Le super-héros hollywoodien et l’ambiguïté référentielle du désastre après le 11 septembre 2001

• Main Author: Vincent Souladié
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Institut des Amériques 2016-07-01
• Series: IdeAs : Idées d’Amériques
• Subjects: September 11 2001; superheroes; Hollywood; disasters; spectacular; city
• Online Access: http://journals.openedition.org/ideas/1548

After 9/11, the figure of the superhero portrayed by Hollywood films was the subject of metaphorical readings, according to which the perilous situations depicted were seen to reflect contemporary cultural concerns and sometimes even to provide answers. Yet the representation of disaster has long been a transhistorical and transgeneric feature of both super-heroic fictions and Hollywood blockbusters. Reading too much meaning in these cinematic spectacles thus remains a highly questionable practice. As the figure of the superhero is typical of the ambiguous intersections between fiction and contemporary visual representations of reality, this article argues that the notion of referential ambiguity can serve to foreground the tension between oblivion and citation at stake in these Hollywood fictions, as well as the contradiction between establishing a distance with the event and exploiting the memory of it.