SUPERHERO MOVIES AND NEW YORK

In The Super Mario Bros. Movie, plumes of dust fill the New York City streets as the monster Bowser attacks the city. Mario, seemingly beaten, hides in a pizzeria. What inspires him to keep fighting? He sees himself in a TV ad for his plumbing business, wearing a superhero cape and flying next to the Freedom Tower. He finds solace in the representation of himself as a superhero and in a city that refused to concede that the game was over after 9/11. Such a scene is emblematic of a seminar that will explore the superhero’s relationship to the city’s history and its traumas. Our eye will move between Hollywood blockbusters and global art cinema to help us mull how the superhero exemplifies, for some, the excesses of the U.S. during the global War on Terror. We will see Batman’s alter-ego Bruce Wayne run towards what looks like an imploding World Trade Center on 9/11 (Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice) and witness the superhero framed as an ideological smokescreen for the callous administration of George W. Bush who used the attacks to justify an endless war (The Broken Circle Breakdown).

While strongly focused on the post-9/11 superhero and its links to New York City, the cross-media seminar will track the superhero’s initial rise in popularity during the trauma of World War II. It will mobilize the archival resources of Columbia's Rare Book & Manuscript Library collections around the papers of noted X-Men writer Chris Claremont, so students can read how the artist conceived of bringing histories around the Holocaust into his spectacular stories. Such dips into the archives will help us assess how such empowered figures offer surprising routes of representation for the disenfranchised. We will also consider the authoritarian possibilities of the vigilante Batman, situating Frank Miller’s The Dark Knight Returns against a cultural study that draws links between the comic and Bernhard Goetz who killed four black teenagers in a Manhattan subway in 1984. To further frame how the superhero serves as a potent means of socio-political critique, acclaimed artists and writers will be invited into the classroom. These include Paul Pope whose Batman: Year 100 (2006) presents a dystopian superhero that allegorizes the oppressive aspects of the War on Terror’s surveillance regime. A culminating field trip to the National September 11 Memorial Museum will be organized. There, students will visit “The World Trade Center