ABSTRACT
If Brecht’s Galileo is correct then we may be living in an unhappy ‘land’, and in the original German ‘unglücklich’ carries also the connotation ‘unlucky’, since across the opening years of this century we have been beset in lm and on TV with a glut of superhero ‘products’. We seem indeed to be in a ‘land that needs heroes’, serviced by a rejuvenated lm and TV superhero genre, endorsed and controlled by major corporations and spawning a seemingly endless series of successful lm franchises as if in a massively more lucrative re-enactment of its comic book origins. It is the intention of this chapter to explore what all this means, to attempt to read the superhero movie generically as what Hamlet called ‘the abstract and brief chronicles of the time’. ‘Days’ the poet Philip Larkin claimed, ‘are where we live’ and there are specic reasons why this particular account of a land needing heroes is keen to locate that ‘territory’ as much in time as in space, not least because these are cultural cartographies of an apparent age of austerity.
