A Key Image in "Iron Man 3"

            Let me say first that “Iron Man 3” was loads of fun. I hadn’t seen the previous episodes, including “The Avengers” (although my daughter urged me to go). Reviewers said there was too much heavy metal in this one, by which they meant the iron suits (but I guess the suits would have been steel in the story? molded plastic in the special effects shop?). I went with the impression that it was going to be a very noisy film but I wouldn’t mind because Robert Downey, Jr., is so witty. Give me a break!

            My project today is to explore a key image in “Iron Man 3,” keeping in mind Johnston’s assertion that in a novel you have only words, but “movies make use of a three-fold narrative technique—telling their stories through script, music and image” (14). How might a single image “tell” the story of Iron Man?

            It appears at the very end. Tony Stark has promised his girlfriend, Pepper Potts, that he is going to step down from his intense occupation as, in my words, the savior of the free world. It gives him anxiety attacks and disrupts their relationship. Not to mention the fact that it has led to the total destruction of his palatial home on a cliff overlooking an immense body of water (the Pacific Ocean, but that’s in real life). He’s walking through the rubble—I forgot to say, he’s had his large, forever greenly glowing electromagnet surgically removed from the center of his chest, so he really is out of it. He looks happy and calm; in a voiceover he says he’s finally able to sleep through the night. Then he stoops down and picks an object up out of the rubble. It is a short-bladed screwdriver with a thick, stubby plastic handle. He smiles and thoughtfully weighs the screwdriver in the palm of his hand.

            Tony Stark is a mechanic. From the first scene in the movie, where we see him tinkering with one of the multiple iron suits he has made, through the moment of crisis when a little boy he has befriended says, “You’re a mechanic; make something”—this is the story’s anagnorisis; see my Wednesday post—the movie has underscored with colorful imagery the nature of Tony Stark’s soul. He is a mechanic. He fixes things. He solves problems by building new things out of the materials he has at hand. The voiceover continues when the screen goes black. His last words before the credits roll are, “I am Iron Man.” This is a film about identity. Can’t you just see the man in your life, there in the garage, gazing down at an engine, wiping his hands on an oily rag, and murmuring, “I am Iron Man”?

            The visual aspects of this movie had to be prominent because Marvel had the story first. “Iron Man 3” is of the comic-book superhero genre. I haven’t read the comics, but several scenes flashed before me as comic-book drawings—hey! The filmmakers didn’t insert those subliminally, did they?

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