Pod Insights The Big Picture 6. ‘The Hurt Locker’ and ‘Iron Man’ | Mission Accomplished About this episode As Hollywood and America look toward a brighter future, two war films explore the long-term impacts of the Bush years on soldiers and civilians alike.
Host: Brian Raftery
Producers: Devon Baroldi, Brian Raftery, and Vikram Patel
Sound Design: Devon Baroldi
Mixing and Mastering: Scott Somerville
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Transcript 0:03 Speaker 00 One night in January 2002, George W. Bush hosted a movie night sleepover.
0:10 Speaker 00 He'd only been in office for a year, but those first 12 months had been tumultuous. 9/11, the strikes in Afghanistan, and the looming threat of war in Iraq. That winter, during a weekend retreat to Camp David, Bush invited 20 Republican members of Congress to watch a movie with him. It was a film that had recently become a political talking point, the 1990s-set war movie Black Hawk Down.
0:36 Speaker 01 Once that first bullet goes past your head,
0:40 Speaker 01 politics go right out the window.
0:44 Speaker 00 Directed by Ridley Scott and based on a book by journalist Mark Bowden, Black Hawk Down was the true story of a disastrous 1993 peacekeeping mission in Mogadishu, Somalia. Hundreds of Somalis and 18 American soldiers were killed that day. Not long afterward, the US withdrew from Somalia altogether.
1:09 Speaker 00 Black Hawk Down had been filmed in early 2001 and made with help from the US Defense Department, which supplied helicopters and trained some of the actors on flight simulators. The result was an extremely visceral war movie. At times, you could almost feel the rattle as machine gun fire hit a US Black Hawk helicopter.
1:28 Speaker 00 C-2, this is 6-8, we've been hit! Though the mission in Black Hawk Down quickly turns deadly, the American soldiers are strong-willed and clear-eyed, even when the odds are against them. In one of the film's quieter scenes, a Delta Force soldier, played by Eric Bana, explains how he'll talk about the battle when he gets home. He knows the kind of questions he'll get. Why do you do it? Why do you knowingly go into combat?
1:53 Speaker 01 They won't understand.
1:56 Speaker 01 It's about the men next to you.
1:59 Speaker 01 That's it.
2:03 Speaker 01 That's all it is.
2:08 Speaker 00 Black Hawk Down opened in December 2001, just as the country was gearing up for war.
2:15 Speaker 00 Some politicians saw the movie as a celebration of American might and bravery. Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld even attended the film's premiere in Washington DC. It's easy to see why Black Hawk Down was championed by the Bush administration. Here was a movie about the power of the military, made with the help of the Pentagon, being released at a time when the president was about to enter multiple wars. After seeing Black Hawk Down, Paul Wolfowitz, a Bush administration official who would help lead America into Iraq, called it, quote, "a powerful film." Wolfowitz then added, "I think it's good for this time. It reminds people what it's all about." Some also thought Black Hawk Down could be instructive when it came to America's current war.
2:58 Speaker 00 When Ridley Scott was asked by journalist Bobby Wiegand what lessons from Somalia in 1993 could be applied to Afghanistan in 2001, the filmmaker's response was characteristically blunt.
3:09 Speaker 02 Don't underestimate the enemy, ever.
3:13 Speaker 00 Black Hawk Down wound up earning more than $100 million in the US alone. The film may have been about a tragic mission, but after 9/11, some moviegoers saw it as a celebration, however downbeat, of American greatness. The movie gave them a way to make sense of the present by looking at the past.
3:34 Speaker 00 But Black Hawk Down turned out to be one of the only contemporary war movies released during the Bush years. Audiences can be fickle when it comes to seeing history play out in real time. In the 1940s, after the United States entered World War II, Hollywood raced to produce dozens of films about the conflict. However, in the late 1960s, as tensions started to escalate in Vietnam, the big studios all but ignored that war. The same thing would happen again in the 2000s. The decade began with massive demonstrations against the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. As the years went on, though, those conflicts stayed off the screen.
4:12 Speaker 03 First politically consequential as the Iraq War was, it wasn't...
4:18 Speaker 03 A galvanizing kind of war. It was like an unpopular thing in the background.
4:23 Speaker 00 That's Jamel Buie, a New York Times opinion columnist and co-host of Unclear and Present Danger, a podcast that covers politically tinged thrillers and war movies from the 1990s.
4:34 Speaker 03 There are all these other scandals. There's Katrina in 2005. There's lots happening on the domestic side that is occupying people's attention. And Iraq is like, it's drip, drip, drip of an unpopular and destructive thing. But that isn't having like a direct impact on most Americans.
4:50 Speaker 00 The same could be said for the war in Afghanistan. To many Americans, it eventually faded into the background. I don't think people were uncaring. It's just that, in a country still recovering from a massive terrorist attack, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan were overwhelming.
5:09 Speaker 00 After all, these were complicated and long-running conflicts. Keeping up with them required a lot of intellectual and emotional energy. And they were playing out on TV 24 hours a day. So there's a good reason Hollywood didn't want to make 2000s war movies during the 2000s. Honestly, who'd want to watch them? It wasn't until the tail end of the Bush administration that a pair of contemporary war films broke through and became must-see events. The first starred Jeremy Renner as an American who gets his thrills by dismantling bombs in Iraq. It's called The Hurt Locker.
5:43 Speaker 04 There's enough begging there to send us all to Jesus. I'm gonna die. I'm gonna die comfortable.
5:51 Speaker 00 The second film is about a very different kind of adrenaline junkie. He's a brilliant weapons manufacturer named Tony Stark, played by Robert Downey Jr. After he's kidnapped by terrorists in Afghanistan and sees the damage his weapons can do, Stark reinvents himself as a sort of anti-war hero.
6:08 Speaker 05 And that is why, effective immediately, I am shutting down the weapons manufacturing division.
6:16 Speaker 00 Tony has another job, too, though you probably know what that is.
6:23 Speaker 00 The Hurt Locker and Iron Man didn't have much in common. One was a somber, low-budget drama that wound up winning the Oscar for Best Picture. The other was a high-flying superhero adventure, one that launched the most successful cinematic universe of all time. But they both forced moviegoers to look back at the wars that had engulfed the Bush era and to consider their consequences. After enduring years of devastation, both at home and abroad, could we still find our humanity? Or have we all gotten lost in the machines of war?
7:03 Speaker 00 From Spotify and The Ringer Podcast Network, I'm Brian Raftery, and this is Mission Accomplished, Episode 6: The Hurt Locker and Iron Man.
7:21 Speaker 06 I'm Pro Football Hall of Famer Brian Dawkins, and I lived for a long time with something I did not know the name of: major depressive disorder. I carried sadness and anger because I thought I could handle it alone, but I couldn't. Now I want to make sure others know that that support is out there. If you're experiencing similar symptoms, talk to a healthcare professional. Visit mddallies.com to watch my story. Paid partnership with Johnson & Johnson. Brian Dawkins has not prescribed Caplyta lumateperone.
7:58 Speaker 07 I needed more from my antidepressant, so my doctor added Caplyta lumateperone, proven to provide greater relief from depression symptoms than an antidepressant alone, building on my progress without starting over. Caplyta is for adults with major depressive disorder when used with an antidepressant and is available by prescription only. Individual results may vary. In clinical trials, weight gain was not common. Elderly dementia patients have increased risk of death or stroke. Caplyta is not approved for dementia-related psychosis. Call your doctor about new or sudden mood changes, behaviors, or suicidal thoughts right away. Antidepressants may increase these risks. Report fever, confusion, stiff muscles... which may be life threatening or uncontrolled muscle movements which may be permanent. High cholesterol and weight gain may occur, as can high blood sugar, which may be fatal. Monitoring is recommended.
8:40 Speaker 07 Common side effects are sleepiness, dizziness, nausea, dry mouth, feeling tired, and diarrhea. These aren't all the side effects. Ask your doctor about Caplyta. Learn more at caplyta.com or call 888-252-4824. This episode is brought to you by State Farm. There's nothing better than having friends who support whatever you're into, like rewatching a director's entire catalog in the lead up to their latest release. And like those friends, State Farm is there to help you feel supported by helping you choose the coverage you need.
9:05 Speaker 00 With so many coverage options, it's nice knowing you have help finding what fits for you. So you can check coverage off the list and spend more time debating movie rankings. Go online at statefarm.com or use the easily accessible app to get help from one of their local agents. Like a good neighbor, State Farm is there. In late 2004, journalist Mark Boal embedded himself with a US Army Bomb Squad in Baghdad, Iraq. He watched soldiers disarm improvised explosive devices, or IEDs, that were being used around the region.
9:37 Speaker 00 As Boal later told Charlie Rose, this was one of the most dangerous jobs in the military. The soldiers were under threat of being ambushed or hit by sniper fire. Boal realized that for the people in charge of defusing these bombs, life in Iraq had been reduced to a single goal, which he described as matter-of-factly as possible. This war is really about finding IEDs before they find you. During his time in Baghdad, Boal kept in touch with a filmmaker he'd worked with in the past, writer-director Catherine Bigelow. She specializes in high-energy dramas about people who are deeply committed to their calling, whether they're cops, robbers, or even vampires.
10:19 Speaker 00 Bigelow's films include Near Dark, which follows a pack of nomadic bloodsuckers as they fight to survive. She also made The Futuristic Strange Days, about a man who hustles other people's memories on the black market. But it's the 1991 hit Point Break that really showcases Bigelow's interest in people who live on the edge. The movie stars Keanu Reeves as an undercover FBI agent who gets in too deep with a team of bank-robbing surfers. One of the criminals, played by Patrick Swayze, explains that he's guided through life by a breakneck philosophy. "If you want the ultimate," he says, "you've got to be able to pay the ultimate price."
10:59 Speaker 00 He then shares a fatalist bit of wisdom, one that's embraced by many of Bigelow's on-screen tough guys.
11:05 Speaker 04 It's not tragic to die doing what you love.
11:09 Speaker 00 Bigelow's fascination with men who go to extremes would help lead her to make The Hurt Locker. She'd started her career as an artist, and in 2009, while talking to The Guardian about The Hurt Locker, she described the film the way an artist would. Combat, Bigelow said, was a canvas upon which to tell a bigger, more profound story.
11:28 Speaker 07 War is a great crucible. You know, it's defining, it's dehumanizing, it's tragic.
11:33 Speaker 00 Bull began working on a script about a team of bomb experts working in Iraq. The movie's title would be inspired by some slang he'd heard while embedded with the army. A hurt locker, Bull was told, was, quote, "a dangerous or painful place."
11:49 Speaker 00 The process of putting together The Hurt Locker took years. Finding a studio willing to make the film proved tough. Bigelow's previous movie, an expensive submarine drama called K-19: The Widowmaker, had been a disappointment. And as I mentioned earlier, Hollywood didn't want anything to do with Iraq. In fact, when you look at the handful of war movies released between 2003 and 2008, the first five years of the Iraq War, all of them were commercial failures. That includes Redacted, a shocking combat drama from Brian De Palma, who directed the Vietnam film Casualties of War. Based on true events, Redacted was about US troops who sexually assault and murder a 14-year-old Iraqi girl. The movie was violent,
12:33 Speaker 00 and to some, deeply upsetting. And not for the reasons you might expect. One man was offended not by the movie's violent content, but by its negative depiction of American soldiers. He protested outside a theater in North Carolina, carrying a sign that said, "Support the troops." In a video from his protest, the man's voice is measured, but you can tell how frustrated he is by De Palma's film.
12:57 Speaker 05 Please don't see this movie, and it looks like not many people are, but understand that this is a bad message to send to America.
13:05 Speaker 00 The backlash against Redacted wasn't especially big. That could be because, when the movie was released in 2007, it opened in just 15 theaters in America, and was gone after a month.
13:21 Speaker 00 Other Iraq war movies released during the Bush years didn't do much better. Like the 2008 drama Stop Loss, starring Ryan Felipe and Channing Tatum. They play soldiers who come home from Iraq feeling angry and distraught. When Felipe's character is told he has to return to the Middle East to keep fighting, he can't hide his rage. He even lashes out at America's commander in chief, who remains unnamed.
13:44 Speaker 06 With all due respect, sir, fuck the president.
13:48 Speaker 00 That comment doesn't sit well with his commanding officer, who's played by Timothy Oliphant.
13:52 Speaker 06 Fuck the president. Yes, sir. He's not over there fighting this war. He's not there seeing his buddies burned alive in Humvees.
14:01 Speaker 00 Stop Loss was co-produced by MTV Films and aimed at young moviegoers, but it struggled to find an audience. So did another war drama from around the same time. In the Valley of Elah, which was based on an article by Bull and which told the story of a young American who's murdered after returning home from Iraq. In the Valley of Elah mostly takes place in America, but to moviegoers, that didn't really matter. By the end of the Bush years, they wanted nothing to do with what was happening in the Middle East. Most people simply wanted to just move on.
14:34 Speaker 03 The Iraq War isn't Vietnam, right? It isn't this sort of epochal unpopular war that does sweep in large numbers of Americans.
14:45 Speaker 00 That's Jamel Bouie again. As he notes, "The feeling of detachment from the Iraq War was felt across the country in the 2000s, including in Hollywood."
14:53 Speaker 03 When you start going through these Vietnam War movies, what you have are a bunch of filmmakers who, in one way or another, have some kind of direct experience with this, right? And so that's shaping their decision to make these movies. It's shaping their approach to this film. It's shaping the decision to greenlight these films.
15:12 Speaker 00 But that wasn't the case for many of the directors coming of age in the 2000s.
15:16 Speaker 03 Like, you don't have writers and filmmakers who necessarily have some connection to the Iraq War.
15:23 Speaker 00 Because studio executives and audiences wanted to stay away from Iraq, Bigelow had to make The Hurt Locker outside of the Hollywood system. After being turned down by several indie studios, she got money from a producer who mortgaged his house. Estimates for the film's budget varied, but The Hurt Locker didn't cost more than $15 million. Not much for a war movie. Bigelow saved money by hiring unknown actors for the leading roles. One of them was Jeremy Renner. He'd been making a name for himself in indie movies and on TV for years, but he'd never had a mainstream breakout role. Renner would play Staff Sergeant William James, a guy who feels most alive when he's closest to death and who's handled nearly 900 explosives during his time in Iraq.
16:07 Speaker 00 After one especially tense bomb scene, and there are lots of them in The Hurt Locker, Staff Sergeant James meets a Colonel, played by David Morse. He treats Renner's character like he's a rock star.
16:19 Speaker 01 What's the best way to go about disarming one of these things?
16:25 Speaker 01 The way you don't die, sir.
16:28 Speaker 01 That's a good one. That's spoken like a wild man. That's good.
16:33 Speaker 00 But Staff Sergeant James's methods lead to clashes with his fellow soldiers. They worry that his actions put them all at risk. One of his fellow sergeants, played by Anthony Mackie, finally loses his cool. In one scene, Renner is trying to come down after defusing a bomb. He sits in his Humvee, unwinding with a cigarette. Suddenly, without any warning, Mackie's character storms up and punches him across the face. In a movie full of explosions and gunfire, the sound of his fist making contact is one of the most startling things you hear in The Hurt Locker. Hey, James. Yeah, yeah.
17:11 Speaker 00 Never turn your headset off again.
17:15 Speaker 00 The Hurt Locker was shot in Jordan, a Middle Eastern country that shares a border with Iraq. Some Iraqi refugees worked as actors in the production, which faced numerous challenges.
17:29 Speaker 00 On the first day of shooting in 2007, locals threw rocks at the crew. And during The Hurt Locker's 44 days of filming, there were multiple death threats. Even when the mood on set was calmer, the heat was raging, with temperatures hitting as high as 120 degrees.
17:46 Speaker 00 The result of all that tension is an urgent and unstable feeling that runs throughout the movie. In every scene of The Hurt Locker, you're aware that something could go wrong at any moment. And when it does, it's never quite in the way you guessed. In The Hurt Locker, it's the audience members that wind up getting punched in the face. The movie drops them into a war they'd spent the last few years tuning out.
18:07 Speaker 03 I remember just being really taken with how tense and nerve-wracking it was.
18:15 Speaker 00 Jamel Bowie.
18:16 Speaker 03 There's not lots of sort of like, we're gonna meet these people and learn about them, and then we'll get to a bomb. It's like, no. Minute one, there is a bomb, and you're getting a sense of what this entire world that they exist in is.
18:32 Speaker 00 On the podcast he co-hosts, Unclear and Present Danger, Bowie looks at 1990s movies like Air Force One and Independence Day. He tries to make sense of what those films were saying, intentionally or unintentionally, about the politics of the time. But when he re-watched The Hurt Locker recently, Bowie was struck by how almost apolitical the movie was.
18:53 Speaker 03 Its connection to the Iraq War is more aesthetic than anything else. You could do this movie about Vietnam, you could do it about the First Gulf War, you could do it about Afghanistan, you could make up a war. It's a totally fictional war. Its concern isn't really the war itself. Its concern is the particular psychology of this group of men.
19:13 Speaker 00 And the psychology of Renner's character becomes clear in the film's final moments. By this point in The Hurt Locker, Staff Sergeant William James has returned home to his wife and son. You'd think he'd be relieved to be surrounded by family and out of danger. Away from combat, though, he's adrift. Real life doesn't actually excite him. When he goes to buy cereal at the supermarket, he just stares blankly at the aisles of boxes. Later in The Hurt Locker, he tells his young son that there aren't many things that really matter in life.
19:47 Speaker 00 Only one or two things. And the thing he loves isn't being a father or being a husband. It's working with those bombs.
19:57 Speaker 00 At the end of The Hurt Locker, he's back in Iraq, walking toward an IED, well aware that, at some point, he might not ever walk back. Bigelow talked about that scene in an interview with 60 Minutes. It's clear she saw similarities between Renner's bomb expert and Patrick Swayze's bank robber in Point Break. Staff Sergeant James is driven to do what he loves, even if it kills him.
20:21 Speaker 07 You know, that comes at a terrible, terrible price for him, and he knows it. But he's incapable of doing anything different.
20:33 Speaker 00 By the time Bigelow was promoting The Hurt Locker, the movie had been in the can for nearly three years. Her film had taken a long time to get to theaters. It was filmed in 2007, made its debut at festivals around Europe in the fall of 2008, and didn't open wide in the US until the summer of 2009. By then, Barack Obama had been sworn into office, and he'd announced that American troops would soon begin leaving Iraq, the start of a process Obama called, quote, "a drawdown." The Hurt Locker would hit theaters just as the war in Iraq was starting to end. And unlike the other films about Iraq, the movie was a success. Not a blockbuster, exactly, but The Hurt Locker did get great reviews, and it made nearly $50 million worldwide.
21:18 Speaker 00 I asked Jamel Bouie about this, about why The Hurt Locker broke through when other Iraq war films had simply disappeared. We agreed that it's a fantastic movie, but maybe The Hurt Locker connected with moviegoers because, with the Bush years finally over, audiences were willing to try to make sense of them.
21:36 Speaker 03 I think that there was
21:39 Speaker 03 an appetite at the time for maybe trying to metabolize the previous decade. Because you remember, in the first Obama year, there's not like a, there's not really a push by the president by Democrats to like, look back, right? To say like, what went wrong? It's very much, we're gonna look forward.
22:01 Speaker 00 A few months after its release, The Hurt Locker was nominated for nine Academy Awards, including Best Picture. The main competition that year was between Bigelow's low-budget war drama and James Cameron's $237 million smash Avatar. Both were about American soldiers in the middle of a troubled military occupation, one imaginary and the other terrifyingly real. And while audiences were way more interested in Avatar, which grossed billions of dollars and launched an expensive new franchise, Oscar voters chose The Hurt Locker. Marc Bolle won Best Original Screenplay, while Bigelow won Best Director, becoming the first woman to do so. And at the end of the night, The Hurt Locker won Best Picture.
22:46 Speaker 00 At the time, Bigelow's victory was the major story coming out of the awards, as it should have been. But looking back now, that Oscar year also feels like a snapshot of a time that was soon going to fade away. When I spoke with Jamelle Bowie about that year's Best Picture lineup, we were both kind of floored by how varied the nominees were. It's a really wild list. So you've got The Hurt Locker and Avatar, but you've also got District 9, An Education, Inglourious Basterds, Precious, A Serious Man, The Blind Side, up and up in the air.
23:19 Speaker 03 It's funny, because it's sort of, this list is like, this is, I mean, at the time, you know, people were complaining about the narrowing space for all kinds of movies at the multiplex. But even here, I mean, you have, you have a big James Cameron blockbuster, you have a big weepy domestic blockbuster, In the Blind Side, you have kind of a quirky.
23:41 Speaker 00 For the record, we both would have voted for A Serious Man that year. My bigger point is that, by the end of the 2000s, mainstream Hollywood still embraced all kinds of films, regardless of size, star power, or genre. Romantic dramas, existential comedies, four quadrant animated films, they were all part of the average movie-going diet. But a whole new cinematic universe was about to take flight, one that would change Hollywood forever.
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25:27 Speaker 00 So you were one of the lucky ones who graduated from college just a few years before the complete economic meltdown of the 2000s.
25:34 Speaker 05 You know, it's a thrill. It's a thrill and an honor to have lived through that and to be on the other side of it, yeah.
25:39 Speaker 00 I think you know that voice. It's Joanna Robinson, the host of such ringer podcasts as House of R and the Prestige TV Podcast. She's an expert on a lot of things, including the pop cultural movie franchises that exploded in the early 2000s.
25:54 Speaker 05 It took all the time about the fact that the first Harry Potter film and the first Lord of the Rings film came out mere months after 9/11. And that is, it is not a coincidence what a stranglehold those stories, which were a very boiled down good versus evil kind of narrative, had on our country that was trying to figure out their way forward in an increasingly morally murky world, I think.
26:22 Speaker 00 And for Robinson, of all the blockbusters of that era, there's one that stands out.
26:27 Speaker 05 Iron Man to me feels like the movie of the Bush era.
26:37 Speaker 00 The story of Iron Man goes back to the 1990s, a pretty rough decade for Marvel Comics. The company declared bankruptcy in 1996 and wound up licensing the film rights to some of its biggest characters. Spider-Man, X-Men, The Fantastic Four. Marvel Studios was not founded yet. And so this is Marvel trying to make a profit off of the IP characters that they have. Iron Man was also up for grabs during that decade, though he was hardly one of Marvel's best-known heroes. In fact, when I was reading Marvel Comics growing up, I remember thinking Iron Man was kind of a stiff. I mean, he did have a cool suit and a lot of money, but he also struggled with alcohol and relationships and all that kind of stuff that, when I was a kid, I didn't really appreciate.
27:22 Speaker 00 Though I gotta say, I definitely get those issues now. Anyway, in the 1990s, Hollywood repeatedly tried to get an Iron Man movie off the ground. Different studios owned the rights to the character at different times, and several big names were rumored to be involved. Tom Cruise, Nicolas Cage, Quentin Tarantino. For years, there were whispers and announcements that an Iron Man movie was coming, all to no avail. You know, it bounced around and no one could really figure it out. In the early 2000s, though, a producer named David Maisel had a meeting at Mar-a-Lago with Ike Perlmutter, the owner of Marvel. A few big Marvel movies have come out recently. Some good, like Spider-Man and Blade, and some very, very bad. David, by the way, was motivated by the Ben Affleck Daredevil,
28:07 Speaker 00 which he hated, and was like, we can do better. And he's like, we're leaving money on the table. You're burning your own brand by putting out these subpar movies. Let's make our own movies. Let's take control of it.
28:23 Speaker 00 So I'm gonna simplify a lot here. If you want to know more, you should just go read Robinson's book, MCU: The Reign of Marvel Studios. But basically, this is how Marvel Studios was born. Maisel made a deal with financial giant Merrill Lynch, which agreed to invest $525 million in a slate of Marvel movies. The catch was that the film rights to a lot of Marvel's most beloved characters were already claimed. Maisel was like, this is what
28:49 Speaker 05 We've got to work with characters that were definitely considered B-listers and C-listers at the time. So Captain America, The Avengers, Nick Fury, Black Panther, Ant-Man, Doctor Strange, Hawkeye. These were all kind of nobodies in the comic book world to a certain degree at that time.
29:07 Speaker 00 It seemed like a great deal, at least for Merrill Lynch. They were getting into one of the 2000s biggest growth industries, movie franchises. If things went well, Merrill Lynch would reap the rewards from a series of hit movies. But if Marvel Studios, which was technically an indie at that point, couldn't make half a billion dollars back with four movies, Merrill Lynch would get the rights to those characters. And that included Iron Man, who didn't seem like the kind of hero who could bring in hundreds of millions of dollars.
29:36 Speaker 05 They did this fascinating focus group in 2005 where they asked people about their awareness of Iron Man. It was near zero.
29:43 Speaker 00 By the way, this was a focus group of kids. And once they found out what Iron Man does, they got a lot more interested.
29:51 Speaker 05 After the kids heard that it was a flying robot who could shoot laser beams out of his hands. And the kids were like, that sounds amazing.
30:00 Speaker 00 Marvel heard that response and decided to go forward with an Iron Man film. The character was now considered toyetic, a hero who would hopefully inspire all kinds of merchandise.
30:11 Speaker 05 So they're like, we can move. It's easier to move an Iron Man action figure than it is to move a Captain America action figure. So we're going to do Iron Man who shoots laser beams out of his hands.
30:26 Speaker 00 In Hollywood, few people believed Marvel could have a big screen success with a B-list hero. Expectations for an Iron Man movie were low, which, in a way, gave Marvel a lot of freedom. The studio hired actor Jon Favreau, whose biggest directing credit at the time was Elf, to oversee the film. And for the title role, Marvel hired an actor who, at that point, was considered the industry's top underdog, Robert Downey Jr. Now, I don't have time to get into all of Downey's troubles in the late 1990s and early 2000s. It included jail time and a struggle with addiction. He'd long been considered one of Gen X's best actors, and audiences always rooted for him. But when Iron Man was cast in the mid 2000s, Downey wasn't exactly a huge draw.
31:11 Speaker 00 Still, the actor had done a great screen test as Tony Stark. And at that point in his career, Downey didn't cost a whole lot to hire. Favreau wanted him, but not everyone else was convinced.
31:23 Speaker 04 The risk averse New York execs were like, "This is an insurance disaster waiting to happen."
31:29 Speaker 00 So Favreau went around the suits.
31:31 Speaker 04 He leaked the news that Downey was in consideration, and the internet responded incredibly favorably. And that was like, sort of, the tipping point to get the New York execs to sign on Downey.
31:43 Speaker 00 Even with Downey on board, though, Marvel still needed a workable Iron Man script.
31:48 Speaker 04 Initially, Iron Man had a number of credited screenwriters, and then, actually, when it got down to it, they made it as this sort of slapdash, "Let's put on a show indie movie," and were kind of, were writing script pages on the day.
32:03 Speaker 00 In the original comic books, Iron Man's origin story takes place in the jungles of Vietnam. That's where the wealthy weapons maker Tony Stark is injured, kidnapped, and forced to create a powerful super suit. Favreau's movie updated the action to war-torn Afghanistan. As Iron Man begins, Stark is demonstrating his latest missiles for members of the US military. He's been running Stark Industries ever since his father's death, and he's an excellent showman. His sales pitch even includes some very Bush-like bravado.
32:34 Speaker 05 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.
32:51 Speaker 00 Stark and his US Army escort soon come under attack and are nearly killed by one of his own company's missiles. He's abducted by a group of terrorists called the Ten Rings and forced to build a deadly missile. Instead, he creates the Iron Man suit and blasts his way to freedom. The action scenes in Iron Man are fantastic, thanks in part to the fact that, like Blackhawk Down, the movie was made with the help of the US military.
33:16 Speaker 04 We interviewed the main consultant, and he said something at the time-
33:20 Speaker 00 About like, the Air Force is gonna look like rock stars in this movie. After he escapes from captivity, Stark returns to America a changed man. He's seen the devastating effects of his weapons up close in Afghanistan. So Stark calls a press conference and announces that he's getting out of the war game. He's had an awakening about the toll of the last few years. An awakening that millions of others were having in the late 2000s.
33:46 Speaker 05 I saw young Americans killed by the very weapons I created to defend them and protect them.
33:55 Speaker 05 And I saw that I had become part of a system that is comfortable with zero accountability.
34:01 Speaker 00 A journalist then asks, what happened over there?
34:06 Speaker 05 I had my eyes open. I came to realize that I have more to offer this world than just making things to blow up.
34:15 Speaker 00 Now, of course, Tony in his suit managed to blow up a lot of things in Iron Man. He has to do battle not only with the Ten Rings, but also a powerful Stark Industries executive named Obadiah. He doesn't want Stark Industries out of the weapons game, which has made him very rich. Obadiah is played by Jeff Bridges. But if you close your eyes, you can almost hear Dick Cheney talking as Obadiah explains his rationale for staying in the missile business. What we do keeps the world from falling into chaos. Moments like that make Iron Man feel like a direct response to the Bush years.
34:51 Speaker 00 And according to Robinson, the movie initially had more to say about America's role in overseas wars. There was a scene in the original script that had, or a version of one of the many versions of the script, that had the Ten Rings organization show Tony Stark various crates of weapons and say Reagan, Clinton, Bush. Like basically, who are the presidents who got these weapons into our hands? Ultimately, Marvel decided against getting too specific about the politics of Iron Man, which makes sense. After all, they wanted the film to make a lot of money. They're still thinking of this movie as one of our four chances to pay back Merrill Lynch the hat. A billion dollars that we owe them.
35:34 Speaker 00 So it needs to be broadly commercially, you know, a hit. Much like The Hurt Locker, Iron Man tells a story about the effects of the war on terror without using too many proper nouns. The movie never mentions 9/11, or Al Qaeda, or the Iraq War. In fact, in Iron Man, nobody even says the word Afghanistan. It only appears on screen. It was entirely possible to watch this movie and barely even think about the real wars going on overseas.
36:02 Speaker 00 The needle they try to thread in Iron Man is let's make a story that's reflective of our time without trying to get too political, too actually political, right? Iron Man threads that needle so carefully, you might not even notice how strangely contradictory the movie is. It's a film about a man who realizes he's stuck in a system that causes destruction, and he makes amends for that by going around and creating more destruction. But hey, at least he's beating up bad guys and doing it in very cool looking ways.
36:37 Speaker 00 That's probably why Iron Man is still my favorite Marvel movie. Like all great blockbusters, it's trying to sell you something and tell you something at the same time. And sometimes, it doesn't even really know the difference. Released after years of drawn out battles and aimed at an audience that desperately needed some escapism, Iron Man turned out to be something else altogether. An anti-war movie, full of awesome war scenes. Is this US military propaganda? Yes. Is it a harsh critique of, you know, American being the architect of its own disaster? Yes. And the fact that it's all of those things inside of this extremely entertaining
37:18 Speaker 00 and, you know, genuinely winning love story and a story of fathers and sons is a tremendous accomplishment. As Robinson notes, Iron Man both reflected and questioned some of the messages Americans have been told over and over again during the Bush years. But I like that it is both reflective of what the messaging of America was, which is this is a battle of good versus evil. Support the troops, like all the other things that were going on this jingoistic era while having. Inside of it, a reflection of the dark reality that American culture was sort of turning its face away from in many senses at the time. And I think that to do both inside of a comic book movie is is wild, absolutely wild.
38:04 Speaker 00 Also wild, the response to Iron Man. The movie opened in May 2008, just as George W. Bush was in his last full year as president. It made about $100 million worldwide in its first weekend and wound up earning more than half a billion dollars in theaters. They were going to almost pay back the Merrill Lynch loan with Iron Man alone. You know, they were they were almost out of the woods just right away. Still, you can't measure Iron Man's impact just with numbers. For one thing, the movie turned Robert Downey Jr. into one of the world's biggest movie stars. And at a time when independently owned studios were going under, the rise of Marvel Studios gave Hollywood a much needed success story. Not that the studio remained indie for too long.
38:48 Speaker 00 In 2009, Disney bought Marvel Entertainment for a whopping $4 billion.
38:59 Speaker 00 Yet maybe the most lasting legacy of Iron Man, the one we're still feeling today, is that the movie launched not only the Marvel Cinematic Universe, but also countless other wannabe cinematic universes. As Robinson mentioned earlier, the franchise era was already underway in the 2000s. Spider-Man, Harry Potter, Lord of the Rings, Shrek. But Iron Man supercharged Hollywood's obsession with remakes, reboots, sequels, and spin offs. Executives had always been making these kinds of films, but after Iron Man, it seemed more and more like that's all they wanted to make. The major studio original films that thrived in the 2000s, movies like Michael Clayton, Zodiac, 25th Hour, would become all the more rare in the MCU era.
39:44 Speaker 00 So would scrappier indie films, especially tough indies like The Hurt Locker. Think back to the year 2000, which we talked about in the first episode of this series. Even though there were lots of franchise movies then, you also had massive original films like Cast Away, Aaron Brockovich, Unbreakable, Gladiator, Meet the Parents. The major studios were making all kinds of movies and chasing all kinds of audiences. But less than a decade later, it became clear they were mostly interested in IP.
40:15 Speaker 00 What do you see is the good and the bad of the Iron Man effects in the last like 20 years or so? I think that the Iron Man beginnings, all the way through Avengers Endgame,
40:29 Speaker 00 will, no matter how you feel about it, stand the test of time as one of the most astonishing accomplishments in Hollywood blockbuster storytelling. Everything that they achieved there, be it, and you've got a lot of things under that tent, you've got Black Panther, you've got Guardians of the Galaxy, like you've got just like a lot of like high highs and then you've got some medium to lows, you know, in the
40:52 Speaker 03 mix there, Thor of the Dark World, we forever don't celebrate you, you know, like there's a mixed bag there. So I celebrate that, absolutely, and I love talking about these films. I regret that it came at the cost of the mid-level quote unquote adult drama, or however you want to describe it, because I feel like, why not both?
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42:16 Speaker 00 When I first started working on this show, I made a list of all the Bush-era movies that evoked the weirdness and chaos and scary shittiness of that time. When I finished, I had easily 75 movies, way too many to fit in just a few episodes. As a result, I had to cut a whole bunch of crucial films. Films like Steven Spielberg's War of the Worlds, starring Tom Cruise as a dad trying to keep his kid safe during an alien attack. When War of the Worlds came out in 2005, it was hard not to watch a movie in which entire buildings get leveled and not think about 9/11. Even the movie acknowledges the fears of that time. What is it? Is it terrorists?
42:55 Speaker 06 This came from someplace else.
42:58 Speaker 00 What do you mean, like Europe? No, Robbie, not like Europe! I also couldn't find room for one of the era's most intelligent horror movies, George J. Romero's Land of the Dead, with Dennis Hopper as a greedy 1%er at war with hordes of angry Americans, and even angrier zombies. Land of the Dead taps into the kinds of fears moviegoers had after 9/11: fear of outsiders, fear of their fellow citizens, and fear that, as bad as things were, they could get even worse.
43:26 Speaker 01 In a world where the dead are returning to life, the word "trouble" loses much of its meaning.
43:31 Speaker 00 Those movies would have to go from my list. So would a lot of films that, early on, I couldn't even imagine cutting. The Dark Knight, Team America: World Police, United 93—there were just too many essential Bush-era movies to include.
43:50 Speaker 00 I bring all this up to point out that, when you dig into the movies from that era, you realize that writers and directors were scrambling to make sense of that strange time, just like the rest of us. They may have been limited by genre or by commercial restraints, yet they managed to make countless movies that, years later, captured the anxiety and uncertainty of the 2000s, even if sometimes just by accident. And many of my favorite movies of that era, no matter how entertaining, also serve as warnings. The threat of power-mad politicians? That's all laid out in The Manchurian Candidate. The dangers of unchecked corporate greed? That's in Michael Clayton. And the long-term aftershocks of combat? Those play out in both The Hurt Locker and Iron Man.
44:36 Speaker 00 But if those films were warnings, we didn't necessarily heed them. In the year we were making this show, a divisive candidate steamrolled his way into office, the country experienced devastating extreme weather events, and America became involved in an unpopular war in the Middle East. You may have listened to that Anchorman episode about a broken media system, or the Chop Shop episode about the struggles of immigrants, and thought to yourself, huh, yeah, that sounds familiar. All of a sudden, it's starting to feel like the early 2000s all over again. Maybe these kinds of backslides are inevitable. After all, as Ellis reminds me every time I watch No Country for Old Men, you can't stop what's coming.
45:21 Speaker 00 But my hope is that, at the very least, the movies we're getting now, and in the near future, will help audiences understand what it's been like to live through these bizarre times. In the meantime, I'll do what I always do when things get weird: I'm going to the movies. This show is reported, written, and hosted by me, Brian Rafter. The executive producers of this podcast are Juliet Lippman and Sean Fennessy. Story editing by Amanda Dobbins. The show is produced by me, Devin Beraldi, and Vikram Patel. Fact checking by Casey Gallagher. Copy editing by Craig Gaines. Talent booking by Kat Spillane. Sound design by Devin Beraldi.
46:06 Speaker 00 Mixing and mastering by Scott Somerville. The music you hear in this series is from Epidemic Sound and Blue Dot Sessions. Art direction and illustration by David Shoemaker. Extra thanks to my friend Scott Brown for helping me kick around ideas for this show, and for helping me remember the 2000s. And thanks, as always, to my wife Jenny and to my kids. Thanks to all the Ringer talents who lent their voices to this show, and to everyone at The Ringer who's helped me make these over the years. And mostly, thanks to you for listening.
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