superhumans—on film can tell us something about why our representatives perpetually disappoint us. Through a pessimist reading of Spike Jonze’s 2013 film Her, he concludes that this experience can also provide clues about what we can do about it. Taken together, these talks may raise more questions than answers about the role of superheroic narratives in contemporary political life. Superheroic films may be appealing because of the mythological portraits of resilience, courage, and fantastic strength they present. Or, perhaps such films appeal because they offer audiences comforting stories of innocence defended, and a world set right. Such seductive narratives might flatter and soothe audiences rather than engaging and activating them. Yet, as these talks demonstrate, if there is anything that superhero films accomplish it is to hold these tensions between saving and failing, innocent and agentic, ordinary and extraordinary, open to sight.
1. On the comic book industry’s reaction to 9/11, see Bradford W. Wright, Comic Book Nation: The Transformation of Youth Culture in America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001), 287–95. I have only included Marvel and DC properties in this count. This includes figures like Zorro and the Lone Ranger, who are considered precursors to the first “superheroes.” For these lists, see en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_films_based_on_DC_Comics and en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_films_based_on_Marvel_Comics (accessed 13 August 2018). 2. See Lauren Berlant, Cruel Optimism (Durham: Duke University Press, 2011); and Michael Rogin, Independence Day (London: British Film Institute, 1998). 3. John Lawrence and Robert Jewett, The Myth of the American Superhero (Cambridge: Erdmans Publishing Company, 2002), 5. 4. Umberto Eco and Natalie Chilton, “The Myth of Superman: Review, The Adventures of Superman,” Diacritics 2, no. 1 (Spring 1972): 14–22. 5. Elizabeth Anker, Orgies of Feeling: Melodrama and the Politics of Freedom (Durham: Duke University Press, 2014). 6. Sheldon Wolin, Fugitive Democracy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2016), 14. 7. Peter Coogan, “The Definition of the Superhero,” in A Comic Studies Reader, ed. Jeet Heer and Kent Worcester (University Press of Mississippi, 2009), 77–93. 8. Richard Reynolds, Super Heroes: A Modern Mythology (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1992), 74. 9. For a contrasting view of superhero narratives focused on comic books, see Neal Curtis, Sovereignty and Superheroes (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2016). 10. Ibid., 5–6. 11. Berlant, Cruel Optimism, 9. 12. See Andreas Kalyvas, Democracy and the Politics of the Ordinary (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 6. 13. Carl Schmitt, The Concept of the Political, trans. George Schwab (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 5. 14. Ibid; Giorgio Agamben, State of Exception (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005). 15. The Avengers, directed and with a screenplay by Joss Whedon (Burbank: Marvel Studios, 2012). 16. Anker, Orgies of Feeling, 27. 17. See, for example, Sheldon Wolin, Fugitive Democracy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2016); and Wendy Brown, Walled States, Waning Sovereignty. New York: Zone Books, 2010). 18. Bonnie Honig, Emergency Politics: Paradox, Law, Democracy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011), 3. 158
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19. On this point, see especially Bonnie Honig, Democracy and the Foreigner (Princeton: Princeton University Press 2001); and William Connolly, The Ethos of Pluralization (Minneapolis: Minnesota Press, 1995). 20. Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1958), 190. Hereafter abbreviated HC. 21. Hannah Arendt, “Freedom and Politics: A Lecture” in Thinking without a Banister: Essays in Understanding, 1953–1975, ed. Jerome Kohn (New York: Schocken Books, 2018), 224. Hereafter abbreviated “FP.” 22. HC, 177. 23. “FP,” 225. 24. Often critically: see, for instance, Sheldon Wolin, “Hannah Arendt: Democracy and the Political,” Salmagundi, no. 60, Special Section on Hannah Arendt (Spring/Summer 1983): 3–19. 25. Fred Lee, Extraordinary Racial Politics: Four Events in the Constitution of the United States (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2018), 15. 26. HC, 234–35. 27. Ibid., 190. 28. “FP,” 224. 29. Kalyvas, Democracy and the Politics of the Extraordinary, 202. 30. Lee, Extraordinary Racial Politics, 14. 31. HC, 44–46, 320–25. 32. “FP,” 244. 33. HC, 178. 34. Avengers: Age of Ultron, directed and with a screenplay by Joss Whedon (Burbank: Marvel Studios and Walt Disney Pictures, 2015). 35. Hannah Arendt, “The Crisis in Education,” in Between Past and Future (New York: Viking Press, 1968), 192. 36. HC, 247.
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