Participants & Abstracts
Berenike JungFreie Universität Berlin
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.
Paper:
Utopian Heroes
Berenike Jung discusses Batman Begins (2005) and Superman Returns (2006) with regard to narrative strategies to incorporate trauma, including their implied or offered audience position, in order to evaluate the politics generated by these strategies. Undoubtedly, the culture of superheroes has a relation to a nation's most utopian, idealistic self-image. What happens to a nation's superheroes after the collective trauma of 9/11? Both Batman Begins and Superman Returns feature strong visual and textual references to the terror attacks of 2001.
The two movies offer contrary narrative examples of superheroes working through trauma, which leads to a conundrum. Working through trauma implies a some sort of personality development, yet superheroes are not supposed to change. They are wedded to a mythical time (U. Ecco, The Myth of Superman). The superhero is forbidden to develop, because he is forbidden to die. This dilemma of an eternal present accounts for the pronounced temporality found in both movies, flaunted already in their titles.
Working through is fairly 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. Superman remains locked in a frozen temporality, negating all change. 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.
A version of this paper has been published in:
Envisioning American Utopias. Fictions of Science and Politics in Literature and Visual Culture.
Antje Dallmann, Reinhard Isensee, Philipp Kneis (Editors). Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 2010.
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