Tag Archives: Iron Man 3

Return of the Yellow Peril

Posted on by

The Yellow Peril is an old frienemy of ours. We officially made its acquaintance for the first time at the end of the nineteenth century, when the catchy comic book villain-esque name was coined as a popular term for underpaid Chinese laborers in the United States, playing on the fear that an influx of Asian immigrants would destroy Western civilization and values. The phrase came back swinging roughly half a century later, during World War II. This time, of course, the Yellow Peril was Japanese. The basic story remained the same, though, painting people of color – specifically those of Asian descent – as an inscrutable and exotic threat to the “true” America, otherwise known as white America. And stories, as we know, have consequences. Fear of the Yellow Peril fueled the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act, which placed some of the heaviest bans on free immigration in U.S. history. That same brand of fear inspired the internment of more than 100,000 Americans in 1942 – for the great and terrible crime of being born with Japanese ancestry.
 

mongolian

Phil May, The Mongolian Octopus

 

Fast forward to the twenty-first century. November 2012 saw the release of action-adventure blockbuster Red Dawn, the thrilling tale of evil North Korean terrorists invading an American town, where they’re fought off by a bunch of white kids. Barely four months later, in March 2013, the theaters treated us to Olympus Has Fallen, the thrilling tale of evil North Korean terrorists invading the White House, where they’re fought off by the white President and his white Secret Service buddy.

Now, this narrative premise – although a bit tired and recycled by now – isn’t inherently a bad one. The Korean War, a distant memory for most Americans, is technically still alive and well on the Korean penninsula. The past year has seen some alarmingly aggressive rhetoric from Pyongyang, culminating in its third nuclear test in February 2013, along with threats of military action against both its South Korean neighbor and the United States. The art of storytelling – whether on paper, stage, or the silver screen – makes an excellent vehicle for examining the nuances and complexities of real life tensions, and the current North Korean government definitely serves up plenty of fodder for discussion.

The trouble is, movies like Red Dawn and Olympus Has Fallen aren’t interested in nuances or complexities. They just want to rehash the tale of the Yellow Peril for a modern audience, and North Korea makes a convenient vehicle. A secretive totalitarian state with nominal Communist sensibilities and nuclear ambitions? It’s practically a Hollywood wet dream. Never mind that even fueled by its pervasively militaristic culture, North Korea’s standing army remains both under-trained and under-equipped. Never mind that the North Korean governments’s infamous human rights abuses – ranging from slave labor to public executions – have been overwhelmingly directed toward actual North Korean people, not foreign enemies. Never mind that North Korea can barely afford to feed itself, and in fact relies heavily on aid from the U.S., South Korea, Japan, and a plethora of other foreign nations, just to stave off starvation. North Korea is far from the friendliest kid on the international block, but the vast majority of victims on the receiving end of North Korea-related atrocities aren’t American, or even South Korean. They’re North Korean.

You wouldn’t know any of that, from watching either of these movies. The North Korean antagonists are monstrously powerful, utterly unrepentent, and have somehow magically gained the resources overnight to go from starving and insular to suddenly, invading Washington, D.C. with top-of-the-line weapons tech. You’d think that – having apparently unearthed the goose that lays the golden egg – their first order of business would be to fix that pesky yet rampant malnourishment problem, but Hollywood logic will be Hollywood logic.

Now, Hollywood has never exactly been a beacon of accuracy. We go to the movies for entertainment, and if entertainment means larger-than-life fight sequences and gun fu, so be it. But there’s a difference between handwaving the laws of physics and promoting white nativism and race-based fearmongering. These are the facts: the main heroes of both Red Dawn and Olympus Has Fallen are white, and the villains are people of color. The heroes are played, respectively, by Chris Hemsworth and Gerard Butler. The villains are played, respectively, by Will Yun Lee and Rick Yune.

Here’s the thing. Chris Hemsworth is Australian. Gerard Butler is Scottish. Meanwhile, Will Yun Lee and Rick Yune? Both born and bred Americans. In a movie that’s all about patrotism and standing up for the United States, we’ve got the hometown heroes played by foreigners and the villainous invaders played by Americans. That in itself might not be so bad – after all, stepping into someone else’s shoes is what actors are paid to do, and Butler and Hemsworth wouldn’t be the first to play outside their nationalities – except that the lines are drawn so very starkly. Asian-Americans don’t exist in the world of these movies. No, Red Dawn and Olympus Has Fallen teach us that real American heroes are white, even when they spend the whole movie awkwardly trying to conceal non-American accents. On the other hand, if you’re Asian, you’re obviously some inscrutable foreign Other, concerned with nothing but tearing down the good old USA. At best, you might be a really sneaky evil Asian guy pretending to be a nice Asian ally – a la Rick Yune the North Korean terrorist posing as a South Korean diplomat – but by the end of the film, you’ll inevitably show your true colors as a scary anti-American evil-doer of supervillainous proportions.

Ironically, the recent release that arguably best deconstructs the problems with the whole “beware the non-Caucasian” narrative is a fellow member of the action-adventure genre – and initially looked like it had all the trappings of yet another Yellow Peril film. Iron Man 3 hit theaters in May 2013, a couple months after Olympus Has Fallen, and featured the villain known as – you guessed it – the Mandarin. Here we go again, we thought. We all saw the previews of half-Indian Ben Kingsley in the samurai topknot and the ambiguously foreign-looking robe, playing the ambiguously brown terrorist. We braced ourselves. What else were we supposed to expect?

Except, it turns out, the Mandarin is a sham. The Mandarin persona is quite literally the creation of Aldrich Killian, the true antagonist of the piece: a white guy who invents a fictional, scary brown villain – complete with a hodgepodge set of “Oriental” iconography and props – so that Killian himself can profit from the ensuing public panic. It’s a deliciously meta-filled plot twist straight out of Edward Said’s seminal Orientalism, published in 1979, in which the Palestinian-American scholar wrote, “The imaginative examination of all things Oriental was based more or less exclusively upon a sovereign Western consciousness out of whose unchallenged centrality an Oriental world arose.” In short, says Said, the idea of the “Orient” – that unfathomable, exotic Other – is nothing but a fanciful product of Western imagination.

The Mandarin of Iron Man 3 is the Orient personified. Like the cartoonish North Korean villains of Red Dawn and Olympus Has Fallen, he’s an elusive fiction who inspires fear and panic, but to no productive end. Similarly, in the wake of Dawn and Olympus, we saw such gems on Twitter as, “I now hate all Chinese, Japanses, Asian, Korean people. Thanks” and “Just saw Olympus has fallen. I wanna go buy a gun and kill every fucking Asian.” Those tweets are just the tip of the iceberg. There are hundreds – maybe more – comments just like them, all spouting the same antipathy toward anyone who might trace their heritage to the other side of the Pacific. Spelling and grammar issues aside, these reactions point to a disturbing trend of xenophobia, jingoism, and ultimately, ignorance-fueled racism.
That’s not patriotism. That’s hate. We may be more than fifty years past Japanese-American internment, and more than a century past the Chinese Exclusion Act, but we obviously haven’t moved past the myth of the Yellow Peril. Korean-American actor John Cho, of Harold and Kumar and Star Trek fame, has remarked, “It’s very difficult to find an original thinker in terms of casting when you’re talking about race at all. And really, although more egregious versions of Asians have fallen by the wayside and become unfashionable, new Asian stereotypes [continue to] pop up.”

Given the political climate on today’s world stage, a North Korea-centric film isn’t necessarily a bad idea. A thoughtful, well-written, and well-performed North Korea movie – rather than fueling ignorance, which fuels fear – has the potential to enlighten and educate the American public on a real and pertinent topic. Such a film could, moreover, easily contain a place for Asian-American heroes, shelving that damaging, long-overused “white man versus the man of color” trope, in favor of something fresher, bolder, and ultimately, a far more interesting tale to tell.

We need stories that speak to a broader American identity, reminding us that we are a nation of immigrants, that so many of us began as the poor, the tired, the huddled masses, before finding our way home to American shores. We need stories that remind us that the “true” America isn’t just white; it’s white and brown and black and yellow and red and a technicolor mix of everything in between, a country full of hyphen identities and roots stretching far across the globe. It’s a legacy of diversity that infuses our cultural traditions with richer flavors, and offers us the gift of variety. And in today’s world, where globalization pushes the borders of disparate cultures closer and closer together, we – with our varied roots, our many languages and entwined histories – are uniquely placed to communicate across those borders. We are in a position not merely to tolerate that which is different, but to understand it. We are in a position to offer empathy instead of fear. That’s not something that deserves our scorn and resentment. That’s something that deserves our pride.

The Hollywood Superhero vs. 9/11

Posted on by

iron-patriot-from-im3

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

Posted on by

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.