Iron Filings – I’m NOT a hopeless liberal…I only play one on-screen

One of the more contentious points that floated around the coming Iron Man movie was if it would somehow “rehabilitate” the character to the people and audience who say they loved the character when they were they were reading the title.   By that it was meant to undo the connection that was made between the Bush Administration’s NeoConservative policies and the storyline of Marvel’s Civil War in which Iron Man sided with the government against Captain America and some other superheroes.

Frankly, I relished the connection as Tony Stark shares much with the Neo-Conservative world view and is an Interventionist of the first-order thanks to his core moral philosophy as can be demonstrated in the course of the comic’s history.
 

Michael Lind, a self-described former neoconservative, explained:

Neoconservatism… originated in the 1970s as a movement of anti-Soviet liberals and social democrats in the tradition of Truman, Kennedy, Johnson, Humphrey and Henry (‘Scoop’) Jackson, many of whom preferred to call themselves ‘paleoliberals.’ [After the end of the Cold War]… many ‘paleoliberals’ drifted back to the Democratic center… Today’s neocons are a shrunken remnant of the original broad neocon coalition. Nevertheless, the origins of their ideology on the left are still apparent. The fact that most of the younger neocons were never on the left is irrelevant; they are the intellectual (and, in the case of William Kristol and John Podhoretz, the literal) heirs of older ex-leftists.

Sounds to me very much like the Origin of Iron Man and the slide into Leftist reconciliation with Corporations that held the center of American politics for so very long that is until it was clear that it was broken.

The now classic “Demon in a Bottle” story owes as much to what made Ronald Reagan president then as it did to deep mining a character’s psychology as a reaction to political shift going on in the social psyche and a ‘where do we go from here’ anomie.  I don’t think anyone ever equated Iron Man through the Sixties and Seventies with the counter-culture despite its having turned on Vietnam as being something worthy of the U.S. back in the now infamous Iron Man #78 and quoting an Bob Dylan lyric or two. To the casual reader Iron Man was “the man” in the lingo of the day.

There is reason why the Iron Man trailers got people stoked and no small part of it was the Robert Downey delivery of such un-repentant American lines like “They say the best weapon is one you never have to fire. I prefer the weapon you only need to fire once. That’s how dad did it, that’s how America does it, and it’s worked out pretty well so far.”

That however is not exactly what turns out to be the message here in the movie.  Intervention apparently ONLY works if you are a superhero not a superpower.  Those guys in the turbans, they really are only able to fight because we keep making the weapons that kill people; which of course neglects that this excludes commercial aircraft in the catalog of weapons used by terrorists.

The ire of Iron Man in the movie is really for the bald bad guy Stane of the late 80’s raider Wall Street Gordon Gekko, Lex Luthor mold of Villain in which the character was created and he comes in very handy in this now waning presidential era.

  

So could the Movie have been more true the comic character? Well, “true” really depends on at what time in the publishing history one might be referring to if one insists on talking political labels. Tony Stark however is an interesting character because it is the ethical/ philosophical modes that he employs that carry him into political areas that call out seeming contradictions not unlike that noted about some NeoCon roots in Marxian belief.

My reading of the Iron Man has so far led me to see that all the writers understood that as a scientist businessman that he is a materialist, pragmatist, positivist, consequentialist. Then again so was Marx a materialist eschewing as much metaphysical mumbo-jumbo as possible.  However could one contend that Marx was true to the Enlightenment critique of the bourgeois as he was?

Iron Man is not a radical nor an idealist, he doesn’t even really right wrongs in the conventional sense but he does fight the good fight. The “criminals” that he has most often gone up against are those that reject the social contract and individual responsibility.  Early in his publishing history most of his villains are business failures, communists or those that alienated from this internalization of obligation and blame; some being such as aliens from space.

The Stane’s of the world are just one such kind of ‘obligation rejectors’ which appeals to the liberal mind’s idea of wrong, mostly because it seems like a conscious choice, to reject collective “good” that abounds to those heartfelt aware.  Alien faiths and practices however don’t go down so well for getting their faces smashed in simply because they are outside the culture. Liberalism now doesn’t sit very well with the idea that there should even be a dominant culture imposing its order.

NeoCons however know that just as often the rejectors, radicals or aliens, pose just as great threat and it would have been nice to see that in the movie rather than having the terrorists folded back into being the pawns of the arms merchants.  Nice because it mostly isn’t true and nice because it would have reflected better on the history of the the Iron Man character.

for more go to my DVD review on reconsidering this film