avelera:

I know it’s in my tags for the Iron Man post but man, do you guys remember the “I am Iron Man” moment at the end of Iron Man 1? Do you guys remember what that represented?

Superhero movies obviously existed before Iron Man. X-Men come to mind, as well as a slew of DC movies like Batman and Superman. But you know what they all had as a subplot? Keeping identities secret. It was such a staple of the superhero movie genre that you went in knowing that there was going to need to be some kind of reset button at the end, or some stupid excuse for why the heroes couldn’t reap any of the benefits (and blame) of having just saved the world. They must always retreat into the shadows at the end, constantly helping but never known, because of “reasons”. Some reasons made sense, like protecting loved ones, but it had the underlying problem of meaning there was always this stale element to so many of these films. The world never fully got to react to superheroes existing, because they always retreated back into hiding afterwards.

When Tony said, “I am Iron Man” the theater erupted. I was barely a superhero fan at that point, and my jaw dropped. Something new had just happened. Everyone sensed it. 

The film had already grounded Tony Stark in the war in Afghanistan, it had already shown him as a fairly realistic tech wunderkind working within the military industrial complex of the day. When you watch the film today, it’s very much a product of the Bush era. For example, everything is about propping up the military, and journalists are automatically annoyances at best and unpatriotic at worst (as a fandom, have we yet acknowledged that Christine Everhart is actually a hero? Her needling helped prompt Tony to change his ways, and far from showing her up by declaring he was Iron Man, he actually handed her the scoop of the century while thinking he was sticking it to her. Hilarious. Everhart is a top-notch journalist and deserves so much more credit.) 

“I am Iron Man” heralded a new era of superhero movies. It meant we were going to have more than just Stark grounded in the real world (which was already a refreshing take on the genre). Rather, all the heroes were going to be grounded in the real world and the real world was going to know who they were and adjust as a result. No reset button. No status quo. No slinking back into the shadows. 

To this day you can feel how DC superhero films are struggling with this old subplot. There’s an underlying element of staleness in those films because they were unable to make any similar bold and dramatic shift to revitalize the genre and bring it into the modern era. When your heroes have secret identities, the world can’t really respond to the superheroes in it because there can be no dialogue between the world and the superheroes, the world can only react to the disasters and try to recover from them. The superheroes go about their lives.

So kudos to this bold move by the Iron Man filmmakers ten years ago. I don’t think it can be understated that this is why we have the Marvel Cinematic Universe today.