We Are All Iron Man

By Al Giordano

Robert Downey Jr. as weapons magnate Tony Stark ended the first Iron Man movie in 2008 with a press conference declaration that “I am Iron Man” and the sequel, opening in the US on Friday, begins by reliving that confession. As is common in the Marvel comics franchise films, the fourth wall in Iron Man 2 doesn’t just get broken. It is mercilessly sledgehammered into rubble, again and again. Downey Jr., in real life, has come back from an industry-imposed tomb; there were years in which the big insurance companies wouldn’t indemnify the single best actor of my generation and so Hollywood would not hire him, and his chemical preferences and resulting antics were grist for the gossip rags and the puritan finger-waggers. The Stark-Iron Man role has put Downey Jr. back on top of the box office and his resurrection parallels that of the blockbuster character he now commands.

But what am I doing writing about what many consider to be a mere action film when an oil slick covers the Gulf of Mexico, when Arizona has declared immigrants as public enemy number one, when the specter of paramilitary ambush and assassination has reappeared in Mexico and all of that ought to be like shooting fish in a barrel for an investigative journalist? It is because at this dark hour of history, humankind needs a hero, or, better said, collectively needs to become one. Unfinished drafts of stories about each of those things and more clutter my desktop but none have yet found that glimmer of hope that has infused so much of the body of work that has flowed from this pen. If there is no chance to change history, why write at all?

And so as I was waiting for the social movements and organizers (forget about the “activists,” whose Modus Operandi is dull repetition, boredom and certain defeat) to show some fighting spirit and get creative in reversing these evils, and thus to give us something to talk about, I wandered into the cinema last Friday for the international Iron Man 2 premier, which opened in Latin America a week before it will in the United States. It is frankly rare when we expats get to see or hear a piece of American pop culture before you who live there do. So let me get out in front of Iron Man 2 and define it for the homeland.

Marvel comics – in which Iron Man has been a lead actor since 1963 - introduced a generation of kids to the concept of the flawed hero. Those books taught that you can be screwed up, neurotic, lacking in self-confidence, an outcast, an illegal alien or a mutant, or any other kind of misfit, and still do extraordinary acts for the good of society.

The Marvel universe provided the older brothers, father figures and role models I never had in real life during a somewhat troubled youth: Matt Murdock (Daredevil) was a blind working class kid from a broken home turned defense lawyer in Manhattan's Hell’s Kitchen who sought vengeance after his pop, a boxer, was murdered by the mob. Dr. Stephen Strange was a Greenwich Village eccentric living at 177A Bleeker Street who’d lost use of his surgeon’s hands so had to learn to transverse separate realities and manipulate time and space via sorcery. Inventors Hank Pym (Ant Man, Giant Man) and Janet Van Dyke (the Wasp) had a dysfunctional marriage and, when not fighting vs. supervillains, were daily at each other’s throats. James “Logan” Howlett (Wolverine) had been born in 1810 but didn’t age, causing him eternal boredom, which he medicated with tobacco, booze and roguish antics. Arms merchant playboy Tony Stark (Iron Man) was a regularly bottom-hitting drunk. Despite – and also because of – their flaws, they, and others like them, saved the world, every month, for twelve cents an issue.

Which is why it was disappointing that the first Iron Man movie, in 2008, turned Stark into a mere social drinker glossing over that which made his character most interesting. The hero who could fire repulsor beams from his palms was regularly, outside of his clunky uniform, repulsive. That lack in the first flick was particularly a letdown because we all knew that Downey Jr. could nail the essence of that character, but the script did not give him the chance. But if you don’t like “spoilers” stop reading right now because here it comes: Iron Man II includes a sensational scene of Stark going on a raving drunk in his Iron Man suit, putting a mansion full of civilians at risk. Col. James “Rhodey” Rhodes, (Don Cheadle replaces Terrence Howard from the 2008 film in the sidekick role), then has to suit up in the uniform that readers of the books know as War Machine to stop him. And Downey Jr. finally gets to market what too many pounded on him as a weakness, now, as a strength and a well to draw from on screen.

The bigger surprise yet from Iron Man II is the emergence of Scarlett Johansson as agent Natasha Romanoff (The Black Widow), cast totally against nice-girl type and emerging with a role that should earn its own spin-off movie as well as a seat around the SHIELD roundtable in the 2012 Avenger’s flick for which the Iron Man films and the 2008 Incredible Hulk movie – along with upcoming flicks based on the characters of Thor and Captain America – are stage setters.

Johannson plays two roles at once: the SHIELD agent Natasha Romanoff (originally named Natalia Romanova in the Marvel book) in black cat leather, sophisticated pistol whip weaponry and loyal accomplice of eye-patched SHIELD chief Nick Fury (played by Samuel L. Jackson) who in the first part of the movie goes undercover at Stark Enterprises posing as legal department attaché Natalie Rushman. Her covert assignment is to keep tabs on Stark. In each metamorphosis Johannson accomplishes something I can’t remember another actor or actress doing in any film, ever: she steals entire scenes from Downey, Jr. To my sister native New Yorker's credit, she also does most of her own stunts. One violent action scene she shares with director John Favreau (who ably plays Stark Enterprises' guy friday Happy Hogan) cements Johansson's baptism into the role of kick-ass superpowerdom and any movie critic who tries to say otherwise will end up like the dozen uniformed security guard she wastes with jaw-gaping acrobatic grace.

In April 2009, without mentioning Iron Man II by name, Johansson wrote a Huffington Post column about her training regimen to be able to skinny into the black leather suit that US movie goers will be seeing her in later this week. Her transformation from perky, bright, amusing Woody Allen comedic sidekick-muse to hard edged, no-nonsense, lethal kickboxing disciplinarian for the reckless Stark goes way beyond physical form. Stark cannot take her eyes off her (“can I have one?” he comments to love interest Virginia “Pepper” Potts, played again by Gwyneth Paltrow, upon meeting his company’s latest employee) and neither can the audience. Johansson out-Downeys Downey entering each scene like a tornado that vacuums up all the attention available on the big screen.

Marvel Comics movies have the budget and fun-factor to have drawn many of the better actors and actresses in Hollywood (and Broadway, as Hugh Jackman’s Wolverine character attests) but until Johansson’s appearance this week, Academy and box office favorite female leads like Paltrow and even Halle Berry (X-Men’s Storm) have been mostly outshone by the male characters in the all-star ensembles (Fammke Janssen’s Dr. Jean Grey-cum-Phoenix in the X-Men series being a notable exception). Jennifer Garner nabbed a spin-off for the Elektra character that she developed in Daredevil, but her solo film didn’t rise to the gut-checking Joseph Campbellian mythology of most of the Marvel motion pictures. Not so with Scarlett as The Black Widow. It’s been some days since this viewer left the theater, and there’s still a welt from her super-heroine sting.

Once Iron Man II breaks box office records (it has already grossed more than $100 million abroad and its commercial triumph is inevitable on the domestic front, too) there should be a clamor to write Johannson into the 2012 Avengers mega-flick if The Black Widow isn’t in there already. She is the character that the Marvel film universe has been waiting for. At 25, Johansson is younger than most of the aging stars of the films that have been worthy of sequels (The X-Men key cast characters, for example: Jackman is 41, Janssen is 45, Patrick Stewart (Professor Charles Xavier) and Ian McKellen (Magneto) are 70, giving that franchise limited staying power.) As for the Iron Man/Avengers franchise, Jackson is 60, Downey, Jr. is 45, Ed Norton (it is not yet confirmed he will be back as The Hulk in the Avengers movie) is 41, Paltrow is 37. Anthony Hopkins, who will play the role of Norse god Odin, father of Thor, is 72. But who among the Marvel movie bigfeet has the potential to usher the franchise into another decade, not to mention Johansson’s potential to widen the demographic? (The Marvel.com website, for example, has a 57-percent male audience, probably indicative of its comic and movie viewers as well.) These times need a heroine even more than they need a hero.

As the Avengers prequel movies come into focus, the Marvel film empire is developing some new and younger talent. 26-year-old Chris Hemsworth will play Dr. Donald Blake a.k.a. the Norse thunder god Thor, and Chris Evans, 28, will be Steve Rogers, The First Avenger: Captain America, in its own feature film that begins shooting next month. Those films will bring those young actors into the top tier, but Johannson entered the Marvel universe one already.

As with Downey’s increasingly complex Iron Man, The Black Widow character has its own complications for the artist Johansson to develop over sequels if they happen. A Stalingrad-born Russian secret agent, markswoman, black belt, and spy, orphaned and raised by Soviet agents, artificially enhanced for long life, and reprogrammed with false memories, The Black Widow defected to the US hopelessly in love with bad-boy Avenger arrow-man Hawkeye. (The book character gets around: The Widow has also had stormy affairs with Daredevil and with Captain America sidekick Bucky Barnes, among others.) Like Captain America, her story begins in the World War II era and the old lady in a young woman’s body has a loner’s streak and rocky relationships in her on-again off-again membership of multiple super teams and duos. The Black Widow, as portrayed by Johansson, screams out for more big-screen time. Joss Whedon - likely director of the Avengers movie and the creator of the Buffy the Vampire Slayer TV series - won’t be able to, nor should he, resist her bite.

As for the villain in the film that critics are raving about, yes, of course, Mickey Rourke puts on a credible Russian accent, broods, aces the role of Ivan Vanko (Whiplash) and then he dies. The end. He was a better villain than the first film's Jeff Bridges, which is what we expect from Rourke. But the heroes of this flick - Downey Jr., Johansson and Jackson as Nick Fury - are what viewers will remember long after exiting the theaters.

(And, as Marvel movie aficionados know already: Do not leave your seat until after the final credits have rolled: there will be a "tag" scene at the end that sets up the next movie in the series. 'Nuff said.)

None of this high praise for Johansson’s Marvel movie debut can obscure Downey Jr.’s acting triumph in Iron Man II. Something about playing a wounded hero is natural to many of the aforementioned Hollywood stars, but more so for the man who plays Tony Stark, a man who has more money and wisecracking charm than God but whose best friends seem to always have to deal with “the problem with him,” put up with him and pick up after his messes more than they seem to enjoy him. Saving the world with Tony isn’t always a picnic. And so it is in life, too. That’s what makes the best Marvel hero flicks so much more than special effects razzle-dazzle, as complex and broken humans stumble through the duties and crises that are much bigger and nobler than them. The DC comics franchise (Batman, in particular) has copied the Marvel formula bringing more angst and edge to its characters, but nobody does it like Marvel, which invented and deepened the characters over so many decades precisely around that genre.

Iron Man 2 is Hollywood’s first super hero of the Obama era, and like the USA itself, the lead character has growing pains of peacetime conversion. “I have privatized world peace,” Stark announces, flashing Nixonian peace signs, at a Congressional hearing in which a pudgy US Senator played by Gary Shandling seeks to make him turn over the Iron Man suit technology to the Pentagon. And there’s an awesome anti-corporate subplot with Sam Rockwell as rival arms dealer Justin Hammer playing an envious Bill Gates to Stark’s Steve Jobs. In the first Iron Man movie, Stark emerges from a kidnapping to cancel Stark Industries’ weapons production and devote the corporation’s entire resources to development of a new energy source. Meanwhile, the suit itself has become the weapon that makes all other weapons systems impotent and nation-states simply can't carry on with wars with the same gusto as they did before.

In the comic books, Stark was Marvel’s token right wing hero - obsessed with fighting communism and ever battling Russian and Chinese nemeses – flanked in the Avengers super team by social liberals like the selfless and noble Captain America and the hippie environmentalist Thor. That theme continued right into this century with the Marvel mega-comic series Civil War, in which Stark leads the half of the superhero universe that is in favor of a Super Hero Registration Act while Cap leads the guerrilla civil libertarian resistance. But the on-screen Stark has adapted to the times, rejecting empire for a higher calling, at least at the key moments between his out-of-uniform personality crises.

The prequel’s confession that “I am Iron Man” infuses and is the theme of Iron Man 2. Downey Jr. is Iron Man. And he is even more so Anthony Edward “Tony” Stark (both of whom inherited their trades from famous innovator fathers, a commonality that Downey Jr. cited to MTV as influencing his portrayal of Stark). This third in the five-or-more-part series leading up to the Avengers crescendo in 2012 – excuse my heresy – will probably end up surpassing the X-Men movie franchise as a pop cultural definer of what heroism looks like in our times.

The personal struggles of the flawed Stark who inherits the sins of his fathers and of his country and has a difficult, not always successful, time evolving into what he knows he needs to be mirrors that of US society and its citizens. And that’s what makes Iron Man 2 more than an action picture for boys and toys. The truth is that in 2010, we are all Iron Man, without enough time left to heal our considerable personal wounds and with new technologies at our fingertips that are at least as evil as they are good, but also the urgent duty to rise above our flaws and convert our technologies at an hour of moral crisis and to go out and save the day.