Secret identities: the superhero simulacrum and the nation

CineAction, Summer, 2009 by Matt Yockey

While Dennis defines himself according to Superman meta-texts, Ogens foregrounds the manner in which we all produce individual meaning in relation to textual codes and systems by inserting footage of Sandy Dennis from The Out of Towners when Christopher Dennis first speaks about his purported background. Dennis himself stitches in another textual thread when he claims that he decided to attempt a career in acting per the deathbed wish of his mother. Thus he subtly invokes one of the primary narrative tropes of the superhero genre, the sacrificing son who is morally impelled to continue a family legacy. This is placed beside another thread within Confessions' textual network, footage of Sandy Dennis's niece, Pam Dennis, being interviewed by Ogens. In this sequence, Pam merely comments on the generosity of her aunt and makes no reference to Christopher. The sequence concludes with a close-up shot of Christopher on the couch maintaining that his mother was a very private person and did not want "a lot of this stuff out."

It is not clear what "this stuff" exactly is and here Ogens hints at a latent tension between Christopher and Pam Dennis's understanding of the truth. This is fully realized in the next two segments of the film to focus on Dennis, the first of which begins with footage of Antonio Banderas receiving a star on the "Hollywood Walk of Fame." Suddenly the space that we have previously seen occupied by Dennis as the imitation celebrity reproduces Dennis as the authentic fan, for he is among the throngs of people who have come to catch a glimpse of Banderas and his wife, Melanie Griffith. More importantly, Dennis is seen as the most vocal of fans, announcing to the crowd that Banderas's limousine has arrived and then shouting and jumping to get the attention of Banderas and Griffith. All of this proves successful for Dennis, as he gets Banderas's autograph, a fact he proudly announces to the camera. Tellingly, Dennis is wearing his Superman costume throughout, suggesting that Hollywood is simultaneously a work space and a recreational space, that, in fact, there is no fundamental division between his public and private selves, that the specific space of Hollywood in fact encourages such liminality. Such dissolution is affirmed by the familiar manner in which fans frequently engage with stars, the aura of intimacy generated by the cinematic and televisual image clinging to the social subject. This is exemplified here by Dennis's informal address of Banderas and Griffith and, later in the film, by his very friendly interactions with Kidder at a Superman convention in Metropolis, Illinois. It perhaps further explains Kidder's response to Dennis. His appropriation of an iconic signifier and his passing resemblance to Christopher Reeve mark him quixotically as a "safe" subject. In his excess he generates an aura of familiarity as well as confirmation of the appeal of celebrity and the power of art.

Dennis wears his Superman costume in nearly every scene in which we see him, affirming this collapse of the public into the private and the leakage of the private into the public. Whether at work on Hollywood Boulevard or at home, he is in costume. He even wears it when he publicly proposes to his girlfriend Bonnie (at the Superman convention) and when they are later married. Both events take place in Metropolis, indicating the manner in which public space is conflated with private space via identification with mass culture. The small town of Metropolis has produced a modest tourist industry by virtue of its name alone (it bears no other tangible connection to Superman). Thus Dennis and the town are comparable texts, reinscribed and meant to be understood in relation to pop culture iconicity, each gesturing towards the collapse of sign and signifier manifested by Hollywood, the simulated space of iconicity, the shadow city in which Dennis as Christopher Reeve/Superman is as much an indexical trace of the movie industry as hand and foot prints in the cement at Grauman's Chinese Theatre. Thus, per Benedict Anderson's notion of the nation as an "imagined community," here America is both imagined and imaginary when the foundational understanding of its meanings is derived from the movies. Thus a textual and cognitive incoherence is both produced and ameliorated by the collapse of sign and signifier.