America and the Monstrous The superpower China Take Los Angeles. Never in its history, the American imaginary apocalypse he has persisted with so much ardor as destructive to Los Angeles. To arrive by water or air, is caused by earthquakes or cataclysmic events of the most extravagant (volcanic eruptions, plagues, ice ages, collisions with comets, explosions or cooling only, bees, piranhas, killer whales) the imaginary catastrophe has sunk at regular intervals, his claws the "City of Angels." Never has been dubbed a city with so much zeal decks, a sprawling imagery of the disaster as well. Fared no better in New York. King Kong and Godzilla have his twin brother, in turn, pulverized. Aliens and plagues were given the change to make it an empty shell, desert, smoking. Mike Davis has called this anxiety running through the destruction of American popular culture a 'mournful ecstasy "," a gay holocaust. " Why so much obstinacy of the dream End?
Hollywood was a very powerful machine for the dissemination of this fascination . Get into the game, writes Susan Sontog, a whole aesthetics of destruction, of those "special beauty that can be found in the catastrophe and into chaos. In the figure of the deformed monster came dall'interspazio converge, the bad and the predatory, providing a great target to the aesthetic enjoyment of suffering and disaster. " Not only that the disaster provides the opportunity to experience - in terms of aesthetics - what is ontologically forbidden to man. "The audience film - insists Sontog - can participate in the operation of fantastic live beyond their death, not only that, but after the death of cities and the destruction of the human species." Work in these narratives a pattern archetype: the disaster brought on the screens, is - at the very moment of its representation - exorcised, weakened. "Portraying an evil, a danger, symbolize anxiety - Gilbert Durand wrote - already means, through the domination of cogito, to dominate everything. Every manifestation of a hazard to minimize the representation. "
This morphology of the great destruction, we can see three "big" moments. The first two characters: an ape - King Kong - and its antagonist, the skyscraper. Decomposed , yet capable of terrifying acts of the first human tenderness. Building, closed in his sovereign indifference, in its way "speaker" the second. There is a suspicion that the two are basically twins, who articulate the same language, as they are inscribed in both dis-measure. With King Kong "begins the story of mutual symbolic exaltation of skyscrapers and imaginary monsters or superheroes" (Antonino Terranova).
In the great ape - "a catalyst for automatic myths," according to Alberto Albruzzese - it is nature that rebels against the de-power of civilization, climbing the odious symbols of the civilization to be knocked down by them. This privilege granted to natural Alloy King Kong to another character in the return to nature inscribes its essence: Tarzan. Even here we are in front of a mirror relationship: monster man who embraces his primitive condition. That the "great ape" and "man-ape" are somehow related to the privilege of genealogy?
That of King Kong and Tarzan is not really the story of an adoption, but of an expropriation. Tarzan "poses at the heart of the colonial muscular body, and built strictly white hero" (Giulia Fanara). White here is the key color. Both King Kong evokes a world of darkness, dark ambush, so the white of which is "covered" Tarzan signifies purity, transparency, innocence. E 'white Tarzan that adequately instructed the monkey becomes the "true" lord of the jungle. Where there was darkness and darkness, now reflected the glow of her skin Adamic. Tarzan, the colonizer, it subtracts the black all'indigeno, the nature of which is the ultimate symbol Kong, its geographical territory and mythic. A King Kong is another "secret". His being reduced to form spectacularized tells us something of our time in which we are immersed: the show as the monstrous figure, a bond that will be separated to become a "figure" society of the spectacle. The death of King Kong is the defeat of the materiality of "too much body" (Francis Muzzioli). His defeat marked the beginning of the second "moment" in our roundup: the time when the threat is approaching immateriality in the form of "too little body," under the law of invisibility. It 's the nuclear threat will dominate the imaginary U.S. since the early 50's.
Invasion of the Body Snatchers - giant pods that are siphoning human forms to accommodate their proliferative power - is a transcript of this new concern: the inability to give a body to the enemy that advances protected by the invisible. The aliens take the form of ordinary people. "Invasion of the Body Snatchers all forms of normality are reversed. Friends are not friends, the police will not protect, sleep is not refreshing, phones are no longer a means to ask for help but a tool to let people know where are the remaining pod people pod "(Stuart Samuels). In short, the familiar becomes fraught with dangers. " We are no longer, as with King Kong, in the kingdom invasion loud and spectacular, but at the time of infiltration camouflage. Do not assume that in altering the evidence of paroxysmal giant, but in diversity that is disguised in the form of 'identity'.
terror to incubate something hostile, alien and monstrous, something that blends the familiar and near, belongs to the mythology of Alien, the alien came from outer space trying to "fertilize" for human bodies ensure its progeny. Alien remains on the edges: the Earth does not call, does not penetrate the city, devastated the metropolis as any Godzilla. Liminal figure, makes one's own being always on the edge of an additional menace: not here, but there could be "(Gianni Canova).
infiltration respond to this silent heroes of paper: cartoon superheroes. Even hybrids: the Herculean Tarzan leaves the jungle to join permanently in the metropolis, serial universe made of skyscrapers, cars, crazy speed. No more lianas: to move in the "stone forest" Tarzan of the children will use a thin cloth and prehensile (Spider-Man), the winged capes (Superman) or hyper-media (the machine-prosthesis that encapsulates the body of Batman). But to tackle the new post-modern scenario, the city that dominates it, the body of Tarzan is no longer enough. His muscles are inadequate, clumsy. The body needs to be equipped with new powers to break through their limits. The family of superheroes is part of the kingdom of contamination. If every superhero is wearing an unusual strategy, but there is a code common to all: the zoomorphic.
At a time when humanity has ceased to maintain relations with the world of magic or ritual animal, the animal is deprived of any significant further than its "use and consumption" -, man transforms the image in the form - once again - the show. But what animal? The universe Walt Disney was a powerhouse of a show of this world "pacified". Made on a human scale. "Walt Disney - wrote Oreste De Fornari - has created an Arcadia in which the gap between man and nature are shortened and communicates easily with animals, Arcadia full of talking animals, uplifting, hilarious, terrifying, or very little humanized, where the hierarchy between species falters and we are constantly reminded of animality of humanity and the animal man. " Uncle Scrooge and his nephew Donald Duck does not embody the cunning of animals, but the vices of men. Rather than be the bearer of otherness animal, they transfigure the "little things" human - the greed of Uncle Scrooge, the lazy reluctance to work the "nephew" - make them appealing, because basically the common man but not the animal . The territory of their stories is not ontological (the difference between men and animals), but moral (diligence / laziness, greed / generosity). This contrasts with the strategy of communication between the two realms (human and animal) which is the bearer of Spider-Man. The animal back, but in the form robbery and poisoned bite. No more peaceful coexistence of opposites, but the bite, in fact, violation. Spider-Man embodies this doubling. In him are fighting two beings, man and the spider: one is the death of the other, the absence of the other one lives. The animal man can not communicate in that form of substitution. It is no coincidence that the body is sheathed in a Spider Man mask that hides and blunts any opening, meaning that all communication between the two worlds is impossible.
This ancestral dimension, this return of the primitive is not enough. There is a new generation of superheroes that makes its way. The origin of new body that is imposed there is "absolute, dramatic, shocking, union integrative body-machine in a crazy and virtually inextricable tangle" (Alessandro di Nocera). No longer an animal but the machine. But not the nature of matter. Ol'istinto not the past, but the future evolution. The agent of this transformation is the radioactivity, "suffered mutation at the molecular level."
example is the story of the Fantastic Four, Jack Kirby out of the pencil. A group of pioneers of space is violating one of the Pillars of Hercules humanity. But the ship on which travel is invisible hit by cosmic rays. The bodies of the Fantastic Four are upset. E 'mutation at work. The human body is, in the transposition comics, extended (up to become a model), its materiality is enhanced (it rocks) or refused to be invisible (transparent), its operational capability becomes relentless (in a flame). iconography of the catastrophe that progressively colonizes the imagination of the American metropolis, is accompanied by another disaster: that of the human body. A body incapable, as it is, without the accompanying need to harmonize this perceptive hyperspace, to adapt to the new metropolitan environment. The more our society is no longer nature, but the artifact.
Whether it is movies, comics and literature the script remains the same. In the staging of catastrophe is masked "a celebration - recoded and updated - the ancient liturgy of success" (Francesco Dragosei). scanning catastrophic event follows a fixed pattern. A man and only one - the hero - has the ability to read the signs of the approaching disaster. It 'an isolated man. His repeated warnings are ignored or derided. Who should protect the city (or the whole company, or the whole planet) destruction is involved in it, is an accomplice, he wants to take advantage for the blind power games. The disaster is materialized in a growing breathtaking destruction, chaos, death, despair. The hero, hitherto unrecognized, is invoked by the community defenseless at the mercy of superior forces. For him, the time frame of the ransom. His speech is salfivico. And 'his genius, his quickness, his stubbornness - the genius, the quickness, the stubbornness of an individual only - to save the city, the community, the planet. The crisis is over, the community found, the average American "eroicizzato. The final apocalypse, one that will erase everything, it's just postponed.
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