Has it really been almost a month since I last posted? Well then. Gorjus has been feeding us such steady and tantalizing glimpses of the forthcoming Sandusky Review that I hardly noticed my own absence, so I doubt you have either. (I’ve read all of SR3, and—spoiler alert!—it’s really awesome when Marlena shoots John Black in the spine.) There’s been a fair amount of crazy-busy insanity here that’s kept me from doing many of the things that usually give me blog post fodder—reading comics, listening to music, talking to my parents—but I have managed to collect a few half-baked thoughts on a variety of topics, such as . . .
1. Iron Man. I liked it! Okay, yes, it’s an Ode to Entitlement, but so is the source material.* And okay, yes, you can read it as a neo-con fantasy of American Innocence: Sure, Tony is making up for past complicity in various atrocities (of which he was of course completely ignorant!), but ultimately the best way to deal with geopolitical threats, says the movie, is unilateral global ass-kicking. Which is also in the source material, and in this case “source material” means “90% of all superhero comics ever published.” So I can live with that, even if I got the sense that the movie thought it was problematizing or complicating a worldview it ends up endorsing. I can live with these philosophical gripes because the move was just a damn lot of fun, front to back. I was so cautious about avoiding spoilers throughout the weeks leading up to the release—an approach that paid off greater dividends than I had expected—that I missed out on the post-credits bonus scene. But glorious, glorious YouTube has it up here, so now I don’t have to go back right away. I could have used more Tony-in-the-suit action, but, as a friend pointed out, I make some similar comment about nearly every superhero movie.
Here I’m going to speculate a bit in a poorly thought-out manner: Mulling over my reservations about the movie, one thing I realized is that, more than any other classic Marvel character, Iron Man’s origin and mission are grounded in the Cold War; this may even be why his title has seemed a bit directionless since the late 1980s—not unlike the similar malaise that has characterized the James Bond franchise in a post-Soviet world. Without another technologically advanced, highly industrialized superpower whose proxies—Crimson Dynamo, Titanium Man—he can face off against in a good old fashioned Marvel-style ideological slugfest, Iron Man wants for good villains, or maybe just for a threat which he doesn’t end through spectacular overkill. The problem is, I think, that Iron Man needs to stay in his weight class, villain-wise: Because of the nature and extent of Iron Man’s powers, his beating up on muggers or low-level terrorist thugs looks like petty bullying in a way that it doesn’t for, say, Spider-Man or Batman—thus my slight squeamishness at one of the “kewl badass superhero” scenes in the film. The binary struggle between US and USSR produced high-powered baddies by the bushel, but the world has changed a fair bit since then. Iron Man v. Crimson Dynamo in a titanic battle of political and economic systems somehow works better than Iron Man v. Guy with Suitcase Bomb. I don’t know if, given China’s rise to superpower status, now is the best or worst time to dust off (and update! Oh, please update) The Mandarin.
(*I also saw Dan in Real Life on video this weekend, and compared to that Ode to Entitlement, Iron Man was a Howard Zinn fever dream.)
2. Don Cazayoux. As you political junkies know, Democrat Don Cazayoux won a special election for the congressional seat once held by Republican Richard Baker—for a district that includes Baton Rouge. BR is red, red, red, and it’s quite an achievement for Cazayoux to have squeaked this one out against an opponent who had support from the very popular Gov. Jindal (but who also was tied to David Duke). As Hullabaloo contributor dday notes here, the fact Cazayoux won despite a well financed attack from the Right linking him to Nancy Pelosi, Hillary Clinton, and Barack Obama should make people realize that the bark of the vaunted Republican attack machine is far worse than its bite.
But I’d go a step further: Cazayoux ran as a very conservative Democrat—in part because he had to if he wanted to get elected in this district, and in part because I think that’s true to who he is as a politician: a social conservative with a dash of economic populism. But his ads were so concerned with establishing his family values bona fides—a lot of them were about Protecting Our Kids from Predators—that it really began to seem barely worth the effort turn out to vote, given the apparent similarities between the candidates. (This is not an uncommon feeling for a liberal in Louisiana.) In a perverse way, and even though at least one of them was factually inaccurate, the attack ads actually appealed to liberal voters indirectly in a way that Cazayoux could not afford to directly; they spread the message about Cazayoux’s liberal-moderate voting record and persuaded me that he was someone worth supporting. Because of my limited sample size (1) I am hesitant to make any sweeping pronouncements about whether or not this phenomenon was widespread, but I will say that there are worse things right now than being linked to the national Democratic party—like, say, being linked to the national Republican party—and that we may realize soon enough that low voter turnout is the only thing keeping the Red Stick a red district.
1. Dan in Real Life sucked (and I don’t usually say that about films…I usually find a nice way of saying it). It should have been called “Dan and his Pretentious Family” (See: family calisthenics scene, the family variety show scene, and the daughters’ unabashed hatred of the Steve Carell character (to say nothing of this multi-million dollar cabin they’re all visiting). Is this how rich people live? And, instead of making fun of how this family lives, is the film suggesting that we should all be so lucky as to have a family like Dan’s?
2. If you’ve read Fareed Zakaria’s story on the Post-American world (this week’s Newsweek) you know that the idea of China’s rise as a superpower is economic and not martial. China has only about 20 nuclear missiles that can reach the US. By contrast, we have some 830, most with multiple warheads, that can reach China. My point being that Tony Stark will have to deal with the threat of China’s rise (Stark Industries getting undercut by low-cost weapons manufacturing?) before Iron Man will. Still, though, I think you’re right about Iron Man needing some sort of Manichean struggle. Lest we forget that, in some parts of the globe (eh hem, North Korea) the Cold War never ended. I’d pay for an issue that featured Iron Man vs. the God-King/ Fatherly Leader Kim Jung IL!
3. About Don Cazayoux. A few days before the election we received a mailer from his supporters informing us that Woody Jenkins was “shipping our jobs to a communist country that offers state sponsored abortions”.
And I had to think: well played, sir. That’s the trifecta, right there (national defense, economy, abortion) in one sentence. All to the image of Woody Jenkins framed in front of a Chinese flag.
I gotta go see Iron Man. Also: the Eliot R. Brown-penned entry in the OHOTMU on the Mandarin’s rings kept me wide-eyed for DAYS! Also: go Cazayoux!
Something I forgot to include in the post was to point out that it’s great that Marvel has a brand new Iron Man series debuting on Wednesday, featuring a great creative team in Matt Fraction and Salvador Larocca; yes, a new Iron Man #1 might be something that lots of people who went to see the movie might be interested in, especially if they read comics as a kid and drifted away or are intrigued enough by the character to want more. So, maybe it would have made sense for Marvel to buy some ad time trumpeting this fact? If not during the previews, then during the BS promo stuff that plays before the previews? Even just an intrusive scroll across the bottom of the Mamma Mia making-of fluff piece? I don’t have a degree in marketing or anything, and I know I persist in the erroneous presumption that the comics matter as much/more than the other media Marvel produces, but, you know, synergy is synergy, right?
Joe, A-men to your assessment of Dan; I wanted to punch everyone in the movie but Steve Carrell, and sometimes Steve Carrell too. You know, Gilmore Girls got away with a lot of similar stuff because it wore its fable-ness, its fairy-tale-ness, on its sleeve; but Dan seemed to think it was offering clear-eyed realism. Insufferable. I don’t know what I expected, except that since I didn’t see Bruce Almighty I still labor under the assumption that anything Steve Carrell is in is probably good.
Superhero Kim Jung Il is an awesome idea, and I don’t know why I haven’t seen it already.
Oh, dear, and I liked Dan in Real Life. Am I shallow? I need to dig into the deeper levels of myself and force myself to go see Iron Man. I will be deeper, I will be deeper. Maybe I liked it because my family actually did play football together on holidays, that is, until my cousin Cindy lost her engagement ring in one skirmish. After that we spent every holiday out on the field with a metal detector searching for diamonds.
But, ahem, we have been missing the Fury posts and expect more regular appearances regardless of the frequency of Gorjus’ postings!
Because PF mentioned the Mandarin I thought I’d pass along this rumor-iest of rumors concerning Iron Man 2. The writer does make a convincing argument about how it would work with the “Ten Rings” group featured in IM 1. Enjoy.
http://www.cinemablend.com/new/Scoop-Iron-Man-2-Plot-And-Villain-Details-8736.html