On Iron Man
Iron Man: A Review
By John David Ebert
In ancient mythology, blacksmith heroes are normally devious, crafty, morally ambiguous figures who cannot be trusted. Their creations are often faulty and sometimes redound fatally upon their users. Worse, they are often murderers. The name of Cain, for instance, who committed the world’s first murder in Biblical mythology, means “smith” and Tubal-cain later became the world’s first worker in bronze and metallurgy. In Greek mythology, Daedalus was a man who was chased out of the city of Athens for murdering his cousin Talos, of whom Daedalus was jealous since Talos was said to have invented the first saw after being inspired by finding the jawbone of a snake. In Scandinavian myth, Volund the smith was imprisoned on an island and hamstrung by a king who wished to prevent him from escaping so that he could use Volund’s talents for the making of weapons, but the crafty smith murdered the king’s two young sons and transformed their skulls into bowls and their eyeballs into jewels which he sent to the king as “gifts” before inventing wings and flying away from his island prison. Ancient societies seem to have been well aware of the warping effects of technology on the human personality.
Smiths, furthermore, are normally demarcated by a physical disability of one sort or another, as though to indicate the cost to their physical well-being that is the price of their ability to create. Volund, as we have already seen, was hamstrung, and the other Greek smith Hephaestus was lame, while the Cyclopes who made the thunderbolts for Zeus had only one eye.
In like fashion, the hero of the new Marvel Comics film, Tony Stark, suffers from the disability of a weakened heart which he replaces with one that is artificially powered. In the opening sequence of the film, we watch as he forges the pieces of his first iron suit while being held captive by Islamic guerrilla fighters in a cave. We see him handling those two archaic signatures of the ancient mythical blacksmith, the hammer and tongs, while he sutures together his iron exoskeleton and then blasts free from captivity, flying away exactly like Volund the smith does in the Poetic Eddas.
Stark is loosely modelled on the Howard Hughes type of persona, for he owns Stark Industries, which manufactures weapons of war, just as Hughes did with his company. However, unlike the ancient mythical blacksmiths, Stark develops a moral conscience about what he does for a living once he is freed from his captors, the very captors, he has come to realize, who were able to capture him using missiles and weapons manufactured by Stark Industries. He decides that he no longer wishes to supervise a company that exports weapons to terrorists and decides instead to help the world by manufacturing a new and upgraded Iron Man suit that will confer upon him the ability to fly and fight terrorists. We are shown long and detailed sequences of him perfecting and tampering with this new titanium alloy exoskeleton with which he surrounds himself.
When Stark finally dons the suit, we realize that we are in the presence of a by now familiar celluloid image, the very same image with which George Lucas’s Revenge of the Sith had concluded: that namely, of the fall and capture of Annakin Skywalker into the mechanical exoskeleton of technology that swallows him up and from which he never emerges. This image of the fall of man into a mechanical suit is a metaphor of the fall, sinking and capture of the modern human soul by technology, for it is no longer the case that we use technology, for by now, it uses us to suit its own ends.
Iron Man is yet another rehearsal of this modern adaptation of the ancient Gnostic myth of the soul’s fall from the heavens into captivity by matter: nowadays it is not just the story of the soul’s fall into a physical body, but of the capture of the human soul as a single entity by the technological exoskeleton which it has built to protect itself from the dangers of what we call “Nature.” The problem now is that, like Darth Vader, we cannot seem to get out of the exoskeleton, for it has completely engulfed our humanity. We can no longer tell where the machine ends and where the human being begins.
And this is a shame, for everywhere we look today, machines are replacing human beings: soldiers are being replaced on battlefields by remote controlled drones and robots; police officers are being replaced by the electronic eyes of video cameras and photo radar at traffic intersections; librarians are being replaced by electronic do-it-yourself scanners; and grocery stores are lightening their staffs as they add similar self-checkouts. Our automobiles, likewise, are becoming more and more mechanized and seem to do more of our thinking for us: they adjust our seatbelts whether we want them or not; they leave our radios playing when the car is turned off; they lock our doors for us once we shift the gears, and so on. And the same goes for our computers and laptops: spell checkers on our Macs now routinely respell words for us which the computer believes that we have misspelled and sometimes will not even allow us to spell it the way we wish. James Joyce, it need hardly be pointed out, could never have written Finnegans Wake on a laptop, for his computer would have “corrected” the spelling of each and every word for him.
Americans seem to be okay with letting machines do their thinking for them, but what they don’t realize is the degree to which they are thereby being turned into servomechanisms and robots themselves. The greater the buffer between the human element and the machine that surrounds him, the more numb do his human sensibilities become. Just ask the bombers who cheerfully drop bombs on their targets without the least bit of worry about killing civilians. If you were to ask these same soldiers to pour gasoline on a child and light him on fire, it is a safe bet that he would refuse to do this. But if you buffer his contact from other human beings by putting him in the cockpit of a smart plane that does his thinking for him, then he seems to be relieved of moral responsibility for his actions and remains content to let the machine take over and drop the bombs.
This is the gravest danger which our contemporary civilization now faces: for the more we allow our machines to think and act for us, the further we retreat from the human world and the farther we fall back into the depths of our machines. In the process, we lose our moral conscience.
The story of Marvel Comics’ best film so far, Iron Man, is a modern myth that works this problem out, for we find that Tony Stark’s nemesis, Obadiah, the man directly beneath him in Stark Industries and who wishes to replace him, gradually becomes less and less moral as he builds a copy of his own Iron Man suit and climbs inside it. The suit is gigantic, and he sits within it, dwarfed by the machinery: his human sensiblities thus numbed, he thinks nothing of throwing cars with people in them about or crashing down buildings, for he is an image of the human being who has become anesthetized by his fall into the machine.
Tony Stark, on the other hand, unlike Obadiah and also unlike Darth Vader, is able to retain his humanity by knowing when to remove the suit and when to put it on. The moment we see him fastening the helmet shut over his very charismatic features — and the director here has done a great job of casting Robert Downey, Jr. as Tony Stark, precisely because Downey’s face is a sensitive one whose large eyes bespeak a certain degree of vulnerability (which is why an actor with a mask-like type of face, a rugged visage such as that, say, of Daniel Craig’s, could never have played this role) — the moment, that is, when the helmet closes over Downey’s very human face is precisely the moment when he becomes depersonalized and absorbed by the mask. For masks, whether in comicbook mythology or in ancient mythology, have the effect of depersonalizing the three dimensional human being by flattening him out and absorbing him into a two dimensional universe, and so once Tony Stark has put on the suit, he is no longer the wonderful and vulnerable Tony Stark that the director very skillfully has taught us to like and appreciate, but has become an abstract, mythical being belonging to another universe altogether.
But Stark never makes the mistake of identifying with the mask and indeed, the reason the film works so well is precisely because the Iron Man suit is put on so infrequently during the film. For most of the film’s duration, we enjoy Robert Downey Jr. as Tony Stark, and when the Iron Man character comes foward we know exactly who we are dealing with and what his moral concerns are. Stark does not identify with the role or allow his ego to become inflated by it, for he is somewhat surprised when, by the end of the film, people have begun to call him Iron Man, which he admits to being, although reluctantly.
In short, Iron Man is the best of the superhero movies so far because it is the most human and humane. It does not lose sight of the whole point of superhero mythology: namely, that it is a modern proscenium upon which masked characters enact the fundamental tragedy of our time: the human battle against the Machine. Iron Man is a job well done and in this case, at least, Hollywood can be congratulated for getting the story right.
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