Impressed By Awesomeness

https://www.esri.com/about/newsroom/arcnews/cartography-goes-beyond-visual

https://www.esri.com/about/newsroom/arcnews/cartography-goes-beyond-visual

The odds of Steve’s father actually being a great war hero who happened to be in the exact same regiment as Bucky Barnes has no basis in reality; both what Steve is saying and how Chris Evans acts is clearly supposed to create the idea that Steve is lying through his teeth, thinking that if he creates a narrative around his father being a great hero he will look like one too by proxy, and just trying his hand to sneak into the same regiment as his best friend.

Now we have no hard evidence in the first movie that he is lying. But we have nothing to suggest he was telling the truth either.

The only consensus I gave this scene is that the meaning could be muddled by Steve telling the truth about how his mother died. If he’s willing to tell the truth about one, why not the other?

But now looking back, there’s actually a chance he’s lying about her too.

Irish women in 1920’s America, to no ones surprised, by treated extremely poorly. The majority of them took on the role of domestic work; nannies, servants, cooking, laundry and childcare. The popular stereotype of the Irish ‘Bridget’ was of ugly, uneducated, sexually desperate brute. The Irish ‘Biddy’ was a popular character on Vaudeville, portrayed as both a slut, and sexually disgusting.

These portrayals in the media had died down by by the time World War 2 was in effect, and the dynamic had shifted with more second generation Irish citizens climbing the social ladder from domestic work into jobs such as teachers, police and nurses.

While none of this has any merit it is worth mentioning that Steve’s mother being a nurse and his father dying in war is an invention made for the movie; in the comics Joseph Rogers was a soldier during WW1, but survived, ending up as an unemployed alcoholic who died when Steve was young.

After Joseph’s death Sarah Rogers took double shifts at a garment factory, and took in laundry. She later died of pneumonia.

It is standard practise in the MCU for the writers to flatten the intentionally political aspects of Steve Rogers character into something more palatable to the audience; when creating the character Joe Simon intentionally made him born and raised in the Lower East Side, Manhattan to reflect his own roots. Being working class, and the son of immigrants is integral to Steve’s character. While Brooklyn is known for its working class roots, it is ultimately ‘safe’ enough to a modern audience. The Lower East Side on the other hand still holds an association with immigrants throughout its history in a way that might make modern audiences ‘uncomfy’.

Framing the scene of Steve trying to get into the military with his rewriting his family history to appear more ‘appealing’ to the authority around him, shrugging off the stereotypes that come with a factory working mother, and alchohol father, is genuinely interesting.