Iron Man

In Iron Man (2008) the battle lines at first seem clear, but eventually they blur. The opening scene occurs in Afghanistan, where the convoy in which our hero, Tony Stark (Robert Downey), an ultra brilliant and wealthy weapons designer and manufacturer, is assaulted by evil foreign nationals who blow up or kill just about everyone but , you guessed it, our hero. They torture him until he agrees to build weapons for their use. Instead he builds a crude suit of iron with a limited capacity for flight and combat. He uses the suit to escape and return to America, resolved to stop manufacturing and trading in weapons of war—the source of his fortunes—and to serve the higher interests of peace and humanity. For reasons that never seem quite clear, this resolve leads him to build an ultra-high-tech robotic suit of iron. When he dons it, he has all the super-powers he has programmed into the suit, including ultrasonic flight, great strength, and a variety of weapons that wreak havoc. With this suit he takes revenge on the rebels who held him for six months.

Iron Man relies on the old notion that great societies are built by great men. Take the Jeffersonian aristocrat, temper him with Nietzsche's übermensch, and you have Tony Stark, brilliant all his life, a success at all he does, never in error, brilliant and cocky and arrogant and amoral—a rake who brags on sleeping with all but one of the women who appear in the super models of the year calendar. Stark is perverse but likeable.

This highly entertaining film is based on a comic book series I've never read. It has all the recognizable traits of a comic book narrative without a lot of the hoopla. We find the standard comic book stereotypes—the avuncular mentor Obadiah Stane (Jeff Bridges), the loyal but neglected beautiful blonde assistant Pepper Potts played by Gwyneth Paltrow, the army general Jim Rhodes played by Terrence Howard (he respects Stark's genius but can't officially acknowledge him because he so often ignores protocol and rules and policies). Stark's father, also a universal genius, is mysteriously dead.

In Iron Man not everyone is who he or she seems. Although the Afghani nationals cease to be much of an adversary after Iron Man wipes them out, a darker enemy emerges. Without revealing too much, suffice it to say that it is a complex of military and industrial interests for whom making money is more important than defending humanity and truth and the American way.

There's a lot of concern about the "handling" of Tony Stark. His rakish, rebellious ways make him difficult to handle. Stane doesn't trust him to act in the best interests of the company that bears his name, or of the America military that buys his weapons. General Rhodes has to protect Stark when he intrudes into enemy airspace or when the military tries to shoot him down. And the long-suffering Penny simply worries about him. He doesn't conform, doesn't respect protocol, doesn't care about rules of engagement or forbidden air space. He simply does what he wants, and out of the chaos there emerges an increasingly recognizable pattern of altruistic, moral behavior. He is one of those super heroes who does good but on his own terms—and that often makes him a problem. One minor theme of the film focuses on how American corporate culture discourages and even suppresses the individualism that is supposedly an inherent American value. One notices also how superheroes rarely rise from a background of poverty. As is with Bruce Wayne of the Batman series, our main character is able to indulge his penchant for inventions and high living only through the large inheritance left to him by his father.

This post 9/11 film implicates American foreign policy and munitions manufacturers as among the causes of the problems in the Middle and Far East. Weapons manufacturers do not always recognize the interests of the American government and military as consistent with their own. Stark discovers at one point that the weapons he has been designing for the U. S. military are also in use by the very enemy the American military is fighting. Not only are his weapons being used by foreign terrorists against American forces, but also against the poor and innocent and downtrodden. They're allowing evil dictators to take power and thereby threaten the rest of the world. When Stark recognizes this fact and sees his own responsibility, he experiences his change of heart. In essence, this is an argument against a global economy. Because Stark's company is committed to the bottom line, to a profit-margin, it sells weapons to whoever is willing to pay, regardless of whether the weapons will be used again innocent civilians or allies or even the United States itself.

Iron Man therefore suggests that Americans bear some responsibility for the rise to power of the myriad hostile forces in the rest of the world. At the same time, the film in a retrograde sort of way suggests that true Americans, which means Americans like Tony Stark—universal geniuses and individuals who abhor bureaucracy and cant and conformity--are essentially good at heart. Whatever errors they may commit, they will rise to the challenges that confront them and the rest of us lesser folks.

The last two words of the film make clear that there will probably be a sequel, and that Tony Stark will continue living his life the way he wants to.