Vigilantes, Incorporated: an Ideological Economy of the Superhero Blockbuster

VIGILANTES, INCORPORATED: AN IDEOLOGICAL ECONOMY OF THE SUPERHERO BLOCKBUSTER BY EZRA CLAVERIE DISSERTATION Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in English with a minor in Cinema Studies in the Graduate College of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2016 Urbana, Illinois Doctoral Committee: Associate Professor José B. Capino, Chair Associate Professor Jim Hansen Associate Professor Lilya Kaganovsky Associate Professor Robert A. Rushing Professor Frank Grady,Department of English, University of Missouri, Saint Louis ii ABSTRACT Since 2000, the comic-book superhero blockbuster has become Hollywood’s most salient genre. “Heroes, Incorporated: A Political Economy of the Superhero Blockbuster” examines these seemingly reactionary fantasies of American power, analyzing their role in transmedia storytelling for a conglomerated and world-spanning entertainment industry. This dissertation argues that for all their apparent investment in the status quo and the hegemony of white men, superhero blockbusters actually reveal the disruptive and inhuman logic of capital, which drives both technological and cultural change. Although focused on the superhero film from 2000 to 2015, this project also considers the print and electronic media across which conglomerates extend their franchises. It thereby contributes to the materialist study of popular culture and transmedia adaptation, showing how 21st century Hollywood adapts old media for new platforms, technologies, and audiences. The first chapter traces the ideology of these films to their commercial roots, arguing that screen superheroes function as allegories of intellectual property. The hero’s “brand” identity signifies stability, even as the character’s corporate owners continually revise him (rarely her). Because young men spend the most on ancillary merchandise, studios favor iconic characters and repeatable coming-of-age narratives that flatter this audience without alienating others. In this production regime, economic and intellectual capital takes human shape in superheroes and their logos, trademarks that outlive both their creators and the filmmakers who depict them. The second chapter examines Time Warner’s Batman films directed by Christopher Nolan, arguing that they dramatize the work of bricolage involved in making a commercial brand. Producers assemble blockbuster movies from disparate sources, and each movie in turn becomes a new source from which the studio can borrow elements to extend the brand across iii other media. By combining elements drawn from many Batman comic books (sold by Time Warner subsidiary DC Comics), Nolan’s films simultaneously address a mass audience that interprets them as a more self-contained texts, and a cult audience that interprets them as remixes and revues of familiar scenes and narrative elements, often decades old. Moreover, these films justify the ways of brand management to the audience, preparing us for future Batman narratives by different filmmakers or featuring different actors. The third chapter looks at Watchmen (Zack Snyder, 2009) as an example of a conglomerate’s attempt to convert a modernist, “off-brand” superhero comic book into a transmedia franchise. Although this film fared poorly at the box office, its release sent reprints of the 1987 Watchmen graphic novel to the top of the bestseller lists. The film adapts Watchmen as prestige films adapt novels, transferring narrative and even dialogue to the screen, and producers marketed the film explicitly in terms of its “fidelity” to its source. Yet the franchise’s mixed results show the company’s failure to bridge mass and cult audiences. Where the graphic novel indicts US conglomerates’ exploitation of superheroes as intellectual property, the movie franchise performs that exploitation. My study of this franchise thereby illuminates the processes at work as producers decide which texts to adapt, how to adapt them, and for what audience segments. The fourth chapter analyzes the cultural logic of Blackness in superhero movies, perhaps the most visible way that studios negotiate between the segments of their core US audience while modeling racial inclusion for global audiences. Superhero blockbusters both show and suppress racial difference, reinforcing white hegemony in the US through gestures that appear inclusive. Bricolage here operates at the intersection of race, textual source, and star image, as filmmakers cast internationally famous Black actors, creating an aura of diversity without examining iv American race relations. Wary of alienating whites, superhero blockbusters either keep silent about race or treat racism as part of a remote past even in films set in the past. In their handling of race, superhero movies once again ask viewers to feel pleased with the world they inhabit, and not to make, or even to remember, organized attempts to change that world. v Contents Prologue : Pinocchio in the Age of Ultron………………………………………………………..1 Introduction……………………………………………………………………………………….7 Chapter One: Allegories of Intellectual Property………………………………………………..58 Chapter Two: Nolan’s Batman: Criminogenic Capitalism and the (Re)birth of a Brand……....106 Chapter Three: Watchmen and the “Unfilmable” Brand…………………………………….…154 Chapter Four: Race and the Hollywood Superhero: Blackness, Inclusion, and Ambiguity……211 Works Cited…………………………………………………………………………………….264 1 Prologue: Pinocchio in the Age of Ultron The teaser trailer for Marvel Studios’ Avengers: Age of Ultron begins with shots of urban destruction, the kind ubiquitous in Hollywood blockbusters since September 11: clouds of smoke in a wobbly frame, explosions, white people screaming in the streets. A sinister male voice-over threatens: “I’m going to show you something beautiful: everyone screaming for mercy.” Shots of Captain America, Black Widow, and Iron Man appear, as the voice says, “You want to protect the world, but you don’t want it to change.” This montage coalesces briefly into a series of close- ups of the film’s stars reacting in horror to a humanoid robot shambling toward them. The voice- over continues: “You’re all puppets, tangled in strings.” Another montage presents superheroes in action, and a crowd of matching robots taking flight, while over the soundtrack drifts a slow, minor-key, and non-diegetic arrangement of “I’ve Got No Strings” from the 1940 Disney film Pinocchio, sung by a child. The trailer ends by revealing the speaker of the voice-over as the murderous robot Ultron, a perennial villain from Avengers comics. He steps into a close up, declaring to the camera, “There are no strings on me.” Ultron now addresses the refrain of the Pinocchio song directly to the audience. As I watched this trailer for the first time—on Facebook, where friends, colleagues, and acquaintances had shared it—three things struck me in rapid succession. First, the voice-over narration offers a concise and de-mystifying summary of what American superheroes have done since their birth in Action Comics #1, in June 1938: they protect the existing order while preventing change. Second, the voice-over’s puppet metaphor seemed to comment on the Avengers simultaneously on multiple levels. Inside the diegesis, one might view the Avengers as puppets, since they work as adjuncts of American state power. Outside the diegesis, the copyrighted characters constitute not autonomous entities but intellectual property, owned and 2 exploited commercially by Marvel Studios and Marvel’s corporate parent the Walt Disney Company. Moreover, the actors who play the Avengers have multi-film contracts tying them to Marvel’s franchise, legal strings that attach them to a controlling brand. However, the trailer’s montage of destruction gave me little time to process the puppet metaphor before something else struck me: nostalgia. When I recognized “I’ve Got No Strings,” I recalled my grandparents’ Zenith console record player, its odor of wood and aging record album sleeves; on that console I had listened to the Pinocchio soundtrack LP as a little boy. This sudden consciousness of distance, always widening, between my childhood and the present, made my chest tighten. I felt nostalgia in the word’s original, medical-psychiatric sense: a longing for home (nostos, Homer’s word for the goal of Odysseus) accompanied by pain (algia). Returning to the present, I considered the trailer’s integration of two different brands: a 2015 Marvel Studios movie cross-promoting a 1940 Disney movie. I wondered if a dark and gritty Pinocchio reboot might be in the works. Disney-Marvel’s marketing strategy seemed to be working: in my Facebook feed and other online spaces where people talk about movie trailers, commentators remarked on the power of the trailer’s spooky inversion of a hit children’s song from a classical Hollywood film—one they remembered from childhood—repurposed as a warning of a robot apocalypse. Yet nobody remarked on the marketing logic evident in that inversion. Where the Age of Ultron teaser ostensibly suggests the science-fiction disaster scenario of a self-replicating machine running amok, I read it as an unintentional allegory of the concentrated corporate ownership of intellectual property. In my initial, horrified reading of the trailer, the Walt Disney Company—which also own the Muppets, Lucasfilm, and Pixar—had taken mass culture a step closer to a kind of branding singularity. Although the lurching, 3 monster-from-its-slab gait of Ultron the robot had primed me to read the trailer for horror,

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