Supply Chain Capitalism in the Planetary Network Blockbuster

Abstract

Drawing on the scholarship on how infrastructures facilitate the borderless mobility of transnational flows across commodity supply chains in a time of dispersed sovereignty, this essay analyzes spatial depictions of interlinked nodes for finance, extraction, and logistics, which define the operations of a capitalist world system centred in metropolitan areas in the Asia-Pacific region. Looking at the emergent genre of the planetary network blockbuster, which comprises superhero, science-fiction, and spy narratives that transpire across an array of transpacific landscapes in the strenuous effort to confront a global threat, it examines its conventional audiovisual construction of setting based on variances of material progress. Diverging from normative critiques of techno-orientalist portrayals of excessive East Asian wealth, which tend to be concerned with racialized bodies, this essay uncovers how the visualization of global inequalities rests on interreferential urban iconographies that juxtapose the order, prosperity, and dynamism of ‘industrialized’ Northeast Asian capitals Tokyo, Shanghai, Seoul, and Hong Kong with the illegality, vulnerability, and squalor of ‘emerging’ Southeast Asian megacities Bangkok, Jakarta, Manila, and Ho Chi Minh City. Focusing on recurrent fragmentary representations from sequels and spinoffs of the Bond, Bourne, Marvel, and Transformers franchises that map intraregional supply chains of monetized biomedical, robotic, and cybernetic technology, it explores how infrastructural imaginaries of skyscrapers, laboratories, mines, factories, powerplants, warehouses, roads, and ports can reorder hierarchies of speculative investment, urban development, scientific innovation, and military security.