UNLOCKED! Bonus Ep9 Iron Man, 2008 (from Oct 2021)
Our hiatus continues, owing to some real pain-in-the-ass stuff in what is jokingly called 'real life'. Hopefully we are nearing the time when we can resume making new shows. In the meantime, here's another old bonus episode to tide you over until our triumphant return. In this one - originally recorded and released exclusively to Patreon subscribers in October 2021 - we discuss the 2008 movie Iron Man. * Daniel's Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/danielharper/posts Jack's Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/user?u=4196618&fan_landing=true Please consider donating to help us make the show and stay independent. Patrons [are supposed to] get exclusive access to one full extra episode a month. IDSG Twitter: https://twitter.com/idsgpod Daniel's Twitter: @danieleharper Jack's Twitter: @_Jack_Graham_ IDSG on Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/i-dont-speak-german/id1449848509?ls=1
I'm Jack Graham, he/him, and in this podcast I talk to my friend Daniel Harper, also he/him, who spent years tracking the far right in their safe spaces.
In this show we talk about them, and about the wider reactionary forces feeding them and feeding off them.
Be warned, this is difficult subject matter.
Content warnings always apply.
Yeah, we should not do these in a row, but I would love to do, you know, some, to just like pick a comic book movie and do it with you as a bonus.
I think that'll be fun.
Yeah, like, I don't know, I was in a funny mood, obviously.
But the original idea was let's just, you know, for bonus episodes, let's just do all the Marvel films.
And I thought that would be quite funny as a troll, to be honest.
Right.
And sort of, you know, on reflection in the pale light of morning, I thought, no, that's a terrible idea.
Right, but I think doing movies that people have heard of is a good idea.
I would like to do the Dark Knight, although I want to do the so-called hoax first.
So I think the Dark Knight should be the next movie episode we do.
Yeah, so we can talk about Afghanistan again.
That's three bonus episodes in a row, which we're talking about Afghanistan, or we can talk about other things in Iron Man because there is a lot in Iron Man.
So kind of up to you what you want to talk about.
There's a lot in Iron Man.
Yeah, it's a it's a dense.
It is an enormously dense text, even without it being the beginning of sort of modern Hollywood.
And the fact that it is sort of the beginning of modern Hollywood is another dense way of viewing it.
So I feel like it's one of the fulcrum points of film history in this weird way.
So yes, we can fill an hour on it regardless.
What angle do we want to take on it?
I feel like we've already started, to be honest.
All this preamble, or most of it anyway, could just be the start.
So yeah, welcome to Bonus 10.
Yeah, here we are.
We've done 10.
This is 10.
Yeah.
Bonus 10, yeah.
And Jack from the future here, interrupting.
It's like an episode of some more news.
Jack from the future here, interrupting to acknowledge That this is, in fact, of course, bonus episode 9.
Not 10.
Blame me.
Eagle-eyed listeners who were punctilious about getting their money's worth will have noticed that they didn't get a bonus, an IDSG bonus anyway, in September.
So yes, we owe you a bonus episode.
So yes, we'll give you two bonus episodes in October, you bloodsuckers.
So yeah, this is the first of those.
This is technically your September version.
We are very, we are very thankful to the bloodsuckers.
That's, you know, we should just be clear about that.
Yes.
You are draining us dry for your dollar, for your dollar a month, but... Daniel's terrified that my jokes might alienate you.
And of course, well, if you feel that way about us, then I'll take back my tolerance.
Living in the US and being a slave to the American healthcare system means begging for every dollar.
Yeah.
And also, as well known, Americans don't understand irony.
Yeah, I wore that too.
Yeah.
So yeah, this is bonus number 10.
9!
9!
God damn it!
And we're talking, what we're talking about, as you might have gathered, is Iron Man, which is a little known film from the... Little indie movie.
Yeah.
Yeah, pretty small.
Well, I mean, it's interesting because, I mean, as I say, we're going to leave in some, at least, of the little Introductory preamble that you, listener, will now have heard.
So you will have heard what we were saying.
So sort of as an adjunct to that, yeah, Iron Man 2008.
Obviously not a little obscure indie movie, as we were ironically saying, but You know, one of the most famous movies, Hollywood movies of recent years, one of the most significant.
I don't think that's arguable, really.
Value neutral term, significant.
Cornerstone of the biggest media franchise in history.
It's bigger than everything now, isn't it?
It's bigger than Bond and Batman and Harry Potter and Star Wars.
It's the biggest officially.
Well, I want to put a pin in Harry Potter because I think there's a clear antecedent in Harry Potter.
So I want to come back to that.
But yes, I agree.
OK, yeah, I'm all in favor of putting pins into Harry Potter.
I think that's a... And in Tony Stark, you know, like so long as it's not a King thing for Tony, you know, so long as he doesn't get any pleasure out of it, you know, that would be fine.
Yeah, moving on.
Sorry.
I made it awkward.
That's, you know, I made it awkward.
Please continue.
That's fine.
Yeah.
So obviously, huge, significant, famous, important film culturally with, you know, words like significant and important being value neutral, completely separate from, not necessarily mutually exclusive, but not necessarily connected either towards like, you know, good or anything like that.
Well, back when back when $400 million worldwide gross was a big number as well.
Yeah, that was respectable.
Like now that was that was a big that was a big movie.
Yeah, for clear.
A Marvel movie that cleared that now would be viewed as a disappointment.
Yeah.
Nowadays, they clear that in just in the US and are considered failures.
Yeah, yeah.
What was I saying?
Oh yeah, my point was just going to be that it wasn't immediately apparent in 2008 what a big deal this was going to turn out to be, was it?
I don't think anybody realised at the time.
I mean, I had an Entertainment Weekly subscription at the time, because I think we got it, I think my ex-girlfriend had it, and then I just kind of inherited it or something, I don't remember exactly.
But, you know, you get your Weekly Entertainment Weekly, and it goes in the bathroom, and you read it, because this is before the smartphone era, and I don't know how many of our listeners remember before the smartphone era, but at the time, when you took a shit, you had to have some piece of paper in front of you.
Or you're reading a shampoo bottle.
So that's that's just how life was in the dark ages before smartphones.
Now we get to go on Twitter.
So anyway, I'm not sure any of our listeners can relate to any of this.
I don't know that I need a comment from anyone on that one of the last 45 seconds of what I said.
But anyway, so anyway, we used to have just pretend it didn't happen.
Yeah I mean it'll be in the podcast for sure because you know historical interest or whatever but anyway I had an Entertainment Weekly subscription and you know I don't know if it was like a cover story but there was like a clear like summer movie preview and I had like a little like thing about like Iron Man this like kind of new movie of this nothing character that nobody really knew about
Um that was going to be kind of the big like Marvel's going to start this like expanded universe kind of thing and it's a little like a half page or quarter of a page kind of thing and I had like the image of like Robert Downey Jr.
with the um the arc reactor in his chest standing in the cave you know and in the tank top etc etc and it was just kind of this like
Like oh this might be the big movie of the summer and I remember seeing the kind of initial trailers the teasers and people kind of like saying oh this is the movie with the big buzz but also like who knows how well this thing is gonna actually work in front of audiences because I did so I did a little bit of like pre-research for this in like 2007 like the big like the big
comic book movie was spider-man 3 which you know sam raimi being sam raimi like it's hard to say like you know we can love sam raimi i don't know your feelings about sam raimi but like you know clearly like a good you know he's a great filmmaker he had an independent vision etc etc but
But like, there's a very clear division between like kind of pre-2008, pre-Iron Man, and sort of post-Iron Man in terms of like the way these movies are made, you know, and Where I was going with the kind of Harry Potter reference earlier was Harry, like these movies, the thing that I always kind of get to is these movies solved the four quadra problem.
You want to appeal to like literally everybody who might go and buy a ticket, right?
And so, like, if you're making, like, R-rated movies with, like, a bunch of sex and stuff, then, like, kids can't get in, etc., etc.
But if you're appealing to, you know, just, like, kind of children's entertainment, then, you know, the adults aren't interested.
And so how I feel, like, the way that's what the key of what Marvel actually did was to just kind of put the key in the lock, twist it, and, like, just kind of Do the algorithm and solve all of that and just get everybody wants to go see whatever the new Marvel movie is.
And it took a number of years for them to sort of perfect the formula.
And I think the first few Marvel movies are like the key to that.
But I think the first one, Iron Man, is the first Marvel movie.
I think that it reflects a very real, like, Like, transition point between that sort of, like, Spider-Man 3 versus what, like, would become, like, The Avengers four years later.
Like, there's a very clear kind of transition point there.
And I think there's a, like, I could go through this, like, scene by scene and sort of, like, analyze it and understand, like, what's going on, you know?
And, like, there's so much here.
It's a very, again, a very, very rich text.
So, I've been talking for a long time, so please respond.
And tell me I'm a piece of shit.
It's fine.
Yeah.
Well, I mean, that goes without saying, but in direct reference to what you're saying, I think interestingly enough, the Spider-Man character is kind of the like the control group.
I don't know if that's the right term, but like, as you say, you have the Raimi Spider-Man trilogy before Marvel really gets started.
And that is very much in that pre-Marvel vein of making superhero movies as big blockbusters.
You watch them now, they feel much more akin to stuff like the first few X-Men movies.
And then, of course, during the Marvel The ascendancy of the Marvel franchise, you get the Mark Webb Spider-Man movies, the two with Andrew Garfield in.
Yeah, which I think are very underrated as well.
I think they're quite good, although I have lots of problems with them.
But I quite like Andrew Garfield as Spider-Man, to be clear.
Yeah, well, I mean, their quality aside, the interesting thing about them, I think the reason that they never quite hit with audiences, I think there's various reasons, but I think the reason they never quite hit with audiences is that they have a slight, they have a certain tonal uncertainty, which is sort of constantly keeps the ground moving under their feet the entire time.
I remember when the second one came out.
Sort of like the official critical line was, well, it's okay, but it feels old fashioned.
It feels like how you made superhero movies 10 years ago, right?
Which is obviously directly a reference to the fact that Marvel has changed how it's done.
And I think there's, I mean, I've only seen them once each of those ones.
I saw them both theatrically.
So yeah.
Yeah.
No, no, I definitely agree.
And I and I feel like one of the things that they did, which, you know, was, you know, they tried to shoehorn in this like, kind of deep mystery of like, Andrew Garfield's version of Peter Parker's history, like his parents were like, I don't remember what the story was, but they're like spies for Oscorp or something like that.
And there's this kind of deep mystery, which is clearly like kind of doing the, we want to make this kind of big universe, you know, which they were, they were seeing like the MCU was kind of doing was kind of building this kind of bigger thing around the individual movies.
And ultimately that like failed utterly, you know, because nobody went and saw the amazing Spider-Man films.
So yeah.
Yeah.
And then, of course, the third part of the story of Spider-Man as a test case is the ones that are part of the Marvel Universe, the MCU.
What's his name?
The little pipsqueak guy?
Tom Holland.
Tom Holland.
Yeah.
Which are, I mean, you know, it's a lot of people who are Spidey fans and I would have not a Spidey fan, but I definitely was like when I was a kid.
My favorite superheroes were definitely Spidey and Hulk by far.
Yeah.
And yeah, like a lot of I mean, I don't feel particularly passionately about this, but a lot of people do feel passionate about Spider-Man.
And one of the things you hear from people is that, you know, it's just it just feels wrong having Spidey kind of, you know, hooked into this wider world where Tony Stark's his mentor and he's got like technological smart suits and stuff.
And I feel that because I feel much more at home With the Raimi version, where he's kind of just this doofy kid who with a homemade suit who, you know, there's this feeling of this guy who's just this New York character, you know, trying to protect his neighborhood and stuff like that.
And, you know, he's kind of a kind of a wise ass kid and stuff like that.
That's kind of what you like about Spider-Man.
Or, of course, I haven't read the comics in, you know, Donkey's years.
So the comics of comics are probably full of, you know, Spider-Man socializing with Black Widow or whatever the fuck, I don't know.
But to me, Spidey is just like this.
That's the essence of Spidey.
He's just like this doofy, wise-ass teenager with a homemade suit who protects his neighborhood.
I like that.
And a lot of people don't like that about the Marvel thing, but it's kind of, they got the rights to Spidey, put him in the MCU, and he kind of has to be integrated that way, doesn't he?
Well, and I think, I think the truth is not to interrupt here, but I think the real key here is that they got the rights to him late.
And so he got sort of like shoehorned into civil war at a certain point.
And so like, if they had gotten the rights, and also they're sharing the rights with Sony.
And so there's like a kind of complicated intellectual property thing.
Capitalism, capitalism, capitalism, bad.
Everybody knows.
Anyway.
Fictional characters can be owned, apparently.
Yeah, apparently.
You can own the concept of a kid with the initials PP with web shooters who saves people.
Apparently, that's the thing you get to do.
Anyway.
That makes perfect sense.
Yeah.
That's not in any way completely fucking insane.
Never mind.
Anyway.
And you can own him despite the fact that he was created like a 50 something years ago, you know.
Anyway, anyway, we don't, we, you know, capitalism bad, everybody knows.
Everybody listening to this knows.
We feel this way.
Anyway, yeah.
But like- That's part of the conversation that we can skip over with our audience.
They're already there.
Yeah, maybe the mainstream audience when we're not talking to our patrons directly.
We don't have to explain that, but you know, not here.
Capitalism bad?
What do you mean?
What are you talking about?
It provides jobs.
Do you know if we actually spent time explaining that?
Steven Pinker says that we've got better now than ever before.
What do you mean?
If we were to slow down and handhold people on these issues, Our podcast will be 10 times as popular.
That's the reality of it.
Let's go straight for the niche.
I'm just imagining how boring it would be to prep IDSG episodes in which I get through like 10% of the amount of material That even now, I'm kind of like, no, we're like, I'm, I feel like I'm handholding now, you know, and like to, like, do it that way.
Like, I would, you know, again, if some big podcast producing company wants to hire me to do that, Jack and I will do that.
Believe me.
Like, yes, please pay me.
But, you know.
Jack will shit can me immediately.
Anyway, so getting back to Spider-Man, which is not even our main topic of conversation here, because, you know, whatever, but he was shoehorned in because they got the rights late and suddenly he gets just kind of written into Captain America Civil War.
And he doesn't, like, the movie is terrible, not because, like, the movie is, I mean, the movie's kind of, There's some interesting stuff in that movie, right?
But then they shoehorn in Spider-Man and then create this, like, airport fight scene or whatever.
And, like, it just kind of totally distracts from, like, the real thing that's kind of going on in that movie.
And everything interesting just got stripped out at some stage, whether that was before or after.
I don't know.
But, like, there's a very real story that could be happening in Captain America Civil War.
And instead, it's like, well, now we have to introduce Spider-Man.
You know when like if they had gotten the rights and then said okay we're gonna wait two years and write Spider-Man Homecoming as kind of the introduction like you don't have to kind of stick Tony Stark in as the like and I'm going to introduce you to the 17-year-old kid Spider-Man or whatever you know like there would be kind of a better way to do that and I feel like there's a A real kind of lesson in, like, the way these movies get made in that story, right?
And that the narrative of the, I mean, the narrative of the narrative, the narrative of the story kind of gets subhorned into, like, well, these movies just get produced on an assembly line, which wasn't necessarily the case in 2008, because this was very much an experiment they were doing.
And if Iron Man had just failed utterly at the box office, none of this would ever have happened.
No, no.
So it's worth.
Yeah, before we move on, there was something else I was going to say.
Oh, yeah.
Like the other test cases, of course, the DC Cinematic Universe, isn't it?
Where they very much try to do the same thing.
And And really, I mean, do it very badly, frankly, even more like, as you say, like Spider-Man turns up in Civil War, he might as well just say, yeah, I'm here at last, guys.
They got the rights.
You know, it really is a case of that dictating what happens in the story.
You know, the story is dictated from behind the scenes by stuff like that.
God, in the DC universe, the characters should turn up and say to each other, right, we're skipping the bit where we meet because we need to get to the team-up movie.
Well, that's the thing.
I'm not a big comic books fan.
I never was a big comic books guy, you know, kind of whatever.
that's the thing that, that, I mean, Marvel there's, I'm not, I'm not a big comic books fan.
Like I never was like a big comic books guy, you know, kind of whatever.
So, you know, take this with a grain of salt.
I'm sure that all of you will yell at me from behind your computers, But also, you don't get to talk to me now.
I can't hear you.
So it's fine by me.
You know, Marvel has this kind of giant, like, kind of slate of second and third tier characters.
And Iron Man was definitely a second or third tier character, you know?
Oh, yeah.
Whereas if they had started with... I never heard of him.
I never heard of him until the movie.
Yeah, no, I mean, I think I may have had had some like kind of vague notion because Orson Scott Card had written them.
I actually can't remember how I felt about him in 2008, but like the fact that he is kind of a lesser known character means that you can kind of write him how you want to.
Whereas if you kind of come out with like Captain America as your first character, Or, I mean, the X-Men were kind of that way where there are kind of like expectations kind of built in.
But even the X-Men don't have the same cultural cachet that Superman has.
And so if you're writing a Superman movie, you're very hemmed in by audience expectation and you're very hemmed in by you have to do the things that you have to do.
And you can't just kind of, it would be interesting if they just jumped into a, you know, like the team movie without like kind of doing the thing, kind of going like, look, everyone knows who Superman is.
Everyone knows who Wonder Woman is.
Everybody knows, you know, who the Flash is.
Let's just do the Justice League movie first, because whatever.
But then on the DC side, they're also hemmed in by Christopher Nolan had made a shitload of money doing the dark and gritty version of Batman.
And so they decided they had to do the dark and gritty version as opposed to, hey, maybe people want Superman to actually feel like a good guy.
Like that would be nice.
Let's do the creepy version.
Dark and gritty is interesting because there doesn't seem to be any way back from it.
I mean it seems like the minute you get started on dark and gritty, the only direction is darker and grittier.
Like we're now at the Batman with Robert Pattinson and I don't know the trailer it looks like he's basically a psychopath and it looks like it looks like seven it's funny I re-watched seven recently and I was watching and I was thinking oh we should do seven sometime I would totally do seven with you sometime Yeah, this is set in Gotham City.
I mean, famously, the city is not named.
And I was thinking, yeah, this is Gotham City.
I mean, the people making the film don't know that it's Gotham City, but apparently everybody who saw this in 1997 or whatever and who then went on to write or produce or direct or star in a Batman movie subsequently knew that it was Gotham City and thought, right, well, this is this is this is a Batman movie without Batman in it.
So now we end up with the Riddler in the trailer for the new Batman film.
And it's just, you know, it's John Doe from Seven by the looks of it, even down to like the childish handwriting.
And yeah, it was inevitable, apparently.
Yeah.
I mean, I guarantee you that like everybody involved with making the You know, Christopher Nolan, you know, his first film Following comes out, like, what, two years after seven, three years after seven?
Like, David Fincher was this, like, god among, like, film students for, like, years and years, even before his feature debut.
I mean, I know Alien 3 was kind of a few years before that, but he was doing music videos for years.
You mean his best film?
He said only half-jokingly.
Yeah, I mean, you know, I have, I have a weakness for panic room, but you know, I haven't actually seen panic room, so I can't.
But yeah, I don't know how we ended up.
Oh, yeah, you were talking about Nolan's first film following coming out.
Well, I mean, and that kind of visual style becomes an aesthetic style, you know, or becomes a kind of narrative style at a certain point.
And clearly Nolan is deeply inspired by that, although Nolan doesn't do every film.
He's not as good as Fincher, frankly.
And I have deep issues with Nolan as a filmmaker in general.
But like, clearly he's... Say what you like about David Fincher, he at least has some inkling of how time and space work, you know.
Oh, have you seen The Dark Knight recently?
Because, you know, there are basic precepts of filmmaking that are just broken in The Dark Knight and that movie made a billion dollars.
There are basic precepts of space that are broken in that film.
How long it takes people to walk across rooms and where, you know, Euclidean geometry is violated.
Yeah, and not in an interesting way, just in a completely, completely inept way.
But yeah, no.
Not in an interesting Lovecraftian way, just in a, you know, I can't be bothered to edit things properly.
We definitely have to do The Dark Knight at some point, as much as I hate having to fucking re-watch that stupid movie, which I saw three times theatrically because I thought it was fascinating.
But I tried to re-watch it about a year ago and I got about eight minutes in and went like, Fuck this.
This is deeply, deeply stupid.
It has like four good scenes.
Everything else is bullshit.
Fight me on it.
It's fine.
Anyway, I've talked about it with and the other Nolan Batman films with Friends of the show, Kit Power and George Daniel Lee, and you can find those on George Daniel Lee's YouTube channel, Exaggerated Elegy.
So if you want to hear me talk about that, but we will talk about it on this on this show as well, because I'm looking forward to that.
Yeah, sure.
Patreon, you know, link below, I guess, you know, you put the link in.
But I feel like that's the thing with the DC Universe, is that it sort of starts with Nolan.
So Nolan made a billion dollars, so he gets to be an executive producer.
And then everything is all like the muted colors and the kind of dark and gritty version.
And also they're trying to kind of do the opposite thing of the MCU, which is kind of do the light and fluffy version.
Which, you know, getting back to Iron Man, Iron Man has some like There's some dark shit in this, you know?
The Incredible Hulk, the Edward Norton Incredible Hulk, which was the second MCU movie that people pretend doesn't exist because it doesn't fit in with this universe hardly at all.
Like, you know, it is it is it was like they made them simultaneously.
And like The Incredible Hulk feels very much more like in that same vein as the sort of like the movies that were being made at that time.
Whereas Iron Man is more kind of its own thing.
It still doesn't feel quite like what we think of as a modern MCU movie.
But The Incredible Hulk definitely feels like kind of a continuation of that kind of process.
It feels more Ramy Spider-Man.
Right.
That's it.
I think it's really like if I was watching one or the other, like, it's a better movie in a very real way.
I think there's some really... The Norton Hulk movie is possibly my favorite of all the MCU.
Yeah, no, I don't think it's my favorite.
I don't think it's my favorite, but I think it's, I think there's a lot of interesting stuff in it and I quite like it.
And it would be, you know, in my like top five probably MCU movies.
And I say that as a kind of a fan of the MCU, but it doesn't feel like an MCU movie in the same way, you know?
It feels, it's very much an afterthought because, you know, Iron Man made $400 million and The Incredible Hulk made $170 million or something.
And so clearly, We know which way to go is to do more Robert Downey Jr.
quipping.
That's what we need.
So hire Joss Whedon was clearly the answer to the problem.
Which points in the exact wrong direction.
Anyway I mean If it's Joss Whedon on one hand And like Christian Nolan on the other Like ultimately we understand where Cinema went wrong over the last 13 years Yeah If these are your two options, yes, everything is awful.
Yeah, I'm afraid I've never been able to work up any enthusiasm at all for anything Joss Whedon has ever done.
Pretty much dislike everything I've ever seen of his.
I have a particular angry hatred for a movie he made called The Cabin in the Woods.
That film, we could do an episode on that if you like, but that would just be me ranting for two hours because it makes me really, really angry.
I think that's what people want from the bonus episodes, so I think we'd be fine with that.
I saw about two-thirds of that, or probably close to like one-half of that, like kind of a middle, like between the like one-third mark and the two-third marks, that's about like that, that's the amount of that movie I saw, and kind of went like, yeah I know where this is going, it's fine, I don't need, I don't need, I don't need, I don't need more of this.
I just get really, really, really annoyed with things that do this, oh, I'm going to comment knowingly and cleverly on the tropes of a genre, and that by itself That often annoys me, but sometimes it can be well done and sometimes it can be fun, like the original Scream.
Where's Craven?
That's fine.
I haven't got a problem with that.
It does what it does and it does it with a kind of underlying respect and it does it on the square while at the same time playing around with the tropes and being very wink and a nod and telling you what it's doing.
And it kind of works because it just has this affection and this charm, but also this underlying Yeah, we are nonetheless still doing one of these movies on the square for you on top of that or underneath it, and it gets away with it.
And I like it.
But a lot of the time, those sorts of texts that take that approach, that sort of, oh, we're in on the metatextual, we're in on the tropes.
Sometimes it can be really, really annoying and really, really smug.
And then there's the texts that do that and don't actually know anything about the tropes of the genre that they think they're commenting on.
And that's the cabin in the woods.
Fair enough.
I feel like the guiding line there is if you want to do the metatext thing, if you want to have that metatextual relationship and you want to wink a nod to your audience, you also have to tell a compelling story.
Unless you're That good that you can just kind of bring everybody along or be like that funny or kind of whatever, like there are ways of doing it well, like you can do that in a way that I'm going to be involved with it.
But after you've seen Scream and after you've watched a few Kevin Smith movies from the 90s, the early Kevin Smith movies, which, you know, whatever we think about kind of the later career, whatever we think about Kevin Smith as a person, like, you know, Clerks was fucking hilarious in 1994, you know?
You know, because there was no, there was no, there was a vacuum of that kind of stuff.
But like, once you get beyond that kind of initial, you know, kind of influx of this, like, you then have to actually be able to tell a story.
And I feel like that's the, you know, as the kind of lifelong Tarantino stan.
Which I apologize for.
You know, Tarantino kind of always got that.
It's like, yeah, I'm going to make movies that reference back to my love of Hong Kong from the 70s, but I'm also going to tell a compelling narrative on top of that.
So you don't have to have all of that like meta text to get kind of what we're going for here.
And I feel like that's something that gets missed in a lot of this conversation on many, many, many sides of it, you know, so.
Yeah, and I agree.
And it's deadly if you're not actually as clever about texts as you're presenting yourself.
And that's that's the Cabin in the Woods.
That's Joss Whedon because it's presented as this, I'm going to deconstruct the tropes of a genre.
I'm so clever.
Look at me to deconstruct the tropes of a genre.
And, you know, it's clear from the film that he doesn't understand the genre that he claims to be deconstructing.
And that is just insufferable.
I'm sorry, that's fair enough.
We should definitely do an episode on it.
You know what the audience tell us in our mentions what we what they'd like to see.
I do feel like there's a name that we're just going to like waltz past, but I am going to say it out loud here and it's a Moffat.
But we can we can we can just leave that.
He was lurking at the edge of my consciousness, and I was sort of, you know, internally, I was going, no, no, no, no, there's no reason to talk about Doctor Who in this in this in this context, or anything regarding that terrible, terrible man.
Anyway, moving forward, swiftly and decisively on.
Yes.
So we should probably talk a little bit about Iron Man.
I don't know, like if we want to.
It's a thought, isn't it?
Yeah.
The point I think we were about to get to was, I mean, you said in 2008, I kind of said there wasn't it wasn't really apparent immediately that this was going to be as huge as it was.
Right.
And you pointed out, yeah, there was there was buzz about it at the time.
Obviously, a lot of that is PR and advertising.
We should differentiate between like buzz and hype and hype is like created by the studio and the PR and then buzz is something that's kind of organic like kind of ground up and there was a little bit of both on this you know so yeah but yeah.
So there was, I mean, people were aware of it.
It was being touted, etc, etc.
But it was, you know, I remember the Warren Beatty movie adaptation of Dick Tracy, you know, that came out in 89 or 88 or whatever it was.
And everybody was like, is this going to be, you know, Batman, this summer's Batman?
Because Batman had just been like the year before, you know, the huge Tim Burton Batman that was massive.
Yeah, Dick Tracy is 1990.
So it's the year after the year after Batman.
Yeah.
So, you know, I remember at the time, everybody was like, is this going to be is this going to be Batman all over again?
Or is it just going to be Is it going to be another crash?
You know, because I think Beatty's career was kind of known for a couple of big crashes by that point.
Big flop.
And it turned out to be... Even in William Goldman's book, Avengers in the Screen Trade in 1980, he references the fact that William Beatty had had like three major crashes of his career in 1981.
So, yes.
Actually, one of them, one of the most famous is a movie called Ishtar, which is kind of a legendary flop with Warren Beatty and Dustin Hoffman.
And it's kind of, I wouldn't say it's good exactly, but it's kind of an interesting film.
That might be another one we could talk about.
Interesting from the point of view of, like, American attitudes towards the Middle East.
I mean, that's something we might get onto in this one.
But yeah, there's an episode of Growing Pains when, no, God, I don't know what show I'm thinking of.
I think it's Growing Pains when Leonardo DiCaprio was the child actor of that.
And there's a scene in which he was in prison and he was on death row or whatever.
Somebody's going to give me all the details that I'm forgetting here and the mentions, I'm sure.
And the priest comes in and says, do you have any last confessions?
And he just turns to the priest, he goes, I liked Ishtar, and that's like my childhood memory of the movie Ishtar, honestly.
Anyway, yes, please continue.
I apologize.
This is Daniel's sitcom half-remembered bullshit from childhood.
That's fine.
On the subject of Ishtar in sitcoms, there is a reference to Ishtar in an episode of Red Dwarf.
There's a joke.
I can't remember which episode it is, but it's one of the episodes where they go back in time and somebody makes a joke about going back to tell Dustin Hoffman and Warren Beatty not to make Ishtar.
So that's how notorious it was as a flop in British sitcoms.
It was a byword for catastrophic failure.
Anyway, the point was Dick Tracy comes out, everybody's like, what's going to happen?
It's one of those films that comes out and it's on a knife edge, you know, and of course, as often happens, it didn't really crash or boom, it just did okay and not well enough to make a dent and just came and went, you know, it's fine.
Whereas Iron Man was a huge hit, despite the fact that it's this third tier character that very few people have Heard of and Robert Downey Jr.
You know, he's an actor who I think up up till this point, he, you know, his time has probably been considered by most people to have come and gone.
You know, he'd had drug addiction problems and been in prison for drunk driving, I think it was, etc.
And he was caught No, no.
Robert Downey Jr., just to, sorry, I did go back and look at this a little bit.
And this is, I think, important to understanding what Iron Man was in 2008.
Robert Downey Jr.
was a child actor like a like he and he kind of becomes a um like a what like a kind of oscar renowned ask uh actor in his like kind of 20s and was like chaplain chaplain play charlie chaplain he He's in Less Than Zero.
He was considered to be kind of that like the way that like Brad Pitt was in like 1993 or so, you know, like that sort of I don't know who the kind of current version of that is.
But, you know, there's always that kind of, you know, actor in their 20s who is kind of considered this kind of up and coming.
This man is going to have an Oscar one day.
He is kind of going for it.
He is doing the thing.
And Robert Downey Jr.
was considered like the great actor of his generation.
And then he got really into heroin and kind of was in and out of jail a couple of times.
And everybody kind of thought his career was done.
And then he got out, got like, went back into TV, which at the time, I don't know, again, for our younger audience, like the idea of like, and then he got out of prison and then like went on Ali McBeal, which was like a huge show at the time, you know, but like Ali McBeal, Jesus Christ, he joined Ali McBeal in like the third season or whatever.
Right.
But, like, at the time, the idea that this, like, giant movie star, big, like, Oscar-caliber actor had, like, done his time in prison and was going to do, like, fucking TV.
Like, this is, like, you're scraping the bottom of the barrel, buddy, you know?
Even being on, like, a TV show.
Like, there was a real, like, you have really gone downhill on this.
So he comes back and he does a couple of seasons of Ally McBeal and then gets back into heroine.
And he gets good reviews, like people like him on Ally McBeal.
I never watched that show, so I don't know.
But like he did.
I watched it back in the day because I really fancied the actress that was in it.
Calissa Flockhart.
Yeah.
Also, the Birdcage would be one we could definitely do because she's in that and she's very young in that.
And that is very funny and very much in our In our wheelhouse in a weird way.
So, you know, anyway.
She's pretty good.
There was a generally pretty bad movie version of A Midsummer Night's Dream that came out in the late 90s, I think, with Kevin Kline and very, you know, star studded.
They were trying to do like a Kenneth Branagh Shakespeare thing.
Yeah.
And she's in that and she's pretty good.
Didn't Joss Whedon direct that?
No, no, no.
Joss Whedon.
I'm thinking of another Shakespeare adaptation, aren't I?
Yeah, Joss Whedon did a kind of modern dress, black and white, shot on video version of... I think it was... Much Ado About Nothing.
But yeah, no, it's different.
So this was like period, but we're not original period.
It was 1910s or something.
But yeah, the point is she was pretty good in it.
But yeah, the point within the point before I digress within the point was I did watch a few episodes of Ally McBeal because I fancied Callista Flockhart and not even that was enough to let me keep watching because it was so bone grindingly awful.
The real, you know, Alec McBeal references the Futurama single female lawyer sequence, which I don't know if you ever watched Futurama, but you know, it's... Occasionally.
The big thing about Alec McBeal at the time was that it kind of had dream sequences.
Yeah.
Like it expressed her inner thoughts by having like surreal hallucinatory sequences that weren't really happening.
Right, right.
So anyway, Robert Downey Jr.
is on that for a couple of years, and then goes back into prison because he could not stay off the heroin, right?
Then he gets out.
He's apparently been clean since 2003.
He does this movie Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, which is written and directed by Shane Black.
Who had originally written, who originally wrote the first, I think the first two Lethal Weapon movies, but like the first Lethal Weapon movie was kind of his like claim to fame.
And there's this kind of whole era of like Hollywood screenwriting in the 80s.
It's sort of like built around like Shane Black getting this thing published and Shane Black is kind of legendary screenwriter, but he finally moved into directing and he did this low budget movie called Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, and he cast Robert Downey Jr.
in the lead role.
And this is kind of like Robert Downey Jr.
coming back to kind of Hollywood in a real way.
And the very next year, he gets cast in Iron Man because Jon Favreau basically says, who directed this, basically says, like, he's the guy or this movie, like, there's no way to make this movie without having Robert Downey Jr.
being like the fucking the most charming man on the planet has to play this character or this movie isn't going to work.
And Jon Favreau was right because this guy is a fucking asshole.
There's no way unless you have like, you know, you know, superstar, greatest actor living play this character.
Right.
You know.
Anyway, Shane Black comes on, eventually he directs Iron Man 3 as well, which is another of my favorite of the Marvel Cinematic Universe movies, for very different reasons.
But anyway, that's kind of the story of like, you know, Robert Downey Jr.
and Iron Man.
Yeah, but as you say, Robert Downey Jr.
in 2008, not guaranteed box office.
He's 43 years old at this point.
And clearly, if you look at the script of this movie, he's clearly meant to be 30 years old.
He's clearly meant to be Zac Efron or somebody.
And I think, and this kind of gets back to something that like Marvel gets, like the movie studio gets, is casting is like 90% of it, right?
Like you cast the right actor in the role and the audience will kind of go with you where you want to go.
And I feel like this, this kind of passes through throughout all the, I mean, I think, you know, whatever we want to say about like everything else about the MCU, positive or negative, largely negative.
I, I speak as a, these are my popcorn movies and I'm fine admitting that, like, I don't have a problem with that.
I like these movies, but like, they're terrible, but I like them anyway.
But, like, casting is clearly, like, the key.
And without Robert Downey Jr.
at the center of the Iron Man franchise, the franchise just doesn't work, like, just as cinema.
You know, Chris Evans is Captain America.
Edward Norton is just terrible to work with and everybody hates him.
Mark Ruffalo as the Hulk, you don't get anywhere past the Avengers with the Hulk without Mark Ruffalo.
Mark Ruffalo is Bruce Banner.
That's the way these movies work and I think that people respond to that.
Yeah, yeah, the poor casting decisions are very few and far between.
Almost all the major roles, very, very cleverly cast.
Or you could cast Christian Bale as Batman.
That would be another choice you could make.
You could do that.
Or cast Christian Bale in anything, really.
Yeah, Christian Bale.
Let's do that when we do the talk.
I think there's a long conversation about Christian Bale movies that we could have.
You know, I think, like, if you'd let Christian Bale play Bruce Wayne the way he plays Patrick Bateman in American Psycho, that could have been interesting.
But no, they just said, Christian, just be bland.
I think Christian Bale is better as Bruce Wayne.
Like in Batman Begins, there's this moment where he's partying with some models.
And the models are swimming in the little water tank or whatever.
They're swimming in a pool.
And, you know, the maitre d' or the manager of the hotel is like, you need to make sure this isn't happening again.
And he like pulls out his check and it's like, sir, we don't, you know, we're not going to take a bribe.
And he's like, no, you don't understand.
I'm buying this hotel.
And like, you know, like that's, that's, I get that as, like, the Bruce Wayne character.
Like, yes, Christian Bale, that's good.
When he's playing Batman, a different feeling I have.
And not even about the voice, the little, like, that kind of voice thing.
That doesn't even bother me.
Except when, in The Dark Knight, when he's having, like, deep philosophical conversation.
It's like, The Kantian imperative implies that we must.
No, no, no, don't.
No, just, just, just, just, just go run to criminals.
It's fine.
You know, I just want him to like take a lozenge and just like cough and then go like, all right, no, no, no, you don't understand.
Like, listen, Gordon, here's the thing that we're really doing here, you know.
Anyway, sorry, I'm completely off topic because, of course, I am.
Yeah, we're failing to stay.
Well, but then, you know, that's us.
That's us.
Particularly in the bonus episodes, we just do the thing.
We just do the thing.
But to try to wrestle us back towards the point, third tier character, Robert Downey Jr., hype PR advertising, but not You know, it was one of those things.
Oh, what's this?
You know, who knows?
Not immediately apparent going to be this huge thing.
Why was it this huge thing?
Robert Downey Jr., whatever you think of him as an actor, whatever you think of him as a person, exquisitely well cast for the script that he's given and also given his head to improvise and play around with the script I'm given to understand.
Works.
Works really well.
There's got to be more to it than that.
And I think it's a very interesting film for its political addresses to the audience.
And I think it's, you know, I've said before, and I think there's an article about Iron Man.
Well, there's an article about filmmaking generally by the film crit Hulk or whatever he's called, where he talks about, you know, how really well made this is.
The script is perfectly structured.
It's like a model in how to structure one of these, the scripts for one of these sorts of films.
And I think that's very true.
He's got a YouTube channel these days.
He did a very good one about Man Backs Fury Road, which maybe we'll link.
But yeah.
Yeah, sure.
But the point is, I mean, this is this is an exquisitely well-made film for the type of film that it is.
It is exquisitely well-made.
You know, the pacing, the performances, the the way the plot unfolds, the setup and payoff, everything.
It's like, you know, it's like textbook.
According to how these things are supposed to work.
This model of storytelling in this sort of very well calibrated machine-like way, this is actually quite a recent development, but it's come about dialectically as a result of films as this massive business You know, pouring more and more money into them.
Therefore, they have to try to make them as certain of success as possible.
So you, you know, they have armies of people very consciously working on working out the formulas for how you do this.
You know, appearances aside, because so many mass Hollywood movies are just terrible.
They're just terribly made.
But they do.
They've arrived at this kind of model of storytelling.
And if you're going to tell stories that way, Iron Man is still, I think, you know, it's a perfect example of how this is done and done well.
It can't just be that, though.
I don't believe it's just that.
There must be something else going on in this film that makes it... I mean, something that makes that much money has resonated with people beyond just being a well-told story and beyond just having a charming leading man, I think.
And I think it's to do with the world it lands in.
You know, it arrives in the culture in 2008.
And that is in the middle of the War on Terror, but after the heyday of the War on Terror and after the sheen is off, isn't it?
This is released in early May of 2008.
So, we're kind of in the midst of the 2008 primary presidential season.
This is, again, one of two movies in the MCU that were released during the Bush administration.
And at the end of the Afghanistan War, this movie is very much around the war in Afghanistan.
I mean, the origin story of Tony Stark is this kind of ambivalence That's I'm using that word in a kind of a complicated way but this cultural ambivalence around the war in Afghanistan, and you know kind of turning that kind of ambivalence into kind of a hero origin story and I think that that.
I think it's possible to overstate that.
I think it's possible to sort of make political what was ultimately just kind of a popcorn blockbuster.
But I think there's definitely something there that people wanted to have the excuse to feel good about something that they had felt a real malaise about for the last few years, at least.
Yeah, yeah, absolutely.
Because it's sort of ineluctable in the concept.
If you're going to make that movie in 2008, you're going to set it in the present day and not set it in the 60s or something in the original period of the comics.
Because of course, as a lot of people know, Iron Man was originally created by Stan Lee and others as kind of a character to wind up the hippies.
I mean, he said that himself.
We make the guy a millionaire, we make him an arms dealer, et cetera, et cetera.
And OK, you're not going to do it as a period piece set in the 60s.
You're going to set it in the present day.
He's he's an arms dealer.
It's kind of just the whole point of the character is that he's this guy that runs this arms company.
That's how he ends up with the Iron Man suit.
But then also, but also he's portrayed as like basic as, you know, like Silicon Valley entrepreneur.
He's like Mark Zuckerberg plus, you know, arms dealer.
He's like, you know, like, yeah.
So, yeah.
Again, it's ineluctable.
If you're going to do that character at that point in time, you're going to end up with him providing weapons to the American military.
That means that he's going to be deploying them in Afghanistan.
Obviously not Iraq.
I mean, I'm kind of surprised, looking back, that they made it a specific real country, that they made it Afghanistan.
You know, it would be more what you'd expect, actually, to have, you know, the sections of the story that are set in Afghanistan set in, you know, fake country-istan, generic-istan, generic Middle Eastern-istan, you know.
You mind if I speak on that?
I feel like there's an element that doesn't get talked about a lot.
Favreau comes out of indie filmmaking.
His first big movie was Swingers.
I think that might have been his directorial debut.
And he worked in indie films in the 90s.
For the bulk of the 90s and then kind of worked in like kind of more indie films and then kind of got more involved with like special effects.
But he was this kind of, again, kind of a weird hire to come in and be like, we're going to have you like build our giant $2 trillion franchise around kind of guy, you know?
And again, this kind of thing of like, nobody really knew this was going to work, but they hire Favreau, you know, who's also, he also plays, he plays Happy in the film for people who don't know.
I mean, he's also, he was also an actor, you know, he's, he's in several of these films.
But I feel like, you know, you look, and I come at this as a, you know, kind of a child of the, like, 90s independent movie boom.
Like, that's my bread and butter.
That's my, like, cinematic home.
These are the movies that I just feel happy rewatching these films.
And, you know, I can't, that's where my aesthetic sensibility comes from.
But I noticed in, like, 2005 with Mr. and Mrs. Smith, I don't know how well you remember that, but this is the Brad Pitt, Angelina Jolie, you know, like spy versus spy, husband versus wife movie.
Is that like in the book of that movie is we're both doing the like, Mr. and Mrs. Smith are in therapy together, and they have snarky dialogue.
We're looking at them as people, and then also having big action scenes around that.
And then they do jokey bits.
There's a scene where they're fighting a bunch of ninja assassins in a minivan, And it's like one of those minivans that was new at the time that had like sliding doors on both sides.
And so there's a scene where like Brad Pitt takes a ninja from one side and then throws about the other and he's like, gotta love those double doors, you know, it's sort of like it's jokey and fun and like, and that that comes out of that, like, A style of humor comes out of that kind of like 90s, you know, indie cinema kind of vibe.
And I feel like Iron Man really embraces that as well.
It's not, you're right in that it fits those kind of Sid Field like storytelling, you know, like screenwriting tropes.
But it does that with the twist that it's also kind of like using Tony Stark as a way of Like, because he approaches these situations with ironic detachment, we're allowed to kind of skip the boring stuff in a lot of ways, right?
So, like, Tony Stark comes back from Afghanistan and, you know, he shows up and he does a press conference where he eats a cheeseburger and he really wants it, you know, and we see him, like, really want the cheeseburger.
He sits down and gets people in there.
He kind of like, like we're allowed to follow him around.
We're allowed to follow that character beat around and we get to skip some of the boring bits.
And where I was going, what I was going for in the sense of like saying, why didn't they make it some fictional country is, well, also this kind of aesthetic means that if you make it, you know, Durdurkistan or whatever, like ultimately that alienates a bit of your audience.
Like the audiences kind of, kind of appreciate this style of You know, kind of ironic humor also wants to see like some degree of kind of a, you know, verisimilitude, some faux realism in their narrative.
And so you don't want to be taken out of it.
And so like setting it like, yes, we're setting in Bagram Air Force Base.
We are doing the thing.
We are, you know, there is a kind of like heft to the fact that we are driving in Humvees and we get attacked by an IED.
And, you know, like there is this kind of like heft to the violence here, at least the beginning of the film, which sells kind of the rest of it, which is part of the thing of like, this doesn't feel like kind of a Schwarzenegger movie.
It doesn't feel like some big out of the way.
True Lies, like kind of faux comedy.
There's a scene in True Lies where literally Jamie Lee Curtis is firing an Uzi and then drops it down a flight of stairs and kills all the people in the room by the fact that the Uzi keeps firing down the flight of stairs.
That never happens in an MCU movie.
And that's this kind of completely off the wall kind of comedy bit.
You don't see that in these kind of films and it's directly antithetical to the kind of like indie spirit.
And I feel like, again, maybe I'm talking on my ass a little bit, but I feel like there is something happening there with this kind of fusion of The independent philosophy and this kind of like big, suddenly given $200 million.
Although this one was made for the minuscule budget of $140 million.
I learned from Wikipedia as I was googling recently.
So, you know, it's funny that like the, you know, this movie, this movie, you know, $140 million is what you spend on the cheap, you know, movie these days, you know?
Yeah.
No, I think there's a lot to that.
And I think that ties in with what I was trying to get to is that I think the time was right in the culture for a cultural artifact that would actually express in a way that the audience was comfortable with.
And as you say, it makes them feel good about issues that are That are causing sort of general cultural anxiety.
You know, at this point we're four or five years after the invasion of Iraq and the discovery of no weapons of mass destruction.
The general admission of the idea that the invasion of Iraq was a quote-unquote mistake.
However inadequate that critique might seem to you and I, and I suspect most of our listeners, to the point that, you know, it was necessary for Barack Obama Who campaign on at least giving the impression that, you know, he understood that that had been a bad idea and that under him, things were going to change.
It wasn't going to be the Bush administration continuing, you know, it was, it was.
I mean, he ran, he ran on an explicit like, he ran on an explicit, we're going to close Guantanamo, the Iraq war was a mistake kind of thing.
And the second he gets into office, it's like, oh, well, oh, you know, tugging the collar, kind of, you know, the realities of geopolitics.
But then he like papers that over with, you know, his very, you know, his brilliant political speaking style in which people thought you could read it either way, either.
Yeah, no, he's totally going to pull us out of Iraq in a few.
Well, Obama is a very charming man, and I think that's applicable to Iron Man, isn't it?
A very charming man in a smart suit can win people over, even if he's dropping bombs on people.
Yeah, Iron Man definitely does.
It was widely, it was so wide in the culture, that broad feeling that this, you know, that there had been at the very least, let's put it in those terms, that there'd been mistakes and that those mistakes needed to stop, you know, as if like people sort of, you know, tripped and accidentally set up a prison for Prisoners who'd been given no trial and no representation to be kept and systematically, psychologically and physically tortured.
You know, you just sort of accidentally slipped on the floor and accidentally invaded Iraq.
But that was necessary.
You forgot to add a two and then suddenly the Iraq war just continued.
Yeah, instead of, you know, stopping.
Oh, God, what a mistake.
Sorry, I just made a mistake with the arithmetic.
Sorry, you know, yeah, should have carried the one.
And look, I'm not having a go at Americans, you know, I'm British.
And, you know, according to our mainstream liberal historians, we acquired an empire that covered three quarters of the globe in kind of this prolonged fit of absent mindedness.
So don't worry about it.
Yeah, but it was so widespread at the time that it was necessary for the democratic challenger to be perceived, let's put it that way, as being anti-stuff like Guantanamo Bay, anti-war on terror.
And that speaks to a very widespread cultural reaction.
Not necessarily a reaction against those things, but a reaction of anxiety and kind of a troubled reaction.
And I think what Iron Man kind of ties into there, I mean, I think that's why it's set explicitly in Afghanistan and not in generic Middle Eastern-istan.
It's that people kind of want it to be confronted in some way.
I'm not saying that like the people that wrote it, you know, took a kind of straw poll and wrote their script accordingly, but it's sort of a Darwinian process.
You know, it kind of succeeds because it fits into a niche that's there culturally.
People respond on On some level to the fact that the film is willing to actually go there and it's actually willing to show you like American troops blown up by IEDs and to show you the American military in Afghanistan and to show you, you know, in a way that the tone is very interesting, the way the tone balances, because it's not a negative depiction because Iron Man, like most Hollywood movies involving the American military, is funded by
by the American military, and is therefore answerable to the American military and the American government generally for how it presents, you know, how tonally it presents American military presence abroad in the American army, etc.
By which, by which, and I think our listeners will have heard this before, but just for any new listeners, the Department of Defense literally gets to, like, line edit these scripts.
Oh, yeah.
The approval, or else the studio doesn't get Doesn't get lended, you know, all the material, all the, you know, all the army equipment, all the, you know, material, all the extras and everything that go into making one of these.
Like if the DoD does not sign off on this, you're adding like tens of millions of dollars to your production budget.
And so the studio is absolutely going to You know, except whatever line of this there are.
And believe me, if you watch this film a few times with that in mind, you can find, like, very particular moments in the movie in which, like, this is very deliberately, there's a line added specifically to, like, make this, like, not indicate anything negative to the US military.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah, absolutely.
Yeah.
To the point like there's there's a line there's sorry just one I was just rewatching this before we start get started here but there's a line when Iron Man is like he has just like kind of blown up the the village with all the terrorists in it and like fought the tank and all that the sort of the fun stuff of you know that bit of the movie and then he's like flying away and he gets like confronted by the two fighter jets yeah and
You know, there's there's a line in which like, oh, was there a bogey in the in the in our airspace or whatever?
And it's like, you know, oh, well, we had to fire on him because they were using human shields.
And it's a little like a line, like one guy says it has no impact on the plot or anything else.
But it's like, oh, they were using human shields.
So it was OK.
Whatever we did, it was fine.
Yes.
Absolutely.
I always recommend this book, but I'll recommend it again.
It's a book called Real Power R-E-E-L by a guy called Matthew Alford.
If you're interested in this, this has been going on for ages.
It's to the point where they will even change.
They will change scripts to the point where they change plot points that completely change the meaning of the story.
There's a movie, I believe, called Rules of Engagement that that happens to.
You know, to pacify the American… Matt Damon's first big movie, by the way, you know.
Yeah.
I think we might be thinking of different movies.
Rules of Engagement.
No, I'm thinking of Courage Under Fire.
I'm thinking of Courage Under Fire.
Oh, right.
Excuse me.
Yes.
Pardon me.
Yeah.
Yeah, the first movie that was made under this regime was Top Gun, although there was government, there was DoD funding for movies going back to the 40s.
Top Gun was kind of the first like, no, no, we're actually just going to make a movie that's like an advertisement for US military.
So, yeah.
She also was Captain Marvel, in which she literally was like, I need to change the colors of my armor to better reflect heroism or whatever.
How about U.S.
Air Force colors?
It's like, Jesus Christ, can you be a little bit more obvious, please?
Anyway, please continue.
Captain Marvel is an interesting one, because all that is true.
And the depiction, the literal depiction of the United States Air Force in that film is just glowing from start to finish.
It's just completely positive.
There's no, you know, like you're allowed to have the American government high up spook Who's not a particularly nice guy that's played by Ben Mendelsohn, you know, wearing a horrible grey suit, etc.
And he's allowed to be a bit of a creep.
But basically all the all the normal, you know, on the ground heart of gold, salt of the earth, American service people flying, flying planes.
They're all great.
And, you know, it's wonderful.
The whole and the film also has kind of this This metaphor about how sometimes the people who are the insurgent terrorists fighting the liberal metropolis utopia, like the alien planet in the film.
You know, it has subways, and it has skyscrapers, and it looks like fucking, it looks like space New York, right?
And she's living there, and they're the good guys, and they're fighting these evil terrorists who are, I don't know what they're even called, they're kind of got, you know, they've got alien faces.
They're space Jews, they're literally shape-shifting space Jews.
Well, yeah, but you could also, I mean, God, Talk about digressing.
This gets complicated, yeah, very quickly.
Sorry, I know where you're going.
They could also be space Palestinians.
Yeah, yeah.
And, you know, let's be clear, just because people are going to yell at me, space Jews does not mean space Israeli government officials, to be clear.
We must differentiate between Jewish people and Israeli government actions.
Anyway, sorry, I stuck that in.
Should not have.
I see where you're going.
I think I know where you're going there.
Please continue.
Captain Marvel does this thing where you have the people who in, you know, in the standard Hollywood movie, they're the bad guys.
They're the evil aliens.
They've kind of got, you know, they've got green skin and bat ears and shit like that.
They've got the tropes of the evil alien race.
They look like the monsters in Star Trek Nemesis, you know.
And they're also shapeshifters.
And they're depicted as like insurgents and terrorists, etc, etc.
And from the start of the film, the Brie Larson character, whatever she's called, she's... Carol Danvers.
She's convinced they're the bad guys.
And she's fighting against them on the side of the good guys who are like the people from the space New York planet.
Yeah.
And of course, it turns out at the end of the movie that the space New York planet is actually the oppressor.
And these people she's been fighting against, the aliens, they're kind of this oppressed nomadic.
There's like this space diaspora of people who've been spreading, you know, and they're fighting for their survival.
They're fighting to get their families back together.
They're fighting for freedom, etc.
The film, actually, so that you can read that film as kind of an anti-imperial, you know, as you can with Thor Ragnarok.
You can read it as an anti-imperialist metaphor.
You can even read it quite specifically as being about displaced, you know, populations displaced by and oppressed by imperialism.
And there's some interesting questions there, and I'm not saying I have the answers to them, but there are some interesting questions about the tension between the metaphorical reading of something like that and the literal reading, because You know, it's very interesting to ask the question to what is the cultural effect of something like that, where you have a metaphorical reading and a literal reading that are apparently at odds.
And why is that?
You know, is it just that the people making it, they understand that imperialism is bad, but they don't see the charge of imperialism as being in any way applicable to like the American Air Force?
Is it just like a total blind spot?
I think, I think, I think there's a, I mean, I think, I think just ask that narrow question.
Like, I think there's a degree to which like a lot of people who get to make movies who have that level of like kind of privilege in their lives and get to that level of, you know, authority actually do just sort of like believe in the, you know, sort of American exceptionalist, like the American military is going out and saving lives and, Et cetera, et cetera, regardless of whatever's going on.
I mean, I think, I think Chris Evans is kind of the, you know, sort of the poster boy for that because, you know, like I quite like Chris Evans.
I think he's probably a really nice guy.
I've never met Chris Evans.
He plays Captain America, by the way, for anyone who doesn't know, you know, and then his Twitter presence is all like, you know, our heroes in the U.S.
military and support Hillary Clinton.
All this kind of thing, you know, and it's like, man.
You were supposed to be the best, Chris.
I was supposed to.
I really liked it.
And, you know, it's not to say like, you know, Hillary Clinton over Donald Trump.
Sure.
But, you know, also like, yeah, no, not it's hard to it's hard to be on board with that.
But I think, you know, I'm just really interested in the phenomenon of imperial cultures creating mass entertainment, the damn imperialism.
Well, I just I think I think we can.
I'm very interested in your take on this, and I'm very interested in your, like, more, kind of, like, thoughtful, you know, materialist take.
But I think, in terms of, like, how did this get made, I think that's a very easy answer.
Is that is, regardless of how any of the, like, creative people on board with, you know, on the screenwriting and the directing and the acting, or kind of whatever end of it, feel about it.
They may want to tell an anti-imperialist story, and they may even have the metaphor in mind of, like, kind of the American empire as, you know, this kind of toxic, evil, you know, presence in the world.
But then this gets filtered through the studio, and the studio goes like, well, we gotta get the DODs, you know.
you know, thumbs up on this.
And so the DOD then just takes whatever, then just puts like all these like Air Force good references in it.
And so suddenly we get this product that very clearly is saying, you know, imperialism is terrible.
And, you know, even with an explicit kind of, like, US Air Force metaphor built within it, which then also has, like, very explicit positive, like, Air Force portrayals, like, kind of built in, right?
And I think that that's kind of, I just think that's how it happens, ultimately.
Yeah, absolutely.
And how we choose to interpret that.
For me, I go back and forth on this, and I think it varies by film, but for instance, Winter Soldier is one of the better MCU movies, I think.
It's, again, one of my kind of top five, I think, And that movie is very explicitly about, like, you know, Captain America is turning his back on the, like, U.S.
surveillance state and the, you know, kind of warmongering, profiteering kind of angle of the U.S.
government.
Like, it is very explicitly about that.
But it's not, because ultimately he's turning his back on S.H.I.E.L.D., which is a fictional agency, which...
Even in text is shown as being infiltrated by, you know, Nazi outsiders from Hydra who are like leftovers from like Nazi Germany and has absolutely nothing explicitly to say about the actual U.S.
surveillance apparatus, right?
And so like when you like abstract to that degree, it is difficult to think that you're actually saying something.
Like it's difficult to kind of Give it credit, right?
You know?
Yeah.
And what you end up with then, instead of a film that is any kind of indictment of the, you know, leaving aside entirely the question of whether or not making films about how bad the national security state is, is in any way like an efficacious way of combating it, All those Vietnam War films, all those anti-Vietnam films, the effect was the DoD just started paying for Top Gun.
So, you know, that worked out great.
I'm a great believer in the power of art.
But I think, yeah, sometimes it can be overstated.
But leaving that question aside, what you end up with Is a film that maybe it started in somebody's head, maybe in the creative imagination of a writer.
It started out as an indictment of, you know, NSA surveillance and stuff like that.
Those aspects of modern post-democratic authoritarian, totally managed capitalist statism, etc.
Maybe they weren't thinking in those terms, but they were thinking about how it's bad that the NSA reads your emails.
Fine, that's something.
It starts out as something like that.
And by the time it gets through the studio system, which you can now look upon as a kind of ideological processing, it comes out kind of rendered and pulped.
And what you end up with is a product with a completely... It's not just not got that original ideological message, it's got the complete reverse of that ideological message.
Because what you end up with is Captain America, kind of the embodiment of the best version of Americanism, American exceptionalism.
That's the great liberal defense of Captain America.
He does represent American exceptionalism, but it's the best version of American exceptionalism, the one that's humane and democratic and liberal, etc, etc.
And what you get is a film about him representing America as those things, Fighting and combating this, you know, even if you take out the whole idea of it being like this alien fascist infiltrating insidious evil, even if you take that out completely, it's still the best version of America combating and winning.
And ultimately, it's about American values of, you know, democracy and freedom and liberalism, et cetera, triumphing.
And you get that in Captain Marvel, too.
Instead of a film that's about You know, that draws any sort of parallel whatsoever between the American Air Force and what the oppressive alien culture that Carol Danvers is originally seen working for.
Instead of drawing any parallels at all, they're not only separated from that metaphor, but they also become the people who solve the problem.
Don't they?
Because Harold and her friend, the other pilot, Nick Fury, etc, etc.
They band together with the oppressed people and save them.
So what you end up with instead of an anti-imperialist metaphor that would lead you to say, you know, to come to actual material anti-imperialist conclusions, what you end up with is something more like, yeah, we should get involved because people need help.
So what you end up instead is with actually a reiteration of, you know, liberal interventionism, liberal humanitarian interventionism, which is, you know, I hope everybody listening to this understands was an ideological cover for American imperialism, American aggression.
And just to be clear, like, you know, not to not to stamp on your point there, because I think, but like, if The US military were actually doing some version of liberal, humane interventionism, and that was demonstrably true.
I think we could have a real conversation about whether that's a good thing to be doing, and I'm not going to oppose Every single American intervention, like kind of on principle, like from, you know, kind of first principles, right?
But if we look back at the history since, certainly since World War II, These are fig leaves given to defend what's ultimately imperialist expansion, largely in defense of large-scale commercial interests of the US.
And so to not acknowledge that is to treat these things with myopia and with a childlike innocence, an almost Richard Spencer-like childlike innocence.
If you go back a couple of episodes, like, you know, that's, you know, and I think we have to, in terms of analyzing these things realistically, I think we have to keep both of those things, you know, in check.
And, you know, just to go back slightly, what you were saying about, like, Captain America kind of represents kind of this, you know, vision of American exceptionalism and all those things that we can, you know, like, look at an American, I was programmed with this since my childhood and, you know, this is part of me.
And we don't, we in Britain, have our versions of it.
Don't get me wrong.
I'm not having a go at America.
No, sure, sure.
But there's a part of me that still kind of, like, wants to, like, you know, you know, cheer up at the flag and the Star Spangled Banner and, you know, the, you know, the land of the free and the home of the brave, et cetera, et cetera.
But I see the hypocrisy kind of built into that.
And there is this kind of belief, there is this kind of, like, desire for that to be real right there is this kind of like want for that to be a thing and characters like captain america and i would argue much more uh even more overtly than a character literally called captain america superman plays into this in like horrendous horrendous ways um super
Superman, of course, is, you know, that is true, but it's also immensely more complex, I would say, in the case of Superman.
And you know why that is.
It's because he's written by two Jewish men.
Well, I mean, Captain America was, wasn't Captain America created by a Jewish man?
I can't remember.
I didn't, I don't know.
I didn't know.
No, no, but well, Superman is very, well, Superman has a more complicated history because he comes from, you know, earlier and like these, He's kind of the example of the superhero, which Captain America is kind of the pale shadow of.
But Superman, even more than Captain America in a lot of ways, because Captain America has also gone through various kind of versions in which he has openly questioned in the comics his own history.
You know, he's totally frozen in ice and then comes back in the 60s and starts questioning those kinds of, you know, historical American values, you know, very explicitly in text, which gets, which again, get kind of through a Pale Shadow get, you know, like kind of examined in Winter Soldier, and even paler versions of that in kind of the future movies.
And one of the failures of the kind of later Marvel movies is that they don't explore that, and it kind of gets completely dropped, right?
Whereas Superman, like in his cinematic portrayals, at least, you know, is Almost just a weapon of, like, American imperialism, in, like, almost an explicit way, you know?
I mean, there's a moment in Man of Steel.
This is actually, like, one of my favorite moments in, like, any movie ever.
In which, like, you know, Superman, like, fights off the Kryptonians and, like, lays waste to this, like, town in Kansas.
Like, it's completely destroyed and takes down, like, a Black Hawk helicopter or whatever.
And then, like, walks out of the rubble and he's, like, visited by, like, four soldiers with machine guns, which will do nothing to this man.
Everybody knows they will do nothing to this man.
They're just pointing spitballs at him.
That's all they're doing.
And Christopher Baloney comes out and goes, this man is not our enemy.
The real answer is like, you know, if you, sorry, I have complicated feels about this.
I really, like, I think this is an interesting moment in which, like, if you view the soldiers of the military at that point as sort of, like, representing the everyman, which I think is, like, and they are speaking on behalf of sort of, like,
The American people and more broadly like the world population, because at this point, the whole question of the narrative is whether they're going to protect Superman against the outside Kryptonians kind of coming in and what they want is to take Superman away.
This Man Is Not Our Enemy is actually a really powerful moment within the narrative because it is like telling us this is the moment in which the world population has seen that Superman is good and suddenly we are on his side, right?
Which is useful.
If you view it as like With any kind of, like, realist materialist perspective, you know, it's the U.S.
military going like, this man is not our enemy.
And by any recognition of, like, the reality of, like, U.S.
military adventurism, like, fuck you.
No.
Yeah.
He's absolutely your enemy, which is actually referenced in text because at the end of that film, he literally downs a drone that is searching for him.
Yeah, US military.
Like, that is such a complicated fucking move.
Like, Jesus Christ, Zack Snyder, if I thought you were actually doing something interesting with this, you'd be the greatest filmmaker of all time.
But, you know, it's just garbage ultimately.
Zack Snyder's thought process is there is, well, we have to lamp, you know, because of course he's that kind of nerd.
We have to lampshade the fact that these days the entire planet is, you know, you've got Google Maps, so you'd be able to find the Fortress of Solitude, wouldn't you?
So we have to mention that in the script, otherwise the nerds will be complaining.
Well, why don't they just find Superman with a drone?
That's the entirety of the thought that Zack Snyder has given it.
But yeah, it's a frustrating fucking film, Man of Steel, because it's so nearly interesting.
There's so much good stuff in that.
I would love to do a full conversation with you about that at some point.
The idea of Superman, you know, who could basically rule the planet, you know, anytime, that version of Superman, anyway, he could just say, right, I'm the ruler of the world now.
And there's nothing anybody could do about it.
But the idea of him saying, I could do that.
I'm not going to do that.
If you tell me to go away, I will.
If you say I can stay, I will stay and I will do what I can to help you.
But I consider myself subject to your laws and, you know, the proper authorities of your planet.
That is a really interesting idea, like Superman choosing to say, I live here, therefore, even though biologically I'm different, I consider myself one of you.
That means I have to abide by the same laws as everybody else.
So you tell me.
In itself, that's great.
That's really thoughtful for the character.
But yeah, as you say, the problem is that the spokesman for the human race that gets to say, you're OK, buddy, with us, we like you, is a member of the US military.
Detective Stabler said I can stay, so it's fine.
That's right, the SVU guy.
We should have asked Mariska Hargitay.
If she'd been around, that would have clinched it for me.
I want to know what Detective Munch thinks about it.
He thinks Superman killed JFK.
Whether it's intended or not, subtextually, just in terms of narrative rhyming, It's the fact that they've seen him just lay waste to a town all in the name of doing the right thing.
That's obviously what's chimed with the American Army guys.
That's what we do!
We smash people's homes up and slaughter people because it's the right thing to do and we're the good guys.
And again, Zack Snyder is not thinking of this in the slightest, right?
There's no question that Zack Snyder was like, we're going to watch Superman destroy a city and then like, you know, the U.S.
military is going to go, you're one of us.
We agree now.
Like, no, that's not the thing.
That's not the thing that's happening.
It's that nobody fucking, it's like collateral damage.
Like, Jesus.
This also this also plays an Iron Man too much more than Iron Man.
The first Iron Man doesn't do this at all.
I mean, you know, like it.
Well, God, it actively doing that with it's like, you know, you know, Tony Stark has is like super precise, like missile system where he can kill exactly the 22 people who are taking the kids hostages or whatever, you know, and not hurt anyone else.
Like that's the key to the Tony Stark brand, you know?
Anyway.
Yeah.
That's all right then, you know, extra judicial killings are fine as long as they're very precise.
They could have been sleeping darts.
He could have taken them all in to a court.
I mean, there's no reason they had to be, you know, like it is like once you start thinking about this at all in the context of like the real world, like, you know, Tony Stark is like the worst villain in history.
Well, this is it.
The films invite it to be thought of in terms of the real world because they set the film in actual Afghanistan and not fake country-istan.
They say this is happening in the context of the actual war on terror.
You open with this quite earthy scene where he's with like these very, these painfully young American soldiers in this van, this Humvee.
And part of the point is that these are just ordinary American kids, and they're like they're babies, you know, in fatigues, and they get blown up.
And then you get like this painfully right on thing, like, because the film is absolutely incredibly Islamophobic.
Like, they make this great song and dance about the Ten Rings being from all these different countries and all these different languages and all these different religions.
So it's definitely not Muslims.
And it's like, you're speaking Hungarian.
I don't speak Hungarian or whatever.
I speak 25 languages, but these guys are speaking Hungarian, and really what they're speaking is like Durka-Durka-Durka language.
That's right, yeah.
But the attempt to escape from the obvious political implication of the aesthetics you're using just emphasizes it.
It really, really does.
It's Sam Harris morality, ultimately.
And you get the painfully like the guy that he's locked up with in the cave is like the good Muslim, you know, and it was apparently a character from the comics.
If you I looked it up, I just read the Wikipedia page, so I don't know.
I'm not an Iron Man scholar, but apparently he in later iterations of the character.
This is like a guy who helped him build the first Iron Man suit after, you know, like the 70s, like kind of when he was supposed to be in Vietnam or whatever.
I forget the details of it, but Like, this is a character supposedly from the comics.
Back when Iron Man's origin story was set in one of America's previous long-running, blood-soaked, imperialist-aggressive wars.
Now the silver medal in terms of American long-running, blood-soaked, imperialist-aggressive wars.
Yeah.
Who would have thought?
Who would have thought in the early 70s?
That would be the case.
As you say, especially after all those movies, you know, they should have sold it.
Yeah.
And the US empire learned its lesson by just not drafting people and just forcing people to serve through the overt propaganda through both US movies and Fox News, and through sheer aggressive poverty, mostly directed towards Ethnic minorities.
That's the way to do it.
Yeah, absolutely.
And then to use technology as much as possible.
So yeah, yeah, absolutely.
Carefully manage public perceptions.
Yeah, no, I think we need to wind up.
I mean, yeah.
As you say, what's the large scale cultural response has been to, you know, carefully manage public perceptions and to perfect the art of consent manufacturing, partly through movies like Iron Man, you know, which, as I say, that they invite you.
I mean, part of the point is that it invites you to connect it to the real world.
It wants you to connect its ideological messaging to the real world of Afghanistan and the war on terror and the American military, because it wants you to take away It wants you to.
I doubt very much how conscious this process is at most levels, maybe at the levels of the people managing this at the DoD and funding and stuff.
But at most levels, this isn't like a conscious thing.
This isn't people sitting around saying, how shall we fool the audience into thinking this, that and the other.
But to use terms like want to and to imply intentionality very loosely when we're talking about what a text is doing.
Well, it wants you to come away with a certain ideological impression about those very things, those very real world things.
And it very, I mean, you know, this has been very much commented on the fact that Tony Stark's conversion isn't about the fact that his weapons are being used to slaughter Afghans.
It's about the fact that sometimes evil terrorists get their hands on them and use them to kill American troops, etc.
But that's really just that that's the blunt end of what is really quite a sophisticated ideological weapon that is being used to very carefully manage people's Understanding of these things.
And I think, I think, you know, these things are always two sided.
And to answer my own question from earlier, why did this take off so much?
Obviously, you know, it's a very well made film, and it has Robert Downey Jr, etc, etc.
All that being said, I think there was also the fact that it came along when at a time when people Kind of wanted their perceptions of these things that were making them anxious.
They wanted those perceptions managed.
And Iron Man does it in quite a sophisticated way, as a lot of movies.
I mean, less so maybe than Iron Man, but a lot of movies that crop up around about this time.
And I think you can, fascinatingly, you can say this about sort of the famous crop of Vietnam movies that pop up in the years after Vietnam.
They do it, they address these anxieties and these concerns that people have culturally about these very worrying topics that people are not really at ease with.
Through kind of a partial processed admission of a problem, very much like what the Obama campaign does.
You know, the Obama campaign is all about saying, yeah, this is wrong.
We can change it.
We're going to change it.
We're going to do it differently.
And it's all about saying, well, it was a mistake.
You know, it was a bad idea.
It was an accident.
We should have had an exit strategy, et cetera, et cetera.
And then, of course, in power, very little changes, although The Obama administration, although still bloody and imperialistic, considerably less so than what preceded it and what followed it.
I mean, let's be honest about that.
But I think what you're kind of seeing culturally, A version of the same thing, where perceptions are being managed, and neuroses are being assuaged, and it's done partly through an admission of problems, a very tactical, compromised, managed admission of problems, followed by a kind of an inspirational, you know, it's like Iron Man does the The yes we can, doesn't it?
Because it's about this guy who has like this Damascene conversion and he becomes a better person and changes as a person.
And the ultimate triumph, you mentioned the scene where he's as Iron Man, he goes back to this village and saves the people of Afghanistan who are being menaced by the evil Ten Rings terrorists.
So ultimately it becomes a vindication of the right kind of humanitarian interventionism.
Through the new and improved technology that he now has to use, as opposed to the Iron Buster or whatever it was, the thing where he stands in front of the mountain and then goes like, they say the best weapon is the one you never have to fire.
I disagree.
It's the weapon you only have to fire once and then blow up a mountain.
There's a real, like, you can imagine this in, like, a satirical take on this, right?
You can imagine this on the, you know, you're watching this, like, giant mountain being destroyed, and, like, how many people live near that mountain?
How many people would this destroy if you had planned this in combat, you know?
Like, this could be the bad, like, And so we get this kind of vision of the satire.
We get this vision.
We're told that this is going to be kind of a redemptive art.
We're told that this is over the top, et cetera, et cetera.
But we never get the real Vision, we never get the, like, it's completely blunted.
It's like cardboard, right?
You know, where, you know, there is this slight cut from the paper cut from the cardboard, but we never really get like the real incisive thing because the movie just can't go there.
And maybe it goes right up to the edge.
It goes right up to the edge of going there.
And it has to because what the audience that it's catering to wants that relief of anxiety.
This thing that there's enormous cultural anxiety about.
So, it kind of needs the acknowledgement of the problem.
But of course, the film ideologically can't say it.
It can't actually say it.
It can't actually show you American missiles killing loads of people.
So what it needs to show you is, in this very comedic scene, which focuses very much on what a big mouth asshole Tony Stark is, what it's showing you is, well, imagine if that weapon was dropped on a town full of people.
It doesn't say that that happens, it still less shows you it happening, but it shows you a massive weapon being very carelessly and asshole-ishly deployed in Afghanistan.
And it's getting as close to acknowledging It's the faintest echo, but it's still as close to acknowledging the horror of what was done in Afghanistan by my country as well as yours.
But the message I get... Because the text depends upon assuaging that very anxiety.
But the message I get from that scene more than any other is like, at least at the time, you know, like in 2008, seeing that in the theater, it was like, you know, that's a that's fucking badass, right?
Like, you know, there's a there is a line there.
I don't know, you know, like maybe maybe I was blind to it at the time that, you know, it's very easy for me now in my 40s to kind of see The flaws of Tony Stark more clearly than at the time.
And, you know, I think that might have been kind of a cultural aspect.
Sure.
I mean, Tony Stark is is enormously appealing even at the start of the film.
But the point of the film is that Tony Stark changes.
I mean, that's right.
Oh yeah, absolutely.
That's integral.
It's integral.
And I can't help thinking about the fact that, you know, so much of the liberal objection to Trump is really just about tone and presentation.
It's about the fact that he's a boorish, truculent ignoramus and visibly a bully, etc.
And you can get, You know, they're not all that troubled by a government with policies that are kind of 98% identical when the guy at the front is, you know, cultured and polite instead.
And really, that's kind of what Tony Stark's redemption arc is.
When Joe Biden's border patrol uses, you know, agents on horses.
Whipping Haitians coming across the border.
It's like, no, no, those were bridles.
Those were not whips.
You are being very dishonest about this.
But then like, you know, two years ago, it's like kids in cages.
This is terrible.
I agree.
Kids in cages are terrible, regardless of which president is doing.
No argument there.
But the tone is different.
And that's really all that happens in Iron Man.
You know, Tony Stark continues to be a billionaire.
He continues to make weapons of mass destruction.
But his tone is different.
He starts, you know, talking about, I don't know, strippers or whatever.
And he ends up talking about human rights.
Well, I have two very quick points.
I know we're trying to wrap up here.
I won't let you go to sleep.
One is, do you know who Robert Downey Jr's father is?
Well, I assume it's Robert Downey Jr.
Senior.
Yeah, no, no, no.
Bob Downey Sr.
was a like radically independent.
He was an independent radical left filmmaker in the 60s.
One of his most famous songs is Putney Swope, in which he imagined basically like the Black Panthers take over a Madison Avenue advertising agency.
Low budget.
It's a great film.
Go check out Bob Denny Sr.
If you've ever seen Boogie Nights, you have seen Bob Denny Sr.
He is the record executive who tells Mark Wahlberg that he's not going to give him back the audition, the tapes that they had recorded.
The terrible songs they recorded on because they haven't paid him.
And it's like, that's not an MP.
That's a YP.
That's not my problem.
That's your problem.
So if you remember Boogie Nights, you have seen Bob Danny Sr.
And he's actually credited as a prince in both Boogie Nights and Paul Thomas Anderson's next film, Magnolia.
Because he was a friend of the family of Paul Thomas Anderson.
Anyway, I am a 90s movie nerd.
I apologize.
I apologize for all that.
Anyway, the other thing is, I think it's worth talking a little bit about sex.
If we're talking about, you know, Tony Stark and his characterization, you touched on it very briefly there.
And that is this is this and slightly in Iron Man 2.
It's basically the only Marvel Cinematic Universe film and really like the last like big budget movie ever to have any kind of sexual content whatsoever.
Which is like, I've seen people like, you know, kind of take the whole MCU and go, how many kisses are there in MCU?
And it's a little like, Pepper Potts kisses Tony Stark for like three quarters of a second at like such and such time in Iron Man 3.
Like, it's very, very sparse.
Like, there is no... Somebody said, didn't they, about the MCU, everybody's beautiful, but nobody's horny or something?
There's a very real thing here.
But like, Iron Man, like, explicitly, like, at the beginning of this film, it's like, He is both like, he's like, yeah, I went 12 for 12 with the Maxim cover models or whatever.
And like, he's talking about like, I banged all these chicks and like, he's literally got strippers on the stripper pole in his like private jet in which, you know, like they're the stewardesses.
And then once they're finished, like serving him his hot towel and his alcohol, there's suddenly a pole that drops down and then they just like dance around with their midriffs, you know, exposed and you know, like that's supposedly like, you know, the, the, the, like that's supposedly like, you know, the, the, the, the height of hedonism, you know, which is weird in the post Epstein world to consider, but you know, like it's, it's, you know, like, like it's family friendly.
Right.
But he also, like, he also, like, sleeps with the, the journalist, right?
Yeah.
Who, you know, comes out and is supposed to be, like, the hard-hitting journalist.
You know, you know, she is a far leftist.
She went to Brown.
You understand.
Yeah, like he called, he says, you went to Berkeley?
No, Brown.
And he goes, and then he calls her Miss Brown.
Like, you know, classic, classic Hollywood writing, you know, like, I actually, I don't mean that even ironically, I mean that literally, like, this is so like, by literally by the book, Hollywood writing, like he calls her Miss Brown.
And then she challenges him and then he gives her, like, the most basic textbook answer.
And then she even calls out that it's like, oh, do you practice that in front of a mirror?
And he's like, I'd like to let you see me try.
And it's like, yeah, how many hours of sleep do you lose at night?
And it's like, I'd lose a few with you.
And then, like, literally the very next shot is her, like, crawling all over him, you know, fucking him.
And then, like, the next scene is, like, Pepper Potts slut-shaming her.
And, like, that's, like, the last bit of sex you ever see in the Marvel Cinematic Universe.
So, you know, these movies, cartoonish violence, terrible opinions about the military industrial complex.
Funded by the DoD, but no orgasms ever.
So, like, I think we should call the MCU the NoFap universe.
I think that's the, you know, that's really, that's really the angle we should take.
Excuses for, you know, a war that that slaughtered God knows how many people, but there's no there's no sex.
Everything's fine.
Everything's decent.
The only other thing we see is Tony Stark lusting after his soon to be secretary, who turns out to be Black Widow.
And like, far be it for me to criticize anyone for thinking Scarlett Johansson in 2010 was hot, but also like this is this is He's going to get me to instantly in the modern world.
Yeah, but this is one of the things like, you know, there's so many angles you could go with, like, you know, what if Tony Stark was real?
And obviously there's several obvious comparisons.
You know, he's a billionaire.
Donald Trump isn't actually all that rich.
Elon Musk literally Puts out press releases comparing yourself to Tony Stark.
Oh, yeah, that's where I was going next.
Like the obvious one is like, you know, a an eminently meetable rich guy with a with a tower with his fucking name on it, you know, obviously.
But, you know, and then Elon Musk and then Jeffrey, you know, like in the real world, the girls on the private plane would be 14, you know, and they would have been trafficked, you know, not to downplay that by laughing.
No, no, no.
The horror of that is beyond comprehension.
But I mean, that's what these people really like.
And again, Donald Trump, almost certainly a rapist, probably a multiple time rapist, as well as being basically a gangster, an international gangster.
You know, this is without talking about what he did in office.
And Elon Musk is just this egomaniacal fucking charlatan, loser, grifter, conman, incompetent poser, fucking crook.
I mean, This is laundering the reputation of these people.
This is laundering the reputation of the ruling class by sort of, you know, oh, Tony Stark, you know, he makes risque remarks and drinks a bit, you know.
Fucked!
I've always said about Citizen Kane, actually, Hearst should have been flattered.
Like, Charles Foster Kane is an immensely better person than William Randolph.
The 25-year-old's completely charming wunderkind, you know, millionaire.
Like, Is a good flattering image for William Randolph Hearst?
Please tell me more.
Also Citizen Kane is a movie you and I should probably do at some point.
I'd add another one to the list.
My take on that, my take on like all that is like, you know, if Elon Musk were actually doing the things that he says he's doing, if he were actually revolutionizing, you know, like the automobile industry and getting us off of fossil fuels and was building like this huge power network.
I mean, Tony Stark In text, in this film, aside from his, like, weapons research, aside from everything else, like, designed and built this, like, arc reactor, which we didn't even talk about the fucking arc reactor.
Eliminates the need for fossil fuels.
We didn't even talk about the fucking arc reactor and all the, like, I've done math on this, right?
Like, you know, like, Basically, the amount of energy you need.
Sorry, I've done math on this is when Jack just goes like, haha.
You know, sooner or later, there's always a bit where Daniel scientifically fact checks, you know, whatever it is we're talking about.
The numbers, the numbers don't make sense.
Let's just put it that way.
But like any reasonable thing, like the suit doing the things that it's shown to be doing In the movie, like, it's literally like the amount of energy produced doing everything else on the planet combined is what this arc reactor is capable of.
And this is a thing that, like, he literally built in a cave with scraps, you know.
Tony Stark could, like, absolutely revolutionize the world and nothing ever changes In the rest of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, because it kind of can't, because otherwise it would be kind of unrecognizable.
But wouldn't it be interesting to kind of show like, like if Tony Stark was like, yeah, I'm going to go be violent and kill a bunch of brown people in the Middle East, but also like free power for everyone.
It would be a much more complicated legacy, right?
You know, like.
And that's what Elon Musk is kind of telling us is what he's doing, right?
That's what Elon Musk is like, well, you know, I'm going to revolutionize the world and so it doesn't matter, you know, you're like, there's a little, there's a little like an interview in which he's like confronted with like, don't your cars kill people?
Shouldn't you have like systems that like kind of prevent people from looking away from the road?
And it's like, well, actually, like if our software gets good enough, Uh, the software will be better than human beings.
And so it would actually be bad to turn, uh, control back over to the human.
It's like, call me back when your software is that good because it's not now.
It's not.
Yeah.
If we can, you know, if we can find a way of impregnating oxygen with calories, then we won't need food anymore.
It's fine.
Don't worry about it.
Yeah.
But the fantasy and this is kind of where I want to I just want to like put a pin again, put a pin in this.
Like the fantasy of Iron Man, the fantasy of Tony Stark absolutely feeds into this kind of Silicon Valley tech bro kind of culture.
Yeah.
And the and the kind of combination of, you know, kind of Hollywood culture and Silicon Valley culture is very, very, very real.
Oh, yeah.
Again, another episode we could do at some point, but I think it's time for us to wrap up.
Well, a couple more things.
Please, I've got all the time in the world.
What you've just been talking about absolutely plays into, you know, an age-old fantasy.
I mean, firstly, it's the Pinker fantasy of, you know, the world is just getting better and better.
It's that Whiggish liberal fantasy of capitalism is making the world better and better, you know, and we've never had it so good.
And the world is better.
It's literally better to be alive now than any other time in history.
And it's just going to keep on getting better, etc, etc.
The age old kings of England didn't have access to the quarter pounder.
So isn't your life better than theirs?
Yeah, yeah.
But this is an age-old fantasy of capitalism.
Capitalism has been saying this about itself since literally the very beginning.
And again, the fantasy of the, you know, the humane imperialism, the American exceptionalism that not only entitles America to go, you know, and empires generally.
Again, I don't want to sound like I'm picking on America, you know.
All empires have this exact fantasy.
Rome had this fantasy about itself.
That it wasn't just entitled to go wherever it wanted and do whatever it wanted at whatever cost in other people's lives and homes, etc.
But also that it was good that it did that.
It was moral that it did that.
It was imperative morally that it did that.
It was for the good.
And even if mistakes were made, etc., etc., we can do it right next time.
So these are ancient lies.
And this film is just the most recent way of packaging them, basically.
And it perfects it for, you know, obviously it's been perfected even more since, but you can look upon the entire MCU as, you know, and again, if it's your jam, that's fine.
You know, I'm a Lovecraft fan.
You know, that's literally sort of fascist fantasy.
You know, I'm not criticizing anybody for liking anything, but you can look upon the entire Marvel Universe as just the vanguard of the, you know, the synthesizing of the perfect way to package this ideology, these ancient ideologies.
For molten consumption.
um but it's interesting how quickly they get away from anything regarding a real world politics and move into you know space opera and you know all that all that other stuff you know like after iron man 3 they barely even like reference any of this and in fact iron man 3 for all that i quite like iron man 3 they literally take the the 10 rings guy and turn him into like oh no i'm just english actor
i'm just uh drinking my cheap beer and sleeping with the girls they give me and i just i'm just playing a role you know so yeah and i recognize that that again it's like the painfully pc stuff where you know the original iron man is going no this isn't about muslims honestly This isn't Islamophobic, honest.
It's that again.
It's the film going, oh, yeah, you've got us far enough that we realize that the Mandarin is a racist orientalist stereotype.
So we're going to subvert that.
Which would actually be more interesting if they put that in the first film, because the first, sorry, we didn't even talk about Jedediah Stane, you know, because if Jedediah Stane had, like, if there'd been a scene in which, like, no, there never was any, like, you know, quote, unquote, Muslim threat, and it's all, like, created by the military-industrial complex through the Through the character of Jedediah Stane.
And suddenly, like, that's kind of an interesting story.
You know, like, it's like it would subvert that immediately.
But like the film, like, it's almost like they got like three movies in and went like, oh, no, we should probably do something about that.
Oh, that looked a little bit racist, didn't it?
Maybe we should maybe we should talk about that.
It's Obama's America now.
We can't be racist.
Come on.
And yet you know the people that we do the main show about for the most part they look at stuff like Marvel and they see like there's one scene in Endgame or whatever it is where there's a guy who talks about being gay and you know they see like this version of the Mandarin in Iron Man 3 and they're like oh this is all communist propaganda.
It's all the Jews trying to train us all to think like liberals.
They think it's so fucking liberal.
It's the Jews telling us that, like, we actually don't have a Zionist occupied government.
That's the, you know, yeah.
Well, it worked.
I'm fooled.
You know, I'm actually, I'm actually, like, amused at, like, you know, because they always, again, not to send this any further, but they always, they constantly complain about all the, like, all the Jews and, like, Hollywood product and, like, you know, there are these Jewish actors that are, like, taking the roles of Aryans.
And to my knowledge, like,
All of the, like, main cast of, you know, like, MCU movies are actually, like, it doesn't matter to me, but I went and looked at, like, I'm fairly, like, Robert Downey Jr., Gentile, Chris Evans, Gentile, Hemsworth, Gentile, you know, Scarlett Johansson is ethnically Jewish, and oh, oh, oh, I once heard Mikey and I talk about Scarlett Johansson and the fact that she's, like, you're allowed to have, like, the hot Jew-ess
Sorry for the language there, but like the hot Jewess gets to be on and like but she has like the big breasts and the thick thighs and like the curvature as opposed to the more slender Aryan profile is a way of like subverting the like white genetic impulse towards and it's like Jesus fucking Christ man like
I could never, I would have to go listen to a whole lot of material to go find that clip again.
It would almost be worth it because it is the most batshit thing of the thousands of hours I've spent listening to these people.
It is probably the one time in which I went like
uh what just uh i don't know there's so much that just washes over you where it's like i explain this to people and they go well that's horrifying and i'm like oh no there's it's worse it's worse don't worry like sorry i just completely forgot that for a minute until i you know like started talking about it and then went like oh yeah there's this one time this thing happened and then that was one moment where i was just kind of let's sit there i had to like stop the i had to stop the playback and just go
Well, that was fucking stupid.
I love the idea of like this Hollywood boardroom, you know, when they're sitting around and goes, who should we get to play Black Widow?
I say we get Scarlett Johansson.
It's like, oh, that's interesting.
Why should we pick her?
And it's like, well, as a Jew, she has like wide hips and then we need to ideologically condition the audience.
It's bigger than that.
It's like where they hire like Jewish actresses in general.
Who will be like not the Aryan ideal.
And so like the more curvaceous women who get, you know, like Kim Kardashian's and that sort of thing are like supposed to be like to reduce like male desire for more, you know, kind of slender Aryan types or whatever.
Like that's sort of the idea that gets pushed upon.
There's also the... Why should we hire Scarlett Johansson and Jennifer Lawrence?
I don't understand.
Why would you want them in your film?
It can only be.
It can only be because they are going to subvert white men from wanting to have sex with their wives because you're creating a Jewish ideal of beauty.
That's the thing.
Yeah, totally.
We can talk about this more on the main show.
OK.
Preview for us getting back to the Daily Show in a few weeks, by the way.
It's happening.
It's happening.
I'm prepping about four episodes right now.
So congratulations.
We're getting back into Nazis soon.
Right.
Well, that was bonus number ten.
Nine on well, some of it was about Iron Man.
Iron Man.
And basically, we're going to start doing superhero movies and we're just going to chat about superhero movies through the lens of one of these movies.
So the next one, we'll probably talk about the Dark Knight and then eventually and during that, we will very likely talk about Meteor Man.
And I don't know that.
Yeah.
Okay.
So yeah, this, as I say, this started as a whimsical idea of mine about doing just bonus episodes on the Marvel movies.
I don't think it's going to be quite like that, but we might, you know, the next time we're stuck for a subject or whatever, we might, oh, let's talk about Captain America or something.
I think that'd be fun.
We've already done Captain America, so we'll have to do another one.
Shit, we have already done Captain America!
Yeah, we'll have to do... We will pick a superhero movie when we don't have another topic, and we will do what we did today, which is talk generally about superhero movies, because it's easy content, and that's what the bonus episodes are meant to be.
That's right.
Easy content.
The paying customers get the bullshit.
The free customers get the hard stuff.
That's right.
This is what you get for your money.
Lazy bullshitting about pop culture.
Well, you knew that coming in.
OK, thanks for listening.
Bye-bye.
Cheers.
That was I Don't Speak German.
Thanks for listening.
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