Supervillainy at the Interface: Hollywood Supervillains and the Digital–Material Dialectic

The self-conscious attempt to emphasise the material, human roots of the supervillain’s characterisation can be related to the filmmakers’ attempts to underscore the live-action spectacle offered by comic book adaptations in a way that distinguishes the films from their comic book source texts. The focus on the supervillain’s facial transformation sets cinematic construction apart from that of the superhero. The significance of the material interplay between extra-diegetic star and diegetic character can be seen in the tendency to construct the supervillain around quirks of the actor’s own facial features. Electro is also a man–machine hybrid diegetically, for Jamie Foxx is an immaterial constellation of electrical circuits, the result of innocent human character Max Dillon being embroiled in a malfunction at OsCorp’s power grid. The centrality of facial transformation to the construction of the supervillains foments complex dialectic tensions between attraction and repulsion, diegesis and extra-diegesis, and human performance and its technological augmentation.