FILM
REVIEW Stark reversals of a Pentagon
blockbuster Iron Man,
directed by Jon Favreau
Reviewed by
Nick Turse
"Liberal Hollywood" is a
favorite whipping-boy of right-wingers who suppose
the town and its signature industry are
ever-at-work undermining the US military. In
reality, the military has been deeply involved
with the film industry since the Silent Era.
Today, however, the ad hoc arrangements of the
past have been replaced by a full-scale one-stop
shop, occupying a floor of a Los Angeles office
building. There, the army, navy, air force,
marines, coast guard, and the Department of
Defense itself have established entertainment
liaison offices to help ensure that Hollywood makes
movies the military way.
What they have to trade, especially when
it comes to blockbuster films, is access to
high-tech, tax-payer funded, otherwise unavailable
gear. What they get in return is usually the right
to alter or shape scripts to suit their needs. If
you want to see the fruits of this relationship in
action, all you need to do is head down to your
local multiplex. Chances are that Iron Man
- the latest military-entertainment masterpiece -
is playing on a couple of screens.
For the
past three weeks, Iron Man - a film
produced by its comic-book parent Marvel and
distributed by Paramount Pictures - has cleaned up
at the box office, taking in a staggering $222.5
million in the US and $428.5 million worldwide.
The movie, which opened with "the tenth biggest
weekend box office performance of all time" and
the second biggest for a non-sequel, has the added
distinction of being the "best-reviewed movie of
2008 so far". For instance, in the New York Times,
movie reviewer A O Scott called Iron Man "an
unusually good superhero picture", while Roger
Ebert wrote: "The world needs another comic book
movie like it needs another [George W] Bush
administration ... [but] if we must have one more
... Iron Man is a swell one to have." There
has even been nascent Oscar buzz.
Robert
Downey Jr has been nearly universally praised for
a winning performance as
playboy-billionaire-merchant-of-death-genius-inventor
Tony Stark, head of Stark Industries, a fictional
version of Lockheed or Boeing. In the film, Stark
travels to Afghanistan to showcase a new weapon of
massive destruction to American military
commanders occupying that country. On a Humvee
journey through the Afghan backlands, his military
convoy is caught up in a deadly ambush by al-Qaeda
stand-ins, who capture him and promptly subject
him to what Vice President Dick Cheney once dubbed
"a dunk in the water", but used to be known as
"the Water Torture". The object is to force him to
build his Jericho weapons system, one of his
"masterpieces of death", in their Tora Bora-like
mountain cave complex.
As practically
everyone in the world already knows, Stark instead
builds a prototype metal super-suit and busts out
of his cave of confinement, slaughtering his
terrorist captors as he goes. Back in the US, a
born-again Stark announces that his company needs
to get out of the weapons game, claiming he has
"more to offer the world than making things blow
up". Yet, what he proceeds to build is, of course,
a souped-up model of the suit he designed in the
Afghan cave. Back inside it, as Iron Man, he then
uses it to "blow up" bad guys in Afghanistan,
taking on the role of a kind of
(super-)human-rights vigilante. He even tangles
with US forces in the skies over that occupied
land, but when the air force's sleek, ultra
high-tech, F-22A Raptors try to shoot him down, he
refrains from using his awesome powers of
invention to blow them away. This isn't the only
free pass doled out to the US military in the
film.
Just as America's wars in Iraq and
Afghanistan continue to bring various Vietnam
analogies to mind, Iron Man has its own
Vietnam pedigree. Before Tony Stark landed in
Afghanistan in 2008, he first lumbered forth in
Vietnam in the 1960s. That was, of course, when he
was still just the clunky hero of the comic book
series on which the film is based. Marvel's metal
man then battled that era's American enemies of
choice: not al-Qaeda-style terrorists, but
communists in Southeast Asia.
Versions of
the stereotypical evil Asians of Iron Man's
comic-book world would appear almost unaltered on
the big screen in 1978 in another movie punctuated
by gunfire and explosions that also garnered great
reviews. The Deer Hunter, an epic of loss
and horror in Vietnam, eventually took home four
Academy Awards, including Best Picture honors.
Then, and since, however, the movie has been
excoriated by antiwar critics for the way it
turned history on its head in its use of reversed
iconic images that seemingly placed all guilt for
death and destruction in Vietnam on America's
enemies.
Most famously, it appropriated a
then-unforgettable Pulitzer prize-winning photo of
Lieutenant Colonel Nguyen Ngoc Loan, South
Vietnam's national police chief, executing an
unarmed, bound prisoner during the Tet Offensive
with a point blank pistol shot to the head. In the
film, however, it was the evil enemy which made
American prisoners do the same to themselves as
they were forced to play Russian Roulette for the
amusement of their sadistic Vietnamese captors
(something that had no basis in reality).
The film Iron Man is replete with
such reversals, starting with the obvious fact
that, in Afghanistan, it is Americans who have
imprisoned captured members of al-Qaeda and the
Taliban (as well as untold innocents) in
exceedingly grim conditions, not vice-versa. It is
they who, like Tony Stark, have been subjected to
the Bush administration's signature "harsh
interrogation technique". While a few reviewers
have offhandedly alluded to the eeriness of this
screen choice, Iron Man has suffered no
serious criticism for taking the imprisonment
practices, and most infamous torture, of the Bush
years and superimposing it onto America's favorite
evil-doers.
Nor have critics generally
thought to point out that, while, in the film, the
nefarious Obadiah Stane, Stark's right hand man,
is a double-dealing arms dealer who is selling
high-tech weapons systems to the terrorists in
Afghanistan (and trying to kill Stark as well),
two decades ago the US government played just that
role. For years, it sent advanced weapons systems
- including Stinger missiles, one of the most
high-tech weapons of that moment - to jihadis in
Afghanistan so they could make war on one infidel
superpower (the Soviet Union), before setting
their sights on another (the United States). And
while this took place way back in the 1980s, it
shouldn't be too hard for film critics to recall -
since it was lionized in last year's celebrated
Tom Hanks' film Charlie Wilson's War.
In the cinematic Marvel Universe, however,
the US military, which runs the notorious prison
at Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan where so many
have been imprisoned, abused, and, in some cases,
have even died, receives a veritable get out of
jail free card. And you don't need to look very
closely to understand why - or why the sleek US
aircraft in the film get a similar free pass from
Iron Man, even when they attack him, or why
terrorists and arms dealers take the fall for what
the US has done in the real world.
If they
didn't, you can be sure that Iron Man wouldn't be
involved in a blue-skies ballet with F-22A Raptors
in the movie's signature scene and that the
filmmakers would never have been able to shoot at
Edwards Air Force base - a prospect which could
have all but grounded Iron Man, since, as
director Jon Favreau put it, Edwards was "the best
back lot you could ever have". Favreau, in fact,
minced no words in his ardent praise for the way
working with the air force gave him access to the
"best stuff" and how filming on the base brought
"a certain prestige to the film". Perhaps in
exchange for the US Air Force's collaboration,
there was an additional small return favor: Iron
Man's confidant, sidekick, and military liaison,
Lieutenant Colonel James "Rhodey" Rhodes - another
hero of the film - is now an air force man, not
the marine he was in the comic.
With the
box office numbers still pouring in and the
announcement of sequels to come, the arrangement
has obviously worked out well for Favreau, Marvel,
Paramount - and the US Air Force. Before the movie
was released, Master Sergeant Larry Belen, the
superintendent of technical support for the Air
Force Test Pilot School and one of many airmen who
auditioned for a spot in the movie, outlined his
motivation to aid the film: "I want people to walk
away from this movie with a really good impression
of the air force, like they got about the navy
seeing Top Gun."
Air force captain
Christian Hodge, the Defense Department's project
officer for Iron Man, may have put it best,
however, when he predicted that, once the film
appeared, the "air force is going to come off
looking like rock stars". Maybe the air force
hasn't hit the Top Gun-style jackpot with
Iron Man, but there can be no question
that, in an American world in which war-fighting
doesn't exactly have the glitz of yesteryear,
Iron Man is certainly a military triumph.
As Chuck Vinch noted in a review published in the
Air Force Times, "The script ... will surely have
the flyboy brass back at the Pentagon trading high
fives - especially the scene in which Iron Man
dogfights in the high clouds with two F-22
Raptors."
Coming on the heels of last
year's military-aided mega-spectacular
Transformers, the Pentagon is managing to
keep a steady stream of pro-military blockbusters
in front of young eyes during two dismally
unsuccessful foreign occupations that grind on
without end. In his Iron Man review, Roger
Ebert called the pre-transformation Tony Stark,
"the embodiment of the military-industrial complex
that president Eisenhower warned against in 1961 -
a financial superhero for whom war is good
business, and whose business interests guarantee
there will always be a market for war."
Here's the irony that Ebert missed: What
the film Iron Man actually catches is the
spirit of the successor "complex", which has leapt
not only into the cinematic world of superheroes,
but also into the civilian sphere of our world in
a huge way. Today, almost everywhere you look,
whether at the latest blockbuster on the big
screen or what's on much smaller screens in your
own home - likely made by a defense contractor
like Sony, Samsung, Panasonic or Toshiba - you'll
find the Pentagon or its corporate partners.
In fact, from the companies that make your
computer to those that produce your favorite soft
drink, many of the products in your home are made
by Defense Department contractors - and, if you
look carefully, you don't even need the glowing
eyes of an advanced "cybernetic helmet," like Iron
Man's, to see them.
Nick Turse
is the associate editor and research director of
Tomdispatch.com. His first book,The Complex, an exploration of the
new military-corporate complex in America, was
recently published in the American Empire Project
series by Metropolitan Books.
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