well, steve’s defining characteristic is always that he will do the right thing, no matter what it costs him personally. only this time, i think – and you’re right – he has less to live for, outside of the work. all his friends are dead, peggy carter will probably die very very soon, and he’s increasingly disillusioned with the organization he works for; not to mention – and this is probably one of my favourite parts that i somehow forgot to put in the review – he’s obviously suffering from some kind of survivor’s guilt and ptsd. that’s why, i think, natasha tries so hard to find him a date; it’s not about settling down, it’s not about having a good time or replacing peggy carter – she’s trying to find him an anchor. but the fundamental difference is that though natasha can reinvent herself over and over to survive, that she has the flexibility and willpower to look forward and not back, to keep moving and atone instead of staying back and risk losing herself – steve can’t do that? which is why the framing of this film, as him literally confronting the ghosts of his past – hydra, bucky – is a kind of healing process that works for him the way sam’s therapy sessions work for the others.
so in a sense, i don’t think he loses the will to survive once bucky shows up, i think he just – like his first face off with hydra – accepts the fact that he may have to die, in order to make things right. its interesting, because if you look at these two passages of dialogue:
SAM: what makes you happy?
STEVE: i don’t know.
and
NATASHA: you seem pretty chipper for a guy who found out he just died for nothing.
STEVE: i guess i just like to know who i’m fighting.
he needs a purpose. he’s not… happy, per se, by the end of this conversation with natasha, but he has a purpose. he knows what he has to do, he knows what is necessary, and so long as he can fulfil that purpose he is more or less, a functional human being. so when you put him on that falling hellcarrier with bucky; he’s not happy. he’s the furtherest thing from happy – but he has a purpose. he had a purpose when he made the decision to crash red skull’s plane, and he has a purpose here. between his life and stopping the bomb from hitting new york, between his life and bucky remembering – well. it’s a small price to pay.
and so, i don’t think he went out on to that plane looking to die. you’re right – he would probably have made more of an effort to survive if bucky had been alive still, but remember that peggy carter was alive and waiting on the other end of the radio, and that didn’t change his decision. certainly bucky’s death is what galvanizes his decision to go after hydra – compare ‘i don’t want to kill anyone. i just don’t like bullies’ with ‘i’m not going to stop until all of hydra is dead or captured.’ – but if bucky was alive, and the decision still came down to between him and the millions of people who would die?
the decision would still be the same.
with regards to bucky, i think the underlying idea here is that even from the very beginning, steve didn’t want to be useless. he didn’t want to be a liability on anyone, and he didn’t sign up for the war for glory or for vengeance (considering this was post pearl harbour) or because he wanted to kill nazis. he did it, very literally, because he felt a duty. because ‘there are men laying down their lives; i got no right to do any less than that.’ so the thought behind this, behind crashing the plane is – this is what happened to bucky. bucky died serving his country, crashing into the alps. he will have an empty casket because they never found a body – he will never have a decent paying job, he will never have a wife or children or grandchildren, he will never get to grow old with them and he will never get to come home from the war with steve. all he had and all he will ever have is that icy death in the alps; because he served his country. he laid down his life.
so steve’s not looking for death. when push comes to shove and a decision needs to be made – steve, well. he’s got no right to do any less than bucky.
Tag: tw: suicide
WARNING: explicit discussion of suicidal behaviour and all that entailsStill with me? Excellent, I have so much more heartbreak in store for you.
We left off with Steve escaping SHIELD custody after yet another death-defying stunt. From this point on, I actually don’t have much to comment on for a while. Steve continues being stupidly brave but not more so than normal. He has a mission now, and a responsibility to see it through, so he doesn’t take as many reckless risks as he has before. He knows that if he fails, there isn’t anyone else to pick up the slack; if he falls, it’s game over.
For example, when the missile hits Zola’s computer brain, Steve acts much less recklessly. He finds a possible hiding place, pulls Natasha with him and shields them both. I honestly suspect that if Steve hadn’t felt like he had a purpose, he would be more concerned with Natasha being safe than himself, instead of the 50/50 kind of thing we get in the movie.
But let’s flashforward to another turning point: the reveal that the Winter Soldier is actually Bucky Barnes.
Oh man, I love that moment. It is perfectly shot and I have gushed about it before, especially about how the movie lets Steve be frozen with shock. Steve, who has fought tooth and nails to evade HYDRA capture, isn’t even present enough to get on his knees when ordered to by Rumlow. That is how shaken he is.
It was him. He looked right at me… He didn’t even know me.
And that is the moment Steve comes to his decision: the first priority is taking down SHIELD and HYDRA, because there is a quickly-approaching deadline on that. But the second that is taken care of, it’s Bucky. Only Bucky. He is going to save Bucky from HYDRA and won’t accept any other outcome. Failure through death is not an option, unless they die together.
But I’m getting ahead of myself again. Maria Hill is a BAMF and rescues the trio and takes them to the safehouse where they regroup and form a plan. And here is the next interesting thing. They are all preparing themselves for the final push, the hail mary, the now-or-never attack, and what does Steve do?
He thinks of Bucky.
He thinks of when Bucky promised him I’m with you til the end of the line, of Bucky offering to carry Steve on his shoulders. He doesn’t think of battle strategies, or of HYDRA, or even of the Winter Soldier. His world has narrowed down to Bucky, because when Steve decides on something, he gets the worst case of tunnel-vision known to man. He knows HYDRA must be stopped but it’s secondary to his quest to save Bucky; it’s only Steve’s sense of duty that keeps him from leaving HYDRA to the rest of the gang.
This marks a massive change. Earlier in the movie Steve recieved an external purpose; a responsibility was placed upon him which he felt he had to uphold out of duty. He is emotionally invested in it, of course, but it’s because of his ideals and beliefs and a little bit of hunger for revenge, as well as betrayal. Now that he knows Bucky is alive and held captive, he gets an internal purpose; no-one has told him that he has to save Bucky, it’s something he tells himself. He is beyond emotionally invested in this purpose, his entire everything is invested in rescuing Bucky. It’s like the difference between an important assignment at work and the novel you write in your free time. In the former case, you do it because you know you should and people depend on you to do it. In the latter, you do it only for yourself and pour your heart and soul into the endeavour.
This is very important to remember as I move onto the scene on the helicarrier. Lots of things happen in-between, of course, but I won’t cover them here. Actually, I will not even go into detail on the fight itself either, because I’ve done that before and I will just once again direct you all to marlowe-tops’ masterpiece on the subject. No, what I want to focus on is what happens after Steve inserts the chip.
The first mission is done. HYDRA has been stopped. With the replacement of that chip, 12 million people have been saved. Steve’s mission is over.
Now there is only Bucky.
Bucky, whom Steve dives down to save, heedless of his own injuries, because Bucky is in danger. He doesn’t have to keep himself alive to complete his mission anymore; he only has to stay alive for Bucky. Which might not be long, considering the helicarrier is nose-diving into the Potomac.
I have no doubt that Steve is certain that Bucky is somewhere inside the Winter Soldier, but he probably thinks he’s rapidly running out of time to reach him before it’s a moot point. So what does he do? He throws the first fight in his life.
Steve: You know me.
Winter Soldier: No, I don’t!
Steve: Bucky. You’ve known me your whole life.
Steve: Your name is James Buchanan Barnes.
Steve: I’m not gonna fight you. You’re my friend.
Winter Soldier: You’re my mission!
Steve: Then finish it. ‘Cause I’m with you til the end of the line.
Look at him. He rolls with the punches. He accepts them and doesn’t make any attempt at defending himself. He tears off his helmet and declares his refusal to fight. He drops his shield into the Potomac because he has no more use for it. Bucky doesn’t need Captain America, he probably never did; he needs Steve.
So it’s going to be Steve.
Even when the Winter Soldier gives Steve the worst beating since his pre-serum days, Steve doesn’t so much as shield himself. He is offering himself to the punishment.
Because that’s what it is. Punishment. Penance, even. It’s fitting, actually, that it’s Bucky himself who punishes Steve for letting him die. I don’t even think Steve is self-loathingly enjoying the pain; he simply sees it as perfectly fair that he gets to feel a fraction of the hell Bucky has been put through.
And if that means he’ll go down in flames with Bucky… Well. He’s with him til the end of the line.
Nothing will convince me that Steve wasn’t ready to die with Bucky in that moment. He didn’t even attempt to get either of them off the helicarrier; he let the Winter Soldier beat him black and blue while just lying down, because hurting Bucky is unthinkable. He only managed it before because at first he had no idea it was Bucky, and later he had to or innocents would die – and even then he pulled his punches. The look on Steve’s face during their previous fight is pure anguish because that is Bucky and he’s hurting him.
We also see an eerie kind of peace in Steve as he falls and later nearly drowns, and I don’t believe we can attribute all of it to Steve being halfway unconscious. Compare Steve’s fall to Bucky’s: Bucky was panicked, reaching out towards Steve and screaming, while Steve quietly falls with a limp body. The situations are different, yes, but usually you freak out at least a little bit when you suddenly find yourself falling.
But not Steve. Probably because he, again, sees it as fair. It has a nice kind of symmetry to it all, and as a movie buff, I’m sure Steve appreciates narrative parallels. (As to why he’s not screaming for Bucky who is still hanging on, my belief is that Steve can’t actually see him at that point and is assuming Bucky is falling as well.)
Then we have the beautifully shot underwater scene where the Winter Soldier saves Steve’s life. The last shot before the screen fades to black, when we see the metal arm reaching out to us, is a POV shot. This is very important to remember. It was Steve who saw the hand, not just us in the audience. This is subtly confirmed when Steve wakes up in the hospital bed, because he turns his head ever so slightly to the left, to the direction the Winter Soldier’s hand came from, the last thing he was aware of. He remembers being saved, and realizes the implications as he takes in the hospital room he lies in.
Which brings me to the end of the movie and, incidentally, my last point.
This scene marks the end of Steve’s personal arc during this movie. He turns down the offer of an external purpose – we’ve been data-mining HYDRA files, looks like a lot of rats didn’t go down with the ship – because he instead chooses his internal purpose – there’s something I’ve gotta do first. He no longer needs anyone to give him a purpose, because he’s found one himself.
At the start of this movie Steve was an isolated island, but now he’s found a bridge. It’s small and rickety and dangerous as all hell, but it leads to Bucky, and that makes it worth every risk. He’s also made friends that he feels he can trust, further anchoring him in this new world. It goes slowly, but he’s starting to build a new life here in this century. But most important of all, he feels he has a reason to live again.
Steve has a reason to live again, because it sure as hell isn’t going to be Captain America who rescues Bucky. It’s going to be that little guy from Brooklyn who was too dumb not to run away from a fight.
‘Cause I’m with you til the end of the line.
(gif sources: 1 piney49 & 2 brigantes & 3 kirknspock & 4 yourcannibalneighbour & 5-6 wintersoldir & 7-8 hiddlesy & 9 thenightshalllastforever & 10-13 brigantes & 14-15maria-sokoli* & 16 yourcannibalneighbour)*turns out they’re a plagiarism blog – please tell me if you know the original source!
(The title is the only facetious thing about this meta. You have been warned.)
WARNING: explicit discussion of suicidal behaviour and all that entailsDisclaimer: I have never been suicidal, so I might not the best person to write this meta; all I can draw from are my own experiences. For two years when I was a child I was steadily getting sicker in a mystery illness until it got to the point where I was expecting to die and stopped caring about it (but was upset that I wasn’t upset) – it was milk allergy, by the way, and I am obviously fine now. Then a few years later I had such a depressive period that while I didn’t want to die, I didn’t want to live either. So I am using these and the stories I’ve heard and read about to extrapolate. If anything rings false, however, please message me and tell me so, because the last thing I want is to be hurtful on this subject.
(I’m breaking up this meta in two parts because it’s monster-sized and I don’t know how it got that way.)
I just want to start off with saying that I don’t believe that Steve is actively trying to kill himself during the course of The Winter Soldier, but rather doesn’t care if he survives or not. He is a self-destructive mess; there is an important distinction to be made there.
To go back a little in time, The Avengers pretty clearly established that Steve is suffering from PTSD and survivor’s guilt; even more so if you count the deleted scenes. After the adorably cute introduction scene in TWS we’re tempted to think that Steve has started to heal from the trauma, but I think the opposite is the case. The Steve we see chatting with Sam is just as much a shield as the vibranium one. Steve doesn’t want to be a bother, doesn’t want to burden anyone, so he puts on a brave face and smiles. I’m willing to bet money that he did exactly the same thing when he was younger and ill. Always seeing the positive side of things, no matter the situation.
The fact that Steve is not okay becomes painfully clear when he speaks to Sam after the VA meeting. First we have the fact that Steve completely understands where the vet who dodged for a plastic bag came from, but the thing that makes all the alarm bells go off is this part:
That little smile, combined with those flat eyes, are among the most tragic things I have ever seen. This is Steve confessing that he doesn’t see anything worth living for. But, in true Steve fashion, he says it with a smile.
But I’m getting ahead of myself. Long before that scene at the VA meeting, we have the one at the Quinjet. Ho boy. We have Steve complaining about being Fury’s janitor, taking on the most dangerous job, cracking a very dark joke and jumping out of the ‘jet… without a parachute.
Now, the distribution of duty can be explained as Steve being his usual selfless self; he is after all the one most likely to survive taking out an entire deck of hostiles. But the bitterness, even when said with that sweet little smile of his, is worrisome and alarming. Steve has a very dry sense of humour, a not-immediately-obvious one that is amazing, but he isn’t bitter. Well, all the guys from my barbershop quartet are dead, so no, not really is not a typical Steve joke.
And then we have the fact that he jumps without a parachute. Don’t tell me he did it for practical reasons. He used a parachute back in ‘43, while the plane was being shot at, and he deliberately refrained from using one this time. That was a high-risk gamble; it payed off in the end, but the risk was Steve breaking an awful lot of bones or even dying on impact. That kind of behaviour is completely reckless.
But let’s talk about the fight with Baltroc. When Baltroc taunts him about I thought you were more than a shield, Steve calmly puts it away and takes off his helmet. At first glance, this is another unnecessary risk Steve takes for no understandable reason. While I agree with that it’s definitely another alarm bell, I also think it goes deeper. There is an excellent meta by verysharpteeth that goes into the differences between Steve’s and the Winter Soldier’s masks, and points out that Steve’s helmet is removable whenever he chooses. And that’s what he does here; he chooses to remove Captain America and become Steve Rogers again. I suspect this is because he feels he is loosing grip of Steve; in this century, no-one knows Steve Rogers. No-one knows that sickly little kid who got beat up in alleyways because he had more honour than sense. No-one knows the artist who dreamt of living off his drawings even during the Depression because it was his passion. No-one knows the young man who was orphaned before turning 20 and watched his mother waste away in TB. No-one knows that behind the serum-enhanced body, it’s exactly the same kid there.
In this century, the only one people know is Captain America.
So I think that while the fight with Baltroc definitely has shades of Steve being passively self-destructive, I also think it’s about Steve clinging to his own identity, to Steve Rogers, the man behind the mask.
This continues in the scene at the Smithsonian. As Steve walks around the exhibit, he only skims past the entries about about himself, sometimes even ignoring them. The ones he linger at are of his friends; the Howling Commandos, Peggy, Bucky. Especially Bucky, who he – in Steve’s own mind – failed.
I want to stop here for a moment. Another fabulous meta by philcoulson brings up how Steve has always been reckless with himself and how it probably is partly due to feeling like he logically should have died years ago and is thus desperate for his life to mean something. Taking this into account, one can hardly start to imagine the survivor’s guilt Steve must be feeling, particularly in regards to Bucky. Because unlike the other Howlers and Peggy, Bucky didn’t get to live a full life; he didn’t get to return home from war, he didn’t get to make a family, he didn’t get to grow old and bounce grandchildren on his knee. Bucky died in the line of duty, under Steve’s command, protecting Steve and Steve has still not forgiven himself for it and probably never will. Bucky was always a survivor; it should have been Steve who died on the train that day. That is what should have happened if the world was logical.
Instead Bucky died, leaving Steve alone and with enough rage and grief to turn from just wanting to fight bullies to actively avenging Bucky’s death. After Bucky’s death Steve goes off the rails in TFA, and he was skirting the line to start with.
Something I won’t linger on, however, is how Steve runs after the Winter Soldier after Fury is shot, for the simple reason that it’s perfectly in-character for him. Stunts like that is what Steve does. He doesn’t like windows but does like jumping off things, this is a well-known fact.
No, the pivotal event in this scene is something else entirely. It’s the purpose Fury gives Steve. TWS is an amazing movie when it comes to thematic contrasts and mirrors, and here is another one I strangely haven’t seen a lot of talk about. Just like the Winter Soldier lives for his missions, so does Steve in this century. When Fury hands Steve that flashdrive, Steve gets a purpose in his life again. He has a world to protect, people to save, he has responsiblity and his actions matter again.
Unanchored by the absence of family and friends and a purpose in life, Steve is just as lost as the Winter Soldier is between missions. They are both men out of time, living in isolation. They are men that are actually islands.
But. This starts to change, however temporarily, when Steve gets this new purpose. He sets out to save the world once again, because it’s what he does. He investigates, he gets in trouble, he regroups. But let’s pause here for a moment.
This scene always makes me bite my lip. On one hand, Steve is amazing and in his element, fighting-wise, and it’s a joy to watch. On the other hand, taking into account his previous behaviour, it’s also worrying. I am referring especially to his leap of faith from the lift.
The logistics of that jump has already been pointed out by ellidfics and scifigrl47 but it still stuns me. I understand that Steve was very much between a rock and a hard place – jump out or face an armed elite squad – but it was still another insane gamble with high stakes. Like I’ve said before, Steve is incredibly reckless with himself in this movie. That is not to say his strategic mind isn’t brilliant or that he is in any way stupid, just that self-preservation seems to be even lower on his priority list than before.
I think I will cut here and direct you to part two of his (way too long) meta, which will feature Steve’s fight against the Winter Soldier, the entire helicarrier scene and a surprisingly positive look at the ending of TWS. No, really, I’m serious.
(gif sources: 1 commandersass & 2 msfili & 3 tochi-tanis & 4 yourcannibalneighbour & 5-6 thenightshalllastforever & 7-8 msfili X & 9-10 tochi-tanis & 11 karyn-filmfanatic & 12-13 thxwintersoldier)
knitting in the dark 