Matters of Gravity: Special Effects and Supermen in the 20th Century

by Scott Bukatman
Duke University Press, 2003
www.dukeupress.edu
ISBN 0-8223-3119-5
Trade paperback $21.95

Reviewed by Michael R. (Mike) Mosher <mosher@svsu.edu>, Saginaw Valley State University, University Center MI 48710 USA.

Matters of Gravity has a cultural sweep reminiscent of Mark Dery’s Escape Velocity and The Pyrotechnic Insanitarium , but is often more academic in its approach. This book works to link several topics--superheroes leaping tall buildings in a single bound or musical heroes dancing around them, the city itself, sublime cinematic special effects. While all well-written and worthy, not all the essays seem to fit in this volume.

Though the topic seems somewhat out of place in Matters of Gravity, Bukatman’s chapter "Gibson’s Typewriter" is memorable. Beginning in a meditation on the fact that the science fiction writer responsible for "cyberspace" wrote his books upon an aged mechanical typewriter, Bukatman then recounts the history of this device. The essay was resonant for this reviewer, like Bukatman a member of the last generation to know the agony of typing a thirty-page college paper on the typewriter and, upon its completion at 4:00 a.m. the morning it’s due, discovering that the footnote was left out of page three, necessitating twenty-eight pages of retyping. In contrast, in the 1980s when I typed a letter for my elderly aunt who had worked as a secretary from highschool graduation in 1921 until retirement, she delightedly exclaimed "No errors! You’re an excellent typist!". No, I now have a system (computer and Laserwriter) that allows me to correct before I hit Print.

Bukatman has also published Terminal Identity, a 1993 collection offering interpretive critical readings of science fiction literature. In the two chapters in Matters of Gravity on special effects, he finds the work of designers Syd Mead and Douglas Trumbull descended from Walter Benjamin’s considerations of19th-century panoramas and the grand exhibition spaces of London’s Crystal Palace. Bukatman gives thanks to film historian Vivian Sobchak of UC Santa Cruz, evidently a mentor. A memorable critique by Professor Sobchak of early 1990s cyberpunk magazine MONDO 2000 skewered its embrace of a virtuality beyond "meatspace" from her hospital bed, where she was recovering from a painful automobile accident that made her own damaged "meat" all too insistent. Here Bukatman delivers a long chapter on movie musicals that reads more like classical film theory than postmodern cultural studies. Yet in analysis of the duet between Fred Astaire and shoe-shining Leroy Daniels in MGM’s "The Band Wagon", his writing zeroes in to examine issues of race. He brings much to his investigation of the racialized and history-rich trope of the zoot suit worn by the hero of "The Mask" and by Batman’s villainous Joker. He also wittily and intelligently locates the digital animation technology of morphing, used in a notable Michael Jackson video, as one more continuation of America’s tradition of blackface minstrel entertainment.

In his two chapters on superheroes, his thought takes graceful flight To examine the look of superheroes in comics from the publisher Image-- a cross between El Greco's attentuated saints and Joe Weider’s steroid-enhanced bodybuilders--he contrasts the strident crosshatching of their heroes’ near-pornographic, attenuated musculature, smoothly colored with digital publishing technology, with the shaggier "friendly line" that illustrated 1960s Marvel Comics. In doing so Bukatman has just explained to me why I always found Image comics coldly repellent. Though he cites America’s post-9/11 mood in the book’s Introduction, he missed a chance to appreciate the 2002 "Spiderman" movie as a valentine to beleaguered Manhattan, its subjective camera swinging the audience from skyscraper to skyscraper. In a closing essay on the comics he discusses the elastic Plastic Man and Mister Fantastic, and artist Steve Ditko’s lithe Spiderman navigating skewed rooftops, with both erudition and fondness. Who is the mighty Bukatman behind the mask? In a revealing aside he frets that his prediliction for low art might sabotage his academic career (memo to Stanford tenure committee: Scott does good). The underexamined medium of the comics clearly deserves a writer of his breadth and depth, so this reader hopes Scott Bukatman dwells in Metropolis and Smallville and Prince Namor’s undersea kingdom as necessary to research of his project, resisting with super-strength any academic conservatism trying to push him towards more conventional subjects.