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I’m just going to say up front that I find Black Sabbath’s “Iron Man” to be one of the creepiest songs in the history of the world. I knew I was going to have to listen to it to write this post and I picked the brightest part of the morning to do it in. And even then, I kept catching myself moving to stop the song, so I wouldn’t have to keep listening to it. I don’t think I’m alone. That song is just objectively, deliciously, scary.
It’s creepy from its opening moments, starting with just the thud of the bass pedal. Now, you can’t possibly know that there’s something just a little bit off about the timing of those thuds—since there’s no other accompaniment to compare it to—but even with nothing else going on in the song, those thuds don’t sound right. It’s hard to tell right at the beginning if Bill Ward is hitting each beat in a very slow four beat measure or hitting every other beat in a rather quick four beat measure (though later on, when you hear some actual quarter notes four in a row, I think it’s apparent that he’s doing the latter). But it leaves me feeling like the beats are somehow coming too fast and not fast enough.
Then comes the dissonant guitar riff, with the notes that refuse to differentiate themselves from one another, but just slide all over the place bearing bad news. And I don’t even have to tell you what comes next—that creepy voice, sounding like it’s rattling out of a metallic graveyard. It never fails to scare the shit out of me.
The lyrics themselves adhere to the first rule of good horror—don’t let your audience get a clear look at what’s going wrong. The longer the audience can’t tell what’s happening or why, the scarier the thing remains. Once there are clear answers, the scariest part is over.
There aren’t really clear answers in “Iron Man.” A man goes to the future to save mankind, though we don’t know from what. There’s some kind of accident and he’s turned to iron—somehow—in the magnetic field. And then he comes back to earth, gets propped up somewhere, and plots his revenge, though what he needs revenge for is also unclear. A third of the song is just unresolved questions about the iron man. And then there’s the killing.
I think this song is brilliant and I love it. But it is, to me, scary as hell.
Which is why I find it baffling that it’s kind of been adopted as the unofficial anthem of Iron Man, the superhero. “Iron Man” plays in the last Iron Man movie. Tony Stark wears a Black Sabbath t-shirt in The Avengers. When you look at lists of songs adapted from or influenced by comics, every single one of them both includes “Iron Man” and concedes that it doesn’t originally have anything to do with Iron Man.
They share a name, but that wouldn’t necessarily seem to lead so many people to connect the two, especially when they’re otherwise so diametrically opposed. But it’s that opposition that I wonder about. After all, if you think about it, “Iron Man” would make the perfect nemesis for Iron Man. “Iron Man” seems to have had some great scientific skill—since he travelled through time—which Stark could appreciate. But “Iron Man” is isolated from people where Tony Stark, though somewhat misanthropic, is in community. We know Iron Man by his intellect and quick wit. It’s not even clear that “Iron Man” thinks about much but revenge. And, of course, Stark is looking to save humanity while “Iron Man” is bent on destroying it.
I’m not a Jungian, but it seems like we’ve, weirdly, decided that Tony Stark needs a pseudo-Jungian shadow, a part of himself that he doesn’t acknowledge, but which we, as the audience, all know is there—and that shadow is “Iron Man.” It’s not him, it’s not even about him, but, in our minds, it can’t be separated from him. Now, the thing that makes this weird (and not Jungian) is that it is us, the audience, who has given Stark this alternate “Iron Man.” And yet, of course, if he’s going to have one, we have to give it to him. Who is there who can give a fictional character a shadow aspect if the artist creating him has not? It has to be the audience.
We have linked Iron Man so closely to “Iron Man” that it would, then, seem to be Tony Stark’s most secret identity—even though we’ve never seen it acknowledged in the Marvel Universe, we suspect he’s the lonely tin man slowly going crazy enough to destroy us all. He just doesn’t know it.
It’s kind of like fan fiction in which we’ve merged these two characters to see what would happen. But no stories have come out of this merger. Except that, clearly, the narrative of “Iron Man” itself is different, even though nothing changes, when it’s Stark who didn’t come back through the magnetic field the same guy he left Earth as.
Here’s what I wonder: Even now, is “Iron Man” so strange and terrifying that we link Iron Man and “Iron Man” not to improve Iron Man, but to give “Iron Man” some context, some way of being easily known and understood? Now, instead of asking, “What the hell happened? Who is this thing and why is it killing everyone?”, we get to pretend that it makes a certain kind of sense—“Oh, it’s Tony Stark! And he’s gone mad, finally.” If figuring out what’s happening makes a horror story less frightening and more manageable, I think the Iron Man/”Iron Man” merge is about making “Iron Man” less terrifying. It gives the song a context in which to understand it that the song itself refuses.
Linking “Iron Man” and Iron Man gives Tony Stark a much darker subtext, but it also gives “Iron Man” a less-frightening context. And more than a darker Stark, I think we crave a less-scary “Iron Man.”
Tales of Suspense #39 (March 1963): Iron Man debuts. Cover art by Jack Kirby and Don Heck.
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The Black Sabbath ‘Iron Man’ is based on the British children’s book ‘The Iron Man’, by Ted Hughes. It was adapted to the cinema as a feature-length animated cartoon directed by Brad Bird under the title ‘The Iron Giant’, with its setting shifted to the USA.
I don’t think that’s exactly true. I mean, surely, there’s a reason why, all of a sudden, at the end of the 60s, everyone’s writing about iron men (probably the same reason we historically fixate on mechanical men–anxiety about industrialization and especially the industrialization of war). But, unless you’ve found some interview where the dudes from Black Sabbath says, “Yep, we were reading this children’s book,” I think it’s the same coincidence that leads to “Iron Man” and Iron Man–a pre-existing artistic (and social) concern with mechanical men.
The biggest problem with any argument that “Iron Man” is based on Iron Man, the comic, or Iron Man, Ted Hughes’ character is that “Iron Man” is a horror story with a terrible ending and Iron Man and Iron Man are both stories of heroism. Their antecedent is The Tin Woodman, who is Dorothy’s protector.
“Iron Man”‘s ancestors are certainly cousins of The Tin Man, but they’re from the evil side of the family–Houdini’s mechanical man (“of no use except as a terrible engine of destruction”) or the 1928 mechanical man who made the paper because he was going to be “ruthless.” He comes from a long line of men who’ve been turned into machines and who either have gone bad from it or we’re afraid will go bad from it.
Which brings me to the second reason I don’t buy the Hughes basis. There’s no person in Hughes’ iron man. It’s a robot, if a robot with a soul, if robots can be said to have such a thing. Part of the horror of Black Sabbath’s “Iron Man” is that there is a man in there, a man something dreadful has happened to that he can’t escape from.
In this regard, Black Sabbath’s “Iron Man” is the war-prone sibling of Joe Bonham from Johnny Got His Gun. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the book was adapted into a movie in ’71, just a year after “Iron Man” came out.
These ideas were in the air, people in all sorts of mediums were grappling with them. I’m sure there was a lot of cross-pollination. I just don’t think it’s as simple as “Iron Man” being based on The Iron Man.
I always thought the song was somewhat connected to Ozzy’s Catholicism. All that talk of salvation and apocalypse….
Hm, if Wikipedia is right then Betsy is right and I’m wrong:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_Man_(song)
Anyway, I much prefer the 1966 theme song:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S-Lx9eEox2A
Love the contrast between the woman singer drooling over this swingin’ playboy and the chorus of leather-throated geeks drooling over his supertech!
About creepy music…Betsy, whatever you do, do NOT listen to The Goblins’ soundtrack to Dario Argento’s “Suspiria” — you’d be catatonic.
There’s a category of music which is considered cute or pleasant and that strikes me as creepy, even though I might enjoy it. Tchaikovsky’s ‘Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairies’ from Nutcracker Suite is pretty sinister (or sinisterly pretty). It was used as such in Derek Jarman’s film of marlowe’s ‘Edward II’.
Another in that class is ‘The Teddy Bears’ Picnic’…
And then there are those songs that sound sweet and bouncy and nice, but when you pay attention to the lyrics! Brecht and Weil’s “Mack the Knife” is the brutal celebration of a murderer, as is the Beatles’ “Maxwell Silver Hammer”.
Anyone got other examples of these types of creepy songs?
‘Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairies’ is, indeed, kind of sinister. I think you’re right that there’s a kind of sweetness in music that can seem almost sinister.
Strangely enough, I think that Amanda Seyfried’s version of “Lil’ Red Riding Hood” has that quality. It’s not just her voice, but how they’ve given her a kind of cute-to-the-point-of-serial-killer-invoking accompaniment.
I think “Goodbye, Earl” falls into the kind of creepy you’re talking about.
What’s funny to me is that, for all its scary posturing–from the band names to the artwork to the songs–I don’t actually find a lot of heavy metal to be that scary. Like Danzig’s version of “Am I Demon?” I think that’s a great song, but not creepy.
Bonnie Prince Billy’s version? Holy shit. That is creepy as hell. But that’s precisely because of the tension between his voice and the words. Danzig asking “Am I Demon?” is not that scary because the answer is “Well, judging by the sound, probably.” Oldham asking it? I don’t know. He could be, but can something that sounds so thoughtful be evil?
That tension leaves a lot of room for horror to sneak in.
Kate Bush’s ‘Wuthering Heights’ also fits that pattern of so sweet that it’s creepy, doesn’t it?
I once heard a cover of that song, by the way, that just blew the original away through sheer emotion. It made me realise how mechanical and cold Bush was…though I still love her uncanny version.
Betsy, this is a great post; I don’t know why you belittle it. Your description of how the song makes you feel is particularly evocative, and I like your theory of how the two became one. There was always darkness in Tony’s heroism, anyway, so they do seem to fit together like opposing teeth in a gear.
I also like how the syncretic Marvel Universe just absorbed the song into the myth, like they seem to do with everything. “Hmm, you say genetics are the new, unpredictably powerful science? Then it was a genetically engineered spider that bit Peter Parker.”
John, I just think the other posts have been fantastic. That’s all. I’m glad you like my post, though. Ha ha.
One of the things I really appreciate about how superheros function in our culture is that it helps me understand how myths must have worked for older cultures. We tell the same stories over and over again, but in slightly different ways. Maybe this time Superman loves Lois Lane, maybe this time he loves Wonder Woman. Maybe this time Thor is Odin’s brother, maybe this time his son.
And I love how we have a sense of what a character would do and what he wouldn’t, even in the face of all the different stories in all the different mediums.
It also helps me understand how the Romans could have looked at Odin and said, “Yep, that’s Mercury.” And why we wonder how closely connected Lugh and Odin are. I mean, for instance, how much of a difference is there between Green Arrow and Batman in different mediums? Sometimes, Green Arrow is MOST DEFINITELY not like Batman. And sometimes they come very close to seeming like the same figure.
I wouldn’t blame future historians for wondering where the line between the two lies.
Just like we sit here and wonder how much one Iron Man leaks into another.
Lou Reed’s “Gun” is off the charts creepy (music, lyrics, the whole thing). As a little kid I thought “Tomorrow Never Knows” was the most frightening music ever put to record,but now I find it sort of comforting (i.e., I’m too close to it to assess its creepiness). But for the full on, bad acid trip creepy I recommend “Rock & Roll Station” by Nurse With Wound. That album is properly upsetting.
Donovan is creepy. Especially his version of Henry Martin. Also, Comus.
Never heard Nurse With Wound; I will check them out….
The Golem of Prague seems related to both the good mechanical man and the evil mechanical man. If I remember right, the Golem goes from being a servant to being an engine of destruction. The Golem was made of clay or some earthen material, not metal, but still. The original comic book Iron Man looks a lot like some images of the Golem of Prague. I think I’ve heard speculation about Jack Kirby’s being influenced by that legend. When I Google Iron Man and Golem, though, all I get is, Who would win in a fight?
A reason the Golem might not fit into this “mechanical man” pattern is that it was never human. It was formed of clay or whatever and then magically made animate. Of course, isn’t that exactly how the Hebrew Bible tells us Adam was made.
Sabbath’s Iron Man seems more similar to The Thing of the Fantastic Four than to Tony Stark/Iron Man: goes to space, is bombarded by powerful electromagnetic rays, returns to earth as a monstrous creature trapped in a hard shell (rocky, not metallic…Golem connection?). I think “Silver Age” Marvel comics were kind of big with English kids in the mid-60s.
The Thing is a hero though, most of the time. Sometimes a baddie could temporarily flip him by promising a cure for his condition, but the cure is never permanent. The Thing is a tragic figure, to be sure. His friends who absorbed the same cosmic rays developed fantastic powers but retained their human form. Only he is doomed to be a monster forever.
Is Tony Stark/Iron Man a tragic figure? He has a life-threatening and incurable condition but his big old brain invented an apparatus that can keep him alive. Without it he is kaput. He’s an alcoholic too, at least in the comics. I don’t know if the movies address that.
What separates Sabbath’s Iron Man character from most of these other heroes and villains though, is that he seems to be totally immobile. The Tin Woodman, since you brought him up, is also in a state of paralysis when Dorothy, and the audience, first encounters him.
The Tin Woodsman’s story is fairly horrific too. Oops, I chopped off my leg. I’ll give myself a metal one. Oops, there goes my arm…until his whole damn body has been replaced. The Oz books are part of an earlier era of children’s stories in which gruesome things are presented in a cheery, matter-of-fact way. They are also lousy with inanimate things which become animate, from the Scarecrow on down. The second Oz book introduces a substance called the “powder of life,” which works about how you’d think and naturally creates all sorts of havoc.
What about Fritz Lang’s Man-Machine?
What about Kraftwerk? Zapp and Roger?
What about…
What about…
What about…
Matt, that was really interesting and thought- provoking. Thanks.
Betsy, when I read your response, I agreed with everything except the part about Lugh, with whom I was not familiar. Now that I’ve read a little, the whole thing makes sense. It adds to the Odin parallel that Lugh’s son was Irish mythology’s greatest warrior.
Regarding Green Arrow and Batman, I think they’re both Robin Hood variants, as outlaw heroes relying on their skills. Granted, the connection with GA is tres obvious. But I’ve see Superman and Batman described as America’s King Arthur and Robin Hood, and that made sense to me. I would bet Batman also parallels with some other night avenger characters in myth and legend, though.
It’s worth remembering that these are corporate characters, I think, though. There are some parallels with myth…but there are also some parallels with trademark icons like the Michelin Man.
Not that that means that the myth parallels are wrong or anything. Just something to keep in mind, maybe….
Totally fantastic post. I know Cory Arcangel (who is a musician as well as a media artist) has some online algorithm for generating super-creepy unresolved Sabbath chord progressions.
I always think of the Sabbath Iron Man as a returning veteran, even though the British weren’t in Vietnam. It seems to be such a blunt, cold answer to both warmongering thugs and shrill whining hippies. I love that song.
I don’t especially care about the superhero, though.
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I’ll have to wait ’til my Significant Other gets up to listen to that song!
Quite enjoyable article and commentary. My two cents’ worth:
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Butler wrote the [“Iron Man”] lyrics as the story of a man who time travels into the future, and sees the apocalypse. In the process of returning to the present, he is turned into steel by a magnetic field. He is rendered mute, unable verbally to warn people of his time of the impending destruction. His attempts to communicate are ignored and mocked. This causes Iron Man to become angry, and have his revenge on mankind, causing the destruction seen in his vision…
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_Man_%28song%29
Well, we’ve got the “Cassandra complex” here (attempts to warn of future disaster — in her case, the Trojan Horse — are ignored and mocked). And also some neat time-travel paradox stuff; “Iron Man” causing the very disaster he sought to prevent…
Re “creepy songs,” I loved the Beatles’ “I Am the Walrus”; have an LP of the soundtrack of “The Exorcist,” where director William Friedkin jettisoned the composed score and picked bits of existing music. The most famous was Mike Oldfield’s non-sinister “Tubular Bells,” but Friedkin also, to unsettling effect,
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…used modern classical compositions, including portions of the 1971 Cello Concerto by Polish composer Krzysztof Penderecki, Five Pieces for Orchestra by Austrian composer Anton Webern as well as some original music by Jack Nitzsche. But the music was heard only during scene transitions. The 2000 “Version You’ve Never Seen” features new original music by Steve Boddacker, as well as brief source music by Les Baxter.
The original soundtrack LP has only been released once on CD, as an expensive and rare Japanese import. It is noteworthy for being the only soundtrack to include the main theme Tubular Bells by Mike Oldfield, which became very popular after the film’s release, and the movement Night of the Electric Insects from George Crumb’s string quartet Black Angels.
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Exorcist_%28film%29
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Bert Stabler says:
I always think of the Sabbath Iron Man as a returning veteran, even though the British weren’t in Vietnam. It seems to be such a blunt, cold answer to both warmongering thugs and shrill whining hippies…
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That’s pretty brilliant; he could’ve been mangled and paralyzed, wanting to warn of the results of war, but ending up as a poster boy for both pro- and anti-war types…
The first part of the idea — after a moment’s reflection — I realized I lifted from Dalton Trumbo’s 1938 (!) novel and 1971 film, “Johnny Got His Gun”:
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Joe Bonham, a young soldier serving in World War I, awakens in a hospital bed after being caught in the blast of an exploding artillery shell. He gradually realizes that he has lost his arms, legs, and all of his face (including his eyes, ears, teeth, and tongue), but that his mind functions perfectly, leaving him a prisoner in his own body.
Joe attempts suicide by suffocation, but finds that he had been given a tracheotomy which he can neither remove nor control. At first Joe wishes to die, but later decides that he desires to be placed in a glass box and toured around the country in order to show others the true horrors of war. Joe successfully communicates these desires with his doctors by banging his head on his pillow in Morse code. However, he realizes that neither desire will be granted, and it is implied that he will live the rest of his natural life in his condition.
As Joe drifts between reality and fantasy, he remembers his old life with his family and girlfriend, and reflects upon the myths and realities of war.
…In 1988, the heavy metal band Metallica wrote the song “One” based on the book and used clips from the film in the video.
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johnny_Got_His_Gun
The “Iron Man” song antedated the “Johnny Got His Gun” movie by a year, so unless Ozzy and Geezer (!) read the 1938 book, there’s no Trumbo influence involved…
Matt, I really love the idea of recognizing the Golem of Prague as one of the cultural antecedents of our iron men. As you point out, the iconography is very similar.
Though one thing struck me as I browsed through the Google images for the Golem of Prague–Darth Vader shows up. And, obviously, if you look at how the Golem has been portrayed in art and what Darth Vader looks like, it’s clear that the latter owes a great deal to the former.
And isn’t Darth Vader an iron man? I have never considered such a thing, but obviously, he is.
So, now I’m kind of more convinced that it’s not really fair to separate Hughes’ iron man from Sabbath’s. If we’re looking at the broad category of artificial men with some kind of animating force, obviously, that animation can either come through some kind of magical “ensoulment” (I’m not absolutely happy with that word, but I hope you guys get what I mean, some animating force that seems to make the case for our artificial man meeting a definition of personhood.) or because there’s a dude trapped in there, animating it.
I’m now kind of feeling like I want to make a clear distinction when really, Hughes’ and Sabbath’s men are two sides of the same coin; there’s no satisfactory clear distinction to be made.
Noah, I’m not willing to exempt Bibendum (who knew that thing had a name?) from the broader artificial man mythology. So he’s the cousin whose a corporate sell-out. That doesn’t mean he’s not family.
One last thing about the brilliance of “Iron Man”–the more fast-tempo instrumental parts. Without those, no matter how creepy, “Iron Man” borders on novelty song. With them, it’s like you’re listening to the soundtrack of a movie you can’t quite see–and in a movie, when the tempo picks up, it’s usually because of some action. And yet, “Iron Man” never tells you what that action is.
I imagine it’s people running in fear, but, obviously, there’s nothing to confirm that.
Like I said, it’s just a brilliant bit of musicality, that inexplicable tempo change. (Obviously a lesson well-learned by Metallica, who, I think, consciously joins “Johnny Got His Gun” with Sabbath’s “Iron Man,” even if the connection wasn’t explicit before then.)
For unspooky spooky music:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CiFfUnimUH4
…from the greatest ma
…from the greatest masterpiece of Camp in the last century!
Spookiest music I know: the arrangement of Gyorgy Ligeti’s ‘Lux Aeternam’ for the manapes-worship-the-slab sequence early in Kubrick’s 2001;A Space Odyssey. (Ligeti was nt pleased, and he successfully sued Kubrick and MGM for distorting his music.)
Just listened to the Black Sabbath “Iron Man”; soon as the first notes sounded, I was like, “Oh, it’s that song!”
After a while, read on to see what new comments might’ve come up, and saw…
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One last thing about the brilliance of “Iron Man”–the more fast-tempo instrumental parts. Without those, no matter how creepy, “Iron Man” borders on novelty song. With them, it’s like you’re listening to the soundtrack of a movie you can’t quite see–and in a movie, when the tempo picks up, it’s usually because of some action. And yet, “Iron Man” never tells you what that action is.
I imagine it’s people running in fear, but, obviously, there’s nothing to confirm that.
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…just as that part of the song was playing. (It sure does sound like running fear — er, feet — pattering away…)
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AB says:
Spookiest music I know: the arrangement of Gyorgy Ligeti’s ‘Lux Aeternam’ for the manapes-worship-the-slab sequence early in Kubrick’s 2001;A Space Odyssey.
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Yes, that was brilliant usage; Kubrick’s use of existing “classics” came to mind when writing about Friedkin’s doing likewise for “The Exorcist.”
The ultra-eerie title music by Wendy Carlos for Kubrick’s “The Shining”: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TgCejsyS0t8
Hazil Adkins== creepy and sort of cartoony.
It’s simple, much more simple than you seem to grasp.
Iron Man, by Black Sabbath, is a dark, skin crawling song. Geeks love good, skin crawling music.
Iron Man (the song) shares the title of Iron Man (the comic book).
Do you understand? If not, please read this, starting at the beginning, until it makes sense.
Still lost?
Read it again, out loud.
Still lost?
Read it again, out loud, in the presence of other adults. Ask them if they can explain it to you any better. Here is a last hint: cool + cool = cooler. It doesn’t have to make any more sense. It’s pop art + pop art = more profit. Read it again, if you still don’t understand, seriously.
I find it more amazing that such a dissonant song as C.R.E.E.P., by The Fall, can sound so comforting, once one absorbs it. But again, I’m not dissing your take on the Iron Man bit… I simply suggest that it is just a mite bit over thought.
Sabbath were not stealing (like Zepplin- see Tauras, by Spirit, and so many other outright remakes that were not credited), they were doing their best to do their thing.
Monkeys on one island pick up rocks and use them as tools, and guess what? Monkeys on another island do the same, independently. So goes the use and prevalence of word combinations, like “Iron Man.”
People have always followed people, and that’s fine. The trouble begins (and it always happens), when people follow a single person or group. The comic book is one thing, Sabbath’s song is another thing, and other people try to make money off of them by combining the two.
“Iron Man” is all over the consciousness of humanity. Albeit, it is not as common as “reclining naked woman,” but it is not an original idea, either.