Demon In A Bottle In A Paper Sack: Iron Man 3 IS Tony Stark’s Alcoholism Story

Editor’s Note: It’s pretty much impossible to discuss the plot of the movie without, you know, spoiling it. So if you want to remain pristine on this, give this editorial a pass until you’ve seen Iron Man 3.

Ever since the news that Iron Man director Jon Favreau had hired Robert Downey Jr. to play Tony Stark in that first movie, there has been an implied promise that, at some point, we would see an adaptation of the classic Demon In A Bottle story arc in one of the Iron Man movies. Sure, Downey was an Academy Award winning actor, but in the early 2000s, he was better known as a reckless drug addict who spent as much time in front of a judge as he did in front of a camera. For good or ill, that history was part of why comic fans got so excited about Downey’s casting as Tony: when the time came to touch on the alcoholism story, it would be fronted by a guy who knew what it was like to lose damn near everything he cared about to substance abuse.

Well, Iron Man 3 is out. It is, as of this writing, the final turn as Tony Stark that Downey is contracted for (although if Kevin Feige has a brain in his Goddamned head, he will offer Downey anything he wants to do Avengers 2, up to and including Stan Lee’s left testicle), and from all advance reports, it was not going to be the Demon In A Bottle story that we’ve been hoping for since 2008 – hell, considering the very first thing we ever see of Tony Stark in any movie is his hand with a Goddamned drink in it, they might as well have promised it to us.

Well, having seen the flick, I can tell you that director Shane Black has excised almost all references to Tony’s drinking… and yet you should make no mistake: this is Tony’s long-awaited alcoholism story. The story fairly reeks of being a first-draft Demon In A Bottle story, with all the overt references to actual, you know, drinking, removed. But if you look for the signs, they’re there… like being around a dude in a nice suit and clean hair, but whose sweat smells faintly of Jack Daniels.

One of the main throughlines of Iron Man 3 is that the events of The Avengers have damaged Tony. We see him have anxiety attacks whenever people ask him about the wormhole. During the first act, we see Tony basically holed up in his basement machine shop, compulsively designing and redesigning new suits of armor, including ways to remote control them, presumably so he doesn’t have to go out and face danger anymore (and if / when I ever get around to actually reviewing the movie, I will address how seeing a drone pilot is not anywhere near as exciting as seeing an actual pilot. It is a failing in the movie, and one that serves a psychological profile of Tony Stark more than it makes an exciting story. Let’s face it: if Top Gun was about a hotshot drone pilot, Tom Cruise would be hustling strangers to take personality tests outside of Grand Central Station right now). We see that Tony’s withdrawal is alienating Pepper and Rhodey, with Pepper all but berating Tony at times for his isolationism.

Which is all well and good, but the on-its-face “panic disorder” story doesn’t really hold up. If Tony was, in fact, suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder, would Pepper and Rhodey really be pissed at him? Wouldn’t they be a little more understanding about a guy who goes into anxiety attacks whenever anyone asks him about the wormhole, and who is coping through work?

Of course they would. But they wouldn’t if he was actually chronically shitfaced and irrational because of it.

Which is how Tony would react to something supposedly so traumatic that it gives him panic attacks. Hell, in Iron Man 2 we saw Tony get staggering drunk when he through he would die of Palladium poisoning. In the deleted opening to that movie, we saw Tony yorking into the airplane toilet before jumping out to Stark Expo, and that was on the day of one of his greatest professional triumphs, for Christ’s sake. You think he’s not spending as much time ripping off a bottle of Johnnie Walker Blue as he is designing new armor?

Look at that scene where Tony calls out The Mandarin on camera: in response to a simple question (well, simple for one of America’s greatest superheroes), Tony becomes abnormally belligerent, threatening to kill The Mandarin, giving out his home address and breaking the questioner’s phone – see it here if you don’t remember it. That’s beer muscles right there, kids. That’s the kind of irrational aggression that you get when you’re hammered, not when you’re so stressed that you can barely talk to people without freaking out. That’s drunk behavior, kids; trust a guy writing this on his fourth beer.

And when The Mandarin predictably shows up at his house with a bunch of rocket-armed helicopters, Tony is unable to effectively fight back. We are told that it is partially because the Mark 42 armor is a prototype, but stop and think about it for a second: that means that, knowing The Mandarin knows where he lives, Tony was messing around with flawed armor. Further, it means that his work on that armor was just sloppy – we see the damn Mark 42 malfunction a handful of times and full on fall apart at least twice. Sounds like the misplaced arrogance and shaky work of a messy drunkard to me.

Then there’s act two, after Tony loses his home to The Mandarin’s attack. He’s stuck out in the back woods somewhere, having to deal with a precocious kid as an assistant, trying to charge his armor off of wall current like a common hippie with a Prius. He’s lying low, meeting possible sources of information in shitty dive bars, and generally slumming it in the ‘burbs with the rest of us, stripped of all his resources. Sound like a guy who’s hit his bottom to you? And through the whole experience, Tony is just a douchebag to the kid, who’s the only one willing to help him out… bad enough that he feels he needs to “make amends” to him by the end of the movie. And wow, isn’t Tony shaky through most of this part of the movie? You can call it anxiety, but I’ll stick with drying out, thanks (as a plot point, not personally. Hello, beer six!).

And let’s not forget that the antagonists of this film are created specifically as a result of Tony being an asshole while he was drunk. It is the one place in the movie where the circumstances of his behavior at that conference in 1999 are stated explicitly; in the final act, speaking of Extremis, Tony says (paraphrased), “I almost had it figured out thirteen years ago, when I was drunk.” That’s a big statement right there; it baldly says that Tony’s life reached this crisis point, where he almost loses his girlfriend, his best friend and his life… because of his drinking. That line is a throwaway line, and could easily be taken as a boast in his scientific abilities… but I saw more there. It is an implicit acknowledgement that his drinking caused these problems.

And then there’s that ending. Tony learns to trust and rely on his loved ones – hell, it’s Pepper that beats the bad guy, making Tony literally powerless… followed by his surrendering himself implicitly by destroying all his armor. And once he does? Things all come back together. He gets his girl back. He makes amends with the kid. And he agrees to have his heart repaired, curing the “condition” he’s carried since the first movie. Jesus, he’s even in half-assed therapy by the end, based on the post-credits teaser. So in the denouement, we have Tony hitting about three or four of the traditional twelve steps (I’m personally only on step eight. And by “step,” I mean, “beer”).

I’m willing to make a reasonably substantial bet that, if we could get our hands on the fist draft of Iron Man 3‘s script, we’d see Tony shitfaced at his workbench, drunk when The Mandarin attacks his house, shaking with the D.T.s when working with the kid, and pouring out the contents of his bar at some point during the final voiceover. But apparently Disney told Shane Black to ice the booze story… yet Black gave it to us anyway. It’s really kind of remarkable if you stop and think about it: all the elements of Demon In A Bottle are in Iron Man 3, while only mentioning booze once or twice.

Would it have been nice to get a one-to-one adaptation of Demon In A Bottle? Sure it would, for comic book fans. But with the right kind of eyes, you can see that Shane Black gave us that story anyway, in full view of the tyrannical Mouse. It ain’t a perfect movie, but it really is a story about an alcoholic.

Right down to hiding its booze.