Relationship Spotlight: Tony Stark & Peter Parker (The Avengers)

This isn’t a connection I would’ve thought to make (is it a big thing in the comics?  I don’t know enough to know,) but ever since Spider-Man was brought back into the MCU fold, his closest tie to the greater franchise has been with Tony.  While I do get a little wary of Tony’s presence overwhelming Peter’s, the film have mostly struck a good balance so far, and I enjoy their dynamic together (Tony-Peter-related spoilers, including for Infinity War.)

Tony is our lead-in to Spidey’s introduction to the MCU.  The mere fact that Tony recruits Peter for Civil War suggests some interesting things about Tony, both good and not-so-good.  First, there’s a suggestion that Tony brings in Peter mainly for his webbing (which he’s seen in the YouTube videos Peter posts of Spider-Man,) meaning he likes Peter’s relatively-efficient method of painless capture.  This means that, despite all that’s gone down so far between Tony and Team Cap, he still wants to bring them in without anyone getting hurt.  On the flip side, he does make the decision to bring a 15-year-old to a superpowered fight (not to mention transporting him to a different country without telling his legal guardian.)  Even though neither side wants to hurt the other, and even though Tony equips Peter with a new suit that probably keeps him safer than his old one, it’s still a dangerous situation to bring a kid into.

Granted, Peter doesn’t need Tony’s help to get into dangerous situations.  He’s a teenage superhero – diving recklessly into danger is his extracurricular activity.  But as the adult in the scenario, Tony does a pretty inconsistent job of considering Peter’s safety.  In Homecoming, Tony sort of sets himself up as Peter’s mentor/benefactor, but in an extremely hands-off way.  He outfits Peter with an even better new suit but doesn’t give him any training on it, which is a problem that becomes much worse when Peter figures out how to override his “training wheels” protocol and unlocks all sorts of potentially-lethal features he doesn’t know how to use.  Tony positions Happy as a liaison for Peter, but that mostly ends up being Peter texting into a void that never answers back, leaving him frustrated and feeling like he has to do something more to prove himself, at which point he’ll finally get the engagement he wants from Tony.

Again, Peter would be throwing himself into danger no matter what – I don’t want to pile on Tony here.  However, Tony’s combination of action and inaction exacerbates the matter, and he comes to learn that it’s not a good idea to give a 15-year-old a bunch of advanced tactical/weapons tech and then leave him to his own devices.  And to Tony’s credit, he does try to be more cognizant of this in Infinity War.  While he’s quick to accept Peter’s help in the fight against Thanos’s followers in New York, he’s adamantly against Peter having anything to do with the space ship.  When Peter (of course) doesn’t listen to that direction, Tony deploys yet another new suit, the iron spider.  His plan is to use it to get Peter out of danger, first providing him with oxygen in the thinning atmosphere and then literally attempting to parachute him to safety, but when, once again, Peter ignores all attempts to get him out of there and the space is too far from Earth to send him back home, the iron spider suit at least keeps him about as safe as he possibly can be in that situation.

Of course, it isn’t enough.  The iron spider suit isn’t enough to save Peter from Thanos – staying on Earth wouldn’t be enough.  Nothing Tony does can prevent Peter from getting dusted by the Infinity Gauntlet, but that’s not exactly a comfort to Tony.  That image of Peter crumbling away in his arms will haunt Tony, and even though we all know Tony’s going to move hell and high water to get Peter and the others back, it’s still going to be a hard one to shake.

Relationship Spotlight: Capt. Steve Rogers & Tony Stark (The Avengers)

For better and worse (and they’ve had their share of both,) Tony and Steve have one of the most significant relationships among the Avengers.  Both are strong-minded and have very different ideas about how to do right, and those ideas can clash in tremendous ways.  However, the Avengers is always at its best when the two of them are using their talents in concert in one another, not in opposition (some Tony-Cap-related spoilers.)

On the face of it, nearly everything about where these guys come from is completely different.  Even if you ignore the fact that Cap is out of his own time by about 70 years, there’s little in the way of common ground.  Tony is the son of a technological genius who inherited his father’s brilliance and wildly-successful company, and before becoming Iron Man, he made himself even richer by designing/selling bigger and better weapons of war.  He spent many years thinking mainly about himself:  his own whims, his own inventiveness, his own gratification.  Becoming Iron Man has been a transformative experience for him, and his worldview has shifted dramatically from focusing on self-interest to focusing on the good of others, although his ego is still a force to be reckoned with and he’s very much of the opinion that his way to protect the world is the right way.  Meanwhile, Steve grew up in a working-class family and found himself constantly fighting losing battles against those bigger (but never scrappier) than him.  When the world went to war, he was desperate to do his part and help, lying on enlistment forms in his efforts to get in.  It was his heart that earned him the chance to try an experimental super-soldier serum, which gave him superhuman abilities and made him Captain America.  Beginning with the war and continuing to the present day, Cap has continually strived to do what’s right, always wanting to look out for the little guys and stop bullies who push them around.  He’s a natural leader, a self-sacrificing hero, and a man with a strong moral compass.

In The Avengers, it doesn’t take long for Steve and Tony to clash.  The corrupting influence of Loki’s scepter plays a big role in the harshest words they exchange (Tony doesn’t give a rat’s ass about his fellow comrades, Steve’s only assets are what the serum gave him, etc.), but the seeds of conflict are there even earlier.  They disagree about tactics, which is emblematic of a lot of the issues between them throughout the franchise.  Tony tends to be act-first-think-later, without too many qualms about what he’s doing when he does it, and although Steve can be just as impulsive, the combination of their personalities can lead to combustion.  When Steve gets on Tony to think about how his decisions effect his teammates, Tony sometimes sees it as a pissing contest and feels the need to throw his weight around, going his own way to prove that he can.  (From my view, Tony is usually the one who comes out looking worse here, but it’s hard when Cap is the other guy – it’s not too often that someone solidly gets the moral high ground on him.  And considering how much growth Tony has gone through over the years, he has a lot of baggage to push through when it comes to his actions, whereas that sort of behavior comes much more naturally to Cap.)

We see the biggest throw-down between them, of course, in Civil War, where they unofficially lead the two different sides where the Accords are concerned.  It’s undeniably brutal, and it’s clearly going to take some serious world-threatening calamity to get them back together, but what I like about their conflict here is how evidently neither man wants it to go as far as it does.  Although they’re no strangers to getting under one another’s skin, both men have learned to respect the other greatly, and it’s almost painful for them to see the other going against them so thoroughly.  Tony pleads with Cap to just see reason, to play ball, to back off while they figure out what’s what, and Cap begs Tony to understand the dangerous path he’s starting down.  At every turn, each tries to pull the other back down, but determination is one quality they definitely have in common, and try as they might, neither can get the other to budge until they see everything they’ve spent the last several years fighting towards come crashing down.  I know there’s gonna be all kinds of characters and craziness going on in Infinity War, but they’re going to have to devote some time to these two and how they end up on the same side again.

Favorite Characters: Tony Stark a.k.a. Iron Man (The Avengers)

Even if we’re only counting the six Avengers from the first movie, Tony is probably my fourth or fifth favorite.  However, that’s a testament to how much I love Cap, Black Widow, and Thor, not any knock against Tony.  He’s a highly-entertaining, integral part of the team, and the MCU might not have the huge franchise it does today if the first Iron Man hadn’t been so good (Tony-related spoilers.)

Tony made a great jumping-off character for the franchise, and not just because Marvel was able to cast Robert Downey Jr.  He’s an engaging character with a strong origin story that’s more of a personal journey than an acquisition of powers.  Seeing the beginnings of non-powered heroes can be interesting because, while superhuman abilities are often acquired unintentionally (like Spider-Man or Daredevil) or differently than expected (like the Hulk,) someone without powers who sets out to do the work of a superhero makes a clear choice that they really don’t have to make.  (Yes, powered people obviously have a choice as well, but with superpowers, you kind of have to address what you’re going to do with them.  The rest of us have no such necessity.)  As such, Iron Man’s origins are about how Tony becomes the man who makes the choice he does.

Granted, that choice initially comes about because of something unexpectedly thrust upon him:  being struck by the shrapnel of one of his own bombs and held captive by terrorists.  Tony’s injuries lead him to make the arc reactor, and making the first prototype of the suit allows him to escape his captors, but that’s not precisely what leads the self-absorbed genius inventor/playboy billionaire to put his life on the line for others.  He’s horrified to learn that his weapons have wound up in the wrong hands – among returning home, he shuts down Stark Industries’ arms division, and his first mission in the revamped suit is a plan to take out the terrorists who’ve benefited from his company’s dirty dealings.  Even though he himself wasn’t involved in selling weapons to terrorists, the fact that he designed them makes him feel responsible, and he can’t let it stand without trying to make it right.

Tony can come off as cavalier and flippant – and to be sure, he has refined his sarcasm to an art – but really, so many of his major decisions are fueled by emotional reactions to what happens to him.  Facing up to his own mortality has, at different points in the franchise, sent him on self-destructive spirals and led him to obsessively make better and badder suits in an unending quest for invulnerability.  In Age of Ultron, all the Avengers are affected by the Scarlet Witch’s mental manipulation, but the fears she reveals within Tony lead him to create Ultron, a misguided attempt to keep the whole world safe that backfires spectacularly.  And in turn, it’s the Ultron disaster that causes Tony to support the Sokovia Accords in Captain America:  Civil War, almost a complete 180 from his typical “it’s up to me to fix everything” MO (although he’s still convinced that he’s the one in the right – Tony will be Tony.)  In this way, he can feel inconsistent, because his reactions are often so extreme and can contradict each other from movie to movie, but I see why he does the things he does.  Tony is a guy who’s so driven to help and so sure that he can that he never does anything by half measures.  He always throws everything into a plan or an invention, which means he frequently takes it too far, and each course correction leaves him a little further off the mark.  It’s hard to know if he’ll ever get the balance just right; personally, I hope not, because that would probably mean his journey was over.

Relationship Spotlight: Tony Stark & Col. James Rhodes (The Avengers)

Woe to anyone who has the misfortune of caring for Tony Stark; as much as he needs it, goodness knows he won’t make it easy.  Pepper is in a similar boat to Rhodey, but with her, Tony at least has a little incentive to try not to piss her off too much.  Rhodey, on the other hand, is Tony’s best friend, and that’s a pretty thankless job (Tony-Rhodey-related spoilers.)

In Iron Man, I couldn’t see it, not really.  I mean, I see Rhodey’s genuine concern whenever Tony’s in real trouble – like when Tony is brought back home after his capture and Rhodey gets emotional as he admonishes Tony to let Rhodey keep an eye on him – but I don’t ultimately see why Tony is worth it to him.  I don’t get those flashes like we see with Tony and Pepper in the first film, those little moments that cut through Tony’s self-absorption and show you why Pepper puts up with him.  Honestly, Tony hooks the military up with sweet weapons, which obviously benefits Rhodey, but there’s not much to suggest that either man actually likes the other.

Through what seems to be a combination of better writing and the different dynamic Don Cheadle has with Robert Downey Jr. (compared to Terrence Howard in the first movie,) things get a lot better from there.  Don’t get me wrong – it’s far from a warm, fuzzy friendship, and these guys get on each other’s nerves a lot, but it feels so different, enough to make me understand why they’re friends.  While originally, their dynamic mainly seems to consist of Tony dumping on and undermining Rhodey every chance he gets, their vibe moving forward is much more mutual.  They both like to rib each other, and yes, Tony has a larger, more aggravating talent for it, but Rhodey gets his licks in, too, and for the most part, Tony’s antics roll off his back.  They have great banter together; I especially love them interrogating the Mandarin together in Iron Man 3 and bickering as they try to lift Mjolnir in Age of Ultron.  To an extent, they just get each other, and that lets them have fun even when they annoy one another.

But of course, everyone has their limits, and like so many people in Tony’s life, Rhodey gets to the point where he’s had enough and gets serious.  Usually, it’s borne out of concern for Tony, who can get reckless and overly-obsessive when stuff bothers him, and he’s really bad about asking for help when he needs it.  Rhodey delivers tough love on more than one occasion, and even though Tony generally takes it about as well as he does when anyone is worried about him, I like that Rhodey keeps trying but knows that, in the end, Tony’s the one who has to decide to accept help.

That’s a lot about what kind of friend Rhodey is and very little about what Tony brings to the table.  It’s understandable, since Tony’s a main character and Rhodey isn’t, so Rhodey’s character is designed more to revolve around Tony’s narrative (not to mention, he’s Tony – “doesn’t play well with others” is in the job description.)  Still, it’s not entirely one-sided.  Tony works pretty well with Rhodey in the field, respecting his friend’s handling of the War Machine suit with only minimal macho posturing, and whenever Tony is ready to ask for help, Rhodey is one of his go-to guys.  It’s mostly little things, but it adds up enough that, when Rhodey takes a serious hit in Civil War, you can see why it devastates Tony so much.