Politicizing Ironman
Fantastic Gawker sci-fi blog io9 writes about the upcoming film extension of the Iron Man franchise.
The film’s strength, they argue, arrives from the flexibility of its political message. Too, they say, it exceeds the source material by politicizing and moralizing rather dry super-hero style material with a storyline about American corporatist interventionism and weapons proliferation. But with explosions and shirtless Robert Downey Jr.
I didn’t intend on seeing the film, but might now, despite telling my boyfriend I’d never see it.
io9 writes:
So Tony Stark’s body becomes a metaphor for American power, and the question of whether you can fix the abuses of power by exerting even more power. Tony is mortally wounded by seeing the results of his own arrogance in spreading massively destructive weapons in a part of the world he hardly understands. And he reacts by turning his own body into a super-weapon. Because the super-suit is powered by the same glowy disk that keeps Tony alive, we’re never able to forget that it’s an extension of his body rather than a costume.
Part of Iron Man’s great strength — and the reason it’ll probably make a squillion dollars — is that you can read whatever you want into its intensely political storyline. You can view it as a straightforward diatribe against America’s long history of arming thugs and the arrogant weight-throwing-around that has turned Afghanistan into a warlord-ridden wasteland. Or you can see it as a profoundly conservative polemic about keeping power in the right hands — Tony is wounded at exactly the same time that he starts to doubt his own righteousness as an arms maker, and he regains his strength when he starts flying back to Afghanistan and kicking the shit out of the bad guys there. Either way, Iron Man is not a pacifist movie, and it bends over backwards to be pro-military and pro-government, even in the midst of speeches about how weapons are evil.
Robert Downey Jr.’s Exposed Torso Is America [io9]
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