THE UPS AND DOWNS OF AMERICAN CELLULOID SUPERHEROES: 1978-2025

Why does Superman work in 1978 and fall flat in 2006? Why did Batman need to become a criminal for audiences to finally trust him? Why can no superhero ever name himself?The Ups and Downs of American Celluloid Superheroes traces fifty years of the genre that conquered American cinema - from Christopher Reeve's first flight in 1978 to James Gunn's 2025 reboot - and reads it as a mirror the country holds up to its own body, its own psyche, and its own politics.Jean-Guy Ducreux moves through three lenses: the hero's body, hardened in 1978 and slowly dismantled by age, technology, and doubt; the Freudian and Girardian machinery beneath the mask, where villains carry the diagnosis and heroes only ever restore the status quo; and the politics of a genre that reenacts, film after film, America's own anxieties - Vietnam, 9/11, Snowden, the pandemic - without ever naming them directly. A final section pushes the analysis into the present, using Plato's five regimes to explain why Iron Man is an oligarch, the X-Men are democrats, and the tyrant the genre has always feared most is the hero himself.Drawing on a doctoral dissertation defended at the University of Lorraine and scholarship from Susan Jeffords, René Girard, Jean Baudrillard, and Francis Fukuyama, this is film history written like an autopsy - rigorous, unsentimental, and often very funny about a genre that keeps promising to save us and keeps needing saving itself.For readers of Superheroes by Peter Coogan and Empire of Imagination, or anyone who has ever wondered why a man in a cape still means something.