Batman vs. Iron Man

When The Dark Knight debuted in 2008, it was quickly acclaimed not just for the quality of Heath Ledger's Joker and Christopher Nolan's direction, but for how perfectly it captured the zeitgeist, what with those opening scenes of black billowing smoke emerging from an assaulted federal building reminiscent of 9/11, and the Joker as the international terrorist par excellence, encapsulating all our anxieties about those "men who just want to watch the world burn" without regard to pain or torture or reason or basic human decency, and the deep moral quandaries of Batman using NSA-esque cellphone-tapping to track down these terrorists, and etc.

Taking their cues right from the Dark in the title and the troubling ending, many critics and fans alike have pointed to The Dark Knight (alongside such other "gritty" and similarly 9/11-milking films as Star Trek Into Darkness and Casino Royale and Skyfall and No Country For Old Men and so forth), as popular expressions of the general hopelessness, despair, and fear felt by the American public in our post-9/11 world gone mad. 

Such sweeping generalizations are always problematic at best, however, as shown by the fact that that same summer of '08, The Dark Knight was not the only franchise-defining superhero blockbuster about a billionaire playboy philanthropist with parental-abandonment issues who transforms into a high-tech vigilante after a personal tragedy in a post-9/11 world gone mad. 

I am referring, of course, to Iron Man.

Arguably Iron Man foregrounds these post-9/11 tropes even more explicitly than Batman; in the opening scene, protagonist Tony Stark is straight-up in Afghanistan, demonstrating his company's new weapons of mass destruction for the U.S. military, when he is captured by a Taliban-esque group (secretly funded by his treacherous business partner) that forces him to create just such weapons for them, which is when he builds his first robo-suit to escape instead.  He then designs an even better robo-suit to battle U.S.-corporate-funded international terrorism.  It's a 9/11 movie that doesn't even try to disguise its 9/11-ness. 

Yet tonally, Iron Man and The Dark Knight could not be more different! The latter is quite literally "dark," gritty, and brooding; the former is all bright colors, big explosions, and slap-stick comedy.  For although both flicks (if we're being honest) are brazenly adolescent-male vicarious fantasy wish-fulfillments, Batman  subsumes those fantasies under a veneer of "dark themes" and such, while Iron Man openly and cheekily embraces them.  Dark Knight may win in the "genuinely serious film" category, but Iron Man probably wins in the "sheer, stupid fun" bracket.  If you were to going to try to gauge the mood of the American public in 2008 strictly by Iron Man, you might conclude not that we are all anxious, fearful, and despairing like The Dark Knight, but as brash, cocky, and cartoonishly self-confident as ever. 

Probably both films are right--we at once feel more helpless and impervious, more serious and more carefree, more anxious and more cocksure, as we ever have.  Most individuals are walking masses of contradictions (a major theme in both Batman and Iron Man), so why not entire countries?  My point here is not to argue that one film is secretly better than the other or whatever, but simply to demonstrate the problematics of trying to make sweeping over-generalizations about an entire generation based solely upon a couple of popular movies.

(Though for the record, impossible as it would be for DC and Marvel to play nice, I would totally pay real money to see a Batman vs Iron Man movie.  "Superman vs Batman" my eye!)