With the Covid pandemic, my local drive-in screened a number of older movies last summer. It was a great opportunity to watch some classics again and to catch a few movies I may have missed.
One of these films was the first Iron Man (2008).
An issue that struck me forcefully on this viewing is the extent to which Tony Stark epitomizes the myth of the isolated, solitary genius. Tony is the CEO Stark Industries, a huge company producing armaments on which the American military seemingly depends. Despite this, however, Tony spends his work time alone in a lab in the basement of his house, which looks a lot like a garage (complete with a jukebox, guitars and muscle cars he is intermittently shown tuning). We occasionally see shots of a huge building where, presumably, research is done. But anything really innovative seems to leap fully formed out of Tony’s brain. Indeed, when Obadiah Stane, the antagonist, tries to get the corporate engineers to replicate the miniaturized ark reactor that powers Tony’s suit, he’s told, “the technology doesn’t actually exist.” When Obadiah sensibly replies that Tony built the original “in a cave” and “with a box of scraps,” the head engineer simply responds, “I’m not Tony Stark.”
Now, one doesn’t go to superhero movies for realism, and, compared to the literal mythological gods that came later, Tony is just folks.
That said, however, Tony is able to take his place in the Marvel pantheon among those gods because of the mythic status of the genius inventor in American culture. In Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49, for example, one of the characters explains how this figure has haunted the American imagination, and the frustration of so many aspiring entrepreneurs upon discovering how research actually works:
In school they got brainwashed, like all of us, into believing the Myth of the American Inventor—Morse and his telegraph, Bell and his telephone, Edison and his light bulb, Tom Swift and his this or that. Only one man per invention. Then when they grew up they found they had to sign over all their rights . . . got stuck on some “project” or “task force” or “team” and started being ground into anonymity. Nobody wanted them to invent—only perform their little role in a design ritual, already set down for them in some procedures handbook. What’s it like . . . being all alone in a nightmare like that?
The idea of a lone genius creating wonders in a garage, then, speaks to something deep in the psyche, describing how we want the world to be. And, from this perspective, it makes sense that the antagonist in Iron Man represents corporate finance, and that the neutered scientists he has working for him are no match for Tony’s unfettered brilliance.
And, to be fair, while numerous studies have rightly stressed collaborative nature of creative projects, anyone who has spent much time on committees knows those happy moments of mutual inspiration are rare, and the more common occurrence is to watch promising ideas being slowly strangled. Being able to do what you want to do in the way you want to do it, then, becomes the fantasy.
And as fantasy, the figure of the lone inventor has taken on a sinister second life in political ideology. Ayn Rand’s aggressive libertarianism is largely predicated on the idea of solitary genius as the real mover of civilization. From this perspective, it’s also not surprising that Tony Stark himself is often read as a poster boy for right wing, libertarian economics.
The fantasy also has been aggressively used to justify growing income inequities and the corporate control of civil life. People commonly associate technology with particular individuals (Bill Gates with Microsoft, Steve Jobs with Apple, and so on), despite the fact that their products were the work of thousands of unnamed engineers and designers. The consequence is that these figures seem superhuman, the genius benefactors of the human race. The fact too that, until recently, Silicon Valley reportage has tended to be uncritically celebratory has added to this illusion. And so, it seems fair that CEO compensation has been rising dramatically, because, in the popular imagination, they’re saving the world by making something miraculous out of scraps.
Travel Only By Night 