| The increased popularity of comic book superhero movies beginning in the late 1980's and continuing though the current era coincides historically with the end of the Cold War and the rise of America's global engagements in the Gulf Wars and the war on terror. The concurrent decline in popularity of the Western film as a genre is informative in illustrating how American ideology has been transformed by the historical events surrounding the end of the Cold War and the rise of the threat of global terrorism. By examining the scholarship that investigates this decline, and applying these same critical approaches to the rise of the superhero film, this paper will uncover the extent to which the mythological underpinnings of the Western have been merely retroped in the contemporary era and how the superhero film responds to the current ideological outlook of American culture. |
