[A spiritual interpretation of the Iron Man films and North by Northwest]
[Warning: This blog contains spoilers]
This
week we’ve been watching the George Clooney IRON MAN films. I’ve been looking forward to seeing them, as I’ve
heard a lot about them. I wasn’t sure
what I would think; they are often cited as ‘high testosterone,’ ‘techy’ and ‘male
chauvinist.’ While I found the first two
counts accurate (which I like), I found them less guilty on the last count
(which was refreshing). Yes, they are
certainly geared to men who like ‘gadgets, fast cars and hot women;’ they
remind me of the early James Bond films.
But I don’t see them evincing anywhere near the degree of sexism as early
James Bond films. Quite to my surprise, Tony
Stark (Clooney’s character) undergoes a transformation that I would construe as
an awakening; a recovery of ‘potential’ and his ‘humanity;’ in spiritual terms,
a degree of ‘soul-recovery.’[1]
Tony
Stark begins as a bold, self-assured military industrialist who manufactures
weapons that he thinks are just what American needs to keep the peace (by
blowing up its enemies; ‘strength through superior force’). Stark is a wealthy genius who outshines
everyone else in his field. Yet he seems
superficial (though he passes as self-assured), emotionally disengaged with the
consequences of his weapons manufacturing, and in so many other ways ‘soulless.’ But his life is about to change. He gets abducted in the Middle East and held
hostage. He sees the US soldiers
travelling with him killed by weapons he designed and devloped, and then sees
his company’s weapons in the hands of ‘terrorists.’
Tony
engineers (literally: he builds the first Iron Man suit in the terrorist camp)
his escape and when he gets back home, declares that he is going to take his
company in a new direction. He is disillusioned
with the weapons industry. He goes into
retreat from the world and starts creating the Iron Man suits that will eventually
enable him to become the best ‘deterrent’ since nuclear weapons. However, in the meantime, Tony experiences a
second blow; he has been betrayed by his father-figure/mentor Obadiah Stane,
who had him abducted and is opposed to Tony’s new ‘turn.’ I would argue that these two events – his
abduction and his betrayal – force him toward an existential crisis that
eventually pushes him into a recovery of his ‘soul.’ But not before he undergoes more betrayal and
opposition.
By
the 2nd film, Tony is an international superhero/celebrity on his
way to bringing about world peace—and his success has heightened his hubris and
put it on a new footing. But then more problems
arise. Other people are developing ‘Iron
Man’ suits and his own government wants to militarize the suit as a weapon. At
this point a new threat from his past emerges.
The son of a man who used to work with Tony’s father has created his own
version of a suit and comes back for revenge on the man who seems to have
ruined his father’s career (or rejected his work?). Tony is forced deeper into existential crisis
and his hubris – which is so apparent at the beginning of Iron Man 2 – gets
undermined decisively.
Also
in the second film Tony’s promotes his long time professional assistant,
secretary et. al. – Pepper Potts -- to CEO of Stark Industries! And she is no puppet CEO. Far from being a male chauvinistic character
put in the movie simply to be ogled by male viewers and pandered after by the
‘hero’ and other men, Pepper is an intelligent, competent, professional, a businesswoman
whose promotion to CEO is refreshing and in the end believable. She is savvy and an equal match for the
equally intelligent Tony, though she has to get used to the reins of power she
has just been thrust into. There is some
of the ‘Pepper has to be saved by men’ stuff going on in the 2nd and
3rd films, but she is no screaming, demure, sex kitten! In the 3rd film she even acquires
super-powers and does a moderate share of ass kicking! _Over which she actually
experiences appropriate remorse; showing that she has soul. There
are plenty of beautiful women in the film, but rarely are the women characters (those who play a role in the
plot) reduced to being ‘objects.’
By
the end of the 3rd film, I would argue that Tony has gone through a redemptive
transformation. He is no longer the
genius weapons manufacturer with a naïve male businessman’s ego about how to
bring peace to the world through war. He
has learned something about the complexity and subtlety of evil in the world
and has been awakened to a deeper sense of what justice, peace and power might
mean. He has learned to care for people
near to him who have suffered through the ordeals brought on by his earlier
hubris, and he has learned compassion. He has seen the effects of violence much
closer to home, and has also seen the victims of war in their own
homeland. He has been awakened through
these experiences_ and in so doing has begun to recover from his soullostness.
Tony
was empty but brilliant at the beginning of the first movie, but by the end of
this ‘trilogy’ of films he has opened to depth, complexity and compassion. He is being humanized. He has given up his ‘fast living’ – though he
still loves tech and cars and women – and is apparently in a committed
relationship with Pepper Potts (!); the CEO of his corporation. He is apparently neither afraid of women with
power, nor does he need to engage in competitive nonsense with them to maintain
his manhood. In this film he is faced
with an international terrorist – Mandarin – who turns out (it was a nice surprise
twist in the plot) to be a puppet of yet another genius whom Tony brushed off
and insulted years earlier. (Again, his
hubris is catching up with him!) Here
again, the consequences of action are again dealt with; and Tony – after brashly
and perhaps not all too wisely makes a public threat against Mandarin – has to
fight to save Pepper and others when the villain comes and destroys his home.[2] I would say these films show a ]soulless
American male’ living in the ‘fast lane’ becoming more human through personal
and social crises. He is tried and tempted
and undergoes loss and threat, coming through the experience a better person
than he was at the beginning of the series.
He starts off naïve and self-serving and ends up committed to those
around him – both male and female
(note his relationship with both Colonel James Rhodes and Happy Hogan) – and to
the betterment of society and perhaps even the world (if he can overcome his
sentimental patriotism). The ‘soulless
American male’ – i.e., a functioning cog in society, often well socialized and
well-groomed, carrying on relationships at the superficial level, looking out
for the illusory ‘Number 1’ and being obsessed with success, prestige, money
and gadgets, but who is ultimately superficial, hollow and soulless—here becomes
a human being.
These
films and their theme remind me of another film – NORTH BY NORTHEST (1959) in
which a ‘hapless’ advertising executive (played by Cary Grant) has his mundane life
upset when he is mistaken for a government agent, is abducted, framed for
murder, and is then pursued across the country by spies who want him dead.
There
is much to ponder in this the old Hitchcock film. What I see today is that this “hapless
advertising exec” is another example of the “soulless American male”[3]
who experiences an awakening though the course of events into which he is
plunged by being mistaken for the (actually non-existent) American agent George
Kaplan. At the start of the film he is
shown to be vain, self-serving and egotistic.
Roger Thornhill (Cary Grant’s character) is concerned about whether his
suit makes him look fat, he has his secretary send flowers to his mother with a
note in his name, and he jumps a cab – taking it away from another potential
fare – telling him the story (a lie) that the woman with him needs to get to
the hospital, or some such thing. This,
he explains to his secretary once they are in the cab, will make the person he
hijacked the cab from feel good about themselves, because they’ve done a good
deed. (!?!)
But
then he gets mistaken for a spy by foreign agents, he is abducted, his life is
threatened, and then he escapes_ by nothing but sheer luck. He tries in his bumbling way to figure out
what’s going on, goes to the UN to find the man in whose house he was being
held, and ends up being framed for the man’s murder. He runs, gets on a train, and meets Eve
Kendall (Eva Marie Saint), with whom he gets romantically involved. It turns out she’s a double-agent. She is pretending to work for the foreign
spies, but is really trying to get information about their smuggling ring for
the US Secret Service. Over the course
of his adventure Roger now begins to really care for someone (for perhaps the
first time in his life) and ends up attempting to save Eve Kendall from the
fate into which the US Secret Service has thrust her! He risks his life to get Miss Kendall away
from the foreign spies once he realizes they are onto her and are going to kill
her (by dropping her into the ocean once their plane takes off). In the process, Roger Thornhill becomes a
superhero of sorts (i.e., climbing around on ledges of buildings and dangling
off the front of Mount Rushmore)! At
each stage in the story, I would argue, this advertising exec is thrown ever
deeper into an existential crisis. By
the end of his adventure, his former world has been shattered, and he is on the
verge of new life possibilities.
You
could see the film as ending with
Roger and Eve married and going back to NYC, where they might stay happily
married for six months or so, after which she will become another cast-off in
the soulless life of Roger Thornhill, advertising exec. But I always see a potential at the end of
the film for something else. I think it
possible that Roger has begun to under an awakening – via the ordeal he has
gone through – and that, by rescuing Eve Kendall from certain death, he has
come to a point of genuine compassion and even
love. He has recovered his ‘soul.’ He has become a human being.
Roger
Thornhill – even more than Tony Stark – represents that ‘soulless American
male’ who is nothing but a functionary in the system; a momentary blip in the
wheel of business; not a fully-fledged individual. He has no real depth; he is self-centered and
does not understand the nuances and complexities of life outside his proscribed
formal public world (which becomes apparent through his dealing with the police
and the foreign spies). He appears to be
a drone; going to work and performing his duties with the appropriate level of
decorum, finesse and in total conformity to the ideal of male selfhood
perpetrated on him by his sexist society.
But Roger Thornhill has no soul at the beginning of the film; when we
first see him he is empty and ‘hapless.’
By
the end of the film, he is on the cusps of potential change. Will he go back to NYC and become the superficial
ad exec he was before, or will his awakening to compassion lead to a
transformation of character and humanization of his professional life? We might well see him continuing to be an
advertising exec after the end of the film. There’s no reason he shouldn’t. Might he treat those around him – his peers
and others in his professional circles – with more compassion and genuine
concern that before? His experiences
might even lead to a different attitude toward advertising and the whole
business in which he is involved. While
we have no “NbyNW 2” or “NbyNW 3” to show what happened to Roger, as we do for
Tony, I’ve always thought this kind of positive scenario possible. Like Tony Stark, Roger Thornhill has been
re-ensouled by his life-threatening experiences. … Sometimes
the foundations of a person’s life have to be shaken before they are able to wake
up.
[I hope I have not gotten any of the
details of the stories wrong; but I think the overall story does allow for the
kind of interpretation I have put forth here.]
[1] I
am using ‘soul’ here in the sense of “the whole of being; genuine in becoming.” I do not simply mean a flitty counter[part of
the self that goes somewhere after death.
I.e., nephesh in the old Hebrew
sense, not an Orphic sense of ‘soul.’
[2] The ‘home destruction scene was one of the more
over the top sequences in this has film,
but it doesn’t come close to the totally
unbelievable, unrealistic action sequences in last year’s Star Trek: Into Darkness and the two Hobbit
films (esp. the Goblin fight scene in Hobbit I and the Smaug sequence at the
end of Hobbit II. Iron Man 3 seems to
have been temped in that direction, but reigned in the action nonsense that so
plagues so many films right now. I could stomach this sequence -- and the battle scene late in the film -- but only because the rest of the film was so good.
[3] I’m
not picking on men, ok? There are plenty
of soulless women walking around in the world and plenty of people in other
countries who have lost their soulfulness.
But as I’m male and an American, the ‘soulless American male’ is a glyph for me;
an anti-icon--reflecting on these characters helps keep me from becoming them. At least_ that’s my hope.
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