Don Cheadle as War Machine / Eunuch

Iron Man 2 was the last movie I saw in a theater in which a black man enjoyed a prominent role. Don Cheadle, an actor particularly notable for his physical restraint, plays Rhodey, the best friend and confidante of billionaire superhero Tony Stark (Robert Downey, Jr.). Cheadle has a thankless role as a boring sidekick in a universe populated by a funny playboy (Downey), a mad tattooed Russian scientist (Mickey Rourke), a buffoonish weapons manufacturer (Sam Rockwell), and a spandex clad femme fatale (Scarlet Johannson) whose rib cage seems to have been surgically removed by CGI geniuses. In the orbit of these characters, Rhodey is little more than a noble eunuch, given the job of appearing as the appropriate straight edge to counterbalance Stark’s cartoonish alcoholic self-destruction. He is the kind of upstanding two-dimensional black male figure mentioned by Simpson in the first reading for this course.

So no, Cheadle’s Rhodey has, at first, little or nothing to do with the highly-sexed criminals mentioned throughout Guerrero and Gray’s essays. But he may have something in common with the 80s-era middle-aged middle-class upstanding black heterosexual male Gray mentions as celebrating an American mainstream ideal. Rhodey is, after all, a good military man. And when paired with Downey’s Stark, they do form yet another interracial buddy team which may have something in common with Mel Gibson and Danny Glover’s pairing in the first Lethal Weapon movie. Guerrero enjoys that movie as it “contrasts the wise restraint of an older Black cop, (Glover) with the risk-taking, violent actions of his younger White partner (Gibson).” Eventually Rhodey dons a Stark-created suit and becomes War Machine to fight alongside Stark’s Iron Man. The script feeds Downey’s Stark the more memorable one-liners. Cheadle’s Rhodey appears happy just to be along for the ride and to do a responsible job.

In this pairing, the white Stark is the undisciplined but charismatic genius who must be reigned in by the hyper-disciplined and boringly decent black Rhodey. Like the black men in Guerrero’s essay, Rhodey serves as a willing support to white culture here exemplified by Tony Stark’s industrial output. He cannot be a lone wolf. One could imagine many spin-offs from Marvel Comics films. But one cannot imagine Don Cheadle ever starring in the film War Machine.