Ah, Slate: what an instinct for getting it wrong you have. With your two-pronged attack on Iron Man, though, your penchant for arch meta-criticism strikes a sour note. Maybe it's the Alan Greenspan quote that gives you away. You probably should have stuck with the cultural trends embodied in clunkers like Jumper, like your sister Salon. In discussing the mass id made manifest, you can't be accused of missing the heart of the matter if you pick flicks that obviously don't have a heart. I suggest the new Indy sequel for the delectation of your cultural Skeksis. Resist the temptation to lionize that upcoming movie with an ironic smirk, and stuff your gobs with chunks of Harrison Ford's career.

Because, here, you have missed the heart of the movie Iron Man. Which is funny, because it's more or less spelled out for you during the scene in which Jeff Bridges' Obadiah Stane literally removes the electronic heart that keeps Tony Stark alive. Just to be sure you get it, Stane utters a line that may as well have come from the mouth of a villain in the work of Alan Greenspan's favorite author: "Do you think that just because you have an idea," he says, "it belongs to you?" Stark gasps as, while saying this, Obadiah Stane carefully removes a device that both powers the technology in the the Iron Man suit and prevents the shrapnel in Stark's chest from killing him.

The device is a miniaturized version of the "arc reactor" that Stark's father developed in the heyday of the company. Stane describes the reactor as a publicity stunt, but it's clear that it's something more: Stark's father worked on the Manhattan Project. Today, the debate over whether the fruit of that project ought to have been used on Japan continues. Stark's father, it seems, had a moment of repentance of his own. Do you think it was a mistake, a display of naked power, to drop the bombs on Japan, when their navy, and their ability to conquer, were finished? maybe it was. But Stark's father was no Oppenheimer, whining about consequences to the men who had made use of his ideas. He made a reactor that produces massive amounts of power with, to judge by consequences, no radiation. He plowed on. He atoned.

Iron Man, like all Marvel movies, and most comic book adaptations, is a bildungsroman, a coming of age story. In the case of comic books, the character's story may start in childhood, or it may not: what is really coming of age is the hero identity he assumes. Reviewers don't usually spend a lot of words attacking the plausability of scenarios, unless the writing is really bad. They are comic books, after all. They usually take a different tack, parsing the symbolic meaning of the hero's arc, in an implicit acknowledgement of the bildungsroman thing. If you don't feel comfortable just coming out and saying heroes suck, or you feel a little silly using the same critical tools on a comic book that you use on more obviously serious literature, you can just criticize the society in which the hero triumphs, since his triumph constitutes a sort of implicit endorsement of it. Or, you can skewer the society that reads his story, since that's a sort of endorsement, too.

Slate does both. In one piece, Grady Hendrix hilariously compares Tony Stark to Steve Jobs. His is a criticism of the fictional society in which Stark lives: the business world of the Marvel universe. He reviews Iron Man's origin as an avenger in Vietnam; he quotes Stan Lee to show us the backward captialist cheerleader creating "the kind of guy that normally young people hate." Hendrix begins his meta-review with an Alan Greenspan quote about captalism, in which Greenspan champions the virtue of the marketplace and the nobility of self-interest. You can practically hear him ticking off the talking points from the objectivist newsletter. how gauche. to drive the point home, Hendrix finishes by telling us that Marvel Studios has chosen to make Iron Man in order to sidestep a snarl of licensing issues encumbering characters from Spider-Man and the X-Men: "The Iron Man movie is a decision born of greed and capitalism...It's a purely capitalist decision, and according to Iron Man ethics...that makes it practically heroic."

In Slate's second Iron Man piece (because what else have they got to do?), Dana Stevens goes for the critique of the society that consumes the story...ours. Iron Man becomes a story glorifying, or perhaps redeeming, the conflict in the Middle East and Afghanistan, the Iron Man suit becomes a conservative geek's exercise in denial: "How much collateral damage have we inflicted by trusting such 'smart' weapons to make moral decisions for their users," laments Stevens. She tells us that the movie's secret power is Robert Downey Jr., and that we meet the character of Tony Stark fully conscious of Downey's troubled past and his "mysterious ability to hold onto Hollywood's goodwill through it all."

But you know what? It's not that mysterious. Robert Downey Jr. is a phenomenal actor, even when he phones it in...which he doesn't, here. The appeal of Iron Man isn't that mysterious, either. I can easily imagine Stan Lee (or Jack Kirby, or scripter Larry Lieber...whoever you give credit for Iron Man's creation to) thinking, back in 1963, about the problems in war, arms manufacture, international commerce, thusly: What if the people whose ideas and innovation power the "military-industrial complex" took some responsibilty for their actions, in stead of just passing the buck? What if Oppenheimer had been a more effective opponent of the power he'd unleashed? It's at least noble enough a fantasy to serve as the basis of a good coming of age story.

And Iron Man's appeal goes beyond that: he struggles to keep his ideas from being perverted, stolen, and smeared. His father's reactor technology, slighted by Obadiah Stane as a publicity stunt designed to allay fears about nuclear power, forms the heart of Stark fils' new technology, his own attempt to redeem the damage his ideas have wrought, using the same technology his father developed, for the same purpose. They did not allow past mistakes to immobilize them with fear. They did not stage a sit-in, or stand outside the Democratic National Convention and help Nixon get elected. They grew up. They waded back in.

These are the moving aspects of the Iron Man story. It's like finding out what would have happened if Howard Hughes (Stan Lee's avowed inspiration for Tony Stark) hadn't gone cucoo, or if Alan Greenspan had been open to the idea that privatizing every damn thing doesn't always (or even usually) work...or if, as a friend of mine would have it, the "greatest generation" hadn't gotten us into a stupid, pointless war, back when Iron Man was being dreamed up. What if, instead of dropping out, our culture had faced the fact that the 50's vision of life and the future was underpinned with a lot of ugliness and lies...and worked to remove it? What if, says Iron Man, we got our peace and our flying cars?

I saw this movie in Mexico two days before it premiered in the U.S. The community I currently live in, San Miguel de Allende, is a sort of time capsule for survivors of the afore-referenced disillusionment period. It is a town full of groovy American expats, who recently meditated to prevent the opening of a Starbucks in the town center. Before I went to see it, I heard someone at a friend's house, a man who makes his living "healing with the power of green laser light," chuckle wryly about this Iron Man Movie his son wanted to see, and about the X-Men movies he'd already seen with that son. "Ah, the eternal dream of the superman...the fantasy of man since he has existed. When will he be happy within himself?" Later, this fellow told me about his latest professional endeavour: a form of "totally clean, totally ecologic" nuclear power that produces no radiation because it "makes power from the gravitational forces of shifting electrons in their orbits."

I knew that I would probably find more scientific accuracy in Iron Man than in that fellow's real-world fantasies. I knew that I would be disapointed in Iron Man's use of the Middle East as a setting, too, but I went anyway, because I wanted a good, ripping yarn about a hero trying to do right...and building some really cool stuff in the process. Criticizing the worldview of a comic book movie, or its oversimplifications of ethical situations, is an absurd undertaking for a movie reviewer, and it just ends up begging the question: why are these our only bildungsromans? Why has the heroic coming of age story been relegated to the genres of science fiction and fantasy? In a world without Mark Twain, why must reviewers pile shit on our Horatio Algers? Why can't an industrialist be a hero, instead of a villain? Why does Grady Hendrix not know the difference between Jobs and Wozniak?

Because it pisses people like Dana Stevens and Grady Hendrix off, that's why. When I got done talking to the laser-light healer, I thought about what sorry shape we are in if people like that guy are our only way out of the energy crisis. If moustache-twiddling, cigar-chomping oil men vs. one-with-gaia wholistic ecologists is really the menu we've got, we're screwed. I knew that a good, simple, comic-book story would cheer me up, like I'm somtimes buoyed up reading Edith Hamilton or bits of the Bible, but that wasn't soon enough.

So I called the one person I know who is both passionately interested and deeply knowledgable about alternative energy: my oil-and-gas-company-executive uncle Robert. He didn't waste my time talking about fictitious schemes of nuclear power. We talked about trash-eating microbes, methane, DC power distribution, the possibilty of microwave power transmission...we talked about the mistakes oil producers had made, and how to fix them, and the silliness of making fuel from food crops. I don't happen to agree that this last item is Jimmy Carter's doing, as he does, but I liked talking about those things with him. I liked it, even though he is a Republican and I am not. And he likes talking to me about that stuff to, because I never say anything like, "See? I told you that oil stuff would turn out badly. I told you Iraq would would be a disaster. War, oil...bad. Bad War. Bad industry. Bad oil."

Instead, it's always, "well, Uncle Robert...what are your thoughts about how to deal with it?" You're never gonna get that kind of commitment from today's war opponents, its Exxon-sucks "eco-wariors", or its Greenspan-and-Friedman-were-wr­ong-so-let's-be-Canada market observers. Which is why, when it comes to dealing with the war in Iraq, or the sagging of the American economy, you'd do better relying on Iron Man. At least he's trying.