SOUL IN THE IRON
The shallowness of this film is purely superficial.
It sets adrift from the familiar superhero doodles’ formula, namely: invincible preternnatural powers (girded in fancy dress) fighting Manichaean battles against freaky villains. But it sticks like a leech to the conventions of the genre (threadbare characterisation, over-the-top plot, jejune jokes) and panders to the ‘juvenile demographic’ with token sex and torture. In doing so it plumbs obscene depths, in which we see ourselves in caricature: magnificently trite and profoundly repugnant.
Tony Stark is half Victor Frankenstein (wanting so much from his creation, but ‘hoist with own petard’); half Mr Hyde (a doolally altered ego wanting nothing from his creator). We see in him a renaissance hit-man designing death engines, who – through his own slingshot brilliance – fires back at each missile his own ‘outrageous fortune’ can manufacture to hurl at him.
But science is pecking away at the chained carrion of his tormented spirit. Trapped in his own private Jericho (‘Plato’s cave’ as a failed state of fatalism) ‘Professor Marvel’ tranmogrifies him into a callow Icarus: a point-device persona lurching up to heaven on napalm-fuel.
By its fatefulness Iron Man actually passes muster as ‘prescience-fiction’. The mother of invention manufactures a fey, feral, ferric, fatidic banshee wailing at the walls that the military-industrial complex has built for its nation-state. As those walls come thundering down we hear the booming echo of an elegy to our lost future.
So Iron Man is the perfect metaphor for mercenary commerce exploiting evanescent freedom; and the Nemesis of zealotry pitted against venal liberalism. It heralds the new world order of the ‘market state’: where the weak perish in order for the greedy to profit. Therefore, no glory may be won; for there is no good to fight for. The most a hero can do is lead his tribe through a sea of red ink away from the slavery of moral bankruptcy.
As such, the film is an eerie reverberation of McLuhan’s creed that Satan is a great electrical engineer. The Stark panoply extends and assimilates. A ‘Tinman’ trope cursed to continually hack off whatever makes him human and artificially replace it – till he carves out his own heart. Iron Man is a sardonic inversion of John Stuart Mill’s philosophy that art determines ends; while science supplies means. Technology is a full metal straitjacket. A heart-piercing, soul-spiking iron maiden. A velvet fist manacled in an iron glove – raised in dead-weight anger against itself. A shrapnel-ridden heart rusted on to anomic armour. The man in the iron mask suffers a secret identity crisis. Unmasked he is us.
