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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One of the immediate discussions in the wake of yesterday’s bombing of the Boston Marathon, particularly in the absence of more information about who might have committed these dreadful acts and what distorted reasoning they might offer for having done so, has been the question of how to handle marathons, which take up enormous amounts of public space and involve enormous numbers of spectators, in the future.

“Marathons are not events with X-ray machines and airtight security,” wrote Clare Malone at The American Prospect. “You cannot police every stretch of sidewalk, predict every plot, bomb-proof every trash can. So the worst part is again not knowing the where or the when.”

And at Grantland, Charles Pierce begins in the same place as Malone but comes to different conclusions—and gets at a larger issue. “Every other one of our major sporting rodeos is locked down, and tightened up, and Fail-Safed until the Super Bowl now is little more than NORAD with bad rock music and offensive tackles,” he wrote. “You can’t do that to the Marathon. There was no way to do it. There was no way to lock down, or tighten up, or Fail-Safe into Security Theater a race that covers 26.2 miles, a race that travels from town to town, a race that travels past people’s houses. There was no way to garrison the Boston Marathon. Now there will be. Someone will find a way to do it. And I do not know what the race will be now. I literally haven’t the vaguest clue.”

All of the things that could make marathons more secure would take enormous resources, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t feasible if municipalities are willing to spend resources to do them. Marathon organizers, in coordination with state and federal law enforcement, could run background checks on everyone trying to get race numbers in an effort to screen out anyone who might be attempting to get in order to place an explosive device or detonate a suicide bomb at the starting line, and could perform similar screenings of volunteers, staff, and medical professionals who provide support to the race. It would be extremely burdensome to do so, and local businesses and residents would be hysterical at the inconvenience, but local police could cordon off the race route for a radius of a block or so a week in advance of the race, search public receptacles, and either set up security checkpoints for spectators, or to ban spectators entirely. Start times could be staggered more to prevent concentrations of runners who would be vulnerable to mass casualties. But Lydia DePillis is right that there’s no way to make a marathon route as controlled an environment as a stadium.

But it’s worth asking several questions before making this decision, which has already faced the organizers of the London Marathon, which will be run this week as scheduled. Do we want to dramatically increase security at road races just because it’s theoretically possible to do so? What gain would we make in public safety, particularly in an era where terror targets have tended to shift as we’ve locked down different sectors of public life, in part with the goal of encouraging us to devote financial resources and emotional energy to locking down our public spaces, and in part because novelty is an effective ingredient in spreading fear? And what do we lose in closing a once-open public space that was the site of democratic and generous civic participation?
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This post discusses plot points from the April 10 episode of The Americans.

I’ve been rewatching all of Mad Men in recent weeks, and one of the things that’s struck me about the show on a second go-round is precisely how broad it is, from its limb-removal via lawnmower, to the bluntness and bigotry of Mrs. Blankenship, to its frequent use of vomit. The show’s silliness and sometimes obviousness are a counterpoint to the often opaque natures of its characters’ motivations and the slow burns of its plot arcs. I mention this to begin a consideration of this week’s The Americans because of how austere the show is shaping up to be, and how clear its lines are. I don’t think these are faults, or that they make the show boring—The Americans can do an action sequence or a domestic scene and make each hit like very few other shows on television, and do them equally well—but because there’s something fitting about the show’s clarity and nakedness given its exploration of absolutists on both sides of the Cold War.

This week’s episode divided into three very well-defined tracks: the escalation of the FBI from an investigative agency to a body on a war footing, the impact of that kind of escalation on the people who practice it, and the limits of the actual appeal of Phillip and Elizabeth’s Communist ideals. It was an elegant and painful triptych.

After Amador’s death, the FBI mobilized to respond, and Stan and Chris’s boss rallied his team with rhetoric that served as a sly reminder that the militarization of law enforcement dates back further than the War on Terror. “So, um, I knew Chris when he started here at CI. He’s— he was a good agent, a good friend, just…a good man. I’m sure you all have your stories about him. I was a little hard on him sometimes. But he did a lot of his department and his country,” he explained. “And now here’s what wer’e going to do for him. we’re going to take every resource we have, every ounce of energy and focus, and we are going to hunt…And we are not going to rest until they are behind bars, or better, until we zip them up in a body bag.” In that moment, he’s just a step away from Mark Strong in Zero Dark Thirty demanding lists of people to be killed. And later, he told Stan “It may be a secret war, but it’s a war. We have to fight like soldiers now, and your’e one of our best…In a war, blood gets spilled. That’s how it goes.”

But one of the strengths of The Americans is that it reveals the hollowness of that pep talk, in this case in a pair of scenes in which Stan and Phillip are each confronted with the impact of what they’ve done in killing Chris and Vlad. There’s something incredibly sad about Stan seeking out Phillip in the hotel room where he’s living out his separation, telling him “No offense, Phil, but this place is kind of depressing,” and then unloading about his friend’s death to his neighbor, who is the author of his misery. “He was stabbed,” Stan explains, and Phillip, for reasons of both friendship and self-preservation, asks “Who did it?” “Bad guys,” Stan tells him decisively, unaware that his confidant is the author of his misery, and that Phillip stabbed Chris in self-defense in a fight motivated by jealousy rather than international intrigue. “We’re going to find them.”
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As the tenth anniversary of the war in Iraq approaches, many of my colleagues who write about policy have been looking back on their past prognostications to see who was right, who was wrong, and who believed what information on what basis. It’s an interesting exercise, considering how many reputations were made and broken on those assessments, but I’m interested in looking backwards for something different. During the decade of America’s involvement in Iraq, Hollywood’s responded with a huge array of movies, television shows, and miniseries that offer a fascinating, and in many ways disturbing window into our desire to support and honor the people who have served in the U.S. military in Iraq and Afghanistan. But despite the profusion of these movies, and of soldiers as heroes even in movies that aren’t specifically about these wars, pop culture tells us as much about our attitudes to Iraq in what movies and television largely leave out: the reasons we sent soldiers to Iraq in the first place and kept them there for so long; the rising number of female veterans who are homeless, even as the Obama administration welcomed servicewomen officially into combat; and what medical recovery from combat injury really looks like. Too often, Hollywood products reflect a public desire to support the troops without recognizing what kind of support would actually be useful. And too often, sympathy for veterans substitutes for grappling with the reasons that we asked them to do things that have left them physically or psychologically injured.

As was the case in the Vietnam War, something I’ve written about at some length before, many of the movies about our involvement in Iraq are set not there, but back in the United States after soldiers return home. It’s a setting that allows audiences to mediate their experiences with veterans, and to consider encountering them as people, rather than as symbolic and inert yellow ribbons. And telling coming-home stories allow movies to engage with small parts of the military support experience. Sometimes it’s the families who stay behind, and in some cases are left behind forever when a soldier dies, as is the case in the John Cusack-starring drama Grace Is Gone, or In The Valley Of Elah, which featured Tommy Lee Jones as a father searching for his veteran son, who is eventually found murdered. Other movies deal with at least some of the bureaucracy of the military and the toll of the war in Iraq, as is the case with The Messenger, which follows Casualty Notification Officers as they deliver the news that soldiers have been killed overseas to their families at home.

Not all movies focus on families: others move closer, foregrounding the experiences of soldiers themselves when they try to reckon with reintegration into civilian life, or the impossibility of doing so. Two of the best moves in this class, Kimberley Pierce’s Stop-Loss and Kathryn Bigelow’s The Hurt Locker, intriguingly, are both made by women, who convincingly convey an alienation from mainstream American culture that’s very different from that experienced by Vietnam veterans a generation ago. Where Vietnam veterans had to deal with a certain amount of disdain for those who had served in the war, Stop-Loss and The Hurt Locker confront different societal challenges: the former is about a soldier, played by Ryan Phillipe, who believes he’s home safe with the war only to find that his contract has been reupped without his consent under the military’s anti-attrition policies, and faces disbelief from his friends when he goes on the lam to attempt to have the decision appealed so he can stay home. Ultimately, he’s unwilling to flee to Canada and forfeit his life in America to avoid another term of duty. An anti-war movement that might have supported him is a long way away: the idea of honoring service is so deeply entrenched that the people around this young man can’t necessarily acknowledge that he might have given enough, that the best way to recognize his devotion to duty would be to let him return to civilian life. In The Hurt Locker, the main character, a bomb defuser, voluntarily decides to return to his dangerous work in Iraq after finding himself overwhelmed and disengaged by the prosperity he encounters on his return to the United States.

And soldiers have become stock figures in all sorts of genre movies, even those that don’t purport to deal directly with war or the soldiering experience as their primary subject—and soldiering roles have become a key way for actors to attempt to rebrand themselves as serious mainstream players. Zac Efron, as part of his attempts to present himself as something other than a teen idol, played a Marine who served three tours of duty in Iraq in an adaptation of a Nicholas Sparks weepie The Lucky One. Professional wrestler John Cena played a Marine who was discharged for overzealousness in the fight against terrorism in Iraq, and who has trouble adapting to civilian life until his skills become necessary in tracking down a violent band of criminals who have kidnapped his girlfriend in The Marine. The remake of The A-Team, which put a jokey spin on the Iraqi insurgency, was part of Bradley Cooper’s move up from goofy supporting player to star, and an attempt to make South African actor Sharlto Copley a mainstream American movie actor after the success of District 9. G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra was a silly stop for both Channing Tatum, who between this and Stop-Loss has benefitted perhaps more than any other single actor from the fad for soldier characters, and Joseph Gordon-Levitt, but it did demonstrate that they were both credible participants in action franchises.
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I continue to believe that Zero Dark Thirty is a much more comprehensively anti-war film than the debate about whether it suggests torture works would indicate. And so I was interested to read Mark Boal talk to Vulture about what it was like to write those sequences, and about how he wanted the emphasis to be on what it was actually like to be in the room when someone was being beaten, waterboarded, and humiliated:

The scene that has been the focal point of all the discussion has been the opening scene of the film, and it was definitely among the hardest to have in my life, let alone include in the script. I’ve had to revisit it over and over again after the film came out, and those torture scenes are incredibly painful. And they’re meant to be! I wanted to show the brutality and inhumanity of the situation, and you see the prisoner’s brain getting scrambled by the pressure and the punishment that’s being put on him. It was a dark and painful place to go as a writer, and I still don’t think I’ve totally shaken it off, to be honest with you.

The story includes scanned pages of the script, which are even more revealing than what Boal says in the interview. Maya’s reactions in that sequence aren’t an acting choice: they’re baked into the script. When she says I’m okay, the script clearly notes that “She’s not.” At one point, “she is on the verge of vomiting.” “The stress and strain on her face is enormous” as she participates in Ammar’s waterboarding—though the movie makes clear that the damage to him is more considerable than it is to her. At the end of the scene? “Dan and Maya exit. They’ve learned nothing.”

I don’t think that Kathryn Bigelow and Boal did themselves any particular favors in the way they’ve talked about Zero Dark Thirty. Describing it as a quasi-journalistic enterprise and insisting on the film’s neutrality may have seemed like a way to provide political cover to it, but refusing to stake out a position left them with essentially nothing to defend but their process as the debate over the movie heated up. Releasing the script and talking about their intentions could have opened up a debate about whether the film lived up to those intentions, a conversation that would have struck me as both politically and artistically useful.

I saw Zero Dark Thirty in Los Angeles, prior to its screening for critics in Washington, DC tonight, and consequently am reviewing it somewhat earlier than my colleagues in the DC critics’ corps. This post contains extensive discussion of plot details in the film, including the final scene, because it is impossible to discuss the most important issues in Zero Dark Thirty without doing so.

Zero Dark Thirty, Kathryn Bigelow’s movie about the hunt for Osama bin Laden, which was in production before bin Laden was killed by American soldiers on May 2, 2011, is one of the difficult movies I’ve ever had to write about. Long before most critics or policy analysts had seen the film, it became the subject of intense debate over whether it presented torture as an effective weapon in the war against terrorism. It’s true that Zero Dark Thirty will be politically unsatisfying to observers who would have liked to see it thoroughly rebuke the idea that any instance or threat of torture ever produces information that can become actionable under any circumstances. As a matter of politics and policy, that’s where my own preferences lie, and I’d like to see the more low-level but still repulsive use of this trope, the threat of torture in police interrogations, slink ignominiously away from popular culture, where it’s become entirely normalized.

But Zero Dark Thirty, quite rightly, makes the argument that whether or not torture is efficacious is not where our debate about its employment should be taking place. Instead, it has a much more radical project. Zero Dark Thirty a shattering, visually stunning argument that we’ve warped our own souls in pursuit of a goal, the killing of Osama bin Laden, that has left us fundamentally empty and dislocated.

The main character in Zero Dark Thirty is a young Central Intelligence Agency analyst named Maya (Jessica Chastain), who, as part of her brief to aid in the hunt for Osama bin Laden, arrives at a black site to witness the torture of a detainee named Ammar (Reda Kateb, in an extraordinary performance that should be one of several contenders for Best Supporting acting nominations) by an agent named Dan (Jason Clarke). When they first meet, Dan remarks on Maya’s lack of preparedness for the work they do at the black site, commenting on “You, rocking your best suit for your first interrogation.” But when Dan tells her “You know, there’s no shame if you want to watch from the monitor,” Maya refuses, insisting on being in the room with him, his team, and Ammar, and in the process provides the key to understanding Zero Dark Thirty: what Maya is willing and able to look at, and what she is capable—and not capable—of seeing.
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