Rewatching Agent Carter, I got the thought about how Howard uses the term ‘friend’. I feel like he views everyone as his friend. Wait! Hear me out on this!
So, basing myself slightly off of this post and what’s said in the series, it’s clear that Howard did not have a happy, carefree childhood. He likely grew up Jewish, he clearly states that there’s a ceiling for people like him, and he’s had to learn to lie to advance.
But let’s back up.
Howard Stark is clearly a genius. He’s not exactly street-smart, and he has this enhanced IQ that wasn’t well-suited for the area. So what friends did he have growing up?
Well, none and several. He probably had no friends in his neighborhood. Here was this boy, arguably smarter than everyone around him, who wanted out and was willing to do whatever it took to get there. And how better to get out than to make friends with the right people. I mean, everybody wants something and Howard was smart enough to make sure that he was the one who got it for them, even if he had to steal (or get someone else to steal it for him – sound familiar?). He became everyone’s new best friend.
Now don’t get me wrong. He knew they weren’t really his friends. He’s not stupid. But friendship, to Howard, became this thing. Anyone was a ‘friend’ because everyone had something they wanted. And they were often willing to pay for that.
So he used this idea he had crafted of friendship to climb his way out of his old life. He probably told himself that he was going to help people when he got out. But living a lie, stealing to get a better position… it weighed on Howard until the idea of ‘helping people’ once he was where he wanted to be became just another lie, one that he told himself.
So what happened later? Well, he met Edwin Jarvis. Like so many others, there was something that Jarvis wanted. But see, what Jarvis wanted wasn’t something petty and material. What Jarvis wanted was to save the woman he loved from ending up another casualty of war. Jarvis did something that made Howard turn his head. He risked his own life to save that of another.
Why this made Howard stop, I can only guess. But something clearly changed in Howard after that. Suddenly it wasn’t only about the money. He remembered that it was about saving people. Helping them. Oh sure, he was terrible at it a lot. He has no idea how to connect with real people.
He knows, of course, that everyone is a potential ‘friend’, but there are only a handful of people who go beyond his idea of friendship. In fact, he can count them on one hand. Edwin Jarvis. Peggy Carter. Steve Rogers. These are the three people who showed him that humans aren’t only petty creatures out for themselves and he really has no idea how to handle that.
So when he calls Peggy and Jarvis his favorites, I don’t think that’s just a sentiment. When he says to Peggy there’s no one else he can trust with the mission of clearing his name, there’s no doubt in my mind that he believes that. Because to him, there’s nobody else he trusts.
Captain America: The First Avenger Trivia Click gifs for more trivia in captions
Calling jeet kune do a style is really misleading. It’s Cap’s fighting style in the sense that Cap sucks up whatever works and then stuffs it all together in an effective way. And that’s what jeet kune do IS.
Bruce Lee grew up street-fighting in Hong Kong. As such, he learned martial arts as a way to beat the snot out of other people. He always found the kind of stylized kata-based tournament-style martial arts to be, hm. Usually they teach you how to look pretty, not how to be effectual (with a few exceptions, such as boxing, which he had a lot of respect for because boxers have never forgotten the point of fighting; and the occasional dojo where they focus on things like self-defense or MMA).
So, while Lee studied many styles, when it came time to use them he simply snagged everything that worked and threw it into his personal style. And that became known as jeet kune do, even though it is, in the formal sense, the opposite of a style.
There are now dojos that train people in ‘jeet kune do,’ even though in some cases they’re turning Lee’s fighting into something that’s exactly the sort of stylized and ineffective thing he worked to get away from. In other cases, they’re simply training you how to be a down-and-dirty fighter, in case you ever need to knock somebody down.
So to say that Cap’s style is ‘jeet kune do’ is simply to say that Cap’s style is to be a combat-move-sponge and to beat the snot out of his opponents in an idiosyncratic but highly effective way. Which is not a thing that Bruce Lee invented, although he was responsible for a renaissance in martial arts and reminding practitioners the world over that the point was not to look pretty, but to stun the fuck out of your opponent.
I bet Steve was thrilled when he discovered Bruce Lee, though. In Marvel-verse, Steve was probably one of the fighters Bruce Lee studied, and I’m sure Steve later returned the favor.