If this seems like a niche, random comparison, that’s because it kind of is. But, I can’t really blame myself for it. The Captain America film franchise has been a special interest of mine since I was in my early tween years, and I have always been (to a fault) eager to jump up and explain to anyone that the films work as rich character studies, filled with complex themes and interpersonal relationships that can tell us a lot about the human condition. And of course, as part of the trans-man canon, I adore Car Seat Headrest’s Twin Fantasy. I won’t try to describe how much it means to me, I’ll just say, I really do love it. Thanks to my best friend, I even have Face to Face on vinyl.
In fact, I was listening to this vinyl as I sat working on a passion project over winter break, something I had wanted to write for a while– an essay on queercoding in the Captain America films (with a heavy emphasis on Steve Rogers and Bucky Barnes’ relationship)– and everything sort of clicked into place in that moment. I realized, in a strange way, if you look at the media through a glass-filled-with-water-held-up-to-sunlight angle (the way I look at everything), they tell similar stories. This comes from their shared themes of memory and identity– more specifically, how they both play with the idea of building your sense of self around another person, and in that becoming a mirror for them as they have been for you, but also about the dangers of therefore creating a character of a person to love in your mind.
Just for clarification:
1. I do know that Twin Fantasy has two versions, and I will be trying to shift back and forth through them as little as possible during this reading, so as not to cause confusion. There will be emphasis on Mirror to Mirror;
2. If you have not seen the Captain America, Steve Rogers saga trilogy, specifically Captain America: The Winter Soldier… I am sorry, but I don’t have time to summarize everything.
Twin Fantasy can be read, in part, as the story of loving someone else so much that you want to become completely connected with them, but not without the dangers of trying to achieve this. It is clear even on the cover art– the dogs there are parts of each other, identical and mirroring with one’s body parts completing the other. But then, what is left of the self? “Beach Life-In-Death” has cultic references, making the lover a personality to be worshipped, and a promise to “paint my face in your colors” takes individuality away from the narrator. The album ends with a similar sentiment, in “Those Boys (Twin Fantasy)” with lines such as “They just want to be one / Walk off into the sun” and “They got a conduit / Their minds are the same” which both give ideas of wanting to be one body, one mind, one soul.
This is taken further when we look at the themes of building a self in relation to another person, that beloved one. For example, there is the invocation of the phenomenological understanding of the “Other.” According to Wikipedia, the Other is an outside force that is not neutral in the formation of the self, but rather, is integral to it. That Other creates a mirror for you to hold up to yourself, for the sake of self reflection and understanding. The Other can be a person, clearly, as is the case for our narrator in Twin Fantasy. In “Beach Life-In-Death,” a significant Other with a capital ‘O’ is specifically called out.
Herein lies the first connection that we can draw with Captain America. In the storylines, the theme of memory as a defining factor of the self is poignant– think about specifically the character arc and struggle that Bucky Barnes goes through after having his memory, and therefore his sense of self, completely stripped away. In a way, especially in the events of The Winter Soldier, Steve Rogers serves as the Other– he is a reference point and a mirror which Bucky uses to come back to himself. Steve definitely tries to use his memories with Bucky as a way to bring him back, with repetitions of “You know me.” The line to break the hold HYDRA has on Bucky and to flip the switch completely, “I’m with you ‘til the end of the line,” is a specific callback to a memory that the two of them share, a flashback that we get to see in full.
Thinking about it further, we can see that the film as a whole in its main character arcs deal with struggles for identity clashing with incomplete memories or completely unreachable nostalgia (“We gotta go back” is repeatedly stated in “Famous Prophets (Minds)” yet it is clear that we never truly can), as we watch Steve grapple with a sense of self against a changing world and against an image of himself that he can no longer emulate– Captain America as an image stands for a bygone era and is meant to follow orders set by a corrupt system, and since Steve is against that, the role works as a barrier. Very few are able to actually see beyond the red, white, and blue and get to the man within. Perhaps the same goes for Bucky– after all, he did commit full war crimes, even though he was brainwashed, and therefore comes with a preconceived label of a dangerous lost cause. In the modern era, the only one who can fully understand Steve beneath his facade is Bucky, and the same goes for Bucky being understood by Steve. Then, take into account their shared life experience from childhood into the future, complete with long stints in ice and manipulation by power structures, and it becomes increasingly clear that they work as mirrors and completions of each other, two parts of one whole. With the other one back into their life, in the present that neither of them should have made it into in the first place, and with the lifetimes of stolen youth and lost time behind them, the ocean washes open the grave as they serve as comforts to rely on and fight for throughout their narrative arcs.
However, what is perhaps the fatal flaw for Twin Fantasy’s narrator is that they mold the one they love into something new, but not something real. “It’s not enough to love the unreal / I am inseparable from the impossible,” as the beloved becomes something more (or perhaps less, given the “dog motif”) than human, something other than a simple self. In that, they become greater than or less than what they truly are. The concept of creating a character is also explicitly stated, in the spoken word piece at the end of “Nervous Young Inhumans,” in which the narrator speaks on “galvanism” and how they “created you [the beloved one] as a character.” They admit to pretending to know more than they really do about the beloved one– they are in love with an image, a specific Other. This is furthered in several other songs. “Bodys” is a great example, as it talks about a deliberate lack of communication as the narrator makes specific avoidances such as “I’ll try my best not to touch your face,” as in, when we make love (read: become one) I will not connect with your personhood, your defining features– even if honest concern comes out in several points of the album, in “Bodys” with fear about bodies falling apart, but also in “Stop Smoking” (the sentiment here is obvious) and “Cute Thing” with admissions of intimate desires with “I wanna sleep naked / Next to you naked.”
Along with this, there is uncertainty about what the relationship actually means to the beloved one– “It’s been a year since we first met / I don’t know if we’re boyfriends yet.” The narrator also makes concessions towards them, with lines such as “We can be two brothers, we can just act nice,” showing that the narrator does not have to get intimate, and will literally give that notion up, as long as the beloved one remains connected to him in some way. By directly pointing to this uncertainty, it becomes clear yet again that the narrator does not really know the beloved one, what they want or what they feel about the nature of the relationship. Again, they are a created work of art to the narrator.
In that, for our purposes, comes the idea of facade and image yet again. As previously mentioned, both Steve and Bucky are stuck in images of greatness and danger, respectively. And while, as previously established, it is clear that they deeply know each other outside of that, one must wonder if their memories hold them back, specifically, again, in how Bucky is perceived by Steve. This is definitely more up to interpretation, since there is not a lot of outward talk about the pair’s feelings in general (“But I know that you don’t care a lot”), but Bucky is clearly not the person he was before the fall from the train– who would be, after decades of torture and trauma? We may be left to wonder if somehow, there is an image left in Steve’s mind that is far from the true, and therefore, becomes an “inhuman.” After all, when he states complete trust and dependability, like with the line “Even when I had nothing I had Bucky,” he could be exercising faith and trust that he can right the wrongs and bring his closest friend back to safety, or it could be an exercise in naïveté .
Twin Fantasy gives us plenty of reminders of how experiences stick with you: “Stuck in one body, stuck in one mind / For the rest of your life / This is the rest of your life,” as stated in “Famous Prophets (Minds),” for example, shows that no matter what you go through, the experiences you have with others stick with you, whether that is brainwashing and war crime-related trauma from an evil science group or a bad teenage relationship. (Perhaps both are equally as devastating.) Either way, the experiences that you have change you, even if you do distill them to lyrics and dissociate like stated at the end of the album, the whole experience closes with “When I come back, you’ll still be here.” Those memories, for better or for worse, are preserved in amber and are the only remainders of the past. In that way, the person you remember in your head, the character you created and held dear, no longer exists in any way or form besides there. The ocean washes over the grave, and they are gone. Much the same for Steve and Bucky, they are almost doomed by the narrative that has them pulled apart constantly, destined not to become one, and destined to always find each other as only images in the back of the head.
Or, something.
Realistically, this reading is a bit of a stretch, but as a lover of both of these media, I wanted to compare and contrast the most compelling parts of both of them. I mostly do analysis for fun, which means that sometimes it is not as deep or profound as it could be. But, I’ll leave you all with a quote from “Beach Life-In-Death” off of Face to Face that explains exactly how I feel: “I couldn’t tell you what it means / But it meant something to me.”
