Matters of Gravity: Special Effects and Supermen in the 20th Century.(Book Review)

Matters of Gravity: Special Effects and Supermen in the 20th Century. Scott Bukatman. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003.

Scott Bukatman's Matters of Gravity, his second book after the well-received Terminal Identity (1993), explores in a series of loosely assembled chapters "the experience of technological spectacle in popular American culture," especially within those genres and media that "invoke heightened, even exaggerated, bodily awareness in relation to highly technologized environments" (2). The essays "move from a consideration of the body as constructed by spectacular experience to an emphasis on the performing body moving within the built environment …