Page - 114 - in JRFM - Journal Religion Film Media, Volume 03/01

114 | Thomas Hausmanninger www.jrfm.eu 2017, 3/1, 105–121 ment at the smithsonian’s exhibition about his previous life, when he encoun- ters the display about his friendship with Bucky,52 but there is none of the tor- menting remorse he experiences in the comics. even though Captain America’s survivor’s guilt is not a dominant feature of the movies, the reiteration of past constellations and the resurfacing of past foes do appear. so, for example, sha- ron Carter, who in the comics is a relative of Captain America’s old love, is men- tioned in the second movie.53 From amongst his foes, in the first movie Captain America again confronts Dr. Armin Zola, the evil scientist and henchman of the Red Skull, who lives on as an artificial intelligence and orchestrated the subver- sion of s.h.i.e.L.D by hydra.54 In Brubaker’s revival of Bucky in the comics, Bucky had definitely died before he was picked up by the submarine of russian General Vasily Karpov after the fatal incident told in the flashback scene of Avengers 4/1964.55 Karpov delivers Bucky to his Communist superiors and he is revived, but besides his physical and trained reflexes and learned languages, he has lost his complete memory.56 he thus offers the Russians very special skills but a blank personality, and from the 1950s to the 1970s is reprogrammed with a completely new personality and, codenamed “Winter soldier”, used for undercover contract killer missions in the West.57 Between missions he is returned to cryogenic stasis and thus does not significantly age over the decades. He serves as Karpov’s bodyguard in the 1980s and, after decades-long stasis, is used again in the 2000s by russian gen- eral Lukin, who at the time of the story is inhabited by the red skull.58 from a Kabbalistic viewpoint, Bucky, having been undoubtedly dead, is re- incarnated into his own body, but regains only parts of his soul – the vegeta- tive and animalistic aspects and some of his acquired rational abilities. his new programming superimposes a different and evil soul, that is to say, a dybbuk. in accord with Kabbalistic theory, in his previous life Bucky had acquired a nega- tive disposition that accounted for his impregnation with that dybbuk: Brubaker gives Bucky an additional backstory from his time with the military in the 1940s, when he was trained by the U.S. Army to carry out killer missions that official members of the army could not execute. the remaining aspects of Bucky’s orig- inal soul, however, are still linked to the soul parts he lost and that formed his personality and biographical memory. these links render him unstable, so that his russian superiors in the late 1950s make him “undergo Mental implantation 52 The Return of the First Avenger (2014), 0:19:00. 53 The Return of the First Avenger (2014), 2:06:00. 54 The Return of the First Avenger (2014), 1:03:14. 55 Captain America 11/2005, 5. 56 Captain America 11/2005, 6-7. 57 Captain America 11/2005, 9. 58 Captain America 14/2006, 22.