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****/**** starring David Corenswet, Rachel Brosnahan, Nicholas Hoult, Edi Gathegi written and directed by James Gunn
by Walter Chaw I’m in the bag for Superman, I admit it. I grew up in a small town, Golden, CO, in an environment some would describe as Norman Rockwellian. Before the bullying started in earnest, before I spoke English, I would earn pennies at the corner barbershop and spend them at the 5 & 10 across the street on Silly Putty, gum, and comic books. Superman comic books, Wonder Woman, too. Superman, for me, is the superhero we should most want to be. I’m not talking about the superpowers, I’m talking about being a decent person who genuinely cares about others. He’s also the one I most wished were real–who, although he had unimaginable advantages, still cared about me. I no longer believe that anyone with more power than me is interested in whether I live or die if it serves them no profit. Do you? When did you stop? I realized somewhere along the way that Superman is my Jesus. When people talk about their Jesus, they use the same words: righteous, just, generous–the Sermon on the Mount, you know? I see a lot of fascist functionaries who want the Ten Commandments of the Old Testament God posted in schoolrooms in order to frighten children into obedience under an omniscient surveillance state. I see no Christians pushing to get their New Testament God’s Beatitudes posted in those same rooms; why? Oh, hey, did you ever notice how you’ve given Santa Claus the same power as your Christian God? What is your God, now, with the threat that bad behaviour will be punished with inferior Christmas gifts?
In the summer of 1946, the popular Superman radio serial (to which an estimated 2.5 million households tuned in) ran a 16-part storyline called “Clan of the Fiery Cross” that detailed the rise of the KKK and Superman ultimately defeating it. Human rights activist Stetson Kennedy had infiltrated a few white nationalist groups around this time and, alarmed by their unchecked expansion, approached the show’s producers with this story pitch. Membership in the Klan began to decline as a direct result of the program portraying Klansmen as arrested weirdos who invented a racist club complete with secret handshakes and titles like “Grand Dragon” and “Imperial Wizard.” The show mocked their cowardice for wearing masks as they spread fear among the most vulnerable of us. It saw them as they were, and contrasted them with a character who symbolized our belief in good. Who Superman’s enemies were mattered. In the fall of 2019, Gene Luen Yang, who in 2016 was handed the reins of “Superman” for a tributary in which Supes was Asian-American, did a three-issue adaptation of “Clan of the Fiery Cross” called “Superman Smashes the Klan”–not to defeat the Klan in real life again, I don’t think, but to remind that idealism matters and resistance matters and art, it’s true, matters. Interestingly, if you listen to the old serial, you’ll discover the reason Superman intervenes is because white supremacists are terrorizing a young Asian-American boy and his family. What shocked me, for what it’s worth, is that the actor playing the Asian-American kid speaks without an accent.
Superman is an alien in every sense of the word, raised with what we have mythologized as traditional values in rural America, sent to spread the gospel of doing the right thing because it is the right thing to do. When he matures, he braves the sin and seductions of the Big City, the mortal city, the Fritz Langian Metropolis, which, whatever its faults, still has a newspaper that aspires to journalism in 2025. There, he falls in love with the creatures he was entrusted to protect. All of them. He sees value in everyone because he is the most alien of anyone. Some people would like to frighten you away from places where you’re forced to consider the broad diversity of mankind as human beings–colleges and cities, for example. Did you ever wonder why? Superman, though, chooses to be a reporter for the DAILY PLANET. As of this writing, 217 journalists have been assassinated in Gaza since the terror attacks of October 7, 2023. At the beginning of James Gunn’s much-anticipated Superman, Supes (David Corenswet) has already halted the invasion of a small country. The aggressors are an extravagantly funded, militarily bellicose nation that intends to ethnically cleanse this strip of land so that a billionaire and a fatuous dictator can carve it into a resort. I have always found it fascinating that Lex Luthor (Nicholas Hoult in this latest incarnation), Superman’s arch-nemesis, is a real estate developer who, in the Richard Donner films, wants to be the King of Australia. Here, he wants to be the “King” of this dot on the map that is inconveniently occupied by real human beings. Listen to how the characters scoff at the notion of kings, especially of parcels of land watered by the blood of Manifest Destiny. Lois Lane (Rachel Brosnahan), an excellent reporter whom Superman compares to Walter Cronkite (in a nod to both his having been raised by elderly parents and how we don’t have anyone now like the universally trusted Cronkite), asks Superman if he considered the geopolitical consequences of halting the genocidal ambitions of what is traditionally an American ally. Superman loses his temper. “People were going to die,” he says, as if every person matters. Oh, sweet summer child. Don’t you know? Almost no one matters. Not to grown-ups who understand how complicated the world is.
I cried before the movie had barely started. It begins with epigraphs establishing trinities of time (3 centuries, 3 decades, 3 weeks, 3 hours…), and if you hadn’t put together that every Superman story is a religious parable, Superman is 33 when he comes fully into his power. The last beat says (SPOILER ALERT), “3 minutes ago Superman lost a battle for the first time.” I weep to think of Superman losing, because Superman is a symbol of the human capacity for good. When Superman loses, we are all of us degraded. I believed in America, you know–the checks and balances and elected representatives who cared about the suffering of their constituents not as feudal lords their serfs, but as human beings care for other human beings. I still believe in what feels right to me–kindness, generosity, and mercy–but I don’t see kindness and I don’t experience generosity, though I’ve kept faith that these qualities exist. Maybe being this kind of corny is “actually punk rock,” as Superman says. While Superman heals, he listens to the voices of his long-dead Kryptonian parents telling him, in a garbled, damaged transmission, that they sent him to Earth to help us. In the Donner films, his mother worries he’ll be ostracized for his difference, and his father says he’ll be so strong and invulnerable it won’t matter. Gunn takes the subsumed threat of the father reassuring the mother that their son could destroy everyone on this planet and reworks it in an ingenious, topical way: What if, Gunn asks, everything Superman believes is a product of misunderstanding his parents’ message? Luthor wants to destroy Superman because he’s a beloved figure and Lex, despite all the technological wonders he abuses his staff to produce in his name, is not. He wants so much to be liked that he creates an extrajudicial paramilitary force expressly to disappear aliens and others he deems inconvenient or not obsequious enough in a secret prison where the inmates are tortured and even murdered.
Superman is a test, you see. It’s like the Parallax experiment from Alan J. Pakula’s The Parallax View, or the whole of The Manchurian Candidate. You can read it as a fantasy if you want, but it’s almost more of a documentary. I’m fascinated by the reviews calling it confusing or muddled. I think it’s because there are a lot of characters, and old folks, when they’re uncomfortable, will look for clutter to blame. But the picture’s moral thrust couldn’t be clearer. You could say that Duck Soup is hard to follow in the same way if you were trying to chase Robert McKee’s rules for writing a screenplay through it, but you’d be ignoring how eloquent an anti-war statement the Marx Bros. are making in the interwar period. What is Superman saying about Israel’s bulldozing of Gaza? A rogue nation’s stunning disdain for international law and conventions it knows it’s immune to so long as America’s red, white, and blue economic and nuclear Sword of Damocles hangs over the rest of the world? Every day for us is a day that Superman has lost another battle, screaming until he’s hoarse about children burned alive in their beds and the construction of concentration camps and the obscene overfunding of an anonymous, jack-booted police force given carte blanche to terrorize our cities. And the only answer he ever hears is that it’s complicated and not all lives are precious. You don’t matter. I don’t matter. No one we love matters. We can’t protect them. We can’t protect ourselves. Pay attention to what those who are more powerful than you choose to defend over their fellow man–businesses, for instance, or the sidewalks outside the schools where children are subject to mass shootings–and you’ll begin to understand who, what, our enemies really are.
It’s easy to be cynical about a film like Superman. Easy to sit back in that leather recliner with a pipe and a sense of smug superiority, telling the youngsters they’ll understand one day how climate change is a hoax, even though 80 of their friends were swept away in a flood that seems more ferocious than any previous one. Yep, they’ll eventually grasp the importance of keeping healthcare from those people on that list the Statue of Liberty is holding. That’s a list, right? A rendition schedule. Maybe it was mistranslated, like that cookbook from “The Twilight Zone”. Maybe the “Give me your tired and poor” was a demand made by an animal with a taste for human suffering rather than a promise of succour. You have vulnerable, desperate humans? Give them to me. Feed them to our factories and fields and for-profit prisons built on swamps. Come to Mammon. The wonderful thing about human beings is that once they’re no longer able to shovel coal to stoke the furnace, they can feed it with their bodies.
The second time I cried in this film–a film that is not sombre, despite its themes and inspirations–was about an hour in, when Clark goes to visit his adopted parents in Smallville and his girlfriend walks around the childhood bedroom of the man she loves but doesn’t understand. She begins to know him then. Later, she pulls him into a private place to steal a kiss, a moment so joyous and innocent, I felt younger than I have in decades watching it. The final time I cried was at the very end, because it was over and I got to see a movie that, whatever its impact in the real world may turn out to be, is evidence of a filmmaker who understands the assignment. Superman is the angel of our best nature. This character was always about standing up and doing the right thing, and not because it’s easy for him, but because it’s right. Superman is an open hand extended to a lapsed patriot. This country made a promise to me once–and the promise I made back to it, before I got so sour, is that I would care about others. That every life mattered to me, that making peace mattered, that standing up for the persecuted was not only my duty but also my absolute privilege. And, in particular, that I would not turn away from my responsibility in mourning. Blessed are those who mourn: they haven’t forgotten how irreplaceable every single life is. Blessed are the merciful, and those who are poor and hungry for fucking righteousness. Up up and away, motherfuckers, time to fly.
