The Falcon and the Winter Soldier lied to its audience
Spoilers for all of Falcon and the Winter Soldier. Very light spoilers for some non-recent comic books.
The Falcon and the Winter Soldier finale left me, as it did many people, disappointed. Underwhelmed, if I’m feeling more charitable. Mostly with a strong feeling of… that’s it? That’s… the climax? I get that they thought they were Doing Something with Sam’s big speech to the GRC people at the end (although he gives this whole monologue and then just walks away and expects them to do better, which… okay), and I’ll admit the Isaiah stuff somewhat got me, I’m not heartless. But so many storylines and side characters felt completely wasted or underserved. It felt like there were plot threads dangling, even though, textually speaking, they were not.
I’m going to try to explain/process some of that here. I’m not going to get into the issues with the philosophy of the show on the whole, because that has been addressed ad nauseam and I don’t think there’s anyone who’s seen the show and spent more than a half a second thinking about it who isn’t aware of it. I’m going to look at the more technical elements of how the show was made, and how it misled the audience, and not in a regular ~subversion of tropes~ kind of way.
A lot has been said already about the less-than-stellar writing, how the character of Karli is incredibly underdeveloped and ill-defined, the unearned plot twists (ahem… Power Broker), etc. What I’m going to focus on here is how the cinematic techniques employed by the show and its creators led the audience to believe the story was going one way, and then failed to deliver on its promises. Gotta use that expensive degree for something, right?
Although they’re not necessarily all codified or formalized, there are a myriad of visual and auditory cues that audiences implicitly understand, and serve as shorthand for filmmakers. For example, if a character is introduced with the face mostly obscured in shadows, that is an indication that they are the villain, or have a dark side, or at the very least are hiding a massive dark secret. If a woman is shown wearing a tight red dress, often with red lipstick, and is the only one wearing red, she is understood to be a femme fatale type, morally ambiguous and dangerous to our righteous male hero (The Matrix explicitly plays with this in the woman in red test sequence). If two characters are making out and the camera pans away, it’s usually understood that they’re about to have sex.
These cues exist so that the audience can understand characters or plot points without necessitating a villain monologue or a character saying “gee I’m so happy we’re about to have sexual intercourse,” as in the above cases. FATWS is obviously not made by amateurs, and the creators understand and properly utilize these kinds of cues in many cases. See, for example, Sam’s Jesus shot from the finale, when he’s carrying Karli’s corpse, clichéd though it was, or the very first episode when Yori and Bucky are out to lunch and the sound dims for a second as the shot focuses on the plate of mochi and then refocuses on Yori, and sad music starts, so we know Yori’s having a mochi-triggered memory, and it’s probably sad and hey probably has something to do with the guy Bucky just killed 5 minutes ago in a flashback? Just a hunch. (Disney+ won’t let me take screenshots so it’s at 00:25:12 of the pilot for reference) I know it wasn’t exactly the same team but hell, basically the entirety of Wandavision was playing on visual cues the audience is familiar with from famous sitcoms.
The fact that they clearly knew how to deploy them properly is what makes it all the more incomprehensible when they cheat or misuse them, like in the incongruous mess that is John Walker’s arc. The things they show us in camera completely go against John’s redemption arc and are, in hindsight, utterly baffling.
Let’s talk about the beard, which is the shakiest of my arguments, in the sense that I completely stand by it, but if someone tells me it’s a stretch, I won’t die on that hill. This basically relies on a trope commonly used in visual media, where a man who is typically clean shaven suddenly has stubble or a beard when he’s having a Bad Time. This usually indicates he’s “letting himself go,” and often implies that he’s either falling into depression or is losing his mental capacities. This is similar to what TV Tropes calls the Beard of Sorrow, but not exactly. Note: I know there’s something to be said for the ableism of using insanity/psychopathy as a pejorative term, but I’m going to operate here in the world Marvel set up, where neurodivergence is clearly seen as a character flaw.
So, in the second episode (technically the ending of the first episode), John Walker is introduced as the squeaky-clean All American Boy. Clean shaven, bright eyes, idealistic, knows how to play the game. In episode 4, the turning point in both John and Karli’s stories, he has the barest hint of a five-o’clock shadow, but overall still looks neat (his stubble grows from one scene to the next that happen in sequence but we’re going to ignore that continuity error here). The stubble is more pronounced, but still groomed, when he has the conversation with Lemar about whether he would take the serum or not. He’s already starting to go to the dark side, by my reading of the beard-o-meter. In the finale, after Lemar has died and John has been stripped of the title of Captain America, his stubble is longer, darker, and unkempt. He’s extremely aggressive and attacks Karli immediately.
Obviously, this is not an exact science, and like I said, this is my most tenuous argument. But I think it’s clear that the show intended for him to progress past the squeaky clean look into more wild territory, but they fumbled it right at the end. It’s especially clear to me since he does temporarily go back to the clean-shaven All American Boy look when he goes to talk to Lemar’s family and say “why yes of course I exacted justice on the exact man that killed Lemar and no one else, no of course this conversation isn’t leading me further into the dark recesses of my own mind, I’m just a good ol’ boy who Does The Right Thing.”
Even if we assume I’m wildly incorrect about the facial hair being an indication of his mental breakdown, there is at the very least some visual dissonance to his redemption, if it can be called that, at the end, when he’s palling around with Bucky and cheekily quoting Lincoln with his murderous rage beard, and not his good boy clean-shaven look. It’s poor visual storytelling at best.
The bigger argument here, the worse deceit by the creators, is the way John is shot in-camera. The way a person is shot tells a lot about who they are or where they stand. If they’re shot from a lower angle, they’re an imposing presence, or a figure of authority (moral or actual). If a person is shot from far away, they probably feel alone, especially if it’s against an empty backdrop. Again, this is something the show clearly knows how to utilize. In the very first episode, in the Winter Soldier flashback/nightmare, whenever the camera is focused on Bucky’s face, the shot blurs in and out, to indicate that he’s not fully himself (S1:E1, 00:17:36). In the finale, when Sam is monologuing to the GRC people, by the end of the speech the camera is shooting him from a lower angle, indicating that he stands in moral superiority to the people he’s shaming (S1:E6, 00:30:30).
These are of course the kinds of things I would write papers on in school, and ~film people~ will analyze for deeper meaning. But they’re also something that an audience intrinsically understands, even without being aware of it. Imagine going to see a run-of-the-mill Dwayne Johnson movie and he’s shot from a high angle with a telephoto lens, but everything else (the grandiosity of the action, his obvious Hero vibes, etc) was the same: it would feel weird. Even if you didn’t know why, something about the movie wouldn’t click for you. The medium is the message, and the medium itself impacts how we experience a story. So what did they do with John?
John’s story itself has all the beats of an archetype most of us will be familiar with, in one way or another: person who believes in a cause lives their life by a set of principles, is forced to grapple with moral gray areas beyond what they might be comfortable with/equipped to handle, loses someone they love above all else and goes on a murderous rampage (depends on the content rating), is turned to the dark side. It’s Anakin’s story, it’s Harvey Dent’s story, it’s arguably Daenerys’s story. The text of FATWS alone is enough for the argument that John should have gone insane/full dark-side by the end of the series, no redemption warranted. The cinematic techniques they use only make it all the more evident, and the ending all the more unsatisfying.
So what exactly do I mean by this? Let’s start with the first scene in which we properly meet John, in the locker room in episode 2 as he prepares for his first television interview as Captain America. Here, he’s sure of himself and who he is, albeit nervous about being the new Cap. He’s shot with a standard lens, clear focus, at eye-level. His conversation with Lemar uses a standard shot/reverse-shot format that positions them on equal footing (S1:E2, 00:03:19). He’s occasionally shot from a higher angle, so no distorted feelings of grandeur. Even his interview with Good Morning America is shot in a surprisingly naturalistic way, considering some of the more experimental techniques the show employed seemingly at random.
Let’s fast-foward a bit. In episode 3, when he and Lemar execute the raid on the people who briefly housed Karli and the Flag Smashers, he’s shot exclusively from below, with the first shot panning up to his face from the shield (S1:E3, 00:02:26). He thinks of himself as superior to others, by the authority the shield imparts on him. After they fail to get info and the man spits on him, the camera blurs in and out as it did in the Winter Soldier flashback when John’s pacing angrily and talking to Lemar. The first hints of anger problems and an inability to handle things not going exactly to plan, and especially disrespect of his authority.
Then, the big shift comes in episode 4, when he and Lemar briefly team up with Sam and Bucky to find Karli. While they’re waiting for Sam to talk to Karli, a shot goes from John grasping onto the shield to a close up shot of the side of his face, shot from a lower angle (S1:E4, 00:20:53). He’s breathing heavily enough to be heard over the music. Something that I would spend a few pages arguing in a film theory paper is that this shot is indicating that he’s going mad with power, but, even ignoring the more esoteric interpretations, this shot still has negative implications on the surface. Even more so when it’s immediately contrasted with a shot of Lemar, waiting patiently, shot at eye level from slightly further away than John was. Something is already not right with John, and this is before he takes the serum. (If I were doing a deeper formal analysis I would also point out that the next shot of him looking out of sorts has Bucky telling him to be patient, which riles him up in the same way the man disrespecting his authority earlier did, and he even says “don’t patronize me,” but *sips tea*)
In the climactic fight with the Flag Smashers, when Lemar gets accidentally killed by Karli, the music stops and everything goes slo-mo for a minute as the characters realize what just happened (S1:E4, 00:44:22). When John is kneeling over Lemar’s body and realizes he’s not going to wake up, the camera falls to an even lower angle and zooms in real close to his face, as some discordant strings come in (the musical equivalent of “shit’s about to hit the fan”). This shot is the cinematic representation of “this is my villain origin story.” There’s no sound other than the discordant strings that are rising in pitch as the camera holds on John settling into a quiet intensity with bloodshot eyes, before he defenestrates himself to follow the Flag Smashers. This was it, y’all. This should’ve been his heel-turn, his Anakin confronting the younglings moment. This was the climax of his downward slide that had been coming since the start, culminating in what was about to happen.
So John chases the Flag Smashers, going after the guy who appeared for the first time this episode to tell Karli how much he loved Captain America as a kid, cause there’s nothing to be said for beating a dead horse on this show. John chases the guy who looks terrified out of his mind, and then brutally murders him with the shield. There are slo-mo shots circling around John with him blurred in the foreground, focusing on the shocked audience in the background. Then, the money shot, him holding the bloodied shield, shot from such a low angle it’s practically on the ground. The shots positions the audience in the place of the body he just decapitated. There should be no coming back from this.
Again, in a separate textual analysis note, the very next episode opens with him getting his ass beat by Sam and Bucky and then getting disrespected (in his view) by his government, the people he believed in and fought for! While Sam and Bucky are being Just Two Dudes(TM) On a Boat he has to talk to his dead best friend’s family! He makes his own shield out of beat-up metal like a psycho stalker! How did this man get a redemption arc?
In the finale, when he confronts the Flag Smashers with his discount shield, he’s shown with the scraggly beard, shot from below, with shaky, occasionally blurry camera work (S1:E6, 00:13:08). He’s shown wiping blood from his mouth and then a very close up shot of his face looking angry pans to a super low-angle shot of him fighting more people, looking like he’s running out of steam. The music playing in the scenes where he’s fighting is completely different from the triumphant action-y score when Sam or Bucky are fighting in their respective parallel scenes. John’s score is almost more melancholic, occasionally reminiscent of scenes like the final Agni-Kai between Azula and Zuko in Avatar (where, I’ll remind you, it was portrayed as a tragedy because Azula had lost her mind). After Karli knocks him out, the music goes back to the upbeat bass-heavy thumping action music, so it’s not like it was Karli or the Flag Smashers that were making the music sad, either. They’re really trying to tell us that what brings him back to the light side is a truck full of nameless GRC members about to fall over a ledge? After he went full rage-mode not 5 minutes before when Karli said Lemar didn’t matter? Really?
John’s storyline and character development feels like a cheat, because the filmmakers abused visual cues that I have to believe they knew implied impending insanity. They portrayed a man at the edge of his rope, brought to his lowest point by the loss of his best friend, purpose, and everything he thought to be true, only to wipe their hands and say “aha jk you didn’t see that, he’s still a good ol’ boy at heart.” I’m not saying there’s no value in redemption arcs, or that I absolutely needed John to be a villain. Anakin, after all, got a redemption arc as Vader, and US Agent has sometimes been portrayed as an antihero, rather than a villain, in the comic books too. I’m just saying that the first five and a half episodes employ cinematic techniques (as well as actual text) to tell the story of a man going dark, but then never follow through and make him suffer no consequences.
Even if they didn’t want to make John an actual full-blown villain (like when he was Super-Patriot in the comic books), they could’ve easily made him an equal and opposite force to Karli. They’re both people who (at least according to Sam/the text) have the right ideas/goals (helping others, I guess?) but the wrong ways of going about them (violence, mostly). They both get somewhat radicalized by the death of a loved one (Mama Donya? Whoever she was? And Lemar), and they both take things Too Far. That could’ve been a really interesting parallel for the show to grapple with. But no, Karli dies as a martyr (and then all her other loved ones are killed as an afterthought), while John gets to banter with Bucky and have a happy ending with a job and his wife and Julia Louis-Dreyfus. He doesn’t even get dishonorably discharged, let alone court-martialed, after yelling at a room full of senators, who just politely ask him to return the shield.
I think ultimately, this comes down to cowardice. Art doesn’t exist in a vacuum, devoid of context. FATWS was made in America, by Americans, by a company who regularly cooperates with the US military. Their hesitance to paint John as an abject villain or at the very least a “bad apple” (which is how people who are afraid of acknowledging systemic problems can acknowledge individual problematic actors) is for the same reason that they had Karli go just nuclear enough to justify her being painted as the bad guy, despite her being, you know… morally correct. Think about it: Sam, the unproblematic unambiguous good guy hero, is an agent of the US government (explicitly in the text), who goes against a group of socialists who want to redistribute wealth and resources to those affected by a global crisis. I mean, they literally advocate for a world without borders; if we had seen them provide medicine to anyone they basically would’ve been Doctors Without Borders. But the text has them be overly violent, and Sam be in favor of their philosophy but against their methods, so that Disney/Marvel can say “see? The socialists are the eeeeeevil ones. If you want true world peace, join the US Army!” And that is also why they couldn’t have John Walker be the bad guy. Because, ultimately, the harms done by the US Army are understandable and excusable. Maybe, with the influence of [comic book spoiler] (Julia Louis-Dreyfus), and John properly becoming US Agent, they’ll lean more into the jingoism next time, but I’m not holding out hope. I don’t see Marvel breaking up with the US Army any time soon.
