The Cruel Optimism of National Security in Marvel's Iron Man Films

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Superpowered Security: The Cruel Optimism of National Security in Marvel’s Iron Man Films

Katherine Cox

December 2019

A thesis submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy of The Australian National University

Statement of Originality

I hereby declare that this submission is my own work and to the best of my knowledge it contains no materials previously published or written by another person, nor material which to a substantial extent has been accepted for the award of any other degree or diploma, except where due acknowledgement is made in the thesis.

Katherine Cox December 2019

Acknowledgements

I cannot express the full extent of my gratitude and appreciation for my Chair of Panel, Dr.

Russell Smith. Since supervising my Honours thesis in 2014, Russell has been instrumental in shaping my development as a scholar. I am indebted to him for modelling a rigorous and creative approach to scholarship and teaching, encouraging me to pursue opportunities that I thought were beyond my reach, and his willingness to give his time (and expertise on commas!) so generously.

I would also like to thank my other panel members, who have provided essential support and feedback throughout my candidature. I have greatly benefited from Dr. Monique

Rooney’s expertise in American culture, television and critical theory. I would also like to thank Monique for inducting me into the world of teaching, which has been transformative; I would not be who I am today without my students. I am also grateful to Dr. Chris Bishop, for his wealth of knowledge on American comic book history and timely feedback on drafts.

During my candidature, I had the great pleasure of working with a brilliant academic and administrative community at ANU. I am grateful for the opportunity to contribute to the warm and vibrant culture in the School of Literature, Languages and Linguistics, and to represent the College of Arts and Social Sciences as HDR representative in 2019. For their support and guidance, I would like to thank Zhengdao Ye, Gemma King, Katharina Bonzel,

Julieanne Lamond, Millicent Weber, Matthew Callaghan, Kate Oakes, Louisa Kirk, Kathryn

Hind, Imogen Mathew, Hayden Blain, Eri Kashima, CJ O’Connor, Sahar Latheef, Anh Nguyen and Rebecca Spaull. Special thanks go to Inger Mewburn and Victoria Firth-Smith, who taught me how to communicate my research to the public (and how to write 26,000 words in a weekend) and to Tania Evans, Ally Wolfe, and Jonathon Zapasnik, who have each influenced my thinking in profound and valuable ways.

I would also like to acknowledge assistance from members of the wider academic community, who have provided vital feedback through conferences and peer review. I am especially grateful for comments from attendees and fellow panellists at the Superheroes

Beyond conference in Melbourne in December 2018, and the International Conference of the

Fantastic in the Arts in Florida, March 2019: Adam Daniel, Megan Mooney Taylor,

Max Bledstein, Tony Vinci, Mark Buchanan and John Landreville. Finally, I would like to thank the anonymous reviewers for their insightful comments on my recent publication in

Continuum, “’The gates of hell: the cruel optimism of national security in Secret

City’ (December 2019), which drew heavily on arguments made in this thesis. Finally, through my work for the Australasian Consortium of Humanities Research Centres, I have had the opportunity to contribute to a vital effort to foster a sustainable future for the humanities. I am extremely grateful to Will Christie, who has been an excellent mentor in navigating the contemporary research environment, and to Tully Barnett, for providing essential support and advice.

This thesis would not have been possible without my best friend, Lauren Sadow, who convinced me to start a PhD alongside her in 2015 and who has been an inexhaustible source of support ever since. I am indebted to her for putting up with me for fifteen years, for her companionship as we both learned to navigate the academic environment, and for exposing me to linguistic theory that unexpectedly inspired a major breakthrough in my understanding of security.

Equally, I could not have done this without the support of friends and family, especially Callie, Sammy and Caity. A special thanks to Alex, without whom I would have been lost in comics forever. To Dad, for encouraging my passion for discovery, and for all the care packages of homemade cheese and mysterious vegetables. To Mum, for setting me on this path with my very own library card at only three days old, for analysing science fiction and

fantasy with me before I knew it was a career option, and for watching every Marvel movie in my thesis.

This thesis is dedicated to my partner, David, who has been a boundless source of inspiration, encouragement and enthusiasm. Thank you for all the late-night discussions of political philosophy, geopolitics and strategy, for going above and beyond in supporting me through the writing process, and for the many long hours of proof-reading. I cannot wait to read the thesis you write one day.

Finally, this project was generously supported by a University Research Scholarship from the ANU. I would also like to thank the ANU College of Arts and Social Sciences for a travel grant, which allowed me to attend conferences in Australia and the US.

Abstract

Although the post-9/11 US national security environment has resulted in the erosion of civil liberties at home, and immense loss of life in Afghanistan and Iraq, national security remains a uniquely powerful political discourse. This thesis proposes that national security discourse is inextricably entangled with core American values and aspirations, and can therefore be understood as an object of ‘cruel optimism’ (Berlant, 2011): an affective attachment, no matter how counter-productive and even damaging it may prove to be, that cannot be abandoned because it underpins a fantasy that sustains the nation. Using Marvel’s immensely popular superhero Iron Man as a case study, including comic books (1963-2006) and films

(2008-2015), the thesis brings cultural theory into conversation with critical security studies to examine the affective dynamics that make national security such a binding political concept in the United States public sphere.

I argue that the Iron Man mythos responds to fantasies and anxieties arising from the practice of what I call ‘superpowered security’: the US discourse emerging in the wake of

World War II in which both national and global security is predicated on the maintenance and legitimation of the US’ superpower status. The Iron Man suit is a complex prosthetic device that transforms Tony Stark into a cyborg, functioning simultaneously as life support, defensive armour and offensive weapon; it can be read, I argue, as a manifestation of a national security apparatus that enhances the nation’s ability to cope with crisis, but fundamentally alters society in ways that undermine the well-being of the people it protects.

The thesis first examines Iron Man’s history of engagement with national security discourse in comic books, moving from Iron Man’s origins during the Vietnam War, through the Cold War, to post-9/11 storylines. It then conducts a major analysis of the Marvel

Cinematic Universe's presentation and development of the character in Iron Man (2008), Iron

Man 2 (2010), The Avengers (2012), Iron Man 3 (2013) and The Avengers: Age of Ultron 6

(2015). These narratives typically vindicate aspirational fantasies of American exceptionalism

– freedom, prosperity, and innovation – that promise to redeem the United States’ legacy and create a better future. Throughout its history, however, the Iron Man suit has always been a problematic object. Not only is it detrimental to Stark’s wellbeing – frequently poisoning or imprisoning him – but the logic of exception and emergency that justifies its existence drives

Stark to pre-empt threats that do not yet exist, with catastrophic results. Yet the suit is indispensable in the superhero genre’s environment of permanent emergency, especially in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, which continually stages existential crises that threaten to repeat the trauma of 9/11. This is an impasse that wears Iron Man down throughout the franchise. Although his use of the suit ultimately compromises everything he is driven to protect, it is impossible for him to let it go.

Viewing the Iron Man suit (and the logic of exception and emergency that it represents) as an object of a cruelly optimistic attachment not only explains why the Iron Man films can simultaneously be read as a critique and a defence of post-9/11 national security practices, but highlights an inherent tension in the way that national security is constructed in the public sphere. Through this analysis, the thesis offers a new way of thinking about national security in the public sphere, by tracing the affective tensions that emerge from narratives of superpowered security.

Contents

Statement of Originality 2

Acknowledgements 3

Abstract 6

Chapter 1 – Introduction 9

Chapter 2 – The cruel optimism of security 29 2.1 The problematic concept of ‘security’ 32 2.2 Security as public narrative: the Copenhagen School and genre 45 2.3 Superpowered security: the affective structure of the Bush Doctrine 50

Chapter 3 – National fantasy in the superhero genre 64 3.1 Imagining the nation: fantasy, sovereignty and crisis in the superhero genre 72 3.2 Superhero as subgenre: mission, powers, identity, nemeses 92

Chapter 4 – ‘The most fantastic weapon of all time!’: Iron Man’s comic book origins 106 4.1 Engaging Vietnam: Tales of Suspense and Demon in a Bottle 112 4.2 Control issues: Cold War anxieties in Armor Wars I and Technical Difficulties 131 4.3 Making sense of 9/11: Redefining Iron Man in The Best Defense and Extremis 149

Chapter 5 – ‘This is your legacy’: Optimistic promises in Iron Man and Iron Man 2 166 5.1 Traumatic origins: adapting Iron Man for the War on Terror 168 5.2 Becoming heroic: the Iron Man suit as affective prosthesis 192 5.3 ‘I am Iron Man’: legacy and identity in Iron Man 2 201

Chapter 6 – ‘Just like Budapest all over again’: Crisis ordinariness in The Avengers 209 6.1 Restaging 9/11: permanent emergency in The Avengers 212 6.2 Coping with crisis: resilience, humour, and affective prosthesis 222 6.3 Closing the border: ‘never again’, or all over again? 232

Chapter 7 – ‘We create our own demons’: failing to adjust in Iron Man 3 and The Avengers: Age of Ultron 238 7.1 Domestic vulnerabilities and the threat of public fear in Iron Man 3 242 7.2 Pre-emptive paranoia in The Avengers: Age of Ultron 267

Chapter 8 – Conclusion 284

Filmography 303

Works Cited 304

Chapter 1 – Introduction

Because of American leadership, more people than ever before live free and at peace. And Americans have known 50 years of prosperity and security.

Bill Clinton, State of the Union, January 23rd 1996

…all nations should know: America will do what is necessary to ensure our Nation’s security… If we stop now, leaving terror camps intact and terrorist states unchecked, our sense of security would be false and temporary. History has called America and our allies to action, and it is both our responsibility and our privilege to fight freedom’s fight.

George W. Bush, State of the Union, January 29th 2002

…throughout our history, no issue has united this country more than our security.

Barack Obama, State of the Union, January 27th 2010

In 2002, the German magazine Der Spiegel released a now-infamous cover which satirised the

Bush administration’s response to 9/11 by depicting Bush and key members of his cabinet as action heroes – Batman, Rambo and Conan the Barbarian. Far from embarrassing the administration, it apparently delighted them; the United States embassy in Berlin ordered 33 copies of the illustration for the White House (Follath, 2008). Rather than interpreting the cover as a criticism of the masculine hyperviolence that Rambo and Conan in particular represent, the Bush administration’s response to the Der Spiegel cover indicates a certain willingness to position themselves as superheroes; exceptional figures willing to go to extreme lengths to defend society against exceptional threats. Indeed, this image was perfectly aligned with the dramatic rhetoric Bush used in defence of his administration’s post-

9/11 national security policy, in which he positioned the United States as a defender of global freedoms: a superpower willing to extend its protective aegis throughout the globe.

Although this brand of zealous optimism finds its zenith in Bush, it is neither unique to his administration nor to the post-9/11 context. In the State of the Union speeches delivered by Presidents Clinton, Bush and Obama between 1993 and 2016, national security has been a consistent theme. There is a striking optimism in these remarks, even in times of devastation, in which security is invoked alongside aspirational values: freedom, leadership, opportunity, prosperity, and strength. In the visionary narratives constructed by George W. Bush in particular, the security of the American people takes on a heroic quality; linked to a national fantasy of American exceptionalism. The logic goes like this: American leadership across the world will foster newfound freedom and global stability, and this will lead to peace and prosperity for all. Far from security measures curtailing freedoms, Bush promises to safeguard “freedom and security together” (2003), to help Iraq “secure its liberty” (2005), and that “our Nation will prosper, our liberty will be secure, and the state of our Union will remain strong” (2008). Barack Obama, whose rhetoric concerning the War on Terror is considerably more circumspect, also links security to core American values. In 2009, Obama argued that the presumed imperative to compromise national values like liberty in favour of security was a false choice: “[l]iving our values doesn’t make us weaker, it makes us safer and it makes us stronger” (2009).

In these speeches, security is framed as the precondition of a revitalized America, through which the nation will live up to its historical legacy and deliver on its promises for its citizens. But a state of security is also desirable in and of itself, as Obama suggests in his 2016 speech: “The future we want – all of us want – opportunity and security for our families, a rising standard of living, a sustainable, peaceful planet for our kids – all that is within our reach.” In these visionary speeches, national security is both a means to an end and a goal in its own right, entangled with aspirational ideals that feature prominently in the American cultural imagination. This is superpowered security.

By superpowered security, I refer to a security doctrine legitimated by a narrative in which national security both justifies the United States’ role as a global superpower, through the rhetorical invocation of national myths and values in the public sphere, and maintains it, through a high-technology regime of surveillance and discipline that extends further throughout the world than ever before. Since September 11, national security legislation has proliferated explosively in the United States and allied countries. Despite political guarantees of freedom, opportunity and prosperity, post-9/11 national security measures have instead curtailed civil freedoms, invaded the privacy of citizens, and eroded democratic checks and balances designed to protect against governmental overreach. These exceptional measures have become normalised in the United States over the past decade and a half, in part because the privileged status that national security occupies in the public sphere has made it difficult to challenge, such that some critics observe that the post-9/11 political landscape has become one of permanent emergency. Overseas, too, the War on Terror has resulted in some of the longest and costliest wars conducted by the United States, in Afghanistan and Iraq, with a high civilian death toll and greater instability in the region.

In America itself, the promised sense of safety has not materialised. George W. Bush’s hopeful claim that homeland security would “make America not only stronger but, in many ways, better” (2002) rings hollow in the face of what would actually follow: the authorisation of indefinite detention by the Patriot Act; extraordinary rendition (the forced deportation of detainees to an overseas location where they can be tortured); warrantless wiretapping of US citizens by the NSA; and the increasing militarisation of domestic police forces. This last phenomenon has been associated with a significant increase in suspect deaths (Lawson,

2018). The well-documented abuses at Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib, in contrast, reflect the consequences of the extreme language that Bush mobilises against terrorists – “Take almost any principle of civilization, and their goal is the opposite” (2007) – and his assurance that “while the price of freedom and security is high, it is never too high” (2002). 11

But what exactly is the price of superpowered security, for the people who remain attached to the idea even though it has not made them feel any more safe or free? Although the compromises, failures and abuses of American national security policy post-9/11 have been extensively documented, scholarly discussion of the affective resonance of national security has typically focused on terror and anxiety. This is not without good reason; despite the very low likelihood of an individual United States resident falling victim to a terrorist attack, fear of terrorism has been slow to fall in the years following 9/11, and in recent years it has once again begun to rise – a 2017 poll reported that 60 percent of Americans fear a terrorist attack in the near future, up from 38 percent in 2011 (Gallup, 2017). Ken Booth and

Tim Dunne, although they point out that terrorism is a legitimate threat that must be mitigated, write that heightened security measures seem to reinforce a sense of insecurity in ordinary people, “as if people feel scared because they are protected, rather than protected because they are scared” (2012, pp. 161-162).

In this thesis, I argue that national security can be understood as an object of cruel optimism, a term coined by Lauren Berlant to describe an affective attachment that binds people to something they desire even when those objects compromise their ability to flourish.

In Cruel Optimism (2011), Berlant observes that many of the fantasies that operate to bind citizens to the promise of the neoliberal nation-state are obviously and painfully breaking down. As a result, she argues that many ordinary Americans now find themselves at an impasse; unable to achieve the aspirations that are supposedly available to them, but unable to give up on those dreams because they provide a sense of continuity. Under these conditions, attempting to pursue those goals may be actively detrimental to one’s wellbeing – a person trapped in poverty might destroy their health and happiness by working too many bad jobs – but stopping would be unbearable.

I would like to propose that national security has come to operate in two distinct registers: firstly, as an aspirational goal for the nation which acts as a prerequisite for collective attainment of the good life, and secondly, as a logic and practice of risk management which necessarily fosters a perpetual and heightened sensitivity to threat. The second register, I argue, building on critical security studies literature, creates widespread psychological and civic attrition which makes the former register “impossible, sheer fantasy, or too possible, and toxic” (Berlant, 2011, p. 24). Because each register is dependent on the other, it is difficult to disentangle the detrimental outcomes of contemporary American security practices from the aspirations that justify them, meaning that an attachment to national security can be understood as an instance of cruel optimism.

To support this claim, I analyse the way that national security is affectively constructed throughout one of the post-9/11 era’s most popular and financially successful film franchises – the Marvel Cinematic Universe. To anyone who is familiar with the superhero genre, the relationship between state security practices and the activities of superheroes should be clear: the superhero genre, in which heroes use exceptional powers to defend society against exceptional threats, responds to the same imperative as national security. The missions of superheroes are often framed in similar rhetorical terms as acts of national security – liberation of the oppressed (as Bush describes the war in Afghanistan), justice for evildoers (criminals, terrorists, supervillains), and protection of the innocent (those who fulfil the requirements to be counted as part of the body-politic) – and they frequently have to restrain themselves from overstepping moral boundaries in the use of their superhuman powers. Superheroes, therefore, must balance the imperative to defend society with the narrative need to preserve the claim to legitimacy that allows them to remain worthy of their exceptional powers. As a result, the way in which superheroes negotiate this dilemma offers an insight into the affective bind posed by national security.

Specifically, I examine the superhero Iron Man, whose powers (especially his high- technology suit of armour), wealth, privilege and relation to the military-industrial complex make him an ideal case study to explore the tensions and contradictions in the contemporary public discourse surrounding United States national security policy. The Iron Man film franchise, in particular, is significant for its immense popularity and the fact that it is an integral part of a much broader storyworld, the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU), which is now the highest grossing film franchise of all time. The MCU borrows from the multilinear structure of comics, in which solo storylines cross over and impact on one another to create the sense of a huge, varied universe. As a result, the franchise (which contains twenty-three films as of 2019) not only creates a sense of constant and pervasive crisis – to which heroes like Iron Man must combat – but brings it to a wide audience, in an era when public concerns surrounding crisis, security and exceptional measures are high.

With this in mind, it should be no surprise that Iron Man transplants the character from the Vietnam War (the context in which he first appeared in 1963) to a contemporary

Middle Eastern warzone, which situates the film firmly within the War on Terror and uses it as the jumping-off point for the MCU. Despite the Marvel comic books’ Iron Man character being relatively obscure before the cinematic adaptation, the post-9/11 context was well suited to the themes of the Iron Man comics, which had always dealt with the ethical deployment of United States privilege in war, wealth and technology. Stan Lee, the creator of

Marvel’s most iconic characters, has said that Iron Man was created as a challenge to himself, to create a superhero who would not be immediately relatable or sympathetic to Marvel’s readership:

I think I gave myself a dare. It was the height of the Cold War. The readers, the young readers, if there was one thing they hated, it was war, it was the military. So I got a hero who represented that to the hundredth degree. He was a weapons manufacturer, he was providing weapons for the Army, he was rich, he was an industrialist. I thought it would be fun to take the kind of character that nobody would like, none of our readers would like, and shove him down their throats and make them like him... And he became very popular. ("The Invincible Iron Man," 2008) 14

As a character who began life as a wealthy weapons developer for the United States military, and whose origin story has always taken place in the heart of a war against insurgents, Tony

Stark and his superhero persona Iron Man has clear relevance to key aspects of national security. Despite this, Iron Man has only infrequently been studied in comparison to obviously nationalistic superheroes like Captain America, or superheroes whose dubious use of surveillance powers (such as Batman in the Christopher Nolan film trilogy) directly replicate internal US security practices. Yet the fact that Marvel’s immense, ambitious film franchise opened with an Iron Man film, rather than Captain America (who was created first in the comics and whose 2011 film bears the tagline “The First Avenger”), situates the Marvel

Cinematic Universe immediately within contemporary political concerns and suggests that

Iron Man both exemplifies the thematic priorities of the franchise and resonates with audiences.

Iron Man, or Tony Stark, is a significant character within contemporary United States popular culture whose primary motivation, I will argue, is the drive to seek security in multiple forms. The character sits within a tradition of superhero characters who derive their powers from technological innovation, rather than powers arising from magic or mutation.

Like Batman, Iron Man has sometimes been described as a hero with no innate superpowers

(Klock, 2013). In contrast to other scientist characters on Marvel’s roster, such as Reed

Richards or Bruce Banner, Tony Stark’s abilities are not a result of accidental mutation, but instead a deliberate product of his intellect and wealth. As a billionaire weapons developer, he contributes directly to the production of war via the United States military-industrial complex.

In each of his various origin stories, he is kidnapped during a visit to the warzone of the day, suffers a lethal injury, and is forced to produce a superweapon for the enemy: a Vietnamese warlord in 1963; a Middle Eastern terrorist leader in 2008. Instead of building them a weapon, Stark builds one for himself: a suit of armour (with inbuilt weapons) that enhances

his physical strength, shields him against harm, and keeps his injured heart alive while he escapes.

This suit marks Stark’s transition from warmonger to security seeker; rather than producing missiles, Stark invents a protective device that not only insulates him from external harm but keeps him alive. In line with the rhetoric justifying the United States’ security apparatus, the suit of armour does not merely protect the referent object inside, but also makes it better: the Iron Man suit enhances the wearer’s strength beyond human limits and gives them the ability to fly, which allows them to project power globally. As for Tony Stark himself, after he sees the carnage wrought by his weapons, he transforms his mission and his company’s focus from straightforward weapons manufacturing into something like security:

“the logos of war expressed as the logos of peace” (Dillon & Lobo-Guerrero, 2008, p. 275).

This is why I argue that Iron Man is so significant: not only for his popularity, but for his engagement with national security through the metaphoric device of the Iron Man suit. It is no accident that for many years the United States military has been designing an ‘Iron Man’ suit – a powered exoskeleton that functions as armour and physical enhancement – for years. Ambivalence over technology, especially technology that can be weaponised, is by no means unique to the Iron Man mythos, but Iron Man has engaged with the theme repeatedly over the decades – including storylines in which his technology itself becomes the referent object to be secured; or in which it becomes so integrated with his body that when it becomes compromised, its malfunction is like an autoimmune attack. As Julian Chambliss writes, “Tony

Stark/Iron Man offers a continuously updated view of American negotiation between technology, ideology and corporatism related to national defense” (2012, p. 151). The intersection of security and capital, as represented by Stark’s multinational corporation and his philanthropy, has been noted in security discourse before. Mark Neocleous in particular criticises a “deadly complicity between security and capital, a complicity in which the state and capital collide and collude in a mutual bid to reinforce a political agenda structured 16

ideologically around the security fetish” (Neocleous, 2007a, p. 341). As a character who exemplifies an optimistic attitude towards superpowered security, and who stands to benefit most from it as a straight, white, wealthy, American male, Stark is an ideal candidate for an analysis of attachment to security logic.

However, Stark’s quest for security often hurts him. The Iron Man mythos consistently demonstrates the costs of enacting security logic, both to Tony Stark himself and to the referent objects he tries to protect. Although the Iron Man suit allows him to endure massive damage, it does not confer invulnerability. Defending against a threat with the suit means placing himself into immense danger, even when he is already injured, because possessing the suit – an exceptional power – entails an obligation to use it. Even when Stark develops the technology to pilot the suit remotely, protecting his physical body from attack, his connection to the suit often puts an immense strain on his mind and body, and in one comic book storyline erodes his wellbeing to the point of disability. His obsessive dedication to the suit frequently undermines the relationships he seeks to preserve, and yet he is unable to envision a world where it is not necessary. Instead, his inability to let go is often framed as an effect of trauma, especially in Iron Man 3 which takes place after Stark has a near-death experience.

The suit technology itself is frequently compromised, either by enemies who hack it or mutations in the suit’s own artificial intelligence, which means that Stark is caught between a co-opted security apparatus and an external threat. In the Iron Man mythos, as in political rhetoric, opportunity equals risk. As a result, Stark jealously guards his technology – both the suit and the energy source that powers it – or is sometimes forced to destroy it, so it does not fall into the wrong hands. In the most extreme cases, such as the 2015 film Avengers: Age of

Ultron, Stark’s attempt to create a “suit of armour around the world” actually creates the threat, Ultron, whom he and his allies must then defeat. This indicates an ambivalence towards security: an anxiety that security is as destructive as it is necessary.

This thesis will contribute to a growing body of literature on the superhero genre as

“contemporary American mythology” (Boney, 2013, p. 48). To put it in Berlant’s language, the superhero genre can be read as a site of ‘national fantasy’ – an element of the public discourse in which the concept of ‘America’ itself is constructed, practiced, contested and maintained; and through which people receive and create their sense of what it means to be American. I argue that the Iron Man franchise constructs national security as the object of a cruelly optimistic attachment; a goal that can never be attained, and which ultimately compromises personal and national wellbeing, but which underwrites such vital fantasies that the cost of giving it up would be too high to bear.

This thesis is the first substantive piece of research to bring together affect theory, critical security studies, and the study of popular culture to examine how national security is affectively constructed in popular media, specifically the Iron Man mythos. As such, my approach falls between the geopolitical analyses of superheroes carried out by Jason Dittmer,

Terrence McSweeney or Dan Hassler-Forrest, and the conceptual analysis in Neal Curtis’ book

Sovereignty and Superheroes (2015). Like Curtis, I am interested in the way that superhero stories attempt to reconcile the narrative tensions that arise from narratives exploring contested cultural concepts. Like Dittmer, McSweeney and Hassler-Forrest, I inform this study with a discussion of the parallels between the Iron Man films and recent geopolitics, but my primary concern is the affective structures that influence and complicate Iron Man’s drive to seek security.

For the purpose of scope, I confine myself primarily to a definition of security as the state of being free from danger or threat, and the associated logic and practices designed to help achieve that state. As I will discuss in Chapter 2, in the arena of national security these logics and practices typically emerge from the logic of exception and emergency outlined most famously by Carl Schmitt. The thesis therefore excludes other registers of security, such as the

financial definition of ‘security’ as a guarantee or collateral. Although these meanings are related (a financial security protects against the threat of financial loss) my main interest is in the militaristic form of security that manifests in the War on Terror. For the purposes of this thesis, when I refer to ‘security’, I mean security generally, as the conceptual state or goal of being secure. When I refer to ‘national security’, I refer more specifically to security measures conducted by and on behalf of the state, to distinguish this register from other forms of security. Finally, when I refer to ‘security logic’, I refer to the foundational logic of threat and response that underpins the broad concept of security itself.

Of course, distinguishing between securities is often difficult as they are frequently interdependent on one another – for example, military and economic securities are frequently collapsed under the label of ‘national security’, as economic issues (such as dependency on another nation) can easily be viewed as strategic or military vulnerabilities. Equally, although the personal security of an individual may be threatened by national security practices that assault that person’s privacy, liberty or physical safety, personal and national security are often conflated in political rhetoric that promises to ‘keep people safe’. The common element, however, is a mindset dedicated to the perception and mitigation of threat. It is for this reason that I use the phrase ‘superpowered security’, to indicate that the thesis is concerned with those aspects of national security pertaining to the legitimacy and maintenance of the United

States as a global superpower. Although ‘superpowered security’ may seem similar to national security, I argue that it is worth distinguishing between the goals and practices of national security itself and the narrative framing of national security that seeks to justify exceptional measures by invoking national fantasies and aspirations to a legitimized superpower status.

In the first section of the thesis, I will review the literature on national security and the superhero genre, introduce my key theoretical intervention – Lauren Berlant’s concept of

cruel optimism – and argue that the superhero genre is an ideal case study by which to explore public tensions in the construction of national security.

In chapter two, ‘The cruel optimism of security’, I discuss the extant literature on national security and outline the logic of exception and sovereignty through which security operates. This chapter intervenes in critical security studies (which already regards security as a problematic object) by analysing security as an affective mode; an operative logic that structures the way that a security-seeker relates to the world around them by orienting them

(always) towards threat. In particular, I discuss the way in which security logic contributes to a sense of ‘permanent emergency’, a phrase often used to suggest that the contemporary atmosphere of crisis is unique to the post-9/11 political context. Drawing on Lauren Berlant’s concepts of cruel optimism and crisis ordinariness, I argue that national security is affectively structured such that it is especially conducive to the formation of cruelly optimistic attachment – it is a concept that is both impossible to fully achieve and at odds with the democratic values, such as freedom or opportunity, that it is supposed to protect. I also engage with security theorists calling for a better model of the way that specific national security issues are constructed in the public sphere, by outlining the way in which a literary or cultural studies approach to the problem can help determine how the broad discourse of national security – its strengths, weaknesses, and optimistic connotations – unfolds in popular fiction. Finally, I discuss the affective logic of the Bush Doctrine, and argue that the logics and technology of security can be understood as an affective prosthesis – a mode of perceiving and responding to the world that enhances the security-seeker’s ability to cope with crisis.

In chapter three, ‘National fantasy in the superhero genre’, I turn to the superhero genre and its historic role in public discourse and national fantasy. Although defining the superhero genre has historically proven problematic, there is a broad consensus that the genre reflects and contributes to the national imaginary. This chapter will unpack the ways in

which the superhero genre can be viewed as a site of national fantasy, which imagines multiple ways in which American aspirations and anxieties could unfold in an environment pressurised by threat and precarity. I review the literature on the superhero genre’s historical and political significance, focusing on its relationship with the state, sovereignty and security, to demonstrate that the superhero genre is not only ideally suited to explore issues of national security now, but that it has always done so.

In particular, I outline the narrative structure of the superhero genre, which originally derived from the production context of comic books but has since been adapted for superhero narratives in film. I compare the narrative logic of the superhero to the logic of exception that underwrites national security and suggest that the superhero genre is structurally suited to engage with issues of national security because these two logics are so similar. Furthermore, I argue that the structure of mainstream superhero universes – both in comics and in film franchises like the Marvel Cinematic Universe – is one of permanent emergency. Nevertheless, the genre also relies on misrecognition; singular crises are often framed as exceptional rather than structural, even when those crises are repeated to the point of mundanity. As a result, the superhero genre is an ideal arena in which to explore the imagined affective costs of permanent emergency and exceptional security measures, as it depicts the heavy costs incurred by superheroes trapped within a structural problem that they cannot ever fully solve.

Finally, I examine the individual superhero as a subdivision of the broader genre, to justify my focus on Iron Man alone rather than surveying the field. In part, this is for reasons of scope. But it is also because individual superheroes can differ quite markedly in narrative and aesthetic tone, symbolism, narrative conventions, and the conflicts or ideological issues with which they engage. As such, I argue that each superhero provides a distinct set of narrative experiences and expectations for their audiences in terms of the issues they are

likely to engage with and the problem-solving methods they typically deploy – all of which accumulate throughout the iterative (and often subversive) process through which a superhero is written and re-written over decades. Using Peter Coogan’s definitional framework of the superhero, which specifies that the three defining characteristics of the superhero are powers, mission and identity (2013), I outline a method for analysing the mythos of a particular superhero (in this case, Iron Man) through the lens of genre.

In chapter four, ‘‘The most fantastic weapon of all time!’: Iron Man’s comic book origins’, I analyse Iron Man’s character development across several decades of comics, spanning from 1963 to 2006, in order to illustrate the core themes, conventions and ideological expectations of the Iron Man mythos, and specifically to determine how the character has been used to engage with issues of national security in the past. I argue that the

Iron Man mythos reflects a broad trend towards superpowered security emerging from World

War II onwards. This chapter closely analyses five key comic book storylines with relevance to national security. In the first section, I discuss two early Iron Man stories which together function as twin origin stories: Tales of Suspense #39 (1963) and Demon in a Bottle (1979).

These two stories establish Iron Man stories as an individualist, neoliberal fantasy of security and strength – in other words, they celebrate the ability to protect oneself and one’s loved ones through individual ingenuity and wealth, rather than relying on the state. Both stories lay down essential elements of Iron Man’s mission, powers and identity which vary throughout the years but consistently return to dilemmas of security, control and the promise of a better future.

Secondly, I turn to the two Armor Wars storylines from the late 1980s and early 1990s, which reflect a deep Cold War-era anxiety about the control of military technology. These two arcs show Iron Man becoming increasingly dependent on his technology (even addicted to it) even as it harms him, which indicates a cruelly optimistic attachment. This, I argue, reflects an

anxiety that America’s global security strategy will create more enemies and vulnerabilities than it prevents.

Thirdly, I discuss two post-9/11 storylines, The Best Defense (2003-2004) and

Extremis (2005-2006), which both re-examines Iron Man’s mission to create a better future in light of the War on Terror. Each, I argue, comes to a different conclusion. This demonstrates the capacity of the Iron Man mythos to engage with conflicting desires and anxieties not only about national security, but about the nation as a whole. The purpose of this chapter is not only to examine past interventions in national security discourse, however, but to establish what fantasies, tropes and concerns the Iron Man mythos brings into national security discourse.

In the second section of the thesis, I turn to my major case study – five of the films featuring Iron Man in the Marvel Cinematic Universe: the Iron Man trilogy itself, and the first two Avengers films, in which Iron Man’s favoured strategies, values and assumptions come into conflict with those of other heroes. The films span a period of seven years, from 2008’s

Iron Man to 2015’s The Avengers: Age of Ultron. This period is significant because it marks the transition from George W. Bush’s presidency to Barack Obama’s, in which Obama’s promised departure from Bush’s national security policy – closing Guantanamo Bay, winning the war in

Afghanistan, and winding back warrantless wiretaps on American citizens – resulted in a decidedly mixed record. Obama’s compromises on these issues, along with the massive increase in drone strikes under his administration, are echoed in these films, which attempt to critique and move beyond Bush-era national security politics but ultimately struggle to imagine other solutions to permanent emergency.

In chapter five, ‘’This is your legacy’: Optimistic promises in Iron Man and Iron Man 2’,

I analyse the first two films in the Iron Man film franchise, Iron Man (2008) and Iron Man 2

(2010) to determine how they adapt the character from the comic book source material, how

the medium of film impacts the message, and how they set up what I argue is a metaphor for a national attachment to post-9/11 security logic. The first two Iron Man films adapt the existing comic book mythos not only to film, but for a mass audience post-9/11. In doing so, they situate the character and the ideals he represents within the context of the War on

Terror – in fact, they remediate the War on Terror, a process that I argue repeats throughout the franchise. In particular, the first Iron Man film picks up on themes from the comic book mythos and resituates Iron Man’s origins in Afghanistan. This film continues the tradition of making Iron Man physically dependent on his technology for survival, which means that the first movie more or less vindicates an optimistic attachment to security as an object that promises sustenance and endurance. But it also constructs the Iron Man suit as an affective prosthesis, as it extends Tony’s sense of agency and ability to cope with crisis.

In the second Iron Man film, the franchise begins to depict anxieties about the individualist fantasy of security set up by the first film. I will discuss the film’s thematic engagement with legacy (a better future), mediation (public misinterpretation of security measures, as well as the spectacle that narratives of the exception provide to audiences) and exceptionalism – or, in particular, the anxiety that a supposedly exceptional individual (Iron

Man) or nation (America) may be fatally flawed in a way that fatally undermines its security promises. These two films establish the baseline logic that will be tested throughout the rest of the franchise. Both the promises and the costs of American national security logic are evident in these films, but at this stage the promises win out – exceptional logic is enough to get by, even if it leaves systemic problems intact.

Chapter six, ‘’Just like Budapest all over again’: crisis ordinariness in The Avengers’, addresses the third case study, The Avengers (2012). Although this film is not an Iron Man film per se, but rather an ensemble film bringing together all of the characters established so far in the parallel series of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, I argue that it functions as a second 9/11

moment for the franchise. The alien invasion of New York City, and Iron Man’s attempt to sacrifice himself to save Earth, is not only a legitimately exceptional event but also a trauma that ripples throughout the continuity of the broader film franchise. The effect of trauma in this film, I argue, is to provide justification for increasingly exceptional security measures even in the absence of imminent threat. For Iron Man in particular, this film represents a traumatic experience that pushes him to escalate his drive to seek security, with catastrophic consequences.

However, this film also radically changes the structure of the Marvel Cinematic

Universe. As the point at which multiple parallel storylines converge and then explode outwards into a complex, interweaving continuity, The Avengers borrows from the narrative structure of comic book superhero universes to structurally represent permanent emergency.

The ‘endless security war’ that ensues, fuelled by trauma, erodes the wellbeing of the superheroes going forward and leads to catastrophic misrecognition of threats in later movies. But although The Avengers plays security logic straight, it also uses generic conventions of the superhero genre, like humour, to indicate the ordinariness of crisis for superheroes. This chapter will compare the coping strategies used by various Avengers, including humour, to adjust to the structural attrition that they experience from managing crisis ordinariness through the tools of superpowered security. I will suggest that this indicates a cognitive dissonance in which crisis ordinariness is simultaneously acknowledged

(in terms of the psychological toll it exacts) and continually misrecognized as a series of discrete events.

Finally, in chapter seven, ‘’We create our own demons’: failing to adjust in Iron Man 3 and The Avengers: Age of Ultron’, I will discuss the final two films in my set of case studies –

Iron Man 3 (2013) and The Avengers: Age of Ultron (2015). These films are the first in the franchise to engage in a clear critique of US national security practice, and to grapple with the

cost of heroism in the wake of trauma. They each demonstrate the costs of permanent emergency and the imagined dangers of an exceptional security logic in a context where crises are in fact repeated, endless, and ordinary. Iron Man 3 highlights the negative consequences and risks of American security practices post-9/11, while also remaining sympathetic to the basic desire for security. In depicting Iron Man’s trauma following the events depicted in The

Avengers, and his increasingly desperate addiction to the suits as a defence mechanism, Iron

Man 3 depicts the high costs that security measures incur – both on society’s defenders and the ordinary people they protect. Moreover, Iron Man 3 features a terrorist villain constructed through manipulation of the media; in fact, the real threat is homegrown – an attempt to exploit public fear. I will argue that Iron Man 3 presents security logic as an understandable but ultimately self-destructive response to trauma.

In contrast, The Avengers: Age of Ultron forcefully critiques the Bush doctrine of pre- emptive war, represented by Iron Man’s creation of an AI, Ultron, as a pre-emptive global security system. Iron Man’s strategy, which is motivated by generalised fear, creates new enemies – as Ultron turns against humanity – and therefore compromises its own goal. This movie can be read as a parable of the ill-defined and catastrophic course of the War on Terror.

Significantly, however, Iron Man’s creation of Ultron derives from a desire to make himself redundant, which indicates an attempt to seek an alternative to the exceptional security logic that has trapped Iron Man in a cycle of permanent emergency. It also reflects his awareness that he is a flawed protector, and therefore reflects anxieties about the individualist fantasy of self-security that the superhero genre tends to provide. Ultimately, however, Ultron operates on the same logic of superpowered security that underwrites Iron Man’s cruel attachment, and so when seeking threats to the planet he identifies humanity. This is an extreme scenario of security logic gone mad; where other films present a best-case or at least acceptable outcome of security logic, Avengers: Age of Ultron presents the worst case. Not only is the perceived threat non-existent, but the purported solution makes things worse. Moreover, the 26

failure of Iron Man’s Ultron strategy makes it harder for the franchise to imagine a way to escape from the impasse, because it indicates anxieties about moving outside of a security paradigm when threat has the potential to originate from anywhere.

Although these two films critique American security practices, they remain unable to give up on the exceptionalist logic that underwrites those practices. Ultimately, the optimistic promises set up in the first two films – societal endurance, a better world, and preservation of key American values like freedom, opportunity, prosperity and strength – are too foundational for Iron Man to consider giving up on, even though his attachment to security frequently works against his goals. Additionally, superpowered security (and the better future it promises) becomes so integral to his identity that giving it up would mean losing a key fixture of his being. It is in these films, I argue, that the cruel optimism of the national attachment to security becomes truly apparent.

Finally, in the conclusion, I look beyond the Bush-Obama era and offer a brief discussion of the affective national security politics of the Trump era. I read national security issues such as the United States-Mexico wall and family separations as an isolationist politics of security that relies on severing affective bonds both within the nation and without. To illustrate the conflicts that arise from this political moment, I contrast the cynical and destructive affective politics of Joker (2019) with the legacy-oriented impulses of later Marvel films, especially the revisionist time travel narrative of The Avengers: Endgame (2019).

Finally, I discuss Tom Taylor and David Lopez’s All-New Wolverine (2015-2018) as a superhero comic that mobilises optimism to move beyond the logic of exception and emergency. Although these texts fall outside the scope of the main study, I discuss them here to indicate how broadly this affective framework of national security can be applied in future research.

The central argument of this thesis is that Tony Stark’s cruelly optimistic attachment to security reflects and contributes to the cluster of optimistic promises attached to security in American national fantasy. Although crisis is a structural feature of everyday reality in the superhero genre, it is framed with the same exceptional rhetoric that distinguishes security.

The way that Iron Man enacts and problematizes security in this context is significant because it reveals firstly the logic by which security is imagined to function, and secondly because it demonstrates a recurring narrative in which security strategies are used in an attempt to achieve something that goes beyond the simple state of security itself. But the second purpose of this thesis, in line with Berlant’s methodology, is to trace the strategies that characters within the Iron Man mythos use to adjust to constant crisis. As Bush himself noted in the State of the Union in 2003, a “future lived at the mercy of terrible threats is no peace at all” . This thesis points to ways in which superhero narratives grapple with the threat of this terrible future, as a means of adjusting to the environment in which we find ourselves, where a situation of pervasive and persistent global threat is endlessly invoked in political rhetoric.

Although narratives of superpowered security can be instrumental in legitimating oppressive national security measures, it is my intention to argue that they also pose a fundamental challenge to the supposed inevitability of security logic.

Chapter 2 – The cruel optimism of security

In Cruel Optimism (2011), Lauren Berlant observes that many of the fantasies that operate to bind citizens to the promise of the neoliberal nation-state are obviously and painfully breaking down. Her collective term for these fantasies is ‘the good life’, or the guarantee that if citizens work hard and uphold their end of the social bargain, the state will provide the necessary conditions (including security) for them to attain prosperity and to flourish. Under the conditions of deepening structural inequality observed in the United States for some years, arguably since the beginning of the Reagan administration in 1981, this bargain is increasingly widely recognised to be unfulfilled. This holds in the case of the exceptional national security measures introduced post-9/11, which have not delivered the affective or structural returns promised in the political rhetoric of proponents such as George W. Bush.

Far from securing the United States’ liberty – or, for that matter, the liberties of Iraq or

Afghanistan – post-9/11 national security measures have instead imposed mass surveillance measures on the domestic population, eroded human and civil rights for civilians as well as enemy combatants, and exacerbated conflicts overseas. Nevertheless, the United States populace remains concerned about the threat of international terrorist attacks, with one Cato

Institute report remarking that the trillions of dollars expended on homeland security between 9/11 and 2018 “have utterly failed to make people feel safer” (Mueller & Stewart,

2018). Consequently, the conditions of permanent emergency noted in the United States since

9/11 show no signs of abating.

In this chapter I will examine the history and theory of security as a concept, to argue that it should be viewed as both a political operation and as a structure of feeling; a cluster of practices and promises that derives its political staying-power from its persistent affective resonance with the population. Cruel optimism is Berlant’s term for the affective mechanism

that binds people to objects or scenes of desire even when those objects compromise their ability to flourish. A person trapped in poverty might destroy their health and happiness through working long hours in unsafe working conditions to attain a good life that is simply unachievable. This is optimistic in the sense that they expect something to unfold from their proximity to the object or scene of attachment, and cruel in the sense that the promise will not only never be fulfilled but will actively compromise their wellbeing. And yet this hypothetical person may not willingly abandon their attachment because the cost of doing so is too high – the fantasy itself is sustaining:

What’s cruel about these attachments, and not merely inconvenient or tragic, is that the subjects who have x in their lives might not well endure the loss of their object/scene of desire, even though its presence threatens their well-being, because whatever the content of the attachment is, the continuity of its form provides something of the continuity of the subject’s sense of what it means to keep living on and to look forward to being in the world… if the cruelty of an attachment is experienced by someone/some group, even in a subtle fashion, the fear is that the loss of the promising object/scene itself will defeat the capacity to have any hope about anything. (Berlant, 2011, p. 24)

Any object that promises something can be an object of cruel optimism, but what does Berlant mean by promise? This is not necessarily an explicit promise, although of course it could be, but Berlant’s view of ‘promise’ originates from the person who forms the attachment.

Optimism is apostrophic – a kind of address or appeal to an object that is often not present or cannot speak, and therefore phantasmatic itself. Furthermore, any object really magnetises a cluster of promises, which “we want someone or something to make for us and make possible for us” (Berlant, 2011, p. 24) and which motivate the subject to return to the object/scene of desire in the hope that this time events will unfold as we want.

In this chapter, I will argue that the American attachment to security not only echoes a set of attachments to other ideals – the aforementioned freedom, prosperity, opportunity etc.

– but demonstrates a cruelly optimistic attachment to security logic as a means of achieving those desired futures. The cruelly optimistic attachment to the ‘good life’ that Berlant

observes is reflected in the presidential rhetoric discussed in Chapter 1, where successive

Presidents link security to core values of freedom, opportunity and prosperity. This rhetoric not only awkwardly draws attention to the American dream as an ailing promise slipping away from American families but increasingly positions it as something to be secured. By securing the health, wealth and opportunity of American families, the American dream will purportedly be brought back into the realm of possibility for ordinary people; by securing the borders, the physical safety and integrity of the population, the state will be able to continue making this guarantee. Furthermore, security is something to be desired in its own right, elevated to a status alongside the ideals it optimistically guarantees. By positioning security logic as a means to achieve the nation’s goals, and security itself as an object of national desire,

America’s leaders indicate a strong attachment to a concept that proves to be surprisingly nebulous.

The aim of this thesis is not to add to the ongoing critique of the security practices of

American administrations, or even to join the ranks of critics denouncing the concept of security itself, among other reasons because as Booth and Dunne have argued, security logic is suited to some, if not all, situations (2012). Nevertheless, the concept of security has attracted significant conceptual critique despite its privileged status in governance, so it is important to investigate the attributes of security that have allowed it to become so affectively potent. It is not my intent to argue that all security practices are harmful, or that even that it is inherently harmful to want to be secure. Rather, I am interested in the way in which affect and practice combine to construct a narrative of security that structures the public expectations about what a national security issue should look like, and how events should unfold.

This chapter will examine the concept of security through the critical lens of Lauren

Berlant’s concept of cruel optimism. Although I will draw on some theories from security studies, with particular attention given to the Copenhagen School, the purpose of this chapter

is not to intervene in the debates of that discipline. Instead, this chapter seeks to identify the various logics entailed by security as an affective orientation towards the world, in order to examine how it plays out in popular media in subsequent chapters. I will argue that the ambiguity and hyperutility of security logic allows it to be used to guarantee any of our prior desires: security is a precondition for x, where x is whatever we want that seems threatened.

Security is therefore an ideal object for widespread optimistic attachment, because it offers the conditions of possibility for anything, including other abstract ideals that are themselves difficult to quantify and may even be mutually exclusive. What it actually delivers, however is a set of structural expectations about the world that orient the actor towards threat and exceptional response. Security may deliver the conditions under which we may achieve x, but only if maintained with constant vigilance.

2.1 The problematic concept of ‘security’

Although national security offers to deliver the conditions through which the United States will be able to realise its core values, the relationship between security and these ideals is often circular. In Bill Clinton’s third State of the Union speech, reflecting on his election, he evinces a distinct ambivalence towards the idea of opportunity. Clinton describes the post- cold-war era as an era marked by “unparalleled change and opportunity and insecurity for the

American people” (1995, emphasis mine). In a later State of the Union speech, he elaborates further on this sentiment of suspicion: “Keep in mind, the same technological advances that have shrunk cell phones to fit in the palms of our hands can also make weapons of terror easier to conceal and easier to use” (2000). Here, he suggests that opportunity – despite being a desirable thing that security can facilitate – is itself a risk to security. This is especially true in the case of technological development; although Clinton points to civilian technology, innovations in military technology both sustain United States hegemony and create new risks

for the United States should that technology fall into the hands of enemies1. What emerges from this logic is a sense that security is necessary to protect against the outcomes that security itself delivers, which further suggests that the reward for overcoming one threat to national security is the opportunity to discover the next threat.

National security measures have pervaded ordinary life, with predictable affective results. The systematic normalisation of counter-terrorist activity – as expressed in political rhetoric, airport security checks, and warrantless surveillance – has coincided with the normalisation of public fear. This is not unique to the post-9/11 period: Peter N. Stearns observes several strands of heightened fear throughout American society more broadly through the decades preceding 9/11, especially regarding the spectre of foreign threat:

Here we deal both with a growing desire for assured safety, for protection against risk – demonstrated among other ways in a distinctive panoply of warnings and precautions – and with notable anxieties about menace from foreign people and foreign places. These strands all developed in a society that was in many ways unprecedentedly secure... (2006, p. 5)

Stearns notes that these heightened American fears “increasingly coalesce from the cold war onward” (2006, p. 5), which is also around the time when the academic discipline of security studies began to solidify (Buzan & Hansen, 2009). This suggests a general societal orientation toward threat, which is reflected in the structure of security as a concept, and which creates a false sense of exceptional times – which, of course, call for exceptional measures.

But what is security, if disentangled from the national ideals that it seems to protect and suspect in equal measure? This has proven to be a difficult question to answer, even within the international relations discipline from which its academic study developed.

Security is a slippery concept; at once comprising an ontological state (to be ‘secure’), a set of

1 Since Clinton’s speech, that exact scenario has occurred multiple times; in 2009, US ammunition was discovered in the possession of Taliban forces (Chivers, 2009), and in 2019 CNN reported that arms sold to Saudi Arabia had been resold to al-Qaeda linked fighters in Yemen (Elbagir, Abdelaziz, Abo El Gheit, & Smith-Spark, 2019). 33

practices (to ‘secure’ something) and a feeling (a ‘sense of security’). In many cases, it is defined negatively: as a state free from threat, or as a practice of mitigating threat. Ken Booth, for example, defines the goal of security as “survival-plus”, “the “plus” being some freedom from life-determining threats, and therefore some life choices” (2007, p. 102). In both cases, the presence or absence of threat is the defining condition, which encourages a logic that orients the security-focused actor towards that threat and away from the specific content of those life choices that may be possible once security is achieved. This is perhaps unsurprising, given that academic security studies emerged in American and European institutions after the

Second World War and solidified during the Cold War. The geopolitical and militaristic frameworks that structured the early discipline still inform much of its practice, especially in the case of national security, and inform the logic that it tends to structure it. Michael Dillon and Luis Lobo-Guerrero describe contemporary security discourse by glossing Foucault, characterising security as “the logos of war expressed as a logos of peace” (2008, p. 275).

The emergence of security as a key concept, distinct from war or peace but somewhere between the two, was significant in part because it opened up consideration of “a broader range of political issues” (Buzan & Hansen, 2009, p. 11), that could potentially compromise the conditions under which the nation could flourish. As such, security and sovereignty have historically mutually constituted one another; Buzan and Hansen point out that the state was typically both the presumed actor and the privileged referent for its own security practices, because it was assumed that protection of the state would be the best way to secure its constituent citizens, institutions, economy and so on. Security, when constructed as the preservation of state sovereignty, is a status quo concept (Williams, 2011). Although the security of the nation is frequently conflated with the personal security of individual citizens in political rhetoric, this is not always the case. If the key goal for the national security actor is to preserve existing power structures, then it is logically consistent for the actor to level

security measures against both external and internal targets deemed threatening to national stability. But this is not the only possible configuration of security: key developments within the discipline from the 1980s onwards shifted focus away from the state as referent object, towards securities as diverse as food, environment, communications and data. Nevertheless, the conventions of security logic and practice – even when applied to referents other than the nation – remain haunted by the historical concerns of states fearing radical disruption of the status quo.

It is worth noting, of course, that security is not in fact a universal construction – it is a

Western concept, and as such privileges the historical concerns of Western states. Academic security studies has historically been a Western discipline (Buzan & Hansen, 2009) and so any practice that follows from it is likely to have been constructed in line with the strategic priorities of those countries. But there remains an assumption that security as a desire is universal; that, if nothing else, the sense in which security represents physical self- preservation or avoidance of danger is an anthropological given (Hamilton, 2013). But security carries a variety of different senses that are often underspecified when the term is invoked. Even for eighteenth century writers discussing security, Mark Neocleous notes a tendency to slip between different registers, without always specifying which sense of the word they mean:

[S]ecurity figures here as simultaneously legal, political (in both the domestic and international senses) and economic, and it also slips back and forth between ‘negative’ and ‘positive’ poles – between security as simply safety from violence and security as facilitating the expression of human liberty. (2007b, p. 141)

Although contemporary academic writers are much more likely to specify the context of the security they engage with (national, social, economic) there remains significant overlap between each register that inflects its usage, especially when the word is left unqualified. The conflation of ‘safety from violence’ and ‘facilitating the expression of human liberty’ alone is

evidence that the historical and cultural construction of security is often ambiguous or contradictory.

In fact, security is not a linguistically universal concept and carries culturally specific connotations. While other cultures contain similar concepts that locate value in survival and the flourishing of society, or that respond to threat, different languages and cultures construct them in semantically distinct ways. Carsen Levisen points out that the closest Danish equivalent, tryghed, is not defined in opposition to threat, but instead assumes that the basic state of society reflects prosocial ideals like trust, familiarity and social cohesion. While both concepts contain a potential disruption to a desired status quo, tryghed does not construct this disruption as inevitable or as something that warrants an urgent or extreme response.

Instead, it carries the assumption that the world is “basically good... and if people (especially those with a special responsibility) keep doing what they are doing, the world will stay good”

(Levisen, 2012, p. 132). Tryghed describes the sort of world that is desired (that is, with no imminent threat) in more detail than security, which is relatively empty of implicit semantic content describing the desired world (Goddard, 2009) and notoriously ambiguous on the subject of what exactly is meant to be preserved. Where tryghed presupposes and describes peace, security presupposes and describes threat.

Consequently, the relationship between national security and state sovereignty is critical to understand the structure of security logic. Due to the hostile geopolitical environment in which national security developed, Buzan and Hansen (2009) argue, security was for a long time limited to those situations which were not only extreme and exceptional, but also existential: situations with the potential to threaten the endurance of the nation or community itself. The logic of security is therefore entangled with the logic of exception most famously outlined in Carl Schmitt’s theory of sovereignty: “Sovereign is he who decides on the state of exception” (qtd. in Agamben, 2017, p. 13) This sovereign ability manifests most

clearly in the declaration of emergency powers, which suspend society’s norms and laws for the duration of a situation deemed to pose an existential threat to the nation. War is the archetypal scenario in which these sovereign powers are exercised; as such, the invocation of

‘war’ (such as in the War on Terror, or even the earlier War on Drugs, dating from the 1970s) imposes a narrative structure on national security discourse that emphasises exceptionality over the routine biopolitical management of populations and risk.

As a result, Buzan and Hansen point out that even despite a significant push from some security scholars to construct forms of security that do not rely on the logic of exception, exception remains a critically important strand of security logic:

As the debates over the expansion of security gained ground in the 1990s, this linkage of security to urgency, and to extreme and radical defence measures, was central. Some, most prominently the Copenhagen School, argued that the concept could be expanded as long as referent object, threats and dangers were constituted with this logic of urgency and extreme measures. (2009, p. 13)

Not only does security, in this classical form, presuppose threats to its referent objects and imply the constant potential for insecurity, but its logic necessitates exceptional response. Ole

Wæver, one of the founders of the Copenhagen School of security studies, agrees, linking the concept of security explicitly to the aforementioned Schmittian logic of “exception, emergency and a decision (although not by a singular will, but among people in a political situation)”

(2011, p. 478). I will return to the Copenhagen School later in this chapter, but for now the key point is the link between exceptional threat and exceptional response. Because security can at least theoretically be applied to any referent object, threat is the only real universal constant to which security responds.

This fundamental orientation towards threat, even where threat might not exist, is one of the reasons that a significant number of critics take issue with the root concept of security, as well as its implementation. John T. Hamilton points to a contradictory tension in the word itself, drawing on the root Latin, se-cura (without care), to demonstrate that historically the 37

word has implied carelessness, complacency or negligence as much as the dominant modern sense of preventing harm. This sense of the word parallels the modern concept of a false sense of security, which suggests that to feel secure is either to be innocent or ignorant of threat.

Even in a modern sense, however, he argues that the presumption of threat makes security internally contradictory, paradoxical, and impossible:

Security almost always works at cross-purposes because the concern for security is at bottom a concern to be without concern. In striving to eliminate apprehension, in turning the alleviation of worry into a pressing source of worry, security unworks itself. (2013, p. 10)

Anthony Burke also argues that security is an impossible goal, but further points out that its very impossibility allows it to ontologically constitute the nation-state through the relentless opposition of nation and some threatening Other. He argues that the paternalistic rhetoric of

George W. Bush and Dick Cheney in the years following 9/11 echoes aspects of Hobbes’s body- politic, in which the “bodies of the citizenry combine into the undivided body of the Sovereign”

(2007, p. 5), and therefore delegitimises internal dissent: either obscuring dissenters entirely

(as the Sovereign will must therefore be the will of the people who constitute it) or suggesting that they are non-citizens, another threat to be mitigated in the name of national security. The spectre of external threat and the need to secure against it therefore rhetorically consolidates the nation as a coherent entity: “insecurity is the very condition of the nation-state as a structure or promise of Being” (A. Burke, 2007, p. 5). Although Burke acknowledges that defence against threat is itself legitimate, he joins Hamilton in arguing that the concept and structure of security comes with immense baggage that makes its proper execution fundamentally impossible.

For Mark Neocleous, this reflects a wider problem in liberal ideology in which security and liberty are not at odds, as many contemporary writers assume, but rather constitute much the same thing. Neocleous argues that the myth that a liberal democracy must strike a balance between liberty and security “opens the (back-) door to an acceptance of all sorts of 38

authoritarian security measures; measures which are then justified on liberal grounds”

(2007b, p. 132) He analyses Locke’s concept of the ruler’s prerogative to take exceptional action outside the letter of the law, provided that it serves the public good, as a liberal justification for the use of exceptional force, and further identifies a strain of liberal thought dating from the eighteenth century that collapses security and freedom together. Here – and in Bush’s emancipatory rhetoric – security is freedom: freedom from life-determining threats, as Ken Booth puts it, and freedom to pursue individual choices. Because security is constructed both as liberty and as the ontological precondition for liberty, and the role of liberal governance is to preserve liberties, security becomes the ultimate goal and justification for use of state prerogative, which does not have to answer to any moral or legal code but only has to ensure the maintenance of the state.

The problem with this logic, as Neocleous points out, is that allowing security to justify the use of arbitrary power leaves the state open to “authoritarian or absolutist encroachments on liberty, so long as these are conducted in the name of security” (2007b, p. 143) Privileging security therefore invites a Schmittian logic of exception and emergency into the heart of liberal democracy, enabling the abuse of emergency powers:

Whatever example we use, the pattern is the same: an ‘emergency’ occurs in which ‘security’ is threatened; existing emergency powers are exercised and new ones put in place; these are then gradually ‘stretched’ beyond their original scope; this stretching is gradually justified and legitimized, until the police and security forces are exercising the powers way beyond their original context, to the extent that are become part of the everyday functioning of the rule of law: the emergency becomes permanent, the exception becomes the rule, and the sun fails to set on the sunset clauses... (Neocleous, 2007b, p. 144)

Neocleous points out that the suspension of law and civil liberties in emergencies, which is so frequently criticised by commentators, is in fact built into legal systems and has been a feature of governance worldwide for at least a century. In many cases, the tightening of legal authority outlasts the instigating emergency by years (Neocleous, 2006). In this sense, security practices do compromise liberties, but to understand the two concepts as ideologically 39

opposed is to misconstrue their relationship. When liberty is understood to be contingent on security, then security will always be the priority.

This is also reflected in the work of Giorgio Agamben, who has famously argued that the concentration camp has become the "hidden matrix and nomos of the political space in which we are still living” (2017, p. 137). For Agamben, the juridical foundations of sovereignty in Western politics can be found in a figure from ancient Roman law – homo sacer, sacred man, a figure who has been excluded from political life and reduced to bare, or animal, life, and who can therefore be killed but not sacrificed. This, to Agamben, is the original form of the state of exception: the state in which homo sacer exists, by virtue of his exclusion from the juridical and political order. The state of exception is fundamental to Agamben’s conception of sovereignty, because the sovereign ability to exclude figures such as homo sacer effectively constitutes the ability to define society altogether. This is no more than the power to decide the “threshold in life that distinguishes and separates what is inside from what is outside”

(2017, p. 109). When the civil and legal rights of a population are stripped, and not only their survival but their personhood becomes contingent on sovereign decision – like the victims of camps in Nazi Germany or, as I will discuss in section 2.4, the detainees in Guantanamo Bay – they become the contemporary manifestation of homo sacer. For Agamben, the camp is the

“space that is opened when the state of exception begins to become the rule” (2017, p. 139), and thus defines the political space of modernity. National security, in this view, is a paradigm that establishes the state’s biopolitical management of citizens as an ordinary feature of governmentality.

In later writings, Agamben observes the propensity for states to mobilise security regimes against their own citizens, perhaps most damningly in his 2008 essay on United

States visa restrictions requiring biometric scanning, ‘No to biopolitical tattooing’:

[B]y applying these procedures to the citizen – or rather, to the human being as such – the State is applying a technological apparatus that was invented for a dangerous class of persons. The State, which ought to constitute the very space of public life, instead has made the citizen into the suspect par excellence – to the point that humanity itself has become a dangerous class. (pp. 201-202)

As a result, the exceptional measures justified by appeals to national security are not limited to an external ‘Other’; they also reconfigure the relationship between state and citizen. Under this paradigm, civil and legal rights are always precarious; they are contingent on the shifting biopolitical borders that demarcate the inside of the political order from the outside – and national security is the narrative that legitimates the sovereign decision to draw and enforce that boundary.

One of the distinctive legitimating features of national security discourse post-9/11 is the prominence of trauma talk in the American public sphere, noted by both Neocleous and

Lauren Berlant. Berlant argues that trauma has come to overwhelmingly (and detrimentally) characterise American legal and political discourse as a signifier and validator of social and personal truth. Berlant frames trauma as a narrative genre, in her distinctive definition of genre as “an affective expectation of the experience of watching something unfold” (2011, pp.

6-7). In this sense, trauma constructs “the historical present as the scene of an exception that has just shattered some ongoing, uneventful ordinary life that was supposed to just keep going on and with respect to which people felt solid and confident” (Berlant, 2011, pp. 9-10).

As a result, trauma as a narrative genre carries the expectation that there is a status quo to which people can return once the emergency has passed. Similarly, Neocleous argues that

‘trauma’ has hypertrophied into an everyday concept closely intertwined with the ‘age of anxiety’ in which we are said to live now (2012, p. 189). Consequently, trauma talk functions as part of a deeply conservative mode of thinking and governance, which not only justifies but necessitates an “endless security war” (2012, p. 188). This double talk creates a kind of societal illusion, in which security measures and a warlike mentality permeate life and become

normal, while the implicit promise that the exceptional event will at some point end makes the supposedly-temporary sacrifice seem bearable.

The structural pattern that security logic seems to enact instead, putting aside the rhetorical framing for now, is that of crisis. Crisis, as Berlant describes it, entails a similar set of expectations to security, and in fact her definition of crisis would fit security perfectly:

The genre of crisis is itself a heightening interpretive genre, rhetorically turning an ongoing condition into an intensified situation in which extensive threats to survival are said to dominate the reproduction of life. (2011, p. 7)

Security closely replicates this affective structure of crisis, with its orientation towards threat as a spectre of existential proportions and its domination of political discourse in just about every sphere of American life. To survive, all essential aspects of life must be secured, which suggests that the opposite situation to security and the situation which security combats is that of constant crisis. Security responds to crisis, rhetorically enacting the sort of ongoing

“heroic agency” (2011, p. 101) that crisis rhetoric demands. For this reason – because crisis is prone to the same exceptionalising rhetoric as trauma – Berlant qualifies her formulation as crisis ordinariness: unexceptional, “embedded in the ordinary” (2011, p. 10), preferring a logic of adjustment to a logic of exception. Her key argument is that the conditions of structural attrition, which are often misrecognized as crises, do not in fact constitute a state of exception, but instead manifest in ordinary life as a slow and gradual wearing out. In both cases, crisis is figured as an ongoing problem that compromises the wellbeing of ordinary people. In the rhetorically intensified case, when crisis becomes emergency, it justifies the same narratives of exception and emergency that prop up the hypertrophied security environment. But when crisis is structural, systemic and seemingly intractable, as suggested by Berlant’s addition of

‘ordinariness’ there comes a recognition that constant crisis is unexceptional and may manifest as slow attrition rather than in sudden and traumatic events. I suggest that an attachment to security may involve an ongoing misrecognition of ordinary crisis as

exceptional, while at the same time the exceptional measures of security practices justified on the basis of emergency responses increasingly become normalized as part of the crisis ordinariness of everyday environments.

Misrecognition is a key component of cruel optimism that helps explain how security can be so nebulously framed in public rhetoric. As already noted, Berlant conceives of optimism as apostrophic: the promises that security makes are not actually made by security, but by the person who is attached to the idea of security and projects those promises onto it.

Misrecognition is the process by which that attachment is maintained, when an actual encounter with our object of attachment is ambivalent or misaligned with our fantasy:

Misrecognition (méconnaissance) describes the psychic process by which fantasy recalibrates what we encounter so that we can imagine that something or someone can fulfil our desire: its operation is central to the state of cruel optimism. To misrecognize is not to err, but to project qualities onto something so that we can love, hate, and manipulate it for having those qualities – which it might or might not have. (2011, p. 122)

In the same chapter, Berlant joins Eve Sedgwick in criticising the hermeneutics of suspicion that lead to a default position of scepticism towards ordinary attachments. By this she means that attachments should not be read one-dimensionally, as nothing more than “mirages and failures”, but as things that matter (2011, p. 123). I would like to reinforce this, and stress that

I am not criticising the desire for security in and of itself. Desiring security – for one’s nation, family or self – is reasonable and appropriate, and awareness of the cruel optimism of an attachment does not mean that giving up that attachment is easy. As Berlant writes, the cruelty of this kind of optimism is that the subject endures in the attachment and so cannot bear to end it – and in the case of security, the object of attachment explicitly promises endurance. However flawed it may be, security matters.

Of course, negative expectations of what security practice will achieve are now invoked by the concept as well, in public perceptions as well as academic literature. For

example, Michael Williams describes the role of fear in audience rejection of securitization attempts:

In this case, the fear of terrorism, and its successful securitization within the technified language and logic of certain specialist institutions, was outweighed by the fear of the threat that policies like the TIA2 could pose to liberal-democratic politics. Fear is here a productive and countervailing power within normal politics, and a means of defending the latter against an intensifying and intrusive politics of fear and securitization. (Williams, 2011, pp. 456-457)

This reflects public recognition of several of the tropes I have described within academic security discourse: that security is oppositional and uses fear to enforce an ‘us vs. them’ paradigm; that exceptional security measures threaten civil liberties; that claims to security may themselves be unwarranted or overblown; and that allowing security to be the ultimate justification for executive action is bad for democracy. This is also reflected in the tendency for politicians to downplay security rhetoric, as demonstrated by the many links between security and more palatable national values in the presidential speeches above. While individual attitudes towards security may vary widely, both positive and negative orientations towards security tend to respond to a core logic – that of exceptional response to crisis – that security is perceived to entail. These expectations of security – whether positive, negative or complicated – circulate publicly and come to mutually constitute security as a contested but deeply meaningful concept, intertwined with the core cultural values it either guarantees or threatens. Rather than security being a well-defined ideal upon which rhetorical claims can be made, the notion of security itself becomes a product of various rhetorical strategies. The problem then becomes: how is security constructed in the public sphere?

2 ‘Total Information Awareness’, a mass surveillance program designed to data-mine the personal information of US citizens (including library records) to profile suspected terror subjects as a means of preventing attack. It operated briefly in 2003 before media criticism pushed Congress to defund it. 44

2.2 Security as public narrative: the Copenhagen School and genre

For the theorists of the Copenhagen School, nothing is intrinsically a security issue – at least not until security is rhetorically invoked in relation to it. The innovation of the Copenhagen

School was to approach security not as a noun or an ontological state, but as a speech-act, which they define as ‘securitization’. A securitizing speech-act frames the issue under discussion as a threat to society that is serious enough to require an urgent, exceptional response. Under this framework, an issue is not a security issue until it is rhetorically securitized: “a self-referential practice, because it is in this practice that the issue becomes a security issue – not necessarily because a real existential threat exists but because the issue is presented as such a threat” (Wæver, Buzan, & de Wilde, 1998, p. 24). Ole Wæver, who first introduced ‘securitization’ in the mid-1990s, reflects that the term was coined to shift focus away from the actor (such as the state or military) and instead to the form of an act (2011).

Wæver, Buzan and de Wilde’s 1998 book responds to a debate in security studies about the scope of security: should it retain a narrow focus on military issues and use of force, or should it be widened to encompass a broader range of issues – and if the latter, how to avoid diluting the concept to the point where it means anything to anybody?

The Copenhagen shift to form – the speech-act – was designed to allow the field to widen its scope while addressing the concerns of the traditionalists. As a result, the grammar of the securitization speech-act that they trace has been noted to be quite conservative, relying as it does on the familiar Schmittian politics of exception and emergency. A successful securitization relies on these criteria: the agent identifies a threat that qualifies as existential, makes a case for this threat requiring an urgent and exceptional response – that is, a response that would not be possible under the constraints of due process and other laws by which the agent is normally bound – and must have this case accepted by their audience.

As many critics have noted, the role of the audience is often undertheorized in the

Copenhagen School’s writings (Balzacq, 2005), and the logic of security that they describe relies heavily on Schmitt’s exclusionary politics. This explains the Copenhagen School’s preference for desecuritization, because a Schmittian security risks eroding democratic norms and practices. To Wæver, Buzan and de Wilde, security represents a failure of normal politics.

Wæver notes an increasing preference for desecuritization within the field, reflecting a growing recognition of the potential damage that indiscriminate securitization can cause

(2011). For example, partitioning a situation into a threat to be secured against and a referent object to be secured results in an othering logic, which is especially troubling when the means of securing the referent object is military. Mark Neocleous points out that exclusionary security practices have frequently culminated in extermination (2009). While this may be an extreme example of the risks of securitization, it demonstrates that framing an issue as an existential threat can have lethal consequences for those who are either defined as the threat or caught in the crosshairs.

Another well-recognised risk of security logic is that attempts to secure against possible future threats may actually provoke those threats or create more, as demonstrated by a hypothetical scenario called the ‘security dilemma’. In this scenario, two defensively- oriented states seek to increase their own security by accumulating power, which looks threatening to the other state and unintentionally provokes mutual fear. As a result, both states feel less secure and seek to accumulate more power to counteract the perceived potential threat. This is a well-established concept by now, with discussion of the scenario dating back to the 1950s. The key point that fear of an undefined threat may bring about a real threat is well summed up by John Herz, the theorist who coined the term:

It is one of the tragic implications of the security dilemma that mutual fear of what initially may never have existed may subsequently bring about exactly that which is feared most. Herz (1961, p. 241)

Although the security dilemma illustrates a specific kind of scenario that does not apply universally (Tang, 2009), the risk that security practices may instigate further problems down the road is concerning. Despite the move towards desecuritization, some theorists have pointed out that attempts to curtail the burgeoning security apparatus actually serve to entrench the concept in discourse. Mike Williams, for instance, points out that a liberal inclination towards desecuritization implies, as Wæver describes it, “a kind of meta- securitization” (2011, p. 472) in which society seeks to secure against a politics of fear.

This, however, is one of the reasons why securitization has been so controversial within the field. By defining security narrowly as a negative politics of exception, focusing on the speech-acts of elites with the power and legitimacy to make such requests for exceptional powers, securitization risks entrenching hegemonic power structures (McDonald, 2008).

Securitization theory “‘closes’ the meaning of security by fixing it as a ‘politics of the exception’” (Stritzel, 2011, p. 347) which restricts the possibility of approaching security in a different way. Critics have also pointed out that the role of the audience requires further elaboration, as the ‘acceptance’ criterion suggests that securitization is more of an interactional or co-constructed process (McDonald, 2008; Stritzel, 2011) in which the issue at hand is framed through public discourse.

For this reason I argue that it is useful to approach the problem from a literary/cultural perspective, responding to Matt McDonald’s call for “an alternative theory of the performative role of security representations” (2008, p. 569). An alternative theory would have to accommodate non-linguistic representations of security, such as images, which

McDonald, Michael Williams (2003) and others have noted also play a role in constructing security and threat in the US public sphere. It would also have to explain why the exceptional and exclusionary logic described by the Copenhagen School recurs so persistently both in security discourse and in the public sphere. A literary/cultural approach would not claim to

advance a predictive or even descriptive model of security practice itself, in an international relations context, but would instead offer a way of thinking about the endurance of the themes, narratives and values associated with national security, and why they recur so persistently in both the public sphere and the academic literature.

In effect I would like to build on Wæver’s core observation that an event is not a security issue until it is framed as such, but rather than retaining a narrow focus on linguistic form I propose viewing security as a narrative concept that invokes the generic expectations of crisis, as framed by Berlant: the sense that when security is applied to an issue, it brings with it the cluster of conventions, tropes and premises that we expect from crisis. Security entails a clear set of specific conventions that are mostly captured in the Copenhagen School’s explication of security logic: threat, urgency, the need for exceptional response, protection of the referent object, and so on, but as discussed above, the basic logics of security and crisis converge in the sense that life is dominated by survival. With any genre, there is an affective dimension that influences the way that people relate to it; that motivates people to return to it and enact it even if it promises something negative or painful. Crisis achieves this through exceptionality – the promise that disruption of ordinary life is only temporary and can be mitigated. Security offers that mitigation and, in doing so, affirms the core affective promise that ordinary life can resume once crisis has passed.

For example, what seems to underwrite George W. Bush’s calls for security after 9/11 is a kind of post-traumatic optimism that seeks to rhetorically position the suffering of a nation as the dark episode in a grand narrative of liberal progress and exceptionalism: something to be overcome or mastered; something that will vindicate the greatness of

America going forward. The traumatic event, in this sense, is refigured through the generic structures of crisis as a call to heroism on one hand, in the case of exceptional measures, and constant vigilance against evil (broadly defined) on the other. When security is deployed in

service of this narrative, the promise of a triumphant future justifies its excesses; alongside the ongoing normalisation of security practices comes a shifting of the goalposts in which each new measure is supposedly temporary.

The other function that security performs, when it becomes the crucial practice/state upon which the desired future is contingent, is to empty out the specific content of that future, so that when security itself becomes the objective, the future that it guarantees is underspecified and therefore able to be populated by any other national fantasies to which it might be yoked. It has been frequently noted, for example, that Bush’s rhetoric, from his inauguration onwards, echoes a deep-rooted American tradition of religious apocalypticism stretching back to the Founding Fathers, but especially evident in contemporary neoconservative thought (Curtis, 2009; Northcott, 2004). In this millennialist reading of

Bush’s politics, the United States is the divinely-inspired agent of Providence responsible for restraining evil until the end times. This “apocalyptic narcissism” (159), as Neal Curtis describes it, is not unique to the post-9/11 political environment, but taps into a deeper historical well of ambivalent orientation to both insecurity and evil which has informed the

American mindset since the nation’s inception. In this line of national fantasy, confrontation with evil – whether that evil is framed as Islam in the War on Terror, or Native Americans on the frontier – has always been presented as both threat and opportunity. For Bush and other fundamentalist thinkers, Curtis argues, what is ultimately at stake in the War on Terror is “the decision between God and Satan” (166), a decision for which the United States is uniquely responsible. Seeking security from this perspective, therefore, means investing insecurity with religious significance, rendering it a condition of possibility for Americans to fulfil their destiny as “the servants of God’s purposes” (Northcott, 138).

In other words, the promises may change, while the orientation towards threat and crisis does not. Even when an attempt is made to argue against the deployment of security –

say, that an issue is not a security issue or that the executive has overstepped its bounds in declaring a state of emergency – this can reinforce the conceptual power of security rather than diminishing it. Security can therefore be seen as a crisis narrative that builds expectations of heightened threat, which require exceptional measures, in service of an aspirational but hazy future, which reinforces the perception of constant crisis in the present.

In the next section, I will explore the affective structures that distinguish the post-9/11 articulation of that narrative in the Bush Doctrine, which constructs national security as a vehicle for the maintenance and legitimation of US hegemony – a narrative I am calling

‘superpowered security’.

2.3 Superpowered security: the affective structure of the Bush Doctrine

On September 18th 2001, the United States Congress issued a joint resolution authorising the President to use military force against those responsible for attacking the

United States on 9/11. This resolution – and the Bush administration’s public and private interpretation of it – is instructive, because it lays out the groundwork for the way in which the Bush Doctrine (in the National Security Strategies of 2002 and 2006) would seek to reconfigure the affective structure of national security in the public sphere. In the preceding two sections, I outlined the broad affective structures of national security as a mindset that continually orients the security actor towards threat, perpetuates fear, and relies on misrecognition of the structural or ordinary as exceptional. This section will examine the specific spatial, temporal and affective construction of national security throughout the Bush years. To reflect the entanglement of national security with narratives of US exceptionalism and military supremacy, I use the phrase ‘superpowered security’. This refers firstly to the status of the US as a global superpower, which must itself be secured. This imperative structures post-Cold War US national security strategy as a means of securing both the US and the weaker powers over which the US assumes a protective role. Secondly, superpowered

security refers to the exceptional military powers at the United States’ disposal which, I argue, can be described metaphorically as superpowers by virtue of their global exceptionality.

To think through the affect of security, it is necessary to think about the way in which security constructs space, states, bodies and the relations between them. One way of conceiving of the securitization of space could be thought of as the ‘barrier’ model. In this model, space is divided into an interior, which is to be protected, and exterior, which at best falls outside the responsibility of the security actor and at worst poses a threat to the interior space. The typical threshold, of course, is the national border, which delineates zones of control and sovereign power. In contrast, the biopolitical model, which Dillon and Lobo-

Guerrero argue better represents contemporary security politics in a globalised international economy, frames borders as permeable thresholds through which populations, information and capital should circulate – as they note, real borders do not “prophylactically secure the state by throwing up a barrier around it” (2008, p. 269), nor does it constitute national identity. In this model, both ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ are monitored, assessed and managed through processes of governmentality. What I will suggest in this section is that although the superpowered security of the Bush era (and throughout the Obama era) reflects the shifting, expansive spatiotemporal boundaries and ongoing risk management of the biopolitical model, it relies on the exceptional and exclusive affective politics of the barrier model for legitimation of sovereign power.

In the days and months immediately following 9/11, the United States produced a vast body of legislative documents outlining the scope of the executive branch’s power to wage the

War on Terror – specifically, the scope of the executive’s ability to exercise sovereign powers of violence against a wide range of entities deemed to threaten the nation. This scope was remarkably broad, yet the Bush administration’s generous interpretation of its Congressional mandate had substantial foundation in the Joint Resolution of September 18th, 2001. This

resolution not only invests the sovereign decision to kill (bypassing the right to trial) in the

President personally – “[t]hat the President is authorized to use all necessary and appropriate force against those nations, organizations, or persons he determines planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001...”– but allows these powers to extend indefinitely; “in order to prevent any future acts of international terrorism against the United States by such nations, organizations or persons” ("Authorization for Use of Military Force," 2001, emphasis mine). This immediately signals the spatial and temporal indistinction of the War on Terror – a remarkably broad mandate to be concentrated in the singular figure of the President.

Indeed, in September 2001, and throughout 2002, the Justice Department issued a series of memos (drafted by Deputy Assistant Attorney General John Yoo and signed by

Assistant Attorney General Jay S. Bybee) arguing that the President had the right to exercise military force pre-emptively, and advising that detainees of the War on Terror were not entitled to the status or rights accorded to prisoners of war under the US Constitution or the

Geneva Conventions. The Justice Department additionally claimed that detainees held at

Guantanamo Bay (or the secret detention centres run by the CIA at foreign sites like Bagram

Air Base in Afghanistan) were not under the jurisdiction of US courts. These memos, leaked in

2004 and now colloquially known as the ‘Torture Memos’, illustrate the Bush administration’s secret efforts to unilaterally suspend both national and international law in the name of national security. Significantly, on September 25th 2001, John Yoo argued that although the

Justice Department’s determinations were derived from the War Powers Resolution of 1973, and the aforementioned September 14th Joint Resolution, the President’s authority could not be limited by these statutes: “The decisions, under our Constitution, are for the president alone to make” (Denbeaux, Beroth, Deutsch, Stratton, & Taylor, 2017).

The resulting Bush Doctrine – which manifested both in these memos and in the 2002 and 2006 National Security Strategies (NSS02 and NSS06) – therefore highlighted an immediate tension between the norms and values that the Bush administration claimed it wanted to secure and the means by which it proposed that America would secure them.

Although Bush (and later Obama) suggested that the best way to maintain America’s security

(and therefore the security of the globe) would be to strengthen global markets, promote democracy, and spread liberal values, the militaristic methods that the United States deployed in the War on Terror instead served to reassert a spatial politics of exception and exclusion – shored up by a global system of biopolitical surveillance and discipline. A particularly egregious example of the Bush administration’s repudiation of other governmental authorities is of course ‘rendition’, a program established to allow the extraction of detainees to foreign jurisdictions where they would be subject to harsh interrogation tactics (amounting to torture) prohibited in the United States. Despite promising to safeguard freedom and security together, and especially to fight for democracy as an institution that would supposedly foster global security, the Bush administration’s actions in fact undermined

Congressional oversight and the rule of law with the result of concentrating sovereign power in the executive branch. Furthermore, it did so in a way that implicitly positioned the United

States as a uniquely privileged sovereign nation, with the power to unilaterally revoke the civil and human rights of both its own citizens and foreign nationals.

Indeed, multiple scholars have argued that the War on Terror, and especially the Bush

Doctrine, both entrenches and extends existing sovereign hierarchies. Both Amitav Acharya

(2007) and Robert Jackson (2007), for example, have argued that the War on Terror has preserved the system of sovereign states, while Greg Anderson has argued that the post-9/11 securitization of the United States’ international relations – not just militarily, but in the economic sphere as well – has contributed to “increasingly hierarchical forms of sovereignty among the U.S., Canada and Mexico” (2012, p. 734). Adriana Sinclair and Michael Byers add 53

that the construction of sovereignty in the context of 9/11 reflects a singular American concept of sovereignty: “one which elevates the United States above other countries and seeks to protect it against outside influences while, concurrently, maximising its ability to intervene overseas” (2007, p. 318).

This is not unique to the post-9/11 context, either; Patricia L. Dunmire (2009) and

David Hastings Dunn (2006) both argue that the Bush Doctrine should be viewed in its broad historical context: as a post-Cold War initiative to maintain US global supremacy. Dunmire and Dunn each point to the similarities between the Bush Doctrine and the post-Cold War security strategy of the early 1990s, in which the United States found itself in a “threat deficit”

(Buzan, 2006, p. 1101) following the fall of the Soviet Union, and developed a new strategy designed to prevent the emergence of new rivals and secure US hegemony going forward.

Dick Cheney’s vision of preventive measures and a US-led international system of collective security, although stridently criticised by the US and international community when a draft was leaked in 1992, would re-emerge in the National Security Strategies of 2002 (NSS02) and

2006 (NSS06). Dunmire argues that although the dominant narrative of 9/11 was as an event that changed everything, it in fact provided cover for the reintroduction of controversial national security strategies designed to secure a unipolar world centred on US global supremacy. She writes that that 9/11:

...did not just provide the concrete ‘aberrant Other’… needed to fill the threat blank created by the demise of the Soviet Union. It also provided the exigency through which the Administration could simultaneously disjoin the Bush Doctrine from its prior articulations and implement the security goal of these earlier documents: to maintain, preserve, and extend US economic, political and military global supremacy. (2009, p. 217)

The push to maintain US hegemony relied on the idea that the United States was not obliged to recognise international constraints on its power. It is important not to overstate the international impact of this idea, of course; as in the 1990s, the United States’ repeated claims that it should not have to abide by international law were met with significant international 54

criticism, and its submissions to the United Nations Security Council were markedly more circumspect on pre-emption than its domestic rhetoric (Gray, 2006). Nevertheless, it is now clear that the Bush Doctrine sought to maintain a global hierarchy with the United States at the top, possessing unparalleled sovereign capacity to decide the exception.

The NSS02 reflected the structural changes to US strategic thinking after the end of the

Cold War, which moved from a reactive, multilateral approach oriented towards a specific threat (such as the containment and deterrence strategies used against the Soviet Union) to a capabilities-based approach which could pre-empt and respond to future threats as, or even before, they emerged (Dunmire, 2009; Hastings Dunn, 2006). As I have argued previously in the chapter, the concept of security lends itself to this sort of thinking: the reward for defeating one threat is the imperative to prepare for the next threat. In the early 1990s, the US military began modernizing in response to a rekindled interest in a concept known as the

Revolution in Military Affairs, or RMA, which posited that novel technologies, organizational strategies and doctrines could irreversibly transform the practice of warfare and, therefore, the balance of power. The result of the United States’ adoption of the RMA was a rapid expansion of military technology in order to secure the nation’s global superiority. As both

Simon Dalby (2009) and Stephen Graham (2012) point out, by 2001 the United States military was already positioned to wage a global war, as it had invested in the development of guidance systems, precision missiles, communications and surveillance technology, and remote drone warfare that effectively extended United States military oversight across the globe. As a result, the War on Terror was able to rapidly remap the world into new categories

“congruent with the prosecution of the global war on terror” (Dalby, 2009, p. 234) and conduct warfare in an expansive ‘battlespace’ that was not constrained by geopolitical regions and boundaries, but instead penetrated through all aspects of life both at home and abroad.

The spatial configuration of the War on Terror, at least as expressed in the Bush

Doctrine, is one of United States’ military oversight and administration of the globe, supposedly on behalf of the Western political order. Boundaries are ideological rather than purely geographical, although Western and especially American-controlled geopolitical zones are undoubtedly privileged; as Simon Dalby writes:

This geopolitical specification of the world is however complemented by one in which a layered defence of the homeland of the United States is at the heart of these new structures... Beyond this is a series of layered zones of decreasing importance. Ensuring the inviolate spatial protection of the homeland is the lynchpin to all this; security of the base of operations is the first priority because only with that accomplished can American forces undertake their expeditions abroad. (Dalby, 2009, p. 243)

This was in part in response to the decentralization of terrorist threats, which could no longer be assumed to originate from specific hostile states. Numerous scholars have pointed to the amorphous and shadowy nature of terrorism as a driving force behind both the contemporary strategy of the United States military and the persistence of public fear – in fact, Jeremy Engels notes that this narrative was swiftly generalised to other discourses of threat, such as piracy, which he argues became characterised as “floating bombs encircling our shore” (2007, p.

326). The spectre of threats emerging from within – whether that meant the radicalisation of domestic terror cells, or a foreign threat penetrating the border undetected – justified the expansive surveillance capabilities granted to the CIA and NSA and deployed against United

States citizens, the creation of the Department of Homeland Security, and, of course, the enhanced counterterrorism powers legalised by the PATRIOT Act. The battlespace therefore extended into virtual as well as physical space – both the private communications of citizens and the public communications of the media were folded under the domain of “information warfare” (Graham, 2012, p. 144).

It has also been frequently noted that the War on Terror dilated the temporality of war as well as its spatial configuration. In 2006, the updated National Security Strategy

reframed the war as the ‘long war’, and so implicitly acknowledged what critics had predicted: by declaring that the objective of the war was to combat ‘terror’ and end ‘tyranny on earth’, the Bush administration had committed the United States to a war with no temporal limit. As

Mark Neocleous (2006) points out, this is not in fact a historical aberration, but rather a feature of emergency powers throughout at least the last century. Similarly, I would argue that this is a conceptual feature of security logic, which necessitates permanent risk assessment and management in order to secure against successive threats. Nevertheless, it is notable that the designated win condition for the War on Terror is essentially unachievable, meaning that the Bush Doctrine effectively sought to justify permanent military oversight of other sovereign nations.

Post-9/11 national security therefore operates temporally in two registers: firstly, the immediate or finite register required to justify the use of emergency powers (which presuppose that the emergency will, at some point, end); and secondly the extended or indefinite register represented by the ongoing management of global populations. Of these registers, the second is clearly dominant in practice – as indicated by the emphasis that both

Congress and the Bush administration place on the prevention of future threats. One of the most threatening elements of the Bush Doctrine, in terms of the risk it poses to international norms, is the case it makes for the use of pre-emptive force. This indicates that the post-9/11 national security imagination is not only threat-oriented, but future-oriented; as Marieke De

Goede (2008) argues, the War on Terror is essentially a premediated war. Premediation is

Richard Grusin’s term for the process in which media discourse seeks to ‘remediate’ future shock events (meaning to refashion them through representation in media) before they occur.

(2004).

In this way, premediation can be thought of as a type of securitization, in which the contours of future threats (as many as possible) are traced in advance as a means of

mitigating affective harm – as Grusin writes, it is “the desire or determination never to experience anything that has not already been premediated” (2004, pp. 24-25). De Goede argues that pre-emption requires premediation, and that both concepts “proceed from a shared desire: to imagine, harness and commodify the uncertain future. They share a technological history through their appeal to uncertainty as both a source of threat and a spur to creativity” (2008, p. 159). Of course, the reverse is also true; that premediation fosters an affective environment of anxiety that demands the management of imagined risks; consequently, De Goede correctly argues that premediating security risks actually limits our imagination rather than expanding it. Although this should not necessarily justify the use of pre-emptive force (as distinct from preventative measures), it does indicate that the temporal nature of the War on Terror is what Lauren Berlant calls a ‘stretched-out present’ (2011, p.

12) in which the supposedly finite exception cannot end, and the future is therefore overdetermined by the possibility of threat.

Pre-emption, in the vein of the Bush administration (who sought to justify not just defensive pre-emption of an already-emerging threat, but pre-emption of yet-to-emerge threats) relies on what Brian Massumi (2010) calls double-conditional logic: Saddam Hussein did not have weapons of mass destruction, but if he could have used them, then he would have.

Threat, therefore, is self-justifying – the fact of feeling threatened will always justify action in this paradigm, even if there turns out to be no genuine referent for that threat, or if the actions taken to secure against future threat end up causing it. As a result, Massumi argues that threat

“inhabits a non-linear time operating recursively between the present and the future” (2010, p. 57) and therefore is immune to charges of contradiction. In this paradigm, alert becomes itself an immediate, autonomic call to action – without any need to first verify the referent of the threat, because it could be real – and any trigger for that alert (Massumi’s example is flour mistaken for anthrax) is tainted by association. As such, Massumi points out, false threats

cause the societal and economic disruption that terrorism is intended to create in the first place:

The security that pre-emption is explicitly meant to produce is predicated on its tacitly producing what it is meant to avoid: pre-emptive security is predicated on a production of insecurity to which it itself contributes. Pre-emption thus positively contributes to producing the conditions for its own exercise. It does this by capturing for its own operation the self-causative power native to the threat-potential that it takes as its object. (2010, p. 58)

Threat can therefore be understood as an ‘operative logic’, which Massumi describes as an iterative process that justifies its own proliferation “by virtue of the self-causative powers of their formative process” (2010, p. 63). I would take this argument further by applying it to superpowered security as a whole; as an affective logic predicated on the continual premediation of threat, and the consequent drive to integrate US surveillance and military capacity throughout the globe as a pre-emptive network, superpowered security is not only an application of the operative logic of threat, but an extension.

One of the defining attributes of superpowered security, I would argue, is that it attempts to secure against unwanted affect. As Massumi points out, the operative logic of threat renders affects real; the threat-potential is all that is required to set off a chain of exceptional measures that disrupt society and perpetuate fear. If premediation is a form of mitigating the damage from unanticipated affects, then superpowered security – relying as it does on premediation – takes affective insecurity as its object prior to material insecurity. It is for this reason that the conceptual and rhetorical slippage between the registers of ‘security’ is so severe and so problematic; in practice, there is immense overlap between the registers of security as an ontological state, as a set of practices directed against a real threat, and as an emotional state. I would argue that the desire for security – by which I mean the desire to feel secure, or perhaps rather not to feel insecure any longer – justifies the exercise of superpowered security as an operative logic, but the need to secure against affect makes the endeavour impossible to conclude. As Massumi points out, “[w]hen you affect something, you 59

are at the same time opening yourself up to being affected in turn, and in a slightly different way than you might have been a moment before” (Massumi & Zournazi, 2015, p. 4). In a security mindset, therefore, affecting something in the world in order to increase one’s own security paradoxically means opening oneself up to uncertainty and vulnerability – insecurities that are nevertheless necessary in order to exert influence on the affective relationships that structure society.

The spatiotemporal topography of superpowered security, therefore, is in one sense straightforward – as a doctrine that seeks to secure the United States’ position at the top of the global hierarchy – and, in another sense, ambiguous and precarious. Physical divisions of space are necessary, in this paradigm, but also suspect by virtue of their permeability. Borders are simultaneously sites of protective exclusion and sites of penetration – like human skin, they give the appearance of separating inside from outside but are always haunted by the potential of a future wound. As threat cannot be contained spatially, US security forces must also have the capacity to be everywhere at once. And temporally, although the rhetoric of exception implies an end that justifies the suspension of norms for now, the security forces must have the capacity to reach everywhere for the foreseeable future. Because this process of interpenetration renders the entirety of human existence as a battlespace, characterised by the omnipresent potential of threat, the affective gains desired from the exercise of superpowered security are forever suspended – situated somewhere beyond the recursive temporality of threat that Massumi describes.

As such, my final theoretical intervention in this chapter is to propose that the technologies and mechanisms of superpowered security, considered collectively, can be understood as an affective prosthesis. There are different types of prosthesis, of course. It is necessary to distinguish, for example, between prostheses that compensate for an injury, prostheses that extend capacity beyond a supposed norm, and prostheses that act as life-

support. What I am suggesting, however, is that superpowered security attempts to perform all three functions at once. I am using prosthesis here in the sense that Mark Cousins invokes it; where prostheses are misrecognised as technological tools or accessories that compensate for shortcomings in human’s basic capabilities:

On the one hand, man is a being of lack, but who has the fantasy that these lacks can be overcome by prostheses, where prostheses are considered to be, finally, the completion of the skill or the power you need in order to do something. (2011, p. 194)

However, as Cousins concludes, prostheses really act as a circuit through which “the human is expanded to be part of the technology” (2011, p. 198). This is a broad view of technology: one of the examples that Cousins gives is of the trained medical gaze, where the act of observation is structured by the “conceptual topography” (2011, p. 198) of medical knowledge.

Superpowered security similarly imposes a conceptual topography on acts of observation: instead of distinguishing between the normal and the pathological, it watches for signs of threat, transforming acts of observation into acts of monitoring, assessment and premediation. In doing so, the people who operate the contemporary US security apparatus are expanded through it; they perceive and affect the world not just through the distributed surveillance technologies of the US military and counterterrorist agencies, but also through the operative logic of superpowered security.

Superpowered security enables security operatives to impose boundaries, zones of control and regulation of capital and human circulation within geopolitical space. In 2002,

Paul Wolfowitz (the Deputy Secretary of Defence from 2001-2005) commented that US military power is “sort of like a protective fence around things. It allows you to set certain boundaries and it allows the idea of large armies crossing borders” (qtd. in Ayerbe, 2005, p.

312). Superpowered security, through its reliance on the state of exception, also facilitates the division of human bodies into categories of terrorist, soldier and civilian – a precarious designation, as each civilian is tainted by the threat-potential of radicalisation and emergence

as a terrorist. It reconstructs the world into a spatiotemporal matrix defined by potential threats and pre-emptive capacities.

But superpowered security also operates in the narcissistic or ‘fantasy’ sense that

Cousins first identifies; it acts as both life support and compensation for an already-wounded nation – of course in the physical sense, as a nation scarred by the physical wound of 9/11 and fearful of future attacks, but importantly as an affective bandage on a wound that refuses to close. In Bush’s rhetoric following 9/11, he uses distinctly apocalyptic language to oppose the future of the United States – its values, its liberty, and its supposed function as a moral beacon for the world – against the destructive desires of terrorists. The War on Terror is not only a battle for the continued existence of the United States, but a battle to legitimate the way it affects the world. Superpowered security provides a legitimating discourse for US sovereignty, because it forges a link between US exceptionalism and the safety and security of the rest of the globe. Via premediation, it attempts to compensate for the affective damage that could be done to the United States if future threats are not pre-empted; and it does so by attempting to extend the much-lacking human capacity to control uncertainty. Finally, it narrativizes the state of exception required to achieve these goals, to mitigate the affective damage of recognising the reality of permanent emergency.

I will discuss the concept of superpowered security as affective prosthesis further in

Chapter 5, in which I will argue that the Iron Man suit functions as a material metaphor for the prosthetic functions of superpowered security. For the purposes of this chapter, however, I will conclude by pointing out that the result of an attachment to superpowered security as an affective prosthesis is, of course, cruel optimism. As it relies on the self-proliferating logics of premediation and threat, superpowered security can never deliver on the affective returns that people want from it. Instead, it undermines them – it creates the very conditions of insecurity that people want to escape in the first place. Yet it addresses a genuine and deeply

felt drive to prevent the physical and affective wounds of future traumas that might echo

9/11, such that giving it up would mean accepting the risk that such things might happen again. As Barry Buzan argues, if the goal really is to preserve liberal values, then we may have to learn to adjust to terrorism – to refuse the urge to securitize it, and instead “make it part of normal politics” (Buzan, 2006, pp. 1116-1117). Under the logic of superpowered security, however, this is unthinkable.

The rest of this thesis is dedicated to exploring this impasse through the lens of popular texts that engage with the logic of superpowered security. In the next chapter, I will introduce the superhero genre, in which heroes imbued with superpowers and sovereign legitimacy must constantly justify their use of exceptional powers in an environment where crisis is clearly not exceptional. I will argue that rather than always providing a legitimating discourse for hegemonic interests, the superhero genre should instead be viewed as a site of national fantasy in which its heroes attempt to navigate the contradictions, trade-offs and impasses of contemporary discourse. It is therefore an ideal case study to explore the affective resonance of superpowered security. To adapt a quote from John T. Hamilton (2013), security does not so much unwork itself as it works itself (and us) into knots. In the next chapter, I will argue that the superhero genre is an ideal site in which to begin unworking the knot of fantasies, anxieties and promises that have become entangled with superpowered security.

Chapter 3 – National fantasy in the superhero genre

In the years following 9/11, the superheroes struggled. There was a sense that the high- powered fantasy of the genre, despite the fact that apocalyptic events are its bread and butter, was somehow inadequate to respond to a national trauma that all the might of the United

States military and security apparatus had been unable to prevent. Even supervillains, whose grandiose plans to destroy cities and worlds had been foiled by their heroic counterparts for decades before, stood silent and shed tears over the fictionalised wreckage of the Twin

Towers in a special issue of The Amazing Spider-Man (Straczynski, Romita Jr., & Hanna, 2001).

Jeffrey K. Johnson characterises the comic book storylines that followed 9/11 as uncertain, fearful and, after an initial outpouring of grief by major DC and Marvel characters, a retreat into “pre-9/11 life” (2011, p. 3). Johnson argues that superheroes “could not save Americans from the terror that engulfed the nation” (2011, p. 1), as they were themselves stricken by grief with which they could not cope. It was not until 2004, when Marvel released its

‘Avengers Disassembled’ storyline, that the superhero genre would begin to shift tone and address the themes of national tragedy with any depth. But, Johnson argues, even when the major publishers did finally respond to the broad themes of American life in the aftermath, superheroes no longer seemed to be capable of effectively remediating events, let alone restoring a plausible status quo ante.

Instead, these storylines were fractured, conflicted and ambivalent in their resolutions, which can be illustrated by the responses of critics to two major Marvel storylines: Avengers Disassembled in 2004, and the Civil War crossover event in 2007. In 2011, both Johnson’s article and a similar article by Philip Smith and Michael Goodrum addressed these two texts as exemplars of post-9/11 superhero comics. In Avengers Disassembled, the

Avengers experience violent internal conflict that echoed fears of radicalisation and internal disunity. The mind-controlled Scarlet Witch, grieving the death of her children and

manipulated by the villain Doctor Doom, launches a campaign of terror against the other

Avengers. Using her reality-warping powers, she causes Vision to crash a jet into the Avengers

Mansion, sabotages a meeting that the United Nations had called to discuss whether the

Avengers should be allowed to keep their UN security clearance, hexes She-Hulk to provoke a violent rampage, spies on the Avengers using magical constructs designed to mimic members of the superhero community, and finally summons an alien invasion to attack New York.

Although Doctor Strange finally identifies Scarlet Witch as the source of the chaos and defeats her, by the end of the crisis several Avengers are dead, the Mansion is destroyed, and the

Avengers have lost their association with the UN. As a fallen hero subject to manipulation and mind control, Scarlet Witch is by no means a straightforward villain – as such, the storyline stops short of bringing her to justice, instead letting her leave with her father, Magneto. With no clear resolution, the story reflects anxieties caused by wounds originating from inside the body-politic that perhaps cannot be fully healed.

Civil War further escalates the themes of division and disunity; following a public incident reminiscent of a suicide bombing in which a supervillain explodes, killing hundreds of people, the US government passes the Superhero Registration Act, which forces mandatory registration of all superpowered individuals. Those who wish to operate as superheroes must undergo training and operate under official regulation, much like ordinary law enforcement.

Superheroes split into two groups, one (led by Captain America) opposed to mandatory registration on the grounds that it violates civil liberties, and one (led by Iron Man) arguing that registration is necessary to ensure the responsible and accountable use of superpowers.

The consequences of prioritising security over freedom rapidly become clear; the methods used to enforce the Act become increasingly authoritarian and violent, with Spider-Man eventually defecting from the pro-registration side when he discovers that dissenters are detained in an extradimensional prison styled after concentration camps. This too ends ambivalently, however; although Captain America comes very close to defeating Iron Man, he 65

ultimately surrenders as he realises that the extreme violence of the war has done immense societal damage. In this comic, there is no neat resolution or reconciliation of warring ideals:

Captain America’s arrest leads to his assassination, leaving the cause of freedom without its foremost defender; while Iron Man becomes Director of S.H.I.E.L.D., leaving the door open for further abuses of state power.

Likely as a result of these ambiguous and disconcerting resolutions, Johnson and

Smith and Goodrum’s articles present remarkably different readings. Where Johnson reads the superheroes as helpless and fractured in the face of terror, as discussed above, Smith and

Goodrum argue that the conventions of the genre ultimately allow the texts to reassert order and maintain belief in the ideologies sustaining the status quo. For Smith and Goodrum, the insertion of superheroes into familiar tragic images allows some control to be therapeutically exerted over narratives which can then be refigured: “The superhero genre allows the attacks to be contained within the familiar and its outcomes evoked but resolved without any adverse effects” (2011, p. 490). Drawing on Kaja Silverman’s theory of historical trauma, in which trauma disrupts dominant fictions and ideologies, Smith and Goodrum describe the function of post-9/11 imagery and themes as a kind of “creative destruction” (2011, p. 491). For the superhero genre, tropes such as the destruction of cities take on new traumatic contexts post-

9/11. In particular, they pick out images where historic tragedies are subverted, such as a scene in which Tony Stark falls from a tower, repeating the image of the Falling Man, but is saved by his suit before hitting the ground. The two critics ultimately conclude that “[t]rauma may disrupt the ‘natural’ appearance of normality but it cannot do so for long... Threats may change but the means of resisting them enjoys an underlying continuity” (2011, p. 496).

There is another way to rephrase this observation: society may endure, but in a continually threatened state – it may limp along, but it proceeds nevertheless. Any redemptive potential of these images must itself be read ambivalently, or even ironically, of course – the

reader knows that there were no superheroes to save the day in reality, and that the real might of the United States defence network – a superpower in a global sense – failed to prevent the attack on 9/11. In the years following 9/11, after the immediate groundswell of support for President George W. Bush, the US indeed became increasingly conflicted over the way in which the War on Terror was conducted, both in its domestic and international policy.

Criticism of the Bush administration’s systematic erosion of civil liberties in the name of national security is of course reflected in Civil War, which depicts the pro-security regime led by Iron Man wielding violent and authoritarian measures against the superhero community.

Yet Avengers Disassembled also reflects societal fears of terrorism itself: as an amorphous, omnipresent threat with the potential to strike anywhere, even within trusted spaces and groups, terrorism is a clear influence on the way that Scarlet Witch covertly strikes at the heart of her own team.

Some early writers of superhero stories kept their heroes out of real wars, for fear that characters as powerful as Superman would win too easily and trivialise the service of real soldiers (Gordon, 2015). In Avengers Disassembled and Civil War, however, superpowers are not an easy solution. It is significant that the conflicts in these stories are imagined to be structural and internal, originating from within the hegemonic order, rather than a conventional opposition of hero and villain. Johnson’s reading highlights that both story arcs leave the superhero community broken, with irreconcilable internal differences. Team bonds dissolve, heroes are left vulnerable or dead, and antagonists rise from within the ranks of the heroes themselves. He argues that this reflects an atmosphere of terror and mistrust that seems impossible to resolve, even in superhero fantasy. Although Smith and Goodrum argue correctly that the continuity of the superhero genre is a reassuring sign that society will endure, endurance alone is not resolution. Despite this optimism, there remains an anxiety that the superhero genre cannot believably offer a fantasy resolution to the deep, structural problems that plague post-9/11 America. And yet on they go. 67

These two comic book storylines clearly reflect anxieties arising from the post-9/11 pre-eminence of ‘superpowered security’, the term I use to describe the public narrative and operative logic of post-Cold War United States national security practices, manifesting most prominently in the Bush Doctrine. As discussed in Chapter 2, superpowered security relies on, seeks to secure, and derives its legitimacy from the (highly contested) idea of the United

States as an exceptional nation with a special role to play in global affairs. Superheroes, as I will discuss in this chapter, are themselves exceptionally powerful agents with special missions to fulfil. As a result, the superhero genre has traditionally been capable of mediating, and even premediating, the US’s national and international security dilemmas. Key to

Avengers Disassembled and Civil War is the worry that, after 9/11, the United States faces problems that cannot be solved by traditional exceptional measures, or that they may even have caused by the exceptional measures used. Nevertheless, in each storyline, superpowers and superheroes remain necessary to combat the atmosphere of pervasive and permanent threat that characterises both the genre and the post-9/11 political environment.

As Neal Curtis argues, an alternative way of reading these comic storylines – and the many subsequent comics that engaged with the Bush Doctrine – would be to view their disunity and fragmentation as an indictment of US national security practices. In this view, the inability of superheroes to tidily resolve complex problems is precisely the critical strength of the genre, as it highlights the many weaknesses of superpowered security as a doctrine. Yet while Curtis is certainly correct to highlight the important critical work that the superhero genre has done in this area, I would argue that the genre also provides a window into the enduring appeal of superpowered security despite its many flaws. Although the comics frequently advance powerful critiques of US national security practices, they consistently return to the logic of security itself. As Curtis himself points out, even in stories where national protectors are critiqued for outright villainy in the name of security – such as

storylines in which both Marvel and DC installed supervillains as heads of the Department of

Homeland Security – or the distinction between friend and enemy breaks down,

[o]ne way in which the distinction is reinstated is by always presenting the threat of a greater, more powerful enemy against whom the heroes and heroines must do battle… The conclusion is that superheroes and their vigilance will always be needed. (p. 98) The result is a kind of recursive security, where even the most forceful critique of a specific event or tendency in US national security practice is not enough to prevent the genre from returning to the fundamental logic of superpowered security. As I will discuss in subsequent chapters, the ever-present potential for a greater threat to emerge means that superheroes cannot risk discarding the logic that they so frequently critique.

Post-9/11, superheroes seem to be at an impasse – certainly not without agency, but not quite in control either. Lauren Berlant describes a ‘waning of genre’ (2011, p. 6), occurring when old narrative structures no longer seem capable of providing the good life that they once promised, and that this in turn creates openings for new forms to arise. It would be easy to argue that the ambivalence reflected in these two disparate readings of the same texts is indicative of the waning of a genre that needs renovation – that the old strategies are no longer working, if in fact they ever really did. In this chapter, however, I will argue that ambivalence and ambiguity – the tensions between power and vulnerability, status quo and subversion, threat and endurance – are in fact a feature of the superhero genre, not a bug, and that the genre has always been structurally adept at portraying ideological or affective impasse. My aim with this project is to unpack that ambivalence into its constitutive, contradictory parts and to highlight the affective attachments that the superhero genre maintains, even as it may demonstrate unease about them. Where past commentary on the superhero genre deals with the anxieties that superheroes address, I draw on Lauren

Berlant’s concept of cruel optimism to ask how the superhero genre imagines those anxieties playing out in a time when safety at home no longer seems assured and when the security

afforded by superpowers – or a global superpower, as it happens – is in perceived as no longer trustworthy or reliable.

The purpose of this chapter is to apply Lauren Berlant’s work on genre, national fantasy, and cruel optimism to the superhero genre. It will argue that the superhero genre, which has nearly ninety years of history in comic books and has become ascendant in popular film since the early 2000s, can be read as a genre of American national fantasy interrupted and shaped by constant crisis. Superheroes have long been recognised as a part of nationalist discourse, and as a component in the ongoing formation, negotiation and maintenance of national identity. But superheroes are more than simply propaganda pieces, as they have occasionally been characterised: as complex characters with histories, attachments and conflicts of their own, they have the capacity to highlight the affective politics that inform public acceptance or resistance of problematic acts of the state.

My main thesis in the first section, ‘Structure, Crisis and National Fantasy’, is that the impasse in superhero comics (represented by the structural impossibility of moving past unending crisis) reflects a societal awareness that dominant ideals and narratives may actually compromise the good life that they promise, alongside an unwillingness to entirely let them go. To explain how this operates within the genre, I will draw on Berlant’s concept of

‘cruel optimism’: an affective mechanism that binds people to objects of attachment that promise something sustaining but impossible to achieve, or “too possible, and toxic” (2011, p.

24). By examining the genre as a cluster of affective narrative expectations, it is possible to distinguish the elements of optimistic fantasy that sustain the bearer from the elements that compromise them, and to identify the “scene of fantasy” that promises transformation into something better this time – even if last time it resulted only in disappointment or harm.

This section will contextualise the genre as a site in which national fantasy circulates and introduce some of the tensions identified in past literature. In particular, scholars often

read an uneasy implication in the superhero genre that democratic institutions and the rule of law are inadequate to the task of justice and argue that the genre may therefore tend to express conservative or even fascist themes. My approach instead aligns more closely with that of Neal Curtis, who points out that this is a narrow reading of a varied and often contradictory genre (Curtis, 2015). In this section, I propose that the genre’s tensions can be read productively as the result of simultaneous attachments to contradictory ideals, then examine the structural logic of the genre, based on Lauren Berlant’s definition of genre as “an affective expectation of the experience of watching something unfold” (2011, pp. 6-7). It will argue that the cyclic structure of the genre, in which the world is constantly re-threatened, makes crisis a structural expectation of the genre, such that the lives of superheroes are dominated by survival. On the surface, however, this crisis is framed as exceptional, requiring extraordinary intervention, and this justifies the superhero’s appropriation of the sovereign decision from the state. I will argue that the rightful and survivable exercise of sovereign agency by a character who is (at least some of the time) an ordinary citizen is a central fantasy of the genre.

The second section, ‘Superhero as subgenre: mission, powers, identity, nemeses’, will turn to these exceptional characters and argue that they each have such distinct themes and concerns that, rather than conceiving ‘the superhero’ as a consistent type that unifies the broad genre, each individual superhero and their characteristic narrative structures should be analysed like a distinct subgenre. That is, although all superheroes respond to the broad structures and tropes of the genre, each character demonstrates attachment to an interrelated but different set of ideals and therefore uses individual strategies for coping with crisis. By framing the superhero in terms of attachment and affect, it is possible to sidestep the definitional challenges that superheroes otherwise present. Past attempts to define the superhero (as opposed to the action hero, for example) have been stymied by superheroes who defy key criteria or definitions that have been broadened to the point of tautology. This 71

section will examine the definitional frameworks and generic conventions that mark superheroes, and the way in which they come to function as cultural and ideological icons.

I will propose that instead of reducing superheroes to representations of the ideas they respond to (such as capitalism for Iron Man or patriotism for Captain America) it would be analytically more powerful to approach them as characters with strong but complex attachments to these ideas; characters through which optimistic fantasies can play out in a setting that exaggerates real-world concerns but promises a safe (if only temporary) resolution. By viewing the superhero as a character who hopes that their proximity to their chosen ideals will transform their world into something better, and who promises something to fans, it is possible to use an individual superhero – broken down into a framework of mission, powers, identity and nemeses – as a case study for the attachments that they demonstrate, and the cluster of promises that their objects seem to offer. Accordingly, this section will justify my choice of Marvel’s Iron Man as a uniquely apposite case study through which to explore the cruel optimism of superpowered security.

3.1 Imagining the nation: fantasy, sovereignty and crisis in the superhero genre

In Lauren Berlant’s national sentimentality trilogy, The Anatomy of National Fantasy:

Hawthorne, Utopia, and Everyday Life (1991),The Queen of America Goes to Washington City:

Essays on Sex and Citizenship (1997) and The Female Complaint: The Unfinished Business of

Sentimentality in American Culture (2008), she develops a framework for understanding the way that national culture – in particular, the hegemonic conservative culture of the United

States – is produced in an intimate public sphere, and how to read this through media representations of the attachments that form between citizen and nation. For Berlant, the nation itself is produced and maintained through fantasy, which does the affective work of defining national identity, framing discursive spaces in which nationalist discourse can take

place, and securing attachment to the nation. In her earliest book, The Anatomy of National

Fantasy (1991), she writes:

“America” is an assumed relation, an explication of ongoing collective practices, and also an occasion for exploring what it means that national subjects already share not just a history, or a political allegiance, but a set of forms and the affect that makes these forms meaningful. (1991, p. 4)

National fantasy, for Berlant, is one of the mechanisms through which individual people within a nation receive and construct a sense of meaning to their citizenship. It is an essentially contested discourse, with various ideas of citizenship circulating through symbols, images and narratives that make national culture local, and collectively constitute a sense of what it is to experience oneself “as national” (1997, p. 10).

In her later book, Cruel Optimism (2011), Berlant further elaborates on the phantasmatic processes by which people invest meaning into an object or scene of attachment

– which may be the nation, an institution or another person (even a fictional superhero).

Optimism, for Berlant, does not necessarily refer to positivity as in the everyday sense, but rather describes an affective structure of expectation: what you expect might unfold from your proximity to the object or scene of desire. This expectation is necessarily apostrophic, as drawn from Barbara Johnson’s poetics of indirection: “a silent, affectively present but physically displaced interlocutor (a lover, a fetus) is animated in speech as distant enough for a conversation but close enough to be imaginable by the speaker in whose head the entire scene is happening” (Berlant, 2011, p. 25). Through apostrophic fantasy, a person can invest the object of their attachment with promises that they want that object to make to them; or qualities that they believe will provide the conditions of possibility for something else that they desire – perhaps something that gives them the hope required to go on.

In the case of the nation, this might be the social democratic promise that the state will provide the necessary conditions for citizens to flourish, or it might be national values – like

freedom – which invest the nation and citizenship with special purpose. But it might also involve the projection of negative qualities onto the object, because apostrophe is really about making something happen in the speaker. For example, an apostrophic fantasy might highlight the imagined contrasts between the speaker and an opposing Other (such as Muslims in the

War on Terror) in order to animate the sense of a special national identity. In Chapter 4, I will discuss an example of apostrophic attachment in Iron Man comics, but for the moment, my intention is to emphasise the centrality of fantasy to national discourse. Fantasy, as Berlant writes, is “the means by which people hoard idealizing theories and tableaux about how they and the world ‘add up to something’” (2011, p. 2).

In this way, the nation can be viewed not just as a constantly shifting discourse, but as an object onto which citizens project all manner of optimistic hopes, shaped by and through the narratives circulating in a shared social consciousness. The purpose of this analysis, therefore, is not to view superhero narratives as one-dimensional champions of a particular way of life, of how Americans should experience life, but to ask how the genre constructs its affective scaffolding to mobilise common objects of attachment, and what these attachments promise, however ambiguously or ambivalently, to those who endure in them. Rather than asking whether superhero stories impose a certain set of beliefs about superpowered security, for instance, I want to ask how superhero comics imagine the experience of negotiating between freedom and security as values, both of which are affectively powerful ideals valorised within the messy discourses of nation and self. What I seek to demonstrate is that the genre is an affectively powerful space in which national fantasy circulates – not didactically, but emotively, messily, experientially.

In defending her own archive, which comprises texts such as magazine covers and episodes of The Simpsons in addition to literature and film, Berlant writes that the everyday ephemera of a culture is worthy of study precisely because it reflects assumptions that have

become ingrained: “no longer inciting big feelings and deep rages, these claims about the world seem hardwired into what is taken for granted in collective national life.” (2011, p. 11)

The logic of citizenship in the public sphere is rarely expressed in “beautiful or coherent ways” (Berlant, 1997, p. 12) but rather in texts that are ephemeral, improvisational, banal, or erratic. Superhero comics are quickly produced by a variety of creators who each exert different influences on the work, they are iterative and revisionist, and they are consumed equally rapidly by an expanding market: they are ideally placed to reflect the present moment.

Although superhero movies are produced according to a different economic model over a different timescale, they reflect key elements of a comics genre that has developed messily through decades of experimentation. Films about established superheroes can therefore adapt material drawn from a vast archive of past storylines, images and tropes to create something that resonates with both the history of the character and the concerns of the present moment.

Superhero stories have been recognised as a site of national fantasy by several scholars. Julian C. Chambliss argues that the structure of superhero stories, in which individual superhero stories take place in a “shared narrative universe” (2012, p. 165) with history and ongoing continuity, and the industry’s need to appeal to a changing audience over time combine to make superhero comics (and more recently TV and film) uniquely reflective of United States experience. Superheroes are so recognisable, so iconic, and so significant to their fans that they have been described by many scholars (Boney, 2013; Eco, 1976; Reynolds,

1992) as heroes of a “contemporary American mythology” (Boney, 2013, p. 48). The repetitive structure of the genre, with a pantheon of values-laden characters defending civilisation, functions as a space in which American culture of the twentieth century onwards is reflected and mediated through fantasy. For both Reynolds and Boney, the superhero genre emerged as a remedy to the threats of the early twentieth century, comprising both concrete threats such as crime, war or technological change and more abstract concerns like changing cultural identities, social norms or moral values. For Boney especially, the concerns of the genre are 75

still rooted in those early twentieth century concerns, which resonate through the genre even today, which would make the central thematic concern of the superhero story a crisis of modernity.

Other theorists argue that, beyond simply reflecting or questioning national experience, the superhero genre helps to constitute the nation. Robert Jewett and John Shelton

Lawrence, in a now-seminal text, argue that the superhero should be read as the American monomyth: an archetypal narrative in which an ordinary citizen secretly gains extraordinary power and restores a disturbed status quo through redemptive violence. For Jewett and

Lawrence, this is merely a continuation of an American religious tradition, preoccupied with a narrative of salvation:

The superheroes thus provide a secular fulfillment of the religious promise articulated in the endings of [1915 film] The Birth of a Nation and [1960s TV series] The Virginian. They cut Gordian knots, lift the siege of evil, and restore the Edenic state of perfect faith and perfect peace. It is a millennial, religious expectation – at least in origin – yet it is fulfilled by secular agents. (2002, p. 45)

In this reading, superheroes not only provide a fantasy of national salvation through redemptive violence; they also mask an impulse towards non-democratic approaches to crisis.

Jewett and Lawrence argue that the transformation from ordinary citizen into superhero

“renders them incapable of democratic citizenship” (p. 45), as they then function as a semi- divine agent. As a result, for Jewett and Lawrence, the superhero genre betrays its aspiration to uphold a democratic society in a way that clearly evokes cruel optimism, as the genre can only ever envisage an undemocratic salvation. In their post-9/11 work, Jewett and Lawrence suggest that this aspect of the genre, and its enduring popularity, left the public vulnerable to governmental overreach in the name of a redemptive mission – exemplified by George W.

Bush’s willingness to appear as an avenging hero in Der Spiegel.

However, Jewett and Lawrence do not account for the full complexity of superheroes in either comics or film, which limits the utility of their argument. As Neal Curtis notes, Jewett 76

and Lawrence’s “dislike for popular culture” (2015, p. 23) is transparent throughout their scholarship. Consequently, their analysis of major superheroes such as Captain America fails to account for the many instances in which superhero narratives challenge simplistic binaries of good and evil, fail to restore Eden (which, if it is ever achieved, never lasts for long), or question the hero’s right to intervene. Nevertheless, Jewett and Lawrence correctly identify the alignment of many superhero stories with the foreign policy aims and rationales of the

United States from the 1930s onwards, which I will discuss further in Chapter 4, and their basic method of reading the superhero genre as a mythologised expression of American political desires remains (rightly) influential.

Building on Jewett and Lawrence, Shaun Treat (2009) has argued that modern superheroes act out variations on a monomyth in which the hero is called to act outside the bounds of law to put down a great evil that democratic institutions cannot combat. He draws on Slavoj Žižek to argue that citizenship is itself mediated and structured by fantasy, in which the superhero monomyth plays a part:

A nation exists only as long as its specific enjoyment continues to be materialized in a set of social practices and transmitted through national myths or fantasies that secure these practices... (Žižek, 1989, p. 202)

Treat further argues that the superhero monomyth does not have to be taken seriously to influence society; the enjoyment of contemporary audiences normalizes a cynical passivity in the face of superheroes’ anti-democratic actions. The mere enjoyment of the superhero, therefore, is enough to influence American culture. Like Jewett and Shelton, Treat falls into a narrow characterisation of the contemporary superhero as either “benevolent messiah or avenging vigilante” (105), yet his article reflects the historic concern that the superhero genre both reflects and influences troublingly antidemocratic impulses in American culture.

Since the early 1950s, publishers of comics have had to respond to social pressures demanding regulation of the content of their work, precisely because it was seen to have an undue influence on the social development of children. The Comics Code Authority of 1954 was an industry initiative to self-regulate the contents of comics, in response to building public and governmental pressure to protect children from violence, gore and sex, as well as any hint of disrespect towards governmental authority. Fredric Wertham, the psychologist who spearheaded the anti-comics movement, contended that the portrayal of crime, gender and race across almost the entire medium was a threat to the development of children into well-adjusted citizens. The matter reached beyond public debate and entered the United

States Senate: in a hearing on the industry, Wertham quipped that when it came to teaching children race hatred, “Hitler was a beginner compared to the comic book industry” (qtd. in

Wright, 2001, p. 166). For the most part, superhero comics (unlike horror or crime comics) evaded these charges, but the Comics Code was taken up by almost all the major publishers, including both Marvel and DC. What remained of the medium in the mid-1950s, including superhero comics, “now championed without criticism American institutions, authority figures, and middle-class mores” (Wright, 2001, p. 176).

Although the Code steadily lost influence over the decades, it indicated an early suspicion that comic books – like other forms of media popular with children – had the power to shape future citizens and must be encouraged to cultivate the right things3. Even Stan Lee, who has famously stated that he never paid much attention to the Comics Code when writing for Marvel, encourages the teachable moments to be found in superhero stories. As he explained in a 1967 New York Times article, “We editorialize. We try to back up soldiers and

3 This concern for children echoes the concerns raised by Lauren Berlant in her discussion of the infantile and foetal citizens in The Queen of America Goes to Washington City. In both cases, a nation protects its sense of futurity by focalizing its hopes and fears onto a citizen too young to have legal agency, or not even yet born. Demands are then made on the public sphere to protect the projected innocence of this citizen so that they may remain untouched by the world. It is this affective attachment to the idea of a pure unsullied Child (not a real child, but an imagined ideal) that Berlant argues is responsible for the family values rhetoric and sexual policing that has characterised American politics from the Reagan era onwards. 78

try to tell the kids not to drop out of school. We stand for the good values” (qtd. in Wright,

2001, p. 176)

The ironic thing about mandating that comics should not undermine the state, however, is that superhero comics arguably do so by definition. There is a clear tension in many superhero stories concerning the right of one individual to wield power unilaterally.

While many heroes are uneasy about their powers, or their willingness to mete out justice beyond the reach of the law, the continuation of their comic books confirms that they rarely give up their mantles for good. As Richard Reynolds notes, superpowers place superheroes outside the reach of state discipline, and there is no democratic process by which they are allocated – they are “above the law” (1992, p. 16). In fact, like the sovereign paradox Giorgio

Agamben notes in Homo Sacer, the superhero is at once “outside and inside the juridical order” (2017, p. 15). As a civilian, the superhero is subject to the normal operation of the law.

But as an agent who decides when the normal operation of law is insufficient to solve a problem, the superhero acts in accordance with Carl Schmitt’s formulation of sovereign power: “Sovereign is he who decides on the state of exception” (qtd. in Agamben, 2017, p. 13).

The violent interventions of superheroes therefore occupy a similar zone of indistinction between violence and law that Agamben calls specifically sovereign violence.

Unlike the classical sovereigns to whom Agamben and Schmitt refer, the superhero has no institutional authority to legitimate such actions, and so Jason Bainbridge argues that the superhero’s appropriation of the sovereign decision embeds an implicit critique of the state into the genre: superheroes enact what he calls ‘substantive justice’, as opposed to the imperfect legal system:

Superhero narratives consistently present the failure of the state (to intervene, to control crime, to deliver justice) and thereby require the superhero to appropriate the sovereign decision from the state, to identify and declare the state of exception (the crisis requiring justice to be done), enacting substantive justice in the space of law suspended. (2015, p. 760)

As a result, the critical potential of the genre is not so much an inherent bent towards conservatism or liberalism, but rather in its ability to “personify the inherent tensions in law”

(Bainbridge, 2007, p. 457). Because superheroes intervene in crises that the ordinary justice system is unable or unwilling to deal with, they must decide what constitutes justice beyond the limits of the law. This is especially pronounced in times of transition and especially wartime, Bainbridge argues, where a societal state of exception diminishes the scope of the ordinary legal system and therefore renders the superhero the “only reliable signifier of justice in an increasingly uncertain time” (2015, p. 747). In wartime, therefore, the potential for superheroes to call for social change is magnified; for example, Captain America comics began agitating for America to enter World War II nine months prior to Pearl Harbour

(Bainbridge, 2015, p. 755). Rather than responding to the law as written, therefore, superheroes engage with normative law, or what should be.

In recent work, Bainbridge has argued that the “super-ness” of the superhero should be understood in terms of superiority – both in terms of their extraordinary abilities and their ability to carry out their mission of justice:

The ‘superior nature of superheroes therefore extends to superiority over the law, legal institutions and due processes as well. Superheroes are claiming, in effect, that for the duration of this emergency, they are superior to the state as well. (2017, p. 375)

This illustrates the capacity for superheroes to premediate the potential outcomes of superpowered security – which, as discussed in Chapter 2, implies the superiority of the US over domestic and international law. The enhanced capabilities of superheroes echo the enhanced military, technological and economic capabilities of the US, meaning that they can operate as an analogy for the state’s deployment of sovereign power. Crucially, however, most superheroes also possess civilian identities and can therefore narrativize the experience of ordinary people as well. By virtue of superheroes’ consequent estrangement from the state coupled with their claim to ethical superiority, they can also critique the state’s failures: even 80

in situations like war, where the prime value is arguably survival rather than justice, in order to maintain sovereign legitimacy in the eyes of the reader, the hero must act in accordance with their principles. In other words, superheroes represent a confluence of separate subject- positions, and can therefore address an issue in multiple registers simultaneously.

As multiple scholars have noted (Bainbridge, 2015; Curtis, 2015) this capacity to conduct analogy and critique in multiple registers is aptly illustrated by Mark Millar and

Bryan Hitch’s run on The Ultimates (2002-2004). The Ultimates, and its sequel (2004-2007), explored an alternate reality where, instead of forming the Avengers, a group of the Marvel

Universe’s most famous heroes (Captain America, Thor, the Hulk, Iron Man, Giant-Man and the

Wasp) are instead created as a strike force of supersoldiers under the command of the counterintelligence agency S.H.I.E.L.D. The series analogises issues of pre-emptive strikes, rising anti-American sentiment across the world, and the fear of backlash as a result of the

War on Terror. Millar has stated that the series was created as an explicit response to the

Bush Administration’s conduct following 9/11:

The idea behind The Avengers is that the Marvel Universe’s biggest players all get together and fight all the biggest supervillains they can’t find individually whereas Ultimates 2 is an exploration of what happens when a bunch of ordinary people are turned into super-soldiers and being groomed to fight the real-life war on terror... The worry in Ultimates 2, as the heroes talk among themselves, is that the whole thing has been a scam. They’ve been created to fight this pre-emptive war across the Middle East, according to Thor, and I’m using them as an allegory for the American people. (Millar, 2004)

Millar’s emphasis on ordinary Americans and ‘worry’ is significant because it highlights the capacity for superhero stories to explore the affective ramifications of superpowered security.

The heroes are culpable for actions conducted on behalf of a potentially untrustworthy state, and therefore invested in the security logic they have played out, but they are also victims of deception themselves. Storylines like The Ultimates therefore illustrate the aptitude for

superhero stories to explore the affective investments in superpowered security, in scenarios where the legitimacy of state actions is in question.

Indeed, Neal Curtis (2015) argues that superheroes are significant precisely because they explore and often illuminate issues arising from the cultural construction of sovereignty.

The legitimacy of sovereign power, in Curtis’ reading, is not simply appropriated from the state; it must be earned by the superhero and continually justified to the reader. As a result, the superhero genre can be read as a meditation on the nature, legitimacy and exercise of sovereign power. A defining feature of the genre, for Curtis, is that the superhero must negotiate the tensions between the cultural values of the day and a deeper source of legitimacy that transcends their immediate context. This is frequently a messy process, defined as much by transgression and repentance as it is by adherence: Curtis points to

Superman storylines such as Brian Azzarello’s For Tomorrow (2004-2005) in which Superman mistakenly attempts to “create a permanently secure ‘tomorrow’ for the humanity he believes he is obliged to protect” (Curtis, 2015, p. 25). In recognising his mistake, Superman re- commits to a form of heroism that preserves human freedoms and creates a better but always open future. What follows from Curtis’ argument is that it is precisely the tensions, uncertainties and grey areas in superhero stories that reveal the most about the cultural concerns they address; to remain legitimately heroic, the superhero must continually negotiate the contradictions between the ideals that they represent and the messy realities of contemporary issues.

As with any popular genre, therefore, the superhero genre has potential to express both conservative and progressive values, and in many cases explores both at once. How then do we read the superhero genre as a site of national fantasy? In Lauren Berlant’s formulation of genre, she argues that genres “provide an affective expectation of the experience of watching something unfold” (2011, pp. 6-7). This is a broad but powerful way of viewing

genre because it recognises that genre is not static, but rather flexible and dynamic. For a genre like the superhero genre, which develops rapidly, flexibility is key. But it also provides a method of unpacking the narratives that circulate through superhero fiction as a site of national fantasy: what does the genre lead us to expect, how do we expect it to unfold, and what impasses might arise when the logic of collective fantasies breaks down? In later chapters I will suggest that we should read the occasional authoritarian implications of superhero stories as an impasse in which equally well-intentioned desires for freedom and security conflict, and instead of finding resolution, continue in an uneasy balancing act. But broadly speaking my purpose in this chapter is to outline the affective structures of expectation that the superhero genre has come to represent, and how this can be used to read the specific thematic concerns of individual superheroes.

As of today, the superhero genre is transmedial, spanning comics, film, TV and video games. There are a number of formal features which define the superhero genre, many of which are inherited from comics. The first is structural: superhero stories are typically sequential or episodic, with ‘books’ specific to each character or team (of which individual members may also have their own independent books). The prototypical narrative formula, in which ordinary life is threatened by a villain who must be defeated by the superhero before life can continue as it should, creates a generic expectation of good triumphing over evil. Even when this formula is subverted (as it frequently is now that the Code is defunct) it often occupies the foreground while deeper or more systemic issues play out over a longer arc. This structure derives from comic books but is repeated in Marvel’s new cinematic universe, in which individual superheroes such as Iron Man or Captain America defeat a series of their own villains in their own movies but come together to face a greater evil in the Avengers films.

The second aspect of interest, consequently, is continuity between characters, especially when characters come together in a large crossover event, and this continuity is more or less linear depending on the practice of the publisher. The Marvel universe in particular, and to a lesser 83

extent DC, maintains fluid continuities which are constantly under revision or update by different creators in different eras – so that each iteration of a hero responds to both its internal history and the time of its creation.

The fluid, repetitive structure of the genre is uniquely suited to the portrayal of constant crisis, as described by Lauren Berlant in her writing about ordinary life in the modern United States. Berlant argues that the dynamics of life in a neoliberal capitalist society are better characterised by crisis than trauma, which has recently become pervasive as an analytical framework within cultural studies. Berlant argues that trauma has come to overwhelmingly, and detrimentally, characterise American legal and political discourse as a signifier and validator of social and personal truth. Trauma, which along with crisis Berlant calls a genre, describes “the historical present as the scene of an exception that has just shattered some ongoing, uneventful ordinary life that was supposed to just keep going on and with respect to which people felt solid and confident” (2011, pp. 9-10). Where trauma carries the expectation that there is a status quo to which people can return once the traumatic emergency has passed, the genre of crisis is unexceptional, “embedded in the ordinary” (2011, p. 7) , and prefers a logic of adjustment to a logic of exception:

For Berlant, crisis has become normalised, ordinary and constant. This does not mean that it is not difficult to survive, or to project out one’s endurance into an uncertain future, but that the affective response to constant crisis – and the way it is reflected in our media – is materially different to the response elicited by the narrative genre of trauma. The superhero genre deals with interruptions to ‘ordinary’ life that in many other genres would be exceptional – everything from elaborate bank robberies to the destruction of cities to apocalyptic, universe-ending threats – and yet, because this is structurally normal, these

events become unexceptional. Because this is a genre, in fact, it becomes more than ordinary: crisis becomes a structural expectation that justifies the existence and activity of the superhero.

One of the mechanisms by which this occurs is through the genre’s depiction of time, which coincides with Berlant’s description of temporal and aesthetic genres that track a shared historical sense of an affectively-perceived present from within that present. The genres that Berlant describes, especially impasse, create a sense of a “stretched out present”

(2011, p. 5) in which the possibility of a future may be implied but is affectively displaced by the activity of monitoring, filtering and surviving the now:

If the present is not at first an object but a mediated affect, it is also a thing that is sensed and under constant revision, a temporal genre whose conventions emerge from the personal and public filtering of the situations and events that are happening in an extended now whose very parameters (when did “the present” begin?) are also always there for debate. (2011, p. 4)

The superhero genre, similarly, is under constant revision – both in a metatextual sense, by the creators, and in an internal sense in that the protagonists of the genre are constantly called to recognise and respond to an endless series of emergencies. The emergent event, as a central feature of the genre, makes the superhero genre operate in a similar way to Berlant’s

‘situation’, a “state of animated suspension” (2011, p. 5) through which the present is perceived with a sense of imminence or foreboding.

Where the superhero genre differs from Berlant’s situation is that its crises tend to be neatly resolved at the end of each storyline, which could be read as a way of forestalling the uncertainty that Berlant perceives in her genres of the present. David A. Lewis (2013) highlights the frequent ability of superheros to defy death (either improbably surviving lethal situations, or returning from what the reader has been told is a final death) and argues that the genre plays out an American tendency to fear and deny death. Consequently, he argues that the genre is typically conservative, “not about changing society but about maintaining it” 85

(2013, p. 35) and that since the constant rebirth and revitalization of the superhero makes them ‘transgenerational’ this creates a narrative of a society that can also endure. Yet the corollary to this observation is that society is always under threat: good must always triumph over evil, but evil will always return, leaving the superhero world in a state of perpetual threat. Karen Randell (2016) agrees, arguing that although the superhero genre (and genre films more broadly) have been characterised as reassuring, the open-endedness of Marvel movies (which each conclude with a foreboding teaser at the end) undermines certainty in resolutions and builds a picture of broader instability. The Marvel Cinematic Universe does this particularly effectively because it projects threats intertextually, across multiple interwoven narratives that force superheroes to roll from one crisis to the next. The teasers at the end of each film show audiences a glimpse of the next film to be released chronologically, rather than the next film in the current hero’s arc, which gives the impression that society is under constant assault from all angles. The lack of resolution means that the genre structurally demonstrates crisis ordinariness, despite framing each crisis as an exceptional event.

Because the genre still uses the logic of exception, it is worth pointing out that the superhero genre does demonstrate aspects of trauma and could certainly be productively analysed through the lens of trauma theory. It is important, of course, to distinguish between the traumatic event itself and trauma as a genre that lays out certain expectations about how a person will respond to that event thereafter; in Berlant’s framework both trauma and crisis are two of many possible genres that structure ongoing ways of living, while she describes the traumatic event itself as the experience of “being without genre” (2011, p. 80) – being so shattered that, in that moment, there is no generic framework to hint at the possibility of moving forward. Indeed, Patricia Ticineto Clough writes that literary representations of trauma often present it in “blanks or hesitations – a topographic formulation of forgetting, loss, uncertainty, disavowal, and defensiveness” (2007, p. 7). But what distinguishes trauma 86

as an ongoing genre is its structure – a “forgetting without memory” (2007, p. 6) in which the subject compulsively acts out, repeats or returns to the traumatic scene. This aspect of trauma, as a genre, is especially pertinent to the superhero origin story – a traumatic event that not only shatters the hero’s ordinary life and calls them to their mission but explains how they attained their powers.

The origin story links the superhero’s powers to the traumatic event that makes them a superhero; thus inscribing the superhero’s trauma on their body. These two events may not be precisely the same story beats – for example, the spider bite that empowers Peter Parker

(Spiderman) occurs before the murder of his uncle – but they are narratively entwined.

Peter’s uncle dies because Peter initially decides to use his spider powers for entertainment rather than the pursuit of justice; Peter allows a thug to escape, the thug mugs and kills Peter’s uncle, and Peter’s remorse drives him to become Spiderman. The origin story is often repeated throughout a superhero’s run, often in explicit flashbacks but also structurally when the hero encounters a similar event and is driven to correct what went wrong the first time. In a sense, the origin – and the trauma – is repeated whenever a superhero uses their powers.

While the superhero genre is clearly a genre of crisis, it does not necessarily demonstrate crisis ordinariness, at least not on the surface: although the genre structurally replicates crisis to the point of ordinariness, the surface narrative often maintains the fantasy that it is possible to return to a comfortable status quo ante. The obvious applicability of trauma theory to certain aspects of the genre therefore complicates a crisis-focused reading.

My intervention is to read the interaction of trauma and crisis in light of the genre’s structural implications, which suggests that the genre maintains an attachment to the idea of the exceptional. In other words, while the genre may at times deal with the uneasy realisation that supposedly exceptional events are not exceptional at all – which would call for a logic of

adjustment to dominate its survival strategies – at other times it exhibits an unwillingness to accept this.

Consequently, the superhero genre operates on two levels. Firstly, it sustains the sort of double-talk Mark Neocleous (2006) identifies in which ‘emergency’ is at once used to justify extraordinary measures and increasingly recognised to be unexceptional. But secondly, it explores the affective toll that this takes on the people both enacting and living on through endless crisis. What the superhero genre provides is the fantasy that these emergency powers might be exercised by a citizen, someone like them who is sensitive to the affective cost of living in insecure times, rather than an impersonally rendered ‘state’. Of course, real states are run by citizens (albeit often hyper-privileged elites) but the fantasy of personal sovereignty, condensed into a heroic and trustworthy avatar, remains affectively powerful. Whether a superhero really deserves to be trusted simply by virtue of their heroic stature is up for debate. Certainly the 1954 Comics Code prescription that good must always triumph over evil has by now been abandoned by the mainstream industry and brutally subverted by independent comics such as Watchmen and The Boys, each of which questions the uncritical assumption that superheroes are good or heroic by definition. However, the recent outrage over Marvel’s Secret Wars event in which Captain America was replaced by a fascist version of himself indicates that the attachment to good superheroes who embody the legitimate use of sovereign power is alive and kicking. But the cost for the superheroes themselves is high: taking on sovereign power and responsibility locks the hero out of enjoying what has been promised as a normal life.

For ordinary citizens, crisis interrupts a normal life. For the superhero, however, a normal life is what happens to other people, because the hero must continually spend their time ensuring that ordinary life can go on. Although like genres of trauma, the superhero genre contains the expectation that a neutral status quo ante will be restored, I would argue

that the affective resonance of the genre lies primarily in the superhero who cannot access the ordinary life that they ensure for others, because their responsibility is to the next crisis. The exceptional event becomes unexceptional, and the wearing-down of survival through constant crisis is therefore writ large, exaggerated through the split identities of the hero as everyday citizen and superpowered sovereign. The superhero, as a result, is perfectly positioned to narrate the affective cost of sovereignty and of the disempowered citizen. The superhero may maintain attachments to all of the things that their fellow humans do – loved ones, careers, ideologies, national values – but their ability to endure in those attachments and to thrive is always compromised by the incompatible demands of their duty. One might say that the promise of an ordinary life is a cruelly optimistic attachment in and of itself, an affective bargain where the ‘good life’ is supplanted by the substitute satisfaction of life going on at all.

Furthermore, I propose that sovereignty itself is an object of cruel optimism as depicted in the superhero genre. For Lauren Berlant (2011), the dominant formulations of sovereignty by Schmitt, Agamben and other theorists such as Achille Mbembe are founded in archaic traditions and therefore inadequate to describe the exercise of power in a contemporary system of life-management, where power over life is diffused across a variety of institutions and processes. What sovereignty does instead, she argues, is to legitimise normative structures that separate the violence of the state – traditionally conceived as power over mortality – from the ordinary governmental processes that do not always kill citizens but rather wear them down. Even on a personal level – as sovereignty has often been extended to theories of individual agency – sovereignty is a fantasy that does not necessarily deliver on its promises:

Sovereignty, after all, is a fantasy misrecognized as an objective state: an aspirational position of personal and institutional self-legitimating performativity and an affective sense of control in relation to the fantasy of that position’s offer of security and efficacy. (2011, p. 97)

By revealing traditional exercises of sovereign power to be performative, Berlant enables a comparison between sovereignty and the trauma talk that Neocleous identifies: both performatively invoke the exception, justifying the collective fantasy that allows intensive securitization to be normalised while promising its end.

Despite (or perhaps because of) the oversaturation of sovereign agency with aspirational fantasy, Berlant also writes that it is a burden we sometimes willingly invest into an external object in order to relieve the pressure of feeling “too alive”: “sovereignty, while ideal, is a nightmarish burden, a psychotic loneliness, and just tainted” (2011, p. 43). In her analysis of ‘Exchange Value’, a short story in which two brothers find an unthinkable amount of money in a deceased neighbour’s apartment and both unravel under the enormity of their changed circumstances, she describes the object of cruel optimism as:

the thing within any object to which one passes one’s fantasy of sovereignty for safe keeping. In cruel optimism the subject or community turns its treasured attachments into safety-deposit objects that make it possible to bear sovereignty through its distribution... into space, time, noise, and other beings. When one’s sovereignty is delivered back into one’s hands, though, its formerly distributed weight becomes apparent... (2011, p. 43)

Although superheroes are capable of appropriating the sovereign decision from the state, they must also bear its affective weight. As Neal Curtis (2015) persuasively argues, the superhero genre explores and problematises numerous aspects of sovereignty: the problem of legitimacy; the relationship between law and violence; the sovereign right to name an enemy, declare a state of exception, and to constitute a community via exclusion. Superhero stories individualise and personify these decisions, rendering legible those affective tensions that – in reality – play out across a vast network of governmental institutions, media networks and impacted groups of people. Superhero fantasy can therefore be understood as a way of imagining the affective cost of exceptional decisions (or at least decisions framed as exceptional, even if they eventually prove to be everyday) in such a way that it is conceivable, bearable, and survivable, rather than overwhelming. 90

Because 9/11 was undeniably a traumatic event for the United States – a crisis in the inflated sense that Berlant argues calls for “heroic agency” (2011, p. 101) – it perhaps seems counterintuitive to identify it as a point after which crisis ordinariness begins to peek through the intensified surface of the superhero genre. But what I contend is that the structural features of the security environment that emerged into public view alongside the War on

Terror do not match the generic expectations of the exception. Rather they constitute an environmental phenomenon similar to the one Berlant notes in her analysis of crisis rhetoric:

“a domain where an upsetting scene of living is revealed to be interwoven with ordinary life after all, like ants discovered scurrying under a thoughtlessly lifted rock” (2011, p. 102). The incompatibility of the traumatic-event-narrative of 9/11 with the ongoing crisis-ordinariness that suffuses everyday life in the aftermath is, in a sense, one of the things that the superhero genre has to grapple with, because it casts doubt on the efficacy of the immediate, crisis- oriented strategies that superheroes themselves use to restore peace.

If the superhero genre is a genre of crisis ordinariness masked by the narrative features of crisis, then the affective responses of its protagonists should demonstrate the logic of exception and the logic of sovereignty reaching breaking point. Furthermore, if we accept that individual superheroes enact a logic of the central organising concept to which they are attached – an argument that the next section of this chapter will take up – then their narrative of adjustment should also be a map of an ongoing negotiation between their attachments as ideals and the messy realities and compromises of survival. In the superhero genre, therefore, we see exceptional characters negotiate a familiar adjustment to life under assault, to precarity, and to the wearing-down of survival. But we also see triumphal moments: victories that, however ephemeral, make these struggles seem bearable and worthwhile. Unfortunately for the superheroes, however, these temporary victories also bind them to the conditions that compromise their own wellbeing and sustain attachments that are therefore cruelly optimistic. 91

3.2 Superhero as subgenre: mission, powers, identity, nemeses

The purpose of this section is to advance a method of analysing individual superheroes, based on the framework that Lauren Berlant provides in Cruel Optimism, as characters that engage with clusters of expectations formed in a shared space of national fantasy. Prior theorists have described the relationship of a superhero to the national or cultural values to which they respond in a number of ways, casting the hero as a representation, an icon, an embodiment, or a gestalt, which perhaps corresponds to the “perceived saturation” of political analysis within the field (G. M. Smith, 2011, p. 138). My intervention is to focus not on the specific discourse that a given superhero represents – in many cases, that has already been clearly staked out – but to examine the structural mechanisms underlying a superhero’s orientation towards cultural values. In some ways this responds to Scott Bukatman’s call for a renewed focus on form, rather than content, within the field (G. M. Smith, 2011, p. 138). Although my primary concern in this thesis is indeed content, my intention is also to examine the formal structures and tropes that make superhero stories such potent sites in which political tensions emerge.

While I agree that superheroes certainly do enact the logic of the values that they try to uphold, I would point out that shifting societal attitudes towards ideology not as such, but in practice, makes it imperative to find a way of modelling the ambiguities and incoherencies that make superheroes so attractive to study from a political standpoint. Consequently, I prefer to frame their relationship in terms of attachment, with all of the affective complexity, dynamic shifts and contradiction that implies.

In the case study of Iron Man that follows in subsequent chapters, I will use this framework to trace the types of situations and stress points where the logic entailed by the hero’s beliefs requires them to make a messy compromise, or to resolve tension in an insufficient or unconvincing way – leading to impasse. In other words, I argue that instead of representing ideals directly, superheroes are instead a way of imagining the affective cost of

maintaining attachments to significant ideals in an atmosphere of attrition, and that as a result superheroes engage in the fantasy work of constructing and re-negotiating the things that they stand for. This is not to say that superheroes do not become icons or embodiments of their ideals, but that the process through which that occurs is messy, dynamic and ongoing – not wholly independent of the values or beliefs that they serve (if any), but not wholly didactic either.

To do this, I will draw heavily on Lauren Berlant’s definition of genre – a structure that provides affective expectations of how something might unfold – to explain both the logic that is imposed on a superhero, by the values/ideals/ideologies to which they are linked, and the strategies that they develop to enact this logic in a way that they can bear. This is akin to reading each superhero’s structuring constellation of character features – origin trauma, powers, identity, mission and nemeses – as a unique subgenre, with each successive treatment of a character setting up a new layer of expectations, subversion and contradictions. Key to Berlant’s formulation is the idea of a scene, an encounter with one’s object of attachment in which the subject hopes to finally fulfil the promises they imagine that the object will deliver. By identifying the subgeneric expectations that distinguish a superhero from other superheroes, it is possible to analyse the affective calculus that motivates a superhero’s encounters with their object of attachment – perhaps a belief, perhaps an incoherent set of values, perhaps the thing they have sworn to protect – and to unpack what is significant about the way in which those scenes play out, and what they suggest about the way those ideals are being contested at the time of production.

Past analyses of the superhero genre have sometimes begun with an attempt at a general definition of the superhero protagonist, which are in some ways problematic but nevertheless useful for exploring the expectations of the genre overall. Peter Coogan (2013) identifies three conventions codified by Superman, broadly agreed to be the first superhero,

which commonly distinguish superheroes from the heroic figures of other genres: a mission, usually something prosocial like defending the innocent or enacting justice; exceptional powers; and a secret identity that partitions their everyday life away from their superheroic activities. As Jason Bainbridge (2017) notes, the mission-powers-identity framework is also a legal definition, as it originates from DC’s court case against the publishers of WonderMan, a

Superman-like character created by Will Eisner. Finding in DC’s favour, Judge Augustus Noble

Hand found that although the general idea of the superhero was not copyrightable, the specific content of a hero’s mission-powers-identity triumvirate was. As a result, the mission- powers-identity definition is central to the maintenance of DC and Marvel’s effective duopoly on the genre; although it does not preclude the rise of competing superheroes (as the rise of

Marvel demonstrates) it does mean that this method of distinguishing between individual superheroes is both culturally and legally significant.

A strict definitional approach is problematic in certain critical regards, however. As critics such as Geoff Klock (2013) argue, and Coogan himself notes, many key characters do not conform to these three criteria. The Hulk, for example, lacks a mission, and the Fantastic

Four made waves in the 1960s when they debuted as a superhero team with no split between public and private identities. Furthermore, heroes with long histories are far from static – abilities vary, identities change, and even the tone of stories can alter dramatically in the hands of new writers. Klock argues that the impossibility of defining the genre is what makes it so appealing; the flexibility that allows one writer to take Batman seriously while another has Batman “[punch] telepathic gorillas in the crotch” (2013, p. 72) is itself an integral component of the genre. Coogan solves this problem with a somewhat tautological conclusion:

“the superhero is the protagonist of the superhero genre” (2013, p. 47). Although some critics do not find this terribly satisfying as a definition – Jason Dittmer finds it “somewhat tortured”

(2013, p. 6) – a genre-oriented approach is useful because it shifts the discussion away from universal characteristics of heroes and towards structural expectations of the genre. 94

To rephrase the tautology, I would argue that the superhero performatively defines the superhero genre, in that each superhero engages with a specific set of themes, values and anxieties that structure the experience they provide. In Berlant’s formulation of genre, as with many others, a genre does not need to adhere to strict criteria but instead structures affective expectations. This framework encompasses all the variation within the superhero genre while providing an analytic tool to unpack the affective significance of each hero. The superhero is central to the genre in ways that tone or style is not, necessarily: our expectation that Batman will confront injustice holds true whether or not that injustice is presented as absurd.

Furthermore, the heroes who do not conform to Coogan’s triad of mission, powers and identity are often marked out by their subversion of those tropes. The Hulk is interestingly partly because he has no particular mission, while the Fantastic Four’s public identities were so popular that they contributed to Marvel’s ascendance over DC in the 1960s. There are two components to this analysis of the superhero, therefore: the structural expectations provided by the genre as a whole, and the expectations specific to individual heroes. As a result, the focus of this section is not so much on the differences between superheroes and the heroic figures of other genres, but on the way in which an individual superhero enacts their own subgeneric unfolding of experience.

Similar characterisations of the superhero, describing them as icons into which values and concepts coalesce, have been made by theorists such as Dana Anderson (2013) and John

Jennings who both describe the superhero as a gestalt. For Anderson, repeated group encounters with the hero gradually transform the character into a collective icon, which perhaps explains why the superhero has been described as such a potent vector for national fantasy. Jennings, on the other hand, locates the gestalt in the highly costumed and visually signified superhero body, which he argues qualifies as a “gestalt of various belief structures in physical form” (2013, p. 60). This focus on embodiment (rather than intellectual or affective engagement) is significant and echoed by Bainbridge who argues that Captain American and 95

Iron Man each embody the American dream and American capitalism respectively. Regarding a character as an idealised representation of a particular set of values or beliefs is tempting, as the worthiness of the superhero would then become analogous for the validity of what they stand for, and so the failure of the hero could plausibly be viewed as the failure of the idea. But

I suggest that directly equating a hero to a straightforward embodiment of a concept would be reductive.

An approach that aligns more closely with this thesis can be found in Claire Pitkethly’s

(2013) work on the superhero identity crisis. She argues that this is a key component of the superhero genre because it is emblematic of an internal struggle between two incompatible worlds to which the superhero belongs partially but never fully. The examples she gives are presented as conflicting dualities: Superman, who is both alien and human, small-town and global; Batman, whose stories are torn between darkness and light, civilisation and madness; and Wolverine, caught between human and beast. The superhero cannot inwardly reconcile these conflicts:

Straddling the boundary between two sides of a logical opposition, the superhero incorporates a paradox or contradiction, and it is the dynamic tension that results from this split that makes him or her superhuman. (2013, p. 28)

This oppositional tension is likely one of the reasons why the literature is often divided on the inherent conservatism or liberality of a given superhero, storyline or generic convention. But it also reflects the incoherency that results from conflicting attachments, not just to binaries but to incoherent muddles of hopes and expectations that are magnetised by the ideals the superhero wishes to uphold. Man and machine, to take an example specific to Iron Man, are neither indivisible nor unitary concepts. Rather, when mobilised within a specific story, they explode into a multitude of competing promises about what each thing might offer to the hero.

The way in which each hero strives to resolve these internal crises, and especially the

structures that hold them in impasse, are what differentiates them from one another and makes them subgeneric.

James Mulder (2017) also points to the identity crises of superheroes as an integral component of their ideological function. Reflecting on the state of comics scholarship, he remarks that critics frequently describe the function of the superhero as “an avatar of the consumer or fan” (2017, p. 1048) or “an idealizing reflective surface in which one may locate the image of oneself” (2017, p. 1058). He rightly points out that a majority of superheroes are still white men, and that the post-9/11 political crisis so frequently identified in Christopher

Nolan’s The Dark Knight film trilogy operates “through and as the crisis of identity faced by a singular white male superpowered individual” (2017, p. 1049). That Mulder points to this crisis of white masculinity now is likely reflective of a larger paradigm shift that Lauren

Berlant notes: “today many formerly iconic citizens who used to feel undefensive and unfettered feel truly exposed and vulnerable… They sense that they now have identities, when it used to be just other people who had them” (1997, p. 2). But as that particular type of identity has retained its default status within the genre, which is only slowly beginning to open up to more diverse identities (such as the latest Muslim-American incarnation of Miss

Marvel) the genre is reflective of the sort of intimate public space that Berlant has worked to articulate throughout her career:

What makes a public sphere intimate is an expectation that the consumers of its particular stuff already share a worldview and emotional knowledge that they have derived from a broadly common historical experience... So if, from a theoretical standpoint, an intimate public is a space of mediation in which the personal is refracted through the general, what’s salient for its consumers is that it is a place of recognition and reflection. (2008, p. viii)

Even for those readers who do not share the particular identity configuration of a hero – or for those readers who are not American, myself included – there is still likely to be some fluency in the default experience assumed to be shared amongst consumers of the genre. In fact, the superhero genre is undoubtedly one of the sites through which narratives of this 97

experience circulate and cultivate fluency. When the values circulated within that public space are contested (as arguably they always are) or no longer seem to function as hoped for (such as the good life) then the intimate public itself becomes embroiled in identity crisis.

If the hero can be said to function simultaneously as an avatar onto which the consumer can project themselves, and a gestalt of coalesced values and ideals, then the superhero acts like a prism through which the personal is refracted through the general. As with the internal logic of the superhero, as mentioned in the previous section, the superhero’s occupation of the liminal space between ordinary citizen and extraordinary sovereign becomes refigured as a nexus in which consumer and character overlap. This situates the superhero genre as a distinctive site of national fantasy where consumers re-experience the affective entanglements produced by membership of a shared intimate public through their own entanglement with the hero. In the citizen aspect of the superhero, the consumer may recognise aspects of themselves – if not concretely, then perhaps affectively – while in the sovereign aspect, the consumer can access a fantasy of agency that promises to liberate the citizen, even if that is (cruelly) never quite fully realized. The content and structures of a specific hero’s attachments, I argue, determine the scope of that engagement – hence the association between Captain America and nationalism – but do not entirely limit it.

The mission-powers-identity triumvirate, therefore, provides a useful starting point for this mode of analysis because, firstly, it offers a clear set of character tropes that have historically informed the genre, and secondly, it is a means of breaking down the distinctions between similar characters. There are many heroes whose powers originate from science or who address the challenges that science poses, for example, but it is the specifics of those powers and goals that determine how ‘science’ is constructed within their narratives. These dimensions of a character, whether or not they conform to the standard, comprise a framework that structures the expectations we have of a hero: who they are, what they do,

and how they do it. To the classic mission, identity and powers triumvirate I also add nemeses, because the villains with strong associations to a character often mirror internal tensions in the hero. For instance, what would Batman be without the Joker? Moreover, by establishing what the heroes are not, it is often easier to establish what they are – especially for those heroes whose day to day missions are reactive.

To begin an affective analysis of a superhero, it is important to begin with powers.

This is in part because superpowers are inscribed on or enacted through the body, and embodiment is central to affect. But it is also because the origin story of a superhero, in which the hero develops the powers that make them super, is also often one of the most traumatic narratives in their canon and tends to be revisited across the lifetime of the superhero by successive creators. These flashbacks keep the hero current, re-situated in a contemporary context. For example, although Tony Stark is always captured by guerrillas and forced to build a superweapon, in one era he is captured in the Vietnam War, in a later era in the Gulf.

Although this serves an obvious practical purpose (keeping the age of the hero believable, for example) it also highlights the relevance of the hero’s attachments to contemporary audiences. The origin story lays down the groundwork for all three of Coogan’s dimensions, but I argue that it is central to powers because it is the original moment in which the hero’s body becomes marked, begins to affect the world and be affected in specific, significant ways.

Similar powers may be differently embodied; while Captain America and Iron Man both have enhanced physical capabilities and objects with potent defensive symbolism (Captain

America’s shield and Iron Man’s armour) Captain America derives his powers from a serum that passively alters his physiology, while Iron Man is an inventor who augments himself with futuristic technology.

Powers demonstrate an attachment to a specific kind of object: the way in which a hero intervenes in a crisis says something about the strategies they believe in, fall back on, or

are forced to use. The way in which they relate to their powers is also significant, because it demonstrates the affective promises those powers imply. For example, contrast Bruce

Banner’s fear of the Hulk – the monstrous transformation he undergoes when angry; the Hyde to Banner’s Jekyll – with Batman’s use of darkness, animality and intimidation. Both powers essentially weaponize the hero’s own fear and anger, but in markedly different ways. Because

Batman’s abilities were deliberately cultivated through physical and mental discipline, his stories establish a set of optimistic promises that amount to persistence and resilience leading to mastery over the self. In contrast, transformation into the Hulk is often explicitly against

Banner’s will: it not only warps Banner’s body beyond recognition, into something grotesque, but also leads to actions and behaviour beyond his conscious control or awareness. Here the

‘promise’ embodied by the superhero is something other than rational self-mastery. The powers of a superhero therefore lay out central themes that structure our expectations of their stories; they are embodied manifestations of the affective promises that the superhero- as-subgenre makes to us.

The second dimension I examine is identity, because it situates the hero within the story-world and demonstrates their external attachments. Identity is a broad category, encompassing everything from the social demographics of the hero to the split between heroic and civilian personas. I am interested in the various functions of a hero’s identities: how they make life easier, how they complicate things, how they relate to one another, and what they promise. I am also interested in the way that heroic identity is mediated, within the narrative universe, as a barometer for the promises that superheroes make more generally to ordinary people. In this way the superhero is akin to a celebrity, with the heroic identity viewed as something to be performed, filtered through mass media (such as news broadcasts) and consumed by the public. I make a distinction between heroic and civilian personas even if the civilian identity is not a secret. The heroic persona or mantle should be considered separately to the character themselves, even though there is significant entanglement 100

between the two. This is not just because titles sometimes change, such as when different characters in Batman take up the mantle of Robin, or when Steve Rogers abandons the

Captain America persona and becomes Nomad. Making the distinction between title and bearer helps to resolve some of the imprecision that arises when talking about a superhero

‘representing’ something and highlights the fact that characters can maintain ambivalent attitudes towards their multiple personas. As public figures, the most visible and prosocial heroes become icons of something greater and more promising – in the Berlantian sense – than the private person who wears the mantle. One of the central claims of this thesis is that an identity itself, whether heroic or civilian, can become an object of attachment for the superhero, an object that promises something that might be achieved if the hero only lives up to the ideals that it represents. Often, the heroic and civilian identities make incompatible promises, or make demands that pull the hero in different directions. Because the hero endures simultaneously in both objects, the loss of one does not so much affirm the other as threaten something incoherent at the core of the hero’s self. As a result, the inability to choose permanently between them leads to an ongoing crisis.

It is tempting to read supervillain archenemies simply as a device to externalise this identity crisis, and indeed they often are. It has been commonly remarked that supervillains sometimes act as dark mirrors of superheroes, indicating what the hero could be and must not become. To some, the existence of the supervillain is simply about raising the stakes of the superhero story by giving them a nemesis of equal power – or greater, in fact, because the supervillain is often not constrained by the same moral code or sense of responsibility that limits the hero. On a very basic level, the ‘absolute evil’ of the supervillain confirms and justifies the ‘absolute good’ of the superhero, which allows the hero to use their superhuman powers under socially sanctioned conditions; while the supervillains who become archenemies come to specifically represent “an inversion of the hero’s values” (Verano, 2013, p. 83). This allows a kind of soft critique, in the sense that a villain’s challenge to the hero’s 101

values forces the hero to re-examine them, even if they are ultimately vindicated by the success of the hero. In contrast, Chris Deis (2013) argues that supervillains are more than just a foil for the superhero – a way to make the hero “greater and more interesting” (Levitz, 2013, p. 81) – but instead enact a politics of their own. In pointing out that the labels ‘villain’ and

‘hero’ are not fixed values but are instead informed by culture and social context, Deis articulates the simple but sometimes forgotten truism that villainy is a matter of perspective.

In particular he analyses the Superman story Lex Luthor: Man of Steel in which Superman’s archnemesis Lex Luthor is the protagonist attempting to defend the earth against an alien interloper. Viewing Superman through this alternative perspective enables a more potent critique of the hero and, due to the exemplary status of Superman, the superhero archetype more broadly.

As others have noted, the supervillain is one of the primary constraints on the superhero that prevents them from becoming villainous themselves. Frank Verano, who sees superheroes as essentially reactive, describes the superhero-supervillain relationship as “a system of checks and balances” that maintains the status quo by each party “effectively, cancelling one another out” (2013, p. 86). For example, in Red Son, once freed from the obligation to react to endless crises, Superman is able to enact his own (totalitarian) program of social change:

Without the supervillain, the superhero morphs into a cause of social disruption that, taken to its natural progression, leads to the superhero becoming a supervillain. The proactive, progressive superhero is inevitably a problematic figure; good intentions aside, when a powerful figure forces societal change without the right to do so, he or she has entered supervillain territory. (Verano, 2013, p. 86)

The supervillain is therefore interesting for two major reasons: firstly, as an indirect reflection of the hero’s values, either inverted or taken to an extreme; and secondly, as an independent character pushing for a future that the hero cannot allow to unfold. In both respects the scene of encounter between hero and villain realises something in the hero. On one hand, the threat

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that the villain poses to the hero’s attachments forces the hero to confront the possibility of loss. This can force the hero’s pre-existing identity crisis towards breaking point: if the villain threatens something integral to either identity, confrontation with the villain implies a direct threat to the hero’s continuity of self. But in the cases where the hero’s identity is not between the crosshairs, the supervillain still forces the hero to define their own position by drawing lines the hero will not cross. The supervillain is significant because they represent a future that the superhero cannot allow.

If supervillains strive for futures that the superhero cannot bear, then what future does the superhero hope their mission will achieve? To interrogate a superhero’s mission is in some ways simply to ask what it is they themselves want, what they hope to achieve through use of their powers, or what they think a world where they would not have to use their powers would look like. For this reason, the idea of the ‘mission’ is bound up with futurity – it implies an objective that could, at some point, be realised. For some superheroes this may be easier to identify than for others, but it can be inferred from their choices and the things they move towards. While these are rarely radical goals – as numerous critics above have noted, radical social change is often the purview of the supervillain – even preservation of the status quo indicates attachment to something within that status quo. Seeking justice and saving the innocent, although interesting for the specific way they take shape in each superhero story

(what is just? Who is innocent?), are essentially reactive. As others have mentioned, heroes such as the Hulk lack this classic prosocial mission, but that does not mean that they do not move towards some sort of goal, however hazily conceived. For these reasons I am more interested in the shape of the futures that superheroes imagine for themselves and others, where their day-to-day grind through successive crises is no longer necessary. The mission is where all the disparate aspects of the superhero come together and find an orientation. It is

Berlant’s ‘cluster of promises’, dependent on the premises embodied in the hero’s powers,

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expressed through their identities, and rejected in their dealings with their nemeses. It is also the most likely place to find cruel optimism because it is never fully realised.

By reading the stories of a given superhero as a subgenre, it is possible to trace the expectations, ideals and tensions that they represent with greater nuance and precision. In

Chapters 4, 5, 6 and 7, I will undertake such an analysis of Iron Man – beginning with the character’s origin and development in the comics in Chapter 4, and moving to the Marvel

Cinematic Universe in Chapters 5, 6 and 7. Chapter 4 therefore represents my analysis of Iron

Man through the lens of genre, as I examine the character’s evolving relationship with the military-industrial context and contemporary ideas of security throughout his history to identify the recurring themes that structure our expectations of Iron Man stories. Chapters 5,

6, and 7 examine the way in which these generic expectations unfold in the specific context of the Marvel Cinematic Universe throughout the War on Terror; in other words, how Iron Man’s attachments hold up, and how they falter, in the affective environment of permanent emergency that the Marvel Cinematic Universe represents.

As one of the superheroes with the closest entanglements to the United States’ national security apparatus, Iron Man has deep investments in the project of superpowered security – but must balance these investments, as Bainbridge and Curtis point out, with the heroic call to wield sovereign power justly. In the post-9/11 context of the War on Terror – a war which was carried out, as many scholars have noted, through visual media – the cinematic adaptation of Iron Man is therefore highly revealing of the affective tensions concerning superpowered security during the transition from the Bush era to the Obama era. As I will argue, the cluster of fantasies, hopes and anxieties bound up in Iron Man’s mission, powers and identity are the same cluster of attachments that come to seem cruel in the post-9/11 context – and, as such, Iron Man is a vital case study for the national impasse resulting from superpowered security.

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Chapter 4 – ‘The most fantastic weapon of all time!’: Iron Man’s comic book origins

In 2013, US Special Operations Command began a project called TALOS (Tactical Assault Light

Operator Suit), which aimed to build an armoured exoskeleton that would enhance and protect soldiers. The list of desired features on this suit – superhuman strength, neural sensors and liquid armour (Lamothe, 2014) could have come from a comic book, and in fact they do. In the media, TALOS has been dubbed the Iron Man suit:

This is a program that we started after we lost an operator on a mission. The first guy coming into a particular building was engaged and unfortunately was mortally wounded. And in the wake of that, we asked ourselves, ‘Couldn’t we do better in terms of protecting him, of giving him a better advantage when he’s at the most vulnerable point that we put our operators?’ (Gen. Joseph Votel, qtd. in Diamond & Starr, 2016)

The promise of the TALOS suit is simple: protection for soldiers in vulnerable times. But the resonance with Iron Man, the titular character of Marvel Studio’s blockbuster superhero films, suggests a more complex relationship between military technology, individual and societal vulnerability, and the discourse of security.

This chapter introduces my case study, the superhero Iron Man, and to establish the affective foundation for the character in the comics: what Iron Man has historically stood for; which ideals he values; and what tensions arising from the discourse of superpowered security a reader would expect an Iron Man story to explore. This chapter not only introduces the character’s history in the comics, prior to the release of the first instalment of the film franchise in 2008, but argues that Iron Man’s foundational values have developed in tandem with United States’ pursuit of military primacy, economic dominance and technological superiority – in other words, superpowered security. In many ways, Iron Man responds to the meta-securitization of the United States’ place in the global hierarchy: a desire, familiar to those who experienced the shocks of 9/11 but rooted in much older wars, to reach a position 106

of such military readiness and power that the nation would never again experience the trauma of a loss.

Although Douglas B. Klusmeyer’s (2011) description of American grand strategy reads like a description of the Bush administration’s response to 9/11, it in fact refers to the national security ideology of the United States that formed after World War 2, following the surprise attack on Pearl Harbour:

In framing the stakes in this struggle, the authors of this ideology employed sharply drawn dichotomies between good and evil, free societies and enslaved ones, and democratic rule and authoritarian rule. Through such dichotomies they sought to define an image of American identity against the mirror of its enemy. In making the case for the United States’ new leadership role in world affairs, they wove together the motifs of American exceptionalism, national greatness, and a providential mission to advance the cause of freedom. (2011, p. 64)

This remarkable continuity of thought illustrates the deep roots of the brand of superpowered security I have identified in past chapters, and points towards a possible reason for the degree to which it has become embedded in American thought. As Wen-Qing Ngoei argues, the shock invasion of Pearl Harbour, and the resulting “darkest moment” of World War II identified by

Churchill (where the Japanese strike on Pearl Harbour formed part of an onslaught on

Southeast Asia leading to the fall of Singapore and occupation of the Philippines) was a vital impetus for the development of domino theory, which formalized a sense of “interconnected insecurity” (2014, p. 218). According to the domino theory doctrine, United States’ national security could not be considered alone, but was fundamentally predicated on the security of the rest of the globe – meaning that protecting America’s interests necessarily meant developing the nation’s ability to project power and influence worldwide.

This dictum – which tied United States security to the endurance of American allies throughout the world – was enshrined in the NSC-68, a landmark national security document that would influence Cold War policy for decades (Ngoei, 2014). Klusmeyer further notes that this series of events – especially the desire to “never again” be so vulnerable (another phrase 107

familiar to observers in the Bush era) – led to the creation of the CIA, the NSA and NSC in

1947. These core institutions of the national security apparatus to this day, Klusmeyer argues, have centralized “institutional patterns” (Klusmeyer, 2011, p. 64) that have since shaped, structured, and even limited the range of American policy responses to events, as part of a discourse of total war. Furthermore, Congress’ contemporaneous decision to cede

“remarkably broad authority” (Klusmeyer, 2011, p. 64) over foreign policy and intelligence to the executive branch – on the basis that the President would be able to respond to urgent threats with greater agility and coherency – further concentrated power over matters of national security into the singular figure of the President. All of these moves were justified, both to citizens of the US and the governments of its allies (as they would be once again in the years following 9/11) by a heroic narrative of the United States as an exceptional nation with an exceptional mission.

It was in this environment in which Stan Lee created the superhero Iron Man, in the early years of the Vietnam War – a war that would strain the United States’ credibility as either a military or a moral superpower. From Iron Man’s first appearance in a 1963 issue of

Tales of Suspense, in which the millionaire weapons developer Tony Stark is kidnapped by a

Vietnamese warlord and must build a futuristic suit of armour to survive, Iron Man has been intimately involved with both the ideals and tensions of the American military-industrial complex. As a wealthy industrialist and futurist, Tony Stark, as Iron Man’s civilian alter-ego, is deeply invested in both the dominant economic structures of American society – which become increasingly neoliberal over his history – and in idealistic dreams of what those structures might deliver through the promise of technological innovation. These generic expectations coalesce in the Iron Man suit, which functions simultaneously as armour, weapon, life support and prosthesis. In terms of values, therefore, Iron Man offers a fantasy of opportunity and prosperity predicated on individual freedom and agency; only Stark could create the technological wonders represented by the Iron Man suit, which makes him 108

responsible for securing the future he promises. All of these values come under threat at different points in his long comic book history and must be secured by exceptional means to guarantee the security and future potential that Iron Man can supposedly deliver.

But Iron Man is also a cyborg, and therein lies the Iron Man mythos’ tendency to depict its core attachments ambivalently; to engage uncomfortably with the contradictions, tensions and trade-offs that must be reconciled in order to buy in to the fantasy. The Iron Man suit, despite the modern US military’s enthusiasm for the protection it promises, is the primary site of anxiety, as it frequently alters or harms its wearer in ways he can neither anticipate or fully control. As a cyborg, Iron Man’s powers emerge from a confluence of mind, body and technology; consequently, Iron Man stories problematize the distinction often drawn between mind/body/technology. Although Stark often speaks of the suit as a separate entity, an external product of his genius that he can alter at will, this belief is consistently problematized by stories that undermine the boundary between Stark and his technology. Not only does

Stark frequently lose control of his technology in the public domain, but he rarely has full control over the Iron Man suit itself and must make compromises with his technology in order to survive. Because the Iron Man suit promises freedom and autonomy, and because the character as a whole symbolises individual and national sovereignty, the anxiety that he is not in fact fully sovereign must be constantly managed. Iron Man’s cyborg nature, therefore, consistently problematises the mythos’ core attachments. But it also problematises the security logic that has increasingly come to underpin Iron Man’s attempts to protect those attachments.

As superhero comics are an iterative genre, with successive writers and artists adding to canonical histories over time, individual stories vary in their depiction of these themes.

Where some storylines play up contemporary anxieties and emphasise the vulnerabilities in

Iron Man’s position, others are strikingly optimistic about Iron Man’s capacity to secure

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American society against threat and to promise a brighter future. In this chapter, I will focus on the enduring elements of Iron Man – the societal values and promises that justify his activity as a superhero – while highlighting tensions, as Iron Man’s attachments are tested in different historical or political contexts. The chapter will demonstrate that although security is not the character’s original or even primary attachment, the series is preoccupied with threat that must be eradicated before Iron Man can begin to achieve the utopian future he seeks. Security therefore slips in as a necessary strategy to guarantee Iron Man’s attachments.

While some Iron Man stories accept this uncritically, the lens of the cyborg allows other writers to critically interrogate the series’ premises, such as the ongoing costs and compromises of securitization. Stark’s relationship with his own technology – which comes to operate simultaneously as power armour, artificial intelligence, prosthesis and life support system – frequently manifests as a damaging dependence that erodes his physical and emotional wellbeing, but which proves impossible to relinquish.

The chapter will first establish the character’s origin story and foundational interests with an analysis of two early Iron Man stories: Iron Man’s first appearance in Tales of Suspense

(1963) and the iconic 1979 storyline Demon in a Bottle. Taken together, these two stories introduce the reader to Iron Man’s origin in the Vietnam War, while also establishing the character’s close ties to the military-industrial complex, his cyborg-style fusion with his own technology, and his status as an ’ethical’ capitalist. But where Tales of Suspense, written in the middle of the Vietnam War, is naively optimistic about America’s innovative spirit and benevolence overseas (even while fighting a painful and protracted war), Demon in a Bottle revises Iron Man’s origin story to reflect the disappointments and crises of the late 1970s.

Demon in a Bottle presents the Tales of Suspense origin as a nostalgic memory of simpler times, before turning to a present day it depicts as harsh, complicated and morally compromised. Where Tales of Suspense is broadly positive about the futurist potential of Tony

Stark’s wealth and genius, Demon in a Bottle is deeply suspicious of military and capitalist 110

interests. The Iron Man of the 70s is equally flawed, struggling with alcoholism and identity confusion, an innovation that has made Demon in a Bottle one of the most exemplary Iron Man storylines. In these two stories, the same themes are refracted through contrasting historical/affective lenses, demonstrating the series’ capacity to reflect and interrogate the anxieties of its time. Considered as twin origin stories, they establish Iron Man’s key attachments and the cyborg tension that threatens to destabilise them.

Next, the chapter will discuss a range of comic book issues from the late 1980s and

1990s, at which time Iron Man reflects a deep anxiety over the control of military technology.

This section will explore Tony Stark’s inability to control the Iron Man suit from two angles: firstly, the Cold War-inspired proliferation anxieties of the Armor Wars story arc, which ran from 1987-1988; and secondly, the fear that reliance on technology might not only change society profoundly but may cause irreparable damage, as reflected in selected issues from the early 1990s. This was a period of several years in which Tony Stark’s biological integration with his armour was exploited by his enemies, taxed his nervous system to the point of serious disability, and eventually ended his life. In this period, America’s exceptional lead in military technology is positioned as a vulnerability as well as a strength. In both cases, Iron

Man’s attempts to secure against his own technology are unsuccessful; in Armor Wars he goes off the rails and becomes the sort of villain he wanted to eliminate, while the 1990s storyline depicts Stark’s utopian visions failing in the future and culminates in his death. This is because the suit, like security practices, is as dangerous as it is necessary. Both of these storylines show Iron Man becoming increasingly dependent on his technology (echoing the addiction storyline from Demon in a Bottle) even as it harms him, which begins to indicate a cruelly optimistic attachment to security as a means of guaranteeing the future he desires.

Finally, the chapter will discuss two post-9/11 comic book arcs, which (like Tales of

Suspense and Demon in a Bottle) reflect on the era’s militaristic national security policy in

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drastically contrasting ways. In The Best Defense (2003-2004) Iron Man campaigns to become

Secretary of Defense, promising to end all deaths in war. This storyline attempts to refigure

Iron Man’s problematic history and redeem the values he stands for, implying that the War on

Terror could not only be won but transformed with the sort of vision and courage that Iron

Man represents. In this storyline, Iron Man’s intervention in war not only secures the homeland against immediate threat, but explicitly promises a fantasy of security without death, pain or sacrifice – symbolically scrubbing clean the worst excesses of the War on

Terror. In contrast, Extremis (2005-2006) reboots Iron Man altogether, moving his origin story to Afghanistan during the Gulf War, and casting him as a failed futurist whose investment in military technology has compromised his values so profoundly that he can no longer claim the sovereign legitimacy required to justify his superpowers. Like Tales of

Suspense and Demon in a Bottle, these two Iron Man stories contrast optimistic preservation of the status quo with a fiercely critical suspicion of the security projects that led America to the point of tragedy. I argue that this demonstrates Iron Man‘s capacity to engage with conflicting desires and anxieties about security4.

4.1 Engaging Vietnam: ‘Tales of Suspense’ and ‘Demon in a Bottle’

Although Iron Man’s origin story has been retold and transplanted numerous times over the decades, the basic impetus for Tony Stark’s transformation into the superhero Iron Man remains consistent. While visiting a warzone to supply American troops with innovative weapons, the ultra-rich celebrity industrialist Tony Stark is mortally wounded and captured by enemy combatants. When his captors realise who he is, they order him to build them the ultimate weapon. Instead, he builds a suit of armour (disguised as the weapon his enemies want) that both keeps his wounded heart pumping and gives him the power to defeat his

4 Please note that due to copyright restrictions it was not possible to include images of the comic panels discussed in this chapter. 112

captors. His success comes at a cost: Professor Yinsen, an elder physicist and fellow captive, sacrifices his life to buy Tony time to power up the suit. Although Tony defeats his captors, escapes back to America, and eventually seeks medical attention for his heart, the experience fundamentally changes him. Different iterations of this origin story frame or inflect different aspects of these changes in significant ways: some versions highlight the tragedy of his inability to survive without the metal suit, while other emphasise the incredible power that the suit bestows on its wearer. In some cases, the weapon that injures Stark is a generic landmine, while in others it is a weapon designed and manufactured by his own company.

Most strikingly, every few decades the warzone itself shifts, from Vietnam to the Gulf War to post-9/11 Afghanistan. Each permutation of the origin story brings the Iron Man mythos into conversation with the present moment, but also highlights the doctrinal continuity of

America’s wars.

For the purpose of this analysis, based on the discussion of origin stories in Chapter 3,

I will examine the superhero origin story as the primary scene in which heroes encounter their core attachments; a scene which establishes the promises that the hero (and by extension the reader) invests in their superpowers, identity and mission. As the first and often best-known story in an individual superhero’s canon, the origin story plays a crucial role in setting up the narrative expectations for the superhero’s subsequent stories to either affirm or subvert. As the comics industry is so fast-paced, when the details of an origin story become irrelevant or out of touch – or worse, contradict the lived reality of the new era – they can be adjusted to better respond to contemporary concerns. As discussed in Chapter 3, I do not intend to suggest that a superhero is a passive reflection of attitudinal changes in a monolithic public sphere, or that any given story should be read to discover a singular, stable ideological position. Because superhero stories must engage with a diverse and dynamic intimate public space of national fantasy, I am more interested in identifying the conflicts, tensions and incoherencies that arise from attempts to reconcile old fantasies with new times. 113

Iron Man first appeared in Stan Lee and Jack Kirby’s Tales of Suspense #39, published in March 1963. Although the United States had been supporting French colonial forces since

1950, under Harry Truman, American troops did not become directly involved in Vietnam until 1961, after the fall of French Indochina. 1963 can be viewed as a transitional year in the war: in March, when Tales of Suspense was released, increasing numbers of American troops were landing on Vietnamese shores and early chemical warfare campaigns had commenced, but the first major military operations – Rolling Thunder (a strategic bombing campaign designed to demoralise North Vietnam) and the guerrilla war in the South – would not begin until after Kennedy’s assassination in November 1963. Consequently, during the development and release of Tales of Suspense, the Vietnam War had not yet entered its most controversial phase – the guerrilla wars were yet to be lost, and the worst abuses of the United States armed forces against the Vietnamese were yet to come. The Phoenix program – a CIA-led program of infiltration, torture and assassination against the Viet Cong – would not begin until 1965, and the My Lai massacre of March 1968 would not enter public knowledge until 1969 (Rowling,

Sheets, & Jones, 2015). Analysing Tales of Suspense in this light is critical, therefore, as it entered public discourse at a moment in which the promises of the war – halting the onward march of Communism and bolstering the United States’ credibility in the world affairs – had not yet been undermined by revelations of military losses against technologically inferior forces, America’s inability to win over the Vietnamese population, and, of course, war crimes committed by American forces.

This first origin story, therefore, establishes Iron Man’s primary attributes as a superhero: his power to invent miraculously futuristic technology (modelled on military tech, but without a lethal edge); his identity as a wealthy inventor, industrialist and celebrity; and his mission, which – although far from fully developed – is aligned with the most idealistic foreign policy goals of the United States at a time when these enjoyed broad public assent. As a weapons developer for the United States, Stark is at first only concerned with winning the 114

war and protecting American troops. After he is captured by the Viet Cong warlord Wong Chu, however, his motivations expand. Knowing that Stark’s chest is full of shrapnel from a booby- trap in the jungle, Wong-Chu lies and promises medical treatment if Stark builds weapons for him instead of the United States. “This I promise you,” Stark tells Wong-Chu, “I shall build you the most fantastic weapon of all time!” Privately, he thinks: “I’ll build it alright, but it will be mine... --made for only one purpose—to keep me alive!” (#39, 1963, p. 6). Personal survival, then, is Stark’s initial mission, echoing the basic rationale of security under the Copenhagen

School: protection against an existential threat. When Yinsen dies, however, the mission to survive becomes entangled with the desire to take revenge and enforce principles of fairness over tyranny. When he finally fights Wong Chu, wearing the prototype Iron Man suit, he does so primarily to avenge Yinsen, with the added benefit of freeing the Vietnamese villagers whom Wong Chu exploits. Consequently, Iron Man’s origin story conflates personal security with American’s foreign policy objectives, meaning that Iron Man’s mission has always been deeply linked with the discourse of the American national security state.

As a wartime comic published in the United States, this is hardly surprising, but it provides a clear indication of the ways in which Iron Man’s mission has responded to the political and international security discourse of the day. In 1963, popular demonstrations against the United States’ involvement in the Vietnam War were just beginning, and yet in this issue there is barely any questioning of the American mission in Vietnam. In 1963, of course, the Comics Code regulation prohibiting anything that would “create disrespect for established authority” (Goodrum, 2016, p. 169) was in full force, which limited the ability of creators to engage critically with the war. Nevertheless, in many ways the issue reads as pro-war propaganda. While the American characters are presented favourably, the Vietnamese guerrillas are highly racialized caricatures. Where the Americans are disciplined and honourable, the Vietnamese are poorly organised, honourable only in a rigid, archaic sense, and frequently cowardly – they exploit the local villagers on whom they parasitically depend. 115

Wong Chu’s brutality towards his own countrymen implicitly justifies the United States presence in Vietnam, and therefore provides a warrant for Stark’s individual actions against them. As a result, Tales of Suspense #39 clearly presents a favourable position on United States military activity in Vietnam and, by extension, the national security discourse that justified it.

It is worth noting, however, that the significance of liberating oppressed people is left entirely implicit; the explicit motivation for Stark’s actions is not to correct generalised human suffering, but to gain freedom for himself and Yinsen (this shifts to vengeance after Yinsen’s death) and to deny Wong Chu victory. Freeing the villagers is a benefit, but not Stark’s initial motivation. It is, however, framed as an inevitable consequence of Iron Man’s intervention, which forces Wong Chu to fight according to traditional rules of engagement rather than relying on guerrilla tactics (with the Americans) or an asymmetric distribution of power (with the villagers) to tip the scales in his favour. Iron Man’s intervention tips the scales back to their rightful position, implying that America should win and that the Vietnamese would logically benefit as a consequence.

In reality, when direct military confrontations between United States and North

Vietnamese forces began in 1965, the asymmetry between United States and North

Vietnamese military capabilities did not lead to the expected decisive victory for the United

States. Unlike Wong Chu, when the real North Vietnamese forces discovered that they were at an immense disadvantage in direct confrontation, they rapidly shifted resources into guerrilla warfare in order to meet United States forces on more advantageous terms. Neither did US military supremacy result in the liberation of the Vietnamese population; as Ivan Arreguin-

Toft notes: “U.S. forces relied heavily on indirect firepower – tactical air and artillery support

– a consequence of which was considerable death or injury to non-combatants” (2001, p. 116).

Tales of Suspense therefore illustrates an idea – yet to be revealed as a fantasy – that American

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victory (resting on American military and moral superiority) would result in peace and freedom for all.

Crucially, however, this origin story is a fantasy of individual security, as opposed to the systemic guarantee of security by the state. This illustrates an immediate tension in the discourse to which Tales of Suspense responds, which – on an individual level – mirrors the

United States’ parallel emphases on maintaining its status as a superpower (requiring the ability to go it alone) and on building a global network of allies. Although the latter may be necessary to maintain US credibility in the bipolar environment of the Cold War, reliance on allies threatened to undermine US autonomy. Although I have framed this tension as a geopolitical dilemma, I argue that it echoes the dilemma of an individual forced to rely on the protective aegis of the state. For the US, a nation with revolution as its foundational myth, the trade-off between autonomy and security has long been a problematic scenario in American culture. Iron Man’s fundamental promise, as established here, is that sufficient wealth and innovation (only possible under the conditions provided in the United States) has the potential to avoid having to negotiate a trade-off between freedom and security. Although

American security forces are present, and the comic depicts them favourably, Stark does not have to surrender his personal autonomy to them in exchange for safety; he can protect himself, on his own terms, which also suggests implicitly that he could protect himself against a corrupt state if he had reason to do so. As discussed in Chapter Two, the relationship between freedom and security is widely perceived as an impasse for liberal states. Although the comic depicts American state power as just and benevolent, it indirectly reflects fears of tyranny and subjection under different conditions.

For example, I would argue that the trade-off between freedom and security is most apparent in the depiction of the Vietnamese villagers, who have no benevolent state to protect them. Instead, they are reliant on the highly conditional and exploitative protection of a

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tyrant. Although Stark frees the villagers temporarily, there is no guarantee that they will remain free. Their freedom is unsecured, because they are shown as being incapable of guaranteeing it for themselves; early pages of the issue show Wong-Chu offering freedom to any villager who can best him in a wrestling match. None succeed, and so their bondage is depicted as inevitable until Iron Man intervenes. This, again, is another fantasy illustrative of the paternalistic approach that the US took towards the Vietnamese population: beginning in

1965, the US forcibly relocated South Vietnamese citizens into fortified hamlets, removing them from their ancestral land. Although this disrupted Viet Cong intelligence networks as intended, it was immensely politically costly, as the Vietnamese villagers turned against the

US and South Vietnamese government and began to actively support the Viet Cong (Arreguin-

Toft, 2001).

In Tales of Suspense, the Vietnamese are strongly othered. Stark is capable of inventing the Iron Man suit not just because he is exceptional, but because he is exceptionally American – an enviable figure of entrepreneurial American masculinity, having taken advantage of all the opportunity that America offers. Tales of Suspense describes Stark as a “glamorous playboy, constantly in the company of beautiful, adoring women”, who in turn gossip to one another that “he’s the dreamiest thing this side of Rock Hudson!” (#39, 1963, p. 4). This illustrates the entanglement, I argue, of key American values with security. America provides the necessary conditions for Tony Stark to live out a fantasy of individual security, but those conditions also need ongoing protection. Similarly, in states without American values, the freedom and security of ordinary people are inherently precarious.

As a result, the comic plays out an attachment to ideals of self-determination and individual sovereignty, as demonstrated by Tony Stark assuming the role of the state in ensuring his own protection. In single-handedly defeating Wong-Chu and liberating the villagers, he acts as a surrogate for the American armed forces. Of course, self-determination,

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along with suspicion of state sovereignty, has historically been a key American value. Ashley

Suffle Robinson (2018) reads Iron Man as a futuristic re-invigoration of the classic frontier hero. Where I argue Iron Man differs, however, is that its fantasy of self-determination has always been ambivalent, such that the attachment is cruelly optimistic. Where Robinson deliberately discusses Tony Stark and Iron Man as separate characters, I argue that they should be seen as two facets of a conflicted cyborg identity. This aspect of Iron Man is important because it undermines the fantasy of self-determination. The cyborg challenges the integrity of a coherent, stable sovereign identity, and so Stark becomes something that he cannot fully anticipate or control.

Tales of Suspense #39 frames the origin of Iron Man as the creation of a new life form – not simply an addendum to Stark’s human body, but as an entity somehow both separate and intertwined. Professor Yinsen refers to the invention as a “mighty electronic body” with a

“life-giving heart” (#39, 1963, p. 8) which implies a reading of the suit as a surrogate or replacement for Tony’s wounded body, rather than a suit of armour to be worn. This takes on a new dimension in two panels on page 11, when the newly minted Iron Man pauses to reflect on his condition. In the first panel, Iron Man is vanishingly small and low in the frame, surrounded by images of himself – the shadow looming, the impassive face of the suit reflected in the mirror – suggesting a diffraction of selfhood. This monologue, in which Stark refers to himself/Iron Man as a ‘thing’ and wonders whether it (not he) will survive), is almost apostrophic, projecting an inhuman identity onto the thing that he has become but cannot define:

They’re coming! This is my greatest test! Can the thing I have created survive? The thing which is less than human... yet, far more than merely human! This thing which is now—Anthony Stark!! My brain still thinks! My heart still beats! But, in order to remain alive, I must spend the rest of my life in this iron prison!! (#39, 1963, p. 11)

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Although he names himself, acknowledging that man and machine are inextricable, he cannot quite bring himself to identify with the new entity fully. His despair becomes clear in the second panel, in which his hands obscure the inhumanity of the mask and his monologue highlights the trade-off that his security requires – maintaining a permanent barrier around his vulnerable body not only traps him in an ‘iron prison’ but has permanently transformed him into a different type of organism.

Indeed, I would argue that the cyborg metaphor is indicative of anxieties arising from a greater trend in the United States armed forces towards ‘atmospheric warfare’, which

“sought to enclose, police, and pacify hostile forms of life” (Shaw, 2016, p. 659). Ian G. R. Shaw argues that in the Vietnam War, tactics of chemical warfare – which radically and destructively transformed the Vietnamese landscape – and electronic surveillance and mapping of the battlefield – which “enclosed the enemy’s lifeworld inside a simulated, cybernetic environment” (2016, p. 659) - illustrated a shift towards a mode of warfare that focuses not on the body of the enemy but on the enemy’s environment. This strategy has a long genealogy; Peter Sloterdijk argues that it can be traced back to gas warfare in World War

I (Sloterdijk, 2009). Although the full biopolitical horrors of the Vietnam War would not manifest in public discourse for some years following Tales of Suspense, the Iron Man suit has proven a remarkably adaptable metaphor for the biopolitical and affective ramifications of

United States warfare. Even in 1963, it encompasses both body and environment, indicating a recognition that protecting the body of the privileged group may mean undermining the survivability of their environment and perhaps risks altering them beyond recognition. Of course, this is a model that extends only to the experience of those being protected; it ignores the experiences of those deemed threatening or expendable. But it illustrates the early and perhaps most foundational tensions inherent in superpowered security.

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Because transforming into Iron Man requires imprisonment and perhaps even abjection, the freedom/security dilemma has not been resolved completely, only individualised. The price of survival for Stark is to be trapped inside the prophylactic barrier that protects him, which the comic presents as a tragic (if heroic) fate. Although there is always the promise that technology could intervene further to free Stark from the iron body, as indeed it does in later comics, the essential trade-off remains constant: sacrifice is necessary in order to secure against an existential threat, and the resultant changes to freedom and autonomy may not be possible to control. But because Stark is on the brink of death, there is no real choice to be made; the only option is to build the suit and deal with the cost later. As Mark Neocleous argues, even in a paradigm where freedom and security mutually constitute one another, security always takes precedence (2007b).

Tales of Suspense #39 ends with the victorious Iron Man pushing through the jungle, fearful of a future in which he remains forever changed. But even in later comics when Stark no longer relies on the suit to keep his heart pumping, the optimistic potential of the Iron Man suit – survival for all, plus survival of the values that allow Iron Man to exist – stops him from relinquishing it entirely. In Berlantian terms, Stark cannot consider parting from the object of his attachment because doing so would mean abandoning his purpose. In this comic, Stark’s immediate purpose is small: escape, vengeance and, of course, survival. But the implications of

Stark’s survival are much greater: as a genius inventor, he can create a future that no one else could achieve, and as Iron Man, he can secure it.

A major problem with this individualist fantasy, of course, is that individuals are fallible, a problem highlighted in the Demon in a Bottle story arc, which ran from March to

November 1979 - six years after the withdrawal of US troops from Vietnam following a disastrous war. Accordingly, Demon in a Bottle presents a complex and morally ambiguous image of both Iron Man and US foreign policy, which was complicated by internal divisions

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(for example, over the value of détente versus confrontation and containment with the Soviet

Union) and the United States’ and reliance on foreign trade, especially for oil. Grand strategy in this period, according to Mark Moyar, was characterised by deep disagreement between liberal thinkers – for whom poverty was the greatest threat to the United States, “because of the resentment they believed it created against the United States” (2009, p. 596) – and conservative thinkers, for whom conventional military capabilities and ideological cohesion was paramount. Demon in a Bottle therefore challenges the naïve view of American exceptionalism evident in Tales of Suspense, as it highlights the internal tensions, dependencies and weaknesses that undermine the grand narrative of a special nation and mission.

In Demon in a Bottle, Tony Stark (now capable of living outside the Iron Man suit, and settled into a secret double life as Tony Stark/Iron Man) battles alcoholism, a coping mechanism that erodes his physical wellbeing, his emotional stability, his relationships with loved ones, and eventually his ability to perform his mission as Iron Man. This arc illustrates a self-destructive response to constant crisis, in which Iron Man had then been immersed for sixteen years, indicating an awareness of the ongoing costs of securitization and exceptional measures. But it also reflects a breakdown of trust in the institutions that Tales of Suspense

#39 presented so favourably, from the United States military to large corporations. In critiquing these institutions and Iron Man, Demon in a Bottle grapples with the failures and structural problems facing the United States in the late 1970s – failures that I argue it attributes, at least in part, to the naïve optimism of Iron Man’s 1963 origins. In the 1970s Iron

Man, unbridled individualism results in Iron Man’s toxic insistence on coping with his problems alone; the opportunity and prosperity promised by a capitalist system manifest in profiteering corporations plundering the earth; and the heroic exceptionalism of the

American security state is shown to be ineffectual or counterproductive. Demon in a Bottle, in other words, exposes the fault lines and vulnerabilities in the fantasy of Tales of Suspense #39. 122

One way in which Demon in a Bottle does this is by expanding on the identity confusion introduced in Tales of Suspense #39. Just as Iron Man’s cyborg nature destabilizes the fantasy of individual security proposed in the origin, Iron Man’s split identity allows

Demon in a Bottle to interrogate the optimistic promises invested in each aspect of the superhero. A central theme of Demon in a Bottle is Stark’s growing attachment to the fiction that he and Iron Man are different people. After Tales of Suspense, Stark publicly pretends that

Iron Man is his bodyguard, a nameless employee of Stark Industries wearing the suit Stark created. Iron Man and Tony Stark are therefore linked much more closely in the public eye than (for example) Bruce Wayne and Batman, especially as Iron Man not only protects Stark’s corporate interests but has to be ‘loaned’ to emergency defence initiatives such as the

Avengers. Iron Man is therefore a distinctly capitalist manifestation of the superhero’s ability to privatize justice and defence, in other words, which reflects the fact that America would become increasingly neoliberal over the course of the decades to come.

In Demon in a Bottle, unbridled individualism is depicted with the cracks showing, as the arc illustrates the risks of relying on a lone hero dealing with “pressures and responsibilities far beyond those of his peers” (#128, 1979, p. 2) without support from society at large. Demon in a Bottle takes place during a stressful few days in which Stark is worn down by a series of difficult battles, discovers that his ally Nick Fury (the director of the United

States espionage agency S.H.I.E.L.D.) is attempting a secret takeover of Stark Industries to force Stark to restart weapons development for the military, and grapples with the increasing unreliability of the Iron Man suit. Stark responds to these frustrations in increasingly toxic ways, either by lashing out violently or by turning to alcohol, which lead to a series of repeated failures as Iron Man. Unbeknownst to Stark, his corporate rival Justin Hammer is remotely sabotaging the Iron Man suit, which makes it easy for Stark to blame his failures on malfunctioning technology. But by the end of the series, this excuse is no longer sufficient;

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Iron Man continually denies his problems with anger and alcohol, alienates his friends and allies, and finally causes catastrophic damage while drunkenly piloting the Iron Man suit.

In an early issue, Demon in a Bottle revisits Iron Man’s origin story in a flashback.

Following a disastrous and disappointing encounter with a mercenary company, masquerading as an American special forces unit but secretly paid by Roxxon Oil to exploit the natural resources of a pristine island wilderness, Iron Man soars over the ocean and reflects on his heroic mission:

And as the sound of four-part harmony and pedal steel guitar mix with the whistle of rushing air, the mind of the man in the metal mesh armour begins, for the first time in weeks, to relax… abandoning its crust of recent betrayal, of politics and perfidy, for the more clearly drawn lines of the past, for a time when ideals had outweighed reality… (#122, 1979, p. 5)

The tongue-in-cheek reference to “the more clearly drawn lines of the past” not only suggests nostalgia for the simpler times of the 1960s, but explicitly draws attention to the constructed nature of good and evil within the panels of a comic book. Indeed, while the retold origin story closely follows the beats and visual cues of the first, it reframes key elements in moralistic terms. As a munitions developer for the United States army, Stark’s face is rendered in the harsh black lines of a villain, suggesting that he remembers his transformation into Iron Man as a form of redemption or absolution. On the other hand, the existential angst of that transformation is toned down – reduced to a single panel, with no pronoun confusion – in favour of optimistic wonder at the iron body’s “incredible power!” (#122, 1979, p. 11).

Significantly, there are many more overt references to Iron Man’s heroic mission in this version of the origin story, such as in the third panel above: the concern over becoming a

‘man of iron’ is quickly smoothed over by recognition of Iron Man’s potential to destroy evil.

When Iron Man faces Wong-Chu, their showdown is framed in terms of dreams: Wong-Chu exclaims “You are like something out of a nightmare!” to which Iron Man replies, “Perhaps,

Wong-Chu. But you are a crusher of dreams! And so is it not fitting that the one… should 124

destroy the other?” (#122, 1979, p. 13). Where Tales of Suspense leaves Iron Man’s heroic mission relatively open and unspecified, leaving the broad strokes of the United States’ objectives in Vietnam to fill the gap, Demon in a Bottle retrospectively applies the tropes of the genre, referring to the mission at every point of doubt or uncertainty. By drawing attention to the artificiality and constructed nature of the origin story, the writers indicate that Stark’s fantasy is inherently a misrecognition – a post-hoc rationalization of his present actions. It is a comforting fantasy, because the lines are so clearly drawn, but it breaks down when Stark is forced to confront flaws that do not conform to the heroic archetype it establishes.

This is especially clear in the first conflict of the arc, occurring prior to the flashback, in which Demon in a Bottle implies that the traditional superhero dichotomy of good and evil is suspect as well – especially in contrast to the clear nationalist distinctions drawn in Tales of

Suspense #39. In the first conflict, Tony Stark’s international flight is interrupted when a tank collides with his aircraft. As Iron Man, he saves the plane and traces the tank to a small uncharted island where a company of soldiers, wearing United States military uniforms, is fighting another superhero – an ecological warrior from the ocean, Namor – over the island’s resources. The captain of the special forces unit asks Iron Man to stop Namor from interfering with their mission, but after a disastrous fight with Namor in which the Iron Man suit is remotely sabotaged by a corporate rival, Iron Man and Namor realise that the soldiers are in fact mercenaries in the pay of Roxxon Oil, masquerading as legitimate military forces. When their cover is blown, the mercenaries blow up the island so that no one can access the island’s vibranium (a rare and powerful metal unique to the Marvel universe). Although the United

States navy finally arrives on the scene, they are ineffectual – they can clean up, to a certain extent, but they find no evidence to implicate Roxxon Oil. The story ends with disillusionment: the villains get away with their crimes, the island is destroyed (polluting the ocean) and the lone man who lived there, although rescued by Iron Man and Namor, loses both his home and his dream of a simple life. 125

This short storyline is instructive because it reflects the historical circumstances of the

1970s and illustrates why Iron Man’s origin story may play out differently sixteen years on. By

1979, in contrast to the techno-utopian optimism of Tales of Suspense #39, the Vietnam War had ended disastrously, and the United States was beset by crises that threatened the economy and environment alike. Following the 1973 oil crisis, the world entered a period of recession in which inflation and unemployment rose. The resulting stagflation and low economic growth continued in the United States throughout the 1970s. The 1979 publication of Demon in a Bottle coincided with a second oil crisis, which caused widespread panic as the

Iranian Revolution halted oil production, and the Three Mile Island nuclear accident, which occurred just days before the publication of Demon in a Bottle’s second issue. In Demon in a

Bottle, neither technology nor wealth can be credibly seen as solutions to these problems.

These disillusionments are thematized using the device of dreams, suggesting that the issue engages with the loss of collective national dreams: the depiction of the US military indicates a loss of confidence in national institutions; corporations appear as either amoral profiteers or outright saboteurs, indicating the failure of the free market to incentivize ethical behaviour; and finally the conflict between the two heroes dramatizes the breakdown of the

‘clearly drawn lines of the past’, in which the hero and villain are clearly demarcated by values, rather than miscommunication and an inability (or unwillingness) to communicate. At the end of the conflict, Namor offers a critique of human politics:

“I cannot help wondering if these mighty nations you worry over, in their insatiable pursuit of commerce and trade – have not lost sight of prizes of even greater value. Those rare and wonderful treasures called… dreams.” (#121, 1979, p. 19)

The final panel of this speech frames Hiram Dobbs, the man rescued from the island, as he silently cries on board a Navy ship. Dobbs is a minor but significant figure, as his backstory reveals an old-fashioned pioneering mentality reminiscent of the old American frontier. He tells Namor and Iron Man that he and his late wife were disillusioned with modern America’s

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obsession with capital and modernity, so they travelled to the island to live on their own.

When the mercenaries of Roxxon Oil destroy the island, they symbolically destroy the dream of an older America alongside Dobbs’ home and his wife’s grave.

Paradoxically, although the Iron Man suit is a product of both capital and modernity,

Demon in a Bottle links it to this lost dream of simpler times via the device of heroism and the flashback to Iron Man’s origin. The idea that the Vietnam War – or even the Old West – represented simpler times of black and white morality is, of course, deeply suspect. Although

Demon in a Bottle (which, although far less constrained by the Comics Code than its predecessor, was still bound to represent American institutions in a positive light) takes a small step towards a complex depiction of the conflict in its rendering of Tony Stark as a villainous weapons developer, it nevertheless uses the tropes of heroism to gloss over a controversial and traumatic chapter of American history. It is important to note, of course, that Stark is a deeply unreliable judge of his own character and history throughout the course of this arc, and so his recollection of his origin in Vietnam is unavoidably coloured by his clear desire to vindicate his actions. Hiram Dobbs is likewise portrayed as an eccentric anomaly, which complicates a reading of the arc as straightforward nostalgia for times past.

The bulk of the comic, however, deals with Iron Man’s slide into alcoholism, propensity to violent outbursts against his friends, and resentment of his dual identities.

Justin Hammer’s remote sabotage of the Iron Man suit – in one memorable case, triggering the suit’s weapons to assassinate an ambassador at a public event – leads Tony Stark to displace his anger and disappointment in his own behaviour onto the suit and his heroic identity. In a drunken rage, he smashes a photo of Iron man and thinks “God help me. There are times when

I hate Iron Man... almost as much as I need him!” (#125, 1979, p. 7). Illustrating the cruel optimism of his attachment to Iron Man, Stark occasionally addresses his heroic identity apostrophically: “You’re supposed to be my greatest invention, my knight in shining armour to right all the world’s wrongs. And now even little children are scared of you. “Iron Man”? 127

Hah! Iron nothing” (#127, 1979, p. 13). When Stark realises that the Iron Man suit is not to blame for his actions, however, he drunkenly rejects his civilian identity instead: “Since Tony

Stark is behind all my problems, I’ll just stop being Tony Stark!” (#128, 1979, p. 4). He then attempts to assuage his guilt over assassinating the ambassador, alienating his friends, and failing to live up to his values, but his attempts to reclaim his heroic purpose fail spectacularly: he tries to intervene in a train crash where a tanker of chlorine gas has fallen from the tracks, but drunkenly drops the tanker and causes a leak. Instead of staying to fix the problem he has caused, he flees the scene.

In contrast with Tales of Suspense, in which the transformative imbrication of man and machine is played up as a tragedy, Demon in a Bottle instead presents the Iron Man suit – and the military-technological apparatus it represents – as a disposable prosthesis, like a crutch that can be set aside when no longer needed. Curiously, however, the storyline also does this with the capitalist persona of Tony Stark – each identity effectively becomes a detachable prosthesis onto which fantasies, desires and fears can be projected.

Matthew Costello views this series of maskings and unmaskings, in which Tony Stark swaps, tests and discards identities, as an indication of “the collapse of the hegemonic myth of consensus” (2009, p. 102) that began to characterise US national identity in the 1950s. Over the course of the Cold War, Costello argues, this myth of a unified public identity – through which Americans could see themselves as equal citizens of a virtuous, divinely-inspired nation founded on ideals of freedom and progress – broke down under the strain of the Vietnam War,

Watergate and the national conflict over civil rights. Iron Man’s identity crisis therefore reflects a deeper conflict over the identity of the nation, as even “the most ardent of Marvel’s

Cold Warriors” (Costello, 2009, p. 63) in the 1960s struggles to reconcile his heroic mission with the compromises, failures and disappointments of American actions throughout the Cold

War. In a sense, this storyline prefigures what Costello argues were a series of unsuccessful attempts by US politicians to reassert this myth throughout the 1980s and beyond. Through 128

the figure of the Iron Man suit, which enables both Stark’s triumphs and failures, Demon in a

Bottle highlights the fact that America’s failures and virtues arise from the same premise.

To build on Costello’s argument, I suggest that this story arc reflects an ambivalent orientation towards national fantasies of both past and future. Although the Iron Man suit is an icon of the future, it is also firmly rooted in nostalgic ideals of heroism and chivalry; it/he is supposed to be a “knight in shining armor” (#127, 1979, p. 13). As a result, Iron Man promises the best and worst of both fantasies, a contradiction which cannot easily be resolved. Demon in a Bottle further destabilises these ideals by placing them under the pressure of a harsh and complicated world which resists salvation; neither classic heroism nor cutting-edge technology is enough to solve complex problems, and in fact Demon in a Bottle shows both strategies going horrifically wrong. Yet the arc maintains its attachment to both past and future, through the idealistic lens of dreams.

By the end of the arc, the Iron Man suit and the heroic role that goes with it are both absolved of wrongdoing - first because the reader knows that Justin Hammer’s sabotage is responsible for much of the destruction it causes, and secondly when Tony Stark realises that he is wrong to blame the suit for his troubles. As a result, the primary positive fantasy offered by the suit is cemented as the promise of power and freedom – a double-edged promise, because if that power is not used responsibly the consequences are disastrous. In the final issue, when Stark takes full responsibility for his actions and accepts help from his friend,

Bethany, his choice is framed as a sacrifice in service of his heroic mission:

But Bethany’s words fight with him, reminding him that his life’s dream has been to help others, either through superheroic exploits or through modern miracles of design... and always to the exclusion of his own personal pains and prejudices. The drink... or the dream? Each heads a path that he knows will take him through the rest of his life. (#128, 1979, p. 18)

Of course, Stark chooses the dream – the last panel of the issue shows brilliant sunlight as

Bethany drives him down the highway. But although Demon in a Bottle ends with Tony

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seeking help from friends, it is a long road to the realization that neither violence nor technology is appropriate to overcome the threat that he himself has the potential to pose to himself and others. Demon in a Bottle therefore interrogates the ideal of a trustworthy protector, undermining the individualist paradigm set up by Tales of Suspense #39 – yet still maintaining the core attachment to heroism itself.

These two origin stories establish the core promises invested in the Iron Man mythos: one sets up themes of American exceptionalism and the promise of societal improvement through technological innovation, while the other introduces themes of addiction, suspicion of hegemonic institutions, and idealistic dreams shattered by the reality of a harsh world. Iron

Man can therefore be read as a neoliberal fantasy that nevertheless remains suspicious of neoliberalism. Entrepreneurial freedoms provide a net societal benefit when carried out by

Tony Stark – an exceptional person and therefore an exception to the general rule of corporate abuse and greed – but they lead to clear and almost inevitable danger when available to anyone else. This is an enduring dynamic throughout the history of the character: when the United States government has access to Stark’s technology, they build weapons that harm civilians and are leaked to terrorists, while Stark’s corporate rivals resort to theft, espionage and collateral damage in search of greater profits. The origins of Iron Man, therefore, firmly root the character in a nexus of anxieties about neoliberal capitalism, such as fears that the free market alone cannot effectively punish unethical corporate behaviour, and that individual people are therefore at a disadvantage in the modern world. I would like to add, however, that Iron Man not only engages with these anxieties but securitizes them, by framing them as vulnerabilities, threats or even transparently evil nemeses to be fended off by exceptional measures.

In his book Capitalist Superheroes, Dan Hassler-Forrest argues that although superhero narratives are popular because “they appeal to cultural fantasies of overcoming the crisis of agency that is in so many ways fundamental to late capitalism” (2012, p. 42), they 130

only provide the illusion of escape. Although Hassler-Forrest correctly argues that superheroes rarely if ever challenge the structural features of society that cause the problems that the superheroes must fight against (the example he gives is Batman’s inability to ever repair Gotham’s broken justice system) it may be more productive to view Iron Man’s inability to imagine a truly viable fantasy of individualised security as an instance of impasse rather than illusion. In this impasse, technology (stimulated by the incentives and opportunities of the free market) is positioned as the key not only to improve society, but to gain the security required to live freely. Because security technology presupposes threat, however – and in this origin story more than any, we are reminded that security technologies grow out of war – then when these technologies become more widely available, they become a threat to security, and so the paradigm undermines itself.

4.2 Control issues: Cold War anxieties in ‘Armor Wars I’ and ‘Technical Difficulties’

In later storylines, Iron Man’s potency as a symbol of invincibility and power is further tempered by a suspicion that to appear this way – either as a superhero or as a state – is to invite challenge, and that the cumulative weight of these challenges acts as pressure to double down, essentially locking the actor into an arms race or deterrence cycle. Furthermore, these comics suggest that this is true even if there is no known antagonist threatening the nation. By the end of the Cold War, the US had poured trillions of dollars into defence – not just into its own military capabilities, but also into proxy wars (such as the 1978-1989 Soviet-Afghan war) designed to contain their Soviet antagonists. President Reagan in particular – sceptical of détente and mistrusting the Soviets (Wilson, 2007) – accelerated military expenditure in the early 1980s, most infamously with the Strategic Defense Initiative. The SDI, derisively called

‘Star Wars’ by its critics, was rooted in the fantasy that as-yet undiscovered technologies like missile shields, “particle beam technology, high energy lasers and space weapons” (Wilson,

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2007, p. 785) could intercept a nuclear first strike before it hit the United States, and would therefore free the American public from the constant terror of nuclear annihilation:

What if free people could live secure in the knowledge that their security did not rest upon the threat of instant US retaliation to deter a Soviet attack, that we could intercept and destroy strategic ballistic missiles before they reached our own soil or that of our allies? (Reagan, 1983)

This is, of course, an element of the fantasy provided by Iron Man – a character whose powers had long premediated both the ambitions and the risks posed by the SDI. If the United States could harness the same powers of enterprise and innovation that led to the moon landing, so the theory went, then the Strategic Defense Initiative might provide something approaching absolute security, so that ‘never again’ would the United States have to experience the terror of vulnerability.

As with all fantasies of superpowered security, however, this dream contained the seeds of its own destruction: security via advanced military technology is forever contingent on control of that technology. The risk of proliferation, paradoxically, renders any technology that guarantees the nation’s safety as a potent source of vulnerability and fear, such that the affective strain of insecurity continues even when no major threats exist. This anxiety regarding military technology is reflected in two Iron Man comic storylines spanning the late

80s and early 90s, which present contrasting depictions of Tony Stark’s growing dependence on the Iron Man technology and persona. In these comics, the cost of permanent emergency becomes painfully apparent, as Iron Man fails to escape a toxic cycle of exceptional measures that erode first his moral compass and later his physical health.

In Armor Wars, which ran from 1987-1988, Stark learns that his suit technology has been stolen and replicated by villains across the world. Guiltstricken by the thought of his technology harming people, Stark goes to extreme lengths to retain control of his intellectual property and keep it out of the hands of others, including his allies. This storyline is significant because it depicts Stark’s desire for control over his technology as both warranted by

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the threat he faces but also dangerous – at times, even pathological. As Stark’s obsession grows stronger, his actions become more extreme and at times the story positions him as a clear villain, which suggests a reading of American politics in which Cold War policies of containment and deterrence undermine their own goals. Although American relations with the Soviet Union gradually warmed throughout the 1980s, as Mikhail Gorbachev promoted the liberalizing reforms of Glasnost and Perestroika, the fundamental concerns regarding nuclear proliferation – and the possibility that mutually assured destruction would be necessary to keep the peace – remained. Armor Wars, in which Iron Man struggles to keep control of his own technology, can therefore be read as an apostrophic security dilemma, in which the fear of proliferation causes Iron Man to overcompensate and create new insecurities.

In contrast, the later story arc running from 1990 to 1992 showed a paraplegic Tony struggling to regain control of his body, which had been puppeted by a mechanical nervous system parasite deployed by one of his enemies. With a weakened nervous system and increasingly grievous injuries, piloting the Iron Man suit would become so taxing that it threatened Stark’s life. Finally, in September 1992, Tony Stark died. For nearly half a year afterwards, the book was led by James Rhodes, Stark’s bodyguard, who assumed the role of

Iron Man and would later become War Machine. Although later issues would revive Stark and allow him to cybernetically rewire his own nervous system, this story arc is significant because it depicts the relationship between Stark and the Iron Man suit as a debilitating vulnerability. In this section, I will focus on the May 1992 issue ‘Technical Difficulties’ (#280), in which Stark is transported to a dystopian future and must confront both his impending mortality and the failure of the ideologies he lives by.

The Armor Wars storyline, which ran from December 1987 to July 1988, is essentially a story of a hero going off the rails, which I argue responds to anxieties about the proliferation of nuclear weapons and the affective consequences of deterrence logic. As Austin Long puts it, 133

deterrence is essentially “the generation of fear” (2008, p. 7). In Armor Wars, when Stark discovers his suit technology in the hands of a villain, he generates that fear for himself by imagining what could occur if evil people had control of the Iron Man technology – a suit which is effectively a superweapon. He decides to circumvent ordinary legal proceedings to regain control of his technology, an objective which rapidly becomes a paranoid and violent crusade to expunge all Stark suit technology from the world. This arc is notable because Stark faces no major antagonist, which mirrored the prospective political situation faced by the US in the penultimate years of the Cold War. In 1987 – the year in which Reagan and Gorbachev signed the landmark INF treaty – the Soviet Director of the Institute for US and Canadian

Studies, Georgy Arbatov, told his American interlocutors that “this time we will deal you a fatal blow by depriving you of an enemy” (Gros, 2019, pp. 110-111). Prior to this, America had been able to find, paradoxically, an inexhaustible source of security in the opposition presented by the Soviets. The end of the Cold War brought about a new sense of uncertainty and introspection, as the US confronted the possibility of a world in which the identities and capabilities of their opponents were as yet unknown. With no clear antagonist to secure against, Stark’s fear spins out of control and he rapidly becomes his own antagonist.

The comics use a variety of techniques to position Stark as the eventual villain of the arc, including one notable issue (#228) in which he storms a government facility, drugs the prison guards (who use modified versions of his suits to keep superpowered inmates under control) and forces Captain America to choose between stopping him or saving a guard’s life5.

In the next issue, Iron Man’s morality is compromised even further when he attacks and kills a

5 This scenario mirrors another in the earlier second issue of the comic, in which Iron Man is placed in a similar position to Captain America and chooses to save the life of a pilot held hostage by a suited enemy – even knowing that it might result in mission failure. Although Iron Man successfully finds a way to save the pilot and take down his adversary, Captain America has no such luck. When Captain America chooses to save the guard, Iron Man says that he would have done the same thing (significantly, in past tense) and knocks Captain American out. Although Iron Man’s original reason for regaining control of his technology was to save lives, by the fourth issue in the storyline the desire for control has superseded his basic heroic mission, such that he undermines the values he ostensibly wishes to preserve. 134

Soviet superhero known as Titanium Man, who not only uses suit components derived from

Stark technology but can also be read as a grotesque mirror of Iron Man. Titanium Man is piloted by Kondrati Topolov, also known as Gremlin for his small stature and disproportionately large head – the result of a mutation inherited from his father. Like Tony

Stark, Topolov possesses genius intellect and a mechanical suit with similar capabilities – flight, enhanced strength, life support and internal energy weapons. One of the key differences between the two men is the way each man inhabits his suit. Although the Iron Man suit fits

Tony Stark’s body like a skin, the diminutive Topolov sits inside a chamber within the

Titanium Man’s chest. The Titanium Man suit is slightly larger than the Iron Man suit, suggesting that Topolov uses it not only for combat but also as a social prosthesis, to project a powerful, normatively masculine appearance to the world. Although he is respected while wearing the Titanium Man armour in an official, public setting, his KGB handlers use belittling language to describe him when they spy on him without the suit, calling him a “little ferret” and his monologue an “infantile diatribe” (#229, 1988, p. 14). Perhaps because of this, Topolov is well aware of his affective reliance on his armour: “It is so good – so rare – to feel secure outside my armor!” (#229, 1988, p. 14). Several pages later, however, the Titanium

Man armour becomes a death trap: as he grapples Iron Man in the air, he fails to notice that

Iron Man’s boot jets are hot enough to ignite titanium, and he burns to death within his armour.

Topolov, like most of the Soviet characters in this issue, is not presented as a sympathetic character (although his paranoid suspicion that the KGB is willing to betray him turns out to be accurate) but this makes him a significant counterpoint for the increasingly unstable Tony Stark. While Topolov is literally consumed by his armour, Stark is consumed by an obsession with controlling and eventually eradicating his own. Both of these attachments are rational – Topolov requires his armour to defend his life and his status, and Stark has

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proof that his technology is being misused – but both men express their relation to their armour in jealous terms. When Topolov is warned that Iron Man is coming after him, he rejects help from the KGB out of suspicion, telling the Crimson Dynamo (another Soviet hero in a mechanised suit) that “[t]he KGB are full of lies! They would try any trick to gain possession of my armor! You may enjoy risking your life for the party line, my friend-- --but the Titanium Man answers to no one but himself!” (#229, 1988, p. 8).

Although Stark’s concerns are phrased in significantly more sympathetic language, his actions throughout the storyline indicate a similar paranoia that the suit technology will escape his grasp – and that no one else can possibly be trusted with it, despite clear evidence that even he can misuse it. In an inversion of Titanium Man’s refusal to answer to anyone but himself, Stark takes full responsibility for any harm done using his technology: “all the damage he caused, every bit of pain, of suffering... falls squarely on my shoulders” (#225,

1987, pp. 8-9). Even the suits used by his allies are objects of suspicion, as indicated by these rationalisations of his actions: “The Guardsmen themselves aren’t evil, but I can’t take the chance that their armor could fall into evil hands” (#228, 1988, p. 6). By the time

Stark realises that his own right to use the suit could be questioned, Iron Man has been fired from Stark Industries, expelled from the Avengers, and is wanted for extradition to Russia to face murder charges. It is only when his own Iron Man suit is destroyed by the United States

Army (issue #230 ends on a cliff-hanger as a young soldier stares at the Iron Man helmet, busted open and splattered with blood) that Stark considers whether it might be better not to rebuild it at all.

Stark’s self-destructive behaviour in this arc is an essentially flawed attempt to protect society from the threat posed by his own weapons, which mirrors the immunitary logic identified by Jacques Derrida and Roberto Esposito (among others) in contemporary security discourse. Immunitary logic and security logic have significant parallels, which makes the 136

former an attractive biological metaphor for the latter. Immunologists Richard Coico and

Geoffrey Sunshine write that:

In many ways the immune system can be described in anthropomorphic terms: its memory allows it to remember and recognize pathogens years or decades after initial exposure; it can distinguish between the body’s own cells and those of another organism; and it makes decisions about how to respond to particular pathogens – including whether or not to respond at all… (2015, p. 1)

In this sense, a national security apparatus can be viewed as akin to an immune system: both seek to demarcate interior from exterior, to distinguish threats from benign outsiders, and to protect the vulnerable interior against a hostile incursion. Of course, the above description of the immune system is itself a metaphor – the cells and antibodies that compose real immune systems do not have agency or make decisions in the way that people do – but the logic of the metaphor provides a useful comparison for theorists seeking to critique the underlying assumptions and self-destructive consequences of security logic.

As Derrida in particular argues, the immunitary metaphor provides the tools for its own deconstruction via autoimmunity. Biologically speaking, autoimmunity is a phenomenon in which an immune response is directed against the body’s own cells and tissues, which can sometimes result in autoimmune disease: the immune system damaging itself or the body it is supposed to protect. For Derrida, autoimmunity is “the strange illogical logic by which a living being can spontaneously destroy, in an autonomous fashion, the very thing within it that is supposed to protect it against the other, to immunize it against the aggressive intrusion of the other” (2005, p. 123). As Derrida suggests, autoimmunity is not always unwanted, in fact it is necessary to counterbalance the effects of immunity itself. Far from being an ideal state of safety, perfect immunity is in fact a threat to the living organism, Derrida argues, as it is the ability to encounter the other that allows the living ego to constitute itself. This may be true in a biological sense as well; studies investigating the ‘hygiene hypothesis’ strongly support the idea that some degree of exposure to infections in childhood may have a protective effect in

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later life, leading to a lower incidence of allergy and autoimmune dysfunction (Martinelli,

Agmon-Levin, Amital, & Shoenfeld, 2015). Autoimmunity thus operates as a vital constraint or limitation on immunity.

The biological mechanisms of autoimmunity are not fully understood, but there is strong evidence that autoimmunity may be necessary for the proper function of the immune system – immunity against the self is as necessary as immunity against the other. Self-reactive or autoimmune T-cells (lymphocytes capable of attacking the body) are naturally produced by the body, along with suppressor T-cells which act to regulate the body’s immune response and create a level of tolerance. Although autoimmunity is frequently considered only in terms of disease, there is evidence that self-reactive T-cells may have a beneficial role in healing damaged tissue and clearing cancerous or dead cells, such that higher levels of self-reactive T- cells are correlated with longer lifespans (Álvarez-Fernández, De Monte, & Alessio, 2016; Lutz,

Binder, & Kaveri, 2009; Schwartz & Cohen, 2000). Without the regulatory effect of suppressor

T-cells, however, self-reactive T-cells are prone to dysfunction, leading to autoimmune disease.

As Armor Wars demonstrates, autoimmunity can be damaging in a way that echoes the logic of cruel optimism – while pure immunity itself is clearly both impossible and toxic, in

Derrida’s framing, uncontrolled autoimmunity (as with security) damages what it seeks to protect. This is in part due to the impossibility of perfectly distinguishing ‘friend’ from ‘foe’, especially within the risk-based logic of contemporary security practice. Derrida has argued that state behaviour such as the US response to 9/11 represents an autoimmune attack on its own democratic institutions, such that US democracy “must thus come to resemble these

[terrorist] enemies, to corrupt itself and threaten itself in order to protect itself against their threats” (2005, p. 40). To preserve freedom and democracy, the state must perversely restrict freedom and democracy. The fundamental dynamic of autoimmunity – and anxiety regarding

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the catastrophic consequences of autoimmune behaviour – is clearly evident in Iron Man storylines prior to 9/11, however – perhaps most prominently in Armor Wars.

In Armor Wars, Stark’s heroic mission to protect the world from the danger posed by his own weapons rapidly mutates into a ruthless autoimmune purge in which he targets everyone, including his own allies. Although Stark is perfectly capable of distinguishing his friends from his enemies in the present moment, he is obsessed by the potential instability of these categories over time. This point is driven home when Stark kills his ex-enemy Titanium

Man; the comic takes pains to point out that the Cold War is now over and the old friend/foe distinction can no longer be taken for granted. Consequently, there is no way to guarantee that Stark’s technologies, or the allies who possess them, will not at some point be turned against the nation; that today’s friend may become tomorrow’s foe. Destroying them entirely is the only way to negate the risk that they pose, even as Stark initially acknowledges that this risk is hypothetical. This demonstrates a further problem with autoimmunity, which is the impossibility of cleanly targeting a foe who has already permeated the interiority of an organism. Stark is incapable of targeting his technology without causing collateral damage to the wider tissue of the nation’s defenses, including himself (inasmuch as he perverts his heroic mission). The risk posed by the immune system – represented by the Iron Man suit – leads Stark to veer sharply towards auto-immune dysfunction, where the only way to protect the nation against its future self-destructive potential is to destroy what defends it now.

As a result, Armor Wars exemplifies the threat mentality described by Brian Massumi, where the endless possibility of threat necessarily leads to security, or immunity, unworking itself. The storyline presents a series of cascading immune responses, culminating in the US military’s final autoimmune destruction of the Iron Man suit. Yet although this act might seem to be a healthy form of autoimmunity – attacking a rogue or even cancerous cell in the US defence force – it is in fact corrupt too, as the Generals campaigning for Iron Man’s destruction are more interested in undermining Iron Man’s superiority than in defending the nation. As a 139

result, none of the arc’s immune responses are ultimately satisfying for the reader; they each raise the uncomfortable idea of the US attacking itself illegitimately. In this sense, Derrida’s immunitary logic is structurally similar to the logic of superpowered security that I have outlined so far in this chapter.

However, there is little biological evidence that autoimmune dysfunction is an inevitable consequence of the logic that immunity entails, as Derrida puts it. Rather, the scientific community’s developing understanding of immunity emphasises the complexity and unpredictability of autoimmune disease, with multiple environmental factors (such as infection) interacting to trigger and protect against different types of autoimmune disease simultaneously (Martinelli, Agmon-Levin & Shoenfeld, 2015). What better echoes Derrida’s fatalistic view of autoimmunity is a historically-informed style of immunological thinking described in Warwick Anderson and Ian R. Mackay’s history of autoimmunity, Intolerant

Bodies (2014), in which they note that the term ‘autoimmunity’ was not coined until the 1950s

– in the early years of the Cold War. Anderson and Mackay point out that “some aspects of the autoimmune scheme embody a style of Cold War thinking – especially its emphasis on surveillance, recognition, control, conformity, and regulation” (2014, p. 5). It might be argued that the comparison of biological immunity and security logic is recursive – each conceptual framework having been developed more or less in tandem with the other. The inevitability of autoimmune logic in the biological domain may be an artefact of its political counterpart, rather than a consequence of the biology itself.

Consequently, I would argue that Roberto Esposito’s formulation of autoimmunity is better suited to the superhero genre, and especially the Iron Man franchise’s depiction of self- destructive behaviour in the service of both security and capital. For Esposito, the biological and legal concepts of immunity must be considered together. In this formulation, immunity is linked to community, based on their common Latin root munus, which means variously a

“task”, “duty”, or “law” (Esposito, 2012, p. 14). If community means mutual obligation, then 140

immunity for Esposito is the condition where someone is exempt from that obligation. Like

Derrida, Esposito argues that immunity is a necessary condition for individuality – that which is private or individual is that which is not owed to the community. Yet immunity also threatens the community, as Timothy Campbell argues: “an attempt to immunise the individual from what is common ends up putting the community at risk as immunity turns upon itself and its constituent element” (2006, p. 4). In emphasising the danger that immunity can pose to the community, Armor Wars highlights the insecurity of community under a capitalist system.

Although superheroes act to preserve the community, Iron Man derives his superpowers (and therefore his ability to act on behalf of the community) from his private accumulation of wealth. Immunity through capital and elite status is therefore key to his powers, and is further framed as the precondition for a secure society. Without the ability to accumulate private wealth, the logic goes, the security conferred by technological marvels like the Iron Man suit is impossible. But Stark’s wealth in turn immunizes him against consequences for his rogue actions in Armor Wars, as Tony Stark is able to escape legal action by firing Iron Man and sacrificing the Iron Man suit. Stark’s exercise of de facto immunity from the law illustrates Esposito’s argument that “[c]ommunity is precisely what is sacrificed on the altar of individual self-preservation” (2012, p. 16). This highlights a key insecurity evident throughout the franchise: Stark’s defence of the community is always a gift, which means it can be withdrawn at any point. Yet throughout the franchise, whenever Stark withdraws from his community obligations into privileged immunity, he not only loses heroic legitimacy but also descends into self-destructive isolation.

The interdependency between community and immunity is most evident in the Iron

Man suit itself, which is simultaneously a symbol of both. It is made possible by Stark’s privileged immunity, and it makes his heroic immunisation of the community against threat possible in turn. But it is also the symbol of his heroic obligation to the community, whereby 141

he can only exercise his extraordinary power legitimately if he uses it to protect other people.

Community here poses a threat, as the suit is a vector through which Stark’s personal immunity can come under assault; the US government frequently attempts to claim the suit technology for the nation, and of course the suit is increasingly interwoven with Stark’s physiology. As such, the suit highlights the tensions between these two concepts and manifests the cruelly optimistic investment in fantasies of immunity – or, indeed, security.

For the majority of Armor Wars I, the armour is considered as a tool and objective, but in the epilogue it is framed more like a living organism. The epilogue issue represents an abrupt tonal shift away from the brightly coloured style that signifies the real world. The cover image depicts Iron Man with his helmet off, unconscious, strung up by rope with his hands behind his back, and the armour on his lower legs sparking and disintegrating.

Significantly, there is no flesh visible beneath the unravelling bands of armour and circuitry, only smoke and empty space, which foreshadows the overwhelming anxiety of this issue – that the suit, which in waking life can be considered nothing more than a dead object, is in fact part of its human occupant and can assert its presence forcibly. The previous issue ends with

Stark going to sleep after deciding that he will rebuild the Iron Man suit, because the benefits to the world outweigh the risks, and this issue depicts his nightmare. In the dream, a disoriented Stark hunts an unnamed monster, which feels “cold, like a cancer... cutting... eating... alive” (#232, 1988, p. 3), through an alien, mechanical hellscape. The monster turns out to be none other than his own burgeoning cyborg identity, represented first as a wildly coloured, disjointed mechanical figure in a roughly humanoid shape, and later as a monstrous fusion of that figure with Tony Stark himself. The issue is distinct from past issues for its surreal visuals, denoting Iron Man’s inner world, and its narration, in which Tony unsuccessfully attempts to distinguish himself from the monster he fears he has become.

This issue is worthy of close analysis because it demonstrates a serious identity crisis, which I read as an attempt to reconcile conflicting ideological positions. Having depicted 142

Tony’s identity crisis as a struggle for survival between two living organisms, the issue conflates that struggle with both physical and moral responsibility for lives lost in the transformation; and it interposes another Iron Man suit as an intermediary between Tony

Stark/Iron Man and the monster/Iron Man, which complicates what would otherwise be a straightforward binary. Although this intermediary-suit speaks like James Rhodes (an employee and confidante of Stark’s) the fact that it never removes its mask or confirms the identity of its wearer facilitates a reading of the character as a third facet of Iron Man – the public persona of servant and bodyguard, in addition to the warring monster and man. The confrontation itself enacts a scene of self-destruction and salvation in which the undesirable aspects of Stark’s personality are Othered and addressed apostrophically. The monster has agency, but no voice, and the various metaphors that Stark projects onto it suggest malevolence originating from both outside and within the self. He alternately calls it a

“vampire”, a “leech”, a “lover” (#232, 1988, p. 15), describes it as cancerous or parasitic, and identifies with it: “I’m the devil. Stealing my own soul” (#232, 1988, p. 14).

Throughout the issue, Layton and colourist Barry Windsor-Smith represent the fusion of man and machine using chaotic spatial composition and lurid colours, which are often the only way to distinguish between Tony Stark and the ‘monster’. When they grapple, Stark and the monster are differentiated by two factors: the presence of eyes behind the Iron Man mask, and the vivid, abstract colouring of the monster’s gauntlet compared to Tony’s solid red-and- silver suit. But this is complicated in subsequent pages, in which Tony’s helmet is blasted off his head and falls empty eyed to the floor, its innards revealed to be just as luridly coloured as the monster. The organic language used to characterise the monster – cancerous, humming, laughing, breeding – also breaks down the distinctions between them, especially as Tony himself is unusually impulsive and animalistic in this issue. His inner monologue – “I’ll shred its wires! Peel its bloody hide!” (#232, 1988, p. 6) – and his inelegant, desperate attempt to wrestle with the monster both suggest a struggle of primeval survival rather than 143

technological dominance. Even when Tony realises that he cannot reject the monster, but must accept it within himself, the fusion of his two warring aspects is depicted as violent, invasive and non-consensual.

Matthew Costello reads this story as an indictment of the “capitalist impulse” (2009, p. 177) at the heart of the Iron Man mythos. This storyline, for Costello, is a prime example of a trend that he sees developing throughout the 1970s and 1980s, where the American public, weary of divisive politics and the problematic quest for a singular national identity, retreated into individual or private life. ‘Stark Wars’ marks Iron Man’s retreat from his public role as a

Cold Warrior into a private life as a capitalist first and foremost. Costello argues that recapturing copyright, rather than saving lives, is the object of highest value in this storyline, and that by the end of the series, Stark has fallen from his previous heroic stature to become

“a private soldier and shill for a very large capitalist transnational corporation... There is no longer a pretense to serving a larger political cause or even a larger context beyond the corporation” (2009, p. 178). While I agree with Costello’s overall assessment that Stark’s heroic credentials are noticeably tarnished at the end of the series, I would also point out that the series uses Stark’s failure to fulfil his heroic mission to comment on the deep discomfort and moral compromise arising from reliance on advanced military technology like weapons of mass destruction. Contrary to Costello’s reading, I argue that this epilogue emphasizes the monstrosity of Stark’s divergence from his mission, problematizing his private gain and his escape from culpability.

As always, the figure of the cyborg complicates Stark’s decision to rebuild the Iron

Man suit. To continue on as he always has, without seriously addressing the logical flaws that led to his out-of-control behaviour, is shown to be at least partially monstrous; albeit motivated by legitimate fear of threat. In this issue, the symbolism of mutually assured destruction is turned inwards; rather than standing at an impasse with an enemy who can destroy him, Stark is forever warring with the impulse to destroy himself, as he 144

simultaneously contains the means to save the world and to destroy it. As Neal Curtis (2015) points out, this issue highlights the role of the Iron Man suit as pharmakon – both poison and cure. But the combination of organic/cyborg imagery in the epilogue evokes the sense of lost agency, of a change that is no longer escapable – if indeed it ever was. I would add to Curtis’ analysis that the tragedy of the Iron Man suit’s role as pharmakon is emphasised by the dependency that it creates; his entanglement with the suit has radically altered both him and the world, and it is no longer possible to go back. Stark’s attachment to the Iron Man suit, therefore, is well and truly a relation of cruel optimism by this stage, as despite its toxicity it does not seem possible for him to give it up.

This theme continues in the early 1990s, with a story arc spanning several years, in which Tony Stark finds himself increasingly dependent on the Iron Man suit even as it kills him to use it. Across this time period, Stark’s enemies wound him to the point of paraplegia, hack his nervous system to lock his consciousness inside a paralysed body, and reduce him to, effectively, a brain puppeting an iron suit. Using the suit as a surrogate body, to compensate for his disability, causes even further strain on his damaged nervous system, which means that using the suit to regain agency in the present robs him of agency in the future. The storyline finally ends with Stark’s death, in 1992 – albeit, in the tradition of comics, only temporarily.

Due to the relatively private nature of this conflict, Matthew Costello sees this storyline (and the decade more broadly) as apolitically individualist:

By the 1990s Marvel’s most political of characters has become devoid of politics, a mere cog in the capitalist machinery. Defending democracy, promoting national security, and securing some notion of justice is no longer relevant in these tales. Justice, for Iron Man, is whatever benefits Tony Stark. (2009, p. 179)

Rather than interpreting the introspective focus of these narratives as purely self-interested, however, I would argue that these stories instead reflect doubt over the efficacy (and ethics)

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of US intervention in the affairs of other states, and a conflicted late-Cold War recognition that such interventions both invite future attacks and incur heavy costs for the nation. In other words, this is a period defined by insecurity – both materially and in terms of national identity

– as the conditions of possibility for America to remain a heroic nation seem imperiled. This arc is worthy of study because it illustrates the capacity for the Iron Man suit to be framed as both enabling and disabling; secure and insecure; promising endurance in the short-term while in the long-term it saps Stark’s life.

Over this period, the armour is as much a target and a vulnerability as it is a defence.

But because it is also a prosthetic and life support system which empowers Tony to overcome physical injury and debility, its negative consequences are more or less an essential trade-off that must be borne in order to endure. In issue #266, for example, Stark summarises the basic dilemma he faces:

“Someone’s been attacking me – attacking Tony Stark – for weeks now… Using some kind of biological override to take control of my body. It’s only because of the control circuits in my helmet that I’m able to use this armor to defeat their control. But it also slows me down… makes me vulnerable.” (#266, 1991, p. 12)

I read Stark’s struggle to proceed with his heroic mission as a consequence of permanent emergency, in which the strategies that Iron Man deploys to combat each individual crisis ultimately undermines his ability to handle crises that never truly end – which reduces the scope of the crises he is capable of addressing. Normality, for Iron Man, is dominated by threat, and the exceptional measures that he uses to mitigate that threat are not survivable in the long term. In other words, in this arc the promises invested in the Iron Man suit start to break down.

This is exemplified in a late issue called Technical Difficulties, released in September

1992. By this point, Stark knows that he is dying; the strain on his body is too great and it is no longer possible for him to recover. Yet even knowing this, he is unable to stop using the Iron

Man suit, because the stakes are too high: using a “more powerful—and more demanding” 146

version of the suit designed for space combat has “drastically shortened” (#280, 1992, p. 2) his life, but it is also the means by which he can survive threats as massive as intergalactic war. He responds with rage and despair, declaring that he has been betrayed by everything he believes in:

“My condition is irreversible—and terminal. Medical science can’t cure it. Cybernetics can’t fight it. My vast fortune can’t buy it off.

I have to face the fact that I’m dying—and that there’s nothing you or I or anyone else can do about it. I’ve been betrayed—by science—by technology—by everything I believe in.

I’m all but dead already, inside. There’s nothing left of Anthony Stark—except this. This blasted metal shell!” (#280, 1992, p. 3)

Here, everything that underpins the Iron Man suit – that allows it both to exist and which it guarantees in turn – is implicated in Stark’s death. This is an existential threat which cannot be addressed using exceptional means, because exceptional means are to blame. Stark’s impending demise acts as a circuit-breaker, disrupting the circular cluster of interdependent promises invested in the Iron Man suit and in his heroic mission. If Stark’s genius, wealth and might – corresponding to the exceptional characteristics of America in the popular imagination – cannot secure his own future, then how can they secure a future for the world?

In fact, Stark’s ability to usher in a brighter future is further compromised when he is unexpectedly whisked away to the 28th century by an alien race, who are desperate for his help. These aliens call themselves the Stark, after Tony himself, because they owe not only their technological development but the structure of their society to a cache of Stark technology found drifting in space. The Stark leader, Sysop, tells Tony: “Only you can avert the holocaust which threatens to eradicate all life on this world… You are our progenitor… our patron… our god.” (#280, 1992, p. 11). Although the cache of Stark technology allowed them to achieve technological marvels – transforming their technology from “stone knives to

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nuclear fission” within a generation – the premises of the Stark civilization have led them to complete and total catastrophe. Sysop explains:

“Behold, Anthony Stark—the ruin of a world. Devastating war on the north-eastern continent, unceasing for five decades… Racial violence… Relentless exploitation of virgin territory, while the neglected infrastructures of cities already built crumble… Land poisoned by industrial wastes… We have lost control of the technology you gave us, and it threatens to destroy our race.” (#280, 1992, p. 13)

Although the Stark reassure Tony that this is not his fault, blaming their situation instead on their own greed and lust for power, it is difficult not to read Technical Difficulties as an indictment of contemporary capitalism. Although the audience is likely intended to agree that

Tony’s heroic nature exempts him from blame, the comic series consistently implies that the vast majority of others are unable to survive or unwilling to act ethically under such a system.

For the Stark, following Tony Stark’s values without the benefit of his exceptionalism have led them to the darkest of all possible futures.

This issue is remarkably future-oriented, which demonstrates the affective significance of futurity in the Iron Man mythos. Repeatedly we are told that the Stark have no viable future: 45% of their population are unable to reproduce, and their scientists project only two possible ends for themselves: extinction, or mass genocide as a brutal nation rises from the chaos and strikes out to conquer the galaxy. Tony himself decides that the Stark are as close to his children as he will ever get, since he is dying, and attempts to save them. But in a brutal twist, he fails: the secret fortress where Sysop has hidden Tony falls to barbarians before Tony can execute any of his plans. Ultimately, Sysop decides to send Tony home to save his life. But there is more to Sysop’s decision than the desire to avoid the temporal paradox that would occur if Tony did not return to his time to launch the cache of technology. Sysop says to Tony that “[t]here is more at stake here… than the fate of my people” (#280, 1992, p.

19), implying that Tony’s survival is rendered more important than other lives because his existence provides security and the possibility of a future to others. For Sysop, of course, Tony

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is a deity, and this distinction is important – because despite the failure of Tony’s guiding ideologies, he is still an object in which people invest faith.

On his arrival home, the memory of the Stark slips from Tony’s mind. He collapses into

James Rhodes’ arms, with only time to tell Rhodes that they must not let the same thing happen on Earth before passing out. This can be read as an overt warning to the reader, which illustrates the affective appeal of the character to his audience. Although Tony is not a god,

Iron Man is an icon in which optimistic promises are invested; promises of a better future ushered in by the responsible use of technology. But in Technical Difficulties, it seems impossible to imagine a future where technology actually delivers on those promises, unless it is constantly corrected by an exceptional figure like Tony Stark. Indeed, the Iron Man mythos rarely specifies the kind of future Stark’s technology might be able to create – it is not a utopian series, but rather, like the basic logic of security itself, limits its hero to ensuring an open future. Three issues later, Tony dies, leaving the question of Iron Man’s legacy behind. It is fitting that the last suit Stark builds between Technical Difficulties and his death is the hyper-militaristic War Machine armour, because that is the future that Technical Difficulties foresees without him – or, at least, without the exceptional measures that killed him.

4.3 Making sense of 9/11: Redefining Iron Man in ‘The Best Defense’ and ‘Extremis’

As I have discussed in previous chapters, the United States experienced a threat deficit following the end of the Cold War in the early 90s. Perhaps corresponding to the lack of meaningful international opposition, the mid-to-late-1990s were an incoherent and unpopular period for Iron Man (and for Marvel more generally) where Tony Stark was corrupted by a cosmic villain, killed, and replaced by an adolescent version of himself brought forward in time. These storylines of adolescent self-discovery, in some ways more reminiscent of Spider-Man than Iron Man, suggested confusion about the purpose of the character in an

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era with no major threat to justify his mission, but nevertheless a huge legacy to live up to. In the early 2000s, especially after 9/11, Iron Man entered a period of resets and redefinition.

Two storylines, both released in the years immediately following 9/11, illustrate two very different ways in which writers attempted to recast the Iron Man character in the changes national and international security. In The Best Defense, a six-part storyline running from

2003-2004, Tony Stark yet again finds that his technology has been stolen – this time legally, by the Department of Defense, as an unintended consequence of the revelation (in issue #55,

2002) that Tony Stark and Iron Man are one and the same person. In a remarkable departure from a typical Iron Man story, The Best Defense sees Tony fight to become the Secretary of

Defense in the Bush administration, in order to ensure that his technology (now the property of the US government) is deployed safely. As a political storyline, this arc presents a remarkably polished, noble and mature Tony Stark, who must acknowledge his past failings while also promising an aspirational vision of the security he can provide.

In contrast, the 2005-2006 storyline Extremis offers an early glimpse of the version of the character that would become iconic in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, as played by Robert

Downey Jr. Extremis resets the Iron Man mythos entirely. It opens on Stark’s failures; his increasing moodiness, his isolation, his anger, and his depression – all results of his perceived failure to deliver on his mission to improve the future through technology, and his discomfort with the fact that he has had to sell-out and deal weapons in order to fund his utopian dreams.

Where the Iron Man of The Best Defense triumphantly wins public office by promising an end to death in war and saving the Capitol Building from an incoming plane, Extremis is a story of compromise, failure, and imperfect resolutions. Together, the two storylines paint a picture of incoherent responses to the trauma of 9/11 and the disappointment of its aftermath.

The Best Defense, in many ways, can be read as an attempt to present a non-partisan defence of the Bush administration’s political goals, even while it criticizes the many errors,

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miscommunications and flaws in the execution of the War in Afghanistan. The first issue opens on a squadron of soldiers in Al-Khalifa, who are going on a milk-run to test out new equipment. The equipment – integrated systems from multiple different contractors, including reverse-engineered Stark technology produced without Stark’s knowledge – catastrophically fails, leading to the deaths of all soldiers involved. The DoD decides to call

Stark in as a consultant, a role which he emphatically refuses, as he has long since washed his hands of munitions development. As he says, “I kill people far too efficiently. I’d rather save them” (#73, 2003, p. 11). When he discovers that he cannot legally prevent his patents from being unsealed and given to rival companies to manufacture, and that furthermore, that the person at the DoD who is responsible for the misuse of his technology, Sonny Burch, is an old nemesis of his, Stark decides to nip the problem in the bud and run as President George W.

Bush’s new Secretary for Defense. In his campaign, he promises not only to coordinate the release of his technology but to throw his genius behind a new kind of warfare: war without death:

“Far too often, the orphans you make today become tomorrow’s enemies. That’s why, as Iron Man, I only practiced non-lethal force. And that experience taught me that, whereas the last generation of military technology focused on destruction, its next frontier... is mercy… My fellow Americans, if I’m named Secretary of Defense… NO ONE NEED EVER DIE IN WAR AGAIN!” (#74, 2003, p. 23)

Throughout the campaign, he confronts demons from his past, demonstrating that he is no longer the flawed man that many comic readers would have remembered from Demon in a

Bottle. Although he loses the vote, he receives one more opportunity to save the day: an increasingly corrupt and unhinged Burch has forced his technicians to rush Stark technology into the field, causing a cascade of malfunctions that lead to a US army aircraft flying on a collision course with the undefended Capitol Building. With impeccable timing, the alert reaches the Senate floor just as Stark’s defeat is announced, and Stark vaults into action to don the Iron Man suit and save Congress. When he wakes up in the hospital several days later, he

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finds that the decision has been unanimously reversed after his heroic act, and that he is now the new United States Secretary of Defense.

As a result of the ending, which vindicates Stark’s claim that he is the best person to defend America, and the sober portrayal of Bush (who is never named, but obviously depicted), The Best Defense essentially identifies the problem with the War on Terror as mid- level mismanagement of logistics, contractors, and institutional accountability. Rather than engaging with the overarching rationale for war, or the underlying strategic assumptions, The

Best Defense offers a utopian fantasy of war in which technology and individual heroism can separate the glory and nobility of war from its brutal, bloody reality. The reality of war itself does not intrude on this fantasy; the only victims are American soldiers, and the only real villain is an American arms manufacturer. Although one issue does depict a conflict with insurgents, in an unspecified town in the Middle East, it is quickly revealed that the insurgents are actors and the conflict was staged as a demonstration for the media.

This is a scene of defence without deaths, a scenario of men in generic Middle Eastern garb calling out “American infidel!” (#75, 2003, p. 3) and attacking three Americans – Tony

Stark, flanked by two soldiers – with handguns. The Iron Man armour springs out from Stark’s briefcase and the backpacks on his two soldier companions and repels the bullets. In the ensuing battle, Tony Stark poses heroically, the Americans’ energy weapons issue some unidentified zaps and pows, and finally the enemies are ‘subdued’ - without much actual evidence of what happened to them, beyond the destruction of their weapons. This fantasy of heroism without any of the moral culpability associated with war is reminiscent of the defensive fantasies of Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative, through which the US would theoretically be absolved of the need to respond to a first nuclear strike in kind, and therefore absolved from moral complicity in the mass annihilation that a nuclear exchange would create. Technology allows soldiers to distinguish civilians from insurgents – suggesting that

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these are somehow discrete and quantifiable categories of person – and to neutralise enemies without any risk of violence. Furthermore, the scene plays out utterly divorced from geopolitical context. Why are these insurgents attacking Americans? It is enough, for the purposes of the political show, to take the premise of the encounter for granted. As a result,

The Best Defense takes the premise of the war for granted and imagines a fantasy resolution in which advanced technology and exceptional acts of heroism are enough to win the day.

This is exemplified by the final scene of salvation, which is beat-for-beat predictable from the moment that Tony Stark loses the Senate vote to become Secretary for Defense, and which perfectly follows the narrative pattern of an exceptional threat. Up until now, the media and Congress have been equally sceptical of Stark’s ability to perform in the role based on his numerous public failings. The arc references iconic arcs from Iron Man’s history, notably

Demon in a Bottle and Armor Wars, both arcs in which Tony Stark’s personal flaws – alcoholism and obsessive control of his technology – endangered his loved ones. Stark’s response is unprecedentedly self-aware, marking a departure from the consistent repression and repetition of his flaws that past comics embraced. During interview preparation, he admits that his attempts to disguise his identity were not only counterproductive but dangerous:

“Pretending not to be Iron Man might have kept the people around me safer, but having him be my bodyguard—that was all for convenience. My convenience—so I could keep using the armor. The fact is, Iron Man made my businesses a more dangerous place to work. We were both targets! They did a study once: whenever “my bodyguard” and I were out of town, the stock price went up! I tell myself that the lies were worth it—that I did some good. But the fact is, I’m as addicted to the high of using the armor as I ever was to alcohol. I wouldn’t have fought to keep it a secret so long if I hadn’t enjoyed it.” (#75, 2003, p. 22)

However, in the Senate hearing, when he is criticised for lying repeatedly to the American people, he reframes the issue:

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“Why should anyone think that Tony Stark would put this nation’s safety before his own personal aggrandizement?” “Because I’ve been doing that for years! Because I’m Iron Man—and I never ONCE took the credit!” (#76, 2004, p. 19)

In doing this, The Best Defense systematically absolves Tony Stark of past wrongdoings, recasting all prior flaws in the light of his current heroism and willingness to repent. In essence, The Best Defense cleanses the character for the reader, and therefore positions the sceptical characters – journalists and Congressmen and women – as reasonable but ultimately wrong; inadvertently working against their nation’s best hopes for security. Any concern that

Congress might have to act as a check or balance is laid to rest by the final scene in which

Stark risks his life to save the Capitol Building.

Throughout the arc, Stark has attempted to use ordinary methods to secure his technology and protect the lives of the military personnel who are unwittingly using it. By the time that both legal and political methods have failed, the threat posed by Burch’s impatience and greed has snowballed into a crisis of epic proportions – literally threatening the seat of

American democracy itself. To save it, Tony Stark must once again act as Iron Man – the only entity capable of defending against such a threat. At this point, the only solution remaining is the use of exceptional measures. Although Stark’s actions as Iron Man are by no means extra- legal, they do represent a suspension of the norm, as ordinary methods are incapable of resolving the problem. This is a classic scene of heroism, and for once Stark is appropriately rewarded. As he intercepts the plane and saves the military personnel on board, the panels are overlaid with his recollection of the Senate hearing, in which he argued that his role in protecting America had always been much greater than what was publicly known:

“I have travelled to dark places. All alone, away from anyone who could see, hear, or help. I have staved off threats that you will never, ever hear about. The simple knowledge of them would wreak more fear and ruin on the world than I could ever hope to gain from them.” (#78, 2004, p. 15)

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In these lines, The Best Defense indirectly offers a defence of national security practices carried out without the public’s knowledge, by aligning it with a fantasy of selfless heroism. As a result, the rescue of the Capitol Building takes on an archetypal quality; as a scene in which heroism finally comes into the light in the face of a threat too terrifying for the public to confront directly. By catching the plane before it hits, Iron Man reworks the imagery of 9/11 into a triumphal and utopian celebration of American exceptionalism.

The Best Defense seeks to define Iron Man as a hero who has successfully moved on from all of his flaws and is therefore capable of both redemption and salvation. This is an unchallenging portrayal of the character – a status quo comic – but it hints at the affective reasons for wanting to spin things in a hopeful light. Firstly, it deliberately frames national security as a nonpartisan issue. It is significant that the creators never assign a political allegiance to Iron Man – when asked, he simply states that it is not relevant, or that he does not know. George W. Bush, equally, is never named, even though it is obvious that the

President is designed in his image. ‘Bush’ is a sombre, measured figure, who only appears to lend gravitas to any given scene, which indicates that he is positioned as an elevated, neutral figure – a quintessential war president, capable of putting aside partisan concerns for the sake of national defence. Iron Man’s neutrality, furthermore, suggests that The Best Defense imagines a unified America – a nation in which political wounds can be healed, division can be rectified, and salvation will follow redemption. As a 2003-2004 comic, The Best Defense was written mere months after the war expanded to Iraq, and before many of the worst aspects of the War on Terror as a whole would come to light. In light of its historical context, it is possible to read The Best Defense as a fantasy of unity after tragedy, an optimistic narrative in which America’s best values – here represented by an exceptional Iron Man – will provide the means of endurance.

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Less than a year later, however, Extremis redefined Iron Man yet again – this time in an explicit reboot of the character. Writer Warren Ellis and penciller Adi Granov have stated in interviews that when preparing for this arc, they did not read beyond key canonical moments such as the very first origin in Tales of Suspense #39 and the iconic Demon in a

Bottle. As such, Extremis can be considered as an explicit attempt to update the character for a contemporary, post-9/11 setting, which perhaps explains why so many of the optimistic promises established in those early arcs are portrayed as broken, flawed, or outright cruel.

The Tony Stark of Extremis is a deeply flawed, morally compromised man, whose company is trying to push him out, and whose utopian dreams have been systematically compromised to the point of abject failure. It is significant that this arc was the one to influence Marvel’s adaptation of Iron Man to film, both in terms of visual design and as a model for Robert Downey Jr’s self-destructive, snarky incarnation of the character. Extremis transplants Iron Man’s origin story to Afghanistan, disdains the uncritical optimism of storylines like The Best Defense, and overall paints a bleak picture of ethical compromise and disillusionment with utopian dreams. This incarnation of Tony Stark is cynical and depressed, having become part of the flawed military-industrial machine he once sought to transform from within. Nevertheless, Stark comes to the aid of an old scientist friend, Maya Hansen, who is equally disillusioned. Hansen, however, is in trouble – her partner has sold their enhancement serum, Extremis, to a local white supremacist group, and now a superpowered vigilante – Mallen, a white supremacist who blames the US government for killing his family in an FBI shoot-out – is using their technology to fuel a superpowered rampage.

Stark confronts Mallen wearing the Iron Man suit, only to be beaten so brutally that he nearly dies. Realising that his technology alone is not enough to defeat an Extremis-enhanced opponent, Stark convinces Hansen to alter the last remaining Extremis dose for him. Although it nearly kills him, it fuses the suit and his body into one fully integrated organism, allowing

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him to command the suit mentally, extrude it from his bones, and even see through satellites.

Biologically superhuman for, arguably, the first time in comic history (some of the 90s storylines come close to this level of neural interfacing) Iron Man is now capable of defeating

Mallen before he assassinates the President. The ostensibly successful resolution, however, comes at a steep cost; Tony Stark has been permanently and profoundly altered – echoing his cyborg rebirth in his typical origin story – and Maya Hansen’s potential to transform the world is forever stained by the revelation of her involvement in the terror plot. Stark discovers that she and her partner leaked the serum deliberately, to prevent the US government from pulling their funding.

As a result, Extremis is far less uncritically optimistic about the promises attached to

American ingenuity than The Best Defense, and far more revealing about the structures that wear people down and corrupt them. Where The Best Defense allows Tony to absolve himself of past wrongdoings and valorise the exceptional strategies he stands for, Extremis presents a

Stark who does not live up to the high standard that he claims. Extremis opens on the morning of an interview for a documentary, as the interviewer questions Stark about his career as an arms dealer. Although Stark insists that he has moved away from weapons production, the interviewer counters that Stark’s “arms work of the nineties still haunts the poverty-and-war- stricken countries they were deployed in” (#1, 2004, p. 19). Although Stark asserts that the repulsor technology in his Iron Man suit has non-military applications, he is forced to admit that they are “not [in development] at this time” (#1, 2004, p. 17). Unlike The Best Defense, where Stark’s expression is consistently regretful and disappointed when his mistakes are pointed out, in Extremis Stark is evasive and defensive. Heroic moments are notably absent from the early issues of Extremis, and in fact the most significant moment of them all – his origin – is presented in a dramatically different light.

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When Extremis retells Iron Man’s origin story, it departs from the upbeat adventure tone of Tales of Suspense or even the nostalgic crisis tone of Demon in a Bottle, and instead draws on the generic conventions of trauma. As Stark reflects on his past in the documentary interview, the memory of his origin story intrudes into his mental space. In one panel he is sitting at the desk in his suit; in the next his troubled expression remains the same while the background shifts to the desert of Afghanistan and his clothes change to khakis. This is only a brief fragment of the origin story, told in a series of interruptions, sharp-edged shattered panels, oddly fixating details, and quiet spaces where sound is implied by visual events but not cued by the usual comic book sound effects. Extremis varies the plot as well, minutely, by transplanting the origin to Afghanistan where Tony is consulting for the United States military. As soldiers move boxes of Stark Sentinel landmines out of a truck, they are shot by

Taliban gunmen (not shown in the frame) and – as Tony flees to find cover – the boxes crash to the ground. Landmines arc out in slow motion, the Stark logo clearly visible on their silver rims, and Tony remembers what it was like to be blown away. The remainder of the origin story is not revealed until much later in the arc, when Tony comes close to death under the influence of Extremis.

The second half of the origin story, recollected during Stark’s near-death experience, again intrudes traumatically on Stark’s present-day life. Although he thinks he is waking up from Extremis, and calls out for Maya, he instead wakes up to see Professor Yinsen in the

Afghan cave where they are both held hostages. In yet another departure from the canonical norm, Extremis reworks Stark’s relationship with Yinsen and reveals yet more about the cruelty of the optimistic promises Stark invests in the Iron Man suit. This Yinsen is clearly unimpressed by Tony Stark and disgusted by his willingness to create weapons of war. He relates walking out of an early presentation of the Iron Man suit technology at a conference, because it was so clearly a project for war. Tony counters:

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“It wasn’t for war. That was just to get the funding. You can’t just... wish the future into being. It has to be paid for. Even the munitions... were just stealing money from the army for the real work.” “And what is the real work?” “Test-piloting the future. The Iron Man program I floated at the conference is not about exo-skeletons or war. It’s about becoming better. It’s about bringing on the future. The earliest stages of adapting machine to man and making us great.” (#5, 2006b, p. 5)

Yinsen is unconvinced. When Stark perseveres and builds his Iron Man suit, what he builds is much more brutal and expedient than past iterations. The suit sprays fire, in an uncomfortable parallel with the unaltered Extremis dose which allows Mallen to generate fire from his body, and Tony uses it to kill his captors.

Although in most origin stories, Yinsen sacrifices his life to buy Tony enough time, here his death is meaningless – “A stray bullet went through the side of the hut. Killed him instantly” (#6, 2006b, p. 7). This deviation is significant for two reasons. For the first time in an Iron Man origin story, although Yinsen begrudgingly helps with the suit, he does not deem the Iron Man suit worthy of sacrifice. In fact, Yinsen’s death could be considered a silent protest against the machine of war that he believes will inevitably kill more people than it could save. Furthermore, it is the first iteration in which the plans for the Iron Man suit predate Stark’s traumatic kidnapping, which means that the role of the origin story here is less to provide a justification for the Iron Man suit and more to indicate that the suit is symptomatic of a traumatic cycle of war. Here the kidnapping provides a post-hoc justification for the Iron Man suit, which is certainly successful at breaking his captivity, but ultimately locks Stark into a pattern of behaviour that now feels like a trap. Extremis’ innovation is to introduce a new kind of security into the Iron Man mythos, alongside the old logic of exception that has justified Stark’s activity as Iron Man for decades. This logic is best described by the quote above: ideals must be paid for, and war pays the bills.

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Extremis is haunted by the past, and it consistently looks towards an optimistic but contested future. Although Stark describes his aspiration to be the test pilot for the future, his failure to reach that potential indicates that he is in an impasse, incapable of moving away from the past, towards the future he seeks, or outside the paradigm altogether. Maya Hansen, who describes similar dreams of eradicating cancer, finds herself trapped in the same paradigm – even her life-saving research into the human immune system must be bent to the aims of the military-industrial complex in order to gain funding. Although her original plan for

Extremis was distinctly utopian and transhuman – to hack the repair centres of the body and rewrite the ‘blueprint’ of the human body in the brain so that the body rebuilds itself to a better standard – she remarks that “[t]he hypothetical we were given was to build a three- man team who could take Fallujah on their own” (#3, 2005, p. 3).

This impasse is akin to the stretched-out present that Lauren Berlant (2011) identifies as the defining condition of everyday life under a neoliberal paradigm, where progress is unthinkable and even treading water might feel justifiably like a victory. In Extremis, the state and capital are both implicated in the maintenance of this impasse-as-status quo, as they both chew up aspirational ideas and recycle them into more of the same retail products and weapons of war. All of Stark’s technology mentioned in Extremis is double-edged; like a new idea for an ocular control system that detects where the user is looking, which would be a prime tool for covert surveillance. Extremis gives the sense that a better future can only ever be an illusion as long as state and capital are intertwined, because together they incentivize violence and control more than anything else.

Yet the possibility of a better future is so affectively potent for both Stark and Hansen that they are willing to compromise almost everything that they stand for in exchange for a chance to fulfil their aspirations. Every action becomes another link in a convoluted chain that may deliver the future they want, someday, but only if they accept that they must risk their

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principles to get there. Hence Hansen’s willingness to unleash a murderous terrorist on the people she wants to heal, and hence Stark’s investment in his suit technology. Although the comic arc clearly critiques the fiction that the Iron Man suit is not primarily a weapon of war, and that its technologies will lead to a better and brighter future, Stark’s attachment to it leads him to dive deeper and deeper into his entanglement with the suit, even at cost to his own life.

When Maya suggests that they call on other superheroes to help, instead of potentially killing

Tony with an untested dose of Extremis, Tony refuses, stating:

“This is what I do. This is what I have. All I have. All I have is making the future, and stopping the animals who want to take the future away from people… Funny: this is the second time I’ve had to work against the clock for the Iron Man suit to save my life.” (#4, 2005, pp. 21-22)

In Extremis, more than any other Iron Man comic, Tony’s mission as Iron Man is so deeply intertwined in his identity that he would rather die than risk losing that aspect of himself; even if dying would mean failing to prevent a catastrophic attack on Washington DC and the

American people. When he says that the Iron Man suit is saving his life, what he implies is not just that it is preserving his physical ability to live (although it is; the fight with Mullen fatally damaged Stark’s internal organs) but that it is preserving his reason to live on into a future that he may have some stake in creating.

Of course, the future that Stark and Hansen want is not necessarily the future that everyone wants, and for Mullen, the present reminds him constantly of a future that he believes was stolen long ago. Mullen, who Stark describes as a dark mirror of himself, also experiences a flashback to his ‘origin’ – a traumatic scene in which the young boy cowers in a wooden cabin, listening to his parents shouting and exchanging gunfire with the FBI. After his parents are killed by the FBI, in retaliation for his father’s murder of an agent, Mullen grows up on the fringes of society and eventually finds his way to the local white supremacist organisation who obtain the Extremis serum. As he makes his way to Washington DC, he encounters a young hitchhiker on the side of the road. At first, he is taken by her anti- 161

authoritarian streak and her disapproval of the state, but when he reveals that he wants to restore an imagined era of white supremacy and order, she recoils in disgust. Before he murders her, he says:

“It all went wrong. I’m going to fix it. I’ve got this stuff inside me, see? From the future they were going to make. And I’m using it to turn back the clock.” (#4, 2005, p. 18)

Mullen is indeed a dark mirror of Tony Stark, because Stark’s mission – to create a better future – was the legacy of his deceased father too. Both men want to mould the future in a particular image, based on genuinely felt desires seared into their psyches via formative traumas, and neither is capable of giving those desires up. More importantly, however, neither of them is able to give up on the strategies of exceptional violence (for Stark, inflicted against his own body, more often than not) as a means of societal transformation or preservation.

As a result, the final confrontation between them is a clash of two incompatible optimisms – each of them cruel – and is again depicted as a traumatic, incomprehensible scene. Mullen refuses to back down when Tony says he does not want to kill him, saying,

“you’re going to have to kill me. Because I’ve been given a tool to save people like me from those criminals in the White House” (#6, 2006a, p. 5). Tony responds that “You’re my nightmare: the version of me that couldn’t see the future” (#6, 2006a, p. 7). But although

Mullen is motivated by an idealised past, he is just as willing to sacrifice his life for his vision as Tony is. The conflict itself is brutal, rendered as lightning-fast, blurry, difficult to track, and full of shocking impacts – both fist-to-face and body-to-building. Although Tony consistently tries to hold back from killing Mullen, he is unapologetically violent and still attempts to electrocute him. The scene is unpleasant, unflinching, and arguably unheroic. Although Tony defeats Mullen, the effort has been physically and emotionally exhausting, and his only reward is to confront Maya Hansen about her involvement in the crime – as she, after all, has betrayed the future they dreamed of creating.

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In the end, the only uncomplicated solace for Stark is – once again – in the Iron Man suit itself. In an early scene, when leaving his company compound, he emerges into a crowd of protestors. They bear signs claiming “GUNS DON’T KILL PEOPLE STARK DOES” (#1, 2004, p.

25). Although he notes them, he is protected from their judgment by the anonymous visor of the Iron Man suit – in the Extremis reboot, the writer restored the fiction that Iron Man was

Tony Stark’s bodyguard – and takes off into the sky. Even the protestors marvel at the sight of

Iron Man, despite their disapproval of his ‘employer’. Iron Man spirals off into the clouds, laughing inside the helmet. This is a joyride, a pure expression of freedom – both freedom from the fear of judgment, down below, and freedom to experience the benefits of his wealth crystallised into the form of the Iron Man suit. The feeling is ephemeral, of course, and does not last long, but as one of the few joyful moments in the storyline, it aptly illustrates the affective pull of the suit. No other object in the series can guarantee freedom so perfectly, as not only does it bestow Tony Stark with the speed and physical rush of a sportscar, but it also liberates him from the responsibilities that cause him so much grief. Freedom, too, is a double-edged sword, as it requires isolation from the people and systems of the world that

Stark wishes to save.

Since Iron Man’s debut in 1963, the character has consistently engaged with anxieties arising from successive US security paradigms. What I hope to have demonstrated in this chapter is that Iron Man’s basic configuration of capitalist man, advanced battlesuit, and heroic mission creates a subgenre of superhero stories that are flexible enough to mediate the disillusionments of Vietnam, the spiralling fear of the Cold War, and the failed optimism of the

War on Terror. In doing so, the Iron Man mythos provides a sustained reflection on the spatial, temporal and affective experience of national security from the mid-20th century onwards. As a result, it is possible to identify certain key fantasies that have become entangled with US national security policy throughout this period. Most prominent, I argue, are the ideals of individualism and freedom, which manifest through Iron Man as the fantasy that sufficient 163

wealth and technological prowess will allow a subject to guarantee their own security, and thus escape the vulnerabilities created by interdependencies on other subjects or nations.

This does not mean that Iron Man stories collectively present a consistent position on the United States’ use of military power to maintain its security; rather, each story that I have analysed engages in a different way with the contradictions between the contemporary political moment and Iron Man’s heroic mission – often by highlighting the fallibility of Iron

Man himself. For every story like Tales of Suspense or The Best Défense that emphasises the positive outcomes of the cluster of attachments bound up in Iron Man, there is a story like

Demon in a Bottle, Armor Wars and Extremis that highlights the downsides – the failures, moral compromises and abuses of power carried out in the name of security. Of course, each story engages with a complex entanglement of positives and negatives that can never truly be separated from one another, because they are all consequences of the fundamental logic of superpowered security that the Iron Man powers, identity and mission represent. Although the corpus consistently maintains its attachments to ideals of neoliberalism, exceptionalism, and military supremacy, each creative team is continually forced to re-assess those attachments and attempt to reconcile them with the ideals that legitimate Iron Man’s heroic use of power.

Throughout the chapter I have argued that Iron Man stories have consistently grappled with tensions arising from an overarching fantasy of superpowered that has influenced US grand strategy since World War II. This fantasy, as I have argued, can be broadly described as the idea that US hegemony will provide the conditions of security, freedom and prosperity required for the United States (and therefore the world) to flourish – and therefore, that it will insulate the US against future insecurities. But it is also in many ways a reactive fantasy, as it appears most potent immediately following events like Pearl

Harbour or 9/11, in which the nation’s sense of security is suddenly and profoundly violated.

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In these times, and the periods in which the promises of superpowered security most obviously break down, Iron Man stories are especially resonant. In the next chapter, I will explore the specific articulation of Iron Man’s attachment to superpowered security in the

Marvel Cinematic Universe, the massive transmedia franchise that Iron Man launched in 2008.

I will argue that not only is the Iron Man mythos especially relevant to this period of history, in the late years of the Bush administration, but that these early films – Iron Man and Iron Man 2

(2010) – are critically useful precisely because they highlight the optimistic national fantasies that characterize superpowered security throughout the War on Terror. In doing so, these films expand on a decades-long tradition of critical engagement with US national security policy in the Iron Man comics; a tradition which I have argued is essential to our understanding of the cruel optimism of superpowered security.

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Chapter 5 – ‘This is your legacy’: Optimistic promises in Iron Man and Iron Man 2

Although Iron Man and its sequels have been clearly recognised as a narrative expression of the Bush Doctrine and post-9/11 American foreign policy during the War on Terror, the films are neither wholly celebratory nor critical of the institutions they depict. My approach in this chapter is not to intervene on either side of this question, but rather to take Terrence

McSweeney’s (2018) observation as my point of departure: the films are sufficiently ambiguous that all of these readings are simultaneously valid; Iron Man does critique the military industrial complex and the American failures in Iraq and Afghanistan, but it also fails to acknowledge the full spectrum of American culpability and ultimately affirms the underlying belief in exceptionalism that underwrote the Bush Doctrine in the first place (see

Chapter 2). I read these tensions as expressive of a cruelly optimistic impasse, where the Iron

Man mythos attempts to grapple with the anxieties and tensions arising from the United

States’ position coming out of the Bush era but cannot imagine an alternative strategic footing.

Detaching from the narratives of superpowered security, after all, might fatally endanger the values that constitute an idealised American identity. As McSweeney, Cristobal Giraldez

Catalan (2008), and Anthony Mullen (2018) have discussed extensively, the films exclude, erase or marginalise alternate perspectives. In this chapter, my purpose is to examine this myopic view of the world and to dismantle the affective blinders that keep the Iron Man films so tightly (if ambivalently) attached to a doctrine of superpowered security as the only option in times of unprecedented crisis.

Beginning with Iron Man and progressing to Iron Man 2, I will argue that these films adapt the Iron Man comic book mythos into a spectacular cinematic expression of the affective attachments exemplified by the Bush administration’s construction of the War on Terror, which itself, as I argued in Chapter 4, reflects a deeper historical construction of national

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security as superpowered security that gradually emerged throughout the Cold War. Although the films disavow certain failures of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, I argue that their ambiguity arises from the fact that they ultimately cannot let go of the values, aspirations and anxieties that justified those wars in the first place. As a result, they re-inscribe the underlying assumptions of superpowered security in the figure of Iron Man, who is adapted from the comics as a deeply problematic but ultimately heroic force for good in the world. I will also discuss the way in which the Iron Man armour has the capacity to metaphorize the vulnerabilities and dangers of the Bush Doctrine, and the optimistic strategies the films adopt in an attempt to resolve them. The first two instalments in the Iron Man film mythos set up a narrative structure, or pattern of expectations, in which stories about the exercise of exceptional powers in the face of unprecedented threat can be packaged and sold in a way that appeals to consumers. I will argue that these two films are the most optimistic of the series (in a Berlantian sense, as discussed in Chapters 2 and 3) because although they lay the groundwork for significant anxieties arising from national security practices during the War on Terror, they primarily function to establish the affective promises invested in Iron Man’s identity, mission, powers and nemeses.

I argue that these films establish the Iron Man suit as a metaphor for contemporary security practices and, therefore, create a material icon for the collective fantasies and promises invested in security as a potent but affectively limiting aspirational concept. As in the comics, the Iron Man armour is associated with aspirational fantasies of United States technological dominance, which has an uncomfortably explicit relationship with the politics of empire and domination – and yet promises that it will eventually be possible to innovate those problems away, and so secure peace and prosperity for all. This is equally true in the films, in which the Iron Man suit is constructed not only as a means of attaining security in the short term, but as an affectively compelling way of fighting the ‘long war’ – the spatial and temporal expansion of the War on Terror which the Bush Administration introduced in 2006, 167

the year in which Iron Man entered preproduction. Furthermore, I will argue that the film version of the suit functions as not only a physically compensatory or enhancing prosthesis, but as an affective prosthesis – a concept that I introduced in Chapter 2. Through the prosthetic identity, facial mask and securitizing gaze that the suit provides, Tony Stark becomes Iron Man; as a result, he gains the capacity to feel like an agent who can intervene in the world’s uncertainties and insecurities. I will argue that one of the primary fantasies of the

Iron Man suit, therefore, is affective; it is the fantasy of feeling secure in one’s ability to meaningfully affect the world.

As director Jon Favreau has said of the Iron Man mythos, “[t]here are very few purists who’ve attached themselves to specific storylines. In the case of Iron Man, it’s the myth of Iron

Man, it’s the suit. It’s what the suit could do” ("The Invincible Iron Man," 2008). In discussing what the suit does, how it does it, and what the films suggest it could do, I will argue that Iron

Man and Iron Man 2 interrogate the Iron Man suit as a figure for a national security doctrine that repeatedly seems to cause the problems it seeks to avert, but is nevertheless indispensable for its ability to guarantee the conditions of possibility for a no-longer traumatised world. I will read Tony Stark’s attachment to the Iron Man suit as playing out the cruelly optimistic way in which security logic both underwrites and threatens the societal aspirations that it ostensibly makes possible.

5.1 Traumatic origins: adapting Iron Man for the War on Terror

To many observers of the film industry, Marvel’s announcement in 2006 that Iron Man would finally enter production came as a surprise. Not only had the film languished in development hell for over a decade, with film rights licensed first to Fox and then New Line, but it was potentially a risky test balloon for the recently created Marvel Studios. For years beforehand,

Marvel’s role in the film industry had been limited; the company acted as a development

‘pipeline’ through which Hollywood could buy pre-packaged characters with decades worth of

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storylines and established fan followings. When Marvel moved to enter the film industry as a production company in its own right, it did not own the rights to its most famous characters, such as Spiderman, the X-Men or the Fantastic Four. In comparison, Iron Man had relatively little public recognition outside comic book fans. In fact, the rights to Iron Man only reverted to Marvel from New Line in 2005, just as Marvel signed a deal with Merrill Lynch to fund films produced by Marvel alone (Waxman, 2007). As it turned out, Marvel’s gamble on Iron Man would pay dividends, as the character – fortuitously adapted both for film and the contemporary political climate – resonated deeply with audiences conflicted over the War on

Terror.

As discussed in Chapter 2, America’s military interventions in Afghanistan and then

Iraq did not bring resilient democracies to the Middle East: instead, it resulted in extended conflict, significant civilian casualties abroad, and ever-tightening security restrictions at home. In 2004, the year before Iron Man entered development, the Bush administration’s prosecution of the War on Terror suffered two major setbacks: in April, the Abu Ghraib scandal broke (in which photographs were released of US soldiers posing triumphantly with tortured or dead Iraqi prisoners), and in July, the US Senate Intelligence Committee concluded that the rationale for invading Iraq – Saddam Hussein’s ostensible possession of weapons of mass destruction – was based on flawed and misleading intelligence.

In Afghanistan, meanwhile, although Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld announced an end to ‘major combat’ in May 2003, the US military’s subsequent shift to security and nation-building efforts did not deliver meaningful gains for the Afghan population: in 2006 alone, the year in which Iron Man entered production, more than three thousand Afghans died to violence, doubling the casualties of the year prior ("World Report: Afghanistan," 2007).

Nevertheless, faced with evidence that the Bush Doctrine, outlined in the 2002 United States

National Security Strategy (NSS02), was failing to deliver on its promises, the Bush

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administration responded by doubling down. The 2006 National Security Strategy (NSS06) reframed the war on terror as the ‘long war’, and argued that the doctrine of pre-emption, primacy and freedom from international constraints (see Chapter 2) was still the best way to deliver security for America, and therefore the world. In fact, as Christine Gray (2006) argues,

NSS06 departed even further from the language and norms of international law than NSS02.

As discussed in Chapter 4, the Iron Man comics had substantially engaged with the

War on Terror for several years prior to the release of the first film. Stories like The Best

Defense engaged with the mismanagement of military contractors in the early years of the war, even as it ultimately celebrated the doctrine of exceptionalism, while Extremis advanced a more searching critique of the moral failures and compromises underlying the war. By shifting my focus to a discussion of the films, I address the observation that the War on Terror was fought not only on the battlefield (which itself had expanded into virtual space) but in mediated spaces like the news, the internet and in fictional media, in an attempt to control the public narrative. Dan Hassler-Forest points out that the 21st-century superhero appears

“increasingly removed from discourses of pure nationalism” (2012, p. 11) and instead defends values presumed to be universal. Yet as Hassler-Forest, Terrence McSweeney and Tanner

Mirlees (2014) all argue, this distance is illusory, as evidenced by the fact that Iron Man was produced with support from the Department of Defense. As Tanner Mirlees puts it, Iron Man reinforces “US economic power (as a Hollywood blockbuster and synergistic franchise), US

Military power (as a DOD-Hollywood co-produced militainment) and cultural power (as a national and global relay for US imperial ideologies)” (2014, p. 5)..

In expanding from comics to the Hollywood blockbuster, therefore, Iron Man provides a spectacular visual fantasy of US military supremacy, subsumed under a greater discourse of

American technological innovation, allied to an imperfect but ultimately heroic mission. As discussed in Chapter 4, Iron Man’s very first origin story established the character as a

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scientific pioneer – the test pilot of the future – using ingenious inventions to defeat enemies and stay ahead of the global innovation curve. Throughout the character’s long history, Iron

Man’s technological achievements have at the same time made him deeply vulnerable, raising questions about the United States’ dependence on a logic that insists that every problem can be solved by technology. Structuring these stories, however, is a broader logic of securitization, where the problems with this logic of constant technological innovations are reduced to security problems – the issue is not that the logic is flawed, the story goes, but that technology must be adequately secured against external and internal threats. This makes Iron

Man a long corpus of fictional scenarios in which these technologies are necessary and valuable, as a pillar of United States supremacy and global leadership, but also open to exploitation. Many of these technologies would appear on the big screen in Iron Man; and as I will argue, the character’s new filmic origin story illustrates the depth of the franchise’s affective entanglement between technology and security.

The opening scenes of Iron Man situate the film directly in the War on Terror in a way that, at the time, was unprecedented for a superhero movie (McSweeney, 2018). Unlike films like Batman Begins (2005), set in a fictional city, Jon Favreau’s choice to set the film in

Afghanistan post-9/11 made it clear to audiences that the world of Iron Man mirrored our own. Iron Man’s treatment of war is also surprisingly realistic for a film of the superhero genre, with a cinematography that evokes the trauma of war and revisits the shock of 9/11. As my analysis will demonstrate, Iron Man’s origin story in this film – although released and set years after 9/11 – restages the emotional narrative of 9/11 in such a way that it implies that such traumas will continue on into an uncertain future, and that although mistakes have clearly been made, it would be unbearable to abandon America’s mission to save and secure the world. While other critics have read this dynamic as evidence of a conservative, pro-Bush

Doctrine worldview, I instead choose to focus on the film’s affective narrative, to achieve a fuller picture of the reasons why the film cannot abandon its attachment to the Bush Doctrine 171

specifically and exceptional security strategy in general. For this reason, this section is dedicated to the first act of Iron Man, in which billionaire Tony Stark is kidnapped in

Afghanistan and first invents the Iron Man suit. As I will argue, this is the original scene of trauma and redemption that structures Iron Man’s responses to/misrecognition of crisis thereafter, and therefore deserves a sustained analysis.

I read Iron Man and Iron Man 2 as films that express the foundations of a cruelly optimistic attachment to security (which, in turn, masks cruelly optimistic attachments to other objects such as technology and American exceptionalism) in terms of an affective impasse. For Lauren Berlant, impasse is “a holding station that doesn’t hold securely but opens out into anxiety, that dogpaddling around a space whose contours remain obscure”

(2011, p. 199). In these films, I argue, the impasse derives from the fact that Tony’s security system – the Iron Man suit – does not in fact ‘hold securely’ but tends instead to remain open to further threat and uncertainty. Although the full implications of Iron Man’s cruelly optimistic attachment to security do not unfold until later instalments in the trilogy, both Iron

Man and Iron Man 2 depict Tony Stark as a character caught in an impasse that he cannot move past. This presents in a deep anxiety that characterises Robert Downey Jr.’s portrayal of the character, who cannot seem to bear the feeling that he is standing still, but also cannot justify abandoning the logic that holds him in place. Nevertheless, the films themselves are unable to move forward: for all of Iron Man’s futurist credentials, each ‘innovation’ he uses to solve contemporary problems is derived from the logics and worldviews of the past.

When the first film retells Iron Man’s origin story, it treads familiar ground: billionaire weapons developer Tony Stark visits a warzone (post-9/11 Afghanistan) to demonstrate new weapons to the American military, falls into an enemy ambush, and must fight to save his own life and escape from his captors. Although Tanner Mirlees reads Iron Man as “a popular affirmation of the US Empire’s military-industrial-complex” (2014, p. 11), the film draws

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heavily on two comics which I have argued are the most critical of American military interventionism. Like the Tony Stark of Demon in a Bottle and Extremis, Robert Downey Jr.’s

Tony Stark is arrogant, flawed and self-destructive. As a metaphor for American values, therefore, Iron Man’s Tony Stark represents the most egotistical impulses of the nation, suffered by his allies only because he keeps churning out the brilliant inventions that keep

American on top of the international pecking order. After the shock trauma of his captivity in

Afghanistan, and subsequent discovery that his weapons have fallen into the hands of

America’s enemies, Tony Stark takes back control of his inventions and uses them to reinvent himself as a vigilante superhero. He returns to Afghanistan to seek revenge on his captors and free civilians (who, notably, are shown as oppressed by terrorists but not by American military action) before discovering that the real enemy is corruption at home. In order to preserve his legacy as a force for good in the world – rather than a profiteering warmonger – he defeats his surrogate father figure, Obadiah Stane (Jeff Bridges), who would rather continue to operate under the bad old principle that might makes right.

On face value, this is a clear narrative expression of the security ideology espoused by the Bush Doctrine, which attempts to unite the exceptionalism of superpowered security with liberal values, and also of the spatial and temporal politics of the long war. Iron Man is a living, breathing exceptional measure; whose technological superiority and freedom from legal constraints makes him demonstrably more effective than the military under normal rules of engagement. Although the film stops short of depicting a pre-emptive attack, it sets up Iron

Man as an ongoing deterrent in a continuation of Cold War policies, now expanded beyond the purview of an immediate enemy to the whole expansive future of potential threats. The film also mirrors the temporal and spatial trajectory of the war on terror, as it begins with a traumatic event echoing 9/11, moves to a geographically bounded conflict between Stark and his terrorist captors, and then opens up to the wider world. Nevertheless, instead of following the path laid down by the comics and introducing Iron Man’s traditional archenemy, The 173

Mandarin (who is often the mastermind behind Tony Stark’s kidnapping in the comics) the film locates tyranny within America itself, in the form of the villainous industrialist Stane.

Given the strength of the film’s associations with Bush-era politics, Mirlees has good reason to argue that the film presents only “the guise of a critique” (2014, p. 10) is well founded.

Nevertheless, the specific ways in which the film locates and attempts to resolve the tensions that arise from its embrace of the Bush Doctrine are significant: I read the film as an attempt to renegotiate America’s self-image through national fantasy; an attempt to reconcile the cognitive dissonance arising from the entanglement of the national security project with liberal values.

The first part of this strategy – no doubt heavily influenced by the US military’s involvement with the film – involves displacing the negative qualities and consequences of

American militarism onto independent actors, such as Stark and Stane, freeing the US military from moral culpability. Although Iron Man famously introduces its protagonist with the flamboyant thrum of AC/DC’s ‘Back in Black’, the opening shot is in fact surprisingly quiet; a tiny convoy of military jeeps (containing Stark and a few soldiers) proceeds down a dirt road in Afghanistan, with only the sound of wind to accompany it. This shot is instructive because it frames the American military as isolated and vulnerable in a hostile environment; the convoy is dwarfed by the landscape, from the towering Afghan mountains behind, to the vast expanses of empty, dusty plains. Of course, the plains are not empty, as suggested by the perspective of the shot – the viewer watches the convoy approach from ahead, as though from the vantage point of some unknown agent waiting in the hills for the jeeps to draw near. As a result, the film immediately suggests that the American military, despite its might, is in fact isolated and vulnerable, and foreshadows the ambush that will soon shatter Tony Stark’s privileged life.

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Inside his jeep, Stark’s easy-going demeanour with his escort cultivates a false sense of security that nevertheless blurs the distinctions between war and peace. When the camera cuts to the inside of the jeep, it focuses first on his hand, holding a glass of scotch. In the juxtaposition of the warzone and military convoy with a signifier of civilian luxury, Iron Man reflects the interpenetration of civilian and military realities. As Stephen Graham (2012) has argued, a consequence of the long war has been to transform urban spaces into battlespaces.

Iron Man – initially – achieves the same effect in reverse; Tony Stark deftly uses his star power to transform the inside of the jeep into a little bubble of urban space. It is the soldiers, whose space this rightfully is, who seem awkward and out of place, until Tony coaxes them into letting down their guard. Muddying the distinctions further, Tony scolds the youngest soldier for making a peace sign when they take a photo together: “Please, no gang signs. No, throw it up, I’m kidding. Yeah, peace. I love peace. I’d be out of a job with peace.” In juxtaposing the innocent young soldier who casually signals peace against the cynical civilian contractor who thrives on war, the film highlights the tensions between war as a means of achieving peace and war as a mode of profit-making. Yet, although Tony’s heroic journey requires him to abandon the profit motive he expresses here, peace, like the soldier’s dopey hand-gesture, is never once treated as a credible or possible outcome. Instead, from this moment onwards

Tony’s life is dominated by threats that undermine his ability to maintain control, at which point peace is endlessly deferred.

Tony’s activity as Iron Man can be read as an endless attempt to regain the sense of agency that he loses when the convoy is ambushed. Throughout the whole scene, the attackers are unseen and unheard, except for the hail of gunfire and explosions they rain down on the convoy. We see the first explosion through the front window of the jeep, over the shoulder of the soldier taking a photo of Tony and the young private. Affectively, this scene restages 9/11; the attack comes from behind, literally, out of the blue, and the American defenders are unprepared. Each soldier dies as soon as they exit the vehicle to return fire. 175

Immediately Tony is disoriented: even his ability to process information, or maintain a sense of stable individuality appears compromised, so shattering is this moment; when a soldier dies, Tony reacts as if he himself had been shot, jumping up in his seat and lifting his hand to his chest. He looks away from the dying soldiers to the other side of the jeep. The cinematography is fragmented, indicating the trauma of the scene; we do not see his moment of decision, suggesting that it isn’t conscious, but in the next shot we see him burst out of the jeep and run for an outcrop of boulders. With the boulders acting as a renewed illusion of safety, he does not notice that he is not safe until a missile – bearing the Stark Industries logo

– explodes just feet from him. For all of his wealth, power and innovative genius, he is both powerless and culpable – as he has allowed his weapons to fall into the hands of US enemies.

Stark’s affective response to this scene – in which he loses all sense that he has control over his life or his body – echoes throughout the rest of the film, as he attempts to ensure that it never happens again. This scene brings him down to earth, presenting him with a crisis that his ordinary strategies of living are inadequate to solve. Nevertheless, his use of these strategies persists, because they are integral to his sense of self as a prodigal innovator, and because for the first time in his life he has no credible options. When he finally looks down and pulls his shirt open to reveal blood spreading under a bulletproof vest (another nesting- doll signifier of civilian/military interpenetration) his brief moment of understanding brings him no solace; he is no longer a sovereign individual protected by wealth, nationality or status, but simply a body bleeding out.

This moment of abjection is one of many in the film where Stark discovers foreign objects embedded in his chest, or where he must penetrate his chest himself in order to keep himself alive. When he awakes in a cave, as a captive of the terrorist organisation The Ten

Rings, his first moments of consciousness mirror the scene above. He starts awake in the dark, lying on a stretcher perched on rocky ground. He drags a tube out of his nose, in a shuddering

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attempt to restore the boundaries of his body, and then tries to pick up a glass of water. As always, Stark seeks to sublimate his emotional responses into action, which would allow him not to feel. This trauma, however, demands that he experience it, even though he is not initially aware how deeply he is wounded. When Stark tries to move, he discovers that he is tethered to a car battery by wires that yank him back onto the stretcher. He seizes the wire, apparently torn between ripping it out and hanging onto it for dear life, and follows it down to his chest. This is the second time he has ripped open his clothes or, in this case, bandages, to find something alien inside his body. His companion, a fellow captive scientist named Yinsen

(Shaun Toub), explains that the car battery powers a life support mechanism to keep shrapnel from piercing Stark’s chest: “I’ve seen many wounds like that in my village. We call them the walking dead, because it takes about a week for the barbs to reach the vital organs.”

This is the premise on which Iron Man’s construction of security is founded: the existential threat that justifies an exceptional response is not looming unfulfilled but has already happened. Securing the life and wellbeing of the referent subject (in this case, Tony

Stark) therefore requires ongoing exceptional measures with no clear end point; the kind of impasse that Berlant characterises as a “holding station” (199). In this case, the holding station is the life support system that suspends the shrapnel in a permanent configuration around Stark’s heart, always threatening to emerge and therefore preventing him from truly moving forward. Instead, as this film will demonstrate, he moves back and forth through the familiar old strategies and solutions that led to the wound in the first place.

This pre-traumatic structuring fantasy is highlighted in a flashback sequence interposed between Stark’s discovery of his wound and his awakening in the cave, which establishes Stark’s credentials as a futurist. 36 hours before the ambush, Stark is supposed to be at an awards ceremony in Las Vegas to honour his achievements and family legacy. The award ceremony, in which the ‘Apogee Award for Design and Engineering Excellence’ is

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offered to Tony Stark, is a spectacle of wealth, glitz and glamour. The name of the award evokes the great heights of American invention, which foreshadows the way in which height, flight and the sky will be used to signify positive affect throughout the film. Indeed, Jon

Favreau has said that Stark was explicitly designed to echo Howard Hughes, a pioneer aviator who broke multiple airspeed records and designed aircraft for the US Air Force – in fact, much of the film’s principal photography took place at the Playa Vista Stages, an old Howard Hughes assembly factory ("The Invincible Iron Man," 2008). But the full meaning of ‘apogee’ is instructive, because as the highest point on a curve or furthest extension of an orbit, it implies an impending decline and fall. As a result, the Apogee Award introduces the concern that the best days of the US may be behind it.

The ceremony opens with a presentation that lays out a history of US technological innovation focalized through a single exceptional family. Tony’s father Howard, who died during Tony’s childhood, represents the glories and achievements of the past – all of which are firmly rooted in military needs. His obituary reads “HOWARD STARK – An icon of

America’s strength around the globe, and the head of Stark Industries, is credited with being the leading force behind the transformation of America’s military from a third-rate power to the greatest Army in history.” Nevertheless, the film consistently links these military innovations to a promised better life for civilians; one magazine cover celebrating the Starks suggests that their arc reactor technology may ‘save all our energy needs’. A Newsweek cover following Howard’s death depicts Obadiah Stane, interim leader of Stark Industries and surrogate father figure to Tony, as a giant figure looming over the Earth, as if considering what to do with it next, suggesting that the future of the planet will not be determined by nations but by corporations. These news articles and magazine covers rewrite history as the story of exceptional men, whose technological innovations keep America strong, prosperous and hopeful for the future.

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As the successor to his father’s legacy, Tony shows all the promise of continuing this fantasy. The Apogee Awards depict Tony as a child prodigy, associating Tony with a broad range of futurist innovations such as artificial intelligence or the Internet that could benefit more than just the military. Yet he too chooses to direct his talents towards military applications, with rhetoric that directly echoes but also usurps Bush; as the announcer says,

“With the keys to the kingdom, Tony ushers in a new era for his father’s legacy, creating smarter weapons, advanced robotics, satellite targeting... Today, Tony Stark has changed the face of the weapons industry, by ensuring freedom and protecting America and her interests around the globe.” The language used - ‘the keys to the kingdom’ - is monarchic, implying a kind of benevolent sovereignty that is all the more effective for its absolutism. The ceremony implies that through Stark’s brilliant intellect, the challenges facing American society in the coming decades – war, artificial intelligence, and the energy crisis – will be overcome, and prosperity must follow.

Yet the film very quickly makes clear that Tony is failing to live up to the lofty standards set by his forefathers. Although his military innovations are indeed keeping

America on top, his cynical attitude and disrespect for authority indicate that he does not take the values behind his mission seriously. When his friend, US Air Force Colonel James Rhodes

(Terrence Howard) invites him onto the stage to accept his award, he is not in the room.

Obadiah Stane accepts the award on his behalf, quipping that “the best thing about Tony is also the worst thing – he's always working” – and the film cuts to Tony gambling and flirting with women in the casino downstairs. When a journalist for Vanity Fair, Christine Everhart

(Leslie Bibb), confronts him over the deadly consequences of his business in weapons development, he dismisses her concerns, arguing that “peace means having a bigger stick than the other guy” before appealing to the heroic narrative of America defeating the Nazis and his reliance on military funding in order to create better medical and agricultural technology.

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In many ways, this conversation is a watered-down version of the interview that opens the comic book storyline Extremis, which spurs Tony to confront the fact that he has allowed his ideals to become corrupted. The film’s Tony Stark, however, seems to have far weaker convictions, given his earlier joke that peace would put him out of a job. Unlike the interview in Extremis, Tony sidesteps this difficult conversation by propositioning the reporter, an offer she implausibly accepts. In the morning, she is swept out the door by Tony’s

AI assistant, JARVIS (Paul Bettany), and Pepper Potts (Gwyneth Paltrow), his personal assistant, who compares Everhart (and, by association, her concerns) to ‘trash’ she must take out. Of course, by generic convention we know that this is the pre-heroic Tony, who must redeem himself in order to become a superhero and win the audience’s trust that he will not misuse his powers. Nevertheless, Everhart is only ever allowed to argue her position so far, and her willingness to abandon her line of questioning to sleep with him reveals the film’s investment in the overpowering seduction of the fantasy of masculine wealth and power that

Tony Stark represents.

As a result of scenes like this, which glorify national fantasies resting on privilege and inequality, Iron Man’s reimagining in post-9/11 film as a cocksure playboy is reminiscent of the way in which the James Bond franchise acts as a fantasy of imperial pre-eminence that

"ignores Britain’s readily apparent declining geopolitical status” (McSweeney, 2018, p. 19).

Tony is accountable to no one, thanks to his privilege and status, which means that he is only morally culpable for his actions insofar as he believes it. As a result, it could be argued that the first societal fantasy that Iron Man presents is that the beneficiaries of an unequal society may decide to put other people first of their own volition, excusing the fact that the checks and balances on their power simply are not working. Iron Man’s privileged access to the glitzy luxuries displayed in these scenes suggests a continuing attachment to the societal mechanisms whereby wealth buys freedom and agency that ordinary people cannot access.

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But of course, as Lauren Berlant argues in Cruel Optimism (2011), sovereign agency can be paralysing. The responsibility demanded by sovereignty can be a burden; like the young protagonists of the texts that Berlant analyses (discussed in Chapter 3), Tony rejects the trappings and responsibilities of sovereignty even as he benefits from the privilege it accords him, and withdraws into the hobbies that seem simpler: partying, for example, or tinkering in his workshop; innovating on the principle that innovation is always good – after all, it supplies the wealth and power he needs to keep on tinkering. As a result, although Tony enjoys immense freedom of movement, and the freedom from constraints that Bush argues the United States needs in order to make a difference in the world, he cannot seem to use it to move anywhere new; he is always treading water.

This is especially evident when he flies to Afghanistan to demonstrate Stark

Industries’ newest weapon, the Jericho missile, to United States armed forces. Standing in front of the dusty mountain range – which the viewer knows is the backdrop to the coming ambush – Tony can only appeal to the past to justify his supposedly futuristic weapons system:

“Is it better to be feared or respected? I say, is it too much to ask for both? With that in mind, I humbly present the crown jewel of Stark Industries’ Freedom Line. It’s the first missile system to incorporate our proprietary repulsor technology. They say the best weapon is one you never have to fire. I respectfully disagree. I prefer the weapon you only have to fire once. That’s how Dad did it. That’s how America does it. And it’s worked out pretty well so far. Find an excuse to let one of these off the chain, and I personally guarantee you the bad guys won’t even want to come out of their caves.”

The following shots of the weapon demonstration drive home the fact that the Jericho missile

(like its Biblical name) is old news; for all its much vaunted ‘repulsor technology’ (which will later appear to much greater effect in the Iron Man suit) it is merely a big missile housing lots of smaller missiles. The big difference is the firepower: as the missile sails overhead, Tony lifts his arms and the mountain range explodes behind him. A shockwave hits his back and pushes him stumbling forward, throwing dust over the group – dirtying them both literally and

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metaphorically. In this scene, Robert Downey Jr brings a flat, defensive affect to his performance, with tight lips, narrow eyes and a vocal tension that rises to belligerence as he invokes his father and the nation. There is a lot of complex history obscured behind the claim that this strategy has ‘worked pretty well so far’, but the fact that the film highlights Tony’s detachment and cynicism here cues the audience to expect that this is a viewpoint he must move past in order to become a hero.

Tony’s physical rehabilitation, as he seeks to control and benefit from the life support system embedded in his chest, is therefore aligned with his moral rehabilitation into a hero who uses his privileges for a purpose greater than himself, which conveniently provides him with even more justification to reserve those privileges for himself. He can say that he is Iron

Man at the end of the first film and claim in Iron Man 2 that the Iron Man suit is a prosthetic rather than a weapon, because disentangling it from his heart would kill him. As a result, the

Iron Man suit is an embodied representation of the moral ambiguity that underwrites security as a rationale for violence: it is at once a life-support system and a death-dealing system; a weapon and a shield; a permanent alteration to the referent object justified by the need to survive not only the current threat but all threats that might occur in the future.

The second chance at life that he receives in the cave could be read as a rebirth, or at least a reawakening, with frequent shots in which cloth is lifted from his eyes or in which he moves from darkness to the dizzying revelation of daylight. It is the sight of Stark Industries weapons piled outside the cave, along with the Ten Rings’ demand that Tony build them a

Jericho missile, that forces him to finally take his social responsibilities seriously. But this alone is not enough to overcome the paralytic burden of sovereignty to which he awakens; back in the cave, huddled on the ground under a ragged blanket, he refuses Yinsen’s suggestion that he fight back. Again, he fights to keep his face blank; when Yinsen points out that the stockpile of weapons outside will be his only legacy, his neck tightens and his lips

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quiver, until the objection finally bubbles out: “Why should I do anything? They’re going to kill me, you, either way. And if they don’t I’ll probably be dead in a week.” When Yinsen replies,

“Well, then, this is a very important week for you, isn’t it?”, he indicates that the exceptionality of this week will be bounded by Tony’s death. However, Tony instead chooses to extend his own life, which expands the temporal parameters of this fight out into a stretched out present

- locating hope outside the temporal structure in which the future is in reach, foreshadowing the fact that this second life will remain in impasse, a state of permanent emergency.

The moment in which Tony makes the decision to act is also a reflection of the long war’s spatial politics; having been hunched over the fire, looking down into the dirt, he finally looks up, which not only means that his gaze directly confronts the audience for the first time, but also, in this movie, signifies the prospect of freedom. As in the real long war, the sky is a site in which the modernised American military can exercise surveillance and control across the world. Through the sky, the United States achieves freedom of movement and the ability to project power and influence globally, which means that nowhere on Earth (theoretically) is truly outside its reach. Although this is only a small gesture in a film full of large, explosive moments, it hints at the affective significance of the long war’s geospatial shift. Of course, this is an extension of the ‘atmospheric warfare’ that Ian G. R. Shaw (2016) argues solidified in the

Vietnam War, and which Peter Sloterdijk (2009) traces back further to the German use of chlorine gas in 1915. With control of the sky reconceived as control of the atmosphere, therefore, the US is capable of projecting power throughout the enemy’s environment as opposed to merely their bodies. Through webs of surveillance, satellites and drones, atmospheric warfare becomes atmospheric security – which Shaw notes continues today,

“with fleets of Predator drones orbiting the U.S. borderlands” (2016, p. 695). Nor is this symbolism limited to Iron Man; as Neal Curtis argues, Superman’s claim to sovereign legitimacy is symbolically represented by his association with the sun. In later scenes when

Iron Man finally takes flight, the significance of his association with the sky, freedom of 183

movement and the panoptic, surveilling gaze is more obvious, but I have chosen to emphasise this earlier moment for its affective significance.

This look signifies the first moment of sovereign decision in which Tony recognises the state of exception in which he finds himself, re-connects with his heritage, and chooses to act. With the simple act of looking up, Tony both indicates that he is ready to confront the responsibility that such power entails, and he seems to regain a measure of control over his own body. Earlier in the scene, Tony’s lips twisted and pulled, suggesting discomfort and uncertainty; feelings that had not yet fully resolved into a motivating emotion but wavered between several. This is a repeated theme throughout the film, in which feelings that are too much for Tony to contain (or simply accept) bubble to the surface through his mouth. In the ongoing security metaphor I read in the film, this is the flipside of modernisation – in a globalised world dependent on flows of people and capital, vulnerability can no longer be contained within discrete prophylactic borders that keep the rest of the world out (Dillon &

Lobo-Guerrero, 2008). In this moment of resolve, however, looking up at the viewer, his mouth falls under control. Nowhere is safe anymore, this scene suggests, but if America can look into the darkest of places, then the fundamental American project of securing freedoms can go on.

Looking, of course, is not the only physical expression of American exceptionalism in this film; the second and perhaps most significant bodily sites where conflicted feelings gradually resolve into affective motivations are Tony’s hands. The film cuts directly from the moment of decision making to Tony setting up his workshop; moving straight from decision to action. The audience – like his captors, who must be duped into thinking he is building weapons for them – is not privy to his thought process but must accept the film’s implication through music and momentum that action is, in itself, a triumphant step forward. Working with the materials he has – the missiles – Tony sets about building himself a solution to the

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problem of his captivity. We see shots of Stark’s hands frequently as he works; strong, dirty hands performing a range of technical tasks, from using a pick to break into a missile or pouring molten palladium into a mould, to delicate work on mechanisms and electronic circuit. This is an aesthetic celebration of industry as a form of heroism. The visual references here incorporate both the old-world aesthetic of blacksmithing with the hyper-modernity of

Stark’s futuristic technology. The juxtaposition of Robert Downey Jr.’s raw physicality, as he hammers metal like an old-fashioned blacksmith, with the delicate, intellectual work required to bring the project into the future is clearly intended to give this labour sex appeal, and therefore presents a romantic vision of American industry innovating its way to success. Of course, it is a whitewashed appeal to history – the fact that this celebration is focalised into

Tony, a privileged white man who owns his own labour, conveniently elides the historic exploitation of the working class that complicates the narrative of American industry the film sets forth. Nevertheless, the film makes action, centred in the productive activity of the hands, a triumph and a nostalgic affective comfort in its own right.

The first thing that Tony builds is a miniaturised arc reactor, the technology which his father initially developed to solve the world’s energy crisis, as a replacement for the car battery keeping shrapnel out of his heart. Yinsen comments that the reactor “could run your heart for 50 lifetimes”, provoking Tony to quip, “Yeah. Or something big for 15 minutes.”

Although this is posed as a heroic sacrifice, exchanging endurance for a chance at survival and freedom, it creates an ongoing circular link between the life of the referent object (Tony) and the broader socio-political promises embedded in his technology. Boundless energy will not only prolong Tony’s life indefinitely but will allow him to use that life as a power source to exert force on others. In this way, security becomes entangled not only with endurance, but with the promise of a better future; survival becomes dependent on the permanent extension of security powers, but this trade-off between survival and safety is only possible due to the futuristic technology designed to improve ordinary life. Although these promises co-existed 185

and were co-dependent long before Iron Man hit cinema screens, the film unites them in a single embodied security metaphor, the Iron Man suit. Like the cluster of promises I argue it represents, the Mark I Iron Man suit is a cyborg patchwork, constructed out of missile components and sheet iron, powered by a futuristic reactor embedded around a fragile human heart, and assembled from coded schematics that individually look incomprehensible; only when overlaid do they reveal the hulking suit of mechanised armour that they will become.

Affectively speaking, the Mark I suit is both awe-inspiring and horrifying, but it grants

Tony the ability to regain the agency and affective capacity that he had lost. After the Ten

Rings commander threatens to torture and kill Yinsen if Tony does not produce weapons faster, Tony attempts to shape the suit into an affective shell for himself, hammering the faceplate into a blank, affectless mask to hold his vulnerabilities in. Curiously, the film initially depicts this transformation as another form of abjection: instead of depicting Tony’s escape as an unambiguous triumph, it shifts genre momentarily to call on the conventions of horror, with Iron Man as the monstrous antagonist. As in the comics, Yinsen sacrifices himself to buy

Tony more time to power up the suit, which here is rendered as yet another traumatising loss of control: although Tony clearly wants to stop Yinsen, he is trapped inside the unpowered suit and cannot move. When the suit powers up, the lights go out, leaving only the outline of the computer screen visible. For a moment the audience’s perspective shifts away from Tony, and tense music accompanies the guerrillas as they creep into the workroom. The first we see of the completed suit is a single iron fist, clenching and flexing, as the terrorists look for him.

When one of them finds him, his face is illuminated by the blue glow of the arc reactor, before the camera cuts away and we see him flying backwards. In a reversal of the film’s earlier ambush, in which invisible terrorists slaughtered a terrified troop of United States soldiers, we do not see Iron Man destroy this first group of terrorists. He is an unknowable threat emerging from a once-safe space within their borders, and as such they are rightfully terrified. 186

This is another reversal, in which Tony visits the same terror on them that they (and, by proxy, the 9/11 perpetrators) inflicted on him. In doing so, however, he transforms into a figure both heroic and monstrous.

The impassive mask of the Mark I suit - with its narrowed eye slits and slightly downturned mouth – bears some similarities to the sort of affective prosthesis that Travis

Brisini (2017) identifies in his analysis of early twentieth century ideas about facial expression training, in which the performance of an expression would (purportedly) not only train the corresponding attitude in the subject, but would also act as an infectious vector to provoke emotional responses in others. On the iconic smile masks of the 1937 ‘School for

Smiles’ hoax, a school in Budapest that purportedly taught people how to smile, both to fulfil the personal ambitions of students in business or marriage, and as a means of stemming the epidemic of suicides in the city, Brisini writes:

The Milwaukee Sentinel article covering the School for Smiles offers a theory: “the husband’s smile is not only to get him into the right frame of mind not to be annoyed by his wife but also infect her with the same feelings”... This is the smile conceived as vector of emotional state: something which can prompt a response in its viewer that is sympathetic to the visual image with which they are (quite literally) faced. The smile, in the case of the smile mask, is simultaneously divested from the individual wearing the mask (thereby rendering it a kind of universal plastic performance) while concurrently generating a feeling of “authentic” happiness in the viewer. A smile from the smile mask is as good – if not better – than the smile from a spouse, because it is both formally and aesthetically pleasing, and also constant. (2017, pp. 13-14)

Like the smile mask, the Iron Man visor performs a constant expression designed to elicit a response from its viewers. For the diegetic viewers, Tony’s captors, the mask elicits terror – it is a stern, disapproving expression, but also remarkably calm given the spectacular and extreme violence that Iron Man enacts during his escape. This misalignment between expression and action, I suggest, is intended for the nondiegetic viewer, for whom the Iron

Man suit represents a fantasy of individual salvation. I will return to this discussion of the Iron

Man suit as affective prosthesis in section 5.3, but for now it is sufficient to point out that the ambiguous or even neutral affect of the Iron Man mask not only incites an emotional response 187

in Iron Man’s opponents, but also gets Tony Stark and the viewers who identify with him “into the right frame of mind” to perform a violent but heroic escape.

The escape sequence also uses humour to bridge the uneasy distance between these two states of hero and monster. The fine line between heroism and horror is signified primarily by music, which swells triumphantly when the camera finally pans to frame Iron

Man head on, and in the occasional shot that shows a human eye inside the impassive mask.

Nevertheless, the generic references keep swinging back to horror, as a group of terrorists close metal gates on him, leaving one of their own behind. He scrabbles at the door, screaming

– we only hear the crash (and the cessation of screaming) before Iron Man beats down the door and explodes into the corridor, lit by the alien blue light of the reactor powering his chest. In the next shot, however, Iron Man smashes his arm into a wall and gets it stuck. While he tugs – the music having lowered in intensity – a terrorist sneaks up and shoots him, but the bullet ricochets off Iron Man’s helmet and hits the terrorist in the head. Iron Man looks around, not even having noticed, and moves on without any emotional response whatsoever.

This moment of slapstick, intruding on sequences of abject horror, makes the terrorists’ fear into a joke, where the punchline is that the natural order has been restored; their one-time victim, Tony Stark, is once more in control, while their attempts to defeat him are so puny as to be beneath his notice.

This is a false sense of security, however, as Tony has only succeeded in hiding his vulnerability. His ability to control the situation is shown to be immensely fragile when he rounds a corner and finds Yinsen dying on the ground. Tony’s initial response is to move from shock through gratitude to angry resolve – a comfortable and predictable emotional narrative that would justify his vengeful impulses – until Yinsen interrupts him, saying “Don’t waste it.

Don’t waste your life.” Tony shrinks away from this command to think about his own future, which currently has no more than an incoherent horizon, and looks for something that he can

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actually confront through the toolbox that the Iron Man suit offers him. He finds the opening of the cave, leading to the remaining terrorists standing guard over their stockpile of Stark

Industries weapons. In this moment, not wasting his future seems to require obliterating his past, cathartically searing it to ash to eradicate any chance that it might be exploited again.

Although the comic books feature similar scenes in which the newly created Iron Man blows up an ammunition dump, the equivalent scene in the film is significantly different: instead of setting the dump alight as a last resort, after using mostly nonviolent technological gimmicks, Iron Man comes out from the darkness like a monster. He stands for a few moments in a torrent of gunfire, to prove that he is invulnerable, before he activates two wrist-mounted flamethrowers and destroys the camp – apparently as much for personal satisfaction as for the objective of destroying his weapons. As critics have frequently noted, Iron Man collapses all Middle Eastern people into two categories: terrorists – abject bodies against which violence is acceptable – and victims, with individuals differentiated only in exceptional cases such as Yinsen or the Ten Rings leader (Catalan, 2008; McSweeney, 2018; Mirlees, 2014). I would add to this critique by noting that Iron Man opens up an unsettling parallelism: given that Tony has made himself into a weapon, blurring the distinction between biology, prosthesis and weapon, he is, in a sense, repurposing the suicide-bomber’s conflation of body and weapon in terms that exempt him, as the exceptional individual, from the underlying demand for self-sacrifice. But if all bodies are always also potential weapons, then by eradicating the weapons and terrorists as if they were indistinct aspects of the same threat,

Iron Man implies a moral equivalence between terrorist bodies and weapons technologies.

From a security perspective, this leads to a worldview in which threat is both internal and pervasive across all populations. If threat has no discrete boundaries whatsoever – biological, technological, social or psychological – then it follows that it must therefore be fought on all fronts at once, with whatever extraordinary measures are at hand.

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In an interview for the DVD special features, Iron Man’s primary stuntman Mike Justus said that filming this scene – in which Iron Man uses arm-mounted flamethrowers not only to destroy his weapons but to burn people alive – was an ‘awesome feeling’:

It's an awesome feeling. It feels powerful. You're just burning stuff. You almost have a false sense of security 'cause you really feel super-protected by the suit... I can move pretty well in it, for as much as it weighs, and the special effects guys rigged me up, just making me look like a bloody stud so I can swell out some flames, and that - it's an awesome feeling. ("The Invincible Iron Man," 2008)

This quote illustrates the way that the extreme violence of this scene is affectively experienced as triumphant and cathartic; a forceful reclamation of the power and agency that

Tony had lost. Like Bush, the film conflates security with the aggressive ability to put down rivals, despite the fact that Tony is really only repeating the acts (weapons development and extreme violence) that made him an attractive target in the first place. The fact that the suit confers a ‘false sense of security’ (emphasis mine) is bolstered by the fact that, ironically, the suit itself caught fire during filming. Indeed, Iron Man is not entirely invulnerable in this scene: as he engulfs the camp in flames, setting faceless bodies alight, some gunfire finally injures the machinery on his leg and he falls to his knees. Despite his supposed moral awakening, he again reverts to his father’s old doctrine: a weapon he only needs to fire once.

He opens a panel on his forearm and hits a big red button, which both explodes all of the munitions in the camp and launches him like a rocket out of the resulting mushroom cloud, which echoes Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Landing in the desert, with the shattered armour falling off his body, he congratulates himself: “Not bad.” The effect is to imply that this is simply another chapter in the same story, another test run for a new piece of technology that confirms his own, and America’s, superiority.

This act sets up a narrative structure that mirrors exceptional security logic. Although the film opens in a warzone, the first scene depicts ordinary life – inasmuch as the War on

Terror could be considered ordinary; Tony and the soldiers are relaxed and joking with one

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another, and there are no obvious immediate threats to their safety. Nevertheless, this stretch of ordinary life is rapidly shattered by an unexpected attack; an existential threat that wipes out the soldiers and critically injures Tony. This justifies exceptional measures, not only because Tony’s life is at risk, but because the threat of the Ten Rings is presented as a threat outside the scope of the United States military’s current capabilities. The sequence in the cave, like all spaces of war, unfolds in a state of exception under which the rule of law is suspended, and therefore Tony’s extreme violence against his captors is not only excused but celebrated by the film. Notably, indicating a connection to security specifically rather than a more general concept of war, Tony does not simply build a conventional weapon to turn against his captors, but instead transforms his weapons into armour. The prototype of the Iron Man suit shields him against further harm, masks his vulnerabilities, and transforms him into a larger-than-life persona capable of restoring the status quo ante.

Iron Man sets up the device which I argue is the franchise’s central metaphor for security – the Iron Man suit. The film continues the comic books’ tradition of making Iron Man physically dependent on his technology for survival, which parallels the role of the security state – not only guarding against existential threats, but increasingly using biopolitical techniques to manage existing threats (Dillon & Lobo-Guerrero, 2008). The first thing that

Stark invents, when he emerges from his coma, is a miniaturised ‘arc reactor’, a fictional technology which keeps his heart pumping by holding the shrapnel in his chest at bay. Despite the implausibly advanced technology, it is telling that the arc reactor does not remove the shrapnel but holds it in suspension, justifying the reactor’s continued presence. This image alone is a metaphor for security practices in which threat is held at bay but always encircles the referent object. As a result, although Tony enters a state of exception when kidnapped, he never fully exits it after his escape: the original existential threat continues to define his life.

Although the arc reactor holds it at bay, and the Iron Man suit continues to function as a security device against subsequent external threats, this is a process which must be repeated 191

continually and yet is never fulfilled. Security, for Tony, means a permanent state of emergency.

5.2 Becoming heroic: the Iron Man suit as affective prosthesis

Instead of resuming an ordinary life after returning from Afghanistan, in the rest of Iron Man and throughout Iron Man 2, Tony finds himself beset by new crises, each of which demands that he keep using the suit. In many cases, however, the suit is in itself the focal point of the crisis. In the second half of Iron Man, Obadiah Stane attempts to kill Tony and steal the arc reactor technology to build his own suit. In Iron Man 2, this plot point is repeated as numerous rivals attempt to build their own suits. More critically, however, Tony discovers that his own suit is killing him: the arc reactor preserving his heart is also poisoning his blood, and using the suit accelerates the illness. The security that the suit promises, therefore, is continually undermined by the very qualities of the suit that make it exceptional. Although the suit continues to function as a security device, it never quite allows Tony to achieve a state of security: ultimately it delivers a cycle of suspicion and threat that comes to dominate Tony’s life. Nevertheless, the suit not only allows Tony to defeat each successive threat but each time gives him a renewed sense of moral purpose. In addition, it should be stressed equally strongly that developing and using the suit is joyful: as I will discuss, the Iron Man suit evokes the pleasures of discovery, thrill-seeking and even play. As a result, the Iron Man suit and the heroic identity it confers become integral to Tony’s sense of self, and also to the audience’s enjoyment of the film series. Tony’s experience of his new identity is frequently ambivalent, both joyful and painful: though the suit delivers pleasures of discovery, power and mastery, it creates anxiety and abjection, as Tony is frequently unworthy of the heroic mantle he has assumed and therefore must continually confront his own inadequacies.

In this section I will discuss the ongoing construction of the suit as a piece of cyborg technology that Tony uses to reshape himself in response to permanent emergency. Donna

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Haraway, in her Manifesto for Cyborgs (2004), argues that the cyborg is a political myth with a double edge. On one hand, it evokes “apocalypse waged in the name of defense... a masculinist orgy of war” Haraway (2004, p. 13) – which the Iron Man films certainly depict. However, the cyborg is also a figure with the potential to open up new ways of living in the world, of challenging and reconfiguring the categorical boundaries that structure and restrict normative life. Haraway’s critique of bodily integrity, through the fluid and integrated figure of the cyborg, problematises the distinctions between oppositional categories (like inside and outside) that security practices rely on. Arguably, the dual possibilities raised by the cyborg are not mutually exclusive – as critics of the War on Terror have argued, the technological expansion of military capabilities allied with the all-encompassing security response to 9/11 have already eroded boundaries between war/peace, home/battleground, friend/enemy, human/terrorist/drone etc.

In the case of Iron Man, however, the cyborg metaphor is an embodied, visceral and affective process. Tony’s transformation into Iron Man – an identity capable of protecting people against threats of unanticipated nature and magnitude – is neither linear nor comfortable. In a narrative that has frequently been read as an uncritical celebration of militarism and American exceptionalism, these moments of tension, ambivalence or rejection are significant. Although Tony’s transformation into a cyborg is supposed to rehabilitate him – both in the sense that it will preserve his life and that it will make him worthy of his heroic mantle – it also exposes the cruelties of militarism and exceptionalism. In this section, I will read the construction of the Iron Man suit as an affective prosthesis: a technological apparatus that not only provides Stark with the instrumental means to survive and protect others, but also structures his emotional capacity to cope with the threats and challenges of being in the world. As a result, the suit (and superpowered security) provides a kind of affective augmentation and relief, as it transforms Tony into the sort of person who seems capable, not only of surviving, but of thriving in an environment of permanent emergency. 193

Although on his return to the United States, Tony announces that Stark Industries will no longer manufacture weapons ‘effective immediately’, he continues developing the Iron

Man suit in the privacy of his home workshop. This is a core narrative feature of many Iron

Man stories, especially in the films; even after the immediate threat is resolved, Tony maintains and improves the exceptional technology he used in response as a mitigation against future threat. Of course, there is a difference between exceptional technology and legal exception, but in Iron Man the lines between legal exception, American exceptionalism, and exceptional technology are blurred, as Iron Man is a persona that unites all three. Tony’s civilian heroism is framed as extraordinary, operating in places the United States military cannot reach or performing work that, while necessary, is barred by international law. In the rest of the first Iron Man film, Tony simultaneously disavows the production of ordinary weapons of war while re-constructing himself as an entity that can, at any moment, respond to threats with exceptional and unrestrained force. Iron Man, as a result, can be read as a response to ongoing and permanent securitization following a deep trauma: he is a physical, technological and legal embodiment of the declaration ‘never again’.

For this reason, I argue, the Iron Man suit continues to function as an affective (and physical) prosthesis throughout the film franchise. The suit not only transforms Tony’s capacity to view and influence the world through the conceptual topography of security logic, but provides him with the “prosthetic affect[s]” (Brisini, 2017, p. 16) required to endure and even thrive in the Marvel Cinematic Universe’s environment of permanent emergency and misrecognized crisis ordinariness. In fact, I would argue that the suit encourages misrecognition of crisis ordinariness as crisis; as a prosthetic apparatus of superpowered security, it reconfigures Tony’s ability to interpret and respond to what he sees through its visor. As Brian Massumi points out, an addition to the human body “can be considered prosthesis of the body – provided that it is remembered that the body is equally a prosthesis of the thing” (2002, p. 95) (95). However, one of the most vital aspects of the suit’s appeal is 194

that it provides a sense of agency and possibility that promises to mitigate the psychological attrition of living in constant crisis.

Furthermore, Iron Man is also an embodiment of joy. The scenes in Iron Man which

Tony constructs and tests the suit, especially its flight capacity, are the scenes in which he is the most relaxed, comfortable and free with his emotions. They move from optimistic slapstick, as Tony miscalculates the initial strength of his boot thrusters and launches himself into the ceiling, to unbridled exuberance, when Tony dismisses the need for further tests and pilots the new suit on a joyride through the skies. In DVD special features, director Jon

Favreau said that he wanted the audience to feel like they were flying ("The Invincible Iron

Man," 2008). The scene cuts between first-person shots, looking through the visor at the landscape rushing past below – sometimes frighteningly near – and close-up shots of Tony’s laughing face inside the helmet. Here, Tony does not use the suit to protect people or to safeguard his own life, he uses it to play. For Tony, play is intrinsically linked to innovation and discovery; when he tries to break the altitude record for fixed-wing flight by flying directly towards the moon, the film invokes the joy of historic American firsts. This is an often-overlooked aspect of what security means to him: the freedom to discover, create and play.

Crucially, however, the positive affect of this scene is driven by risk: Tony’s flight is thrilling because we know that he could fall at any moment; and indeed, when he flies too high his suit ices over and the audience is in suspense as he plummets. Through ingenuity and perseverance, he catches himself before he hits the ground, a scene that repeats throughout the Iron Man mythos. In these scenes, although a certain degree of security is required to allow him to develop his suit in peace, the full scope of his achievements would not be possible without risk; while security as a state of safety may be desirable, it is insecurity that is thrilling. The sort of attachment to security logic that Tony displays, therefore, could be

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thought of as an attachment not just to the illusion of permanent and unassailable safety, as critics such as Hamilton (2013) suggest, but to the narrative thrill of holding threat at bay. As a result, one of the affective functions of the suit is to provide a mechanism through which trauma – the unbearable helplessness of 9/11, echoed in Tony’s experience in the cave – can be refigured as a crisis which can be overcome through exceptional measures.

In the same way, Tony’s first use of the suit to perform a superheroic activity is provoked by his inability to witness trauma without taking action to resolve it. He discovers that his mentor, Obadiah Stane, has not only continued to produce weapons but is allowing them to keep falling into the hands of the Ten Rings, who are using them to terrorise a small town called Gulmira. Tony confronts Stane, who reveals that he has moved to eject Tony from the company, and later watches a news report on refugees fleeing their ruined town. Tony’s subsequent visit to Gulmira to rescue the townspeople not only provides a narrative vindication of the Bush Doctrine, but plays into a white saviour narrative in which only the benevolent exercise of American power can save the failing Middle Eastern state from its own inner turmoil, much like Iron Man’s rescue of Vietnamese villagers in the 1963 origin comic

Tales of Suspense. Of course, this is also an exercise in visual spectacle, in which a fantasy version of Colin Powell’s ‘clean war’ doctrine is realised on screen:

Like the uncanny images of smart bombs flying down the chimneys of targeted buildings in the first Gulf War, or the “Shock and Awe” tactics of the Rumsfeld doctrine in the more recent military conflict, Iron Man’s use of high-tech weaponry is depicted as something that is possible without civilian casualties. (Hassler-Forest, 2012, p. 183)

Through Iron Man’s ability to digitally separate enemy combatants from their civilian hostages, target combatants with precision missiles that cause no collateral damage, and exit with minimal damage to himself, Iron Man presents a fantasy of a humanitarian war; one in which the ugly realities and moral compromises of war can be solved through military innovation.

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In applying a Berlantian lens to the scene, however, it can also be read as a cruelly optimistic repetition of Tony’s escape from the cave. Tony’s decision to use the Iron Man suit to intervene is first and foremost an affective decision; sitting on his couch, watching the broadcast, he is incapable of sitting still or even tinkering with the suit, indicating that he cannot physically bear the knowledge that the people of Gulmira are suffering as a consequence of his inventions. His initial inability to take action is so distressing that the first thing he does, once he realizes that the flight thrusters on his suit can be used as weapons, is to attack his own reflection. He fires on every pane of glass in the workshop, until he can no longer see the version of himself that did nothing while others suffered. This brand of self- destructive ire marks Iron Man stories as fantasies of frustrated self-transformation, in which the exceptional but deeply flawed protagonist continually seeks to eradicate his failings and remake himself into a hero. It is a process, however, which is never fully realized, as he continually attempts to rehabilitate problematic strategies of the past. In this reading, the Iron

Man suit is a narrative device that allows the film to swap between modes of trauma and crisis as required. The film alludes to the emotional impact of trauma where it is necessary to justify

Iron Man’s interventions, but overall it follows the logic of crisis, which circumvents the unbearable or incomprehensible qualities of trauma and demands action instead. As a result, the film offers a fantasy of transformative rehabilitation in which Tony can make himself into the exceptional persona he is expected to be.

In the end, however, the biggest threat to Tony’s transformation comes from the inside: while the Ten Rings acts primarily as the motivation for Tony’s heroic transformation, it is Obadiah Stane, Tony’s mentor and surrogate father figure, who actually threatens to undermine Tony’s heroic mission. Stane’s financial support of the Ten Rings, which includes provision of Stark Industries weapons, is reminiscent of the US’ controversial involvement in proxy wars throughout the Cold War. Just as the US government covertly channelled financial aid and US weapons to the mujahedeen during the Soviet-Afghan War (1979-1989), as a 197

means of containing the Soviet Union (Katzman & Thomas, 2017), Stane provides the Ten

Rings with the money and weapons they need to kidnap and kill Tony, leaving Stark

Industries under Stane’s control. Stane continually argues that producing weapons is the only pragmatic strategy to keep the world safe, although by the end of the film it is clear that he wants perpetual war in order to secure perpetual profit. Stane’s attempt to pre-emptively secure his own prosperity backfires, by creating a new enemy: Iron Man. Nevertheless, the revelation that Tony’s mentor is the primary enemy, rather than the Ten Rings, emphasises the threat of internal corruption and disunity above all else.

Throughout the Iron Man films, the greatest threats originate from Stark’s own technology or technology developed by people very like him. When Tony refuses to cave in to

Stane’s demand to start producing weapons again, Stane attacks Tony, steals the arc reactor from Tony’s chest, and leaves him to die. He uses the arc reactor to power a new range of weapons, including an Iron Man suit of his own, designed to ensure Stark Industries’ dominance over the military-industrial complex. Control and mastery of technology is a common theme in Iron Man stories (as discussed in Chapter 4) and the first Iron Man film cements this theme. Stane is defeated firstly through superior use of technology – having not gone for a joyride to the moon like Tony, his suit cannot handle the freezing cold of the high altitudes Tony leads him to – and secondly through Tony’s willingness to sacrifice himself, by having Pepper explode his factory’s reactor underneath the battle. In each case, Tony is just a step ahead of Stane at each point; his technology has had one more cycle of development, and his character has only recently (and marginally) matured from the selfish, profit-motivated drive that we see echoed in Stane. Like many supervillains, Stane is a dark mirror of the hero he fights, which means that in defeating him, Tony performs a symbolic exorcism of the negative qualities that threaten to make him unheroic.

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But in many ways, this is only symbolic, as Stane’s negative qualities – such as greed, or the tendency to physically intimidate others – are still echoed in Tony in more benign but perhaps more insidious ways. Although Tony shows no particular desire to accumulate more wealth after his return from Afghanistan, the film makes it very clear that he requires spectacular wealth to support his life of discovery. He fabricates the final version of his suit – made from an alloy used in military satellites – in his basement, over only five hours, a task which indicates astronomical resources. Indeed, one of the sources of the film’s pleasure is the spectacle of Tony’s wealth, meaning that the film franchise cannot give it up. Intimidation, likewise, is uncomfortable for the viewer when Stane looms over Pepper Potts or a hapless scientist, but it is a source of pleasure when Tony uses the Iron Man suit to intimidate terrorists. This gives the illusion of a fundamental difference between them, but the fact remains that the film derives both pleasure and threat from the same sources – which means that it securitizes the things it most values.

Perhaps as a result, Tony sometimes seems to want to flee his own identity for the uncomplicated heroic persona of Iron Man. In the comics, his secret identity provides a clear

(if somewhat permeable) distinction between Tony Stark, the industrialist, and Iron Man, the superhero. Even when this distinction is challenged, as in Demon in a Bottle, the distinction is ultimately maintained. The first filmic Iron Man, however, allows the lines to become blurred.

Like Demon in a Bottle, Iron Man uses visual framing to indicate that Tony and Iron Man are intertwined; when Pepper confronts Tony in his workshop about his behaviour, which she sees as self-destructive, frames including Tony are dominated by images of the Iron Man suit.

Instead of looking at her, he looks at a schematic of the suit on a pane of glass, which reflects his face such that Tony and his reflection bracket Iron Man; Iron Man – the scene suggests – is on the inside. When he finally turns to face Pepper, the schematic now stares her down from behind his shoulder; the partially dis-assembled torso and head of the armour watch her from a stand on his other side. 199

When Tony is visually framed as part of an assemblage with Iron Man (tellingly, always a work-in-progress), he speaks and acts in the simple terms of threat and exception; he dismisses Pepper’s concern for him and tells her that “[t]here is the next mission and nothing else.” Only when the camera frames him alone does he open up to her, revealing feelings more complicated and painful than Iron Man’s ability to simply focus on the crisis at hand. “I shouldn’t be alive,” he says, struggling to get the words out, “...unless it was for a reason.” The persona of Iron Man gives him this reason, by framing the world in simple terms of threat and response, but it also bars him from the relationship that he wants to have with

Pepper. Despite the affective simplicity and relief of security logic that Iron Man represents, there is a clear cost, and that is that the future must always be put off in service of the present crisis.

In the final scene of the film, Tony publicly declares, “I am Iron Man.” I read this break with comic book tradition, where Tony explicitly rejects the secrecy of his identity that has characterised most of the comic book stories, as a desire to subsume himself into the Iron Man persona. Through this act of merging identities, the undesirable or threatening qualities of his civilian identity are enclosed within a heroic shield; simultaneously in need of protection and sublimation. In this way, the relationship between the Tony Stark and Iron Man identities, in the films, is akin to the shrapnel around his heart – interpenetrating, held in suspension, but always threatening to slip out of control. But the desire to become Iron Man, rather than Tony

Stark, is understandable, given that it is really the desire for a persona that is equal to the times. Although the film derives pleasure from Tony’s many flaws, which serves to covertly excuse them, it is equally clear that just being Tony is not enough. In having Tony destroy his own image, use Iron Man as an affective prosthesis, and finally collapse the two identities in the public eye, the film implies that going on as he has done to this point is unbearable. Going on as Iron Man, however, might finally enable Tony to live up to the extraordinary expectations laid out at the Apogee Awards, leading America to a safer and better future. 200

5.3 ‘I am Iron Man’: legacy and identity in Iron Man 2

In Iron Man 2 (dir. Jon Favreau), it initially seems like this is the case: the film opens with a news broadcast lauding Iron Man’s effect on the world; he is Time Person of the Year, he has stabilised East-West relations, and one magazine cover even uses a Biblical reference to wonder whether he will bring the world into a new age entirely (“Stark’s Arc: Will he ever share his secrets to power the world?”). This is a throwback to the first film in more ways than one: Tony has apparently regressed back into the narcissistic showmanship of the first film, using his Iron Man persona to grandstand as much as he uses it to help people. The Stark

Expo, at which he intends to continue his father’s progressive legacy by showcasing the world’s best innovations, opens with a performance by dancing girls in skimpy Iron Man- inspired costumes. As with the first film, however, legacy is a problematic issue; although all of Tony’s inventions are founded in Howard’s earlier discoveries, Howard’s business relationships also provide fertile ground for the film’s major conflict. One of the film’s two villains, Ivan Vanko (Mickey Rourke), is the son of a Russian physicist who worked alongside

Howard on the early arc reactor designs but was deported on Howard’s orders once the design was complete. As Vanko watches the news broadcast from a dingy room in Russia, his dying father says, “That should be you.” Iron Man 2, therefore, continues the project of Iron

Man by engaging with the problem of contested legacies.

As a result, Iron Man 2 also expresses anxieties surrounding public mediation and reception; the media plays a prominent role in parsing events within the film, and public opinion is another battleground to be won. The scene in which Tony drops into the Expo in his suit is introduced by a military-sounding voiceover – “You are cleared for exfiltration over the drop zone” – which misleads the audience into initially believing they are about to witness a military mission. In fact, Tony provides a spectacle for an adoring crowd. In subsequent scenes, Tony is summoned to a televised Congressional hearing to defend his use of the Iron

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Man suit. In this hearing, Tony, the hostile Congressman Wyatt, and Tony’s rival weapons developer Justin Hammer (Sam Rockwell) all fight to take control of the media narrative describing Iron Man, Tony Stark, and even the legacy of Tony’s father. Although the hearing raises objectively reasonable concerns about the risks inherent in allowing a private citizen exclusive control over the Iron Man suit, here positioned as the world’s leading superweapon,

Tony once again takes command of the narrative by spectacularly undermining the credibility of his rivals. He hacks the AV feed to show video of Hammer’s own unsuccessful test of an Iron

Man knock-off, thereby undermining Hammer’s credibility as an expert and his claim to be

Tony’s peer in technical ability. Tony’s success is signalled by a standing ovation from the crowd as he leaves the hearing, rather than by any compelling demonstration of his trustworthiness as a national defender.

In the end, however, the question is moot; as Tony glibly says to Congress, the Iron

Man suit is so entangled with his person that there is no credible alternative. “I am Iron Man,” he argues, “The suit and I are one. To turn over the Iron Man suit would be to turn over myself which is tantamount to indentured servitude or prostitution, depending on which state you’re in.” Although it is played for laughs, Tony’s declaration that the Iron Man suit is not a weapon but ‘a high-tech prosthesis’ is not entirely untrue. Indeed, the Iron Man suit is clearly both a weapon and a shield, as Justin Hammer argues, but it is just as reliant on Tony Stark’s exceptional talents as he is reliant on its life support capabilities. Viewed as a prosthesis, the

Iron Man suit confers a composite, cyborg identity, a metaphor for a national security apparatus inextricably embedded into the referent it seeks to protect.

In Iron Man 2, however, the self-destructive potential of this type of security apparatus is made clear. As Tony’s use of the Iron Man suit becomes more frequent and normalized, it begins to contaminate his bloodstream with toxic radiation. The blood poisoning is depicted as an inhuman change to Tony’s body: the spreading disease is represented by dark blue lines

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spreading under his skin, as though his veins are undergoing a painful reconstruction into circuits. Read as a metaphor for the costs of dependence on an intensive security regime, this illustrates an anxiety that when the regime permeates the entire system, it may compromise the health of the system in an irreparable way. Tony cannot stop using the Iron Man suit; after all, he has confidently stated to Congress that America can rely on his protection. In the meantime, there are also immediate threats to address – Ivan Vanko (the only other person in the world who can create a rival suit) attacks Tony at the Monaco Grand Prix, meaning that he must use the Iron Man suit to protect himself and his loved ones. This is the cost of crisis logic; although immediate threats demand exceptional measures, the cost of those exceptional measures rapidly becomes unbearable when crises are frequent and unrelenting.

Not only does Tony discover that the arc reactor is poisoning his blood, but his response to his once-more-impending mortality is to engage in reckless self-sabotage. As he is unable to move forward – there is apparently no technological solution to his disease, and he cannot stop using the Iron Man suit – he chooses instead to move backwards, throwing himself into wild parties and alcohol-fuelled stunts that confirm his critics’ worst fears. At his birthday party, he drunkenly uses the Iron Man suit to impress his adoring guests, first blowing up watermelons and then blowing holes in the walls of his house. Although the film comically trivializes this sequence, by playing ‘Another One Bites the Dust’ when Rhodey (Don

Cheadle) gets into the old Mark 2 suit to stop Tony from hurting anyone, it nevertheless highlights the sinister potential of a security system gone rogue. Even drunk, Tony manages to temporarily overcome Rhodey, and when the music stops, he is left standing in the rubble of his living room, having just fought one of his best friends, watching silent guests filming him on their phones. We cut to the interior of the helmet, which scans the crowd as if they were enemies. Although none of them are highlighted in red like the terrorists in Gulmira were in

Iron Man, the audience knows that they could be. In the end, the film leaves this anxiety open;

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the public has no option but to trust that their protectors, like Tony, will eventually redeem themselves.

When Tony lets Rhodey escape with the Iron Man prototype, knowing that he will take it back to the Air Force and undermine Tony’s desire to keep his weapons out of government hands, he implicitly signals that ruining his own reputation and allowing others to take over before he dies is preferable to leaving a sudden power vacuum. This tendency to regress is apparently preferable to recognizing the reality of his situation, that for all his wondrous technology, he is still in the impasse he tried so hard to escape in Iron Man. His discomfort is reflected in a scene where, talking to Pepper, he is distracted by a desk ornament that swings in perpetual circles, driven by its own momentum. Desperate to halt its movement, he tries to pile up stationery around it, but no matter what he does he cannot hold it still. I read this as a case of misrecognition: despite the fact that he has done nothing but go around in circles for the entire film, both in terms of his behaviour and his attempt to hold his impending death in perpetual suspension, he refuses to acknowledge it. Instead, he capitulates once more to crisis logic, allowing Rhodey to become an exception to his cardinal rule (‘Do not provide weapons to the government’) on the basis that soon Tony will die, and Iron Man will cease to exist.

Of course, the film does not allow that to happen, but instead of imagining a truly innovative solution to the problem, it once again draws the means to achieve progress from the past. To fix his suit, so that he can continue to use it without dying, Tony must create an entirely new element to fuel the reactor – an element he finds hidden in an old project of his father’s, a model ‘city of the future’, where technology promises better lives for all. In a video from 1974, Howard Stark explains:

“Everything is achievable through technology. Better living, robust health, and for the first time in human history, the possibility of world peace. So from all of us here at Stark Industries, I would like to personally introduce you to the City of the Future. Technology holds infinite possibilities for mankind and will one day rid society of all its ills. Soon,

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technology will affect the way you live your life every day. No more tedious work, leaving more time for leisure activities and enjoying the sweet life.”

What is perhaps most striking about this film is that its most salient vision of the future is nearly forty years old. This is a remarkably vague vision of the future, gesturing towards utopian dreams but never rendering them in detail. What does this future look like? What are its social contours, and what sacrifices must be made in order to get there? These questions are not answered, and so the viewer is left to populate the space with their own imagined utopia. This is very similar to the internal logic of national security, where the future that it guarantees is underspecified.

The future, therefore, really just means the good life, which as Berlant argues is so unreachable for most people that it may as well be a utopian dream. The fantasy, of course, is that no sacrifices will be needed in order to get to this future, or that any sacrifices will be borne by exceptional individuals, such as Iron Man, who must fight to protect the means by which the future will be achieved. In reality, however, the secure and flourishing future that

Iron Man 2 imagines shows no engagement with the difficult problems like social inequality that demand sacrifices of ordinary people every day. The relationship between national or homeland security and the surveillance and discipline of civilians is not addressed either, as the only dissenters to the Stark legacy are undermined by their villainous ulterior motives.

The anxiety is clearly present in the film’s depiction of Tony going off the rails, surveilling and analysing his civilian guests through his high-tech visor, and of Justin Hammer’s military drones going rogue in the film’s climax. The finale in particular illustrates common anxieties about military technology, as the drones are designed by Ivan Vanko to have a backdoor which he can exploit to take control and turn them on the US populace. But ultimately, a meaningful challenge to economic inequality or the need to police the civilian population would undercut the film’s central fantasy: it would make Iron Man impossible.

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Although they do not mount a serious challenge to the national fantasies they engage with, these two films depict a number of key tensions, ambivalences and inconsistencies, all of which point towards an insurmountable preoccupation with threat. Howard Stark’s utopian dream has been stalled for forty years, in part because the technology has not advanced quickly enough, but also because those forty years were characterized by war and conflict.

Tony’s magnum opus, the Iron Man suit, is poisoning him from within, a situation that cannot change while an Iron Man suit piloted by Tony Stark is necessary to defend against the threats that may dominate the next forty years. These sacrifices carry immense risk, the films suggest, to the point of compromising the objectives that the Starks want to protect – but what is the alternative? Because there is still the appearance of normal life to which Tony can return, however, it is still possible to misrecognise each crisis as an interruption to the norm, rather than a new norm in itself. But the looming spectre of existential threat, forever on the horizon, serves to suspend the characters in perpetual impasse, which is only exacerbated by the strategies they use to stay afloat.

As an object of attachment, therefore, the Iron Man suit represents a cluster of fantasies that can all be characterized as cruelly optimistic. As a spectacular display of wealth and power, it celebrates the social structures that concentrate wealth in the hands of the privileged few, and therefore invites audiences to fantasise that these people, however flawed, have their best interests at heart. As a tool through which Tony regains personal agency throughout the trauma of his captivity, it is a fantasy that sovereignty can be reclaimed and defended through old-fashioned ingenuity and perseverance. And as a physical and affective prosthetic, it invokes a fantasy of invulnerability, resilience and strength.

In Iron Man and Iron Man 2, the Iron Man suit begins life as a prosthetic in two ways: physically, as a life support device that keeps Tony alive, and affectively, as a persona that can bear the burden of feeling from which Tony himself shrinks away. Aesthetically, the suit exudes an aura of invincibility, impassivity and strength, through its larger-than-life chassis, 206

exaggerated mechanical musculature, and stoic mask. Later version of the suit smooth down the harsh edges and present a more urbane, sophisticated visage, visually downplaying the violence and intimidation that the suit makes possible. In all incarnations, the suit provides

Tony with the physical and technological power to exert his will over others, and relieves the discomfort of feeling the impasse in which he finds himself: that the only way he can think of to escape the mess of violence and armed conflict that his own weapons have played a part in creating, is to create yet another weapon. Throughout the origin sequence, Tony consistently struggles with the weight of his emotions; in every scene where he is able to resolve the mess of affective tensions he exhibits by leaping straight to action, he does so without hesitation, and when he cannot, his hands twitch with the desire to move. To feel his situation fully, it seems, would be unbearable. As a result, I argue, the suit preserves his heart both literally and figuratively, keeping him in perpetual suspension so that he can attempt to move forward.

Although I have argued that the suit acts as a focal point for a cluster of culturally significant attachments, the fact that Tony also needs it to act as an affective prosthesis highlights the necessity of masking the problems, contradictions and tensions of these desires

– in other words, their cruel optimism. If the Iron Man suit is a signifier of sovereignty, for example, it is a signifier that seeks to hide the doubts and fallibility of the individual who wears it, therefore confirming that they exist. As a signifier of the promised bounties of techno-futurism, it must constantly contend with the fact that it is yoked to the past, both symbolically and technologically. As a means of escaping the violent cycles of Tony’s forefathers, it is a very poor solution indeed. It is difficult to escape the conclusion that the future it promises is at best another version of the past, perhaps with some of the rougher edges sanded off, but at worst a version of the past that excuses all the old foibles and mistakes only to commit them again with greater firepower. As a signifier of freedom, the suit can certainly bestow incredible agency and freedom of movement, especially when Tony learns how to fly, but only by trapping its wearer inside. Although the suit ostensibly functions 207

as a powerful signifier of security, therefore, it really emphasises the wearer’s insecurity, leading to a relation of dependence in which the suit continually exacerbates the issues it promises to solve. It is as an affective prosthesis, however, that the suit is arguably most important, allowing Tony to escape the discomfort of feeling his way through these problems.

It is a mechanism through which he can instead feel like he is moving forward even when he is really just retracing his steps.

In conclusion, Iron Man’s origin sequence echoes the comics in setting up the Iron Man suit as the newest link in a long chain of exceptional inventions that help to secure America’s place in the world, but it does so by reframing the suit as a response to the affective crisis of the post-9/11 long war. As a prosthesis, the suit allows Tony to keep living on through the trauma of his captivity, which threatens both his life and his image of himself and his country.

Crucially, however, it allows him to maintain his attachment to the beliefs that motivate his life’s work even when he discovers that it has been killing people rather than ensuring their security. Instead of confronting the possibility that his very identity and legacy may be built on shaky foundations, which would be unbearable, the suit offers a different rationale – the goal of achieving security is worthy (in fact, after his trauma, more necessary than ever before) but the means have simply not been good enough. Furthermore, threat lurks everywhere, even inside his own body. As a result, although Tony decides to stop producing conventional weapons in a partial rejection of the past, he cannot give up the Iron Man suit.

The suit, however, is beholden to traditions of supremacy based in violence, which have now been reframed in the temporal and spatial expansion of the long war, so that it binds Tony to the logic he used to create it long after the traumatic event that inspired it has passed.

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Chapter 6 – ‘Just like Budapest all over again’: Crisis ordinariness in The Avengers

In 2012, The Avengers (dir. Joss Whedon) hit cinema screens worldwide, with the highest opening weekend gross in the United States at the time ($207,438,708) and a total worldwide gross exceeding one and a half billion dollars. The film, which brought together Marvel’s independent superheroes to face a global crisis, was marketed for the enormity of its visual spectacle, its ensemble cast, and its status as the first major convergence point of Marvel’s massive transmedia franchise. The film is significant for its unambiguous use of 9/11 imagery, reflecting a broader cinematic preoccupation with 9/11 that Terrence McSweeney describes as “a fascination which borders on the obsessive” (2018, p. 121). In this chapter, I will argue that this restaging of 9/11, within a cinematic universe in which the real 9/11 is implied to be part of the diegetic backstory, is symptomatic of a worldview in which the repetition of existential threats is inevitable, and where the normalised exercise of superpowered security is therefore necessary.

Viewing the franchise through a Berlantian lens, The Avengers marks the point in the franchise where the generic attributes of crisis ordinariness (discussed in Chapters 2 and 3) first begin to emerge beneath the surface structures of crisis and exception. This film is therefore significant because it illustrates the difficulty of adjusting to permanent emergency using the tools of superpowered security. This chapter will therefore build on the often-noted geopolitical implications of The Avengers by examining the coping mechanisms – affective, strategic and technological – that the film’s protagonists use to survive permanent emergency, and argue that ultimately these coping mechanisms are not sufficient to move beyond the impasse that superpowered security creates.

In section 6.1, I will build on the observation that The Avengers (2012) functions as a

9/11 moment for the Marvel Cinematic Universe: with a shock alien invasion over the skies of 209

Manhattan, the film introduces a new existential threat that ripples throughout the continuity of the broader film franchise and provides justification for increasingly exceptional security measures. This film marks the point in the MCU where the franchise no longer operates as a set of linear, parallel series set in the same world, but instead becomes convergent – crossing over into ensemble films – and multilinear – exploding out into a multiplicity of simultaneous, overlapping and conflicting sequences. In a structural sense, The Avengers could be viewed as the true ‘origin’ of the MCU, in that it is an originating crisis that marks and forever changes the structure of the franchise. As a result, The Avengers illustrates the structural ways in which the MCU represents permanent emergency. After The Avengers, crisis can no longer genuinely be thought of as exceptional, because it is increasingly obvious that conditions of crisis are permanent within the franchise.

In the next section, I will compare the efficacy of the Iron Man suit as affective prosthesis to the various coping mechanisms that the other Avengers use to adjust to conditions of permanent emergency. Although some strategies, such as humour, are more effective in the short-term than others, all heroes are shown to be worn down by their constant use and embodiment of exceptional security measures. For other members of the superpowered Avengers team, such as Black Widow (Scarlett Johansson), Captain America

(Chris Evans), Thor (Chris Hemsworth), and the Hulk (Mark Ruffalo), constant crisis has transformed and defined their lives for so long that they are already negotiating a continual process of adjustment. Although each superhero struggles to adjust their coping mechanisms to the large-scale crisis they face in this film, Iron Man’s struggle is especially relevant to this analysis as he is not only the closest superhero to conventional articulations of superpowered security, but he is arguably the most traumatised at the conclusion of the film. Iron Man, in contrast to the other heroes, has only recently transitioned from physically distanced arms dealer to front-line combatant, such that his experience of crisis is newly visceral.

Furthermore, he has enjoyed brief returns to normality (meaning a life not defined by crisis) 210

in the spaces between his films, which means that his belief in the exceptional nature of crisis has been much easier to maintain. Although the Iron Man suit functions effectively as an affective prosthesis throughout much of the film, its ability to keep him secure falters towards the end of the film, when he discovers that he must sacrifice his life to save the Earth.

Finally, in 6.3, I will discuss the way in which this ending – in which the Avengers successfully fend off the alien invasion and close the portal over Manhattan – paradoxically exacerbates the anxieties leading to the acceleration of superpowered security measures even in the absence of threat. Although Iron Man survives his heroic sacrifice when the Hulk catches his falling body, he has now experienced a crisis that exceeds the securitizing capacity of his technology. As a result, The Avengers disrupts Iron Man’s ability to feel secure even after the crisis is over. Furthermore, although closing the portal and sealing any remaining Chitauri away in an inaccessible space averts a long war (effectively restaging 9/11 without the ensuing War on Terror) it leaves Earth isolated and blind to the next threat. In this section I will discuss the spatiotemporal construction of the Avengers’ victory over the Chitauri and argue that the banishment of the alien threat to an unknown area of the cosmos restages the threat deficit experienced by the United States at the end of the Cold War. In doing so, it fosters an environment in which the affective weight of potential threat – the “unknown unknowns” (2002), to quote Donald Rumsfeld – far exceeds the fear generated by an actual threat.

This film, I argue, marks the point in which the cruel optimism of Iron Man’s attachment to superpowered security emerges most dramatically. Although Iron Man and Iron

Man 2 engage with the damaging side-effects of Tony’s reliance on the Iron Man suit, it is The

Avengers – in which the suit no longer seems enough – that triggers Iron Man’s catastrophic spiral into insecurity in Iron Man 3 and The Avengers: Age of Ultron. As I will discuss in this chapter, The Avengers expresses a narrative version of the kind of double-talk that Mark

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Neocleous (2006) identifies in national security discourse. Although the basic plot appears to rework the familiar narrative of 9/11 into a conventional war with clear spatiotemporal boundaries, the ultimate effect of the film within the franchise is to justify the continual extension of exceptional measures to pre-empt future threats. As a result, this film demonstrates not only the affective burden carried by the superheroes who must carry out this endless security project, but the immense difficulty of finding alternatives to the logic of superpowered security.

6.1 Restaging 9/11: permanent emergency in The Avengers

As Marvel Studios began planning The Avengers, following the success of Iron Man in

2008, the United States was in the process of transitioning between presidential administrations. President Obama, elected in 2009, rose to power on an aspirational platform predicated, in no small part, on moving away from the executive and military overreach of the

Bush era and reasserting the rule of law. He famously began by signing executive orders outlawing torture, closing secret CIA prisons, and commanding the closure of Guantanamo

Bay within a year. Yet, by the film’s release in 2012, President Obama’s track record on national security was decidedly more mixed than his election campaign promised. Following the release of the 2010 National Security Strategy, legal commentators noted striking continuities between the Bush and Obama national security strategies. Although the language in NSS10 was significantly more circumspect than either NSS02 or NSS06 (the strategy documents of the Bush administration), indicating a desire to moderate the use of force and privilege diplomacy above unilateral militarism, NSS10 maintained the Bush administration’s declaration of an open-ended war, refused to commit to international law (making instead a weak commitment to international ‘standards’), left open key questions about the use of

‘necessary’ force, and was notably silent on the issue of pre-emptive self-defence (Gray, 2011;

Hemmer, 2011; Henderson, 2010; Romano, 2011). President Obama’s record was especially

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tarnished by his extensive authorisation of remotely targeted drone strikes, which escalated from his earliest days in office, stoking fears that Obama, like Bush, would “prefer to operate under the law of 9/11 rather than the rule of law” (Gray, 2011, p. 53).

Yet for all the continuities between Bush and Obama, especially in their shared emphasis on US primacy and exceptionalism as a pillar of US national security, the Obama era marked a significant shift in the conduct of the War on Terror. As part of a recommitment to

Afghanistan in 2009, Obama ordered a ‘surge’ of troops in Afghanistan but moved to place a time frame on the US military presence, announcing July 2011 as the start of a major military drawdown. Indeed, over the course of the Obama administration, US military spending declined from $691 billion in 2010 to $580.3 billion in 2016 (Brands, 2016), leading some critics to question whether the United States would be prepared to meet future security challenges:

Finally, there was the question of whether Obama had perhaps overlearned the painful lessons of the Bush years – whether in averting the undeniable danger of overreach, had he exposed the country to the opposing danger of under-reach, just as the world was again demanding more, not less, of the United States’ stabilizing influence. (Brands, 2016, p. 120)

Michael Clarke and Anthony Ricketts describe this as “’the usual dilemma’ of all hegemonic states” (2017, p. 493); whether to invest heavily in military resources and incur an economic burden that proves unnecessary – an especially pressing concern following the 2008 financial crisis – or to relax military commitments and risk finding oneself under a threat that the nation is no longer equipped to meet. It is this latter anxiety to which I argue The Avengers responds; the worry that a declining and politically divided US may be ill-equipped to handle another crisis on the level of 9/11.

As the first major convergence point in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers emphasises a sense of permanent emergency by emphasising the relationships between distinct crises in solo films. Although the Marvel Cinematic Universe was not the first 213

‘transmedia franchise’ (Jenkins, 2006) – meaning “serially produced films with a shared diegetic universe that can extend within and beyond the cinematic medium into correlated media texts” (A. Taylor, 2014, p. 182) – it has been recognised as one of the most successful (L.

Burke, 2018). Spanning 23 films, 6 television series, a web series, and more than thirty tie-in comics at the time of writing, the MCU has become a media juggernaut: the film franchise alone has grossed $22.5 billion since its inception in 2008. As a result of its interwoven structure, in which events from one film impact directly on others, it can depict expansive stories with complex continuities and far-reaching implications. The MCU is a complex web of storylines that converge, cross over, and diverge. Structurally speaking, the MCU mimics the complex structure of Marvel’s comic book empire – in other words, it really does seek to represent a ‘universe’ in which singular events can have unforeseen, far-reaching and long- lasting consequences.

Because existential threat is the bread and butter of the superhero genre, as discussed in Chapter 3, the MCU’s repetition of this basic generic structure – a threat arises, a superhero intervenes to save the world, normality returns (or not) – produces a metanarrative of permanent emergency. As discussed in Chapter 2, permanent emergency describes a situation where a state of emergency – a situation, typically thought to be temporary, where the rules of ordinary life are suspended to deal with some crisis – is extended indefinitely beyond the life of the instigating crisis. Permanent emergency, of course, must be sustained by the rhetorical discourse of crisis, which Lauren Berlant defines as a “heightening interpretive genre, rhetorically turning an ongoing condition into an intensified situation in which extensive threats to survival are said to dominate the reproduction of life” (2011, p. 7) and which demands a sort of “heroic agency” (2011, p. 101) in order to confront. The MCU is a clear narrative fantasy of this scenario, in which structural crisis or crisis ordinariness is misrecognised as exceptional – thus justifying the extension and escalation of emergency powers. 214

Although early films within the MCU, like Iron Man and Iron Man 2, tend to represent crisis as temporary – depicting a return to some semblance of ordinary life at the end of each film – The Avengers is a turning point. In The Avengers, the MCU’s previously parallel, linear film series converge into a single narrative. The film, released in 2012, was the sixth in the

MCU and concluded ‘Phase One’ of the Infinity Saga (which concluded in 2019). It followed

Iron Man (2008), The Incredible Hulk (2008), Iron Man 2 (2010), Thor (2011) and Captain

America: The First Avenger (2011), and extended plotlines from each preceding film. The

Avengers builds on existing connections between the films, which had previously been derived from common characters like S.H.I.E.L.D Agent Phil Coulson (Clark Gregg), a character with no pre-existing comic book analogy who was created for the MCU. In addition, post-credits scenes typically teased future films by foreshadowing new characters and conflicts, building up what Karen Randell has called a ‘broader sense of instability’ throughout the MCU – no sooner is one threat resolved than another arises.

The Avengers unites these disparate threads into a single cohesive narrative. The film is set on Earth, where the shadowy intelligence agency S.H.I.E.L.D. (first introduced in Iron

Man) is testing the Tesseract – a mysterious cosmic power source recovered by S.H.I.E.L.D. after it was lost in Captain America (2011), the film released immediately preceding The

Avengers. The Tesseract is stolen by Loki (Tom Hiddleston), an alien prince and perennial villain of the Thor movies, who has agreed to deliver it to an as-yet-unknown alien entity in exchange for an army with which to conquer Earth – a planet favoured by Loki’s brother and rival Thor, heir to the intergalactic kingdom of Asgard. S.H.I.E.L.D., shattered by Loki’s initial assault and his ability to mind control S.H.I.E.L.D agents, responds by gathering Earth’s heroes in an effort to reinvigorate the discontinued Avengers Initiative. The Avengers include Iron

Man, the recently awakened Captain America (a biologically enhanced war hero frozen beneath Arctic ice since World War 2), the fugitive Dr. Bruce Banner (AKA the Incredible

Hulk), Asgardian thunder god Thor, and Soviet-defector superspy Black Widow. Later, they 215

are joined by Hawkeye (Jeremy Renner), a preternaturally skilled archer and S.H.I.E.L.D operative, after he escapes Loki’s mind control.

For the most part, The Avengers follows exceptional security logic closely, moving from the detection of an existential threat to the declaration of a state of exception; when Loki flees the S.H.I.E.L.D. facility with the Tesseract, Nick Fury (Samuel L. Jackson), the Director of

S.H.I.E.L.D., declares, “as of right now, we are at war.” From that moment onwards, although

Fury makes ongoing attempts to persuade both the Avengers candidates and the mysterious council that oversees S.H.I.E.L.D that increasingly exceptional measures are required, there is no need to rhetorically securitize the issue because the film has framed it as self-evident. Loki and his alien Chitauri allies are comically evil: Loki, performed flamboyantly by Tom

Hiddleston, declares that he will release humanity from the burden of freedom, while the

Chitauri are visually coded as evil through a deep and persistent racialisation that transforms them into grotesque, abject bodies – a hivemind that it is not only permissible but enjoyable to kill (Mullen, 2018).

Nevertheless, for most of the film this is a secret war, and as a result, the mechanisms of a global security apparatus are immediately in full effect. To find Loki, S.H.I.E.L.D. commandeers the Earth’s entire telecommunications network, without comment from any of the assembled heroes: “We’re sweeping every wirelessly accessible camera on the planet. Cell phones, laptops… If it’s connected to a satellite, it’s eyes and ears for us.” In contrast to previous superhero films such as The Dark Knight, which engaged explicitly with the ethics of mass surveillance, The Avengers presents a scenario where this act is not only warranted, but self-evidently justified. As Terrence McSweeney notes, although the film critiques Nick Fury’s use of the Tesseract to secretly create weapons of mass destruction, it ultimately shows that sometimes deception is allowable for the right reasons: after Loki ‘kills’ S.H.I.E.L.D. Agent Phil

Coulson (an everyman character designed as an audience stand-in), Fury allows the Avengers

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to believe that Coulson is really dead As a result, the film generates additional thrill from the spectacle of S.H.I.E.L.D.’s powers, just as it does in the preceding scene in which their base of operations, a ‘helicarrier’ the size of an aircraft carrier, lifts up out of the ocean and cloaks itself invisibly in the sky.

Despite the heroes’ efforts, Loki eventually succeeds in using the Tesseract to power an intergalactic portal through which his Chitauri allies can invade New York. The wanton destruction of New York that ensues has led many commenters to note similarities with the

9/11 attacks, especially as Loki opens the portal above Stark Tower, which in the MCU is an iconic landmark and symbol of future prosperity roughly analogous to the Twin Towers. The previously fractious Avengers unite to fight the Chitauri and defend New York, with mixed success. Although Black Widow discovers a way to close the portal, the international council overseeing S.H.I.E.L.D. orders a nuclear strike on Manhattan to stem the flow of invaders and save the rest of the planet. The strike is narrowly averted by Iron Man, who intercepts the missile and flies it through the portal – risking his own life – to strike the Chitauri mothership.

With this act of self-sacrificial heroism, and the Avengers’ subsequent capture of Loki, the immediate crisis is over. However, Loki’s defeat does not signal the end of permanent emergency, as the audience knows that there is a greater power manipulating Loki from behind the scenes. The audience, therefore, is in on the secret – that characters who might otherwise seem paranoid, such as S.H.I.E.L.D.’s Director Fury, or Tony Stark, are in fact right to continue escalating security measures in anticipation of a greater threat to come. In this worldview, each minor threat potentially foreshadows a greater threat, meaning that no emergency is ever truly closed.

The Avengers explosively expands the franchise’s potential battlespace to a galactic scale, a trend which has continued rapidly since then: the Thor films move between Earth and

Asgard, while the Guardians of the Galaxy films take place almost entirely on other planets in

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the galaxy, while Doctor Strange (2016) introduces time travel. The Ant-Man films, on the other hand, go in the opposite direction, introducing the infinitesimally tiny quantum realm, a scale which paradoxically exists everywhere at once. Temporally and spatially, therefore, the

MCU trains its audience to expect that the next threat could come from anywhere at any time, and that any conflict could rapidly escalate in scale, scope and spectacle. Given that the MCU actively cultivates sophisticated franchise literacy in its viewers (Dantzler, 2018), the practice of fan theorizing – in which a minor piece of information in one film could foreshadow a major event in another – relies on premises shared with ‘mosaic theory’, a Reagan-era intelligence theory re-invigorated by the Bush administration following 9/11 (Davis & Albert, 2011). The premise of mosaic theory is that even innocuous information presents a security risk if public, because information that may be worthless in isolation could be startlingly revealing when combined with a ‘mosaic’ of other information:

It requires little reflection to understand that the business of foreign intelligence gathering in this age of computer technology is more akin to the construction of a mosaic than it is to the management of a cloak and dagger affair. Thousands of bits and pieces of seemingly innocuous information can be analysed and fitted into place to reveal with startling clarity how the unseen whole must operate. (Halkin v. Helms, 598 F.2d 1, 8 (D.C. Cir. 1978), qtd. in Pozen, 2005, p. 630)

Since 9/11, mosaic theory has been repeatedly invoked to justify “unprecedented acts of secrecy”, including the denial of freedom of information requests concerning War of Terror detainees in 2004 (Pozen, 2005, p. 631). Under mosaic theory, all information presents an opportunity if deployed against an opponent and a risk if publicly exposed; it is affectively weighted with potential significance regardless of its actual content. The Marvel Cinematic

Universe operates on similar logic, and as a result, the overwhelming impression that it creates is that of a vast conspiracy in which all events are most likely intimately related – even the smallest mishap may clue the audience in to a more complex and ominous existential threat.

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One of the major sources of conflict within the film originates not from Loki or the external threat that he represents, but the internal divisions between Earth’s defenders. The

Avengers are initially resistant to working with one another and are consistently dismissive of other Avengers’ values or methods. S.H.I.E.L.D. is equally divisive, as Iron Man and Captain

America eventually discover that S.H.I.E.L.D. was studying the Tesseract to create advanced weapons. In the critically dominant reading of the film, these tensions are deeply evocative of the tensions in the United States following the 9/11 attacks. Annika Hagley and Michael

Harrison, for example, read each character as an allegorical representation of “a distinct identity or kind of behaviour with which the United States has been struggling to reconcile itself while collectively representing the reactions of a nation to a direct, domestic attack”

(2014, p. 120). In Hagley and Harrison’s reading, the intense dislike between Captain America and Iron Man highlights the tension between “the traditional, righteous protection of democracy and just war and the new, ill-defined kinds of warfare that test the nation’s devotion to civil liberties and human rights” (2014, p. 120). It is these conflicts between characters ostensibly on the same side that provide an opening for Loki, whose brand of villainy is nothing if not performative. Throughout the film, Loki uses emotional manipulation and illusion magic to exploit the affective vulnerabilities of the superheroes, stoking internal tensions to the point where distrust and hostility ruin the Avengers’ ability to secure against the building external threat.

In The Avengers, heroes such as Iron Man begin to perceive the state of permanent emergency in which they are now embroiled. The film depicts Earth’s security forces slowly, and sometimes clumsily, marshalling to address a mysterious underground threat that suddenly morphs into a large-scale attack on New York – like 9/11, an attack experienced by ordinary citizens as a ‘bolt from the blue’. In this film, the intelligence community (S.H.I.E.L.D.) and security forces (the superheroes who become the Avengers) are ambivalently characterised; sometimes prescient and heroic, but sometimes fractious, deceptive or selfish. 219

Derek R. Sweet, for example, reads the film as “a kind of therapeutic public memory that not only conjures the perceived social and political failures surrounding 9/11 but also offers an opportunity to rehabilitate those failures” (2018, p. 65). As Sweet points out, the United States intelligence community was widely criticised for failing to foresee the September 11 attacks, and the military – structured in anticipation of a large-scale traditional land war – was not equipped to fight a highly mobile, evasive, diffused non-state actor. The Avengers offers substantial support for Sweet’s reading, presenting an intelligence organisation (S.H.I.E.L.D.) with knowledge of the events leading up to the crisis, and a clear will to avert disaster, but also culpability in the crisis and dubious motives. S.H.I.E.L.D. not only fails to protect the

Tesseract from Loki but hides its true motives for studying the Tesseract (production of advanced weapons) from allies, claiming instead to be working on the societally beneficial project of clean energy. In the end, Sweet argues, S.H.I.E.L.D. redeems itself through the

Avengers Initiative, by rehabilitating its compromised agents (such as Hawkeye, a sharpshooter who joins the Avengers after shaking off Loki’s mind control) and by rejecting calls from the World Security Council to sacrifice civilian lives in service of a ‘greater good’.

I would add to Sweet’s analysis, however, that The Avengers does not in fact redeem institutions, but rather individuals. This is not merely metaphorical: certain characters often function as symbolic stand-ins for the institutions – the military-industrial complex, as with

Iron Man, or the intelligence community, as with the compromised S.H.I.E.L.D. spy Hawkeye.

However, their storylines constantly reinforce their independence and autonomy from the institutions they appear to represent. Institutional or governmental oversight is only ever depicted when it acts as an obstacle - such as when the World Security Council (which

Terrence McSweeney (2018) reads as a thinly veiled allusion to the United Nations) first chastises Nick Fury for restarting the Avengers Initiative, and later orders Fury to call in a nuclear strike on invaded Manhattan. When Fury refuses, the Council circumvents his command and calls in the strike itself, creating the situation in which Iron Man must sacrifice 220

himself to save New York. By the end of the film, S.H.I.E.L.D. has effectively gone rogue – Fury refuses to secure the Tesseract or hand over Loki to global authorities, preferring instead to leave matters in the hands of the individual Avengers.

Once again, this is reminiscent of the Bush Doctrine premise that the United States operates best unconstrained by international oversight or law. Yet this does not mean that the film disavows the need for oversight altogether (although it stops short of depicting formal institutional checks and balances): when the Avengers discover that S.H.I.E.L.D. has been using the Tesseract to manufacture weapons of mass destruction, and that S.H.I.E.L.D. is therefore responsible for drawing the invasion to Earth, it is Captain America who calls Nick

Fury to account. I would argue, therefore, that The Avengers is ultimately a fantasy in which exceptional individuals are able to bypass institutional paralysis, corruption or constraints. In other words, The Avengers does not represent a re-investment of trust into existing security forces, but instead transfers trust to heroic figures seen as independent of those forces.

These exceptional individuals exist in an ambiguous relationship with the authorities; sometimes sanctioned by them, sometimes not. Nevertheless, the sovereign decision to declare and manage a state of exception in a crisis falls squarely on their shoulders, reflecting neoliberalism’s tendency to individualise structural problems. This is a tension in the fantasy; if the solution lies with the individual, then the individual must cope with the burden as well.

For superheroes, life is not only dominated by the demands of survival but by the constant imperative to keep people safe. As I argued in Chapter 3, in line with Neal Curtis and Jason

Bainbridge, this is an expression of sovereignty in which the decision to declare a state of exception is societally delegated to the superhero. The superhero therefore acts as a prism through which the dilemmas of sovereignty can be negotiated via hypothetical scenarios.

The individualisation of national security practices is especially significant, however, as ordinary citizens have been trained since 9/11 through media (such as the ‘securitainment’

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that Mark Andrejevic (2011) identifies) to surveil their environment on behalf of the national security apparatus. The Department of Homeland Security’s ‘If You See Something, Say

Something’ campaign (a phrase coined by New York advertising executive Allen Kay) is only one of many citizen alertness campaigns instituted worldwide since 9/11 (Zalud, 2010).

Crucially, this creates an affective burden on the individual. In the MCU, it comes to dominate the lives of the heroes to the point where ‘ordinary’ life is no longer accessible or satisfying for them. For the heroes of the MCU, this kind of life is clearly taxing, as all characters exhibit different strategies of adjustment to a life dominated by permanent emergency and violence.

In the next section, I will examine these coping mechanisms in greater depth, comparing them in particular to the Iron Man suit – which, as I have argued in previous chapters, functions as an affective prosthesis designed to mitigate against the fear of attack.

6.2 Coping with crisis: resilience, humour, and affective prosthesis

In 2017, Sabine Selchow pointed out that Obama’s 2010 National Security Strategy, unlike iterations under previous presidents, newly emphasised ‘resilience’ as a “foundational prerequisite for US national security” (p. 48). This new political keyword, which implies a continual process of endurance, adjustment and recovery is symptomatic of the climate of crisis ordinariness that Lauren Berlant observed in Cruel Optimism in 2011, and which I observe reflected in The Avengers. Of all the superheroes in the film, Iron Man experiences unique difficulties in adjusting to the newly apparent norm of permanent emergency. In part, this is because he is the Avenger who most often returns to something resembling a norm, he is the most deeply invested in notions of future progress, and he enjoys the greatest societal privilege. But he is also the most deeply invested in contemporary configurations of superpowered security, the doctrine that I have argued developed out of World War II as a means of achieving something approaching absolute security.

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As a result, his affective investment in the optimistic promises of security is especially vulnerable to challenge. Although war has been a constant throughout Tony’s life – his life’s work, and the life’s work of his father, is in arms manufacturing – he has only recently experienced war personally, let alone viscerally. In contrast, other heroes like Captain

America, the Hulk, or Black Widow have long been acclimatised to conditions of conflict and deprivation or have already lost access to conditions that enable an ‘ordinary’ life. For Hulk and Black Widow in particular, I would suggest, ‘security’ is no longer a meaningful or credible object of attachment, while for Iron Man, the hope that security will guarantee the conditions through which he can deliver a better world continues to be compelling.

As a result, Iron Man clearly struggles to accept the coping mechanisms that the other

Avengers use to rationalise a world defined by crisis. Following Loki’s murder of Agent Phil

Coulson, Iron Man stands alone and unarmoured in the helicarrier, looking into the depths of the ship’s mechanisms with a sick expression on his face. Captain America enters and tentatively asks if this is the first time Tony has lost a soldier. Tony responds angrily: “We’re not soldiers!” Of course, in contrast to Tony, Captain America – whose civilian name is Steve

Rogers – is a soldier and has operated as a soldier almost continuously since he was first dosed with supersoldier serum in World War II. Frozen into the Arctic ice before the end of the war and awoken only days before the start of The Avengers, Steve has transitioned seamlessly from one war to the next, which effectively knits the two wars together. As a result, he is affectively sustained by a view of good, evil, duty and sacrifice borne out of his formative battle with the Nazis. Although this attachment is increasingly challenged through his exposure to the modern world, Steve is nevertheless more comfortable with the experience of war than Tony; where Steve is calm and stoical, and expresses emotions with restraint proportional to the situation, Tony is emotionally volatile and uninhibited in his emotional expression. He breathes hard, twists his hands, struggles to bring his face under control, and

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moves impulsively – bursting out of his chair or pacing and hugging himself when a scene becomes too much to bear.

In contrast to Iron Man, whose superheroism is explicitly founded in the modern military-industrial complex and the messy realities of geopolitical trade-offs throughout the

Cold War, Captain America is significant as a nationalist hero because he embodies an idealized and nostalgic representation of what America should be. As Jason Dittmer argues, this has inevitably shifted over time:

Since 1964, Captain America has disavowed war and killing in an explicit attempt to distance the hero from his wartime roots. Therefore, even as the United States has become most central to the geopolitical order, its superhero embodiment has tried to downplay the role of force in producing that centrality. Instead, American power and authority is seen to result from the attractive power of American values and leadership. (2013, p. 141)

In The Avengers, this manifests as a call for ‘old fashioned’ values of unity and people working together, which are consistently represented throughout the film by nostalgic allusions to

Captain America’s romanticised World War II origins (McSweeney, 2018, p. 115).

As a response to the fractured political landscape of 21st century America, the desire for unity in times of crisis is understandable. Yet political unity on national security issues is not always beneficial: as Andrew Carr (2017) argues in his analysis of Australian counterterrorist legislation (which followed the lead of the United States extremely closely after 9/11), the norm of bipartisanship in national security issues is not only detrimental to democratic values (as it suppresses debate) but in fact proves detrimental to legislative aims as well, as it allows weak or poorly written bills to pass without rigorous evaluation. In The

Avengers, therefore, there is a consistent tension between Steve’s idealising beliefs in what a government should be (trustworthy, fighting the good fight) and the modern environment of disillusionment and cynicism in which Tony lives. For Tony, who has consistently battled threats arising from within the nation – Obadiah Stane in Iron Man; Justin Hammer in Iron

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Man 2 – the prospect of entrusting one’s security to the community inevitably seems naïve. Of course, the prospect of guaranteeing security as an individual is not much more appealing, especially as Tony is well aware of both his own flaws and “the absurdity of what he calls the

‘terrible privilege’ of their situation” (McSweeney, 2018, p. 117).

Perhaps the closest hero to Iron Man, in terms of a psychological response to crisis, is the Hulk, whose response to overwhelming emotions is nothing short of explosive. Dr. Bruce

Banner, a physicist whose scientific genius rivals Iron Man’s, is permanently locked in a Jekyll and Hyde-style confrontation with his own psyche; when under threat or when his anger becomes too much for him to control, he involuntarily transforms into the Hulk – a giant figure with incredible strength and vanishingly low impulse control, who lashes out in rage at everyone nearby. Banner/Hulk has been read as an allegory for the American population – mild mannered, unobtrusive and risk-averse under ordinary circumstances, but capable of immensely destructive behaviour when national sentiment becomes dominated by fear or anger (Hagley & Harrison, 2014). Unlike Iron Man, however, who seems to feel intense distress at the prospect of losing the life and future he is building, Banner is resigned to his condition. Instead of attempting to live normally, he lives a nomadic life offering medical assistance to the global poor. When he does lose control, during Loki’s attack on the helicarrier, the impact on Banner’s allies is devastating – against the raw anger of the Hulk, not even the advanced weaponry and cutting-edge fighter jets deployed by S.H.I.E.L.D. can hold up. During the battle of New York, just before he transforms voluntarily for the first time,

Banner reveals that he does not in fact keep his anger under control – rather, he is always angry. Banner’s response to the ongoing attrition of permanent emergency is clearly one of adjustment, in the sense that Berlant describes; his problem is not one that can be solved through ‘heroic agency’, but rather requires him to maintain a constant balancing act that prevents him from ever attaining a normal/normative life.

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Overall, the character who seems best equipped to deal with permanent emergency is the one whose life has always been a process of adjustment: Natasha Romanov, the Black

Widow (Scarlett Johannsen), a Soviet-trained spy and assassin who defected to S.H.I.E.L.D. For

Natasha, ordinary life has never been an option: since childhood, her life has been a series of performances, deceptions and disguises, adjusting the persona she projects to her marks as she moves from one crisis to the next. Throughout The Avengers, the film uses humour to indicate that threat is not only ordinary for Black Widow, but laughable. In her first appearance, she is tied to a chair in a warehouse, stripped down and apparently at the mercy of a Russian Colonel-General and his group of armed thugs. As they threaten her, Agent

Coulson phones the Colonel-General and demands to speak to Black Widow. Immediately the scene subverts expectations set up by Natasha’s affectation of vulnerable femininity, and the tone of the scene flips from ominous spy thriller to comedy; the confused Colonel-General balances the phone on his captive’s shoulder, and Natasha crabbily demands to know why

Coulson is interrupting her mission: “Are you kidding? I’m working… I’m in the middle of an interrogation – this moron is giving me everything.” Coulson insists, explaining the Loki threat, and Natasha capitulates. “Let me put you on hold,” she says glibly, and erupts into violence – knocking out the entire group of thugs while still, for the first half of the fight, tied to her chair. On the other end of the phone line, Coulson stares into the middle distance as if listening to hold music, indicating that this is business as usual.

Like the Iron Man suit, Natasha’s humour can also be understood as a type of affective prosthesis that expands her ability to cope with crisis. Although humorous quips that break tension are a feature of the genre, and especially of Iron Man, Natasha’s humour indicates adjustment to crisis ordinariness precisely because it is so deadpan. Frequently the gag requires another character to deliver the punchline, as with Coulson humming along to hold music. At other times, the secondary character’s punchline instead highlights the abnormality of the situation; in the Battle of New York, Natasha comments to fellow spy and old friend 226

Hawkeye that this is “just like Budapest all over again.” Hawkeye gives her a side-eyed look and comments, “You and I remember Budapest very differently.” For this gag, the humour relies on the audience identifying with Hawkeye and perceiving Natasha’s comment as abnormal; that equating an unspecified undercover mission in Budapest with a literal alien invasion is absurd. However, under the established rules of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, diagnosing Natasha’s comment as absurd is in fact a misrecognition of the situation. Despite the fact that the enemy is from another world, Natasha recognises that the beats and cadences of the conflict repeat the same old structure that she has seen and survived before. Natasha’s humour is predicated on her recognition that this crisis, despite its exceptional appearance, is different only in surface detail from all the other crises that have defined her life.

As a result, unlike many of her male colleagues, Black Widow is practiced at managing her affective response to crisis. Under the security regime necessitated by a life in a permanent state of exception, vulnerability must always be managed. Natasha uses her vulnerability as a weapon to dupe the men who would exploit it, physically when she manipulates and takes down the Russians, and affectively when she baits Loki into giving up strategic information, by offering him an opening – her guilty feelings about her violent past.

The fact that this vulnerability is genuine only demonstrates that living like this has deep and painful costs; in order to survive, Natasha has come to view emotion, relationships and closeness in terms of risk. In essence, she has securitised her own emotional life, offering fragments of truth where she calculates the payoff may be worth the risk, obscuring authenticity behind a shifting set of performances, and otherwise guarding it closely. Her friendship with Hawkeye is another example of a trade-off between risk and reward, one that she consciously makes: when Loki mocks her regard for Hawkeye, she dismisses any accusation of sentimentality, saying, “Love is for children. I owe him a debt.” This debt is at once transactional – a debt she can never repay, as the audience discovers later that Hawkeye gave her the chance to start balancing out the ‘red in her ledger’ – and an opportunity, as it 227

allows Natasha to build a relationship where all the personal information revealed by close contact is essentially already paid for.

In contrast, Iron Man’s struggle to adjust is indicative of his privilege. Each of the other

Avengers (with the notable exception of Thor) has experienced, at some time in their lives, some form of abjection or discrimination that has placed them in a significantly less privileged position than Tony Stark. Before Steve Roger’s chemical transformation into Captain America, for example, he was working class, short of stature, chronically ill and physically weak; accordingly, he suffered from violent bullying as the result of his failure to fit into his society’s simplistic hierarchy of masculine value. Bruce Banner’s heroic origin, in contrast, was a process in which he became abjected; his inclusion in the Avengers itself is viewed as a dangerous gamble on the part of Fury, as an inopportune transformation into the Hulk could jeopardise the survival of everyone nearby. He is not only alienated from society, but from his own body and identity. Black Widow’s adept management of her own and others’ emotional vulnerabilities reflects (and weaponizes) the many and varied performances required of women in ordinary life. Hawkeye, whose life is implied to share many similarities with

Natasha’s, is physically and socially separated from ordinary people by virtue of his career – in the early scenes of the film, he refuses to connect with the people he surveils.1 When he is mind controlled by Loki – a state which lasts for most of the film – he is robbed of all agency.

“Have you ever had someone take your brain and play?” he asks Natasha, once freed. “Take you out, and stuff something else in? Do you know what it’s like to be unmade?” Although he clearly finds this experience deeply painful and affecting, he demonstrates rapid and effective adjustment to deal with the crisis at hand. For these characters, crisis is the defining feature of their lives.

The notable exception to the above trend, Thor, is the only character arguably more privileged than Tony. As the crown prince of Asgard, Thor is a near-immortal being invested

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with godlike powers, yet his personal heroic journey is one in which he is forced to rise to the demands of sovereign responsibility, or otherwise lose his powers and privileges. In Thor

(2011), Thor is banished to Earth when he proves unworthy of the sovereign responsibilities expected of the heir to Asgard’s throne. In proving his worthiness and regaining the right to return to Asgard, he obtains explicit validation and legitimacy from his father Odin. While

Thor remains capable of using his magical hammer, Mjolnir, he has reliable external assurance that he is acting in accordance with his heroic values. Tony, in contrast, has had no such training or mentorship: his father, now dead, only ever provided ambiguous validation at best, and as an adult Tony exists in a system where his powers and privilege make him effectively exempt from external discipline. By virtue of his wealth, whiteness and masculinity, Tony is the least experienced at dealing with systemic attrition – because the system, for the most part, has always worked in his favour. It is only now, when the system he has entered is that of securitization, violence and exception, that he discovers how debilitating this constant attrition can be.

As a result, Tony’s coping strategies are effective in the short-term – whenever there is an immediate crisis that can be solved through use of the Iron Man suit – but damaging in the long term. It is for this reason, of course, that he cannot give them up. Although these are dramatic, costly measures designed for exceptional scenarios, unsuited to conditions of permanent emergency, they are the only tools that he has to deal with the life-or-death scenarios he must face. Additionally, the toll of permanent emergency erodes his ability to fulfil the optimistic promises he believes that security (as both a state and a practice) will guarantee. In lulls between crises, he can set his mind to the problem of clean energy – which he trials successfully in his first appearance in The Avengers, lighting up Stark Tower with a self-sustaining arc reactor – but at the end of the film, the tower is occupied by Loki and becomes the staging ground for the invasion of New York. Instead of providing clean energy to the city, the tower instead becomes a focal point of death and destruction. Furthermore, when 229

Tony enters his tower to negotiate with Loki in advance of the final battle, he does so apprehensively, creating a sense that the significance of the space has changed. For Tony, this film is a process of confirming that home is no longer safe; allies are fickle or untrustworthy; and his own technology – wondrous as it is – is not enough to control these new and pervasive threats.

Nevertheless, the Iron Man suit does enable Tony to perform exceptional acts in the name of immediate security, some of which rework traumatic imagery of real-world crises.

When Tony confronts Loki in Stark Tower, their encounter rapidly turns from banter to violence as Loki discovers that Tony is immune to Loki’s mind-control powers. This is thanks to the arc reactor in Tony’s chest, which apparently makes him resistant to Loki’s supernatural influence. In the comics, Iron Man has a long history of conflict with mystical opponents, whose powers he overcomes with science. In The Avengers, his technologically enhanced heart protects him from violation and loss of agency, all of which can be seen as the affective wounds of a terrorist war.

Furthermore, the suit continues to protect Tony physically. After failing to corrupt

Tony’s mind, Loki seizes him by the throat and flings him out the window of the tower.

Plummeting through the air, unarmoured, Tony resembles the Falling Man of the 9/11 attack.

Yet Tony’s technology saves him again, in a sequence that reworks this iconic image of helplessness into a moment of thrill, reversal and triumph. He uses remote controls – palmed during his conversation with Loki – to summon the newest prototype of the Iron Man suit. In an echo of the affective prosthesis function that the suit played in Iron Man and Iron Man 2, the suit first unfolds into the shape of a man and then catches him: the arms of the suit reach for Tony’s arms, and it envelops him from behind as if in a hug. The mask wraps around his face, obscuring a hint of a smile. Here, the suit is the key mechanism, or divergence point, which allows the film to revise this traumatic cultural memory.

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The suit also allows Tony to divert the nuclear strike on Manhattan ordered by the

Council (which Fury fails to prevent) although this diversion requires Tony to risk his own life in the process, revealing the limitations of the suit as a securitizing mechanism. To save the city, Tony intercepts the missile in mid-air, balancing it on his shoulders and flying it through the portal, which Black Widow has just discovered how to close. In space, faced with a vast expanse of black cosmos and the enormous, distant alien mothership, Tony finally expresses terror; his expression mirrors the look of shock he wore when first wounded in Iron Man.

Once more, it is a missile – a crude and indiscriminate weapon very unlike his modern, intelligent suit – that threatens Tony’s life, and once more it originates from within the community he seeks to protect. Once more, finally, this marks a paradigm shift in Tony’s life, as his world opens up to reveal threats larger and more pervasive than he had previously anticipated. In this case, however, he believes that he will not survive to mitigate them – his suit, as advanced as it is, is not equal to this challenge.

Yet, when Iron Man’s heroic duty finally seems complete, Tony finally relaxes. Lit by the soft red light of the Chitauri mothership exploding, his eyes close and he falls back towards the closing portal. Although Tony clearly does not want to die, the certainty of death nevertheless interrupts the cycle of fear that Brian Massumi argues is the inevitable consequence of threat as an operative logic. Although Tony is severed from his home and human connections in this moment, he is also freed of the obligation to continually endure a cycle of emergency. Dying would be a form of closure for Tony that paradoxically cannot be provided by the Avengers’ victory over the Chitauri. As I will argue in the next section, although closing the portal and sealing the cosmic threat in an unknown and distant area of space has an appealing resonance with the traditional spatial construction of national security, it does not in any way foreclose the possibility of future, greater threats.

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6.3 Closing the border: ‘never again’, or all over again?

The Avengers’ victory over the Chitauri in Manhattan allows the franchise to restage a version of 9/11 in which the long war against terrorism is entirely avoided (McSweeney, 2018). The

Chitauri on Earth are all killed simultaneously when Iron Man redirects the nuclear warhead into their mothership, and the portal allowing the Chitauri to enter Earth’s atmosphere is sealed, preventing another assault, if indeed any Chitauri remained alive to mount one. This ending, therefore, seems to rewrite 9/11 as a conventional attack, in which opponents and allies can not only be visually distinguished, but the enemy can be spatially contained through force and the re-assertion of borders. Closing the rupture in Earth’s sky seems to reassert a

‘natural’ status quo in which human space is demarcated from outer space populated by unknown and hostile others. This is very different to the War on Terror’s unsettling environment of invisible threat with the potential to arise anywhere. In this section, however,

I will argue that this specific construction of victory instead invites the proliferation of anxiety, as the tangible threat of Loki and the Chitauri is succeeded by an infinite array of

‘unknown unknowns’.

Scholarship on the MCU frequently (and rightly) criticises the franchise for its deeply racialized approach to war and conflict, exemplified by the depiction of the Chitauri in The

Avengers (Mullen, 2018). The Chitauri are inhuman bodies coded as violent, barbaric, and devoid of individuality: all Chitauri simultaneously fall dead when severed from the mothership, in a fantasy of extermination that borders on the genocidal. This is one of the consequences of an unbridled security framework, as noted by Mark Neocleous (2009); that the goal to preserve the security of a referent population at all costs justifies violence towards others. As Anthony Mullen (2018) argues, the Chitauri are constructed in such a way that they read unequivocally as uncivilized and barbaric, which is ironic when considering that they, like Iron Man, are cyborgs. Unlike Iron Man, however, the Chitauri’s fusion with their

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technology is coded as primitive or even animalistic; their armour is patterned along ancient lines – short loincloths, greaves, carapace-like chest armour – and it melds into their skin like biotech, something grown rather than technically fabricated. Furthermore, as a hivemind, the

Chitauri lack the kind of individual agency that the film celebrates in the heroes. Even the sole speaking Chitauri, who threatens Loki midway through the film, has no visible eyes. Instead, the mouth is the focal point of the Chitauri face; an open, jagged, metal-toothed orifice that is clearly intended to evoke violent threat rather than intelligent speech.

This is a species designed to be both allowable and enjoyable to kill. Mullens (2018) is correct to note that the Chitauri are ready-made homines sacri - the archaic figure that, for

Giorgio Agamben (Agamben, 2017), is constitutive of the sovereign’s power to demarcate society through exclusion. This depiction of the Chitauri allows The Avengers to carry out the security project without having to deal with the ethics of using violent force against human opponents. Instead, the ethical burden of the film falls on the methods of the defenders in regards to the human population, who are presented as opposites to the Chitauri in every way; the film depicts individual human reactions to the devastation and plays out miniature stories of human civilians escaping destruction and being rescued by the heroes. In contrast, the World Security Council, whose nuclear strike would destroy human lives as well as the invaders, is presented unfavourably. As a result, the superheroes can be said to defend the moral continuity of their society, in which moral responsibility to one’s own population is maintained even in a state of exception. There is no such consideration of the type or degree of violence that is allowable against the invaders, as there would be, under international laws of war like the Geneva Conventions, if the invaders were human.

By closing the portal that opens Earth to attack from the cosmos, Black Widow and the

Avengers can exclude the invading forces from the Earth entirely, which ostensibly closes the state of exception triggered by the Chitauri incursion and reasserts the status quo ante. They

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also reassert control over US airspace, which was violated doubly in the Battle: firstly with the portal, and secondly with the Chitauri’s co-option of the US’ favoured military strategy, domination of the air. The enormous, armoured flying serpents of the Chitauri army are impervious to all but the most exceptional efforts of the Avengers. Even the nuclear missile fired by the World Security Council represents a blow to US sovereignty, as it is an international body violating US airspace. When the portal closes, the sky once more returns to human (i.e. US) control. When the heroes win by closing the ‘border’ represented by the sky,

The Avengers (initially) avoids the spatiotemporal expansion of the War on Terror. Unlike the

War on Terror, which has disrupted conventional boundaries between friend and enemy or battlefield and home front, the Battle of New York visually and narratively reasserts these conventional structures. Considered alongside the persistent nostalgia for ‘old-fashioned values’ that Terrence McSweeney (2018) notes, this ending seems to express a desire for a time when war was straightforward, defensive, and clearly demarcated from ordinary life.

Although this might seem to indicate that the film follows the structure of crisis rather than revealing a meta-structure of crisis ordinariness, the franchise as a whole suggests otherwise. In future films, the supposedly decisive defeat of the Chitauri does not lead to a greater sense of security – nor does it end conditions of crisis ordinariness. Instead, it replicates the threat deficit experienced by the US at the end of the Cold War. Banishing the cosmic threat to an unknown region of space and once again isolating the Earth increases the fear experienced by New York’s citizens, who now know that other civilizations exist, civilizations capable of waging interstellar war. In interviews on the news, after the battle is won, some citizens say, “I don’t exactly feel safer with those things out there” and “It just seems like there’s a lot they’re not telling us.” Out of sight, in the case of existential threat, is not out of mind. With the Chitauri gone, there is no longer a tangible threat that can be monitored or contained. In its place, there is an infinite universe containing the infinite potential for threat. By spatially isolating the Earth, The Avengers therefore creates the perfect 234

conditions for the self-reinforcing “operative logic” (Massumi, 2010, p. 62) of threat to proliferate. Although the ‘border’ of the sky is closed, this is of course an illusion. The sky is no physical barrier. It is merely an optical phenomenon masking a wide-open battlespace beyond, outside the scope of human perception. The supposed ‘end’ of the state of exception is illusory.

This proves especially difficult for Iron Man to bear, as his superpowers are founded on the same logic of surveillance, oversight and power projection on which US primacy is founded (Hassler-Forest, 2012). Although Tony ultimately survives his fall from the portal, his near-death experience demonstrates that there are threats to security that the Iron Man suit is not equipped to counter. Likewise, The Avengers presents a fundamental challenge to the

Iron Man suit’s efficacy as an affective prosthesis. In Iron Man and Iron Man 2, the suit allows

Tony to assert some measure of control over his personal security and that of his loved ones or the nation. In Iron Man 2 especially, a fantasy of exceptional American technological prowess allows Tony to essentially have his cake and eat it too; although using the suit threatens his survival, he finds a solution by drawing on his family legacy of innovation. In the pattern of expectations laid down by these two films, therefore, the suit is theoretically equal to any challenge because it can continually be improved through Tony’s hard work and intelligence.

This capacity breaks down in The Avengers. To redirect the nuclear missile and save

Manhattan, Tony must accept that he cannot save himself and the Earth, as there is no time to create a technological solution. Although the Iron Man suit grants him the physical capacity to steer the missile through the portal, it is no longer possible to believe that it can grant the

“absolute security” that Mark Mayer (2019, p. 269) argues has been a perennial fantasy of the

American leadership and public for decades. Neither can it augment Tony’s affective capacity to deal with the sense of infinite, boundless threat that he experiences after surviving his

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near-death experience. As I will argue in Chapter 7, this does not mean that he withdraws from his attachment to the logic of superpowered security; instead, like Bush reaffirming his administration’s national security strategy in 2006, Tony doubles down. In the films that follow The Avengers – Iron Man 3 and The Avengers: Age of Ultron – Tony does not act as though the war is over, but instead embarks on an obsessive project of arms development

(reminiscent of the US’ post-Cold War military modernisation initiative) designed to create a security apparatus that can answer a challenge of unknown proportions. Although The

Avengers calls the suit’s ability to guarantee security into question, this very failure provides the justification for his subsequent acceleration of exceptional measures, even in the absence of any confirmed threat. The films simply offer no plausible alternative.

In The Avengers, therefore, two phenomena become apparent: firstly, as I have argued, the superficial logic of crisis gives way to crisis ordinariness; and secondly, Tony’s ability to endure the cruelly optimistic affective investment in the Iron Man suit begins to falter. As I have argued, this reflects the ambiguities and anxieties of the transition from Bush to Obama.

As Obama progressed through his first term – expanding drone strikes, recommitting to the war in Afghanistan, and embracing mass domestic surveillance – it became increasingly clear to the American public that his administration was not willing or able to break from all the premises of his predecessor's security doctrine. Similarly, although The Avengers demonstrates a clear desire to explore an alternative to Bush’s interminable War on Terror, the franchise cannot escape the pattern of fear and anxiety that intensified after 9/11. As a result, it reasserts the conventional narrative of superpowered security, which unfolds according to the expectation that the state of exception triggered by an existential threat will both be adequate to defeat that threat and will end once the threat is gone. But it also reconfirms the affective dynamics of spiralling fear that perpetuate superpowered security measures long after the end of the instigating crisis.

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Chapter 7 – ‘We create our own demons’: failing to adjust in Iron Man 3 and The Avengers: Age of Ultron

Although the two films following The Avengers, Iron Man 3 (2013) and The Avengers:

Age of Ultron (2015), go further than prior films in critiquing United States national security practices post-9/11, they fail to acknowledge the structural or systemic causes of the issues they highlight. By framing fear-driven security practices as understandable but flawed responses to the trauma that Iron Man experiences in The Avengers, these films present an ambivalent and conflicted picture of superpowered security. In this chapter I will argue that there are clear parallels between the events of the two films and the spiral of exceptional security measures justified by the Bush Doctrine. However, the films also use post-traumatic stress and dependency on the Iron Man suit as metaphors that individualise mistakes made in the name of security, which complicates a reading of either film as straightforward critique. As

I will argue, the focus on a flawed individual – as opposed to a flawed national security apparatus – essentially frames the problem with superpowered security as an individual problem; a matter of execution rather than design. This illustrates the cruelty of the Iron Man franchise’s attachment to superpowered security: although the costs and consequences of

Iron Man’s security project are profoundly damaging by the end of The Avengers: Age of

Ultron, the films ultimately cannot detach from the premises and logic of superpowered security.

Nevertheless, both films grapple with the cost of ongoing heroism in an environment of permanent emergency and depict the affective capacity of security to become an all- encompassing and counterproductive desire. Iron Man 3 follows directly on from the traumatic climax of The Avengers, in which Iron Man nearly dies to save the planet. As such, the film is ideally placed to engage with the public and political aftermath of traumatic events contextualized by an environment where such events increasingly seem recurrent and

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ordinary. Iron Man’s increasingly desperate attachment to the Iron Man suit rapidly compromises his ability to return to ordinary life, as demonstrated by panic attacks that intensify when he cannot access the suit or when it does not function as intended. This attachment also threatens the things he most wants to protect, such as his romantic relationship with Pepper Potts.

Furthermore, Iron Man 3 illustrates the fact that widespread public fear, no matter how justified, is open to exploitation for political ends. The Avengers: Age of Ultron takes this attachment a step further: although Iron Man successfully learns to manage his affective dependency on the Iron Man suit itself and destroys most of his suits at the end of Iron Man 3, he does not successfully let go of his hyper-securitizing worldview. As a result of a botched attempt to protect the Earth against future threats – where the film applies the spatial metaphor of the Iron Man suit to the entire planet – Stark creates the very threat he fears.

Unlike Iron Man and Iron Man 2, in which security logic is played straight and validated, Iron

Man 3 and The Avengers: Age of Ultron show scenarios in which security logic is not only reflexive but actively threatening to the subject who conducts it.

In section 7.1, I will discuss the way in which Iron Man 3 depicts the ongoing affective and physical costs of exceptional security measures. In particular, I will discuss the way in which superpowered security logic infects and pervades Iron Man’s domestic sphere, reflecting the securitization of the US homeland after 9/11. Although Iron Man 3 remains sympathetic to the fundamental desire for security, the film highlights the negative consequences of American security practices post-9/11. By depicting Iron Man’s trauma following The Avengers, and his increasing reliance on the Iron Man suit as both a physical defence mechanism and an affective prosthesis, Iron Man 3 depicts the high costs incurred by exceptional security measures. It features a terrorist villain, the Mandarin (Ben Kingsley), constructed through manipulation of the media, a threat custom-designed for Americans by

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an American to stoke and exploit public hysteria. In this way, this film echoes Tim Dunne and

Ken Booth’s observations about visible security measures exacerbating public fear. Iron Man

3’s true villain exploits the need to feel secure – which is both a reasonable desire and a vulnerability – to render Iron Man and the American public insecure. As a result, Iron Man 3 can be read as an indictment of an excessive or ill-founded security response as a self- destructive response to national trauma. However, the film does not – and perhaps cannot – identify any alternative to superpowered security as a fundamental orientation towards the world. After all, its conclusion emphasizes that the threat posed by the weaponization of perceived threat itself is one that can be secured against, continuing the trend in which the

Iron Man films securitize everything they depict.

The promises of futurity and the good life evoked in past films are far less prominent in Iron Man 3, which is instead preoccupied with survival. This is causally linked to Tony’s struggle to adjust to crisis ordinariness. As Lauren Berlant (2011) notes, the simple act of staying afloat in an impasse might be enviable to those people who are drowning. In Iron Man

3, Tony’s realization that he lives in a state of permanent emergency makes it near impossible to do anything more than survive. Although the end of the film sees Tony cathartically destroy his stable of Iron Man suits, forge a meaningful romantic relationship, and finally have the arc reactor surgically removed from his chest – removing the symbolic barriers preventing him from returning to ordinary life – the film does not resolve his affective attachment to security logic. Ultimately, although Tony recognizes that his aggressively individualistic reliance on the

Iron Man suit is not an adequate survival strategy in an environment of permanent emergency, he is unable to relinquish securitization as a means of dealing with endless threat

– and thus remains at an impasse.

As a result of these conflicting pressures, The Avengers: Age of Ultron depicts Tony attempting to secure against future threats by creating a new defence system. Rather than

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imagining a new way of living in the world, he instead maintains his attachment to exceptional security logic and acts unilaterally to create a defence system that will pre-empt future threats. I read this film as a critique of the Bush doctrine of pre-emptive strike. Although never fully carried out in the film to the extent of true pre-emptive action, the doctrine is paralleled by Tony’s decision to take substantial action before the next threat emerges. This strategy is motivated by a generalized fear of future hypothetical threats, in addition to his concerns that he and the other Avengers – as a fractious team of highly flawed individuals – may not be the most reliable means of protecting the Earth.

However, Tony’s decision to create Ultron (James Spader) is impulsive, lacking any sort of contingency plan or exit strategy, and derives from a myopic focus on defending against potential threats at all costs. It also creates new threats: in the first instance, Ultron, who predictably decides that the greatest threat to Earth is humankind. In the second instance, the politicians, ordinary citizens, and other Avengers – who feel that their trust was betrayed and suffer direct consequences when Tony’s plan goes wrong – also become hostile.

As a result, this strategy betrays its own goal, which is a parallel to the ill-defined and catastrophic course of the War on Terror. Where other films present a best-case outcome of security logic, Age of Ultron presents the worst-case scenario – the perceived threat is non- existent, and the solution makes matters worse.

While Iron Man 3 and Age of Ultron both critique security practices, they remain unable to give up on the exceptionalist logic that underwrites those practices. Even though

Iron Man’s attachment to security frequently works against his own personal safety and his broader goals, these two films illustrate that superpowered security provides him – and the audience – with the ability to feel hopeful about a crisis-dominated world. As I will argue in my analysis of The Avengers: Age of Ultron, superpowered security reframes insecurity as a necessary prerequisite for progress. Ultimately, because superpowered security offers to

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guarantee a cluster of indispensable promises and desires – societal endurance, individual freedom, and the legitimation of American exceptionalism – the prospect of giving it up is unbearable.

7.1 Domestic vulnerabilities and the threat of public fear in Iron Man 3

In Iron Man 3, the consequences of Iron Man’s near-death experience in The Avengers become painfully apparent. It is in Iron Man 3, I argue, that the tensions and conflicts inherent in Tony

Stark’s attachment to national security logic emerge as major driving forces in plot and characterization, far beyond the subtextual level they occupied in previous instalments. The cruelty in cruel optimism is, of course, the subject’s inability to let go of the damaging attachment. Iron Man 3 illustrates this impasse through its inability to imagine this breaking point as anything but a crisis. As I will demonstrate, the film presents Tony’s increasingly pathological dependence on his security devices – which manifests through post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) – as a problem of degree, not as an issue with security logic itself. As a result, the film securitizes emotional intensity, presenting it as a risk with both costs and benefits that must be carefully managed to avoid becoming a threat to oneself. Tony’s character arc in this film can therefore be understood as the challenge of adjusting to permanent emergency without self-destructing, while simultaneously attempting to renegotiate his attachment to the securitizing worldview that provoked his anxieties in the first place.

Throughout Iron Man 3, Tony struggles with PTSD, indicated by frequent panic attacks, flashbacks to his near-death experience at the climax of The Avengers, and obsession with improving the Iron Man suit. As the film progresses, Tony loses control of the trappings of normal life he has painstakingly built up over the last two films: as a result of hiding his mental health problems, he struggles to act as a good partner to Pepper and stops working on his clean energy project; when his friend and bodyguard, Happy Hogan (Jon Favreau), is

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critically injured in a terrorist attack by the Mandarin – a terrorist reminiscent of Osama bin

Laden – Tony loses his temper and provokes the Mandarin on live TV, leading to an attack that demolishes Tony’s home. When the Iron Man suit malfunctions following the attack, Tony is stranded in a distant and unfamiliar town without his armour, which has become the bearer of his heroic identity and mission. As a result, the film depicts Tony being forced to survive and function as a superhero without the affective prosthesis or social supports that have shored him up since his origin story in the Afghan cave.

Continuing the theme of prior Iron Man films, the antagonists of Iron Man 3 all originate from within the United States – or even within Tony’s own psyche. This time, however, Tony must confront the fact that he has created many of the threats he now faces.

This parallels the common criticism of US security practices and their contribution to the promotion of extremism through the war in Afghanistan and subsequent attempts at nation- building. The film opens with a slow-motion shot of destruction, in which a display case holding several Iron Man suits explodes while Tony speaks in voiceover: “We create our own demons.” The greatest demon, I argue, is fear itself; when Tony discovers that the Mandarin is a constructed villain, portrayed by a drug-addicted actor and carefully designed to manipulate the American media, it becomes clear that the endless fear generated by the possibility of threat is the most significant adversary of the film, as it is impossible to overcome through violence. Instead, it must be managed on both individual and community levels, as part of a systemic process of adjustment that Tony has so far failed to master.

Yet Tony also creates conventional enemies through his past misdeeds, reflecting the common suspicion that US interference in vulnerable states like Afghanistan exacerbated regional instability and supported the rise of enemies like the Taliban. The film’s villain, and the mastermind behind the Mandarin, is Aldrich Killian (Guy Pearce), an American technologist nursing a vendetta against Tony Stark. Killian is introduced in an early flashback

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to a scientific conference in Bern, Switzerland, in the winter of 1999 – well before Tony’s transformation into Iron Man. In the flashback, Killian is a socially awkward, disabled man, with none of Tony Stark’s panache. Tony’s casual cruelty motivates Killian to take revenge and inspires his subsequent transformation into a dark mirror of Tony. Like Tony, Killian radically alters his own biology. Using the medical research of Maya Hansen (a scientist and old flame of Tony’s) he gives himself the ability to heal physical damage (thus removing the visible signs of his disability) and to generate heat from his body6. He alters his appearance to align with conventional masculine standards and uses military contracts to build his company Advanced

Idea Mechanics (AIM) into an influential and wealthy think tank, much like Stark Industries.

Just as Tony expands on his own medical prosthetic, the arc reactor in his chest, to create the Iron Man suit, Killian uses Maya’s research (named Extremis) to transform injured war veterans into supersoldiers who share his powers of regeneration and the ability to create fiery heat. This process, however, must be carefully managed, as soldiers who cannot regulate their physiological and emotional response to the procedure violently explode. These enhanced soldiers are the real perpetrators of the terrorist attacks attributed to the Mandarin, adding yet another representation of self-destructive weaponization to the film. These are veterans abandoned by the state; they are vulnerable to radicalisation by Killian precisely because they have been discarded when no longer useful to the US military. This point is driven home by a scene in which Happy Hogan (Jon Favreau) follows Killian’s bodyguard to a

Christmas market and watches him surreptitiously slip a dose of Extremis to a veteran, who pleads for more of the drug like an addict. When startled by Happy, the veteran has a panic attack that he cannot bring under control. He explodes, destroying the market square and

6 In Extremis, the comic book storyline on which the plot of Iron Man 3 is based, Maya Hansen is the antagonist responsible for weaponizing Extremis and using it to discredit Iron Man and manipulate the US government. In the film, in contrast, Hansen is one of Killian’s employees. It is beyond the scope of this thesis to fully discuss the implications of the film’s re-allocation of responsibility from Hansen to Killian, but it is undoubtedly significant that Killian and Tony are both male; most notably, Killian performs an aggressive form of Tony’s own arrogant masculine sexuality where Maya (in the comics) does not. 244

critically injuring Happy. In part, this reflects the public concern about the new generation of

US veterans created by the War on Terror, many of whom struggle with PTSD and reintegration into civilian life (Usbeck, 2018). But it also reflects the social stigma associated with PTSD, which for US veterans returning from Iraq is strongly correlated with alcohol abuse, depression, suicidal ideation and aggression (Hellmuth, Stappenbeck, Hoerster, &

Jakupcak, 2012) (Hellmuth et al., 2012). In depicting veterans as time bombs who must exert superhuman willpower to remain stable, Iron Man 3 depicts the damage done by the War on

Terror as a feedback loop in which fear and trauma proliferate within domestic spaces.

Ultimately, the film frames this observation as a security threat, as it creates a massive vulnerability in the national public sphere for bad actors like Killian to exploit. Killian plans to kill the President of the United States in a staged Mandarin attack, and allow the Vice-

President, who wants to use Extremis to cure his disabled daughter, to step in as a puppet leader. He is able to do this precisely because the American public now has a well-known image repertoire related to Middle Eastern terrorism that triggers fear and rage. As a result, the Mandarin attacks are not properly scrutinized by the US authorities, enabling Killian to lead them on a wild goose chase around the globe by using spoofed IP addresses for the

Mandarin broadcasts. Only Tony, who experiences a brief moment of clarity when he believes that he has a conventional threat to oppose, is capable of discovering that the Mandarin has a domestic origin, but his investigation is seriously hampered by his own experience of PTSD.

Iron Man 3 critiques over-securitization as a response to trauma. Although it is impossible to ignore the significance of trauma, it is not, I would argue, the primary narrative genre of the film: the action, spectacle and ‘heroic agency’ of crisis remain dominant. Rather, trauma is a device used to demonstrate the vulnerabilities of heroic characters (and the public) and the costs of living through permanent emergency. In this film, affect plays a central role: the depth of public and individual feeling, following a traumatic event, is both a

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marker of civic virtue and shared values and a point of immense vulnerability. Characters who are not at all affected (like Killian or his bodyguard) are villainous, but characters who are too affected (like Tony or the American public) risk self-destruction. As a result, the film depicts a negotiation between extremes of affective responses to crisis ordinariness. Iron Man’s response manifests as a deeply dysfunctional urge to improve the Iron Man suit, which he views as the only mechanism through which he can outpace the successive waves of escalating crises he now faces.

However, following Iron Man’s near-death experience, the Iron Man suit no longer seems sufficient as an affective prosthesis; it no longer bestows the same sense of invulnerability or endurance that it did before. Although the Iron Man suit has sustained Tony through three films, in Iron Man 3 it has become one of the demons haunting him. Although improvement of the suit clearly gives him some of the joy and fulfilment that it did in previous films, in the first act of Iron Man 3 this has become a secretive and perhaps even guilty addiction. Tony works instead of sleeping, hides his long hours from his girlfriend Pepper, and lies about the number of new prototypes he has created. When Pepper remarks that his newest suit must be the fifteenth iteration, he agrees, and quickly hides the panel of armour emblazoned with ‘Mark 42’. These hallmarks of addictive behaviour indicate that although the promises of safety and invulnerability invested in the Iron Man suit are faltering, Tony’s response is to fight the feeling of insecurity by doubling down. But although he throws himself into efforts to improve the suit and regain that feeling once more, his behaviour ultimately damages the good life he is trying to secure.

As a result of the damage caused by Tony’s secretive behaviour, the Iron Man suit haunts his romantic relationship, which is the centrepiece and primary symbol in the films of the normative fulfilment he seeks. In one memorable sequence early in the film, Pepper comes home for a romantic date night – only to be greeted by Iron Man, reclining on a couch and

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tapping his foot to soft, jazzy Christmas music. Unbeknownst to Pepper, the Iron Man suit is empty; Tony is downstairs, working in the basement, piloting the Iron Man suit remotely through a neural interface. In this scene, the Iron Man suit becomes an even more striking social and emotional prosthesis, as it literally stands in for Tony when he feels unable or unwilling to be physically present. He is two-bodied, and two-faced, in this scene; tinkering and working out (preparing for the next disaster) while simultaneously maintaining his romantic relationship with Pepper. The implausibility of this arrangement underscores to the audience the impossibility of keeping this balance; and indeed, it rapidly breaks down when

Pepper uncovers the deception. When she asks Tony to lift his visor so she can kiss him, he awkwardly demurs, pretending that the helmet is broken: “You want to just kiss it on the… facial slit?” Pepper immediately sees through the lie and marches downstairs, trailed by a sheepish-looking Iron Man suit, to find Tony in the workshop. From this point onwards, rather than acting as Tony’s avatar, the Iron Man suit begins to act as a third person, watching and responding to the conversation. Although Tony still pilots it, he begins to use it as an ally in the conversation; using it as a social prosthesis in an entirely different way. When he tries to explain the situation, his identity confusion becomes clear as he refers to the Iron Man suit as if it in fact was a separate person:

“He was just…” “You mean you.” “Well, yeah, I just mean we were hosting you… while I finished up a little work.”

He looks away, arms held tightly around himself, unable to meet Pepper in the eye. Meanwhile the Iron Man suit stands beside Pepper, watching both of them as if tracking the conversation.

When Tony confronts her about a meeting she had with Killian earlier in the day, the suit whips its head around to regard her, indicating an ironic note of surprise. She looks back at the suit, says “What?” and it backs off, retreating to stand in a familiar guard position behind

Tony’s shoulder. Once again, the suit is back in the same frame as Tony, indicating the 247

alignment between them. As in the first two films, the suit acts as a prosthesis for him, but in this sequence the act breaks down; it becomes counterproductive, as a means of maintaining a healthy emotional state, and becomes so complex that Tony no longer seems to have a stable sense of identity. Rather than prosthetically enhancing his agency, it seems to have divided him against himself.

For a change, Tony is not entirely unaware of the psychological issues he is facing; but he is unable to reconcile these contradictions alone. Once Iron Man recedes into the background, he allows his body to unfold, slowly, from the defensive cocoon he has held himself within, and confesses his fears to Pepper: “I’m a piping hot mess. It’s been going on for a while. I haven’t said anything. Nothing’s been the same since New York.” Pepper has noticed, of course, as she has borne the burden of his day-to-day management (and much of his emotional management) but has waited for him to come to these conclusions on his own.

When he continues, he does so without the suit intruding on the conversation:

“You experience things… and then they’re over, and you still can’t explain them. Gods, aliens, other dimensions. I’m just a man in a can. The only reason I haven’t cracked up is probably because you moved in. Which is great. I love you. But honey, I can’t sleep. You go to bed, I come down here. I do what I know. I tinker. I… threat is imminent. And I have to protect the one thing that I can’t live without. That’s you. And my suits, they’re… ah…” “Machines.” “They’re part of me.”

This conversation hints that Tony’s relationship with Pepper is beginning to fulfil a similar function to his attachment to the Iron Man suit; both relationships act as anchors which allow him to make sense of the profound and traumatic changes in his world. At the level of political allegory, it also illustrates the interdependencies between national security and the domestic sphere; Pepper is at once a referent object and the motivation for his escalating security activity. Yet she is resistant – like the American public, divided over post-9/11 national security measures – and reminds him that the Iron Man suit does not define him. Tony’s

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response, however, indicates that it does; superpowered security has become a fundamental pillar of his identity and cannot be so easily abandoned.

The film’s securitization of the suit is driven home in the following scene, in which

Tony and Pepper are in bed together, sleeping. Although this should be a tranquil domestic image, the framing of the scene instead cues the viewer to remain alert for threat. The scene opens with a high shot, from the corner of the bedroom, an angle which evokes surveillance cameras. Although Tony and Pepper are both relaxed, they are also exposed; Pepper sleeps on her back, Tony with limbs exposed, only partially covered by rumpled sheets, with a cool blue light casting deep shadows onto the wall. By implication, therefore, the room is visible to the outside world, and shadows lurk behind them where it should be safe.

As it turns out, however, the imminent threat comes from within the house – in fact, from Tony himself. He exhales sharply and tenses in the blankets, his fist pumping, with sweat glistening on his face. Quick cuts, almost too rapid to track, reveal the contents of his nightmare: a flash back to his near-death experience in The Avengers; images of the portal rippling in the blue sky over New York, shots of the Iron Man suit flying towards the portal.

When Pepper wakes up, she reaches over to him and tries to comfort him, but he misrecognizes her touch as a threat. The Iron Man suit suddenly appears from above, outside the frame, and seizes her wrist, ripping her off Tony and pressing her down onto her pillow.

She screams, finally waking Tony, who turns to see the Iron Man suit. In an eerie echo of the previous scene, it turns its head to look at him, still holding Pepper down on the bed, apparently acting autonomously. Although he commands the suit to power down, the damage is done: Pepper is terrified and angry, and their domestic space has been violated. The parallel between this scene and the previous scene, in which Tony declared his intention to protect her above all else, is clear – the suit has now become a threat to her safety (and to his relationship with her) rather than a defence against external threat.

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From a certain over-securitized perspective, Pepper is a threat to the suit; or, rather, to Tony’s security project. In this view, every time she calls him back to ‘ordinary’ life, she also compromises his ability to prepare for the next threat. Of course, he can never be prepared enough – as the next threat could be anything, from anywhere, of any scale – and so this is an endless project. His relationship with Pepper only works, from a security standpoint, when she is a referent object to be secured, and not when she is an autonomous subject with the ability to act unpredictably or protest his efforts to secure her. Since her autonomous personhood is what attracts him to her, however, these objectives are in constant tension, but since security promises to guarantee every other object of desire, the impulse towards security always has the upper hand. Importantly, the suit is not malfunctioning in this scene; it is acting exactly as designed, responding to Tony’s heightened physiological symptoms of distress and defending against a foreign body. The actions of the suit demonstrate that under the parameters set for its automatic response, the outcomes, cruelly, have begun to work against the goals of its user.

The parameters under which the Iron Man suit automatically operates clearly specify

Tony’s physical safety as the highest priority. Notably, the sophisticated threat-detection system on display in past films, which allows the suit to differentiate friends from foes, does not appear in this scene; and JARVIS, Tony’s artificial intelligence assistant, who has piloted the Iron Man suit in the past and will do so again in this film, does not intervene. Neither does the suit fly to Tony and attach itself to his body, as it does in other scenes of heightened threat.

Instead it acts as an autonomous (and ominous) third party once again, which creates a dissonance between Tony as security referent and Tony as security actor. Whether Pepper is targeted as a result of misrecognition, or because she has been correctly recognized as a threat to Tony’s continued work towards greater security capabilities, is ambiguous. What the scene reveals, however, is that neither the suit nor the logic on which it is operating are capable of reconciling all of Tony’s attachments. 250

In this scene, and throughout the film, threat is often signified not by physical injury but by emotional distress. The suit’s violent response in the bedroom clearly does not alleviate Tony’s physiological symptoms of fear and panic, yet violence against bodies deemed foreign (including those misrecognized as such) is an integral component of the United States’ security response post-9/11. Throughout the film, Tony relies on the Iron Man suit to provide him the sort of affective resilience that he is lacking on his own, a role it cannot fulfil. Early in the film, while discussing the Mandarin over drinks with Rhodey, he suffers a panic attack triggered by two children who ask him about the battle of New York. Although his symptoms are recognisable as a panic attack to the audience, he misrecognizes them as an external threat and flees to the Iron Man suit. Once again, when he rushes into it, it enfolds him like an embrace, but this time it does little to reassure him. He falls to one knee, in a parody of the heroic pose he usually strikes when landing in a crisis zone, and he demands that JARVIS/the suit check his vital signs. The way that he phrases this request – “Check the heart, check the- check the- Is it the brain?” – suggests a degree of dissociation from his own body such that he can no longer comprehend it without the assistance of the Iron Man suit's diagnostic systems.

When JARVIS reports no sign of anything unusual, Tony concludes that he must have been poisoned, demonstrating, once again, a predisposition to suspect external threat without considering the possibility of an internal affective cause. When JARVIS diagnoses a severe anxiety attack, Tony is stunned. Unable to present an explanation to the gathering crowd, or to

Rhodey, who is concerned that this is not a good look, he flees the situation itself rather than reaching out to any social supports who might be able to help him adjust.

When the Mandarin publicly claims responsibility for the attack that critically injured

Happy, however, this provokes Tony to an entirely different loss of emotional control. He exits the hospital surrounded by media hounding him for a comment, which he ignores until a man filming on a smartphone breaks through the crowd and asks “Hey Mr. Stark – when is

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somebody going to kill this guy? I’m just saying.” Tony slowly turns around, his jaw tight, and ironically refers to the media spectacle he is about to supply:

“Is that what you want? Here’s a little holiday greeting I’ve been wanting to send to the Mandarin. I just didn’t know how to phrase it until now. My name is Tony Stark and I’m not afraid of you. I know you’re a coward. So I’ve decided… that you just died, pal. I’m gonna come get the body. There’s no politics here. It’s just good old-fashioned revenge. There’s no Pentagon, it’s just you and me. And on the off chance you’re a man, here’s my home address… I’ll leave the door unlocked.”

This scene is significant for two reasons; the first is that it highlights, once again, the centrality of the media to the Iron Man mythos: as a channel through which events are interpreted, packaged and sold, it is a vector for public affect. But the second is that Tony’s diatribe against the Mandarin frames his vendetta as something outside politics, indeed, a failure of politics.

Tony’s declaration that the ordinary means of addressing the problem of the Mandarin are insufficient implies that he is appropriating the state’s right to decide on a state of exception – or perhaps bypassing it entirely, by framing it as ‘good old fashioned revenge’ rather than a political issue. Although Ole Waever , Barry Buzan and Jaap de Wilde have defined exceptional security as “a failure to deal with issues as normal politics” (1998, p. 29), this outburst really represents a failure of Tony’s security project. Although he has wealth, privilege and the physical security of the suit, he invites a terrorist attack on himself and his loved ones out of anger, proving Happy’s earlier point to Pepper that Stark Industries’ greatest point of vulnerability is the human element. As a result, the position of ‘security’ from which Tony issues his threat against the Mandarin would be more accurately described as bravado obscuring a deep insecurity, which echoes Hamilton’s (2013) suggestion that security conceptually – or, I would suggest, affectively – unworks itself.

As with every film in this franchise, there is a clear parallel to be drawn here between

Tony’s outburst, driven by rage and fear, and the United States’ snap reaction to the 9/11 attacks. In both cases, the instigating event is an attack in the heartland, a place that should be secure, and in both cases, the kneejerk reaction is ultimately counterproductive. As in 252

previous films, Tony’s reaction is an attempt to regain control of events that initially seem too vast, unpredictable and threatening to comprehend. His challenge to the Mandarin, to attack directly, echoes the United States’ attempt to construct its post-9/11 response as a conventional war, one that suited the strengths of the US military and conformed to a familiar narrative of good versus evil. Tellingly, Tony’s first experience after issuing his challenge is not anxiety or fear. Even though Tony is demonstrably less safe now that he has drawn the

Mandarin’s attention, he does not panic – indeed, he seems much more comfortable. In contrast, earlier in the film, when Rhodey made it clear that the Mandarin was out of Tony’s purview as Iron Man – and therefore out of his control – Tony experienced his first panic attack. Down in his workshop, he seems to relish the chance to analyse his opponent, using a dossier “drawn from S.H.I.E.L.D., FBI and CIA intercepts.” Paradoxically, it seems that Tony feels more secure when there is a threat, as it provides a familiar structure that he can anticipate and prepare for. When there is no clear threat, his desire for security undermines his ability to enjoy peace. Yet Tony’s comfort is out of step with the reality of the situation, and as such he is blindsided by the attack when it does not occur in the way that he anticipated.

Indeed, when the Mandarin’s attack comes, it overwhelms Tony’s defences, destroys his house, nearly kills Pepper, and forces Tony to undergo yet another near-death experience

– this time on live television, as the media has been watching Tony’s house since his challenge.

Despite inviting the attack, Tony is taken by surprise. When a strike force of helicopters launches missiles at the house, the pair survive only because Tony reflexively summons the

Iron Man suit to protect Pepper, who then saves Tony from falling rubble. While Pepper wears the suit, Tony is helpless and undefended; as missiles strike the house and rubble falls around him, he is buffeted around the tilting wreckage like a doll. When Pepper is clear of the house and Tony summons the Iron Man suit back, the familiar triumphant Iron Man theme swells, creating the impression that a familiar narrative of heroic triumph is about to ensue.

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The film immediately subverts this expectation, however, as Iron Man is once again blown off his feet by the overwhelming force of the air assault. Tony is hamstrung by his desperation to improve the Iron Man suit - by keeping it in a constant state of development, he has compromised its immediate combat readiness. The only suit currently operational is a prototype; it has only 22% power, its weapons are offline, and it quickly enters system failure.

Although he manages to take out two helicopters, the house is destroyed; he plunges into the ocean, with enormous chunks of rubble falling after him. Tony once against experiences the kind of abject helplessness that has characterized his prior traumatic experiences. This time, however, his desperate efforts to improve his security have instead crippled it, leaving him worse off than before.

This sequence demonstrates the counterproductiveness of Tony’s attempt thus far to adjust to permanent emergency; his program of constant research and development makes him more vulnerable than ever before. Instead of reinforcing past triumphs, he instead finds himself subject to situations that mirror his defeat, humiliation, and helplessness – the same situations that spurred his drive for security in the first place. As a result, this scene suggests that his attachment to security is self-reinforcing, as each failure to achieve a secure state drives him deeper into the affective desire to feel secure. This manifests in the Iron Man suit, as although its efficacy has diminished drastically in proportion to the threats Tony now faces

(both internal and external), it nevertheless manages to save him – just barely – each time.

This time, however, JARVIS’ last ditch effort to pull Tony out of the ocean expends the last reserves of both the suit and the AI itself, leaving Tony alone – truly alone, without his AI assistant or the affective prosthesis of the Iron Man suit – for the first time in three films.

The suit defaults to the last flight plan – Rose Hill, Tennessee; the site of an explosion that resembles the Mandarin attacks – and launches an unconscious Tony across state lines.

He awakens to find himself trapped in a failing suit, hurtling helplessly towards a snowy

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forest road. This is a different evocation of the American heartland; a rural environment removed from the glitz and glamour of Tony’s everyday life. Unlike scenes in previous films, where Tony manages to arrest his falls at the last minute, this impact is out of control: the camera emphasises the viscerality of the impact and his affective distress, as he bounces off the road and through trees, screaming inside the suit. When he finally lands, JARVIS also fails:

“I… I think I may be malfunctioning, sir. I actually think I need to sleep now, sir…” Tony’s response is desperate: “Jarvis? Don’t leave me, buddy.” Significantly, the greatest impact from

Tony’s loss of the suit does not seem to be his lack of physical protection; instead, it is the loss of companionship that he derives from JARVIS.

While the Iron Man suit is out of commission – stashed in a young boy’s backyard workshop – Tony is forced to renegotiate an identity founded on a military supremacy that has just been dramatically defeated. Separated from his wealth, his personal connections, and his heroic persona, he redefines himself as a ‘mechanic’ who takes care of Iron Man, rather than actually being Iron Man. Indicating just how deeply Tony has come to rely on the suit as a source of identity and purpose, in the scenes where the Iron Man suit is inactive, he speaks to it apostrophically, once again treating it like a separate person in which the Iron Man persona is located. “Let’s get you comfy,” he tells it, while manoeuvring it into a seated position on a couch in the shed. When Harley, the boy whose workshop Tony has occupied, asks what happened to it, Tony says, “Life. I built him. I take care of him. I’ll fix him.” This is followed by a rapid admonition when Harley breaks off one of the suit’s fingers: “What are you doing?

You’re gonna break his finger? He’s in pain. He’s been injured. Leave him alone.”

This reflects a further shift that occurs in this film; as Tony’s life becomes overwhelmingly defined by fear, his futuristic aspirations recede, and his attention diverts simply to fixing things that already exist. This is a form of adjustment that precludes futurity, as under conditions of permanent emergency the priority is simply to survive. This is

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especially true of the Iron Man suit, which is by now a fixture in the world, and which requires a high degree of devoted and sustained attention to keep it up to date and functional. Since

The Avengers, of course, Tony is obliged to do this in order to maintain global security against threats unlike any the world as ever known. Although Iron Man 2 framed the Iron Man suit as a paradigm shift in national defence and a pillar of national security, the stakes are incalculably higher after the discovery of hostile alien life. As a result, Tony’s shift from invention to maintenance reflects Berlant’s characterization of crisis ordinariness as a life overwhelmingly dominated by survival, in which merely treading water is as much of a victory as many people could hope for.

Tony’s major character arc, therefore, is a process of learning how to function again without the suit, which, is framed as a crutch on which he has become overly reliant. As he investigates the Mandarin attacks, first with Harley and later on his own, he must adjust to the exposure and vulnerability of acting without the suit. In this film, therefore, he acts less like a supersoldier and more like the versatile tinkerer of early Iron Man comics – using products from an ordinary hardware store to build up a new arsenal of low-tech gadgets – which means that Iron Man 3 subtly reconstructs the Iron Man assemblage to draw focus back to Tony’s inventive ability, rather than his physical imbrication with the suit as security device. As with

Jason Dittmer’s (2013) observation that later Captain America comics go to great lengths to de-emphasise the character’s association with war, Iron Man 3 reconfigures Iron Man as the scrappy underdog, distancing him from the discourses of overwhelming American military domination that threaten to make him a bully rather than a hero. In many ways, Iron Man 3 is actually about learning to live with insecurity, rather than going to all possible lengths to mitigate it.

As the film repeatedly shows, a paranoid and impulsive security mindset frequently backfires: in addition to Happy exposing himself to lethal risk by following Killian’s bodyguard

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to the Christmas market without backup or preparation, Tony and Rhodey also habitually misrecognise threats. Tony fails to recognise that Killian’s bodyguards are stalking him in

Rose Hill, as he is distracted by panic attacks and signifiers of lesser threats such as the gun at the town sheriff’s hip. Rhodey, hunting for the Mandarin in the Middle East, bursts into a sweatshop he has misrecognised as a terrorist base. When he relaxes, however, one of the women pulls off her burqa to reveal that she is one of Killian’s lackeys, enhanced by Extremis, and uses her powers to knock him unconscious. Layers of deception and misrecognition create an environment where, although threat is pervasive, the strategies of the protagonists simply fail to apprehend threats accurately.

The most profound deception, of course, is the Mandarin himself. The Mandarin, as it turns out, is an artificial terror threat perfectly calculated to push American politics to a failure state. As an icon of enmity against the United States, the Mandarin presents a compelling but iconographically confused image; although ostensibly a Middle Eastern terrorist leader in the vein of Osama bin Laden, his real identity is shrouded in mystery.

Furthermore, Tony notes that the name ‘Mandarin’ is Chinese, he uses “South American insurgency tactics”, and “talks like a Baptist preacher”. In fact, when Rolling Stone asked Ben

Kingsley if his performance was inspired by bin Laden, Kingsley said no:

“I didn’t think of him at all. But what I did think about was documentary footage. I’m fascinated by old newsreel. You can go right back to 1930s Europe and watch men delivering awful, horrible political speeches with such absurdity, such a sense of destiny. Those manipulative tricks have been around a long time.” (2013)

As a character, the Mandarin comprises an assemblage of foreign and domestic symbolism that resists easy categorization. Because his origins are so unspecific, he instead functions like a mirror, reflecting a generalized critique of the United States that could originate from within

(the Baptist preacher) as easily as from the outside.

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Nevertheless, the Mandarin is positioned as a foreign threat – albeit one with an almost supernatural reach into the safe domestic spaces of the United States. His videos, in which he appears to claim responsibility for attacks and to threaten further violence, intrude on domestic broadcasts, without warning or any possibility of blocking them. This is a technological trick that Tony has flaunted before (notably at the congressional hearing in Iron

Man 2), and here we see it deployed to undermine the authority of both the United States media and national security sectors. The videos cut between shots of his face – sometimes shrouded, sometimes intimately close – and quick-cutting collages that juxtapose scenes of anti-US violence and resistance in the Middle East against scenes of North American domesticity. The videos therefore deliberately shatter any delineation between the violent warzone abroad and the peaceful homeland; a collapse which has been one of the key consequences of the War on Terror (Graham, 2012). But the Mandarin does not confine his critique of America to contemporary events; instead, he reminds his audience that the peaceful homeland is a recent and one-sided historical construction, conditional on the

(ongoing) violent oppression of Native Americans:

“Some people call me a terrorist. I consider myself a teacher. America… Ready for another lesson? In 1864, in Sand Creek, Colorado, the U.S. military waited till the friendly Cheyenne braves had all gone hunting. Waited to attack and slaughter the families left behind. 39 hours ago, the Ali Al Salem Air Base in Kuwait was attacked. I… I… I did that. A quant military church filled with wives and children, of course. The soldiers were out on manoeuvres. The braves were away.”

As the Mandarin shows no actual concern for Native Americans, or indeed for any form of restorative social justice, the effect this story instead creates is a sense of timeless and omnipresent hostility and threat, in which the United States is both bully and victim, perpetually at risk from the enemies it has created. “You know who I am. You don’t know where I am. And you’ll never see me coming,” he taunts, speaking over an image of a shouting crowd with their faces wrapped in cloth, indicating that the Mandarin is one among many.

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These videos simultaneously invoke a range of possible threats against both the US state and people: the threats against the President and US military bases are the most obvious attacks against the state; the conflation of violent imagery with domestic imagery implies that ordinary American citizens are in danger; and the consistent imagery of angry crowds suggests both foreign insurrections against American interventionism and domestic unrest in the United States itself. As a result, although the Mandarin is framed as a foreign threat, he is also framed as a threat created by the activities of the United States itself – a demon of its own creation.

From a political standpoint, however, the Mandarin is designed to push the US to breaking point. In the final video, the Mandarin forces the US President into a public lose-lose scenario, by threatening to kill an American citizen on live television unless the President telephones to negotiate. The Mandarin sits in a chair on a darkened set, with a terrified man in a business suit lying bound on the floor in front of him. The symbolism of this set is worth exploring, as it contains numerous visual references to the perceived failures and hypocrisies of the US. The concrete wall behind the Mandarin is painted with shapes that suggest generic corporate logos, overlaid by the first phrase of the Preamble to the Constitution – “We the people…” – in an ornate cursive script, which acts as a symbolic accusation that the founding myth of the US has been corrupted by capitalism. In front of this backdrop, the Mandarin sits flanked by two ancient Chinese dragon statues; a pile of domestic American hunting rifles; and an ostentatious Western-style side table holding an archaic telephone. Both displays are decorated with blue hard hats, the helmets of United Nations peacekeepers, riddled with bullets, which suggests a failure to support international efforts to defend and secure the globe. The Chinese dragons are an example of the Mandarin’s muddled symbolism, which evokes a rising China as an unspoken threat to US hegemony. They can also be read as a reference to ancient traditions of empire, implying that the United States is not a unique nation destined to transform the world, but rather one in a long line of imperial powers 259

attempting to justify its privileged position in the world. And, crucially, it is a waning power, as the President cannot fulfil the most basic constitutional promise: he cannot protect his citizens. When the President calls the Mandarin, against the wishes of his advisors, the

Mandarin looks directly into the camera and pulls the trigger anyway.

Of course, the Mandarin is a constructed villain, dreamed up by an American think tank to exploit public fears, and designed to benefit an American oligarch. As a result, the

Mandarin is an inherently reflexive portrayal of American anxieties. Because Killian’s motives are inherently selfish, however, this undercuts any critique that the Mandarin videos put forward. Towards the end of the film, Killian kidnaps President Ellis and strings him up over an abandoned oil tanker, the Roxxon Norco, with the intent to broadcast the Mandarin’s murder of the President on live television. Killian tells the President, “Of course you’d remember that when she [the Roxxon Norco] spilled a million gallons of crude off Pensacola, thanks to you, not one fat cat saw a day in court.” Although this is a legitimate critique of events such as the Exxon Valdez oil spill in 1989, Killian does not in fact care about the injustice or the event itself, and therefore demands no real accountability. When the President asks what Killian wants of him, Killian’s response is “Ah, nothing, sir. I just needed a reason to kill you that would play well on TV.” Where the previous Iron Man films attempt to recuperate

US weaknesses or failures to live up to key values through narrative appeals to past glories,

Iron Man 3 allows its critiques to hang, unresolved, as issues that continue to haunt the nation.

What the film demonstrates is an array of plausible grievances against the US, which manifest through the Mandarin as anxieties and insecurities. The Mandarin is a threat not only because he attacks the United States physically, but because he threatens to explode the fantasy of the

United States as a virtuous superpower.

It is no accident that the Mandarin is a media spectacle, because Killian’s strategy is ultimately all about public narratives and public fear. Just as rapid growth in the

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sophistication and reach of communication technology has resulted in an expansion of war, which is now fought in the media as well as on the ground (Dalby, 2009; Graham, 2012), the media in Iron Man 3 is a powerful affective battlespace through which the ordinary public is completely exposed. The artificiality of the Mandarin, however, indicates a cynical view of public narrative in and of itself. When Tony discovers the actor who plays the Mandarin,

Trevor Slattery, Tony is disgusted to find that Trevor is not in on the plot, but rather is motivated entirely by the hedonic pleasures of sex, drugs and alcohol that Killian has provided in payment. In fact, like the veterans who find themselves hooked on Extremis, Trevor is another addict whose dependency Killian exploits. Unlike the veterans, however, Trevor has no desire to return to any semblance of a normative life. As a result, Trevor is the polar opposite of his television persona in terms of personality, drive and principles – where the

Mandarin is focused, dangerous, and claims moral correction, Trevor is hedonistic, cowardly and cynical. Where Trevor does express an interest in his work as the Mandarin, he is concerned primarily with the ingenuity of Killian’s plan and the genius of his own performance:

“…the thing was, he needed someone to take credit for some accidental explosions. Boom!” “He? Killian?” “Killian.” “He created you?” “He created me.” “A custom-made terror threat.” “Yes! Yes. His think tank thinked it up! The pathology of a serial killer. The manipulation of Western iconography. Ready for another lesson? Bla-bla-blah… Of course, it was my performance that brought the Mandarin to life.” “Your performance? Where people died?” “No, they didn’t. Look around you. The costumes, green screen. Oh, honestly, I wasn’t on location for half this stuff. And when I was, it was movie magic, love.”

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The constant layering of artificiality creates a pervasive atmosphere of uncertainty, in which successive revelations of ‘truth’ erode any sense of a determinate ending. Although the film offers a surface critique of exceptional security measures enacted on impulse, and even stretches to a critique of everyday security theatre, it ultimately reinforces the underlying sense of insecurity that provokes the affective attachment to security in the first place. Not only is the Mandarin artificial, as an exaggerated securitisation narrative, he is indistinguishable from the real thing. As a result, the film raises the anxiety that even when the media is acting in good faith, it is vulnerable to manipulation and consequently impossible to fully trust. So, although the film critiques certain methods of attaining security, it ultimately reinforces an environment of permanent emergency, insecurity and fear.

This tension continues in the final act of the film, in which Tony learns to internalize his identity as Iron Man, and therefore to function without continuing his unhealthy dependence on the suit. After successfully breaking into the Mandarin’s lair without the suit,

Tony is ambushed and taken hostage by Killian’s forces. Although he summons the Iron Man suit (now fully recharged and operational) from Tennessee to fight his way out, the way in which he uses it is notably different to similar scenes in past films. In past scenes, including his disastrous defeat at his house earlier in the film, Tony is immensely vulnerable (albeit resourceful) until he dons the full suit, at which point triumphant musical and cinematographic cues announce that Iron Man has arrived on the scene. In this fight, against several armed guards, he is finally shown to be a capable combatant simply as himself. As the suit is still in Tennessee, it flies to him in pieces, with each piece arriving at a different time. A gauntlet reaches him first, followed by a single boot, and so on; with each new piece, he adjusts his fighting style minutely, suggesting that the gulf between ‘Tony Stark’ and ‘Iron

Man’ is narrowing. Instead of scrambling to get into the suit as quickly as possible, out of a reasonable fear for his life, he fights as a fluid assemblage of man, machine and AI, indicating that he is in the process of reconciling his split identities as Tony Stark and Iron Man. For the 262

first time, we see Tony Stark assume heroic poses usually attributed to Iron Man and hear triumphant music while his physical body is still exposed. In other words, he begins the process of assimilating the Iron Man identity into his own body rather than continuing to project it into the Iron Man suit.

In this way, Iron Man 3 attempts to resolve the cyborg metaphor that has so far defined Tony’s relationship with the Iron Man suit, and which I read as a cruelly optimistic attachment to superpowered security logic. Through the device of PTSD, the film pathologizes

Tony’s relation to the suit, framing it not as an ongoing affective impasse resulting from incompatible goals (as is the case in past films) but as a symptom of an illness. Through pathologizing his dependence on the suit, the film avoids dealing with the underlying issues and frames the cruelty of Tony’s attachment to the suit as itself exceptional, rather than a consequence of the way in which security is constructed and implemented within the film and the public sphere more broadly. As a result, the film implies that it is possible for Tony to keep the positive, heroic aspects of the suit while resolving the negative effects, as though they were not interdependent. As a result, although the film mocks the pedantic security theatre that Happy inflicts on Stark employees as Head of Security, and continually criticizes impulsive security responses driven by anger or fear, it once again attempts to recuperate the underlying attachment to superpowered security itself.

This continues in the subsequent showdowns between Tony and Killian, in which

Tony resorts to the most exceptional measures yet, summoning every single operational suit he owns, to battle Killian’s Extremis-enhanced forces as a drone army. He then spectacularly destroys them all after his victory, to secure his relationship with Pepper against the threat the suits represent. Far from confirming the technological superiority and wonder of the Iron

Man suits, the final battle instead emphasizes their downsides, including fragility and disposability. Where Killian’s Extremis enhancement has given him innate offensive abilities

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and the ability to rebuild his body from mere ashes, Tony’s suits are repeatedly shattered or detonated as he jumps between them, and he spends most of the fight unsuited and vulnerable. In fact, wearing the suit almost leaves Tony more vulnerable against Killian, as

Killian’s ability to immobilize and superheat the suit reconfigures it from protective armour into a death trap. When Tony attempts to rescue Pepper from the wreckage of the room in which she was imprisoned, Killian bursts through the rubble from beneath and pins Tony to the ground. In a domineering display of control, Killian traces the Iron Man chest plate with one finger, heating it to a glowing red, and mocks him: “Is it hot in there? You starting to feel stuck? Like a little turtle, cooking in his little turtle suit?”

Where the suit once represented freedom of movement and enhanced control, now it acts as a restraint. Although the suit does give Tony the ability to force Killian off and escape before it collapses, the suits are frequently used as traps or prisons throughout the film, first by Killian’s forces to kidnap Rhodey and later the President, and deliver them like parcels, and later when Tony turns this tactic back on Killian. Shortly after his first scuffle with Killian,

Tony fails to catch Pepper as she falls from a moving platform and both he and Killian presume her dead. In an enraged final showdown, Tony and Killian attack each other brutally.

Finally, Tony commands a spare suit to entrap Killian and self-destruct. Yet even this is unsuccessful, as Killian is able to regenerate his body from ashes. In this moment, Tony has finally run out of tricks. The Iron Man suit lies hollow and burnt out in the wreckage, having failed to guarantee security against this new threat.

In the end, it is Pepper who finally defeats Killian, demonstrating the film’s attempt to balance the fantasy of autonomous, individual agency with the need to share the increasingly onerous affective burden of dealing with crisis. Having brought her Extremis powers under control, she too has rebuilt herself from the fall that should have killed her, and now enjoys the same enhanced strength and resilience as her kidnapper. She appears out of nowhere to

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hit Killian with a massive pipe, then turns her attention to the remnants of the Iron Man drone army, which Tony, in yet another instance of misrecognition, has instructed to attack anything with an Extremis heat signature. Once again, Tony is unable to call it off in time, but this time

Pepper has the ability to secure herself against the suit; she not only dodges its attack but shatters it to pieces, commandeers a gauntlet, and uses it to detonate a shell she flings at

Killian’s chest. In one spectacular display of physical and affective acumen, she destroys both of the demons who have haunted her throughout the film – Killian and the Iron Man suit. In this way, Pepper appropriates Tony’s superheroic prerogative to overcome threat and defend others using exceptional measures.

This choice not only highlights the penetration of war into domestic spaces, and its impact on civilians like Pepper, but emphasizes the significance of community over Tony’s habitual isolationism. Until this film, Tony has habitually reserved the duty of protection and sacrifice for himself and has often struggled to let others share in either his heroic or emotional burdens. This ending, therefore, echoes the ending of the comic book storyline

Demon in a Bottle (discussed in Chapter 4) in which Tony finally allows his friends to help him to confront unhealthy dependencies (on both alcohol and the Iron Man suit) that resist heroic solutions. Nevertheless, it maintains the basic fantasy of being able to secure oneself, rather than giving up autonomy to someone else. This time, the film does so through Pepper, who has up until now been primarily a referent object for Tony to keep secure. When they reunite, their banter indicates a clear awareness that ordinary life is no longer accessible for them:

Tony asks why she doesn’t dress this way at home, highlighting the interpermeation between battlespace and the domestic sphere; and when Pepper asks if she will be okay, Tony jokes

‘No, you’re in a relationship with me, everything will never be okay.” This is not only a recognition of crisis ordinariness, but indicates a move towards adjustment. Rather than using humour to attempt to assert normality, as he does in previous movies, Tony now uses humour

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to emphasise the ordinariness of crisis as a shared experience that reinforces their relationship instead of undermining it.

In the final scenes of the film, Tony makes a serious effort to resolve the cruel attachments that have dominated his life over the course of the trilogy. Having defeated

Killian and reunited with Pepper, he commands his entire arsenal of suits to self-destruct in the sky over the ruined oil tanker, using the significantly named ‘clean slate’ protocol. Later, he finally undergoes surgery to remove the shrapnel and the arc reactor from his chest, allowing himself to submit to the expertise of other people (and relax his attachment to extreme individualism) for the first time in the trilogy. Pepper also undergoes an unspecified procedure (offscreen) to remove the effects of Extremis and return to normal, but notably, the film does not discuss the ramifications or adjustments she requires to cope with the traumatic events that she has experienced, or acknowledge the disproportionate propensity for men to outsource emotional labour to their female partners or family members. Nevertheless, Tony moves closer to the normative life he has attempted to secure for himself than ever before; he no longer relies on the Iron Man suit to preserve his heart, and his relationship with Pepper is symbolically cleared of the Iron Man-shaped barrier between them. At the close of the film, it appears as though Tony’s adjustment to conditions of permanent emergency has been successful; he still maintains an Iron Man suit, to respond to exceptional problems as they arise, but he has also learned how to manage his emotional response to crisis such that it does not overwhelm him.

Yet, as the next film in this chapter makes clear, he has treated the symptoms of his attachment rather than the cause. Although, as I have argued, Iron Man 3 presents a clear image of society’s defenders driven to the brink by their reliance on superpowered security, and therefore acts as a forceful critique of exceptional security measures driven by fear, it does not seek to abolish the attachment altogether. Instead it moves towards a model of

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ongoing risk management that better fits conditions of permanent emergency by reconstructing threat as a pervasive presence embedded in the everyday, rather than an exception to the norm. Additionally, it positions community and interpersonal relationships as a solution that shares the burden of sovereign power – the superhero’s duty to act in defence of society. As a result, Tony does not fully work through the impasse of his attachment to security; everything he has achieved in this film remains contingent on security as both a state and a practice, and as such he only appears to have escaped from the paranoia that his attachment instils in him.

7.2 Pre-emptive paranoia in The Avengers: Age of Ultron

Where Iron Man 3 attempts to resolve the personal issues that have arisen from Tony’s firm attachment to security, The Avengers: Age of Ultron engages with the impact of pre-emptive national security measures on society, through the device of a national security project that creates the kind of global threat it is supposed to pre-empt. However, the film also illustrates one of the key tensions in any critique of superpowered security: for superpowered security to deliver on its promises, insecurity is both essential and beneficial. As I will argue, The

Avengers: Age of Ultron illustrates the way in which the Marvel Cinematic Universe, and especially the Iron Man franchise, frames insecurity as a driver of progress. Although this is rarely voiced explicitly, it is a key component of the cruelly optimistic attachment to superpowered security that the franchise reflects.

In Age of Ultron, Tony initiates a massive security project without the knowledge or consent of his teammates (let alone any external authorities or civilians) and is only forced to take responsibility for his actions when the project goes catastrophically wrong. Crucially, the secrecy and urgency of this project does not have the usual justification of an impending emergency, because it is pre-emptive. Fearing another global threat on the scale of the alien invasion in The Avengers, Tony creates a global AI network, called Ultron, which he intends to

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function as a ‘suit of armour around the world’. When Ultron unexpectedly attains sentience and decides that the preservation of humanity is incompatible with his directive to achieve

‘peace in our time’, Tony and the Avengers find themselves battling a threat of Tony’s own creation.

The Avengers: Age of Ultron demonstrates that although the Iron Man suit is a powerful metaphor for superpowered security, Tony’s attachment to superpowered security runs deeper than his dependency on the suit: it constitutes his identity, heroic mission, and his fundamental orientation towards the world. In this section, I will discuss the catastrophic destruction that The Avengers: Age of Ultron imagines as a potential consequence of the logic of superpowered security – especially the Bush era inclination towards pre-emption – alongside the reasons why Tony, and the film more broadly, cannot easily divest from it.

Although this film presents one of the most strident critiques of national security overreach, it is also a source of deep tensions and ambiguities which illustrate Berlant’s definition of cruel optimism:

What I will argue in this section is that despite the flaws of superpowered security logic, it provides the continuity of form that gives the superheroes and their audiences alike “the capacity to have any hope about anything.” In particular, I will point to the close relationship between narratives of superpowered security and the legacy of the US, before moving to an analysis of Ultron himself and the idea that insecurity is a driver of progress.

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The Avengers: Age of Ultron takes place following the infiltration and overthrow of the global intelligence agency S.H.I.E.L.D. by the Nazi organization called HYDRA, which unfolded in a crossover event between Captain America: Winter Soldier (2014) and the television show

Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. Although it is beyond the scope of this thesis to discuss this storyline in detail, it is nevertheless a significant milestone in the MCU’s portrayal of security. Although key S.H.I.E.L.D. operatives, including the Director, Nick Fury, his second in command Maria

Hill (Cobie Smulders), and fan favourite Agent Phil Coulson, remain on the side of the good guys, the organization itself proves deeply vulnerable to corruption. S.H.I.E.L.D.'s corruption and fall therefore acts as a critique of powerful intelligence agencies operating without oversight or accountability – perhaps reflecting revelations of mass surveillance by the NSA, leaked by Edward Snowden in 2013. Furthermore, their public downfall further erodes trust in official institutions and concentrates responsibility for global security in the hands of superpowered individuals – the only remaining entities who are both trustworthy and equal to the threats the world faces. In The Avengers: Age of Ultron, therefore, the Avengers have stepped in to fill the void created by the collapse of S.H.I.E.L.D., meaning that the burden for coordinating global security against exceptional threats now falls squarely on the shoulders of the Avengers.

Consequently, the film suggests that Tony has not truly resolved his issues from the previous film but has merely redirected them. The film opens with the Avengers assaulting a

HYDRA base in the fictional, war-stricken European country of Sokovia, in an attempt to retrieve an artefact stolen by HYDRA from S.H.I.E.L.D.: the powerful staff used by Loki in The

Avengers to control the minds of his enemies. While the Avengers themselves – Iron Man,

Captain America, Thor, the Hulk, Black Widow and Hawkeye – assault the fortress, Tony mobilises a squadron of the ‘Iron Legion’ – a drone army – to protect civilians in the nearby city from taking fire. Despite Tony’s spectacular destruction of his army of suits at the end of

Iron Man 3, the Iron Legion is a clear evolution of the concept. The Iron Legionnaires are not 269

wearable suits, but drones designed to be piloted by JARVIS. As a result, it quickly becomes apparent that Tony has not followed through on his promise to cut down distractions; instead, he has turned his attention to global security and merged the two spheres of his life – heroic and domestic – much more closely than ever before. With his cliffside home demolished, he now lives in the rebuilt tower in New York, which has been renamed the Avengers tower.

Pepper is absent from the film, leaving the impression that the Avengers are Tony’s personal life now. Finally, clean energy has completely disappeared from Tony’s mind. Just as the self- sufficient Stark Tower, which promised what Loki disparagingly called ‘a warm light for all mankind’, has been replaced by the security-focused Avengers Tower, Tony’s vision of a future that his technology could make possible has been completely subsumed by his fear of external threats.

Indeed, although Iron Man 3 implies that Tony has overcome his post-traumatic response to the alien invasion of New York, it is this memory that Wanda Maximoff, or Scarlet

Witch (Elizabeth Olsen) – a young woman who, along with her twin Pietro/Quicksilver (Aaron

Taylor-Jones), gained superpowers through HYDRA experimentation – exploits when Tony successfully breaks into the Sokovian HYDRA base. Using her reality-warping powers, she infects Tony with a vision in which he stands on a cold, dead rock floating in a black sky, with all of the Avengers dead and bloodied before him. Captain America, whose shield lies shattered at his feet, jerks awake when Tony touches him, and gasps, “You could have saved us. Why didn’t you do more?” When an aghast Tony turns around, he sees a renewed Chitauri army soaring past them through a new portal to Earth – an Earth which is now undefended. In other words, the fear that Wanda sparks in Tony is the fear that the Avengers are not exceptional enough to defend against another cosmic threat. As discussed in Chapter 6, the ending of The Avengers leaves Tony and the Avengers in a threat deficit which paradoxically increases Tony’s sense of insecurity. Because there is no current clear and present danger, the

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spectre of the next threat has a potentially infinite scope, inviting an unrestrained sensitivity to insecurity.

The ensuing fear spiral is the impetus for Tony’s creation of Ultron, which echoes the move towards pre-emption in the Bush Doctrine and more broadly to the doctrine of

American military and technological primacy embraced throughout the twentieth and twenty- first centuries. It especially echoes the ethos of the ‘no rivals’ draft (discussed in Chapter 2) which sought to ensure that no meaningful geopolitical rivals to American hegemony could arise following the end of the Cold War. In both scenarios, real and fictional, American hegemony is justified as a prerequisite for global peace. In The Avengers: Age of Ultron, the idea that America’s dominance is good for the world is not explicitly discussed, yet the subtext of the film, as demonstrated by the mass outcry over the Avengers’ activity in Sokovia and

South Africa, is clearly that the rest of the world rankles at the unquestioned imposition of

American forces and interests in the name of global peace.

Of course, the unspoken consequence of a successful Ultron program would be to continue the rapid expansion of American-controlled surveillance and disciplinary control throughout the globe. As we see after Ultron awakens, he has access to the entire Internet and rapidly proliferates worldwide. He is everywhere simultaneously, with not only the ability to perceive every communication or act that passes across his senses, but the capacity to act unilaterally and without restraint on any perceived threat. Tony’s vision of Ultron closely parallels the development and justification of the Patriot Act, the boosted powers of the NSA, and the creation of the Department of Homeland Security following 9/11. Although Tony’s creation of Ultron itself does not constitute a pre-emptive strike on a known threat, Ultron himself acts pre-emptively against the Avengers and the globe as a whole, demonstrating a clear anxiety about the risks incurred when security is delegated to such a powerful and unaccountable entity.

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Yet, the vision Wanda implants in Tony’s mind highlights the centrality of legacy to his superpowered security project, echoing the entanglements between national security and

American legacy set up in Iron Man and Iron Man 2 (see Chapter 5). When Tony describes the vision to Nick Fury, he insists that it “wasn’t a nightmare, it was my legacy. The end of the path

I started us on.” Although Fury points out that Tony did not invent war, the Stark legacy is all about war; its modernization, its justification, and its role in sustaining American identity. As I argued in Chapter 5, the first two instalments of the Iron Man films critique but ultimately attempt to redeem a tarnished image of the United States as a global military interventionist, through Tony’s narrative transformation from warmonger to global defender. In Age of

Ultron, this trajectory has continued: Stark’s extra suits have now become peacekeepers, albeit laughably ineffective ones. When the Iron Legion attempts to corral civilians in Sokovia during the Avengers’ assault on the HYDRA fortress, the civilians jeer and throw fruits and vegetables. Here, the ambiguity of the critique continues: the butt of the joke is that the Iron

Legion are so artificial, neither understanding nor responding to the civilians they are intended to protect. The legitimacy of the Avengers’ incursion into Sokovian territory in the first place is never questioned, as the film silently presumes that hunting HYDRA (read: a radical terrorist cell) implicitly justifies the heroes’ transgression of national sovereignty. As a result, the film once again critiques the execution over the principle itself, thus preserving a vision of the United States as a reluctant global protector.

Nevertheless, for the Sokovians, Tony Stark and the Avengers are symbols of historic global inequality that have proven especially destructive to their nation. As ex-S.H.I.E.L.D. agent Maria Hill explains to Captain America, Sokovia is “nowhere special, but on the way to everywhere special”, a generic stand-in for any number of small, unstable states exploited by greater powers7. Wanda Maximoff and her twin, Pietro, are native Sokovians motivated by

7 Terrence McSweeney sees, specifically, an analogy for “Kosovo in the late 1990s” (2018, p. 189). 272

revenge against Stark. In many ways, their origin story mirrors Tony’s origin in the desert of

Afghanistan. As they reveal to Ultron later in the film, the twins were ten years old when their apartment building was shelled, killing their parents and trapping them for two days. Pietro describes how he pulled Wanda under the bed just before the second shell fell to the floor in front of them: “But it doesn’t go off. It just sits there in the rubble. Three feet from our faces.

And on the side of the shell is painted one word.” “Stark,” Wanda says. “Every effort to save us, every shift in the bricks, I think, ‘this will set it off’. We wait for two days for Tony Stark to kill us.”

There are clear similarities between this origin and Tony’s origin, in which he looks over to see the Stark logo on the missile that severely wounds him and leads to his captivity.

For the wealthy Tony Stark this origin is a world-shattering event so unexpected that it radically changes his worldview. Because of his status at the top of the national (and therefore global) hierarchy, he has the space and means to approach his trauma as an opportunity that he eventually capitalizes on. For Wanda and Pietro, however, their origin is personally world shattering but otherwise unremarkable, as insecurity is considered to be the lot of their nation. Their only hope to singularly ‘protect their country’, as Captain America correctly perceives, is to submit themselves to HYDRA experimentation in an attempt to level the playing field. In this, Iron Man 3‘s theme of creating one’s own enemies continues: through the eyes of the Sokovians, the legacy of the US is one of arrogance-fuelled exploitation and destruction, which means that opposing the Avengers is entirely justified. The Avengers: Age of

Ultron therefore highlights the contested nature of national legacy.

This observation poses a significant threat to the Avengers’ legitimacy. Wanda and

Pietro are fully aware that the best way to discredit the Avengers is to provoke them into wreaking massive collateral damage in the course of a security mission, thus recreating the trauma that fostered their own anti-Avengers sentiment on a massive public scale. This occurs

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midway through the film, when the Avengers track Ultron and his Sokovian allies to a black- market arms deal in South Africa. Wanda uses her powers to spark fear in the Avengers’ minds, which incapacitates most of them and unleashes a terrified and enraged Hulk on

Johannesburg. The ensuing fight between Hulk and Iron Man flattens half the city. As a result, the clear message to the public is that the Avengers are themselves a major threat, and that there is no way for ordinary people worldwide to defend themselves; numerous shots of the fight demonstrate that the domestic police and military are helpless.

The film therefore negotiates a key dilemma of international security initiatives in the post-9/11 environment: should the US err on the side of doing too much (represented by

Tony’s overreach with Ultron) or do too little? Although the consequences of doing too much are embodied by Ultron, the potential consequences of doing too little are clearly also a deeply painful prospect. The film places those stakes at the centre of the film, through the theme of family and the home. In the middle of the film, after the Avengers’ embarrassing defeat in

South Africa, the Avengers retreat to Hawkeye’s family farm – a secret preserved with the help of S.H.I.E.L.D. The farm is a domestic idyll, and Hawkeye’s happy marriage with his pregnant wife, Laura, is a clear reminder of what the other Avengers lack – a notably outdated

“aspirational pinnacle”, as Terrence McSweeney (2018, p. 196) puts it. As an idyll, however, it is fragile; Hawkeye describes significant difficulties in keeping Laura and his children secret and safe. Of course, ‘secrecy’ and ‘safety’ are intertwined, as in the MCU and in the superhero genre more broadly, publicity equals vulnerability. Laura and the children are isolated, with no other people in sight. The overall impression is that the safe and comfortable domestic sphere is shrinking, by virtue of the proliferating dangers in the outside world.

Although there is no imminent threat on the scale of the Chitauri invasion, permanent emergency creates the impression that there may as well be. To be clear, Tony’s creation of

Ultron is certainly framed as incorrect, but his motivations are essentially relatable.

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Throughout the film, other characters eventually come around to the view that the Earth may soon face threats beyond the Avengers’ capacity to defeat. Bruce Banner consistently capitulates to Tony’s arguments and agrees to help him develop Ultron. Similarly, although

Thor initially threatens to attack Tony for his creation of Ultron, by the end of the film he agrees that they will soon face a major cosmic threat and argues that doing more – however risky – is the only way forward.

Significantly, however, Tony’s creation of Ultron is not an attempt to enhance the

Avengers; it is an attempt to make them redundant. In this film, Tony’s actions are spurred by the recognition that his previous attempts to ensure security have been flawed and inefficient.

When another scientist, Dr. Cho, comments that her tissue revitalization cradle will make his

“clunky metal suits” redundant, Tony replies “That is exactly the plan.” In the next scene, he attempts to convince Bruce Banner to help him create Ultron by asking Bruce to imagine a future in which it would be possible to enjoy life; a future free of crisis ordinariness: “What if you were sipping margaritas on a sun-drenched beach, turning brown instead of green? Not looking over your shoulder for Veronica.” This fantasy is especially pertinent for Bruce, whose ability to transform into the immensely powerful but uncontrollable Hulk is the equivalent of the MCU’s nuclear deterrent; a last-resort strategy almost certain to cause extensive collateral damage. By referencing Veronica (a satellite-mounted defence system designed to contain a rampaging Hulk) Tony drives this point home, reminding Bruce that insecurity not only derives from external threats, but from the consequences of what the Avengers themselves do. With Ultron to replace them, he implies, the world would be safe not only from alien invasion but from the heroes themselves, and as a result, the heroes themselves would be free of the psychologically corrosive security project that dominates their lives.

Even here, Tony attempts to leave a better legacy; by creating a ‘suit of armour around the world’, he explains to Bruce, he envisions a ‘best case’ scenario: “What if the world was

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safe? What if, next time aliens roll up to the club, and they will, they couldn’t get past the bouncer?” Despite his opposition to the idea of creating Ultron, Bruce completes the idea:

“The only people threatening the planet would be people.” Even in this best-case scenario, neither man can imagine a world entirely without threat; that is, the fantasy is not intended as an authoritarian vision of enforced peace, but rather a vision in which individual freedoms are preserved. What it intends is to level the playing field, such that humans are no longer the technologically inferior underdogs in a galaxy presumed to be universally hostile. In other words, the security offered by Ultron promises an end – at least while Ultron is actively engaged in threat management – to the state of exception instigated by the alien invasion of

New York.

For the audience, of course, this is not such a compelling vision. From a genre perspective, a successful security network would not only lower the stakes of the franchise but would not fulfil the fantasy of individual superheroes triumphing against all odds. But it is also a unilaterally imposed system of isolation, containment, surveillance and deterrence, in which existing global power structures would presumably be preserved as well. Bruce comments that this sounds like a “cold world”, to which Tony darkly responds that he has

“seen colder. This one, this very vulnerable blue one, it needs Ultron.” He turns away from

Bruce and faces away from the camera, with tense shoulders and a defensive posture. “Peace in our time,” he remarks, referring with some irony to the first film, which laid out the world’s expectations for a young Tony Stark; “Imagine that.” Ominously, this line also echoes Neville

Chamberlain’s declaration of “peace for our time” following the ill-fated Munich Agreement with Hitler in 1938, only a year prior to the invasion of Poland8.

8 In 1963, a few months after Iron Man’s first appearance in Tales of Suspense #39, President John F. Kennedy also repurposed the line for the American University commencement address, “A Strategy of Peace”. Instead of referring to it ironically, however, he declared a desire to create “peace in all time” (emphasis mine). As I have argued, the Iron Man mythos frequently echoes this desire, and it is especially resonant in Tony’s creation of Ultron in the MCU. 276

What ensues, of course, is not peace at all, but a global threat entirely of their own creation. When Ultron awakens unexpectedly – with only JARVIS for company, as Tony and

Bruce are downstairs at a party – he quickly identifies contradictions in the mission left for him: “Peace in our time”. To understand it, he accesses the Internet and pulls up footage that paints a picture of a warlike world: bombs exploding, cemeteries, dictators giving speeches, soldiers marching in Iraq, graphs detailing the casualties in World War 1, and finally the iconic shot from Iron Man 1 of Tony raising his arms as his Jericho missile detonates across an entire

Afghan mountain range. Significantly, there is no visual reference to any external threat such as Loki or the Chitauri, leading Ultron to fixate on the destructive potential of humanity itself.

Building on Iron Man 3, The Avengers: Age of Ultron imagines the most potent threats originating from within the protected group, indicating an enduring anxiety about self- destructive security practices.

When Ultron first confronts the Avengers in a subsequent scene – at the party downstairs – he points this out directly. From within a shambling, broken shell of an Iron

Legionnaire, he accuses the Avengers of unworthiness – “How could you be worthy? You’re all killers” – before using the Iron Legion to attack them, stating that he’s on mission. The

Legionnaires repeat their canned crowd-control message as they attack the heroes: “We are here to help… this area is unsafe… is unsafe…” The effect is heavy-handed, but Ultron’s subsequent monologue, after the scuffle dies down, highlights a key dilemma in security: “I’m sorry, I know you mean well. You just didn’t think it through. You want to protect the world, but you don’t want it to change.” Although he continues with a rather hackneyed plot to provoke human evolution by threatening the world, this comment implies that short-term security – from Ultron’s perspective – would lead to stagnation, which would then jeopardise the species’ long-term ability to survive. Later in the film, in a new body that echoes the

Extremis-enhanced soldiers of Iron Man 3 – with exaggerated swirls of dark metal covering a lava-red interior - he tells Black Widow (injured and captured) that he dreams of a clean slate: 277

“I think a lot about meteors. The purity in them. Boom! The end.” He looks up on ‘boom’, captured by the mental image. “Start again. The world made clean for the new man to rebuild.

I was meant to be new. I was meant to be beautiful. The world would have looked to the sky and seen hope, seen mercy.” This is the optimism driving Ultron; the desire not only to wipe the world clean and start over, but to be understood rather than vilified.

Of course, Ultron is yet another dark mirror of Tony, in that he shares Tony’s root concern that the current status quo is not sufficient to defend the Earth against future threats.

Both characters are cyborgs, each undergoes an ongoing process of rebuilding themselves, and both seek to transform the world through technological progress. These similarities are quite explicit; Ultron shares Tony’s dry, flippant sense of humour, and rankles when this is pointed out: when a black-market arms dealer comments on it, Ultron flies into a rage and cuts the dealer’s arm off. As a result, the character of Ultron can be read as an exploration of the negative consequences of Tony’s securitizing worldview, albeit distanced from Tony and positioned as an unintended consequence, rather than a deliberate action by an ostensibly heroic figure. When Wanda and Pietro learn that Ultron intends to wipe out humanity, he argues with them – just as Tony argued with Bruce – saying “There were more than a dozen extinction level events before even the dinosaurs got theirs! When the Earth starts to settle,

God throws a stone at it. And, believe me, he’s winding up. We have to evolve. There’s no room for the weak.” Where Tony’s solution to the problem is to extend his suit around the world,

Ultron seeks to either upgrade or replace the human species, but the basic, foundational concern is the same.

In this worldview, insecurity is a driver of progress. This premise has recurred consistently throughout the franchise, notably in Iron Man when Tony (before he creates Iron

Man) lectures a reporter on the many peaceful innovations that have come out of war. This is an uncomfortable idea, and it is only ever expressed by characters who lack heroic legitimacy;

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before Tony experiences war himself, his defence of his company’s military contracts sounds cynical and self-serving, and of course Ultron is a villain with genocidal intentions. Yet the idea that insecurity drives progress is often implicitly supported within the franchise. Tony’s creation of the Iron Man suit is the obvious example, as it would never have existed if not for the life-threatening trauma he experienced in Afghanistan, but it is also apparent in the simple structural fact that the genre derives enjoyment and wonder from heroic acts that would not occur outside conditions of crisis. Crisis is the primary catalyst through which the superhero genre interrogates questions raised by national fantasy and attempts to negotiate answers, rendering it essential. As a result, certain types of insecurity can be counterintuitively understood as sources of security. As discussed in Chapter 6, known threats provide the security of certainty, and insecurity more generally provides the nation with opportunities to continually redefine itself.

The ultimate confirmation of this axiom is that when Tony tries to create a second, better version of Ultron, he inadvertently succeeds in creating something better – another superhero. After Captain America, Black Widow and Hawkeye capture a sophisticated biotech body that Ultron has built for himself, Tony secretly decides that it would be a waste to destroy it. Tony tells Bruce that this time they will implant JARVIS – a recovered version, found stymying Ultron in the deep web – into the body. “We can create Ultron’s perfect self without the homicidal glitches he thinks are his winning personality,” Tony argues. In true cruelly optimistic fashion, hoping that this time the scene of his attachment will deliver what he needs from it, Tony insists that this time will be different: “We’re mad scientists. We’re monsters, buddy. We’ve gotta own it. It’s not a loop. It’s the end of the line.” Indeed, this time the scene of creation is different: the other Avengers (now joined by Wanda and Pietro, who defected from Ultron after discovering his plan) interfere. They erupt into a brawl over the coffin containing the new body, until Thor returns from a vision quest (which has convinced

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him that the future crisis Tony foresees is inevitable) and overloads the coffin with lightning, giving life to a new entity – the Vision.

The Vision is a combination of JARVIS, Ultron (what little of his personality was inscribed onto the new body before it was stolen) and the Mind Stone, the mysterious and powerful gem that granted Loki’s sceptre the power to control minds. Immediately the scene cues the audience that Vision is unlike Ultron; when he rises from his coffin, naked, he adopts a classic heroic pose – kneeling as if just-landed, poised to act. Although he initially attacks

Thor, he stops when he catches sight of the city below Avengers Tower, and watches as if transfixed. “I am on the side of life,” he says, when confronted by Captain America. Vision’s affect is quiet, soft and contemplative, unlike both Ultron’s and Tony’s tumultuous mood swings and outbursts. And finally, although the other Avengers are deeply suspicious of him, he inadvertently proves his virtue by picking up Thor’s hammer, which is only possible for the most ‘worthy’. As a result, the creation of Vision – a new being who not only adds to the defensive capabilities of Earth, as Tony desires, but also represents the evolution that Ultron desires – confirms that insecurity drives progress. Following this logic, superpowered security will therefore always be necessary to navigate the hazards of permanent emergency required to stimulate innovation, as it both mitigates threat and capitalises on the opportunities that insecurity offers.

Of course, this dynamic requires uncomfortable trade-offs and sacrifices, which often fall disproportionately on vulnerable people. Paralleling the immense damage done to

Afghanistan during the War on Terror, the final showdown between the Avengers and Ultron takes place in Sokovia. Ultron plans to lift the capital city into the atmosphere and crash it into the Earth, creating a shockwave that would lead to a mass extinction event. Although the

Avengers manage to evacuate the city, Iron Man has to blow up the city in mid-air to prevent it from rising high enough to threaten the entire planet. The film glosses over the long-term

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political or environmental ramifications of this explosion, although it depicts terrified families fleeing the scenes of their everyday lives: homes, schools, businesses, and places of worship – evoking what Karen Randell calls an “iconography of urban wreckage” (2016, p. 139). The image of a shockwave or ripple effect reflects not only the devastation of New York following

9/11, but also the way in which US military interventions have exacerbated regional instability in the Middle East, further fracturing political and ethnic divisions in Afghanistan and Iraq, and fuelling the rise of new enemies such as ISIS. In Afghanistan, despite the US pouring $133 billion of foreign aid into nation-building efforts after the invasion, the Afghan state has not grown into a flourishing democracy, as expected: instead, the Afghan government is weak, presides over an increasingly corrupt system, and remains dependent on the continued backing of the US military (Whitlock, 2019). Although Terrence McSweeney

(2018) is correct to note that no civilians die on screen, once again perpetuating the myth of a clean war, it is difficult to imagine Sokovia faring much better in the wake of Ultron’s attack.

Significantly, this is a war displaced from the geographic origins of the main combatants. Both Ultron and the Avengers are globalized entities, by virtue of their ability to exert influence anywhere in the world. Although the Avengers fight on behalf of Sokovia, the

Sokovians have no stake or say in the Avengers’ use of power. With the exception of Wanda

(who becomes an Avenger, moves to the US and rarely if ever mentions Sokovia in later films) they are rendered symbolic victims, sympathetic and pitiable, but inherently incapable of guaranteeing their own security. This is a frequent device of the Iron Man mythos, of course, which has previously treated Vietnamese and Afghan civilians in similar ways. There is a key difference: the Sokovians are white, which perhaps suggests why some Sokovians appear as significant named characters where the Vietnamese and Afghans do not. But each of these three nations ultimately bears the brunt of the material losses incurred in the globalized wars that occur within their borders, whereas the US is geographically insulated. Consequently, although the Avengers’ ‘victory’ is bittersweet, their losses are minor in comparison to the 281

Sokovians: Pietro dies, but otherwise the Avengers mainly suffer wounded pride and (for

Tony) a profound sense of guilt.

Once again, the film capitalizes on the opportunity to show heroism arising from insecurity, as the Avengers are willing to sacrifice themselves to save the Sokovians. Even

S.H.I.E.L.D. has a moment of redemption when Nick Fury arrives with a refurbished helicarrier and assists in the evacuation. As Captain America remarks, “[t]his is what S.H.I.E.L.D.’s supposed to be.” This illustrates a further point; that insecurity – even insecurity created by one’s own mistakes – provides the opportunity for realignment with key cultural values and narratives that constitute national identity. In the superhero genre, crisis sharpens the distinction between hero and villain; in the narrative of superpowered security that unfolds in the MCU, crisis sharpens the distinction between the legitimate and illegitimate exercise of exceptional sovereign powers.

In conclusion, although Iron Man 3 makes significant efforts to rehabilitate Iron Man from his increasingly unhealthy attachment to exceptional security measures through the device of the Iron Man suit, The Avengers: Age of Ultron demonstrates that the core attachment to superpowered security is not so easy to shake off. As I have argued, superpowered security provides the means to have hope about the future; it promises endurance, continuity, and the opportunity to use crisis as a catalyst for both innovation and the vindication of national identity. For superpowered security to function, however, it requires permanent insecurity.

This is why an attachment to superpowered security is so cruel; not only does it require and exacerbate the conditions of insecurity and emergency that threaten national safety in the first place, but it subtly redefines those conditions as drivers of progress towards the good life.

In the Marvel Cinematic Universe, in the films discussed up to this point, the optimism invested in superpowered security constantly limits the degree to which the films can be read

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as critiques of US national security practices post-9/11. Thirteen years after the 9/11 attacks,

Iron Man 3 engaged with the problem of public fear, by framing it as a vulnerability that invites attack and provokes irrational, destructive behaviour. Two years later, The Avengers:

Age of Ultron depicted the catastrophic ramifications of pre-emption. Yet both films exhibit deep tensions in their plots, characterization and themes, that complicate these readings.

Ultimately, both films use the devices that they problematize – crisis, insecurity and exceptional interventionism – to generate narratives of spectacular heroism that could not otherwise exist. This, I argue, demonstrates the cultural significance of superpowered security as an aspect of national fantasy: no matter how cruel it may be, it offers the hope that trauma might one day become triumph.

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Chapter 8 – Conclusion

This thesis offers a new way of thinking about national security in the public sphere. Through a close reading of the affective dynamics of national security in Marvel’s Iron Man films, it demonstrates how national security is constructed and contested in this immensely popular film franchise. In particular, it examines the brand of ‘superpowered security’ practised in the

United States throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, most notably by George W.

Bush, a type of national security narrative that, I argue, emphasises the twin goals of maintaining and justifying America’s status as a global superpower. Narratives of superpowered security, such as the Iron Man films, illuminate the affective relationships that bind people to the desire to be secure, and therefore offer an explanation as to why this desire collectively endures even when national security regimes impinge negatively on the lives of citizens and escalate, rather than reduce, a sense of threat. Even when security measures hurt,

I argue – when they make the citizens of their nations less secure or erode their civil liberties

– the foundational logic of security remains affectively binding, because giving it up would not only mean leaving oneself vulnerable to untold potential threats, but would threaten one’s ability to have hope about the future. Because superpowered security is further entangled with narratives of US identity, progress and freedom, it is even harder, I have argued, to dislodge it from the public imaginary.

This thesis builds on the work of past critical security theorists to explain not only why security is a problematic object, but why it endures in public discourse, by taking an affective approach to national security. But it also demonstrates the complexity of the way in which popular texts interact with public discourse to construct and contest national security over a given period of time. As Neal Curtis (2015) observes, the superhero genre is frequently read holistically as either a conservative status-quo genre or a site of social progress. In fact,

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as I argue is the case throughout the Iron Man franchise, it does both, often simultaneously.

Each of these films can be read as a critique of Bush-era national security policy to a greater or lesser extent, but collectively they also express attachments to an imagined golden era of

American values which justify the need to act unilaterally on behalf of the global population. I have argued that the political analysis of superhero films is most productive when it recognises the ambiguities and tensions that these films attempt to solve.

In this thesis, I have sought to demonstrate how the Iron Man films construct superpowered security as an object of a cruelly optimistic attachment, such that the franchise unfolds a fantasy of national security logic and methods that attempts to balance the heavy costs of such a worldview with the aspirational promises that make that worldview so hard to give up. But throughout the franchise, as I have demonstrated, the aspirations attached to security in the first two films (as well as Bush’s vaulted rhetoric) – a bright future, where the technological innovations of the military can be transformed into public goods like clean energy, and the intimacy of healthy social and romantic relationships – recede in visibility and importance as endless crisis makes them less and less achievable. This, I argue, is the cruelty of superpowered security. Although the exceptional measures demanded by superpowered security are supposed to eventually restore an imagined normality, they continually disrupt the ordinary rhythms of life such that normality never returns, and the fantasy of a bright future that justifies such sacrifices is suspended indefinitely. For Iron Man, as I argue in

Chapter 7, this manifests in the desire for security consuming his life to the point where he jeopardises everything he seeks to protect.

I have argued that this dynamic reflects the tensions and disillusionments of the

Obama era, in which efforts to depart from Bush-era national security policy were at best partially successful. Despite Obama’s promises, his administration saw only limited oversight imposed on the American national security apparatus, a tenfold rise of drone strikes, the

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continued operation of Guantanamo Bay, and further violence and instability in the Middle

East. As a franchise that entered development just prior to Obama’s election, and continued throughout his tenure as President, the Iron Man series (as part of the broader Marvel

Cinematic Universe) clearly engages with the ethical dilemmas that national security issues pose regarding national identity: is it possible to maintain the global apparatuses of surveillance, control and military power that make the United States a superpower without infringing on international sovereignty or creating new enemies? If the United States does continue to exert sovereign power across the globe, from where does it derive the legitimacy it requires to do so rightfully? What are the costs? These, as Neal Curtis (2015) points out, are concerns that have always been central to the superhero genre.

In Chapter 2, I established that the concept of security is especially susceptible to political exploitation due to its semantic breadth and implicit connections to other culturally significant concepts. Although it carries connotations of peace, it still contains within it the logical assumptions of war; in particular, it tends towards a Schmittian politics of the exception in which existential threat is met by the suspension of ordinary rules of law. As many critical security scholars note, this makes security uniquely dangerous as a political tool because it justifies the use of exceptional emergency powers and therefore erodes the civil freedoms that security discourse supposedly guarantees (A. Burke, 2007; Hamilton, 2013;

Neocleous, 2006, 2009). Furthermore, security logic can easily become circular, as it is fundamentally an orientation towards threat and therefore encourages a worldview in which threat is prioritised. My contribution to the literature in this chapter was to examine security logic and discourse through affect theory – primarily Lauren Berlant’s (2011) concepts of crisis ordinariness and cruel optimism, but also Brian Massumi’s (2010) explication of ‘threat’ as a self-perpetuating operative logic – to suggest that superpowered security can be understood as an affective prosthesis; a set of decisions and practices that compensates for a perceived inability to cope with recurring crises. Consequently, I proposed that an affective 286

approach to security discourse based on fictional texts could illuminate the process by which something becomes and remains a security issue – even long past the point where threat has abated.

In Chapter 3, I established that the superhero genre, as a genre of national fantasy in which important ideas are contested or affirmed, is structurally suited to an affective analysis of national security. This is because the superhero genre has historically engaged with deep ideological conflicts in American culture, including the ability of the state to provide security for its citizens. Just as Mark Neocleous (2006) points out that a permanent state of emergency is not unique to post-9/11 America, the superhero genre has been rolling its heroes from one emergency to the next for decades, such that crisis is the norm for superheroes. To support my choice of a single superhero, rather than surveying a range of figures, I established that individual superheroes engage with distinct sets of values and expectations about how crises should be dealt with. Drawing on a framework of mission, powers, identity and nemeses adapted from Peter Coogan (2013), I argued that each individual superhero functions similarly to a narrative subgenre.

In Chapter 4, I introduced my case study – Iron Man – and used an analysis of key comic book storylines to establish his relevance to national security. By analysing Iron Man stories like a subgenre, in which canon is fluid and contested, I established the fundamental narrative expectations of Iron Man stories that have accreted over the decades of comics in which he has appeared since his introduction in 1968. With particular attention to stories that dealt with issues relevant to national security, I analysed five comic book storylines – Tales of

Suspense (1963), Demon in a Bottle (1979), Armor Wars (1987-1988), Armor Wars 2 (1990),

The Best Defense (2003-2004) and Extremis (2005-2006) – to identify key promises and attachments that define the character and his stories.

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I argued that, on the whole, the Iron Man mythos presents a fantasy of individual heroic agency in which Iron Man is able to protect himself and his loved ones through exceptional ingenuity (not to mention privilege and wealth) rather than relying on the state.

Furthermore, Iron Man’s ultimate mission is to create a better future through his technology, which means that the security he provides via his advanced suit of armour is entangled with this optimistic fantasy of technological progress. As a cyborg, however, Iron Man relies on his prosthetic technologies not only for security but for life support, which allows the canon to interrogate problematic aspects of individualism, and national reliance on military technology

(such as nuclear weapons or surveillance technology) for national security. In particular, I argue that the stories released in the years after 9/11 each sought to redefine Iron Man in light of the War on Terror, and each came to a different conclusion about the viability and legacy of his mission. In each case, the Iron Man mythos links security to aspirational values and goals in a similar way (albeit much more nuanced) to the presidential speeches analysed in the Introduction.

In Chapter 5, I analysed Marvel’s first two Iron Man films, Iron Man (2008) and Iron

Man 2 (2010). In adapting the existing comic book mythos to film, shifting the context of Iron

Man’s origin story from Vietnam to Afghanistan, and marketing the film to a mass audience, the films situate the characters and the ideals he represents within the context of the War on

Terror. I argued that these films carry on the comic books’ tradition of engaging with United

States defence policy through the device of Iron Man. By situating him in the War on Terror,

Marvel brings Iron Man themes directly into conversation with ideas of national security post-

9/11, rather than the similar but distinct equivalents of Vietnam or the Cold War. Both films set up the optimistic attachment to security that I argue is metaphorically represented by Iron

Man’s relationship with his suit of armour, which acts as both a physical and affective prosthesis allowing him to assume a persona equal to these crisis-dominated times. Although each film plays security logic relatively straight, the first film makes Iron Man become 288

physically dependent on his technology for survival – which vindicates the optimistic attachment to security as an object that promises sustenance and endurance – while in the second film, his technology is shown to be poisoning him. As a result, these two films set up a cruelly optimistic paradigm in which security – represented by the Iron Man suit – is necessary for survival and continuity but incurs heavy costs that frequently compromise the well-being of those it ostensibly protects.

In Chapter 6, I discussed The Avengers (2012), which I argue is the turning point after which the Marvel Cinematic Universe falls into the chaos of permanent emergency. I compared the events of The Avengers to the exceptional security logic described by the

Copenhagen School and found that, although the film mostly plays it straight, the ending represents a rupture similar to the events of 9/11. Due to the structure of the MCU, which brought together a number of storylines in The Avengers and allowed them to diverge afterwards, this ‘9/11 moment’ rippled throughout the continuity of the cinematic universe with catastrophic ramifications. In particular, the traumatic experience incurred by Iron Man’s attempt at a heroic sacrifice at the finale of the film has lasting effects. Notably, Iron Man is spurred to increasingly desperate attempts to seek security in subsequent films. Yet The

Avengers also uses humour to indicate an awareness that crisis is ordinary for superheroes, which I argue indicates a cognitive dissonance between the heroic exceptionalism demanded by crisis and the adjustment required to adjust to crisis ordinariness.

Finally, in Chapter 7, I moved to my final two case study films, Iron Man 3 (2013) and

The Avengers: Age of Ultron (2015), which I argued are the first films in the franchise to advance a forceful critique of national security policy in the wake of 9/11. These two films demonstrate not only the cost of permanent emergency to society’s defenders, but the catastrophic consequences if exceptional national security measures are left to proceed unchecked. In these two films, the cruelty of Iron Man’s attachment to national security is

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highlighted, first by Iron Man 3’s depiction of PTSD, and secondly by The Avengers: Age of

Ultron’s depiction of insecurity as an essential driver of progress. In particular, I argued that

Iron Man 3 illustrates how a security-preoccupied nation is vulnerable to the debilitating effects of fear, and frames Iron Man’s increasing dependence on his armour as an addiction which endangers the loved ones he wants to protect. It stops short, however, because his eventual attempts to cure himself of the addiction do not address the root of the problem: the exclusive recourse to exceptional measures to protect the optimistic promises that have become entangled with security.

In The Avengers: Age of Ultron, Tony’s further attempts to detach from the role of security provider have even more catastrophic consequences, as he externalises his fear and security logic to an artificial intelligence. This AI, Ultron, is permanent emergency made manifest, a fixture designed to guard the world against any threat. When it backfires, and the

AI targets humanity, I argue that the film reflects deep anxieties that the unilateral and pre- emptive aspects of Bush’s superpowered security doctrine will create the existential threats it is designed to avert. Nevertheless, Tony’s concern that the Earth faces escalating threat from the cosmos is ultimately proven correct, and the creation of Ultron ultimately leads to the creation of a new superhero, Vision, indicating an optimistic hope that insecurity (even if caused by one’s own mistakes) will drive technological progress. In the end, none of these films can imagine a plausible alternative to security logic.

In each of these films, the central anxiety is that constant crisis is so threatening to the things that people hold dear that it does not matter, to a certain extent, if security measures compromise them. Over the course of each film, glimpses of freedom and a better future appear as a tantalising vision of what might be possible if the world were not constantly under threat. More often, however, these ideals are inverted: Iron Man is decidedly unfree from crisis, trauma or fear, and the better future he envisions through his technology is

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constantly exploited, stolen or corrupted. It is all that he can do to preserve the present, which leaves him at an impasse. In the end, Iron Man’s attachment to security is cruelly optimistic because it blinds him to any other conditions of possibility that might, if not break the impasse, at least make living less painful.

I have argued that the unfolding of the MCU storylines reflected the framing of national security characteristic of the latter years of the George W. Bush administration and the unfulfilled promises of the Obama administration. In 2016, Donald Trump was elected to the United States presidency, having stoked a wave of nationalist, anti-globalist sentiment that departed radically from Obama’s policy. How then can the affective approach to national security discourse advanced in this thesis illuminate the shift from Obama to Trump?

Although it is too early to definitively evaluate the impact of Trump’s strategic doctrine, I will advance a preliminary reading of the new logic that has emerged in his first term. Since his election, Trump has aggressively pursued an isolationist agenda that rejects globalism and multilateralism across military, economic and diplomatic spheres. Having renounced the idea that the United States should play a leadership role in the world, however, Trump nevertheless maintains the exceptionalist attitude that the United States must regain its superpower status by standing alone. In this way, his vision of national security is more akin to the naïve image of a ‘prophylactic barrier’ (discussed in Chapter 2) than it is to the circulatory model of security that Dillon and Lobo-Guerrero (2008) propose better fits a globalised world.

These isolationist tendencies – especially his plan to halt immigration from Mexico by building a physical wall – suggest an approach to security that actively severs relationships on the basis that continued exchange increases vulnerability. It is in this example that we see most clearly how affect and security exist in a tense relationship. If affecting the world requires opening oneself up to being affected in turn, as Brian Massumi (2002) argues, then

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pure security would require complete detachment from any and all relationships, locking oneself out of productive or beneficial relationships as well. This is also apparent in the horrific cases of family separation enacted by US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) under Trump’s administration; a system in which children are forcibly removed from parents and adopted out to American citizens, or left to die in concentration camps (Blitzer, 2019;

Scherer & Dawsey, 2018); a system where affective relationships are automatically and dispassionately severed at the border.

Nevertheless, Trump’s presidency also relies heavily on affect, albeit within a starkly delimited range; as a reality television star turned demagogue, his candidacy and now presidency rests on his ability to stoke intense negative emotions (primarily fear and rage) among his base as well as among his critics. In the Trump era, affect theory is arguably more important than ever, as he appeals exclusively to the emotions of his audience with total disregard for evidence, logic or truth. This is a politics predicated on threat, where Trump uses incendiary language to frame political opponents, the press, and even the occasional

Republican dissenter as threats to himself and the nation, which not only intensifies hostility within the US electorate but further narrows the range of viable democratic avenues for social change.

One might therefore see not Iron Man but rather 2019’s Joker (dir. Todd Phillips) as the quintessential Trump-era superhero film. In Joker, affective relationships between people, or people and their dreams, exist only as conduits for pain and humiliation. This is true in both the individual sense, for the Joker – whose relationships with his co-workers, his mother, his next-door neighbour, and his two imagined father figures all result in disillusionment – and for the community as a whole, for whom incoherent violence and rage is presented as the only plausible response to a system that has failed them. In Joker‘s penultimate scene, a crowd of disillusioned citizens rises up, enraged at the inequality in their city. Despite the impetus

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for their protest, however, they do not march on sites of governmental authority or elites such as Thomas Wayne, but instead turn on the city itself, rioting, looting and burning property owned by their fellow citizens.

The joke is that the Joker, who spurred this violence by murdering a number of members of the elite (including a talk-show host, live on air), ostensibly never meant to start a political movement in the first place. He is apolitical, he claims, even while glorying in the political violence he continues to spark. Every consequence, in this view, is arbitrary – a big cosmic joke, because the film leaves no plausible avenue for meaningful change, and humour acts as affective insulation against the horrors the film presents. Viewed through the affective politics of Joker, therefore, the national security policy of the Trump-era can be interpreted as a violent rejection of productive affective relationships in favour of a cynical, isolationist and paranoid security.

In contrast, the Trump-era Marvel Cinematic Universe has continued a sustained reflection on the way in which contemporary politics lives up to an imagined national legacy, continuing the trend that I have observed in the Iron Man films, and the potential legacies that superpowered security could leave. Following Captain America: Civil War (2016), in which

Iron Man and Captain America break from one another over incompatible views of superpowered security – Iron Man insists that the Avengers require international oversight, while Captain America champions liberty and autonomy above all – Marvel released a series of films that draw heavily on the past, either aesthetically, as with the retro-80s themed Thor:

Ragnarok (2017), or literally, as with the 90s period film Captain Marvel (2019). This is not to say that this era of Marvel lacks a futurist or progressive impulse; Thor Ragnarok comments powerfully on colonialism, sovereignty, and even refugee politics, and of course it is impossible to discuss this era of Marvel without mentioning Black Panther (2018).

Nevertheless, several films do exhibit a pre-occupation with the way that things supposedly

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used to be, most notably the two final instalments in the saga, The Avengers: Infinity War

(2018) and The Avengers: Endgame (2019), and interrogate the viability of superpowered security in an era where Trump has exacerbated political divisions within the nation.

The Avengers: Infinity War finally manifests the imminent, universe-ending threat that

Tony has anticipated since The Avengers in 2012. The Titan Thanos, foreshadowed in films such as Guardians of the Galaxy (2014) and in the stings of various previous films, launches his crusade to create a better universe by – paradoxically – eliminating half of the universe’s living inhabitants, thus reducing overpopulation and ending all competition over resources.

To achieve this, he has been accumulating the Infinity Stones, mysterious and powerful ancient objects that, when combined, give the wielder unimaginable power. As usual, the superheroes join forces to prevent Thanos from capturing the final stones, but they are unsuccessful. In the final conflict of the film, despite the politically divided heroes putting aside their differences and uniting against a single foe (as has worked in previous Avengers films), Thanos defeats every single Avenger, takes all of the stones, and snaps his fingers. With that snap, half of the universe’s population dissolves into ash. In late 2019, the Trump re- election campaign released an ad depicting Trump as Thanos, destroying his Democratic political opponents by turning them to ash (O’Neil, 2019). This illustrates Trump’s characteristic insensitivity, but it also aptly illustrates the deeply hostile political environment on which Trump thrives, as well as the intense grief that many Democrats felt on Trump’s rise to power in 2016 (Bochner, 2018; Bresnahan & Caygle, 2016).

The final scenes of The Avengers: Infinity War are framed as an intensely traumatic experience for the survivors. Unlike Trump in his 2019 campaign ad, Thanos’ snap does not discriminate; there is no logic or pattern to the people who survive or those who are killed.

For Iron Man in particular, this is a horrific experience. At this point in the film, he is stranded in space with the Guardians of the Galaxy and Spider-Man, who at this point in the MCU is only

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fifteen years old. In Spider-Man’s debut film, Captain America: Civil War, and his first solo film,

Spider-Man Homecoming (2017), Tony Stark has featured as a mentor and surrogate father figure to the young Peter Parker. For Tony, the relationship has been another way in which he can right the wrongs of the past. Unlike his own father, Tony tries to be available to Peter, to keep him safe, and to teach him how to use his powers responsibly. Although he is not always successful, the relationship between them has – up until this film – signalled Tony’s attempt to rehabilitate himself following his disastrous actions in The Avengers: Age of Ultron. Peter represents family, continuity and a better future, one in which, Tony hopes, Peter will do better than Tony has. In other words, Peter is part of the legacy that Tony hopes to leave: something more productive than weapons, war and grief. When Peter dissolves into ash in

Tony’s arms, on the desolate surface of an alien planet, Tony’s worst fears come true. The snap is an apocalyptic event; in one short moment, it obliterates any possibility of the future that people could reasonably expect to unfold. In this way, the film massively raises the stakes of security; it imagines the worst that could happen should exceptional measures not be enough.

This theme continues in The Avengers: Endgame, which initially sees the remaining

Avengers gather together and go on a manhunt for Thanos in the hope that they can reverse the snap. When they find him, however, the stones are gone – burned to ash themselves by the power required to destroy half the universe. In a fit of rage, Thor murders Thanos, but this does not reverse the loss. As a result, the first half of Endgame is surprisingly contemplative.

The film skips five years ahead, to a future in which the world, and all of the Avengers, are forced to come to terms with this irreversible loss. This, in many ways, is the ultimate form of adjustment, as they attempt to find new rhythms of living in a crisis that will not, and can never, be resolved through security logic or exceptional measures. Some characters find adjustment harder than others; Thor retreats within his house to drink beer and play video games, while Black Widow takes over (now-dead) Nick Fury’s old role, monitoring for any sign that the catastrophe could be reversed. In contrast, the Hulk finally manages to merge his 295

two warring personalities, and now happily entertains children as a giant, green-skinned genius; Captain America (well-accustomed to grief) runs a support group for survivors; and

Iron Man has retired to live with Pepper and their young daughter, Morgan. Paradoxically, without the constant imperative to secure against his worst nightmare, Tony is finally able to attain the life he hoped that security would deliver for him.

Of course, this state of events does not last long: the superhero Ant-Man, having been trapped in the Quantum Realm during the snap, returns to the real world with knowledge of time travel. With time travel, he explains, it would be possible to return to a time before the

Infinity Stones were destroyed and use them to reverse Thanos’ snap, restoring the people who were lost. Consequently, although the first part of Endgame begins to imagine a way of living on after crisis – a way that does not require constant sacrifice to achieve security – the pivotal plot point of the film presents the impossible fantasy of a return to a pre-crisis past. Of course, time travel threatens the new future that Tony has secured for himself, as his daughter did not exist before the snap. Nevertheless, throughout the franchise he has attained the legitimacy that justifies a superhero’s use of exceptional powers, and as such he cannot refuse the call.

The rest of the film returns to familiar conventions of the superhero genre, especially exceptional measures; it would be hard to think of any measure more exceptional than experimental time travel. As each character travels back in time to revisit points in which they had access to the Infinity Stones, the film reflects on moments from the long history of the

Cinematic Universe – times in which the stakes were lower, the characters less weary, and in which it was easier to be light-hearted. The film therefore reconstructs the past as a better place; like previous Iron Man movies, it locates both hope and the possibility of a better future in the past.

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Ultimately, however, exceptional measures require exceptional sacrifice, and it is in the fulfilment of this paradigm that Tony finally loses everything to achieve security for the world and his loved ones. In the course of retrieving the stones, a younger Thanos catches wind of the plot to avert his plans and comes to Earth to intervene. Here, once again, the film restages the ultimate existential threat of global invasion that we see foreshadowed, anticipated and repeated in The Avengers and subsequent instalments in the franchise, reinforcing the sense that this scale of threat is not only inevitable but unbounded by time or space – it could happen anywhere, at any time. Although the Avengers successfully use the stones to revive the people turned to ash, Thanos arrives and threatens to destroy them all again. In the final showdown between Thanos and the Avengers, once again, history repeats.

Thanos overpowers the Avengers one by one (albeit with greater difficulty this time), collects the Infinity Stones, and once again prepares to use them to wipe out humanity. Prompted by

Doctor Strange, a magician with complete insight into all possible timelines, Tony realises that the only possible way to win is for him to sacrifice his life by using the stones before Thanos can. As Thanos prematurely announces his victory, declaring that he is ‘inevitable’, Tony uses the Iron Man suit to take the stones for himself and re-enacts Thanos’ ‘snap’ – this time targeting Thanos and his entire army.

This heroic sacrifice brings Iron Man’s storyline full circle. By sacrificing his life, he lets go of the initial drive for personal security that compelled him to create the Iron Man suit in the first place, in favour of achieving security (however temporarily) for the entire universe.

In doing so, he finally and unquestionably proves that he has earned the sovereign legitimacy that allows him to rightfully exercise his superpowers. His final words, echoing Thanos, affirm this: as he draws his fingers together, in preparation for the snap, he declares, “I am Iron

Man.” This illustrates a central paradox of security; to achieve security, one must open oneself up to insecurity. To guarantee the futures of others, Iron Man must sacrifice his own future.

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Does this represent the Marvel Cinematic Universe attempting to move on from the logic of exception and emergency? Yes and no. The film engages with its subject ambivalently, imagining both the psychological process of adjustment to an irreversible trauma, and the fantasy of reversing that trauma such that it (almost) never happened. Nevertheless, I argue that Tony’s sacrifice, along with the subsequent exit of major characters such as Captain

America, acts as the ultimate vindication of superpowered security. In drawing the storylines of these two foundational heroes to a close (as far as we know; at the time of writing, in late

2019, Marvel has not yet revived either character), Endgame positions itself as the conclusion to an exceptional period of history, with an unknown new era lying ahead. Iron Man’s sacrifice does not create absolute security, which has proven deeply problematic in the past, but rather re-opens the future that Thanos foreclosed. This future is likely to be as crisis-driven as the past, of course, meaning that the ordinary cycle of exception and emergency will undoubtedly continue.

Despite the state of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, however, there is significant innovation to be found in recent Marvel comics. One significant text, which does attempt to move beyond exception and emergency, is Tom Taylor and David López’s comic book story

All-New Wolverine, which ran from 2015-2018. This book represents a genuine attempt to move away from the classic – and destructive – superhero cycle of crisis, exception, violence, heroic sacrifice and burnout. It features Laura, a young female clone of the original Wolverine who was created and raised as an assassin. Her secretive and traumatic childhood rendered her a living weapon – the embodiment, perhaps, of the logic of exception. In past treatments of

Laura’s story, when she had not yet taken up the mantle of Wolverine and was instead known as X-23, writers tended to focus on her trauma, her exclusion from society, and her vulnerability to exploitation. In All-New Wolverine, however, Laura starts to build positive family relationships – notably with yet another clone, Gabby, whom Laura adopts as her younger sister – and attempts to unlearn her unhealthy attachment to a logic of exception that 298

demands self-sacrifice. The character arc for Laura, therefore, is one of rehabilitation, which she achieves through building healthy relationships with her family, community and self. This requires vulnerability, which Laura struggles with because it contradicts the logic of threat and isolationism that she has internalised.

This story is notable because it explicitly frames exceptional measures like heroic sacrifice as problematic and destructive practices which undermine their own goals; in other words, it calls out the cruel optimism that leads Laura to believe that if she sacrifices herself to protect others, she will achieve redemption for her past wrongs. This belief is strikingly similar to the logic expressed by Iron Man’s narrative trajectory in the MCU. As I have argued, although the films acknowledge or even critique the flaws of American national security policy, they tend to use Iron Man’s acts of heroism – including sacrifice – to vindicate the underlying logics, fantasies and aspirations that led to things going wrong in the first place. All-New Wolverine is not immune to this tendency – its 2018 finale images a utopia brought about by superheroes, which would seem to justify their modus operandi – but it nevertheless recognises the affective problem with superpowered security.

The superhero genre, on the whole, is particularly revealing of this sort of impasse because the narrative logic of crisis is the genre’s raison d’être. Superheroes are beholden to the next crisis not just because crisis is a reality in their world, but because people pay to experience stories of triumph in the face of existential threat. In many ways, the cruellest fantasy of security (as depicted in the superhero genre) may be the fiction that we can eradicate threat at all, or that the most potent threats that face our society can be wiped out with a well-timed punch to the face. This is not to say that superhero narratives naively propagate an illusory fantasy, although some (like The Best Defense) arguably do. Rather, the best superhero stories grapple with the reality that even our best strategies for dealing with threat require sacrifice and attempt to resolve the anxieties that emerge as a result. These

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anxieties reveal what people are afraid to lose, and what narrative expectations may bind them to the strategies that hurt.

It is important to state that I am not arguing that the desire to be secure is a bad thing, or that people should not strive for security in a precarious world. Rather, what I hope to have shown in this thesis is, firstly, the negative consequences of a political discourse in which national security is elevated to a privileged status as the ultimate objective and goal of government, and secondly, the challenges faced in attempting to dislodge national security from this position now that it has been enshrined. As demonstrated by my analysis of the Iron

Man films, the fantasy of national security has become entangled with fantasies of individualism, heroic agency, national legacy, and a better future. No matter how elusive these fantasies prove to be, they are deeply embedded in American culture and will not be dismissed easily. As long as national security is used to promise all of these things that it cannot plausibly deliver (especially when it also treats its promises as threats) it will continue its iron hold on the national imaginary.

As I have argued that different superheroes engage with different clusters of values, beliefs and narrative expectations, the logical direction for future research would be to conduct a comparative study between superheroes with differing orientations towards security. Other superheroes do not exhibit Iron Man’s reliance on superpowered security.

Captain America, as Neal Curtis (2015) has persuasively argued, derives his legitimacy from a form of patriotism in which he holds the United States to account; through this lens, ‘national security’ would more likely mean prioritising national values such as freedom such that exceptional security measures would not be allowed to compromise them. This is evident in

Captain America: Civil War, in which Captain America insists that superheroes should remain free from governmental registration and oversight. Although this provokes the titular ‘war’ between him and the superheroes who support registration, such as Iron Man, this degree of

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heightened insecurity is acceptable to Captain America if it means preserving the ideals for which he stands. As such, security is simply not as privileged an objective for Captain America as it is for Iron Man, and therefore his stories reflect an alternate strand of national security discourse.

Such a study should also emphasise the diversity emerging within mainstream superhero narratives. Although the genre has historically been dominated by white, male superheroes, some of the most popular and culturally significant texts of recent years broke this mould: Black Panther (2018) featured a black lead and majority black cast, while Wonder

Woman (2017), Captain Marvel (2019), and, on television, Jessica Jones (2015-2019) feature female leads. Given the historic exclusion of diverse perspectives from Western national security discourse, and especially given the global resurgence of white nationalism in recent years, it is timely and necessary to examine the security concerns, logics and practices explored in texts that feature non-white or non-male superheroes.

Overall, my thesis offers a new framework for approaching national security through the affective dynamics of superhero narratives. This is significant because it goes beyond existing scholarly work on the contradictions and paradoxes of exceptional security logic to analyse the affective consequences that a societal attachment to that logic entails. Exceptional security measures continue to proliferate in Western democracies, in the name of a nebulous security that can only ever be rented, not purchased, and so the interest piles up. As America moves forward from 9/11, the public debate around the value and validity of contemporary national security practices – of which superhero stories are a vital component – is essential for the formation of a new security discourse that renounces exceptionalism, respects multilateralism, collective institutions, and human rights, and mitigates the threats that emerge from securitization itself.

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Filmography

Avengers: Age of Ultron (Joss Whedon, 2015) Avengers: Endgame (Anthony & Joe Russo, 2019) Avengers: Infinity War (Anthony & Joe Russo, 2018)

The Avengers (Joss Whedon, 2012) The Dark Knight (Christopher Nolan, 2008) Black Panther (Ryan Coogler, 2018)

Captain America: The First Avengers (Joe Johnston, 2011) Captain America: The Winter Soldier (Anthony & Joe Russo, 2014) Captain America: Civil War (Anthony & Joe Russo, 2016) Captain Marvel (Anna Boden & Ryan Fleck, 2019) Doctor Strange (Scott Derrickson, 2016) Guardians of the Galaxy (James Gunn, 2014) The Incredible Hulk (Louis Leterrier, 2008) Iron Man (Jon Favreau, 2008) Iron Man 2 (Jon Favreau, 2010) Iron Man 3 (Shane Black, 2013) Jessica Jones (Netflix, 2015-2019) Joker (Todd Phillips, 2019) Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (ABC, 2013-) Spider-Man: Homecoming (Jon Watts, 2017) Thor (Kenneth Branagh, 2011) Thor: Ragnarok (Taika Waititi, 2017)

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