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

Abstract

ABSTRACT:Phenomenologist Don Ihde posits a technological knowledge rooted in embodied experience via technologically enhanced perceptions. Super-heroes might be understood as embodied technologies and enhanced perceptions. Digital technologies are normally less visually accessible than those of the Industrial Age, but the cinematic superheroes of the twenty-first century are highly visible digital effects that might tell us something about the status of the body in digital culture. A digital superhero comedy, Ant-Man and the Wasp (Peyton Reed, 2018) models one kind of human-digital relation: the hapless Ant-Man knows nothing about how his advanced technologies actually work, but his cluelessness has no bearing upon his ability to use them and effect positive change.