Jason Bainbridge

For fourteen days, all of Australia and much of the world was focused on the rescue of two miners trapped underground in Beaconsfield, Tasmania. This article looks at the period from Todd Russell and Brant Webb’s rescue up to and including Channel Nine’s screening of an exclusive interview with the men on 21 May 2006. It analyses the ways in which Beaconsfield was reported—and the exclusive interview with the miners pursued—as a way of exploring notions of celebrity, infotainment, chequebook journalism and the changing shape of news culture in Australia. For these reasons, the events at Beaconsfield should not be dismissed as just another news story, but rather, should be regarded as indicative of the ways in which news is increasingly being reported, packaged and folded back into larger entertainment structures.

AbstarctBoth the superhero and the supervillain operate outside the law. The former replaces law with a form of substantive justice while the latter seeks to invert or overturn the law in favour of a new grundnorm that best serves their vision for how society should operate. In this paper I consider what this prefix “super” really means in relation to these two classes, drawing on Nietzsche’s original definition of the ubermensch and its relationship to legal concepts such as the state of exception, sovereign power and substantive justice. These relationships will be mapped across a number of examples from the Marvel Studios films—paying particular attention to the antagonists in these movies, both the state and the supervillains, arguing that it is these antagonists who are most illustrative of these concepts in play.

This paper maps superheroes as signifiers of substantive justice and their relationship with the state across two Coverian nomoi, World War II and the “war on terror”. It is argued that the central concern of most superhero narratives is justice, exploring both what it means and how it can best be articulated. This “call to do justice” becomes even more important during wartime where superheroes become agitators for cultural change, appropriating the sovereign decision during states of exception even as they resist co-option by the state itself