LITTLE ROCK — Like a lot of people, I went to see Iron Man 2 with elevated hopes, if not expectations. Because I am (usually) an adult, I wasn’t exactly disappointed with what I saw - it was a cluttered, bridge-y kind of movie designed to tide us over until the flurry of Marvel universe movies starts next year. It was almost exactly what I expected.
Yet, if I were to make a movie about a superhero, I think I’d have all the whiz-bang special effects stuff take place off-screen. I wouldn’t show the character in costume at all. I’d concentrate on the alter-ego stuff; on the man within the mask, rather than the public icon.
I don’t know if anyone would come to see this movie, but that doesn’t matter because no one is going to give me the $40 million or so I’d need to make it. (Though if you’ve got that kind of jack and want to talk, I’ll listen.) But I’d be interested in that sort of movie; I’d like to see someone really try to do a psychological drama about the kind of bifurcated soul that would live that kind of double life. There isa great human interest story in the myth of the Batman; Tony Stark’s story is far more interesting than Iron Man’s.
I understand the obvious problem of such a movie - which is that it’s difficult to make a realistic drama about a ridiculous, non-existent phenomenon. Watchmen tried, to a point, to be about the interior lives of would-be superheroes, and nobody seemed to like it much even though it eventually devolved into the kind of special-effects-driven action movie it sought to obsolete. And I admired Kick-Ass for at least considering the psychic calculus that might lead someone to consider a career as a caped crusader,until its obligatory third-act default to cathartic destruction.
Comic books grew up a long time ago - I was writing about graphic novels 20 years ago and I was by no means an early adopter - so why can’t comic book movies?
We all know the reason. Because there’s more money to be made infantilizing the culture than edifying it, because it’s easy enough to drum up some buzz for the next great noise and light spectacle and, since the mid-’80s, we’ve pretty much trained adults to stay out of the cineplexes. Even those of us who grew up loving the movies (and who still hold out hope for the possibilities of movies) must accept that most movies are designed to titillate the tastes of 14-year-old boys.
Movies can be subtle and sublime but they rarely are, and it’s a mistake to believe that from week to week you’re going to find something that deserves more than your cursory attention. Most movies are at best diversions and we can all usesome diversions; not everything has to be self-improving or difficult, but God help you if you’re a grown-up looking to the movies for intellectual sustenance: You’re gonna starve your head.
I know this, yet I get fooled again and again. Iron Man 2 isn’t awful, it simply is - as the athletes say - what it is. And by my lights, it’s a missed chance, a blown opportunity to do something genuinely interesting in a mass culture context. It is a great disappointment to me, even though I knew they weren’t going to allow their superhero franchise to be anything other than another relatively safe iteration of the proven genre movie. You know in the end it’s all going to come down to flash-a-boom-boom-boom.
Yet ...
I shouldn’t even say it, but I cannot imagine that Don Cheadle or Robert Downey Jr. or Gwyneth Paltrow or Scarlett Johansson or Mickey Rourke or Jon Favreau or Justin Theroux or anybody else intimately involved with the making of Iron Man 2 would ever, on their own dime and their own time, ever go to see a movie like Iron Man 2. Not unless they were deconstructing it for business reasons.
And that’s OK too, I guess. I suppose the chef who comes up with the new sandwiches for McDonald’s probably doesn’t eat a lot of Big Macs either.
Still, the thing is, we pretend that there’s something different about making movies. We think of these folks as artists, of a sort, and most of them think of themselves the same way. Even if they recognize that they’re making an entertainment product, that they’re engaged in the promotion of some corporate vision, most of them have pretensions to doing what they consider good work. Most of them will, now and then, sneak off and do a little heartfelt acting onstage or in a little hopeless indie.
What they typically say is that they do one - or four - for the money (or for their agent, their family or their career) and then one “for themselves.”
I only wish they thought more of us, or that we demanded more of them. I wish someone was pushing back against the familiar and the comfortable, the rote beats and reversals, the palliative, test-marketed, riskless rhythms of mass marketed culture. I wish they’d try harder. And fail better.
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MovieStyle, Pages 35 on 05/14/2010