[COLUMN] Ironheart is a Deal with the Devil Wrapped in Fan Service Armor | by Darren Mooney

Note: This piece contains full spoilers for Ironheart, which is now streaming on Disney +. It’s… fine. It is another meeting that could have been an email, a pretty good two-hour film stretched to six hours of content. It’s also very back-heavy, with the best stuff in the home stretch and a lot of the opening four hours feeling like wheel-spinning and empty fan service. That said, if you are watching it, make sure to finish it before reading this piece.

Perhaps the most interesting thing about Ironheart, the latest Marvel streaming series on Disney+ and the end of Phase Five, is the extent to which the show feels like it is in conversation with Ryan Coogler’s Sinners. Indeed, there are moments when it feels like Ironheart is the other half of the conversation that Coogler was having in Sinners about the necessity of creative compromise for artists – specifically artists of color – trying to build something of their own.

Although the series is being showrun by Chinaka Hodge, Ironheart has strong ties to Coogler. The character of Riri Williams (Dominique Thorne) was introduced in Coogler’s Black Panther: Wakanda Forever. Ironheart is a co-production between Marvel Studios and Coogler’s Proximity Media. Coogler, along with his wife Zinzi, are producers. The opening shot of the trailer promises it comes from “executive producer Ryan Coogler.” Coogler has been doing press for the show.

The show itself is steeped in Coogler’s interests and aesthetics. The show is set in Chicago, a city that Coogler considers his “second home”, as his wife’s family hails from there. At one point, Riri’s mother Ronnie (Anji White) is heard watching an episode of The X-Files, a show that Coogler is currently planning to reboot. While it is important not to downplay Hodge’s authorship of the series, there is a strong sense in which Ironheart is in conversation with Coogler’s larger body of work.

The show follows Riri Williams, a talented young inventor who is struggling to get the resources and the support that she needs to realize her creative vision. In the case of the show, that vision is a suit of armor similar to those worn by heroes like Tony Stark (Robert Downey Jr.) or James Rhodes (Don Cheadle). “I want to build something undeniable,” Riri explains to the Dean of M.I.T. (Jim Rash) in the show’s opening episode. Riri has a strong sense of pride, and is trying to express herself.

When she meets with local Chicago criminal Parker Robbins (Anthony Ramos), she explains her ambitions. “What I’m building is…,” she begins. Robbins cuts her off, suggesting, “… important?” Riri corrects him: “Iconic.” Riri is not building an object of social utility, but a work of art. Riri is making a statement. In particular, she is making a statement about her value and her place in the larger world around her.

Robbins even argues that Riri is not a conventional superhero. “You were so sure you were one of the good ones, but now look at you,” taunts her in the season finale. “You have your fancy suit, but you’re not going to use it to stop a speeding train or save a city from an asteroid. No, you just want this power for yourself.” To be clear, this is not unusual within the framework of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. It is intrinsic to how this fictional universe understands superheroism.

However, Riri is not like most superheroes in this shared universe. She has a fairly sizable disadvantage over most of her contemporaries. “I need cash,” she explains in her opening monologue. “Money. Do you think Tony Stark would be Tony Stark if he wasn’t a billionaire? No shade. That’s just the way the world works.” When Robbins’ cousin John (Manny Montana) asks why she hasn’t broken out yet, she explains, “I don’t have a billion. I can’t compete without resources.”

This premise is not so far removed from the basic narrative set-up of Sinners. Sinners follows twins Smoke (Michael B. Jordan) and Stack (also Jordan) as they return to the Mississippi Delta from Chicago, having worked for (and stolen from) the city’s Irish and Italian mobs. Like Riri, Smoke and Stack are looking to realize their creative and independent vision, using their ill-gotten gains to set up a juke joint for the local African American population.

Both Sinners and Ironheart suggest that any successful creative enterprise involves some deal with a literal and supernatural devil. In Sinners, it very quickly becomes clear that the establishment set-up by Smoke and Stack is not financially viable. At the same time, the bar finds itself besieged by a vampire named Remmick (Jack O’Connell), who offers the brothers “fellowship and love” (and gold) in return for an invitation into their party and the talent of their musician Sammie (Miles Caton).

In Ironheart, Riri agrees to join Robbins’ gang of criminals ripping off local businesses in order to secure the funding that she needs. “I’m only doing this because I have to,” Riri insists at several points. However, it quickly becomes clear that Robbins himself is beholden to a more powerful force, the literal demon Mephisto (Sacha Baron Cohen), who traded Robbins power in exchange for his soul. Mephisto takes a similar interest in Riri, claiming to want “to help the unseen, the unheard.”

In both Sinners and Ironheart, this supernatural moral compromise is framed in creative terms. In Sinners, Remmick seeks control of Sammie’s artistic expression. “I want your stories,” he insists. “And I want your songs.” In Ironheart, Mephisto takes Riri to dinner to pitch their potential collaboration. “Will you sign with me?” Mephisto asks, sounding more like a talent representative than a demon. In Coogler’s world, particularly for people of color, the path to success is often a deal with the devil.

To Coogler, creative opportunities at that level are often built on compromise. Very tellingly, for all that Riri is a generational talent, people seem primarily interested in her as a potential successor to Tony Stark rather than as her own person. Asked about the suit of armor, she explains, “People are obsessed with them. I could build a thousand other things and no one would care. But if I can build one of them? Better than everyone else? People got no choice but to respect me.”

This is perhaps the oldest creative compromise in Hollywood: “one for you, one for them.” In order to be given the opportunity to make their own creative projects, talented filmmakers have historically had to take on work-for-hire jobs for major studios. After all, Coogler had to make Creed for Warner Bros. and both Black Panther and Wakanda Forever for Disney before he was given the opportunity to make Sinners, an original project that he will eventually own in its entirety. Coogler built his assembly-line suits of armor and earned his respect.

Coogler is nothing if not pragmatic. Both Ironheart and Sinners end with the surviving heroes accepting that demonic deal. In Sinners, Smoke dies in a gunfight with the Ku Klux Klan outside the juke joint while Stack lives eternal life as an ageless vampire with his beloved Mary (Hailee Steinfeld). At the end of Ironheart, Riri accepts Mephisto’s deal to render the holographic artificial intelligence N.A.T.A.L.I.E. (Lyric Ross) from inside her suit as a fully realized person, resurrecting her dead best friend Natalie. Her creation is made real.

Coogler is too clear-eyed to fully embrace some abstract romantic ideal of integrity. Compromise is necessary. The problem, of course, is that these deals have become increasingly rare. Now it seems like once a filmmaker ends up within the machinery of the studio system, every project is “one for them.” As Christopher Nolan, one of Coogler’s influences, wryly observed in The Dark Knight Rises, his “one for them” sandwiched between the “ones for him” of Inception and Interstellar, “Once you’ve done what you had to, they’ll never let you do what you want to.”

Although Ironheart was written and shot long before the bidding war over the script for Sinners, the two works feel like the same side of the same coin. Sinners is the more artistic and personal work, largely free from that creative compromise. It is undeniably Coogler’s “one for him.” In contrast, Ironheart often feels like a work of nothing but creative compromise, an extended and protracted example of “one for them.” However, Ironheart is also about what it means to be “one for them.”

The show works best when it focuses on Riri and her family, on her journey and her development. However, to tell that story, Ironheart is forced to embrace the sort of empty formulaic nonsense that holds back so many of these streaming shows. There is a lot of unnecessary fan service, particularly in the opening stretch. The show works hard to tie Riri to Tony Stark, which is a problem when (allowing for pre-recorded promotional messages) Downey does not actually appear in the show.

For its first half, Ironheart is forced to pay fealty to the Iron Man franchise, despite no actual support from the Iron Man franchise. Riri claims that the suit itself is an act of fan service, albeit by transference. Her deceased stepfather Gary (LaRoyce Hawkins) was “the real fan.” In a completely unnecessary twist, it’s also revealed that Riri’s new partner Joe McGillicuddy (Alden Ehrenreich) is really Ezekial Stane, the secret son of Obidiah Stane (Jeff Bridges), the villain from the first Iron Man.

None of this has any actual weight. Because Downey and Bridges don’t appear, it makes no real sense to tie Thorne and Ehrenreich so strongly to those characters. Indeed, because Obidiah Stane only appeared in a single movie released 17 years ago, Ezekial’s entire character arc and back story consists of incredibly labored and clunky exposition. It’s the same vacuous nostalgia that permeated Captain America: Brave New World earlier in the summer, pointless worship of the corporate brand.

This emphasis on tying Ironheart into the larger Iron Man franchise without anything to back it up is a major issue with the show. It means that it takes the show five hours to get to Riri’s actual motivation for building a suit of armor for herself. Her stepfather Gary and her best friend Natalie were killed in a drive-by shooting, so of course the first thing Riri builds is a protective suit. “It was the only thing I could do to protect us,” Riri admits to her mother. “I will never let that happen again.”

This is a legitimately clever character beat. It makes sense given what the show tells the audience about Riri and about her family. It imbues the armor with weight and meaning beyond its familiarity within the larger corporate franchise. It’s such a neat storytelling detail that it feels obvious from the moment that the audience learns how Gary and Natalie died, and it makes it even more frustrating that this revelation – the beating heart of the story – is buried under literal hours of fan service.

Indeed, it is very telling that a significant portion of the show’s extended runtime feels like a set of contractual obligations – continuity, fan service, color-coded blast-battles – to get to what the story is actually about. While most of the Marvel streaming shows suffer from an out-of-nowhere final-episode villain reveal, Ironheart benefits surprisingly well from it. Robbins and Stane are ultimately distractions. The essence of Ironheart lies in that final dinner table conversation with the devil, the compromise Riri has to make to be allowed to create.

For a show about a girl in a suit of mechanical armor, Ironheart is fascinated by magic and mysticism. It makes sense for a show about creative expression to focus on something that cannot be reduced to simple formulas and equations. Indeed, Robbins’ central character flaw is his driven pursuit of “enough commas and zeros in his bank account to feel worthy of respect”, in contrast to his desire to actually make anything meaningful or creative. Robbins is not an artist, unlike Riri.

Ironheart understands that magic operates according to its own economy. “Magic is a mutual exchange,” Zelma (Regan Aliyah) tells Riri. “There’s always a cost.” At its core, Ironheart is a show about paying that price.