Tag Archives: Iron Man

Civil War, Civil Crap

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So the critics like it, they really really like it.

Poor old Batman v Superman (RT Score 28%) is sitting in the corner sucking his thumb as Captain America does his victory jig and Iron Man shakes his buttocks in delight.

But at least BvS didn’t put me to sleep which is more than I can say for Captain America: Civil War. I spent the first hour of the movie fighting back the urge to take a nap and I almost never fall asleep while watching movies at the theater. Yet how are we to fathom this when the Grand Lodge has determined the vast superiority of Civil War (RT Score 94%)?

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I think it’s fair to say that the only thing worse than a comics critic is a movie critic, at least as far as standards are concerned. At The New Republic, Will Leitch swoons over Joss Whedon and Jon Favreau as if they are demi-gods of celluloid, proclaiming them “terrific four-quadrant filmmakers.” In the very same breath, he suggests that Civil War can’t stand up to the two previous Avengers movies but is awesome nonetheless.

I’m sometimes seen as a harsh critic but saying that a movie is worse than Avengers: Age of Ultron is nothing short of farting pointblank into someone’s face. I cringe in horror whenever I think of Whedon’s farm house scene from Ultron especially when I remember how Whedon supposedly fought tooth and nail for its inclusion and considers it the epitome of his superhero aesthetic—in other words shallow, fannish, unnecessary, and dumb.

At the New Statesman, Ryan Gilbey gushes uncontrollably and announces that, “Civil War is the “antidote to Batman v Superman’s poison for comics fans.” Speaking as a comic fan, I think Marvel-Disney has done an exquisite job of poisoning comics and pissing on its grave but let’s not quibble over the finer points. Here’s the best part of Gilbey’s review:

“The plot is so satisfyingly worked out, and the foundations for the hostilities in the second half of the film so carefully prepared, that you want to take aside the makers of Batman v Superman (who thought it was motivation enough just to have one superhero mistakenly believe that the other was running amok) and say to them: See? This is how it’s done. It’s not so hard, is it?”

It helps also that there is nuance and colour here. The characters are multi-layered, crammed full of old allegiances and grudges and irritations. They have personalities. Remember those?”

I don’t know Mr. Gilbey, I agree that Batman v Superman isn’t made of the brainiest stuff (maybe it needs to be retained a year or two) but having two opposing superhero groups decide to wreak havoc across continents because Steve Rogers doesn’t want to sign a UN contract and just wants to protect his mass murdering pal (Bucky) does seem like rather poor motivation compared to seeing all your friends and colleagues killed by two superpowered Kryptonians.

And, no Mr. Gilbey, despite being the characters with the most lines in the movie, Captain America and Iron Man do not actually have “mutli-layered” personalities. They both speak in clichés, are one note cardboard caricatures, and barely have time to articulate a single serious idea; largely because they spend 50% of the movie beating people up, and a solid 25% of their waking hours cracking jokes while destroying public property.

But Gilbey is as nothing compared to the Uber Marvel fanboy, Justin Chang, writing in Variety:

“The shaming of Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice will continue apace — or better still, be forgotten entirely — in the wake of Captain America: Civil War, a decisively superior hero-vs.-hero extravaganza that also ranks as the most mature and substantive picture to have yet emerged from the Marvel Cinematic Universe.”

Now I’m happy for Batman v Superman to be buried and forgotten as long as its tentacles reach out from the deepest nether regions and pulls every single Marvel movie down with it as well. What a wonderful world that would be. No more Superhero Movies as the Scarlet Witch once said. Chang continues:

“And the sides-taking showdown between Team Captain America and Team Iron Man, far from numbing the viewer with still more callous acts of destruction, is likely to leave you admiring its creativity.”

So let me see, would this lack of numbing callous destruction also include the part where the Avengers destroy parts of Lagos, a Berlin airport, and some unimportant city where the Winter Soldier is camping out? I guess it’s all less “numbing” because only Marvel superheroes ravage foreign lands with a smile. Chang is so clearly invested in these idiotic characters that it’s pure comedy to see him turn the joyless lives of Tony Stark and Steve Rogers into Ingmar Bergman Spandex hour. But he continues:

“In assembling this Marvel male weepie, scribes Markus and McFeely show a rare talent for spinning cliches into artful motifs: The pain of deep, irrecoverable loss recurs throughout the narrative, and for both Iron Man and Captain America, the bonds of friendship are shown to run deeper than any commitment to the greater good.”

In other words, Civil War is 3-Kleenex movie: one for when you feel the bile emerging from your stomach, the second for when you spit on the ground in disgust and have to clean up after yourself, and the third for when you finally fall unconscious and someone needs to wipe the dribble from mouth. But let’s talk about that “deep, irrecoverable loss” shall we?

The most affectionate moment between Tony Stark and his parents (the great motivator of the movie’s final fist fight) occurs near the start of the movie where the audience is abused with some godawful CGI which turns Robert Downey into some pasty refugee from Robert Zemeckis’ Beowulf. Seeing this in IMAX 3D did not help one bit. Tony then emotes to a lecture hall full of MIT students about his exquisite feelings of loss before handing out grant freebies to them all. Voila! Instant emotion and reason for knocking the crap out of Captain America. I guess when you’re shot up with the Marvel Super Critic serum, you don’t really need to see and hear the loss to feel the loss. You can just get it by telepathy, presumably from the rotting corpse of Walt Disney.

These are frightening people, folks. They want to convince us that the doggie doo in the apple pie is good for you. But there’s still some butter in the crust. I think it’s possible to see Civil War as a kind of Dr. Strangelove style satire without the bite; all hidden in plain sight with the umbral subtlety of a Dick Cheney.

The fact is, the protagonist of the show (Captain America for those not paying attention) encapsulates the true American Spirit of derring-do and humanitarian intervention. Chris Evans is dressed in primary colors unlike our bespectacled madman, Peter Sellers, but he’s a true psychopath of near Tom Cruise-ian Mission Impossible levels.

When someone tells Cap not to break things, he lets them know that he has to because it’s his Responsibility to Protect; he has to burn the village to save it. He has no interest in the judicial system since it’s run by military madmen just like himself. Like a true villain, his loyalty to Bucky overrides all moral and ethical responsibilities. Logic isn’t his strong suit, he just needs his freedom because his Democracy of One is indubitably best suited to the practice of ecstatic violence. The true heart of the movie is that Captain America wants to save a world that doesn’t need to be saved; a world that was never in any danger in the first place. The real hero of Civil War is Baron Zemo who has engineered a preposterous scheme to get Cap and Iron Man to fight each other and disassemble the Avengers (if they don’t kill each other first) so that the world will be saved from Marvel movies. He’s the Ozymandias of Civil War and, of course, he fails; doomed to watch reruns of Bambi in his jail cell for the rest of his days.

Even the Captain America of the comics turned himself in after a while and got himself killed, but this isn’t an option for the Steve Rogers of the movies since he’s probably all ready to do battle in Marvel’s upcoming Infinity War. Hopefully they’ll just kill him off when the Marvel movie universe starts tanking (just like the superhero pamphlets) some years down the road. Nothing lasts forever…I hope.

Tony/Steve Fanfic: An Introduction

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A couple of months ago, I was nattering on about various amazing Tony/Steve stories, as you do, and Noah asked me to write about it a bit, as he does.  I demurred, being busy with something-or-other, but, in the fullness of time, he asked me again, and this time, I caved.

So.  What’s so interesting about a couple of characters from a movie over two years old?

Especially since it includes a guy who wears tights and another guy who wears iron pants?  (OK, before anyone says, yes, they’re actually titanium-gold alloy pants, thank you, yes I know.  Ahem.)

As of today, there’s over nine thousand fanworks with the pairing Steve Rogers and Tony Stark on the A03 (the most popular fic archive).  Not nine thousand stories that include Steve (twenty-nine thousand stories) and Tony (thirty thousand stories)  as characters, but nine thousand stories that pair them together.

So what’s the appeal?

For me, the appeal is mostly Tony Stark.

In Iron Man 1, Tony’s kind of a womanizing, warmongering drunk.  (What?  He totally is.)

It’s also clear that Tony was raised by wolves (if wolves were bitter, distant alcoholics who felt threatened by their kid’s achievements).  And no, being raised by lousy parents isn’t an excuse for growing up to be an asshole.

But here’s the interesting thing about Tony.

In Iron Man 1, you see Tony make his obnoxious and loud weapons presentation to a bunch of generals and war secretaries.  When he rides back to the camp, he rides with the soldiers.  Tony’s far more friendly to the soldiers.  He jokes with them, tries to get them to laugh, and while he’s brash and obnoxious, he’s actually paying more attention to them than he did to the bigwigs.

And then Tony watches his own weapons kill them.

What I find interesting about the character of Tony is that he makes mistakes.  Often.  Loudly.  Fatally.

Tony generally spends his movies fixing mistakes (his own or other people’s).

When he’s dying, he doesn’t run around trying to arrange for the betterment of mankind (well, actually, he does, yes, but he doesn’t just focus on making the world better).  He gets shitfaced drunk.  That’s, well, kind of human, isn’t it?

Then, when he wakes up, he drags his sorry, sick, hungover ass to get donuts.

It’s good to have stories about people who do right, but it’s also good to have to stories about what happens when we fuck up and have to find a way out through the ashes of our accidentally destroyed life.  Life is complicated, life is messy, and I don’t know about you, but I enjoy watching someone who has the guts to look at their life’s work and say, ‘Oh shit, all of this was a huge fucking mistake.’

There is more to Tony’s character than that, of course.

I’ll let you in on a secret.

The real reason I like him is that Tony Stark reminds me of the girls I hung out with in middle school.  There’s the unkempt hair, the ratty band tee shirts mixed with high fashion, the too-loud music, the driving like a bat out of hell.

But mostly?

It’s that Tony Stark’s still talking to his imaginary friends.

DUM-E might as well be a woodland animal instead of an arm on wheels.

The trappings are science-y, but the core story is about a poorly socialized introverted weirdo who wears a flashy, sexy, extroverted mask.  More than anything else, Tony is a maker.  A creative person who literally builds life, who talks to his imaginary friends, who refuses to be the person everyone else wants him to be, who throws himself into building and fixing and creating.

OK, so that’s a pretty good reason to like the character, sure.

But why fanfic, and why pair Tony with Steve?

Because I want Tony to have a happy ending, and in the movies, his human friends spend time with him because they’re paid.  Someone should want to be with Tony because they like him as a person, not just for what he can do for them (whether it’s money or inventing).

The general appeal of Steve is that he’s a genuinely good guy.  He became a superhero by being good.  His power is the power of loyalty and gentle friendship, of affection and teamwork and hope.

So, here’s the fun part.  I’ve created a list of some of my favorite stories, with links.  This is an enormous fandom, and there’s a little something for everyone.  I’ve included a helpful glossary at the bottom of words that may be unfamiliar.

Classics

The Act of Creation Will Be Your Salvation byscifigrl47  “When Tony Stark was seventeen years old, he built his first AI. On that day, he ceased to be his father’s creation, and became a creating force in his own right.”  My favorite version of this story is the podfic read by reena-jenkins.

and

Some Things Shouldn’t Be a Chore

Average Avengers Local Chapter 7 of New York City by 

 
 

Idea stories.  You know, old-fashioned ‘what if?’ stories:

The Twice-Told Tale by  (very clever story)

slipping through the years by 

The Last Love Song of Anthony E. Stark by  (Tony begins to lose his memory)

Ironsides by  (always-female Tony)

Living In The Future by  (18 year old boy-genius Tony defrosts Steve)

When I Think (Oh, it Terrifies Me) by  (Look, some mornings you wake up and little green men are invading New York City; some mornings you wake up and you can hear Captain America’s voice in your head. Tony has been an Avenger long enough that he saves his freakout for important things.)

Kapitan Amerika and the Iron Man by ,  (The Red Son reboot, in which Steve Rogers’ childhood heroes were aviators and polar explorers, and Tony Stark grew up reading Captain America comics in Siberia.)

 
 

DUM-E and Jarvis centric stories  Often from the ‘bots own perspective

The Act of Creation Will Be Your Salvation byscifigrl47

Run Program: DUM-E by 

Rom-Commed By Fate (Or JARVIS) by 

The Butterfingers G. D. I. Stark Guide to Problem Solving by  (not a Steve/Tony fic per se, but I don’t care–it’s still damn great)

 
 

Romantic Comedies

Love among the Hydrothermal Vents by 

Team Building Activities by 

Bulletproof by 

Semaphore by 

Ready, Fire, Aim by 

99 problems (and the dice ain’t one) by 

 
 

Stories about gender or sex

You’re Not Stubborn (Just Impossible) by  (I always start with the second chapter, omega-verse highschool AU)

Born from the Earth by 

 

Given the size of this fandom, there’s a little something for everyone, as well as some truly inventive crazy-wild stories.

There’s also certain sub-categories that are particularly popular.  Stories about the Avengers all moving into Tony’s tower, Tony getting turned into a cat, and Steve taking a stand against modern homophobia ( the reason you ruminate the shadowy past by ).

I’d rec some fan-art, too, but most of that is on tumblr, and I’m too old to play well with tumblr.

I’m happy to custom-rec stories, discuss themes or favorites, answer questions, etc.  I also have a bunch of favorite podfics, should anyone have a burning desire to listen to Tony/Steve stories on audio.
 
Some useful terms, if you decide to go looking for some fic:

AU: Fan shorthand for alternate universe.  This is not used in the X-Men or Marvel parallel universe sense, but in the story sense.  You take the same characters but pop them in a different situation.  There are certain classic AU tropes: high school, coffeeshop, race track, in space, are werewolves, etc.

BDSM verse: a fandom AU where the world publicly incorporates certain BDSM tropes, such as Dominants and Submissives.  Sometimes these stories are wank fodder, and sometimes these stories are complex explorations of sexuality, gender, power, and societal norms.

Omegaverse or A/B/O: a world where humans have alternate sexes.  Alphas (dominants; males can often knot), betas (moderate, usually like our standard males and females), and omegas (usually submissive, males can get pregnant, often go into heat).   This particular trope has been around at least a decade, but has become more popular recently.

Stony: a fandom nickname name for the ‘ship (relationship)

MCU: Marvel Cinematic Universe

Superhusbands: another fandom nickname of the ‘ship, usually focusing on the happily ever after marriage part of the story, often involving kids.

Canon: the story as told by the official version.

Fanon/fannon: a kind of generally agreed upon version of the story.  Back in the day, it was fannon that Draco Malfoy wore leather trousers.  In MCU fannon, it is generally agreed upon that the Avengers all move into Stark Tower, where they congregate for movie night to catch Steve up on popular culture.

Podfic: a combination of fanfic and podcast.  Podfics are audio recordings of fanfiction.  There are also some genuine weekly podcasts in various fandoms.

Vids/Fanvids: These are fanworks made from video clips, combined, re-edited, and so on to create a new story.

A03: Archive of Our Own.  A fan-run fanworks archive.  A03 is my favorite archive, and the main host for good Steve/Tony fics.  Years ago, Fanfic.net randomly and with no warning deleted a whole bunch of m/m fanfic, resulting in much ire.  A03, while sometimes slow to load and with a bit of a clunky interface, was created for the sole purpose of being a true long-lasting archive.  As with any organization, it’s not perfect, but it does well enough.

 

The Hollywood Superhero vs. 9/11

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The culminating twist of Iron Man 3, declared Anthony Lane in The New Yorker, “signals both the making of Iron Man 3 and, with any luck, the possible unmaking of the genre.” It was an early review, so Lane had to be coy about specifics, but a few weeks and a few hundred million box office dollars later, we can take the spoiler gloves off and just say it:

“This war is not a means to any end but rather is the end in itself. Not only is it the end itself, but it is also its own fuel: it is precisely this endless war – justified in the name of stopping the threat of terrorism – that is the single greatest cause of that threat.”

Oh, wait, sorry, that’s not Iron Man 3. That’s Glenn Greenwald on Assistant Defense Secretary Michael Sheehan’s testimony before the Senate Armed Services Committee that the twelve-year-old foreign policy franchise formerly known as the War on Terror has another two decades of sequels left in it.

What I meant to write is completely different. That Iron Man 3’s supervillianous corporate  technology genius invented his own Osama Bin Laden to mask his R&D and drive up government demand for his ever-expanding arsenal of military products, locking American and the rest of the planet in a self-perpetuating cycle of unwinnable war. But that’s just a movie. The kind that now pretty much defines the Hollywood blockbuster. Director Shane Black even goes the extra metafictional mile and includes the villain’s blue screen movie studio, the same corporate tech keeping Tony and his pals alive.

Iron Man and War Machine without the CGI

“From here on,” writes Lane, “the dumb-ass grandeur around which superheroic plots revolve can no longer be taken on trust.” Greenwald thinks the same about Obama. The war on terror, like the Hollywood superhero, will never end on its own because so many “factions reap a bonanza of benefits from its continuation.” Black lifts the edge of the curtain, but that glimpse will hardly unmake or even marginally slow the onslaught of forthcoming productions. Captain America 2 is shooting in D.C. as I type. That’s D.C., our nation’s capital, and so not technically a Warner Bros or Marvel Entertainment branch office.

The modern superhero movie first took flight in 1978 with Superman: The Movie (the subtitle says it all), with the total number of productions tipping just over forty in 2001. How many since 9/11?  Fifty. In less than half as many years. So, no, 9/11 is not the box office superhero’s origin story. It’s merely the transformative accident that doubled his powers. Like the Golden Age’s Blue Beetle. When his comic book incarnation debuted in pre-war 1939, the Beetle was just another mystery man in a domino mask and fedora. Listen to his first radio broadcast a worn-torn year later and the guy’s ingesting the power-inducing 2-X formula from his pharmacist mentor.

Novelist Austin Grossman recently told my Superheroes class that when he started writing his supervillain-narrated Soon I Will Be Invincible in 2001, he had to ask himself, “Am I just writing about a terrorist?” Austin’s brother, The Magicians author Lev Grossman, penned his own superheroic response, “Pitching 9/11.” The short story is a sequence of failed pitches for adapting 9/11 to screen. Here’s my favorite:

“Lonely, misunderstood Dominican elevator repairman (John Leguizamo?) finds himself trapped by fire after the second plane hits. In agony from the heat and smoke, near death from asphyxiation he jumps from the 83rd Floor. Instead of falling he hover in midair, then rockets upward. The trauma of the attack, and of his impending certain death, has awakened latent superpowers he never knew he had. A handful of others have undergone similar transformations—they hover in a cluster over the collapsing buildings, like so many swimmers treading water. As the roof sinks away below them into nothingness, they choose colorful pseudonyms and soar away together in formation to take vengeance on evil everywhere.”

Lev’s other pitches include scifi thriller, Discovery Channel documentary, and a filmed performance piece, but superheroes are the ready-made absurdity 9/11 was meant for. Diverting the path of an airliner? That’s a job for Superman. The pre-emptive prequel would star Batman. According to The 9/11 Commission Report, President Clinton was so annoyed with the lack of options for taking out Bin Laden he said to one ofhis generals: ‘You know, it would scare the shit out of al-Qaeda if suddenly a bunch of black ninjas rappelled out of helicopters into the middle of their camp.’”

Substitute “ninjas” with the superhero team of your choice and you’ve got your very own dumb-ass grandeur plot.  But according to Blake Snyder (a friend leant me a copy of his Save the Cat! The Last Book on Screenwriting That You’ll Ever Need), the Superhero genre isn’t just about “guys in capes and tights.” It’s what happens when an extraordinary person is stuck in an ordinary world. In addition to Bruce Wayne and the X-Men, Russell Crow’s Gladiator and A Beautiful Mind are his go-to examples of misunderstood Gullivers shackled by Lilluputians.

I’m more than a little skeptical about Snyder (he argues Miss Congeniality is a better film than Memento), but he has a point. Especially when it comes to U.S. foreign policy. Superheroes soared after 9/11 because Hollywood cast America as the planet’s mightiest super being and the rest of the word population as those moron Lilluputians willfully misunderstanding him. Weren’t they listening when Bush Sr. explained the New World Order?

After the fall of the Soviet Union, the U.S. was the lone superpower, to be loved and respected by a planet of grateful mortals. When some of those ingrates go and topple the Fortress of Solitude, what choice does America have but to declare a War on Lilluputianism? “It is hard to resist the conclusion that this war,” laments Greenwald, “has no purpose other than its own eternal perpetuation.”

But then in his own superheroic plot twist, Obama, days after his Assistant Defense Secretary was arguing for an unlimited renewal of the 2001 Authorization for Use of Military Force, declared: “This war, like all wars, must end.” The Associated Press boiled the President’s 7,000- word speech down to a sentence: “Barack Obama has all but declared an end to the global war on terror.”

Congress is balking of course. And so is our Democracy’s fourth branch of government, Hollywood. While Obama declares war on perpetual war, Marvel has two superhero franchises in post-production (Wolverine, Thor), three filming for 2014 release dates (Captain America, Spider-Man, X-Men), and another four announced for 2015 (Guardians of the Galaxy, Fantastic Four, Avengers, Ant-Man). Throw in the S.H.I.E.L.D. TV show that premieres next fall, and the superhero war isn’t dialing back—it’s surging.

But all those capes and tights flying across our screen have been an inverse shadow of real troops on the ground. So what happens when we finally leave Afghanistan? What happens if the drone war on al Qaeda really does die down? I’m no pre-cog, but the pop culture tea leaves are telling me 2015 will be the last big year for dumb-ass superhero grandeur. Though I wouldn’t underestimate Hollywood’s shapeshifting powers either. Both Iron Man 3 and Star Trek Into Darkness were already in theaters, literally blowing up their representations of the U.S. drone armada, when Obama dropped his own policy bomb of a speech.

Box office superheroes will endure. Just scaled back to their pre-9/11 levels, where they belong.

Iron Man vs. the Iron Giant

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The_Iron_Giant_posterIron man 3 poster

Who stuck an adaptation of the 1999 cartoon The Iron Giant into the middle of Iron Man 3? Not that I’m complaining. Even The New Yorker loved it (as opposed to the formulaic explosions that bookend the movie). Robert Downey Jr.’s abrasive bromance with 11-year-old Ty Simpkins is the film’s brightest and most unexpected subplot. Though it also adds to the film’s overall incoherence. Which, again, might be a good thing. Not since Tim Burton was defining the superhero blockbuster in a single bound have we gotten such a (to use Tony’s term) “hot mess” of a movie.

Even before the young Mr. Simpkins’ entrance, Iron Man 3 was straining its thematic rivets. Aside from the obligatory bad guy machinations, the story scaffold looks like your standard marriage plot variety. Yes, Tony and Pepper are already together at the start, not married exactly, but at least, you know, whatever. Tony quickly overturns the domestic bliss by sending one of his remote control drones to romance his girl while he finishes some work in the lab (anyone notice that Shane Black and Drew Pearce lifted the scene from Watchmen?). Tony is literally phoning it in, and Pepper’s stuck with his empty shell.

Soon the robot drone is jumping into bed with them (yep, Watchmen again) and Pepper is packing. Next thing she’s climbing inside some other super-genius’s brain, and Tony’s pal warns him he’s going to lose her if he doesn’t change. Which he does. When things start exploding, he remote controls that robot suit to encase her instead of himself. It’s actually a bit poignant—especially when Iron Pepper returns the favor by shielding him a moment later.

The weird thing though? We’re only about thirty minutes in. Sure, there’s a reprise when Pepper saves him a second time at the climax, followed by the formal exploding of the Iron drones in evidence of Tony’s now focused devotion to Pepper. He even chucks his cyborg heart over a cliff in the epilogue.

But romance is not the machine driving this movie. In addition to becoming a less dickish boyfriend, Tony has to get over the PTSD brought on by his near-death in The Avengers. This is fairly new terrain for a superhero plot and is one of several ways the specter of Afghanistan haunts the movie. The platoon of regenerative thugs are all maimed soldiers who literally grow back lost limbs. Osama Bin Laden is played by the Mandarin—who is played by a Baptist minister—who is played by a washed-up British actor—who’s played by Ben Kingsley—who most of us remember best as Gandhi. Terrorism, it turns out, is not the problem. It’s the War on Terrorism. Which might explain why the President looks like George Bush and not Barack Obama—especially when he’s being rescued by Don Cheadle. So when Tony blows up his armada of Iron Drones, he’s also saying goodbye to a military policy a lot of Americans would like to see go too.

Except when exactly is it that Tony gets over all that pesky post-traumatic stuff? He’s been tinkering in his basement for months, so why does one Home Depot shopping spree turn him into a McGuiver-esque 007? And what does it mean that he promises Pepper he’ll catch her and then can only watch with us as she plummets to her (apparent) death? And if both the romance plot and the foreign policy allegory agree on vanquishing all that deadly hardware, why does the newly superpowered Pepper need an extra boost of tech to put the bad guy down a final time?

Maybe this is where Ty Simpkins and The Iron Giant come in.

If you’ve not seen the Brad Bird movie, I highly recommend it. My daughter adored it when she was four. A mal-functioning robot crashlands in smallville where a father-less boy hides it in his shed while he and a wacky father-figure partner work to repair it. Sound familiar? It gets better. Like the Iron Man suit, the Iron Giant divides into semi-autonomous pieces, and the story climaxes with the self-sacrificing hero sailing into the sky to prevent a U.S. nuclear warhead from destroying the town. Which, incidentally, is also the climax of The Avengers. The Iron Giant even pays homage to the ur-superhero, Superman, who the Giant emulates to escape his programming as a soulless military machine.

But if being a less dickish boyfriend means finding your inner father figure for a half-orphan, the film mocks the tropes more than it fulfills them. This isn’t Spielberg. It’s a Spielberg parody—a particularly hilarious one. Downey and Simpkins are a comic tag-team that skewer the feel-good formula they’re only half pretending to inhabit. It’s as if we’ve crashlanded in a different movie.

But soon Tony is driving back down the main plotline, his remote control suit soon to follow. And what is it exactly that he learned during the detour? Mock sincerity. Deadpan delivery. Comic timing. All the things we loved about Tony but that no longer worked with Pepper in the room. He had to drop his defenses or lose her. All his jokes were misfires on the home front. So the kid gave him a new comic target. Simpkins replaces Paltrow as sparring partner and straight man. Iron Man is above all else a comedian. Refueled with a live audience laugh track, he’s ready to smash the bad guys again.

This all makes sense for one reason only. Iron Man isn’t Tony Stark. He’s Robert Downey Jr. Yes, Black and Pearce wrote the script, and Paramount dropped some $200 million into the budget, but the film’s structural logic isn’t animated by CGI effects. The movie only works because it’s so damn funny.

Even the post-credit Avengers 2 teaser is pure sketch comedy—Tony and Doc Banner trading barbs in a two-minute therapist routine. The material is pretty hackneyed, but these guys make you want to laugh anyway. Political commentary, character arcs, plot structure—it all melts away when you’re laughing.

Comedy is Iron Man’s real superpower.

A Theory of Why the Two Iron Men Became One

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The index to the Comics and Music roundtable is here.
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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.”
 

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Tales of Suspense #39 (March 1963): Iron Man debuts. Cover art by Jack Kirby and Don Heck.

 

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.

The Original Iron Man and Other War Machines

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Eisenhower warned about the War Machine. He called it the military industrial complex, and three days before handing the Oval Office to Kennedy, he said we must guard against its acquisition of unwarranted influence and the disastrous rise of its misplaced power.

Stan Lee wasn’t listening.

Or if he was, he took it as a challenge.

“I gave myself a dare,” says Lee. “The readers, the young readers, if there was one thing they hated, it was war, it was the military. . .  So I got a hero who represented that to the hundredth degree. He was a weapons manufacturer, he was providing weapons for the Army . . .  I thought it would be fun to take the kind of character that nobody would like, none of our readers would like, and shove him down their throats . . .”

Thanks, Stan.

Marvel later retooled Iron Man into a literal War Machine with James Rhodes, a high tech soldier taking orders in the military’s chain of command, something Tony Stark weapons manufacturer steered clear of.

But Tony wasn’t the first Iron Man.

Neither was the 1939 Bozo the Iron Man. George Brenner built him for Quality Comics. Originally a mad scientist’s robot minion, he was dubbed “Bozo” by Hugh Hazzard, the playboy detective who ended his crime spree and reprogrammed him into a sidekick. DC pulled his plug in 1956 when they bought Quality.

Bozo the Iron Man

Stan Lee pulled the name off the scrap heap and handed it to Marvel second-string artist Don Heck in 1962. Bozo was big enough for Hugh to crawl inside, but Heck drew a modern-day knight in a suit of electromagnetic armor. Like the Tin Man of Oz, he also has heart problems. Remove the chest plate, and Tony’s stops. Heck liked to draw the playboy industrialist sitting around hotel rooms, plugged into wall jacks as he unglamorously recharged.
 

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He eventually upgraded to an implant, which makes him a cyborg too. Like the Automaton.  The first movie cyborg, from Harry Houdini’s 1920 silent serial The Master Mystery. A mad scientist removes his brain and wires it into a robot. It was supposed to be a scary, Frankenstein-like monster, but based on the photo stills, the costume designer could have worked for Sesame Street.

Also, the cyborg thing is a hoax. The Automaton is just a clunky metal suit, same as Heck’s, before Steve Ditko refurbished it.

If the 1920s seem like a long leap to find the original Iron Man, then charge your rocket boots. Next stop is the 1590s.

The first Man of Iron was soldered by Edmund Spenser in his epic poem The Faerie Queene:

“His name was Talus, made of yron mould,
Immoueable, resistlesse, without end.”

If you’re rusty on Renaissance English, that’s “iron mold,” “immovable,” and “resistless,” all War Machine synonyms.  Talus’ other superpowers include speed (“him pursew’d so light, / As that it seem’d aboue the ground he went”), invulnerability (though a bad guy “streight at him with all his force did go,” Talus was “mou’d no more therewith, then when a rocke / Is lightly stricken with some stones throw”), and strength (“But to him leaping, lent him such a knocke, / That on the ground he layd him like a senseless blocke”). And that’s just from his first adventure.

Like Bozo, this yron man is also a sidekick. The executive half of Spencer’s dynamic duo is Artegall, the Knight of Justice. Talus originally worked for his mentor guru Astraea, “to execute her stedfast doome,” before she “willed him with Artegall to wend, / And doe what euer thing he did intend.” She also gives Artgall a nifty sword “Tempered with Adamant,” same as Wolverine’s claws. Together “They two enough t’encounter an whole Regiment.”

But Art prefers words over swords. He’s a diplomat at heart. He throws a Solomon-like puzzle at a serial killer squire to expose his guilt, and talks a tyrannical Gyant into recognizing the flawed logic in its false hero rhetoric. Of course all this word-mincing is made possible by his trusty page who carries “an yron flale,” the proverbial big stick for Art’s foreign policy.

It’s the dogged Talus who has to hunt down and retrieve the rogue squire (“Him in his iron paw he seized had”), and then “forced him” to obey Art’s punishment: to wear the murdered Lady’s head around his neck like an albatross.

Thanks, Talus. Good boy.

Pages of Justice are also handy for castle storming (“at the length he has yrent the door”), mob dispersal (“hid themselves in holes and bushes from his view”), and executions (“And down the rock him throwing, in the sea he drouned”). He has no qualms dispatching women either (“Over the Castle wall adowne her cast, / And there her drowned in the durty mud”). In fact, he has no qualms of any kind. It doesn’t matter if his target offers prayers, cash or sex, “he was nothing mou’d, nor tempted” and “Withouten pitty of her goodly hew.”

Basically the guy is a drone.

Like our Commander-in-Chief, Artegall just has to give the lethal nod. Talus, “swift as swallow” and “strong as Lyon,” is well-suited to Obama’s “light footprint” military strategy. “At the end of the day,” writes David E. Sanger in The New York Times, “Mr. Obama’s favorite way to use force is quickly, secretly and briefly.” The yron drone is his perfect war machine:

“And lastly all that Castle quite he raced,
Euen from the sole of his foundation,
And all the hewen stones thereof defaced,
That there mote be no hope of reparation,
Nor memory thereof to any nation.”

But drones are under fire themselves. In the Showtime series Homeland, they convert a loyal U.S. marine into a Muslim suicide bomber when collateral damage includes 72 children.

Since “for no pitty would he change the course,” a drone like Talus has a tendency of “burning all to ashes,” and so can, according to Ben Emmerson, cause “disproportionate civilian casualties.” Last month, the special investigator for the United Nations Human Rights Council started looking at “drone strikes and other forms of remotely targeted killing” to determine “whether there is a plausible allegation of unlawful killing.”

This could be bad news for Obama, Artegall, Hugh Hazzard, Tony Stark and any other Knights of Justice using heartless Bozos to do their dirty work.

Meanwhile, the rest of the Avengers aren’t wild about Iron Man either. General McChrystal says drones are “hated on a visceral level” and create a “perception of American arrogance.” New Secretary of State John Kerry wants to make sure “American foreign policy is not defined by drones and deployments alone.” Dianne Feinstein, chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, wants a court to oversee targeted killings. Commentator David Brooks, even while lauding Obama’s not so “perfectly clean hands” as a Machiavellian necessity, wants the same. I’m not sure how John O. Brennan, our new CIA director and the man who’s been holding Talus’ leash for the last four years, feels, but protesters shouting at his confirmation hearing were very clear: “Drones Fly Children Die.”

Feinstein puts the annual number of accidental drone deaths in “single digits.” The war machines have been at it since 2004, so you can do the math. The Council on Foreign Relations counts over 400 total strikes, with a death toll over 3,000, most of them Al Qaeda.

Ed Craun, a colleague in the W&L English department, tells me Talus represents the Law of Retaliation, lex Talonis, the biblical eye-for-an-eye. The merciless shove-it-down-their-throats mentality you would expect from a military industrial complex. So Artegall spends Book 5 learning to temper that unwarranted influence. By the end, Artegall still employs his Iron Man for military operations (Ed likens one adventure to a search-and-destroy mission in the caves of Afghanistan), but when the War Machine wants to attack an insolent hag, Artegall reins him in:

“But Talus hearing her so lewdly raile,
And speake so ill of him, that well deserued,
Would her haue chastiz’d with his yron flaile,
If her Sir Artegall had not preserued,
And him forbidden, who his heast obserued.”

Artegall knows when to listen to General Eisenhower.

Does Obama?
 

War Machine