mcumeta:

I’ve been thinking about Marvel Cinematic Universe a lot lately (‘No!’, I hear you cry, ‘We never would have guessed!’) and because my BA in English will otherwise just gather dust, I’ve decided to do a series of essays on the films. Because goodness knows I don’t write enough as it is.

The first film I will look at is Iron Man, and the representation of villainy as portrayed in the film.

Iron Man was released in 2008, by which point the USA had already been involved for several years in the second Gulf War in as many decades. Words like terrorist, weapons of mass destruction, and insurgent are now part of the American vocabulary in a way they weren’t before 2001. The Middle East has been front and centre of news reports on and off since then.

In the opening scenes of Iron Man, we are dropped into a scenario which we are expected to recognise and understand: an unnamed middle eastern country (you can tell because of the desert landscape and the random peasant with a goat by the roadside) with US military operations ongoing and armoured vehicles. And we do. This is the place where the terrorists come from, according to all the news reports, and this is where the war on terror is being fought.

So far, so clean-cut.

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