Road To Endgame: 'Iron Man' Built The Foundation Of The MCU Using Charm And Military Fantasy

(Welcome to Road to Endgame, where we revisit all 22 movies of the Marvel Cinematic Universe and ask, "How did we get here?" First up: Iron Man and the foundation of Marvel's messy political outlook.)At Comic Con 2006, Marvel Studios promised an unprecedented four-franchise shared continuity, set to cross over in The Avengers. Thirteen years later, we're waiting (im)patiently for Iron Man to recover from his cosmic loss alongside Captain America, Thor, The Incredible Hulk, the Guardians of the Galaxy, Spider-Man, Doctor Strange and Black Panther, among others, as we head toward a 22-film culmination: Avengers: Endgame.Not only have the aforementioned characters become mainstays of popular culture, the Marvel Cinematic Universe has long since become the highest grossing film franchise in history. It began with Jon Favreau's Iron Man in 2008, a film that feels downright modest by modern blockbuster standards, but one that was tasked with crafting a political backdrop to launch heroes yet unseen.As the foundation of a boundary-breaking, landscape-shifting series, Iron Man is worth lauding. Though, as one of many Hollywood films subsidized by the U.S. government, its relationship to military power is worth further scrutiny, as it impacts both the film's political outlook, and its character-centric story.

Iron Man shifted Stark's comic origin from '60s Vietnam to modern Afghanistan, allowing for a more literal, more contemporary articulation of America's military industrial complex. This approach was embodied not only by the film's villains, but its hero.Superhero movies had been picking up steam for nearly a decade, but Iron Man was the first to set its story against a recognizable geopolitical reality. Stark visits the Middle East to sell deadly weapons to the U.S. military, weapons he openly compares to the Manhattan Project, which his father worked on decades earlier. Charming as Stark is, his outlook here is detestable, and he's forced to face up to it once he's kidnapped, bearing witness to how and where his missiles are actually used."Peace means having a bigger stick than the other guy," Stark tells a reporter early on, who rightly responds: "That's a great line, coming from the guy selling the sticks." At the beginning of the series, Stark profits, albeit unwittingly, from selling to "both sides" of the wartime equation, something his villains (Obadiah Stane, Justin Hammer and Aldrich Killian) are guilty of in every Iron Man film.At its core, the first Iron Man is a tale of an American war profiteer having a change of heart, symbolized by the arc reactor in his chest, a glowing promise of untold possibility. It's a hopeful idea on the surface, centered around a man who sees his weapons fall into the wrong hands and acts accordingly. He contends with his legacy by shutting down the weapons' division of Stark Industries, before taking on the mantle of an armed vigilante. But herein lies the problem with Tony Stark.While he works to get his weapons out of "the wrong hands," be it the Ten Rings militants or the man behind the curtain, Jeff Bridges' Obadiah Stane (to say nothing of the U.S. military, to whom Stark has been more than happy to sell), there's nothing delineating the wrong hands from the right ones. To Tony Stark, the egocentric futurist, the right hands remain his own.The film's final battle, fought between Iron Man and "bigger Iron Man" (the comics' Iron Monger) is an attempt to contrast Stark's newfound righteousness with the warmonger he once was. However, this climax still pits two titans of weapons technology, Stark and Stane, against each other for ideological control of weapons of mass destruction; their conflict plays out in the form of two weaponeers trying to out-weapon one another.We know how Stane would use his legion of iron suits — the same way he uses all weapons, selling them under the table to profit from a never-ending war — but the film never positions Stark as an alternative, or as someone who might better the status quo. He employs distinctly U.S. military tactics like unsanctioned foreign intervention. He hands out extrajudicial murder like candy, and he puts civilians at further risk. In fact, Stark's impetus for intervening at all is the mention of Yinsen's hometown of Gulmira, making his mission one of reckless revenge, rather than an altruistic act. That this is never contextualized as anything but heroic leaves a sour taste, when one considers the destructive real-world implications of America's presence in the region.However, the conflation of super-heroism with real-world U.S. militarism might not be accidental. The film's geopolitical backdrop — proxy wars, a destabilized Middle East, and America's general military industrial complex — is framed only as a product of private capitalism and foreign militia, rather than U.S. government policy (let alone policy that Stark enables). In the Marvel Cinematic Universe, violence is something the U.S. military merely responds to, rather than something it causes. This is by design, though the details of this design weren't made public until Pentagon documents were released under the Freedom of Information Act five years later, including a Department of Defense agreement that locked the film in to a military-approved script.Which brings up a pertinent question: Is Iron Man military propaganda?

In short, yes. It's designed, with direct influence of the U.S. government and paints a skewed narrative of American foreign policy, one in which the U.S. military neither causes nor exacerbates any of the destruction seen in the film. The blame is passed entirely to industry and to hostile foreign entities, a narrative decision whose ripple effect can be felt throughout the series.A number of studio films each year have the distinction of military funding, so it's hardly shocking that a company like Marvel, despite its anti-weapons manufacture flagship character, would tie up with Defense Contractor Northrop Grumman in 2017. A chief complaint to this comic partnership was the ethos of Tony Stark, which fans used to lambast Marvel for its hypocrisy. But this hypocrisy wasn't new; it had been built into Marvel's DNA ever since Iron Man hit cinemas. The possibility of military partnership isn't a bug in the Marvel machine. It's a feature, and it's one we haven't really stopped to grapple with as the Marvel Cinematic Universe has grown in global influence.The MCU often sees heroes struggling with power and how to wield it, but its questions of intervention are locked within an invisible framework, one that allows for lip-service to questioning power, yet one that implicitly comes down on the side of power itself, forever protecting the American status quo in the larger Marvel narrative.The closest thing to a counter-example comes from the other side of the globe. A story like Yeon Sang-ho's Psychokinesis, the 2018 Korean superhero dramedy, wouldn't fly in the MCU. Yeon's film features a working-class father gaining powers and fighting off police violence against the poor; in the process, the film seeks to hold real-world power structure accountable, rather than using metaphorical villains that let real ones off the hook (Metaphors don't quite work as intended when the real issues being alluded to are also present in the narrative, but remain unaddressed).Time and time again, Marvel's villains have been adjacent to real-world structures, but they are never the structures themselves, despite embodying their flaws. In this film, Iron Man isn't tackling an unjust system. He's simply fighting a few bad apples. The film's big-bad, Obadiah Stane, isn't framed as evil for selling lethal weapons, period, but for selling these weapons to America's enemies. In the world of Iron Man, one created in part to appease the D.O.D., civilian casualties and unjust interventions are never framed as American problems.The cinematic language we've grown used to speaking over the last decade is, essentially, incomplete, until we decode this fundamentally propagandist aspect of some of our most beloved blockbusters. Filling the gaps with our own conversations and critiques becomes vital when such vast swathes of our culture claim to speak truth to power, but ultimately take its side.This same problem exists at the core of American politics, wherein many who (rightly) speak out against war and human rights abuses under a given administration tend to fall asleep at the wheel when their "side" is in power, committing equally heinous war crimes while deporting families. It's no wonder, then, that all Marvel needs to do is make its villains seem like the greater of two evils, so that its heroes — Black Panther aside — can serve contemporary definitions of order.It would be easy enough to ignore the series' latent propaganda, were it not so influential on the stories being told.

The Ten Rings terrorist militia — who speak an assortment of languages, from Arabic, Urdu and Pashto to Dari, Mongolian and Russian — have no discernible cultural or geographical origin, and thus, no discernible politics either. While they refer to Stark as "the most famous mass murderer in the history of America," the film fails to specify who used Stark's weapons for murder, against whom, and the reasons these militants retaliate against American military interests.In the film's geopolitical context, to rob the villains of clear objectives is to rob the premise of its full potential. The violence Stark's weapons are used for is never fully contextualized, because painting a clear picture of the villains and their motives would mean portraying the U.S. military destruction they push back against. Therefore, Stark's own remorse and reckoning — the very forces driving the film — have little dramatic grounding.This lacking political framing plays counter to Iron Man's seemingly "real world" setting. The film's texture is real, but its politics are a fantasy, concocted to paint American military power as a neutral (if not necessary) default, in a world where non-specific foreigners and selfish billionaires bear the all responsibility of war.Even so, this responsibility, as it pertains to Stark's atonement, is only ever framed as power fantasy. Stark separates villains from civilians using artificial intelligence; he depends entirely on algorithmic facial recognition to determine, unilaterally, who lives or dies. Rather than an alternative to military power, Stark is merely framed as a complimentary force. He is positioned (at times, through the film's own dialogue) as carrying out what the military should, but hasn't been granted approval to.Stark delights in righteous displays of violence and technological might, in ways that are at odds with his character arc. There's little remorse to be found when punching bad guys to upbeat metal seems so indulgent.