Diseño de Losas

Much like Benjamin’s ‘dialectical image’—grasped in a flash, and binding past and present together in a single juxtaposition, reanimating that past rather than dissecting it in an autopsy of description—Killian’s appearance concretises the symbolism of impurity with culturally and historically specific resonances in the past. The suit he favours in the film—a cheeky checked plaid number—pared with his rings, large flashy watch and bleached, swept-back hair, is striking for its appropriateness to the character, particularly as it contrasts with Stark. Killian’s appearance telescopes over a hundred years of US cultural memory into his character, reminding the audience of iterations of a US archetype—the patent-medicine man, the snake-oil salesman, the confidence trickster, the second-hand car salesman and the risky sorcery of financiers.32

All of these characters carry connotations of trickery, of promises and hope, of dreams of personal transformation – often through consumption – and their products are always the ones that badly need dreams and evoked desires to sell them, because they range from untrustworthy to worthless, and are essentially ways of trading in belief more than material goods. Placing Killian in their lineage reveals him as a man who deals in desire, in the insubstantial world of dreams, in magical self-transformation, in Ponzi schemes that can surely never be honoured. Nor

is he dealer only, but beneficiary of sorcery: his own metamorphosis (from geek to chic, shall we say) bears all the mystery and evokes all the suspicion of the unearned overnight success, the speculators that produce nothing and appear to conjure vast success from thin air.33 _These

characters and their dealings do not sit easily within an ideology of rationality and meritocracy; they take the part of the ineffable and the dangerous, as magic and impurity always do. They stir up an ontological and epistemological instability that always underlies and threatens the stability of the everyday social order, by its easy dissolution of apparently hard and fast categories, its joyful ignorance of propriety,34 _{and its visible rebuke to the ostensible ‘truth’ and completeness of}

an ideology.35

Killian thus reanimates an historical chain, overdetermined by evocations of the magical side of capitalism—of desire, consumption, fetishism, speculation, transformation—structured in sharp relief against Stark, whose aesthetic and symbolic qualities of purity resolve into a contrasting image of idealised US capitalism as stable, rational, organised and productive. We are presented, through the othering of Killian, with Good (idealised / nostalgic / productive / national) Capital and Bad (neoliberal / financial / immaterial / foreign) Capital: here the limitations of the film’s imaginary horizons and the nostalgia of its utopian impulse are made plain. The horizon of the film is quite explicitly bounded by the horizon of capital, its key narrative agents are puppets of capital, and its hope is one of impossible return to an ideal that never really existed, though today it may appear a golden age of morality, economic fairness and US prosperity. With Stark discursively constructed within the film as telescoping an essential US identity, Killian is set up as threatening to destroy that essence. Or at the least change it, which, for an essence, is tantamount to the same thing. What is telling of the film’s ideological limits, however, is that Killian’s ‘evil’ goal is to become rich through obtaining national defence contracts for his company. To this end he has managed to get a hold over the Vice-President, and plans to kill the President, giving his man the right to make the decision. The threat is that

the government would become the ‘puppet’ of capital, but what is occluded in this narrative is that government is already in thrall to capital, as perfectly captured in the scene where Killian and Stark fight over the trussed up and useless president (incidentally wearing an Iron Man suit). Thus the threat really lacks teeth from this perspective. Especially given that in previous Iron Man films, the attitude towards the government is like something out of Ayn Rand— representatives of government are shown as stupid, ugly, arrogant, or just completely ineffectual, and at one point in Iron Man 2, Stark walks out on a Congressional hearing, flippantly remarking that with Iron Man he has ‘privatised peace’. The regular Joe, Fordist Tony Stark of IM3 is a thin veneer that fails to conceal the neoliberal beneath. The Iron Man films do not care for government, they care for capital. The fear that is truly being manifest in the tussle over the President in Iron Man 3 is that the US government will become the puppet of foreign capital, the US will become in thrall to foreign influence—reflective in part, perhaps, of the fact that China is the largest foreign owner of the rapidly expanding US debt.36 _{Either way, it is a nonsense and}

purely ideological distinction along the lines of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ capital—the US government is

already the puppet of ‘foreign’ capital, as are all governments, and capital is fundamentally foreign to the qualitative good of humanity as such. So while the film dramatises an allegedly crucial threat to the ‘purity’ and identity of the US, capital remains the unquestioned bedrock and motive of both sides.