Yale conference - the rest

A long-overdue update following the terrific 'Politics of Superheroes' conference I attended at Yale a few weeks ago. All the start-of-semester activity got the better of me since my return, and robbed the planned update to this blog of some of its urgency. At any rate, the second (and last) day of the small conference was certainly worthwhile, culminating in a closing round-table discussion, which was sometimes annoyingly unfocused (like much of the conference), but which did re-emphasize many theoretical concerns central to the topic of superheroes in popular culture.

My own paper was a modest success, but since the panel's chair wasn't very strict about enforcing the 20-minute time limit on presentations and the first paper was plagued by a computer crash and other technical problems, there was only very little time left for Q&A, most of which was then directed at another presenter, whose misapplication of Freudian terminology drew some heated remarks.

What I got out of it for my own work was firstly a new network of strong contacts, not only from some of the better universities in and around New England, but also from France and the UK; secondly, a number of tantalizing ideas on re-thinking and conceptualizing the superhero figure and how this relates not only to politics, but also to the city, to digital ontologies, to globalization, and to race and gender. So now the time has come to feed some of those ideas back into a new draft of my research proposal as I begin to catalogue funding options for the next academic year(s).

Yale conference - day 1

So the first day of the graduate conference at Yale mostly lived up to my high expectations: most papers that were presented during the two longish panels this morning and this afternoon were solid efforts, with a few standout contributions, and the keynote speech from Scott Bukatman was entertaining and contained some stimulating new insights, even if it was somewhat snarky and opinionated. I was pleased to encounter Ramzi Fawaz again after previously having met at the 2007 PCA/ACA convention, where I had already been impressed by his acute dissection of superhero mythology. His talk here at Yale focused on The Incredibles, laying bare the problematic ways in which this beloved film of mine actually has at its core a problematic resistance towards 'otherness' and non-conformity - I now understand somewhat better why I may have been so reluctant to work on this film and take its true politics to task...

Predictably, much of the discussion so far has been centered on The Dark Knight as a cultural phenomenon, with some heated exchanges of opinion about the film's obvious (and less obvious) flaws. Unfortunately, much of the social banter between panels has had a tendency to the exchange of preferences and opinions rather than further discussion and analysis; I understand the impulse to defend or attack films like these among other academics, but there's really only so many times I can stand to hear what's wrong with Christopher Nolan as a writer, director and/or editor.

Superheroes @ Yale

Meanwhile, our main news item for this month is the announcement of a graduate symposium on post-9/11 superhero movies organized by Yale University's Film Studies department. The deadline for the Call for Papers is December 19th, and I certainly plan to attend, taking the opportunity to expand my most recent research into a new paper that I hope to present there.

Lecture report

My lecture at the Jewish Historical Museum last night went very well, with 70-80 people crowding into the modest basement auditorium, where the heat was unrelenting, and where I tried my best to pack as much information and insight as I could into a remarkably brief 30 minutes. Judging by the interesting discussions with listeners in the lobby afterwards, my half-improvised talk came across as reasonably coherent. I had started off by summarizing Joseph Campbell's idea of the classical monomyth, then contrasting that with Lawrence and Jewett's conception of the American superhero monomyth, and then applying this structure to familiar superheroes like Superman and Batman. During this quick historical overview, I also brought in Althusser and tried to connect his definition of State Apparatuses both to the superheroes' diegetic worlds, and to their functioning as part of western popular culture.

Finally, I managed to move on to the actual topic I was there to discuss: the changes in superhero narratives since 9/11. My first example was Superman Returns, from which I showed the clips in which Kal-El watches the news and sees images that appear related to military conflict in the Middle-East. The next clip was the scene where he takes Lois up above Metropolis/Manhattan and says that he hears the world cry out for a savior every night. I used these monomythic elements to point out that in this particular superhero narrative, little seems to have been added to the traditional formula besides a stronger nostalgic yearning for a more innocent time (represented in the film also by the re-use of familiar elements from the Christopher Reeve films).

I then moved to V for Vendetta as an example of a superhero tale in which the hero's ideology may be different, but where the world's reliance on a superheroic redeemer who uses purifying violence to save a helpless community remains strangely unchanged. I also used some screen shots to illustrate how the film used specific imagery to conjure up associations with post-9/11 American policies and news images. My short tour of different kinds of superheroes finally ended with a side-by-side comparison of Jack Bauer and Jason Bourne, two superheroic icons of post-9/11 pop culture who share their initials and their original affiliation with America's Repressive State Apparatus, but little else: where the world must rely on Jack Bauer's innate ability to make the right decisions (to Hell with due process!) in the patriarchal government's name, Jason Bourne's journey ends with the discovery that not only were his father figures irredeemably corrupt from the start, but that he had sided with them out of choice rather than out of coercion. I'm looking forward now to doing more work on this peculiar 'JB connection' once I finish my upcoming paper on film and comic representations of the 9/11 attacks for the conference in September.