Sixteenth International Conference on New Directions in the Humanities

Abstract

After the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001, the United States, under the spell of “American exceptionalism,” has been increasingly more nostalgic for times when America was an impenetrable superpower that effortlessly dominated the world. In the past, the principles of American exceptionalism have often been embodied by “national” mythic superheroes; however, post-9/11 their role has transformed into a more abject version of the nation’s patriotic idol who typically upholds the nation’s indestructible disposition. Alternatively, they have undergone a metamorphosis into Frankenstein monsters who embody the terrorist within national borders, as well as an insidious mode of nostalgia that reverts back to the nation’s violent imperial origins. Thus, they are generating (schizophrenic) entropy, apocalyptic destruction, and atavistic tendencies. I would like to present my graduate thesis, where I link popular culture, namely the horror genre and “superhero” films post-9/11, to my larger claim concerning the current pathological state of the American nation after the traumatizing attacks on September 11 and its aftermath during the current War on Terror in the United States. These connections are cultivated through particular modes of memory, namely Boym’s diagnosis of nostalgia in “The Future of Nostalgia,” degenerative representations which are illustrated in the first three seasons of the FX TV series “American Horror Story,” and certain “superhero” films, such as “The Dark Knight” (2008), “V for Vendetta” (2005), “The Avengers” (2012), and “The Avengers: Age of Ultron” (2015). These representations are all symptoms of what I have devised and characterized as the nostalgic drive, an insidious form of post-9/11 American memory that uncannily combines Freud’s notion of the death drive with nostalgic trajectories. This ultimately results in the implosion of an idealistic (or utopic) temporal timeline (i.e., present and future), as well as inverts the concept of American exceptionalism. This thesis explores these mythic superheroes alongside the horror genre as an illustration of alternative frameworks through which to examine the retrogression of the American nation post-9/11, its cultural management of collective memory and nostalgia, as well as the abject mutation of the principles employed in the long-standing historical drama and pervasive mythic legacy of, or cult of, American Exceptionalism.