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. seas___post_oedial_desire_for_superhero_narrative.pdf Unformatted Attachment Preview The Post-Oedipal Desire for the Superhero Narrative in M. Night Shyamalan’s Unbreakable Kristen Seas M. Night Shyalaman’s Unbreakable may have departed too far from superhero film conventions to be successful in the box office, but the film nonetheless foregrounds why the superhero narrative itself carries such profound psychological appeal. Rather than relying on special effects and high action to merely replicate traditional comic book stories, Shyamalan juxtaposes self-reflexive discussions about the superhero mythos against a much more subtle diegesis that ultimately bears out that same fantastic narrative. In doing so, the film not only complicates the genre of the superhero film but offers a necessary reflection on the psychological significance of the superhero mythos and its promise of ideological stability for fractured, post-Oedipal subjects. “Do you know what the scariest thing is? To not know your place in this world. To not know why you’re here.”—Elijah Price in Unbreakable Superhero stories constitute an elaborate contemporary mythos in American society. From the conflicted optimism of Superman in the Golden Age of comics to the violent angst of the later Dark Knight franchise, the superhero narrative combines occidental mythology with the best science fiction tropes to map lessons on morality, scientific innovation, and cultural diversity. Although historically marginalized to the speculative genre of comic books, and thus to a subculture of collectors who passionately defend their preferred variations on the mythos, the superhero has become an icon of pop culture. Through television and film adaptations of bestselling DC and Marvel comics, complete with CGI-rendered superhuman abilities and big-budget action sequences, mainstream audiences now recognize these archetypes and have come to expect certain qualities and conventions in the superhero narrative itself. And most representations of the superhero oblige these audiences, merely replicating the moral binary of the original comics without reflecting on the appeal of the mythos itself or why it endures even today in an age of cynicism and technological distraction. Indeed, any attempt to do so meets resistance, as M. Night Shyamalan discovered with the lukewarm reception of his dark superhero fantasy, Unbreakable. Although garnering praise from some critics as a welcome dramatic departure within the superhero film genre, Unbreakable was nonetheless Extrapolation, vol. 53, no. 1 (2012) doi:10.3828/extr.2012.3 26 Kristen Seas considered by many to be a box office failure.1 The film tells the subtle story of David Dunn, a man estranged from his family and purposeless in his life whose apparently indestructible body portends the radical possibility of a real superhero among us. Yet this superhero narrative does not fit the conventions of the standard blockbuster film. In keeping with Shyamalan’s brand of magical realism, Unbreakable leaves out the CGI effects, high action, bright colors, and clean resolutions of the average superhero movie. Indeed, as Aldo Regalado has noted, Shyamalan “largely strip[s] the genre of spandex, capes, death rays, over-the-top action scenes, and the rest of its more flamboyant conventions” (116). Instead the film is introspective, slow, and moody, reading more as a psychological study of the superhero than a moral adventure. Such a stark break from convention likely led to its tepid reception. Shyamalan’s superhero may have been seen as too subtle or understated, and thus did not measure up to audience expectations.2 Forgoing such conventions, however, is essential to the thematic preoccupation of Shyamalan’s film. Unbreakable is less concerned with David’s superhuman nature than with how the characters—and by extension, the audience—grapple with the superhero narrative itself not as an action-packed adventure but as a deeply personal mythos that helps to structure their lives. Indeed, Unbreakable differs significantly from other superhero films by explicitly working through the superhero narrative on two levels juxtaposed against one another simultaneously. On the one hand, Shyamalan’s characters are aware of and self-reflexively discuss the formula behind the comic book genre. Such meta-commentary, according to Aldo Regalado, is precisely what distinguishes Shyamalan’s film because the characters themselves negotiate conflicting views about the idea of the superhero and ultimately represent the “societal tensions that exist in the appreciation of superhero comic books” (117).3 On another level, the diegesis of the film proves to be yet another example of the superhero formula enacted as it reveals the extraordinary gifts of its protagonist much like other hero origin movies. By the end of the film, then, the story told and the story lived by the characters become blurred. Yet the focus throughout is not on David’s extraordinary feats but rather on how the three main characters—David, his son, Joseph, and the antagonist, Elijah Price—discover a sense of purpose and identity they otherwise lack as subjects lost in a society that no longer clearly defines who they are, how they should relate to one another, and what their potential roles are within the larger cultural story. From the perspective of Slavoj Žižek’s Lacanian theory of ideology, this sense of disconnection and crisis found in Post-Oedipal Desire for the Superhero Narrave 27 Western postmodern society stems from the loss of a structuring symbolic order that traditionally operated under the Oedipal Law of the Father. Yet, over the course of the film, we see a new, substitute symbolic order emerge. The contention of this article is that Shyamalan’s Unbreakable can and should be read against type to reveal how the film comments on our cultural investment in the superhero narrative itself, not merely as an entertaining distraction but as an attempt to resolve the post-Oedipal crisis. Specifically, we can see through the psychology of the characters in the film, and their positioning in society, that the superhero narrative suggests a substitute symbolic order capable of assigning a purpose and place to each character. Thus the crux of film is not the extraordinary quality of the superhero himself but the nostalgic desire of the characters who want the story told to become the story they (and we) live.4 (Un)Intelligible Subjects From the perspective of Lacanian psychoanalytic theory, every individual is inherently fissured, suffering an internal conflict born of libidinal impulses and excesses of the Real. To be recognized as a subject, however, the fissured individual must be unified in a way that will be acknowledged by the symbolic order of society. Subjects gain this healing coherence through their interpellation in what Judith Butler has called a “matrix of intelligibility”, which is made up of dominant ideological discourses that “govern the intelligible invocation of identity” (185). In other words, subjects are only recognizable in so far as their qualities and behaviors correspond with the symbolic fictions that determine the parameters by which subjects participate in, and define their identities relative to, the symbolic order. But as Žižek argues, these constituting symbolic fictions are necessary “misrecognitions” of coherence that only appear to heal the fissures experienced by the individual (Sublime 2–3). Thus an ideological fantasy of coherence needs to be sustained for the subject itself to be sustained. Today, however, we have allegedly lost the symbolic fictions that would efficiently structure intelligible subjectivity. In the last chapter of The Ticklish Subject, Žižek explains that the instability of the postmodern subject is a result of the decline in the ideological authority of a symbolic order grounded in the paternal Law represented by Lacan as “the big Other” and traditionally experienced through the dynamics of the Oedipal complex. As postmodern counter-narratives disrupt and deconstruct the symbolic fiction of the big 28 Kristen Seas Other, revealing it to be arbitrary and far from inevitable, then the stability and authority of that symbolic fiction begins to vanish without any definitive narrative to take its place. Thus Žižek suggests that the contemporary subject is “post-Oedipal,” surviving beyond the death of the Name of the Father or paternal Law, which once provided coherence and definition to cultural formations—e.g. signs, subjects, and even societies. In the wake of this death, the subject is untethered from a recognizable (and recognized) symbolic status with corresponding rights and powers in society. On the one hand, the lack of symbolic efficiency allows for fluid subjectivity, a development often celebrated by postmodern theorists and social radicals. On the other hand, loss of an operative symbolic fiction can also leave individuals in the grip of their internal libidinal conflicts, lacking recognition as intelligible subjects. As the primary protagonist, David is quickly established as a postmodern subject suffering from such a crisis: his marriage is failing, he is planning to leave his family for a job elsewhere, he is emotionally estranged from everyone around him, and he describes waking up every morning with a feeling of sadness. Even when his wife, Audrey, questions him about the distance he maintains from both her and Joseph, David cannot justify his behavior except to say that he feels “just not right.” Indeed he is often depicted as oddly affect-less, a melancholic automaton slow to move through and react to the world around him. Memories of his youth as a star football player, preserved in newspaper clippings, serve as the only counterpoint to this stagnation, an indication of what has been lost and replaced by his passive occupation as an underpaid security guard at a local stadium.5 Only after walking away as the sole survivor of a train wreck in which he sustained no injury does David seek the very meaning that seems to be absent from these other areas of his life. As Daniel Argent describes in the introduction to his interview with Shyamalan about the film, David is “a man trying to grasp the threads of his unraveling life, holding on to his life and family as he fights against, then struggles to understand, his place in this new world order” (38). Yet the new world order that emerges over the course of the film is far from ordinary and is not one David immediately embraces. Indeed, David’s resistance, according Žižek himself, is further proof of his post-Oedipal condition. In a very brief mention of this film in his essay “The Violence of Fantasy,” Žižek refers to Unbreakable as a “refined psychological drama […] showcasing the pains of the hero who finds it traumatic to accept what he effectively is, his interpellation, his symbolic mandate” (279). Invoking Badiou, Žižek goes on to say that accepting one’s life as being “in the service of a Truth” is traumatic for humans, a trauma that our current Post-Oedipal Desire for the Superhero Narrave 29 “postideological” condition allows us to sidestep as we “perform our symbolic mandates without assuming them and ‘taking them seriously’” (280). In this view, David Dunn’s post-Oedipal existence has not prepared him for the deeper ontological experience of full interpellation. Thus Žižek reads David as someone traumatized by his potential identity as a hero, as someone who refuses to take seriously his symbolic mandate to embody a greater purpose in life. Yet Žižek overlooks, in his admittedly brief treatment of the film, how that trauma is accompanied by a powerful desire to recuperate what has been lost, to resurrect the dead Father and the certainty of subjects interpellated into the ideology of the Law. Even though interpellation might be traumatic, Žižek’s own theory of subjectification suggests that we desire that trauma in order to become intelligible subjects, to find order and identity in our social worlds. After all, David is not the only invested subject in the film. Joseph Dunn, even more than David himself, repeatedly demonstrates the anxious desire to hold together the threads of his father’s life and work against the consequences of his identity crisis. From the start of the movie Joseph appears all too aware of the unraveling state of his family and the tenuous relationship he has with his father. His investment is established early in the film. After David awkwardly hugs his wife at the hospital following the train wreck, Joseph forces them to hold hands, which they do only until his back is turned. For the remainder of the film he is shown repeatedly latching on to his father, watching him closely, and insinuating himself as much into David’s life as possible. For instance, in one brief scene, Joseph eagerly invites David to play football with some of his friends. When David turns down the invitation, Joseph in turn invites himself along to help his dad work out and proudly shouts this news to his friends. Yet the extent of Joseph’s anxiety is most marked by his belief in Elijah’s theory that David may be a real-life superhero, which the boy threatens to prove by shooting him in a pivotal scene from the film. Thus as David is seeking meaning to his own life, Joseph is also trying to salvage his family and impel David to become a better father, to fit into Joseph’s own narrative of who David should be. Finally, the third key protagonist, who is eventually exposed as the conventional antagonist of the story, is the eccentric Elijah Price, a caricaturist’s embodiment of the fractured Lacanian subject. Elijah has osteogenesis imperfecta, or what is more commonly known as brittle bone disease. He was literally born broken and has suffered over fifty bone fractures in his life, leaving him frequently hospitalized with nothing else to do but read the comic books that his mother provided for him. Even his eccentricities—from his 30 Kristen Seas temperamental dedication to the comic book art he collects professionally to his wildly skewed hairstyle and the dramatic flair of his clothing—can be seen as signs of the libidinal excesses of a subject lacking the parameters of a stabilizing symbolic order. Yet most notably, in contrast to the ideal Oedipal triangle of David’s small family, Elijah’s father is never shown nor mentioned in the entire film.6 Thus he is literally and figuratively post-Oedipal, or fatherless, in his struggle to find his place in the larger social narrative in which his condition senselessly excludes him from “normal” life. Such exclusion is experienced early on, as revealed in a flashback scene in which he tells his mother that he will not go to school and will not get hurt any more because the children tease him, calling him Mr. Glass. As an adult, Elijah is able to articulate his sense of displacement when he enters David’s life and he asks pointedly: “Do you know what the scariest thing is? To not know your place in this world. To not know why you’re here.” Indeed the film ultimately reveals that, along with Joseph’s desire for a father-hero, it is Elijah’s desire to make sense of his condition and place in the world, not David’s or Joseph’s, which drives the plot of Unbreakable. When read through Žižekian theory, Shyamalan’s Unbreakable touches precisely on the nostalgic—yet conflicted—desire for the stabilizing force of paternal Law and explores the implications of appropriating the superhero mythos as a symbolic fiction through which the postmodern subject can find identity. The film specifically offers a self-reflexive, if not entirely self-critical, exploration of the superhero mythos as a desired social order for the characters in the film. Specifically, Elijah, a marginalized black man, and Joseph, David’s anxious son, both seek to position David at the apex of their worldviews as both hero and father figure, respectively.7 Yet as David increasingly becomes the embodiment of the lost paternal Law in the form of the superhero, Elijah and Joseph also find their places in relation to him and thus in relation to the symbolic order he represents, thereby healing the angst and apparent meaninglessness of their own and David’s postmodern existence. Proving a Superhero To explain David’s condition and his own, Elijah embraces—even imposes— the modern mythology of the superhero. Such stories follow a conventional formula derived from the hero/savior circuit of occidental mythology, in which an autonomous, powerful and almost always white male transcends the flaws of mundane humanity and so is in a position to save us from our own flaws and resolve our crises. Moreover, Hal Blythe and Charlie Sweet Post-Oedipal Desire for the Superhero Narrave 31 outline the basic plot of the superhero narrative found in comic books as a high-stakes battle between good and evil, the goal of which is always the restoration of order (53). But the superhero formula is more than just the plot; it also defines those who participate in that plot, plainly delineating hero from villain. This is because characters within popular fictions such as comics, whether human or nonhuman, are largely defined by stereotypes. As Blythe and Sweet describe, such stereotypes allow for easy identification because they do not challenge us to think (47). Thus the superhero formula offers security by glossing over the conflicts and contingencies of real life, providing instead a stable fictional map of identifiable subjects and the moral guidelines by which they must act. In other words, the superhero ideology offers a perfect “misrecognition” of the complexities of real contemporary life. Elijah appropriates this superhero formula as a kind of Ur text against which to judge David as a potential embodiment of the superhero subject. Over the course of the film, he reminds David of a few key criteria that define the superhero over and above the average person: extraordinary strength, resistance to injuries and illness, instincts for knowing when people have done something wrong, and the presence of one lethal weakness that could undermine the superhero despite all of his other “super” qualities. To prove the formula is real, and thus convince David and by extension the audience, Elijah draws on the legitimating narratives of the paternal Law itself—history, logic, and science—to prove the reality of the mythos, and as a result transform that narrative from an allegorical fantasy to a symbolic order defining the diegesis of the film. When David and Joseph first meet him, Elijah offers his theory on the genesis and truth of comics generally, integrating the superhero formula of the comic book into the master narrative of human history. He explains: I believe comics are our last link to an ancient way of passing on history. […] I believe comics are a form of history that someone somewhere felt or experienced. Then, of course, those experiences and that history got chewed up by the commercial machine, got jazzed up, made into titillating cartoons for the sale rack. To define his purpose in investigating David as the unharmed sole survivor of the train wreck, Elijah then relies on the discourse of logical rationalism to defend the plausibility of a real superhero, posing the following inductive argument to David: If there is someone like me in the world and I am at one end of the spectrum, 32 Kristen Seas couldn’t there be someone else opposite of me at the other end, someone who doesn’t get sick, who doesn’t get hurt like the rest of us? […] The kind of person these stories are about? A person put here to protect the rest of us, to guard us? When David continues to resist, Elijah ultimately offers a scientific rationale for each of th ... Purchase answer to see full attachment