THE STRINGS THAT CONTROL THE SYSTEM: More on Iron Honky.

One: My basic thing about Tony Stark can be completely conveyed in the “No Handlebars” fanvid which is not the thing you get on YouTube if you search for “‘iron man’ ‘no handlebars'”–so email me, for real, if you want to see it. That video is better film criticism than I could do in a year of Sundays.

Two: The race thing isn’t the only thing about Iron Man. Honestly, one of the most debilitating things about privilege is the way that it corrupts all the things you like, all the things you love… all the things you might draw hope from. So I can say that “Iron Man” is super cool because Tony Stark is an example of leadership in isolation (as vs. e.g. Cyclops’ leadership, or Emma Frost’s intense focus on her lost students) but it won’t change the fact that there is no Arab Tony Stark. There is no American “Vietnam movie” which is really about the Vietnamese.

And so… here’s an exchange, between me and Blackadder, which I think gets at the real issue underlying my badly-defended initial post:

Him: I don’t get it. Yes, Iron Man is white, and various of the other characters in the origin story are not white.

Okay. So what? What’s racist about that?

Me: It’s the “Dances with Wolves” thing, where non-white people’s tragedies and struggles are constantly sidelined to showcase the heroic white man…. The Asians are instruments, not characters, and Rhodey, for all that he is awesome, is the traditional Black Sidekick who exists to be a character in a white man’s story rather than to have a story of his own.

If “Iron Man” were one of only a few places where that marginalization happened, it wouldn’t matter, but it’s such a common pattern that it becomes a real problem

Him: I guess my reaction here is something along the lines of “dude, it’s a comic book!”

Do we learn much about the inner life and tragedies of Stark’s captors?

Of course not. They are the villainous henchmen from Act I.

Is the side kick character a, well, side kick? Again, of course.

If the treatment of the non-white villainous henchmen and/or non-white side kick were more hackneyed than is typical in such stories, then you might have a point. But it’s not. The treatment of these characters is pretty standard. And to argue that, because certain characters in the story are not white, it’s racist to treat them exactly as you would any other villian or side kick strikes me as being a tad unfair.

Me: But it really is about the larger pattern–who ends up as the faceless villains, who ends up as the sidekick, and who ends up with his name on the cover….

Or, let me try this another way: There really are lazy black people and money-grubbing Jews. But you’d be pretty careful if you wanted to put one in your comic, right? Not because they don’t exist, but because those images play into larger cultural narratives.

This is sort of similar: It plays into a larger cultural narrative in which the only interesting stories/the only heroes/the only people with inner lives and subjectivity, are white people.

Like, the first time you see a story where the non-white people exist solely to serve the white hero’s interior journey, it’s no big thing, that’s how stories often work, not every character can have a rich inner life. But the fiftieth
time, it gets really, really old, and each individual instance of it starts looking more and more suspect.

Him: Okay, so it sounds like the real problem is not that the villains aren’t white, or that the side kick isn’t white, but that the main character *is* white. Or, rather, that all the main characters are white.

And, yeah, you kind of have a point there.

However, I would note two things:

1) This isn’t a problem that it particular to Iron Man. There aren’t any non-white characters with deep inner lives in Spider-man either. Or Superman. Or Batman, etc. It may be more obvious in the case of Iron Man, in the same way that the racial make-up of a party may be more apparent when there is one black guy there rather than none. Nevertheless. And saying that it’s okay to have white people be the only ones with real characterization in a story, but only so long as there are no non-white people in the story whatsoever, then that doesn’t strike me as being very helpful.

2) We’re dealing here with characters that are not being created out of whole cloth today, but that have a pre-existing history. If the racial make up of the characters is undesirable, our only two options would seem to be either to just change the race of the character (as was done with Nick Fury) or to introduce new characters and try to build them into major figures in their own right. The latter option is, ironically, what they tried with Iron Man (and are trying with Iron Man). Rhodes starts out as just another side kick, but if they follow the comic this is just a jumping off point for him to become Iron Man later on.