Ironman: A Rogue Individual

The film Ironman provides an extraordinarily flawed solution to an obvious problem. It is based on a longstanding cartoon character who, as the convention of the genre (and other genres) has it, is obliged to battle various criminals as well as the demons in his own private life. In the case of Ironman, the protagonist is the military-industrialist Tony Stark who has the twin benefits of being born into a life of enormous privilege while also having genius-like intelligence coupled with a potent work ethic. Owing to these benefits, he is possessed of sufficient stamina to combine a life of productivity with another one of extensive alcohol use and vaguely misanthropic relationships with a series of young women.

All is well, then, with Tony Stark and his life, until such time as he is confronted with the negative consequences of finding the weapons for which he is responsible for creating and exporting used against him. This leads to a crisis of both psychological and physical dimensions. Unfortunately, Stark devotes rather more attention on the physical aspects than the psychological or ideological ones and comes to the ultimate conclusion that the prescription for the prevalence of weapons in the world must be an increase in the number of weapons in the world. Secondly, he reaches the conclusion that the lack of accountability and transparency in the disposition of those weapons is to reduce that accountability and transparency by taking the means of production and distribution of weapons directly into his own control. It is clear that these very poor decisions will rain down destruction upon him and those things he values and this more or less happens in due course. Alas, Stark is then removed from the desert like conditions in which he reached his epiphanies and returned to the United States where he at once begins to bring about his own misguided cure to the problem, pausing only to collect a cheeseburger, which is symbolic of all kinds of things largely too obvious to consider here.

The film then descends into a struggle between Stark and his surrogate father which may probably be best seen as a form of Oedipal rebellion. We are very fortunate that Stark’s family seems to have disappeared prior to the beginning of the narrative, thereby sparing us from the customary American trope of massive over-emphasis on the importance of family links. This over-emphasis on family is symptomatic of the clear intentions of manufacturers of cultural products who very frequently have a political agenda involving the weakening of class and social solidarity and promotion of the myth of individual independence.