Significant to this role is Captain America’s ability to connect the political projects of American nationalism, internal order, and foreign policy (all formulated at the national or global scale) with the scale of the individual, or body. The character of Captain America connects these scales by literally embodying American identity, presenting for readers a hero both of, and for, the nation.
– Jason Dittmer (2005: 627)
I.
Despite being known as ‘the First Avenger’, Captain America aka Steve Rogers was actually the last of the Avengers Prime to receive an origin film in the MCU in the form of Joe Johnston’s Captain America: The First Avenger, the penultimate film in Marvel’s ambitious Phase One. While this was Captain America’s first onscreen appearance, his arrival had been foreshadowed on several occasions: both in Iron Man with the Easter egg of his iconic red, white and blue shield hidden in the background of Tony Stark’s workshop, in Iron Man 2 with Stark’s casual use of the shield as an impromptu wedge during one of his many experiments, but also in the inclusion of a variation of the Super Soldier Serum in The Incredible Hulk. Stark’s disrespectful use of Captain America’s symbolic weapon anticipates the conflict which will be depicted between the two in The Avengers, continues in Avengers: Age of Ultron and comes to a dramatic climax in Captain America: Civil War, where Captain America’s irony-free patriotism and old-fashioned values are shown to be far removed from the acerbic wit, scepticism and moral flexibility of a character like Tony Stark. The creation of Iron Man and the Hulk, as we have seen, has been updated many times over the decades, but Steve Rogers has always remained a product of World War II and his origin is so firmly associated with the conflict that it is unlikely that it could ever be successfully altered. His connection to the enduring mytho-poetic resonance of World War II, a conflict which Cynthia Webber explained produces a ‘rich vein of moral certainties that the United States mines at moments of its greatest moral uncertainty’ (2006: 29), might have been why Thomas Foster regarded the character as the perfect antidote to twenty-first-century cynicism. He suggested it was ‘precisely this immediate symbolic burden, this allegorical flatness and lack of psychological depth, and this lack of distance between character and nation, that make Captain America a perfect 9/11 icon for a culture dominated by cynical reason’ (2005: 262). When Captain America was ‘killed’ in the comic books in 2007, fan reaction was mixed to say the least and Joe Simon, his original co-creator stated, ‘It’s a hell of a time for him to go. We really need him now’ (qtd. in Shapiro 2011; emphasis added). The ‘now’ to which Simon refers are the turbulent first decades of the new millennium and it is fitting then that both Marvel Studios and the diegetic universe of the MCU turned to Captain America once again in one such real-world era of ‘moral uncertainty’. The return to more traditional forms of masculinity had been called for, as we have already noted, by the likes of Peggy Noonan and Kim DuToit who regarded 9/11 as something of a wake-up call for all that had gone wrong in America in the second half of the twentieth century, and there could be no better example of this than Captain America, who has been an enduring and iconic figure in the world of comic books and popular culture since his first appearance on 10 March 1941, where he was famously pictured on the front cover punching Adolf Hitler and fighting Nazis nine months before Pearl Harbor and America’s entry into World War II (see Noonan 2001; DuToit n.d.). Nicholas Yanes’ description of him as ‘the meridian example of pro-war attitudes in World War 2 era comic books’ (2009: 53) is an apt one for a character who was originally explicitly created to function as a propagandistic figure both inside and outside of the panels of the original comic book. Jack Kirby, the other person responsible for the creation of Cap, said that he ‘was created for a time that needed noble figures’ (qtd. in Goulart 1993: 4). In fact, alongside Superman there has been no more potent symbol of what many perceive as quintessential American values than Captain America in popular culture and the character has also been described as ‘the ideological center of the Marvel universe’ (Costello 2009: 66). Even the very weapon that he uses and the costume he wears function as synechdocal emblems of these values: the use of a defensive shield instead of an offensive weapon is symbolic of Captain America’s, and by extension America’s, enduring belief in its role of the protector of liberty and defender of innocents around the globe. It is for these very reasons that Jason Dittmer (2012) considers Captain America (and other heroes like him) as superlative examples of ‘nationalist superheroes’ because of their pronounced connection to and an embodiment of the values of the country they were created in and come to represent. This has been viewed very critically by some: John McTiernan, who, in his own way, contributed more than most in the 1980s to the evolution of modern action cinema through films like Die Hard (1988) and Predator (1987), denounced the superhero genre, and in particular Captain America, in an interview with the French edition of Premiere in July 2016: ‘Captain America, I’m not joking…The cult of American hyper-masculinity is one of the worst things to have happened to the world during the last fifty years. Hundreds of thousands of people have died because of this idiotic delusion. So how is it possible to watch a film called Captain America?!’ (qtd. in West 2016).
While the integration of the fantastical character of Thor into the predominantly ‘real world’ diegetic narratives of the MCU proved a challenge, reconciling such an iconic figure of World War II like Captain America, one often associated with jingoistic patriotism and American triumphantalism, to the post-9/11 era was perhaps an even greater one. Unlike the starkly drawn moral binaries that World War II has provided storytellers with in the decades since, in recent years the United States has been viewed with much more scrutiny around the globe and so when the puny Steve Rogers, yet to become Captain America, says ‘I don’t want to kill anyone, I don’t like bullies I don’t care where they are from’, it is an ironic suggestion for international audiences in an era in which America is regarded by some as the ‘bully of the free world’ (see Wills 1999) and by others as the biggest threat to global peace (see Huntingdon 1999). Thus, John Shelton Lawrence and Robert Jewett were right to ask the question, writing prior to the release of the film but after 9/11, in a foreword to Captain America Complex: The Dilemma of Zealous Nationalism, what direction or relevance the character might have after the events of 11 September 2001: ‘Since Captain America’s writers traditionally compelled him to engage in the discourses of power within his eras, consider the strong implications of his playing a role in the Global War on Terrorism. Remaining true to his own character, as well as the genre conventions, how could he fight in this war?’ (2003: v). They use the term ‘the Captain America Complex’ to define the complicated relationship between American national self-identification processes and foreign policy, indicating that the phrase encompasses ‘the uneasy fusion of two kinds of roles. Should America be the “city set upon a hill” that promotes the rule of law even when faced with difficult adversaries? Or should it crusade on the military plane of battle, allowing no law or institution to impede its efforts to destroy evil?’ (2003: xiii).
Joe Johnston’s Captain America: The First Avenger consciously strives to avoid the problematic and divisive politics of the post-9/11 era by setting the majority of its narrative, apart from a brief prologue and epilogue, during World War II. Yet this itself causes a range of complex issues about how its vision of the war is constructed from very modern perspectives. In spite of the presence of fantastical elements like HYDRA, the Tesseract and the Red Skull, its World War II is one very familiar to American audiences and one which has been routinely recreated in American films since Sands of Iwo Jima, through Saving Private Ryan and more recently Fury, films which have dramatised World War II as it would like to be remembered by American culture at large rather than, in any meaningful sense, how it actually was. These films construct a ‘good war’ fought by the ‘greatest generation’ in which US forces are unambiguously heroic and moral, and the Axis forces of Germany, Japan and Italy are unquestionably evil, in a mythic conflict in which America wins almost alone and sacrifices a great deal for very little in return. In Captain America: The First Avenger the war is won because, as Colonel Chester Philips (Tommy Lee Jones) states, ‘General Patton has said that wars are fought with weapons but they are won by men. We are going to win this war, because we have the best men.’ But, as many historians have argued, this is very far from the truth. In actual fact, the most critical aspect of US power was
an economic base that staggered its opponents. Germany and Japan could boast of considerable productive prowess, all the more impressive for an ability to function under tremendous pressure from encroaching enemies. And German as well as Japanese soldiers were typically at least the equal of any the United States sent into battle. (Many observers consider their army with which Germany invaded the Soviet Union, an ally it turned on in 1941, the finest the world has ever seen.) But neither the Japanese nor the Germans could withstand the seemingly bottomless ability of the United States to supply not only itself, but its allies, with whatever it took to win. By 1943, most informed leaders of both Germany and Japan knew they were doomed simply because they could not compete with the seemingly bottomless US capacity for war-making. (Cullen 2017: 6)
Yet this military and capacity is not mythopoetic enough for American identity politics and comments like Colonel Phillips’ are platitudes which have become transmogrified into facts in the cultural imaginary and embodied in fictional American soldiers like Sgt. John M. Stryker (John Wayne) in Sands of Iwo Jima, Captain Virgil Hilts (Steve McQueen) in The Great Escape (1963), Captain John H. Miller (Tom Hanks) in Saving Private Ryan, and Sergeant Don ‘Wardaddy’ Collier (Brad Pitt) in Fury. In these films, and many like them, total military and economic dominance is metamorphosed into narratives about plucky soldiers outgunned and outmanned, but never outfought. As Marilyn Young has stated, the war is understood ‘as a long, valiant struggle that the United States fought pretty much on its own, winning an exceptionally clean victory that continues to redeem Americans under arms anywhere, at any point in history’ (2005: 178), whereas in actual fact it might be more truthful to assert, as Jim Cullen did, that the United States ‘risked the least and gained the most from World War II’ (2017: xix). Several writers have criticised this simplistic depiction of World War II and argued that films like Saving Private Ryan have endorsed and reconsolidated an alluring vision of a ‘just war’ and American altruism which led Debra Ramsay to assert that Spielberg’s film offers a ‘nostalgic view of the Greatest Generation [which] cannot be separated from nostalgia for the war itself’ (2015: 98). The First Avenger does something comparable, rewriting the war in a range of compelling and affective ways, primarily by viewing the conflict through the prism of the twenty-first century in its portrayal of harmonious multicultural communities, American beneficence and moral superiority. In doing so it joins the ranks of a multitude of American films which erase and misremember those unpalatable aspects of the war, in a process which James Berger described as the elision of ‘the actual and evident imperfections of American history’ (1999: 134), offering instead another example of the ‘mythic massage’ that popular media texts are able to perform in their appropriation of cultural memory (Lawrence and Jewett 2002: 116).
II.
The First Avenger begins in June 1943, eighteen months after the attacks on Pearl Harbor, with the diminutive Steve Rogers (Chris Evans) desperate to join the armed forces and serve his country, but finding himself rejected again and again due to his slight frame and numerous health problems. Steve is inspired to join up because he knows it is the right thing to do and that everyone is doing their bit. A newsreel announcer declares, ‘War continues to ravage Europe but help is on the way. Every able-bodied young man is lining up to serve his country…Our brave boys are showing the Axis powers that the price of freedom is never too high.’ Rogers wants to join the 107th Infantry like his father before him who fought in World War I, and it is the unit recently joined by his best friend James ‘Bucky’ Barnes (Sebastian Stan). The film gives us thirty minutes with this ‘skinny Steve’ before he becomes Captain America, but it is important for audiences that he always remains ‘skinny Steve’ at heart, not just in this film but throughout his future appearances in the MCU. It is this determination, earnestness and sense of duty that brings him to the attention of Dr Abraham Erskine (Stanley Tucci) at the World Exposition of Tomorrow who signs him up for the experimental Super Soldier programme, which goes by the name of Operation Rebirth, that finally gives him the opportunity to serve his country.
Steve Rogers, even prior to becoming Captain America, embodies the belief that World War II was a noble war fought for justice and freedom, not a complicated geopolitical enterprise of conflicting rivalry, land, influence and economic interests. This socio-political reality has become progressively diluted into the public’s understanding of a war in which the US was a beacon of liberty, standing up for freedom, both for itself and for those around the globe and the Axis powers were categorically evil, each with designs to enslave the world. In a quiet dialogue exchange at Camp Lehigh where Steve is being trained, the German exile Erskine tells Steve, ‘Hitler uses his fantasies to inspire his followers…with the marching and the big show and the flags’, speaking to a man who will, very soon, inspire his own nation…while wearing a flag on his shield and a large ‘A’ on his head in what Brian Hack memorably described as a ‘eugenic makeover’ (2009: 80). Erskine speaks to particular American fantasies of beneficent power being used only for good and the enduring paradox of the USA desirous of seeing itself simultaneously as the world’s number one and a plucky underdog. While Captain America is undoubtedly being created as an offensive weapon in the war, the process is referred to as a defensive one and ‘the first step on the path to peace’. Erskine persuades the reluctant Colonel Philips to choose Steve Rogers, among all the potential recruits, ‘Because a strong man who has known power all his life may lose respect for that power, but a weak man knows the value of strength’. Erskine is framed very much like Yinsen Ho in the caves of Afghanistan in Iron Man, right down to the similarity of their deathbed pleas: in place of Yinsen’s ‘earn this’ Erskine silently points at Steve’s heart, reminding him of their conversation: ‘Stay who you are, not a perfect soldier but a good man.’ However, unlike Stark and despite his diminutive status, Steve was already heroic before his physical transformation in Project Rebirth, which significantly enhances his physical characteristics, but leaves his essential qualities of goodness and decency exactly the same. So, although Steve is a more traditional form of masculine hero, even in the 1940s he embodies aspects of the new man archetype in his sensitivity and emotional vulnerability.
Captain America’s antagonist in The First Avenger is his most famous and enduring one, the Red Skull, one of the most literal examples of the dark mirror referred to in the previous chapters. The Red Skull retrieves the powerful Tesseract from the town of Tønsberg in Norway (which had briefly featured in Thor) and, with the help of his colleague Arnim Zola (Toby Jones), proceeds to transform it into a weapon of mass destruction (WMD). Even though Hugo Weaving delivers a charismatic performance, the Red Skull is a pantomime-like villain who would not have been out of place in Captain America comics circa 1941 and a disappointingly one-dimensional villain after the Machiavellian allure of Tom Hiddlestone’s Loki in Thor. In an effort to depoliticise the film, Nazis are almost entirely erased from its narrative, aside from a few brief mentions, and Cap is shown to fight against the less politically sensitive HYDRA throughout the film instead, which prompted German film critic Robert Cherkowski to suggest that the film dramatises ‘the last just war in which the US took part. But even this war…is still depoliticized and played out in the fields of fantasy…[and does not] show a single swastika’ (n.d.). Whether this is done with an eye on the international box office is hard to discern, but in some countries (for example Russia, Ukraine and South Korea) the film was released only as The First Avenger rather than Captain America: The First Avenger. What the film does imply is that if a pure of heart American participates in Erskine’s experiments his innate sense of goodness will create an altruistic hero, but if a German does it he will emerge as abhorrently evil, conveniently ignoring how close Captain America fits the image of an Aryan ideal himself. This potent image and Erskine’s earlier comment about ‘the marching and the big show and the flags’ is dramatically realised in the film’s two-and-a-half-minute United Service Organisations (USO)-themed musical number accompanying David Zippel and Alan Menken’s Irving Berlinesque ‘The Star Spangled Man’ which wittily evokes both the wartime musicals of the era like Yankee Doodle Dandy (1942) and The All-Star Bond Rally (1945), and at the same time reproduces early Captain America iconography: from the changing shapes of his shield to showing him punch Hitler in the face on the stage replete with children interacting with the show as if it were a pantomime calling to Cap, ‘He’s behind you!’
Captain America’s involvement with the USO had been instigated by Senator Brandt (Michael Brandon), chronologically the first in a long line of self-serving politicians in the MCU (see also Stern in Iron Man 2 and Senator Christian Ward in Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.) offering him a different way to contribute to the war effort with the question, ‘Son, do you want to serve your country on the most important battlefield in the war?’ This battlefield is not fighting Nazis overseas as Steve had originally hoped, but as part of the USO selling war bonds to the public. The musical number intercuts Steve holding babies and signing autographs with images of both children and G.I.s reading comics about his exploits. In 1942 a remarkable fifteen million comics a week were sold across the United States, a level of popularity that has never been approximated since (see Wright 2003: 31). Brandt’s aid explains to Steve, ‘You sell a few bonds, bonds buy bullets…bullets kill Nazis, bang bang boom!’, but the film portrays Steve’s participation in the process as distinctly unmasculine and even shameful. Steve is informed that bond sales are boosted by ten percent in every city he visits, an achievement in itself, but still Colonel Phillips refers to him dismissively as a ‘chorus girl’ and Agent Peggy Carter, with whom by now he has fallen in love, sees him as ‘a dancing monkey’. However, the centrality of the sale of war bonds to the US war effort is hard to underestimate; between 1941 and 1945 World War II cost the United States government in excess of $250 billion, approximately forty-five percent of which was paid for by taxes with the rest being raised in eight separate war bond drives sold to eighty-five million people (see Kimble 2006). The implication being that the only way for a real man to serve one’s country is by killing its enemies, ignoring, as Hollywood films have done for decades, the hard work and sacrifices of many millions of civilians during the conflict. The sequence ends with Rogers taking the USO tour to Azzano in Italy in November 1943 and performing for servicemen from the 107th infantry, the unit he had earlier aspired to join, who prove to be not as enamoured with him as the children and young women stateside were; they even throw fruit at him, yelling ‘Nice boots Tinkerbell!’
Fig. 10: Captain America (Chris Evans) is a synechdocal figure representative of what are regarded as quintessential American values in Captain America: The First Avenger (2011)
The Azzano sequence is noteworthy for other reasons too, as in the crowd and also in subsequent missions, it is clear to see that the vision of the US army during World War II The First Avenger wishes to project is one of a desegregated military with white and black soldiers serving alongside one another. Nearly a million African-Americans joined the armed forces in World War II in a variety of capacities but they served entirely separately, had separate training facilities and even had separate blood supplies (see Wynn 2010; Controvich 2015). The only black soldiers fighting in Europe at this time were segregated including the famous Buffalo Soldiers of the 92nd Infantry Division who fought in Italy from 1944 until the end of the war. This is not the only time the film shows such scenes of racial harmony, which conveniently ignores or erases the unpalatable realities of the African-American experience of World War II, as have the majority of films about the conflict, as earlier in the film black and white Americans are shown sharing recruitment stations, and black and white children are shown happily playing on the streets together. Charles M. Blow, writing in The New York Times stated, ‘But as I watched the scenes of a fictitious integrated American Army fighting in Europe at the end of World War II, I became unsettled. Yes, I know that racial revisionism has become so common in film that it’s almost customary, so much so that moviegoers rarely balk or even blink’ (2011).
Later when Cap forms his elite unit, the Howling Commandoes, it features an African-American, Private Gabriel ‘Gabe’ Jones and a Japanese-American, Private James ‘Jim’ Morita, who we are informed served in the US Army Nisei Squadron. While a considerable number of Japanese-Americans fought during World War II they were forbidden from being deployed in the Pacific Theatre, whereas no such restrictions were placed on Italian-Americans or German-Americans who fought on the Western Front, and all Japanese-American men not in the armed forces were automatically given 4C status as an ‘enemy alien’. Around 110,000 Japanese-Americans were interned by the United States government due to fears of anti-American activities and sabotage, an act President Reagan later apologised for as part of the Civil Liberies Act of 1988 when Congress stated that the internment was a decision based on ‘race prejudice, war hysteria, and a failure of political leadership’ and ordered reparations paid to every surviving internee. This mistreatment of both African-Americans and Japanese-Americans is entirely erased from the film and even when implied it is treated as something of a joke. On being rescued from a HYDRA cell he is being held in with Jim Norita, Timothy ‘Dum Dum’ Dugan turns to the Asian-American with a look of suspicion on his face and asks, ‘What, are we taking everybody?’ to which Norita replies, ‘I’m from Fresno, ace’. The seemingly offhand choice of Fresno is also an intriguing one which may or may not be coincidental, but in 1942 North Fresno was the location of the Pinedale Assembly Centre, an interim facility for the relocation of Japanese-Americans to internment camps and perhaps somewhere to which Morita’s family and friends could have been sent. These unpleasant truths about World War II offer conspicuous challenges to how it has come to be remembered, as an unambiguous war for freedom fought by all Americans as equals. Dugan’s reaction is one of the more truthful moments in a film set in an era when Japanese characters in comics were routinely caricatured with fangs, buckteeth, hunched backs, and drawn with yellow skin.1 There could have been a scene in The First Avenger in which Captain America protests about the racial inequality of his era, where he advocates his support of the Double-V campaign (the drive to promote for equality for African-Americans in the US) or protests against the incarceration of Japanese-Americans, but the film chooses to ignore these aspects of American history, instead presenting us with a vision of the ‘good old days’ which never really existed outside of film, literature and our collective imagination.2 The First Avenger might only be a fantasy film but it is symptomatic of an American cultural attitude to history and how Americans use the past to create meaning in the present, while at the same time as using the present to images of the past (see Rosenzweig and Thelen 1998). The years between 1942 and 1945 are remembered as a period when the United States was fighting for freedom around the globe, but the fact that it was, at the same time, subjugating large sections of its own people becomes largely forgotten, because such facts do not easily reconcile with the vision America has created of itself.
Fig. 11: The racial diversity featured in Captain America: The First Avenger is one of many examples of how American cinema, according to Bazin, has historically refused to portray American society as it is, but rather ‘just as it wanted to see itself’
After he fails to save his best friend Bucky on one of their missions, an act which will return in consequential ways in Captain America: The Winter Soldier, Cap redoubles his efforts to destroy the HYDRA bases all over Europe. When he comes face to face with the Red Skull in the final base in the Swiss Alps, the Skull asks him, ‘What makes you so special?’ and his answer is very revealing, ‘Nothing…I’m just a kid from Brooklyn’. It is imperative that Cap, despite his prodigious talents, remains identified as an ordinary person with the implication that anyone, were they virtuousness and hardworking enough, could have been in his place: a more powerful evocation of the American dream would be hard to find, as Jackson Sutliff concurred, describing him as ‘the American dream made flesh’ (2009: 121). When he discovers that the Red Skull has used the Tesseract to construct WMDs which are aimed at Chicago, Boston and New York, Cap manages to destroy the first two but the one directed at New York remains stuck in the HYDRA ship, the Valkyrie. In an act of supreme self-sacrifice, he elects to pilot the ship into the ground in order to prevent thousands of civilians being killed. In scenes which have been read as evoking the events of 9/11, on the radio with Peggy, Cap says, ‘This thing’s moving too fast and it’s heading for New York…There’s not gonna be a safe landing but I can try and force it down.’ Sukhdev Sandhu, writing in The Telegraph, wrote that, ‘Only towards the end is there a whiff of genuine terror: a scene in which an aeroplane heading for New York plummets to earth briefly revives disconcerting memories of United 93’ (2011). It is interesting that Sandhu equates the sequence not to 11 September 2001 or the crash of Flight United 93, but Paul Greengrass’s film, United 93 (2006). It is not that director Joe Johnston deliberately recreates the scene from the earlier film or perhaps even that he was self-consciously comparing the two events, but that notions of heroic sacrifice for the good of the nation act as the very apex of heroic masculinity now as much as they did during World War II. Like Thor at the climax of his film and Iron Man at the climax of his, Steve elects to voluntarily give up his life for the greater good, as this is what American heroes do. As in United 93 the moment of impact is too traumatic to bear witness to, so The First Avenger cuts directly to 8 May 1945 and the V.E. Day celebrations suggesting Cap’s sacrifice, and those of many like him, was not in vain.
The film concludes with a brief but resonant coda, as Rogers is shown to wake up in what appears to be a small room in 1940s New York with a seemingly live baseball game playing on the radio revealing that, yet again, the MCU has offered audiences a heroic sacrifice which does not end in an actual sacrifice. But it seems wrong to Steve: there is something odd about the nurse’s behaviour and he informs the audience that he had attended that baseball game in person. Suspecting foul play, he runs onto the streets of New York outside…only to find himself not in 1945, but 2011. The rest of Captain America’s appearances in the MCU will be in the modern era and his struggle to reconcile himself to the differences between the two will be the central dramatic arc for his character. Until then the goals of Captain America and the government he was working for were one and the same, Colonel Phillips had been hard on him but they had shared a clearly defined mission, to defeat the Nazis and HYDRA. The modern world, as portrayed in the MCU, is shown to be, on the surface at least, much more complicated and even his friends and colleagues like Tony Stark, Nick Fury and Black Widow frequently display ambiguous moral compasses. The film ends with a close up of his face, now ninety-three but having not aged a day, cast adrift in a world in which everything he knew has been taken from him. He utters just a single understated line and one of the most human moments of the MCU thus far: ‘I had a date…’
Notes
1 Somewhat revealingly the actor playing Jim Morita, Kenneth Choi, is not of Japanese but of Korean descent. However, given the relative paucity of roles for Asian-Americans in American film and television his career has been littered with films in which he plays not only Koreans, but both Chinese and Japanese characters: from his Fujimoto in Harsh Times (2005), Chester Ming in The Wolf of Wall Street (2013), to Henry Lin in Sons of Anarchy (FX, 2008–14) and Judge Lance Ito in The People v. O. J. Simpson: American Crime Story (FX, 2016). Choi reappeared in Spider-Man: Homecoming as Principal Morita, with a picture of what one presumes to be either his father or his grandfather, James, in his office.
2 Just as the film struggles to reconcile its twenty-first-century view of race from the 1940s by erasing it from the film, The First Avenger raises and then refuses to explicitly mention the Holocaust in its narrative. For many contemporary Americans, the Holocaust now counterfactually has been altered from a difficult-to-process fact learned during and after the war to now being one of the reasons the war was fought for in the cultural imaginary and ‘like the story of D-Day a central part of [the American] victory narrative and celebration’ (Bodnar 2010: 221). It is alluded to in Captain America: The First Avenger in a newspaper headlines read ‘Nazis retake Zhitomir’ in an allusion to the Zhitomir Pogrom. Dr Erskine is never confirmed to be Jewish but the death of his family in Dachau in 1937 is mentioned in the MCU comic book Captain America: The First Vengeance (2011). It can also be seen in the reactions of an elderly couple when ‘skinny Steve’ visits a cinema where a disrespectful bully shouts at the newsreel. The couple are obviously visually coded coded as being Jewish and the film’s script describes the moment as ‘Steve looks across the aisle. A YOUNG WOMAN watches the screen, tears welling. She clearly has a man overseas. Across the aisle, a middle-aged Jewish couple looks somber’ (Markus and McFeely 2014: 13).