Iron Man 2: A Review in Two Parts

By John David Ebert

1. Quaternio

At one point in this film, Tony Stark, who realizes that he is dying of palladium poisoning (the fictitious element that powers his artificial heart) sets to work in order to synthesize a new element that will enable him to replace the palladium that is currently poisoning him. He finds the design for this element encoded in a model of a prototype city (think of Disney’s original plans for EPCOT) bequeathed to him by his dead father, Howard Stark, who was a physicist and urban designer (sort of a cross between Walt Disney and Howard Hughes).

Stark disassembles the model and uses his holographic computers to decode the formula for him, then sets to work building a makeshift particle accelerator with which to synthesize the new element. The element comes out encoded in a glowing, downward pointing triangle that he then swaps out with the old circular shaped disc that powered his heart before (the new triangle on his chest is visible on the movie poster above). Now he is healthy and ready to take on the army of drones that he must combat to save his Stark Expo artificial city from being destroyed.

Now, of course, the downward pointing triangle is the old symbol for the element earth which once composed a quaternity of elements that Western alchemists inherited from Aristotelian science. The other three elements were water (also downward pointing) and air and fire (both upward pointing triangles). In alchemical iconography, these four would often be circled by an ourobouros, or cosmic serpent, as a symbol of earthly wholeness, a sort of cipher transcribing the essence of matter.

In shifting from the circle to the downward pointing triangle of earth, in other words, Iron Man is shifting, in the present film, from a unitary Oneness to a fragmentary part of a larger whole, since earth is only one element of a larger quaternio. (In the days of the ancients, Stark’s particle accelerator would have been a crucible in which the alchemist analyzed and then synthesized his chemicals and substances in order to withdraw from them a transformed element, the lapis, or philosopher’s stone).

Which is interesting because the plot of the film is based upon an ontology of copying, replicating and duplicating Iron Man himself. In this film, he is no longer quite such a unique entity, but must battle an entire army of drone copies of himself produced by an independent contractor for the military. And not only that, but he also acquires a sidekick who steals an older, silver suit from him and puts it on and insists upon fighting by his side. And then there’s the villain, a Russian ex-physicist and black marketeer who builds his own Iron Man suit and goes to war against Iron Man seeking revenge for his father’s death, since he blames the United States government for condemning and exiling him for selling military secrets to the Russians.

In the first film (a much better film, by the way, although the sequel isn’t bad) Iron Man existed on a transcendent plane of ethereality, in which he could soar through the heavens above the earth as a unique mythical entity, a comic book retrieval of the man in the iron mask motif that has haunted mythology forever in one form or another. But in the sequel, he must undergo a process of analysis, a descent into matter, in which the Platonic Form is broken up, disintegrated, dispersed and scattered throughout the material realm like the Gnostic Anthropos who falls into Physis. Traces of him can be found everywhere.

Translated into the discourse of the postmodern consumer society, the problem becomes one of banality: Deleuze’s principle of Seriality and Repetition, the mass reproduction of the original form that no longer has any meaning because there are too many copies of it accessible to all and sundry.

What to do in this case?

As the triangle discussion above suggests, one becomes a part of a larger whole that will gain a strength from its parts which the original prima materia did not possess. Consequently, as the film’s ending indicates, Iron Man is now set to play the function of one member of a larger superhero group, namely, the Avengers, with whom he will soon join. The larger group with all its differentiated functions will then render the problem of seriality and repetition obsolete, since quality originarily triumphs over quantity. In consumer society, more is actually less, as Benjamin indicated with his idea  of the cheapening of the original aura as the result of mass reproduction of an image. More must give way to difference and not repetition.

2. Empire

Tony Stark, in this film, it is important to note, is defending an artificial city, named the Stark Expo that he has built as a zillionaire for exhibiting all his new gadgets and toys. For the first time, then, we see the superhero defending an ersatz city instead of a real one, like New York or Los Angeles. These kinds of modern expos are the direct descendants of the World’s Fairs that originated in France at the end of the eighteenth century as a means for exhibiting the latest and greatest in industrial engineering projects. Gradually, these fairs grew in size until with the Chicago World’s Fair in the 1890s, they became virtual cities within larger cities, like embryos waiting to be born out of the mother city as a new brood of technological children.

The ersatz city, though, is a perfect metaphor for what America is currently exporting to the rest of the planet: a Geography of Nowhere, in which every building in every city looks exactly the same, because it is historically denuded and culturally worldless. And hence, nihilistically meaningless. But it is nevertheless, the kind of world, a worldless world, that American society has currently invested all its energies into creating and exporting around the world. “Shopping mall architecture” might be a good way to describe it.

In this film, Iron Man is the defender of this world, and as such, he is a symbol for the American mentality generally speaking. The disaffected bad guy and terrorist Ivan Vanko, portrays the point of view of those Others around the world who are striving desperately to hang onto some shred of their own unique and local cultural zones, so that they don’t get gobbled up by the American megamachine. Meaning and significance rests upon the local and the particular; it cannot come and does not come from the exportation of a global “empire” of meaningless shopping mall banality which is passed off as an excuse for real and authentic culture.

So please be aware of what this film is asking you to buy: the values propagated by Iron Man 2 are those distinctly in support of this shopping mall / parking lot society that America insists is the only valid mode of being-in-the-world. All other modes, all Other ethnicities, are dismissed and caricaturized as “terrorists” even when they are not really so.

That it is those with the money who make the rules is a cliche that has never been more true than it is today. America, for now, has the dollars to convince much, but not all, of the rest of the world, that its understanding of Being as Shopping is really the only way to Be.

And that’s, of course, too bad because living in a world with no real values is not a world that is worth living in.

But history, as Toynbee pointed out, is never on the side of the Empire. Time belongs not to the cultural homogenization inflicted upon societies by empires, but rather to their external proletariats which, sooner or later, inevitably overwhelm them, for the world wants, and always eventually gets, Difference, not Repetition.