Captain America: Brave New World · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

There is a lawn outside the White House where the cherry trees bloom, and Brave New World stages its climax there, among the blossoms, with a red thing tearing through them. Keep that image. The whole film lives in the seam it opens. For two acts this is a movie about men in rooms: the Oval Office, a retreat, corridors of state, hard key light on faces across a desk. Then the floor gives way and a septuagenarian movie star becomes a CG monster on the grass.

The rooms are where Julius Onah's real contribution is, and it's worth naming precisely, because franchise directors rarely get credited with an invention at all. Onah came to this from Luce, a chamber piece about a Black adoptee living under everyone's expectations, and he brought its method with him: two people, one room, a conversation whose stakes are who gets to be trusted. He builds a Captain America picture as a series of two-handers between Sam Wilson and a sitting President. A Black Captain America across a desk from the presidency, negotiating with it, finally opposing it. That's the strongest formal idea in the film. Nobody had staged the shield that way before.

Deleuze has a useful word for what the villain is actually attacking. In his account of the movement-image — ordinary cinema, where someone perceives a situation and acts to change it — the smallest working part is the mark: an object that means something because of the habit it sits inside. See the gun on the mantel, expect the shot. Marks are how a film gets from perception to action without stopping to think, and they're how we get through a day.

Samuel Sterns's scheme is an assault on exactly that. He conditions a man so that a cue fires and the body executes; Isaiah Bradley, the wronged super-soldier, attacks the President and is left horrified at himself. The device comes straight from The Manchurian Candidate (1962), which invented the sympathetic pawn programmed to kill on command. But put it in Deleuze's terms and something sharper appears: the sensory-motor circuit, the engine of every action picture ever made, running with nobody home. The action-image weaponized. That's a genuinely frightening idea, and it's the best thing in the script.

It also explains why Sam is the right hero for it. He has no inherited certainty; his gifts are diplomacy, doubt, and a wingsuit. Against an enemy who turns people into reliable machines, the useful hero is the one who hesitates. Deleuze calls that living gap between perceiving and acting the interval, the place where a response gets chosen instead of triggered. Mackie has been playing that interval for a decade. For a while the film seems to know its climax should be a conversation.

The investigation half reaches back further than Marvel. The Parallax View (1974) supplies the visual rhetoric Morgenthau restages, the individual dwarfed and boxed by monumental architecture. Three Days of the Condor (1975) supplies the decent operative who discovers his own apparatus has turned on him. Seven Days in May (1964) supplies the coup plotted in office suites. The Winter Soldier (2014) had already transplanted that whole grammar into the superhero form, down to using Sam as the audience's grounded eyes; Onah copies the template and pushes it further indoors.

What the seventies films share is a structure Deleuze named the condemnation of the plot: a conspiracy so diffuse it has no center you can reach, so the assembling never finishes. The dread and the pleasure are the same thing. Films like that hand the work to the viewer, and Deleuze's term for an image that only means once a third party puts it together is the relation-image. You are the third party. Nothing on screen tells you; you infer.

Then the film has to be a Marvel film. The diffuse plot resolves into one nameable man with a plan, and the mystery becomes a fight: force against force, hero against monster, what Deleuze calls the binomial, the oldest and simplest shape action can take. Thirdness drops back into Secondness. The thing you were assembling turns out to be something you can punch.

Give the film this, though. What comes up through the floor isn't only spectacle. Ross has been straining against forces political and physiological at once, and the transformation reads as an appetite that was always under the office, erupting through it. Deleuze would call the Oval Office a derived milieu, a civilized surface, and the gamma biology beneath it an originary world of pure drive. The slope runs one way. Ford plays a man losing to himself, and the facial capture keeps enough of that face for it to land. There is real pathos in the red.

And there's a second situation pressing on this film, one that has nothing to do with Washington. In Deleuze's account of the action picture, the encompasser is the milieu that bears down on a character until an act becomes necessary. Here the encompasser is the archive. Brave New World exists in large part to reclaim The Incredible Hulk (2008): Sterns, gamma science, Ross himself, threads left hanging for seventeen years in the franchise's orphaned entry. The situation calling for action is the back catalogue.

That's what this film did to narrative, and it deserves to be taken seriously rather than sneered at. It's a bet that continuity is the draw, that a long-deferred payoff can do the work novelty used to do. But the seventies films it borrows from got their dread from having no bottom, and a serial can't afford that. Every thread must eventually be tied off, which means the plot behind the plot always has to turn out to have a face.

So watch the rooms. Watch what Onah gets from two people, a desk, and a country's iconography behind them, and notice it's the simplest staging in the movie. Then watch the blossoms come down, and sit with the question the film opens without answering: what do you do with a hero built to hesitate, inside a form that runs on reflex?