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Post by svsg on Nov 20, 2008 23:04:47 GMT
Note should be made of how blatantly politically reactionary this film is. To the point of hilarity. My memory of this film is somewhat weak, how is this film politically reactionary?
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RNL
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Post by RNL on Nov 21, 2008 0:51:26 GMT
Iron Man always was a symbol of reactionary American jingoism. He started out as an anti-communist character in th 1960s, and now he's been reinvented as an anti-Islamic/anti-Middle East character. The character manufactures weapons for the US military and has no moral compunctions about it, until he's taken hostage by Viet Cong soldiers/Afghani paramilitaries and realises that they're using his weapons too. His epiphany is that the weapons he manufacturs for the US military might fall into the wrong hands: hands which belong to enemies of the US.
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Post by ronnierocketago on Dec 6, 2008 15:44:28 GMT
Iron Man always was a symbol of reactionary American jingoism. He started out as an anti-communist character in th 1960s, and now he's been reinvented as an anti-Islamic/anti-Middle East character. The character manufactures weapons for the US military and has no moral compunctions about it, until he's taken hostage by Viet Cong soldiers/Afghani paramilitaries and realises that they're using his weapons too. His epiphany is that the weapons he manufacturs for the US military might fall into the wrong hands: hands which belong to enemies of the US. The comic's origin was jingoism, but I can't agree with you on the movie. Unless of course, having the villain revealed to be Dick Cheney instead of Osama Bin Laden is now jingoistic too...........
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RNL
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Post by RNL on Dec 14, 2008 17:50:02 GMT
You're referring to Obadiah Stane, I presume.
It's perfectly in line with bourgeois Hollywood liberalism to criticize the American war machine. That doesn't for a second mean the Afghani (or were they Iraqi?) paramilitaries aren't cast as dangerous Others or that an attempt is made to understand their plight or their cause.
So "his epiphany is that the weapons he manufacturs for the US military might fall into the wrong hands: hands which belong to enemies of the US." Suggesting that some of those enemies might be within the US doesn't alter the reactionary, jingoistic quality of that epiphany in any significant way. Admitting there's some bad apples working within a system isn't an indictment of the system itself, it can actually implicitly be the most ringing possible endorsement of that system; it can insist that the system self-corrects.
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Post by ronnierocketago on Dec 15, 2008 0:04:21 GMT
You're referring to Obadiah Stane, I presume. It's perfectly in line with bourgeois Hollywood liberalism to criticize the American war machine. That doesn't for a second mean the Afghani (or were they Iraqi?) paramilitaries aren't cast as dangerous Others or that an attempt is made to understand their plight or their cause. So "his epiphany is that the weapons he manufacturs for the US military might fall into the wrong hands: hands which belong to enemies of the US." Suggesting that some of those enemies might be within the US doesn't alter the reactionary, jingoistic quality of that epiphany in any significant way. Admitting there's some bad apples working within a system isn't an indictment of the system itself, it can actually implicitly be the most ringing possible endorsement of that system; it can insist that the system self-corrects. With this logical pradigm, I can see your point. But again, IRON MAN is politically liberal, which surprised me that the knee-jerk right wing blogs didn't go mad over it. Still, I dig that IRON MAN sets up Brown Terrorists as the villainy, until a plot twist reveals that they're loose dirt compared to the true bedrock enemy, which basically is symbology of the military-industrial complex. In other words, how would you have done it RNL?
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RNL
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Post by RNL on Dec 15, 2008 1:53:47 GMT
You're referring to Obadiah Stane, I presume. It's perfectly in line with bourgeois Hollywood liberalism to criticize the American war machine. That doesn't for a second mean the Afghani (or were they Iraqi?) paramilitaries aren't cast as dangerous Others or that an attempt is made to understand their plight or their cause. So "his epiphany is that the weapons he manufacturs for the US military might fall into the wrong hands: hands which belong to enemies of the US." Suggesting that some of those enemies might be within the US doesn't alter the reactionary, jingoistic quality of that epiphany in any significant way. Admitting there's some bad apples working within a system isn't an indictment of the system itself, it can actually implicitly be the most ringing possible endorsement of that system; it can insist that the system self-corrects. With this logical pradigm, I can see your point. But again, IRON MAN is politically liberal, which surprised me that the knee-jerk right wing blogs didn't go mad over it. Still, I dig that IRON MAN sets up Brown Terrorists as the villainy, until a plot twist reveals that they're loose dirt compared to the true bedrock enemy, which basically is symbology of the military-industrial complex. In other words, how would you have done it RNL? But I don't think Stane symbolises the military-industrial complex, he's portrayed as a flaw in that system. And the flaw is corrected. I don't know how I would've done it. But my version wouldn't have been greenlighted, I know that.
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