The villain of the not very good disaster-movie spoof The Big Bus (1976) is nicknamed "Ironman", and he's star actor José Ferrer in a prop iron lung for some reason; honestly I wasn't paying that close attention, so if there's some good explanation I missed it. But the mere "Ironman" name is a reminder that there have been lots of "iron men" in popular culture. The nickname is an obvious one, and therefore a powerful one. Who wouldn't want to be tough and hard as steel?
Well, at least one of those iron men, namely Tetsuo the salaryman from Tsukamoto Shinya's 1989 horror film Tetsuo: The Iron Man, supplies us with some kind of answer: squishy human bodies and cold hard metal are two very different things, and when the first of these things becomes more like the second of these things the results are bound to be horrific. Human bodies are, apart from their skeletons and a few other hard structural parts, gooey and wet and fluid, and that's actually a strength in some ways. Fluidity implies the ability to change and adapt to different circumstances, the way that fluids can assume the shape of any container. Metals are crystalline and permanent things, and when they change the change usually implies some sort of breakdown. Most of the changes of metals used for constructive purposes are destructive changes: corrosion, metal fatigue, parasitical reactions with adjoining materials, and the like. Metal and flesh are so unalike that they can get along (so far) only in certain ways, rigidly constrained. Blurring the boundaries between the two is apt to go badly awry.
But how did the boundaries get blurred? In Tetsuo: The Iron Man it happens because a salaryman runs over a man with a metal fetish (played by the director!) in his car. The automobile confers a kind of protective anonymity to the person who commits a crime in their car: it's like The Car did the crime, and the driver is simply along for the ride. The crime can now be imagined as something cold and impersonal, a collision between squishy organic life and unyielding metal, with an inevitable result. Tough luck huh? But the Tetsuo movie suggests there's a horrific spiritual cost for allowing oneself to feel protected by the unyielding and inevitable nature of metals and machinery. By some odd coincidence a different Tetsuo has a similar lesson to teach about trying to merge oneself with cold hard metal.
Marvel's "Iron Man" is immensely popular and well-promoted these days, undoubtedly because there's tremendous fundamental power in the idea that a faulty human being can somehow make himself into iron, and thereby renew himself and become powerful. I don't like Marvel's "Iron Man" but I will say only this about him: having him collide with the real-life Elon Musk has been a disaster, and a disaster curiously akin to what happens to the salaryman in Tetsuo: The Iron Man.
~Chara