So I wrote this quick but oh-so-long analysis. It obviously contains tons of Captain America: The Winter Soldier spoilers, and one old-ish spoiler for the Winter Soldier’s arc in the comics. And here it is:

For a movie that, despite its gestures at political complexity, offers a pretty basic hero v. bad guy plot, Captain America: The Winter Soldier actually has a lot to say about the anxieties and obsessions of modern Western culture. I’m not talking about its nods towards surveillance concerns, or the way that Hydra here has been rendered as kind of a neo-conservative Illuminati. The explicit themes of the film are, I think, actually pretty centrist: freedom good, not-freedom bad, traditional ideals of America good, everything else bad, some suffer nobly so others won’t have to suffer, violence is bad except when it isn’t and so on. Yet against of all this standard action-film background noise, the Winter Soldier appears as a violent disruption. He dominates the screen, despite appearing in relatively little of the movie, and the force of the trauma he both embodies and represents ends up, I would argue, over-haunting everything else.

One of the centrist themes that is most noticeable in the film is that of wounded warriors. Steve, Sam, Natasha, and Nick Fury all play this out in various ways: Steve is struggling to adjust to the modern world, troubled by the people and ideals who seem not to have survived into it. Sam helps counsel other soldiers who, like him, are struggling with the return from active duty overseas. Natasha and Nick both seem in some way disabled by the violence and betrayals that have left them wary of trust. Notably, the specific wars and/or other conflicts in which these four have suffered are not explored in detail. This is specifically notable (since we are expected to know something about Steve, Natasha, and Nick’s backstories) with Sam: the complicated and unpleasant question about the legitimacy of the war he served in is brushed to one side, so that we may focus on the simpler subject of his heroism.

One strange and dense line that sticks out, given the cleanness of all four’s “woundedness,” is Nick Fury’s reference to the fact that the “Greatest Generation” did some unpleasant things. What were these things? We don’t know. It’s a little needle of darkness, the first drip of the Winter Soldier’s oncoming night. Because the Winter Soldier in many ways is the embodiment of the repressed trauma of those unpleasant things: the ghost of the traumatic past refusing to die.

Those who read my blog have probably seen me refer to the concept of “hauntology” in terms of its usefulness in trauma studies. The way it’s worked out in that specific field is more-or-less this: events have physical bodies in the time and space where they occur. When these events are “past,” their bodies are “dead.” But though the events may be past, they are not over. They survive, in the form of a “haunt” that– like the more familiar ghost, surviving the death of a human body– persist. This “haunt” is not a memory or echo of the ended event. It is, in a very real sense, the event continuing: continuing to affect, continuing to wound.

The Winter Soldier is the realization of persistent trauma on many levels. He is the man who did not return from war. He is the man who died, and whose voice is therefore never admitted to conversations about war and its violence. He is the ultimate trauma: that which cannot be spoken about, because it is beyond the limit of survival. Even here, dead-and-not-dead, he cannot speak about it: at first, it seems like he may not have a voice; later, we see that he has a voice, but almost no memory, and a mangled mind. All he can do to re-present that trauma is be present. His existence is disturbing.

But the trauma he is re-presenting here is not specifically the trauma of the Second World War, the invisibilized trauma of the soldiers who fought and died in it. He is also someone to whom continuous violence has been done, and importantly, in the movie, it is not clear who did it. The Red Room is gone; it seems that his relationship with Natasha is gone; it seems that the USSR, in fact, is all gone. Instead we have Hydra: an international cabal entrenched in the U.S. intelligence services. What is Hydra, here, in this universe? As I mentioned, it seems like a neocon Illuminati: something between a corporation and a transnational political party.

I want to suggest a parallel that I see as significant. In the scene that establishes Pierce as Evil Hydra Leader, we see him giving the Winter Soldier orders in his exquisite, expensive home. His nice Balkan (going by the actress) housekeeper accidentally overhears their conversation, and Pierce very politely, very pleasantly shoots her dead.

What’s going on here? This rich, cultured, powerful, polite white man is shown here to wield power over two bodies: the body of his seemingly immigrant domestic servant and the body of the Winter Soldier. (The power he holds over the latter is more fully explored in a scene in which he backhands and dominates the docile Winter Soldier despite the latter’s cyber-enhanced physical strength.) I think it’s possible to read this as showing Pierce as the face of what I will call (for reasons that will become clearer in a moment) “old neoliberalism."

The Winter Soldier is the body that old neoliberalism has created: a body fashioned through torture, through forced re-education, through the repression and erasure of history. And he is the "haunt” of this violence and this erasure, which continues to be enacted through and on him. (Sure: he’s a white man, but I think that the ultimate turn of this narrative, in the “new neoliberalism” I’ll describe further, requires this.)

Another interesting parallel in the film is between the Winter Soldier and Dr. Zola. The latter has survived only as an enormous, primitive computer: his consciousness uploaded into a machine. The Winter Soldier, of course, is a cyborg: outfitted with a cybernetic arm, and created through technological mindwiping. Both cases seem to express anxiety about man becoming machine: Zola is even more disturbing as a computer than he was as a human body, and the Winter Soldier’s mechanical aspects serve as a visual reminder of his loss of humanity. Compare this to the off-the-grid Steve and Natasha: dressed in civilian clothes, driving a beat-up pick-up truck to a 1940s Army base. The whole of the Shield Resistance is shown as fairly low-tech: housed in a grimy warehouse, throwing human bodies against technological surveillance and a fleet of warships.

The ultimate triumph of human versus machine, in this narrative, is the triumph of the Winter Soldier over himself, or Bucky Barnes over the Winter Soldier. This is the very final note of the film, in the second stinger, and is a given for fans of the comics. Of course the “real” Bucky is going to re-emerge from “inside” the Winter Soldier, proving the indomitability of the human spirit. Of course he’s going to join the ranks of the wounded warriors, who are troubled (but not too troubled) by the violence they’ve been involved in.

But in fact this is quite a troubling development, and it points towards what I want to call the “new neoliberalism.” This is the neoliberalism of many Western human rights movements, which presuppose the existence of a universal human self. This UHS is the self constituted by Western understandings of basic human desires. It is the UHS that white feminists go looking for “under the burqa,” the UHS that is waiting to be told that it is free to participate in any sanctioned sexual category, and free to participate in any form of marriage or family deemed acceptable in the West. And so on, and so on. This is the liberated UHS that operates as the ideal global consumer: completely free of unacceptable “superstition,” free of any deeply imprinted cultural trace.

There should not be, inside the Winter Soldier, any “old” or “real” Bucky. People who have read about or worked in neuroscience probably recognize this. In fact, even the comics recognize this, to the extent that it requires a magical space artifact (the Cosmic Cube) to restore his “self”/memories. Yet the narrative has a powerful need to demonstrate that he can be reclaimed, that he can be “saved” from what he’s become– in other words, that an indomitable, whole “self” is very deeply hidden inside his overwritten cyber-body.

So: to translate what I’m trying to say here: the new neoliberalism comes into action here as a means of saving/reclaiming the creature that the old neoliberalism has created. The Winter Soldier is the damaged, “monstrous” embodiment of the violence of the old neoliberalism– and, one could argue, of pre-neoliberalism, in terms of the Second World War trauma that has been forcefully repressed. The new-neoliberal belief in his salvation is effectively a commitment to the effacing of history: a reversion back to the “old”/“real” self that existed prior to these violent transformations. The accomplishment of this means the successful re-repression of this trauma– the elimination of the “ghost” that intrudes disruptively into the world.

I think it’s also necessary to look at the fact that the split between “new neoliberalism” and “old neoliberalism,” in my reading, is a split between “real SHIELD” and “Hydra SHIELD” that only occurs late in the movie. Prior to this split, Our Heroes were effectively working for the organization that created the Winter Soldier. The retrospective reinforcement of the split (“it wasn't all of us, it was just them”) is in many ways a fiction that allows “real SHIELD” to absolve itself of the violence committed in its name– including the violence that the Winter Soldier represents. His erasure/reversion therefore becomes also a means of wiping away the visible, troubling reminder of SHIELD’s history.

When I say “his erasure,” also, I mean this in a very complicated way. There is no “real” Bucky Barnes waiting to be released from the “fake” prison of the Winter Soldier. (The comics did not handle this particularly well, and I’m interested to see how the films will deal with it.) The insistence on “undoing” the Winter Soldier in an effort to “heal” Bucky is an insistence on denying the legitimacy of those experiences because they are unpalatable or horrifying to a certain audience. This is very similar to rehabilitation efforts that insist trauma must be “overcome” or “conquered” rather than integrated into the self. And it is, of course, very similar to new-neoliberal efforts that insist unpalatable desires and beliefs are illegitimate and must, in the same manner, be excised from the self. The Winter Soldier is troubling, disturbing, literally haunting. What the heroes of this story want is his destruction, but they frame this as his salvation.