Sightlines · a reading
A Deleuzian reading of Captain America: The First Avenger
2011 · Joe Johnston · Captain America: The First Avenger on Sightlines
There's a long stretch in the middle of this movie where the hero is a chorus line.
Steve Rogers, newly enormous, gets handed a garish stage costume and sent out to sell war bonds. Painted backdrops roll past. There's a song-and-dance number. Months of touring compress into a few minutes of cutting. The strongest man in America is doing a show about the strongest man in America, and Joe Johnston holds on it long enough that you feel the gap open between the two.
That gap is the film. It's also where a few ideas from Gilles Deleuze stop being French and start being useful.
Deleuze split cinema down the middle. For its first sixty years it mostly ran on what he called the movement-image: someone perceives a situation, the situation presses on them, they act, and the act changes the situation. Perception flows into action with no gap. He called that the sensory-motor circuit, which is a clinical name for something you already know in your body — the hero does the thing, and the doing works. After 1945 a lot of serious cinema lost faith in that circuit. Characters began watching and enduring instead of acting, and time started being felt for itself rather than as the measure of somebody's movement. That's the time-image, and most of what we call art cinema lives there.
Captain America: The First Avenger is a restoration project. It rebuilds the movement-image in its most confident form, what Deleuze named the large form of the action-image: a global situation that keeps pressing until one decisive act transforms it. Situation, action, new situation. The war, HYDRA, the Alpine fortress, the Valkyrie. Deleuze's word for the milieu that generates the pressure is the encompasser, and Shelly Johnson's camera is built for it. Composed wide masters. Clean coverage. None of the shaky handheld that dominated action filmmaking in 2011. The film breathes the way old adventure pictures breathe, swinging between the vast space of the war and the taut single line of the mission cutting through it. Deleuze called that alternation respiration-space, and you can feel it in the way the Alps open out and then narrow to a corridor.
Why does that matter? Because almost nothing looked like this at the time. The prevailing action grammar was fragmented, and the prevailing superhero register was ironic. Johnston's specific invention, worked out twenty years earlier in The Rocketeer, is analog-futurism: a future as imagined from inside 1943, brass and vacuum tubes, weaponry drawn like storybook illustration. What he discovered is that sincerity becomes legible again if you move it into a period whose visual grammar already licensed it. Put an uncomplicated good man in a 2011 metropolis and he reads as stupid. Put him in front of Manchester's preserved brickwork standing in for Brooklyn and he reads as true.
Which brings the USO sequence back. What Rogers does on that stage is an old form Deleuze inherited from Eisenstein — the attraction-image, where action is transposed into spectacle rather than performed. He isn't fighting. He's figuring fighting, for a paying audience, in a costume, to raise money. And the posture he holds up there is what Deleuze, borrowing from Brecht, called the gest: a bodily attitude that exposes the social relation underneath it. The state needs a symbol more urgently than it needs a soldier. The costume says so before anyone does.
Here's the move that makes the film smarter than its genre. Deleuze thought postwar cinema fractured partly because filmmakers became conscious of clichés and could no longer deploy them straight. This film arrives at that consciousness early, stages its own cliché as a literal stage act, lets Rogers be humiliated by it, then walks him off the boards and into the war. The costume changes with him, from garish showpiece to functional combat uniform. It metabolizes its self-awareness in one sequence and spends the rest of the runtime having earned the right to mean what it says. That's rare. It's why the sincerity doesn't curdle.
The moral engine underneath is what Deleuze called the binomial, force against force. Erskine's line, that the serum amplifies everything inside, makes Rogers and Schmidt the same experiment run on different contents. The villain isn't the hero's opposite. He's the hero's process applied to worse material. And the film sorts its own inheritance along that same seam. Rogers gets warm Kodachrome ambers and Silvestri's brass march, a melody running straight back through Korngold's Adventures of Robin Hood: leitmotif heroism, unembarrassed. Schmidt gets cold steel-blue, the uncanny hum of Tesseract weapons, a face reduced to a skull. That's German expressionism, light and shadow charging objects with a life that isn't organic, quarantined inside the antagonist. American adventure cinema for the good guys, Weimar for the Nazis. The film knows its family tree and casts it.
The tree is wide. Raiders of the Lost Ark supplies the premise whole — Nazis chasing an occult super-weapon — plus the set-piece grammar to move it and the habit of staging villains as pulp menace instead of psychology. The Last Crusade supplies the mentor-and-relic structure and the treasure-hunt pull grafted onto WWII iconography. Johnston learned clean heroic silhouettes and effects marshaled to sell a lived-in world inside the Star Wars art department. And the USO number is Yankee Doodle Dandy repurposed, flag-draped homefront showmanship turned into a critique of itself.
Then the ending breaks the machine the film spent two hours building.
It's framed in the present day, which means the whole 1943 story has been a dated flashback — a recollection-image, a former present recalled. Except nobody is recalling it. Rogers goes into the ice and comes out with 1943 still running inside him, undiminished. Two presents coexist and neither cancels the other, which is closer to what Deleuze called peaks of present than to memory. The proof is the dance with Peggy. It was scheduled, not remembered. It sits in the film as a future promised in one present that can never be spent in the other. A movement-image film, almost pure, closing on a seam of time-image.
He won the war and lost the world the war was for.
What the film did to filmmaking is partly structural: it was the girder Phase One needed, the picture that made The Avengers possible, and it was popular enough that Peggy Carter walked out of it into a show of her own. But the larger thing it proved is that the confident action-image was still available to a mass audience, provided you gave it a period to live in.
What it leaves open is harder. Why was 1943 the only place American cinema in 2011 could put a good man? Watch the USO sequence again and notice what the film already suspects. The country wanted the costume. Rogers had to walk off the stage to become the thing the costume was advertising, and by the time he managed it his present was gone.
Concepts in play
- action-image-large-form — The encompassing WWII/HYDRA situation presses across the film until one decisive act — crashing the Valkyrie — transforms it; the screenplay is built as a classical origin story overlaid on a wartime mission narrative.
- the encompasser — Shelly Johnson's classical coverage — composed wide masters, clean coverage, deliberate avoidance of the handheld idiom — plus large-scale environment extension for the Alpine fortress, presenting the war as a milieu that calls the act forth.
- respiration-space — The film alternates vast milieu-space (Alpine fortress, the Valkyrie, period New York streetscapes) with the taut line of the mission, cut for spatial clarity rather than fragmentation.
- binomial — Erskine's premise that the serum 'amplifies everything inside' makes Rogers and Schmidt the same procedure with different contents — force against force, staged as hero and pulp-theatrical Red Skull.
- attraction-image — The USO montage: the transformed Rogers works as a costumed war-bond mascot in a diegetic song-and-dance number with changing backdrops — action transposed into staged spectacle rather than performed.
- the-gest — Rogers's stage posture in the garish costume exposes the social relation beneath it (the state needs a symbol, not a soldier); the costume's diegetic evolution from stage outfit to functional combat uniform is the film commenting on its own imagery.
- consciousness-of-cliches — The USO sequence stages the film's own patriotic cliché as a literal stage act — 'Captain America' as propaganda performer — and dramatizes the irony of symbol versus soldier before returning Rogers to sincere action.
- expressionism — HYDRA's cold steel-blues, the eerie Tesseract glow, the uncanny tonal signature of its energy weapons, brass-and-vacuum-tube ray-gun Gothic, and the digital/prosthetic skull-face reveal — things charged with non-organic life, quarantined in the villain.
- mnemosign / image-souvenir — The film opens and closes in the present day, turning the entire 1943 story into an extended flashback — a former present formally framed as recalled.
- series of time — Rogers survives frozen for decades, so 1943 persists undiminished inside the contemporary present; the planned dance with Peggy remains a promised future belonging to neither present, converting the triumphant ending into elegy.