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 ANATOMY
OF THE
SUPERHERO
FILM

Larrie Dudenhoeffer
Anatomy of the Superhero Film
 Larrie Dudenhoeffer

Anatomy of the
Superhero Film
Larrie Dudenhoeffer
Kennesaw
GA, USA

ISBN 978-3-319-57921-4 ISBN 978-3-319-57922-1 (eBook)

DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-57922-1

Library of Congress Control Number: 2017939880

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2017

This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher,
whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation,
reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any
other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation,
computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed.
The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this
publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are
exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use.
The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in
this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher
nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, express or implied, with respect to the material
contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains
neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.

Cover credit: © Alija/Vetta/Getty Images

Printed on acid-free paper

This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by Springer Nature

The registered company is Springer International Publishing AG
The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland
 To my mother and father:
in my eyes, my very first superheroes
 Acknowledgements

Unlike those superheroes that mostly operate alone, writing and rewriting a
manuscript requires a team effort. So I wish to recognize the editors, readers,
and staff members at Palgrave for their advice, encouragement, and assistance
in moving Anatomy of the Superhero Film towards its completion. I especially
want to thank Shaun Vigil for supporting this project and for taking the time
to discuss the most recent superhero film releases with me.
I also want to thank David Marsh, Khalil Elayan, Marvin Severson, Chris
Palmer, Keith Botelho, and several of my students, friends, and colleagues for
vetting my ideas and sharing their insights into various superhero films, com-
ics, and characters. Also, I cannot forget Vickie Willis, Ashley Shelden, and
Nancy Reichert for reading sketches of my chapters and offering me invalu-
able suggestions towards their revision.
Early drafts of the introduction and conclusion were presented at the 2016
SCMS Annual Conference in Atlanta, Georgia and the 2015 PCA/ACA
Annual Conference in New Orleans, Louisiana. Thanks to the organizers of
these conferences for allowing me the chance to share my ideas with fellow
film, comics, and media scholars.
Videodrome, one of the few remaining movie rental stores in the Atlanta
area, supplied most of the screenshots in the essays to follow. John Robinson
and the rest of the Videodrome staff deserve many thanks for their assistance
and for the discounts.
Of course, my love and appreciation go to Joe and Becky, for all the
­support they offer me, including sending me terrible movies to watch, and
to Grant and Anna, for affording me the chance to see some of my favorite
­characters again with new eyes.
Finally, I save my dearest admiration for Terri, my love, my partner,
my friend, and a true superwoman of whom I am truly a fan.

vii
 Contents

1 X-Ray Visions: An Introduction to an Anatomy

of the Superhero Film 1

2 An X-Ray into the Endo-Prosthetic Superbody 25

3 An X-Ray into the Exo-Prosthetic Superbody 81

4 An X-Ray into the Epi-Prosthetic Superbody 165

5 An X-Ray into the Ecto-Prosthetic Superbody 233

6 Imaging Results: An Addendum on Superhuman

Embodiment 289

Bibliography 301

Index 311

ix
 List of Figures

Fig. 2.1 The object–human split in L’arrivée d’un train26

Fig. 2.2 Human-as-object in Annabelle Serpentine Dance27
Fig. 2.3 The autopsy of a Reaper in Blade II31
Fig. 2.4 The correspondence of Blade to the Reapers in Blade II31
Fig. 2.5 The “inner eye” of Daredevil41
Fig. 2.6 The “world on fire” to Matt Murdock in Marvel’s Daredevil46
Fig. 2.7 Typhoid’s exfoliation of the mise-en-scène in Elektra55
Fig. 2.8 The “fiber optic” Bifröst bridge in Thor58
Fig. 2.9 Mjölnir endo-prosthetically returns to its owner
in Thor: The Dark World65
Fig. 3.1 Batman “thinks” the outline of the Bat-logo in the Batman serial 83
Fig. 3.2 The noetic features of the title character’s costume
in the 1960s Batman88
Fig. 3.3 The Bat-logo again frames Bruce Wayne’s cranial vault
in Batman Returns95
Fig. 3.4 The Joker and Batman as two ends of the same face-card
in The Dark Knight114
Fig. 3.5 Batman and the Joker as two ends of the same face-card
in The Dark Knight114
Fig. 3.6 Peter Parker spurts webbing all over the room in Spider-Man122
Fig. 3.7 The news media’s description of the title character’s webs
in Spider-Man124
Fig. 3.8 The antihero “wastes” a criminal in Deadpool156
Fig. 4.1 The crystal chamber X-rays the title character of Superman II176
Fig. 4.2 Professor X’s epi-prosthetic connection to the supercomputer
Cerebro in X-Men196
Fig. 4.3 The title character’s toyetic solid-light constructs in Green Lantern215
Fig. 4.4 The absent-present nature of the Vision in Avengers: Age of Ultron225
Fig. 5.1 Father and son fight in a series of “comic panels” in Hulk248

xi
xii List of Figures

Fig. 5.2 The simulacrum of Aldrich Killian’s neurocerebral networks

in Iron Man 3265
Fig. 5.3 The “second skin” afterimages in Pas de Deux and Ant-Man269
Fig. 5.4 The “second skin” afterimages in Pas de Deux and Ant-Man270
 CHAPTER 1

X-Ray Visions: An Introduction to an Anatomy

of the Superhero Film

The 2000s saw the (re)birth of the superhero film. The first decades of the
twenty-first century, in fact, unlike the relatively measly slates for the super-
hero film in the 1980s and 1990s, average a release of about four-to-six films
of this type each year. The superhero film mostly outmuscles similar fare (war
films, crime films, fighting films, and even some science fiction spectacles)
at the ticket counter, and in addition the superhero film’s uniquely fantastic
action dynamics—the characters in it able to do the miraculous easily with
their minds, mutant appendages, or skeletomuscular endowments—more and
more so inform the stunts, set-pieces, camera motions, frantic editing style,
and digital special effects of other forms of action cinema. Such earlier action
film stalwarts as James Bond, Indiana Jones, and Sherlock Holmes now take
on the characteristics of the superhero. James Bond, for example, negotiates
the iron flanges of a skyscraper under construction in Casino Royale (Mar-
tin Campbell 2006) with the nimbleness of Batman. At close to 60 years of
age, the title character in Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull
(Steven Spielberg 2008), the fourth entry in the series, moves with more
suppleness than in the films from the 1980s, and appears as agile as Captain
America when dodging machinegun fire while running across the rafters of a
warehouse. The version of the sleuth in Guy Ritchie’s Sherlock Holmes (2009)
thinks in the manner of a computer, constructing mental schemata to fore-
see the moves made in fight scenes, to calculate the most effective strikes and
counterstrikes, and to unerringly execute them—this Holmes thus resem-
bles another one of Robert Downey Jr.’s iconic roles, Tony Stark in Iron
Man (Jon Favreau 2008), who uses the vision systems in the armor suit to
do much the same. Finally, the title characters of Tommy Wirkola’s Hansel
and Gretel: Witch Hunters (2013) each carry an arsenal of weapons far too
cutting-edge for the early modern era and also move onscreen in the style of
such superheroes as Hawkeye and the Black Widow from The Avengers.1

© The Author(s) 2017 1

L. Dudenhoeffer, Anatomy of the Superhero Film,
DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-57922-1_1
2 L. Dudenhoeffer

Why does the superhero, though, or rather its onscreen variant, after the
turn of the millennium assume such cultural force? One reason is that the
superhero film capitalizes on Hollywood’s current reliance on computer ani-
mation, virtual world-making, and three-dimensional (3D) modeling in visual
effects design more than any other type of film. The superhero film might
not flourish as it now does if not for its almost wholesale use of the wire-
frames, virtual cameras, digital mattes, and motion-capture markers so typical
of contemporary cinema ever since the colossal successes of Steven Spielberg’s
Jurassic Park (1993), John Lasseter’s Toy Story (1995), James Cameron’s
Titanic (1997), and Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of
the Ring (2001). According to J.P. Telotte (2010), these films, along with
such earlier efforts as Steven Lisberger’s Tron (1982), as they introduce com-
puter generated (CG) characters and mise-en-scène elements into otherwise
naturalistic environments, effectively explode “the boundaries between ani-
mated and live-action cinema in ever more complex ways, while also creating
new possibilities for hybrid narratives” (182). Of course, the use of digital
effects seems instrumental to compositing or incorporating drawn characters
from comics into those forms of realistic cinema that traditionally might resist
them or make them appear fake. The adaptation of the superhero comic2 thus
seems the most appropriate vehicle for dramatizing the singularities of digi-
tal cinema: in other words, much as the comic nests a fantastic element, the
superhero, into an otherwise ordinary milieu, so too does the digital film nest
a “fantastic” or rather a completely non-indexical element, the CG animation,
into footage taken of actual actors, objects, and settings.
However, the superhero film, as the crowning achievement of the cine-
matic use of digital effects, represents much more than a remediation of the
content or the aesthetics of its source material. As Stephen Prince (2012)
argues,

The digital era in cinema challenges our understanding of the medium and not
simply because of the shift to electronics from celluloid. It challenges us to think
anew about the nature of realism in cinema and about the conjunction between
art and science, as these domains collaborate in the design and use of technolo-
gies that make possible the creation of a new class of images, ones that have a
transformative effect on existing media and offer viewers opportunities to enter
new optical domains. (11)

While arguing that CG design merely offers new tools with which to create
artificial worlds, as cinema sought to do ever since its invention, Prince none-
theless confers on the digital the special ability to expose viewers to “new
optical domains.” The impressive use of travelling mattes in Superman (Rich-
ard Donner 1978) might allow us to watch the title character fly, while the
use of costly and elaborate sets in Batman (Tim Burton 1989) might allow
us to watch the title character cruise the neo-Gothic streets of Gotham City
in a futuristic urban combat vehicle. These films, though, without digital
 1 X-RAY VISIONS: AN INTRODUCTION TO AN ANATOMY … 3

effects, cannot for any extensive amount of screen time easily, convincingly, or
cost-effectively show us a man, for instance, continually remain on fire, or a
woman whose skin turns invisible, except for the faint motion distortion that
accompanies the activation of this superpower.
However, to attribute the vogue for the superhero to twenty-first century
upticks in digital effects, to the shift to electronics, misses out on the specific
diegetic modalities that make these films different from other fantasy, science
fiction, and action adventure extravaganzas. To do so might also risk failing
to appreciate the artistic successes and other moments of interest that crop
up in the more experimental stages of the superhero film’s formation, in the
Fleischer Superman cartoons (1941–1943), in the more episodic serials of the
1940s and 1950s, and in the more colorful feature-length film events of the
1970s, 1980s, and 1990s. If we are to establish the genre specificity of the
superhero film from its origins in the early twentieth century to its renascence
in the early 2000s—if we are to determine what makes it so different from
other types of cinematic spectacle—we must first set forth the axiom that the
real crux of the superhero film, whether it uses digital effects or not, consists
in its elaboration, exaggeration, and transformation of the normal morpho-
physiological conditions of its title characters.
Horror and action films, of course, use special effects in ways that also
signally concern embodiment. More often than not, though, these films use
them to expose the insides of their characters’ flesh to our view, whereas the
superhero film concretely and explicitly extends this flesh into the objects, set-
tings, data displays, and other compositional values of its mise-en-scène. How-
ever, the superhero film does not merely dwell on “the fractured, punctured,
trampled, and wounded body,” as Scott Bukatman (2011) contends, nor does
it necessarily use the superhuman expressivity of its characters to cast into
relief the inadequacies of its main actors’ real-life flesh, as when Toby Magu-
ire concedes the role of Spider-Man to a digital stand-in or when Eric Bana,
Edward Norton, or Mark Ruffalo morph into slightly different versions of the
Hulk as their diegetic avatar (119–122). Speculating on the formative devel-
opment of the 2000s-era superhero film, Bukatman further argues,

In the absence of a “real” body, the cinematic superhero becomes an incarna-

tion of electronic technology—a digital being embodying the fact of being digi-
tal. It’s no accident that this wave of superhero films followed the development
of ever more convincing CGI technologies. Whatever they are within the plot,
these are bodies that are newly adequate to the malleable conditions of digital
culture. Taken at their most radical, they might be seen to capture and convey a
sense that bodies are no more inviolate than any other form of coded informa-
tion. (122)

Must we reduce the ideational thrust of the superhero film to anxieties about
disembodiment, corporate dispossession, or the waning of our collective sense
of “realness” in the new millennium? Might we not rather say, more so in the
4 L. Dudenhoeffer

manner of Spinoza (2000), that the object of the idea constituting the super-
hero film “is the body, or a certain mode of extension actually existing and
nothing else” (47)? What can the superbody do, in other words? Or rather
what is superhuman embodiment, whether analogic or digital, actually capa-
ble of in these films?
Anatomy of the Superhero Film thus offers four “X-rays” into the rela-
tively nonhuman sensoria, anatomic structures, internal systems, cellu-
lar organizations, and orthotic, chemical, or technological enhancements
of the superhero. These X-rays, in short, offer what we might describe as a
metamorpho-physiological approach to the superhero on film. This approach,
a nominal tribute to one of DC Comics’ creations, Metamorpho, a crime-
fighter who can shape-shift into air, water, earth, or fire, examines more than
the relationship of the forms of such characters to their somatic functions, or
the ways in which their appearance dovetails into their specific set of super-
powers. This approach, as the “meta” indicates, also examines the ways in
which the “substance” of superheroes, which includes their masks, costumes,
chevrons, weaponries, and auras, extends into the diegetic environment of the
film, transgressing it, transforming it, and most significantly corporealizing
it, making it emblematic of the shape, dimensions, contours, and organismic
workings of one or more of our major organs, members, orifices, fluids, or
cell formations. This approach, then, might typically follow this schema:
Body part: Costume ∝ Superpower: Mise-en-scène
The first side of this statement sets one or more features of the superhero’s
costume—for instance, its mask, armor, cape, color scheme, chest sym-
bol, or accessories—in ratio correspondence to one or more of our organs,
appendages, somatosensory receptors, or neurochemical mechanisms. This
ratio of costume-to-embodiment functions in commensurate relation to the
next side of the statement, which analogizes the character’s superpowers
to certain aspects of the film’s mise-en-scène, as well as to its narrative arc,
ideological valences, representational strategies, and sociohistorical release
contexts. These superpowers, so as to integrate the two sides of the schema,
displace the form, functions, or cell rudiments of the superbody into the
film’s diegetic ecologies. Overall, then, the formula that sets the superhero
film apart from other action, sci-fi, or martial arts films runs as follows: some
aspect of these superheroes’ appearance transcodes one aspect of their ana-
tomic-physiological constitution, which they map onto the film’s exteriors
through the use of their superpowers.3 These superpowers, in short, act as
morphogens on the film, spreading a quotient of the superhero’s organismic
substance across its narrative structure, audiovisual style, and thematic design.
Therefore, the superhero film deals first and foremost with the conditions of
superhuman embodiment, over and above its responsiveness to the anxieties
of the twenty-first century or the transition to digital filmmaking. Still, even
if we at a minimum define superhero films as works that imagine new modes
 1 X-RAY VISIONS: AN INTRODUCTION TO AN ANATOMY … 5

of extension developing from our organs, nerves, fluids, and members, we

must admit that the superbodies onscreen do not often resemble one another
in form, size, shape, figure, or mode of expression. What remains for us to
do, then, is to inquire into what exactly makes a superhero a superhero, rely-
ing on certain onto-phenomenological and speculative materialist insights to
tease out an answer to this question, and then from there to inventory the
major somatotypes of the superhero film, taking our examples from Tim Sto-
ry’s mid-2000s Fantastic Four series.

The Pursuit of the Superhuman

The superbody is more than that which the superhero exhibits or articulates4;
it designates the capacity of the superhero to engage in a sort of self-re-elab-
oration, to enter into interbodily contact with the objects, settings, digital
artifacts, or other characters onscreen. The superhero, through the use of
certain superpowers, enfleshes the rest of the film, even as the film in turn
enworlds the superhero’s flesh. How can we include such non-superhuman
characters as Batman, Catwoman, Hawkeye, or the Punisher, though, under
the umbrella of the superhero film, especially since they do not seem to rep-
resent the type of embodiment that most defines it? Peter Coogan (2013)
argues that these figures share with their more extraordinary counterparts
three conventions of the superhero genre. First, the superhero, unlike the
Westerner or space adventurer, avows a clear mission to “fight evil,” “act self-
lessly,” and save the innocent—this sense of mission fulfills “the hero part of
superhero” (4). Next, superheroes use character-specific superpowers that dif-
ferentiate them from “ordinary people,” that often “defy the laws of physics,”
and that enliven narratives set in an otherwise “realistic version of modern,
urban America” (4–6). Finally, superheroes assume distinctive identities that
consist of a codename (“Superman”), an alter ego (“Clark Kent”), and a cos-
tume that symbolizes their mission, origins, or idiosyncrasies and announces
their membership in the “superhero community” (6, 9). These conventions,
according to Coogan, form a tight network of desiderata for typing a char-
acter as a superhero: those who do not meet all three requirements, such as
Flash Gordon or Buffy the Vampire Slayer, simply do not attain to the sta-
tus of the superhero. However, Coogan does not explain why Batman’s
“martial arts prowess” or “supreme tactical abilities” count as superpowers,
when the abilities of similar characters, such as Zorro or the Green Hornet,
do not. Unfortunately, this rubric also cannot do justice to those characters
without codenames or a sense of dedication to an altruistic mission, such as
Luke Cage, the star of a Marvel Netflix series, or Lex Luthor, Superman’s
archrival and a master of every scientific discipline without equal in the DC
comics universe. We must discover another set of attributes, then, in order to
set the superhero, and more importantly the superhero film, apart from such
matinee or serial characters of the 1930s and 1940s as Tarzan, Dracula, and
6 L. Dudenhoeffer

Spy Smasher, and also apart from such contemporary action icons as John
Rambo, Katniss Everdeen from The Hunger Games (2012), and Ethan Hunt
from the Mission–Impossible (1996-2018) series.5
Richard Reynolds (1992) enlarges upon Coogan’s three criteria, includ-
ing considerations of theme and narrative alongside the superhero’s mission,
secret identity, and superpowers. He argues that these texts additionally fea-
ture a review of their characters’ origin, which tends to separate them from
their social surroundings; a moral conflict, which often forces the superhero
to make conscientious decisions over and against the rules of the state; and
an indiscriminate use of science and magic, which coexist in the same diegetic
universes and even dovetail into each other, as in the case of the Fantastic
Four’s main villain Doctor Doom, an evil master of robotics, cybernetics,
occultism, and even alien forms of telepathic communication (104–107).
Reynolds further mythologizes such characters as “earthbound deities,” since
they do not use their abilities in a self-serving manner, as do supervillains,
criminals, or certain antiheroes (106). The trouble with these sorts of argu-
ments, though, is that they take more interest in tracing the origins of the
comics superhero to ancient mythologies, theological discourses, or other
mystical traditions—often in such a way that concedes that comics might at
first seem a sort of subliterature that requires revaluation through comparison
to more venerable sources—than they do in specifying what makes the super-
hero distinct in form and function from their fictional antecedents or other
characters similar to them. Although still describing the major characters of
the comics medium as “modern messiahs,” John Jennings (2013) thus comes
closer to setting forth some of the distinctive markers of the superhero film
(61). He suggests that the “hyper-physical body” of the superhero functions
as a “symbol of power,” in that it reifies certain social and cultural values,
such as strength, courage, and selflessness (59, 60). Jennings concludes that
superbodies inspire their audiences to recognize in them symmetries of form
and signification unattainable to ordinary men and women, and moreover
to recognize that these superbodies’ flawless sagittal quadrants connote cer-
tain notions of “balance, justice, goodness, strength, power, and perfection”
(61). However, while these symmetries may characterize the superbody as it
appears in comic strip form, they do not necessarily convey an accurate sense
of the dynamic interplay of a superhero’s unique state of embodiment with
the special effects and the mise-en-scène constructions of the cinema.6
Although she agrees that action films condition their audiences to thrill
at the musculoskeletal exertions of the stars onscreen, Lisa Purse (2007)
nonetheless qualifies Jennings’ ascription of symmetries to the superhero’s
flesh, drawing attention to the fact that it more often comes across as visu-
ally unstable and even monstrous to film audiences, especially in the era of
digital character design.7 She thus argues that “once the comic-book body,
frozen in arrested motion, is recreated in film,” it comes to seem “disturb-
ing and unnatural in its elasticity and capacity for infinite transformation and
 1 X-RAY VISIONS: AN INTRODUCTION TO AN ANATOMY … 7

reconfiguration” (8, 14, 15). Yet what distinguishes the superhero film from
the traditional action film, according to Purse, is that it shapes its main char-
acter’s mode of embodiment as a visible digital effect, making it difficult for
audiences to relate to a “virtual replacement” for an “actor’s flesh-and-blood
body,” one that derives its existence from computer modeling software rather
than “real-world substance” and often does not realistically emulate “impact,
momentum, weight, and gravity” (9, 10, 12). The superhero film thus at
once raises and allays cultural anxieties over the unstable and mutative effects
of digitization on our regular morphological features, in that its main char-
acters’ ability to return to normal after they assume an inhuman appearance
or fully morph into a CG clone works to situate virtue, courage, spirit, and
the other values Jennings mentions in those who can manage or retain to an
extent their “consistency of form” (16, 22).
These arguments, although they rightly identify embodiment as a cen-
tral concern of the superhero film, unfortunately move too far away from
it, either in a centripetal direction, towards discussion of a character’s reas-
suringly normal anatomic shape, size, and structure, or in a more centrifu-
gal direction, towards discussion of the abstract social values that a character’s
actions might symbolize and champion. These arguments do not say enough
about the ways that the superhero’s conditions of embodiment manifest
themselves onscreen. Nor do they say enough about the different varieties
of the superbody; about their interaction with the film’s mise-en-scène, not
only its narrative trajectories; or about their interfusion with animal, veg-
etal, machinic, energetic, or otherwise nonhuman substances. Lisa Purse’s
argument fails to consider some of the crucial insights of Maurice Merleau-
Ponty (2014), namely that a subject, rather than only taking interest in “real
situations” that draw upon certain functions of its “anatomical apparatus,”
can also “turn away from the world, apply its activity to the stimuli that are
inscribed upon its sensory surfaces, lend itself to experiments and, more gen-
erally, be situated in the virtual” (111). The superbody thus does not merely
confront audiences with the uncanniness of its digital rendering or supple-
mentation. More exactly, it aligns its sensorimotor experimentation with its
radical openness to its diegetic environment, as in Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man,
which features a scene in which Peter Parker (Tobe Maguire), in the form of
a digital stand-in, for the first time exercises the abilities to move at superhu-
man rates, stick to walls, emit spider webbing, and swing across rooftops. This
scene treats the readjustment of Parker’s sense of embodiment as an occa-
sion for delight and amazement, at once for the character and also for viewers
able to “turn away” from the world’s realities. This scene, in Merleau-Ponty’s
(2014) words, shows us that embodiment, rather than consciousness or spirit,
functions as that site which reckons with “the possible,” which in the film’s
diegesis and in the viewer’s experience “acquires a sort of actuality” (112).
Most importantly, this scene suggests that the superhero, unlike in other
action films, does not so much dodge explosions or react to volatile situations
8 L. Dudenhoeffer

as develop new habits of sensorimotor coordination and self-expression. Mer-

leau-Ponty (2014) argues that our flesh characteristically “catches,” “under-
stands,” and incorporates into its “world” the motor significance of the newer
movements it undertakes, as in the case of dancing, during which it recre-
ates a series of ideal steps, or as in Spider-Man, in which the main character
crashes into a wall after trying for the first time to swing across the street
on a web (140, 144). These webs, as digital artifacts, situate Spider-Man’s
embodiment in the realm of the virtual in more than one sense of the term;
they also function as analogues to Merleau-Ponty’s famous example of the
walking stick as an adjunct to the sensorimotor capabilities of those who use
one. “The blind man’s cane,” for Merleau-Ponty, acts more as a “sensitive
zone” in its own right rather than a mere object, in that it extends the man’s
“scope and radius” of touch and then commutes this sense of touch into an
alternate way of seeing (144). “Habit,” as Merleau-Ponty concludes from this
example, “expresses the power we have of dilating our being in the world,
or of altering our existence through incorporating new instruments” (145).
Spider-Man’s web-shooters—or, for that matter, Wolverine’s claws, Captain
America’s shield, or Green Lantern’s ring—share in the volumes, textures,
and densities of these characters’ relative forms of embodiment. As with the
walking stick, their weapons and superpowers serve as prosthetic enlargements
or transpositions of their skin, eyes, nails, arms, or other major organs, mem-
bers, fluids, or skeletal components, allowing them to map their senses, motor
functions, neuromechanic adaptations, metabolic reactions, or cell migrations
onto the other diegetic elements of the film.
Although the origin stories common to the superhero film turn on its main
characters’ acquisition of certain motile habits, as Spider-Man soon learns
to dive, curl, and swing through the air with finesse and ease—director Sam
Raimi even devotes the entire final scene of the first film to these acrobat-
ics—and although the special effects in these films, whether mechanical or
digital, work to spectacularize the prosthetic elaboration of their characters’
organs, appendages, orifices, senses, or skeletomotor reflexes, these films
only to a certain extent remain responsive to such quasi-phenomenological
explanations. After all, Merleau-Ponty writes that the “body cannot be com-
pared to the physical object, but rather to the work of art,” in that our arms’
movements, for instance, must synthetically involve the arrangement of our
wrists to our shoulders, much as music, drawing, or writing involve their own
modes of arrangement, to strike us as experienceable and significant (152–
153). However, the superhero film, even as it turns its characters’ flesh into
a “work of art” through morphing, match moving, digital compositing, or
more traditional optical effects, also compares their flesh to certain “physi-
cal objects,”8 as in the case of the Fantastic Four’s Thing and Mister Fantas-
tic, whose skins simulate the toughness of stone or the malleability of rubber.
The superhero film consequently also seems object-oriented in its treatment of
embodiment, in that its characters, as they exercise their extraordinary skills
 1 X-RAY VISIONS: AN INTRODUCTION TO AN ANATOMY … 9

and abilities, combine into their morphophysiological features what Jane Ben-
nett describes as the occult “thing-power” of material objects. This notion
affirms that nonhuman or even inorganic objects contain within themselves
“an inexplicable vitality,” a conative and agentive force that can affect other
objects or trigger events (2, 3, 9, 18, 22). Moreover, it calls attention to the
“alien” nature of our flesh, the fact that we exist always as “an array of bod-
ies,” a confederation of organic and nonhuman components, our organs and
tissues coinciding with the minerals that make up our skeletons, the electricity
that fires our synapses, and the microbiota that assist our digestion, impact
our mental states, and stimulate our immunological responses (10, 112).
The superhero, more visibly and consistently than almost any other character
in film, is seen at once as object and organism, as an array of animal, vegetal,
chemical, energetic, mechanical, significatory, and anthropomorphic forces or
“actants” that require constant negotiation and manipulation. Spider-Man,
for example, as a superhero who can crawl up walls and ceilings, discharge
cables of sticky webbing so as to swing across rooftops and towers, and avert
danger through the use of a clairvoyant sixth sense, draws together into one
figure the flexible chitin of spiders and other arthropods, tensile epoxies or
spider silk, the sensors of early warning systems, and even the cinematic ico-
nographies of Edgar Rice Burroughs’s Tarzan. Superheroes, we must conclude,
function more as objects than as deities, or more accurately as arrays of several
objects all at once.9
Graham Harman (2011), one of the foremost exponents of speculative
realism, argues that the term “object” subsumes us, nonhuman creatures,
nonliving substances, machines, energies, atomic substrates, and “those enti-
ties that are neither physical nor even real,” such as abstract concepts, semi-
otic rules, digital algorithms, or fictive superheroes (5). Objects, for Harman
(2012), are not reducible to their components, meaning that our “bodily
organs,” for example, remain autonomous from the somatosensory systems
that they comprise (15). Timothy Morton (2013b) thus concludes that
objects even withdraw from themselves, their “own parts” or qualities unable
to access them and vice versa (44). For these theorists, then, our flesh is not
the same as the organs, tissues, appendages, cells, fluids, microbiota, or neu-
ral networks of which it consists, as each of these units withdraws some of
their shadowy object-being from our cognitive-perceptual registers, our sci-
entific instruments, and our subjective consciousness. “Regions of silence are
thus marked out in the totality of my body,” Merleau-Ponty claims, anticipat-
ing the central axioms of speculative realist discourse (84). Once we see our
corpora as singular objects, irreducible to the whole that they make up, they
must then appear mysterious to us, withdrawn to some extent from our facul-
ties, compelling us to ask, in another twist on Spinoza, “What can they do?”
What can they do when they mix their objectal nature with that of animals,
nonliving things, or digital technologies?
10 L. Dudenhoeffer

The major characters in the superhero film thus do not simply incorporate
the sensual, discernible qualities of different objects or take on their appear-
ance, as does Iceman, obviously, in the X-Men series. They also tap into
what Levi R. Bryant (2011) calls the “virtual being” of objects, the system
of “powers” that inheres in a substance and delimits “what it can do” (89).
The qualities of an object, which as a rule never exhaust its virtual capacities,
do not reveal that which an object “has” or “is” so much as they indicate the
ways in which an object can act, affect other objects, or vary its own qualities
in connection with them (89–90). Bryant argues that we often wronghead-
edly ascribe a certain color, among other qualities, to such objects as a coffee
mug; rather than doing so, we must entertain the notion that the mug, in an
active sense, colors, that it “does” a certain tone or tint that varies under dif-
ferent conditions, as when the mug comes in direct contact with sunlight or
total darkness (90). The superpowers of the characters in such films as X-Men
(Bryan Singer 2000), Fantastic Four (2005), and Guardians of the Galaxy
(James Gunn 2014) similarly express the virtual dimensions—or, to use Bry-
ant’s terms, the dormant “powers”—of the objects that their flesh adapts to,
combines with, morphs into, separates from, discharges, mounts, or embeds.
The mutant Iceman’s superpowers, for example, consist in decreasing the
temperature of the water vapor in the immediate environment and then tap-
ping into the virtual “powers” of the icy conditions that result. The charac-
ter can thus use this ice as a sheath of armor; can fashion shields, missiles,
and sleds to move faster on out of it; and can even merge with its substan-
tial form or that of other water molecules to change in size, mass, or solid-
ity. Moreover, these superpowers function in an ecosystemic way, since they
awaken some of the virtual capacities of the objects with which they come
into contact, so as to affect the ambient moisture in the air; concuss, deflect,
freeze, or slip up enemies; dissolve, solidify, evaporate, deform, or reconsti-
tute certain constructs made of water; or even resize, reshape, or repair tis-
sue through converting atmospheric materials into organic ones (after all, our
flesh is 65–70% water).
The character Catwoman, sometimes an ally and sometimes a foe to Bat-
man, in another vein explores the more zoomorphic or animal-like quali-
ties of our embodiment. Her feline athleticism complements the cat-suit she
wears, and the retractable claws, caltrops, cat o’ nine tails whips, and stealth
goggles she uses cast the structure and functions of our flesh into a more con-
tiguous relation, to use Greg Garrard’s (2012) terms, to that of feral cats,
with their flexible vertebrae, quick reflexes, night vision, and sharp claws and
teeth (154). The versions of the character in Tim Burton’s Batman Returns
(1992) and Pitof Comar’s Catwoman (2004), as they endure multiple res-
urrections throughout these films, thus even tap into a more abstract type
of object, namely the cultural myths surrounding cats’ “nine lives,” them-
selves an exaggeration of these animals’ righting reflexes. One aspect of Cat-
woman’s embodiment, then, the fingernails, appears more important to the
 1 X-RAY VISIONS: AN INTRODUCTION TO AN ANATOMY … 11

character than other organs, orifices, or appendages, overcoding her costume

and its accouterments. Catwoman’s weapons and superpowers, in turn, func-
tion altogether as metamorpho-physiological displacements and extensions of
the fingernails’ form and function. The metal claws, caltrops, and whips, as
prostheses, stretch the distal edges of the nails into these films’ mise-en-scènes,
allowing Catwoman to scratch or clasp remote objects or adversaries, while
the character’s more mystical-in-origin or superhuman “nine lives” might also
metaphorize the ability of our nail matrixes to regrow or regenerate their cells
when we cut or tear them.
Other superheroes, with their own specific costumes, weapons, skill-sets,
modalities of embodiment, and connections to nonhuman objects, might
of course differ from Catwoman in terms of somatotype, taken to mean the
rough equivalence of a character’s superpowers to the “virtual powers” of one
of our organs, fluids, tracts, or nerves (rather than the eugenic attribution of
someone’s intelligence, self-worth, and moral disposition to their size, shape,
and strength, a school of thought coming out of William Herbert Sheldon’s
now-dubious 1954 Atlas of Men into which those who define superheroes in
terms of their “virtue” might slip). Our resignification of somatotype implies
that we can definitely trace distinct morphophysiological schemas out of the
actions of superheroes on film, that we can feel confident that these super-
heroes do not deviate from one another in the forms and functions of their
embodiments to such an extent that we cannot expect to categorize them or
to determine those features most essential to the superhero film. One of the
first Marvel Comics teams, in a rather interesting and fortunate sociohistori-
cal twist, already set forth the framework, it turns out, through which we can
start to explore the fundamental somatotypes of the superhero film.

Twists and Turns
The superhero can measure up to one of four somatotypes, which a film can
materialize onscreen through the use of either digital or more traditional
effects. These four types of superhuman embodiment involve the develop-
ment of new sensorimotor orientations that enable the film’s main characters
to interact with its diegesis in ways impossible for those of us with ordinary
morphophysiological structures, functions, or distributions. On the whole,
then, these somatotypes distinguish superhero films from other forms of
action cinema, calling our attention to the prosthetic enhancement of the
superbodies in them. The Fantastic Four films revolutionizes the figure of the
superhero, in that they divide into four taxa their main characters, qualifying
their superbodies in relation to their effects on the series’ narrative order, set
construction, and digital composition:

1. Endo-prosthetic: The extension of the superhero’s organs, appendages,

cellular components, other corpora, or their objective correlatives into
12 L. Dudenhoeffer

areas of diegetic space normally impossible to reach; then the reinte-

gration of these organs or correlatives with the rest of the superhero’s
flesh. Some examples include Mister Fantastic’s elastic skin and Thor’s
war-hammer Mjölnir.
2. Exo-prosthetic: The expulsion of the superhero’s organs, fluids, tissues,
other corpora, or their objective correlatives into remote areas of the
film’s diegetic space, without their returning to the one who discharges
them. Some examples include the Human Torch’s flames and Spider-
Man’s webbing.
3. Epi-prosthetic: The transposition of the superhero’s organs, tissues, ori-
fices, appendages, or their objective correlatives into diegetic space,
connecting them to this space so inextricably that contact with one will
affect the other. Some examples include the Invisible Woman’s force
fields and Green Lantern’s solid-light constructs.
4. Ecto-prosthetic: The encrustation of the skin, or sometimes the skeleton
or the other internals, of the alter ego of the superhero, so that a shell,
coating, or integument starts to form over it, able to overcome some of
the constraints or impediments of the film’s diegetic space. Some exam-
ples include the Thing’s rocklike skin and Iron Man’s armor.

The value of Fantastic Four, in short, consists in dramatizing more clearly

than any other film the four somatotypes of superhuman embodiment
through each of its four main characters.
The first film in the series opens with a shot of astrophysicist Reed Rich-
ards (Ioan Gruffudd) and astronaut Ben Grimm (Michael Chiklis) marveling
at a titanic statue of megalomaniacal CEO Victor Von Doom (Julian McMa-
hon), whom they ask to finance a mission into outer space that will enable
them to study the effects of cosmic radiation on our species-evolution. Along-
side siblings Susan Storm (Jessica Alba), the research director for Von Doom
Industries, and Johnny Storm (Chris Evans), an extreme sports enthusiast
and former astronaut, they embark on a space station to observe the clouds
of radiation streaming over it. A mishap occurs, though, as Grimm, floating
towards the ship in a spacesuit, survives the effects of full irradiation, while
the others, including mission supervisor Von Doom, suffer somewhat smaller
degrees of exposure. After they recover, they each start to exhibit strange new
abilities, afterwards speculating that they underwent some sort of cytogenetic
mutation from their experience in space. Unlike those superheroes who work
to conceal their alter egos, the members of the Fantastic Four allow news-
casters to name their team and eventually cultivate a reputation as television
celebrities at the insistence of self-promoter Johnny Storm. The secret identi-
ties of most other superheroes dovetail in this film into more merchandisable
public identities: much as with certain actors, musicians, or athletes, the Fan-
tastic Four invite fan interest in their exploits as Mister Fantastic, the Invisible
Woman, the Human Torch, and the Thing,10 as well as over their squabbles,
 1 X-RAY VISIONS: AN INTRODUCTION TO AN ANATOMY … 13

emotional vicissitudes, and sex intrigues, in the manner of TMZ (which also
came out in 2005) and similar tabloids. The executive shareholders, mean-
while, after the unsuccessful spaceflight, decide to dismiss Von Doom, whose
flesh slowly mutates into a metallic substance that can absorb and discharge
electricity. Ultimately, Von Doom attacks the Fantastic Four—dispatching a
missile at the Baxter Building in allusion to the film’s release after 9/11 and
the original comic’s debut after the Cuban Missile Crisis—until they combine
their superpowers to turn the villain into a statue, a smaller scale version of
the one that opens the film.
As Mister Fantastic, Reed Richards’s flesh takes on a cartoonlike elastic-
ity, stretching, squeezing, distending, elongating, and reforming at will while
remaining dense, malleable, and mostly resistant to concussive attacks, as
when it reacts to the Thing’s fists in the manner a trampoline might if some-
one were to strike it. Mister Fantastic first uses these superpowers, though,
at a dinner date with Susan Storm; after they accidentally drop a decanter
of wine from the table, Reed’s arm stretches to catch it and then retracts.
He uses these same abilities at subsequent moments in the film, for example,
to catch a fireman from falling off a truck as it dangles from the Brooklyn
Bridge, an act that ensures the Fantastic Four’s media fame. Also, for more
comedic reasons, and to undercut the ethical or mediatic seriousness of this
action sequence, we see Mister Fantastic’s arm stretch across a corridor to
fetch a roll of toilet tissue during a montage sequence that shows the Fantas-
tic Four developing new habits of sensorimotor articulation and self-control.
Mister Fantastic’s flesh appears able to configure into other shapes as well, as
when it encircles and ties up an irascible Thing, or when it transforms into
a wheel and then a mesh net to incapacitate Victor Von Doom in the film’s
climax. Mister Fantastic, through the exercise of these diverse abilities, thus
sets forth the template for the first of our four somatotypes of superhuman
embodiment: the endo-prosthetic, in which a superhero extends or releases
one of their organs, appendages, or anatomic sections—or even a symbolic
substitute for one of them—into the film’s diegetic environment so as to
accomplish some task therein, only for that organ or appendage to return to
the whole of their figure, either immediately or in due time according to the
demands of the narrative or action set-piece.
The superhuman abilities of Mister Fantastic more than imitate the elastic-
ity of rubber or the amorphousness of water. More interestingly, they make
thinkable the ways that such objects as these might “experience” on their
own the virtual capacities of their substance or the qualia they re-present to
our senses or to other objects. The superhero film, though, does not merely
speculate about the thingness of rubber or even ask, “What is it like to be
made of rubber?”, nor does it correct through an act of the imagination
our frailties or motor deficiencies. The superhero film, through its depiction
of such characters as Mister Fantastic, might also reflect on what is already
spongy or rubbery about our flesh; for example, it might map onto such
14 L. Dudenhoeffer

figures as the Fantastic Four the multipotential capabilities of certain cell clus-
ters to differentiate into other cell types. The film, through some of Reed’s
dialogue, thematizes its focus on the “recombinant DNA” of its characters,
so that the “Fantastic Four” might more accurately signify the four nucle-
obases (AGCT) that inform our chromosomal makeup. Mister Fantastic, after
all, can contort into different shapes and assume the consistency of rubber
or some other elastomer, much as stromal cells, with their considerable vis-
coplasticity, can differentiate into osteoblasts, adipocytes, muscle fibers, and
other cells. Moreover, along with the rest of the team, with the exception of
the Thing, Mister Fantastic wears a costume made of unstable molecules with
the trademark insignia “4” on it, a conceit that allows these characters to use
their superpowers without ruining their clothes. Mister Fantastic’s costume,
as it expands and contracts along with the flesh inside it and also as it evokes
the compounds of a DNA chain, indicates that the endo-prosthetic capabili-
ties specific to this character actually re-elaborate the nature of our cytoplasm,
the thick internal solution inside of our cells. This solution exists in variable
solid, fluid, and semisolid states, much as do Mister Fantastic’s skin, organ tis-
sue, and skeleton.
The cellular mutation of Mister Fantastic thus corresponds to the unstable
molecules of the Fantastic Four uniform; and, according to the formula of the
superhero film, they together resemble in their modularity the CG effects that
enable their manifestation onscreen as superpowers that can affect the digi-
tal design of the sets. The specifics of the formula for Fantastic Four and its
sequel run as follows:
Cellular mutation: Unstable molecules ∝ Digital effects: Virtual environments
One of the scenes in Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer centers on Reed
showing off some unconventional dance moves at a nightclub. Ostensibly to
clue us in on the anatomic-histological features most at stake in the series,
Mister Fantastic enlarges and contorts into a shape that resembles a DNA
supercoil. He does so while wearing civilian clothes, which we must assume
derive from unstable molecules and which might seem totally anomalous to
the superhero film, until we remember that, unlike Spider-Man, for instance,
the team dispossesses themselves of a true alter ego—thus, to the masses,
Reed simply is Mister Fantastic, much as Stefani Germanotta simply is Lady
Gaga.11 His arms furthermore reach out to two women standing at a dis-
tance at opposite ends of the dance floor and intertwine them, a use of digi-
tal effects that accents the silhouettes of dancers on display on screens that
flank each side of the club DJ in the scene. The film’s diegetic environments
and its CG rendering of Mister Fantastic’s endo-prosthetic superpowers
thus reflect and comment on each other, as the dance club and its center-
piece character accomplish their spectacular effects through the same means,
namely the adjustment and manipulation of radiance values and color intensi-
ties. The cytoplasm analogous in nature to Mister Fantastic’s flesh, as well as
 1 X-RAY VISIONS: AN INTRODUCTION TO AN ANATOMY … 15

the unstable molecules that constitute the Fantastic Four’s outfits, discover
their complements in the manipulable subpixels that render Mister Fantastic’s
superpowers visible on the screen. These films develop throughout their nar-
ratives the correspondence of these tiniest of units: the cells that evolve its
characters into superheroes, the molecules in their costumes that transform
in sync with them, and the subpixels that allow such figures as Mister Fantas-
tic to act at a distance on the other elements within the frame, regardless of
whether they stem from material indexes or alphanumeric codes.
The impetuous Johnny Storm, as the Human Torch, can manipulate
fire; create streams of it; fashion it into spheres, rings, the numeral “4,” or
other shapes; and use it to thrust through the air at supersonic speeds, as
though relying on an afterburner. Also, true to the namesake of the charac-
ter, an aura of flame usually engulfs the Human Torch’s flesh, able to vapor-
ize almost anything that comes into contact with it. The Torch, then, might
at first appear similar to Mister Fantastic in somatotype, as these films use
digital effects to continually redesign the morphological extensities of these
characters. However, they actually oppose each other as fire does to water,
which the first film indicates, in a scene in which the Torch reacts with disgust
as Mister Fantastic melts in form in order to slip underneath a door. As the
flesh of Mister Fantastic dissolves, retracts, and returns to normal, it functions
endo-prosthetically to affect the diegetic environment in ways impossible for
ordinary men or women. The Human Torch, in contrast, does not emit fire-
balls, explode into omnidirectional nova-flames, or trail streaks of fire when
in flight in order to reabsorb them. Once these flames issue forth from the
Torch’s specific form of embodiment, they either set an element of the mise-
en-scène ablaze or die out on their own in a matter of seconds. The somato-
type of the Torch we might therefore term exo-prosthetic, as it describes those
superheroes who detach, discharge, or split off their organs, fluids, tissues,
filaments, endocrine signals, or neuro-electric charges into the film’s diegesis
so as to affect the objects, situations, or other characters in it.
The Human Torch, for example, in the climactic scene of Rise of the Silver
Surfer (2007) casts a fireball at Von Doom, which finds its target and extin-
guishes on its own soon afterwards, without reuniting with the rest of the
flames that wholly envelop the Torch’s flesh. Moreover, an earlier scene from
the sequel at once defines the Torch’s superpowers as exo-prosthetic and sug-
gests the ways that they can channel the objectal qualities of fire, or more
accurately its digital simulation, above all when it comes into contact with
some of the other material items on the set. The Torch and the Thing, drink-
ing at a tavern, compete over darts and, so to speak, enter a “heated” con-
versation; then the Torch rather “hotheadedly” throws a dart that seems to
spontaneously combust once it sticks to the wall. The exo-prosthetic super-
powers of the Torch, through clever editing and visual effects design, set the
inner rings of the dartboard on fire from across the room, with neither the
flames nor the dart ever returning to the character’s fingertips. This moment,
16 L. Dudenhoeffer

more than an adumbration of the fireball at the film’s climax, shows us some
of the ways that fire can act, as it differentially impacts the other objects or
visual compositions it touches on the screen, sometimes scorching or melt-
ing them (as with the dart), sometimes illuminating or tracing outlines in
them (as with the “4” that the Torch skywrites), sometimes doing nothing to
them (as with Von Doom’s armor). The settings of the film, though, can also
expose the shortcomings of the Torch’s specific form of embodiment, in that
they can affect its oxidation rate, as when the snow drifts on a ski-slope in the
first film smother the character’s flames or when the alien Silver Surfer in the
sequel rockets him into outer space with similar results.
The Human Torch also wears a costume made of unstable molecules, so
that, rather than turning to ash, it transmutes into the flames surrounding
the Torch’s flesh. The costume, sometimes afire, sometimes not, thus seems
suggestive of the metabolic transformations of our cells, which the Torch’s
superpowers re-enact, metaphorize, and embellish. These superpowers, in
their more destructive aspects, seem to refigure our catabolic mechanisms,
which first degrade molecules into amino acids, nucleotides, monosaccha-
rides, or fatty acids, another variation on the “4” on the team’s uniform.
Then, through an oxidative reaction, these mechanisms degrade these mol-
ecules further into cellular wastes or release them as caloric energies. Heat,
in other words, results from this series of changes. The first Fantastic Four
compares the Human Torch’s exo-prosthetic superpowers to the catabolic
actions of our cells, in that they each involve constant expenditure, and not
only when the Torch decides to toss a fireball or set something aflame. For
instance, one of Von Doom’s smart missiles tracks the Torch’s thermal signa-
ture, or trail of caloric waste, so as to chase this character over digital mattes
of the Baxter Building and the New York waterfront. The digital avatar of the
Human Torch, along with viewer inference about its catabolic efflux, more
than affects the movements of one of the digital artifacts in this scene; it also
serves as an objective correlative to the subpixels that compose them, in that,
much as with the transfer of cellular energies from one molecule to another,
they can render into new shapes or designs, alter the film’s resolution rates, or
composit images together in order to change the visual information onscreen.
However, since these subpixels also rearrange into different forms—for
instance, from facsimiles of a missile to the explosion it causes—they motion
us towards the more anabolic or constructive characteristics of the Torch’s
superpowers. Our anabolic mechanisms, those responsible for our cellular
regeneration, create tissue from the smaller units that we catabolize. Similarly,
the inchoate flames or invisible warmth that the Human Torch sheds often
reconfigure into macro units of the mise-en-scène, as when the Torch cooks
popcorn (in a popcorn movie) without a stove or microwave in the first film,
or willfully emits steam after stepping out of the shower to make an impres-
sion on a woman as “smoking hot” in the sequel. The cellular mutations that
condition the Torch’s exo-prosthetic abilities, and that, with the assistance of
 1 X-RAY VISIONS: AN INTRODUCTION TO AN ANATOMY … 17

digital image manipulation, reimagine our own metabolic networks, thus vis-
ibly affect other objects onscreen. The Torch causes these objects to “anab-
olize” in their own right, triggering their virtual capacities to turn either into
spectacular fireworks, edible foods, or sexual signifiers.
“Look at me!” demands Susan Storm, upset at feeling invisible throughout
a dinner conversation with Reed Richards. Of course, she turns semitranspar-
ent right at that moment, visible only to the viewer as a digital skeuomorph.
Susan Storm can thus turn invisible, even though, as the two Fantastic Four
films make clear, to effectively do so she must wear clothes made of unstable
molecules or waste time and risk embarrassment in disrobing out in the open.
Although these superpowers might frustrate the exposure times of traditional
cameras, they nonetheless expose the Invisible Woman to the constant atten-
tion of fans and TMZ-style reporters eager to catch one of their favorite
celebrities in a state of undress, in the event that this character’s superpowers
falter or malfunction. Lillian S. Robinson (2003) interprets the superpowers
of the Invisible Woman in terms of “Sue’s characteristic shyness,” a descrip-
tion of the character that these films seem to update for the era of ubiquitous
media coverage (112). Sue’s wish earlier in the first film—“Look at me!”—in
an ironic twist comes in the form of self-branding, self-commodification, and
the sort of fame that media circuses attract. Susan Storm, much more ambiva-
lent about stardom than the novalike Human Torch, thus cultivates in these
films a certain degree of standoffishness, which sets forth the characterologi-
cal tenor of the Invisible Woman’s other superpowers. More specifically, she
can create invisible force fields of variable strengths, textures, shapes, or den-
sities, so that she can use them to cushion impacts, contain dangerous forces,
fortify objects against collapse, or even cause them to explode from the inside
out, which she threatens to do to Von Doom in one of their encounters.
The Invisible Woman in the first film uses these superpowers to screen fire
away from onlookers at an accident scene, and in the sequel to stop the Lon-
don Eye Ferris wheel from falling into the Thames. At the climax of the first
film, we see what makes the Invisible Woman’s somatotype distinct from that
of the other team members, as she creates an invisible dome to safely contain
the radiation the Human Torch works up in order to turn Von Doom into a
statue. As the radiation strains the force fields surrounding it, she shouts in
agony, “I can’t hold it,” experiencing nosebleeds in this scene and in a simi-
lar one in the sequel that also requires terrific exertion. These moments thus
define the Invisible Woman’s somatotype as epi-prosthetic, in that such char-
acters, as they develop their superpowers from their mental, tactile, energetic,
technological, or supernatural connection to something external to them in
the diegetic environment, render themselves vulnerable to attacks forceful
enough to sever this connection. The force fields thus telesthetically double
for the Invisible Woman in the flesh, in that a force strong enough to stress,
rupture, or cave them in might also traumatize, injure, or strike down the one
creating, manipulating, and maintaining them, even if at a distance. Although
18 L. Dudenhoeffer

she can turn as invisible as the air, Susan Storm’s epi-prosthetic superpow-
ers still trace a digital signature onscreen, so that the force fields retain some
image of their connection to the motor expressions and morphological con-
tours of their originator’s flesh.
In Rise of the Silver Surfer, for example, the media’s obsession with the
Susan Storm-Reed Richards wedding, which their duties as Fantastic Four
teammates require them to reschedule over and over again, starts to consid-
erably irritate Susan, especially in one scene, during which she voices these
frustrations as she stares into a mirror, spots a rash of acne in it, and turns it
invisible so that none of the invitees can see it. The Invisible Woman there-
fore seems able to experiment with the “virtual powers” of those screens most
conspicuous on digital devices,12 in that she can control the information we
see down to the smallest details. The “4” on Susan Storm’s costume, also
made of unstable molecules, so that it too can turn invisible, might at first
suggest the four corners of the screen, even though it equally well suggests
the four components—the fatty acids, amino acids, carbohydrates, and cho-
lesterol—that compose the cell membrane, that aspect of our cytostructure
that this character’s superpowers more closely re-elaborate. The membrane
separates the cytoplasm inside it from the extracellular environment, while
also conferring shape on the cell and coordinating it with other cells in order
to form tissues. Similarly, Susan Storm’s superpowers work to separate out
certain spaces from other areas of the mise-en-scène, to shelter either charac-
ters or objects from deleterious influences, as when she uses force fields to
stop a helicopter from crashing into a rooftop in Rise of the Silver Surfer.
Moreover, the cell membrane is selectively impermeable, so that, through
osmosis or the invagination of its surface, it can allow the movement of ions,
small molecules, or other substances into and out of its interior. The Invisible
Woman can also modulate the density, absorbency, and toughness of the force
fields that she creates, so that, at one extreme, she can use them to delicately
inhibit the Thing from fighting with the Torch, or, at another, to thwart Vic-
tor Von Doom’s attempt to ram a metal stake into the Thing’s chest during
the first film’s action climax. However, these force fields, as epi-prosthetics
that affect the diegetic environment from a distance and still remain in tactile-
kinesic contact with their maker, displace the “anatomical apparatus” of the
Invisible Woman on to different areas of the set, much as the mirror in the
wedding scene splits this character’s image into two. To shatter these force
fields, then, is to incapacitate the Invisible Woman; conversely, to distract or
render this character unconscious is to disperse or render these force fields
ineffective. The membranous qualities of this character’s superpowers, as such
moments attest, thus square with the compositing of actual and digital ele-
ments in the visual designs onscreen. The CG aura of the force fields at once
remain separate from Susan Storm’s actual flesh and in continuous connec-
tion to it, while the invisible form of this character, through the wizardries of
digital special effects, can interact with material objects on the set.
 1 X-RAY VISIONS: AN INTRODUCTION TO AN ANATOMY … 19

As with DNA transcription or digital coding, these three members of the

Fantastic Four can switch their abilities on and off, and so can switch roles
with their CG clones or “virtual replacements,” as Lisa Purse calls them.13
Unlike the rest of the team, though, the Thing cannot revert to a normal
form at will. More significantly, the actor who stars as the Thing, rather than
stepping aside for a digital avatar in the action sequences, must wear a rubber
monster suit throughout most of these films. The superhuman embodiment
of this character, unlike the others, remains mechanical, a matter of make-up
effects; and whereas Mister Fantastic, the Invisible Woman, and the Human
Torch often use their abilities for cosmetic reasons, the Thing in turn suf-
fers from an excess of the cosmetic, unable to remove the monstrous veneer
that differentiates this character so much from the rest of the team. Tellingly,
though, a subjective shot sutures the viewer to Ben Grimm, who awakens
from a coma after the episode in space, the film tricking us into thinking that
we will soon see this character’s mutation into a rocklike monster, which only
occurs after the other teammates start to exhibit superpowers. The relation-
ship that this first-person shot establishes invites us to ask ourselves, in the
words of Steven Shaviro (2014), “What is it like to be rock?” Shaviro, follow-
ing the object-processual metaphysics of Alfred North Whitehead, argues that
“even rocks have minds,” meaning that such entities, “entirely apart from
us,” retain their own inner experience, their “scarcely expressible” needs,
desires, feelings, or modes of self-valuation, even as they remain open to the
“causal influences” of other entities (85, 90, 106, 107). These entities there-
fore encompass “first-person experiences as well as observable, third-person
properties,” the sense of which the subjective camera in this sequence imparts
to viewers, as it asks them to think about the “what-is-it-likeness” of rock,
no matter that its “private interior” remains to them off-limits, fundamentally
“spectral, impalpable, and incommunicable” (97, 105).
The cosmic radiation that engulfs the Fantastic Four’s spacecraft trans-
forms Ben Grimm’s skin, soft tissue, and musculature into a rocklike sub-
stance, one that shares in the “thing-powers” of stone, explicitly its tensile
strength, durability, and endurance. The Thing exhibits enough of these
superhuman qualities in the first film to shoulder tackle a semi-truck about to
run over a man without incurring any damage whatsoever, and then, in the
resulting commotion, to catch a fire engine from falling off of the Brooklyn
Bridge. As a matter of fact—or rather a fact of matter—a number of objects
shatter or flatten upon contact with the Thing’s exterior, including the truck
and the rotor-blades of the helicopter in the sequel. Through the use of digi-
tal compositing and match moving techniques, these objects deform, scintil-
late, or ricochet off of the Thing, as though the skin of this character was
deflecting the film’s attempts to digitize it. These moments in these two films
define the Thing’s somatotype as ecto-prosthetic: such characters condense
some element of the film’s diegetic environment into their flesh, so that a
shell, an exoskeleton, or another epidermal stratum starts to crust over their
normal, usually weaker forms.
20 L. Dudenhoeffer

One of the comedic moments in Rise of the Silver Surfer offers a sugges-
tion as to which aspect of our cell structure the Thing’s ecto-prosthetic skin
most resembles. Von Doom smashes the Thing into one of the corridors at
the Siberian camp that serves to imprison the Silver Surfer, using so much
force as to indent the wall in a cartoonish fashion with the Thing’s outline.
After the surprise attack, the other superheroes rush to assist the Thing at
the same time that they notice that Mister Fantastic is also missing. He soon
turns up, though, right underneath the Thing, completely flat, as the rest of
the team scrapes them from the wall. The immense frame of the Thing, as it
conceals the image of Mister Fantastic in this scene, suggests more than the
closeness of these two friends; it also further delineates for us the ecto-pros-
thetic somatotype, in which a thick shell or “second skin” encases the flesh of
a normal-looking man or woman. However, as much as this scene caricatures
the superhuman embodiment of the Thing, it also evokes certain features of
our cell architecture, namely the close relationship of the eukaryotic cytoskel-
eton to the cytoplasm that it supports (and which, again, Mister Fantastic’s
superpowers re-elaborate).
The cytoskeleton functions as the cell’s “muscle,” much as the Thing func-
tions as the team’s “muscle,” in that it determines the cell’s shape, organizes
its contents, resists its deformation, and scaffolds the movement of its vesicles
and organelles. The Thing’s tough, nearly invulnerable skin, as it contrasts
Mister Fantastic’s more viscoelastic flesh, establishes this character as the
affective “rock” of the Fantastic Four, re-humanizing the team as a “real,”
even if mechanical, effect, especially as the other members turn the films’
action scenes over to their digital stand-ins. The Thing, in short, stabilizes the
team, counterbalancing their quirks as celebrities—despite the self-conscious-
ness of this unprepossessing figure, the Thing sells even more merchandise
than them, as one cut scene from the sequel shows us—much as the cytoskel-
eton stabilizes the cell, mediates its functions, and frames its cytoplasmic con-
tents. The Thing, though, unlike the rest of the team, does not wear a regular
uniform or even a shirt with a “4” on it. Nonetheless, a clasp in the shape
of this number appears in the sequel above the Thing’s waistline, as indica-
tive of the four components of the cytoskeleton, its microfilaments, its much
stronger intermediate filaments, its more dynamic microtubules, and its sep-
tins, amino-recruiters which assemble into rings, as do the rocklike masses
that encrust the Thing’s skin.
The 2005 and 2007 Fantastic Four films thus clue us into what exactly
constitutes the superhero film as a distinct (sub)genre of action cinema.
Certainly, these films address the anxieties of their release contexts, the
digitization of the visual image, and the universal commodification of cul-
tural creations. However, the way into the narrative codes, compositional
values, representational strategies, ideological valences, intertextual refer-
ences, or sociohistorical resonances of the superhero film must first come
about through a close examination of the specific modes of superhuman
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 THE FREEBOOTER OF LOCHABER.

By Sir Thomas Dick Lauder.

Towards the end of the seventeenth century, there lived a certain

notorious freebooter, in the county of Moray, a native of Lochaber, of
the name of Cameron, but who was better known by his cognomen of
Padrig Mac-an-Ts’agairt, which signifies, “Peter, the Priest’s Son.”
Numerous were the “creachs,” or robberies of cattle on a great scale,
driven by him from Strathspey. But he did not confine his
depredations to that country; for, some time between the years 1690
and 1695, he made a clean sweep of the cattle from the rich pastures
of the Aird, the territory of the Frasers. That he might put his
pursuers on a wrong scent, he did not go directly towards Lochaber,
but, crossing the river Ness at Lochend, he struck over the mountains
of Strathnairn and Strathdearn, and ultimately encamped behind a
hill above Duthel, called, from a copious spring on its summit, Cairn-
an-Sh’uaran, or the Well Hill. But, notwithstanding all his
precautions, the celebrated Simon Lord Lovat, then chief of the
Frasers, discovered his track, and despatched a special messenger to
his father-in-law, Sir Ludovick Grant of Grant, begging his aid in
apprehending Mac-an-Ts’agairt, and recovering the cattle.
It so happened that there lived at this time, on the laird of Grant’s
ground, a man also called Cameron, surnamed Mugach More, of
great strength and undaunted courage; he had six sons and a
stepson, whom his wife, formerly a woman of light character, had
before her marriage with Mugach, and, as they were all brave, Sir
Ludovick applied to them to undertake the recapture of the cattle. Sir
Ludovic was not mistaken in the man. The Mugach no sooner
received his orders, than he armed himself and his little band, and
went in quest of the freebooter, whom he found in the act of cooking
a dinner from part of the spoil. The Mugach called on Padrig and his
men to surrender, and they, though numerous, dreading the well-
known prowess of their adversary, fled to the opposite hills, their
chief threatening bloody vengeance as he went. The Mugach drove
the cattle to a place of safety, and watched them till their owners
came to recover them.
Padrig did not utter his threats without the fullest intention of
carrying them into effect. In the latter end of the following spring, he
visited Strathspey with a strong party, and waylaid the Mugach, as he
and his sons were returning from working at a small patch of land he
had on the brow of a hill, about half-a-mile above his house. Padrig
and his party concealed themselves in a thick covert of underwood,
through which they knew that the Mugach and his sons must pass;
but seeing their intended victims well-armed, the cowardly assassins
lay still in their hiding-place, and allowed them to pass, with the
intention of taking a more favourable opportunity for their purpose.
That very night they surprised and murdered two of the sons, who,
being married, lived in separate houses, at some distance from their
father’s; and, having thus executed so much of their diabolical
purpose, they surrounded the Mugach’s cottage.
No sooner was his dwelling attacked, than the brave Mugach,
immediately guessing who the assailants were, made the best
arrangements for defence that time and circumstances permitted.
The door was the first point attempted; but it was strong, and he and
his four sons placed themselves behind it, determined to do bloody
execution the moment it should be forced. Whilst thus engaged, the
Mugach was startled by a noise above the rafters, and, looking up, he
perceived, in the obscurity, the figure of a man half through a hole in
the wattled roof. Eager to despatch his foe as he entered, he sprang
upon a table, plunged his sword into his body, and down fell—his
stepson, whom he had ever loved and cherished as one of his own
children! The youth had been cutting his way through the roof, with
the intention of attacking Padrig from above, and so creating a
diversion in favour of those who were defending the door. The brave
young man lived no longer than to say, “Dear father, I fear you have
killed me!”
For a moment the Mugach stood petrified with horror and grief,
but rage soon usurped the place of both. “Let me open the door!” he
cried, “and revenge his death, by drenching my sword in the blood of
the villain!” His sons clung around him, to prevent what they
conceived to be madness, and a strong struggle ensued between
desperate bravery and filial duty; whilst the Mugach’s wife stood
gazing on the corpse of her first-born son, in an agony of contending
passions, being ignorant from all she had witnessed but that the
young man’s death had been wilfully wrought by her husband. “Hast
thou forgotten our former days?” cried the wily Padrig, who saw the
whole scene through a crevice in the door. “How often hast thou
undone thy door to me, and wilt thou not open it now, to give me
way to punish him who has, but this moment, so foully slain thy
beloved son?” Ancient recollections, and present affliction, conspired
to twist her to his purpose. The struggle and altercation between the
Mugach and his sons still continued. A frenzy seized on the unhappy
woman; she flew to the door, undid the bolt, and Padrig and his
assassins rushed in.
The infuriated Mugach no sooner beheld his enemy enter, than he
sprang at him like a tiger, grasped him by the throat, and dashed him
to the ground. Already was his vigorous sword-arm drawn back, and
his broad claymore was about to find a passage to the traitor’s heart,
when his faithless wife, coming behind him, threw over it a large
canvas winnowing-sheet, and, before he could extricate the blade
from the numerous folds, Padrig’s weapon was reeking in the best
heart’s-blood of the bravest Highlander that Strathspey could boast
of. His four sons, who had witnessed their mother’s treachery, were
paralyzed. The unfortunate woman herself, too, stood stupified and
appalled. But she was quickly recalled to her senses by the active
clash of the swords of Padrig and his men. “Oh, my sons, my sons!”
she cried; “spare my boys!” But the tempter needed her services no
longer,—she had done his work. She was spurned to the ground and
trampled under foot by those who soon strewed the bloody floor
around her with the lifeless corpses of her brave sons.
Exulting in the full success of this expedition of vengeance, Mac-
an-Ts’agairt beheaded the bodies, and piled the heads in a heap on
an oblong hill that runs parallel to the road on the east side of Carr
Bridge, from which it is called Tom-nan-Cean, the Hill of the Heads.
Scarcely was he beyond the reach of danger, than his butchery was
known at the Castle Grant, and Sir Ludovick immediately offered a
great reward for his apprehension; but Padrig, who had anticipated
some such thing, fled to Ireland, where he remained for seven years.
But the restlessness of the murderer is well known, and Padrig felt it
in all its horrors. Leaving his Irish retreat, he returned to Lochaber.
By a strange accident, a certain Mungo Grant, of Muckrach, having
had his cattle and horses carried away by some thieves from that
quarter, pursued them hot foot, recovered them, and was on his way
returning with them, when, to his astonishment, he met Padrig Mac-
an-Ts’agairt, quite alone in a narrow pass, on the borders of his
native country. Mungo instantly seized and made a prisoner of him.
But his progress with his beasts was tedious; and as he was entering
Strathspey at Lag-na-caillich, about a mile to the westward of
Aviemore, he espied twelve desperate men, who, taking advantage of
his slow march, had crossed the hills to gain the pass before him, for
the purpose of rescuing Padrig. But Mungo was not to be daunted.
Seeing them occupying the road in his front, he grasped his prisoner
with one hand, and brandishing his dirk with the other, he advanced
in the midst of his people and animals, swearing potently that the
first motion at an attempt at rescue by any one of them should be the
signal for his dirk to drink the life’s-blood of Padrig Mac-an-
Ts’agairt. They were so intimidated by his boldness that they allowed
him to pass without assault, and left their friend to his fate. Padrig
was forthwith carried to Castle Grant. But the remembrance of the
Mugach’s murder had been by this time much obliterated by many
events little less strange, and the laird, unwilling to be troubled with
the matter, ordered Mungo and his prisoner away.
Disappointed and mortified, Mungo and his party were returning
with their captive, discussing, as they went, what they had best do
with him. “A fine reward we have had for all our trouble!” said one.
“The laird may catch the next thief her nainsel, for Donald!” said
another. “Let’s turn him loose!” said a third. “Ay, ay,” said a fourth;
“what for wud we be plaguing oursels more wi’ him?” “Yes, yes!
brave, generous men!” said Padrig, roused by a sudden hope of life
from the moody dream of the gallows-tree in which he had been
plunged, whilst he was courting his mournful muse to compose his
own lament, that he might die with an effect striking, as all the
events of his life had been. “Yes, brave men, free me from these
bonds! It is unworthy of Strathspey men,—it is unworthy of Grants to
triumph over a fallen foe! Those whom I killed were no clansmen of
yours, but recreant Camerons, who betrayed a Cameron! Let me go
free, and that reward of which you have been disappointed shall be
quadrupled for sparing my life.” Such words as these, operating on
minds so much prepared to receive them favourably, had well-nigh
worked their purpose. But “No!” said Muckrach sternly, “it shall
never be said that a murderer escaped from my hands. Besides, it
was just so that he fairly spake the Mugach’s false wife. But did he
spare her sons on that account? If ye let him go, my men, the fate of
the Mugach may be ours; for what bravery can stand against
treachery and assassination?” This opened an entirely new view of
the question to Padrig’s rude guards, and the result of the conference
was that they resolved to take him to Inverness, and to deliver him
up to the sheriff.
As they were pursuing their way up the south side of the river
Dulnan, the hill of Tom-nan-Cean appeared on that opposite to
them. At sight of it the whole circumstances of Padrig’s atrocious
deed came fresh in to their minds. It seemed to cry on them for
justice, and with one impulse they shouted out, “Let him die on the
spot where he did the bloody act!” Without a moment’s farther delay,
they determined to execute their new resolution. But on their way
across the plain, they happened to observe a large fir tree, with a
thick horizontal branch growing at right angles from the trunk, and
of a sufficient height from the ground to suit their purpose; and
doubting if they might find so convenient a gallows where they were
going, they at once determined that here Padrig should finish his
mortal career. The neighbouring birch thicket supplied them with
materials for making a withe; and whilst they were twisting it, Padrig
burst forth in a flood of Gaelic verse, which his mind had been
accumulating by the way. His song and the twig rope that was to
terminate his existence were spun out and finished at the same
moment, and he was instantly elevated to a height equally beyond his
ambition and his hopes.
 AN HOUR IN THE MANSE.

By Professor Wilson.

In a few weeks the annual sacrament of the Lord’s Supper was to

be administered in the parish of Deanside; and the minister,
venerable in old age, of authority by the power of his talents and
learning, almost feared for his sanctity, yet withal beloved for
gentleness and compassion that had never been found wanting,
when required either by the misfortunes or errors of any of his flock,
had delivered for several successive Sabbaths, to full congregations,
sermons on the proper preparation of communicants in that awful
ordinance. The old man was a follower of Calvin; and many, who had
listened to him with a resolution in their hearts to approach the table
of the Redeemer, felt so awe-stricken and awakened at the
conclusion of his exhortations, that they gave their souls another
year to meditate on what they had heard, and by a pure and humble
course of life, to render themselves less unworthy to partake the
mysterious and holy bread and wine.
The good old man received in the manse, for a couple of hours
every evening, such of his parishioners as came to signify their wish
to partake of the sacrament; and it was then noted, that, though he in
nowise departed, in his conversation with them at such times, from
the spirit of those doctrines which he had delivered from the pulpit,
yet his manner was milder, and more soothing, and full of
encouragement; so that many who went to him almost with quaking
hearts, departed in tranquillity and peace, and looked forward to that
most impressive and solemn act of the Christian faith with calm and
glad anticipation. The old man thought, truly and justly, that few, if
any, would come to the manse, after having heard him in the kirk,
without due and deep reflection; and therefore, though he allowed
none to pass through his hands without strict examination, he spoke
to them all benignly, and with that sort of paternal pity which a
religious man, about to leave this life, feels towards all his brethren
of mankind, who are entering upon, or engaged in, its scenes of
agitation, trouble, and danger.
On one of those evenings, the servant showed into the minister’s
study a tall, bold-looking, dark-visaged man, in the prime of life,
who, with little of the usual courtesy, advanced into the middle of the
room, and somewhat abruptly declared the sacred purpose of his
visit. But before he could receive a reply, he looked around and
before him; and there was something so solemn in the old minister’s
appearance, as he sat like a spirit, with his unclouded eyes fixed upon
the intruder, that that person’s countenance fell, and his heart was
involuntarily knocking against his side. An old large Bible, the same
that he read from in the pulpit, was lying open before him. One
glimmering candle showed his beautiful and silvery locks falling over
his temples, as his head half stooped over the sacred page; a dead
silence was in the room dedicated to meditation and prayer; the old
man, it was known, had for some time felt himself to be dying, and
had spoken of the sacrament of this summer as the last he could ever
hope to administer; so that altogether, in the silence, the dimness,
the sanctity, the unworldliness of the time, the place, and the being
before him, the visitor stood like one abashed and appalled; and
bowing more reverently, or at least respectfully, he said, with a
quivering voice, “Sir, I come for your sanction to be admitted to the
table of our Lord.”
The minister motioned to him with his hand to sit down; and it
was a relief to the trembling man to do so, for he was in the presence
of one who, he felt, saw into his heart. A sudden change from
hardihood to terror took place within his dark nature; he wished
himself out of the insupportable sanctity of that breathless room;
and a remorse, that had hitherto slept, or been drowned within him,
now clutched his heartstrings, as if with an alternate grasp of frost
and fire, and made his knees knock against each other where he sat,
and his face pale as ashes.
“Norman Adams, saidst thou that thou wilt take into that hand,
and put into those lips, the symbol of the blood that was shed for
sinners, and of the body that bowed on the cross, and then gave up
the ghost? If so, let us speak together, even as if thou wert
communing with thine own heart. Never again may I join in that
sacrament, for the hour of my departure is at hand. Say, wilt thou eat
and drink death to thine immortal soul?”
The terrified man found strength to rise from his seat, and,
staggering towards the door, said, “Pardon, forgive me!—I am not
worthy.”
“It is not I who can pardon, Norman. That power lies not with
man; but sit down—you are deadly pale—and though, I fear, an ill-
living and a dissolute man, greater sinners have repented and been
saved. Approach not now the table of the Lord, but confess all your
sins before Him in the silence of your own house, and upon your
naked knees on the stone-floor every morning and every night; and if
this you do faithfully, humbly, and with a contrite heart, come to me
again when the sacrament is over, and I will speak words of comfort
to you (if then I am able to speak)—if, Norman, it should be on my
deathbed. This will I do for the sake of thy soul, and for the sake of
thy father, Norman, whom my soul loved, and who was a support to
me in my ministry for many long, long years, even for two score and
ten, for we were at school together; and had your father been living
now, he would, like myself, have this very day finished his eighty-
fifth year. I send you not from me in anger, but in pity and love. Go,
my son, and this very night begin your repentance, for if that face
speak the truth, your heart must be sorely charged.”
Just as the old man ceased speaking, and before the humble, or at
least affrighted culprit had risen to go, another visitor of a very
different kind was shown into the room—a young, beautiful girl,
almost shrouded in her cloak, with a sweet pale face, on which
sadness seemed in vain to strive with the natural expression of the
happiness of youth.
“Mary Simpson,” said the kind old man, as she stood with a timid
courtesy near the door, “Mary Simpson, approach, and receive from
my hands the token for which thou comest. Well dost thou know the
history of thy Saviour’s life, and rejoicest in the life and immortality
brought to light by the gospel. Young and guileless, Mary, art thou;
and dim as my memory now is of many things, yet do I well
remember the evening, when first beside my knee, thou heardst read
how the Divine Infant was laid in a manger, how the wise men from
the East came to the place of His nativity, and how the angels were
heard singing in the fields of Bethlehem all the night long.”
Alas! every word that had thus been uttered sent a pang into the
poor creature’s heart, and, without lifting her eyes from the floor,
and in a voice more faint and hollow than belonged to one so young,
she said, “O sir! I come not as an intending communicant; yet the
Lord my God knows that I am rather miserable than guilty, and He
will not suffer my soul to perish, though a baby is now within me, the
child of guilt, and sin, and horror. This, my shame, come I to tell you;
but for the father of my babe unborn, cruel though he has been to
me,—oh! cruel, cruel, indeed,—yet shall his name go down with me
in silence to the grave. I must not, must not breathe his name in
mortal ears; but I have looked round me in the wide moor, and when
nothing that could understand was by, nothing living but birds, and
bees, and the sheep I was herding, often have I whispered his name
in my prayers, and beseeched God and Jesus to forgive him all his
sins.”
At these words, of which the passionate utterance seemed to
relieve her heart, and before the pitying and bewildered old man
could reply, Mary Simpson raised her eyes from the floor, and
fearing to meet the face of the minister, which had heretofore never
shone upon her but with smiles, and of which the expected frown
was to her altogether insupportable, she turned them wildly round
the room, as if for a dark resting-place, and beheld Norman Adams
rooted to his seat, leaning towards her with his white, ghastly
countenance, and his eyes starting from their sockets, seemingly in
wrath, agony, fear, and remorse. That terrible face struck poor Mary
to the heart, and she sank against the wall, and slipped down,
shuddering, upon a chair.
“Norman Adams, I am old and weak, but do you put your arm
round that poor lost creature, and keep her from falling down on the
hard floor. I hear it is a stormy night, and she has walked some miles
hither; no wonder she is overcome. You have heard her confession,
but it was not meant for your ear; so, till I see you again, say nothing
of what you have now heard.”
“O sir! a cup of water, for my blood is either leaving my heart
altogether, or it is drowning it. Your voice, sir, is going far, far away
from me, and I am sinking down. Oh, hold me!—hold me up! Is it a
pit into which I am falling?—Saw I not Norman Adams?—Where is
he now?”
The poor maiden did not fall off the chair, although Norman
Adams supported her not; but her head lay back against the wall, and
a sigh, long and dismal, burst from her bosom, that deeply affected
the old man’s heart, but struck that of the speechless and motionless
sinner, like the first toll of the prison bell that warns the felon to
leave his cell and come forth to execution.
The minister fixed a stern eye upon Norman, for, from the poor
girl’s unconscious words, it was plain that he was the guilty wretch
who had wrought all this misery. “You knew, did you not, that she
had neither father nor mother, sister nor brother, scarcely one
relation on earth to care for or watch over her; and yet you have used
her so? If her beauty was a temptation unto you, did not the sweet
child’s innocence touch your hard and selfish heart with pity? or her
guilt and grief must surely now wring it with remorse. Look on her—
white, cold, breathless, still as a corpse; and yet, thou bold bad man,
thy footsteps would have approached the table of thy Lord!”
The child now partly awoke from her swoon, and her dim opening
eyes met those of Norman Adams. She shut them with a shudder,
and said, sickly and with a quivering voice, “Oh spare, spare me,
Norman! Are we again in that dark, fearful wood? Tremble not for
your life on earth, Norman, for never, never will I tell to mortal ears
that terrible secret; but spare me, spare me, else our Saviour, with all
His mercy, will never pardon your unrelenting soul. These are cruel-
looking eyes; you will not surely murder poor Mary Simpson,
unhappy as she is, and must for ever be—yet life is sweet! She
beseeches you on her knees to spare her life!”—and, in the intense
fear of phantasy, the poor creature struggled off the chair, and fell
down indeed in a heap at his feet.
“Canst thou indeed be the son of old Norman Adams, the
industrious, the temperate, the mild, and the pious—who so often sat
in this very room which thy presence has now polluted, and spake
with me on the mysteries of life and of death? Foul ravisher, what
stayed thy hand from the murder of that child, when there were none
near to hear her shrieks in the dark solitude of the great pine-wood?”
Norman Adams smote his heart and fell down too on his knees
beside the poor ruined orphan. He put his arm round her, and,
raising her from the floor, said, “No, no, my sin is great, too great for
Heaven’s forgiveness; but, oh sir! say not—say not that I would have
murdered her; for, savage as my crime was, yet may God judge me
less terribly than if I had taken her life.”
In a little while they were both seated with some composure, and
silence was in the room. No one spoke, and the old grayhaired man
sat with his eyes fixed, without reading, on the open Bible. At last he
broke silence with these words out of Isaiah, that seemed to have
forced themselves on his heedless eyes:—“Though your sins be as
scarlet, they shall be as white as snow: though they be red like
crimson, they shall be as wool.”
Mary Simpson wept aloud at these words, and seemed to forget
her own wrongs and grief in commiseration of the agonies of
remorse and fear that were now plainly preying on the soul of the
guilty man. “I forgive you, Norman, and will soon be out of the way,
no longer to anger you with the sight of me.” Then, fixing her
streaming eyes on the minister, she besought him not to be the
means of bringing him to punishment and a shameful death, for that
he might repent, and live to be a good man and respected in the
parish; but that she was a poor orphan for whom few cared, and who,
when dead, would have but a small funeral.
“I will deliver myself up into the hands of justice,” said the
offender, “for I do not deserve to live. Mine was an inhuman crime,
and let a violent and shameful death be my doom.”
The orphan girl now stood up as if her strength had been restored,
and stretching out her hands passionately, with a flow of most
affecting and beautiful language, inspired by a meek, single, and
sinless heart that could not bear the thought of utter degradation and
wretchedness befalling any one of the rational children of God,
implored and beseeched the old man to comfort the sinner before
them, and promise that the dark transaction of guilt should never
leave the concealment of their own three hearts. “Did he not save the
lives of two brothers once who were drowning in that black mossy
loch, when their own kindred, at work among the hay, feared the
deep sullen water, and all stood aloof shuddering and shaking, till
Norman Adams leapt in to their rescue, and drew them by the
dripping hair to the shore, and then lay down beside them on the
heather as like to death as themselves? I myself saw it done; I myself
heard their mother call down the blessing of God on Norman’s head,
and then all the haymakers knelt down and prayed. When you, on
the Sabbath, returned thanks to God for that they were saved, oh!
kind sir, did you not name, in the full kirk, him who, under
Providence, did deliver them from death, and who, you said, had
thus showed himself to be a Christian indeed? May his sin against
me be forgotten, for the sake of those two drowning boys, and their
mother, who blesses his name unto this day.”
From a few questions solemnly asked, and solemnly answered, the
minister found that Norman Adams had been won by the beauty and
loveliness of this poor orphan shepherdess, as he had sometimes
spoken to her when sitting on the hill-side with her flock, but that
pride had prevented him from ever thinking of her in marriage. It
appeared that he had also been falsely informed, by a youth whom
Mary disliked for his brutal and gross manners, that she was not the
innocent girl that her seeming simplicity denoted. On returning from
a festive meeting, where this abject person had made many mean
insinuations against her virtue, Norman Adams met her returning to
her master’s house, in the dusk of the evening, on the footpath
leading through a lonely wood; and, though his crime was of the
deepest dye, it seemed to the minister of the religion of mercy, that
by repentance, and belief in the atonement that had once been made
for sinners, he, too, might perhaps hope for forgiveness at the throne
of God.
“I warned you, miserable man, of the fatal nature of sin, when first
it brought a trouble over your countenance, and broke in upon the
peaceful integrity of your life. Was not the silence of the night often
terrible to you, when you were alone in the moors, and the whisper of
your own conscience told you, that every wicked thought was
sacrilege to your father’s dust? Step by step, and almost
imperceptibly, perhaps, did you advance upon the road that leadeth
to destruction; but look back now, and what a long dark journey have
you taken, standing, as you are, on the brink of everlasting death!
Once you were kind, gentle, generous, manly, and free; but you
trusted to the deceitfulness of your own heart; you estranged yourself
from the house of the God of your fathers; and what has your nature
done for you at last, but sunk you into a wretch—savage, selfish,
cruel, cowardly, and in good truth a slave? A felon are you, and
forfeited to the hangman’s hands. Look on that poor innocent child,
and think what is man without God. What would you give now, if the
last three years of your reckless life had been passed in a dungeon
dug deep into the earth, with hunger and thirst gnawing at your
heart, and bent down under a cartload of chains? Yet look not so
ghastly, for I condemn you not utterly; nor, though I know your guilt,
can I know what good may yet be left uncorrupted and
unextinguished in your soul. Kneel not to me, Norman; fasten not so
your eyes upon me; lift them upwards, and then turn them in upon
your own heart, for the dreadful reckoning is between it and God.”
Mary Simpson had now recovered all her strength, and she knelt
down by the side of the groaner. Deep was the pity she now felt for
him, who to her had shown no pity; she did not refuse to lay her light
arm tenderly upon his neck. Often had she prayed to God to save his
soul, even among her rueful sobs of shame in the solitary glens; and
now that she beheld his sin punished with a remorse more than he
could bear, the orphan would have willingly died to avert from his
prostrate head the wrath of the Almighty.
The old man wept at the sight of so much innocence, and so much
guilt, kneeling together before God, in strange union and fellowship
of a common being. With his own fatherly arms he lifted up the
orphan from her knees, and said, “Mary Simpson, my sweet and
innocent Mary Simpson, for innocent thou art, the elders will give
thee a token, that will, on Sabbath-day, admit thee (not for the first
time, though so young) to the communion-table. Fear not to
approach it; look at me, and on my face, when I bless the elements,
and be thou strong in the strength of the Lord. Norman Adams,
return to your home. Go into the chamber where your father died.
Let your knees wear out the part of the floor on which he kneeled. It
is somewhat worn already; you have seen the mark of your father’s
knees. Who knows, but that pardon and peace may descend from
Heaven upon such a sinner as thou? On none such as thou have mine
eyes ever looked, in knowledge, among all those who have lived and
died under my care, for three generations. But great is the unknown
guilt that may be hidden even in the churchyard of a small quiet
parish like this. Dost thou feel as if God-forsaken? Or, oh! say it unto
me, canst thou, my poor son, dare to hope for repentance?”
 The pitiful tone of the old man’s trembling voice, and the motion
of his shaking and withered hands, as he lifted them up almost in an
attitude of benediction, completed the prostration of that sinner’s
spirit. All his better nature, which had too long been oppressed under
scorn of holy ordinances, and the coldness of infidelity, and the
selfishness of lawless desires that insensibly harden the heart they do
not dissolve, now struggled to rise up and respect its rights. “When I
remember what I once was, I can hope—when I think what I now am,
I only, only fear.”
A storm of rain and wind had come on, and Mary Simpson slept in
the manse that night. On the ensuing Sabbath she partook of the
sacrament. A woeful illness fell upon Norman Adams; and then for a
long time no one saw him, or knew where he had gone. It was said
that he was in a distant city, and that he was a miserable creature,
that never again could look upon the sun. But it was otherwise
ordered. He returned to his farm, greatly changed in face and person,
but even yet more changed in spirit.
The old minister had more days allotted to him than he had
thought, and was not taken away for some summers. Before he died,
he had reason to know that Norman Adams had repented in tears of
blood, in thoughts of faith, and in deeds of charity; and he did not
fear to admit him, too, in good time, to the holy ordinance, along
with Mary Simpson, then his wife, and the mother of his children.
 THE WARDEN OF THE MARCHES:
A TRADITIONARY STORY OF ANNANDALE.

The predatory incursions of the Scots and English borderers, on

each other’s territories, are known to every one in the least
acquainted with either the written or traditional history of his
country. These were sometimes made by armed and numerous
bodies, and it was not uncommon for a band of marauders to take
advantage of a thick fog or a dark night for plundering or driving
away the cattle, with which they soon escaped over the border, where
they were generally secure. Such incursions were so frequent and
distressing to the peaceable and well-disposed inhabitants that they
complained loudly to their respective governments; in consequence
of which some one of the powerful nobles residing on the borders
was invested with authority to suppress these depredations, under
the title of Warden of the Marches. His duty was to protect the
frontier, and alarm the country by firing the beacons which were
placed on the heights, where they could be seen at a great distance,
as a warning to the people to drive away their cattle, and, collecting
in a body, either to repel or pursue the invaders, as circumstances
might require. The wardens also possessed a discretionary power in
such matters as came under their jurisdiction. The proper discharge
of this important trust required vigilance, courage, and fidelity, but it
was sometimes committed to improper hands, and consequently the
duty was very improperly performed.
In the reign of James V. one of these wardens was Sir John
Charteris of Amisfield, near Dumfries, a brave but haughty man, who
sometimes forgot his important trust so far as to sacrifice his public
duties to his private interests.
George Maxwell was a young and respectable farmer in
Annandale, who had frequently been active in repressing the petty
incursions to which that quarter of the country was exposed. Having
thereby rendered himself particularly obnoxious to the English
borderers, a strong party was formed, which succeeded in despoiling
him, by plundering his house and driving away his whole live stock.
At the head of a large party he pursued and overtook the “spoil-
encumbered foe;” a fierce and bloody contest ensued, in which
George fell the victim of a former feud, leaving his widow, Marion, in
poverty, with her son Wallace, an only child in the tenth year of his
age. By the liberality of her neighbours, the widow was replaced in a
small farm; but by subsequent incursions she was reduced to such
poverty that she occupied a small cottage, with a cow, which the
kindness of a neighbouring farmer permitted to pasture on his fields.
This, with the industry and filial affection of her son, now in his
twentieth year, enabled her to live with a degree of comfort and
contented resignation.
With a manly and athletic form, Wallace Maxwell inherited the
courage of his father, and the patriotic ardour of the chieftain after
whom he had been named; and Wallace had been heard to declare,
that although he could not expect to free his country from the
incursions of the English borderers, he trusted he should yet be able
to take ample vengeance for the untimely death of his father.
But although his own private wrongs and those of his country had
a powerful influence on the mind of Wallace Maxwell, yet his heart
was susceptible of a far loftier passion.
His fine manly form and graceful bearing had attractions for many
a rural fair; and he would have found no difficulty in matching with
youthful beauty considerably above his own humble station. But his
affections were fixed on Mary Morrison, a maiden as poor in worldly
wealth as himself; but nature had been more than usually indulgent
to her in a handsome person and fine features; and, what was of
infinitely more value, her heart was imbued with virtuous principles,
and her mind better cultivated than could have been expected from
her station in life. To these accomplishments were superadded a
native dignity, tempered with modesty, and a most winning
sweetness of manner. Mary was the daughter of a man who had seen
better days; but he was ruined by the incursions of the English
borderers; and both he and her mother dying soon after, Mary was
left a helpless orphan in the twentieth year of her age. Her beauty
procured her many admirers; and her unprotected state (for she had
no relations in Annandale) left her exposed to the insidious
temptations of unprincipled villainy; but they soon discovered that
neither flattery, bribes, nor the fairest promises, had the slightest
influence on her spotless mind. There were many, however, who
sincerely loved her, and made most honourable proposals; among
whom was Wallace Maxwell, perhaps the poorest of her admirers,
but who succeeded in gaining her esteem and affection. Mary and he
were fellow-servants to the farmer from whom his mother had her
cottage; and, on account of the troublesome state of the country,
Wallace slept every night in his mother’s house as her guardian and
protector. Mary and he were about the same age, both in the bloom
of youthful beauty; but both had discrimination to look beyond
external attractions; and, although they might be said to live in the
light of each other’s eyes, reason convinced them that the time was
yet distant when it would be prudent to consummate that union
which was the dearest object of their wishes.
A foray had been made by the English, in which their leader, the
son of a rich borderer, had been made prisoner, and a heavy ransom
paid to Sir John, the warden, for his release. This the avaricious
warden considered a perquisite of his office; and it accordingly went
into his private pocket. Soon after this, the party who had resolved
on ruining Wallace Maxwell for his threats of vengeance, took
advantage of a thick fog during the day, succeeded by a dark night, in
making an incursion on Annandale, principally for the purpose of
capturing the young man. By stratagem they effected their purpose;
and the widow’s cow, and Wallace her son, were both carried off as
part of the spoil. The youth’s life might have been in considerable
danger, had his capture not been discovered by the man who had
recently paid a high ransom for his own son, and he now took instant
possession of Wallace, resolving that he should be kept a close
prisoner till ransomed by a sum equal to that paid to the warden.
It would be difficult, if not impossible, to say whether the grief of
Widow Maxwell for her son, or that of Mary Morrison for her lover,
was greatest. But early in the ensuing morning the widow repaired to
Amisfield, related the circumstance to Sir John, with tears
beseeching him, as the plunderers were not yet far distant, to
despatch his forces after them, and rescue her son, with the property
of which she had been despoiled, for they had carried off everything,
even to her bed-clothes.
Wallace Maxwell had some time before incurred the warden’s
displeasure, whose mind was not generous enough either to forget or
forgive. He treated Marion with an indifference approaching almost
to contempt, by telling her that it would be exceedingly improper to
alarm the country about such a trivial incident, to which every
person in that quarter was exposed; and although she kneeled to
him, he refused to comply with her request, and proudly turned
away.
With a heavy and an aching heart, the widow called on Mary
Morrison on her way home to her desolate dwelling, relating the
failure of her application, and uttering direful lamentations for the
loss of her son; all of which were echoed by the no less desponding
maiden.
In the anguish of her distress, Mary formed the resolution of
waiting on the warden, and again urging the petition which had
already been so rudely rejected. Almost frantic, she hastened to the
castle, demanding to see Sir John. Her person was known to the
porter, and he was also now acquainted with the cause of her present
distress; she therefore found a ready admission. Always beautiful,
the wildness of her air, the liquid fire which beamed in her eyes, from
which tears streamed over her glowing cheeks, and the perturbation
which heaved her swelling bosom, rendered her an object of more
than ordinary interest in the sight of the warden. She fell at his feet
and attempted to tell her melancholy tale; but convulsive sobs stifled
her utterance. He then took her unresisting hand, raised her up, led
her to a seat, and bade her compose herself before she attempted to
speak.
With a faltering tongue, and eyes which, like the lightning of
heaven, seemed capable of penetrating a heart of adamant, and in all
the energy and pathos of impassioned grief, she told her tale,—
imploring the warden, if he ever regarded his mother, or if capable of
feeling for the anguish of a woman, to have pity on them, and
instantly exert himself to restore the most dutiful of sons, and the
most faithful of lovers, to his humble petitioners, whose gratitude
should cease only with their lives.
 “You are probably not aware,” said he, in a kindly tone, “of the
difficulty of gratifying your wishes. Wallace Maxwell has rendered
himself the object of vengeance to the English borderers; and, before
now, he must be in captivity so secure, that any measure to rescue
him by force of arms would be unavailing. But, for your sake, I will
adopt the only means which can restore him, namely, to purchase his
ransom by gold. But you are aware that it must be high, and I trust
your gratitude will be in proportion.”
“Everything in our power shall be done to evince our gratitude,”
replied the delighted Mary, a more animated glow suffusing her
cheek, and her eyes beaming with a brighter lustre,—“Heaven reward
you.”
“To wait for my reward from heaven, would be to give credit to one
who can make ready payment,” replied the warden. “You, lovely
Mary, have it in your power to make me a return, which will render
me your debtor, without in any degree impoverishing yourself;”—and
he paused, afraid or ashamed to speak the purpose of his heart. Such
is the power which virgin beauty and innocence can exert on the
most depraved inclinations.
Although alarmed, and suspecting his base design, such was the
rectitude of Mary’s guileless heart, that she could not believe the
warden in earnest; and starting from his proffered embrace, she with
crimson blushes replied, “I am sure, sir, your heart could never
permit you so far to insult a hapless maiden. You have spoken to try
my affection for Wallace Maxwell; let me therefore again implore you
to take such measures as you may think best for obtaining his
release;” and a fresh flood of tears flowed in torrents from her eyes,
while she gazed wistfully in his face, with a look so imploringly
tender, that it might have moved the heart of a demon.
With many flattering blandishments, and much artful sophistry,
he endeavoured to win her to his purpose; but perceiving that his
attempts were unavailing, he concluded thus:—“All that I have
promised I am ready to perform; but I swear by Heaven, that unless
you grant me the favour which I have so humbly solicited, Wallace
Maxwell may perish in a dungeon, or by the hand of his enemies; for
he shall never be rescued by me. Think, then, in time, before you
leave me, and for his sake, and your own future happiness, do not
foolishly destroy it for ever.”
 With her eyes flashing indignant fire, and her bosom throbbing
with the anguish of insulted virtue, she flung herself from his hateful
embrace, and, rushing from his presence, with a sorrowful and
almost bursting heart, left the castle.
Widow Maxwell had a mind not easily depressed, and although in
great affliction for her son, did not despair of his release. She was
ignorant of Mary’s application to the warden, and had been revolving
in her mind the propriety of seeking an audience of the king, and
detailing her wrongs, both at the hands of the English marauders and
Sir John. She was brooding on this when Mary entered her cottage,
and, in the agony of despairing love and insulted honour, related the
reception she had met from the warden. The relation confirmed the
widow’s half formed resolution, and steeled her heart to its purpose.
After they had responded each other’s sighs, and mingled tears
together, the old woman proposed waiting on her friend the farmer,
declaring her intentions, and, if he approved of them, soliciting his
permission for Mary to accompany her.
The warden’s indolent neglect of duty was a subject of general
complaint; the farmer, therefore, highly approved of the widow’s
proposal, believing that it would not only procure her redress, but
might be of advantage to the country. He urged their speedy and
secret departure, requesting that whatever answer they received
might not be divulged till the final result was seen; and next
morning, at early dawn, the widow and Mary took their departure for
Stirling. King James was easy of access to the humblest of his
subjects; and the two had little difficulty in obtaining admission to
the royal presence. Widow Maxwell had in youth been a beautiful
woman, and, although her early bloom had passed, might still have
been termed a comely and attractive matron, albeit in the autumn of
life. In a word, her face was still such as would have recommended
her suit to the king, whose heart was at all times feelingly alive to the
attraction of female beauty. But, on the present occasion, although
she was the petitioner, the auxiliary whom she had brought, though
silent, was infinitely the more powerful pleader; for Mary might be
said to resemble the half-blown rose in the early summer, when its
glowing leaves are wet with the dews of morning. James was so
struck with their appearance, that, before they had spoken, he
secretly wished that their petitions might be such as he could with