And thus did a battle start that was mighty. Steve was angry that Bucky would ever claim such a thing, while Tony was ecstatic. Tony would occasionally parade around the tower in nothing but shorts when Steve and Bucky was around, while Steve’s shirts began to get tighter and tighter.
Meanwhile, Bucky just sat back and watched the show. That is until it came to blows. Which is when he told both Tony and Steve that they were both attractive. Tony went to his apartment to Pepper a little sadder, but still happy. Steve went to his apartment a little sad as well. Neither were unhappy long, for Pepper told Tony that he was perfect for her, while Steve soon got a knock upon his door. Bucky was on the other side, and neither of them were heard from for a while.
This was a really interesting, insightful, and well-balanced read! Some of my own musings (and Age of Ultron spoilers) behind the cut:
There’s a common saying that no comic book character stays dead “except Bucky, Jason Todd, and Uncle Ben” (although in recent years they’ve all made varying degrees of reappearance, so I’ve heard). If that saying typifies the canon Whedon grew up with, then it’s entirely possible that having Bucky around in the MCU might rub him the wrong way. Whedon is known for unapologetically writing the death of beloved characters (I always get nervous when rebar or long, pointy objects enter the scene). He’s said that he regrets bringing Coulson back for the Agents of SHIELD TV series and, for all intents and purposes, Coulson is still dead in the Age of Ultron movie ‘verse. “It mattered that he’s gone,” Whedon says. “It’s a different world now. And you have to run with that.” It wouldn’t be a huge leap to think Whedon might feel the same about Bucky. So there’s that.
Personally, I didn’t read Bucky being largely absent from Age of Ultron as an exclusion. I saw it more as a matter of necessity in an already bursting storyline. That being said, there were ways he could have easily been represented more fully without it seeming forced.
It did strike me as odd that we open with Steve off on a mission in Europe helping to dismantle a Hydra base when he refused to do literally that exact same thing when Fury asked him at the end of The Winter Soldier. Looking for Bucky was more important to Steve then–why did that change? Of course, we don’t know how long Steve and Sam were working together trying to track Bucky down (following cold leads… get it?), and I DO think it’s in character for Steve to set aside his personal desires to accomplish world-saving tasks like retrieving Loki’s scepter. He’s seen the scepter in action and knows firsthand how much trouble it can cause.
We also find out that Steve is looking for a place to live in New York (I can’t remember whether or not it was back in Brooklyn where he grew up). While there may be a lot of reasons for that choice, in my mind it’s entirely possible that he hopes Bucky will come back to the city where they grew up together. Of course, that’s just my own assumption.
In general, I would have liked to see Steve a little more conflicted about having to take his focus away from his search for Bucky. He doesn’t seem bothered by it at all, even when discussing it briefly with Sam. While it’s debatable that Steve might play the Bucky card close to the chest with the rest of his team (and pretend he’s fine when he’s not), there’s no reason for him to pull that with Sam. Sam knows firsthand how important Bucky is to Steve. A pointed “How ya holding up?” from Sam followed by a somber “I’ve been better” from Steve would have sufficed for me.
linzeestyle makes a good point that Pepper and Jane get mentioned by name during the party, and, in the same scene, Bucky is only referenced by Sam as “our missing persons case.” If Jane and Pepper are important enough that not mentioning their names would be an insult, it’s arguably the same for Bucky who is clearly one of the most important people (if not THE most important person) in Steve’s life, romantic interest or not. Not only is he not named, he’s not even a person–he’s a “missing persons case.” He’s characterized as a problem to solve, not a friend or even a human being who needs help. Is that a peek into Whedon’s perception of Bucky’s character? Maybe. Maybe not.
I say “arguably” here because the events of The Winter Soldier show us that Sam is especially sensitive to Steve’s situation. Sam lost a partner in the line of duty, too, and he worked with vets who came back from their tours with all kinds of psychological issues. I can easily see Sam choosing to be oblique because they’re at a party. Maybe mentioning Bucky by name or in a more serious way might upset Steve. Best not pull that trigger. Not to mention, while Tony and Thor are relatively happy in their relationships at this point in time–Pepper and Jane are off being amazing at life and doing what they love to do–Steve isn’t in the same place at all. Bucky is lost or hiding somewhere, probably hurting, confused, guilty, and alone. He’s quite possibly a danger to himself or others. That’s heavy stuff to dredge up for a Saturday night, as they say.
More problematic is Steve’s Scarlet-Witch-induced vision of a WWII era dance hall where there are soldiers and their gals drunkenly (borderline hysterically) celebrating. Peggy shows up dressed to the nines to offer Steve that dance she promised, but conspicuously absent from this hallucination of “dames and soldiers” is Bucky. Why wasn’t he there, since Bucky and Peggy are the two most important figures of Steve’s life as a WWII soldier?
I don’t know if casting and editing might have been an issue here. Whedon wanted Loki to appear in Thor’s vision, but scheduling didn’t initially pan out. And then when it did, the execs axed most of the scenes having to do with Thor’s vision (which is why it makes almost no sense in the final cut). I haven’t heard anything about that being the case for Bucky, so I’m going to set practical concerns aside.
I think a deeper look is needed here to see why Bucky might not have appeared in the dance hall. In relation to Steve, dancing has always been a thinly veiled reference for sex/romance. Popular speculation is that Steve’s still a virgin up to and including Age of Ultron, where he makes a quip about being the “world’s foremost authority on waiting.” He certainly doesn’t lack for romantic opportunity post-serum, but he never takes advantage of those opportunities to “dance.” Why not?
In The First Avenger, while talking with Peggy on the ride to the lab, Steve says that, after a while, dancing (just for the sake of dancing) “didn’t seem important anymore.” What matters to him is finding “the right partner.” Steve’s resistance to being set up by Natasha in The Winter Soldier seems to indicate that he hasn’t really changed his mind as far as finding a dancing partner is concerned. Not just anyone will do. To me, this rings true as a demisexual or asexual perspective, and even though it’s probably to be assumed that Steve initially envisioned a female partner, “partner” is a truly gender neutral term. Steve wants a partner, and I think his vision in Age of Ultron could suggest that he’s beginning to understand who that partner should be.
I can’t remember if he dances with Peggy in the hallucination or not (I think he does?), but the vision of the hall stutters and flashes empty–perhaps signifying Steve’s own feelings of isolation and disconnectedness from the revelry everyone else seems to be caught up in. When he comes out of the vision, he’s unsettled by it. Each of the team members are upset by their personal visions because they touch on some deeply rooted trauma or fear. In Steve’s case, he was given a window into an experience he thought he wanted, and it didn’t sit right. Maybe he’s struggling with regret for the things he lost, but maybe not. Maybe he’s starting to realize something he hasn’t been able to admit to himself yet.
At the farmhouse, Steve is confronted again with traditional (mainstream) notions of love and family. Clint has his wife and 2.5 kids, cosily living together in the country. There’s a moment where Steve is standing on the front porch, framed by the door of the house, looking inside. There’s a faint echo of Peggy’s voice beckoning him inside, “We can go home.” Almost angrily, he turns around and walks away from the house.
And again, at the end of the movie, he’s talking to Tony who jokes about retiring and building a house in the country for Pepper. Tony reassures Steve that he’ll “get there someday,” but Steve’s answer is surprising. He doesn’t know if the traditional family life is what he wants. He says maybe the part of himself who wanted that kind of thing died when he went into the ice and, when he woke up, someone else came out.
Steve’s response could be his way of coming to terms with losing his life with Peggy. Then again, maybe it’s telling that these thoughts are in Steve’s mind not long after he’s discovered that Bucky is still alive. The Age of Ultron narrative is positively drenched in symbolism surrounding familial ties and issues revolving around traditional male/female romance and reproduction (“strings” being used liberally to represent puppets and umbilical cords). While the rest of the team wrestles in different ways with those strings, Steve consciously and pointedly rejects that narrative for himself. The home he claims instead is the battlefield, and that’s the one place where he knows he’s most likely to meet Bucky again.
Is it possible Whedon left Bucky out of the WWII dance hall as an oblique way of dealing with Steve’s desire for a different kind of dance partner? In my head, yes absolutely. But that’s what I want to read into it. It might very well be that Whedon doesn’t feel comfortable (or doesn’t know how) to write two strong male characters in a close relationship without reducing it to something quippy or silly (and so he simply left Bucky out). He certainly spends more time focusing on the dynamics between male and female characters (and this is true throughout his body of work).
In any case, I’ll be interested to see how some of these issues are resolved in Civil War (if I don’t get some quality Steve & Bucky interaction, so help me…). Canonically, I don’t particularly mind if Steve and Bucky are OTP or BroTP, I just want them to be together again, fighting side by side. But Marvel has been making attempts to diversify their representations in MCU, and so far haven’t had any openly LGBTQA individuals among their cinematic cast. I would dearly love it if they make Steve their choice for that representation, but we all know the box office has the final say.
Sigh.
One of these days we’ll get there.
Reblogging for A++ additional commentary and possibly the best fan-reading of AoU I’ve seen.
I swear to you, Tumblr. One day I will find the article I (and my dissertation director!) both remember reading about Marvel consciously coding Steve as queer (seriously, I will make this my graduation gift request of my committee if necessary, I will find this article). It absolutely transfers int the comics, and while I don’t believe that it’s entirely similar in the MCU, it’s a big part of why I never really expected or saw the need for a “new” (let’s be real) “replacement” love interest for Peggy. It bothers me a lot that they seem to be moving forward with Sharon as an explicit “replacement,” possibly to the point of having Steve and Sharon initially bond at Peggy’s funeral, but I maintain some trust in the Russos’ handling of female characters and I want to believe that her transfer to the CIA will at the very least mean her role is primarily practical/tactical rather than romantic. One of the reasons Peggy resonated so significantly with fans is that she was not a “love interest” – if anything, and increasingly, Steve was hers: her fridged boyfriend, her origin story, but nowhere near the entirety of her narrative. So far they’ve done a wonderful job excising one of the most troubling points of her reboot in Brubaker’s arc (the fact that she never got over Steve), which gives me hope that they’ll do the same to Sharon (the one thing I did like about Sharon in Cap 2: the line about her aunt being a night-owl was cute, and suggested a relationship between them that had fuck-all-hell to do with Steve.) If they’re going to bond, I want it to be because Steve sees the same spark in her as in Peggy: the drive and the take-no-shit attitude, and frankly, I want him to see it in action, in combat, and preferably when everything goes to hell. I want her made into her own character, so divorced from Peggy that it never crosses an audiences’ mind that she’s a “replacement,” but rather that she’s a legacy: that Peggy raised a goddamn amazing extended family too, and that Steve’s come to realize that on the merits of that woman, on her own. The downside is that requires more than one movie, I believe; the upside is, if they do create of Sharon a fleshed-out, strong character, I would be all about her presence in Infinity Wars.
My nightmare, honestly, is to have them force a relationship between them based on Peggy and to see film reviews that treat it as business as usual; that are uncritical and unquestioning of the literal swapping-out of women, because hey, they’re related and they’re both hot, it’s all the same, right?
(In fairness to both Marvel and the Russos, while Marvel has fucked up nine ways to Sunday wrt female characters, they’ve yet to do something that fucked up in the MCU and do in fact seem committed to fixing issues in the comics that have since caused strife [i.e., the “problem” of the cosmic cube and the potential for it to result in a one-day retcon of Bucky-not-being-Bucky]. I’m deeply hopeful we’ll see similar with Sharon: give me her working with Natasha, and Maria; give me her rising up through the ranks at the CIA and using that to help the anti-registration movement based on her own beliefs and morals. Give me a character whose happiness I root for, and not just a “trophy” for Steve. Show me why I should want this to happen.)
It’s interesting to me that they ended with Steve believing his chance for a “normal life” disappeared in the ice – particularly after his similar rejection of such at the end of TWS. It’s possible this is his nadir, and Sharon will be the realization he can still have something like that (though let’s be real, that doesn’t track at all with the characters’ relationship in 616, where Steve went to fucking Zola-hell-space to avoid marrying her). I think reading Whedon’s text as suggestively queer might be giving the primary narrative a bit too much credit (and similarly, giving the OP not enough), but TWS certainly didn’t shy away from hints of it (the need for “similar life experience” isn’t exactly one fulfilled by Sharon either, unless they intend on really hitting the gas on the ‘creepy replacement for Peggy’ narrative – an uphill battle, given Peggy is still enough of a draw that they’re bringing her in to try to save Ant Man). Still: regardless of its actual canonicity, this is the headcanon that will let me include AoU in the MCU’s actual canon, so:
And thank you, OP!
Oh my! *blushes* Thanks so much for the reblog and the reply to my ramblings linzeestyle 🙂
I agree that reading Steve’s arc in Age of Ultron as deliberately suggestive of a queer orientation may be going a bit too far. Even if we can assume that’s the direction Marvel wants Steve taken in the MCU (which we can’t), at most Whedon’s script can be interpreted as a grudging concession–acknowledging it by not acknowledging it, so to speak. A more overt way to depict Steve’s feelings might have been to give Steve a vision of Bucky dying all over again in present day, or a vision of Bucky with no chance of reconciliation. That would have been a more compelling and straightforward acknowledgement of the bond they share.
As you pointed out, Steve’s issues in Age of Ultron could just as easily be seen as the turning point where Steve despairs utterly of getting the life he wanted–only to have the events of Civil War turn it around for him entirely. I honestly hope that’s not what they’re going to do; but I can’t say I’ll be too surprised if that’s the case. Disappointed? Definitely.
In recent years, other writers have played far more “dangerously” with homoerotic subtext and have still boomeranged the characters back into classically heterosexual relationships. The Doctor Who series, the recent Sherlock Holmes movies, and the BBC Sherlock TV series spring immediately to mind. In each case, the leading characters demonstrate characteristics that compellingly suggest alternate orientations; but those characteristics are almost invariably given a heteronormative veil behind which those traits can be obscured at will.
That being said, at this point I do trust the Russos far more than Whedon and I hope they’ll be able to maintain the depth of character development they established in The Winter Soldier. I couldn’t agree with you more–if they’re going to set Steve up with Sharon, I really want to see her earn it as a strong, independent character of her own. And, while I’m making wishes, I also want to see her care about Bucky and genuinely respect the connection Steve has with him.
explodingcrenelation 