Stereotypes In Iron Man And The Killers

The movies Iron Man and The Killers seem to have nothing in common besides the fact that there are bad guys in the movies. However, there is one other similarity: the stereotype of races. In both movies, White men are the superior race; they are powerful and, most of the time, rich. The minority races, such as Black and Middle Eastern people, are given “menial positions or in positions of social inferiority” (Neff). There was only one scene in The Killers where a Black man is shown and he was the cook, which is seen to be a menial position and low class. In Iron Man, the Middle Eastern men were terrorists who were low class in raggedy clothes and dirty faces. It seems that most of the other races, besides White, are given bad or lowly representations.

White men in the movies are represented by symbols that make them seem powerful and rich. Tony Stark in Iron Man is symbolized through the way he dresses, how he acts, and where he lives. He dresses up in expensive fancy suits, acts like an arrogant playboy who goes out and parties, and he lives a huge, beautiful, and high-tech house. In the first scene, Stark does not even go to his awards

The symbols that depicted this was through the different languages they spoke, the place where they hid out, and by the way they dressed. Society has determined that most Muslim and Middle Eastern people are all terrorists due to 9/11 and the movie reinforces that notion by making the Middle Eastern characters be the bad guys. The audience knows that they are the bad guys when we see the terrorists wear dirty, ripped-up clothes, carry guns, and yell at Tony Stark in a different language, fitting the stereotypical image we have of what terrorists look like. These symbols fortify the ideas of what terrorists look like to society and supports the stereotype that Muslims and Middle Eastern people are all terrorists despite the actual truth that most of them are