Iron Man Poster Analysis

In an Iron Man 2 movie cover found on the Amazon website, there are four people on the poster. Specifically, there are two men and two women. The men are positioned above the women and are dressed in suits. Both women appear to be wearing tight, form-fitting clothes. While the men are wearing sharp suits that seem to emphasizes their size. The women’s clothes seems to be used to play up their beauty, while the men’s’ seems to be to enhance their powerful look. The background is mostly black with two different Iron Men positioned behind the four people. The men are in the center of the cover, while the women are near the sides. An interesting aspect of this poster is that everyone is wearing dark clothing. The men and women are all wearing black …show more content…
He has two giant Iron Men behind him to his side, almost like they are his personal robots. This could imply that the audience is powerful men or women that can identify with that kind of command that RDJ seems to possess in this poster. It seems that the positioning is so that RDJ is the first to captures the viewer’s attention. RDJ is almost exactly in the middle and everyone else in the poster seems to be positioned so that they draw attention to the focal point that is RDJ. Just from his positioning and sharp clothing, he seems to be the main figure of the poster. He looks like an ideal man because he seems almost perfect physically. George Mosse in “The Image of Man” mentioned the Germans use of the concept of positioning and idealistic depiction during the Holocaust. The Germans placed a giant statue of a naked male in the middle of propaganda display. This man was made to look flawless and the ideal representation of a man in an attempt to show a “physical inferiority of the Jews,” (66). The key use of positioning drew onlookers’ eyes to the man in the middle and almost naturally compared him to the inferior-looking men to the sides of him. The movie poster does a similar job of positioning RDJ so he is like the nude man thus making him look like the most powerful figure. The poster could also be aiming at an audience that likes to choose sides because the seemingly evil figure in the bottom middle is almost divided by a line from the pure, heroic looking RDJ above him. The destruction and fire that the rugged man is causing is the evil side. He looks like a natural villain who just wants to cause mayhem and chaos. On the top, RDJ and his crew are all dressed like a crime-fighting group with professional outfits and a look of determination in their eye. The four look like law-abiding citizens, while the rugged man looks like a rebel. Mosse discusses a Karl Marx idea of masculinity that was slightly different.