Secret identities: the superhero simulacrum and the nation

CineAction, Summer, 2009 by Matt Yockey

Central to this process is, to use Nichols' term, vivification, the production of affect that exposes the contradictions that representational strategies of Hollywood films obscure. Vivification in Confessions is about the historicity underlying the representation, about the conflicting meanings that reside beneath the surface of the superhero costume in fiction films and the inherent contradictions of the superhero costume in reality. Confessions vivifies the tensions between the individual and mythology, between subject and society, between life and death. What requires vivification is not "the sound and fury of spectacle ... but the experiential awareness of difference that, in the social construction of reality, has been knotted into contradiction." (5)

In Confessions place becomes a central component of understanding and working through these contradictions. We understand bodies in this film in the context of place that is inherently unstable (whether Hollywood Boulevard or Metropolis, Illinois) but which also can be used to stabilize individual and collective identity. This is evident in a scene in which a police officer assigned to patrol Hollywood Boulevard indicates for Ogens' camera the line between private and public property that the street performers cannot cross. There is, however, a gap between the two lines he points at and he says, "I'm not quite sure about the DMZ there, but, uh ..." The inherent instability (multiple meanings/meaninglessness) of Hollywood Boulevard (and Hollywood more broadly as a culturally constructed space and idea) is exposed by the inability of social authority to fully apprehend this space. This is reinforced by the presence behind him of two signs in a storefront window that say "London" and "Tokyo." The mutability of space gives agency to the mutability of individual subjects occupying that space. This sequence indicates the ongoing social need and desire to create and sustain boundaries, the inherent instability of those boundaries, and an essential attraction to liminality and the reorganization of social meaning.

Reflections on place inevitably bring us back to the ways in which Confessions, like most superhero texts, is engaging with the constructed nature and meaning of an American identity, America as a liminal space and an "in-between" state of mind, always transforming, always being reinvented, always in the process of becoming. The superhero indicates this by always being transformative; a primary element of the genre is the moment of transition from secret identity to superhero identity. Dennis, as the transparently average person inhabiting the Superman costume, bears the tension of the transformative moment perpetually. He is neither average nor super, but both. He is an identifiable figure because we understand this liminality as the inevitable symptom of modern American life in which the transformative qualities of the American Zeitgeist are channeled through popular culture. The ongoing "becoming" of America has been historically understood in terms of utopian ideals, which indicates the necessary place of bodies, and especially superhero bodies, in this process. Nichols confirms that the documentary film "is an active reassemblage of the body as the repository of personal meaning and of a Utopian unconscious of collective values." (6) In his appropriation of the Superman persona, Dennis indicates how Hollywood superhero blockbusters are comparable repositories. In documenting this, Ogens reveals the fluid relationship between mediations and subjects, between nation and citizens.