By Joshua Christianson
Genius and Failure
“You start with something pure. Something exciting. Then come the mistakes, the compromises. We create our own demons.”
Last time we talked about how Tony Stark’s struggle with responsibility shows us the difficulty inherent in using the genius within us. People who develop their genius have more power in their choices and must do what they can to choose wisely. Ideally, they always do. In reality, like Iron Man, they all too often don’t.
In every Marvel movie, one of Tony Stark’s biggest struggles is also to address the unintended consequences of his own actions. Despite the way he learns to take up the responsibility of genius, that same brilliance doesn’t keep him from making terrible mistakes. Like everyone Iron Man is still a human being… And, to modify a line from Stan Lee, the creator of Iron Man, with great power comes great failure.
While trying to bring new technology to the world in Iron Man 2, his designs are replicated by his enemies to be used for war. While he destroys the suits, in Iron Man 3 he discovers that years ago in a drunken haze he wrote down formulas which created more dangerous technology, only for them to be used by terrorists for profit once again. In both films, he has to handle the problems his own genius created, whether or not he intended it.
In Avengers: Age of Ultron his fear of failure drives him to do dangerous things. Trying to protect the world from future threats, he ends up creating an evil AI and an army of robots intent on wiping out humanity. That same army results in the deaths of some civilians, and confronted with that information in Captain America: Civil War Tony’s efforts to prevent future mistakes like that are what fractures the very team he helped create. By the time Thanos attacks in Infinity War the heroes are broken, divided, and unprepared in large part because of Tony’s mistakes.
This is the second hard truth everyone must face when pursuing genius: there will always be failures. It’s not just a possibility – it’s a certainty. Maybe you won’t arm terrorists and create evil AIs, but you will get passed up for promotions. You will screw up in front of people you want to impress. You will disappoint some people you care about… Nobody is perfect, and we all do our best to live with it how we can.
However, pursuing excellence in ability or intelligence can only come when we make those mistakes and lean into them. Despite the overwhelming mistakes he made, Iron Man kept fighting for a better future when others would have given up. Though men and monsters were prepared to break the world itself, no matter how badly he was beaten Tony always stood back up, grinned in the face of it all, and tried again. And, as we’ll explore in the final part of this series, maybe that persistence in the face of failure is what truly makes him Iron Man.