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Nostalgia in

Contemporary Superhero Movies

Master Thesis
Sarah Schulz

University of Amsterdam
Faculty of Humanities
Cultural Analysis

Supervisor: Murat Aydemir


Second Reader: Dan Hassler-Forest
 
 
 
 
TABLE OF CONTENTS

1.  INTRODUCTION   3  

2.  CRITICAL  MASCULINITY,  POSTMODERNISM,  NOSTALGIA  AND  SUPERHEROES   6  

2.1  THE  CRISIS  OF  MASCULINITY   6  


2.2  POSTMODERNISM,  NOSTALGIA  AND  GENDER   10  
2.3  NOSTALGIA  FILM  AND  THE  POSSIBILITY  OF  RESISTANCE   13  
2.4  SUPERHEROES:  ICONS  OF  MASCULINITY  BETWEEN  HISTORY  AND  MEMORY   16  

3.  THE  SUPERPATRIOT:  CAPTAIN  AMERICA  AND  THE  AMERICAN  SELF-­‐IMAGE   23  

3.1  A  SUPERHERO  IN  CRISIS   24  


3.2  THE  NATIONAL  SUPERHERO   26  
3.3  CAPTAIN  AMERICA  AND  THE  AMERICAN  SELF-­‐IMAGE   27  
3.4  THE  FIRST  AVENGER  AND  THE  WAR  ON  TERROR   30  
3.  5  NOSTALGIC  DISAVOWALS   34  

4.  BATMAN  AND  THE  VIRTUES  OF  AMBIGUITY   35  

4.1  NA-­‐NA-­‐NA-­‐NA-­‐NA  BATMAAAN:  BATMAN  AND  CHILDHOOD  VIEWING  EXPERIENCES   35  


4.2  A  HERO  TO  BELIEVE  IN   37  
4.3  THE  BEAUTY  OF  SUPERHEROIC  MASCULINITY   39  
4.4  THE  SIMPLE  NATURE  OF  RIGHT  AND  WRONG   42  
4.5  BATMAN  AND  THE  WAR  ON  TERROR   44  
4.6  SUPERHEROISM  IN  THE  21ST  CENTURY   45  

5.  NOSTALGIA  AND  SUPERHEROES   47  

WORKS  CONSULTED   50  

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1. Introduction
Nostalgia, derived from the Greek words nostos, meaning to return home, and algia, the pain
accompanying this longing, is envisioned as reaction to loss and expresses the wish to return
an idealized past in which this loss had not yet occurred. The term first appeared in 1688 in a
medical context, connoting homesickness, respectively a spatial longing for a particular place.
However, its meaning shifted from a spatial to a temporal connotation under the influence of
Immanuel Kant who maintained that what was longed for was not the childhood home, but
childhood itself (Radstone 120). Directed at an irrevocably bygone time, nostalgic longing
can never be fulfilled. Nostalgia thus acquires a “poetic meaning” and takes on a “pejorative
connotation: the word implies a useless yearning for a world or for a way of life from which
one has been irrevocably severed” (Starobinski, qtd. in Radstone 120).
Albeit nostalgia regained new prominence as analytical tool since the rise of memory
and remembrance culture in the West, in its postmodern usage nostalgia in film remains
devalued as escapist fantasy that distracts from confronting history and/or the present moment
in relation to history. In her analysis of gendered aspects in the scholarly discourse
surrounding the notion of nostalgia, The Sexual Politics of Time, Susannah Radstone provides
a detailed account of the history of the term and cautions that the widespread denigration of
nostalgia brings with it the danger that important aspects may be overlooked. She further
points out that “comparative studies of different contemporary nostalgias” remain absent
“from discussions of contemporary nostalgia culture” (130), so that the concept of nostalgia in
its complexities cannot be really understood. In this paper I am therefore interested in a
comparative approach to nostalgia in the superhero genre.
Looking at the first decade of 21st century’s mainstream cinema one can rightfully
claim that, by and large, this cinematic decade was marked by a return of superheroes.
Starting with Bryan Singer’s X-Men in 2000, the superhero wave had its breakthrough
moment in 2002 with the first part of Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man trilogy. With the release of
more than 30 blockbuster productions, the following years witnessed a sheer explosion of
superhero movies, including Batman Begins (2005), Superman Returns (2006), Captain
America: The First Avenger (2011), Fantastic Four (2005), The Incredible Hulk (2008) and
Iron Man (2008), most of which started whole series of film franchises, sequels and spin-offs.
Superheroes are firmly anchored in childhood experiences of several generations of men so
that the return of superheroes on the big screen today pronounces a nostalgic desire for
childhood ideals of masculinity. Superheroes are also historically specific artifacts related to
the historical context of theirs original release, and often directly address political and social

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anxieties of that period in their narrative. In the latter case, today’s returning superheroes
constitute a repertoire of hegemonic masculine performances that appears irrevocably lost
today. 1 It is between the conflicting properties of memory and history that I situate this study.
Approaching contemporary superhero movies within the context of masculinity in
crisis, nostalgia and postmodernism, I intend to argue that superheroes return today as
nostalgically invoked repertoires of masculinity. I investigate whether the past is thereby
utilized to speak critically of past and/or present repertoires of masculinity, or if the past is
employed as escapist fantasy of masculine plenitude that ultimately reinforces notions of
masculinity as hegemonic per definition. My paramount claim is that whether or not nostalgia
is progressive towards the perceived crisis of masculinity depends upon whether nostalgia is
directed at history, or if nostalgia operates via the spectator’s memory and provides a return to
childhood ideals of masculinity. Whereas the former trajectory appears essentially regressive
in its focus on and reinforcement of those ideals that ground male hegemony in history,
nostalgia directed at childhood memories might be progressive towards the perceived crisis
since it enables joyful reminiscences of a past ideal of masculinity that might now be revealed
as fantasy and thus gently laid to rest.
To this end, I will provide two case studies featuring two popular superheroes, Captain
America and Batman, illustrating this distinction. Within a psychoanalytical inspired
framework I will analyse Captain America (2011) and focus on the nostalgic invocation of a
particular, historical era, exemplifying how the past is here utilized to shore up patriarchy. In
the second analysis I will argue that Batman Begins (2005) and The Dark Knight (2008)
provide viewers with nostalgia for childhood ideals of masculinity, encapsulated in and
transported through the superhero figure. Against the backdrop of contemporary political
quandaries the films potentially allow bargaining with and renegotiating the meanings of
superheroism for today’s masculinity.
I propose that an analysis of the distinct operations of nostalgia with respect to the
crisis of masculinity offers the chance to understand in greater detail the current state of
masculinity in pop-cultural texts, and the possibilities of cinema to address and work through
this perceived crisis. Most importantly, I am convinced that my argument will contribute to a
more nuanced view of nostalgia in contemporary mainstream cinema.
Such complex claims, of course, do not come without limitations and the scope of this
paper necessitates some restrictions in my argument. First, this study is situated in an

                                                                                                               
1  In this paper I follow the definition of hegemonic masculinity as proposed by R.W. Connell, cf. R.W. Connell.
Masculinities. Second Edition. University of California Press. Berkley: 1995/ 2005.  

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American context and does not claim applicability to other national contexts. Although the
argument presented partly applies to the European context as well, the focus on oftentimes
explicitly American superhero stories, as well as the cultural events that I assume to be
responsible for the upsurge in superhero movies – the terrorism attacks of 9/11 and the
subsequent War on Terror – restrict the possibility of transference to the European context.
Secondly, I exclusively approach the white, male and heterosexual – in short, the
unfortunately still normative – subject in this paper. I am well aware that this subjectivity is
best understood as it intersects with other social categories and subjectivities – i.e. female,
homosexual, and ethnic – but given the limited scope of this paper I am unable to provide
detailed accounts of these subjectivities or of how they relate to masculinity, nostalgia and
superheroism. I also acknowledge that in doing so I remain within patriarchal boundaries, a
problem that is amplified by the use of psychoanalytical theories, in which the centralized
position of the phallus necessarily replicates patriarchal power structures. Nevertheless,
psychoanalytical theory remains fertile in conceptualising filmic subjectivities, the position of
the spectator in relation to these subjectivities, and the crisis of masculinity in Western
culture. For future studies, however, approaching nostalgia in superhero movies in relation to
other subjectivities might be an interesting perspective and possibly furthers the
understanding of nostalgia’s arguably progressive potential in cinema.
Last but not least, I should admit that despite my appreciation for superhero movies,
not once in my life have I read a single superhero comic book. However, this study is neither
interested in the comic book as medium, nor is it necessarily interested in adaptation theories.
Instead superheroes are here approached as cultural icons and historical artifacts, so that
second-hand sources are preponderantly more insightful than the comic books themselves.
 
 
 

 
 
 
 
 
 
 

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2. Critical Masculinity, Postmodernism, Nostalgia and Superheroes
In this chapter I provide the theoretical framework for the subsequent analyses of nostalgia in
superhero movies. I start with a brief introduction to the postmodern crisis of masculinity,
foregrounding psychoanalytical theories on male subjectivity in relation to loss. The next
paragraph will introduce Frederic Jameson’s concept of postmodern nostalgia. Highlighting
gendered aspects of this notion I will indicate the appeal of his theories for an analysis of
masculinity in crisis. Next, I intend to challenge Jameson’s essentially negative stance
towards the nostalgic mode by contrasting it with Vera Dika’s study on The Uses of
Nostalgia, in which she argues that nostalgia’s internal friction between history and memory
is capable of criticality. The last section of this chapter relates the discussion of nostalgia to
contemporary superhero movies. I argue that whether nostalgia in the superhero genre is
potentially progressive towards the perceived crisis of masculinity depends upon whether the
superhero is approached as historical artefact or as childhood ideal of masculinity; a claim
that will be verified by the case studies that follow.

2.1 The Crisis of Masculinity


The notion of masculinity in crisis centres on the decline of the economic and socially
privileged position of normative masculinity in postmodern society. Even though a complete
and comprehensive account of this complex subject goes beyond the scope of this paper, I
would like to roughly frame and outline the male crisis by highlighting several components
leading to the alleged decline of male hegemony.
The late 1960s and 1970s were witness to extensive social change and upheaval, and
the consequent rise of identity politics: Women demanded more rights and freedom; Civil
Rights Movements encouraged African-Americans to claim political visibility and agency; the
Gay Liberation Movement called for acceptance of sexuality outside of oppressive
heteronormative boundaries. These progressive movements also entailed economic shifts in
the labour order, changed demands in the work force, and the discontinuance of industries
dependent on intense physical strength. They were accompanied by structural changes such as
globalization, involving the diminished importance of the nation state, and the rise of mass
and consumer society, which invites men “to define themselves through consumption”, and
involves “a consequent stress on the fabrication of identity, a denaturalizing of the supposed
naturalness of male identity” (Tasker, qtd. in Powrie 8).
These developments rattled the gilded cage of white, heteronormative masculinity
vigorously from the outside, affecting a decline of the economic and socially privileged
position of normative masculinity in Western society (cf. Beynon). Accordingly, Sally

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Robinson states that what defines normative male subjects “in this period is a sense that they
have lost what was rightfully theirs; they experience a ‘deep alienation from a social system
which, by rights, they ought to dominate’” (29).
As shorthand for all these changes, the notion of an alleged feminization of society
prevails in articulations of masculinity in crisis. “Secondwave feminism and its critique of
masculinity and patriarchal social relations” have indeed led to an extension of “values,
practices and traits associated with the signifier ‘femininity’” to men and are now
“increasingly dominant throughout contemporary society” (Bainbridge and Yates 301). Yet,
looking at economic, social, and institutional realities, to speak of masculinity in crisis, or a
feminization of society appears utterly misguided. On a material level an alleged feminization
of society is highly doubtful as the gradual removal of injustices and power balances, clearly
in favour of men in the Western World, is first of all still incomplete and secondly, does not
seem to lead to a society where women are actually more powerful than men. 2 However, as
Robinson argues, crisis is a performance that must be considered real whenever rhetorical
strategies and tropes, respectively discursive conventions of ‘crisis’ are in play (10). Hence,
because the male subject experiences the alleged feminization of society as a threat, he
positions himself as “victim of decades of gay, lesbian, and feminist insurgence, and
concomitant changes in the gender and labour order“ (Walsh 3).
This is where psychoanalysis comes in as the discipline that is theoretically well
equipped to analyse the resulting crisis: “The lived experience of this postmodern moment
amounts to a form of psychic and cultural trauma, and psychoanalysis lends itself well to its
analysis” (Bainbridge and Yates 302). Albeit the notion of trauma appears excessive in
relation to a perceived loss of privilege, it seems that on a cultural scale, the crisis of
masculinity is indeed traumatic, since – as the following discussion of Kaja Silverman’s work
demonstrates – this crisis not only pertains to the situation of normative male subjects within
postmodern society but affects society as a whole. Psychoanalysis provides the concepts and
theoretical background necessary to describe and analyse this perceived crisis, which,
however, does not mean that it can only be described in negative terms. Arguably – as is
much debated in psychoanalysis and cultural studies – the blurring of boundaries between the
binaries masculine and feminine can also initiate a shift to masculinities that are more
emotional and reflexive (cf. Bainbridge and Yates).

                                                                                                               
2  Cf., for example, the OECD report Gender Equality in Education, Employment and Entrepreneurship,
available on the internet http://www.oecd.org/els/family/50423364.pdf

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In psychoanalytically inflected theories postmodernism has been described in terms of
the lost paternal signifier (Silverman), the breakdown of the paternal metaphor (Jardine), and
a diminished believe in the Name-of-the-Father (Radstone). Based on Lacan’s version of the
Oedipus complex, in which paternal authority is considered a linguistic function (cf. Jameson
1983), these theories approach the crisis of masculinity as a crisis in the cultural signification
of the paternal function. To understand how paternal authority is weakened by postmodern
society, a brief rehearsal of the traditional and arguably out-dated model appears suggestive.
Moreover, since this idealized fiction of hegemonic masculinity continues to inform
popcultural texts, male subjects are torn between this older myth and the reality of a
postmodern society. Therefore, this arguably anachronistic fiction itself constitutes another
component in the crisis of masculinity.
Conceiving of subjectivity as “a position occupied within language, precipitated by the
social interpellation of individuals” (Walsh 19), Jacques Lacan differentiates between three
orders of consciousness – the Real, the Imaginary, and the Symbolic – and argues that
Imaginary relationships between child and Mother must be suppressed to give way to the
Symbolic identification with the Father during the Oedipal complex. The “linguistic
interdiction of ‘No’ by the Name-of-the Father disrupt[s] imaginary identifications in favour
of symbolic ones, forcing the child to suppress its desire for its mother, and take up a position
within the Symbolic register” (19). Envisioned as “realm of male authority, a fact that
perpetuates the privileging of male symbolization over female” (19), the Symbolic stands in
for law, structure, and various signifying systems, most importantly, for language. The Name-
of-the-Father is “lived by the boy as the paternal legacy which will be his if he renounces the
mother, and identifies with the father” (Silverman 40), thus passing patriarchal privilege from
one generation to the next. Since the boy assumes his father’s authority originates from his
possession of the penis that the mother lacks, a fundamental misrecognition of the penis as
phallus occurs, resulting in a continuous overestimation of the boy’s sense to patriarchal
entitlement (Walsh 21).
Yet, the entry into the Symbolic and “the assumption of a privileging ‘masculine’
position within the Symbolic” also affords the boy sacrifice: “he must submit to the Law of
the Father and be symbolically castrated. He must extricate himself from the mother’s body,
and all associated experiences” (Walsh 21). And this is pivotal here: in identifying with the
father the boy has to end and deny his pre-Oedipal experience of union with the Phallic
Mother, the not-yet castrated mother. Crucially, as Coppélia Kahn maintains, loss is
constitutive of male subjectivity, and by extension patriarchy: “While the boy’s sense of self

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begins in union with the feminine, his sense of masculinity arises against it” (qtd. in Walsh
22). This may indicate the appeal of nostalgia for this form of subjectivity.
Emphasising the loss of paternal legacy in her feminist appropriation of Lyotard’s
notion of a “ postmodern legitimation crisis” – affecting all juridical and political systems in
the West formerly sanctioned by the Enlightenment – Alice Jardine argues that “since
legitimacy lies at the heart of ‘that judicial domain which, historically, has determined the
right to govern, the succession of kings, the link between father and son’ … the legitimation
crisis ‘is the loss of the paternal fiction’”. The postmodern notion of crisis, then, is at its heart
“the linked breakdown of the paternal fiction, or ‘metaphor’, and those systems of
representation and figurability sanctioned by the name-of-the-Father “. Jardine describes two
reactions to this: one is the embrace of loss and the breakdown of structures, a killing of the
Father “in all his disguises, whatever his function or form” (qtd. in Radstone 173, 174). 3 This
position can be aligned with the feminist, utopian vision of postmodernity that interprets the
waning of oppressive, constricting aspects of paternal authority as liberating for the individual
(cf. Kaplan). The other reaction identified by Jardine is nostalgic and “often take[s] the form
of a critique of what is called conformity or mass culture: of ‘the society without a father…’”
(Radstone 174). I will align this position with Fredric Jameson’s theory of postmodernism and
nostalgia below.
Pertaining to the critical state of masculinity in cinema, feminist film scholar Kaja
Silverman develops a “psychoanalytical theory of hegemony”, drawing on Althusser’s model
of ideology and psychoanalytical theories of subjectivity (Silverman 23). The basis of her
argument is that Western society constitutes and sustains its reality through collective belief
in its ideology, which she terms the dominant fiction: those texts, images, and stories
“through which the conventional subject is psychically aligned with the symbolic order” (54).
As the dominant fiction is constitutive of subjectivity, Silverman positions the positive
Oedipus complex as primary vehicle of insertion into the dominant fiction. Accordingly, “our
present dominant fiction is above all else the representational system through which the
subject is accommodated to the Name-of-the-Father. Its most central signifier of unity is the
(paternal) family, and its primary signifier of privilege the phallus“ (34-35). It mediates
between subject and symbolic order, and constructs and sustains sexual difference (8).
Since the dominant fiction “depends upon a kind of collective make-believe in the
commensurability of penis and phallus” (15), it is characterized by the basic tension between

                                                                                                               
3  Radstone here refers to Jardine, Alice. Gynesis: Configurations of Woman and Modernity. Ithaca/ New York/
London: Cornell University Press, 1985. Print.    

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the biological penis and the signifier of patriarchal power, the phallus, originating from the
Oedipus complex. The commensurability of penis and phallus is of outmost importance, not
only in regard to sexual difference, but moreover, for the “maintenance of our governing
‘reality’” (16). As most important and “most vulnerable component of the dominant fiction”
(47), it is delicately threatened by moments of ‘historical trauma’, which Silverman defines as
“a historically precipitated but psychoanalytical specific disruption, with ramifications
extending far beyond the individual psyche” (55). These disruptions occur when large
numbers of men are forced into “such an intimate relation with lack that they are at least for
the moment unable to sustain an imaginary relation with the phallus, and so withdraw their
belief from the dominant fiction” (55). In such situations, it is “imperative that the belief in
the penis/phallus equation be fortified” (47), and the texts of popular culture are one
important site on which belief in the dominant fiction can be bolstered.
Silverman’s work is insightful for this study since superheroes traditionally share an
intimate relation with historical trauma and often emerged as reaction to such events,
recuperating the dominant fiction and the penis/ phallus equation. Moreover, as the
postmodern social climate, marked by the waning of paternal authority, already contests male
hegemony and thus challenges the commensurability of penis and phallus, the terrorism
attacks on the World Trade Centre in 2001 constituted a recent culturally traumatizing event
that furthered the critical state of masculinity in Western culture by forcefully disrupting the
dominant fiction and impairing the penis/phallus equation within American culture. As I try to
demonstrate below, the contemporary upsurge in superhero movies can be interpreted as
reaction to these events.

2.2 Postmodernism, Nostalgia and Gender


The crisis of masculinity described in the prior section finds its popcultural expression in the
contemporary nostalgia film, famously described by Fredric Jameson. As his notion of the
nostalgia film cannot be fully apprehended without the socio-political context from which it
arises, I find it necessary to provide a brief introduction to his theory on postmodernism and
nostalgia before examining the nostalgia mode in film in greater detail. This is particularly
crucial for the endeavour of this study since Jameson’s postmodernism appears as confining
framework to the operation of nostalgia in film. Because of its continued importance in film
theory, part of the common evaluation of nostalgia as essentially regressive devise in film
arguably stems from Jameson’s initial pejorative conception of both, postmodernism and
nostalgia.

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In Postmodernism and Consumer Society, one of the first expansive theoretical
treatments of the subject, Jameson positions postmodernism in full historical specificity as
“periodizing concept“, which correlates

the emergence of new formal features in culture with the emergence of a new type of
social life and a new economic order –what is often euphemistically called
modernization, postindustrial or consumer society, the society of the media or the
spectacle, or multinational capitalism. (1988: 15)

In this conception, postmodernity, a condition associated with social, political and economic
changes in society and its institutions from (roughly) the 1950s onwards, consolidates with
postmodernism, the social, political, literary aesthetic philosophy and practice underpinning
this condition. For Jameson, postmodernisms constitute a radical break with modernist
notions of individuality, unity, and wholeness at the same that they amplify formal features of
modernity that now gain centre stage: “the immense fragmentation and privatization of
modern literature– its explosion into a host of distinct private styles and mannerisms–
foreshadows deeper and more general tendencies in social life as a whole” (1988: 194).
Attesting to a failure of “art and the aesthetic, the failure of the new, the imprisonment in the
past” (1983: 116), Jameson argues that in postmodernity innovation has become impossible
and “all that is left is to imitate dead styles, to speak through the masks and with the voices of
the styles in the imaginary museum” (1988: 196).
Pastiche, the imitation of styles without modern parody’s satirical or humorous
impulses, has entered popular culture in form of the nostalgia film, which is not a historical
film, but rather a film “based on the recognition by the viewer of pre-existing historical
stereotypes, including the various styles of the period, [and] is thereby reduced to the mere
narrative confirmation of those same stereotypes” (Jameson 1998: 155). The nostalgia film
thus attests to Jameson’s observation that “for some reason, we were unable today to focus on
our own present, as though we have become incapable of achieving aesthetic representations
of our own current experience” (1983: 117). Pastiche and nostalgia films signal the growing
inability to position the current political and social momentum in relation to history, which
has triggered temporal confusion and the erosion of depth and meaning. Drawing on the work
of Jaqcues Lacan, Jameson describes this as a state of schizophrenia resulting from the child’s
failure to fully access the domain of language, represented by the Name-of-the-Father (1983).
In her psychoanalytical reading of the discourse surrounding nostalgia, Susannah
Radstone points out that Jameson’s denigratory vision of postmodernity unwittingly replicates

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the claim of the alleged feminization of society forwarded in articulations of – and blamed for
– the crisis of masculinity. As described above, the political and social movements of the
1960s encompassed structural changes in society, apparently facilitating the rise of mass and
consumer society. Jameson’s critique of postmodernity largely depends upon these
developments – condensed here as “new economic order” (Jameson 1988: 193) – which are
then denigrated “through an association with femininity, and contrasted with a nostalgically
evoked residual or high culture of depth, meaning and value”, in turn associated with
modernity and masculinity (Radstone 153). Thus, a subliminal distinction between masculine,
modernist nostalgia, associated with high culture, criticality and self-reflexivity, opposed to
postmodern nostalgia, aligned with femininity, the entertainment industry, popular and mass
culture, described as essentially uncritical, emerges in Jameson’s writing. His conceptions of
postmodernity and nostalgia are therefore intrinsically nostalgic, inevitably marked by
“phallocentric desire” (146), and can be aligned with the nostalgic reaction to the postmodern
legitimation crisis described by Jardine above.
Because of these phallocentric and patriarchal aspects, Jameson’s position partly
coincides with the psychoanalytical reading of nostalgia, aligned with patriarchal
constructions of masculinity by its emphasis on the Oedipal scenario, focussing – as described
above – on the resulting castration anxiety which positions male and female subjects
differently to loss:

Nostalgia can be understood psychoanalytically as a defence against the


acknowledgement of castration, which is best conceived of, I believe, as a revision of
an earlier loss of that fantasized plenitude of the past associated with oceanic feelings
and oneness. (Radstone 148)

Hence, on the one hand, the subliminally phallocentric aspects of Jameson’s concepts makes
them especially suitable for an analysis focussing on masculinity in crisis. On the other hand,
as Radstone cautions, “what is at stake here is an elitist and nostalgic … dismissal of
contemporary mass culture” (130).
I would therefore like to contrast Jameson’s essentially negative stance towards
postmodernity with the aforementioned utopian vision of postmodernity, which sheds a
positive light on the very same developments Jameson bemoans, highlighting the possibilities
of postmodernity in search for liberalization of marginalized groups. As E. Ann Kaplan notes
“‘utopian’ postmodernism involves a movement of culture and texts beyond oppressive
binary categories”, made possible by postmodern theories of “feminism, deconstruction and

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Lacanian psychoanalysis” that together constitute a “significant cultural break” (3). From a
feminist perspective, the collapse of discourse and genre into ‘contemporary theory’ (i.e.
deconstruction and structuralism) Jameson laments thus provided for a long overdue prolific
inquiry of existing power structures, enabling critical ways of thinking about gender as
discursive construct and gendered subjectivity, i.e. identity politics, in the first place. As
Robinson argues, white heterosexual men were traditionally “coterminous with the abstract
individualism which an identity politics attempts to erode”; normative male subjects are
therefore not participants, but ‘victims’ of identity politics, which forces this group to become
visible as social category and marked by race, gender and sexuality (4). This identification
with a “collective entails the sacrifice of uniqueness, individuality, and unmarked
normativity” (8). Hence, while the asserted ‘feminization of society’ helped marginalized
groups in gaining political visibility and agency, it robbed masculinity of its traditional
privilege of being unmarked.
Consequently, to normative male subjectivity postmodernism appears as burden rather
than as opportunity, and it appears that in Jameson’s conception of postmodernity, the subject
positioned at the mercy of the new economic order is essentially male. While there are
reasons to be wary of too hasty a union between postmodernism and feminism as Barbara
Creed points out – note for instance the different weight attached to the respective concepts, if
one discusses the relevance of feminism for postmodernism, or vice versa the relevance of
postmodernism for feminism – the contrasting of both positions has highlighted the omittance
of liberating aspects of postmodernity in Jameson’s conceptions; an omittance that resulted in
an analysis of postmodern films that Creed regards as inadequate (Radstone 173). 4

2.3 Nostalgia Film and the Possibility of Resistance


Fredric Jameson positions the ‘nostalgia mode’ in cinema as mass-cultural expression of the
features of postmodernism described above: it is related to schizophrenia, the death of the
modern, individualistic subject, and, as utterance of pastiche, it reinforces the lost sense of
time and history (1983/1988). Nostalgia films can invoke the past by stylistically recreating a
particular era in the filmsetting and mise-en-scéne, so that nostalgia films are easily confused
with “the more traditional genre known as the historical film” (1988: 196). Yet, in comparison
to the historical film, which consciously recreates past periods, the nostalgia film is “based on
the recognition by the viewer of pre-existing historical stereotypes, including the various
styles of the period, it is thereby reduced to the mere narrative confirmation of those same
                                                                                                               
4  Radstone refers to Creed, Barbara. “From Here to Modernity: Feminism and Postmodernity”. Screen, 28, 2:
47-67. Print.  

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stereotypes” (1998: 155). Past genres, fashion styles and even minor details such as the film’s
credits then act as signifiers for historical periods, consolidated in fragmentary fashion. As the
pastiche of distinct historical periods converged into one seemingly coherent period, these
signs loose theirs indexical relation to real world referents and gain a simulacral status – they
cannot point beyond theirs surface meaning anymore and are not related to each other in a
stable or unified way. Instead signs appear material and dense: “a signifier that has lost its
signified has thereby been transformed into an image” (1983: 120). The nostalgia film thus
blurs historical specificity and is “historicist rather than historical, which explains why it must
necessarily displace its centre of interest on to the visual as such and substitute breathtaking
images for anything like the older filmic storytelling” (1998: 155).
In relation to the present crisis of masculinity, nostalgia films present the past as
idealized period in which the foundation of our dominant fiction, the equation of penis and
phallus, remained – purportedly – still intact. By way of juxtaposition, the present situation of
masculinity then emerges as critical, so that the nostalgia film makes palpable the perceived
crisis. Paradoxically then, the nostalgia film testifies to the crisis of masculinity precisely by
avoiding the threat posed by the postmodern social order to notions of hegemonic
masculinity. The mythological film, to take an example, is devoted to historical events of
Western civilization, which are read as foundational moments of western masculinity, and
claims historical authenticity (cf. Bainbridge and Yates). As such, mythological films present
an idealized past – in which masculinity is associated with hegemony and equated with
supremacy – as historical. Watching the film, the viewer is returned to times in which this
kind of masculinity was supposedly more appreciated in society. Conversely, the present
emerges as anti-masculine, feminized world that undermines, underrates and castrates
supposedly ‘real’ archaic masculinity by denouncing it as hegemonic. In returning to
foundational moments of Western masculinity, mythological films like Troy (2004), King
Arthur (2004), and Beowulf (2007) generate nostalgia directed at the ideals that ground male
hegemony in history and thus support and reinforce belief in the dominant fiction.
Hence, the nostalgic wish to return is often combined with the wish to avoid perceived
feminist threats to masculinity (Powrie; Radstone; Modleski). Therefore, nostalgia “seems to
vehicle the crisis of masculinity as a social phenomenon” (Powrie 11) for in its return to the
past, nostalgia in film articulates a longing for “a pre-feminist age when traditional masculine
values remained unassailed” (Radstone 152). By naively implying that if things were just ‘as
they used to be’ the world would (still) be a better place, nostalgia films make it evermore
challenging to confront present social, political or economic concerns in any progressive

  14  
 
 
fashion. Instead, nostalgia films appear to lash against social progress and support belief in
the dominant fiction through an idealized presentation of the past as masculine kingdom of
heaven, employed as escapist fantasy pitted against present day problems. Moreover, in
returning to and reinforcing an arguably redundant concept of male supremacy, nostalgia
films constantly remind male subjects of the privilege they once enjoyed. It therefore appears
to me that these texts also directly feed into the critical state of masculinity: trapped between
conflicting demands of a feminized society and an expired idea of male supremacy, male
subjects cannot acknowledge the loss of theirs privilege as long as this loss is denied in
popculture. This circumstance further indicates why the question of whether or not nostalgia
can also help in accepting the loss of patriarchal privilege appears pivotal.
In his essay Postmodernism and Consumer Society, Jameson leaves the question open
whether in postmodern culture there can be resistance to the dominant capitalist logic but he
does not see this option in his later writings, at least not for the nostalgia film. Recalling
Radstone’s caveat concerning the elitist dismissal of mass culture, the alleged impossibility of
resistance in nostalgia film seems related to the neglect of democratizing and egalitarian
aspects of nostalgia in Jameson’s writing. Conversely, historian Raphael Samuel “defends the
proliferation of nostalgia outside the universities on grounds that it democratizes access to
‘the past’ and that it animates that past in ways unknown to or unacknowledged by traditional
academic history”. Much rather than a deprivation of history, the ‘nostalgia mode’ in popular
culture therefore represents a “triumphing of living memory over academic history”
(Radstone 126). Similarly, Vera Dika recently challenged Jameson’s position in her excellent
study Recycled Culture in Contemporary Art and Film: The Uses of Nostalgia,  in which she
examines a number of films to investigate whether “past images and genres, as examples of
worked-over cinematic languages, [can] be seen as sign systems capable of being
reconstructed in oppositional ways to speak critically new texts” (23).
Unravelling the internal friction between history and memory intrinsic to nostalgia
films, she argues that the re-use of past images can indeed have critical value. Whereas the
idealization of historical periods in nostalgia films appears necessarily regressive, Dika
contends that when nostalgia operates via memory it does not weaken “our sense of history,
but [encourages] us to confront it” (65). Her notion of nostalgia is based on Frederic
Jameson’s conception of the term, but whereas his examples “comprise the films’ theatrical
elements” (10), Dika shifts the ontological status of film back to its photographic basis as
image. Drawing on Roland Barthes’ theories on photography, Dika imagines the filmic image
as a “past frozen moment extracted from the continual flow of time” (6). When an image from

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the past is stripped of its original context and put to new use in nostalgia films, it becomes a
“time machine, a carrier of once-lived worlds into the present, a quality that connects us to the
past” (7). This effect is amplified when the viewing subject experienced this past, bestowing
the spectator with a ‘lived resonance’ and the knowledge that even the past was not that
simple. Therefore, nostalgia, when operating via memory “relies on the viewer’s historical
and cultural knowledge to make its additional points” (153). Past images must be understood
as codes to be unravelled by the spectator, creating an “internal montage” (14) by which an
internal and critical opposition between memory and history, fact and fiction, reality and
stereotype arises. Whereas potentially progressive affects of nostalgia are here intrinsically
interwoven with the cinematic image, I propose that the use of past objects, like superheroes,
may have similar effects.
Rather than by stylistic recreation of a given past within the film, nostalgia can also
operate metonymically, by reinventing a certain experience of the past. For this category,
Jameson provides the example of Lucas’ Star Wars cycle, which re-creates the experience of
Saturday afternoon serials of the 1930s to 1950s: “it does not reinvent a picture of the past in
its lived totality; rather, by reinventing the feel and shape of characteristic art objects of an
older period (the serials), it seeks to reawaken a sense of past associated with those objects”
(1988: 197). The metonymically operating nostalgia film is therefore particularly intertwined
with its spectator, and instead of history it specifically addresses the spectator’s memory. As
the following paragraphs will indicate, in this light, the return of superheroes in nostalgia
films could indeed be capable of questioning the meaning of masculinity through an
opposition between what once was assumed to be masculine – the childhood ideal of
masculinity embodied by the superhero – and the lived experience of what it actually means
to be a male subject in our strange, compelling time arguably hostile to hegemonic
masculinity. Instead of necessarily supporting the dominant fiction, nostalgia in cinema could
then possibly “offer a way of renegotiating the places of masculinity in relation to ideas of
history” (Bainbridge and Yates 311).

2.4 Superheroes: Icons of Masculinity between History and Memory


The prior discussion of Vera Dika’s work has unveiled a critical potential in the nostalgic
cinematic image, arising from the conflicting properties of history and memory. In this
section, I extend my discussion by situating superheroes in the same matrix.
In the most basic sense, superheroes are benevolent fictional characters possessing
superhuman powers used for a greater good, like protecting the innocent. They are guided by
a strong moral code, dress in distinctive costumes and wear masks to protect their secret

  16  
 
 
identity. A substantial minority of superheroes does not possess superhuman abilities but
reimburses this lack through extraordinary skills. Sharing all other features of the superhero
proper, figures like Batman are generally identified as superheroes, too (Kaveney 4).
Superheroes are further characterised by their righteousness and generally show an
astonishing competence in judging good and evil. The Manichean struggle between good and
evil constitutes the main narrative pattern of the superhero genre, which is therefore generally
conservative, simplistic and naïve in its worldview (Schlegel and Habermann 29). Superhero
fiction first appeared in comic books in the early 1930s, and, although not every superhero
originates from a comic book, and not every comic book features a superhero, to this day
superhero fiction remains conflated with comic books in the popular vocabulary. That
contemporary superhero movies most commonly feature superheroes originally derived from
this media form already indicates the nostalgic quality of these films.
With its narrative focus on male heroism, superhero fiction – in comic books, cartoons,
live action series and films alike – is pre-eminently targeted at boys, respectively men and
constitutes a long established and influential popcultural myth of hegemonic masculinity (cf.
Amadou). Historically, superheroes emerged in, and reacted to moments of national,
economic and political crisis, those moments that can in reference to Silverman’s work be
identified as historical trauma. “Superheroes on the comic-book page first came to
prominence in the prelude to World War II. That Superman could do the things in comics that
people wished they could in their everyday lives provided an escape for readers in an age
fraught with peril” (Burke 12-13). As particularly successful constructions of compulsively
heterosexual masculinity, superheroes are employed to strengthen and reinforce belief in the
dominant fiction and play an important part in the popcultural construction of hegemonic
masculinity. Next to the recent explosion of superhero imagery in cinema, the growing
number of ordinary men dressing in superhero costumes to perform heroic deeds as ‘real life
superheroes’, as well as the father’s rights organisation Fathers4Justice, which successfully
draws on the cultural signification of the superhero in their protests against the judicial
marginalization of fatherhood (Walsh), attest to the continuous importance of superheroes as
icons of masculinity in the Western world.
However, since comic books are conventionally designated as serials right from the
start, Dika argues that films adapted from this media form lack a singular, original source text
against which potentially critical opposition can be raised: “The very notion of an original
falls away when ‘remaking’ a serial” (206). Because “the further calcification of the image
through its transformation from television, comic books and other serialized forms into film”

  17  
 
 
(197) inevitably results in pastiche and thus robs the cinematic image of its indexical
relationship to reality (205), Dika queries whether nostalgia’s progressive potentials can be
assigned to the superhero movie genre. Additionally, the necessary transformation of formerly
small comic book images into technologically advanced and inflated cinematic images
illustrates “the economic growth that has produced these later images” (204). Since “the sheer
size and sound of the spectacle underscores that capitalism is triumphant”, Dika suggests that
the very return of comic book superheroes to the big screen constitutes an uncritical
celebration of neoliberalism and capitalism (204).
Albeit I agree with Dika’s caveat concerning the celebration of neoliberalism,
considering that superhero movies that cinematographically acknowledge their comic book
source remain a rarity in mainstream entertainment (with notable exception of Sin City, 2005),
I suggest that contemporary superhero movies most commonly draw on superhero imagery in
abstracted fashion, approaching it as popcultural repertoire of masculinity that has calcified
by cycles of re-launches, remakes, and adaptations by other media forms, lost its relation to
the original media source and now acts independently as popcultural myth.
Yet, in order to render these popcultural icons of masculinity recognizable, superhero
movies necessarily reiterate the respective superhero’s origin story. As generic convention of
comic books, origin stories introduce the hero, his powers, his moral code, and his
archenemy. They also provide a basic theme, i.e. revenge or responsibility that indicates
possible future stories and structures the series. Since origin stories encapsulate all elements
characterizing the respective superhero, their rehearsal in each new media text featuring the
hero seems imperative (Rosenberg). Superhero movies therefore retain the nostalgic quality
that arises from the popular conflation of superhero fiction with comic books. Depending on
the centrality of the origin for the myth of the respective hero, as well as the origin’s relation
to history, these singular origin stories may reimburse the lack of a historically specific,
original source text that Dika laments, and so evade the question of seriality.
Because superhero narratives traditionally emerged in times of historical trauma,
origin stories oftentimes are marked by the anxieties of their initial production time. For
instance, the orphaned superheroes Superman, Batman and Spider Man attest to a diminished
belief in the dominant fiction, since these heroes literally lack a (symbolic) father. Moreover,
that superheroes commonly act as self-appointed vigilantes indicates an incapability and
failure of those systems represented by the Name-of-the-Father, i.e. the law, police, and the
state. Hence, superhero fiction relates well to psychoanalytical descriptions of the postmodern
crisis of masculinity as absence or waning of paternal authority. To better meet the Zeitgeist,

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elements of the origin stories can be subjected to change (for example, in the original comic,
Spider Man is bitten by a radioactively enhanced spider, whereas in the latest cinematic
treatment, the spider is genetically modified). However, some origin stories are narratively
tied to the original context of their initial publication, remained stable in every instalment
throughout the years, and have therefore retained their historical specificity.
The prime example for this is Captain America, first published in 1941, and
narratively tied to the historical context of World War II. Appointed as super-patriotic figure
to promote American involvement in the war, the first issue depicted Captain America
punching Adolf Hitler, and Nazis remained Captain America’s primary enemies in virtually
every succeeding instalment. As national superhero dressed in the American flag, Captain
America represents the American nation, and, as I will attempt to demonstrate in the first case
study, embodies a historically specific national identity associated with the historical period
of World War II. In the recent cinematic revival Captain America: The First Avenger (2011),
which recreates the World War II setting of the comic books, nostalgia then appears pre-
eminently directed at history.
Conversely, Batman, first released in 1939 and thus coeval with Captain America,
completely lacks historical specificity. To begin, arising from the tradition of pulp magazines
and detective stories, for the first six months of publication Batman had no origin at all, and
only gradually and fragmentary, through diverse media texts, acquired a backstory
(Rosenberg). Additionally, his adventures take place in the fictional Gotham City, which
further removes the figure from reality, respectively history. As the hero with most cinematic,
televised, and animated instalments (Langley 5-6), Batman was especially subjected to a
‘further calcification of the image’. Consequently, in Christopher Nolan’s Batman trilogy,
Batman Begins (2005), The Dark Knight (2008), and The Dark Knight Rises (2012), the most
recent revival of Batman for the cinema, Batman appears as pieced together combination of
disparate, eclectic elements from the whole of cultural productions in which the hero
appeared, now assimilated into one coherent story. “[T]he resulting amalgam of elements”,
suggests Dika, “provides viewers with a kind of game, a web of already seen material through
which the shocks and challenges of the new film can be experienced” (208). Instead of one
specific version of Batman, we thus find that “the form itself is […] invoked, as it is
overriding with pastness” (206). Therefore, any notion of historical specificity appears
untenable in relation to this hero, and nostalgia here operates primarily metonymically by
reawakening “a sense of past associated with those objects”, i.e. Batman (Jameson 1988:
197). Since a vast number of media treatments of Batman target children, the nostalgia

  19  
 
 
Batman triggers appears pre-eminently directed at childhood viewing experiences. “Whenever
we ‘identify ourselves with a collective past’ or as members of a given generation, those
books and films and television shows and popular music that we especially enjoyed as
children … ‘are what constitute our collectively shared experience’” (Gray and
Kaklamanidou 5). Nostalgia therefore does not operate on a historical level, but on a
generational, respectively personal level instead.
The distinction between historical and personal nostalgia is, however, not clear-cut.
The individual viewer might associate Captain America more readily with childhood than
with history, and the discourse surrounding the release of Batman Begins expressed historical
nostalgia for the original comic book. Yet, in the succeeding case studies I will demonstrate
that, depending on the respective protagonist’s relation to history, the contemporary films
place special emphasis on either history or memory. By focussing on the different ways in
which the past is nostalgically invoked in the films chosen for analysis, the two case studies
featured in this study consolidate to a complex view of nostalgia in the superhero movie
genre. It will emerge that nostalgia’s progressive potential to offer ways ‘of renegotiating the
places of masculinity in relation to ideas of history’ depends on the emphasis given to history
or memory.
However, last but not least, it is important to note that, like the historical predecessors,
contemporary superhero movies emerged in, and reacted to a moment of political and national
anxiety, constituted by the terrorism attacks on the World Trade Centre in 2001, and
America’s response to it, the War on Terror. The attacks on September 11, frequently dubbed
the nation’s greatest tragedy, constituted a culturally traumatizing event that considerably
weakened the American dominant fiction and patently qualifies as historical trauma. As
Silverman reminds us, the texts of popular culture are crucial in re-establishing belief in the
dominant fiction. It is therefore unsurprising that soon after the attacks, the Office of Public
Liaison started a series of consultations with high-powered Hollywood executives to discuss
the film industry’s potential in “issuing a ‘call to service’ to all Americans and ‘aid in the
process of reassuring children and families in these uncertain times’” (Young 257).
As Juliana Halpert observes in her analysis of American commemorative practices in
response to September 11, “America’s self-assigned placement at the top of the new world
order creates a special obligation to compulsively place layers of higher meaning over any
fissures in its banner of stability and peace” (8). Consequently, President George W. Bush
portrayed the attack as “primarily, an affront to America’s core ideology; his very first
sentence [during the first presidential address after the attacks] announced, ‘Freedom itself

  20  
 
 
was attacked this morning by a faceless coward. And freedom will be defended’”(12). With
such rhetoric, America “returned to a simple narrative of freedom versus fascism” (Steinmetz
197). Moreover, Bush “described the ensuing conflict in stark Manichean terms: ‘This will be
a monumental struggle of good versus evil. But good will prevail.’” (McCrisken 191), and
Senior White House advisor Karl Rove is quoted saying “That the war is against terrorism,
not Islam . . . that this is a global conflict requiring a global response, and that it is a fight
against evil rather than a disagreement between nations” (Young 257). Strongly recalling the
main narrative pattern of the superhero genre, this rhetoric positioned the nation as
quintessence of goodness and marked the alleged enemies of America’s freedom “by the
genre conventions of the comics … as supervillains” (Lawrence 5). Therefore, the superhero
film genre became one of the most suitable genres of popular culture to articulate and forward
the political agenda of the Bush administration in campaigning for America’s War on Terror.
Additionally, Gray and Kaklamanidou suggest the overuse of the word hero in the aftermath
of September 11 has diminished its power, and necessitated the return of super-heroic figures
(1). They further cite the economic crisis as a contributing factor in the rise of superhero
imagery in the 21st century (2).
However, the government’s domestic and foreign policy during the War on Terror
betrayed American ideals and impacted the nation’s self-understanding as “an extraordinary
nation … not only unique but also superior among nations” (McCrisken 1). While this may
not be equally traumatizing as the 9/11 attacks, the War on Terror created additional
destabilizing fissures in America’s dominant fiction. As the French poststructuralist Jean
Baudrillard points out:

The faultless mastery of this clandestine style of operation is almost as terroristic as


the spectacular act of September 11, since it casts suspicion on any and every
individual. Might not any inoffensive person be a potential terrorist? If they could pass
unnoticed, then each of us is a criminal going unnoticed (every plane also becomes
suspect). (qtd. in Schlegel and Habermann 34)

Hence, in sharp contrast to the “the constant barrage of messages about the ‘good’ and the
‘bad’, the virtuous and the terrorizing” in the wake of 9/11 (Halpert 10), the actual War on
Terror is characterised by a fundamental ambiguity and therefore decidedly evades the
simplistic worldview intrinsic to the Manichean structure. Given the socio-political context
Baudrillard describes, the return of the Manichean structure in contemporary superhero
movies seems to disavow the political and moral complexity of the present situation.

  21  
 
 
Associated with a simpler past, the structure appears nostalgically soothing, relieving the
spectator momentarily of today’s ambiguity. In Captain America, as well as in Batman Begins
and The Dark Knight, the contexts of September 11 and the War on Terror constitute focal
points against which the respective story unfolds, and the Manichean structure plays a crucial
role for nostalgia’s progressive potential in the superhero movie genre.

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3. The Superpatriot: Captain America and the American Self-Image
Released in 1941 by Marvel Comics predecessor Timely Comics, the first issue of Captain
America depicted the superhero dressed in the American flag punching Adolf Hitler on the
jaw. Pre-dating America’s entry into World War II, Joe Simon and Jack Kirby created
Captain America as super-patriotic hero intended to promote American involvement in the
conflict. Proving commercially successful, the national superhero “along with some other
comic superheroes who were partisan to America and its allies, helped boost the morale of
servicemen throughout World War II” (Weiner 9). Used for propagandistic purposes, first by
his creators, and soon by the American government and military, Captain America had to be
an identificatory figure that soldier’s would see as a role model. Hence, though the injection
of a super-serum transforms sickly and effeminate Steve Rogers into Captain America, the
first and only super-solider of the American military and epitome of human physicality,
Captain America’s physical stamina remained merely supportive of Steve Rogers noble
character, modesty, bravery, and most importantly, his patriotism. As stated in an editorial
note, “take away that union suit and the ideals, beliefs and personal motivations of Steve
Rogers would remain unchanged. As Mark Gruenwald so effectively pointed out during his
run, you can put the suit on anybody, but it’s the man that makes the clothes” (DuBose 213).
By suggesting the ordinary man becomes superheroic through incorporation of the American
ideals, Captain America soon grew to be the very ideal of American masculinity, and, to this
day, has not lost his appeal as popcultural paragon of masculinity within the American
collective psyche. 5
It is therefore quite notable that in Joe Johnston’s recent blockbuster production
Captain America: The First Avenger (2011), this successful construction of masculinity is
denigrated by association with the feminine, display’s male masochism, and assumes a
victimized position. In this case study, I argue that the film intentionally renders current
notions of masculinity in crisis explicit in order to bestow the American nation with a
victimized status in relation to the terrorism attacks on September 11, 2001. This ultimately
serves to disavow America’s questionable foreign policy conduct during the ensuing War on
Terror, and reinstates the American self-image as conceived by George Monbiot: “the world’s
saviour and the world’s victim, a sacrificial messiah on a mission to deliver the world from
evil” (qtd. in Straw 129).

                                                                                                               
5
Lawrence describes how Captain America continues to be employed for propagandistic purposes by the
American government (2-4).

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Nostalgia plays a crucial role in this trajectory. First, the return of an established ideal
of American masculinity, now robbed of his former glory as successful construction of
masculinity, constitutes a form of disillusionment that intensifies the male’s feeling of despair
and victimization. Secondly, the World War II setting of the film reinforces the link between
the figure of Captain America and the American self-image during this historical period, in
which the values and ideals represented by Captain America coincided with America’s
political and military conduct. By alluding to September 11, the film creates a contemporary
context upon which the former American self-image as world’s saviour and world’s victim is
transferred, and ultimately reinstated.

3.1 A Superhero in Crisis


The third film version of Marvel’s comic book series Captain America, Joe Johnston’s
Captain America: The First Avenger was released in 2011, and tells the story of mild-
mannered Steve Rogers (Chris Evans), eager to fight for the USA, but rejected for military
services because of his asthma and effeminate physique. Because of his self-sacrificial
bravery, modesty, and strong morals, Steve is chosen to become the first super soldier of the
US military by injection of a super serum developed by doctor Erskine (Steve Tucci). After
his metamorphosis into Captain America, Steve has to fight the Red Skull/ Johann Schmidt
(Hugo Weaving), leader of Hydra, a sect of Nazis disbanded from the official NSDAP that
worships Teutonic gods and plans to attack several American cities with kamikaze airplanes.
In a final act of sacrifice, Captain America saves the nation by crushing the airplane heading
to New York over uninhabited territory.
Recalling Dika’s statement that in nostalgia films oftentimes the returning form itself
is overriding with pastness, I suggest that after years of absence from mainstream
entertainment Captain America’s return in a Hollywood blockbuster in 2011 must be
considered nostalgic. Albeit nostalgia films most commonly testify to the crisis of masculinity
by returning to a past in which the equation between penis and phallus remained intact, this
film does not provide an escapist fantasy in relation to the current crisis of masculinity.
Instead, the film explicitly presents his main protagonist as male subject in crisis.
While Captain America is an epitome of male physicality, associations with femininity
paradoxically denigrate his masculinity. Soon after Steve’s instant transformation into
Captain America, a Nazi spy destroys the formula for the serum. To protect the serum in his
blood from falling into the enemy’s hands, Captain America is denied entry into the war once
again. Instead of entering the male realm of war, Captain America has to perform in a nightly
soiree promoting the American military. Objectified on stage, dressed in tights, and

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contemptuously referred to as ‘chorus girl’, Captain America is relegated to the feminized
realm of spectacle, and his masculinity thus disparaged by association with the feminine.
Notably, the distinction between the male realm of the war and the feminine realm of
spectacle, visually reinforced by golden, bright tinges in the female realm, and darker, bluish
hues for the male realm, replicates the claim of the alleged feminization of society forwarded
in articulations of the crisis of masculinity. The present crisis is therefore acknowledged and
represented, becomes palpable, and is reinforced in the viewing subject.
From the onset of the film Steve is bullied and constantly beaten by his comrades.
When a man double his size beats up Steve in a backstreet, without any chance of winning
this quarrel or even throwing a punch himself, Steve gets up time and again and “turns his
cheek whenever he has a chance of receiving a blow” (Freud, qtd. in Silverman 188).
Psychoanalytically speaking, through this willing submission to pain Steve Rogers,
respectively Captain America, assumes a masochistic position. While masochism is
traditionally understood as constitutive principle of femininity, masochism constitutes a
perversion of male subjectivity, “‘an expression of the female nature’ in male subjects”, that
challenges male identifications with the symbolic order (Walsh 31). Having a former ideal of
masculinity adopt this subjectivity therefore casts doubt on the nostalgically reassuring
quality of Captain America, especially since the representation of male masochism in cinema
arguably constitutes a contributing, reinforcing factor in the current crisis of masculinity.
Revealing male masochism as “failed narcissism”: “an unwillingness to acknowledge
that one is enslaved by one’s own image” (39), David Greven recently argued:

Masochism represents a regressive failure of the libido’s campaign to push Death-


forces out of the body: masochism is the ‘introjection’ of sadistic and destructive
forces, which in fact can simply be called primary masochism, the desire for the living
person to destroy [himself]. (50)

Therefore, the representation of male masochism in cinema illustrates that masculinity is


captive to the older myth of male supremacy, but cannot help laying this myth to rest because
the myth’s enslaving powers remain unacknowledged. Via viewer-identification,
masochism’s destructive, sadistic powers become part of the viewer’s self, so that
representations male masochism reinforce the crisis of masculinity in the male spectator.
Since the film revives an established ideal of American masculinity, which is then robbed of
his former glory as successful construction of masculinity through the display of male
masochism, a trajectory constituting a form of disillusionment that intensifies the male feeling

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of despair and victimization, it seems that Captain America utilizes the nostalgic quality of its
protagonist to amplify male masochism’s regressive potentials.

3.2 The National Superhero


Because of masochism’s firm relation to female subjectivity, psychoanalytical film theory
maintains that the male subject cannot avow masochism “without calling into question his
identification with the masculine position” (Silverman 190). Masochism is therefore
traditionally valorised as resistant mode of male subjectivity. However, recent scholarship on
the representation of male masochism in popcultural texts suggests that “masochism, far from
being radical, has emerged as the default mode of traditional, normative masculinity” (Greven
19) . 6
Within the context of postmodern identity politics, “the notion of crisis”, Pamela
Robertson suggests, “is nothing more that [sic!] a discursive strategy circulated by men in
order to reoccupy centre stage and reclaim patriarchal privilege” (qtd. in Walsh 7). Fintan
Walsh adds that crisis “is not an end in itself but a period of disorder that precedes and
precipitates a longer period of productivity, restructuring, and redevelopment, which may
even lead to the re-establishment of the temporarily agitated norm” (8). Since endowing
hegemonic subjects with a victimized status by implication entails the marginalization and
decentring of authentically disempowered groups, the representation of male masochism in
cinema is an essentially conservative and regressive practice that reinforces the status quo of
male hegemony.
Captain America could easily disavow the current crisis of masculinity through a
nostalgic return to a past in which the equation between penis and phallus remained inviolate.
Since the film instead uses nostalgia to reinforce this felt crisis, I suggest that here, male
victimization is not an end in itself, but serves to endow the American nation with a
victimized status. Dressed in the American flag, Captain America is designed to be the male
representative of the American nation. Because the “process of engendering between the
gendered subjects of the nation and the nation itself is dialogic, since each influences the other
and since the nation creates masculinity at the same time as masculinity creates the nation”
(Reeser 178), Captain America’s virtues of courage, honour, and honesty, always used in
service of protecting the innocent and serving justice, by extension endow the nation with

                                                                                                               
6  For a detailed account of male masochism and victimization in literature, cf. Sally Robinson. Marked Men:
White Masculinity in Crisis, Columbia University Press: 2000. For male masochism and victimization as
performative discourse, cf. Fintan Walsh, Male Trouble. Masculinity and the Performance of Crisis, Palgrave
Macmillan: 2010. For male masochism in contemporary cinema, cf. David Greven, Manhood in Hollywood from
Bush to Bush, Palgrave Macmillan: 2010.

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these attributes. Therefore, Captain America enjoys a special position in American culture: as
the national superhero, he “narrates American identity in a way that other icons … cannot”,
and is “often referred to by fans and creators as an idealized version of what Americans can
(and should) be” (Steinmetz 191). Captain’s costume, suggests Mike DuBose, “is supposed to
enhance that role. Yet, if his physical might starts to wane … then all that is left is his image,
his symbolism” (212).
While Captain America’s physical might remains intact in the contemporary
instalment, I suggest that since Captain America’s hegemonic position is placed in jeopardy
by the display of male masochism his function as symbol of America is here equally
emphasised as DuBose demonstrates for recent novelizations. Substituting Uncle Sam in
promotional posters that appear in the background of several scenes, Captain America is
unmistakeably positioned as representative of the American nation. Therefore, the film’s
portrayal of Captain America as male masochist by analogy endows the American nation with
a victimized status, and illustrates how “American national identity is founded upon mythical
constructions of victimhood, perceived emasculation and the centralization of male crisis in
representation” (Straw 127).
Significantly, Captain America stylistically recreates the original World War II setting
of the comic books in a sentimentalized, nostalgically idealized fashion. I suggest that this
recreation, especially in its nostalgically idealized form, reinforces the association between
Captain America and America’s national identity during World War II. This way, the film
ultimately reinstates an anachronistic American self-image, which serves to disavow the
recent erosion of said self-image under the impact of America’s War on Terror.

3.3 Captain America and The American Self-Image


In American culture, the Second World War is remembered as period of American grandeur,
and the “generation that fought World War II” is idealized as “the greatest” (Young 256). The
defeat over Germany cemented America’s self-understanding as “an extraordinary nation with
a special role to play in human history; not only unique but also superior among nations” and
“established the US as fully engaged world power” (McCrisken 1, 14).

The ‘Four Freedoms’ [freedom of speech, religion, from want and from fear] and their
contrast from fascism rooted the war effort in one of the central ideas of American
political culture and remained dominant in public discourse and official rhetoric
throughout the war. (14)

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By fighting oppression, totalitarianism, and fascism, and by protecting the innocent without
any conceivable ulterior motive other than ‘doing what seems right’, America’s foreign policy
conduct during World War II corresponded to, and was equivalent with the virtues, ideals and
the national identity that Captain America promoted and represented. Since the distinction
between good and evil appeared absolute during World War II, this war fitted neatly into the
Manichean good versus evil structure that is characteristic, even constitutive, of the superhero
genre.
This would, however, not always be the case. During the Vietnam War a divergence
between the American self-image, ideals and values represented by Captain America and the
actual practice of political and military conduct of the US became palpable, and challenged
America’s national identity. Television news coverage swamped American households with
images of American soldiers committing acts of cruelty against unarmed civilians, women
and children alike, and any moral necessity to intervene in the conflict seemed lacking.
Hence, in the wake of the Vietnam War, which still resonates today “as a sore spot in
the American psyche” (Dika 55), it was questionable whether the American nation really held
itself to a higher ethical and moral standard, and the American self-image as ‘superior among
nations’ came under scrutiny (McCrisken). 7 Given the atrocities committed by US soldiers,
in contradistinction to World War II good and evil seemed not absolute anymore, nor were
they mutually exclusive opposites any longer. Therefore, this war was also at odds with the
naïve and simplistic Manichean good versus evil structure presented in the comic books.
While the highly popular original comic book series had been cancelled in 1948,
Captain America was re-launched during the Vietnam conflict and reinstated the Manichean
structure by positioning not the Viet Cong, but Nazis as primary enemies, epitomes of evil
that seemed worthy of Captain America’s further effort. While Captain America does travel to
Vietnam in this series, John Moser argues that constant flashbacks to Captain America’s
wartime service made World War II the main setting of the story. Additionally, Captain
America was perpetually pitted against attempts to re-establish the Third Reich (31). Most
significantly, the series made alterations concerning the characterization of Red Skull that
disavowed America’s own moral wrongdoings during World War II, and, given the present
socio-political context, also those committed in Vietnam.
As Hayton and Albright elaborate, in the original series the alter ego of Red Skull,
Captain America’s archenemy, was George Maxon, an American industrialist who was

                                                                                                               
7
McCrisken provides a detailed and intriguing account of how the Vietnam War impacted the notion of
American exceptionalism.

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promised the position of Minister of All American Industry in exchange for supporting Hitler
and the Nazis. “In some ways worse than Hitler himself, the enemy of true American
principles lurked within our own fold during that difficult time” (17). However, in the
Vietnam War series, the archenemy was an

embittered European orphan taken under Hitler’s wing, who killed and replaced his
look-alike the American industrialist George Maxon … thus playing down America’s
real and known involvement with the Fuhrer, the subject of many original Captain
America tales of the 1940s. (19)

This displacement of singular elements can be considered nostalgically reassuring of the


American self-image derived from World War II that cast the nation as moral example of the
free world. Indeed, Moser observes that during the Vietnam War a broader nostalgia wave for
the distinctively more heroic militarism of World War II spread, “evidenced in the popularity
of television programs such as Combat and The Rat Patrol, and by war comics such as
Foxhole, Waterfront and Battle” (31). During a conflict that cast considerable doubt on
America’s national identity, nostalgia for World War II served to disavow the traumatic
disillusionment of the American national psyche encompassed by the Vietnam War. The
nostalgic recreation of the World War II setting in the contemporary film, which reinforces
the association between Captain America and the World War II self-image of America, must
be considered similarly reassuring.
With the exception of some elements of fantasy that are intrinsic to the story (i.e.
Steve Rogers instant transformation) Captain America authentically recreates the era of
World War II in its mise-en-scéne, but is notably devoid of the true horror that characterized
World War II. For instance, military training camps rather than battlefields represent the
realm of war, and throughout the film neither Nazi Death Camps, nor genocide, or wartime
atrocities are mentioned. Disavowing America’s own wrongdoings, the film positions the
nation’s representative, Captain America, as defensive victim. Time and again, we watch
Steve win fights merely by protecting himself with his shield – his only ‘weapon’– and
hoping for some fortunate circumstance: the Nazi who blows up the laboratory ingests
cyanide; while a troop freed by Steve fights Hydra, Steve is busy saving his comrade; and not
even the Red Skull is killed by Captain America, but by Teutonic gods. Since Captain
America merely reacts to the evil deeds of his enemies, he lacks narrative agency. The
eschewal of violence therefore reinforces his subordinate position, at the same time that it
positions the nation firmly as defensive, and therefore innocent victim.

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Thus, Captain America relates well to Marilyn Blatt Young’s description of
contemporary war films. She argues that in wake of 9/11, “the only refuge for the righteous
fighting man has been World War II” (254). In the Bush administration’s campaigning for the
War on Terror parallels drawn between Pearl Harbour and 9/11, as well as the
characterization of the enemy as “fascist, totalitarian, a spoke in the axis of evil” strongly
recalled World War II (254).

Only in World War II, the film historian Thomas Doherty pointed out, can Americans
find ‘the consolation of closure and the serenity of moral certainty. For Hollywood
and American culture the Second World War would always be a safe berth.’ Fought
for an unquestionably just cause, ending in total victory, World War II could be
reliably invoked to remind Americans of their own best selves. (254)

As Monbiot states, in wake of September 11 Hollywood has created a “new myth of


nationhood” that casts the nation “simultaneously as the world’s saviour and the world’s
victim, a sacrificial messiah on its way to deliver the world from evil” (qtd. in Young 261). I
claim that this new myth of nationhood is patently illustrated in Captain America. Like the
nostalgic television programs and nostalgically adjusted Vietnam Captain America series, the
film enacts what Marita Sturken has termed the process of “making way for the next
war”(qtd. in Straw 131). As Straw summarizes, this involves that

cultural texts memorialize, commemorate and sentimentalize wars with the effect of
robbing them of their collective culturally traumatic power. Collective memories of
horror and violence must be resolved, in order for war to be deployed in the future and
to sustain belligerent foreign policy on which US cultural authority is predicated.
(131)

Released in 2011, the contemporary films immediate socio-political context is that of


America’s War on Terror, which is, just like the Vietnam War, characterised by America’s
barbaric and gruesome foreign policy. Suggestively, the nostalgic sentimentalized
representation of World War then serves to ‘make way’ for, respectively support this war.

3.4 The First Avenger and the War on Terror


Not unlike during the Vietnam War, more than ten years after the terrorist attacks on the
World Trade Centre in 2001, America again finds itself not as liberator or the world’s saviour,
but instead as victimizer. The ideal American self-image represented by Captain America

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seems untenable like, arguably, never before. News images of the degrading, inhumane
treatment and abuse of Abu Ghraib’s detainees sanctioned by the highest ranks of the US
military and government travelled the world and left their imprint in the collective
consciousness. Photographs of American soldiers posing triumphantly next to theirs victims
made unmistakably clear that America degraded democratic principles by the use of torture as
legitimate measure of political conduct, and when attacked America is not morally or
ethically superior to any nation at all. Measures like extraordinary rendition, the surveillance
systems run by the NSA, and in general, the Patriot Act that severely restricted civil liberties,
speak of a remarkable governmental distrust towards its own populace. These contemporary
flashpoint themes surrounding the War on Terror fit perfectly into the original Captain
America storyline, in which, as mentioned above, domestic subversion was a narrative focal
point. And yet, in Captain America the present domestic subversion of America’s highly
valued freedom remains unacknowledged. The film does, however, provide visual and
narrative motifs that relate to the terrorist attacks in 2001.
To begin with, comparing Hitler and Red Skull, doctor Erskine explains that Hitler
and Red Skull share a passion for occult powers and Teutonic myth. Whereas Hitler
rhetorically employs these fantasies in his speeches to inspire his followers, and thus for his
political agenda, the Red Skull religiously believes in these myths, takes them for real, and is
convinced that the Tesseract, a glass cube of mythical power, will transform him into the
infamous Übermensch. A political motif that readily presents itself is thus substituted by a
religious motif, replicated in the portrayal of the Hydra members who are visually removed
from ‘political Nazis’ by way of their uniforms. Moreover, Red Skull is not the original,
American industrialist, but the high-ranking German Nazi officer Johann Schmidt, who
speaks with an unmistakable, exaggerated German accent. Hence, Red Skull is decisively
marked as foreign threat, and much rather than a political adversary, i.e. a Nazi acting on
behalf of political ideology, the Red Skull, planning to attack New York City with a kamikaze
airplane, is narratively linked to the religious fundamentalists who destroyed the Twin
Towers. Interestingly, Norway, the source of the Tesseract is depicted in dark hues and sepia
tones, and bears little resemblance to the actual Norway in 1942. The dark colours bestow the
shot with medieval undertones, amplified by candles dimly lighting the medieval district
surrounding the castle – another medieval motif – in which the Tesseract is stored. Moreover,
the bearded guards protecting the castle are dressed in rags recalling the costumes of ordinary
peasants in the contemporary television series Game of Thrones (2011-), and appear
completely anachronistic to 1940s fashion, even when completely worn down.

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This mythological rather than historical depiction of Norway – significantly the source
of Red Skull’s power – is styled according to present day stereotypes of the Islamic world as
morally, politically and socially stuck in the dark ages (cf. Straw). Since the first Gulf War,
such stereotypical denigrations of Islamic culture have been a staple of mainstream
Hollywood productions, so argues Marc Straw. He quotes Susan Linville stating that the
“West has persistently coded the East as feminine, inferior, fecund, and treacherous” (Straw
133). This coding here serves to relate the Red Skull and the members of his Hydra sect to the
threat posed by Islamic terrorist in 2001.
However, most explicitly, this tragic event is represented in the film when Captain
America, in his final act of sacrifice crushes the kamikaze plane heading to New York City
over uninhabited territory. This scene narratively circumvents destructions in New York City,
which factually occurred in 2001. Visually, the introductory shot of New York in the
beginning of the film more pronouncedly disavows this destruction. Clear and bright, this shot
shows the skyline of New York without the Twin Towers. On the one hand, this image
arguably illustrates how nostalgia films testify to moments of historical trauma precisely by
avoiding them, since by returning to a past pre-destruction, the factual destruction of the Twin
Towers is circumvented. On the other hand, no despair accompanies this sight – in all its
radiance the shot offers a nostalgically reassuring New York pre-destruction, a hope-inspiring
image that does not show what is now missing, but what was yet to be created. This shot is
extremely significant because it inevitably directs attention to the traumatic events of
September 11, and therefore, does not disavow the event itself.
Importantly, Dika reminds us that in “the psychic trauma of the castration complex [in
psychoanalytical theory the event that predisposes the male subject to nostalgia] the trauma of
the feared loss is substituted, according to Freud, by a fetish, an object on which the gaze fell
just prior the trauma” (207). I therefore suggest that in Captain America the visual allusion to
September 11 does not represent trauma. Rather, this event is positioned as the moment
preceding the trauma, the fetishized, and therefore unthreatening, reassuring object upon
which ‘the gaze fell just prior the trauma’. The actual trauma is constituted by the more recent
disillusionment of the American nation encompassed by America’s atrocious military conduct
during the War on Terror. Suggestively, America’s implied victimhood then “serves to
repress and contain the visibility of the barbaric foreign policy upon which US cultural and
economic pre-eminence is predicated” (Straw 129), eerily present during the War on Terror.
Furthermore, as indicated in the prior chapter, the War on Terror is characterized by a
fundamental ambiguity and therefore evades the simplistic Manichean good versus evil

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structure that permeates superhero fiction. But, as Steinmetz points out, it “has been argued
that the events of September 11, 2001, allowed Captain America to return to a ‘good war’ like
World War II, in which evil was defined in black and white terms, and America had returned
to a simple narrative of freedom versus fascism” (197). In this respect, it is noteworthy that
doctor Erskine reveals that Hitler supported Johann Schmidt as young orphan and took him
under his wings, which renders Red Skull the spawn of evil. Since the Red Skull is further
planning to overthrow Hitler once he has taken hold of the Tesseract, his lack of loyalty to
Hitler makes him unpredictable and imponderable, which arguably renders him even more
dangerous, more vicious than Hitler. Since the actual Adolf Hitler is perhaps the most
ferocious human being ever, such comparison positions the Red Skull as epitome of evil – the
embodiment of evil at its worst, most absolute form.
Significantly, Erskine was forced to inject the same super-serum that he later injects
Steve Rogers to Johann Schmidt, who then became Red Skull. As Erskine explains, the
“serum amplifies everything that is inside. So…good becomes great bad becomes worse”.
Hence, the injection of the super-serum does not alter the already existing attributes of Johann
Schmidt, nor does it alter Steve Rogers’ character. Instead, the serum leads to a physical
transformation that makes the inherent attributes of both, hero and villain, visible. Since it is
not the serum’s effect that makes Red Skull evil and Steve Rogers good, their attributes are
innate qualities, and therefore have ontological quality. Hero and villain thus constitute a
binary opposition of absolute good versus absolute evil and the Manichean structure is
reinstated as absolute, ontological distinction itself.
Notably, the Bush administration’s promotion of the War on Terror employed a
rhetoric that strongly recalls the Manichean structure, as when announcing that “our
responsibility to history is already clear: to answer these attacks and rid the world of evil”,
and, expanding on the theme of world redemption, proposing to end “tyranny in our world”
(qtd. in Lawrence 3). Such rhetoric, suggests Lawrence, marked the state’s enemies by “the
genre conventions of comics … as supervillains” (5). Simultaneously, it characterises
America as superheroic saviour of the civilized world, defending not the American nation, but
freedom and democracy worldwide (4). This recalls an absolute, and ontological opposition
between good and evil, which excludes any intermediate degrees of goodness, respectively
evilness. The film’s reinstatement of the Manichean comic book structure, transferred onto
the event of September 11 through several allusions, arguably disavows the possibility that
although America fell victim to terrorism, in response to it, America became a victimizer
itself.

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3. 5 Nostalgic Disavowals
By disavowing the War on Terror through emphasizing September 11, Captain America
reinstates the Manichean structure of good versus evil, and transfers it onto September 11.
Through the performance of male masochism, the film endows the American nation with a
victimized status that, by way of the Manichean structure, disavows a simultaneous role of
America as victimizer. Since the reinstated Manichean structure represses criticality towards
America’s foreign policy conduct in response to 9/11, this structure itself must be considered
nostalgically reassuring of America’s righteousness in the War on Terror. Hence, the film
ultimately restores faith in the American self-image as ‘the world’s victim and the world’s
saviour’.
In as far as the world’s saviour is envisioned as sacrificial messiah, the assumption of
a feminized, victimized position does not undermine Captain’s, respectively America’s claim
to hegemony, but conversely, strengthens it. Referencing Slavoj Žižek, Walsh argues:
“sacrifice is structured around an economy of exchange, whereby something precious is
‘offered up’ to the Other in hope of acquiring something that is even more vital” (51).
Therefore, Captain’s final act of sacrifice – crushing the kamikaze plane heading to New
York over uninhabited territory he sacrifices his life – is rewarded by him entering the history
books as celebrated hero, testified by the succeeding shot of kids running through the streets,
reading his heroic stories. Captain America, respectively the nation he represents, is thus
rendered a ‘sacrificial messiah on a mission to deliver the world from evil’.
Significantly, the nostalgic recreation of World War II manifests America’s ‘new myth
of nationhood’ and reinforces America’s claim to victimhood. Largely devoid of violence, the
sentimentalized version of World War II robs this period of its undeniable horrors, and
simultaneously disavows the horror and atrocities committed by the American government in
response to September 11. These aspects consolidate to support the American foreign policy
conduct during the War on Terror, and restore faith in the America represented and embodied
by Captain America; ‘an extraordinary nation, not only unique but superior among nations’.

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4. Batman and the Virtues of Ambiguity
In a recent online poll by ranker.com Christopher Nolan’s Batman trilogy, Batman Begins
(2005), The Dark Knight (2008) and The Dark Knight Rises (2012) domineered the top five of
the best superhero movies of all times. 8 Detailing Bruce Wayne’s metamorphosis into
Batman, from the initial trauma of witnessing the violent murder of his parents, his
consequent oath to avenge theirs deaths, to the years of training necessary for his eventual
transformation, Batman Begins offers the first exhaustive account of Batman’s origin story,
The Dark Knight stages Batman’s fierce combat against one of his best-remembered villains,
the Joker, and the final part sees Wayne’s last assignment before his eventual retirement as
Batman.
Focussing on Batman Begins and The Dark Knight, in this second case study I argue
that the utter popularity of these films stems from the successful recreation of a superhero
best-known from childhood. I maintain that by rendering Batman a conceivable hero even
adults can believe in, the films provide spectators with the metonymically nostalgic
experience to re-live and re-experience the same admiration for Batman as idealized
construction of masculinity they enjoyed as children. I further claim that the nostalgic
Manichean good versus evil structure that permeates the superhero genre is contrasted with,
and problematized by the films’ staging of contemporary political quandaries, which
seemingly evade easy, comfortable solutions, and clear-cut boundaries between good and evil.
By way of this contrasting, the films challenge the applicability of the nostalgically recreated
childhood ideal Batman as paragon of masculinity in the contemporary social and political
climate.

4.1 Na-na-na-na-na Batmaaan: Batman and Childhood Viewing Experiences


Today, Batman is one of the best-known, most successful superheroes; the superhero with
most cinematic treatments, adopted for more TV shows and animated series than any other
superhero, as long-time Batman devotee Travis Langley points out in Batman and Psychology
(5-6). The Caped Crusader fighting crime in Gotham City first appeared in Detective Comics
# 27 in 1939 and has since become a steady figure in popular culture. “Even though Batman
originated and endures as a comic book character, most of us first met him on TV” (8), where
ABC’s live action series Batman (1966- 1968) cemented Batman’s now iconic status in
popular culture. Featuring Adam West as light-hearted, bright and gleeful Batman dressed in
lilac-grey tights, the show was continually rerun on television, and is still one of the best-

                                                                                                               
8
Cf. http://www.ranker.com/crowdranked-list/the-best-superhero-movies-ever-made

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known Batman instalments. For many, the series constituted the first encounter with the
Caped Crusader during childhood. Since Batman lacks the historical specificity I ascribed to
Captain America in the prior case study, the nostalgic appeal of the figure is pre-eminently
directed at childhood memories, as this fan testimonial – among others quoted in Will
Brooker’s recent study on Batman in the 21st century – demonstrates: “When it comes to
Batman I still am, and always will be, that five-year old boy who got his first Batman mask
and cape, put it on and truly lived for everything that the Caped Crusader did” (36).
One might therefore assume that in the recent Batman trilogy by Christopher Nolan,
Batman’s nostalgic relation to childhood viewing experiences of a mainstream audience
would be exploited, or at least alluded to. Quite to the contrary, Brooker intriguingly argues
that since the popular television series is best remembered for its homoerotic innuendo (to this
day one of the most controversially discussed facets in the Batman mythology), the dark
colours and shades that dominate Nolan’s films and that facilitate a gloomy, almost noir-ish
atmosphere serve to contrast Nolan’s Batman from the colourful, radiant, and arguably campy
television incarnation. At the same time, this styling claims authenticity to the allegedly dark
and sinister original Batman form 1939, idealized in the promotion of Nolan’s films as “a Bat-
Platonic Ideal of how Batman should really be” (Medhurst 161; cf. Brooker 110), a trajectory
that “carries blatantly weighted value judgements about masculinity and sexuality” (Brooker:
119).
Transferring Brooker’s argument to nostalgia, we can claim that in Nolan’s films
nostalgia for childhood viewing experiences is intentionally repressed and replaced by
historical nostalgia for the original, nostalgically idealized comic book Batman. Recreating a
popcultural icon of hegemonic masculinity by stylistic reference to its (heterosexual) history,
nostalgia in Batman Begins and The Dark Knight functions like nostalgia in the mythological
film, briefly discussed above, and thus appears inevitably regressive. However, I suggest that
the stylistic reference to former, nostalgically idealized Batman incarnations constitutes just
one element supportive of the more significant metonymical nostalgic experience these films
provide.
Since, as Jameson maintained, the metonymical nostalgic film “does not reinvent a
picture of the past in its lived totality; rather, by reinventing the feel and shape of
characteristic art objects of an older period (the serials), it seeks to reawaken a sense of past
associated with those objects” (1988: 197), I claim that the new Batman films provide viewers
with the metonymical nostalgic experience to re-live and re-experience the same admiration
for Batman as idealized construction of masculinity they enjoyed as children. On the one

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hand, in a time in which masculinity experiences itself in crisis the recreation of Batman as
epitome of narcissistic masculinity allows male viewers to experience the beauty of
masculinity again, arguably helping to counterbalance representations of masochistic
masculinity that currently domineer mainstream Hollywood cinema with a more positive,
self-accepting, and hope-inspiring alternative. On the other hand, having male viewers fully
believe in Batman as aspirational model of masculinity again forms the perquisite for the
destabilising and subversive potential of the new Batman films to challenge and question the
applicability of superhero imagery in the 21st century. Therefore, focussing on metonymical
nostalgia, nostalgia’s progressive potential in contemporary superhero movies may be
revealed.

4.2 A Hero to Believe In


To this day, Batman’s homoerotic past associated with the 1960s television series continues
as a sore spot in the Batman myth. Batman-admirers still “defend him against what they see
as negative interpretations” (Medhurst 161), with reactions ranging from openly homophobic,
to discretely so, as Brooker recently demonstrated (120-121). However, recalling his own
childhood viewing experiences in his important essay Batman, Deviance and Camp, Andy
Medhurst states that he was infuriated by his parents’ laughter at the show, and would only
later, when watching reruns of the series, understand and share the “parental hilarity“, derived
from the show’s unintentional homoeroticism and campiness (149). It thus seems that
Batman’s presumed homosexuality remained largely unrecognized by children, and only
retroactively dethroned Batman as aspirational model of heterosexual masculinity by
disillusioning adult male viewers, aware that homosexuality poses a destabilising threat to
heterosexual masculinity, since “heteronormative, heterosexual subjectivity depends on the
implementation of the taboo against homosexuality” (Walsh 26).
Circumventing, respectively disavowing Batman’s retroactive fall from (heterosexist)
grace through a sinister and gloomy styling that leaves no trace of Batman’s colourful
television past, Nolan’s films allow adult male viewers to re-experience Batman as “notably
successful construction of masculinity“ (Medhurst 150). It provides disillusioned male
viewers with the metonymical nostalgic experience to re-live the same admiration for Batman
as idealized construction of masculinity they enjoyed as children, as this fan testimonial
verifies: “they finally got it right. Finally. Batman is finally the character I read on the page
since I was a child” (Brooker 110).
However, to fully recreate Batman as aspirational model of masculinity, this
metonymical nostalgic experience is supported and reinforced by rendering Batman as a

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conceivable, realistic “hero even adults can envision existing in real life, with less suspension
of disbelief” (Langley 5). To this end, “specific approaches to performance, editing,
characterisation and narrative” endow Nolan’s films with a pronounced realism that became a
linchpin in the promotion of Batman Begins and The Dark Knight (Brooker 93). To begin
with, narrative allusions to America’s political conduct during the War on Terror, which I
address in greater detail below, situate Batman in a contemporary environment and render the
diegetic world of Batman Begins and The Dark Knight feasible and realistic.
This also necessitates the eclipse of elements of fantasy and science fiction,
characteristic of superhero narratives in general and the 1960s television series in particular.
For instance, the new Batman (Christian Bale) cannot fly and operates decidedly “within the
conceivable bounds of human potential” (91). By having not Batman, but Lucius Fox
(Morgan Freeman), a trained engineer and residing head of Wayne Enterprises’ Department
of Applied Sciences, design the gadgets with which Batman traditionally reimburses his lack
of actual superpowers, the gadgets are legitimised as realistic by reference to contemporary
science. Accordingly, the Batmobile is now the ‘tumbler’, a bridging vehicle designed for
military purposes, and Batman’s famous cape is now made of ‘memory cloth’, a highly
engineered piece of fabric. In various scenes it is further implied that only his wealth enables
Wayne to acquire these gadgets, making the perquisites of Batman’s superheroism feasible.
Hence, the diegetic world presented here seems “only one or two steps removed from our own
[reality]” (131), and superheroism appears conceivable and realistic beyond the fictional
world of Gotham City.
Moreover, as the first exhaustive account of Batman’s origins, Batman Begins is less a
film about Batman being a superhero, than it is about Wayne becoming a superhero. With, as
Vincent M. Gaine observed in his study on Genre and Super-Heroism, training montages
echoing martial arts films, and combat scenes reminiscent of ‘hard body’ action movies (115),
Batman Begins centres on the acquirement of skills and documents in painstaking detail how
the orphaned Bruce Wayne actively recreates himself as superhero by burning ambition,
mental stamina, and most notably, by intense physical training. This “illuminates the way in
which the superhero works to produce ‘unimpaired masculinity’… through active self-
creation” (Walsh 158). Significantly, Wayne is clearly aware that by becoming Batman, he
has broken the limiting boundaries of personhood and created something greater, more
meaningful and momentous, something worthy of his veneration: “People need dramatic
examples to shake them out of apathy and I can’t do that as Bruce Wayne. As a man of flesh

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and blood I can be ignored, I can be destroyed. But as a symbol, as a symbol I can be
incorruptible, I can be everlasting”.
However, within the conceivable and realistic environment created by Nolan, the
focus on Wayne’s transformation leaves the impression that superheroism is an attainable
mode of masculine performance so that Batman is recreated as aspirational model of
masculinity. As Christopher Nolan states Batman is “really just a guy that [sic] does a lot of
push-ups” (qtd. in Brooker 103), a characterisation legitimized by an intentional blurring of
the boundaries between actor and character in the promotion of the film as Brooker observes.
After emaciating his body off 31.75 kg for his role in The Machinist (2004), Batman-actor
Christian Bale underwent a “rigorous physical training” in order to portray the brawny
Batman. “Bale was never a career bodybuilder like Schwarzenegger, but a man who, like
Bruce Wayne, changed his body type through sheer determination and inherent sense of
drive” (98). Since Bale ‘really’ succeeded in this transformation, Wayne’s fictional
metamorphosis into Batman is rendered feasible and ‘real’ by implication – a circumstance
heavily promoted in the marketing and press coverage of Batman Begins. By stating “if you
trained hard enough … maybe, just maybe, you could become Batman” (93), and that Batman
is a hero “anyone can aspire to be. You could never be Superman, you could never be the
Incredible Hulk, but anybody could conceivably become Batman” (90), viewer identifications
with Batman’s all-powerful masculine performance were actively encouraged in the
promotion of Batman Begins.

4.3 The Beauty of Superheroic Masculinity


In film theory viewer identifications with onscreen protagonists are traditionally
conceptualised as “bastion of white male privilege” (Greven 19). As Laura Mulvey famously
argued:

As the spectator identifies with the main male protagonist, he projects his look on to
that of his like, his screen surrogate, so that the power of the male protagonist as he
controls events coincides with the active power of the erotic look, both giving a
satisfying sense of omnipotence. (48)

Since the screen-surrogate becomes a “more perfect, more complete, more powerful ideal
ego” whose narrative agency and active control over diegetic events the spectator shares
through identification (48), the viewer is implicated in a “project of shared narcissistic
omnipotence, the psychic state of masculinist hegemony” (Greven 27).

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However, David Greven recently cast a significantly more positive light on the
performance of male narcissism in cinema. Drawing on Freud’s initial conception of primary
narcissism as the “original libidinal cathexis of the self” (22), he argues that male narcissism
should be understood in its primary form as “universal human desire to live: ‘the libidinal
complement to the egoism of the instinct of self-preservation, a measure of which may
justifiably be attributed to every living creature’” (50). Relating male narcissism to the Life
Force, associated with freedom, creativity, impulse, love and joy (47), Greven suggests that
the consumption of male narcissism in cinema is joyous and should be understood as
celebration of life and beauty.
Notably, male narcissism can refer to both “the queer male who enshrines his own
beauty and the straight male who is the icon of desire upon whom a prohibition against
looking is both placed and enforced” (20). It is therefore interesting to note that in the Batman
films, frequent low angle shots pronounce the spectacularity of Batman’s body while noir-ish
colours and shadows emphasize the desirability of his muscularity. Such depictions are open
to queer gazing, and given the prohibition against looking at the straight male, this queer
gazing ruptures the hegemonic surface of the film text.
However, while in psychoanalytical theory homosexuality’s alleged desire for
sameness has tied this sexuality intimately to male narcissism, homosexuality is also related
to male masochism, because, as indicated in the prior chapter, the assumption of this
subjectivity by the male subject forecloses identifications with a hegemonic masculine
position within the Symbolic order. Hence, the homosexual subject’s identification with male
narcissism frees the subject from masochism’s destructive powers resulting from masochism
relation to the death drive. Referencing the work of Stanley Aronowitz, Greven therefore
assigns male narcissism a radical political potential for the homosexual subject: “far from
being the enemy of radical politics, narcissism is indeed essential to it [because] the sense of
autonomy gained from self-affirmation is precisely what allows the subject to revolutionize
his or her political situation” (47). However, while the heterosexual male subject is
emphatically not in need of narcissism’s political potential (since however much the subject
experiences masculinity in crisis he still remains the figure of relative privilege in Western
society) for the homosexual and heterosexual subject alike, the display of male narcissism in
cinema enables the male subject to enjoy the beauty of masculinity.
Despite the possibility of queer gazing, this is also joyous for the heterosexual viewer.
Presumably assured of Batman’s heterosexuality through the repression of former Batman
incarnations associated with homosexuality, the male spectator can disavow homosexuality’s

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destabilizing power. Especially against Hollywood’s ubiquitous representations of male
masochism, the possibility of enjoying male beauty again provides the heterosexual subject
with an at least temporarily escape from the crisis of masculinity. In this sense, the new
Batman films do not represent the crisis of masculinity, but rather challenge it. Focussing on
the transformation initiated by the tragic loss of Wayne’s parents, Batman Begins is arguably
not a film about loss, but about coping with loss, a call for action that ‘shakes people out of
their apathy’. Recalling the example of Fathers4Justice, who resignify “marginalization and
emasculation by filtering fantasies of phallic masculinity through the figure of the animated
superhero” (Walsh 155-156), despite subversive potentials, the display of male narcissism
then results all to easily in the reinforcement of ‘the psychic state of masculinist hegemony’.
And yet, in reference to Steve Bruhm’s work, Greven identifies Narcissus (the name
giver of the psychoanalytical concept, a beautiful youth of Greek mythology who endlessly
stared in admiration at his own reflection) as a figure that rejects the binary oppositions upon
which Western culture is founded. Since, as Greven details, Narcissus rejects the culturally
privileged options in favour of the culturally denigrated part of each binary, narcissism
contains a fundamentally destabilizing, subversive potential: “Recognizing our narcissistic
disposition can lead [to the utopian possibility] of seeking sameness in the form of difference
that radically reimagines difference itself as a different form of sameness” (46). 9
Drawing on this understanding of narcissism as rejection of binary oppositions, in the
following paragraphs I will attempt to demonstrate that by narratively paralleling Batman
with his adversaries Batman Begins and The Dark Knight indeed reimagine difference as
sameness, which ultimately destabilizes the binary opposition of good and evil. Since this
opposition – the Manichean good versus evil structure – is the generic component of
superhero fiction, its destabilisation problematizes the self-righteous narcissism of
superheroes. Moreover, by contrasting this nostalgic structure with today’s political
quandaries, which seemingly evade easy, comfortable solutions, and clear-cut boundaries
between good and evil, the films challenge the applicability of superhero imagery to the 21st
century. By highlighting America’s fundamental ambiguity in wake of the War on Terror, the
films ultimately problematize, or even deny, the viewer´s nostalgic return to the phallic
mother, who represents the “end of contradiction and the end of ambivalence” (Marcia Ian,

                                                                                                               
9  The original reads “Recognizing our narcissistic disposition can lead to a utopian erotics of seeking sameness
in the form of difference…”. I have substituted ‘utopian erotics’ with ‘utopian possibility’ to emphasise
narcissisms potential beyond sexuality. Given Greven’s reference to Stanley Aronowitz’ conception of
narcissism as perquisite for radical political change (cf. Greven 47), this alteration is in accordance with the
larger argument Greven presents.

  41  
 
 
qtd. in Greven 120). Batman Begins and The Dark Knight are therefore anything but escapist
fantasies.

4.4 The Simple Nature of Right and Wrong


The Manichean struggle between good and evil is a constitutive element in the superhero
genre and, endowed with ontological status, this binary opposition is rendered absolute. But in
Batman Begins and The Dark Knight parallels drawn between Batman and virtually all of his
adversaries, most notably the Scarecrow (Cillian Murphy) and the Joker (Heath Ledger),
depict good and evil as anything but absolute opposites.
In Batman Begins the use of fear as weapon connects Batman to the Scarecrow.
Whereas Batman turns his childhood fear of bats into his best tool for intimidating his
opponents through his costume, the Scarecrow develops a hallucination-inducing toxin to
throw Gotham in a state of panic. In this way, the Scarecrow reveals the use of fear as weapon
as flagrant and monstrous, exposing the questionability of Batman’s own methods, and, most
significantly, contesting the assumption of a fundamental difference between hero and villain.
Notably, as Brooker points out, the Scarecrow’s toxin is repeatedly referred to as medicine,
which recalls Plato’s Pharmacy, one of Jacques Derrida’s key studies. Here, Derrida plays on
the multiple meanings of the Greek word pharmakon as medicine and toxin, remedy and drug.
“Derrida’s attempts to communicate the multiple meanings of pharmakon convey a sense of
movement, fluidity and flow that does not just overturn and reverse oppositions, but resist
binary structures” (190). As Derrida states, trying to fix its meaning necessarily dismantles all
intrinsic binary distinctions “to the point where opposition itself …gives way to a process
where opposites merge in a constant undecidable exchange of attributes” (qtd. in Brooker
189). In the thematic overlap of Batman and Scarecrow’s use of fear the dichotomy of good
and evil is subjected to semiotic drift, negotiated, and rendered an “unstable phenomenon of
produced and ascribed meaning…” (Schlegel and Habermann 31).
Schlegel and Habermann further maintain that theatricality, another intrinsic element
of the superhero genre as the mandatory presence of costumes testifies, connects Batman to,
and parallels him with the Joker, and constitutes “the predominant mode of negotiating good
and evil” in The Dark Knight (34-35). Providing various accounts of his own origins, the
Joker not only mocks and subverts the genre’s obsession with origin stories. Rather, without
“verifiable identity, the Joker comes into being only as performance and staging” (42).
Batman for his part is literally borne “from the spirit of theatre” (32). Immediately before his
parents are killed, the family attends an opera so that the initial trauma that leads to Wayne
becoming Batman is visually and narratively connected to the theatre. Moreover, during a

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training montage Bruce’ mentor and later adversary Henri Ducard (Liam Neeson) states in
voice-over that “theatricality and deception are powerful agents”, and “The will to act is
everything”. As the authors point out, this is “an obvious pun on the double meaning of the
verb to act, which means to take action, but also to perform a (fictional) role” (32), again
evoking Derrida’s pharmakon. Therefore, Brooker (195) as well as Schlegel and Habermann
all identify Batman, like the Joker, as “floating signifier, whose fundamental semantic
openness is theatrically induced” (35). Both characters become “means to negotiate the binary
opposition of good and evil” (32).
Additionally, Batman’s theatricality is also remarkable in relation to his masculinity.
During his first encounter with Wayne, Ducard explains “if you make yourself more than just
a man…if you devote yourself to an ideal… than you become something else
entirely…Legend, Mr. Wayne”. This initiates Wayne’s transformation into, as Wayne later
says, an “incorruptible symbol“. In both Ducard’s and Wayne’s accounts of Wayne’s
transformation, the connection to theatricality thus reveals Batman as symbol of masculinity.
This implies that hegemony is not an intrinsic quality of the male subject. Since theatricality
is a “process of production whose product is consumed” simultaneously (Schlegel and
Habermann 35), I suggest that in Wayne’s creation of Batman the audience witnesses an
unconcealed performative genesis of signs. Because “theatricality is a performance in view of
a specific audience”, the “perceived sign does not precede its performative genesis” but
depends for its signification on the audience, which therefore becomes the constitutive
counterpart to Wayne’s production of signs (35). Hence, the audience itself is implicated in
the signification of the signs of masculinity that Wayne employs in his creation of Batman.
Therefore, the construction of hegemonic masculinity is revealed as dependent upon cultural
signification. Whether or not this particular construction of masculinity is regarded as
successful then fully depends on the viewing audience.
The parallels drawn between Batman and his adversaries relocate “the focus from
representations of ontological good or evil to the distinction itself” (44), rendering it
permeable and unstable, and ultimately destabilize a constitutive element of superhero
narratives, the Manichean structure of absolute good versus absolute evil. Importantly, the
very necessity to renegotiate and debate this distinction “is the manifestation of a radical
confusion, which ultimately affects the individual” (34). Against the backdrop of the films
manifold allusions to the radical confusion in wake of America’s War on Terror the
destabilized Manichean structure then brings into question the very relevance of superhero
imagery in the 21st century.

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4.5 Batman and The War on Terror
In the popular and scholarly reception of the Batman films, their relation to, and
representation of America’s political conduct in the War on Terror emerged as common
theme. For example, John Ip argues that “the Joker’s grainy homemade videos, cell phone-
detonated human bombs, burnt-out remains of buildings swarming with rescue workers—give
[The Dark Knight] a distinctly post-9/11 aesthetic”. Ip identifies “three specific
counterterrorism policies associated with the Bush Administration’s war on terrorism, namely
rendition, coercive interrogation, and surveillance” that allow reading the film as “parable
about the dilemmas that face society when confronting terrorism” (213-214). For Batman
Begins, Gaine suggest that “Gotham City serves as a metaphor for post- 9/11 America, reeling
from a severe trauma”. Capitalizing on “contemporary fears about terrorism, exploiting and
manipulating the (perceived) fear of the audience”, the “fearful state of the city ‘hails’ the
viewer and inserts us into its symbolic design” (118).
However, in Power, Choice and September 11 in The Dark Knight, Christine Muller
indicates that scholars fervently debate whether “The Dark Knight’s themes transparently
favoured the Bush administration’s War on Terror” or “exposed this response’s flaws” (47).
In the popular discourse surrounding the release of Batman Begins and The Dark Knight this
question remains similarly disputed, as Brooker demonstrates (200-203). For Muller, such
ambivalent interpretations result from the fundamental ambiguity that surrounds the War on
Terror. Since September 11 “occurred as an end in itself, massive deconstruction as self-
sufficient spectacle, rather than as overt advancement of a specific cause or interest”, Muller
argues that in such cases “modes and drives lie outside reason, refusing negotiation and
confounding ordinary forms of counteraction” (54). Congruously, in America’s War on
Terror “patently right answers fail to reside and choices must be made without the luxury of
self-righteous assurance” (47), which The Dark Knight renders explicit by staging no-win-
scenarios.
For instance, desperate to learn the location of Harvey Dent (Aaron Eckhart) and
Rachel Dawes (Maggie Gyllenhaal), both kidnapped by the Joker, Batman resorts to torture,
smashing the Joker’s head into walls and punching him in the face. Whether or not this
coercive interrogation is morally justifiable remains ambivalent since this scenario’s outcome
does not justify the means: when the Joker finally gives in and reveals that each hostage is
kept at a different part of Gotham, he forces Batman to choose whom to save. Since Batman
can rescue only one of them, the Joker effectively implicates Batman in the killing of at least
one person, taunting Batman that “Killing is making a choice. You choose between one life or

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the other ”. Whatever Batman chooses to do he will ‘kill by default’, so that neither choice is
morally justifiable let alone satisfying. Hence the Joker’s next taunt: “You have nothing to
threaten me with. Nothing to do with all your strength”.
On the one hand, since the film remains ambivalent about, and refrains from providing
a moral evaluation of this scenario, the staging of contemporary dilemmas brim-full of
ambiguity positions the audience as active and integral component in the moral evaluation of
the film. Allusions to the War on Terror “integrated seamlessly throughout the narrative,
create a context … for the film’s staged exigencies in terms of a particular exigency,
September 11, in the audience’s own recent past” (Muller 50), and “enable people– from
professional critics to casual viewers–to talk about an issue central to the first decade of the
twenty-first century, working through its dilemmas and debating its terms” (Brooker 210).
Moreover, the above-described scene dramatizes “that even formidable power can be
hamstrung and sabotaged and choice can sometimes lead only and inevitably to problematic
outcomes” (Muller 53), implying that clear-cut distinctions between good and evil are
irrevocably lost to, and incommensurable with today’s political challenges. This creates a
contemporary political context that is fundamentally antithetical to one of the most
significant, constitutive features of superheroism – the hero’s competence to, without any
doubt, discern right from wrong, respectively good from evil. This ultimately brings into
question the relevance and suitability of superhero imagery in the current political and social
landscape. Far from signalling a growing inability to position the present political momentum
in relation to history Batman Begins and The Dark Knight then force us to recognise and
confront our present moment in relation to history.

4.6 Superheroism in the 21st Century


Whereas the transference of the presently untenable Manichean morale onto contemporary
problems works nostalgically reassuring in Captain America, Batman Begins and The Dark
Knight refrain from presenting the Manichean structure as equally reassuring.
Instead, the films’ overt allusions to the current political landscape and its moral ambiguity
are contrasted with the Manichean good versus evil structure expected of superhero
narratives, making palpable that presently only a fine line separates good from evil. The films
therefore expose the genre’s comfortable morale as – albeit nostalgically reassuring –
essentially anachronistic to today´s problems and ultimately cast doubt on the relevance for
superhero imagery in the 21st century.
It is of vital importance that Batman is nostalgically recreated as hero even adults can
believe in. On the one hand, only through the metonymically nostalgic experience of fully

  45  
 
 
believing in Batman again can adult fans take the films seriously, without feeling that they
have personally out-grown superhero narratives and their naïve worldview. What emerges
instead is the critical feeling that somehow, the easy morale of superhero fiction is untenable
today. Superheroism then appears not only as a thing of the viewer’s past, but maybe even of
our collective, historical past. On the other hand, since Batman is recreated as male narcissist
proper by reference to his nostalgically idealized history, with respect to the crisis of
masculinity the films ultimately imply that even if masculinity is unambiguously restored to
hegemonic glory and escapes the threat of an allegedly feminized society, the contemporary
postmodern reality remains too complex for ambiguity to end. Since nostalgia in film is
generally understood as return to the phallic mother who represents the “end of contradiction
and the end of ambivalence” (Ian, qtd. in Greven 120), the nostalgic pleasure of union with
the phallic mother is at least problematized, if not denied altogether.
Of course, I can merely suggest that positive potentials of nostalgia are actualized in
the viewing subject since it is completely up to the spectator to evaluate the film’s staging of
superheroism, masculinity, and the War on Terror. But if these potentials are actualized,
nostalgia in Batman Begins and The Dark Knight does not challenge us to confront the past as
Vera Dika suggests (65), but forces us to confront our present situation through an artefact
from the past, whose traditional narrative form seems incapable of serving its established
symbolic purpose in the complexities of our own era.

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

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5. Nostalgia and Superheroes
The events of September 11 and the American foreign policy conduct during the consequent
War on Terror constitute what Silverman calls ‘historical trauma’: “a historically precipitated
but psychoanalytical specific disruption, with ramification extending far beyond the
individual psyche”. This creates a socio-political context in which men are forced into “such
an intimate relation to lack that they are at least for the moment unable to sustain an
imaginary relation with the phallus, and so withdraw their belief from the dominant fiction”
(55). In a climate in which the penis-phallus equation is already compromised by the waning
of paternal authority encompassed by an alleged ‘feminization of society’, and in which men
experience “a deep alienation from a social system, which by rights, they ought to dominate”
(Robinson 29), the recuperation of the dominant fiction by reinforcement of the penis-phallus
equation is of outmost importance “for the maintenance of our governing ‘reality’”
(Silverman 16). The representation of masculinity in popcultural texts plays a pivotal role in
this project of remasculinisation.
The recent rise of superhero imagery in Hollywood blockbuster production, which
nostalgically revives long-established popcultural icons of hegemonic masculinity, attests to
the cultural need for remasculinization in popular culture. The case studies presented in this
paper demonstrate that in contemporary superhero movies the specific portrayals of
masculinity are amplified by the films’ nostalgic qualities. In Johnston’s Captain America:
The First Avenger the formerly heroic and hegemonic figure of Captain America is
repositioned as male masochist, a subjectivity that challenges the male subject’s identification
with the Symbolic order and thus reinforces the felt crisis of masculinity. Placing a former
icon of masculinity in a subordinate, feminized position reinforces the male masochism of
Captain America and arguably challenges the superhero’s place in popular culture as ideal of
American masculinity. Batman in Christopher Nolan’s trilogy, on the other hand, is rendered
a male narcissist, a subjectivity traditionally aligned with “the psychic state of masculinist
hegemony” (Greven 27), returning male viewers to a state of infantile, imaginary plenitude
associated with the phallic mother. The Batman films therefore seem to offer a temporarily
escape from the experienced crisis of masculinity.
However, contemporary superhero narratives are marked by the socio-political context
of September 11 and the consequent War on Terror. Against this backdrop, my analyses have
shown that contrary to the first impressions, the nostalgically amplified display of masochism
in Captain America does not challenge the male subject’s identification with the symbolic
order, nor does the nostalgically reinforced narcissism of Batman necessarily support male

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hegemony. Instead, male masochism in Captain America reinforces the experience of the
male subject in the postmodern society. By contrasting a feminized realm of spectacle and a
male realm of war, here employed to denigrate the masculinity of its protagonist through
association with femininity, the film replicates the notion of the postmodern feminization of
society. This renders the current crisis of masculinity explicit and by way of viewer-
identification, the displayed masochism reinforces the seemingly desperate state of
masculinity in the male spectator. Utilized to endow the American nation with a victimized
status, the display of male masochism here serves to reinforce male hegemony by detour.
Translating victimization into sacrifice, and disavowing America’s role as victimizer during
the War on Terror, Captain America shores up patriarchy and reinstates a presently untenable
American self-image as the world’s saviour and simultaneous victim. In this sense, the film
can be interpreted, in Jardine’s words, as a nostalgic critique of the postmodern “society
without a father“ (qtd. in Radstone 174).
Conversely, rendering Batman a conceivable hero “even adults can envision existing
in real life, with less suspension of disbelief” (Langley 5), the Batman films amplify Batman’s
narcissistic qualities by nostalgically reawakening the veneration for Batman as ideal of
masculinity associated with childhood viewing experiences. This reinstatement of Batman as
paragon of heterosexual masculinity forms a crucial perquisite for the films’ implicit
deconstruction of the superhero. Contrasting the Manichean structure that permeates the
superhero genre with today’s political and moral quandaries, the films enable a critical
questioning of the applicability of superheroic figures in the 21st century. Because the mature
viewer has outgrown the naïve and simplistic worldview of this Manichean structure, only by
rendering Batman a conceivable hero adult viewers can admire can the critical stance towards
the relevance of superhero imagery be actualized as resulting from the fundamental ambiguity
of our times, not from the viewer’s adulthood.
Hence, nostalgia’s progressive potentials in the superhero genre depend upon whether
nostalgia is directed at history or memory. Supporting the nostalgic appeal of Captain
America by nostalgically recreating the original World War II setting, Captain America
belongs to the category of stylistically nostalgic films and directs nostalgia primarily at
history. Yet, World War II is here sentimentalized as period in which America rightfully laid
claim to its still leading self-image as world’s saviour and simultaneous victim. Largely
devoid of violence, the film robs this period of its actual horrors. “[B]ased on the recognition
by the viewer of pre-existing historical stereotypes… [and] thereby reduced to the mere
narrative confirmation of those same stereotypes” (Jameson 1998: 155), Captain America

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attests to the postmodern failure of “art and the aesthetic, the failure of the new, the
imprisonment in the past” (Jameson 1983: 116). Since the film neglects the fundamental
ambiguity of the current socio-political context, the viewer is allowed to return to a state of
infantile, imaginary plenitude associated with the phallic mother. Captain America therefore
offers an uncritical escape from the problems and concerns of today’s world.
Nostalgia in the Batman films, on the other hand, works metonymically and “relies on
the viewer’s historical and cultural knowledge to make its additional points” (Dika 153), so
that nostalgia here is primarily directed at memory. The calcified or condensed figure of
Batman here becomes a “carrier of once-lived worlds into the present, a quality that connects
us to the past” (7). As code to be unravelled by the spectator, the recreated figure enables an
“internal montage” (14) by which the viewer can contrast his childhood memories of Batman
with the nostalgically revived version. The films emphasise the fundamental ambiguity that
marks the War on Terror and therefore deny the viewer the nostalgic pleasure of union with
the phallic mother. Instead, the films imply that even if masculinity is restored to former
hegemonic glory, the postmodern world is itself too complex, too ambivalent and challenging
for ambiguity to end. Hence, in the Batman trilogy a nostalgically revived artefact from the
past challenges us to confront our present moment in critical fashion.
In conclusion, with the two case studies provided in this paper I have tried to
demonstrate that nostalgia in the superhero does possess critical value and not necessarily
always constitutes an escapist fantasy. It appears decisive whether nostalgia remains directed
at history, and therefore bound up with the academic, elitist understanding of history, or
whether nostalgia operates via the viewer’s memory. In the latter case, nostalgia implicates
the spectator and his cultural knowledge in the signification of the nostalgically revived
artefacts, and so offers a democratic access to history, which represents a “triumphing of
living memory over academic history” (Radstone 126). Indeed, when nostalgia is not directed
at history, but implicates the viewer in a process of signification by reference to his own
memory and experience “the final completion of the work comes through the audience’s
active reading and interaction with the film” (Dika 103). Therefore, nostalgia can be
employed to speak in critical ways of our present moment in relation to history, tell stories
that are very much our own, and open up spaces in which the spectator can reflect on social
and political anxieties, as well as negotiate the meanings and relevance of popcultural
representations of masculinity in relation to contemporary concerns such as the crisis of
masculinity.

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