major spoilers for ca:cw under the cut.

so.

there are a lot of things i loved about civil war; natasha, bucky and sam are always at the top of my lists. but as i walked home (almost 2 miles because i was so fucking keyed up) something kept cycling through my brain, and it started with one moment and it didn’t end there:

peggy carter dies, and steve doesn’t get to cry.

and like, okay, steve’s not much of a crier, i hear you/buck/everyone saying. sure. we get a scene of him wanting to be alone in the hallway. we get a scene of him at her funeral. but they aren’t scenes of mourning, not really- the movie instantly asks us to switch our interest to sharon, to steve’s attention to sharon. natasha coming to comfort steve is also about an update on the accords. there’s no moment like the one in ca:tfa where steve cries out in agony against the side of the train, where he drinks himself sober alone in a bombed-out room. the movie doesn’t stop or wait for those feelings. and those moments aren’t just for the characters. they’re for the audience. crying can be cathartic to watch. mourning can be cathartic to watch. letting a character soak in grief for a moment before they move on, gives the audience a satisfying hit of real feeling. lets them anchor themselves somewhere– “i am identifying with this character. i am feeling this character’s visible pain.”

we didn’t really get it. (aside from a couple of key scenes with t'challa that i’ll note in a second.) chris evans is a good enough actor that he can make steve rogers holding very very still into a symphony of sadness, but for me it was as if the movie wanted to talk past him. the movie wanted to push us along. and this kept happening. it was especially jarring to me when tony’s trying to beat bucky to death for murdering his parents, and he’s yelling “do you even remember them,” and bucky’s like “i remember all of them.” and then the fight just moves onward, unabated.

hey, movie, what???

like, can we slow down for one fucking second and talk about how bucky barnes doesn’t get a single scene where he’s allowed to actually break down or show anything other than a.) rage or b.) stoic masculine-coded I’m A Man Who’s Generically Done Bad Things guilt? the audience gets to stand inside the room where they tortured bucky for decades, we get to walk through the fucking cages where they beat him like a dog, but he never gets to talk about it. (again, sebastian stan’s face was working overtime to give us those super complex emotional stories, but the movie was giving him no space.)

it’s a failure of catharsis. it’s a failure of empathy. we’re allowed to watch the characters act and react, but the movie doesn’t give enough time and space and breathing room to take us deep enough to see what’s truly churning under the surfaces. (tony more than anybody, which ends up being a strange choice.) and let me say it again: the extremely stoic, masculine surfaces. i don’t think it’s an an accident that even though this movie is about a.) friends violently hurting each other and b.) huge life-altering grief and loss, nobody cries except t'challa, as he loses his father (and i’m gonna say this several times, but THANK FUCK for t'challa). nobody else ever just collapses with sadness. instead, the major, overwhelmingly dominant mode of expressing emotion in this entire movie is anger. and anger, of course, is the one emotion men are taught that it’s natural to express. men are allowed to be angry, but they are not allowed to be much else. anger and violence is how the villain expresses his grief. anger and violence is how tony expresses his grief. anger and violence are the only outlets offered for pain, whether you’re the hero or not. but the movie doesn’t really force that parallel clearly enough.

(again, thank fuck for t’challa. he is the one character who has a true cathartic moment, on the mountain with his father’s murderer. his face is beautiful there, showing us every flicker of torment and sadness and eventually, peace. before that i was starting to feel like tensed-up anger was the only emotion i could still feel. his emotional arc was the most resonant.)

the inability to empathize is everywhere in the character’s storylines. i mean, when i say the audience gets to walk through bucky’s Siberian Nightmare House, tony gets to do that, too. tony watches the video in the same room as the chair. the chair! i mean, Jesus Christ! tony is standing in the room where they scrubbed the fucking personhood out of bucky barnes for fucking decades! he got to see the other winter soldiers locked in their tanks with fucking tubes coming out of their arms! i understand his immediate reaction of fury and grief-stricken rage, but i do not understand the movie’s inability to have characters look at each other’s experiences.

i don’t have much of a conclusion. but i am feeling keenly the absence of moments like those in ca:tws, where steve gets herded into the prisoner transport after seeing bucky for the first time: the movie blurs and sways with steve, the sound dies away. we feel his incomprehension, everything else washes away while he processes it. we’re with him, fully with him, inside his journey in those instants. we get to feel what he’s feeling. the only real emotion i felt like i really had been granted access to during ca:cw was anger, maybe frustration; but i couldn’t sustain that for three hours. it grated. i wanted somebody to express tenderness. weakness. softness. natasha’s turning the tide– her ability to understand steve’s plight and then to act accordingly– was one of the few moments where anybody stopped for one second, let go of the story’s insistence on fighting, and let gentler, kinder, more loving feelings drive the action.*

*(wanda and vision almost managed this, but not quite, for me. probably unpopular opinion time: vision tenderly holding wanda in his arms post-battle is closely followed by wanda being locked up in a fucking straitjacket and collar and nobody but steve doing anything about it– so thanks for nothing there, vision.)



and maybe it’s all thematic. maybe this entire movie was about society’s insistence on male anger. but if so, it needed a different ending. it needed more. the villain’s motivation was barely mentioned until the end, and then it was paralleled with t’challa’s decisions, not tony’s. (which lets tony sidestep forgiveness entirely while t'challa grants it.) if the movie wanted to make that point, it missed by inches.

anyway. i stil love y’all, avengers; russos. but please, please, my dudes: let superheroes cry 2k16.