Ta-Nehisi Coates's Blog, page 4

Wakanda And The Black Aesthetic

Black Panther #3 drops today and I thought I’d say something about the poetry that both opens and closes the book. The poem we used is Henry  Dumas’ “Rootsong.”  I first encountered this piece during one of my many study sessions with the poet Joel Dias-Porter. This would have been somewhere around 1995 or 1996. Joel is a tremendous poet in his own right, but at that point (and perhaps even today) he was mentoring a whole crop of young writers—Terrence Hayes, Yona Harvey, Jelani Cobb—who happened to be in the DC area. Terms like “study session” and “mentor” make all of this sound more formal than it was. Usually it was a crew of us at a restaurant or a cafe discussing anything from sports to politics to poetry. At one of these sessions, Joel whipped out a collection of Dumas’ work and turned to the poem “Rootsong.” What stunned me about the poem is how it used black myth to construct a narrative of the diaspora before and after colonialism and enslavement:

Once when I was tree

flesh came and worshiped at my roots.

My ancestors slept in my outstretched

limbs and listened to flesh

praying and entreating on his knees.

There is an Edenic, utopian quality to Dumas’ depiction of precolonial Africa. “Rootsong” always struck me as romance—not so different from the kind of romance than you’d see in Marvel’s Thor. Poetry is a natural cousin to comic books. Comic book writing, like poetry, requires a ruthless efficiency with words. The art is the hero and if I may say so myself, the art in Black Panther #3—particularly in the pages using “Rootsong”—is heroic.

Dumas was killed at the age of 34 by New York city transit cop. But his legacy endures through the strivings of the poet Eugene Redmond and the great Toni Morrison. It was Redmond who posthumously edited Dumas’ poems into a book. It was Morrison, then an editor at Random House, who ultimately published them. At the time she wrote of Dumas:

In 1968, a young black man, Henry Dumas, went through a turnstile at a New York City subway station. A transit cop shot him in the chest and killed him. Circumstances surrounding his death remain unclear. Before that happened, however, he had written some of the most beautiful, moving and profound poetry and fiction that I have ever in my life read.

That Dumas wrote the words, that Morrison and Redmond made it possible to read those words, that I was exposed to those words during my tenure at the Mecca, and that those influenced my own words points to the deep and enduring power of tradition and lineage. Indeed as an atheist, tradition and lineage are the closes thing I have to any notion  of afterlife. The work outlives us, and the work exerts power long after we are gone.

I hope you feel that power in Black Panther #3.

'A Species of Labor We Do Not Want'

One of the early triumphs of Black Reconstruction In America is the way its author, W.E.B. Du Bois, is able to offer a cogent class analysis of the antebellum economy, without flattening the difference between different types of “degraded” labor. In Du Bois’s time, and even occasionally in our time, intellectuals would often claim that slave labor was ultimately no worse than free labor. “One-half of them prefer hiring their servants for life, and the other half by the hour,” claimed Thomas Carlyle.  More to the point, while workers in the North enjoyed no guaranteed support and thus were “free to starve,” in the South the enslaver assumed responsibility for clothing and feeding the enslaved. The enslaved were awarded shelter, rudimentary health care, and cared for in old age. In many respects (so the argument went) the black slave was advantaged over the white “wage slave.” This argument found traction among slavery’s apologists and even some left radicals in the 1830s.*

When labor activist George Henry Evans explained to abolitionist Gerrit Smith his opposition to emancipation, he noted:

I was formerly, like yourself, sir, a very warm advocate of the abolition of slavery. This was before I saw that there was white slavery. Since I saw this, I have materially changed my views as to the means of abolishing Negro slavery. I now see, clearly, I think, that to give the landless black the privilege of changing masters now possessed by the landless white would hardly be a benefit to him in exchange for his surety of support in sickness and old age, although he is in a favorable climate. If the Southern form of slavery existed at the North, I should say the black would be a great loser by such a change

Du Bois was having none of it:

...there was in 1863 a real meaning to slavery different from that we may apply to the laborer today. It was in part psychological, the enforced personal feeling of inferiority, the calling of another Master; the standing with hat in hand. It was the helplessness. It was the defenselessness of family life. It was the submergence below the arbitrary will of any sort of individual. It was without doubt worse in these vital respects than that which exists today in Europe or America.

Above all it was the fact of being vended like oxen that separated the condition of the enslaved from the oppressed worker—“No matter how degraded the factory hand,” writes Du Bois. “He is not real estate.”

And yet having teased out the difference, Du Bois does not lose sight of the ways the slave society injured the prospects of poor non-slaveholding whites in the South. The slave system depressed wages and ensured unemployment—why pay a white person to do a job that an enslaved black person is bound to do for free?Enslaved blacks worked in nearly every capacity in the South, from field-hand to artisan leaving white labor to “compete” with enslaved blacks for jobs and wages. But there was no competition on account of slavery. The only real restraint was the supply of enslaved blacks, and slaveholders tried to alter even that by pushing to re-open the slave trade. “If we cannot supply the demand for slave labor,” asserted the governor of South Carolina in 1856. “Then we must expect to be supplied with a species of labor we do not want.” That would be poor whites.

Big slaveholders feared the white labor movement emerging much to the detriment of the slaveholder. From the Charleston Mercury in 1861:

Read On »

O.J. Simpson and the Counter-Revolution of 1968

Every fall Sunday, when I was a kid, half an hour before the pre-game shows and an hour before the games themselves, I would tune into the latest offering from NFL Films. This was the pre-pre-game show—an assembly of short films derived from the massive archive of professional football. Steve Sabol, whose father founded NFL Films, would preside. He’d offer and then throw it to Jon Facenda or Jefferson Kaye, who would narrate the career highlights of players like Gale Sayers, Earl Campbell, or Dick “Night Train” Lane.

“Highlights” understates what NFL films was actually doing. The shorts were drawn from some the most beautifully shot footage in all of sports. It wasn’t unheard of for NFL Films to go high concept—this piece on football and ballet, with cameos from Allen Ginsberg and George Will, may be the definitive example. Great football plays would be injected not with the normal hurrahs, but with poetry. When Facenda, for instance, wanted to introduce a spectacular touchdown run by Marcus Allen, he did so in the omniscient third person: “On came Marcus Allen—running with the night.”

I watched that Super Bowl run live when it happened. I can still remember leaping up and down in my parents’ living room. But the NFL Films version, with its sweeping chords, is so powerful that I remember it through that lens. Indeed Todd Christensen—who was on the field in that very game—remembers it in the same way. The point of all of those sweeping chords was to convince the viewer that professional football was not just a sport, but an elegant tradition. The NBA was a game. The NFL was heritage.

More importantly, NFL Films was propaganda—beautiful, gorgeous, and artfully rendered propaganda, but propaganda all the same. Some of that same footage appears in the first episode of Ezra Edelman’s majestic documentary O.J.: Made in America, though to very different effect. The five-part film is as great as everyone says—a majestic work which doesn’t uplift, but haunts. Edelman agrees with the NFL—football is heritage—but proceeds to put that heritage within the context of the flawed human history that makes football so necessary to us all.

In this business, it’s worth restating that O.J. Simpson was a dazzling tailback and Edelman frames him in all of his balletic beauty. We see Simpson—high and angular—his hips lurching in one direction, his head swiveling in another. We see him accelerating at an uncanny rate—surrounded by swarm of defenders, and then just as suddenly alone in the open green. He seems to have an advanced sense of space and time, twisting defenders in knots, juking them until their sense of balance distorts and they fall as though struck by a great blow. There’s one shot of Simpson falling untouched on a play and the defender falling with him. But unlike the defender, Simpson gets up and keeps on running. “This is how it is supposed to be,” he said, attempting to capture the sentiment of breaking a big run. “This is correct. This is the natural state of things.”

NFL Films usually backs its highlights with loud, martial music. Edelman prefers the kind of subtle pianos and soft strings more appropriate for an in memoriam segment. Where NFL Films typically celebrates a running back gliding through a hole, Edelman seems to be mourning the death of some part of Simpson, or the death of some part of us. The contrast—awe and loss—works because football is itself a great contrast: a game of terrible, violent, brain-bashing beauty. As beautiful as Simpson is cutting through the field—and he is beautiful—you always know that the subtext of that beauty is 11 men paid and primed to inflict as much violence as the rules permit upon his body.

The employment of contrast goes beyond the music. Edelman pairs the violence of the football field with the violence of America itself. Simpson came of age in the late ’60s, during a time when America was exploding with riots and assassinations. He dazzled at USC—a veritable utopia built within walking distance of Watts. While other athletes perceived the overlap between sports and politics, Simpson and his coterie would have none of it. “For us, O.J. was colorless,” says the Hertz CEO Frank Olsen. And then the racist underpinnings of that “colorless” status become clear. “He’s African,” says the ad man Fred Levinson. “But he’s a good looking man, he almost has white features.”

What O.J. seemed to perceive—and then exploit—was the extent to which the larger country was interested in his talents and disinterested in the forces that produced them. At one point Edelman asks O.J.’s USC teammate Fred Khasigian what he thinks about when he thinks of 1968. Khasigian pauses for a minute. We see a collage of images—Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy’s assassination, the violence at that year’s Democratic convention. And then he answers:

I think of winning all the games, getting O.J. famous. Everybody on campus thinking this is the greatest thing on earth. That’s all we thought about. There was nothing else going on.

In fairness, Khasigian is likely aware that more was “going on” that year. But he captures the insular sense at USC and around football in general—the notion that sport can, somehow, be greater than all of us. But it is not. And the contrasts that Edelman teases out throughout the film are not artifacts of the past. Though Edelman is skeptical of its import for Simpson, the question of CTE hangs in the background throughout the series. As do the ways in which black athletes are used up and disregarded at the college level. Episode One is a counterweight to the kind of slick football propaganda NFL Films fed us as kids. It works not by being delivered as an anti-football screed, but by showing all the beauty and ugliness of the game, all at the same time, and thus giving the truest depiction of pro football I’ve ever seen.

'But This Latter Person, I Am Not Trying To Convince'

One of the best parts of the old blogging system, here, was the ability to talk about what I was reading at the time. I think I’m going to try to bring some of that back.

I’ve read a lot over the past year or so (though less than previous years) and there’s a lot I want to talk about: Yaa Gyasi’s Homecoming (inspiring in its generational ambition), Laurent DuBois’s Avengers of the New World (history of the Haitian Revolution, an idea some 200 years ahead of its time), John Scalzi’s Old Man’s War (conservative and romantic in every way that I love), Mark Waid and Chris Samnee’s Black Widow (so intense, and this story never lets you take a break—oddly reminiscent of Mad Max: Fury Road), William Doyle’s Oxford History of the French Revolution (great primer for anyone starting—as I was—with just the barest knowledge of the French Revolution.)

But those are things I’ve already read, or, in the case of Black Widow, ongoing things which I’m in the process of reading. Right now my eye is trained on a book that my historian friends have been demanding I read for the past few years—W.E.B. Du Bois’s Black Reconstruction In America. I just started yesterday, and already I can see why the book has so many fans in the academy.

Over the past 40 years or so, there’s been a movement among some American historians to put white supremacy at the center of their field of study. Much of my own work, and my current understanding of American history, pulls from these historians—Edmund Morgan, Beryl Satter, Ed Baptist, Thomas Sugrue, Arnold Hirsch, Eric Foner, Barbara and Karen Fields.

Read On »

Bob Costas To Muhammad Ali—"Well Actually..."

Bob Costas went on national television and made the kind of statement that typifies the ongoing dialogue around racism in this country:

A lot of what Ali said was profound. Some of it was hyperbolic. When he said that Cassius Clay was a slave name that was ironic because the original Cassius Clay was a white abolitionist who was shot by a pro-slavery guy in Kentucky in the 1840s. Now that doesn’t mean that Ali didn’t have the right to do what he did and didn’t do it for good reasons. But, just to correct the historical record, Cassius Clay was an abolitionist.

No he wasn’t. The anti-slavery movement in the antebellum period encompassed a wide-range of views—some of them white supremacist, some of them deeply humanist, some of them conservative and some of them radical. Abolitionism was the radical wing of the movement, favoring the immediate and total destruction of slavery. Clay thought that enslavement was a moral evil and bad for his native Kentucky, but, much like George Washington, Clay believed in the gradual freeing of the slaves.

This is not mere categorical pedantry—Abraham Lincoln and Wendell Phillips aren’t interchangable. Part of why Clay wasn’t an abolitionist was that he was a slave-holder living in the South. At times Clay did the kind of things slave-holders tended to do—like sell people:

On September, 1843, when his second son, Cassius, Jr., became ill, Emily, the boy's Negro nurse, was suspected of having poisoned him. Although the boy died, no action was taken against Emily until 1845 when another son became ill under similar circumstances. Thereupon Emily was charged with having administered "a deadly poison called arsenide, to wit five grains." Even a pro-slavery jury found the evidence inconclusive and Emily was acquitted. Then Clay aroused a storm of protest by selling Emily, her mother, and a brother under the express provision that they be shipped "down the river."*

Even as Clay freed those people whom he personally held enslaved on his estate, he “retained in slavery a number of Negroes who were attached to the estate without being his personal property.” When you are black and your namesake is literally a slave-holder, there is nothing ironic about calling it a “slave name.”

Now, I find Clay heroic. Clay did not ask to be a slave-holder. He was born into slave-holding and, at great financial loss to himself, freed those he personally held in bondage. This was not a small thing—collectively, enslaved people, represented the greatest asset in the country at that time. Clay, himself, took a $50,000 loss—in 1860 dollars—in order to live out his principles. He went even further—loudly denouncing slavery as evil, and thus constantly courting danger. This isn’t enough for Bob Costas. Clay can’t be a brave and complicated human. Clay has to be the wholly innocent, wholly righteous white guy in the black movie.

But Muhammad Ali would not define himself through Clay’s legacy. Ali was more interested in the legacy of Emily, the enslaved woman whom Clay sold away. That was the entire point of Ali changing his name. Unfortunately none of that could save Ali from Bob Costas’s need to be all loud an the smug of chorus of “Well, actually...” that must dog us all into our very graves.

“The Anti-Slavery Career of Cassius M. Clay.” Lowell H. Harrison. The Register of the Kentucky Historical Society, Vol. 59, No. 4 (October, 1961), pp. 295-317

The Black Journalist and the Racial Mountain

Howard French has an interesting piece in The Guardian tackling “the enduring whiteness of American media.” French’s claim is two-fold: 1.) Big media organizations have failed to produce a staff that looks like the larger country. 2.) Big media has failed black journalists, specifically, by siloing them in “stereotypical roles—sport, entertainment and especially what is euphemistically called urban affairs.” These twin effects, according to French, “strongly but silently [condition] how Americans understand their own country and the rest of the world.” This is an important piece—one worthy of the ongoing dialogue around newsroom diversity. But unfortunately it also shows how an attempt to analyze a problem, can actually reinforce it.

Howard French is a great journalist and a trailblazer—an African American who has reported from, among other locales, China, the Congo, Haiti, South Africa, and Japan. There are few journalists of any background who can match the depth and breadth of his experiences. But French is black, and garnering that experience has meant traveling outside of delineated boundaries and enduring a specific kind of skepticism lobbed at black journalists. That kind of skepticism has not disappeared. But to the extent that it has diminished, it is directly due to the efforts of black journalists like French.

Those efforts, and the fruits they bore, don’t appear in French’s essay. Instead he presents black journalists in two varieties—those chained by the boundaries of the press’s racism, and those specifically empowered to help maintain those boundaries. I am touted as an exemplar of that latter category. French sees me in a tradition of token black writers whom white people shower with plaudits so that they might better argue “that we don’t have a race problem any more.” To be sure, French sees this as “great work being celebrated.” But at its root it is still “the re-enactment of an old, insidious ritual of confinement”:

Coates was doing, after all, the one thing that black writers have long been permitted – if not always encouraged – to do: write about the experience of race and racism in the world and in their own lives.

This permission serves to both keep black journalists and writers from competing in venues beyond the sphere “of race and racism,” and allow whites to celebrate “their own enlightenment and generosity.”

French is airing a common suspicion—one that concerns itself not so much with black writing, but with what white people think of black writing. At The Washington Post, Carlos Lozada argued that because “liberal elites” enjoyed Between The World And Me, the book must be wrong. Jacobin writer Cedric Johnson addresses himself to “Ta-Nehisi Coates And The White Liberals Who Love Him.” David French felt so moved by the accolades given by “white liberals” that he wrote the same blog-post three different times. The writer Thomas Chatterton Williams reviewed the book twice—once when it was published, and then again after it was being celebrated. By his own admission, the writer John McWhorter did not bother to read the book, but did read what everyone else was saying about the book. This disturbed him so much that he considered giving up writing about race entirely. “Oh God,” moaned McWhorter. “One of the Men of The Year is going to be Ta-Nehisi Coates.”

That intellectuals like McWhorter are more provoked by what the (largely white) critical establishment has to say, than what an actual black human has written, is neither mysterious nor mystical. Indeed Glenn Loury made it quite clear in one of his more illuminating discussions of Between The World And Me:

If you’re riding high on The New York Times’ nonfiction best-seller list #1, 2, 3 and if you’re up there for a couple of months you’re selling hundreds of thousands, maybe even millions of copies of a text and you’re getting royalties of, I don’t know, it depends on the contract three, four, five bucks a pop. You understand? Anybody can do that arithmetic….

Moreover, you become the person who frames the conversation in the editorial board-rooms, in the corporate board-rooms, in the community activist meetings. Your text becomes influential in a very deep way. It resonates in the lives and in the minds of people. You become a household word. You become the go-to person. These are all very, very, very good things.

Loury’s thirst is Saharan. The strictures of racial spokesmanship, the perils of fame, the trap of being “the one,” none of this troubles him. Indeed Loury does not object to king-making. He objects to not being made the king. “If you’re so smart,” he wonders about himself. “Why don’t you have the prize?”

Though less craven, the gravity of white adulation distorts Howard French’s case all the same. Implicit in French’s focus on what is “permitted,” is a framing, a point of reference, an origin story that privileges the whims of presumably white gate-keepers above all others. Covering the force of racism in America is not something that a black writer can, of his own volition, believe to be interesting and essential. “The Race Beat” is a ghetto which white people tolerate in order to preserve those arenas that truly matter (business, technology, culture etc.) French tells the story of a black colleague who hoped to garner “some recognition” by covering “subjects that he knew white peers would find unattractive.” Those subjects were black. And the great tragedy of this colleague’s career, according to French, was that his attempts to move beyond his own people were repeatedly frustrated.

French believes that it is imperative that black writers cross “the river,” as he did, and escape the presumably provincial confines of covering race. In this, he echoes the white critics who so often say to those of us interested in black America, “Can’t you write about something other than racism?” without realizing that racism is the font of their very question, their very identity, their very world. Now, no writer—black, white or whatever—should spend time covering subjects which don’t interest them. It’s not fair to the writer and, more importantly, it’s not fair to the people being covered. But there is a segment of black writers who cover their own communities, not in hopes of garnering “recognition” from their white peers, but because they believe Harlem has as much to say to the world as Dakar, Silicon Valley, or Tokyo. The possibility of this sentiment is absent in French’s piece, and that absence puts French, unwittingly, on common ground with the very institutions he attacks. The outcomes are similar—the vanishing of black writers.

Reading his piece, you would never know that the same year The Atlantic published “The Case For Reparations,” it also published Nikole Hannah-Jones’s disturbing portrayal of the return of school segregation. You’d never know that both pieces were nominated for a National Magazine Awards. You’d never guess that Hannah-Jones went on, the next year, to be named NABJ’s , and then win both the Peabody and the Polk awards.

Hannah-Jones does not stand alone. The most important work of American long-form journalism, in the past decade, was executed by Isabel Wilkerson—The Warmth Of Other Suns. Wilkerson, a 1994 Pulitzer prize winner, produced a book that was both a commercial triumph (New York Times best-seller) and a critical success (National Book Critics Circle Award winner.) The omission of Wilkerson and Hannah-Jones is characteristic of French’s piece. There are no Jelani Cobbs in his essay, no Alexis Okeowos, no Jamelle Bouies, no Yamiche Alcindors, no Rembert Brownes, no Trymaine Lees, no Malcolm Gladwells, no Joel Andersons, no Kelefa Sannehs, no Kara Browns, no Brentin Mocks, no Jenna Worthams, no Wesley Morrises. You would never guess that there are black journalists, here at The Atlantic, covering business and politics, editing its website, and designing its pages.

Here is the great sin of French’s piece—in losing sight of an entire community of black writers and journalists, he replicates the very tokenism he disdains. It’s as though The Undefeated never happened. This was a year in which three black journalists won the Pulitzer Prize. And though this fact can not be disconnected from mighty efforts of journalists like French, it merits no mention from him.

Contrary to his intent, French has produced a lengthy essay on the perils of restricting and omitting black writers, that omits and restricts black writers. In a piece running over five thousand words, French offers only three sentences to a generation of “high-profile black writers” and “new non-white voices.” French isn’t sure whether “this marks the beginning of an important shift, or is simply a short-term trend.” I think it marks something else—a community and tradition that endures whether the larger culture is paying attention, or not.

The most significant thing about my work, in French’s rendering, is that an influential community of white people have praised it. (Even this formulation is restrictive and rooted in the dated notion that there are no black decision-makers at the National Book Foundation or the MacArthur Foundation.) Another perspective might hold that this community of influencers is ancillary to my work, that my writing is actually a product of the community of black writers and journalists who French erases.

This is not sentimental. This is how it happened. I have been arguing with Jelani Cobb since I was a freshman at Howard University. I have been arguing with my book editor, Chris Jackson, for over a decade. It was Wilkerson’s work that helped inspire “The Case for Reparations.” Wilkerson is a Howard alum who edited The Hilltop, the campus paper that published my first articles. The most significant endorsement I have ever received did not come from the MacArthur Foundation, nor the National Book Foundation, but from a black woman—Toni Morrison, Howard alum, pupil of Alain Locke.

Tokenism attempts to obliterate these links—obliterates tradition and community. Your family is rendered invisible, and you become what other people, from other places, say about you. But popular and critical adulation are tricks of timing, luck, and fate. Viewing them as anything else, as self-definitional, as primary, is corrupting, is thirst. The favor and disdain of others is random. Community and tradition are not. Perhaps one might protest by pointing out that French was critiquing whites, not blacks, and thus his focus on white institutions, at the expense of black writers, is appropriate. This approach will always be myopic. I was not the only black writer to win the National Book Award. I was not even the only black person to be awarded a MacArthur.

When I started writing Between The World And Me, the only person’s permission I needed was black. He was my editor. He grew up like me. He understood where I was trying to go—even when I didn’t quite understand it myself. My father—who subsidized the self-published blog which is the seed of my presence here—read and critiqued the book before it was published. My mother—who taught me to read and write—did the same. The first stop on the book tour was West Baltimore. The next was Catonsville High School, where my mother works. The next was Howard University. Throughout the tour, we made a specific effort to be in black spaces, and pull in black bookstores. This was not a carefully laid plan to seduce white liberals. It was an attempt to be able to sleep at night. Writing a book from a black perspective is freeing. Seeing it constantly examined from a white perspective is depressing.

I think there are reasons to write beyond placing a thumb in the eye of “white liberals,” who are not our Gods and who are not our slaves. French is disturbed to see black writing function as a salve to the collective white conscience. But by the lights of history, the collective white conscience has never needed salve, has made no apologies, and has proven impervious to the import of black literature. It’s almost as though writers should write for themselves, should hew to their own standards, and keep their own conscience instead of fretting over the feelings of those who they can not change, and who they do not control.

Killing Dylann Roof

On Tuesday, Attorney General Loretta Lynch announced she would seek the death penalty for Dylann Roof. It has not been a year since Roof walked into Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church and murdered nine black people as they worshipped. Roof justified this act of terrorism in chillingly familiar language—“You rape our women and you’re taking over our country.” The public display of forgiveness offered to Roof by the families of the victims elicited bipartisan praise from across the country. The president saluted the families for “an expression of faith that is unimaginable but that reflects the goodness of the American people.” How strange it is to see that same administration, and these good people, who once saluted the forgiveness of Roof, presently endorse his killing.

Dylann Roof’s act stood in a long and lethal tradition of homegrown American terrorism stretching back to the Civil War. The response to this terrorism that the powers-that-be tend to endorse is nonviolence—love, forgiveness, and turning the other cheek. The symbol of this approach is, of course, Martin Luther King Jr. One problem with using King in this way is that the actual King had an annoying habit of preaching nonviolence, whether it was convenient or not. Whereas American power generally regards nonviolence as a means of cynically enforcing order, King believed protesters should be exemplars of nonviolence, but not its unique employers.

There are defensible reasons why the American state—or any state—would find King’s ethic hard to live up to. States are violent. The very establishment of government, the attempt to safeguard a group of people deemed citizens or subjects, is always violent. In America, a president is the commander in chief. Anyone who voted for Obama necessarily voted for violence. Furthermore, there is indisputable evidence that violence sometimes works. The greatest affirmation of civil rights in American history—emancipation—was accomplished at gun-point.

But one has to be careful here not to fall into the trap of lionizing killing, of pride in the act of destroying people even for just ends. Moreover, even if nonviolence isn’t always the answer, King reminds us to work for a world where it is. Part of that work is recognizing when our government can credibly endorse King’s example. Sparing the life of Dylann Roof would be such an instance—one more credible than the usual sanctimonious homilies delivered in his name. If the families of Roof's victims can find the grace of forgiveness within themselves; if the president can praise them for it; if the public can be awed by it—then why can't the Department of Justice act in the spirit of that grace and resist the impulse to kill?

Perhaps because some part of us believes in nonviolence not as an ideal worth striving for, but as a fairy tale passed on to the politically weak. The past two years have seen countless invocations of nonviolence to shame unruly protestors into order. Such invocations are rarely made to shame police officers who choke men to death over cigarettes and are sent back out onto the beat. And the same political officials will stand up next January and praise King even as they act contrary to his words. “Capital punishment is against the best judgment of modern criminology,” wrote King, “and, above all, against the highest expression of love in the nature of God.”

Moreover, killing Roof does absolutely nothing to ameliorate the conditions that brought him into being in the first place. The hammer of criminal justice is the preferred tool of a society that has run out of ideas. In this sense, Roof is little more than a human sacrifice to The Gods of Doing Nothing. Leave aside actual substantive policy. In a country where slaveholders and regressive white supremacists still, at this late date, adorn our state capitals and our highest institutions of learning, it is bizarre to kill a man who acted in their spirit. And killing Roof, like the business of the capital punishment itself, ensures that innocent people will be executed. The need to extract vengeance cannot always be exact. It is all but certain that a disproportionate number of those who pay for this lack of precision will not look like Dylann Roof.

When The World Runs Out Of Room For Monsters

I finished the first volume of Alan Moore’s  Swamp Thing earlier this week. I don’t think I’ve ever read a more compelling—or sadder—opening issue of a comic book.  This right here is all TNC-bait defined:

Swamp Thing #20. Pencils: Denis Day. Colors: Tatjana Wood.

In case this is hard to see, the words read as follows:

Frame #1

“I had to come, Arcane.”

“I had to be sure.”

Frame #2

“Oh, I know I saw your ship falling and burning. I know I saw it..Drop like a wounded sun...exploding beyond the mountains. I know you that you couldn’t have survived.”

“But I didn’t...hear the rattle in your windpipe. I didn’t see….the glaze crawl over your eyes. I didn’t see the body, Arcane...”

Frame #3

“...And I learned that if you don’t see the body...”

“...then the rotten stuff...just keeps coming back.”

For me, the best thing about writing comics is how it takes me back to everything I loved about writing poetry. The game of spacing and efficiency is so challenging and so important. Moore proves himself a master of both here--in three frames he gives you something of Swamp Thing’s compulsions and loneliness. There’s a progressive, forward energy in the first lines—“I had to come, Arcane”—that leaves us wondering what, specifically, could be so important that he had to come. And then the answer slowly dribbles out an air-ship “falling and burning” dropping “like a wounded sun...exploding beyond the mountains,” the angsty feeling, native to the marvelous world of comics, of thinking an antagonist dead but not hearing “the rattle in [their] windpipe,” not seeing “the glaze crawl over [their] eyes,” of never seeing “the body.”

Swamp-Thing’s old foe Arcane is (for now) dead, and though the two were enemies, what we get in the comic is a sense that, somehow, the same forces that hunted Arcane are now hunting Swamp Thing. Those forces don’t just represent “evil” but a kind of modernism which threatens to sweep all the magic in the world away. Swamp Thing #21 (the second issue in Moore’s run) is considered the classic, because it offers a brilliant take on the character’s origins. But for me, it’s really Swamp Thing #20—with its high poetry—that sticks.

I’m thinking about this volume a lot as I start sketching out the second season of Black Panther. I really like how Moore is able to do both broad thematic work and character study with lines like, “Maybe the world...has run out of room for monsters.” Balancing those two things are tough, and if there’s one thing thing I’d like to do better with S2 of Black Panther it’s to figure out how to burrow deeper into T’Challa’s head while at the same time delving expanding and deepening the Wakanda around T’Challa.

Picking Sides in Captain America: Civil War

Captain America: Civil War is here—an ambitious, sprawling epic featuring a dozen superheroes doing battle over the question of whether the United Nations should start regulating their activities. The latest entry in the Marvel Cinematic Universe is ostensibly the third Captain America movie, following that hero’s resistance to the “Sokovia Accords,” which would keep his Avengers beholden to UN interests. On the other side is Tony Stark/Iron Man, who’s racked with guilt over the destruction his superhero battles have wrought across the world and seeking to make amends.

The Atlantic’s film critic, Christopher Orr, gave Civil War a positive review on Friday. Now that the film is in theaters and earning the typical Marvel big bucks, Ta-Nehisi Coates, David Sims, Gillian White, and Matt Thompson dig into the wider political implications of its story, the deftness with which it introduces new characters like Spider-Man and Black Panther, and the film’s real-world parallels. Viewers who haven’t made it to the theaters yet, beware: Spoilers abound.

Ta-Nehisi Coates: OK. I thought it was a really, really good movie. I think people need to be aware of how easy it would be to screw up a movie like this. How many heroes are in this thing? It would be so easy to just have this be a mash of spider-webs and vibranium claws. (You know what I mean!) But it actually worked. Nothing felt forced, everyone came in when they were needed, and for the most part, everyone got an arc. I think the movie benefited a lot from being able assume people were familiar with some of the cast. There was no need for (yet another) spider bite for instance. The movie didn't try to establish Black Panther's origins. And you don't really worry about those origins because, I think, in this film and in the entire series, the Universe has been so well set up.

One other thing—this was the rare story that actually improved in the third act. I thought the unwillingness to heal wounds, indeed to salt them just when those wounds seemed to be healing, was brave, and really well done.

David Sims: I think the biggest strength of the Marvel style is the confidence with which it introduces new characters. Black Panther and Spider-Man don’t need elaborate origin arcs because we’re already so used to this living, breathing world of superheroes: It’s their motivations and how they relate to the specific story that the audience is into. I liked that we started with very clear battle lines (Cap vs. Tony, collaboration vs. vigilantism) and then Black Panther occupied murkier independent territory between them. I loved that the ideal of Spider-Man—the “with great power comes great responsibility” line, which he didn’t even need to say—could represent the best version of what Iron Man was aiming for, without feeling diametrically opposed to Cap.

It’s hard to shake how much setup these movies need, though, just because of the sheer number of characters they’re throwing into the mix. For me, Civil War didn’t really kick off until at least an hour in—around when Spider-Man showed up for the first time—because there was so much story groundwork to lay out. It’s probably why the movie juggles its ensemble so well, because it takes such care in having every hero pick a side for plausible reasons before having them attack each other. And unlike some recent superhero films (cough, Batman v Superman), it keeps things comic-book light, a specific tone these Marvel movies have always hit when so many of their rivals can’t.

It’s not straight-up goofy, it’s almost like watching pro athletes jaw at each other, delighting in deflating each other’s egos—until things get all serious. I liked that there wasn’t a simple resolution, which would have felt cheap after all this build-up. But I also kinda hated it. Cap and Iron Man shouldn’t just shake hands and agree to be friends again after all that, but I couldn’t shake the sense of “watch this space!” as they parted ways. The Empire Strikes Back nailed the bitter, open-ended ending Civil War was obviously going for, but that was only setting up one more Star Wars movie. This is setting up 10 more sequels. Civil War dug into a lot of deep superhero questions I want answered, but I was hoping at the end for a complete story arc for any of its lead characters. For Cap and Tony, not so much—if anything, Black Panther came closest.

Gillian B. White: I’m in firm agreement on the balance between giving viewers enough setup to enjoyably follow the storyline but not rehashing everything. I think I would’ve started crying in the theater if we’d walked through the Spider-Man origin story for the millionth time. But I also loved how characters were in on the joke, wondering out loud who some of the new entrants were.

I kind of hated the clear-cut moral lines when it came to picking superhero teams, so it was gratifying to see some greyer areas show up later (thanks Black Widow). But I also didn’t love the ending. At all. It was very, “Don’t worry we’re all still friends when it comes down to it.” I feel like you can’t get away with that after all the open-wound-salt-pouring action that just happened. Not to mention the nearly killing each other! I wanted it to end on a slightly more antagonistic note between the main rivals so we don’t know how, or if, they’ll be able to reconcile, and are left wondering if this really is the end of the Avengers.

But while we’re on the subject of what will become of the Avengers, I’m interested to hear what you guys thought about the idea of them having to register—the argument that kicked off the split in the first place. I thought the idea was pretty compelling, both within the framework of the movie and within the larger context of who gets to decide which causes are worth fighting for. Captain America kind of sold me with his argument that registering, even to a body like the United Nations, means that they would always be beholden to someone else’s political agenda and biases.

Coates: What side did folks come down on? In my heart I was #TeamCap but in my head I was #TeamTony. It’s been said before, but the idea that these guys should register isn’t actually that absurd. Indeed, there’s something almost tyrannical in the notion that they should be the deciders of what conflict to disrupt, devoid of any democratic oversight. Steve’s distrust of politicians is also a distrust of the people who elected them.

And yet my heart was still with him. Part of it was the fact that it was governmental oversight that had failed. When New York and Washington were nearly leveled, it was SHIELD that had authority over the Avengers. So it wasn’t clear that oversight would prevent any of this. I also think Bucky exerted a strong pull on me. His story-line—being reprogrammed, put to sleep, and reawakened to kill people—just got me going. Anyone who loves that character must read Ed Brubaker’s Captain America arc, which transformed Bucky into the Winter Soldier.

Sims: Agreed on the Brubaker arc, which felt so revolutionary on its release (just in its chutzpah in reviving a character who had been dead for decades, and doing it with such skill). Civil War should hinge on Bucky, because he represents everything that’s important and perhaps unattainable for Captain America: a belief that everyone’s inherent good can be rehabilitated, in the importance of personal connection and trust, that if we all sit down together we can come to the right conclusion. I liked what he said early in the film about agendas, that organizations like SHIELD and the UN can have them and thus corrupt the heroes working for them. That happened in The Avengers (SHIELD fired a freaking nuke at New York City), and especially in The Winter Soldier. But Cap’s position also felt a little hopelessly naive. How can the world, so acquainted with Bucky’s actions as the Winter Soldier, possibly accept him as a hero? How can Cap expect Iron Man to forgive and forget? Doesn’t Cap himself suffer from an agenda—his understandable weakness for Bucky—which causes just as much harm as good in the end? I, too, went into the movie figuring I’d be #TeamCap, especially since the logistics of the Sokovia Accords don’t make a ton of sense. But I appreciated that Civil War made it hard to rationalize his actions.

There’s a larger meta-question that the film is asking too, one that Vision poses during the initial debate over the Accords. If superheroes announce their existence to the world, they’ll quickly be challenged by villains of equal might, be they from this world or another: The Avengers’ very existence “invites challenge,” as Vision put it. You can’t have a Marvel Cinematic Universe this epic without the stakes being equally epic, and that means cities, planets, even galaxies will be under threat, and civilians will be in the way of these epic battles. Civil War is responding to the chaos of the previous movies, especially Age of Ultron (where multiple cities were torn apart) and trying to hold its heroes accountable. But it’s kind of an impossible challenge: If you’re going to have superheroes, things are going to get messy. It’s easy to understand Tony’s efforts to control things, but as a viewer, you know he can’t succeed.

White: Ugh. Bucky. I would more easily align myself with #TeamCap if it weren’t for this never-ending Bucky-saving crusade. I get it, I do. Best friends, presumed death, they did horrible things to him, he became a killer against his will. Guys, I totally hear you on what Bucky represents for Captain America, and in a larger context, but after several other iterations of the Bucky plotline I grew weary this movie. When he asked whether or not he was worth it, my initial response was, “I don’t know, man.” Is that just me? Am I too dark and cynical? In any case I was happy when they put him back to sleep so we could all focus on other things.

Coates: Gillian, I don’t think we can speak again. I don’t know how to communicate with people who hate Bucky. Here are some other things that people like you hate. Kittens. Rainbows. Babies.

White: For the record, I love kittens and babies. But rainbows may be overrated in the age of Instagram.

Matt Thompson: I agree with much of what’s been said here. I thought Civil War was a very well-executed superhero movie, and especially commendable for being lucid and cohesive despite the dozens of moving sub-plots and backstories. It was a directorial feat, and the acting, on the whole, met the challenge. The movie was especially excellent at the crescendo into those last few battles, layering on the feeling of, “No one wants to be here, this might be the worst of bad options, but this is where we are, so let’s do this.” Special praise to Scarlett Johansson for that: She played that gentle, grudging resignation, world-weariness, and internal tumult so well across multiple scenes that came with very different demands—the fog-of-war set pieces, the brief conversation with T’Challa at the UN, the parting shots at the airfield.

Where the film fails for me is in the storyline that drove this putative conflict—the relationship between Cap, Bucky, and the “villain,” Zemo. Not only was I fully #TeamTony, but both my head and my heart were there for Tony in a way that they just weren’t for Cap, and I think that made a big part of the movie feel suspect. By that closing fight, Tony was coming to the table with at least a couple strong emotional backstories—the murder of his parents and his separation from Pepper Potts, plus the (effective!) bit of heartstring-tugging from a grieving mother played gorgeously by Alfre Woodard. And even if Tony’s emotional motives had totally subsumed his rational case for restraint and submission by the ending, that case still held up: The Avengers had, after all, just destroyed an airport largely for matters of personal pique.

I have a hard time relating to Cap—stoic, righteous, beautiful Steve Rogers—in the best of circumstances, and he was at his most stoic and righteous and beautiful and unrelatable for me in this film. To believe he’d go as far as he goes for Bucky in this movie, you have to believe he loves Bucky, with all the ugliness and vulnerability and passion that love would bring. I never did. The briefest of moments between, say, Hawkeye and Black Widow, or between T’Challa and his father, heck, even between Tony and an absent Pepper, seemed more genuine and affecting than any equivalent moments between Cap and the Winter Soldier. This wouldn’t be a big problem except that the film’s ultimate conflict relies on some equivalence in the dueling emotional arcs—the rational dispute about the Sokovia Accords is mostly moot by the movie’s third act. By the time Tony and Cap and Bucky were all fighting, a moment when I wanted the emotional tug of a man avenging his parents’ death weighing against the tug of a man defending his best friend’s life, all I kept thinking was, “Wait, what are they fighting about again? And why isn’t anyone worrying about Zemo?”

Coates: I get why it’s hard to relate to Cap—or why people think it’s hard to relate to Cap. The basic idea is that he is, as you say, stoic, righteous, and beautiful. But here is the real beauty of Captain America—he’s living in an era where all of that seems in question, in a way that it didn’t during World War II. Captain America is, perhaps above all, a man out of time. He’s trying—and arguably in this case—failing to maintain these pure values in a world of nuance and complication. Fraternity bonds him to Bucky. But that fraternity conflicts with the facts of what Bucky has actually done, brainwashed or whatever. I’ve always thought that Cap, at his best, was a kind of comment on how we see World War II, “The Good War.” He’s a cartoon pulled out of our own imagined past, set in an uncomfortable, uncertain present.

Picking Sides in <i>Captain America: Civil War</i>

Captain America: Civil War is here—an ambitious, sprawling epic featuring a dozen superheroes doing battle over the question of whether the United Nations should start regulating their activities. The latest entry in the Marvel Cinematic Universe is ostensibly the third Captain America movie, following that hero’s resistance to the “Sokovia Accords,” which would keep his Avengers beholden to UN interests. On the other side is Tony Stark/Iron Man, who’s racked with guilt over the destruction his superhero battles have wrought across the world and seeking to make amends.

The Atlantic’s film critic, Christopher Orr, gave Civil War a positive review on Friday. Now that the film is in theaters and earning the typical Marvel big bucks, Ta-Nehisi Coates, David Sims, Gillian White, and Matt Thompson dig into the wider political implications of its story, the deftness with which it introduces new characters like Spider-Man and Black Panther, and the film’s real-world parallels. Viewers who haven’t made it to the theaters yet, beware: Spoilers abound.

Ta-Nehisi Coates: OK. I thought it was a really, really good movie. I think people need to be aware of how easy it would be to screw up a movie like this. How many heroes are in this thing? It would be so easy to just have this be a mash of spider-webs and vibranium claws. (You know what I mean!) But it actually worked. Nothing felt forced, everyone came in when they were needed, and for the most part, everyone got an arc. I think the movie benefited a lot from being able assume people were familiar with some of the cast. There was no need for (yet another) spider bite for instance. The movie didn't try to establish Black Panther's origins. And you don't really worry about those origins because, I think, in this film and in the entire series, the Universe has been so well set up.

One other thing—this was the rare story that actually improved in the third act. I thought the unwillingness to heal wounds, indeed to salt them just when those wounds seemed to be healing, was brave, and really well done.

David Sims: I think the biggest strength of the Marvel style is the confidence with which it introduces new characters. Black Panther and Spider-Man don’t need elaborate origin arcs because we’re already so used to this living, breathing world of superheroes: It’s their motivations and how they relate to the specific story that the audience is into. I liked that we started with very clear battle lines (Cap vs. Tony, collaboration vs. vigilantism) and then Black Panther occupied murkier independent territory between them. I loved that the ideal of Spider-Man—the “with great power comes great responsibility” line, which he didn’t even need to say—could represent the best version of what Iron Man was aiming for, without feeling diametrically opposed to Cap.

It’s hard to shake how much setup these movies need, though, just because of the sheer number of characters they’re throwing into the mix. For me, Civil War didn’t really kick off until at least an hour in—around when Spider-Man showed up for the first time—because there was so much story groundwork to lay out. It’s probably why the movie juggles its ensemble so well, because it takes such care in having every hero pick a side for plausible reasons before having them attack each other. And unlike some recent superhero films (cough, Batman v Superman), it keeps things comic-book light, a specific tone these Marvel movies have always hit when so many of their rivals can’t.

It’s not straight-up goofy, it’s almost like watching pro athletes jaw at each other, delighting in deflating each other’s egos—until things get all serious. I liked that there wasn’t a simple resolution, which would have felt cheap after all this build-up. But I also kinda hated it. Cap and Iron Man shouldn’t just shake hands and agree to be friends again after all that, but I couldn’t shake the sense of “watch this space!” as they parted ways. The Empire Strikes Back nailed the bitter, open-ended ending Civil War was obviously going for, but that was only setting up one more Star Wars movie. This is setting up 10 more sequels. Civil War dug into a lot of deep superhero questions I want answered, but I was hoping at the end for a complete story arc for any of its lead characters. For Cap and Tony, not so much—if anything, Black Panther came closest.

Gillian B. White: I’m in firm agreement on the balance between giving viewers enough setup to enjoyably follow the storyline but not rehashing everything. I think I would’ve started crying in the theater if we’d walked through the Spider-Man origin story for the millionth time. But I also loved how characters were in on the joke, wondering out loud who some of the new entrants were.

I kind of hated the clear-cut moral lines when it came to picking superhero teams, so it was gratifying to see some greyer areas show up later (thanks Black Widow). But I also didn’t love the ending. At all. It was very, “Don’t worry we’re all still friends when it comes down to it.” I feel like you can’t get away with that after all the open-wound-salt-pouring action that just happened. Not to mention the nearly killing each other! I wanted it to end on a slightly more antagonistic note between the main rivals so we don’t know how, or if, they’ll be able to reconcile, and are left wondering if this really is the end of the Avengers.

But while we’re on the subject of what will become of the Avengers, I’m interested to hear what you guys thought about the idea of them having to register—the argument that kicked off the split in the first place. I thought the idea was pretty compelling, both within the framework of the movie and within the larger context of who gets to decide which causes are worth fighting for. Captain America kind of sold me with his argument that registering, even to a body like the United Nations, means that they would always be beholden to someone else’s political agenda and biases.

Coates: What side did folks come down on? In my heart I was #TeamCap but in my head I was #TeamTony. It’s been said before, but the idea that these guys should register isn’t actually that absurd. Indeed, there’s something almost tyrannical in the notion that they should be the deciders of what conflict to disrupt, devoid of any democratic oversight. Steve’s distrust of politicians is also a distrust of the people who elected them.

And yet my heart was still with him. Part of it was the fact that it was governmental oversight that had failed. When New York and Washington were nearly leveled, it was SHIELD that had authority over the Avengers. So it wasn’t clear that oversight would prevent any of this. I also think Bucky exerted a strong pull on me. His story-line—being reprogrammed, put to sleep, and reawakened to kill people—just got me going. Anyone who loves that character must read Ed Brubaker’s Captain America arc, which transformed Bucky into the Winter Soldier.

Sims: Agreed on the Brubaker arc, which felt so revolutionary on its release (just in its chutzpah in reviving a character who had been dead for decades, and doing it with such skill). Civil War should hinge on Bucky, because he represents everything that’s important and perhaps unattainable for Captain America: a belief that everyone’s inherent good can be rehabilitated, in the importance of personal connection and trust, that if we all sit down together we can come to the right conclusion. I liked what he said early in the film about agendas, that organizations like SHIELD and the UN can have them and thus corrupt the heroes working for them. That happened in The Avengers (SHIELD fired a freaking nuke at New York City), and especially in The Winter Soldier. But Cap’s position also felt a little hopelessly naive. How can the world, so acquainted with Bucky’s actions as the Winter Soldier, possibly accept him as a hero? How can Cap expect Iron Man to forgive and forget? Doesn’t Cap himself suffer from an agenda—his understandable weakness for Bucky—which causes just as much harm as good in the end? I, too, went into the movie figuring I’d be #TeamCap, especially since the logistics of the Sokovia Accords don’t make a ton of sense. But I appreciated that Civil War made it hard to rationalize his actions.

There’s a larger meta-question that the film is asking too, one that Vision poses during the initial debate over the Accords. If superheroes announce their existence to the world, they’ll quickly be challenged by villains of equal might, be they from this world or another: The Avengers’ very existence “invites challenge,” as Vision put it. You can’t have a Marvel Cinematic Universe this epic without the stakes being equally epic, and that means cities, planets, even galaxies will be under threat, and civilians will be in the way of these epic battles. Civil War is responding to the chaos of the previous movies, especially Age of Ultron (where multiple cities were torn apart) and trying to hold its heroes accountable. But it’s kind of an impossible challenge: If you’re going to have superheroes, things are going to get messy. It’s easy to understand Tony’s efforts to control things, but as a viewer, you know he can’t succeed.

White: Ugh. Bucky. I would more easily align myself with #TeamCap if it weren’t for this never-ending Bucky-saving crusade. I get it, I do. Best friends, presumed death, they did horrible things to him, he became a killer against his will. Guys, I totally hear you on what Bucky represents for Captain America, and in a larger context, but after several other iterations of the Bucky plotline I grew weary this movie. When he asked whether or not he was worth it, my initial response was, “I don’t know, man.” Is that just me? Am I too dark and cynical? In any case I was happy when they put him back to sleep so we could all focus on other things.

Coates: Gillian, I don’t think we can speak again. I don’t know how to communicate with people who hate Bucky. Here are some other things that people like you hate. Kittens. Rainbows. Babies.

White: For the record, I love kittens and babies. But rainbows may be overrated in the age of Instagram.

Matt Thompson: I agree with much of what’s been said here. I thought Civil War was a very well-executed superhero movie, and especially commendable for being lucid and cohesive despite the dozens of moving sub-plots and backstories. It was a directorial feat, and the acting, on the whole, met the challenge. The movie was especially excellent at the crescendo into those last few battles, layering on the feeling of, “No one wants to be here, this might be the worst of bad options, but this is where we are, so let’s do this.” Special praise to Scarlett Johansson for that: She played that gentle, grudging resignation, world-weariness, and internal tumult so well across multiple scenes that came with very different demands—the fog-of-war set pieces, the brief conversation with T’Challa at the UN, the parting shots at the airfield.

Where the film fails for me is in the storyline that drove this putative conflict—the relationship between Cap, Bucky, and the “villain,” Zemo. Not only was I fully #TeamTony, but both my head and my heart were there for Tony in a way that they just weren’t for Cap, and I think that made a big part of the movie feel suspect. By that closing fight, Tony was coming to the table with at least a couple strong emotional backstories—the murder of his parents and his separation from Pepper Potts, plus the (effective!) bit of heartstring-tugging from a grieving mother played gorgeously by Alfre Woodard. And even if Tony’s emotional motives had totally subsumed his rational case for restraint and submission by the ending, that case still held up: The Avengers had, after all, just destroyed an airport largely for matters of personal pique.

I have a hard time relating to Cap—stoic, righteous, beautiful Steve Rogers—in the best of circumstances, and he was at his most stoic and righteous and beautiful and unrelatable for me in this film. To believe he’d go as far as he goes for Bucky in this movie, you have to believe he loves Bucky, with all the ugliness and vulnerability and passion that love would bring. I never did. The briefest of moments between, say, Hawkeye and Black Widow, or between T’Challa and his father, heck, even between Tony and an absent Pepper, seemed more genuine and affecting than any equivalent moments between Cap and the Winter Soldier. This wouldn’t be a big problem except that the film’s ultimate conflict relies on some equivalence in the dueling emotional arcs—the rational dispute about the Sokovia Accords is mostly moot by the movie’s third act. By the time Tony and Cap and Bucky were all fighting, a moment when I wanted the emotional tug of a man avenging his parents’ death weighing against the tug of a man defending his best friend’s life, all I kept thinking was, “Wait, what are they fighting about again? And why isn’t anyone worrying about Zemo?”

Coates: I get why it’s hard to relate to Cap—or why people think it’s hard to relate to Cap. The basic idea is that he is, as you say, stoic, righteous, and beautiful. But here is the real beauty of Captain America—he’s living in an era where all of that seems in question, in a way that it didn’t during World War II. Captain America is, perhaps above all, a man out of time. He’s trying—and arguably in this case—failing to maintain these pure values in a world of nuance and complication. Fraternity bonds him to Bucky. But that fraternity conflicts with the facts of what Bucky has actually done, brainwashed or whatever. I’ve always thought that Cap, at his best, was a kind of comment on how we see World War II, “The Good War.” He’s a cartoon pulled out of our own imagined past, set in an uncomfortable, uncertain present.