We Are Ant-Man: The Digital Body in a Superhero Comedy.

Comedy, too, is a genre with its own expressions of embodiment, and while there's plenty of banter in superhero films, I physical i comedy is the more relevant subgenre, from early gag films and silent film comedy, through at least Looney Tunes and Jerry Lewis. This is not to posit Ant-Man and Keaton movies as equal, but rather to understand something of superhero movies, digital bodies, and the power of comedy to articulate anxieties and fantasies around our proliferating technologies. Denson argues that "we are bound up in and transformed by the processual experience of digital mediation."[58] In the relatively conservative realm of the superhero movie, the superhero's job is to I perform i for us these transformations, these processual experiences, these interminglings of physical and digital of movie and reality. Carroll argues that Keaton's films depend not just upon displays of bodily intelligence (emphasizing the body's adaptability and alertness) but also a I visible intelligibility i (which solicits viewer participation in this corporeal mindfulness): "Keaton, the director, does not merely see the world himself as an engineer; he enables the spectator to apprehend the material world that way as well."[10] The computer-generated, hybridized imagery of the twenty-first century superhero film would seem to offer little in the way of such a privileged, analytical perspective. [Extracted from the article]