SPOILER ALERT: When Rodgers insists on dismantling SHIELD entirely, it was another hell yeah moment for me. I appreciated his unwillingness to compromise and I enjoyed how contrite Fury seemed in that moment. I also liked the interactions with Bucky. The film wasn't terribly rich in deeper emotional connections (it wasn't devoid of them, but let's face it, this is not a movie about feelings) so I liked how they worked with this one.

Anyway, there are two aspects I wanted to get into in more detail, and if you're worried about spoilers, and you've still managed to get this far, you really might want to stop reading now.

Retro-Futuristic Cyberpunk
This was a new one to me. Of course, I don't read cyberpunk or seek out cyberpunk fiction in any form, really, mostly because with the one novel I read, Mona Lisa Overdrive, I understood maybe a third of what I was reading. However, I understood enough of it to immediately recognize that Zola in the computers was like a big Gibson shout-out. The thing about it that struck me, though, was that these were what, 1960s computers? Maybe 1970s? They put me in mind of computers from old episodes of Wonder Woman so maybe 70s. Anyway, my point is that the scene was retro-futuristic. You have the retro-computers--huge ugly beasts that they are. But the tech is futuristic, what with Zola having downloaded his consciousness into them and all. As I understand it--and again, I am not a cyberpunk expert--one of the big differences between cyberpunk and all its derivative other-punks (those that I've encountered, anyway) is that cyberpunk is not retro-futuristic. It's just futuristic. By its nature, cyberpunk fiction is set in a near future, most often dystopian, where computers rule.

I haven't read the comics so I can't speak to the origin of this idea of combining a ghost in the machine with retro computers. If the movie makers came up with it, I'm impressed.

Checking the main page for "Cyber Punk" on TVTropes makes me think that that character of the Winter Soldier is also grounded in this aesthetic. There's an illustration on that page of a guy who could be the Winter Soldier himself, just with a shorter hair cut. On top of the physical similarities, the caption reads, "I never asked for this," which also fits.

Anyway, I thought the most interesting moment in the movie was the scene with cyber-Zola, and it was frustrating to me when the bunker was subsequently destroyed. Please, correct me if I'm wrong, but it looked to me like they did something new there, blending retro-futuristic with cyberpunk. I am such a sucker for retro-futuristic stuff, I got pretty excited about it. I'm going to have to give it some more thought, because that scene was just too short for me. I may have to come up with a way to do retro-futuristic cyberpunk in a novel. Maybe the third book in the City series.

Paladins, Ronin, and Alignment Shifts
Okay, so here's where I really fly my nerd flag, folks. If you've read my bio you may have caught the bit about how I played D&D for a while back when I lived in San Diego. It's actually not entirely accurate to say I played D&D. I did play some games set in worlds the D&D folks created, but I also played games and ran games set in worlds I created, and for several years tabletop RPG was a big part of my life (I miss it a lot). All this to say that I still see much of the fiction I encounter through the lens of D20 rules. It helps make me feel better when, say, a villain survives being pulverized when a huge flying helicarrier (I may be mistaken as to that term) crashes into the building he's in pretty much exactly at the level of the floor he's on. I think to myself, he's just that high level. His hit points are just that high. And I can go with it.

Another way I often wear RPG goggles when approaching fiction is with the nine alignments. In case you are unfamiliar with this concept, the short and dirty version is that all characters in D20 RPG, at least back when I was playing it, could be sorted on two spectrums. One was law versus chaos, the other was good versus evil. Here's a graphic:

I don't really agree with some of these choices for each category, but that's not the point here.

I've heard that the latest version of D&D does away with this system and has only five (?) alignments. This is unfathomable to me. I will not budge on this. The system of nine is the only way that will ever make sense to me, and even it has its limitations. ANYWAY. I've written three paragraphs here and I haven't even begun to get to the point. Yeesh.

Captain America, as you can see in the graphic, is Lawful Good. Unlike some of the choices in this graphic, he's really a great example of LG, because he's both genuinely good, and genuinely lawful. In Marvel's The Avengers he's actually fairly annoying about this. When I was watching The Winter Soldier and feeling disappointed about it not being a dieselpunk story, I realized something. I do like Rogers and his morality is a big part of that. But what made The First Avenger fun for me was the dieselpunk stuff. As a main character, Rogers just isn't a lot of fun. Not like, say, Tony Stark. Chaotic Good is just way more fun than Lawful Good. That's why there are so many stories about the rogue cop and the loose cannon and all the mavericks out there who shake things up and break all the rules in order to win the day.

Anyhoo, that's not my point. My point is that I think the biggest flaw in this movie is that Captain America doesn't stay true to his alignment.

Captain America is essentially a paladin. A paladin is your quintessential knight in shining armor. When you're a paladin, you are a warrior with a higher calling. Serving whoever or whatever it is you serve is your only aim in life. You are Lawful Good and you believe in order and hierarchy and following orders. Now, it is possible for a paladin to break with his or her faith or order or whatever, but this is a cataclysmic event in a the paladin's life. We're talking big angst here, and most likely an alignment shift, which is rare to impossible to achieve in a game, if you're playing with people who take their gaming seriously. Some paladins who go through this become evil, known as blackguards. Some become independent somehow. To be honest I don't remember how this works exactly. I have this vague memory of a paladin with a big red X over the arms on his shield and this wisp of an idea that suggests this was a character who broke with his faith for some reason but somehow managed to remain a kind of good paladin. Of course, in a fantasy setting based on feudal Japan, this would play out as a samurai who left the service of his lord and became a ronin.

In The Winter Soldier, Rogers goes from LG paladin to NG ronin* with nary a blink of a eye. I mean that almost literally. Chris Evans plays Rogers with such restraint that it's a good thing the camera can do close ups on his eyes, or we'd think he was totally wooden. I had to really puzzle over what moment constitutes the crisis point that causes Rogers to break with SHIELD. I think it's when Fury gets shot in Rogers' apartment. And honestly all the hinting about wanting to give up his service to SHIELD before that was really weird to me. I can see him disagreeing with Fury and having moral problems with the way they do things, but it doesn't add up to an LG paladin giving up his service. A Lawful Good character, even without actually being a paladin, would seek to remedy the problems of the organization from within, using the existing structure. They would not think going solo was the answer.

So that's really too bad, because the movie doesn't really work for me as a result. And you can't just forget that Rogers is LG because he does remind you of it several times throughout the movie, claiming he won't push someone off a building and that he's always honest. Basically he's forced into abandoning SHIELD when Fury gets shot, but then there's really no fallout for Rogers from having to do that. A well-written LG character, particularly a paladin like Rogers, would be pretty shattered by such a crisis. But this is a movie, with time limitations, as well as limitations on what the target audience is willing to put up with. I gather most people watching Captain America are going to think it's already angsty enough, what with the rather sad scene involving Peggy Carter as an elderly woman with Alzheimer's. They won't be entertained by Steve Rogers having a truly shattering existential crisis.

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*Yes, I am aware of how problematic it is to appropriate words from actual Japanese feudal history to describe a fantasy character... give me an alternative and I'll edit this page. It can't be "rogue" though because in RPG terms, that's an entirely different thing, and since this whole section is rooted in RPG stuff, I can't start confusing things.

What is Dieselpunk?

After my recent blog post on Captain America: The First Avenger, I got a couple of questions about the terms "dieselpunk" and "decopunk." There's a pretty nice description of dieselpunk here, but I thought I'd talk a little about what it means to me.

I've come across a forum post where someone described dieselpunk as a scene rather than a genre, mainly, if I understand correctly, because of the dirth of actual dieselpunk fiction out there. I'll grant you that there aren't as many movies and TV shows with the elements that make up dieselpunk than there are capitalizing on the popularity of steampunk, but I think it's incorrect to say there aren't very many. In the last few months I've watched eight movies and two anime tv shows (notably Last Exile, which perhaps due to the fact that I watch it at 3am when I'm giving the baby his bottle and I have the sound turned almost all the way down, has come to a point where it is incomprehensible to me, unfortunately. I still really enjoy the soundtrack, though)--and of those eight movies, none were in the Indiana Jones series. There are also quite a few books that qualify, at least according to my definition.

So I should probably get to that.

To me, dieselpunk is fiction genre (or, more broadly, a scene) that draws on sci fi from the 1920s-1940s. Dieselpunk differs from steampunk in that its machines have internal combustion engines. You don't see airplanes in steampunk--at least, not unless they are some sort of steam-powered clockwork. You do see airplanes in dieselpunk--prominently so. But you also see other, weirder vehicles like the vanships in Last Exile. Also, very often you see robots. The idea with dieselpunk is that the tech is retro-futuristic (a combination that I find delightful). Lots of dials, knobs, gauges, levers, and grease, but I could see a story where these old-fashioned machines allow for (minor) space travel or teleportation--much like Telsa's inventions in The Prestige are steampunk yet futuristic.

The time period encompasses the decades of history I find most interesting to study--the 1920s, especially in the U.S. due to Prohibition, are fascinating because they represent the moment when westerners entered the modern age. Probably because of that, much of the pulp fiction of the time involved exploration of nonwestern parts of the world--the exotic, mysterious places most threatened by extinction in the modern age. More on that in a moment, as it raises a rather thorny problem.

The 1930s provides the concept of noir--film noir, detective stories, and the rise of fascism in several locations around the world.

And the 1940s gave us World War II--a terrible time, of course, but also a time people remember as a golden age of victory gardens, radio programs, and shared purpose. In our memories, everyone was in agreement in the 1940s--the Allies were working together to oppose the evils of the Axis Powers, who in turn were working together to destroy everything good in the world. Through a simple lens, World War II is the most ethically accessible war, because there are such clear bad guys, especially in Europe. (Please understand, I'm saying this as a writer, not as a historian. As a historian, this sort of thing does not fly.)

So dieselpunk has a rich playground to run around in. Add to that all of the bright optimism and faith in science that preceded the dropping of the atomic bombs and the discovery of the death camps. Think of the excitement of the World's Fairs. And to top it off, dieselpunk has its own artistic style: art deco. In fact, a subgenre of dieselpunk (itself a subgenre of steampunk, of course) is decopunk--basically everything dieselpunk is without such an interest in the machines.

But back to the exotic lands, for a moment, and the problem they pose.

I may eventually devote an entire post to this minefield, because it's a doozy, and it's one I'm particularly concerned with because I'm liable to get caught in the middle of it one of these days. Orientalism.

What, you ask, is orientalism, and what does it have to do with dieselpunk?

In a nutshell, orientalism is the representation of nonwestern cultures (most often Middle Eastern, but it's just as valid for various Asian areas as well as any other part of the world where people are predominantly brown, in my opinion) through the filter of western ideas, desires, opinions, prejudices, etc. It's a form of racism with a long history in fiction. Probably one of the best examples of a movie that is both dieselpunk and orientalist: Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. One of the big problems with orientalism is that writers who fall prey to it often misrepresent cultures or conflate two or more cultures. In the case of Temple, for instance, the goddess Kali is depicted as evil and ruling the underworld, which is inaccurate. Much of the cuisine is probably closer to Chinese than Hindu, as well. The attitude in days gone by among writers and fans of orientalist fiction was to shrug and say something along the lines of, "It's all the same anyway." (In case that's your attitude, try turning it around and imagining what it would be like for a Hindu or Chinese film to depict your culture as the same or at least jumbled with some other culture--usually belonging to a historical enemy. Now imagine that happening over and over in every book and movie that depicts your culture for hundreds of years.) For more on Temple's issues specifically, go here.

Nowadays I see a deep uneasiness in movies like Sky Captain & the World of Tomorrow--they so desperately want to be able to depict grand adventures like those of Allan Quatermain (a character who was originally more steampunk than dieselpunk) but they don't want to come under fire for racism. It's a pickle. I love stories of treasure hunts, dungeon crawls, scary jungles and survival in ice storms. But how do you write about exotic lands without othering those people the main characters, who by nature of being dieselpunk characters will be westerners, will encounter there? How do you portray a culture respectfully while simultaneously making it mysterious, sinister, and, in many cases, somehow mystical? What's a white writer in love with the retro-futuristic fiction of the1920s-1940s to do?

The best I've come up with is to take the story off of planet Earth altogether, and set the dungeon crawls, barroom brawls, and mystical encounters on other planets entirely (Firefly, anyone?). And don't even think about basing the alien cultures on specific (stereotyped and misrepresented) Earth cultures. Lucas did that and it's painful to watch. Of course, the real problem with that solution is that you've pretty much left dieselpunk behind once you leave Earth or at least an Earth-like setting. Yes, it's sci fi, but it's limited sci fi. Dieselpunk is not atomicpunk, and I can't see diesel engines powering even the most fun retro-futuristic space ships farther than a trip to the moon, maybe.

What do you think about dieselpunk? Do you like stories set in the 1920s-1940s?
How would you handle the orientalism problem?

A Dieselpunk Surprise

So I recently rented Captain America: The First Avenger from Netflix. I did it knowing next to nothing about the movie and having little idea of what to expect. There are a couple of reasons for this. 1) I generally avoid all descriptions of movies I'm going to watch because they inevitably spoil things. 2) I was not initially the least bit interested in Captain America. It sounded cheesy and overly patriotic. I like superhero movies... sometimes. I didn't think I'd like this one. But then I saw that The Avengers is out, and I'm mostly a Joss Whedon fan (although after what happened to Wash I'm not as sure as I once was). So I watched Thor, which streams, and enjoyed it, particularly because of the Norse mythology since that's a core aspect of my WiP. And I thought, okay, if I'm going to see The Avengers, I'd better get up to speed on all the individual superheroes (The Incredible Hulk is next on the Netflix queue).

So Captain America arrived the day before yesterday and the hubby and I started watching it. Due to the nature of parenting a 7-month-old, we watch anything over 30 minutes in parts. Very quickly, however, I realized something fundamental about the movie that came as a surprise: it was set in the 40s. During World War II.

I know this was probably obvious to anyone who paid even the slightest attention to the movie when it came out; I had not. So I was immediately intrigued. Somehow overly patriotic heroes like Captain America are not nearly as grating in the context of World War II. And then I began to see it: the dieselpunk. Oh my goodness. The lovely, detailed, beautifully designed retro-futuristic dieselpunk.

This was awesome. Not only had I gotten a little boost of inspiration from Thor's Norse pantheon, but now I got to spend the better part of two hours admiring the machines, planes, costumes, sets, etc. of Captain America. Totally unexpected, and a real treat.

My only annoyance: what the heck was up with Red Skull's pin? It's a death's head (okay, that's appropriate for a Nazi) surrounded by tentacles. I'm not the only one seeing a Cthulhu reference here, but nothing comes of it. Empty Cthulhu references annoy me.