Secret identities: the superhero simulacrum and the nation

CineAction, Summer, 2009 by Matt Yockey

Ogens introduces the segment on the Superman convention in Metropolis with a series of shots of this small town in southern Illinois that aesthetically evoke an 8mm home movie. Ogens juxtaposes comments by the town's mayor about his town's association with the character with images of weathered Superman signs and murals around the town, as if it is small town specter of the Hollywood commodity-scape that dominates the rest of the film. This also speaks to the inherent tension between the comic book Metropolis (the bustling and vibrant equivalent of New York City) and this town, which, on the surface, more resembles Smallville (and, thus, a culturally produced idea of a generic "Middle America"). Even that association is undermined by an interview with a shirtless young man whose chest is emblazoned with a barbed wire and flame adorned Superman logo. He characterizes his town thusly: "Lot of drugs, stuff like that, around here. Criminal activity. Whole bunch. Dangerous little town, man. Really is. Lot of black people's moved here. Used to be none. But lots of black people moved in."

When Ogens asks him, "Why is everyone so obsessed with Superman here?" the young man replies, "You tell me. I been here all my life and I don't know. My comic books say New York. I don't know why they put Illinois in Metropolis." His accidental reversal of terms, Illinois in Metropolis, conveys a sense of the instability and incoherence produced by writing a pop culture text onto the surface of a small town that itself has escaped a more traditional and conservative understanding of the town's better (utopian) past (as indicated by his naked racism).

Ogens does not limit the significance of this instability and disparity to the space of Metropolis; rather it follows Dennis wherever he goes. The ambivalence that reinscription produces is revealed in an exchange between Dennis and a tourist on Hollywood Boulevard. While tipping Dennis, a young woman asks him if he does this all the time. His reply, "When I'm not working in movies and TV shows," prompts the woman to laugh and Dennis responds, "I'm serious. I'm also an actor." Ogens cuts to Dennis on the couch, where he elaborates: "Let's see, I've been in, like, eighteen movies, nine TV shows, four commercials, and a couple of music videos." Ogens then cuts to a clip of a film in which Dennis appears as an extra dancing in the background. The insertion of this textual thread confirms the incredulous attitude the viewer is expected to take regarding Dennis's claims. His body of work is what you might expect of someone whose primary strategy for becoming a rich and famous actor is dressing up as Superman on Hollywood Boulevard. It is a moment of easy disavowal; too easy, in fact, for while Ogens may superficially give the viewer an opportunity to mock Dennis, such an outcome is subverted by the larger context in which this meaning is produced. The revelation is utterly anti-climactic; we have already positioned Dennis at the margins of the entertainment industry because he has done so himself. The only shock that could be produced here would be if we saw Dennis "really" acting in a "real" film. We use the same standards of "good" filmmaking that Dennis implicitly endorses through his devotion to the Christopher Reeve Superman films. The more deeply felt revelation at this point in the film, if we allow ourselves, is that Dennis's modest self-aggrandizing duplicates the ways in which we all re-produce ourselves to one another (and ourselves) as social subjects. The promise of a confession is the promise of revelation but disclosure always comes with a price. The confessor must be prepared to live with the knowledge being granted him or her and the intimacy the shared secret generates between confessing subject and confessor facilitates empathy. The confessional subject reveals, in part, because he or she believes the confessor will understand. The basis of such an understanding is self-recognition.