Editor’s Note: Aaron Freedman is a writer based in Brooklyn, NY. Follow him on Twitter at @freedaaron. The views expressed here are his. Read more opinion at CNN.
Note: this article contains spoilers.
As a kid, I never cared much for comics or superheroes. While I nurtured a love of high fantasy, my passion for masked vigilantes in capes ended with family outings to the latest Tobey Maguire Spider-Man movie.
And then came the summer of 2008. I went with a group of high school friends to see a movie about a minor superhero, a sort of Batman wannabe. I didn’t have much interest in seeing the film, but I wanted to be part of the male bonding experience and tagged along.
Two hours later, “Iron Man” had made a superhero fan out of me.
Eleven years and countless — countless — sequels, spin-offs, crossovers, and copycats later, it’s easy to forget just how big a deal “Iron Man” was when it first came out. Rather than offering a purely action-packed feast, it managed to be naturalistic and funny, while still giving the adrenaline rush we came for. Critics loved it. Parents enjoyed it. And my friends and I left the theater saying it was a contender for Best Picture.
But the success of “Iron Man” was not purely on its own merits: It was a product of a particular time.
The summer of 2008 was also the summer of Obama, the summer of hope, the summer of a liberal awakening after the long Bush years of my adolescence. While “The Dark Knight” would achieve greater acclaim when it came out later that summer (The New York Times praised it for being “darker and deeper than any Hollywood movie of its comic-book kind”), it would be ‘Iron Man’ and its legacy — the Marvel Cinematic Universe — that truly tapped into the zeitgeist, captivating my generation of young men for more than a decade.
For us, Robert Downey Jr.’s portrayal of Tony Stark, the playboy industrialist-turned-superhero, both fed on and encouraged a certain young, white, male, liberal teen fantasy. Stark was everything my friends and I wanted to be: rich (though like some of us, he was helped by a good deal of family money), handsome, sharp-tongued, charming and seductive.
But he also had a conscience. Nearly forgotten amid the fancy armored suits of the latest Avengers, Iron Man’s origin story lay in opposition to war. At the movie’s opening, Tony Stark arrives at a demonstration of his munitions company’s latest missile in Afghanistan, only to be ambushed by terrorists wielding his own firm’s weapons. Realizing that the family business has been dealing to both sides and profiting on the bloodshed, Stark’s first order of business on coming home is to announce that his company will no longer manufacture weapons. The move provokes the ire of Stark Industry’s corrupt and greedy CEO, who appropriately enough becomes the film’s main villain.
In those days when the Iraq war still dominated headlines and being a good progressive still meant condemning American military adventures, Stark’s confrontation with his own company’s role in murder resonated. You could have it all, get the girl and still be one of the good guys. Tony Stark’s persona and success assured a generation of soon-to-be-men that we could still be on top of the world, and — so long as we used our hot-headedness and sarcasm for good—not feel all that bad about it.
It’s appropriate that 11 years later, Marvel has finally laid Tony Stark to rest, with a tearful funeral that closes out “Avengers: Endgame.”
For if Iron Man embodied the spirit of the early Obama years, he is woefully inadequate as a hero for today.
Who will save us from inequality and capitalist oppression? Surely not the rich kid who inherited a fortune from his daddy. In the era of #MeToo, is the playboy-turned-savior the right role model? And as white supremacy emanates from the highest echelons of government, do we really think Tony Stark would be leading the project to dismantle it?
It’s all too easy to beat on “Iron Man” as a vestige of a more regressive era, when we made movies that coddled the egos of affluent, straight white men (well, even more so than today). But there’s more to it than that. Superheroes are our modern mythology, idealizing and modeling the values of the society that creates them. Iron Man accurately reflected the limited horizons of the early 2000s cultural mainstream and was certainly a far better role model for privileged white teens than Christian Bale’s Batman, who fulfilled an almost fascist fantasy of working outside the law to clean up the riff raff.
Tony Stark at least existed within the society he was saving and showed a genuine (if naive) compassion for the victims of corporate abuse. When, in later Marvel films, world governments seek to regulate superheroes, Tony Stark leads the Avengers faction wishing to comply (of course this regulation turns out to be an evil plot, perhaps also appropriate to outdated values).
So, for young men, did Tony Stark once model a good “ally” (including all the lack of skin-in-the-game that term represents)? Maybe. Is he the hero we need now? No way.
But who is?
“Avengers: Endgame,” appropriately enough, leaves us with no clear successor to the founding father of Marvel’s film franchise. We finally have several inspiring and formidable women superheroes, from Brie Larson’s Captain Marvel to Letitia Wright’s Shuri, herself a brilliant and precocious inventor like Stark. But they barely exist in the movie: Captain Marvel is less an Avenger and more a human warhead.
And while Valkyrie (played by a black woman) and Sam Wilson (played by a black man) are endowed by Thor and Captain America as their respective successors, the camera shows them looking apprehensive. The old order is gone — Thor literally abandons Earth to fly off into space with the Guardians of the Galaxy — but we don’t yet know what will take its place. Are new people donning the same old suits even the answer? A black Captain America would be a step in the right direction, but in the era of “America First” is it possible to be proud of any captain?
Perhaps this uncertainty is exactly what we need in our superheroes now. As America divides between nostalgia for the ways of yore and a desire to build a new and just world, our heroes reflect the forked road our country faces.
Marvel will no doubt serve up some new, multimillion dollar-earning superheroes in coming sequels (in fact, this possibility is alluded to in the trailer for the forthcoming Spider-man movie, to be released on the heels of Endgame). But as for what our real heroes will look like? How they will fight the injustice of our society and the existential threat we face from climate change? Will they embody the same values that got us to this point, or new ones that we need to move past it? That’s up to us.