RogerEbert.com editor and New York television critic Matt Zoller Seitz is one of my favorite people to read, so it’s no surprise that, though it seems he and I took rather extraordinarily different things away from the Man of Steel screenings we attended, his review of the movie still made me think. Suggesting that Amy Adams and Henry Cavill lacked chemistry, which I’m not quite sure I agree with, Matt notes the way the movie plays down romance. “Considering that every previous “Superman” movie put the courtship dance between men and women at the heart of its action — particularly “Superman: the Movie”, “Superman II” and “Superman Returns” — the fact that “Man of Steel” has a No Girls Allowed sensibility seems like a deliberate creative choice, a way to reassure young male viewers accustomed to the glib swagger of “Iron Man” and the dire self-pity of Nolan’s Batman that this hero is very much in the same wheelhouse,” he argued.

It’s absolutely true that Man Of Steel is much less concerned with the budding relationship between Superman and Lois Lane than in Clark Kent’s self-actualization and Lois’ insatiable curiosity, though there is a smooch, and a discussion of whether superheroes do it better. But reading Matt’s review, I realized that I was fine with that. In fact, unlike Matt, for which it was a decided and unwelcome abandonment of tradition, I was so relieved to see any break in the portrayal of superheroes’ love interests that it probably upped my overall assessment of the movie. I’m so burned out on the way superhero movies treat romance that I’d actually be relieved by one that leaves out the prospect of a climactic kiss altogether.

What is it that women do in superhero movies, after all? If they’re Pepper Potts, you act as a dutiful assistant, waiting to be noticed, then run Stark Industries faithfully while your boyfriend runs off to save New York, get ignored as Tony Stark navigates PTSD, then remembered when someone else expresses romantic or sexual interest in you, get kidnapped, get superpowers, and get divested of said superpowers. If you’re Jane Foster, you pursue obscure astronomical research, fall for the hunky guy who crash-lands out of the sky, get saved a lot, and get shipped off on fellowships to be removed from possible danger, since apparently Thor couldn’t just call her up and say “please get out of town for a while and when this is all over you and I can hit up a resort.” If they’re Peggy Carter, they’re feisty and then dead of old age. If you’re Black Widow, things are a little bit better: you get cocktail dresses that can apparently stand up to delivering an ass-kicking, you get to hang tough through an interrogation with a very cranky god, and you, unfortunately, get to beat the hell out of your brainwashed maybe-love interest before rewiring his brain correctly. If you’re Rachel Dawes, you get to be Batman’s moral compass, and in the process, get drugged and then burned to death. If you’re Catwoman, you get to rob and lecture Batman before he delivers unto you your actual purpose, and then runs off to Paris with you. If you’re Talia al Guhl, you get to honey trap Batman, while having a much more interesting backstory with Bane that gets filled in by two minutes of dialogue. In other words, over and over again, you get to participate in a man’s self-actualization.

Don’t any of these guys have male friends who are non-employees, unlike Happy and Alfred, with whom they could shoot the breeze or work through a few more of their issues? What about women friends or coworkers who aren’t there simply to be love interests? That might be a way for the Marvel universe, at least, to make use of the dramatically under-utilized Cobie Smulders as Maria Hill? If superheroes are supposed to be possessed of tremendous will, couldn’t they take care of some of the self-actualization their own selves? I am exhausted by watching talented actresses get cast as the little women to very big men, not just because it’s sexist, but because over and over again, the narrative arc of these origin stories is exactly the same, whether the origin is of the superhero’s powers, or of his relationship with the love interest who helps him manage them.
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I’ve been thinking a lot lately about how badly our blockbuster movies have done at designing villains lately, prompted by frustration both with Iron Man 3 and Star Trek Into Darkness. But yesterday, two pieces I read made me think about a rather different issue that’s raised by the way we design villains: how our heroes deal with them. Because we’ve got a situation that’s a problem not just for storytelling variety, but for what we understand as heroic. If all villains are so powerful that they present a threat to our continued existence, our only solution becomes to subject them to an awful lot of physical violence. It’s not just, as Linda Holmes has suggested, that we’re still hailing as heroes people who are responsible for or fail to prevent an awful lot of collateral deaths. Heroism’s getting collapsed to the ability to do a lot of physical damage in the name of right, no matter the cost to our stated values.

“One reason filmmakers might be wary of this idea is that they’re afraid of the optics of a male hero hurting a female villain, given the prevalence of real-world male violence against women,” Dan Wohl wrote at The Mary Sue. “If physical confrontation between hero and villain is absolutely crucial, it’s hard to deny the possibility that the imagery of domestic violence or sexual assault could be evoked.”

It’s telling, in Wohl’s formulation, that we’ve become awfully comfortable with wildly showy displays of violence against male villains, even those who are eventually taken into custody for trial or imprisonment. In The Avengers, the climactic showdown with Loki comes in the midst of an invasion of New York City. It makes sense that the superheroes in question mount up in response to the sudden arrival of alien invaders who proceed immediately to killing an enormous number of American citizens without serving notice of their intentions or giving anyone any sense to surrender. But those invaders are somewhat different from Loki, the god from Asgard who spearheaded their incursion. When he comes face-to-face with the Hulk, Hulk tosses Loki around like a rag doll, literally pounding him into the stone inlay in Tony Stark’s office. It’s a very funny bit of action choreography that fits well with what we know of both characters, both Loki’s sense that he’s invincible, and the Hulk’s sense of profound irritation. But if the Hulk could physically subdue Loki, he also could have taken him into custody, as Loki is later taken, without beating the hell out of him.
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We’re still early in the rollout of this summer’s blockbusters, so it’s a bit early to say this is a trend. But I was struck by a problem that Iron Man 3 and Star Trek Into Darkness, both movies with very long second acts, and short, action-heavy conclusions had in common, and that marred their action sequences: bad villain design.

I’ve talked about villain design before as an advantage that movies based on DC Comics, at least in Christopher Nolan’s Batman franchise, have had over Marvel, with the exception of Loki, so far. For the most part, it’s been a matter of ideas and motivations rather than action choreography. Ra’s al Guhl’s totalitarianism, the Joker’s anarchism, and Bane’s vision of class warfare all posed very specific challenges to Bruce Wayne’s vision of a Gotham capable of saving itself. But Iron Man’s villains have tended to be relatively poorly developed, the Red Skull, while a villain of particular vintage, never told us anything about Captain America’s basic decency we didn’t know, and Loki emerged as a good villain mainly because he challenged the logistical capacities of his opponents rather than their values.

Iron Man 3 and Star Trek Into Darkness had a different problem in common, though: it wasn’t clear what would take their villains down. In Iron Man 3, Aldrich Killian (Guy Pearce), a former nerd enhanced by the chemical treatment known as Extremis, which allows injured people to regrow their limbs, seems pretty much invincible, as do his minions. They can be shot, blown up in enormous explosions, punched extremely hard, attacked by unmanned Iron Man suits, and keep on going. In the movie’s climactic action sequence, Killian survives even devastating blows from Tony Stark (Robert Downey Jr.)—only to finally be put down by a killer punch from Pepper Potts (Gwyneth Paltrow), who he’d dosed with Extremis at the risk of killing her. Had Killian’s strength been sapped by his previous regenerations, which had happened in close succession? Can someone with Extremis powers only be taken out by someone else with the same enhancements? I have no idea, and the movie doesn’t seem to either, unless there’s a snippet of conversation I missed somewhere along the way. But it’s relatively clear that Killian succumbs to Pepper’s punchings mostly because the action sequence needed to end at some point, and because it was a chance to see Pepper, mostly relegated to being good at business and remarkably successful at tolerating Tony as a romantic partner, do something awesome. That lack of clarity left the third act without much of an arc. It was a chance for Iron Man 3 to show off Tony’s programming abilities, but not for us to understand why he won, and should have won, and why Killian lost.
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At Deadline today, Editor In Chief Nikki Finke has an extensive report on the contract negotiations for The Avengers 2, with a particular focus on Robert Downey Jr.’s quest to earn himself a bigger payday in the wake of Iron Man 3. She writes:

I’ve learned he’s already made $35 million from the actioner, which grossed $680 million worldwide in its first 12 days. He should exceed his biggest payday to date — that $50M from The Avengers which I’ve learned was more like $70M-$80M now that the film is all in. But it’s really Avengers 2 where he’ll clean up big-time — if he wants to reprise the role. He’s hinting to some media it may be time to retire Tony Stark. And saying to other outlets that Marvel better show him more money for Avengers 2. ”I don’t know,” he said on The Daily Show. ”I had a long contract with them and now we’re gonna renegotiate.” (“You are Iron Man! You are!” cheered Jon Stewart.) I’ve learned that Marvel and therefore owner Disney are going to run into big trouble on that sequel because the upfront pay, backend compensation, break-even points and box office bonuses aren’t pinned down yet for several big stars and castmates. This is major hurdle that Walt Disney Co Chaiman/CEO Bob Iger hasn’t even mentioned to Wall Street or shareholders though he’s already been hyping Avengers 2 for more than a year now.

First and foremost Marvel does not have Downey in place yet. ”They need him, and they don’t have him. He’s got a lot of leverage,” one insider tells me.

Whether Marvel needs Robert Downey Jr.’s Iron Man from a business perspective is one matter. Whether they need him for creative reasons is another one entirely.

Iron Man, released in 2008—a relatively recent date, though one that feels positively ancient given the changing role of superheroes in popular culture in general and Marvel’s dominance of this dominating genre in particular—was the first movie in Marvel’s current exercise in multiple-movie, multi-genre long-form storytelling. That didn’t necessarily mean that the character of Iron Man, inveterate tinkerer and playboy Tony Stark, had to be the cornerstone of that story. But he worked, in part because the funny, self-absorbed Tony allowed Marvel to run a wet rag over the very crowded chalkboard of prior movie superheroes. Rather than a blandly noble guardian in the mold of Superman, or a campy guy in a cape, as Batman was all too frequently on screen before Christopher Nolan got to him, Tony was a reluctant, self-interested hero, someone was more enamored of the badass nature of his trauma-acquired powers than interested in how he could use them for the greater good, who frequently made himself a target and ventured into the fray only when his interests were directly threatened.
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This post discusses plot points from Iron Man 3 in extensive detail.

“A famous man once said we all create our own demons,” Tony Stark (Robert Downey Jr.) says at the beginning of Iron Man 3. The backlash theory of terrorist attacks on the United States and its interests has become somewhat popular in culture in recent years, most notably in Showtime’s drama Homeland, in which the death of a child in a drone strike inspires an American prisoner of war to become a suicide bomber. But Iron Man‘s extensive critique of the war on terror—a major subject of the film, along with eighties movie tropes, domestic harmony, and fan culture—takes a different and more radical tack, suggesting that the threat of violence by terrorist actors may be real, but the War on Terror is an invention that both terrorists and terrorized participate in.

Iron Man 3 begins in 1999, on a New Year’s Eve where Tony Stark’s conduct has two fatal consequences. First, he rejects a pitch from Aldrich Killian (Guy Pearce), a brilliant but hopeless nerd whose use of a cane, unkempt self-presentation, and transparent eagerness, offend Tony’s sense of cool. “She’ll take both,” Tony tells Killian, who offers up his business cards to Tony and to Maya Hansen (Rebecca Hall), a biologist who Tony is taking back to her room for the evening. “One to throw away, and one not to call.” In a bit of high school cruelty, Tony tells Killian he’ll meet him on the roof of the hotel, and then maroons him there, making an enemy. Killian will return fourteen years later with suits and big ideas, and the intent to go after, at least, Tony’s now-girlfriend, Pepper Potts (Gwyneth Paltrow). Second, he talks science with Maya, who is pioneering a radical new technology that allows plants to regenerate themselves, but that is encountering some problems, and then sleeps with her. The first is a rather more intimate act then the second, especially after Tony leaves Maya with part, but not all, of a solution to the flaw in her project, and then becomes the person who doesn’t call.

Both of them reappear in Tony’s life fourteen years later for reasons that appear to be unrelated to larger events. After Loki’s attack on New York, Tony is personally traumatized. But the United States is distracted by what seems like it ought to be considered a comparatively minor threat: the appearance of a human terrorist who calls himself the Mandarin (Ben Kingsley), and likes to deliver pretentious lectures through hacked television signals and internet connections before bombing targets like a military church. There’s a general sense of insecurity. “The human element of human resources is our greatest point of vulnerability,” Tony’s former driver Happy (Jon Favreau), now running security at Stark Industries, tells Pepper. “We should start phasing it out immediately.” And the United States’ primary response has been the aggressive deployment of Colonel James Rhodes (Don Cheadle), who in his own Tony-designed suit, is jetting around the world like the fantasy of how a drone should work, preventing American troops from harm, but still providing human judgement in targeting and decisions to fire.
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Watching the trailer for Thor: The Dark World that was released yesterday, I was struck by a sense of how annoyed I would be if my boyfriend went missing for an exceedingly long time, and then showed up only to port me to an alternate universe without even giving me time to let my kicky astronomy colleague Darcy know where I was going. And it got me thinking about what women are allowed to do—or at least what movie studios think audiences will be psyched to see women doing—in trailers for the action movies that will be released this year.

Thor: The Dark World: If you’re a lady in Asgard, you apparently get to be anxious, get kidnapped, and walk around tables. On the upside, you also get to be in battle, which is a great setting for having your hair whip artfully around your face.

Fast and Furious 6: Appear in black-and-white surveillance photos. Be counted among the crew when the gang gets back together. Hang out with The Rock in a professional capacity. Attend parties where they wear miniskirts. Hang from jeeps. Shoot guns. Specifically at Vin Diesel. Have fist-fights in subway stations.

Man of Steel: Kal-El’s mother gets to be pessimistic about her son’s chances on earth. A neighbor lady gets to be perceptive about his abilities. Faora gets to stand near General Zod, though it’s a blind-and-you’ll-miss-it appearance considering she’s supposed to be a significant villain. And in a rare exception, Lois Lane gets to talk about her reporting.

I’ve been generally bullish on Zack Snyder’s forthcoming Superman reboot, Man of Steel, or as I’ve been jokingly calling it given the long shots of waves and broody atmosphere of the trailers, Terrence Malick’s Superman. So I was excited to see this latest trailer in the form of a calmly-voiced demand from General Zod (Michael Shannon), demanding that Clark Kent be turned over to him:

It’s also a reminder that while Marvel’s done a much better job of developing its full roster of heroes into a gigantic franchise that runs in multiple tracks that converge into event pictures like The Avengers, DC has its rival beat all hollow when it comes to the development of generally frightening and distinct villains. Marvel’s villains have tended to relatively cartoonish and disposable. Iron Man has faced off against Obadiah Stane, who despite Jeff Bridges’ generalized acting chops was a relatively generalized industrialist, the Ten Rings, who were relatively generic jihadists, and Ivan Vanko a reasonably generic Former Soviet Bloc Crazy With Eccentric Teeth. Captain America went up against the Red Skull in The First Avenger, and the bonkers makeup didn’t do much to conceal that Hugo Weaving’s villain schtick has seen better days. Only Thor has had a truly worthy adversary in his half-brother Loki, but it took two movies for him to morph from standard-issue petulance to achieve his “brain like a bag full of cats,” an unsettling combination of imbalance and precise manipulation.

DC, by contrast, has been extraordinarily lucky to have Christopher Nolan designing its villains for the better part of the last decade in his Batman films, which have anchored the DC franchise even as Marvel seemed ascendant. The Scarecrow may have been the least of Nolan’s creations, but it was an unsettling performance that made the best possible use of Cillian Murphy’s sharp, almost pretty features. As the Joker, Heath Ledger was so unsettling and so fully committed to the role that it remains uncomfortable to watch him. And if The Dark Knight Rises made some miscalculations in the handling of Bane, it provided Anne Hathaway with a career-shifting role that let her be sensual and angry in ways she’s never been on film before. These villains are indelible, rather than disposable—I think, not matter how unsettled they make us feel, they’re characters we’d happily spend time with on their own, and certainly ones who offer specific insight into facets of Batman’s personality and mission in a way Marvel villains rarely have. We’re still a long way from knowing how Man of Steel will shake out, but DC’s been wise to know that you can’t know superheroes without knowing their nemeses, and that’s a strong insight DC will have on its side as it tries to play catchup to its own rival.

Because I’m traveling, I didn’t get a chance to get around to the comments on my post on Tony Stark and drone warfare for a while, and so I’m just now getting to an argument some of you are making that I’ve mixed up Tony Stark and War Machine based on a trailer for Iron Man 3.* That’s entirely possible! Hollywood movie trailers are frequently cut to be confusing so as to conceal plot points, etc. But I don’t actually think it changes the point I was trying to make, which is that the Iron Man technology, which combines extremely precise targeting, a human judgement in closer proximity to targets than is the case behind a computer screen, and a near-zero risk of injury or death to the person pulling the trigger, is a fantasy of how we’d like to solve the problem that drone warfare ws intended to address. Whether it’s Tony in the relevant suit or not, it’s still a fantasy.

Even if Tony isn’t the person in the fancy armor, the Iron Man franchise raises scary questions for me about the role our assessment of other people’s judgement plays in how willing we are to accept drone warfare. If the president of the United States is deploying Iron Man technology badly, I don’t actually think it makes it a solution for Tony to have continued access to that technology just because we’re fond of him as a character. It’s the reason conservatives have a point when they say that if George W. Bush was the person leading an enormous expansion of our targeted killing program, the reaction to that program would be very different among liberal Senators. You don’t get to expand the powers of an office, or let a technology out into the world and then do a take-backsies when there’s a risk that it will be used in a way that you don’t like.

And if Tony isn’t working for the government, that just increases the extrajudiciality of his use of Iron Man technology, as was the case in the first Iron Man movie when he jaunted back to the Middle East to dispatch his former tormenters without regard for either the legality of his actions or the impact on diplomatic relations and local military operations. The escalation of drone possession of states is always going to be limited in its impact by the balance of power: the U.S. will probably be protected by the lack of nearby states who would let other countries stage drone strikes on America from their territory. But getting enamoured of Tony Stark’s possession of the ability to jaunt off and kill people people because we happen to trust him is a road that makes me pretty queasy.

*NB: As with grammar and spelling, if you think I’ve made a mistake, email me directly! That’s the quickest and most reliable way to reach me, and much more effective than leaving comments or yelling at me vaguely on social media.

Inspired by Teju Cole, who has begun writing microfictions that make famous literary characters the target of drone strikes, and Bones‘ recent episode in which a terrorist hacked a drone and aimed it at an Afghan girls’ school, I’ve been thinking a great deal recently about the depictions of remote killing devices in our culture, popular and otherwise. And when I saw the trailer for Iron Man 3, I was struck by an idea: is Tony Stark so compelling to us because he and his Iron Man suits are a fantasy of the way that drone warfare is actually supposed to work?

It’s an idea that’s heightened by the idea, clearly suggested by the trailer, that Tony has gone from dissing Congressional committees to working directly for a President of the United States who’s been elected almost solely on a platform of aggressive action in defense of American security. The question of how superheroes would be regulated or controlled has been an open one around the edges of many of the movies in The Avengers franchise. Joss Whedon’s movie suggested that there was some sort of intergovernmental council in charge of making decisions about superhero deployment, but it was also clear that Nick Fury had the ability, if not the authority, to shrug off their decisions. Iron Man 3 looks like it will tackle Stark’s work for the president much more directly.

And what is it that Tony Stark does for the President? His primary job is to hunt down a terrorist called the Mandarin, and to prevent him from causing more damage to American interests. In pursuit of that goal, Tony swoops in to save people who have been blown out of jets by the Mandarin. As we’ve seen since the first movie, he also appears out of the sky, suddenly and without much warning, much like a drone, to kill people. Except, and this is where the fantasy comes in, he’s got targeting technology that means he can shoot just villains, rather than their victims, even if they’re being held hostage. With Iron Man technology, you don’t have to worry about obliterating a wedding party or killing American teenagers. The person piloting the technology, Tony Stark himself, is both directly in the war zones where he kills people on behalf of the government, so he can make decisions based on information he’s seeing in person, rather than from behind computer monitors, a remove that hasn’t prevented real-life drone pilots from getting burned out or diagnosed with PTSD. But unlike, say, the SEAL team that we sent in to kill Osama bin Laden, and no matter how many times we see Tony pull off his face mask and look dazed, as Iron Man he’s not really at physical risk: both the franchise and our dream of his capabilities demand it.
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I’ve been a little worried that Iron Man 3 was going to repeat the cycle of Tony Stark being an entitled, self-regarding rich bro before rising to the occasion that’s become the character’s signature arc, but this trailer has my mind at ease:

If you’re going to have a giant, years-long story, continuity should be a benefit of The Avengers franchise, rather than a hindrance. So I’m excited to see that Shane Black, who directed Robert Downey, Jr. in Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, which helped bolster Downey’s comeback, is making a movie that’s deeply engaged with the impact of the events of The Avengers on Tony Stark. “Nothing’s been the same since New York,” Tony reflects in the trailer’s voiceover. “I experience things and then they’re over. I can’t sleep, and when I do, I have nightmares.” It makes sense that a man who enjoys life as much as Tony does would be shaken by his own decision to sacrifice himself, and that, powerful he is, he’d be unnerved by his first glimpse of the world beyond the one he’s known and dominated on almost every level. “Genius billionaire playboy philanthropist,” as Tony laid out his resume in The Avengers, doesn’t count for quite as much in a world where there are giant alien armies prepared to descend on Midtown.

I’m less immediately stoked about Ben Kingsley as The Mandarin, both because it would have been nice to see an actor of Chinese, rather than Indian and British origin, play the role, and because there’s a bit too much Bane in at least what we’re seeing here. “Some people call me a terrorist. I consider myself a teacher. Lesson number one. Heroes? There is no such thing,” said in a funny voice, feels like Black and company picked it up off the cutting room floor for The Dark Knight Rises. Loki’s been so much fun in The Avengers because, as Bruce Banner put it, “his brain is a bag full of cats.” He’s twisty, unpredictable, and we’re a long way from his end game, but perhaps most importantly, his motivations, courtesy friend of the blog Zack Stentz and company, have been clear going back to Thor. Coding a villain as intellectual is not actually a substitute for explaining who they are and what they want.