Avengers Assemble! by Terence McSweeney

Author:Terence McSweeney
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: PER004030, Performing Arts/Film/History & Criticism, PER004010, Performing Arts/Film/Direction & Production
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Published: 2018-04-16T16:00:00+00:00

III.

Captain America’s anxiety concerning his role is embodied in the film’s first dramatic mission on the S.H.I.E.L.D. vessel, the Lemurrian Star, which has been hijacked by pirates in the Indian Ocean led by the French-Algerian ex-DGCE (General Directorate for External Security) Georges Batroc, who is said to be at the ‘top of INTERPOL’s Red Notice’. What Cap initially presumes to be a rescue mission becomes more complicated when he discovers the ship is not off course, as he has been told, but trespassing and is actually a mobile satellite-launch platform. When Cap calls to Black Widow for assistance he learns that, unbeknownst to him, she has been given a secondary mission to retrieve confidential S.H.I.E.L.D. files by Nick Fury, in an example of his ‘compartmentalisation’, an action which could have compromised the safety of the hostages. Returning to the S.H.I.E.L.D. headquarters in the Triskellion in Washington DC on the banks of the Potomac river, Captain America confronts the director of S.H.I.E.L.D. with his discovery, to which Fury responds: ‘I didn’t want you doing anything you weren’t comfortable with. Agent Romanoff is comfortable with anything.’ Fury’s evocation of the idea of compartmentalisation, which he describes as ‘nobody spills the secrets, because nobody knows them all’, is one of the film’s many sustained connections to the current geopolitical environment: throughout the George W. Bush and then the Barack Obama administration compartmentalisation emerged as a key policy in the how state secrets were kept under the umbrella term SCI or ‘Sensitive Compartmented Information’. These practices became widely discussed after the STELLARWIND leak on 27 June 2013 which was shown to have authorised such practices as warrantless wiretapping, data mining and call recording. The leaks revealed to the public for the first time the extent of the collection of metadata (in the form of phone and email records) that nine major internet companies had been ordered to turn over to the NSA in bulk which was reported to be, by October 2011, in excess of two hundred million internet communications each year. In further revelations, it was also revealed that these practices were paid for by the tax payers themselves as part of a hidden ‘black budget’. In the year before the release of The Winter Soldier taxpayers spent $10.3 billion on NSA surveillance, a figure 53% higher than it was in 2004. As Charlie Savage has observed, ‘It became clear that twenty-first century technology coupled with a virtually unlimited budget in the post-9/11 era were helping to grow the American government’s surveillance arm into a leviathan. It was also clear that the surveillance story, even more than other areas of national security legal policy, was really one single narrative that spanned the Bush-Cheney and Obama administrations’ (2015: 169).

Fury reveals to Cap the extent of the World Security Council’s plans and the reason for their secrecy: Project Insight, the construction of three huge next-generation aircraft known as helicarriers which are able to adopt continuous suborbital flight around the globe, each of which is armed with weapons capable of pre-emptively targeting one thousand hostiles per minute.

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