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From LeverNews.com — Lever Time is the flagship podcast from the investigative news outlet The Lever. Hosted by award-winning journalist, Oscar-nominated writer, and Bernie Sanders' 2020 speechwriter David Sirota, Lever Time features exclusive reporting from The Lever’s newsroom, high-profile guest interviews, and expert analysis from the sharpest minds in media and politics.
Arjun Singh 0:03
Arjun from the levers. Reader supported newsroom, this is lever time. I'm Arjun. Singh, it wasn't long ago that America used to cheer for its billionaires. In the early years of the war on terror, Silicon Valley was the rage, and on the silver screen, actor Robert Downey Jr had fans swooning over his portrayal of billionaire Tony Stark better known as Iron Man. The first film in Marvel's sprawling cinematic universe, Iron Man was a bombastic portrayal of American military strength, and that was by design. Working with the Pentagon, Marvel agreed to let the military effectively censor the movie by nixing elements that may have shown the military in an unsavory light. 18 years later, Downey Jr has retired the character and the country has grown fatigued with forever wars and increasingly uncomfortable with the digital web of surveillance tools at the government's disposal. Meanwhile, billionaires have become their own class, launching rocket ships, hijacking political campaigns and embedding themselves into public life, whether we like it or not, it's all made a character like Iron Man, a mega rich weapons developer, feel a lot different today, but that's where my guests today come in. Today, I'll sit down with Spencer Ackerman, a Pulitzer Prize winning reporter who covers national security and is the author of a new Iron Man comic series developed by Marvel. We'll sit down with journalist Dave Gonzalez, who's done deep reporting on Marvel and Disney and in particular, how the two work together with the Pentagon and the MCU early years,
Arjun Singh 1:42
when I was in high school, you'd hear about war whenever you turned on the TV. This was back in 2008 way before streaming and usually after I'd finished my homework. My weeknight sounded a little bit like this.
News Broadcast 1:54
They fanned out across Washington, DC on the Iraq invasions fifth anniversary, the city to
Heath Ledger 2:02
say, city deserves a better class. I'm gonna give it this summer. Out of the Darkness
Barack Obama 2:13
comes the night. Are you gonna have to phase up Afghanistan? I think that we are gonna have to send a couple of additional brigades into Afghanistan to help shore up what has been a declining security situation in Afghanistan. But
Arjun Singh 2:31
I remember one night when I was channel surfing, I saw a trailer for a new movie. It was called Iron Man.
Iron Man Trailer 2:37
Mr. Stark, you've been called the Da Vinci of our time. What do you say to that? Absolutely ridiculous, I don't paint what do you say to your other nickname, the merchant of death? That's not bad.
Iron Man Trailer 2:48
They say the best weapon is one you never have to fire. I prefer the weapon you only need to fire. What?
Iron Man Trailer 2:55
That's how dad did it. That's how America does it, and it's worked out pretty well so far. To pace,
Arjun Singh 3:03
as a giant comic book geek, I knew all about Iron Man. I knew he was one of the Avengers, and he flew around in a giant robot suit and had more money than Richie Rich and the monopoly man combined. See, this was the early days of superhero movies. At the same time Iron Man was coming out. There was Spider Man and Batman had a movie Superman. Everyone seemed to be getting movies. They even made one for Ghost Rider, this obscure motorcycle riding skeleton with a flaming head. But today, Iron Man is probably best remembered as Marvel's first movie in what's now called the Marvel Cinematic Universe. And when that trailer hit the airwaves, I was hooked. It was sleek, action packed. Robert Downey, Jr as Tony Stark, the alter ego of Iron Man, had an old school cool about him, reminiscent of the Rat Pack, and it was loaded with high tech action. See, Iron Man is the story of a weapons developer turned superhero. In a nutshell, it'd be like if the CEO of Lockheed Martin designed a robot suit and started fighting crime. A frightening image, right? But Robert Downey Jr played the character of Tony Stark with charm. There's this one memorable moment in Iron Man two, for example, when Tony Stark is forced to testify in front of a Senate committee about his decision to, well, operate as a one man military because he's rich enough to be able to do so. It's working.
Tony Stark 4:27
We're safe. America is secure. You want my property.
Tony Stark 4:30
You can't have it, but I did you a big favor. I have successfully privatized world peace.
Arjun Singh 4:36
The eerie parallel between Tony Stark and Elon Musk is one thing, but another awkward truth about Iron Man is that the film was a powerful piece of propaganda for the US military. In exchange for getting to use military equipment in their movie, Marvel agreed to allow the Pentagon to edit their scripts, altering them to make the military look more positive, and it's a process they've been doing for decades. But in the case of. Iron Man. Even if the military hadn't interfered with their script, the movie probably would have served the same purpose as an embodiment of both the national security state and US foreign policy. Iron Man is forever intertwined with our perception of military might. His characters are Rorschach test for how America feels about the use of force around the world. It's for these reasons that I reached out to two of my guests today. One of them is Spencer Ackerman, a Pulitzer Prize winning journalist who's covered the war on terror in the security state for more than 20 years. Spencer is currently the author of the newsletter forever wars, but he's also the mind behind a new Iron Man series that's out right now. In the series, Spencer tells a new tale of the billionaire weapons developer turned superhero, one that's informed by his own reflections and insights. After covering the war on terror, and my other guest is Dave Gonzalez. Dave is a co author of the book MCU, the reign of Marvel Studios, and the co host of the podcast trial by content like me. Spencer and Dave grew up reading comic books, and they were tools to help us make sense of the politics and culture wars of our childhoods. So was Spencer now at the helm of his own Iron Man story. I wanted them to help me unpack a question, can a billionaire vigilante, one who frequently refuses to yield to any form of accountability, still be seen as a hero today. So you've had a really interesting career. You've covered the war on terror for a long time. Now, you're writing a new Iron Man comic series for Marvel Spencer to start off. Just, um, tell us a little bit about this series, and what's the energy that you're bringing to it.
Spencer Ackerman 6:40
Well, Iron Man is coming out of a period in his character history where he was briefly in the X Men side of Marvel during the end of an era of X Men comics that, toward the end of it centered around essentially a mutant genocide. So they're relaunching the book. This is the run that I'm doing with the tremendous artists, Julius Otto and Alex Sinclair, back into a more traditional mode of Iron Man storytelling. But I take it as a starting point that he just lived through witnessing a genocide unfold, and because he was not the target of that genocide, he would probably have a lot of doubt and uncertainty about whether he would be entitled to his trauma. And that is kind of the energy I think I don't really have to elaborate on how that would be particularly relevant in 2024 That's the energy I'm sort of taking the character into this run. That's not to say it's a dour one. It's one in which we're gonna have a lot of superhero action. But at the same time, threading it back to Tony Stark as a billionaire, a billionaire's pursuit of scale and some questions about what heroism looks like in a context like that. Yeah. I mean, Iron Man is inextricably linked to warfare in the military industrial complex like I remember when it came out in 2008 it didn't really dawn on me at the time, because I was in high school. But, you know, the setting is that he's in Afghanistan to deliver brand new slate of rockets. I think it's a rocket that launches into seven different rockets to the US military. And you know, at the time, you sort of, you're a teenager, and you're like, oh, cool, big explosions and whatnot. But there's the trauma that I want to get to, that you talk to there. But Spencer for you. I mean, you have covered deeply warfare, the war on terror, the security state.
Arjun Singh 8:53
How does that influence you when you're writing about this character? And do you think about these kinds of things?
Spencer Ackerman 9:00
I think about these kind of things, non stop this. This is just who I am at this point in my life. Yeah, I would say that, you know, not to make it too much about me and not about Iron Man. But as you mentioned, I've reported from Iraq, I've reported from Afghanistan. I've covered the real life equivalents of what we're now calling Stark unlimited through both, you know, down range explosions on ship tests and weird expos in Washington and Tampa. So putting all of this into Iron Man. Not only is it a natural fit for that character and that character's mythology, but also it allows me to kind of say things that journalism won't allow you to kind of get into. And you know, for some good reasons, as well as for some frustrating ones, this is. Going to be a run that reckons with, as you mentioned, Arjun, how even when Iron Man is not selling what the military would call a kinetic package, a weapon, for instance, he is still deeply intertwined with the militarized aspects of the US economy are and those are far reaching things we're speaking over the internet, one of the historic creations of the Department of Defense, methods of digital surveillance that have a lineage not only in Silicon Valley, but through the war on terror, have matured to the point that they are central aspects, load bearing, aspects of the 21st century economy. And there is a lot you can say with with Tony Stark's involvement in that as well. Dave, you know you've covered the history of the Marvel Cinematic Universe now it correlates with what's going on in the world. The Edward Snowden revelations, for example, are a prominent part of the movie Captain America, the Winter Soldier. We talked about Iron Man. You know, his origin story takes place in Afghanistan.
Arjun Singh 11:11
For the behind the scenes, though, at Marvel, how did they talk about this clear like relationship with the military? And my understanding is also that if you put something like a tank, for example, in a movie, or you feature the US military, they have to have a level of involvement within there to kind of clear that, you know, this movie is okay for them to use military surplus or military equipment. But when they were talking about this character and the scale of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, were they conscious of how this relates to what was happening in terms of national security and the dialog around warfare?
Dave Gonzales 11:49
Yeah. So we talked to all four writers for MCU, the reign of Marvel Studios, but specifically the group of Matt Holloway and art Markham. They were like, that is why we wanted to do it. They were like, We originally Marvel Studios was thinking Iron Man period piece, you know, put it back in Vietnam, where the source material was, but these guys were like, no, why wouldn't we try to make, you know, basically, like a good guy out of Dick Cheney. Like, you know, that was their idea going into it. These are the ideas they wanted to wrestle with. And they were even lines, I mean, because they are dealing with the terrorism of the 10 Rings, but trying to navigate in a way where the 10 Rings isn't necessarily Middle Eastern people. It doesn't quite navigate out of brown people, but they at least tried. And when they were originally shooting it, the leader of the 10 Rings was there was a scene where he would unveil all of these missiles, and he'd be like, these ones are from Bush, and these ones are from Clinton, and these ones are from W but basically saying, like, you put the weapons in these worlds, they all funnel to me. And not only was Disney not into that, but the military was not into that. So sort of the rub you're referring to is the military has trademarks on all its technology and all of its logos. So that's their sort of way of if you want to portray the military, you need permission from them, either to use that, or, in the case of something like Iron Man, they actually wanted to use the planes. They actually wanted to use Edwards Air Force Base. In order to do that, you either, you know, buy your own F sixteens for millions and millions of dollars, which nobody does. There are, like private collectors, and, you know, non state armies that have these things that occasionally, you know, to pop up in Steven Seagal movies, but for the most part, if you want to use American military technology, you have to get it cleared through the Pentagon in some sort of way. And they are not as prickly about the things that you would think they are. You could show conflict within the American military, but they definitely don't want to show any sort of break in the chain of command. So ultimately, Marvel Studios is getting Pentagon approval for things like the Iron Man movies, the Captain Marvel movie, where, very specifically, she's an Air Force pilot. But everything after the Avengers, they sort of don't touch because the Pentagon had a problem with in the first Avengers movie, shields and Nick Fury being able to sort of negate the world Council's chain of commands. So
Spencer Ackerman 14:28
if I could just jump in for a second on that. About a dozen years ago, I was wired magazine's Pentagon correspondent, and it so happened that the story Dave mentioned about the Pentagon pulling out of the Avengers movie. I broke that story. Hey, the way it worked, I haven't been back in the Pentagon for a couple years now, but the way it worked then was when you as a reporter walk the corridor between the press bullpen, where, you know, working, and core reporters do their their you know. Our little write ups, and the Briefing Room. About halfway between them is a small and completely nondescript office that is the office of Hollywood liaison. And one day, as I, you know, kept passing the store, I figured, like, I should probably knock on this door and like, see who answers and what the deal was there. And there was this guy, Phil Straub, who ran the office at the time and would delight, unlike many at the Pentagon, in talking about what he had cooking with various Hollywood Studios. So the issue with him, with the Avengers, was that there appears in The Avengers movie to be a Supra national security decision making Council, and the Pentagon's considerations were that if they cooperate with this movie, it would act as a kind of tacit approval of the idea that the US military could be placed Out of sovereign American hands, and that's the kind of thing that will get the Pentagon pulling out of your franchise. The first Iron Man movie, I think it's important to point out, is a piece of military propaganda in a very direct way. The very direct way is there is a prolonged scene in which Iron Man has a dog fight with an F 22 raptor at the point at which they are filming Iron Man, and the point at which the Air Force is cooperating with this movie, the Air Force is in an enormous fight with Congress not to kill the F 22 program. This was one of the most expensive fighter aircraft the United States had ever built. It had proven to be entirely useless in the war on terror, because the United States was not facing an adversary Air Force, and so wouldn't have a utility for, you know, air to air combat, and that's what this platform specialized in. And so as Congress is figuring, as it ultimately would, after the movie comes out, capping the program at 187 aircraft. Here's the Pentagon aggressively promoting this new and extremely expensive aircraft as something that can, you know, goes toe to toe with Iron Man. I don't know which way it cuts in that propaganda sense that Iron Man completely totals the jet. But nevertheless, it was something that the military did not do accidentally. That was a very deliberate ad in that movie. If iron so you take the idea that Iron Man 2008 is a form of military propaganda, when you would go talk to people, whether they're in the military, whether they're you know, in the defense industry, did it land with people like did you talk to soldiers or people who got into it, and what would Did they tell you they fucking loved it. I mean, everyone loved Iron Man. I think the first Iron Man movie is a great Absolutely. Remember how excited I remember how excited I was when I saw that movie, like I could a it felt like a crazy swing to have Iron Man in a movie, let alone Iron Man as a we wouldn't have known it then. But like a redemption career move for Robert Downey Jr, I went to Afghanistan. Shortly I get so that movie would have come out in like may 2008 Dave, correct me if I'm wrong. So I went to Afghanistan for September of 2008 and like, you know, not only were people excited about that move, and like, you know, there's, there's especially even in war zones, especially in war zones, however you would put it, there is a tremendous amount of downtime when you really just have nothing to do. And so you're just sort of talking and bullshitting with people. And, you know, movies an inevitable aspect of that also on this particular trip, the MWR tent at a base in eastern Afghanistan called Salerno and cost province that obviously is no longer in use by the United States military. The MWR tent, Morale, Welfare and Recreation, basically, was a place where, like, you could watch movies often, you know, movies that had been in the theaters very recently, and in September of 2008 I remember like, Oh, I didn't see Iron Man there, but there was, like, a lot of enthusiasm for that movie.
Arjun Singh 19:14
Yeah, I feel like the one thing with Iron Man is that he insists that he is changing, and he's a changed person. But his means of trying to be a changed person is still to do what he always does, you know, which is, you know, he's regretting what his role in warfare was. So his idea is to just build more weapons, but this time he has control of the weapons. I don't really ever get a sense that he ever reckons with the idea of wealth inequality and things like that. You know in your run that you're writing now. Spencer, what's it like inside of Tony Stark's head, like he has a clear sort of a Messiah Complex, but to rectify and correct the things that he's done in the past, or the guilt that he feels? How does your iron man go about doing that? Does he ever reckon with these questions? That he's an oligarch in a very unequal society, that he is a weapons provider who is upping and escalating the warfare game while trying to be a symbol of peace.
Spencer Ackerman 20:13
I think the way you do that is by having other characters like be avatars for those arguments. Billionaires tend not to come to uncomfortable thoughts without being led there. So it's more interesting. And also, like, I'm not gonna get a comic book approved if it's like 20 pages of Iron Man reckoning with liberal guilt, right? So I neither want to write that, nor do I want to read it. I think you've got to make the conflict happen and make if I'm doing my job well, and I want to make the politics organic in the stories, rather than feel like a layer dolloped on top of it. I think it's easy to laugh at people who say things like, well, when did the X Men get political right? Like, those of us who were very familiar with these stories can see that the politics was always there, yeah, however, for a lot of people, and this was certainly the case when I was a young you know, comics reader, and especially X Men reader, the comics were crafted in such a way that if you wanted to just read it for like, Wolverine clawing a dude like it's there for you, the interpretation is clear. And if you wanted to look further onto a more subtextual level, and you know, in some cases, it's more obvious than others, but the point is, is that this was all kind of mixed into one souffle, as opposed to, I think, perhaps a storytelling style that, you know, I'll just, you know, speaking for myself, I can find is somewhat easy to fall into if you don't guard against it, where there's kind of, you know, a scene in which people punch each other, and then there's a scene in which, like, they talk like they have, like, a Talking Heads page in which, like, you wrestle with some kind of political or philosophical point. And like, I don't know if that makes for the best reading experience. And I think what works a lot better is if you can tell a story that has those themes as just an inherent part of the story, if not a motivating factor for it, and find ways to turn this into, like, suspense, turn it into action, turn it into some mystery and turn it especially into conflict. A
Arjun Singh 22:26
fter the break, I'll continue my conversation with Spencer and Dave. We'll be right back. You.
Arjun Singh 22:43
Dave, was there a moment for you when you realized comic books or just the general pop culture you were consuming was political or was influenced by the politics of the moment
Dave Gonzales 22:53
it came out in think, I mean, I was 17 on September 11, so I think I fell for a lot of the flag waving, nationalism, promoting, let's get an American flag pin, you know, sort of thing for a couple of months. And then, because I was 17 and in high school, I very quickly became, you know, like anti forever wars, as we Spencer would call them, and so that was became, I think my political awakening, applying that to pop culture is, I think, still an ongoing process, especially with the MCU, and something that I think I found attractive in comics, but didn't really have like a word for yet, is, I love the power of Storytelling, but I feel like in the 21st century, we've sort of broken certain parts of it, because instead of using a story to give an emotional catharsis or to give a thrill, there's this background hum that I've been calling franchiseology, which is just, there's the capitalism at the back of every story. It's like, Why would I kill Why would I killed my hero, because then I can't make any more heroes. You know, back in my day, I was like, I would love to have a Spider Man movie. And so the first Spider Man movie came, and I'm like, sure the Greek album looks like a Power Ranger character, but this is great. I never thought I was going to see this. Now, there's something that I think the MCU definitely fed into with this, sort of like, each movie is a sequel to another movie that is both genericizing stories and making it difficult to end stories, and so it's harder, I think, to drive home something super thematic, which is why I think, if we're talking about how to politicize mass entertainment, I think comics is still where I turn to for that, because you could Have a splash page where I could obsess over the line work and the explosions and things, but then you could have ideas, and those ideas are allowed to, I think, keep a sharper edge, because they are allowed to also have the splash page. There's a rich tradition in comics of allowing reboots, spin offs, side stories. Elseworlds all these things that I think in the 21st century, American story economy, those have been cut off. Marvel was forced to do a multiverse saga because they're like all these things that aren't in continuity also happened in our universe. That doesn't feel like a storytelling thing to me, but that's how you make movies. Warner Brothers right now is living in 2000s it's rebooting Harry Potter. It's making more Lord of the Rings films. So it's that that's where Hollywood is, and I'm sad, because it means the more interesting storytelling for me, superhero storytelling is back in the comics, which is good if you're reading the comics. I want more people to read comics. Basically something
Spencer Ackerman 25:41
that I don't think I could have fully appreciated until I started making comics, is that I don't think there's another medium that can reach as many people as quickly. If I'm writing a movie, I don't even know how many hands are in that, and I won't go from my word processing software to the screen in under two years. I'm also writing a book right now. I've written a book before, and that's also a two plus year process. I'm sure it's, you know, different. I'm sure it's longer for movies, and I just don't have the sufficient visibility, you know, if I'm writing fiction, getting a contract to publish, that is another thing that goes for perhaps longer than you know, I think in a lot of cases, the perishability of a certain idea, perhaps. And I started work on Iron Man in March of this year, and the first issue was published in October. And I that's just and mostly that book is by four people, four or five people. That's new to me, obviously, as a short turnaround journalist, as well as doing long form stuff that I have, I'm very used to perishability and collaborative environments. That's how a lot of news, and it's especially how a lot of investigative journalism gets made. Always pay attention to the fact that there's more than one byline on a lot of the best journalism that you've read, like with comics, there's a limit to auteuring stuff, but at the same time, from a creative standpoint, I don't really know that there's anything that can get reaction to a contemporary event, or perhaps perspective on A rising cultural moment or cultural sensibility into print in front of as many people, as fast as comics can.
Dave Gonzales 27:45
Oh, it sounds like Iron Man's getting into
Spencer Ackerman 27:47
healthcare. Boy, let me tell you. I The day that happened. I sent some notes back to issue seven. We changed some dialog. There's gonna be, there's gonna be some stuff going on, but yeah, like you really, you really can. And you know, you can do it badly. You can do it in a way that sacrifices the superhero stuff and sacrifices what people who are coming to Iron Man for superhero action are there for. Or you can try threading it into that thing. And if the run that Julius and Alex and I are doing are successful. It'll be because we did that second round and we were able to pull it off.
Arjun Singh 28:31
Thanks for listening to another episode of lever time. This episode was produced by me, Arjun Singh, with editing support from Joel Warner and Lucy Dean Stockton. Our theme music was composed by Nick Campbell.