Fluent Essays

Formal Response papers (2-3pp) — Response papers should be composed in formal prose and be used to practice thesis development and argumentation. They should function primarily to develop and focus theses that may be refined into a final paper. You may approach a concept related to the assigned material, delve into details, explore broader themes, symbols, or ideas, or engage any other literary, critical, theoretical, analytical, or humanistic argumentation.All formal writing assignments must follow these guidelines. Not following correct formatting with be penalized:--Be formatted according to MLA--Contain a works cited page--Use one inch margins on all sides.--12 pt, Times New Roman font--Double spaced--Last Name & Page # in top right corner--Contains parenthetical citationsFilm Writing: Best PracticesAs this course is mainly engaged with film, you will be required to use time markers for each in-text citation: (Title of the Film Hour:Min:Sec) eg. (Batman 01:23:15). Because you will need to reference a fair amount of evidence in your analysis and writing (direct quotes, scenes from the films, articles, etc.), I highly suggest that you watch the film with subtitles on so you are able to write down the exact quote. You are expected to read and watch the entirety of whatever is assigned. If you take notes as you read, you will be much more prepared for the written assignments. Also, remember to save all of your work often and in multiple locations. mulder___believe_it_or_not__this_is_power.pdf Unformatted Attachment Preview “Believe It or Not, This is Power”: Embodied Crisis and the Superhero on Film JAMES MULDER “I don’t read superhero comics anymore. I’m probably not as worried about my dick as I used to be. Well, that isn’t exactly true. . .” Scott Bukatman (Matters of Gravity 48) CHRISTOPHER NOLAN’S GENRE-SHIFTING REBOOT OF THE Batman franchise in the Dark Knight trilogy, an enormous proliferation of superhero reboots and sequels continues to form a significant feature of the post-millennium popular American film and television landscape. As the Marvel Cinematic Universe grows to encompass three network television series and numerous Netflix series in addition to its already expansive catalogue of blockbuster films, DC Comics pits Superman against Batman in a much-anticipated crossover film while also adding to the Arrowverse, a nickname used to denote the growing number of television series that stem from The CW’s Arrow. Although much critical work on comics self-consciously identifies the close study of superpowered aliens, mutant humans, and the fight between good and evil as the preoccupation of a teenage male subject, or perhaps a symptom of the geekish manchild whose masculinity is questioned as a result of his interest in such things (an archetype tirelessly incarnated in such characters as Ross from Friends or, most obviously, every male character in The Big Bang Theory), the immense crossover viewership of superhero media would seem to demand a more expansive interpretive paradigm. Some notable work approaches questions of representation in superhero F OLLOWING The Journal of Popular Culture, Vol. 50, No. 5, 2017 © 2017 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. 1047 1048 James Mulder narratives from the perspective of identities that are not first adolescent and male,1 though as Scott Bukatman notes in a Cinema Journal roundtable facilitated by Greg Smith, others in the field worry that such studies risk “overburden[ing] their objects of study with a lot of ideological analysis” that merely repeats identitarian concerns that have been well-trodden already in other fields of literary study (138). The consensus in the Cinema Journal piece might seem odd in a field virtually comprised of self-identified fans, and in which scholars are so commonly engaged in tracking the way the superhero functions as an avatar of the consumer or fan. Certainly, Bukatman’s emphasis on close analysis of the formal and artistic dimensions of superhero portrayals promises powerful disciplinary insights. Nevertheless, the resistance to a perceived saturation of ideological analysis in the field runs the risk of overwriting the hegemonic cultural impact of a genre that remains, despite decades of critical study, indicatively oriented toward the anxieties and self-images of white male artists, characters, and fans. If, as is widely agreed, the superhero is a cipher in which the fan is meant to locate her own image, then the burden borne by the superhero is precisely the burden of ideology. The burgeoning genre of superhero films owes its genesis at least in part to a stylistic shift in the Dark Knight films toward what Martin Fradley calls, “Nolan’s much-vaunted preoccupation with realism” (25). Fradley tracks Nolan’s shift “in favor of darkness, violence, and machismo” alongside the film’s “recurrent promotional tropes—rationality, realism, political seriousness, masculine gravitas—which functioned to distinguish the franchise from the high camp of Batman and Robin (1997)” (26). Indeed, Nolan’s dark, introspective Batman sparked a forceful cascade of critical work on the political configurations implied by the allegories and affects activated by the films. As Nick Winstead notes, the affective texture of the Dark Knight films renders “Batman. . .sexually safe yet palatable to a wide audience who read ‘gritty’ and ‘real’ action movies as reinforcing and shoring up their investment in a clearly hetero-masculine Batman” (573). This article focuses on two additions to the world of superhero narratives that follow from and respond to the generic precedents set by The Dark Knight. First, DC Comics’s cinematic superhero release following the final Dark Knight trilogy film in 2012: Zack Snyder’s Man of Steel (2013), which was produced by Nolan and tonally consistent with the Batman trilogy that preceded it. Second, one of the most- Crisis and The Superhero 1049 awarded films at the 2015 Academy Awards: Alejandro Gonzalez I~ narritu’s Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance) (2014), which satirized superhero films by offering a tale of postmiddle-aged actor Riggan Thomson, played by Michael Keaton of Tim Burton’s Batman (1989) and Batman Returns (1992). I juxtapose these two films not only because of their shared antecedents but also because they represent two drastically different visions of the superhero, one superlatively sincere, and the other highly ironic. Man of Steel tells a superhero origin story that falls squarely within the narrative conventions of its genre: Clark Kent (Henry Cavill), a young man raised in rural Kansas, discovers that his super-strength and super-senses are products of his birth on the planet Krypton. Originally named Kal-El by his Kryptonian parents, he is sent to Earth as an infant to begin a new future untainted by the corruption on Krypton. Inevitably, however, Krypton’s villains locate him on Earth, and the struggle between good and evil, freedom and constraint, rebellion and fascism, falls at Clark/Kal’s feet. Birdman, in contrast, caricatures the gravel-voiced, pointy-masked, Nolanesque Batman and offers a sardonic metacinematic view of the superhero. The film follows Riggan, former star of the eponymous superhero franchise, as he struggles to mount a Broadway production of Raymond Carver’s What We Talk About When We Talk About Love in a bid for serious artistic recognition that supersedes his popular fame. As opening night nears, Riggan imagines a specter of Birdman dogging him at every turn, a relentless reminder of his past success. In what follows, I move through these two films’ narratives of masculine identity crisis by tracking the ways in which biological sex is variously activated in each film. Tracing the sexed body through Man of Steel and Birdman reveals a topography of contemporary masculinity that is shaped by these films’ shared genealogy in the Dark Knight trilogy. The sense of political crisis that subtends the Dark Knight trilogy, which many scholars have attributed to the films’ post-9/11 sensibilities, importantly operates through and as the crisis of identity faced by a singular white male superpowered individual. The two films I consider here, and the shared anxieties that attend the superhero figure in both, continue to trace out what Lauren Berlant calls “the living precarity of this historical present” within the frame of a crisis in masculine identity (196). Traversing cinematic superhero rhetorics from Man of Steel to 1050 James Mulder Birdman reveals a set of mutually reinforcing strategies of masculine representation that reorient male protagonists in crisis through the figure of the superhero. These representations of masculinity reforged through embodied crisis seem to produce what we might call a rebooted vision of masculinity as self-aware and sensitive to its own fragility. Politically sensitive, self-effacing masculinity shapes not only the new superhero, but the film industry more broadly. The 87th Academy Awards ceremony—at which Birdman received four Oscars including Best Picture and Best Director—exemplifies this. The narratives of a progressive popular imagination that the ceremony as a whole works diligently to construct are reiterated and reinforced by the white, able-bodied men who give their voices to the representation of, as Jared Leto put it in an acceptance speech in the previous year, “those of you who have ever felt injustice because of who you are” (Oscars). My object here is to build upon an ongoing critical conversation about the depictions in popular media of masculinity in crisis and, furthermore, to track the ways in which culturally salient reformulations of the masculine are attributed progressive political force even as they recenter narratives of distinctly (and exclusively) male embodied experience. Rescuing the Womb In the summer of 2013, I went to see Man of Steel in a theater in downtown Boise, Idaho, where the person who took my ticket (Steph, according to her name badge) informed me that she herself had seen Man of Steel for the second time earlier that day. “Is it good?” I asked, thinking I was more or less following a script of which I knew the endpoint. Yes, it is good, I expected Steph to say, if you like that sort of thing. Against my expectations, however, Steph hesitated. “I like it,” she reflected, “but—” she said apologetically, as though girding me for disappointment, “—there’s something feminine about it.” I pressed her to elaborate. Steph obligingly cited the amount of screen time given to the “story” and “feeling,” as opposed to “action.” Introspective, melancholy, and riven with familial tensions, Man of Steel seemed to Steph to be a not-quite-proper member of the masculine-coded superhero movie genre. Her point about the emphasis on story might seem an odd one particularly in light of the fact that the Crisis and The Superhero 1051 film’s protracted sequences of large-scale urban destruction prompted a gamut of viewer responses ranging from bored to trenchant and even appalled. Still, alongside the overwhelming spectacle of the film’s climactic battle scenes, Steph’s lingering impression of the film’s failure to embody the masculine form of the action narrative is all the more striking. From a scholarly standpoint, my pursuit here is the question of what is at stake in that difference, which for one particular viewer constituted femininity, that troubles the masculinity of Man of Steel. Like Steph, critics almost invariably remark upon its departure from the expected affective texture of a superhero film. Instead of the resolute, invincible superhuman one might expect, Man of Steel offers a vision of what Richard Corliss of Time characterizes as Superman’s “roiling humanity.” Praise for the film hails, as Steve Persall puts it, the portrayal of “a movie superhero we only thought we knew.” Rather than inviting pure admiration of Superman’s trademark super-strength, the film follows the precedent set by the Dark Knight trilogy and shows superpowers to be a product of and a contributor to the protagonist’s trauma and alienation. Few superheroes more than Superman himself have been more widely read as a figure of idealized, all-American masculinity, and Man of Steel’s affective dimensions appear to relocate the fantasy of masculinity to darker, grittier terrain. Kal’s struggle to reconcile himself to his powers draws him to the discovery of a crashed Kryptonian ship, where it is revealed that Jor has programmed his consciousness on a Kryptonian device that enables him to appear, like a futuristic ghost of King Hamlet, in the form of a holographic projection to his son. At his father’s urging, Kal dons the full superhero costume for the first time while Jor explains in voiceover how Kal’s superpowers came to be. Iconic formfitting blue and red fabric displays the muscled contours of Kal’s body to the camera’s admiring view as Jor-El slowly anatomizes the effects of the Earth’s sun on Kal’s body. Jor intones, “Your cells have drunk in [the sun’s] radiation, strengthening your muscles, your skin, your senses.” In short, Kal’s body becomes the object of the camera’s desiring gaze. The scene places him in the vulnerable, yet hypermasculine position of the “hard body” action hero Susan Jeffords locates in earlier action films: simultaneously armored against threat and threatened by the gaze, the male body is reconsolidated as an anxious metonymy for “the nation as a whole” (27). In the sequence 1052 James Mulder that follows, sweeping long shots of various landscapes feature Kal teaching himself to fly. The drama of the long shot, as David Savran indicates, draws on the symbolic force of the American landscape to imagine “the free, authoritative white male subject that ostensibly embodies it” (319). In tracing the contours of Man of Steel’s reconstructed version of superhero masculinity, though, I cannot help but return to Steph. How does this “feminine” film forge a remasculinized Man of Steel? The answer, I argue, lies precisely in the film’s somaticization of the superhero’s struggle between good and evil. Indeed, the film dislodges the expansive, optimistic promise embodied by the white male superhero and relocates it, perhaps unexpectedly, in the womb. In an interview about Female Masculinities, J. Halberstam remarks that in feminist scholarship on gender, “there is a sense that male masculinity can be a bit toxic, so to get men in touch with their femininity seemed to be a good, soothing, domesticating influence upon testosterone-driven, violent masculinity” (Williams 363). The visibility and scholarly attention conferred upon male femininity reflects, in other words, a sense that contact with the feminine produces a less toxic, less chauvinistic masculinity. Man of Steel takes such a logic to an extreme by putting Kal quite directly in touch with his mother’s body from the opening scene of the film, which depicts his birth. Lara (Ayelet Zurer), Kal’s biological mother, lies supine on a raised platform in a bare metallic room. She gives birth in the intimate pulses of extreme close-ups; the depth of focus throbs with her pained cries. She is sweating. Her cries become full-blown screams. The camerawork aligns with her bodily work, empathizing with her labor. The camera invites the viewer to Lara’s bodily experience; blurs and shakes of the camera visualize, from Lara’s point of view, the way that one’s vision is clouded by pain, the way the eruption of bodily sensation wrenches one’s focus from one’s own control. In addition to opening the movie in the throes of a female-bodied experience, Man of Steel’s opening scene also discloses the fact that the act of giving birth on Krypton constitutes an act of rebellion. The reason for the momentousness of this particular birth is that it is the first so-called natural birth on planet Krypton in centuries. Infants are traditionally produced in the plant-like automated pods of the “genesis chamber” on Krypton, which regulates their births as well as their social status. By reuniting birth with the body, the El family Crisis and The Superhero 1053 renders their child, in Jor’s hopeful words, “free to choose his own destiny.” Placed back in touch, so to speak, with femininity, the child is returned his freedom of choice, which the mechanical matrix of the genesis chamber would otherwise have denied him. The body, envisioned as porous, elastic, and vulnerable, promises choice in opposition to the constrained order imposed by unfeeling machinery. The opening premise of the movie thus shifts Superman’s classic struggle between good and evil to the terrain of the body: resistance to evil (marked as the obviously fascist mechanized rule of the genesis chamber) is a possibility embedded in the choice of what one does with one’s own body. Lara is killed in the implosion of Kal’s planet of origin, but the infant Kal survives being jettisoned to Earth, where he grows up with adoptive parents Martha and Jonathan Kent (Diane Lane and Kevin Costner). A flashback to his childhood shows Kal, then called Clark, fleeing from class to hide in a custodial closet. Overwhelmed by the sonic and visual input from his super-senses, Kal does not emerge until his adoptive mother coaxes him out. Formally, the scene echoes Lara’s labor as bodily sensation intrudes into and disorganizes Kal’s field of vision. Extreme close-ups and disorienting changes in the depth of focus once more figure the loss of bodily control. Kal appears as a teen whose body is constantly betraying him, rather than as an invincible superhuman. Bukatman notes an analogous trend in X-Men comics of the 90s: “Like the eruptive body of the mutant superhero. . .internal powers are uncontrolled; where once superheroes guaranteed social stability, they now threaten to disrupt it” (69-70). Although Bukatman associates the “eruptive body” of the superhero with adolescence, in filmic superhero universes of the 2010s, the eruptive, disruptive experience of adolescence is not a temporary developmental stage so much as a state of being. The superhero’s body now guarantees social instability. Man of Steel and its sequel, which pits Superman against a new incarnation of Batman (Ben Affleck), are premised on the hunt for superheroes who pose a threat to political order in a world already made precarious by the specters of terror, surveillance, and war. Of particular interest to these films is the internal conflict of the superhero regarding whether his (or, less frequently, her) body holds the promise of social good or social disorder. 1054 James Mulder As Lara’s pregnancy occasions revolution precisely by embodying it, Lara prefigures the bodily crisis Kal goes on to face in the uncontrollable eruptions and sensations of his superpowered body. Following Lara, Kal’s bodily incorporation of the crisis of good and evil requires the intervention of his adoptive mother.2 Martha provides the catalyst that enables Kal to master his body. She directs Kal to “focus on [her] voice” until the sensory input becomes less overwhelming. Through the labor of this second mother, Kal masters his body and reclaims control. This reiteration of bodily crisis shifts Lara’s crisis onto her son’s. Such a depiction of masculine crisis repeats, as Tania Modleski describes, the way in which popular culture’s “women. . .are made to bear, as always, the burdens of masculine ambivalence about the body” (109). In adulthood, Kal embodies the kind of “masculine gravitas” and seriousness Fradley and Winstead associate with the Nolanesque superhero. With Earth on the brink of war with the Kryptonian General Zod (Michael Shannon), Kal is drawn to church as he faces the decision of whether to act or to refrain—whether to reveal himself to the world as another Kryptonian alien who might be able to prevent the war, or to remain hidden and waiting for a better moment. On hearing Kal’s dilemma, the pastor inquires, “What does your gut tell you?” In the airy silence of the church setting, one hardly needs to strain to hear the resonance of the question with another question, which one might rather expect to hear from a pastor: that is, “What does your God tell you?” The aural slippage relocates the differentiation of good and evil from God to gut; the right choice is, according to the pastor’s promise, already lodged somewhere in Kal’s body itself. The moral of the story appears to be that Kal ought to follow his gut, which is to say he ought to follow an internal, bodily experienced moral compass rather than (and in defiance of) the orders imposed upon him by external authorities, politics, or social pressures. Lara’s labor is remapped, through Kal, on a global scale; the “realism” of the Nolan aesthetic entails the amplification of the superhero’s individual seriousness of affect by way of its resonance alongside the seriousness of global political crisis. Kal’s indecision specifically about what to do with his body makes him a figure of relentless individualism. He breaks from established moral codes and turns inward to follow his gut. In the fight against evil authoritarianism, the promise of fr ... Purchase answer to see full attachment