Il ragno e il grattacielo. Lo spettacolo e la catastrofe

• Main Author: Pier Paolo Zampieri
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Mimesis Edizioni, Milano 2016-03-01
• Series: Im@go. A Journal of the Social Imaginary
• Subjects: Spiderman; show society; 9/11; image; catastrophe; metropolis
• Online Access: http://cab.unime.it/journals/index.php/IMAGO/article/view/1131

The paper framework aims to be a reasoning between two media images, set in a time span covering almost half a century: Spiderman’s debut in the “cartoon” medium (1962) and what is probably the first “narrative” elaboration on 9/11 produced by the great cultural industry machine (Straczynski J. M, Romita J. JR., [December] 2001). This paper offers a genealogy of the superhero genre, and discusses the internal reasoning of a medium which, having metropolis, image and seriality as its constituents, summarizes and maybe discloses contemporary societies’ dynamics. Show and catastrophe, under this perspective, are perhaps only logical and ordinary consequences.