Perverse Iron Frechman

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This piece first ran on Comixology.
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iron_man_posterI’m the last person in explored space to see the first Iron Man movie. I watched it this month and am pleased to report that it hasn’t dated a moment. We’re still wandering around Afghanistan haplessly blowing and being blown up; arms traders are still sexy/cool; bad boys with hearts of plutonium still get the girl; Gwyneth Paltrow is still frighteningly thin and brittle, with little flecks of poisonous spittle flicking out from behind her girl-next-door façade. Also, random Westernized foreigners with doctorate degrees are always happy to sacrifice themselves for the callow American so that said callow Americans can continue to be callow but with a mission; black guys are sidekicks; male womanizers are rakishly hot/forgivably flawed, but women who open their legs are trashy bitch sluts. Also Americans save all the brown people. Or maybe kill them. It’s hard to tell.

You probably know that though. After all the film is two years old. And superheroes are, what, going on 80? There’s been some finessing of the template, of course. Semi-socialist Superman beat up crooked industrial robber barons on behalf of the working man. In the post-Marvel age of superhero realism and relevance, Iron Man beats up crooked industrial robber barons on behalf of crooked industrial robber barons who have had a change of heart. But the main point is truth, justice, the American Way, and uber-violence on behalf of peace. The gods are us and we like to hit things — but in a good cause.

It’s not just sanctimonious Americans who find this sort of thing appealing, though. Perverse Frenchmen want to be superheroes too. Or at least that’s what I’ve gleaned recently from reading some of the poems of Georges Bataille. Bataille, like Robert Downey, Jr.’s Tony Stark aka Iron Man, is obsessed with sex and pleasure — surely Stark, for example, would appreciate a poem titled “I Place My Cock…” Like Strark, too, Bataille dreams of being more than human:

the glory of man
no matter how great
is to desire another glory

I am
the world is with me
pushed outside the possible

I am only the laughter
and the infantile night
where the immensity falls

I am the dead man
the blind man
the airless shadow

like rivers in the sea
in me noise and light
lose themselves endlessly

I am the father
and the tomb
of the sky

the excess of darkness
is the flash of the star
the cold of the grave is a die

rolled by death
and the depths of the heavens jubilate
for the night which falls within me.
(from “The Tomb,” trans. Mark Spitzer)

The poem almost makes more sense if you decide it’s about Iron Man than if you don’t. Even all the talk about death — “I am the dead man/the blind man/the airless shadow” — fits, since Stark is essentially a walking corpse, his heart powered by the same technology that runs his suit. His weakness is his strength as he pushes outside the possible, in a hyperbolic apotheosis of noise, light, and self-dramatization.

In another poem Bataille declares, “I fill the sky with my presence.” And that does seem to be the point for ecstatic modernity, whether pop dreck or snooty highbrow philosophizing. Presumably it’s Nietzsche’s fault that God is dead and all we’re left with is the will to power of arms traders and self-proclaimed radicals. Or maybe Jung’s right and it’s just a mythopoetical heroic something — though it seems telling that we’ve only recently decided that we require one hysterically hyperbolic hero with a thousand faces rather than making do with all the dinky little heroes with one face each.

In any case, theirs is undoubtedly a thin poignancy in the desperation on display. It’s not enough to be Robert Downey, Jr., not enough to be Robert Downey, Jr. and a genius — you’ve got to be Robert Downey, Jr. and a genius and have enough fire-power at your fingertips to make Afghanistan right. Or, if you’re Bataille, it’s not enough to fuse romantically with nature, you have to actually fuck nature to death and tramp on her corpse before stabbing yourself in the eyes with Christ’s nails. When Paltrow, as Stark’s assistant Pepper Potts finds her boss fooling around with his armor, Stark laughs it off by commenting wryly that it’s not the most embarrassing thing she’s ever caught him doing — but I’m not so sure about that.

Tom Crippen had an article in The Comics Journal sometime back in which he referred to Superman as Siegel and Schuster’s “big dumb dream.” That dream is alive and well, but I’m not so sure it was Siegel’s and Schuster’s, or at least not theirs exclusively. Superheroes are just one, somewhat popular way to wrap the world around man or man around the world like some clunkily gaudy suit of CGI armor. As Bataille says, “the universe is within me as it is within itself/nothing separates us anymore/I bump against it in myself.” You can hear the dry “thunk” of his head on the inside of the helmet before he powers up and goes off to deface some idols or beat up some bad guys, whichever comes first.

17 thoughts on “Perverse Iron Frechman”

  1. Everything good about the first Iron Man movie is in this mock-Vanity Fair article:

    http://www.butcheredart.net/Fiction/Kids.html

    I kinda liked the second one for its wonky pacing, where Tony Stark spends the first half of the movie on a power trip and the second half apologizing. Although the movie wasn’t willing to go quite far enough and risk the audience turning on Stark, which undermines the apologetics since it’s not clear within the movie why he’d have to do that. But, you know, I like the idea of this, in theory.

  2. Good lord, that article is enormous. I don’t care enough about Tony Stark for that! (Instead I’m going to read Graeber’s Debt — which you also recommended.)

  3. Not that I mind reading this again, but is there any particular reason you’re reposting this over two years later? Eager to stir up some debate in anticipation for the new one? Have you watched the first sequel?

    (Also, what’s a Frechman?)

  4. No reason! I often reprint things over here at some point; just happened to get to this one.

    And nope; haven’t seen the first sequel. Didn’t really like the first one enough to go on with it….

  5. Hmmm.. so Bataille is a warmonger? Sort of in the mode of Zizek’s mystical Zen samurai who kills without thought?

    I agree that Bataille enjoys violence– but everyone enjoys violence. I don’t know that he justifies violence, though, like most (often far more soft-spoken and moderate) warmongers.

  6. I don’t think Bataille is a warmonger…more like a self-monger? It’s about adolescent power fantasies, which can be channeled into invading Afghanistan or shocking the bourgeoisie, depending.

  7. Hmm. I don’t think power fantasies are particularly adolescent, though they may be somewhat male, a least in this model. But if “shocking the bourgeoisie” is your summary of Bataille (which would, of course, work for, oh, Howard Stern, etc.) I suppose I can see that point. I am willing to agree that modernism is sort of essentiaily fascist. But when it’s sort of self-destructive and anti-visionary, I become somewhat skeptical that you’ve found the poster child for modernist pragmatist imperialism.

    And you really aren’t going to fix that “Frechmen” thing are you?

  8. Oh, fine, I fixed it.

    I don’t think it’s quite that modernism is essentially fascist. More like fascism is essentially modernist. The vision of humanity filling the world, or defacing the world — no gods but us.

    I don’t think Bataille’s poetry is anti-visionary. And self-destructiveness is kind of complicated when the self is all there is.

    Iron Man isn’t pragmatic imperialism, either. It’s ecstatic imperialism, I think.

  9. “The warrior’s nobility is like a prostitute’s smile, the truth of which is self-interest.”

    You can crap on Bataille all you want. But I don’t think he’s quite as godless and rational as the Christians who fly drones over Waziristan.

  12. It is to some degree. But it’s witty also; Ben Saunders has a reading of it as being about spiritual vulnerability which I think make sense. It’s not great or anything, but it’s not utterly repulsive.

  15. My wife saw it so I don’t have to. He bugs me.

    Where’s the Iron Man that Ozzy sang about? “Can he walk and talk? Or if he moves, will he fall?”

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