Self-insert

There’s a bit in Jonathan Lethem’s (excellent) Amnesia Moon where a character describes the novel’s protagonist:

[H]is ratty hair wasn’t ratty anymore; it was slicked back wet over his head, exposing his forehead and eyes, which were strong, stronger than his mouth and chin. He suddenly looked nice.

Now look at Jonathan Lethem:

I can’t tell whether I’m reading Lethem’s words onto his face, or if he’s describing his protagonist as himself. I’m tempted to say it’s the latter, for two reasons. Firstly, people like to write about themselves. Self-insert fanfiction thrives on this. Secondly, you are the only person you will ever completely know, and the person closest to yourself. It’s just easier to draw bits from yourself and put them on the page. The only way I can get around it is by figuring out what I need first, then becoming it long enough to write about it.

Big tech, small cats

I was in a thrift store in Oregon today and found a vintage Polaroid camera, which I didn’t buy for reasons of suitcase space and general uselessness. One of the good things about Polaroids was that no equipment was needed to view their photos. The 35mm camera required developing, which is still not bad, but digital cameras require a massive apparatus that will either become hopelessly obsolete or be destroyed, leaving the last ten years as a blank spot on the face of history.

I also went briefly to a church singing group and met a very personable kitten with a broken leg.

Retro tech: First-generation iPod Shuffle

I was walking to a Midtown sushi place today when my coblogger and I stopped into a weekend church flea market. Between the “videophone-enabled” modems and Precious Moments figurines, I spotted a misshapen manila envelope and pulled it out. On the front was a printed return address label and the scrawled epigram “MAC iPOD SHUFFLE.”

It was a first-generation Shuffle, complete with charger and earbuds and with enough power that we could still listen to the renditions of “Jupiter, Bringer of Joy” and “Sing Sing Sing” that were loaded on it. The woman at the counter wasn’t entirely certain what it was, and gave it to me for two dollars. So wherever you are, Mr. Philip I. Rafield, thank you.

I’ve never had one of these before, and I’m inordinately excited. There’s something really fascinating about the idea of technology that’s deliberately limited, since I’m used to getting the most functional thing that I can. Being at the mercy of your device for songs is an odd feeling.

Further notes: The manual is quite thick–at least sixteen or twenty pages. It’s a tribute to how much more revolutionary these things were than even the iPhone: People were so unfamiliar with the idea of a device that played music from your computer that they included an entire booklet on how to do it. I miss that, especially in video games (the Deus Ex manual took me longer to read than the training section of the actual game.)

But on the other hand, I’m pleased that these devices have become commonplace, because my smartphone really does improve my quality of life. It lets me find restaurants, or talk to friends, or read anything in the public domain, including Bruce Sterling, Machiavelli, G.K. Chesterton, and John Stuart Mill to name just a few. Not all devices are created equal, ethically, and there are a lot of problems with the negative effect that electronics manufacturing has on the rest of the world (factories in China; mines in Africa), but that’s a problem with the process, not the theory. I disagree with plenty of electronics, but not the idea of electronics in general. My phone is not a device designed for sucking my time into some nebulous idea of “screen time;” it’s a facilitator–a book, and a telephone, a drafting board, and a map. That’s what computers are, and don’t let anyone tell you otherwise.

Why I don’t like booth babes.

It seems that the folks over at Penny Arcade recently took a poll about booth babes (the long-suffering, often scantily-clad professional models hired to stand alongside product booths at conventions), and most of the community is against them:

6,313 people took the poll, with 60 percent of respondents either liking or loving the ban on booth babes. Only 12 percent of respondents hated the ban, putting public opinion firmly in the anti-babe area.

Looking at the Ars Technica comments, however, it’s clear that folks there are, at best, confused. Plenty of people give reasons why they agree with the ban (I’d put it at about 60%, much like the poll), and there are the usual number of joke comments (“You know how you’re gay?”) But a good number of people seem to think that this means the PA community is either prudish, micromanaging, or fascistic:

I went to PAX 2008. I remember seeing a booth babe at least once. I had no problem with her being there.

What I learned from this survey: PA fans are surprisingly prudish for being fans of a routinely NC-17 rated comic.
Okay not NC-17, but certainly “R”

I’ve never been to one of these and probably never will, but this is silly.
I don’t get the obsession with trying to get people to take games seriously. They’re games

There are a couple angry posts (one person calls this “feminism run amok”), but overall people who disagree seem simply bemused, as if they simply couldn’t imagine a reason why people would dislike seeing booth babes at the convention (for the record, the “ban” is not on female or costumed booth staffers–it requires that there be no partial nudity, although revealing costumes that are true to the character design are allowed, and that employees be knowledgeable about the products they represent.) So, in the interest of communication, here’s why I would.

Where have all the hackers gone?

Okay, it’s been a while. It’s ninety-seven degrees outside and feels every one of them. I graduated and suddenly found myself unable to do anything but spend hours playing with the Source SDK and reading House of Leaves. And playing System Shocks 1 and 2. I’ve finally completed both of them in somewhat under 35 hours total, which is something like twice the minimum amount of time in which they can be finished at non-speedrun pace (playing the original System Shock mission on “hard” gives you a maximum of seven hours to complete the game.) This is due both to the fact that I’m extremely methodical, and that for all the time I play, I’m really not very good.

Playing System Shock (and Uplink, a 2001 War Games-esque hacking sim) has made me realize how much the hacker has really retreated as a figure of our cultural imagination. Time was, everyone and their sister was a hacker, and every ridiculously over-specialized tactical strike team included a computer expert (who was invariably recruited after the FBI burst into the server farm he had assembled in his parents’ basement. There was always a server farm and a giant magnet. And unless you were in Cowboy Bebop, it was always a he.) But where have they gone?

I last remember hackers in the early Oughts, and while there’s still the odd one, they seem to have phased out. The dot-com bubble may well have had a lot to do with this, as well as the fact that computers aren’t nearly as foreign as they used to be. We’re also apparently in a sort of macho phase, where we’re afraid of a man who’s too skinny or is too good at purely non-physical pursuits. The place occupied by the hacker seems to have split into two career tracks: The engineer and the social engineer. The engineer is more common in video games, the social engineer in film and print fiction.

Fictional hacking was always a combination of two factors: Technical aptitude and confidence tricks. The hacker understood computers better than (s)he understood people, and could break into any technical system. But even if the hacker was borderline-autistic, they would at very least have figured out social interaction as a mechanical process, and at best be geekily charismatic. People, to paraphrase Kevin Mitnick, are the weakest part of any security system.

The engineer takes the technical tricks of the hacker, but with a more tactile, mechanical bent. It’s a good choice, honestly, because ever since Neuromancer writers, including myself, have been jumping through hoops in order to make hacking seem interesting, whereas engineering actually occasionally involves something more exciting than extended typing sessions. The engineer combines the hands-on work of the mechanic with the cerebral intellectualism that convinces the audience they’re watching/playing someone of a higher caliber (while we seem content to have relatively low-ranking soldiers in combat fiction, we only accept people with civilian jobs if they’re some kind of intelligentsia.) Hence Tony Stark of the recent Iron Man movies, or Isaac Sciencefictionportmanteau of Dead Space, who are both engineers.

In the case of Isaac, we see the social ineptitude of the hacker preserved, because Isaac verges on straight-up autism. In game cutscenes he literally has supposedly good friends speak to him without appearing to even acknowledge their presence. And mind you these are third-person cutscenes.

The flip side of this is the social engineer. This person tends not to have any specific demonstrable skills, but is an all-around clever smooth talker. They may be able to tech their way out of something, but more likely they talk their way out of it, and the technology becomes window dressing on their charisma. The Tenth Doctor from Doctor Who is the first example that comes to mind: The series came back in the mid-Oughts, and after a season with Ninth Doctor Christopher Eccleston, we got David Tennant as a fast-talking, self-describedly “clever” social engineer who faked his way into events with psychic paper and essentially crowdsourced his rebirth in one of the season finales. Historical and heist fiction also lends itself to this well: Take Leonardo diCaprio’s role in Catch Me if you Can and remakes of The Italian Job and the Ocean’s Eleven series.

As with the hackers, the engineer and social engineer are often from poor backgrounds (particularly the social engineer, who is living by his wits), but they’re both taking advantage of a certain level of cultural trust, which often points to them being white men (who are the people people trust.) The exceptions to this that I can remember are rare: You’ve got Kaylee from Firefly, in many ways a toned-down version of Ed, the hacker from Cowboy Bebop (who was, after all, originally supposed to be male.) But women who get by on their wits have a distinctly different narrative, and it’s usually much more strongly tied to their sexuality (I get the feeling that the female superhacker from The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo is something like this, although I’ve not read it.)

It’s kind of a shame, because as I’ve said, it would open up the possibilities for characters immensely. It’s also just that narratives are important. The way we frame our lives is through stories, by imagining ourselves as heroes. What do we do when all our hero play gets supplanted by rationalizations–”I’m like Iron Man, but…a girl, and…that means I can’t have Pepper Potts, but…” In the end, it just kind of peters out.

L-l-l-look at you, hacker.

Games are an odd medium in that they require that you interact with them in very specific ways, and I think that’s one reason why they don’t age well. We can watch movies with terrible special effects because they do not require our continued attention to keep playing, and because the way we interact with them at least seems to remain largely the same.

With games, it’s different. Virtually all non-point-and-click PC games today use WASD as the main movement keys, and the mouse to look–but it’s a system that’s been around 12-15 years at most. Imagine if you had to watch movies from before 1960 with your eyes half-closed. And, similarly, it seems unlikely that this system will last more than another decade. On the one hand, it seems like we’ll see a lot more direct point-and-click games; on the other, first-person gaming might move in a more Project Natal-like direction. In either case, what we’re looking at will be a convergence of gaming with real life, or WYSIWYG gaming, if you will.

I would complain about this, because I really enjoy the feeling of actually having a skillset that you get in games from the late 1990s and early 2000s, but I’m playing the original System Shock and it is absolutely opaque. After spending about an hour learning to emulate a pre-modern-Windows system in DOSBox so I could get the game running, I got into the game to find about a million tabs and a control scheme that included leaning, lying down, and moving through real space and cyberspace. Like so:

As much as I enjoy obtaining the skillset, I realize that a lot of what we think of as “legitimate” skills are really just old skills, and that each new era brings with it a new set that we don’t recognize until long after the fact. Few people learn cursive these days, but typing is a learned skill that’s no less complex or useful. Changing the oil in a car is useful, but I rarely have to do it, while fixing a computer problem is something that comes up all the time.

Same goes for what we refer to as “evolutionary skills.” Strength is an important attribute, but it seems like sometimes we mistake it for the most important attribute simply because it was at some point in our history. If you’re working out on a regular basis for serious bodybuilding purposes, it’s not making you a better person than someone who can balance a checkbook or reason out how to cook a meal: Those are current “evolutionary” strengths just as much as anything. A good deal of the “strength” I see now seems more cosmetic than anything.

And, lastly, apparently always useful: Hacking and nerd references. Note the Watchmen smiley face on the Hacker from System Shock.

Ithaca has the best book sale in the world

It lasts three weekends, and you can find anything from rare 1940s science fiction to obsolete software, including the1997 Youth Risk Behavior Survey, which allows you to survey…youth risk…from the comfort of your home.

Software is one of those interesting things whose value seems to drop to below zero after a period of time. I would, for example, almost literally pay money to never again see a copy of the email client Eudora, which was available in spades at this year’s book sale. I’d certainly never ask anyone to put down solid money for the honor of storing a physical copy of it.

Drones are boring. So are scruffy white guys.

I said I would mention this, so I will: Never send a drone to fight a hero. Robots fighting heroes is okay, because they’re senseless killing machines. Hive mind drones are okay, because they’re part of a massive unkillable whole (like the Many!) But Star Wars: Episode I should have taught us that remote-control drones are not cool in an action movie.

A large part of Iron Man 2 revolves around various Iron Men (including Don Cheadle, who is wasted on a straight man role in IM2 because apparently after Hotel Rwanda everyone forgot that he was quite funny in Boogie Nights) fighting various other Iron Men, who are occasionally Iron Drones. This is excruciatingly boring, for two reasons. Firstly, a typical round of combat in the Iron Man universe consists of lobbing a few missiles, then throwing a haymaker punch. I’ll never really understand why so many superheroes go out of their way to construct fantastic new forms of weaponry and armor, only to use them for the same tired fisticuffs, especially after the success of superpeople who don’t, like Spiderman or Magneto.

Secondly, watching copies of the same guy fight each other makes IM2 far more boring than it has to be, especially when their enclosure in the suits erases any trace of humanity, rendering the entire process something like an episode of Battlebots without the gadgets. The absolute best fight scene in IM2 is the first, in which Rourke’s otherwise-generic Russian Guyovitch walks onto the track of the Grand Prix in an orange jumpsuit and giant robot arms and attacks Tony Stark while he’s in a race car. Why did they decide that Rourke and Downey Jr., both quirky, well-established actors, were better off in sterile metal body casts?

This extends further than supersuits, down to the protagonists that science fiction/superhero comics and movies have tended to favor, which can basically be summed up as “a million bland scruffy white guys”–think Yorich from Y: The Last Man or the entire cast of Terminator: Salvation. I’m not the kind of comics fan who buys every issue of X-Men as it comes out, but I’m the kind who orders copies of Watchmen for everyone and owns really nice library-bound copies of Hellboy, so as a Real True Comics Industry Funder–stop with the affirmative action for white boys already. It’s disappointing when an industry that purports to be based on stories of the uncanny and unusual devotes itself so unswervingly to ignoring everyone who doesn’t fit a very specific mold, then argues that it’s because this is the only place where these stories can be told, or because other stories aren’t “realistic” enough.

Seriously, if you’re a scruffy white guy, it’s cool. And I like reading about you. But I don’t want the only post-2000 influential comic book authors to be Brian K. Vaughn and Ed Brubaker, or for Sam Worthington to get thrown unnecessarily into every movie because they need to fill their SWG quota. Because after a while, it’s all just more guys in sterile suits to me.

The art and the craft

Oh my goodness, System Shock 2.

(Here there will be spoilers for it and Bioshock.)

Immediately after finishing finals and before graduating, I took up Bioshock again, because someone had told me about being immersed in the game so deeply after the big twist that they had played through all night to the end. I had found it disappointing the first time, but the second (well, really third) time around was better, and I started to get drawn in by the atmospherics, the great writing, and the gameplay opportunities, which never quite gelled but started to seem much less forced as I went on.

I think the tipping point for me was when I was listening to a genetically engineered monster lament her lost beauty, distracting her with bees while I shocked a gun turret in a room to stun it, then hacking the turret and letting it finish her off. A close second would be when I watched a ghost before meeting my first teleporting Houdini Splicer, who flitted from room to room so quickly that I became convinced that there was a ghost attacking me and there was nothing I could do about it, as witnessed to my coblogger:

Me: Oh shoot shoot shoot I’m getting burned to death by a ghost!
Him: Kill it!
Me: I can’t! My weapons won’t work on ghosts!

And then I wrenched it to death. But anyways, despite the loveliness of Bioshock, it continues to disappoint me by taking awesome ideas and then forgetting about them partway through. I was really enamored of the Objectivist Freedom Ship Dreamland, but disappointed when the idea fizzled out after the first or so level because I’d been envisioning a world where everything cost money, where selfishness and individuality were taken to their logical ends, where might made right, and where everyone was trying to cheat everyone else, and was given that in part, but not in whole. I was promised something as dense and intelligent as the incomparable Deus Ex (which feeds your paranoia with chapters from G.K. Chesterton’s The Man Who Was Thursday) and given a console-ready game that you could play as a functional illiterate. I was promised Objectivism, and given an Objectivist protagonist whose big evil act is nationalizing business. I was promised innovative environmental usage, and given random oilslicks on the floor.

But Bioshock has, in turn, been the gateway drug to System Shock 2, and for that I thank it. System Shock 2 is the source of ninety percent of Bioshock’s gameplay and eighty percent of its plot (including the wrench-based gameplay, the characters–stand-ins for Atlas, Tenenbaum, Jack, and the Splicers, among others–and the big twist), and it does the gameplay significantly better. SS2 is true survival horror, in that your weapons break, your health is limited, and virtually everything, including hacking or reviving, costs money. You’re constantly in fear for your life, and, no matter how healthy, just one psionic monkey away from dying.

In Bioshock, you literally can’t die, because you’ll respawn in a “Vita-Chamber” about thirty feet away, with most of your health and mana returned. SS2 has the equivalent regeneration chambers, but there’s only one per level, they return you with only a third of your health, and they cost ten “nanites” (read: dollars) to use. This isn’t a huge barrier, but it’s enough to make you think twice before attacking a gun turret with a wrench.

Plot- and idea-wise, it’s a more interesting showdown. Bioshock comes out on top in voice acting, since most everyone in SS2 except SHODAN sounds like a 23-year-old with a script in front of them. Dialog goes to Bioshock too: The best of the writing in Bioshock (by which I mostly mean the opening lines and Atlas’ stuff) is nothing short of amazing, and the worst would still be about average for SS2. What really makes Bioshock is the attention to characterization. The Splicers, standard-issue mooks, shout their stories to no one as they wander levels; the relationship between Andrew Ryan and his son is genuinely touching, and Dr. Tenenbaum’s origin–she was a Jewish camp prisoner who became a Nazi scientist–is a bit of a cheap shot, but actually does stay with you.

The individual characters in SS2, meanwhile, don’t get a lot of definition, and the protagonist is your basic FPS nobody space marine. Its opening premise is scarcely different to Doom, especially compared to the idea of Bioshock‘s underground wonderland, with its Grecian gardens and massive human circuses. But this is really where the differences between Bioshock and System Shock 2 begin to emerge.

Bioshock is a game with a highbrow pedigree and a lot of potential theory. It’s the kind of game you don’t have to feel bad about telling your philosophy-student friends about–Whatcha playin’? Oh, nothing, just an exploration of selfishness and virtue set in an undersea metaphor for unbridled capitalism. The names are classy, the style is classy, and steampunk always had a sort of self-aware charm that made it more acceptable than cyberpunk among non-SF fans. When you scratch the surface of Bioshock, though, there’s not a lot that sets its characters or world apart from the average FPS. Fight a crazy person, fight a guy in a robot suit, decide whether to be angelically good or baby-eating bad. So on, so on. Its characters have fantastic potential, but after a while even they all start to seem the same, and little is done to explore the real notion of what it means to be self-awarely selfish or unprepared for reality.

Even the thing Bioshock was supposed to do best–make you aware of your own lack of free will–gets fumbled. When you finally find Andrew Ryan, the first villain in Bioshock, you discover that he is actually your father, and that you are little more than a psychically-controlled puppet, bound to the words “Would you kindly…?” Ryan, choosing to die rather than be betrayed by his own son, orders you to kill him…and you do.

But, the thing is, you don’t. Instead, you see a first-person cutscene of yourself killing your father.

Now, here’s something that happened to me in Grand Theft Auto. I had taken a mission from a crooked cop to steal some incriminating documents from a philanthropist lawyer. The entire time, I had been told how good this guy was, and he was nothing but nice to me up until the point where I drew a gun and stood.

And then, he gave me the files. “Here they are, just don’t hurt me!” he said. And I tried, I really tried. But the game wouldn’t let me leave the room until I gunned down this poor guy. I waited, I turned…and I did it. I felt like a terrible person, but I really had no choice.

I promise you that I would have felt like an even worse person if I had had to actually bring the wrench down on Andrew Ryan in Bioshock, and it would have exponentially deepened what the game was trying to say. But instead of following through on its promises, Bioshock merely leaves them in the air, hanging.

System Shock 2, meanwhile, makes no such pretensions. You’re on a spaceship. The spaceship is full of things that try to kill you. By virtue of its unprepossessingness, however, the game starts to become something else. The enemy you fight, the Many, is a sort of Borg-like hivemind: The people who attack you do so while moaning “Are you one of us? No…I’m sorry. Run…run!” The ship’s HAL-like security computer addresses you coldly as “Intruder,” and tries to logically convince you of your own inferiority. The few characters that the game does create–the Many, SHODAN–come across far more strongly than anyone in Bioshock, and the ideas they live by seem truly real. They affect the way you play, the things you do, even the way you see, as the game begins to thrust you into hallucinations brought by the Many.

Even the lowbrow outer-space atmosphere, in the end, becomes much more symbolic and beautiful than the undersea Rapture. System Shock 2 is a maze of corridors and tunnels, but every so often, you look out a dirty window and catch yourself staring off into the endless nothingness of space, realizing just how precarious your position on this floating spaceship is. It’s a really true sense of alienation that you never get in Bioshock.

Bioshock and System Shock 2 are both art, in their own way. But Bioshock is high-A Art. It takes a big concept–Objectivism–and a big budget, gorgeous effects, and fantastic acting. But it doesn’t go beyond that. SS2 is arts & crafts. It does what it’s supposed to do, and works with what it knows–outer space, parasites, hackers, space marines–to turn the nuts and bolts of science fiction and gaming into a truly transcendent experience. And it makes me like it so much more.

We don’t need another hero

I genuinely liked the first Iron Man movie, so it seemed worth it to see the second (DC comics are more to my taste than Marvel ones, but Marvel superheroes make better screen fodder.) Unfortunately, it’s a huge muddled mess; fortunately, it lets you forget it for long, illuminating periods of time. There are at least three or four separate sides, none of which are played off each other to any extent–with Tony Stark, superhero agency S.H.I.E.L.D., Stark Industries, Marvel-world Lockheed Martin, and an angry Russian physicist all working at cross-purposes, this movie should be a lot more complicated than it actually is.

To some extent, that’s a good thing. Characters appear only to serve the main plot, then disappear conveniently, never staying long enough to bog it down. Tony Stark’s one-liners aren’t as fresh as they used to be, but Downey Jr. is still in good form. The writers fortunately gave up any hope of verisimilitude with the real world about ten minutes in, ratcheting up the super-science to levels that make Buckaroo Banzai look like a physics textbook. A meter consistently shows Stark’s blood toxicity rising through the movie, beginning at nineteen percent. If this were alcohol, a .19 BAC would have you blackout drunk. I guess palladium isn’t as toxic, because even at well over fifty percent the poisoning appears to be an entirely cosmetic malady.  And this doesn’t even touch the part where Stark builds a particle accelerator in his rec room, creates a new element, shoves the element into his chest, and goes out to fight.

Honestly, I’m all in favor of this, because I love the “science hero” origins of superheroes, and if choreographers can get away with fight scenes as blatantly unrealistic as anything in most films, an actual vocation might as well get to look cool too. And for the first thirty minutes, IM2 showed some serious potential in this regard.

The primary reason that Iron Man and part of its sequel worked so well was, as far as I can tell, unintentional. It’s because Iron Man represents, as my coblogger says, the military-industrial complex (or collaboration between heavy industry and the military) of the 1950s and ’60s. And, in a movie set after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the rise of insurgency wars, Iron Man comes to represent the floundering of the complex in a more complicated world.

Dwarfing any other plot holes in the film is this one: What is it, exactly, that Iron Man is good for? Think about it–you’re a super-strong guy with flying powers and a laser gun. What do you do? Superman could move planets, and even he spent his early adventures nabbing pickpockets. Batman worked because he became a symbol; Spider-man had a rogues’ gallery that was just as bizarre as he was. They had powers that easily matched Iron Man’s, but they were all either grass-roots vigilantes or fighting supervillains.

The writers of the Iron Man movies, however, want to convince us that Tony Stark and his supersuit have somehow, as they put it, “privatized world peace.” Stark, for example, has “stabilized east-west relations.” But this is never demonstrated, and can’t be demonstrated, because Iron Man is a centralized solution for a multipolar problem, and after the Cold War, the centralized, high-tech weapons of the military-industrial complex just don’t work. Tony-as-weapons-manufacturer always seems a little underwhelming, because none of his weapons present a solution to the insurgency wars raging in the background. He can make missiles, but you don’t need missiles for house-to-house urban warfare. The most useful feature in the Iron Man suit is, tellingly, a heads-up display that color-codes your friends and enemies.

Now, once again, you’re in a super-suit, and there’s only one of you. You’ve been dropped down in Israel–scratch that, you flew to Israel, because apparently Iron Man’s suit has a cross-continental range and he has nothing better to do–and you’re supposed to stabilize relations there. Not topple a government, not destroy one side (peace through genocide is not allowed here), but stabilize relations. What do you do?

Give up? So did the screenwriters, who, while grappling with the problem of how to fight in a new world, simultaneously have to deal with who to fight, and put us back in the Cold War again. The Cold War involved a lot of countries, but the reassuring fiction of it was that we always knew who our enemy was, and anyone else we fought was going to be connected to the Big Bad, Russia. But now there’s no head to the body that is international war. We’ve tried to replace it with a religion–Islam–and a few names in the War on Terror, but the fact is that global politics aren’t a neat string of dominoes, and you can’t knock down one Kingpin and see the whole thing tumble down.

So Iron Man gets sent to fight the Axis of Evil, offscreen, as a “nuclear deterrent.” There are about five superheroes who could be considered “nuclear deterrents,” and Iron Man is not one. The most plausible, of course, is Dr. Manhattan, an American superhero who can actually repel nuclear weapons and send them back to the Russians, or do anything else enabled by his complete control over matter. But Iron Man is as much a deterrent as the cast of WWE wrestling. This puts us back where we were before: In an uncertain world, looking for an enemy to fight.

Which puts them back down with the personal. While Stark certainly has ideals, as far as I can tell his major battles all involve punching out the competition, who are conveniently also evil. After the global scope of the first movie, its climax was two businessmen in metal suits duking it out on a freeway, and the sequel isn’t much of a departure. All of his other baddies–usually rough-looking foreigners–will turn out to be in league with whoever the Lockheed Martin equivalent is in a given film, making global conflict something not so much facilitated by the arms industry as manufactured by it.

Is Stark Industries also a part of this warmongering? It’s unclear. In the first film, Stark declares that his company will no longer make weapons; that said, it’s unclear what exactly they have to make besides weapons, since Stark basically only uses the suit technology as a personal toy. That’s probably better than actively hiring homicidal scientists to build a robot army, but it’s not doing a whole lot to help things, either.

In fact, it’s the problem with superheroes in general: The stunts that make them heroic are usually more about photogenic poses than actual efficiency or good results. There’s a beautiful scene towards the end of the movie where Scarlett Johansson storms a compound with acrobatic grace, crushing windpipes between her ankles and taking down armed gunmen with an Avengers-issue garrote. It’s absolutely gorgeous, until you start to wonder–why is she posing at the end of each kill? And how is the result any better than just going in with a shotgun and a bandoleer? By the time she gets through, the villain has escaped.

The best comics–things like Watchmen, The Invisibles, or anything by Garth Ennis–recognize this and play with it, complicating the idea of the superhero. The movie here, though, ignores it completely. Watchmen in particular was all about the relationship of heroism with ethics, and how our actions can be defined by our enemies. Iron Man gives us a fantastic rogues’ gallery (Sam Rockwell as a preening, New Management-style arms CEO and Mickey Rourke as a grim, silent tech-for-hire) and wastes them on the mind-dullingly unambitious goal of copying Stark’s suit. It’s the arms race writ small: Nuclear bomb met with nuclear bomb, power armor met with power armor, for ever and for ever.

I want an Iron Man movie that recognizes the challenges that the coming age has brought to the military-industrial complex and America as a world power. I want to see the complex fail, and be built up as something new. I want Tony Stark to realize that what he thought was the linchpin of defense was really just a distracting bauble keeping everyone’s eyes off the real strategic goal.

Okay, strike that, I just want to see Iron Man fight Magneto.

I think I’ll have to leave the second part–what went wrong with the fighting–till next time, but here’s my basic premise. The first rule of storytelling: Show, don’t tell. The second: Nothing is more boring than a robot drone in a fight scene.