Ghost of a flea

I have sent them you, my only son

Spoiler warning. See the film before reading.

Superman Returns is out and, though many have yet to see the movie, not everyone is happy about it on the right hand side of the blogosphere. Aside from no-brow complaints this is a "metrosexual" Superman one line has the usual suspects up in arms. Hollywood Reporter notes a change from "truth, justice and the American Way" to "truth, justice and all that stuff." In context it is a small joke, another aside for the unrelenting and unavoidable self-referencing of a story that has been told and retold since World War II. Especially so for a film that is an extraordinary, respectful homage to the Christopher Reeve Superman many of us grew up with; including director Bryan Singer.

Certainly much of the Superman mythos from his unconvincing disguise to his Captain Underpants suit seems hokey or, more charitably, the product of a (supposedly) more innocent time. Much as the Bible benefits from new translation as colloquial English changes, some updating of the Superman story is necessary for its central truths to be communicated. Even so, it is difficult not to read the elision of "the American Way" as a disavowal. Screenplay writer Dan Harris makes weasel noises about the decision:

An "international superhero" might have lived up to a phantasy internationalism*, and might even have made for an interesting movie, but Harris' claim is in no way supported by a film whose every character and every setting is American.** Despite his Canadian creator, Superman is not an "international superhero" but a hero in the hands of film-makers who risk sounding embarassed by their own myths. It is hard to deny truth, justice and "the American Way" sounds hokey but for a story whose central character is an alien prancing around in his underwear such may be to protest too much.

It seems to me the more egregious editorializing moment comes when a certifiably crazy Lex Luthor says "bring it on"; Hollywood newspeak for blank criticism of the current President. Not that this necessarily means the film's right-wing critics are right to be annoyed. Even with a villainous invocation of "bring it on," I suspect the anti-Bush dig is more formalistic than pointed and, more importantly, only written into the script as cover for Bryan Singer's attempt to do something unfashionable in contemporary American cinema. He has created a film grounded in earnest emotion instead of ignorant knowingess. Despite these two nervous ticks in the screenplay, Singer has broken a fundamental intelligentsia (and would be intelligentsia) taboo by deciding to take a genre film seriously.

The James Bond franchise made a pass at answering a pop-culture problem in the opening credits of Die Another Day: How to represent existential evil in a world where Bond villains had descended into pantomime. After September 11, 2001 it was said (in error) that irony was dead. It turned out it was our capacity for metaphor - not irony - which had failed us. Cartoon bad guys were totally inadequate to making sense of all the falling bodies. In Die Another Day we discover Bond did not stop the jihadis because he was otherwise occupied by scorpion stings in a North Korean torture room. Bond's absence was a sign the world had moved on and a signal that, along with Bond, our security services had been too preoccupied by the last war and with the wrong opponents to notice the new ones. Some blame the Madonna curse for the film's failure (and quite right too). But it is more fair to say the film failed its own premise. Instead of addressing the problem posed in the opening credits, the plot dissolved into the usual post-Soviet, post-Cold War mush as the enemy turned out not to be al Qaeda - not even the scorpion stings of North Korean madness - but a renegade North Korean whose irresponsible actions jeopardized an entirely hallucinatory peace process. In the real world, North Korean fascists fire missiles over Japan and threaten their neighbours with nuclear genocide even as they impoverish and enslave North Korea's starving people. But in the brave new world of James Bond it is not the North Korean general but his wayward son who is the bad guy.

The same psychotic transformation neutered the jihadis of Tom Clancy's "The Sum of All Fears" as the film adaptation morphed them into neo-Nazis; some of the only acceptable villains left now that Hollywood can no longer fall back on marble-mouthed English accents for its bad guys. In the real world, there is an international death cult using nail bombs to kill Jewish commuters, raping Russian school-children en masse, slicing off noses and tongues in Indian Kashmir, detonating up to six hundred bombs simultaneously in Bangladesh (with nary a word in the Western media let alone a single street protest by Western "progressives"), trying to restart a slow-motion genocide in East Timor as the same continues unimpeded in Darfur and, not incidentally, murdering 3000 people at a go somewhere ever so slightly downtown from the Daily Planet building. And yet somehow to point to any of this agit prop by a tiny minority of activists, let alone the crater in lower Manhattan, is in poor taste.***

We find ourselves in a world where the enemy must never be named; only excused. Where the bombers' targets are asking for it and it is "racist" to notice, let alone complain, about the fact. We have made for ourselves a world where hundreds of thousands of Americans have fought, and several thousands died, defending themselves in a conflict with the latest uptick in a centuries long holy war but to Hollywood the real enemy remains thinly coded "Jews" as phantom conspirators and venal businessmen. I suspect the only possible explanation for this situation is psychological. How else to make sense of a context where every real conspiracy our security services unearth is instantly written off as a sign of the ineptitude of the enemy and every conspiracy that ends in bloodshed is represented as a sign of the ineptitude of our security services. How else to explain why it should be impossible to give the jihadis simple credit for their own clearly stated purposes; not to mention their moderate success at generalized rapine and mayhem.

This is not a problem of fantasy but of phantasy. 1940s comic book readers could credit Superman in a fist fight with Hitler but this (admittedly unedifying) spectacle neither detracted from the reality of war or the suspension of reality necessary for Superman's world to make sense. The Nazis were even presented as having "heroes" of their own, most notably Red Skull, whose supervillainy accounted for some of Nazi Germany's continued existence in the face of superpowered Americans. To even raise the possibility of DC or Marvel creating a latter day jihadi Red Skull is laughable. Imagine the cartoon jihad that indigestible morsel of truth might provoke let alone a newspaper or book seller brave enough to carry the comic. More laughable yet, imagine a Superman Returns where Superman, and not Lex Luthor, had said "bring it on."

It should go without saying that America's current enemies would slaughter Bryan Singer - gay, Jewish and American - at their first opportunity (Superman may not be gay but the casting decisions were). It seems that rudimentary self-interest fails where self-respect and veneration of tradition have long fallen by the wayside.

After all this complaint, what is to be salvaged from Superman Returns? Nothing, except that it is a masterpiece.****

Michelle Malkin dislikes the film. Or rather, she dislikes the first half of it that she saw. I suspect her reaction is as knee-jerk and formalistic as the "PC" Hollywood conventions she despises. Tell a right-wing blogger something is "metrosexual" - that is code for gay in case anyone is unclear on the point - and the rest is fair game. I fail to see anything more or less Beckhamish about the Brandon Routh portrayal than the Supermen who have gone before him. Even the new cape is toned down; less flamboyant, as it were. This is a film conservative Christians should love but have instead decided to castigate for a Lois Lane who, despite her long-term committed relationship, is written off as a "single mother." So much more satisfying to throw stones than to pay much attention to what Christ had to say on the subject.

We are presented once again with the grim and stupid logic that valorizes a religious ceremony - any religious ceremony - over everything else including and especially commitments grounded in personal conviction rather than institutional dictat. No small government for those conservatives who insist the state, and not their Saviour, guarantee their virtue. To these people, an arranged marriage into a faith they despise or about which they know little or nothing (pick one: Islam, Hinduism, etc.) renders respectible a relationship no matter what brainwashing, coercion or UFO logic is meant to support it. More baffling to me still is that this crazed conclusion should seem self-evident to the fundamentalists despite a fifty-percent divorce rate. Time to stitch a scarlet letter for Lois Lane; the character these dimwits have failed to notice is the Virgin Mary of the piece.

Christianists and "conservatives" notwithstanding, this new Superman could have been written by C.S. Lewis*****; a latter day Gospel of Krypton for a humanity lacking "the light to show the way."

Superman Returns is the most blatant, unashamed and moving Christian addition to popular culture in recent memory. Yet the Malkin literalists, even those who bothered to sit through the whole film, have lost so much of their capacity for metaphor that their God-given reason is lost to them and along with it the mythological truth which should be their foundation. These same people fail to understand metaphor and literary convention in the Scriptures themselves so none of this reaction should surprise me... and yet still it does. After all, if Jesus had "merely" performed the acts ascribed to him his superpowers would be poor in comparison to those demonstrated in the acts of Galactus or Eternity, let alone the Beyonder or Thanatos with the Infinity Gauntlet. More to the (DC) point, his superpowers are limited in comparison to Superman (though Jesus would most probably have been unharmed in the presence of kryptonite).

It is a woods for the trees problem; it is not existence but essence which underpins a mythological truth. The truth of Jesus' enduring importance is not his biography but his message. Superman Returns is a testament addressed to a question all Americans must face. So too the rest of the world even if much of the rest of the world has yet to notice:

If Superman exists, why did he not act to prevent the attacks of September 11, 2001?

It seems to me the film does a better job of addressing the question than I can. For all its moments of anti-Bush posturing and for all the ritualized anti-metrosexual complaint of the blogosphere, Bryan Singer's Superman takes us to the heart of the message of grace and the challenge of salvation. In fact, if Superman did not exist I think a post-9/11 America would have had to invent him. Superman's Jewish creators could hardly have foreseen the Christology that would spring up around him. Though as this might equally be said for Jesus himself Superman finds himself in good company.

*The kind of internationalism where only France and Germany have the power to render a decision multilateral and where internationalism includes selling Führerbunkers and chemical weapons precursors to dictatorships provided they agree to only use them against local minorities, Jews or Americans.
**Though the Fortress of Solitude is located in Canada, obviously.
***By contrast, saying "George Bush is stupid!," whispering gross 9/11 conspiracy and making Holocaust jokes is the height of wit in the Annex. Not incidentally, so too is using the word "gay" as an insult.
****I have changed my mind. If Bryan Singer wants to remake Logan's Run he should go right ahead.
*****But for the point that everyone and everything in it is clearly allegorical, a rhetorical convention Lewis at least claimed to avoid.

With great power comes great responsibility Update: Douglas Kern considers Superman's burden and America as a superpower (via Instapundit).

Posted by Ghost of a flea at July 3, 2006 12:04 PM

Comments

Posted by: dorkafork at July 3, 2006 12:51 PM

Posted by: Ghost of a flea at July 3, 2006 12:57 PM

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