Despite being part of an obscenely important demographic and therefore ruling the mainstream media with a large beer- and pizza-stained fist (slightly bent out of shape from playing too much Halo), the 18-24-year-old American male has his insecurities. “Iron Man” is, on many levels, a great superhero movie–it’s shiny, it never stagnates in exposition, faux-philosophy, or “drama,” and it invests you just enough in its characters for you to care (slightly) about the outcomes of its various explosions. But it’s also, I think, eerily thorough at playing to, and briefly (though vicariously) placating, the specific desires of its audience–to the point that it often feels like cinematic Valium or a cinematic handjob. Consider Tony Stark, and think about how obscenely fucking close he comes to a hidden, haunting archetype.
We want, desperately, to conquer the technology that seems to enslave us on a daily basis; to become masters of machines.
With celebrity easily and most often obtained through slimy means, we want to be rich and famous for something substantive, something we’ve done on our own (most likely involving technology; see: Steve Jobs).
Forget stoicism, depression, guardedness: we want to be cocky, funny, and endearingly sarcastic at all times.
We want enough power over women to justify having a system for ushering them out the door in the morning–but we also want meaningful relationships.
We want a morality (and even a pacifism) that somehow still allows us to kick some ass and set things on fire.
We want a geopolitical climate (actually, an understanding of the geopolitical climate) that clearly establishes good and evil; we want Iron Man’s civilian/terrorist targeting system.
And yet, we also want to be impossibly fucking smart–we want to have knowledge that no one else has, hording blueprints, ideas, expertise in the workshops under our giant Malibu mansions instead of feeling lost and useless amidst the cacophonous noise of everyone else’s expression. We want to build a prototype and hold a copyright.
We want, finally, to be strong–but not Superman strong, not Hulk strong, not steroid strong. Not even Batman strong, because Batman gets all his shit from Morgan Freeman. We want sovereignty and informational mastery; certainty and autonomy—we want to know how to get power and we want to attain it by ourselves.
Tony Stark has his cake and eats it too. He has many cakes, in fact; the secret to “Iron Man” is that he eats them one-by-one in front of our faces while pointing at their paradoxically undisturbed existence.
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Tony Stark owns a bakery?
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