Secret identities: the superhero simulacrum and the nation

CineAction, Summer, 2009 by Matt Yockey

speed-induced stupor: "I was sitting there watching TV and I see a death scene. For like an instant it was like I was seeing my own death, which, that was like a spiritual awakening." The historical subject recognizes his indexical trace within the narrativized space of the televisual. Ogens strongly suggests that this encounter with magnitude, the penetration of distancing aesthetics of Hollywood, informs Dennis's paradoxical immersion into a Hollywood-produced textual universe by then becoming a Superman/Christopher Reeve impersonator. He brings himself closer to the magnitude of death by embracing the iconicity of Superman and Christopher Reeve.

This is the deconstructivist power of the fan-as-producer and, by extension here, the deconstructivist significance of the documentary film as testimonial to this. This is compounded by the two other magnitudes in Dennis's life: the death of his mother (as he reports it) and the death of Christopher Reeve. He uses both as a means to more fully construct a mythologizing narrative that allows him social agency and historicity. Dennis recalls his reaction to the news of Reeve's death this way: "Chills ran up my spine right there. There's no way he could be dead. He's Superman. The Man of Steel himself. He -there's no way. He can't be dead. And I'm sure there's people out there who don't realize that Christopher Reeve has passed on. [voice cracks with emotion] So..." As with the death of his mother, Dennis reconfigures loss as access to meaning. The death of his mother impels him to become an actor, the death of Christopher Reeve to become something more than the term "impersonator" conveys. The death of a celebrity mother (possibly) and the real death of a celebrity made personal are understood here in relation to Dennis's own imagined death. In response he transforms himself into a kind of living tribute to the actor and his mother. Tellingly, Dennis expresses a more vividly emotional response to the death of Christopher Reeve than to the death of his mother. In this moment we witness the power of the Hollywood blockbuster to simultaneously acknowledge and repress magnitude. Further we see that it is the documentary film that more fully represents the magnitude of multiple losses that are rendered mythic in the text of Superman. The presence and absence of Reeve is contained within the figure of Dennis in costume

Dennis offers a solution that can only be realized by looking at him, thus the documentary fills in the gaps left over by the Hollywood blockbuster. The documentary resists closure, it affirms the ongoing power of mass culture to be absorbed and used by individuals to assert social agency. If the blockbuster superhero film evades death via iteration - the constant recycling of conflict between superhero and supervillain-Confessions confronts death via the remediation of the superhero body. Dennis simultaneously responds to the symbolic power of the superhero but also lays bares the manner in which we react to mass culture as a means of mediating our own deaths. This is emphasized by the confessional mode of documentary, which Nichols argues "grants us the power to extract and manage (secret) knowledge - what the body knows but cannot openly say." (4) Here we see the intersection between documentary and the representational strategies of the superhero film, in which the body is a perpetually unstable signifier, always in the process of accessing meaning, always eluding final meaning. The documentary pins down meaning by acknowledging its construction, both by the subject and by the filmmaker him or herself.