Kiyoshi Murata    Department   Undergraduate School  , School of Commerce    Position   Professor
Date	2017/06/05
Presentation Theme	Superheroes on Screen: Real Life Lessons for Security Policy Debates
Conference	CEPE/ETHICOMP 2017
Conference Type	International
Presentation Type	Speech (General)
Contribution Type	Collaborative
Venue	University of Turin
Publisher and common publisher	Andrew A. Adams, Fareed Ben-Youssef, Bruce Schneier and Kiyoshi Murata
Details	Introduction Security policy, whether computer security or societal security, creates the sharp end of ethical decisions in their application to the real world. Laws and procedures set much of the scene for the consequences of these policies, but the people empowered to implement the policies also play a part in the outcomes of those policies. These policies are often justified, and sometimes even presented, in a narrative form. Arendt (see Disch (1993)) and Žižek both stressed the importance of stories in their role of how we understand the world: "The experience that we have of our lives from within, the story we tell ourselves about ourselves, in order to account for what we are doing, is fundamentally a lie - the truth lies outside, in what we do" (Žižek, 2008). For decades superheroes have formed a significant part of the modern cultural referents of many societies. In the past decade, the superheroes of the Marvel and DC comics have become some of the most broadly watched stories not just in the US and UK (where most of their writers originate) but around the world. The power of superheroes and the villains they battle can be (and this paper argues are) used to represent (via analogies or metaphors) the choices presented to politicians and voters about how powerful actors in the real world can be understood: their motivations, their goals, their methods, their limits and the intended and unintended consequences of their actions. The power of the superheroes often represents (directly or indirectly) the power conferred by technology: Superman's X-Ray vision versus the full body scanners now in use in many airports. One of the most powerful individuals in the world, President Obama, used Batman metaphors in discussions with senior security advisers (Goldberg, 2016). In this paper the lens of the humanities scholar and in particular the method of close reading of texts, is applied to three recent televisual and cinematic renditions of superheroes: Daredevil (Season 2) from Netflix and Marvel Studios; Captain America - Civil War from Marvel Studios; Batman v Superman from DC and Warner Brothers. One of the key elements of each of these is the pitting of hero against hero and the relationship of the superhero to the law. Key scenes from each piece are used as data to develop key questions about the security policies of states and in particular the question of how voters and democratic institutions/politicians can deal with powerful institutional or individual actors, both those clearly within the law, those skirting the edges of the law, those breaking the law with "good" intent and those breaking the law for their own ends.