On ideological incoherence in Iron Man.

I feel vindicated by the revelation that Iron Man went into production without a shooting script, if only because now I know the reason Robert Downey Jr. had so few quality lines is that he and director Jon Favreau were making up the dialogue as they went along.  This approach works when you can endlessly re-shoot uninspired or botched takes on the cheap, i.e. when you're not filming a $200 million film on someone else's dime.  Favreau delivered all that could be expected working under such constraints: a serviceable plot that relies heavily on the many charms of its actors and the explosiveness of its explosions.  The lack of a shooting script accounts for the ideological incoherence of the film Spencer Ackerman noted shortly after its release.  It is difficult for any film to have a singular vision in an age of studio-groomed auteurs and homogenizing test audiences, so one in which there is no script is bound to wander off the message it never had.  No matter how much attention Downey Jr. and Favreau paid to the lines to be delivered on a given day, they had no written substrate on which to base their improvisations.  There are no lines that resonate outside the immediate moment in the film because no one sat down and labored over the text in the manner required to create such resonance.  

In short, the ideological incoherence of Iron Man can be attributed to the material conditions of its production.  The same cannot be said of The Dark Knight.  Its ideological incoherence is a function of its script ... as I will discuss at some length in a forthcoming post in which I demonstrate that the film is all about dogs.

Comments

[dr]

Got nothing to say except that I dig the closing graph of this post.

[SEK]

Stay tuned, then, as I've got a whale dog of a post for you soon enough.

[Ahistoricality]

I'm not an Iron Man reader, so take this as a basically naive question: Is Iron Man an ideologically coherent comic to begin with? Is there a substrate in the source material from which they could have worked, were they familiar with it?

[SEK]

Is Iron Man an ideologically coherent comic to begin with? Is there a substrate in the source material from which they could have worked, were they familiar with it?

As a fellow Iron Man non-devotee, I can only say what I've picked up from reading Favreau claim that The Ultimates version of Iron Man was the source material for the film ... in which case, you can catch up quickly and see that there is, in fact, a very clear ideological agenda behind this version of Stark. The thing is, even if that is the version the character's based on, it's difficult to say anything definitive because of the amount of on-the-fly emendations they performed. I've actually got a much bigger argument to make here (as you can probably guess from the last few sentences of the first paragraph) concerning the consistency and texture of a work, but I want to hold out until I discuss The Dark Knight, which I believe was deliberately incoherent, because such incoherence befits a film in which the Alan Moore/Heath Ledger version of the Joker is its center of gravity.

[Bob Reed]

It seems odd to me that such a detailed film would move forward with no actual script and with just the director and actor ad-libbing their way through it.

Especially considering the amount of money laid out!

[Hugh]

Your post reminded me of Umberto Eco's essay on Casablanca. He says that it, too, was being written as it was shot, but he claims that some of its good features (or at least, the characteristics that make it what it is, and a potential cult film) arise from the resulting incoherence.

(Sorry, not sure if Eco would be either someone you would obviously have read, or someone you wouldn't possibly have any interest in reading.)

[Dr. Psycho]

I always thought that Iron Man was one of the more ideologically clear characters, at least as originally conceived: Howard Hughes in powered armor.

And I can't take seriously the claim that the movie's Tony Stark was derived from Orson Scott Card's precocious (and cancerous) thrill-seeker. He strikes me as being much more like the original character, and thank Ghu for that.

But what I really can't forgive the film for is that it didn't have a proper place for the classic rock song (which, not actually being about Tony Stark, would not have threatened the fourth wall), since it worked so well in the first movie trailer.

[SEK]

Sorry, not sure if Eco would be either someone you would obviously have read, or someone you wouldn't possibly have any interest in reading.

Absolutely, Hugh! In point of fact, I teach this essay every quarter. I'm not sure about the Casablanca written-on-the-fly legend, though, because the problem wasn't that they had no script, but that they had the original play, Everybody Comes to Ricks, and two script treatments (the Epstein brothers and Koch) competing for supremacy. They had two many scripts, which, you could say, is worse than having none at all.

I always thought that Iron Man was one of the more ideologically clear characters, at least as originally conceived: Howard Hughes in powered armor.

But "Howard Hughes in powered armor" itself a pretty ideologically loaded set-up? Especially as concerns the relationship of the military to its industrial partners?