Iron Man and the Merchants of Death

It's rare that I enjoy films based on stuff I've read and loved. Up till recently, the one notable exception has been Peter Jackson's LOTR trilogy. Having read (and gone gaga) over Tolkien's the Fellowship of the Ring, the Two Towers and the Return of the King over and over again, I found myself amazed, and the breath taken out of me by the visualizations in the films. Something more had clearly been brought to the experience of the story.

Another exception has just come around. Iron Man. Just saw it with the family a few nights ago, and it's very different from the stories I used to read ages back. But different in a good way. It's an excellent rework of the origin, one I'm ready to accept because of the little touches that add to the bigger story. Some origin reworks have gone very well - what Miller did with Batman, what Moore did with Swamp Thing, and certainly, what Gaiman did to Sandman (Ever read the original Jack Kirby Sandman? You will laugh. Here's a clue. Evil man-sized talking frogs).

On the surface, Iron Man is a fun and high-tech superhero beat-the-overwhelmingly-powerful-bad-guys flick. Scratch a little deeper and it's a story on the evils of the arms industry that seems to be so acceptable in modern society. Deeper still, and you have the man-machine interface. Is flesh and bone enough to make us man or do we need a heart to truly be human? Does one become less human when one's physical powers are augmented by servos, circuits, pneumatics and power-generators?

Iron Man has been present since my earliest days of reading comics. The random issues that Uncles Tom and Igni used to get from a house along a road whose name I do not know, but can still see the route to in my head as clear as day, were treasures back in Green House Area, Taiping, days. Iron Man was in standalone issues of his own title. He was also with the Avengers. The stories continued across multiple issues, which was a bit of a problem because the comics we had then were pretty random. Mildly frustrating, but not a huge issue for one of a tender age.

I got serious about reading Iron Man during the run by David Michelinie and John Romita Jr/Bob Layton. They had begun a story arc titled "Demon in a Bottle" in 1979. It was the year of my A-Levels, National Service was looming around the corner, and this was the time I decided to really diversify my reading habits and was making excellent use of my CJC library card. "Demon in a Bottle" was, I think, the first ever story arc on a superhero having to deal with alcoholism. As Tony Stark loses control to alcohol, his enemy, a rival industrialist (Justin Hammer) discovers a way to take control of the Iron Man armor remotely. At a critical point in the story, Iron Man's repulsors turn on and blast a hole through an innocent foreign dignitary, killing him instantly. Tony Stark is now a murderer, the killing took place in full view of TV cameras and all hell breaks loose.

Highlights of the series are the new variants of the armor for different environments, and the fall from the SHIELD helicarrier, in which Stark does a mid-air routine of opening the suitcase, putting on the armour segments, activating the armour and getting the repulsors to work just before hitting ground. Excellent visual sequence by John Romita JR!

The film opens with Stark's capture, not by Vietcong soldiers as in the original origin, but by Afgan Mujahideen. Just prior to the capture, he has been demonstrating Stark Industry's new missile system to an appreciative US Military audience. The new missile system seems like a super-intelligent cluster bomb system. It's code named "Jericho"

The city of Jericho is now part of the West Bank in the Palestinian Territories - which we hear so much about in the news. This is the same Jericho we read about in the Old Testament. The one whose walls were brought down by Joshua, together with the power of the Ark of the Covenant (shades of Indiana Jones!). Part of the process involved in destroying Jericho's walls included walking around the walls of the city every day for 7 days, with 7 priests carrying rams horns in front of the arc.

In real life Jericho is a term given to Israeli Ballistic Missiles, now already in the third series. Interesting that the writers for the Iron Man movie chose this name for the new Stark International weapon system.

Not far from Jericho is another country that's very much in the news - Lebanon. In the recent Israel-Hezbollah war, Israel was condemned for using cluster bombs in Lebanon by no less than the United Nations.

A couple of weeks back, on the BBC World Service, there was a story about moves to ban cluster bombs. Two days ago, the BBC carried a story on the Cluster Bomb treaty signing which is excellent news indeed. The not so good news, though, is that there are 111 countries that chose to boycott the treaty.

The treaty would outlaw all current designs of cluster munitions and require destruction of stockpiles within eight years. Although the US refused to sign the treaty, there is the possibility that European allies could order U.S. bases in their countries to remove cluster bombs from their stocks.

There is a sense of Deja Vu when looking through the list of countries that boycotted the cluster bomb treaty. Just think back to the earlier efforts to ban land mines - a cause that had a highly prominent spokesperson in the form of Diana Spencer.

Princess Di angered Conservative Government Ministers by calling out publically and strongly for an international ban on the use of landmines while on a visit to Angola with the International Red Cross in Jan 97. During that visit, she walked through a minefield in view of international television crews .....TWICE ...to really get the point across to the journalists who loved following her every step and utterance.

The British Labour Party, then in opposition, supported Diana's call. A few months later, in May, Labour swept to power, and the new Prime Minister, Tony Blair, promptly promised to ratify the international Ottawa convention on banning landmines. Diana was killed in the fatal paris car crash a few months later, in August that year. Perhaps her great purpose on this world was done with that brave action in Angola, and she could then leave this valley of tears. Her legacy still survives in that Britain, under Gordon Brown, has also been strongly in support of the treaty to ban Cluster Bombs.

Of the many things she has done, and the many causes she championed, this is what I will most remember her for.

As I write this post, I find myself thinking of two things I have in common with Diana - she was born in the same year as I, and she harbored a great admiration for Mother Teresa of Calcutta.

I think also of how the Iron Man story arc by Michelinie/RomitaJR/Layton about human fraility and heroism that I so enjoyed back in 1979 was running at the time Prince Charles was starting to court Diana. Had she never entered the tragic marriage into the British Royal Family, she would never have had the stature to draw the world's attention to the evils of land mines.