one of the things i’m concerned about re: infinity war is the fact that, post civil war, the writers have made it so that i have trouble rooting for tony. and i love tony. i have loved every iron man movie, even and especially the third film, because i was deeply glad to see a superhero film explore PTSD, and tony absolutely deserves a story that acknowledges and deals with his considerable trauma.***
but civil war, namely its hamfisted need for a big pointless steve/tony melee, changed a lot of things. the script rendered tony a.) uncharacteristically authoritarian, b.) a mega-genius who is somehow easily duped by government stooges, and c.) so shockingly unempathetic that he tried to murder someone inside of that person’s actual personal hellscape.
like, of all the sins that civil war committed, and there were many, this is the one i return to over and over and over: they went to the chair. the chair! and nobody cared.
they physically went to the base where bucky was held and tortured and forced to kill and electroshocked and brainwashed. they went to it, and walked inside of it with him, and NOBODY LOOKED AROUND FOR A FUCKING SECOND AND SAID, “WHOA, what the FUCK.” not in the script. like, steve and bucky share plenty of “whoa” glances, probably because they are inhabited by good actors who can read between the lines they’re given. but that final fight could have happened anywhere– inside of a barn or a bunker in utah or a dimly-lit target– instead of inside bucky’s personal hell. the script didn’t treat that space like it was important emotionally. it had tony stark walk in and decide that he needed to beat bucky to death right there, in a room where people had been beating bucky to death for fucking decades. they didn’t have tony turn around once and say to himself, “huh, why are there so many bone saws hanging up? are these… dog cages?” the script didn’t and couldn’t allow tony one smidgen of empathy, because if any empathetic person looked around at where they were and who was in front of them they’d have stopped. tony would have stopped. the script couldn’t allow it, so instead they plunged ahead with ruining him, reducing him to someone who would willingly kill just to relieve his anger; and then at the very end, the script decided that the person who most needed the final catharsis of forgiveness was… still tony.
so yeah. i’m a little worried about infinity war. i’m worried that they will use the “tension” that’s “between” tony and bucky for a gag or a throwaway. i’m worried that tony will do something like… fire a warning shot at bucky. “whoops!” tony will say, sarcastically, before he flips the visor down and flies off. “guess he’s not over it,” clint will say, deadpan, and bucky will look grim, badump-dump tsssh. but like… i’m not going to think it’s funny. because bucky barnes spent seventy-odd years fighting “alongside” people who had the authority to punish him. his captors obviously talked a big game about the mission, and sent teams out with him to hand him his guns, but they were also clearly there to round him up, take him back to base, and shock his fucking brains out. they could hurt him if they chose to and he couldn’t retaliate. sure, he backhands a technician at one point in ca:tws, but then two minutes later they scramble him like a fucking egg.
(i don’t actually think tony would or will try to hurt him again. it’s out of character… it was out of character the first time, tbh… and i think the writers are done with that idea. but imagine being bucky, fresh on your new friendly non-nazi team, the first time somebody on that team threatens you. even in jest.)
so do you think i want him on a team with this newly empathy-free version of tony? in the hands of writers who gave tony his friendships and his dignity back but stuffed bucky into a bag of frozen carrots? not really.
i would love to be so hilariously wrong about this that we all laugh, of course. that’d be swell.
***you know what’s fucking infuriating though, is if the writers sat down for five minutes and had themselves a winnie-the-pooh style Think about this shit, they would realize that tony’s guilt re: arms dealing and indirectly causing a metric fuckton of human collateral damage would provide a genuinely interesting parallel and counterpoint to bucky’s guilt about involuntarily killing people as a brainwashing victim. those two characters might actually be able to go on an interesting moral journey together, but this is fucking marvel, and if it’s not exploding i guess nobody in charge is fucking interested in it
But the real reason I had to chime in was that Steve Rogers is my favorite superhero. Why? Because unlike other patriotism-themed characters, Steve Rogers doesn’t represent a genericized America but rather a very specific time and place – 1930’s New York City. We know he was born July 4, 1920 (not kidding about the 4th of July) to a working-class family of Irish Catholic immigrants who lived in New York’s Lower East Side.[1] This biographical detail has political meaning: given the era he was born in and his class and religious/ethnic background, there is no way in hell Steve Rogers didn’t grow up as a Democrat, and a New Deal Democrat at that, complete with a picture of FDR on the wall.
Steve Rogers grew up poor in the Great Depression, the son of a single mother who insisted he stayed in school despite the trend of the time (his father died when he was a child; in some versions, his father is a brave WWI veteran, in others an alcoholic, either or both of which would be appropriate given what happened to WWI veterans in the Great Depression) and then orphaned in his late teens when his mother died of TB.[2] And he came of age in New York City at a time when the New Deal was in full swing, Fiorello LaGuardia was mayor, the American Labor Party was a major force in city politics, labor unions were on the move, the Abraham Lincoln Brigade was organizing to fight fascism in Spain in the name of the Popular Front, and a militant anti-racist movement was growing that equated segregation at home with Nazism abroad that will eventually feed into the “Double V” campaign.
Then he became a fine arts student. To be an artist in New York City in the 1930s was to be surrounded by the “Cultural Front.” We’re talking the WPA Arts and Theater Projects, Diego Rivera painting socialist murals in Rockefeller Center, Orson Welles turning Julius Caesar into an anti-fascist play and running an all-black Macbeth and “The Cradle Will Rock,” Paul Robeson was a major star, and so on. You couldn’t really be an artist and have escaped left-wing politics. And if a poor kid like Steve Rogers was going to college as a fine arts student, odds are very good that he was going to the City College of New York at a time when an 80% Jewish student body is organizing student trade unions, anti-fascist rallies, and the “New York Intellectuals” were busily debating Trotskyism vs. Stalinism vs. Norman Thomas Socialism vs. the New Deal in the dining halls and study carrels.
THIS is Bucky Barnes: tough exterior, still getting used to the world, beautiful man on the inside, highly confused, boyfriend material, still trying to figure himself out, smiley around Steve
THIS is James Buchanan Barnes: soft, likes science expos, Stark’s flying car was “eh” to him. The thing didn’t even stay off the ground, pre-war. Husband material, may or may not fall off a train. It really depends on when you turn the movie off, calls women “doll”,
THIS is The Winter Soldier: HYDRA’s play thing, murder bae, scary af, “Who the hell is Bucky?”, not dating material cause he’s and assassin, and also cause he’d forget the important dates. Probably hates old ladies. Probably going commando under those pants. Aka Bucknasty
THIS is Bucky: V handsome, Saved Sam from Spider-Man, war veteran, 100 years old, “What the hell hell is that?” , scared, straight outta cyro, has a ski jacket he obviously ripped the arm off of, also boyfriend material but he might forget some things, PTSD, needs everyone to be patient with him, will most likely let you play with his hair, #too old for this shit
What about that scene in Bucky’s shitty squat? The reunion scene? Cap’s like “do you know me?” And Bucky? Bucky’s, like…
Just be in Bucky’s shoes for a second here. Standing in front of Bucky is Steve Rogers, his best pal from forever ago. That was (if nothing else) a seriously solid friendship. Think of the mutual respect in TFA. Think of how people avoid seeing old friends (hell, even avoid seeing old enemies – think of high school reunions!) because they’re worried what that old friend will think of them.
Now imagine that turned up as high as it could possibly go. Bucky is a wanted criminal, a murder machine. He worked for the Russians during the Cold War, and the nazis, and pretty much anybody on the Bad list. And in case that’s not enough, he beat the ever-loving shit out of his best friend the last time they met. So, “do you know me?” Christ, poor Bucky. I’d fake ignorance too.
After all, Bucky’s just gotten his head together enough to be surviving on his own. He’s not integrated into society, but he’s passing for it, or nearly. He’s got that horrible past. He’s got to be suffering PTSD, survivor’s guilt, all manner or trauma related shit. To say nothing of the Jimminy Cricket of his own morality that’s probably keeping him up at night with questions like, “why didn’t I kill myself? How culpable am I for what I did? Do I deserve to be alive and free?”
And who’s standing in front of him? Not just his bestie, no. Captain fucking America. In his suit and everything. All shiny and perfect and upright, who gets an exhibit at the Smithsonian and probably commemorative stamps too. When Bucky says he read about Cap, he’s not lying. He doesn’t know the man in front of him; he knew Steve Rogers, not this guy. He doesn’t know Cap anymore, and he doesn’t know what he’ll do. “I read about you,” he says. He’s hiding in the last place left to him: amnesia.
Bucky is scared. Not of what Cap might do to him, but of Steve’s disappointment and reproach.
When Cap asks “why’d you pull me from the river?” He’s not asking that, not really. He’s begging Bucky to come out of hiding. When Bucky keeps hiding (“I don’t know.”) Steve has to show him that he doesn’t care about all the bad stuff, that’s not why he’s there. He’s there as Steve Rogers, not Cap. And Steve doesn’t care about what Bucky did. He cares about Bucky.
That scene where Bucky’s like “I don’t know if I’m worth all this…” He’s inviting Steve to be Cap and bring him in, and Steve’s like “I already decided that you are.”
This actually happened in some of the cartoons! I gasped out loud when I saw it for the first time. (Go to about 10 minutes in for the full scene.) I thought I’d do something a little different, because while I love Erik in the First Class movies, I always wanted a happier ending for him…
The Howling Commandos, as a forward team focused on Hydra, hadn’t liberated many camps; the ones they had were Hydra slave labor camps, where the men were, if not well-fed, then at least not the gaunt, barely-alive prisoners they’d heard about from Red Army soldiers and Allied units.
This camp was different; at the heart of it was some kind of lab. When Steve battered down the last reinforced door, he found a man holding a gun to the head of a young boy.
“I’ll kill him,” the man said. Steve didn’t bother with an answer; the shield took the man’s head off before he could threaten the kid again.
Still, in that second before death, Steve had seen the man’s finger spasm on the trigger, and felt the thickness in the air when the trigger wouldn’t move. He looked at the boy, looked at the body, and had a sense of destiny resettling itself in the world.
“Was he the camp commander?” he asked the boy, who nodded, huge-eyed. “Commander…Shaw?”
The boy nodded again. He turned and pulled Steve’s now bloody shield out of the concrete wall like it was nothing. Then, with narrowed eyes, he floated it across to him, through the air, without touching it.
Steve took the shield out of the air, shook off what he could, put it on his back, and said, “Thank you.”
“My pleasure,” the boy said, in trembling English.
“What’s your name, son?”
“Erik Lensherr.”
Steve had seen a lot of things in the war; nothing like this, but there had been signs of strange experiments in Hydra labs. This was comparatively harmless.
“Well, I’ll make you a deal, Erik,” he said. “I won’t tell what I saw here just now, and you help me close this place down. Then we’ll take you to HQ and get you a hot meal. Sound good?”
Erik nodded, then offered, “They knew you were coming. They destroyed all the records.”
“Doesn’t matter,” Steve said. “Come on.”
In the convoy, bringing the prisoners out of the camp, Steve brought Erik up to the cab of the lead truck, and put him in next to Bucky at the wheel.
“Who’s this?” Bucky asked.
“Erik,” Steve said. “He’s riding with us.”
“Sprichts du English?” Bucky asked.
“Yes,” Erik replied. “I can speak. English, German, Yiddish, some Russian. Good interpreter. I can work for Allies?”
“How old are ya?” Bucky asked.
“Sixteen,” Erik said.
“You are twelve,” Bucky told him.
“I’m just small,” Erik replied.
“Yeah, because you’re twelve,” Bucky insisted. “Well, we’ll make sure the folks handling the refugees take good care of y – “
“No, he’s coming with us,” Steve said.
“What?”
“Erik’s coming with us to HQ. We could use an interpreter. And he’s small enough to make a good spy. He’s had enough of camps, ain’t ya, kid?” he asked, and Erik nodded.
“You wanna join the allies, huh?” Bucky asked.
“I go with Captain America,” Erik announced.
“Yeah, that’s what I said, and now I know better,” Bucky replied, but he was grinning. “Fine, on your own head be it. Sixteen my ass,” he said to Steve.
Steve took off his helmet and plopped it onto Erik’s head. “Sorry, got a new sidekick now,” he told Bucky, who laughed.
Years later, when a magazine asked Erik Lensherr why he agreed to become Captain America after the disappearance of Steve Rogers, he said, “Steve took a terrified twelve-year-old Jewish kid out of a slave labor camp, gave him a helmet, and told him he had power. I believed him. Turns out he was right.”
ALSO IMAGINE MAGNETO AS CAPTAIN AMERICA WITH THE SHIELD. HOLY CRAP. 😀
I had a dream last night that I was writing a sequel to this in which Erik is on the train when they’re going after Zola, and manages to yank Bucky back up into the train by the metal snaps and buckles on his uniform. So Bucky is part of the assault on Schmidt’s fortress, and he and Steve go down in the ice together, and are thus brought out of the ice together in the sixties.
And they’re in a SHIELD conference room waiting to have what the HELL HAPPENED explained to them when they see through the glass wall Captain America and a guy in a blue jacket with a sniper rifle walking through SHIELD, and Steve is like “….TINY ERIK LENSHERR?” and Bucky meanwhile is like “And who the fuck are you?” to the young guy in the blue jacket and Erik’s like “Uhhhh this is my sidekick I’m training, his name is Tony, you may remember his dad…”
Also there was a bit where they went to Westchester and Charles was like “You really should pick a mutant name, all the kids have them and it sets a good example” and Erik’s like
Erik: I’m already Captain America, can’t that be my mutant name? Charles: It’s your name, Erik, you get to pick it. Please don’t pick Captain America. But I don’t approve mutant names for other people. Erik: That’s a terrible policy. You let that one kid name himself Asskicker. Charles: We’re working on it, Bobby has a troubling sense of humor. Erik: Uh okay lol my name is….MAGNEEEEETOOOOO” *wiggles his fingers menacingly* Charles: *rubs forehead*
DAMMIT
Also I changed Shaw to Schmidt because apparently that was his alias in First Class, and I may wander off into an AU where Johann Schmidt and Karl Schmidt were brothers.
I rewatched bits of First Class for this and I am once more reminded how I would watch an entire movie that was nothing but Erik Lensherr running around the world in a sharp suit fucking up Nazis.
Anyway here’s Wonderwall.
***
Erik had been reasonably well-fed and looked after in Schmidt’s lab, but he hadn’t let his guard down once; the entire time he was there he’d eaten only what he was giving and usually not all of that, never wanting to have indigestion or a full stomach when he didn’t know what would happen from one minute to the next. Schmidt had been…volatile.
But Steve, giant, smiling Steve with his white star and his shield, had killed Schmidt in front of him, unkillable Schmidt. The shield had a strange feel to it; for some reason Schmidt hadn’t been able to absorb its energy the way he had other attacks.
Schmidt was dead and Erik was free, and just from listening to the soldiers Erik could tell the tide of the war was turning.
When they reached HQ, it turned out to be a collection of sturdy tents, and Steve sent Bucky (Erik hadn’t decided whether to trust Bucky yet) off to report to someone. Then he led Erik straight to the mess tent and started piling food on a tray for them both.
“No – that’s got pork,” he said, when Erik reached for the beans. Erik widened his eyes.
“Are you – ?” he asked.
Steve shook his head. “I had friends in the Jewish neighborhoods growing up,” he said. “And the Jewish fellas in the unit talk. You can’t get real Kosher in the army, but don’t eat the beans, they got salt pork in ‘em.”
Erik nodded soberly. He probably would have taken a bullet for Steve Rogers just then.
JUST NOTICED LAST NIGHT THAT BUCKY WAS ALSO ON A DRIP IN THE ENTIRE CHAIR SCENE
I know it’s a fucked up scene, I do, but that to me just is nOPE. What the fuck are they putting into his system on top of the mind wiping and the physical abuse and the conditioning.
wait, what?
THE TUBE ON THE BACK OF HIS RIGHT HAND, IS THAT A DRIP?
Dr. Cyan calling in here, and yes, that is absolutely a peripheral IV cannula on his right hand. Watching the scene carefully you can see the IV stand on his right, with two infusion bags attached (sorry for the crappy images, maybe someone can grab a better screenshot if they have the DVD):
If you watch frame by frame, you can see that Bucky pops the connection tube off when he attacks the med tech; it dangles freely from the IV bag when the guards move to point their guns at him. In real life he’d probably have torn the cannula out of his hand entirely; it happens all the time with little old ladies in my ER so I was disappointed the directors didn’t draw on that particular body horror/’ouch’-factor here.
The infusion bags appear to be one 1,000 mL isotonic saline or D5W/D5NS (dextrose/glucose in a saline solution) for tissue rehydration, and one 500 mL isotonic saline, most likely a diluent for injectable/parenteral drug administration:
Which drug? Well, it could be any HYDRA concoction, but I’d put my money on the tried-and-true fallback of some benzodiazepine. BZDs/derivatives are anxiolytic (anxiety-reducing), hypnotic (sedative/sleep-inducing), anticonvulsant (good for when you’re electrocuting someone’s brain), amnestic (affecting memory), and myorelaxant (muscle-relaxing), a nice cocktail for working with the Winter Soldier – and hey! paradoxical BZD reactions include aggression and violence (such as attacking attending medical staff), and it may also cause anterograde amnesia as well as internalised feelings of turmoil, anxiety, depression, and loss of the ability to experience and/or express feelings. Plus, withdrawal can cause depression, depersonalisation, derealisation, hypersensitivity, psychosis, and suicidal ideation – sounds like a lot of Bucky-in-from-the-cold fanfics, am I right?
Seriously, writing this, I’m wondering where the withdrawal!Bucky fanfics are – the fics I’ve read all focus on his mental issues, but what about the physiological ones? I’d really like to read a fic about Bucky coming off whatever HYDRA pumped him full of – now that’d make for some neat hurt/comfort (and a lot of curling up on Steve’s bathroom floor shaking and puking his guts out).
(When I get my hands on a HD copy of the movie I’ll have a look at the rest of the medical setup in that scene. I’m especially interested in the screens behind the chair – maybe some more medical meta to be explored? Please send any screenshots my way if you have them!)
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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