Director: Jon Favreau; Release date: out now
Andrea: "Unhappy is the land that breeds no hero."
Galileo: "No, Andrea: unhappy is the land that needs a hero."
Life of Galileo by Bertolt Brecht
Iron Man is the latest superhero to get his own film as Hollywood continues to loot the pages of comics in a desperate search for a blockbuster. In box office terms a blockbuster is what they've produced, as it's one of only ten films ever to have taken more than $100 million in the first three days of its release.
Fans of the comic series will be pleased to discover that the makers have been faithful to the character and to a mythology which stretches back over 40 years. But that's actually a problem.
Marxist criticism has often been attacked for interpreting cultural products in a crudely ideological and economic fashion. The 19th century Italian Marxist Antonio Labriola contemptuously dismissed those critics who could read Dante's Inferno as an expression of the economic activity of "wily Florentine cloth merchants" in the Middle Ages. However, an equal danger would be to ignore the ideological content clearly present in popular culture.