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 of the American city" (6-7), a movement that corrects a tendency in critical debate to underestimate the degree to which both ideology and its critique are rooted in concrete embodiment.

With this agenda in mind, Bukatman lays out an embarrassment of riches for his readers. We find discussions of Christopher Walken's performance in a Fatboy Slim video; of Disney theme park rides and their genealogy, back to world fairs and expositions; and of William Gibson's typewriter and speed-typing competitions. He investigates the politics of bodybuilding and superhero comics; Douglas Trumbull's special effects in science fiction cinema and the technological sublime; nineteenth-century American landscape painting; and Philip Kaufman's film The Right Stuff, "the last great epic of the Machine Age" (129). The discussion continues with morphing in Michael Jackson's "Black or White" video and The Mask, and dancing bodies, individual or arranged into Kracauer's "mass ornament" in New York musicals from 42nd Street to West Side Story.

This may sound like a hodgepodge of details haphazardly cobbled together from essays not intended to interlace and connect. But once readers abandon exaggerated expectations of argumentative tightness, Bukatman's voice and personal perspective succeed in tying everything together, making the book a rewarding and intriguing read.

Emblematically framing Bukatman's position are Baudrillard on one side, declaring contemporary postindustrial capitalism as an inescapable and coercive totality that ...