Last week, Matt and I watched the David Suchet version of Murder on the Orient Express, which we hadn't seen before. It was very late in Suchet's run as Poirot, post-9/11, post-Sopranos (i.e. after TV changed, irrevocably). I gave Matt the whole set of Suchet's Poirot as a quarantine gift, and we've been working our way through it chronologically, but we skipped ahead to Orient Express due to one of my moods. I remembered the solution of the mystery but didn't remember anything leading up to it.
The foibles and light humor of Poirot earlier in the run have given way to a quiet, introspective Poirot. Suchet plays him, as always, as if he knows him better than anyone ever has. But Poirot is almost incidental to the ensemble at work in Orient Express, and Suchet knows that. He mostly leaves aside the old self-centered Poirot and acts as an immutable part of the landscape instead.
Until the end. He is furious about the perversion of justice. It betrays everything he has always believed in. He weeps a little. You realize, looking at this man, that what he is forced to accept in this situation may break him. (We do not all break through torture or atrocity; sometimes ideas will break us.)
After I finished The Winter Soldier, I thought about watching Captain Marvel again. Much as I love Captain America, his powers are a lot less showy than hers, and I kind of wanted to watch a hero do things well beyond the reach of normal humans - things that render guns and fists irrelevant. And, incidentally, I wanted to watch a woman doing them.
This morning I thought maybe I'd watch the scene where Fury sings "Please, Mr. Postman," in Captain Marvel instead. Not sure why, just a whim. When I entered "captain marvel" into YouTube's search bar, one of the auto-fills was "vs. thanos" and I went, yeah, okay. There was a video that collected all of her scenes in the Avengers movies, so I watched that. It was about four minutes long. She was awesome, of course, but I realized (somewhat stupidly, belatedly) that the nature of her power is the ability to destroy on an enormous scale. Maybe she's powerful enough not to need fists and guns, but what she can do outstrips fists and guns; it doesn't render null the violence inherent in them.
It's not fun to wake up and look around at the world these days. Injustice has always been this bad, of course. But living through a pandemic is much more depleting than history has ever recorded.
What occurred to me this morning is how different the world of The Winter Soldier is than the world I live in today. Part of the reason Cap is such a balm to audiences in a post-9/11 world is his idealism, his belief in fixing whatever is wrong and the attendant belief that he can be the man to do that fixing. Yet his solutions are the same old solutions we've been thrusting at the world's problems for centuries: fists and guns.
The movie repeats that it's a different world now and Steve Rogers is not psychologically equipped for that world. This is a pretty careless interpretation of the past, which was always complicated, but in this limited case the point is solid. Punching Nazis is a different thing than sorting through (un)reliable intelligence from morally dubious sources. But the movie does not offer a new solution, or at least not a nuanced one. Captain Marvel, too, uses the old solution. Awesome as she is, her powers are all violence and destruction, no nuance.
You cannot shoot the coronavirus. You cannot punch corrupt police departments.
What Cap is asked to bear across the movies made around him seems unbearable. That's another reason I love him so much. He copes with profound burdens and still wants to carry whatever others can't lift. I don't know what he would try to do in this national moment. I think he'd be central in a public relations campaign to get people to wear masks and stay home (he of all people understands influence and inspiration), but that's incidental to what he's built for: action. Violent action. How he would cope with having to sit still, I don't know.
Poirot must learn to live with, and in, a world in which arresting people is not the only solution when a murder is committed. When we watched the episode last week, I found him deeply naive, in his resistance to believing that justice is not always found in a courtroom. That's the nature of privilege: the ability to be naive about justice for decades of a life. Truly coming to terms with such naivete can break a man, particularly if that man's profession depends upon this premise.
In my early thirties I had to reckon with the lie of America with which my father had raised me. This nation is built on broken backs and genocide, and all the fine ideals of its prized documents and the genuine beliefs of the good men who wrote them do not excuse what lies under its foundations. It nearly broke me. Such a process meant unstitching essential seams of my identity. But I did it, because Cormac McCarthy is right, James Baldwin is right, Angela Davis and Ta-Nehisi Coates are right. This place is a nightmare and we have done virtually nothing to wake up from it. We parade over the bones. We wave flags at the breaches.
Cap is part of that lie. He is the very best of it, I think, embodying what we all want to feel if we could stand to be patriots.
If anything, I think the two major issues of this year (so far, God help us) demonstrate that we can't throw the same solutions at new problems. 9/11 tried to teach us that: you can't get an aircraft carrier into a foxhole. You can't use guns on a deadly virus, and you can't throw tear gas at ideas.
Because our heroes continue to operate on old premises, they will continue to fail us. They must learn new ways of being in the world. But they may break, if they try.
What will we do? How will we survive? What will we be asked to bear for each other?
