Matters of Gravity: Special Effects and Superman in the 20th Century (review)

Matters of Gravity explores the uses and meanings of technology embedded in popular culture: science-fiction films and novels, superhero comic books, Disney theme parks, and Hollywood musicals from the period 1930–60. In each of these arenas Scott Bukatman finds that technology is used to reduce the tensions and alleviate problems endemic to urban life. This is accomplished by the ability of popular culture to free us from the gravity of technological existence and lift us aloft, often into cyberspace. Needless to say, technology and gravity are used in their broadest senses in Bukatman's pages.

Highly centralized, sophisticated technology hides behind a user-friendly facade in Disney World or Disneyland. Audioanimatronics allow Disney's imagineers to create singing bears or robotic versions of American presidents in the nostalgic setting of Main Street, U.S.A. The amusement rides literally free the bodies of riders from the pull of gravity. Simultaneously, wraparound movie screens transport spectators into cyberspace. In Bukatman's apt summary: "[Disney] parks present technology with a Mouse's face" (p. 31).

Although typewriters are virtually an obsolete technology, they play a part in Bukatman's analysis. It is well known that William Gibson originated the term cyberspace in his 1984 novel Neuromancer. It is also common knowledge that even though Gibson wrote about a computer cowboy who jacked his consciousness directly into cyberspace via "wet" connecting plugs, he typed the book's manuscript on a manual typewriter. Quoting Nietzsche's typewritten remark that "our writing materials contribute their part to our thinking" (p. 34), Bukatman argues that typewriting creates a disjuncture between hand, eye, and letter. It thus produces a new kind of information space, one divorced from the writer's body. That space is the first step along the way toward a fully realized cyberspace. Hence Gibson's neologism owes more to the typewriter's proto-cyberspace than the casual observer might think.

Cinematic special effects and comic book superheroes offer some of the best evidence for Bukatman's thesis concerning the transforming powers of technology in popular culture. Special effects make use of new technology to create films that display narratives about technology. At the movies, older technologies of visual representation are enhanced by new technologies. The results entertain audiences and divert their attention from the real problems associated with technology. Bukatman cites the work done with special effects by Douglas Trumbull in 2001, in Close Encounters of the Third Kind, in Star Trek: The Motion Picture, and in Blade Runner. He might have added any number of similar films that come and go at the local cineplex. These movies recall A. C. Clarke's dictum that "any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic" (p. 118). The magic of special effects convinces us that we have escaped the bounds of technocracy while we are even more deeply immersed in advanced technologies of representation.

Bukatman notes that superheroes, who could live anyplace on earth, settle down in cities: Superman in Metropolis, Batman in Gotham City. Superheroes prefer the grid, defined by city streets, and the heights of towering skyscrapers. But if necessary they explore the urban underside: dark, dangerous neighborhoods; sewerage and subway systems; and the foundations of huge buildings. Superheroes, who are masters of deception, could only hide their true identities in large cities. They go where they are called to fight crime but we typically think of them as swinging from skyscraper to skyscraper while soaring far above the urban grid. "Look! Up in the sky! Is it a bird?" Of course not. "It's Superman," who can "leap tall buildings in a single bound." Superheroes underscore Bukatman's claim that in popular culture we escape gravity and experience the exhilaration of weightlessness.

This book falls into the genre of cultural studies. It will please those who like that sort of thing and bore or anger those who do not. I happen to like it...