Apologia for Iron Man 2

If you want to understand the differences between Jon Favreau's Iron Man and its imaginatively titled follow-up, Iron Man 2, you need look no further than the respective historical moments from which each movie was borne. And I'm not talking about the sort of tabloid-news understanding of American politics that results in ham-handed representations of so-called "Tea-Baggers" as somehow equivalent with white supremacists. Like its predecessor, Iron Man 2 is interesting because it evinces a subtle and complex understanding of the particular forces at work in our country and the peculiar leadership challenges faced by those concerned with fixing our broken country.

But this subtlety might also be the biggest flaw of Iron Man 2, in the sense that much of the film's sophistication has been missed by critics and moviegoers. In a genuinely probing—not to mention almost wholly justified—critique of superhero movies, no less a critic than Matt Zoller Seitz credits Favreau's Iron Man franchise with "cool competence" . . . and little else. As Seitz formulates them, superhero movies "[crank] up directors' box office averages and [keep] offbeat actors fully employed for years at a stretch by dutifully replicating (with precious few exceptions) the least interesting, least exciting elements of its source material." The critique is perfectly apt, but I think it fails to register the sort of societal self-examination that Favreau effects through this replication.

Robert Downey Jr's Tony Stark is a perfect stand-in for the sort of second-generation tycoon that typifies the deficit of integrity and self-effacement that have been the unfortunate legacy of America's post-World War II prosperity. Stark wants all that is glamorous and awesome about being a titan, without any of the mundane drudgery. Part of this, of course, has to do with the sort of media saturation and commodification of sexuality that is a relatively recent development in American culture. Americans do not want their titans to be mundane any more than the Tony Starks of the world themselves do. But this sort of unbridled vanity is not without its costs, not the least of which is represented by the blurring of the lines between economies of production and value creation, and those derived solely from a desire to get rich.

If it seems like I'm getting a bit doctrinaire, there is a point to it. Iron Man 2 picks up right where its predecessor left off, with Stark basking in the glory of his revelation that he is indeed Iron Man and parlaying the public's fervor into the multi-million dollar monkey-spank that is the Stark Expo. The film's message about hubris and unbridled ambition is obvious, but where things get really interesting is in the weird doubling/opposition of Gwyneth Paltrow's Pepper Potts and Scarlett Johansson's Natasha Romanoff.


As with the best mainstream comics, Favreau uses an obvious opposition, in this case Pepper's prim elegance against Romanoff's more overt sensuality, to do something surprisingly sophisticated. As Romanoff first enters the film, at this point as Stark Enterprises counsel Natalie Rushman, she projects a dark and dangerous influence over Tony's life. Over Pepper's—and the viewer's—objections, Rushman encourages Tony to give in to each of his self-indulgent whims. The results of this are rather predictable, with Tony self-destructing at his own birthday party, losing an Iron Man suit, as well as the respect of just about everyone in his life.

Had the movie played out predictably, Stark would have realized the error of his ways, rejected the sexual decadence of Rushman/Romanoff, in favor of Pepper's relentless responsibility, and ultimately defeated Ivan Vanko's robot army by tapping into the unique combination of organizational genius, bluff daring and technical wizardry that has pretty much defined his character over the years. But that isn't what happens—at least not exactly. The monkey wrench thrown into the works is at least nominally due to the film's relationship with the overall Marvel universe. The biggest surprise of the entrance of Samuel L. Jackson's entrance as Nick Fury—ignoring for a moment the incongruous casting—is the revelation that Natalie Rushman is actually S.H.I.E.L.D. agent Natasha Romanoff. Her turn as legal counsel Rushman is simply a cover that allows her to get close to Stark/Iron Man, whom Fury covets for his quasi-covert governmental goon squad.

But setting aside this sort of comics nerd esotericism, it becomes clear that the movie can be read as something of an allegory of the early years of Obama's presidency, with Pepper Potts and Natasha Romanoff representing two seemingly opposed personae that the president has struggled to reconcile. Johansson's luridly sexual Romanoff is the equivalent of Obama as messianic world savior whose very election seemed to suggest that all the world's problems were over, while Paltrow's Pepper smacks of the pragmatic Chicago dealmaker whom everyone refused to see. What becomes clear as the film enters its third act, is that it is necessary to reconcile and harness both of these personae in order to have any hope of dealing with the enormous threat posed by Vanko and his slimy benefactor Hammer. The same can also be said of Obama as president—messianism alone cannot fix the enormous problems America faces, and yet people are bored by problem-solving pragmatism and thus it must be sexed-up a bit to make it more palatable.


If it seems like I am stretching things a bit with this analogy, consider Mickey Rourke's delightfully threatening turn as Ivan Vanko. Vanko is essentially Stark's intellectual equal and yet he is far more dangerous precisely because he is not motivated by a desire for wealth or personal glory. As Vanko sees it, men like Stark and his father placed their own personal gain ahead of the sort of selfless dedication of men like his own father and, in doing so, not only robbed him of his own personal birthright, but ultimately made the world a much less salubrious place. There are many Americans now, misguided though some of them may be, who feel a similar disgust at the sort of unbridled greed and unprincipled ambition that have come rather close to bankrupting the country.

Iron Man was the product of an America in which the greatest threat to our prosperity continued to be the foreign conflicts in which we were involved for increasingly nebulous purposes. What is perhaps most surprising about Iron Man 2 is that it avoids the predictable representation of the industrialist as unalloyed villain. Like its predecessor, Iron Man 2 is sophisticated precisely because it rejects just that sort of easy polemicism that simplifies national problems into neatly categorizable distinctions between Right and Left or Liberal and Conservative, and presents events in terms of a broadly distinguishable struggle between good and evil. And that it does so at the same time as it delightfully entertains is certainly deserving of admiration.

Cinematic Subtlety: The Politics of Ironman

There is a moment in the opening act of Jon Favreau's Ironman in which Tony Stark and his fellow prisoner Yinsen are visited in their cell--really a cave somewhere in the mountains of Afghanistan--by their captors. I happen to be this guy who can recognize Arabic when it is spoken and thus knew that the bad guys were speaking Arabic and Yinsen, an Afghan whose native language might be Dari, Pashto or even Farsi, but certainly not Arabic, responded in that language. A few moments later, Stark and Yinsen are having a conversation and Stark asks Yinsen how many languages he speaks. Yinsen's reply is that he doesn't speak enough to cover all of those spoken amongst their captors.

In that ever so brief exchange, the film acknowledged that Yinsen speaks at least three languages (English, Arabic and whatever his native language may be) and that the militants who operate in that region of the world are an amazingly polyglot bunch comprising some mixture of Pashtuns, Persians, Uzbeks, Tajiks, Turkmen, Bosnians, Chechens and a handful of Arabs. This is precisely the sort of undemonstrative cue that assumes an informed audience that John Ford used in The Searchers but that one would not expect from a 21st Century comic book superhero movie.

Political movies are generally problematic because they are usually either obvious and obnoxiously preachy or they are too timid to commit to anything controversial for fear of turning off too many viewers. The thing about politics, though, is that if what you are saying isn't controversial, it probably isn't worth saying. The political content of Ironman avoids all this because it asks questions about some truly paradoxical stuff in American foreign policy, but also avoids making any naive conclusions about them.

In the scene in which Stark is demonstrating his company's new high-tech missile to the gathered dignitaries, he makes a comment about how the enemy will be afraid to come out of their caves. This seemingly throwaway line actually says a lot about the attitudes and assumptions of Americans in regards to our current enemies. Later in the film, when Obadiah Stane goes to Afghanistan to retrieve Stark's original Ironman suit from his captor, Stane makes a comment about how it was always technology that kept that part of the world behind. Taken together, these two comments reveal something of the impotence Americans felt in the face of what happened on September 11, 2001. Like, if these people are able to use our technology to destroy two of the largest and most robust structures on the face of the planet in a plan hatched in a cave in Afghanistan, we must be fucked. These scenes also point out the ironic doubling of cowardice in the current conflict against terror: They hide in caves while we hide behind our technology.

Although I think this was a relatively rare phenomenon, there were certainly some right-leaning critics of the film who pigeonholed it as a typical left-wing, anti-corporation, anti-military film. Still others coming from the left decried the film's portrayal of brown-skinned Muslims as the villains. Both readings are ultimately simplistic and basically ignore what is really going on. Insofar as there is a villain in the film, it is the double-dealing plutocrat Obadiah Stane. Sure he pays a group of presumably Muslim militants to kill Stark, but this is only one portrayal of Muslims in the film--the other and more affecting is as victims of just the sort of amoral business practices Stane engages in. Moreover, I would argue that the movie's primary moral barometer is none other than Colonel James Rhodes, a military officer in charge of the development and procurement of new weapons technology.

The film does ask some basic questions about the morality of arms manufacture as a means of earning a living, but it does so without pretending to have all the answers. As Stark himself points out, many of the technologies his company developed that have helped people around the globe were made possible with military money. Questions are asked, complexities are exhibited and acknowledged, people are left to come to their own conclusions--this is what politically and philosophically serious films do.

Running as fast as they can, Iron Man lives again!

Remember that great super hero movie Iron Man? It comes out on DVD today and got me thinking back to the time I saw it in the theaters. There was this bizarre incident where the power went out 30min from the end of the movie. One member of the audience volunteered to go tell the theater officials of the mishap but then shouted back in, “the whole theater is blacked out!” After watching a movie featuring a lot of terrorism other members of the audience began to get a little freaked out. It’s kind of a perfect example of how the first hour and forty-five minutes of Iron Man have you sucked into a completely believable world.

The movie itself was really good, and from the very first scene it captures your attention. It’s the scene that you’ve watched in all the trailers where Tony is having fun in his Humvee and then it’s attacked by terrorists. When I first saw it in the trailers it convinced me to go see this movie. It’s a good blend of over the top character and reality that is perfect for a comic movie. What you don’t see in the trailer is the continuation of the scene. Tony’s army protectors get out of the Humvee as Tony is completely terrified trying to take hold of the situation. He spouts out lines that you’d hear in the movies, “What’s our situation?” and “How many we got?” The soldiers ignore him as Tony and the audience is plunged into the middle of the chaos of war. There’s no objective only shooting at the enemy. A hand held camera and close-ups of the soldiers help the feel of reality also. Tony watches each solider die not in the glory of battle but quick and real. Stark is taken prisoner and there is a shot of Tony captured by the terrorists that is reminiscent of the beheading videos. Then the ‘IRON MAN’ title screen followed by extended flashback of Tony being the celebrity playboy that we saw in the first couple of minutes. The movie continues to balance out moments of real terror with comedy and actual character development all the way through.

Tony’s character is the most interesting part of the movie. He pretends to be this celebrity jerk, but at his heart he’s part kid and part nerd. The exact combination that appeals to most comics’ fans. It’s also subtle which is important. The next morning after he gets this Vanity Fair reporter in bed he retreats into his basement to work on a hotrod engine and lets his secretary, Pepper Potts, deal with showing her out. He’s at least somewhat concerned for her because he asks how she took it and by working on something mechanical tries to take his mind off of it. It’s important to see how these parts of his personality are there all along because after he’s captured and comes back we see them emerge. When he comes back he’s not completely changed just slightly. One of the weirdest things about the Spiderman movie is how he changes so dramatically after his Uncle dies. Yeah, it’s a major life-altering event but the change in the movie feels way more contrived. He’s shown as a complete shut-in and then as soon as he gets super powers he gets adventurous. Stark is already crazy when the movie starts so when he is testing out experimental technology in his basement and fighting terrorists it’s believable. When he comes back the only thing that changes are his priorities not his personality.

It’s kind of impossible to ignore the political themes in the movie. The terrorists, even though their boss wants to rule Asia, and the soldiers all bring up thoughts of the war in Iraq. Tony’s attitude of: go in blow everyone up from the air and it will be just fine, has a similar feeling to the Bush administration’s going into the war. Then things go horribly wrong. Tony finds out that his company has been double-dealing to the enemy. It’s vaguely similar to the war profiteering Halliburton was accused of. Even the dorky guy from the Strategic Homeland Intervention Enforcement Division sounds like a Bush style government official with a needlessly long name and way behind in information. Iron Man has a hopeful vision of the future with a focus on armoring individual solider and corporate responsibility. By the end even the dorky guy is now a S.H.E.I.LD. liaison and in control of Tony’s situation. That’s why the end when Jeff Bridges goes nuts and becomes Iron Monger sucks so much. It doesn’t make any sense with all the other stuff going on in the movie. It makes thematic sense, but why not just let the terrorist guy pilot it and have Jeff stick around for Iron Man 2? It doesn’t take away from the movies message about corporate greed. If he stuck around to the second one it would be more effective because it would be show how hard it is to get rid of Obidiah Stane type guys.