8/17/2023 0 Comments Iron man war![]() ![]() Is this film going to set up the rise of Iron Man as a gross anti-terrorist allegory for the nobility of our invasion of Afghanistan? Of course not, the film winks. It is a bold introduction, particularly when you consider the political context of a post-9/11 America in 2008. Tony is captured, bloodied, and plopped in front of a group of veiled militants like a terrorist-hostage video, right before the Iron Man title card drops. I’d be out of a job with peace.” Then, on cue, he and his Army escorts are ambushed by an enemy who, we soon learn, uses the very weapons manufactured by Tony’s own Stark Industries. When Tony Stark takes a photo with a soldier throwing up a peace sign, the billionaire arms dealer quips, “I love peace. The film opens with a shot of an arid desert in Afghanistan, a trail of Army humvees barreling through the landscape, set to the flexing score of AC/DC’s iconic “Back in Black.” But we are soon meant to see that this particular rock-and-roll gung-ho glorification is actually bad. Iron Man arrived to fit perfectly in this political in-between zone and is quick to announce itself as such. And films like The Hurt Locker, Katheryn Bigelow’s critically acclaimed, Oscar-winning profile of an American soldier who disables bombs to save Iraqi civilians, served as an exercise in a certain humble, naturalistic form of military hero-worship that conveniently elided any questions about the atrocities that the American military had introduced to the country. Yet, simultaneously, the show 24, which glorified Jack Bauer as a counterterrorism officer who tortured suspects in order to save lives, was deep into its multi-season, Emmy-winning run. It was a liminal period - two years after the filmmaker Paul Greengrass (the director behind the Bourne franchise) made his 2006 9/11 ode United 93, but two years before his subsequent 2010 film Green Zone, a shaky-cam exposé that tracked a harried Matt Damon uncovering the American lie of “weapons of mass destruction,” a somewhat remarkable political stance for a major studio movie when the country had yet to end its war there. military to exit Iraq, and questions around the Blackwater massacre (the dubious circumstances behind an American team of private military contractors and the murder of 17 Iraqi civilians) and the military-industrial complex were a major source of political debate. The nation’s attitude had at least somewhat tempered from the aggressively jingoistic post-9/11 ethos: On his way out of office, Bush had made an agreement that created a path for the U.S. When Iron Man hit theaters in 2008, the American public’s view of the military’s involvement in the Middle East existed in a gray area. ![]() But Iron Man, more than any suspect, is the superhero film that, at the time, directly and radically grappled with themes of military power and American intervention. There is a version of this charge of imperialist propaganda that has been leveled at not only all of the MCU but at the concept of the superhero writ-large: Beneath the cape or cowl, superheroes embody a display of unfettered power and violence carried out according to the hero’s version of moral good. stumbling its way out of Afghanistan, means seeing the film more clearly than ever as muddled military propaganda, even as it purports to be the opposite. But a recent cable TV rewatch, particularly on the heels of the U.S. It’s a film that you can immediately recognize as the revitalization of Robert Downey Jr.’s career. In retrospect, that mythos around the film is warranted Iron Man remains a well-crafted blockbuster that goes down easy and sets the narrative tone for the two dozen or so superhero flicks that would follow. Now, it’s known as the launchpad for the Marvel Cinematic Universe, a historic tentpole for the most lucrative film franchise of all time, which in itself has, more than any cultural phenomenon, helped steer what Hollywood now makes and what its audiences will reliably go see. When Iron Man was in the works, it was seen as a risky film, the first movie for a nascent Marvel Studios based on a somewhat lesser-known hero. If you take a look at the current shape of Hollywood - an IP landfill churning out reboots, franchises, and spinoffs - and attempt to trace a line back to where that landscape began to take form, you’d more or less land on a single movie from 2008. What was the world like when you first considered this piece of culture, and what’s changed? Does it hold up as timeless, or is it better left to the past? Pitch us at. Hits Different is a new series that takes a second look at a TV show, song, album, episode, movie, scene, or clip from the past that, in our current context, just hits different. ![]()
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