Description
Book SynopsisFeatures essays on cinema, the body, and the experience of modernity. Focusing on the experience of technological spectacle in American popular culture, this book reveals how popular culture tames the threats posed by technology and urban modernity, by immersing people in kinetic environments like those traversed by Plastic Man and Superman.
Trade Review“
Matters of Gravity is more than a collection of tour de force essays, although it is certainly that. It maps an important theoretical and critical project, reclaiming the ‘lively arts’ and exploring the kinetic and affective dimensions of popular culture. Scott Bukatman’s breathless prose and conceptual pyrotechnics embody popular culture’s dynamism, making us feel it, making us want to dance it. His writing crackles with wit, sparkles with vividness, and throbs with his own passionate engagement with his topic.”—
Henry Jenkins, coeditor of
Hop on Pop: The Politics and Pleasures of Popular Culture“Scott Bukatman is one of the very top figures in the attempt of cultural studies to understand modernity by looking at the interlocking of such phenomena as urbanism, new forms of masculinity, new technologies, and the role of the body.”—
Dana Polan, author of the British Film Institute books
In a Lonely Place and
Pulp FictionTable of ContentsPreface xi
Acknowledgments xv
Introduction 1
One Remembering Cyberspace
1 There's Always . . . Tomorrowland: Disney and the Hypercinematic Experience 13
2 Gibson's Typewriter 32
3 X-Bodies: The Torment of the Mutant Superhero (1994) 48
Two Kaleidoscopic Perceptions
4 The Artificial Infinite: On Special Effects and the Sublime 81
5 The Ultimate Trip: Special Effects and Kaleidoscopic Perception 111
Three The Grace of Beings
6 Taking Shape: Morphing and the Performance of Self 133
7 Syncopated City: New York in Musical Film (1929-1961) 157
8 The Boys in the Hoods: A Song of the Urban Superhero (2000) 184
Notes 225
Bibliography 257
Index 270
