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How “Strawberry Wine” influenced the way I view Steve’s ending in Endgame.
Bear with me:
Bear with me:
Strawberry Wine is one of the few country songs I have liked so far in my life. It came out when I was in middle school. It’s essentially about the nostalgia of first love and how the loss of it and growing beyond it can mean much more than if that love had stayed possible.
Enter: Steve Rogers and Peggy Carter. TFA is about this sort of love. It’s tragic, and beautiful, and I still get choked up a little at the end of the movie because I am a sap at my core under all the armor. But, this is also why the EG ending makes me so unspeakably angry.
See, nostalgia works like rose colored glasses, or perhaps in this case Strawberry Wine colored glasses. It colors memories and softens the edges of them into sweetness when the reality is not reflective of those selective memories. It’s emotional soft focus.
If you brought it back into the clarity of the present it would lose that, the hard flawed edges would come back, and all the personal reasons why that love didn’t work out in the first place—more than just circumstances—would be brought back into focus. This is what EG did.
Instead of leaving that bittersweetness of a love lost it only leaves hard questions with worse answers. It’s a wineglass smashed beyond recognition.
Instead of leaving that thread alone like it should have been (because many story threads should be left open, my fellow writers), they chose an unsatisfactory solution. Instead of leaving Steve with his nostalgic memories they tried to answer a question that is unanswerable.
To quote the song, “Is it really him or the loss of my innocence I’ve been missing so much?” The point is that the singer doesn’t know, and it doesn’t really matter, since the memories are more important than the question. And everything about Steve’s ending forgets that fact.
