Making the Modern Iron Man
The New York Sun, April 25, 2008
With its dusty Humvees, violent Afghan battlefields, and worries about the munitions business, the upcoming "Iron Man" is a film set firmly in 2008. That'll do, I suppose, but what was wrong with 1963? If there's any tale that deserves the chance to return to the sheen, swank, and soul of its Rat Pack, space-age, pay-any-price-bear-any-burden origins, it's Iron Man's. Conceived by comic maestro Stan Lee and launched by Marvel Comics in the final year of the Kennedy administration, "Iron Man" was Bond-in-a-can, a doughty cold warrior manufactured in the jungles of a Vietnam that still could be won. Fearless, noble, and smart, he was a mighty, mechanized embodiment of the belief that there were no limits to what the combination of American spirit and know-how could achieve.
But that sentiment, however admirable, has since found somewhat mixed consequences abroad.
You won't find any trace of such reservations in "Tales of Suspense," no. 39. That's the issue in which Marvel's readers were first introduced to Tony Stark, the man who became Iron. He's a millionaire industrialist and scientific genius, a member of the military-industrial complex so patriotic that even President Eisenhower would have approved, an inventor and supplier of the high-tech armaments needed to defend America from the communist menace: Within a few frames of the book, Stark is in South Vietnam testing some miniature mortars.
They work ("the reds never knew what hit them!"), but the mission collapses into chaos when Stark steps into a booby trap. He regains consciousness to find himself desperately wounded (fragments of shrapnel are edging ever nearer his heart) and a captive of "red guerilla tyrant" Wong-Chu. Drafted by this "grinning, smirking, red terrorist" to design armaments for communism, Stark secretly builds an armored suit instead. Crucially, it includes a gizmo to fire up his faltering ticker. Lethally, it includes weapons to fire on the enemy. Stark dons the armor. Iron Man is born. Wong-Chu dies.
Once back in America, Iron Man does what superheroes once did: rough up a series of monsters, creatures, mutants, and villains with a wild, grand, uncomplicated élan. And it's striking that there are more Marxists than Martians in their midst. This was a time when Americans knew who the real bad guys were:
"A telegram for you, Mr. Stark...from behind the Iron Curtain!"
"From Commieland? Sounds like trouble, Pepper!"
Spy rings are dismantled, and the gap-toothed, near-Neanderthal Red Barbarian ("A top red general ... noted for his brutality!") is thwarted. "Pudgy, scowling" Nikita Khrushchev sends the Crimson Dynamo ("vast electrical powers") to destroy Iron Man, but the Dynamo fizzles. The Unicorn ("Back, you capitalist fool!") is blunted, and the beautiful Madame Natasha ("I only serve the cause of international peace!") turns out to be insufficiently seductive. Slab-faced Boris ("Boris does not walk around obstacles ... it is easier to hurl them aside ... so!!") fails, too, gunned down by the former Crimson Dynamo — who had earlier been won over to the American Way. But the American Way is not only stronger; it's also kinder. When, after a three-issue-long struggle in "the tiny, neutral nation of Alberia," Iron Man defeats Bullski The Merciless (Titanium Man), he is, naturally, merciful: "Lucky for you, I'm not a red! I can't continue to attack a helpless enemy!"
No, he couldn't. A sense of America's essential decency runs through Marvel's depiction of the country that Iron Man risks so much to defend. It has its rough edges, sure, but at its core, Iron Man's America is a socially cohesive, hardworking, and fundamentally good-hearted place. It's neither sappy nor nostalgic enough to be Bedford Falls, but it's still a notion of nation that Frank Capra would have appreciated, one made all the more compelling by its distance from, and closeness to, the truth. It's a we-the-people fantasy that helps explain why Stark agrees to appear before a congressional committee that could compel him to disclose that he and Iron Man are one and the same: "No one has the right to defy the wishes of his government ... not even Iron Man!"
Howard Roark, he's not. Howard Hughes, on the other hand, well, the saturnine, pencil-mustached Stark, a regular at El Morocco and the Stork Club, "is rich, handsome ... constantly in the company of beautiful, adoring women ... linked with every actress and society beauty from Hollywood to Rome ... the dreamiest thing this side of Rock Hudson." When Mr. Lee subsequently acknowledged the similarities between the 20th century's two greatest playboy-industrialist-scientists, he wasn't giving too much away.
But, in a twist that would delight Cotton Mather, if not Howard Hughes, Stark's need to conceal his life-sustaining iron chest plate means that there's a limit to how far he can go with the ladies. His relentless partying only emphasizes what was taken from him in Vietnam. It's a sort-of-disguise, and it's a sort-of-distraction. It's also an effective device to keep pretty Pepper, his loyal, adoring secretary, at arm's length: A truly tragic hero, Stark has lost what remains of his heart to her, but he cannot risk a relationship: "Marriage is for other men, not for a fella who lives in the shadow of death!"
Back in the real world, however, an infinitely greater tragedy was unfolding. America, too, was being horribly wounded in, and by, Vietnam, wounds that changed it in ways so profound and pervasive that comic book red-white-and-blue no longer found so many takers. Stark's thinking, as the smug saying goes, "evolved": The old Iron Man is — like El Morocco, the Stork Club, and South Vietnam — no more.
But he, like they, and their world, should be remembered and, sometimes, mourned.