Annual Students & Graduate Conferences at Humboldt: Publications
 
Envisioning American Utopias. Fictions of Science and Politics in Literature and Visual Culture



Contents

Berenike Jung

Berenike Jung graduated from Free University Berlin with a Magister in North American Studies and Comparative Literature. Her thesis is titled "Narrating Violence in Post-9/11 action movies: V for Vendetta, Children of Men, Munich." Berenike also studied Cinema Studies on a Fulbright stipend at New York University, Tisch School of the Arts, and French Literature at Université Paris 8. She is currently working on documentary film projects in Chile.

Trauma Reenactment and Stalling
in Batman Begins and Superman Returns

Undoubtedly, the culture of superheroes has a relation to national self-image. This paper attempts to analyze what happened to the nation's most utopian, idealistic self-images - to its superheroic fantasies - after the terror attacks of 2001. Both movies feature strong visual and textual references to 9/11, making clear which trauma is being worked through.

A close-reading of Batman Begins and Superman Returns will analyze the movies' different narrative strategies to incorporate trauma, including their implied or offered audience position, to evaluate the different politics generated by these strategies. Batman Begins and Superman Returns offer contrary narrative examples of superheroes working through trauma, a process that necessitates some sort of personality development. Superheroes, however, are not supposed to change. They are wedded to a mythical time (U. Eco, The Myth of Superman). The superhero is forbidden to develop, because he is forbidden to die. This dilemma of an eternal present could account for the pronounced temporality found in both movies, flaunted already in their titles.

Batman Begins is retracing its protagonist's trauma as a textbook psychoanalytical case. Eventually, the trauma work is successfully completed: By incorporating his darkest fear, Bruce Wayne becomes the Batman, literally incorporating what he most fears. Via focalization the viewer is enabled to empathize with Bruce, while Bruce learns to use empathy as a weapon against compulsive repetition and begetting of further trauma.

By contrast, in Superman Returns, the politics of the film are complicit with a protagonist in denial. Upon his return, Superman remains locked in a frozen temporality. He attempts to convince the people that they still need him( a.k.a. the US as benevolent leviathan). Yet part of trauma work consists in accepting change and in becoming conscious of the temporal difference between past experience and today's shock. Negative elements of the self are rejected and projected onto the villain Lex Luthor - it is he who is talking of strategic advantage of empires and banks on technological and economical advantage to beat his enemies. Yet the casting of an incredibly cool Kevin Spacey as Luthor is only one of many factors that allow for an oppositional reading. For despite the pains taken to erase what has happened, the text ultimately fails at doing so. Irreversible changes have come to pass while Superman was away: Lois has a baby and a new boyfriend who can fly, too.

Traumatic working through is successful in Batman Begins. The implication here is that there is something to be found in the past that will offer causal links and thus help us understand the chaotic present. By contrast, Superman Returns features a struggle of denial. At best or worst, the film is a good example for camp: a seriousness that fails. These readings reflect on the ideological positions offered in the cinematic texts.

held at: Utopian Thoughts. Trans-Atlantic Fictions of Science and Politics,
April 26-28, 2007