O Captain, my Captain

Avengers: Endgame spoilers near the end of this post.

It's funny, though not surprising, how social media gets a whiff of your preferences and then doubles down on them. For example, I once looked at a picture of Cara Delevingne on Pinterest -- a site I signed up for just so I could look up a recipe -- and the site began inundating my email notifications with other pictures of the model-turned-actress. Since I'm getting all these pictures of an admittedly beautiful woman, sometimes I look at one or two more, and the intensity of Delevingne-related notifications just escalates again. It's a vicious cycle. (And given how many times she hits my inbox, you'd think I'd have memorized how to spell her last name, but no, I have to look it up every time.)

A similar thing has happened with Twitter and Chris Evans. I tried tweeting for about two months something like six or seven years ago, maybe longer, as an enhancement to this blog. I've since been dormant, but I do still receive email recaps from Twitter related to people they think I'd be interested in, based on the few people I follow and other tweets I've randomly looked at over the years. For a while they were giving me the tweets of everyone who ever appeared in a Star Trek franchise, though that has died off. Now Chris Evans leads my email notification every time -- though I have encouraged this more than I ever did with Delevingne.

In the nearly ten years since Evans debuted as Captain America, he has grown immeasurably in my estimation. At the start I think I thought of him as sort of a poor man's Ryan Reynolds, someone who was charming enough but had no real substance. He could display an acting chop now and again but he was mostly forgettable.

I was initially opposed to his casting, because I agreed with the logic that Marvel missed an opportunity to cast someone who more directly represented what we think of as America today, or at least in 2010: even more of a multi-ethnic melting pot than it ever was. A black or Latino Cap really seemed like the way to go, and Evans' unavoidable honky-ness felt particularly retrograde. But Marvel stuck true to the origins of the character and I went into the movie with great wariness.

But then Captain America: The First Avenger was my favorite Marvel movie to that point, and its two sequels only increased my affection for the franchise and its main character. Evans had done the role proud, though he admittedly may have benefited from the strong directing of first Joe Johnston and then the Russo brothers. How much of my love for the franchise was due to Evans, and how much to other factors, was difficult to discern.

Evans has since proven his worth in a way that is decidedly his own -- off-screen.

I don't remember why I first clicked on an Evans tweet, but I think it was because it was critical of Donald Trump. I have since realized that Evans is relentless with Trump, even having his own pet nickname for him: Biff. He addresses him directly as Biff in his tweets, and his tweets usually focus on the dumbest things Trump is guilty of, in a hilarious way. I can imagine Trump is out there squirming every time Evans hits send, or submit, or whatever you do to send out a tweet.

Lately, I've noticed Evans tweeting more set photos and videos from Avengers: Endgame, and he's been quite generous with that stuff. But this morning I saw he tweeted out a video in which the leader of a youth organization devoted to fiscal responsibility gave the OK sign to alt-right "white power" chants. "Garbage people in this thread," Evans tweeted.

What I love is that this man who is so clearly meant to be a symbol of America has made such a clear statement about what side of the political debate (the correct side) he is on. You could say it's the character who's a symbol, not the man. But if we're being honest, you don't cast somebody in a role without knowing that the actor him or herself is going to take on a similar iconic, symbolic status as the character. If Evans had been a different type of person, or if Marvel had been a different kind of company, he/they would have seen it as their responsibility to truly "represent America" -- to be cagey about political affiliations and give people on both sides of the aisle a hero to look up to that represents them in some way. Instead, Evans doesn't hesitate to imply that half of his potential constituency -- his viewing audience -- might be "garbage people." Either they're garbage people themselves, or they give safe harbor to garbage people, which amounts to the same thing.

Chris Evans has made Captain America into truly the type of ambassador we should want to give out to the world. He is, or was, a type who fights for justice for the downtrodden, and presents to the world a face of acceptance of the tired, the poor, the huddled masses yearning to breathe free. We have in our collection of kids books a Captain America storybook that spends a weirdly long amount of time on the origins of the U.S., specifically on its status as a home for immigrants who came through Ellis Island and became Americans. It's corny, but the way Evans has embodied those virtues fills a person with pride.

And Marvel has the best of both worlds as they now do get to give us a Captain America who actually embodies that multi-ethnic melting pot in his own ethnicity. As Evans has obviously retired from that role, he's now passing on the shield to Anthony Mackie, the black actor who has been playing Sam Wilson/Falcon since Captain America: The Winter Soldier.

Mackie should do the shield, and America, proud. But Evans has made sure he's had big shoes to fill.