Man in the iron mask

Shortly after the Boston Marathon bombings last month, I started tuning into the way technology now leaves us sifting through an ever-complex matrix of data to glimpse the truth — what David Foster Wallace termed “Total Noise.” How do you spot a suspect amid an overwhelming convergence of information? It’s led to a new way of narrowing down data, with the media after the marathon bombings going into a frenzy of “crowdsourcing.”

There were a thousand cameras and fan videos gathering data that sunny April day, not to mention Twitter and YouTube, e-mails and security cams. How could the terrorists imagine they would go undetected for long? Their images and identities were part of the enfolding matrix, making the trail easier to decipher than ever. The same ball of Total Noise that grants you obscurity and secrecy will come back to expose you, reveal your footsteps.

All of this came to mind while watching Iron Man 3, in which the rapscallion billionaire genius Tony Stark (Robert Downey Jr.) is having security issues of his own. Ever since nearly ascending into the Chitauri portal in last year’s Avengers (thanks again, Wikipedia), he’s suffering from insomnia and panic attacks, something you wouldn’t expect of someone so comfortable in an iron suit. His anxiety causes him to build more and more suits, which can now clamber onto his body from great distances, like trained pets. This doesn’t sit well with Pepper Potts (Gwyneth Paltrow), now head of Stark Enterprises, who is also being headhunted by Aldrich Killian (Guy Pearce), a formerly crippled scientist who has been developing a regenerative drug called Extremis for his company, Advanced Idea Mechanics. She declines his job offer, and soon after Stark finds himself calling out a new global terrorist who’s been bombing key targets and slipping away undetected. This terrorist, who goes by the name of Mandarin (Ben Kingsley), is cut from the same cloth as Osama bin Laden: bearded, glaring, menacing, broadcasting videos promising bigger and bigger targets, yet reciting his litany in a drawling Baptist preacher’s accent. Stark’s taunt apparently does the trick: a fleet of helicopter gunships arrives to destroy his home, and he and Pepper barely survive the attack.

Suddenly reduced to mere fragments of his Iron Man arsenal, Stark must rebuild his technology, his relationship with Pepper, and his own sense of self-worth — all while blowing up lots of expensive-looking things in a blaze of CGI glory.

This is the third and possibly last Iron Man outing for Downey, whose contract is up, though he declares in the post-credits teaser that “Tony Stark will return.” Naturally, when the first Avengers movie racks up close to a billion bucks at the box office, Tony Stark isn’t even close to retiring. But perhaps the Iron Man series is. In truth, despite its huge Asian/Philippines opening, this is a retread of 1 and 2, just inserting a new villain/villains and a new roster of wisecracks to keep the patter flowing. Yet the formula is so successful, it still squeaks by, and the script by Shane Black and Drew Pearce touches on some new points in our modern age of crowdsourcing and terrorism.

It’s a given now that most comic book movies will feature a scene of someone uploading a phonecam video to YouTube, thus causing the “truth” to become spread virally. Iron Man 3 has a bit of that, but it’s also concerned with the masks and suits that people wear to hide their identities in an age where anonymity is harder and harder to come by. (Hell, even Disney World in Florida has installed a finger-scanning device at its arrival gates to chart day-pass visitors, an eerily Big Brother touch from the Happiest Place on Earth.)

Stark is a mega-celebrity of course, with strangers constantly ID-ing him, asking for autographs and celeb shots and such, and this makes it even more difficult to operate under the radar in tracking down Mandarin. With great celebrity comes even greater visibility.

The Iron Man series, under the influence of Downey, has always displayed a metaphorical subtext: in the first movie, it was about Tony’s hubris; in Iron Man 2 it was about Stark relying on chemicals and drinking too much, heading for a “relapse” of sorts. Iron Man 3 focuses on Stark’s dependence on his armor, relying on comforting masks andidentities to avoid facing his own truth. Another layer of self-deception comes with the US president endorsing a modified version of Stark’s Iron Man suit — now euphemistically called the “Iron Patriot,” sent out to preemptively destroy terror targets not unlike drone technology — which is being deployed by the US military under a wary but loyal Colonel “Rhodey” Rhodes (Don Cheadle). 

Stark has his usual gallery of bluster to rely on while hunting down Mandarin, but his most truthful moments come when he encounters a 10-year-old Tennessee kid named Haley (Ty Simpkins), whose dad left home when he was six and forces Stark to confront his deeper anxieties.

Confront, not eliminate. Stark is, by the very end, still, as he likes to put it, a “piping hot mess.” The bad guy Mandarin turns out to be a bumbling, substance-abusing British actor — “Sir Laurence Oblivier,” as Stark dubs him. In this day and age, we can’t even trust villains to be who they claim to be. And in a future where reality becomes an endless data stream not unlike the jumble of green code flowing onscreen in The Matrix, it becomes more and more crucial to spot the truth.