My Five Year Plan

Consider yourself warned. Here be spoilers:

Though I’ve never been much of a comics reader, I’ve always been intrigued by the mythology of Iron Man. Tony Stark’s weakened, near-death mortality (along with his insatiable vices for women and the drink) contrasts fascinatingly with the Iron Man’s almost fascistically overstated transhumanism. Like Robocop or the powered-armor exoskeletons of Heinlein’s Starship Troopers, the mechanized, enhanced body of the Iron Man (and his rival Iron Monger) is a political and philosophical problem: by transcending the physical limitations of the human body, do we necessarily transcend its ethical imperatives?

The root for this sort of sci-fi convention is of course the history of fascism in general, and its tendency toward eugenics, both as theory and as practice: perfect discipline, perfect race, perfect body, perfect order. For some artists, the fascism of the transhuman body offer occasion to deliver queasily ecstatic paeans to militant order (Heinlein). For others, the resistance of the soul to transhuman programming (Verhoeven in Robocop, the greatest of all science fiction films). Iron Man complicates this question both in its unique political origins and its recontextualization within the paradigm of faceless modern warfare (Gulf War missile down the chimney endlessly repeated on CNN, pilotless planes, MOAB, etc.) and corporate neoconservatism.

Iron Man, of course, has its origins in an altogether different moment in American conservatism, the red-baiting gung-ho era of the early Vietnam war. Stark, icon of American military might and titan of industry-turned-vigilante militant seems a perfect embodiment of that era’s rising military industrial complex as well as that era’s fear of communist threat. Iron Man’s most unique threats - the Mandarin and the parade of Soviet baddies known as Crimson Dynamo - represented Stan Lee’s interest, at least while the war was popular, in producing a hero defiantly in service of free-market ideals. Iron Man served as a propaganda hero for a specific moment in our economic history, the moment in which paleoconservative isolationism transmuted into neoconservative interventionism and corporatism.

Recontextualized for the war on terror (much of the film takes pains to demonstrates Iron Man’s origins in an Afghani prison-cave), our new hero is an altogether different breed - no longer working in service of anti-communist aims, or even really for the government (indeed, Stark/Iron Man positions himself as a vigilante rogue who will fly halfway across the world to rough up a few baddies in his dead friend’s home village and then fly away after showing off what a badass he is). He’s further made suspicious of corporatism as well, and of his own company’s war profiteering. So what are the politics of Tony Stark?

Let’s just say that if he had voted in the 2008 primaries, I think Stark would’ve been a Ron Paul man - blustery pro-individualist sloganeer, anti-government reactionary, and suspicious of taxation. He represents not the fascism of a plurality but the fascism of the individual, the preeminance of personal self-interest - a calculating Randian robot. If the government is that body which holds a monopoly on legitimized violence, then the nature of Stark’s superheroism is to deny such a monopoly in the first place. The final battle sequence - in which Iron Man’s rugged individualism faces against the corporate interests of Obediah Stane’s Iron Monger - is the struggle between two models of ubermenschen, respectively John Galt and the corporate fascist.
Oh, and to point out that I’m not a complete stick in the mud: I thoroughly enjoyed myself at this picture. The action is well-staged, Downey is great, Jon Favreau’s direction is competent, and the halfhearted shrug of a performance by Gwyneth Paltrow as Pepper Potts is surprisingly welcome - why do we so little of this actress?