I’ve been giving serious—perhaps too serious—consideration to the leitmotif of brainwashing that runs throughout Ed Brubaker’s Captain America stories. Brainwashing and mind control are sturdy genre tropes, of course, and that’s basically how I’d thought Brubaker was using them up until this most recent issue, #30, when I began to suspect that there may be more at work here. There has to be right? Because every member of Cap’s supporting cast—Sharon Carter, Bucky—is under some form of mind control. The Red Skull has taken over the mind and body of his one-time partner in crime Aleksander Luskin. The Skull’s own daughter, Sin, recently broke free of the normative, well adjusted persona that the folks at SHIELD has constructed for her and re-discovered her “true” self, sadism and nihilism and all.
That list leaves out the Falcon, of course, but not really. Though the Falcon began his career as a civic-minded social worker turned crime-fighter, 70s-era Cap writer Steve Engelhart revealed/retconned that the Falcon had once been a thuggish ne’er-do-well named “Snap” Wilson, and that his heroic personality was created by the Red Skull (using, of course, the cosmic cube), who molded him into a good-natured sleeper agent in one of many nefarious anti-Captain America plans. (More info on this here.) Yes, he cast off the Skull’s control but kept the straight-laced hero personality. (Although if I recall correctly a series of back-ups in Captain America during the DeMatteis/Zeck era established that Falc’s heroic self was closer to his “real” self than his Snap persona; DeMatties was probably sensitive to the fact that Marvel’s first African American hero seemed only to be heroic because a white supremacist made him that way.)
“Battle of wills” is a well worn cliche for describing the struggle between a hero and a villain. But I wonder if Brubaker is playing with the implications of that phrase a bit. We expect villains, especially those like the Red Skull or Darkseid who have their roots in some version of totalitarianism, to treat their supporting players and henchmen as mere extensions of themselves, articulations of their will. But the dark truth at the heart of these stories may be that Cap works that way, too (or did when he was alive), if maybe less deliberately. Recall that the Winter Soldier only got his “Bucky” memories back when Cap ordered him to—an order he facilitated by using the cosmic cube, the same device the Red Skull used to make “Snap” Wilson into the high-flying, heroic Falcon. Yes, I know that Cap was restoring Bucky’s “real” self and the Skull was creating a false Sam (at least in the terms of Engelhart’s story), but the parallels are striking. And really, when you’re dealing with the cosmic cube, who knows what you’re really getting?
We’re used to thinking about Cap inspiring those around him, not terrorizing them like the Red Skull does; but, Brubaker’s stories ask, Is the effect really so different? It’s a darker view of the relationship between a hero and his supporting players than the “family” paradigm so familiar from classic DC anthology titles—Superman Family, Batman Family. And it’s a lot closer to the way that Randall Dowling’s powers are described in Warren Ellis’ Planetary: a Mr. Fantastic analog, he stretches not his body but his mind, worming his way into the minds of others until they become a part of him without their even knowing it.
So it’s interesting to note that, now that Cap is dead, his supporting players seem to have fallen under the sway of the next most powerful personality—the Skull. Faustus has wormed his way into Sharon Carter’s noggin (which I guess he technically did while Cap was still alive, since she’s the one who shot him—um, spoilers for a months-old story, by the way), and in the most recent issue the Red Skull shuts Bucky down by using a “shutdown code” left over from his days as a brainwashed Soviet cyborg assassin. (By the way, Ed Brubaker, I still believe most of this but I’ve pretty much made peace with it since I think your Cap stories kind of rock.) And now Dr. Faustus seems to be getting his hooks into him too.
The implication here is that Cap and the Skull are truly the only important personalities, the only important selves; everyone else in the book is just a proxy for one man or the other. For Sharon and Bucky (and we’ll see what happens with the Falcon), identity is not only flexible and permeable but completely fluid and beyond their control. Their individuality is something they only get to express when the primary figures, the ones with will, aren’t paying attention.
I don’t know if this is something that Brubaker is deliberately weaving into his stories, or if all these implications about will and identity are merely incidental. He’s got Milla mind-controlled over in Daredevil, too, so maybe it’s just a reliable genre element for him. But Brubaker is a smart writer, and I think he’s bound to be hip to the larger ramifications of this sort of story in the pages of Captain America, a hero who, as previous writers have observed, can slip easily from inspiring people to a new understanding of democratic principles to inspiring them to slavish obedience.
Past Cap material on PrettyFakes:
“America is a Piece of Trash!”
Cap and Assistant Editors Month.
The Trouble with Bucky.
Complicity, History, and Captain America #292.
On Priest and Brubaker.
The Last Time Captain America Died
Prof, how great would it be if the “battle of wills” thing you outline actually did come out of the subtext for some climactic issue or other? What you’ve described here is practically a note-perfect Satanic soliloquy of just the type the Skull would love to uncork on his old enemy; good fodder for a Seventies-style questioning/reassumption of identity in the Englehart Cap vein, and in these post-Alan Moore days of a thousand and one superficially-compelling Villainous Justification speeches I would love to see a truly thoughtful attack on heroic self-worth such as this!
I do believe you’re right, and it’s in there somewhere. Has to be. Well, it’s the Cosmic Cube, isn’t it?
Well-spotted as always.
Thanks, Plok. You know, I think in every previous Cap-and-the-Cosmic-Cube story, the whole point is that Cap resists using the Cube because Free Will Is Important, etc; it’s what separates him from the Red Skull and others. And yet here we have him giving in and using it—with good intentions, of course, but one wonders about first steps down the road to hell…
Prof., I’m amazed at the parallels you’ve drawn between the Skull and Cap. Here is my question: is Brubaker drawing parallels between the authoritarian state of 2007 American democracy—i.e., forcing the “freedom” belief down the throats of others (“we will be greeted as liberators“) and that of fascistic, dictatorial regimes?
In other words, is he saying that freedom not chosen is not freedom at all, but simply another form of control?
I’m digging where you’re going with this, gorj—I think you’re right that there’s a global-political subtext here about how freedom, democracy, all the ideals of America have simply become window-dressing for an ideology that is in fact utterly opposed to those values.
Not quite on the same subject, but my brain just made a leap to an indelible image by Kevin O’Neill from an issue of Marshal Law—an American warplane on a bombing run, with its underside painted with the image of Christ on the cross—his arms the wings, etc. At the time I thought that was a little extreme, but these days it seems startlingly apt.
Do you think that its possible that he’s trying to paint that Cap with a few tweaks could actually become the Red Skull? That with his good intentions taken to the extreme he could very well have endorsed the actions that his most hated nemesis carried out? I think it’d be worth reading.
As far as the current political strife goes, it seems more orwellian to me than anything…ORDO AB CHAO. But I’m truly off the beaten path on most of these things.
I read a good Spider-man comic at lunch. It was all about him wanting to give up and turn himself in so that MJ and Aunt May wouldn’t be in danger anymore, all about his early realtionship with Mary Jane and what it means to be married and so on. Good comic…Sensational Spider-Man Annual 2007. It’s probably been out a while, but its good anyway. I got the first two issues of the new Thor book. We’ll see how it goes. I never cared about Asgard and all that, but we’ll see…I’m not sure why i think I’ll like it now.
Not Cap, I should say, but America...after all, the whole idea is that Cap’s struggle against evil/willingness to grow and change is always the American spirit’s struggle against/with the same things, right?
This is making me re-evaluate Brubaker’s run quite a bit now, actually…
Might I point out that whenever the Cosmic Cube has shown up in Cap, the danger is that not just desire but memory will supersede reality?
Oh yeah, it’s neat!
When I read your post a day or two ago I thought of Faust and Mephistopheles or maybe more like Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Or maybe just the Yin-yang of our own souls. It certainly seems to have that form to it, doesn’t it? plok’s and gorjus’ thoughts are quite interesting.
Ah yes, that’s a good point, Plok. The most recent example I can think of is from the first Waid/Garney arc a few years back—with Cube in hand, new tough-as-nails black-ops Sharon Carter turns briefly into classic Kirby (or Buscema?) Sharon Carter—not just in dress/hair but in the very art style. It’s not just memory on Cap’s part but nostalgia—an even more insidious temptation. Reforming a society based on idealized versions of its past is usually a recipe for disaster.
Of course, it’s interesting that the Bucky that Brubaker gives us is a decidedly un-nostalgic Bucky; he’s not the teenaged firecracker of, say, Nicieza and Maguire’s Cap origin mini-series from the 1990s.
I really enjoyed reading this days ago when it was first posted but wasn’t sure how to frame a comment. My initial thought was “I should start reading comics again.” But the less visceral response was to consider this in relation to other conversations I have been having lately, namely discussions about weakness of will. What does it mean and how is it possible to have weakness of will? Its a problem that stretches all the way back to Plato. I can’t say much about current discussion on the topic; it involves a lot of stuff about from philosophy of mind and cognitive science. But I know that the early moderns had huge debates about this stuff. Hobbes, for instance, denied that there was such a thing as weakness of will or even, amazingly, free will. But, his position is surprisingly simple and mechanistic; the will is simply that thing which drives us to action, to say that our will is free is to imply that our will behaves in some way separate from the person who wills it.
Anyway, I think the discussion is fascinating, especially when we relate it to the current political environment.