A classic Marvel/DC debate turns ten years old! Phil and Josh take two different perspectives on which game changing superhero movie has maintained greater cultural relevance!

Think back ten years ago. It’s the 2008 blockbuster season. Marvel Studios first real cinematic feature, starring Robert Downey Jr.’s comeback, drops in May; six weeks later, Christopher Nolan’s second bat-instalment follows. The Dark Knight and Iron Man both garner reviews like no other superhero movies ever have since Superman ’78. One garners an Academy Award, one changes the focus of the industry.

A decade later, which movie retains more cultural relevance?

The Dark Knight (2008) — Ten Years Later

Iron Man’s strengths for the candidacy are admittedly impossible to contest. But for all the industry relevance and the resulting pop culture relevance, all of Iron Man’s heft is in retrospect. It was great fun and it restructured the way franchises work in the film industry, but of the significant impacts of Iron Man, it has also never been accused of a substantive commentary on our society – or being truly culturally relevant. Such commentary is the stock and trade of all three of Nolan’s bat-films. So much so, in fact, that the trilogy might too often stray into allegory.

If Batman Begins was about how easily the spread of panic and fear can incapacitate society as represented by Gotham, and that Batman’s emergence as the response is at once absurd and effective, it also begs the question what absurdities are we willing to live with in order to address our collective fears? This is the concept that Nolan is wrapping his shiny British knuckles around in The Dark Knight – this lean towards a darker ordering principle. Introducing, in the person of Batman, the techniques of a literal “dark order” – the League of Shadows – to set Gotham right may have unforeseen consequences.

Alfred (Michael Caine) boils it down– “You hammered them to the point of desperation, and in their desperation they turned to a man they didn’t understand…he can’t be bullied, bargained, reasoned or negotiated with…” When a principle of order as unchecked as the Batman emerges, the response is the anarchistic punk sensibility of broken orders that the Joker brings to the scene. In a scenario where the justice system is full of criminals, and a vigilante criminal is necessary to bring justice, there is too much wrong with those inversions – perversions – being counted on to hold up a crumbling, corrupt order.

The Joker claims to have no plan, but that’s only partially true, and besides, we already know he’s an unreliable narrator. To hell with order – an arbitrary, easily manipulated concept to the Joker. His plan is chaos, to opportunistically sew discord. Gotham by this point has already been worked over by fear – criminals’ fear of Batman, citizens fear of criminals, citizens fear of Batman, and who-knows-what sort of lasting effects a dosing of the Scarecrow’s “fear toxin” might have on Gothamites, both psychologically and pharmacologically speaking. By the Joker’s arrival, Gotham was softened up just enough for someone who could exploit its public anxieties. The chaos reaches such a pitch that even the newly emboldened do-gooders working within the system crack. When the only way to catch the Joker is to lean further into the ethos of the dark knight, it creates a solution problematic not only in its overreach, but in the path it paves towards becoming potentially oppressive.

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In all of that there are a lot of parallels to what happened culturally and politically in the U.S. after the fall-out of 9/11, and the War on Terrorism that ensued. The lines to the military industrial complex, the Patriot Act, and acts of terrorism, are fairly clearly drawn. But the movie is also anticipatory, prescient even, of some of the strange effects the New World Chaos would bring to American society.

There are a lot of reviews that talk about those connections, so I won’t address the well worn paths here. The lesson that jumps out at me now is the slightly corny one about the people of Gotham. It didn’t ring true for me at the time. It wasn’t the contrivance of the two ferries, nor the convenience that one was full of convicts and one was full of citizens. It was simply that I didn’t see any way the boat full of citizens didn’t overwhelmingly vote to blow up the boat full of criminals. As articulated in the film, the criminals had their chance.

And in no way did I believe the criminals wouldn’t smash that button with immediacy once they got their hands on it. But the situation is unrealistically devised perhaps because this is where some of Nolan’s allegory pokes through. The criminals aboard that boat don’t represent criminals, so much as the least amount of humanity we as a society are willing to grant certain swaths of the population. The contrivance has more to do with what the citizens of Gotham believe about the criminals, because it is a metaphor for what we think about those we perceive to be thoroughly unlike us.

As a nation, we’ve been worked over. Terrorism has made us frantic. The Bush years, the Iraq War, Arab Spring, Syria, more terrorism, more domestic terrorism, Russia and the upheaval of social and political orders the world over for better and worse in the last decade has traumatized us. We’ve been over-medicated, over-media-saturated, doped up and roped into pop-nihilism. We’ve been struggling internally so long, it was only a matter of time before it all snowballed into the once unimaginable scenarios we find ourselves currently in. We’re a traumatized Gotham.

And the point we’ve arrived at socially and politically over the last ten years is a fascinating if frightening one. Naturally, everyone believes they’re on the boat of good Gotham citizens, and everyone across the aisle is on a boat of criminals, degenerates, and deplorables. Tension is palpable. Each is willing to overlook the other’s humanity because their own survival is at stake. But is it? Or is that the contrivance of madmen with a compulsion to manipulate? I wonder sometimes whether people would refrain from pounding on a button that makes everyone they’ve deemed an enemy disappear. Or if in the midst of chaos we can opt not to comply with what is becoming a social imperative to dehumanize “the other side”. While I know this is all theatricality and deception, when the chips are down, we fall to the level of what we’ve been rehearsing. I often wonder what theatrics are we being coached into performing, and whether it will get us anywhere but further at each other’s throats.

It was a resolve in The Dark Knight that didn’t ring true for me at time, but these days I sure hope Nolan’s belief in humanity is justified. I want to buy it. Its corny, and its hopeful. That maybe we can grasp that the stakes have been artificially raised, that social pressure points are being purposefully strained. Despite its grim circumstance the film offers the recognition of humanity as the method, the mechanism of hope. Even when the cops, the law, even when Batman falls victim to the Joker’s game, the people will not be disabused of their humanity amidst the designs of chaos.

Its a nice thought. Nolan holds up as worthwhile a response that may not ring true, but could be true if we reached toward it. Its not glamorous or dramatic, but it is still heroic.. I’d like to think that for as much hostility as our social and political exchanges have absorbed, we can find similarly humane justification not to treat people as badly as they might deserve. Impressively, ten years on, I can’t think of a more raw, relevant bundle of nerves at which Nolan’s The Dark Knight still strikes. — Phil Bowman

Iron Man (2008) — Ten Years Later

If you ask someone to name a superhero movie, they’re most likely going to say The Avengers. Which is understandable. The Avengers films are some of the highest grossing Marvel films, heck, they’re some of the highest grossing films period and for good reason. They’re really freakin’ good. But the Avengers films wouldn’t be the monstrosity of the movies they are without Iron Man, the movie that started it all.

Iron Man, without even considering the legacy it spawned, was a great film. That is in part due to the nature with which Robert Downey, Jr. seemingly fused with the character. RDJ seems as though he was born to be Tony Stark. I’m not even convinced that he isn’t actually Tony Stark pretending to be an actor pretending to be himself. Iron Man reignited his career in a way that almost parallels his character. Both RDJ and Tony Stark were plagued by past events and actions in their lives, and through the movie they were able to get fresh starts. It’s this stellar performance that brought the character of Iron Man back to the Marvel front page. When people think of Marvel these days, they don’t immediately think of Spider-Man or X-men, they think of Iron Man.

Few films have been the cultural catalyst that Iron Man has become. It brought comic book movies back when they were slowly fading away. Aside from the success of The Dark Knight, which if we’re being honest was largely due to the incredible performance of Heath Ledger, comic book movies were not doing well. TDK was regarded generally as a good film as opposed to a pivotal comic book movie, and Batman Begins was successful in its own right, but neither was starting a revolution. The Spider-Man Trilogy also failed to start the comic-movie movement, especially with the third installment sputtering and stalling in terms of general sentiment. It wasn’t until Iron Man came along and proved that superhero movies could be fun and filled with action that people became obsessed with seeing their favorite comic book heroes on the big screen. DC has tried and failed numerous times to catch up to Marvel and be the force in the film and TV world that Marvel is, and they keep falling short because the content doesn’t fit the mold that Iron Man started.

Iron Man himself has become a sort of cultural icon. Billionaire techies are being compared to Tony Stark, a name that would not have been AS wildly known without the success of Iron Man and the subsequent Marvel films. Sure, he’s still a popular comic book character, I’ll give you that. But an incredible amount of people who never would have read the comics or had previously never been introduced to the character now know the name like he was a famous musician. The image of Iron Man can be seen everywhere. Even Tony’s Arc Reactor is a recognizable symbol. T-shirts, tattoos, the Arc Reactor itself practically has a legacy.

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The movie has permeated culture so deeply that you would need to find a cave to hide in for a bit just to get away from it, though if you meet a doctor who is making weapons for a terrorist organization, you might not be as far from it as you think. — Josh Strate

Phil Bowman is a reader, a writer, a drawer, and an afficionado of efficient tornadoes. This is his first contribution to the Geekiverse. See what Phil scribbles on instagram: @philipjbowman

Joshua Strate is a lover of music, science, fiction, and philosophy. He likes to spend his time pretending he’s smarter than he actually is.

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