That scene in iron man where Obadiah stane is buttoning up Tony’s shirt (after he shows him the arc reactor) gives me the creep
There’s a lot about obadiah and Tony that are fucking classic tells of a toxic relationship women so often find themselves in. It’s creepy because its real. Same with the scene of obadiah taking the reactor out of a helpless, paralyzed Tonys chest. It’s rape without the sex. It’s the nightmare so many of us have lived or live in fear of. I’m honestly so glad they made Tony to be the “damsel in distress” if only for the fact so many more people can now realize these things.
“It’s rape without the sex” That scene always gave me the absolute creeps and this post really finally helped me put my finger on why that was. Especially as he had essentially been roofied.
Yeeeeeup. everything about it has always made me see direct parallels to sexual assault. i hate it and it makes me sick to my stomach but it’s such an important and masterfully done piece of cinema.
tony has been incapacitated. his consent cannot be given and yet he is aware of whats happening. obadiah is gloating over him - and it doesn’t help matters that he’s almost straddling tony, only furthering his power play. and not only is he gloating, but he’s blaming tony for this. it’s tony’s fault he’s in this situation. furthermore, obadiah was someone he trusted like family, and about the last person he would expect this from. and for the cherry on top, the camera is off center and tilted, almost putting us in tony’s perspective, making everything feel just so many kinds of uncomfortable as he’s being assaulted.
Thank you.
THANK YOU.
I’m honestly glad I was not the only one skeeved out by this because honestly - I’ve been wanting to say it for years, but I was always terrified that someone would say I was just reading into it too much.
I mean…let’s be frank (especially if we are talking about parallels to rape/sexual assault):
Tony was a playboy - he was not shy about his drinking, sexual history, or lifestyle. He had garnered a reputation for it. While fun loving and a good time kind of guy, he makes sure that consent is present during any liaison.
Here’s Obediah - this huge wall of a guy, acting like a friend and mentor. It gives him an in to be close, touchy-feely under the guise of a friend. Tony trusts him, hence why the closeness doesn’t bother him. That’s just how Obie is! Right? Right….
Tony has a traumatic encounter that changes his entire life….and no one takes him seriously. Pepper, Rhodey, Obediah - they are all guilty of trying to tell him that he just needs to sit back and get over it/get his mind straight/threaten to walk out on him because they think he’s crazy.
Huh….what does that sound like? Sounds like dismissal - a regrettably loathsome reaction many have towards victims of trauma and while not malicious (except for established douchebag Obediah), it can make bad situations worse and gives Obediah the perfect in for Tony’s downfall (the injunction, claiming it’s for his own good, all that jazz…exerting a shit ton of power over Tony and simultaneously trying to strip Tony of what power he has left)
To make matters worse - the scene itself where Obediah assaults Tony: Tony is alone. He is vulnerable. Obediah overpowered him, incapacitated him, but left him fully aware of what was going on. He penetrated him without consent (the mechanism literally punched in and pulled his “heart” out), gas lit him to hell and back by using not only his own past but his father’s past to justify his treatment bring “deserved”…..and then leaving him broken and for dead.
The reason a lot of people didn’t view it that way: we don’t normally see a man - especially an outgoing superhero type - being stripped of his agency in a brutally visceral manner. Its s shocking scene to begin with….but it gradually gets worse when you put it through the lens of a rape victim.
If that isn’t a giant parallel for sexual assault, I don’t know what is.
Oh and the fact obadiah has basically been grooming tony since he was a teen, robbing him of bodily autonomy, pressuring him and forcing him into situations he doesn’t particularly want to be in, and always asserting his dominance with grabbing/holding/touching, or in some cases like OP pointed out, even dressing him. Obie is a predator in every sense of the word, and way too similar to how a rapist behaves for it to be a coincidence.
I hate, hate, hate this scene. It makes me so uncomfortable that I can barely watch it. IM1 has some of the most vicious, brutal scenes in the MCU and glosses over much less than the following ones.
It’s a brilliant movie but a painful one as soon as you look beyond the shiny armor.
okay i dont normally reblog stuff like this, but i’ve mentioned in tags tons of times that their entire dynamic creeped me out. I’d never talked about it this in depth before but yeah, he definitely used touch as manipulation, and I believe he touched tony more than any other character this entire movie
(yes i spent way too much time making that.)
When Tony gets back from Afghanistan, gets out of the car with the burgers, Obadiah has at least one of his hands on him the entire way into the building. As someone else mentions – he buttons up tony’s shirt which - yeah tony has a busted arm, but he unbuttoned it relatively easily – so the creep factor still applies. and then you’ve got the other examples too. Also the fact that they’re business partners//mentor/mentee//father/son dynamic …. and obadiah deadass calls tony shirtless. like i dont know much about grown men but im pretty sure thats not that common even among friends.
and anyway if we look at the other characters who touch tony in this movie, it’s rhodey and pepper and christine. Tony in this movie doesn’t initiate touch nearly as much – he usually reacts to it (e.g. even though he’s the ‘playboy’ christine is the one who takes the lead in sex. rhodey is the one who initiates almost all of their contact, etc). after this movie that changes. You can definitely see him start to initiate almost all touch, except with pepper and rhodey (e.g. him poking bruce, him slapping steves hand off him, but putting one on steve). this is definitely a way of asserting contol over a situation – idk if the writers did it purposefully…probably not, but it is interesting. one could argue, i suppose that afghanistan/torture is the cause, but….i think him being scarred by obadiah is more likely.
also, Obadiah used tony’s name. A Lot. We don’t really think about it bc with the Avengers it’s always last name, last name, last name. (the ones who call him tony are easy to notice – fury, pepper, rhodey, sometimes steve). But Obadiah uses Tony’s name a lot more than seemingly necessary. And we all know calling people by their first names is a way of acknowledging them as a person, but also it also indicates familiarity/fondness aka a bond. Someone compiled a video of it.
I’d also like to mention how Tony hardly ever touches people later on, even Peter when he obviously treats the kid like his own.
Stane’s influence effected him years later, possibly even to the point of being afraid of becoming like him. As a lot of abuse and assault victims do, sexual or otherwise.
This is also demonstrated in IM2 with his reaction to Justin Hammer. I mentioned in another post that when Tony is at the race in Monico. Justin Hammer gets into his personal space intimating a relationship that is not present.
I’m actually quite upset with Pepper in this scene because Tony sees Justin approach and whispers to Pepper “Don’t leave me” and she still walks away.
At one point Justine is literally leaning on Tony and Tony mutters “god that’s awful” as he tries to pull away. Putting his sunglasses on so that no one can see his eyes.
It is only a few minutes later that we see Tony testing his blood for toxicity levels and decides to take over driving his own car in the race. This could just be seen as an attempt to just be reckless, but it is also a desperate need to assert control over something when he just escaped a moment where he was once again stripped of his choices and support by the people around him.
It might not seem that severe but for someone that has already dealt with trauma on the levels that Tony has, it could be triggering.
The scenes with him always make me so uncomfortable. Now I finally know why!
I get why Pepper left him though. I am betting under normal circumstances she wouldn’t have but she was pissed because he went behind her back and hired Natalie even though she lined up a bunch of highly qualified candidates to be his PA. She likely needed time to compose herself or she was going to lose her shit and do or say something she didn’t mean.
That being said the scene did make me feel uneasy because you could tell just how uncomfortable Tony was with Hammer touching him.
