Tony Stark’s Peace Sign Is Iron Man’s Best Secret

The most important moment in 2008’s Iron Man saw Tony Stark crack a joke about peace – and he would live the rest of his life defined by it.

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Tony Stark’s “peace sign” scene in Iron Man is actually the center of his character arc – and the MCU’s best kept secret. When Stan Lee created Tony Stark in 1963, he wanted to create what he called the “quintessential capitalist,” and he deliberately tried to make Tony Stark as unlikable as possible. At the height of the Cold War, Lee deliberately designed a superhero who was a war profiteer, an arms manufacturer who worked alongside the military complex and whose morality seemed decidedly “shades of gray.” Lee would later describe it as though he’d set himself a dare.

It took Robert Downey, Jr. to bring this superhero to life on the big screen. He was something of a gamble for Marvel Studios, because most of Hollywood believed Downey’s career was at an end at the time, with the actor’s personal crises frequently hitting the headlines. Jon Favreau, however, was convinced Downey’s struggles embodied Tony Stark’s own vulnerability, and Marvel ultimately agreed to give Downey a shot. It proved a wise decision, and Downey’s Tony Stark became the greatest hero of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. There’s a sense in which the entire MCU was built on the foundation of 2008’s Iron Man.

And Iron Man’s personal journey in the MCU is actually signposted in an early scene. The film tells the traditional Iron Man origin story, updated for the 21st century; the first few scenes show Stark as a cocky, arrogant billionaire who has no care for his responsibilities, and who considers himself irresistible to members of the opposite sex – and is usually right. He is capitalism embodied, every war profiteer’s dream life. And then he heads to Afghanistan, and shares a Humvee with a group of fanboy soldiers who want to take photos of themselves seated next to their idol. One makes a peace sign, and Stark is unable to resist a crack. “Yeah, peace,” he quips. “I love peace. I’d be out of a job with peace.” A lot of Iron Man was improv, and that appears to be true of this scene, because the script shows different dialogue. But, strangely, it’s also the key to understanding Tony Stark’s entire character arc in the MCU.

Just minutes after he made that joke, Tony Stark would watch the soldier who made the peace sign get cut down in a hail of bullets from members of the Ten Rings – shot down with Stark weapons. He would learn the real human cost of the violence he had profited from all these years, and would return from Afghanistan a changed man. The first thing Tony Stark did when he returned to the United States was grab a cheeseburger; the second was call a press conference in which he declared Stark Industries was abandoning its arms contracts. That decision cost him, but he stood by it, and by Iron Man 2 was proudly boasting he had successfully privatized world peace.

This quest for peace lay behind the construction of Ultron in Avengers: Age of Ultron, as Stark attempted to accomplish his dream. “This very vulnerable blue [world]? It needs Ultron,” Stark told Bruce Banner. “Peace in our time.” The quote actually originates from the Anglican Book of Common Prayer, as part of a petition to God signifying peace as His greatest gift; thus Stark’s quest for peace became a demonstration of the same hubris he had displayed as a weapons manufacturer, because he believed peace was his gift to grant, not God’s. But there’s another aspect to that phrase as well, because it is commonly associated with British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain, who in 1938 announced he had returned from meetings in Germany with a treaty that stood for “peace for our time.” The Munich Agreement, of course, was flawed; Chamberlain was dealing with Adolf Hitler, and within a year the entire world was consumed by war.

Viewed through the lens of the “peace sign” scene in Iron Man, all this is Tony Stark’s attempt to redeem himself. The man who joked about peace became the one who sought it earnestly, because he had seen those soldiers killed before his very eyes. War had become no laughing matter, but instead the monster to be utterly defeated.

Link Source : https://screenrant.com/iron-man-tony-stark-peace-sign-mcu-story/