Iron Man

Let us be honest with ourselves, yes? We are currently drowning in the "content sludge"—the endless, gray digital soup of the current cinematic universe. But if we return to the primal scene, to 2008, to Iron Man, we find something much more terrifying, much more seductive, and—dare I say it—absolutely brilliant in its ideological purity.

What is the basic premise here? We have Tony Stark. He is not the old, boring capitalist of the 19th century, the fat man with the cigar who wants to starve the orphans. No! He is cool. He listens to Suicidal Tendencies, he sleeps with the journalists, he eats the fast food. He is the embodiment of what Žižek calls "liberal communism"—the idea that the only way to fix the problems of capitalism is with more capitalism, but this time, capitalism with a human face. Or, in this case, a titanium face.

Consider the trauma. Stark is injured by his own weapon. This is the intrusion of the Real! The shrapnel is moving toward his heart. It is the internal contradiction of the system returning to kill the creator. And what is his solution? He does not dismantle the military-industrial complex. No, my God, he miniaturizes it! He places the Arc Reactor—the literal engine of capital—inside his own chest. He becomes the system. He says, "I am not distinct from the machine; I am the machine."

This is why the film works so well, why it captures us. The suit is not just armor. In Lacanian terms, the suit is the object petit a. It is the shiny, fetishized object that covers up the void, the lack, the rotting meat of the man underneath. When he puts on the suit, he is not hiding. It is the opposite! The moment he enters the Mark III, he becomes his true self. The human Stark is the fake; the Iron Man is the truth.

And look at the politics! It is a pure fantasy of techno-feudalism. We have Obadiah Stane, the "bad" capitalist who only cares about profit. Then we have Stark, the "good" capitalist who cares about... well, his own narcissism, which he calls "peace." The film tells us: "Do not trust the government. Do not trust the democracy. Trust the eccentric billionaire with the flying laser tank." Is this not precisely the nightmare we are living in today with the likes of Elon Musk? Stark was the prophecy. He privatized world peace. He looked at the Middle East and said, "I will not wait for the UN resolution; I will simply go there and shoot the bad guys myself." And we cheered! We loved it!

The ending is the key. The most important moment in the last twenty years of pop culture. He stands at the podium. The agent tells him to read the script, to maintain the "secret identity"—the old lie that power must be humble. Stark looks at the card, throws it away, and says: "I am Iron Man."

Boom. The gap between the public good and private interest is erased. He is telling us: "I know very well that I am a weapon, but I am doing it for you." It is the ultimate cynical function of ideology. We enjoy the movie not because we believe Stark is a hero, but because he allows us to enjoy the fantasy that a billionaire can save us from the very world the billionaires destroyed. It is a perfect, beautiful lie. And so on, and so on.