Garth Ennis

Paper d'esame in Analisi del Cinema Americano Contemporaneo, che si sofferma sul segno che l'atto terroristico del 9/11 ha solcato nella politica americana e nella narrativa seriale pop contemporanea, prendendo come caso di studio la serie televisiva di Amazon Prime Video "The Boys".

In order to shed light on the current worldwide success of Marvel's comic-book inspired Endgame and the overall rise of “heroes in tights” in cinematic as well as televised form for the last decade or so, one must consider a phenomenon that revolutionized the US comics' mainstream industry, the British Invasion, which started in the early 1980's and lasted for about thirty years. It also seems to have played a key role in the recent transmedial success of comics, and its influence seems to grow even more as the quality of those productions improves.

The representation of conflict in fiction raises an important ethical problem – what terms are appropriate to representing warfare through fiction? Representing conflict is arguably one of the most continuous challenges to understanding the nature of literature, or artistic expression in general. It is often seen as the very limit of literary expression.

An important part of this question is whether fictions ought to be treated as a form of immediate, visceral engagement, or as a meditative, intellectualised and more considered form of engagement. Key here is the question of whether it is valid for literature to address recent, real events—9/11, Israel/Palestine, Afghanistan-Iraq—through de-familiarised, non-realist terms, or even through fiction at all. Or should such ground be ceded solely to journalism as its natural (realist) province?

Attendant upon it is the issue of emotional and/or ideological proximity of fictional representations to recent, actual conflicts. Non-realist representation is implicitly a fantasy, a visceral, subjective investment, which might be construed as wish fulfilment or whimsy, or exploitation. Such a stance is always context dependent, always fraught and always needs to be reconsidered in light of specific instances; I argue that any attempt at representing a conflict realistically is as implicitly ideological and no less visceral or subjective – and no more or less proximate to wish fulfilment or whimsy than more (explicitly) fantastical approaches.

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In treating matters of religious belief, Vertigo’s Preacher (1995-2000) treads a path bound to provoke any but the most liberal. However, the very same controversy that the comic has raised in past years renders it rich material for scholarly exploration of the graphic depictions of sex and its intersections with violence. Preacher offers a perspective on sex and violence that touches on variety of sexual practices, including necrophilia, bestiality, sadomasochism, and child pornography. The introduction of these rather notorious practices, in a text that evokes the Nietzschean position on God, further fuels the controversy. This paper therefore investigates sexuality, sexual desire and sexual activity in Preacher, focusing specifically on the comic’s presentation of the connection between sex and violence.