So I'm trying to watch Iron Man, but its race and power politics keep making me too squicked out to continue. Does it get better, or is it just impossible to make a classic superhero movie that isn't somehow pro-fascist, pro-imperialist, and disturbingly Eurocentric (or America-centric) ? (Neo-con Batman was bad enough...)

Well, the main bad guy is a dishonest American arms dealer who foments third world conflict for power. The main good guy is a guy that used to do that, but sees the error of his ways and wants to repurpose his technology to promote peace and end armed conflict. Nothing fascist about that.

And really, classic superhero movies are about archetypes. Unless you're working from Alan Moore source material (V For Vendetta), you're not going to get anything truly subversive. And that's fine. Sometimes, you just want an action movie where shit blows up.

@Namrok - Right. I can see power politics and gender issues in my breakfast cereal if I try hard enough. But I won't go into my rant about postmodernism. I think it'll get me too many enemies.

Well, if you're gonna rail against the dude at least be fair. Fascism is about state control of industry and I don't think Tony Stark would want to hand over his company to the government.

HAS HE LOST HIS MIND? CAN HE SEE OR IS HE BLIND?

@Namrok: short version, because I have a plane to catch.

Postmodernism is incredibly useful for identifying power dynamics that may be subtle or non-obvious. And in targeting those subtle means of discrimination, it offers new understandings of how society functions. But what then? Because one of the tenets seems to be that "everything has a power dynamic," we can't actually ever get rid of them, because it'll just replace one with another. Indeed, if you turn it on itself, pomo is an invidious power dynamic - between the criticalists and everyone else, between the victims who are trying to find some way to be superior to the oppressors, etc., etc.

Which is why I can't stand many naked discussions of power. OK, fine, there's a disparity there. Whoop-de-doo. That doesn't end the discussion. There's no reason to smugly rest on your laurels there like you just ended the argument, because you didn't actually identify a problem with a solution, because the theory is incapable of offering any solutions. Or identifying a problem so subtle that nobody even thought it existed, and it didn't operate at even a subconscious level.

Which, however, is not to say all critical theory is bad. There's some fairly decent critical legal theory that actually does offer solutions. But lierary/art critical theory? Let me enjoy blowing shit up.

that's very post-postmodern there, heraldic

... seriously? You're going to an Iron Man movie and not expecting it to have that whole pro-america thing going on? Iron Man, who in the comics is pro registration and DIRECTOR OF SHIELD (caps is in the job title, not emphasis)?

If you can't disengage that part of your brain to enjoy a sfx/shit blowing up movie, then no, it's not going to be possible to go see a super hero movie.

David Denby is on your side!

http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/cinema/2008/05/05/080505crci_cinema_denby

"In any case, the freelance fanatics, or whatever they are, waterboard Tony Stark, which, considering what some American interrogators and their surrogates have done to suspects recently, is enraging to watch. Such are the ways of pop: we cast our sins onto others. The complaint sounds a little wan, but it's worth noting that, possibly, more Americans will see this dunderheaded fantasia on its opening weekend than have seen all the features and documentaries that have labored to show what's happening in Iraq and on the home front."

did you bring your laptop into the theater? i feel as if i missed something.

The comic geek in me loved it....

but...

Actually, that's about where it ended.

@Sarah: In all fairness, everyone in that movie except for Robert Downy Jr was a cardboard cutout. Hardly fair to single out just the women as being simple characters.

@namrok- excuse me?

what the fuck?

"Oh little girl, it's not sexism it's the way the world works."

that's what you just said.

yes but this is a stereotype against half the planet.

I take issue with it.

And? All the villians were power hungry destructive men. Hell, all the good guys were power hungry destructive men too.

It's not like there aren't male stereotypes too.

You just see the ones that offend you most.

and, to answer the actual question "is it just impossible to make a classic superhero movie that isn't somehow pro-fascist, pro-imperialist, and disturbingly Eurocentric (or America-centric)?"

Assuming you mean classic in that it's a character in the canon of comic books, probably not. A lot of them came around in the 50's, when the US was at it's most pro-imperialist and disturbingly Eurocentric (or America-centric).

The problem lies in how to take the characters out of their own histories and origins and try and make them somehow less....uber-50's. And I'm not sure you can do that without a complete reboot to the series, which writers still wont be able to ignore because they already know the histories and that will inform what they write.

@AJT: neo-con batman -> what i'm doing is the right thing to do so it doesn't matter whether what i'm doing is legal, or even ethical. batman is remarkably Machiavellian, and the neo-cons definitely worship "The Prince."

I think you guys are overlooking that this is a comedy about a rich jerk. He's not SUPPOSED to be virtuous. He's Iron Man and Iron Man is a douchebag.

Well, I hope you're all satisfied. You slandered a bunch of naive comic book movie folks -- folks celebrating an era where values are...different. They weren't thinking about the war. They just wanted to tell a story, a story about an iron man, and you slick feminists took 'em for all they were worth.

A little background on the character and the creators of the movie might be valuable here:

The original comic version of Iron Man was an anti-Communist individual that suffered his life changing wounds in Vietnam, the major conflict at the time his comics debuted. The story was updated to take place in Afghanistan, because that's the major conflict at the time the movie debuted. The terrorists are written in the script not to portray the usual string of bad guys that American media outlets like to rail against, but as a multinational threat - hence why Yinsin comments early in the film about how they're speaking a large variety of languages. It's weak, granted, but at least they didn't simply go with "This is Ahmed, he is evil."

In the end, almost everything you see that is produced in English is Eurocentric or American-centric. Just the nature of the beast. The only American movie I recall off the top of my head that does things from a different perspective is Letters from Iwo Jima.

In the end, I respect your opinion, Sal, but as I read once, don't go shopping for kiwis in a shoe store. Superhero movies (and by extension, the comics they spawn from) are rarely done in anything but broad strokes featuring heavy use of archetypes, because they represent fundamental fantasies of a wide group of people. I can't think of a single person that at some point or another wished they could do something extraordinary to correct a wrong, a slight, or an injustice. Amp it up and take it to the next level, and you have men and women running around in tights pummeling bad guys. It's simple, it's direct, and it appeals to the masses.

Comics since the late 60s have attempted to become more culturally relevant, including real world issues and problems into the page count - but you've also got a far lower overhead than when you're making a movie. With millions of dollars and the future of their production company at stake, Marvel went with a very broad brush and painted a tableau of straightforward characters with lots of explosions. Arguably the most convincing relationship in the movie was that between Robert Downey Jr and his fire extinguisher robot. Not a lot of depth, but then again, that's not what I went to Iron Man to see.

I do hope you finished the movie though, as I do believe that despite whatever underlying issues surround script, storyline, subtle references, plot, or whatever, the archetype of a superhero makes all of us, at least a little bit on the inside, go "wow" and aspire to be just a little bit better people in our every day lives.

@halon- I did think the portrayal of the robots was fair and well thought out.

@hal: i'm not offended by it in the slighest, just acknowledging that it's there. it doesn't interrupt my enjoying watching ironman fly around like a badass or anything any more than knowing about british imperialism interrupts my enjoying heart of darkness, or that british xenophobia is part of dracula. understanding what's going on in the subtext doesn't make it bad.

Still at work, but I'm still following this.

Anyway, Sal, short version: I'd recommend you check out Occasional Superheroine and Friends of Lulu, where these kinds of issues are dealt with head-on. Damn good reads.

Also, Batman as neo-con? Are you talking about the Frank Miller version?

"We define our lives in terms of movies all the time."

The surest sign that someone does this is when they claim others do.

Namrok, well yeah, in part I do. But what, you never heard anyone else do this? We have a limited access to first-hand experience of things beyond our immediate social sphere. We do, in fact, rely on movies and books to show us things beyond it. And it totally colors people's perspective. Don't tell me that going to films that repetitively cast the brown man as the baddie or the disposable other isn't going to affect your gut perception of such stuff. Why else do we have movie icons, do you think? Films create cultural signposts.

By the way, to whoever asked--no, I am not leaning towards the Sex and the City flick, because that show is stupid and sexist. Note that I did not accuse Iron Man of sexism. It kinda was, but that wasn't its main concern, and it wasn't horribly bad on that point, so whatever.

Whoever says I shouldn't get annoyed by this 'cause the baddies here were *bad* and I should just enjoy it must also enjoy Nazi propaganda movies, like the one recapped in "Kiss of the Spider Woman," because the Jews there were clearly *evil* and so got what they deserved, and it was just entertainment!!

Well, I'm probably out of my depth in this discussion, but, just my two cents:

As a fan of the comics, I pretty much unabashedly love this movie. It hit every mark it was supposed to within a popcorn-flick framework.

On the other hand, I did find the politics of it a little troublesome. I did wince a bit when Iron Man went back to Afghanistan as the noble (white) knight to save the brown people from themselves. That kind of thinking gets us into trouble.

But even that wince didn't hamper my overall appreciation for the flick. I think that, generally, it did what it did pretty well.

As for non-Fascistic superheroes, I think you're really looking at the wrong genre. They're vigilantes, they operate outside the law, they do only what they perceive to be right. Their MO is to punch people who don't agree with them. It's who they are and what they do.

So if you're going to (understandably) equate imposing one's will upon others (criminals, bad guys, whatever) without regard for the rule of law with fascism, then all superheroes are fascists and you're probably better off avoiding them altogether.

Sal: Sure, there's some out there who fit those parameters. Green Arrow is a staunch liberal for someone in his tax bracket. The Authority stood out because it actually deposed corrupt governments. And then you've got the X-Men, "fighting to save a world that hates and despises them" and such.

But, as has been said, Iron Man is *not* the hero to champion those causes. He's a futurist, a businessman, a prick and an alcoholic.

@Saolmea: Don't get me wrong, I love superheroes, but the ones that ARE actually superheroes (as opposed to anti-heroes) are almost by definition fascists and paternalists.

Their way is right, and they believe that they must save humanity from itself. It doesn't help that they are also overwhelmingly male, white, and in favor of conservative American values.

And then another problem arises: if you have these powers and this technology and a desire to do some good, why waste it on punching things? That's one of the fundamental problems of Tony Stark right there - it's not even that he's part of the military-industrial complex, it's that he's got all this hyperscience, but his use of it (barring the occasional alien invasion) is kinda small potatoes compared to what he COULD do with it.

And, actually, there have been comics dealing with exactly those flaws in the superhero archetype, most notably Watchmen, but also, I'd say, things like certain storylines in the Authority and the Ultimates.

But a lot of the time, I really just prefer to look at it like this: they're people who are extraordinary and they're attempting to do some good.

@Art: I beg to differ on the Authority, BTW. A big part of that particular series is the question as to whether they're revolutionaries or just another jackboot.

I still like the line from Superman Returns:

"You say the world doesn't need a savior, but every day I hear people crying out for one."

That's why his relationship with Lois Lane is so important - it keeps him grounded. The whole deification process occurs whenever they make the 'Super' more important than the 'man.'

Siegel and Shuster had it right in the original concept - he was an outsider, trying to fit in, just like they were. Being from Krypton may make him Superman, but it's his love for Lois Lane that keeps him human. Especially in all the movies. (and by all the movies, I mean all the movies except III and IV. I don't acknowledge their existence.)

Oh, and thanks Cocktails. And Halon makes me wanna watch Superman Returns.

Sal: You might hate all those things, but it made sense for *that character* to need to see those things, and to be imprisoned by his own tech, before he could begin to pull himself out of his spiral -- what, you think it's a coincidence that he drinks less and less throughout the course of the film?

And yes, part of the deal with the character is that he's *not* heroic. The roguish appeal, I believe, comes from Downey's own experience, and that's why the role fit him like a glove. It's also no coincidence that his closest friends, aside from the robots, are his closest subordinates and enablers, Pepper and Rhodey. It's another layer of the character and the culture he inhabits. That's why, in the books, the character of Iron Man worked best when he was paired with Captain America, who, while being the living symbol of American military-industrial dick-waving, was written first and foremost as a skinny kid who believes in his country, even if it meant going against the chain of command.

ABNA: I'll agree that that's probably the case with his formative years, but being the devil's advocate that I am, I'll suggest that there's an overwhelming number of small town, solid upbringing folk that went to the Big City and never made it anywhere, instead becoming self-serving and cutthroat because of the shift in pace and pressures. I agree Clark stuck to his original upbringing because he feels extraordinarily close to his parents, but at the same time, he's grown into a good man and stays that way because he's got Lois. A lot of men in love feel like they can fly, this one just happens to be right.

thanks!

Sal: Oh, definitely not, and that's Marvel's plan -- they want to make popcorn movies, not the next Watchmen, for sure. I do find it interesting, however, that they're already planning to deflect any jingoism issues with their upcoming Captain America movie by subtitling it "The First Avenger."

Monkey: Either way, I bet those Bucky scenes are gonna be more interesting now, eh? (I'm working off the theory that the Cap movie will be a WW2 piece, culminating in his getting frozen and discovered by the Avengers/Ultimates).

Right, Cocktails... but that is why what I'm complaining about is the glorification of that particular character, rather than his actions per se. Ie, not how he acts and how he thinks, but how the movie *presented* how he acts and how he thinks.

I haven't, but I want to. It's Alan Moore, 'nuff said.

I blame the fact that robert downey jr. is just too damn charming.

a *lesson* wow my nerves are shot to not being able to type :P.

I didn't say there weren't at all, just that we should examine the source of our projections as well. It's pretty much a widely admitted fact that cold war era sci-fi was packed with metaphors!

I think everyone should look for meaning in just about everything, it's very entertaining!