Introduction

Throughout the years, films have shown different ways that artificial intelligence, also referred to as “AI” can be incorporated into different storylines. From holograms in Star Trek, to voices through an earpiece in Her, to fake movie stars in Simone, and virtual assistants  in a super suit in Iron Man. This shows the wide variety in which AI can be portrayed within different scenarios. Artificial intelligence has been around for years, or at least the idea of it. It  is a bit crazy to think that these were just ideas and now they have come to life in a sense. With lots of new technology coming around, we can now see how fictional movies have “predicted the future”. The use and portrayal of artificial intelligence has also had an influence on many people. By analyzing Iron Man through Michael Chion’s well studied theory of acousmêtre, we see how bodiless AI voices like J.A.R.V.I.S. build human-machine relationships through sound design and existence. Throughout this writing I will be discussing the use of artificial intelligence in Marvel’s Iron Man through sound, using the method of acousmêtre.

The movie “Iron Man” created by Marvel is arguably one of the most popular, important, cinematic, and advanced movies that falls under the Marvel Universe timeline. Through my viewing of the movie I would say a theme that gets depicted would be technological advancement. The movie portrays Tony Stark, who is a billionaire that was forced to create a suit while doing weapon testing in the middle east. He then goes on to recreate this “Iron Man” suit, but this time more technologically advanced. Though the movie was released in 2008 the use of technology in it was huge. In terms of what Tony used and created to help him become Iron Man. Through all the technology, one thing that stood out was the use of artificial intelligence. When creating the suit Tony also uses a form of AI called, J.A.R.V.I.S (Just A Very Intelligent System). Which is interesting  that AI was being used or shown that long ago. Throughout the film and other films including Tony Stark, Jarvis assists him with whatever he needs.

So what is J.A.R.V.I.S? Jarvis is a form of artificial intelligence Tony Stark uses inside of his Iron Man suit, named after his household butler Edwin Jarvis. Where he serves Tony as a personal assistant for his needs while operating the suit. Though that is where he is used, he was actually created by Tony Stark to speak, rethink, run simulations, rendered views, and holograms, and take actions that can be controlled via electronic systems. (Frisby, 2001). Where it is also mentioned that he would originally work for Tony when Tony couldn’t. As mentioned before the movie was made in 2008 so to have something that was as advanced in this was quite interesting but again nobody thought of it that way back then because now AI is a much bigger thing. Another thing to mention about Jarvis is that he is never seen throughout the movie. In the film series, Jarvis is just a voice. The viewers never see Jarvis, we only hear him. A faceless and bodiless assistant that is only known through the sound of his voice.

As mentioned, Jarvis is just a voice. We as the audience never see Jarvis. We only ever hear him when Tony summons him on voice command. I found this interesting because as I mentioned before, the method I am applying to my study is called acousmêtre. “Literary scholar  Andrew  Gibson  associates  this  acousmatic presence with the ghostly figure, asserting that the acousmatic voice is a feature distinctive  to  cinema  that  best  reflects  its  proper  condition –  spectrality” (Chung, 2011, p. 107). Acousmêtre, according to Michael Chion, is a character in a film narrative whose voice we hear but whose body we do not see, or only partially see or refers to a sound that is unseen by the visual eye (Charlton, 2021). In this case we do not see Jarvis. According to Harry Charlton, “Chion defines three distinct forms of the acousmêtre. The first is a person that you talk to on the phone having never seen their face. The second is the visualised acousmêtre, you can put a face to the invisible voice. The third is the complete acousmêtre, this is a voice of something that is not yet seen but is liable to appear in the visual field at some point the future. Chion suggests that the acousmêtre that has already been visualised is a comforting and reassuring presence, whereas he who never shows his face is less so”(Charlton, 2021). I think that this is the perfect method to apply to my study because it matches with the character in this piece of media. There are many other films which acousmêtre occurs that I never even thought about which will be referred to later in my analysis. When learning about acousmêtre, I thought of it more as a narrator or a storyteller, which in some cases could work but when thinking more about it, it is more about characters within the film or form of media rather than someone outside of it.

Michael Chion, born in 1947  was a French film theorist who studied sound and is one of the most notable people who researched acousmêtre and published many seminal books on the relationship between image and sound in film (Xavier, 2022). “Chion elaborates his theory by comparing it with the work of Freud. Chion talks on the relationship of the Mother and offspring, during the raising process they are constantly playing a game of the seen and unseen, when breastfeeding, when playing hide and seek, holding them when sleeping etc.” (Charlton, 2021).

“Why all these powers in a voice? Maybe because this voice without a place that belongs to the acousmêtre takes us back to an archaic, original stage: of the first months of life or even before birth, during which the voice was everything and it was everywhere” (HarshiniJK, 2017). 

Another person I learned about was Susan Phillipz. While she does not directly study acousmêtre she uses acousmêtre indirectly. According to noveltyprogramme, it is mentioned that Susan Phillipz uses singing and her voice to create awareness of the surroundings (noveltyprogramme, 2013). Which is why I would consider that indirect acousmêtre. With the help of these two people, Michael Chion and Susan Phillipz I was able to gain a better understanding of acousmêtre and how I can apply it to other sources of media, which in my case is Jarvis in Marvel’s Iron Man.

Analysis

As I mentioned above, I must mention that J.A.R.V.I.S is played by an actor named Paul Bettany. I wanted to find this out because I thought that it would be important to know who we were hearing, along with I wanted to see if he played any other roles that were related to a character based on acousmêtre. The first time we see or should I say hear Jarvis in a scene with a woman laying in what seems to be Tony Stark’s bed. We then hear a greeting, “Good morning, it’s seven am. The weather in Malibu is seventy-two degrees with scattered clouds. The surf conditions are fair with ways to show the shore lines.” The woman then exits the bedroom trying to find Tony. She stumbles upon an electronic device in the wall where she becomes curious and begins to touch it. “You are not authorized access”. Most people know who this voice is but in case you did not know, that’s where Pepper Potts comes in, “that’s Jarvis, he runs the house.” To think deeper, the actor or character is actually experiencing acousmêtre as well, since she can hear the voice yet she does not see a face. I found this important because it is the first example of acousmêtre we see with Jarvis.

While on the topic of acousmêtre and Jarvis, I thought it would be important to mention the other versions or styles of acousmêtre since looking further into my research they still work together. Throughout my research I learned that there were other different styles of acousmêtre. There’s acousmêtre and de-acousmêtre. Introducing this new variant of the method is important because it is actually used a lot and eventually it gets used in the Iron Man timeline. As mentioned before, we know what acousmêtre is, hearing a voice without seeing a face according to Chion. A great example thanks to the help of Zachary Xavier of this would be in The Wizard of Oz. Where at one point in the film we only hear the Wizard when Dorothy is in the tower in Emerald City. Another movie that uses the method of acousmêtre is 2001: A Space Odyssey. With HAL 9000 who is more relatable to Jarvis as they are both forms of artificial intelligence. Same as Samantha from the movie Her. Where Samantha is also a form of artificial intelligence that you can only hear when wearing a certain earpiece. All three of those examples are forms of acousmêtre.

Now going into the other methods, de-acousmêtre is the visualization of an acousmatic or offscreen sound (Xavier, 2022), also known as visualized acousmêtre, where you can put a face to the once invisible voice. An example of de-acousmêtre would also be included in the film The Wizard of Oz. where at first we only heard the voice of the wizard. That is until Dorothy uncovers the wizard speaking into a microphone, causing him to no longer be acousmêtric. I think that the idea of de-acousmêtre is important because at one point in The Marvel Cinematic Universe Jarvis becomes de-acousmêtric. In the film Avengers: Age of Ultron, J.A.R.V.I.S eventually becomes Vision after Tony Stark and Bruce Banner (The Hulk) help to create Vision. I think that this was important to add because it shows that Jarvis goes from being acousmêtric to de-acousmêtric by allowing the audience to physically see the once acousmêtric voice or sound.

“Embodying the voice is a sort of symbolic act, dooming the acousmêtre to the fate of ordinary mortals…. [like] the purpose of burial ceremonies is to say to the soul of the deceased, ‘you must no longer wander, your grave is here’ (164).” (HarshiniJK, 2017)

Jarvis fits into the idea of Chion’s acousmêtre because as we know by now, we can hear him yet we cannot see him. Another thing we know is that Jarvis helps Tony within the suit, outside the suit, and with his everyday needs. Which allows the viewer to hear Jarvis more and see what he does. When reading an article from Fawzi Ammache, I was able to understand what Tony Stark teaches us as the audience about artificial intelligence. He teaches us three important lessons about the messages conveyed in Iron Man about AI. The first lesson we learn from Ammache is that AI is an assistant, not a replacement. We know Tony is the one in charge, and Jarvis helps by giving ideas and simulating his experiments. “Stark doesn’t use Jarvis to replace him so he can sit on a beach all day sipping margaritas. Instead, he uses it as an assistant to support and enhance his work” (Ammache, 2023). This conveys the message that AI should never take over but rather help you and guide you. The second lesson we learn is that artificial intelligence complements our weaknesses. Some things we can’t do or need help with, AI can help us with that. The example provided by Fawzi is, “He calls on Jarvis to render a digital 3D replica of the model, highlight some elements, and strip away some others, which reveals the hidden atomic structure of Vibranium.” This helps us understand that we are not perfect, and that artificial intelligence has abilities that we as humans do not. The third lesson taught in this article is that autonomous AI is the real danger. In another film Tony and Jarvis attempt to create “Ultron” which the purpose is to protect earth. Although Jarvis never does anything without confirmation of Tony, something goes wrong. Which there are multiple instances where Jarvis confirms with Tony, for example when the suit is first built Jarvis tells Tony there needs to be more downloaded before the first test flight . An example said in the article that makes sense is that creating AI to play a chess match is better than an AI made to protect Earth. This teaches us to never rely on AI, never depend on it, and only use it for low risk outcomes.

The impact of  AI through movies has affected the audience. Lulia (2018) has written that studying AI changed her perspective on the Marvel movies that use AI., “How studying AI ruins Marvel movies for you: Tony Stark’s J.A.R.V.I.S. – clash of geek and science”. Lulia being someone who studied artificial intelligence, tells us about how it changed or altered her perspective on Marvel movies that use AI. An example she uses is the comparison of the function of Jarvis. “So far so realistic: natural language processing is something that is very much a hot topic within the tech world today. By this we understand a “chatbot” or “digital agent” that can process the natural language input from a user, extract the necessary entities and intents from such sentences and realize the “desire” or the user.”(Lulia, 2018). Basically what I gain from this is how she now sees the idea of Jarvis and how her knowledge on artificial intelligence changes her perspective on how “cool” technology like Jarvis is. Another example Feroli gives is the actuality of Jarvis. “In practice in order to make a truly effective intelligent system one must focus on a very specific and well-defined task and invest in predicting and coding any possible situation that would occur within its context, which dramatically decreases the complexity of the tasks. But Jarvis is of course not only a highly specialized alarm clock, an advanced light switch system, or a well trained flight co-pilot: he is all of these at the same time and much more. Which is where the comparisons with real life systems start to fall short.” This shows the impact that not only Marvel movies but movies in general that use artificial intelligence, and how people who have now studied AI view the movies in today’s day.

Bouncing off the last topic, I think that the use of artificial intelligence in media , specifically Marvel’s Iron Man, has influenced viewers. It has had such an effect on the audience that some people have even begun to try to create their own versions of J.A.R.V.I.S. If you really wanted to get deeper into this you could say inventions like Siri from Apple are a form of artificial intelligence like Jarvis because they are both acousmêtre that takes demands upon your request and eventually helps you. In an article written by Apirujee Rujirek, she mentions the invention of a Jarvis like system created by Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg. In 2016, he introduced this AI after spending a year coding. Although it does not help him create a super suit, “Some of the tasks he mentioned are controlling home lighting and temperature, recognizing friends’ faces at the door, and maybe even displaying VR representations of data to help him work.” (Rujirek, 2024). Within the article Rujirek also mentions, “there is an innovative AI butler that researchers from Robotics Institute, Carnegie Mellon University have been developing. Called HERB, short for ‘Home Exploring Robot Butler’ the robot can already separate Oreo cookies and scrape off the cream without any break, put books away on a bookshelf, load a dishwasher, clear a table, grab a beer from the fridge, and sort items all on its own.” I think this is important to talk about because it truly shows the impact that Marvel movies have on their audience by creating their own fictional characters based on artificial intelligence.

In conclusion I think that Marvel using AI in Iron Man was crucial, as him being a billionaire tech geek. Along with how they portrayed their AI characters like Jarvis was also done right. Marvel’s use of  acousmêtre through Jarvis helps the film explore themes of artificial intelligence, dependence on technology, and the evolving relationship between humans and AI,  along with  creating an iconic character. With that, the importance of Jarvis in the film also helps create a better representation of Tony Stark. A personal assistant that helps Tony, showing his technological advancement and symbolizes his character more. Overall I think that the use of sound in the media  is very important in this film. Helps connect with the audience and is a key to creating a lasting franchise.

Sources

Ammache, F. (2023, June 23). What Tony Stark teaches us about using AI. Year 2049. https://year2049.substack.com/p/what-tony-stark-teaches-us-about

Can We Make Our Own Jarvis from Iron Man? – Carnegie Mellon – CMKL│Thailand. (n.d.). https://www.cmkl.ac.th/post/can-we-make-our-own-jarvis-from-iron-man

Film Sound: Michel Chion’s Acousmêtre. (n.d.). Www.youtube.com. Retrieved May 12, 2022, from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hixv9eGpf9g

Frank Frisby. (2020, May 18). What you didn’t know about Jarvis. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e-HpE7h-rcM

HarshiniJK. (2017, September 24). Notes on “The Acousmêtre” by Michel Chion. Finding Theatre. https://findingtheatre.wordpress.com/2017/09/24/notes-on-the-acousmetre-by-michel-chion/

How studying AI ruins Marvel movies for you: Tony Stark’s J.A.R.V.I.S. – clash of geek and science. (n.d.). Www.linkedin.com. https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/how-studying-ai-ruins-marvel-movies-you-tony-starks-jarvis-feroli/

MICHEL CHION – Harry Charlton’s Sound notes. (2021, October 14). https://harrycharltonssoundnotes.myblog.arts.ac.uk/2021/10/14/the-acousmetre-michel-chion/

noveltyprogramme. (2013, December 13). A World of Sound by Rozita Gatzouli. Novelty Programme. https://noveltyprogramme.wordpress.com/2013/12/13/a-world-of-sound/

View of Cinema as Archeology: The Acousmêtre and the Multiple Layering of Temporality and Spatiality. (2025). https://contemporaneity.pitt.edu/ojs/contemporaneity/article/view/22/10