In a cave! With a box of scraps!

Dear friends,

Whenever a cave, or something very much like a cave, are portrayed in a work of fiction, we ought to ask ourselves two important questions.

Question 1: Is it Plato's cave?
Question 2: It is a womb?

I watched Iron Man again last night, and afterwards I mused for a while as to what the meaning of the cave was, particularly whether the answers to either of the two above questions was Yes.

I'll deal with the first, bigger question in a bit, but for now I want to focus on the second. I want to know whether Tony Stark and Yinsen spent a large part of the first third of the film in a cosmic womb.

Yes, yes they did. Well, it is a womb for Stark anyway. For Yinsen it is a tomb (perhaps another common symbolic meaning of the cave). The main piece of supporting evidence for this is that it is within the cave than Iron Man is made, crafted out of base materials to emerge as a new, fully formed identity/person-like-thing. It is both the birth of a new entity in the form of Iron Man, not yet mature as the technical specifications of the suit later progressively improve, ad the rebirth of Tony Stark, an idea that I will return to later as I discuss whether the cave is Plato's. Iron Man is born into violence, built from violence, both facts that jar with Tony's later protestations that the suit is merely an advaced prosthetic. The birth metaphor is in keeping with the film's purpose as an origin story, in the tradition of the first in a series of super-hero films. These films attempt to answer questions about where super-heros come from, how they are made. Heroic births are traditionally extreme in nature. I, for example, was born of a lightning bolt and a fairy queen, at midnight on the winter solstice, on the top of Mount Everest in a blizzard. The extreme nature of events surrounding the birth of Iron Man are a continuation of this tradition. The second Iron Man film can be viewed, among other things, as a coming of age film. These are the simple building blocks of our literary tradition. Though somewhat lacking in subtlety they exercise much power over the human imagination.

But, is the cave representative of Plato's cave? I think the answer to this, too, is yes. I am slightly more ambivalent on this count. The analogy is not perfect, but good enough that I think that the comparison is instructive and can add to our understanding of the film.

I feel I should briefly introduce Plato's allegory of the cave before I begin its discussion. It can be found in Book VII of The Republic, available in translation on wikisource here. It is one of the more influential passages in ancient philosophy, and among the most evocative imagery employed in the history of philosophy, indeed in the history of all writing. It is also an allegory which is frequently alluded to in works of fiction, indeed it can be a pleasant diversion to reflect on the many instances in which this occurs.

In the allegory, Plato describes a group of prisoners in a cave under the ground. All they can see is a shadow-theatre playing out in front of them on a screen. Having never experienced anything else, they presume that this is the real world. Plato describes what would happen if one were to release one of these prisoners, and drag them up out of the cave into the light. There they would come to understand that what they saw before was not real, and come to an understanding of what is real illuminated by the sun, which for Plato is the almost God-like Truth, or the Form of the Good.

Now that I have made a hash of the work of one of the greatest pieces of philosophy of all time, I will try to apply it to the film Iron Man. We might first be led to think that the allegory does not apply, because Stark does not start out in the cave, he has experience of a world outside it. This mislead should not stop us from exploring further though. As a matter of fact he was blinded by ignorance in his previous life as he was unaware of the true nature of things, in this case the corruption within his company. This, and the revelation that he has much more to live for than his habitual shallow playboy ways. A second objection could be that it is actually before the cave when he is attacked, and inside when Yinsen acts as a father figure and contributes to his moral development, that truth is revealed to Tony Stark. The parallel is by no means perfect, but the themes of truth and goodness coupled with the striking imagery of the cave itself suggest to me that this is indeed an instance of the employment of the allegory of the cave.

The TV Tropes article "Everyone is Jesus in Purgatory" would advise caution before ascribing tenuously justified meaning to what may just be convenient plot points: for example maybe he is just in a cave to explain why his allies have been unable to find him in spite of persistent searching. I agree, and post-Freudian and philosophical interpretations are not always applicable, but equally most writers will know about these traditions and may throw bones to them as something of a shout-out, or as a brain-teaser for the widely read audience member. There are also many other, possibly more interesting, ways to interpret Iron Man, ways of thinking about it with reference to individualism, anti-corporatism, American self-perception, post-9/11, teh military-industrial complex, super-hero deconstructivism, liberal interventionism, technological fetishism, and, my personal favourite, interpreting the interesting fact that Stark is, for a super-hero, really rather old (his dad worked on the Manhatten project). You can even read a pro intellectual property and monopoly rights message, compounded in the sequel. I may return to some of these ideas another time. It's about time to finish now. I've got to go off and read far too much into some more unsuspecting works of fiction.