"Tone down the boobs, please!" reading the special effect body in superhero movies (1).

Superheroes have overcome their lowly pulp comic book beginnings to become an intrinsic part of North American pop culture. They have become iconic symbols to be reiterated and recycled in popular culture to mobilize and reflect themes, tensions, and anxieties of American ideology in terms of genre, gender, sexuality, class, politics, science and culture. Part of the nature of superhero stories has become the movement between mediums and across genres. Superheroes are constantly being re-embodied through different generations of comic books, TV serials, and films, not to mention the never-ending barrage of toys, candy, underpants, video games and other marketing products. As well, part of the history of the comic book superhero is that he or she is the product of many artists and writers who, over the years, subtly change and rework that persona. Scott Bukatman traces the history of the superhero body in his book, Matters of Gravity. With industrialism, railway and industrial accidents made the human body seem breakable. (2) It was after the horrors of World War I that Superman, "the Man of Steel," emerged. (3) In this incarnation he could not fly nor did he have an aversion to kryptonite but he could withstand the rigours of the Machine Age. In the 1960s and 1970s with the new Marvel superheroes like Spider-Man and the Hulk, science fiction and superhero weaknesses were injected into the superhero narrative. Superhero narratives re-imagine the limits of the human body - imagining them mixed with other species, crossed by science, and above all, imbued with superhuman god-like heroism. The year 2000 marked the release of a frenzy of superhero movies more in keeping with the traditional superhero story. Beginning with X-Men (2000), and including X2 (2003), X-Men: The Last Stand (2006), Spider-Man (2002), Spider-Man 2 (2004), Spider-Man 3 (2007), Hulk (2003), The Incredible Hulk (2008), Fantastic Four (2005), Catwoman (2004), and Superman Returns (2006), these films use big budget special effects, such as Computer Generated Imagery (CGI or CG) technology, to embody the powers of the superhero and heroine. What becomes obvious in watching these films is that they are not only traditional in terms of the superhero narrative but they are positively regressive in terms of their portrayal of male and female bodies, and gender relations. Despite the varied creative re-workings of the superhero mentioned above, hypersexualized bodies remain an intrinsic part of the superhero and comic book legacy. Scott Bukatman says that in comics like X-Menand W.I.L.D.C.A.T.S.,

  hypermasculine fantasy is also revealed, with unabashed obviousness,
  in the approach to female superheroes. The spectacle of the female
  body in these titles is so insistent, and the fetishism of breasts,
  thigh, and hair is so complete, that the comics seem to dare you to
  say anything about them that isn't just redundant. Of course, the
  female form has absurdly exaggerated sexual characteristics; of
  course, the costumes are skimpier than one could (or should) imagine;
  of course, there's no visible way that these costumes could stay in
  place; of course, these women represent simple adolescent
  masturbatory fantasies (with a healthy taste of the dominatrix). (4)

Included as part of this fantasy is, of course, the invincible and muscle bound male counterpart and his gear. As any feminist knows, watching mainstream Hollywood movies, especially big budget action movies, is contradictory. It requires an ambiguous viewing position, what feminists term the "guilty pleasures" of watching blockbuster movies that are politically conflicted. As a feminist reading strategy, guilty pleasure acknowledges the ideological contradictions present in mass texts like Hollywood blockbusters. This strategy assumes that signification is contested and recognizes the negotiations that the consumer-spectator engages in while viewing such texts. Although blockbuster, action, and scifi movies are often racist, classist, sexist, and homophobic, these readings do not always capture the complexities of the anxieties about the body, gender, science, and the status quo that are being played out. Simply criticizing the representation of race and gender in the latest cycle of superhero movies is too easy; it does not provide a satisfying reading of these texts. Nicholas Mirzoeff shows that reading cultural texts in terms of the representations of race, class, and gender has become obvious, even banal, because of the ways that racism or sexism are intentionally played to by dominant culture. (5) Ambivalence and ambiguity are deliberately mobilized, often in conservative ways, so that traditional modes of film such as reading a text against the grain or exploring the inherent contradictions present in a text are thwarted. (6) Some feminist critiques, such as reading the representation of particular bodies, are apparent to mass and academic audiences and yet racism and sexism continue to be pernicious problems. The question of how to continue the academic project of feminism when our critiques are obvious, and therefore potentially politically unproductive, is difficult. As a fan of action movies and a comic book reader, I look forward to the release of superhero movies. I want to like these films. What is at stake in the recent cycle of superhero films with respect to the superheroic body? What anxieties are at play in the production of these reductively gendered bodies? Why have aspects of the revisionary superhero text and body not been translated into this recent cycle of superhero films? What is a feminist to do with these films?

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Examining the use of CGI to represent the body of the superhero is central to reading and understanding the recent cycle of superhero films. Much of the discussion surrounding CGI in both trade magazines and by film theorists has focused on the conditions and limits of that technology, and innovations to it. (7) Industry publications such as Cinefex and American Cinematographer offer detailed discussions of how CGI techniques are used in different film productions. These articles reveal how the body is produced, the priorities in producing such bodies, and some of the implications of CGI to overall film production. In the recent cycle of superhero films, the super-hero/ine body is produced through a composite of the actor playing the character, stunt doubles, and, increasingly, the use of CGI technology. Don Burgess, the cinematographer for Spider-Man, asks, "are these real actors, stunt doubles, or CG characters?" (8) Visual effects supervisor Michael L. Fink talks about trying to keep the film budget of X-Men at $75 million US while still accommodating the necessary special effects. (9) He says, "The difficulty of keeping the visual effects budget down was due, in part, to the variety of effects required for a film in which each major character would have his or her own set of superpowers." (10) And, "It was made very clear that Bryan [Singer, the director], Tom [Desanto, executive producer] and screenwriter David Hayter kept reworking the script to get the numbers down while keeping a compelling storyline." (11) Scott Bukatman says that the superhero performance and body are dependent on the public gaze. (12) These bodies literally erupt and demand to be looked at, and the CGI body is a spectacle to be visually consumed. Due to the great cost of CGI, the bodies are literally created at the expense of the plot. The body becomes the site on which the narrative is played out and enacted. In any film, deliberate and detailed aesthetic decisions about how bodies "should" look are part of production, but where CGI is involved, the possibilities for creating different bodies are theoretically endless. These discussions also highlight the constructedness of the bodies in superhero films. Considering CGI effects and bodies requires a shift from doing a conventional textual analysis to a consideration of the production process, or at least the production of CGI bodies. This paper endeavours to do just that. I will explore the construction of the superhero body, specifically, how gender and race work to stabilize the rupturing CGI superhero action body. I will focus on those films and bodies that are most discussed in special effects industry magazines such as American Cinematographer and Cinefex, focusing on the bodies of Hulk, Spider-Man, and Mystique.

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According to Julia Moszkowicz, much of the literature on digital cinema is celebratory and tends to focus on improvements and changes to the technology, rather than the conditions which create and produce digital images. (13) Improvements to how "real" or believable digital animation is dominates discussions including the texture of hair and clothing, for example. It is not the technological innovation defining the aesthetics of a film that this type of literature tends to examine, but as Moszkowicz explains in "To Infinity and Beyond: Assessing the Technological Imperative in Computer Animation", it is notions of "realness" and "realism," which are informed by aesthetic decisions and norms from earlier technologies and medias, that dominate. (14) With respect to CGI and other digital technologies, the focus is, for example, on the "realness" of the dinosaurs in Jurassic Park. (15) It is worth remembering that in the case of both dinosaurs and super-heroes, the constructed images can only be strictly products of the imagination of those who produce them. Because CGI seems to work with "natural vision," as though we were seeing it unfold with our own eyes, it can be easy to forget that it is a product of artistic and scientific practices. (16) For example, in the film Shrek CGI animators were concerned with making Fiona's eyes and skin aesthetically pleasing so that it would be "believable" when Shrek falls in love with her. (17) Realness and believability in the construction of virtual bodies reveal expectations about how flesh and blood bodies "should" look, especially in terms of gender, whether the heroine is in human or ogre form. In superhero movies, where superhero sequences are done with CGI technology, the human actor is literally becoming a special effect, or the superhero CGI character. Superhero bodies such as The Hulk or Spider-Man are unbelievable bodies that are meant to look "believable". We start with blank page bodies and make them into whatever we want them to be.

In scifi action films, heroic masculinity has become more and more ambiguously constructed, hysterically coded as stable and natural but simultaneously assaulted and torn apart in a myriad of ways. In her essay, "Action Bodies in Futurist Spaces: Bodybuilder Stardom as Special Effect", Linda Mizejewski looks at how the male superbody reimagines and transforms the body and its genders. (18) She suggests that there is a relationship between the male body and special effects in science fiction films of the 1990s. Both push visual limits with regards to "the impossible" and the "unnatural." This can be seen in films beginning in the 1980s starring Arnold Schwarzenegger, Sylvester Stallone, and Jean-Claude Van Damme where the "natural" body becomes almost unbelievably muscle-bound. It continued in the 1990s with films like Total Recall (1990), Lawnmower Man (1992), as well as Johnny Mnemonic (1995). These texts code masculinity, especially white, heterosexual, aggressive, heroic masculinity as stable and traditional - natural - but they play it out on muscular "superbodies," bodies so unbelievably muscular that they almost blatantly invite us to view them as unnatural. (19) Mizejewski suggests that the persistence of the muscular male body builder body that is so fiercely coded as "normal" or "natural" in films like Timecop (1994) and Demolition Man (1993), among others, is a clue to its nervous self-consciousness. In other words, the hypermasculine body reveals anxiety about a loss of "natural" or "essential" masculinity understood as muscular and heroic. The bodies of Schwarzenegger, Stallone, and Van Damme that Mizejewski discusses are real--but they are also unbelievable. She suggests that the representation of masculinity is so exaggerated in the muscular superbody that it becomes akin to a "magical" special effect. (20) This obscures the hypermasculine body as "natural" and works to destabilize the male super body.

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Some superheroes are more obviously linked to a bodybuilder lineage than others. The bodies of the Thing from Fantastic Four and the Hulk function as parodies of masculinity as violent and muscular; the Thing has a scaly-looking brown hard body that protects him from physical attacks while the Hulk is green, massive, and grotesquely muscled. Similarly, reading about the production of the Spider-Man body reveals the obsessive and fetishistic nature of creating the Spider-Man physique. Detailed in American Cinematographer are problems and issues with matching costume colours between the day and night sequences, the live-action sequences, and CC sequences. (21) Spider-Man cinematographer Burgess says:

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  ... today's superheroes have to look as if they spend most of their
  time in the weight room, and even though Tobey [McGuire] is in great
  shape, the costume had to accentuate that to make him become more of
  a specimen. Instead of bulking up the suit with latex muscles, which
  would have made it cumbersome, Jim Acheson [the costume designer]
  added more than 120 silk-screened muscle-tone shading details to the
  suit. (22)

Imageworks animation supervisor, Anthony LaMolinara, speaks of the difficulties of animating the CGI Spider-Man,

  The actual Spider-Man costume, which was skin-tight, was ...
  difficult to make believable, especially when he was flying between
  the buildings. To create the feeling that the character had volume of
  muscle and flesh inside his costume, we added extra muscle controls,
  then hand-edited the muscle movements. (23)

Spider-Man's body has been carefully crafted down to the most minute details. Reading these descriptions there is an insistence on the traditionally masculine aspects of the Spider-Man construct's body - namely his muscles. Even though Spider-Man is not necessarily coded as "hypermasculine", his construction as heroic figure is signified, and emphasized, through built muscles.

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In "The White Man's Muscles," Richard Dyer traces the white bodybuilder body in Italian pepla films (adventure films based on classic stories starring American bodybuilders) to the films of Jean-Claude Van Damme, Arnold Schwarzenegger, and Sylvester Stallone. He argues that white bodybuilder bodies parallel colonial concerns in these 90s action films; the mastery and control necessary to create the built body carries strong echoes of narratives of control and mastery of colonial rule. (24) Unlike the pepla films and films such as Rambo, superhero films do not necessarily or explicitly reference colonial relations. Yet, as with many American big-budget action films, they do have a tendency to posit their American heroes globally. In X-Men, Professor's Xavier's Cerebro machine is able to locate all mutants in the world. In Superman Returns (2006), Superman flies into outer space, hovers above the earth, and "listens" to the sounds of the globe including different languages, motors, sirens, babies crying, and alarms, but ultimately rushes back to stop a crime in New York City. Typically the action happens in the US, represented as the centre of the globe. Although these may be peripheral details with respect to plot, they are critical for the heroic aspect of the character, building his scope and importance. At the end of Hulk (2003) Hulk/Bruce Banner escapes to the Amazonian rainforest to work as a doctor. In The Incredible Hulk (2008), a traumatized Bruce Banner hides out in the Rocinha Favela of Rio de Janeiro and works in a factory. His presence in Brazil carries strong colonial overtones and his relationship with the factory owner is paternalistic. Brazil is portrayed as under-technologized, as we see when Banner is able to fix the factory equipment helping to keep the out of date machinery working. Once the American military locates Banner, the poor neighbourhood he lives in becomes a playground for US military maneuvers. Hulk flees to Guatemala, through Mexico, and back to the US. American imperialism is taken for granted as Mexico, South, and Central America are represented as interchangeable and poor. They are also presented as uniformly "backwards" places, which is why Banner is able to go off the grid there.

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Where Dyer connects the white bodybuilder body with colonialism, whiteness and heroic masculinity are connected in superhero movies. Superman, Spider-Man, and Hulk continue to be played by white actors. In terms of mainstream live action superhero films and television, it is significant that white super-heroes remain white in live action retellings while both black and white actors have played the character of Catwoman. In the 1960s Batman television series Eartha Kitt played an unforgettable Catwoman. Batman Returns featured Michelle Pfeiffer in 1992 and in the 2004 Catwoman movie Halle Berry took over the Catwoman role. The casting of these roles illuminates the construction of femininity as changeable and is also a reminder of the racist portrayals of black women as animalistic in pop culture generally. The Hulk turning green undermines his whiteness at least to the extent that it "others" him. The Hulk is, like other superheroes, colonized by science, his body is an American military secret. Superhero bodies fit into the trajectory of big budget scifi action films where the body of the hero is a site of contradictory forces. If bodybuilder bodies played by live action actors function to essentialize masculinity as Mizejewski argues, but are so excessive that they function as a special effect, then special effect superhero bodies can be understood as even more contradictory narrative sites where the "natural" body of the actor is actually replaced by the CGI character. Superheroes are already bodies ripped apart, created by accidents of nature, the military, and science gone awry. Given this history, an essential masculinity is, in some ways, an improbability, yet in the recent cycle of superhero films it is precisely the inconsistencies of that masculinity that are being played out. The instability of the special effects bodies is in direct conflict with the narratives of these films which work to control and confine these bodies. Whiteness functions to shore up heroic masculinity in these films. Masculinity is also defined by, and in opposition to, femininity. Heteronormativity is also used to buttress heroic masculinity.

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In Hulk and the Spider-Man films, Hulk and Spider-Man are both defined against and in relation to a feminine love interest, who restores and defines them. Heterosexual romance is central to both the action of the Hulk and Spider-Man films and to the changing bodies of the heroes. The narratives in all three Spider-Man films suggest, albeit in different ways, that Mary-Jane is not only linked to Peter Parker and his changing body, but is crucial to Spider-Man's continued existence. As with Hulk, Spider-Man's changing body and masculinity analogize adolescence. The introductory monologue in Spider-Man connects what is happening to Spider-Man's body to Mary Jane. The voiceover that begins in the opening credits begins,

  Who am I? Are you sure you want to know? The story of my life is not
  for the faint of heart. If somebody said it was a happy little tale,
  if somebody told you I was just your average ordinary guy, not a care
  in the world, somebody lied. But let me assure you this, like any
  story worth telling, is all about a girl. That girl. The girl next
  door, Mary Jane Watson, the woman I have loved since before I even
  liked girls.

The voiceover, narrated by Peter Parker, introduces the Spider-Man story and emphatically connects who Spider-Man "really is" to Mary Jane. Throughout all three films Mary Jane functions as little more than a place marker for "that girl, the girl next door." She exists solely in relation to Peter Parker/Spider-Man as a love interest and someone to be rescued. In Spider-Man, Green Goblin kidnaps Mary Jane and she is left hanging onto a broken and dangling balcony, screaming. Unsurprisingly, Dr. Octopus kidnaps Mary Jane again in the second film. Mary Jane is ultimately someone who can be used to manipulate Spider-Man. She is his liability, her femininity the repository for his weakness. Likewise, Bruce Banner's story of becoming the Hulk is totally linked to Betty Ross. His masculinity is "resolved" by finding a feminine counterpoint against which to define himself. When Banner literally erupts with emotion--anger--into the Hulk, it is Betty Ross who is able to restore him back to non-threatening human form. Kindness and understanding change the Hulk back to Bruce Banner. Betty Ross literally helps him to stay "human." Mary Jane and Betty Ross exist to be saved and fought over. Spider-Man and the Hulk are defined by their love interests, and, their humanity is defined by their masculinity, which is, in turn, insistently heterosexual.

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Although these narratives work to reinforce white heteronormative masculinity, the CGI body and performance, and the superhero body generally, do not necessarily support such a reading. Reading the industry literature on the production of the Spider-Man construct mirrors the tensions played between the body of the superhero and the plot of the film. Watching CGI Spider-Man, his performance is lithe, supple, and quite beautiful. Director Sam Raimi describes Spider-Man's CGI performance as an "aerial ballet" and as a "graceful dancer." (25) Of any of the CGI superheroes, Spider-Man's body as he flies through the city has the most dancerly qualities - strength, mobility, and grace. In Hulk even CGI Hulk bounding through the desert loses his smashing lumbering destructiveness and appears almost nimble and free, seeming to belong in the landscape. On the one hand Spider-Man and Hulk are aggressively heroic, destroying villains in battles that cannot be contained by their surroundings, breaking down walls, ripping up train tracks, crumbling buildings and cliffs. Their bodies literally cannot be contained by "nature" or by human constructed spaces. On the other hand, alone in his environment, the CGI superhero performance is not necessarily defined by these traditionally masculine heroic qualities. Rather, the performance is defined by agility and beauty and it serves, in some ways, to stretch and challenge those very definitions of masculinity that the rest of the text works to set up.

In "Digital Heroes in Contemporary Hollywood: Exertion, Identification, and the Virtual Action Body," Lisa Purse considers how the bodies of digital heroes affect the spectator's pleasurable engagement with those bodies. (26) Action films are body-centered and work to produce an embodied response in the spectator. (27) Critics of the first two Spider-Man movies were dissatisfied with the computer animated human body because the CGI sequences did not persuade the spectator of what Purse calls "their (fictional) materiality." (28) Despite the attention to Spider-Man's physique described above, the action body in motion did not accommodate the spectator's expectations. Visual details of the virtual action body in motion which enable the spectator's pleasure include "mastering complex muscle and tendon structures, simulating physical forces of weight and counter-weight, mass, momentum, resistance, torque, impact, and so on." (29) Purse suggests that the amount of screen time given to the animated hero might help to account for the lack of connection experience by the critics. (30) Body-centered action films, including superhero movies, become a location where the allowable, or tolerable, limits of animated digital filmic bodies are negotiated by filmmakers and audiences. (31) Purse says that virtual heroes expose anxieties about change and mutability in the human body that audiences may not want to see enacted. (32) Critics of Hulk were even less satisfied with the CGI Hulk, which Purse attributes to the inherent instability of the Hulk character and body. (33) A crucial aspect of virtual heroes not explored by Purse is how gender, particularly masculinity, functions in action bodies.

One of the digital techniques used to represent the changes to the Hulk character is the morph, a technique that directly references anxieties about shifting body surfaces. In "After Arnold: Narratives of the Posthuman Cinema," Roger Warren Beebe suggests that the morph can be understood as a visual rupture--the figure that marks a shift in the ways that narratives are told in a given film. (34) He says that there are links between Gunning's cinema of attractions, where films show the audience something they have never seen before, and films that use morphing technology because of the centrality of non-narrative moments where the spectacle interrupts the narrative. (35) In the case of superhero films, the morph reinforces the fact that the narrative of the body is as important as the plot of the film. In his essay "Morphing and the Performance of Self" Scott Bukatman says that the morph suggests the ability for self and body to undergo transformations - to make and remake oneself. (36) Live action superhero movies pay attention to the body and showcase its spectacle of change. An inordinate amount of screen time is given to the visual spectacle of the shifting body, highlighting the difficulties of animating, editing, and showcasing the imaginary and unbelievable superhero body--through human, stunt double, and/or CGI embodiments. With the morph, this anxiety is heightened as it embodies these contradictions even more.

Bukatman suggests that the morph is plastic and empty, tending towards stabilizing an unstable identity. (37) For superheroes this reads like a description of their bodies - identities that can safely, without physical damage, move between superhero and human - but that are essentially volatile.

If the morph is central to creating the visual spectacle of characters such as the Hulk, it epitomizes X-Men villain, Mystique. Mystique is a blue skinned, yellow eyed, scaly shape-shifting mutant who can take on the appearance of other humans. With this ability Mystique is able to impersonate virtually anybody and infiltrate almost any building. In the first two X-Men films, she is able to impersonate, among others, members of the government and various X-Men in order to steal information and convince various characters to act in ways conducive to achieving the villainous Brotherhood's goals. Her powers embody and visualize the anxieties about transformation and volatility in the human body, which, as Lisa Purse explains, often typify villainous characters. (38) Not only is she deceptive, but her character is created by techniques of visual deception, CGI and morphing technologies. (39) When Mystique is not in her own form, but that of another human, the only way she can be identified is by a yellow eye flash. As Purse points out, even this eye flash does not always let the audience know when it is Mystique embodying another human, reinforcing once again the multiple deceptions of her character. Not only do her powers typify villainous characters, but I would suggest they also characterize the powers of female superheroines in the X-Men cycle of films.

The X-Men are a team of heroes who fight a group of organized villains, separating them from the lone crime fighter superhero narratives. Scott Bukatman says that the X-Men are "transgressive, uncontrollable, and alternative" and that their mutant bodies in comic books are directly correlated with historically subjugated bodies - queers, Jews, people of colour, and First Nations bodies. (40) X-Men comics have become known as the "multicultural" comic book because the mutant heroes are more diverse than the American and white-dominated pages of Batman, Superman, or the Hulk. For example, they include German Nightcrawler, Russian Colossus, African Storm, and Canadian Wolverine as well as strong female figures like Rogue, Storm, and |ean Grey/Phoenix. However, other than Storm, these bodies are all still white. Bukatman suggests that super-heroines in these and other comics do not just have "wimpy powers" like invisibility and telekinesis any more; they are more powerful and dangerous, and they now fight alongside their male companions. (41) However, in live action films, although female superheroes do fight alongside their male companions, they tend to have markedly different powers than male super-heroes. Looking back to the original comic book texts, the cross-medium migration from comic book to live action blockbuster film can be charted and read for how the superheroine bodies are mapped with respect to femininity. In these films, the female body consistently remains surprisingly "intact." Neither the mutation nor special effects work to visually disrupt, dismantle, or change the surface of the female form. The powers attributed to female superhero bodies are linked to traditional notions of female power, including manipulation, sexuality, and masquerade (rather than brute physical or muscular strength). Masquerade can be understood as a drawing of attention to body surfaces through costume, make-up, or other effects, in order to draw attention away from the interior. (42) In superhero films, the signifiers of femininity that can be linked to masquerade - the ubiquitous hair, breasts, and bodies fetishized by the superhero outfits - can be said to draw the attention of the viewer to the idealized female form, leaving the superheroine's supernatural powers hidden and internal. Her less "feminine" powers do not mark her body. Reading the bodies of super-heroines, or the body narrative, without considering the storyline, female superhero bodies can be powerful, forcefully harnessing strengths and powers traditionally associated with femininity. However, the storylines tend to work to contain the bodies and strengths of the heroines.

Female mutant superheroes are also severely punished by the plots of the X-Men films. We see them naked and dead but not ripped apart. Perhaps one of the most disappointing comic-to-screen character transformations is that of Rogue who, in the comic books, is confident and capable, but appears in the X-Men films as a scared and helpless teenager who cannot adjust to her mutant powers. Jeffrey A. Brown argues that in her comic book incarnation, Rogue's ability to steal a man's (or another mutant's) power with a touch or a kiss is fetishistic, drawing on the iconic powers of the dominatrix. (43) In the film trilogy, however, Rogue's youth and inexperience are emphasized. By X-Men: The Last Stand, a scientist has developed a vaccine to "cure" mutants of being mutant, allowing them to become "normal" humans. Rogue, who is unable to touch her boyfriends and must wear gloves at all times, is thrilled. She gets inoculated with the vaccine, despite the virulent protests of other mutants, including her boyfriend. The storyline of the film works to control and severely limit Rogue's powers, portraying her as a victim of her own strength. Because her powers are very much derived from notions of feminine strength, even drawing from the figure of the dominatrix in the comics as Brown suggests, the restoration of Rogue to mere human resolves as a curtailing not just of mutant powers, but also, crucially, of female force.

The Jean Grey/Phoenix character emerges in the X-Men comics when the Phoenix is a mighty alien entity that merges with Jean Grey, attracted to her powerful mind. Phoenix is not "bad" in the comics, but in X-Men: The Last Stand, Phoenix is the evil side of Jean Grey's personality, and she joins the villainous Brotherhood. The storyline reinforces lean Grey's unstable emotional and mental state as significantly contributing to the manifestation of her powers. For example, when she gets angry or upset she accidentally levitates objects in the room. In the final battle of the film, Jean Grey/Phoenix saves all the mutants by stopping needles fired at them containing the mutant vaccine. She stops them from being turned into "regular" humans. However, unable to control her powers, Jean Grey/Phoenix begins to systematically destroy the entire island of Alcatraz, where they are fighting. Objects hurl through the air, water rises out of the ocean, and Jean Grey/Phoenix begins to wreck everything and everyone. She is awesome and terrifying. Wolverine, her close friend, with his ability to quickly self-heal, walks towards her and begs her to stop, even as she rips his skin off. She whispers, "kill me," and he stabs her with his claws to save everyone, including her, from herself.

The most interesting character of the X-Men trilogy with respect to femininity is Mystique. Her body literalizes masquerade. She revels in her powers and the possibilities of her body. When, in X2, Nightcrawler, whose natural state makes him look like a devil, asks Mystique why she does not just stay in the shape of a "normal" human, she replies, "I shouldn't have to." In terms of special effects, it is Rebecca Romijn-Stamos's transformation into Mystique that dominates discussions in industry magazines like Cinefex. Body paint and over one hundred reusable silicone prosthetics adorned Romijn-Stamos as Mystique. (44) Created by morphing technology, the character of Mystique can seamlessly transform into any human body. The technology augments the prosthetics by creating effects that cause the scales to emerge on her skin, "like a bird ruffling its feathers," for example. (45) As with the other superheroines, the costumes, special effects, and body paint tend to augment, rather than transplant the actor's body. CG techniques were needed to accommodate the character of Mystique's transformations. A computer programme that maps body points from body scans was used to match Romijn-Stamos' body as Mystique with that of the other actors in the sequences where Mystique mimics the form of another character, such as in the helicopter sequence in X7. (46) Not surprisingly, the discussions of special effects in superhero movies in Cinefex have typically gendered overtones. With Romijn-Stamos, the discussion emphasizes that she is a model. In discussing the body paint: "The switch from food coloring to paint was due to the fact that the former is much more difficult to remove than the latter; and Romijn-Stamos could hardly show up for modeling gigs with blue-tinged skin." (47) Later, discussing one of the sequences of X2 where Mystique has taken on the form of Bobby (Iceman) and is infiltrating Cerebro, Erika Wlczak, the visual effects producer, describes the sequence as one of the "most challenging" because, "our synthetic Mystique had to match not only Rebecca Romijn-Stamos' model-like gait, but that of the actor playing Bobby, her previous incarnation. In essense, Kody [Sabourin, the lighter] had to make a CG representation of a supermodel walking like a guy." (48) The fact that Mystique, when she is in her "true" form is played by model Rebecca Stamos-Romijn, is continually reiterated.

In X-Men: The Last Stand, a guard with an anti-mutant vaccine dart shoots at Magneto and Mystique dives in front of it, saving him. She falls to the ground, twitches, her blue skin fades, and she becomes a regular human. Magneto abandons her there, naked and regular, and dismissively says to Pyro, "it's a shame, she was so beautiful". Of all of the female superheroes, Mystique is the only one whose powers manifest fully and visually on the surface of her body, allowing her to change gender, race, and appearance, and literalizing masquerade. Simultaneously and contradictorily, Mystique draws attention away from her real identity and powers, concealed on the interior of whichever body she has created for herself. The surface of her body can conceal her true identity and powers. The film works to construct this masquerade as frighteningly powerful and utterly feminine. When Mystique succumbs to the mutant vaccine dart, it exposes her simply as a human woman - naked and powerless. Mystique is fully neutralized; her amazing powers annihilated. Her body is stopped and the narrative of the film reinforces both her femininity and her failure, working to deactivate both the power of her female body and her "feminine" powers. Although the plot and narrative work to code her as female, her performance of transformation makes it clear that categories of gender should be irrelevant; but even though the character can easily change gender, the gender of both the character and the actor is continually reinforced. The fact that Mystique can change her body is repeatedly connected to her gender, reinforcing notions of masquerade as feminine. Her ability to change gender happens on the surface, using what Bukatrnan describes as the logic of the morph generally. (49) Her changes are not deep or lasting, but are marked by playfulness, transience, and surfaces, which, as Bukatrnan says, is more about exterior change than liberation. (50) More humiliated and emasculated than Jean Grey/Phoenix who is killed at full strength, Mystique is thoroughly neutralized by the film's narrative, stripped of her powers and left naked and vulnerable, not liberated at all.

Conclusions: "These Are Mediocre Times" (51)

Mystique embodies the anxiety that Purse identifies when she argues that "virtual body's inherent mutability reverberates with unspoken fear of phenomenological instability and potentially monstrous metamorphosis within which state of flux the distinct is somehow lost." (52) It is difficult to ignore the gendered aspect of Mystique's powers. The way in which the X3 storyline works to severely punish the most powerful female hero is yet another iteration of the punishment of strong female characters in Hollywood films, going back most obviously to the femme fatale in Noir films. Mainstream film and television have for decades imagined female bodies that ambiguously transgress gender norms, often "giving" them certain freedoms or strengths while simultaneously reining them in, in other ways. More recently, pop culture action heroines have appeared in TV shows such as Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1997 to 2003) Alias (2001 to 2006), and Heroes (2006 to present), all of which star kick-ass, capable, and very feminine heroines.

Superhero bodies such as Mystique, Hulk, and Spider-Man are corporate creations that signal anxiety and ambiguity around conceptions of gender. The male superhero is housed in a rupturing body that is uncontainable, erupting, in violent ways, to literally transform into a special effect, the CGI body. The CGI special effects body of the male superhero is lithe, free, and joyful especially in contrast to the constraints, imposed by the narrative, on his body and masculinity. The female body is "too powerful" and is contained, not just by the narrative, but also by the production process that is unable or unwilling to imagine ways in which the surfaces of the female body might shift. Even in their moment of death the female heroines retain their female forms. The construction of the Hulk and Spider-Man virtual bodies reflects the contradictions and anxieties about masculinity and the instability of the male body. While the production of the special effect Hulk and Spider-Man bodies explores these contradictions, to a certain extent, the plot uses whiteness and heteronormativity to shore up traditional notions of heroic masculinity. Mystique's body literally embodies the tensions about the mutability of the human form, but the production of her special effect body and our final image of her as naked, disempowered and vulnerable both work to re-stabilize traditional notions of female gendered bodies and re-contain dangerous feminine power. When the plot, as with the Hulk and Spider-Man, works to limit the possibilities of mutability and change by shoring up traditional notions of gender, this strategy of re-enforcement only curtails and punishes Mystique. The contradictions between the body narrative and the plot of the film collide with the male heroes signaling anxiety and confusion. With the female heroes the body narrative and the plot of the film coincide working to further reinforce traditional notions of gender.

What's a feminist to do with these bodies? The obviousness of a critique of the representation of gender and race diminishes the deliciousness of the guilty pleasure reading strategy. Looking at the cycle of superhero films and comparing them to what Geoff Klock describes as the revisionary superhero narrative illuminates the possibilities of the superhero narrative and body. In the 1980s revisionary superhero narratives appeared in the print comic genre and were gritty and cynical imaginings of our world inhabited by superheroes. These stories were deconstructions of the superhero rather than more traditional superhero stories and include Alan Moore's The Watchmen (1995) and Frank Miller's Batman: Dark Knight Returns (1997). (53) Both have recently been made into feature length films. Across mediums, superhero bodies and narratives vary greatly and take up different subject matter and concerns. Batman and Robin, in the television series Batman (1966-1968), were campy and over the top. The homoerotic subtext of the masked superhero duo is spoofed in the hilarious cartoon The Ambiguously Cay Duo, played on the television show Saturday Night Live (1996 - present) and in Michael Troy's novelty book, Homo-Hero's Big Book of Tun and Adventure (2002). Michael Chabon's novel, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay (2000), takes up the early days of comic book publishing in New York. As well, The Incredibles (2004) is an animated movie about a family of superheroes living in witness protection in suburbia. Unbreakable (2000) is the story of a "regular" working class man who has incredible physical strength and his discovery of his power. All these texts deconstruct and reimagine the superhero narrative, and rework the good versus evil world view presented in traditional comics. These narratives queer, age, and relocate the superhero body and narrative, and paint morality in shades of gray. The possibilities revealed by these revisionary superhero narratives and bodies make clear the simplistic and regressive representation of gender in the recent cycle of superhero movies. Considering the production process and examining the use of CGI animation illuminates anxieties about how bodies could and should look, especially with respect to gender. Simply considering the representation of bodies would not necessarily reveal how CGI affects the construction of these superhero bodies.

Sabine LeBel is a PhD candidate in the Communications and Culture Department at York University.

Notes

(1) Kirsten Dunst to Spider-Man video game makers, in response to Mary Jane's (played by Dunst in the Spider-Man movies) exaggerated cleavage in the video game character (Ireland On-Line. Retrieved September 4, 2004).

(2) Scott Bukatman, Motters of Gravity: Special Effects and Supermen in the 20th Century (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2003), 53.

(3) ibid.

(4) ibid, 65.

(5) Nicholas Mirzoeff, "The Subject of Visual Culture," in The Visual Culture Reader, ed. Nicholas Mirzoeff (New York: Routledge, 2006), 9.

(6) ibid.

(7) Julia Moszkowicz, "To Infinity and Beyond: Assessing the Technological Imperative in Computer Animation," Screen 43/3 (2002), 298.

(8) Jay Holben, "Spider's Strategem," American Cinematographer 83/6 (2002), 35.

(9) Kevin H. Martin, "The X-Men Cometh," Cinefex 83 (2000), 73.

(10) ibid.

(11) ibid.

(12) Scott Bukatman, Matters of Gravity: Special Effects and Supermen in the 20th Century (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2003), 188.

(13) Julia Moszkowicz, "To Infinity and Beyond: Assessing the Technological Imperative in Computer Animation," Screen 43/3 (2002), 294,

(14) ibid, 314.

(15) ibid, 298.

(16) ibid, 300.

(17) ibid, 298.

(18) Linda Mizejewski, "Action Bodies in Futurist Spaces: Bodybuilder Stardom as Special Effect" in Alien Zone II: The Spaces of Science Fiction Cinema, ed. Annette Kuhn (New York: Verso, 1999), 154.

(19) See Anne Balsamo's Technologies of the Gendered Body (1996) for a discus sion of the muscular body as a product of technology.

(20 ) Linda Mizejewski, "Action Bodies in Futurist Spaces: Bodybuilder Stardom as Special Effect," in Alien Zone II: The Spaces of Science Fiction Cinema, ed. Annette Kuhn (New York: Verso, 1999), 154.

(21) Jay Holben, "Spider's Strategem," American Cinematographer 83/6 (2002), 36.

(22) as quoted in ibid.

(23) as quoted in Ron Magid, "Crawling the Walls," American Cinematographer 83/6 (2002), 53.

(24) Richard Dyer, "The White Man's Muscles," in Race and the Subject of Masculinities, eds. Harry Stecopoulous and Michael Uebel (Durham and London: Duke University Press:1997), 311.

(25) as quoted in Ron Magid, "Crawling the Walls," American Cinematographer 83/6 (2002), 46 and 49.

(26) Lisa Purse, Digital Heroes in Contemporary Hollywood: Exertion, Identification, and the Virtual Action Body," Film Criticism 32/1 (2007), 7.

(27) ibid.

(28) ibid, 9-10.

(29) ibid, 11.

(30) ibid, 12.

(31) ibid, 23.

(32) ibid, 15.

(33) ibid, 18.

(34) Roger Warren Beebe, "After Arnold: Narratives of the Posthuman Cinema," in Meta-morphing: Visual Transformation and the Culture of Quick-change, ed. Vivian Sobchack (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press: 2000), 160,

(35) ibid, 161.

(36) Scott Bukatman, "Morphing and the Performance of Self," in Meta-morphing: Visual Transformation and the Culture of Quick-change, ed. Vivian Sobchack (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press: 2000), 226.

(37) ibid, 245.

(38) Lisa Purse, "Digital Heroes in Contemporary Hollywood: Exertion, Identification, and the Virtual Action Body," Film Criticism 32/1 (2007), 1 7.

(39) ibid, 18.

(40) Scott Bukatman, Matters of Gravity: Special Effects and Supermen in the 20th Century (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2003), 40.

(41) ibid, 65.

(42) Shelley Stamp Lindsey, "Horror, Femininity, and Carrie's Monstrous Puberty," in The Dread of Difference: Gender and the Horror Film, ed. Barry Keith Grant (Austin: University of Texas Press: 1996), 288. Although the term masquerade is usually attributed to loan Riviere and Michele Montrelay, Stamp Lindsey's essay, which draws on their theories to look at the film Carrie (1976), is more relevant to this study. In her essay, she exam ines the character of Carrie who, like many superheroines, has telepathic abilities, and is therefore more closely related to superheroine characters, like Jean Grey in the X-Men.

(43) Jeffrey A. Brown, "Gender, Sexuality, and Toughness: The Bad Girls of Action Film and Comic Books," in Action Chicks: New Images of Tough Women in Popular Culture, ed. Sherrie A. Inness (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), 66.

(44) Kevin H. Martin, "The X-Men Cometh," Gnefex 83 (2000), 74.

(45) ibid, 82.

(46) ibid, 77.

(47) ibid, 81.

(48) as quoted in ibid, 89.

(49) Scott Bukatman, "Morphing and the Performance of Self", in Meta-morph ing: Visual Transformation and the Culture of Quick-change, ed. Vivian Sobchack (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press: 2000), 226.

(50) ibid.

(51) Elijah Price, the villain, to Audrey Dunn, the hero's wife, in the revisionary superhero film, Unbreakable (2000).

(52) Lisa Purse, "Digital Heroes in Contemporary Hollywood: Exertion, Identification, and the Virtual Action Body," Film Criticism 32/1 (2007), 16.

(53) How to Read Superhero Comics and Why