While recently celebrating a friend’s birthday in a Norwich pub, I got accosted with this question again and again by an angry mature student in a waistcoat (he was probably about he same age as me, doing an MA in Film Studies and quite pissed). Sloshing around on his stool he kept at me: but HOW do you get away with it? When people find out I’m doing a PhD on Superhero movies they react with either enthusiasm, envy or in this case anger.

All I could say was ‘What am I getting away with? My friends from home are all settling down, with partners, steady jobs, houses and cars. I’m 30, stuck in a room in a student house eating mini pizzas and trying to do a Freudian analysis of Spider-Man, loneliness and the masturbatory overtones of Peter Parker’s accidental bedroom fluid emissions trying to block out thoughts of occupational and financial uncertainty and a probable decade’s worth of debt.’

How did I get here, writing a PhD in Film and Television Studies at the University of East Anglia called Superheroic Bodies: The Corporealities of Contemporary Film Superheroes? It all began in a small Monaghan bedroom not dissimilar to the one I occupy now, where I spent almost all of my teenage years reading 2000AD, Marvel and DC comics and watching too many movies, mostly science fiction and horror. When I got to do a degree in Media Studies at the University of Coleraine in 1993, I was amazed that one actually got praise, kudos and good marks for having and intimate knowledge of such things—a reaction, it goes without saying, not shared by my GAA-loving class ‘mates’ in rural Ireland.

Now, it’s not quite the opening scene of Goodfellas, but ever since I knew Media Studies lecturers existed and got paid to do this stuff, I wanted to be a lecturer. The inevitable star-studded and glamorous career of every Media Studies graduate beckoned: a brief period on the dole in Belfast, a warehouse job in a toy shop, administrative assistant in Andersonstown dole office, Dunnes Stores despatch clerk, the illustrious list goes on. There were some journalist jobs along the way but writing advertorials about awful bands and worse promotional events in Belfast rather than things you’re interested in for the princely sum of 100 pounds (count ‘em) a week can only last so long if your heart isn’t in it.

While doing office jobs in Dublin, I started a part-time in MA in Media Studies at DIT and got back to using the obscure knowledge I continued to gain while doing crap jobs and got a first for my thesis on images of the body in David Cronenberg movies. I loved it; the themes of sexuality, technology, the body, gender, science fiction, horror all coalesced with writers like Marshall McLuhan, William Burroughs, J.G. Ballard, Julia Kristeva, Georges Bataille, Foucault and Derrida. Basically, all the cool theorists that I secretly love but now cause me immense pain when I hear foppish rich grad students name dropping them to impress impressionable and hot undergraduates.

A couple of years later I was in good office job (summarising American magazine articles into 100 word abstracts, which honed writing skills and added yet more arcane facts on American culture). I was hitting late twenties and spending all my money on renting a one-bedroom bedsit in Rathmines, thinking to myself I need to do something with this love of and knowledge of movies and comics before I end up like the other old and insane denizens of my residence. I looked up the author of one my favourite academic books that read when I was 17, Yvonne Tasker’s Spectacular Bodies: Gender, Genre and the action cinema and applied to the university where she was lecturing to do a PhD. I got accepted but still had to try and raise the funds, after wrangling and many forms and got a grant to cover fees but not maintenance: cue trying to do a PhD and being a bar man/kitchen porter, more glamour beckoned.

At first, doing the PhD was exhilarating, hanging out with people on the same wavelength, but some of my impetus went. When I was a 9-5 office monkey doing the MA in Media Studies was the wacky strange thing I did at night. It was weird being in a position where my bizarre obsessions effectively became my job. Confidence became a weird problem for me. When you are quoting books, analysing or arguing with them as an undergraduate, they are just books so you argue away. When I started doing the PhD I thought, feck! I might actually bump into these people at conferences, so critical analysis became difficult. You get over it though, academic publishing is so slow most writers have already thought out criticisms to their own work in the meantime, they are normally pleased you’ve read their work that closely.

Day-to-day PhD life may not have the structure of 9-to-5 but what is lacks in monotony it makes up for in pure white-hot panic and guilt, you never really have a ‘day off’. As soon as you start, the clock is ticking: 100,000 words in three to four years. Here’s where it gets tough, your ideas get institutionalised, they become a departmental project that must be completed on pain of death. I realised this first when I outlined a chapter on Cyborg Theory, Posthumanism and the X-Men movies in my first year. My supervisor goes, well do the posthuman X-Men chapter by this date…and I’m like (in my head) ‘Wait a minute, I only came up with this idea about two days ago and now it’s departmental policy I have to finish it, is this late-1970s period Philip K. Dick stuff, do you own the stuff in my head?’ It’s what you have to do though to get the fabled ‘Dr.’ in front of your name, go through the academic hoops, read the ‘right’ stuff and use the ‘right’ words. The kicker is you only know the ‘right’ books after you’ve read a bunch of them and only know the ‘right’ words when you have written and rewritten them a bunch of times.

Whatever you read in the press about cultural studies and Mickey Mouse degrees, a PhD in Film and Television Studies, a PhD in any area, will never be easy, that’s why it’s a PhD. The way to make it easy, is to chose a topic that is very straightforward, restricted, and doable. Choose some director or film that is so obscure that people won’t challenge you and you’ll go far. Choose something like superhero movies and everyone’s expert, or so they think. Sure many people have a passion for comics or movies, many people are intellectually and emotionally attached to the issues they throw up, but the difference is I’m staying in on weekends filing and collating every article I can find on superhero movies, what I say or write has to stand up to more than a geeky rant or a drunken argument.
It’s like when Dougal has that idea about having some sort of fundraising event and Ted goes and what then…and Dougal goes ‘ahh, I didn’t know you had to follow up an idea with lots of other little ideas’. That’s what a PhD is like, if you have an idea you have to follow it up to the nth degree, that’s what’s hard about it and that is what’s great about it.

So that’s what happens when you do a PhD on superhero movies, you can’t just make some schoolboy nudge nudge wink wink comment on Spider-Man’s web-fluid, you have to explore what does his web-fluid mean. You write about the Spider-Man movies and ask what new organs has Parker developed to shoot out this stuff? How is that presented in a family movie without seeming suspect? What connections are there between a mask that hides your face and issues of loneliness, sex and voyeurism? big starey eyes for seeing and no mouth. It’s a tough job but someone’s got to do it.

For more from Lorcan, check out his blog; The Life and Times of Jimmny Homunculus. The illustration was created by Bob of Clamnuts Comics.