Yet another lost opportunity to make a truly smart popcorn movie.
Ah, summer is here. Sure, officially it’s still spring. But as everyone and their mother knows, the true change of season is heralded by superhero movies. Screw the calendar and the summer solstice. Iron Man has entered the building. Or perhaps I should say, Iron Man has supersonic jetted into the building. For Iron Man, apparently, is precisely what audiences want very, very badly in these times of great global and economic trouble (they sure don’t feel the need for Speed). Just look at that name. Iron Man. Even if you’re not a comic book enthusiast or a heavy metal fan (music and chemical), the name still carries a frisson of power. It’s so…solid. Hard. Elemental. Earthy. He’s not super, nor incredible. He doesn’t float like a bat or sting like a spider. He’s just pure, unalloyed strength. Of course, technically he’s actually Gold Titanium Man, but that sounds like he ought to be making jewelry, and heroes do not make jewelry. They shoot flames. Thus, he is Iron Man. Firm. Sturdy. Oh, tee hee, he’s played by the anything-but-firm and sturdy Robert Downey Jr. Wink.
Would that the entire film had lived up to that bit of casting—not to mention the potential in Jeff “The Dude” Bridges’s presence as the arch bald villain Stane (he’s like, er, a rust stain?). By casting Downey, who has cornered the market on neurotic, self-aware twitchiness, the filmmakers sent a loud, crashing signal that this Iron Man wouldn’t be your sincere, garden-variety superhero. And for the majority of the film, he isn’t. He’s actually interesting (okay, Christian Bale’s Batman is interesting too, but I suspect Heath Ledger’s Joker will be even more interesting, whereas Stane is not more interesting than Iron Man. But I digress.). It isn’t just that he’s interesting, though. It’s how he’s interesting, especially given the context in which he has reared his metal-clad head. As more than one writer has noted, superheroes are all in one way or another working out some sort of inner angst as they defy gravity and break things. The nature of Iron Man né Tony Stark’s angst, however, is striking. He wants to atone for his manly sins.
As the first part in what I’m sure Marvel hopes will eventually grind out into a trilogy, Iron Man is saddled with the duty of telling the origin story of how high-flying, -living, and –earning science geek/weapons inventor/arms dealer Tony Stark became the ferrous male. As usual, something bad happens to him, and as usual, he reacts by building a super-powered metal suit in an Afghan cave. Hey, doesn’t everybody? Anyway, this origin story could be a bit of a yawn that’s easily forgotten among the familiar emotional Sturm and Drang of origin stories, except for one key fact. Whereas Iron Man’s other comic-cinematic superhero brethren arise primarily because of something that was done to them, whether it’s a spider bite, the destruction of one’s family, or an excess of gamma rays, Stark is moved to superpowerdom because of something he did (i.e. make killing machines). And wants to undo. Woe unto you, ye geeks who divorce technical expertise from humanity, and who profit quite handsomely from perpetual warfare. You’ll have blood on your hands. Because, oh jeepers, the weapons you design can fall into the wrong hands. No! Say it ain’t so.
Now, it’s not that surprising that in updating the Iron Man origin story, the writers moved Stark’s theater of conflict from Communist Vietnam to war-on-terror Afghanistan (guess they got the memo that Iraq is Box Office Poison). It just serves as one more sign that the War on Terror is the millennial Vietnam: endless, messy, and subject to great profit-generating abuses that have nothing to do with whether one agrees with its political motivations. What is rather thrilling in this day and age, however, is the idea that Stark, as a brash symbol of the military-industrial complex, gets that he has royally screwed up. Score one for gratifying movie fantasy. Granted, he has to, in essence, have his own weapons turned upon him for that to sink in, but still. Must I really re-hash the history of U.S. arms support to the Afghan mujahideen forces, including bin Laden, during the 1980s when they were fighting the Soviets, not to mention the tacit support to Iraq when they were fighting Iran during that same period, to show how much this is a movie fantasy distinct from reality? Didn’t think so.
This doesn’t seem to be the only sin, however, for which Stark must make amends. Sure, it’s the biggest, and it’s the source of his others. Nevertheless, there are those other errors. Because he is a bazillionaire inventor of lethal weapons, he is also cocky, narcissistic, and, yup, a ladies’ man. The opening scene is a model of concise exposition, from the Scotch on the rocks in Stark’s hand to his quip about sleeping with twelve Playboy Playmates of the Month. Please, somebody smack that guy. Or, ya know, shoot a bazooka at his Humvee. Anyway, regardless of how charming Downey can make this rogue, he’s still cruisin’ for a bruisin’. His prolonged transformation into Iron Man (and then Gold Titanium Hot Rod Red Man), becomes a lesson in collaboration with and appreciation for other human beings (sacrificial lamb Yinsen), espousing something resembling humility and purpose, and respecting women…or at least Gwyneth Paltrow’s limp-rag-in-fuck me pumps assistant Pepper. He’s a new (better) man in every way. And he does it while remaining Ironic Man! I’m so with this movie…
Then something happened. I’m not sure, but given that there are four credited screenwriters (and who knows how many uncredited), I keep picturing somebody with the power to change the course of a movie declaring that Iron Man was in danger of becoming moderately intelligent, and that simply could not, not happen. How else to explain the sudden, jarring, and ghastly written transition from an allegory (sort of) about testosterone-soaked war profiteers to a high tech version of My Metal Guy is Bigger Than Your Metal Guy? The revelation of Stane’s stain-iness isn’t so much a twist as a lame-o excuse to restage Transformers for older, follicularly challenged men (seriously, would it have killed them to prevent Bridges’s head from sporting a five o’clock shadow?). I know, Stane is part of the war profiteering Bad Guys because he sells the Stark missiles to the movie’s first Bald Bad Guy, but this is a case wherein the images overwhelm the purported narrative. To wit, what we see in the final, seemingly endless battle is this: bald, older Stane feels the need to build a bigger, harder, more Iron outfit to squash the younger, fully hirsute, more compactly metallic Stark. Only then can he be mas macho. Jeez, maybe if he had hair he wouldn’t be so pissy.
Stark wins, naturally. Still, the results of his atonement project remain unsatisfying. It’s one thing for the younger, faster, more flexible guy to figure out how to defeat the big ol’ behemoth (size doesn’t matter). That’s easy to plot, because the superhero—especially with his newfound conscience—will always be more potent. But what about undoing the damage that his weapons have done because they’ve been misguided (so to speak)? That was supposed to be the new Stark’s purpose and his humble, if implicit admission that he’d made a mess of things through his corporate and scientific arrogance. That was the idea that set him apart from other vengeful or abstractly righteous superheroes. That was what made him interesting as a man/hero. Perhaps the powers-that-be realized, as some other powers-that-be elsewhere have realized, that undoing the damage one’s weapons have done is a far more complicated matter than who has the bigger Go-Bot.
Guy Movies is a biweekly analysis of machismo cinema from the perspective of a woman.
