*sciency ramblings about bucky’s arm with a bit of angst*
I made a gifset yesterday that highlighted Bucky’s nervous habit of clenching and unclenching his metal fist, right after Steve says “I need you to do better than ‘I don’t know’”. Later on in that scene, there’s a brief shot of him sitting, hunched over, and wringing both of his hands together.
Both of these instances say a lot about how much sensitivity the limb has, specifically in the fingertips; the technology is so advanced that it’s a part of him in the most literal sense, and he unconsciously treats it as such.
The arm also has a clear sense of pressure and touch, as demonstrated in CA:TWS (that one scene with the tiny, round explosive device that everyone is fond of making gifsets of for really weird reasons) and CA:CW (he tests plums for ripeness by gently squeezing them).
I’m guessing there are a ton of electrodes embedded in the internal mechanism, all of which allow him to control and manipulate the arm, recieve sensations of pressure, heat, cold, texture, etc. Whether he can feel ‘pain’ is debatable, considering he was able to use his metal arm as a brake along several feet of roadway, but there’s definitely got to be some sort of equivalent in order to warn him if he’s going to damage it–and it would take significant trauma in order for that to happen. In general though, his brain treats the prothesis like a real arm.
All this to say: getting the whole shebang ripped off at the shoulder joint by an arc reactor beam probably felt like he was losing his flesh arm all over again. Because it’s the same concept–all the signals that his brain was recieving from the prothesis are suddenly gone. Right after losing his arm, he passed out for several several minutes, and when he came to, he could hardly move, and if that doesn’t indicate severe pain, I don’t know what does.
I mean, think about it. Bucky is one of those people who doesn’t go down easily. He spent 90% of his screentime in CA:TWS getting the crap kicked out of him, and hardly made a sound. As the Winter Soldier, he was taught to disregard physical damage to his body in order to complete the mission. That suicidal endurance isn’t going to go away. It’s as much a part of him as his arm was, and will permanently affect his combat behaviors.
So when Bucky is physically unable to give any contribution to a fight beyond grabbing his opponent’s ankle, it’s a pretty good indicator that he’s Suffering™.
Bucky mentally preparing himself for death is so fucking upsetting because after all of the torture he went through, after all of the physical and mental pain, he survived because Steve saved him, and here he is ready to die for him. He lets himself have this moment of fear because he knows what’s coming, he knows that he’s going to die and he allows himself to accept how scared he really is. He knew what he was getting in to when he made the choice to fight side by side with Steve (because what other choice was there really?), and part of him probably always knew this was how it would end – he was either going to live for Steve or die for him, the only thing left for him to do was to acknowledge his unhappy ending when the time came.
FRIENDLY REMINDER THAT POSITIONING BUCKY’S SACRIFICE AS HIS CHOICE MEANS THAT IT WAS THE LAST TIME HE EVER GOT TO EXERCISE HIS OWN FREE WILL.
But this is actually really important, though, looking through a biopolitical lens, because in fact that choice (his choice to sacrifice himself, to die) got taken away from him. His “resurrection” as the Winter Soldier is a denial of his right to die, his right to decide what to do with his life, his body. That type of control is a horror that we tend to think of as a horror above or beyond death; there is something worse than death, and it is losing what we think of as the basic embodied human right of inhabitation of, autonomy over one’s own body. That’s what he’s about to suffer, and it kind of turns this scene from tragedy into horror story.
Holy shit just.
This has been sitting on the edge of my consciousness for a while now and it’s so truly horrible.
And it parallels with Steve (although never as bad, Bucky is everything that could have gone wrong and did go wrong and Steve is everything that could have gone wrong and somehow went almost right) because the same thing happened to Steve, he put himself in the water, he died to save the world and then the world brought him back and he got to see that his sacrifice meant nothing and it’s no fucking wonder he was so willing to let Bucky kill him on the helicarrier he realised too well that you can fight the good fight but the FIGHT NEVER ENDS and Steve is just. so. tired.
OK so now that I’ve had a chance to cool off and get some perspective, here’s the main reason I left Age of Ultron really pissed off at Joss Whedon (spoilers under the cut)
[op’s commentary and mine include mentions of forced sterilization and body violation. proceed with caution]
quoting op: ‘Bruce thinks he’s a monster because of the things he’s done to
people. Natasha thinks she’s a monster because of the things people have
done to her.‘
this made me realise how it stinks of victim (self-)blaming by placing a lot of negative focus on the person suffering from body violation.
the whole plot point heavily emphasises on how cis women supposedly have value and virtue only when their reproductive system is intact. and its terribly fishy how only SHE gets a tragic backstory which reduces her to her genitalia.
no matter how the russo brothers write bucky, im fairly certain that his flashbacks and trips down memory lane would never include something to do with people sexually violating him or sterilizing him like they did with nat. i mean even his sole flashback in catws included body violation-the vivisection-followed by him choking a doctor; thats active reclaiming of power. most of nats shots in the flashback showed her either being manhandled or lying passively on the table and silently crying. there was nothing powerful or self-owning in it, just the silent acceptance of abuse which terrified me more than anything.
im sorry if i went off track but…i have FEELINGS about how whedon thrashed nat
Thanks for bringing up Bucky. I’ve received a few comments from people disagreeing with my interpretation of Natasha’s backstory, arguing that ‘No, that’s
not what that scene is about, she’s just reassuring Bruce that she wants to
be with him, not saying she’s a monster because she’s sterile.’ But Scarlet Witch’s visions aren’t about Brucenat, they’re about tearing the Avengers apart. Why is that memory in particular supposed to make Natasha doubt her place in the team? The reason I put my foot down is that you would never write something like this for a male character.
writers of avengers fic consistently misunderstand this phrase, and honestly i don’t blame them, it’s pretty confusing in context. bucky barnes is a sniper. snipers use rifles. fury was shot outta nowhere, by a sniper, presumably with a rifle. and if you’re not a humongous gun nut, you probably don’t automatically think slug == shotgun, not rifle. nor will you know that ‘rifling’ can mean two different things.
lucky for you, i am a humongous gun nut, so i’m here to sort that out for you!
okay, for starters, shotgun barrels are, in fact, rifled. and we all know you trace a bullet by the marks the barrel’s rifling leaves on it. so how could the winter soldier’s leavings make the ballistics techs at SHIELD shrug helplessly? well, because it wasn’t a bullet, it was a slug. a shotgun slug. and in shotgun slugs, ‘rifling’ doesn’t mean the grooves in the barrel, it means the fin-like protrusions on the slug itself, like so:
that’s an american-made big game slug, and it’s got those fins to keep it twisting despite the drag of the cork back end, which acts to stabilize it with air resistance. short range, but plenty effective if you’re hunting moose.
but the winter soldier was hunting bigger game: nick fury. through a brick wall. which is why he used something more like this:
stainless steel saboted slugs. as you can see, they have no rifling – that is, no twisty fins. they rely on their forward-weighted mass for their accuracy, which is tolerably good up to about 100 meters.
there are a number of russian makers of these, going back to soviet days, but you can also easily machine your own. these don’t deform on impact, meaning they wouldn’t have great stopping power against, say, a charging polar bear – but also meaning they keep their trajectory when going through obstructions like the wall of steve’s apartment. and that plastic sabot, or boot, which makes it fit tight and grip in the barrel, flies off when fired, taking with it any identifying marks from the barrel rifling.
i don’t think we ever got to see what bucky fired these from, but it would probably have been something like this:
a russian vepr 12 shotgun, which looks a whole lot more like a rifle than a shotgun at first glance. tactical shotguns like these are popular with law enforcement for the same reason bucky used one to shoot fury – urban combat. right through the dang wall.
so there you have it. ‘russian slug, no rifling’ means bucky came loaded for bear.
was oriented intentionally by Bucky. The mattress could cover the window when flipped,
the cinderblocks held relatively empty shelves,
the table was situated so that it could be flung and wedged against the door.
Even the floormat was placed to be used as a defensive weapon.
bonus:
I imagine Bucky sitting on the mattress, reading or writing under the yellow glow from the lap in the corner.
speaking of corners, I’m going off to mine to cry.
listEN CAN WE TALK ABOUT THE STUFF IN HIS KITCHEN TOO?
Like, I literally think about his green spatula and that red thermos CONSTANTLY. Did he pick the green spatula out himself? Did he think it was cute? Or was it something he just acquired out of convenience? Does he use that thermos? Does he put soup in it? Does he fill it with coffee and sit in a park and drink it while feeding birds?!?!
Yes, he bought that green spatula for himself, he loved it, and the red (silicone?) mitt on the stove (and the cute curtain hiding the under-cabinet). The thermos is absolutely used for exactly those purposes.
he also has a pink (?) radio and two chairs, the radio is visible in the gif below as well as the still (where you’ll see the chairs).
I spy more notebooks and possibly a couple of other reading materials besides the couple of days worth of papers.
also, on the subject of steve’s superhuman status…
i felt like this movie was brutally heavy-handed about showing us just how much steve’s body can take. like, we get a hint of it in first avenger but even steve isn’t sure by the end of the movie the entire scope of what his body can do–what can be done to it. then in the avengers, we get a little more…ideas about his endurance, his agility, his combat skill–but they’re just glimpses, and really, nothing earth-shattering is discovered.
and then this fucking movie comes along, and all of a sudden, the audience is seeing in visceral constant detail just how super this soldier has become.
steve fights like lightning in a bottle–he’s a tremendous force in a contained, controlled package. we see his skill, but more than that, we see how his skill is the vehicle for his power. how many times do we get it reiterated that this dude is magnificent? the very first scene of the movie is all about how he’s running THIRTEEN MILES in 30 minutes like it’s nbd. and then rumlow pointing out steve’s jump sans parachute and how well he was single handedly taking on the ship’s crew before rumlow landed. and then his fight with batroc, how it’s very specifically meant to show that even without the shield, steve is more than capable. that he can withstand things and do things other human beings can’t. that HE and HIS FISTS AND FEET AND MASSIVE MUSCLES AND CORE STABILITY can and will fuck you up. the entire first half of the film is all about steve being a force to be reckoned with, not just as a person but as a body, as a physical presence.
and as the battles escalate, so too do the stresses on steve’s body. every new thing was like a dare. a step further. a question–how much can this guy withstand?
steve, leaping through a window into ANOTHER BUILDING ENTIRELY, crashing through WALLS like they’re nothing, running at top speed and withstanding the force of throwing the shield and being thrown the shield, stopping a hairsbreadth from the edge of the roof.
steve, getting ambushed in an elevator, several burly and skilled men and their assorted weapons against him. this scene is SO important–those little electricity things that rumlow zapped steve with at length and several times? remember how a tiny little zap was enough to knock out that french mercenary? yeah, well, it barely pHASED steve even after it’s stuck to his gut for like 30 agonizing seconds, repeatedly. that whole scene is an exercise in showing the audience that steve literally has the strength of multiple men, maybe even more. (and he knows it, too. it’s why his fairness, the fact that he gives those goons the OPTION TO GET OFF THE ELEVATOR, is so much more remarkable than it otherwise would be. because he knows what his body is capable of now. and it’s a fucking lot.)
oh and then he leaps out of the elevator and falls several thousand feet at full speed and not only lives but barely staggers after a couple minutes of shaking it off and then he leaps onto a moving jet and disables it before somersaulting to the ground? this isnt just innate confidence, it’s a lack of fear borne from the knowledge that his body can take it.
like sitwell said–“are you kidding me?” it’s pretty significant that in a world of superheros and mutants and gods, sitwell is shocked by a SUPERSOLDIER and what his body can do. as well sitwell should be, tbh.
bc MULTIPLE TIMES steve uses his own body as a buffer between the shield and people he’s protecting–two times with nat and a potentially catastrophic and close range explosion and once FALLING OUT OF A FUCKING SPEEDING VEHICLE. he knows the shield will provide the first line of defense, but he also knows his body is capable of creating another. his body becomes a shield, too. a weapon and a tool.
and it’s worth noting that he’s posed as superhuman by acting as a mirror to another superhuman. when he’s fighting bucky on the bridge, he matches bucky move for move–i still cant decide whether that fight is meant to drive hom how powerful bucky is or steve, tbh. like, on one hand, we already KNOW how strong steve is, so the fact that bucky is fighting him shows the audience this isnt just an assassin–he’s souped up more than the average human. but on the other hand, we see early on how fast and powerful bucky is, and when we see his fist hit the shield we get a sense of his incredible strength even more, and that just shows us AGAIN how very strong steve must be to keep up with him and fight him like an equal.
anyway, the next round of death defying comes with the helicarrier business. and a lot of his awesome comes from how well he moves and how tactical he is, but there are elements–when he leaps into the open air and freefalls waiting for sam to catch him, when he uses his upper body strength to fucking climb up the outside of the helicarrier after being thrown off the side–that you’re reminded again that beyond him being a great soldier, he’s also got a body that is a conduit for all that knowledge, all that skill. and that body is a weapon unto itself.
guys. guys, he’s shot MULTIPLE TIMES and STABBED and he just wrestled a super assassin into submission and he STILL makes it up to change the blade for the helicarrier. and when the helicarrier is crashing, he stILL has enough strength to move a steel beam off bucky. and then he SITS THERE AND GETS PUNCHED REPEATEDLY IN THE FACE BY A METAL HAND. this is the first time we really see steve rogers bleed in this movie. the first time we really see how exhausted and worn down he must be. THE FIRST TIME in TWO HOURS–after multiple battles and running away and fatigue and villains.
but even as he bleeds, he lives. he’s alive. conscious. TALKING. as a viewer, at this point, i was just like–how much can steve take??? how much MORE??? and it seemed that steve would keep answering me with “i could do this all day!”
except then he falls into the potomac. but EVEN THEN we don’t see him get mouth to mouth. we see bucky drag him to shore and leave and steve’s breathing on his own. his lungs are EXPELLING THE WATER IN A THIN STREAM OUT OF HIS MOUTH. steve is literally defying everything i know about drowning and breathing in this scene. his body 😦 so magic 😦
given all this, the fact that one of the last scenes of the movie was steve in a hospital…it feels right. it feels like we finally get to see steve slow the hell down and take CARE of himself. it feels like there was a natural culmination to all that getting beat up and beating other people up, and it’s there in that hospital bed, waking up with his wounds not yet healed, showing that as superhuman as he is, even he has some limits.
but those limits are pretty well fucking beyond most powered humans, imo. and that’s another reason i love steve rogers.
Captain America: Civil War Commentary (Stephen McFeely, Joe Russo)
HE USED HIS FLESH HAND
WELL I FUCKING FEEL IT, ALRIGHT MCFEELY?!? ARE YOU HAPPY NOW?! I’m in a perpetual and incurable state of empathic suffering. Thanks a heap.
Maybe someone can explain this to me, because from where I’m standing, this is just sloppy writing.
We have Bucky, a.k.a. The Winter Soldier a.k.a. the “ghost story”, and yet he kills Tony’s parents in the least efficient way possible, lingers in front of a camera as if he’s posing for New York Fashion Week and then shoots the camera, like that even matters when his face is so clear to see? And which roadside security camera in records high quality images anyway, let alone one from 1992?
There’s a fan theory out there that Hydra forced him to do it this way, just to see if he could kill someone who used to be his friend, but if that’s true, they should have at least alluded to that instead of having us clean up the mess. Or is it because an admission like that would, one again, make Bucky sympathetic to the viewer?
I like the Russo’s and I’m sure they were hampered by the studio execs, but if they’d introduced an actual conflict, they wouldn’t have needed to force the issue like this.
Well, I mean. They are not wrong, that’s true. The thing is, we already knew all that? We have seen the Winter Soldier kill. We have seen him as the remorseless killing machine. And unlike it is for other bad boy characters, I honestly haven’t seen much of the typical white-washing. No one denies the Winter Soldier was a brutal killer. And the news that Tony’s parents were among his victims were of no surprise.
So it’s not that it was not necessary, because as they say it would take a very strong person to resist the impulse to kill the man they witnessed murder their parents. We needed to see it and it needed to be bad, because otherwise Tony’s reaction would not be justifiable.
Except… the movie opens not on the murder, but on a scene of torture. It opens on an explicit depiction of the murderer being (a) treated inhumanely, followed by (b) literal mind control. Then the murder. By the time we land in Siberia there is no doubt, whatsoever, that Bucky is not culpable. Not to mention that this scene literally takes place in the same place Bucky’s nightmare happened. And that’s kind of the problem with this sequence. We get that Tony has the right to his anger, and we get that he needs to lash out and make someone pay. But the longer the fight goes on, the less justifiable Tony’s anger becomes, until finally we arrive at a scene where Tony, in his titanium armor, kicks a crippled, lying-down man in the face (a man, at this time, poses no threat). And that’s somehow fine. We needed to see Bucky’s hands commit a murder to justify Tony’s rage, but we were also shown plenty of footage that makes it unjust, so that scale never balances itself. Not in this or the following movie.
Side note: I kinda like that the Winter Soldier strangles Maria with his flesh hand. I’m not fond of the “left arm is the murder arm” fanon. It’s his arm. It may not be flesh, but it’s his arm. The Winter Soldier is not in the arm, he’s in the head.
has gotten a lot of flack, and I don’t disagree that it could and should have been handled a lot better, but even as it is, I really really like what it says, or rather, confirms about
Bucky.
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