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In this Alternate Take I want to talk a little about the tricky question of ‘realism’. It is clear that Iron Man isn’t anything like what we would normally call a ‘realistic’ film, for the simple reason that it is a superhero movie containing a fairly indestructible hero, fantastical technology, and a maniacal villain. As I said in my short review though, Iron Man does nevertheless contain elements that that make it feel perhaps more ‘realistic’ than some other superhero films.

I have compared the movie to the recent films made by Judd Apatow and his stable, which create much of their comedy and poignancy by trying to tap into awkward aspects of the ‘real world’ that their audiences can recognise, whilst still existing within more or less traditional genres. On the Knocked Up (2007) commentary, Apatow reveals that almost every moment in that film comes from some personal experience that he, his wife, or his friends have experienced, but that they have been put through a ‘crazy mirror’ for the purposes of the film.

There is certainly something to be said for the argument that it isn’t in fact commonness, but rather uncommonness, that makes something feel ‘realistic’. Discussions of ‘realism’ in aesthetics stress the fact that we understand a work of art as being ‘realistic’ or not mainly because of whether it uses certain conventional devices that we have learned to associate with the term. In film, such devices might be, for example, a handheld camera style, a narrative that focuses on the seedy or depressing side of life, an improvisational acting style, and so on. If we see such things as ‘realistic’ it is less because they are necessarily ‘life-like’, but rather because they are conventions have become aesthetic signifiers of ‘realism’, and have been used again and again to create this particular sensibility. These now-common devices were in their turn reactions against earlier common devices which, through repetition, had come to be regarded as ‘unrealistic’. Repetition alone can act to make virtually anything seem ‘unrealistic’ simply by virtue of the fact that, if we notice it recurring in a large number of films, it can come to seem as only a device - something that is not a truthful reflection of our world, but rather something happens again and again in film worlds: it is thus seen as a convention, and thus ‘false’. Accordingly this can also happen for devices that we once saw as ‘realistic’ too.

All this is a long and drawn-out way of setting up the point that it is the moments in Iron Man which seem to deviate from norms that mark the film’s world as being nominally ‘realistic’, but also that the strategy of deviation walks a fine line: while sometimes it can feel ‘real’, it can also feel like familiar self-conscious avoidance of convention, and thus seem ‘unrealistic’ by comparison. Iron Man has moments that fall into both these categories.

There are two main ways in which Iron Man manages to achieve its sense of ‘realism’. One is the relationship the film sets up with a real-world political situation…

As I said in my short review, it is fairly unusual (at least recently) for a superhero film to make specific reference to our real contemporary political landscape. That Iron Man does this, via the Afghanistan storyline, in a sense certainly increases its ‘realism’ on one level merely because it guarantees that its world immediately seems to resemble ours more closely. In our world the Middle East is currently the most important area for America’s international military attention, and for a film about a military weapons manufacturer to avoid this would necessarily mean that it was enacting a significant break with our world - that this film doesn’t do this automatically means its sense of ‘realism’ is heightened.

The moment relating to the film’s political dimension that creates the greatest sense of ‘realism’, however, is I think the scene in which Stark watches a news broadcast concerning the plight of Afghani refugees at the hands of terrorist insurgents who have been armed with his weapons. He watches the television while perfecting the offensive devices on his suit, a blaster attached to the hand of his armour. He first sits on the couch, watching the footage of the displaced people with a look of rage on his face, then gets up and tries out his weapon while we hear the reporter on television say: “There is little hope for these refugees, refugees that can only wonder who, if anyone, will help them”. He then realises that he is needed in Afghanistan. (Note: unlike Superman Returns [2006], which featured a similar scene in which Superman watched international trauma on TV, this film favours direct action. While Superman decided not to help those he saw on the news, but rather prevent a - surely less-pressing - jewellery heist in New York, here Stark immediately flies to the effected region.) This moment taps into a very recognisable feature of current everyday life: the mixed sense of sadness, anger, and helplessness one is forced to feel when watching the news - particularly news about Afghanistan and Iraq; the shot we get of Stark with his back to the camera, watching the TV from his sofa, almost feels like the emblematic image of this familiar feature of contemporary Western life. That the film is then able to take this ‘realistic’ moment and craft from it some satisfying wish-fulfilment - i.e.: unlike us, Stark is able to help - is indicative of the nice position the film manages to occupy between ‘realism’ and ‘fantasy’. (It is perhaps significant in this respect that two of the film’s writers also worked on Children of Men [2006]).

These moments, and others like them, are using a kind of comedy that we are not terribly used to seeing in mega-budget superhero films. They belong to the family of humour that we might call ‘observational’ - that which gets its effects from its grounding in real-life situations, and which relies on an audience’s recognition of the fact that underlying it are actual social interactions and human foibles. This is the humour of the sitcom, or the Apatow-esque comedy, or - perhaps more relevantly, given Favreau’s involvement - that of Swingers (1997) or Made (2000). We laugh at Rhodey's slightly too-personal, slightly too-true, confessions under the influence of alcohol essentially because we can recognise that we, and our friends, have made similar confessions when drinking. It speaks of the loosening of social strictures that do actually take place under certain conditions - the kind that we might then look back on with some rueful embarrassment the next morning. The comedy here thus makes us apply our knowledge of our world and how it works onto the world of the film, which in turn implicitly means that we are made to understand the film’s world as operating in similar ways to ours. These comic moments thus increase the film’s ‘realism’ both because (like the ‘unhappy endings’ of French New Wave films) they are using conventions that we are unused to seeing in this context, and because they rely on us mapping our world onto Iron Man’s.

In closing, I’d just like to say that there is a tendency for ‘realism’ to be used as a de facto term of praise, and ‘unrealism’ to be a term of abuse; in a sense I too have been guilty of using the terms in this way. There is in fact no reason why this should be the case: both are merely words that we use when recognising certain aesthetic conventions, and as such shouldn’t necessarily be evaluative but instead be merely descriptive. It is perhaps unavoidable, however, that breaking from what we understand to be conventions will often (though certainly not always) be an exciting thing for art to do. Because ‘realism’ has also historically been, rightly or wrongly, collapsed into such anti-conventionality, it is probably unsurprising that it has gained the critical caché it currently enjoys. I personally intensely dislike critical judgements that nonsensically equate ‘unrealism’ with ‘bad’. Nevertheless, the pleasures that can often be afforded by avoiding wholly-expected conventions have, in the case of Iron Man, encouraged me to like the film for its ‘realistic’ elements. This is not, though, because ‘realism’ is intrinsically good, but rather because it was a convention that I didn’t necessarily expect to find being used in this film, and coming across it gave me the sense of surprised enjoyment that can often cause us to respond well to any artwork.