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Some Thoughts About SteveBucky (and Why It Was Deliberate In The CATFA And CATWS Narrative)

Some thoughts about SteveBucky (and why it was deliberate in the CATFA and CATWS narrative)

As you might know, nowadays my approach to the MCU canon is pretty much on the lines of, the movies are Kevin Feige’s shitty fanfiction of a concept that could have been good and was attempted at intervals at the beginning at various levels but not executed, and the story and the characters are just suggestions I can play with in my mental sandbox.

But occasionally I like to listen to the Captain America: The Winter Soldier soundtrack to remember how it felt to be in love with that movie, and today that got me in the kind of mood where I am actually convinced that bisexual Steve and SteveBucky as a romantic dynamic were in fact written deliberately into the narrative, or, better, are structural elements of the narrative, because the emotional narrative is structurally made of parallels between the relationship between Steve and Peggy - the relationship of the past - and the relationship between Steve and Bucky - the relationship of the future - and it’s all too architectural in the narrative to not be deliberate.

In particular today I’ve been thinking about pictures. There’s the obvious parallel between the way the 40s story in CATFA and the body of CATWS end, one with Peggy looking at a picture of Steve before his transformation from a SSR file, while Howard tries to help by going looking for Steve, one with Steve looking at a picture of Bucky before his transformation from a Hydra file, while Sam offers to help go looking for him. But I’ve also been thinking about the scene in the Smithsonian in CATWS, and what the infamous picture of Peggy in the compass was about in that scene.

We assume that the compass was the only relevant object Steve had on himself when he crashed the plane and this was found; someone from Shield must have been, here we found this on you, take it back. Basically, it’s Steve’s only belonging in his new life. But here’s the irony: it’s a picture of a person (the only person of Steve’s smallest circle of people close to him) who is actually still alive.

The movie juxtaposes Steve’s visit to Peggy, alive and changed by time, to Steve’s visit to the secular altar to Bucky in the exhibition, crystallized in the past. It’s in fact an interesting detail that, in the museum scene, we only see pictures or wordless footage of Bucky, while we see footage of Peggy where she speaks; she has a voice in both the museum and real life, while Bucky doesn’t have a voice–we literally meet him masked and muted. (Peggy’s responsibility in what happened to Bucky, as the director of the organization Hydra flourished as a parasite of, is a potential the third Captain America movie could have tapped into, if they’d actually decided to make a third Captain America movie. RIP Captain America 3, we’ll never forget you. But this is is not relevant to this post.)

So, Peggy has lived - she has grown older, she physically carries the signs of the time she’s lived through, and even the footage in the museum shows her slightly older than we left her in the first movie, and in color, a deliberate emphasis that the footage was taken later than the time Steve left; Bucky, on the other hand, is unchanged, both in the museum and in real life. In the museum, assumed dead, he’s “frozen” in images from the past (in black and white); in real life, he’s literally been frozen to the point he’s not aged much.

Steve carries a black and white picture of Peggy with him, inside his compass, and the scene compares it with the footage - from a later time, in color, in motion, where Peggy has a voice. That Peggy from the compass is dead to Steve, and he mourns her just like he mourns the man whose black and white images are shown at the museum.

Except that the picture in the compass is something he can mourn privately; it’s, as we said, his only belonging. In fact, it’s ironic that he now has a picture of Peggy, and no one else. In the first movie, we see why: Steve and the Howling Commandoes went on missions on the frontlines of the war, Peggy belonged with the strategic command of the army. So Steve would keep a picture of her to remember her by as they were apart - it would make no sense for him to keep a picture of Bucky, because Bucky was there with him. It’s ironic because Bucky sees the picture and is jealous, but the point is that Steve doesn’t need a picture to remember him by when they’re together.

Of course, Bucky’s presumed death parts them. And Steve finds himself with no pictures of Bucky with him, and needs to visit the museum to mourn him in front of images of him. And this is an interesting point because Steve can mourn past Peggy privately - as he owns the compass with her picture, something that belongs to him and no one else has access to - but he cannot mourn Bucky privately, because he owns no object that connect him to Bucky, so he needs to go to a public place to be able to see an image of him.

In order to mourn Bucky properly, in front of a memorial of him, he is forced to do it in a place that not only is public, but is actually a place where his personal history is treated like a museum curiosity to put on display for everyone to consume.

There’s something deeply poignant in the fact that he hides, that he pretends to be someone else, in order to mourn his deceased male companion - the scene emphasizes that Steve does not want to be recognized, and the metaphor of him hiding his real identity to have an emotional moment regarding Bucky is not so subtle. (Yes, there is material of Peggy in the Smithsonian scene but the scene contains Steve’s visit to Bucky in parallel to Steve’s visit to Peggy in person, so I feel authorized to read the scene as mostly a visit to Bucky, especially since at the end of the movie Bucky also visits his own memorial there, emphasizing the cruciality of that picture in the narrative.)

In fact, the whole hidden identity to visit Bucky thing is not accidental because later, when he needs to confront Bucky, he steals his old uniform from the same exhibition: before finding out about Bucky, he wears incognito clothes to hide his identity, after finding out about Bucky, he reclaims a powerful sign of that identity - the uniform he wore when he fought alongside Bucky - basically breaking it out of the closet. It’s not a coincidence that earlier in the movie he wears a monochrome uniform meant to be unseen, either: the movie plays a lot on secrecy and openness regarding Steve’s identity, and the pivotal element in this narrative is Bucky. Steve reclaims his identity in parallel to trying to give Bucky’s identity back to him. It is a movie about identity and closets after all.

To go back to something I mentioned earlier, you have the contrast of the black-and-white picture of Peggy in the compass with the in-color, speaking, living Peggy; and that contrast highlights the deep difference between the two, because Peggy has lived a long life and grown older and changed. And then you have the contrast between the black-and-white picture of Bucky in the museum with the living Bucky, and in this case the parallel shows how little Bucky has actually been allowed to change, he’s been frozen in time, allowed no voice, allowed no change, no motion.

Steve, unlike Peggy, hasn’t gotten to live his life, but has been frozen in time, like Bucky. Shared life experience and all that jazz…

These fuckers (writers? directors? I don’t know) had the idea of writing two love interests for the titular character and framing the m/f relationship as the relationship of the past, and the m/m relationship as the relationship of the future, as one does, and built the emotional narrative on parallels between the two, and everything was fun and games until Disney Marvel ruined it all because they realized, I suppose. I mean, no, not everything was fun and games because things could have been written a lot better especially in regards of *gasp* female characters, that rarely work in the hands of misogynistic writers, but the two movies, with varying degrees of success, did something interesting (the theme of masculinity in CATFA is so fascinating) that was nice as long as it lasted. At least I’ll be thinking this until I get enraged at some shit they said and change my mind again. #saladforbucky

As always you’re welcome to share thoughts, questions, comments, whatever.

Some Thoughts About SteveBucky (and Why It Was Deliberate In The CATFA And CATWS Narrative)

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