At the end of Captain America: The First Avenger (2011), Steve Rogers does a slow pivot in Times Square. His mouth hangs open. His chest heaves following a brief battle and a run away from what he believed were would be captors. Times Square is bright and loud, filled with glowing billboards and honking horns. We know it from the ball dropping on New Year’s Eve, but Steve looks around in a daze. He has never seen anything like this before.
Then a hard voice rings out: “At ease, soldier.” Steve sees a black clad Nick Fury approach. “You’ve been asleep, Cap, for almost 70 years.” A look of shock crosses Cap’s face, and he stares around him bewildered, trying to take it all in and understand.
“You gonna’ be ok?” asks Fury.
“Yeah,” says Cap. “Yeah. I just...I had a date.”
With one quiet line, Steve captures that he has lost everything. His true love, Peggy Carter. His friends, the Howling Commandos. His whole world. Every single thing he knew and cared about. He has become the man out of time.
It’s easy to criticize the film rendition of Cap as being too perfect. Cap (played as no one else can by Chris Evans) always does the right thing. He always makes the right choice. He is always willing to sacrifice himself. Even before he gets his superpowers, when Colonel Chester Phillips (played so well by Tommy Lee Jones) throws a hand grenade into a group of soldiers, Steve jumps onto the grenade to try to save everyone else who has fled away. He does this without thinking, automatically. Cap always does what is right, what is needed. That’s just who he is.
But it doesn’t bring him happiness. Over and over, Steve loses the people that matter to him. Dr. Abraham Erskine (played excellently by Stanley Tucci), the man who perfected the Super Soldier Serum that turned Steve into Captain America dies in Steve’s arms. Bucky Barnes (played nicely by Sebastian Stan) falls to his (supposed) death from a mountain train, just out of Steve’s reach. Peggy Carte (played to perfection by Hayley Atwell) only gives Steve one brief kiss before he has to say goodbye to her, imagining that the only way he can save the people of New York City from a bomb carrying plane is to crash the plane, sacrificing his own life in the process.
I think in Steve Rogers we not only see someone who chooses to do the right thing again and again, but we also see the price he pays. The war begins, so Steve chooses to join the army. He gets rejected due to his frail stature, but he keeps trying to join until Dr. Erskine lets him in. Steve feels compelled to choose to fight in the war, and so he enlists. Later Steve sees a grenade thrown into a crowd, so he chooses instantly to jump on it. When Steve gets a chance to become a super soldier, he volunteers. When the super soldier experiment seems to be going awry, Steve tells Erskine and Howard Stark (played by John Slattery) to keep going anyway despite the risk and the pain he is in. When Bucky and his troop are captured by Hydra, Steve chooses to risk his own life in order to try to save them.
Of course, Steve has superpowers, so it’s easy for him to charge off to save Bucky. But the rest of his choices are made when he has no powers. It’s easy for a superhero to make the right choice. But an ordinary person has to make that choice even if they’re scared they don’t have the strength to carry the choice out. We all get these choices as life goes by. And most of the time we know which choice is right. Yet too many times we make the wrong choice anyway. We’re afraid or we’re selfish or the price is too high. That’s what makes Steve a hero. He always makes the right choice no matter what it costs. And, over and over, what it costs him is the things he loves.
So, by the time we get to that final scene in Times Square, we know how much Steve is hurting. By then, he has lost everything. He’s still Captain America, so we know he will carry on. He will bury the pain. He will keep fighting the good fight. But we can see it there on his face for a moment as he looks at this strange new world into which he has awoken. He’s just an ordinary man who’s lost everything that matters to him. You can see his sadness, even feel it. Who would want that loss? Who could bear it?
As Steve stands there in the square, you can see him thinking. Did I make a mistake? Should I have chosen something else? Maybe something for myself? You know he’s thinking about Peggy in that moment. It’s the missed date. That’s all he really cares about.
What I think we need to realize is that the message of Captain America: The First Avenger is not about perfection. Cap isn’t meant to get us to always make the right choice. In fact, I think Steve Rogers knows we can’t always make the right choice. He would want us to try. And he would also know sometimes we are going to fail. Sometimes we will have to choose what is best for us rather than what is best for everyone. That’s life; we aren’t perfect. Steve would tell us, that’s ok. (There are some other figures I’m sure you can think of that extoll the same virtues, but we don’t need to get into religion here.)
Ultimately, what we need to do is find a balance, the right mix of choosing to serve others and choosing the things we need in life. The moments of choice will keep coming at us. We won’t know the outcomes. And we don’t have superpowers. So we will just have to do the best we can. And if we feel lost at times, like Steve does in that square, we have to trust that we should just keep going on and things will turn out. We just won’t know when that will be. In fact, Steve Rogers doesn’t find that balance at the end of this film. And his counterpart, Tony Stark a.k.a. Iron Man, hasn’t found the right balance either, despite getting 2 movies. It will take them both more time, the same as us.
But Marvel has time. And, with Captain America: The First Avenger, it’s clear the company made a decision to take their time and do things right. Marvel chooses here to tell their own story in the mighty Marvel way: No apologies, no excuses, no second guessing. This is a Cap story right out of the comics. We get a real superhero who acts like a superhero. We get a real supervillain, the Red Skull (played by Hugo Weaving). The Skull issues Cap a challenge during one fight scene: “You pretend that you are just a simple soldier, but you are afraid to embrace that we have left humanity behind.”
But Steve never leaves his humanity behind. He stays human. He tries to help the people around him. He loves and he loses and he goes on. So, we need to go on too, even when things get bad. And we need to keep going, even though we will make mistakes and make the wrong choices. We can do that much. We don’t have to be perfect like Cap, but we do have to keep going like he does. And that much is in our power, super or otherwise. The message of Captain America: The First Avenger isn’t to be perfect, it’s to keep trying to make the right choices whether you’re prefect or not.
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