From the Eastern seaboard, the land-locked Mid-west, the keys, the Alps, the Blackhills and Budapest
Disjointed thoughts on Tony Stark during Iron Man 3:
"You know who I am"
The phrase is on Tony's name tag at the conference in Switzerland, he says it right in the first part of the narration, and even the Mandarin says it [but more on that later]. In 1999, Tony knew who he was. After the cave changed his life, and after he built the first Marks he *couldn't wait* to tell everyone who would listen that he was Iron Man. A year ago Cap asked Tony -- take away the suit of armor, what is he? Well. Genius, billionaire, playboy, philanthropist. Before the wormhole, Tony knew who he was. But the wormhole changed everything.
IM3 doesn't spend THAT much time analyzing Tony's psyche if you think about it. But his internal turmoil is what moves the entire narrative. And you add the sleeplessness to the anxiety attacks and you get a pretty nasty picture. The events in NYC took a really hard toll on him, and it figures. He was confronted by his own mortality from several angles all at the same time. Half of his team is made up of an immortal God, a superhuman soldier HIS OWN FATHER had a hand on creating, and a buddy scientist who turns green and goes basically invulnerable. Then, after Cap accused him of being incapable of sacrificing himself for ANYBODY, he does decide to sacrifice himself to SAVE THE ENTIRE PLANET. The trip through the wormhole was a one-way suicide mission, and he has no idea how he survived that.
Except for the fact that he was only able to save everyone because he built the suit. And he only survived because he was inside the suit both in outer space and while being manhandled by Hulk. So of course in his head, "I am Iron Man" stops being about his humanity, and the ONLY thing he is now is the suit. He is only useful to society in the suit. And well, this is what he does. "Threat is imminent", he says. So he tinkers. And he builds another suit. And another. And so on and so forth and suddenly he went from the Mark 7 a year ago to the Mark 42 now. The suit IS Iron Man, and Tony is just the man in a can.
"The Mechanic. Tony."
IM3 is part Hero's Journey, part an It's a Wonderful Life reenactment of sorts. The Christmas setting solves a practical problem -- why didn't the Avengers/SHIELD show up to help? Because everything happens oh so very fast -- but it also sets up the spirit of the movie. Our Hero has lost his sense of self, and then he loses his house, and his toys, and even JARVIS goes to sleep early in the journey.
Until Tony is all alone in the dead cold Winter with nothing but his set of skills to sort through this mess.
And a little snarky kid who looks at Tony and the suit, and decides the suit is Iron Man, and Tony is the mechanic. Which in turns is what ultimately helps Tony solve his own self-identity issues. The turning point comes when Harley asks him, "you're a mechanic, right? Why don't you just build something?"
It's a neat narrative trick -- if Iron Man is nothing but the suit, then let's make Tony spend almost the entire movie outside of the suit so he can find himself again. We get the bonus of the nice callback to TONY STARK WAS ABLE TO BUILD THIS IN A CAVE. WITH A BOX OF SCRAPS. when he buys the terrorist's wet dream shopping list and infiltrates the Mandarin's palace in sunglasses and a hoodie [he wore the hoodie! /random Smallville reference only 3 people will get] and his arsenal of home-made toys.
And even when he's in the suit, most of the time it's only parts of it. The Mark 42 is both insanely brilliant, and a piece of malfunctioning crap. Kinda like Tony's head during most of the movie.
[And no way no how that's a random number. It's geek catnip, it's what 42 means. Besides the answer to life, the universe and everything, of course. Which hey! Isn't it all tied up in a pretty bow? That's kinda what Tony is looking for. Let's give this script a very slow clap, everyone.]
And so the movies goes -- from Iron Man being nothing but the suit, to Tony having no suits at all, to random pieces of a faulty suit [insert Man-Machine Kraftwerk joke here], to a whole army of suits that Tony is manning FROM THE OUTSIDE like an opera conductor with the same grandiosity he chastised Harley about.
"How does it look?"
"Like Christmas, but with more... me."
The suits *were* a distraction, and an escape, but in the end, destroying all of them is not a sacrifice. He can build all of them a thousand times over. He says it: you can take away his toys, and his house. The suits were a cocoon, and he was hiding behind [well, inside] them ever since the wormhole, but now he was the understanding that he IS Iron Man. And The Mechanic. Tony.
...
ETA: And the Mandarin:
I find it interesting that the Mandarin also says "You know who I am", because in a movie where the hero is searching for his own identity, it's a neat trick to take the same sentence he starts with -- the thing he is searching for -- and distort it completely by the Mandarin being a fake construction of a megalomaniac rich white dude and his PR people.
And it's the fact that the Mandarin's "you know how I am" sounds oh so completely true at the moment in the movie he says it that brings me to my next point: he is *exactly* what the Western Civilization expect him to be.
I think the thing that makes the Mandarin being fake such a brilliant twist is that up until the gotcha! scene, we-the-audience maybe feel a little uncomfortable by his existence. Why is he such a bad cliché? Aren't we past the stereotyping, Hollywood? And why didn't you hire a Chinese actor to play a Chinese character? Why hire Ben Kingsley, an actor of Indian descent? Are we back to putting every non-caucasian actor in the same othering category and making it OK to give them whatever heritage a movie needs by yellow-facing him?
And then comes the twist, and we learn that he WAS yellow-faced, and it was deliberate. "They gave me plastic surgery", Trevor says. A rich white dude used Western society's own prejudices and created the perfect cardboard cut villain, and the thing that makes me tick is that we-the-audience DO NOT SEE IT COMING *because* he is the perfect cardboard cut villain our collective prejudices as a society concocts.
And I gotta tell you, a Hollywood popcorn superhero blockbuster that inverts yellowfacing into an actual critique of society's innate prejudices is something that I truly and really appreciate with all my social justice little heart.
...
It's also worthy of mention that Maya and Pepper's scenes together -- especially their conversation about their *work* -- make this movie pass the Bechdel Test, which is another thing I did not expect, and also truly appreciate.
...
I have more stuff on Pepper, and Tony/Pepper, but I'm leaving that to another post because this is gonna get super long and confusing if I go on. Comments on everything about the movie are more than welcome though, especially now that my good friends at the North have all seen the movie already, right? Talk to me, peoples! :)
"You know who I am"
The phrase is on Tony's name tag at the conference in Switzerland, he says it right in the first part of the narration, and even the Mandarin says it [but more on that later]. In 1999, Tony knew who he was. After the cave changed his life, and after he built the first Marks he *couldn't wait* to tell everyone who would listen that he was Iron Man. A year ago Cap asked Tony -- take away the suit of armor, what is he? Well. Genius, billionaire, playboy, philanthropist. Before the wormhole, Tony knew who he was. But the wormhole changed everything.
IM3 doesn't spend THAT much time analyzing Tony's psyche if you think about it. But his internal turmoil is what moves the entire narrative. And you add the sleeplessness to the anxiety attacks and you get a pretty nasty picture. The events in NYC took a really hard toll on him, and it figures. He was confronted by his own mortality from several angles all at the same time. Half of his team is made up of an immortal God, a superhuman soldier HIS OWN FATHER had a hand on creating, and a buddy scientist who turns green and goes basically invulnerable. Then, after Cap accused him of being incapable of sacrificing himself for ANYBODY, he does decide to sacrifice himself to SAVE THE ENTIRE PLANET. The trip through the wormhole was a one-way suicide mission, and he has no idea how he survived that.
Except for the fact that he was only able to save everyone because he built the suit. And he only survived because he was inside the suit both in outer space and while being manhandled by Hulk. So of course in his head, "I am Iron Man" stops being about his humanity, and the ONLY thing he is now is the suit. He is only useful to society in the suit. And well, this is what he does. "Threat is imminent", he says. So he tinkers. And he builds another suit. And another. And so on and so forth and suddenly he went from the Mark 7 a year ago to the Mark 42 now. The suit IS Iron Man, and Tony is just the man in a can.
"The Mechanic. Tony."
IM3 is part Hero's Journey, part an It's a Wonderful Life reenactment of sorts. The Christmas setting solves a practical problem -- why didn't the Avengers/SHIELD show up to help? Because everything happens oh so very fast -- but it also sets up the spirit of the movie. Our Hero has lost his sense of self, and then he loses his house, and his toys, and even JARVIS goes to sleep early in the journey.
Until Tony is all alone in the dead cold Winter with nothing but his set of skills to sort through this mess.
And a little snarky kid who looks at Tony and the suit, and decides the suit is Iron Man, and Tony is the mechanic. Which in turns is what ultimately helps Tony solve his own self-identity issues. The turning point comes when Harley asks him, "you're a mechanic, right? Why don't you just build something?"
It's a neat narrative trick -- if Iron Man is nothing but the suit, then let's make Tony spend almost the entire movie outside of the suit so he can find himself again. We get the bonus of the nice callback to TONY STARK WAS ABLE TO BUILD THIS IN A CAVE. WITH A BOX OF SCRAPS. when he buys the terrorist's wet dream shopping list and infiltrates the Mandarin's palace in sunglasses and a hoodie [he wore the hoodie! /random Smallville reference only 3 people will get] and his arsenal of home-made toys.
And even when he's in the suit, most of the time it's only parts of it. The Mark 42 is both insanely brilliant, and a piece of malfunctioning crap. Kinda like Tony's head during most of the movie.
[And no way no how that's a random number. It's geek catnip, it's what 42 means. Besides the answer to life, the universe and everything, of course. Which hey! Isn't it all tied up in a pretty bow? That's kinda what Tony is looking for. Let's give this script a very slow clap, everyone.]
And so the movies goes -- from Iron Man being nothing but the suit, to Tony having no suits at all, to random pieces of a faulty suit [insert Man-Machine Kraftwerk joke here], to a whole army of suits that Tony is manning FROM THE OUTSIDE like an opera conductor with the same grandiosity he chastised Harley about.
"How does it look?"
"Like Christmas, but with more... me."
The suits *were* a distraction, and an escape, but in the end, destroying all of them is not a sacrifice. He can build all of them a thousand times over. He says it: you can take away his toys, and his house. The suits were a cocoon, and he was hiding behind [well, inside] them ever since the wormhole, but now he was the understanding that he IS Iron Man. And The Mechanic. Tony.
...
ETA: And the Mandarin:
I find it interesting that the Mandarin also says "You know who I am", because in a movie where the hero is searching for his own identity, it's a neat trick to take the same sentence he starts with -- the thing he is searching for -- and distort it completely by the Mandarin being a fake construction of a megalomaniac rich white dude and his PR people.
And it's the fact that the Mandarin's "you know how I am" sounds oh so completely true at the moment in the movie he says it that brings me to my next point: he is *exactly* what the Western Civilization expect him to be.
I think the thing that makes the Mandarin being fake such a brilliant twist is that up until the gotcha! scene, we-the-audience maybe feel a little uncomfortable by his existence. Why is he such a bad cliché? Aren't we past the stereotyping, Hollywood? And why didn't you hire a Chinese actor to play a Chinese character? Why hire Ben Kingsley, an actor of Indian descent? Are we back to putting every non-caucasian actor in the same othering category and making it OK to give them whatever heritage a movie needs by yellow-facing him?
And then comes the twist, and we learn that he WAS yellow-faced, and it was deliberate. "They gave me plastic surgery", Trevor says. A rich white dude used Western society's own prejudices and created the perfect cardboard cut villain, and the thing that makes me tick is that we-the-audience DO NOT SEE IT COMING *because* he is the perfect cardboard cut villain our collective prejudices as a society concocts.
And I gotta tell you, a Hollywood popcorn superhero blockbuster that inverts yellowfacing into an actual critique of society's innate prejudices is something that I truly and really appreciate with all my social justice little heart.
...
It's also worthy of mention that Maya and Pepper's scenes together -- especially their conversation about their *work* -- make this movie pass the Bechdel Test, which is another thing I did not expect, and also truly appreciate.
...
I have more stuff on Pepper, and Tony/Pepper, but I'm leaving that to another post because this is gonna get super long and confusing if I go on. Comments on everything about the movie are more than welcome though, especially now that my good friends at the North have all seen the movie already, right? Talk to me, peoples! :)