One Marvelous Scene: Heil Hydra!

In honour of The Avengers: Endgame, I figured I’d hop on the “One Marvelous Scene” train in-between my mini-series; after all, everyone on YouTube’s doing it, so why can’t I?

2014 was a tough year. Academically, it was when I graduated from university, a feat I was once told I’d never achieve. Socially, I jumped ships from the then-dying ScrewAttack website to the now-defunct Infinite Rainy Day. Personally, it was the year of my dad’s near-fatal heart attack and my Birthright trip to Israel. And politically, there were the riots in Fergusson and another war in Israel, both of which left a huge impact subconsciously. It was also when GamerGate started, but the less said there…

If there’s one area that really solidified 2014, it was the maturation of The MCU through two movies: Captain America: The Winter Soldier, and Guardians of the Galaxy. Both proved that it could be taken seriously outside of Iron Man and The Avengers, and both are considered fan-favourites in the Phase 2 roster. Yet while Guardians of the Galaxy may have been funnier and better-directed, Captain America: The Winter Soldier is far more-ambitious. It made Captain America a character to be reckoned with, after all! And it managed to have my favourite scene in The MCU.

I wasn’t a big MCU stan pre-Captain America: The Winter Soldier. I enjoyed it as a time-waster, but nothing, save for Iron Man, truly blew my socks off. Yet Captain America: The Winter Soldier showed the franchise deserved my respect. And it did so by highlighting an issue that, in hindsight, probably shouldn’t have been so ambitious.

The scene that really grabbed me most is halfway through, when Steve and Natasha, now fugitives, come across SHIELD’s birthplace. They enter an abandoned warehouse, get to the basement and are amazed to discover a room with super-computers. Natasha uploads a USB drive to the mainframe, and it reveals a surprisingly familiar voice. What follows is an exposition dump that flips the movie on its head and re-centres what the we thought we already knew: that Hydra, that fascist organization Cap fought and defeated in WWII, was alive. And not only alive, but thriving. And not only thriving, but thriving under SHIELD’s own nose.

I should first mention that The MCU, up until this point, hadn’t done twist-reveals too well. Iron Man 3 was an enjoyable enough, but its Mandarin reveal was divisive amongst fans: some loved it, while others thought it was awful and disrespectful to a classic villain. I’m torn on it, but I’ve already shared my thoughts. Regardless, The MCU didn’t have such a great track-record when it came to plot twists, and here they were attempting another one.

And it works. It also passes both of my personal criteria for a good plot twist, namely that: a. it fits into the story that came before. b. it progresses the story in a good direction afterward. It explains why SHIELD was after Cap and Natasha, and it reframes everything about SHIELD as being a lie. But it also shows that, sometimes, not everything is as it seems.

I remember in the months following that some people derided this twist as a cheap attempt at transferring real-world problems to Nazis, cheapening their ramifications. I can see why, it does feel like an easy way out, but I still think it fits the narrative. Ignoring how this came out two years before Brexit, Trump and the resurgence of Nazism, hence feeling prophetic in hindsight, that Hydra was secretly SHIELD is still brilliant. It demonstrates the sly cunning and persistence of evil throughout history, mutating like a virus to suit the times. Hydra might be Nazis, but they could be a stand-in for anything. They could range from anti-Zionism being a stand-in for Antisemitism, or even MAGA being a stand-in for a lot of bigotry.

How did Hydra manage to become so big? Simple: by infiltrating SHIELD and slowly corrupting it from the inside. It didn’t happen overnight, that’d be too difficult. Instead, Hydra would topple governments in foreign countries, not unlike how The CIA does in real-life, by installing puppet leaders through coups. When these leaders turned, or the people fought back, Hydra would, through its SHIELD persona, sell this as propaganda to get American citizens to surrender their rights and freedoms willingly. It got to the point that the average citizen became vulnerable.

The parallels to The CIA and military interventionism by The US government are no accident: by making the big baddie Hydra, Captain America: The Winter Soldier’s secretly commenting on The US. It’s alluding to American imperialism without directly calling it out, and it makes sense: The US has been a cause of its own shame and folly, routinely making everything worse while simultaneously claiming to “help”. It’s gotten so bad that there are, arguably, real Nazis working in positions of power, ironic given that the Nazis were “the enemy abroad” a little over 74 years ago.

It’s like Arnim Zola says: cut off one head, two more shall take its place. That’s how evil actually works, when you think about it. The sooner one hate movement dies, the sooner another one takes its place. It’s not enough to cut off its heads, you have to strike it down at its core. Its base needs to be dealt with, something we keep forgetting.

If anything, the only way to solve the problem entirely is destroy the root cause. It was SHIELD that brought in Zola as part of a secret operation in the 50’s. It was SHIELD that fostered Zola and nurtured his talents. It was, therefore, not surprising that SHIELD and Hydra became one-in-the-same, even ordering hits on their own when people became too suspicious (see Tony Stark’s parents). Considering that Hydra wasn’t a bug, but a feature, of SHIELD, it only seemed right that SHIELD had to go. And go it went, considering how Captain America: The Winter Soldier ends.

It helps that, even outside of the aforementioned layers, the scene is also expertly crafted. It’s well-directed, the muddied lighting fits the aesthetic, it has its moments of tonally-appropriate levity (like when Steve punches a monitor and Zola resumes talking like nothing had happened), and it’s suspenseful. Most-importantly, like any good scene, it gets you to think critically. How this level of subtext went by unchecked still astounds me, even five years later.

Will The Avengers: Endgame have a scene that tops this? I’ll know in a month, but don’t spoil anything!