Wogs
by George McCartney
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A review of Iron Man (produced by Marvel Studios; directed by John Favreau; screenplay by Mark Fergus and Hawk Ostby; distributed by Paramount Pictures) and The Visitor (produced by Groundswell Productions; directed and written by Thomas McCarthy; distributed by Overture Films)
[amazonify]B00005JPS8[/amazonify]It is always reassuring when a big-budget superhero film fulfills its responsibility to edify the young. Iron Man, the latest Marvel comic book to come to life on the big screen, does just that. This movie teaches youngsters that it’s righteously cool to kill Middle Easterners by the caravanload.
Iron Man is, in short, a mechanized wog obliterator, if I may borrow Mrs. Clinton’s mot juste as to what she would like to do to Iran if things got out of order. And we wonder why Middle Easterners hate us. But I’m getting ahead of myself. Let’s start at the beginning.
Iron Man is really Tony Stark (Robert Downey, Jr.), an arms manufacturer who never saw a war he didn’t like. We first meet him as he skims the Afghan desert in the backseat of a Humvee while sipping a Scotch and joking merrily with the soldiers accompanying him. He is on a mission to assess how well his weapons are slaughtering the local wogs. But the joke’s on him. His Humvee is blasted by one of his own weapons stolen by a troop of cave-dwelling Afghan . . . insurgents? Terrorists? It is hard to say. In a futile attempt to avoid offending overseas markets, the film never utters the words Muslim, Islam, or Al Qaeda. Lots of luck.
Stark wakes in a makeshift clinic where Yinsen (Shaun Toub), an Afghan doctor and one of the few good wogs, has installed an electromagnet in the center of his chest. Stark’s body has been perforated by shrapnel from one of his own missiles. The metal fragments are intelligent. If they don’t kill the victim upon penetration, they gravitate to his heart to do the job later. The gizmo Yinsen has installed deflects their deadly mission. It also works as a handy symbol. Yinsen has given Stark the heart he never had. Before becoming Iron Man, he becomes Tin Man, searching for an Ozian rainbow.
And so the cynical arms manufacturer begins to rethink his callous ways. He learns that the doctor is as much a prisoner as himself and, worse, that the bad Afghans are threatening to kill his family if he doesn’t keep Stark alive. They want the “most famous mass murderer in America,” as they respectfully address him, to build them one of his ominously named Jericho missiles. It seems they have some more walls to set a-tumble. Under the pretense of following their wishes, the ingenious Stark builds a weaponized metal suit instead to make his escape. Although he fully intends to bring Yinsen with him, the doctor, true to his good wog status, happily plays Gunga Din and sacrifices himself so Stark can blast his way to safety.
Once back in America, a chastened Stark holds a press conference announcing that his company will no longer make weapons but turn to peaceful pursuits. Understandably, his board of directors and second-in-command are thrown into a tizzy and take the company away from him. For reasons not entirely clear to me, Stark repairs to his home lab and, with the help of a robot more solicitous than Luke Skywalker’s R2D2, improves upon his original metal suit, transforming it into a gleaming red and gold mannequin reminiscent of Hollywood’s Oscar award. This comes in handy when he learns from CNN that the bad wogs have invaded Yinsen’s village and are forcing the men to join their campaign. The bald, beardless, and blatantly un-Islamic leader, Raza (Faran Tahir), has monomaniacal ambitions to be the next Genghis Khan, ruling an empire that will extend from Arabia to the Pacific. Stark suits up metallically, blasts off, and swoops down on these nasties, killing them right and left. But, of course, he does so with a precision that guarantees the safety of the innocent. At one point the bad wogs take hold of a group of women and children, using them as shields against the titanium warrior. No problem. Stark simply programs the mini-multi-missile launcher built into his arm and targets them so exactingly that the shells only explode the villains, leaving the innocents they are clutching wholly unscathed. It is a variation on the smart bombs we used to hear about, the ones that only killed the bad wogs and left the good eternally grateful for our intervention. Well, what are comic books for if not dreaming?
I suppose I wouldn’t mind all this if it were happening in some comic book never-never land. But this action takes place in present-day Afghanistan where, in pursuit of a just goal, our actual Armed Forces have inadvertently wrought incalculable havoc on innocent people. This is not fantasy land; it is the sorry site of our failure to capture Osama bin Laden and his Al Qaeda forces because of our current administration’s infamously wrongheaded decision to wage a larger war in Iraq. To make this the background of a children’s fantasy is flatly obscene. Worse, it could conceivably lead our young to believe in the myth of American omnipotence, setting them up to countenance a future administration’s military folly.
Speaking of obscene, why in a children’s movie do we need to watch the hero casually bed a brazen babe on the make? Although their coupling is shown in shadow, even an eight-year-old would not mistake it for a friendly wrestling match. Or does the fact that the woman is a feisty reporter who learned to scorn America’s Middle Eastern policies at left-wing Brown University justify screwing her?
[amazonify]B0015OKWKI[/amazonify]The Visitor, a film of exquisite charm and poignance directed by Thomas McCarthy, turns the geopolitical tables. Here, the Middle East and Africa invade New York City. This will not surprise anyone who has walked the streets of the city’s five boroughs, of course. Nevertheless McCarthy has rendered this invasion with an astonishing intimacy that forces us to rethink our positions on the fraught issue of immigration.
The film begins with the portrait of a wan WASP not living but rather existing in suburban Connecticut. So wan is Walter Vale (Richard Jenkins) that we don’t even see him at first as McCarthy’s camera glides about the empty rooms of his chaste and chilly home. Then the doorbell rings, breaking the genteel hush, and, finally, Walter appears, a bespectacled man in his early 60’s who would seem inoffensively mild were it not for his perpetually guarded expression. In glancing asides, we slowly learn that he is a widower who has not yet come to terms with the loss of his wife, a concert pianist. As if to sustain her presence, he has embarked upon piano lessons for himself, but it’s going dismally. His instructor tries to console him. “Learning an instrument at your age is difficult, especially if you don’t possess a natural gift for it,” she says, in an entirely misconceived attempt at kindness. Walter merely stares at her wordlessly through his black-rimmed glasses. He is trying to reconnect to the lost rhythm of his former life, only to suffer this fatuous consolation.
More than piano lessons, Walter needs to be shaken from his soul-destroying depression. On cue, the shaking begins the next day. Teaching global economics at a Connecticut university, Walter has allowed himself to become that most useless of things, an uninterested and uninteresting professor. He hasn’t prepared a class for years, nor has he written much of anything since publishing the four books that established him earlier in his career. When his chairman asks him to give a talk at a New York University conference on global economics, he reluctantly agrees and takes himself to his Greenwich Village apartment located near the school. Upon entering the apartment, he discovers he has unexpected visitors. He hasn’t been there in some time, and in his absence a young couple have taken up residence. After a few fearful moments on both sides, Walter and his uninvited guests figure out what has happened. The couple were misled to believe they were subletting from a “friend.” Both are illegal aliens who have fled their home countries—Tarek (Haaz Sleiman) from Syria; his girlfriend, Zainab (Danai Gurira), from Senegal. They apologize, and Tarek offers to pay for their tenancy; Walter declines. They quickly pack their few things and leave. When Walter discovers them on the street a little later, desperately phoning their friends to find quarters for the night, he takes pity and invites them back into his apartment, saying they can stay until they find something else that suits them.
While they share the apartment, Walter becomes fascinated by Tarek’s talent on the djembe, a West African drum he plays professionally in various jazz clubs. Tarek offers to teach Walter how to play, and, with some coaxing, the reserved academic agrees. Things go fitfully at first, but this doesn’t deter Tarek. He’s a natural enthusiast and keeps encouraging Walter. “Walter,” he says, “I know you’re a very smart man, but with a drum you have to remember not to think. Thinking just screws it up.” This is Walter’s breakthrough. Soon after, he is joining Tarek, drumming in Central Park with other enthusiasts, often the only white guy in the group and certainly the only 60-year-old wearing a tie and sport jacket under a nylon windbreaker. I am usually not a fan of the don’t-think-just-be philosophy, but seeing the joy that overtakes Walter’s face in these sessions, I found it impossible not to respond to the life-affirming energy invading his long-stifled existence. Tarek’s trespass has colonized him with unexpected joy. Jenkins is marvelous in these scenes. He manages to convey both Walter’s awkwardness as a reserved, isolated intellectual and his growing exuberance as a man rediscovering his life’s rhythm.
This is one aspect of Walter’s return to life. There is another, however, and it has none of drumming’s appeal. When immigration authorities discover Tarek’s illegal status, they clap him in a detention center, a grim cement block of a building. Uncharacteristically, Walter wastes no time. He hires an immigration lawyer in an attempt to extricate Tarek from the Byzantine toils of INS regulations. He also sees to the needs of Tarek’s mother, who flies in from Michigan to help her son. Eventually, he even takes a leave of absence from his university to support Tarek. In short, he wrenches himself out of his guarded insularity, trying to shout down fate itself. It is his belated assertion that he is still alive.
It is tempting to dismiss this film for being foolishly sentimental about illegal immigration. But that’s too easy. McCarthy is not arguing ideology. He is on the side of individual humans. He recognizes that we are all visitors here, calling hopefully to one another across the borders that separate us, banking on what we share despite our differences.
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1 Comment by John Smith on 4 July 2008:
Mass immigration is the Zyklon B of the white hating left. Constantly portraying whites as cold and soulless and needing to be redeemed by impossibly good non-whites is the white hating left’s way of declaring them to be sub-human – rats running through the gutter – a delegitimization that makes their physical destruction that much easier. McCarthy is pushing an ideology, the ideology of racist genocide against the West and its people. Ethylene glycol is said to have a sweet taste, but you probably shouldn’t advise your friends to drink it.
2 Comment by D Simmons on 4 July 2008:
I thought it a good movie Downey being a great actor for that part, but it was the usual white supremacy from the left. Evil whites, good whites, moral black supermen playing a subordinate yet authoritative role, bad becomes good and then selflessly works to save world, end of story. But the same basic story of incomplete yet well meaning whites has been overdone, and even this review which might play well at the reviewer’s faculty lounge where such is taken as the currency of the day plays its part. “Iron Man” still doesn’t beat “Song of the South” for its time subversive in a fun way that well deserved a showing, but for the Maxim generation it will have to do.
3 Comment by In the Village on 4 July 2008:
“McCarthy is not arguing ideology. He is on the side of individual humans.” – Yeah, that’s the old canard: we are all children of God after all. Mass migration via the New Testament.
Please.
4 Comment by Bob Johnson on 4 July 2008:
The description of Iron Man leaves me confused. The “Iron Man” starts out making weapons for the US Federal Government to use overseas, changes his ways by saying his company will stop helping the USFG make war, and then goes back to fighting for the USFG overseas for no other reason than learning that certain enemies of the USFG instituted a draft?
What reason did the Iron Man give for wanting to stop his company from making weapons for use by the USFG?
On “The Visitor”, if anyone buys that there wasn’t a political motive behind the film when they couldn’t even help themselves from making the immigrants be of the illegal variety, I have a bridge for you that’s just come on the market.
It reminds me of how the critically acclaimed actress Adrienne Shelly was brutally murdered by an illegal immigrant in New York, and then Hollywood somehow say fit to exclude her from the Oscar Telecast’s gallery of important actors, actresses, and directors who died the previous year.
Sadly, it appears the people of Hollywood will even spit on the memory of one of their own for the sake of a craven political purpose.
5 Comment by Kirt Higdon on 4 July 2008:
I don’t think I can remember a summer so filled with the release of movies not worth seeing even at the lowest common denominator mass entertainment level. Iron Man and The Visitor went instantly to my avoid-at-all-cost list just on the basis of previews I saw in the early spring.
6 Comment by Bob Johnson on 5 July 2008:
In the Village @ 3,
It is very important, I think, to understand not just the wrongheadedness, but also the hypocrisy of the people who put forward that canard.
What they seem to be putting forward is that it goes against the New Testament for a Country to stop the inhabitants of poorer Countries from immigrating into it.
But if they actually believed that, they would concentrate incredible anger and activism at Mexico, which goes to tremendous lengths to keep out immigrants from its poorer Central American neighbors.
Why are they so offended by the suggestion of the American border with Mexico being sealed, when they don’t mind the reality of the Mexican Border with Guatemala and Belize being sealed?
Why are they so offended by the suggestion that America allow only a small number of legal immigrants, when they don’t mind the reality of Mexico only allowing a small number of legal immigrants?
The answer is that they have fallen under the sway of a strange modern philosophy which holds that while the culture of Mexico (etc.) is valuable and worthy of being protected, the culture of America is not.
Furthermore, this philosophy holds that while the Mexican worker is worthy of being protected from having to compete with lower wage Central American labor, the American worker deserves no such protection from lower wage Mexican labor.
7 Comment by T. Chan on 7 July 2008:
Mr. Johnson:
The description of Iron Man leaves me confused. The “Iron Man” starts out making weapons for the US Federal Government to use overseas, changes his ways by saying his company will stop helping the USFG make war, and then goes back to fighting for the USFG overseas for no other reason than learning that certain enemies of the USFG instituted a draft?
Tony Stark orders the company to stop making weapons not because he doesn’t want to help the USFG make war, but because the weapons he has created are being used against American troops. As for fighting the terrorists–again, it’s not because he’s doing the work of the USFG, but because he feels guilty that the terrorists are able to harm innocents by using weapons manufactured by the Stark Corporation.
8 Pingback by Conservative Heritage Times » A dissenting film review - Iron Man on 8 July 2008:
[...] George McCartney is a good film reviewer by I will dissent from his review of the movie Iron Man which I enjoyed. There was a discussion on Takimag.com about the [...]
9 Comment by Sean Scallon on 8 July 2008:
There was a discussion on Takimag.com about the “message” or “meaning” of the film and there were some conservatives who viewed the film as pro-intervention. But I took the view that film highlighted a Ron Paul view of foreign policy, using Constitutionally approved “letters of marque and reprisal” which allow private citizens to carry out, in a sense, the government’s foreign policy. So here you have weapons manufacturer Tony Stark, who, instead of turning over his new Iron Man weapon to the government that he had been working, uses it by himself to go fixes the problems that his weapons had previously caused.
The idea that the film promotes the killing of “wogs” in the context of the current war in Afghanistan, when one of those very “wogs” saves Stark’s life in the beginning of the film, to me, completly misreads the film (not to mention McCartney’s vetching over a non-existent sex scene in the film). Stark turns his back on manufacturing weapons for the state and military industrial complex because such weapons have been misused and manufactures a weapon he can use for his own aims. This is in part of the essence of a Paulian foreign policy. Maybe we can learn something from it.
10 Comment by George McCartney on 9 July 2008:
To all those who think me a wrong-headed, possibly hypocritical, open-border simp for praising The Visitor, let me put my cards on the table. I descend from a man who arrived in Brooklyn in 1904 illegally. My grandfather, George, fled Ireland to Canada in 1900 after running afoul of the Protestant ascendancy in the North. His employer, a Protestant farmer, knew the police were on George’s case after he had roughed up a couple of lads foolish enough to have attacked him after a village dance. These boyos couldn’t forgive his effrontery. He had danced with a Protestant lass. Knowing him to be a hard and reliable worker, George’s employer arranged for him to escape Ireland and go to work on his brother’s farm in Ontario. From there George made his way to Boston and then Brooklyn. Understandably, then, I’ve always had scruples about cracking down on illegal immigrants without first enquiring of their reasons for coming here. To take another instance, my younger son currently dates a Chinese girl whose family fled the Muslim rampages in Indonesia ten years ago. They got here legally, I understand, but still do not have citizenship. Shall we deport them? And while I’m at it, let me tell you of one of my older son’s closest friends since his grammar school days. He arrived in New York from Haiti at eight when his parents fled the nightmare of Baby Doc Duvalier’s regime. Should they have been deported?
And now to The Visitor, the film in question. Tarek, the Syrian illegal who seems to be upsetting some of my readers, is in America because his mother brought him here after her journalist husband died as a result of being imprisoned and tortured for saying something unflattering about the Assad regime. She arrived on a temporary visa and then failed to take the steps necessary to gain permanent residency. She then ignored the problem and simply stayed on in Michigan. Was this wrong? Unquestionably. And the film never says otherwise. It was also foolish since she would have had a chance for asylum as a member of a politically persecuted family. Do she and her son deserve to be deported? Legally, yes. Still, given the family’s circumstances as elaborated in the film, I think it’s not traitorous to wish they could have been afforded another chance to make their case for citizenship rather than to be shuffled through an outsourced and hopelessly inept INS bureaucracy. Some seem to think the film is arguing for continued waves of mass Mexican immigration. I fully appreciate and frequently share the paranoia that has descended upon us since 9/11. But we must make moral and practical distinctions. Otherwise we’ll become what we deplore: a people who ignore the individual within the mass.
To those who find my review of Iron Man misbegotten, a few words. Had I known Iron Man was a plank in Ron Paul’s foreign policy platform, as Sean Scallon has usefully indicated, I should certainly have foresworn any criticism of the movie. But I wonder. Can Congressman Paul really believe we should all don self-propelled metal suits equipped with missile launchers? I doubt even the NRA is prepared to go quite this far. And would we, so martially outfitted, infallibly blast America’s enemies? Or would we occasionally make a mistake and obliterate a few innocents while fulfilling our patriotic duty? It also occurs to me that Dr. Paul has argued, admirably in my estimation, that wogs should be regarded as something more than targets. As for my vetching about a “non-existent sex scene,” does Mr. Scallon mean kvetching, Yiddish for persistent complaining? Well, I never thought of myself as a kvetcher, but I can’t deny complaining about sex scenes in movies pitched to children. Call me a prude, but unless it can be demonstrated to have some thematic urgency, the two-backed beast has no place on the family screen. Jimmy and Judy will learn soon enough where they came from. Besides I’ve always had an aversion for circumlocutions. “Yes, Jimmy, that lady is undressed, but, you see, it’s like this. Iron Man asked her to a slumber party and she forgot to bring her p.j.’s.” Any scene in which consenting actors vigorously grind pelvises rates as a sex scene in my practical anatomy. Now it may be, of course, that Marvel Studios had this scene trimmed from Iron Man’s run in Mr. Scallon’s part of the country (there’s no bottom to the shameful tactics of movie producers!) but I can assure you that in New York actress Leslie Bibb would certainly have ground Mr. Downey to dust had there not been a timely cut to her alone in his bed quite naked under artfully arranged sheets, her hair wrecklessly tousled, in the wake of her passionate exertions. Of course, we could also understand this sequence in terms of advanced waste disposal. When later that morning Downey’s secretary peremptorily orders Ms. Bibb out of the bedroom, she explains that her duties include throwing out the trash. I suppose this hose and dispose moment has educational value for the young.
11 Comment by Mike Ezzo on 10 July 2008:
Mr. McCartney it is a big treat for me to finally read your opinion on this website (the above writeback). I have enjoyed immensely your reviews for Chronicles, for a decade. They are a masterful, and thoroughly **literary** contribution to a magazine that could never be the same without you. To be honest, I am no movie-lover, and my taste is simple and much different from yours — “Vanilla Sky” was penance to sit through; “The Village” I loved, as I do all of Shyamalan’s works, even if I am completely cognizant of his penchant for being obvious or heavy-handed. But in my opinion your writing is far richer and more meaningful than what I imagine of the movies you write about. And your nuanced views (about real people; not posited abstractions) towards immigrants you expound on above is a very welcome addition to Chronicles. This evening I read your review of “A.I.” three times….. I don’t know how Chronicles ever found you but I’m glad they did. Please write some books, some day. Thank you very much!
12 Comment by George McCartney on 10 July 2008:
Dear Mr. Ezzo,
Thank you. I feel very fortunate to have you as a reader. I am especially pleased to learn that even when you disagree with my assessments you nevertheless find some value in them. That is a compliment to be savored. Ideally writing should bring us into the realm of collegial discussion and honest dispute and this I take to be your central point. It’s good to read it. As for books, dismayingly, there is but one: Confused Roaring: Evelyn Waugh and the Modernist Tradition. Needless to say, it’s a superlative performance. Waugh, by the way, was an inveterate moviegoer. Although he had little regard for most movies, he was fascinated by the medium and schooled himself in its techniques in order to write his vivid, quicksilver narratives.
Yours, George McCartney
13 Comment by G.S. on 10 July 2008:
While I strongly doubt I would share Mr. McCartney’s views on The Visitor, I second comment #11.
My wife & I regret we didn’t read Mr. McCartney’s review of *Juno* prior to wasting good money on seeing that turd in theaters — but I guess that’s what we get for heeding sycophantic hype from the “professional pro-Lifer” circles, who regarded *Juno* as a bone thrown to them from the alternative-hip arts crowd.
As to Iron Man, while I hold Mr. Scallon in high esteem, I think Tony Stark is best read not as a Ron Paul-esque icon of American independence but rather as a synthesis of George Soros and Bill Gates. A transnational, New World Order billionaire technocrat hero, with oodles of gadgets, devoted to helping the world get better and better every day, in every way.
As a former comic-book junkie in my high-school years, I can vouch that the explicit depiction of Tony Stark is that of a shallow, pseudo-intellectual atheist who spends much of his time fighting reactionaries like “The Mandarin” — who values tradition & ancestors (how ghastly) over “science” (as defined by the philosophical geniuses at Marvel Comics).
Or he fights backwards, change-fearing rednecks (vice Arabs) who steal his technology in order to run amok and commit dastardly deeds. I kid you not, that was one of the plotlines.
Moreso than any other comic-book hero, Iron Man is an avatar of the Cult of Progress.
But comic-books in general are absolutely perverse. I keep an eye on them, and can assure you all that they have only degenerated further even in my own short lifetime.
A recent issue of “Captain America” depicts a neo-Nazi villain trying to rise to power by starting a Third Party (gasp!).
The villain also dupes the masses, by criticizing the hypocrisies of the Democrat-Republican binary system — which is of course the surest sign of a fascist, as every good little media-entertainment zombie knows.
I do not exaggerate. If any of you all have kids out there who collect comic books, take it from me that you should burn them.
14 Comment by G.S. on 10 July 2008:
Er, the comic-books, I mean — not the children.
15 Comment by Sean Scallon on 13 July 2008:
I can rest assure you Mr. McCartney that when it comes to gratuitous sex scenes in film all of us provincials “in my part of the country” see the exact same scenes in the cosmopolitan canyons of dear old New York. The Legion of Decency is long since gone and we get the full Monty. Now I don’t consider you a prude Mr. McCartney, because if you were, you would not be a film critic in this day and age. I’m sure you’ve seen worse such scenes on silver screen compared to what was shown in Iron Man, which is why I felt the criticism of it was strange, as if though you thought the film makers were being too cute by half or weren’t honest enough.
And if we are comparing films, I don’t feel Iron Man is any more of a “Let’s kill some bloody wogs!” film than the Rambo films, or the Missing in Action films or any of the other of the mortal super hero genre where one-man armies wipe out endless hordes of enemies by themselves. No doubt Iron Man is part of that genre. But as I stated in my earlier post, since the hero is saved by the one the “wogs” in the beginning of the film, and since we see the transformation of the playboy munition maker Tony Stark into someone concerned that his inventions have needlessly killed “wogs” and wanting make amends, I just don’t see where you can simplistically put Iron Man into a category of chauvanistic fantasy escapism. I pointed out one angle the story could be viewed from and while the average fellow may not be able to construct a suit of armor with missles as Tony Stark does, it would not suprise in this day and age or privitze warfare, a bounty hunter or lone guman would kill Osama bin Laden before the state armies of NATO do.
Now if you will excuse me, I have to brush up on my Yiddish…