Conservatives Are Freaking Out About the New, “Woke” Superman. He’s Something Else Entirely.
This article contains spoilers for Superman.
In a field outside a small American town, a mysterious object falls from the sky. A childless couple witnesses the impact from the windows of their farmhouse and rushes to investigate, and they find an infant nestled in the crater, miraculously unharmed. They raise the child as their own, always knowing he is different, and gradually realizing that he may be the most powerful man who has ever lived, but they try to instill in him a sense of humility and homespun decency, as well as the responsibility that he bears to all of humanity.
This sequence doesn’t appear in Superman, but only because writer-director James Gunn reckons it doesn’t have to. “We have seen a million movies with characters who don’t need to have their upbringing explained,” he told the Times of London. “Who cares?” Gunn, who has the task of rebooting not just the Man of Steel but the entire fictional universe around him, starts his movie in a rush, with a flurry of text that squishes his version of the character’s first three decades into a few seconds of screen time. But a twist on that emblematic origin story does appear in a movie Gunn made in 2019, years before he was charged with reinventing the most recognizable superhero on the planet.
That movie is Brightburn, and although Gunn’s name only appears as its producer, it was written by his brothers Brian and Mark and features several actors drawn from his previous projects, including a brief appearance by his wife, Jennifer Holland. (The director, David Yarovesky, also worked with Gunn for more than a decade.) More to the point, the movie’s gruesome, subversive take on superhero mythology is very much in line with the sensibility of Gunn’s early career, before middle age and the success of the Guardians of the Galaxy movies softened his resentments and his penchant for provocation. In Brightburn, a superpowered infant crash-lands outside the home of a kindly Kansas couple, who, like the endless iterations of Ma and Pa Kent before them, take him in and raise him as their own. But the story diverges drastically once the boy hits puberty, and his impulses turn dark, and, in every sense, uncontrollable. This version of the character was sent not to save Earth but to conquer it. One night, he hears strange sounds coming from the family’s barn, where the spaceship that carried him has been, like the true nature of his parentage, hidden away for years. The jagged, twisted hunk of metal pulses with a dark-red light, along with an ominous, snarling voice that eventually resolves into a three-word command: Take the world.
When Gunn was named the co-head of DC Studios, I took a certain smug pleasure in knowing he’d recently been involved in a riff on the studio’s most iconic character that presents him as a budding serial killer. I never expected that Gunn would wind up reusing one of Brightburn’s plot points—and making it his movie’s biggest bombshell.
Superman (or Kal-El or Clark Kent or whatever you want to call him) has long since left Krypton by the time Gunn’s movie picks up the thread. But we’re reminded early on what he’s doing on Earth. As David Corenswet’s Supes recovers from his wounds—one of the opening text’s other revelations is that he’s just lost his first fight, to someone or something called the Hammer of Boravia—his robot attendants soothe him by playing the holographic message his parents sent with him to Earth. Like Marlon Brando’s Jor-El in the 1978 movie, this Superman’s parents, played by Bradley Cooper and Angela Sarafyan, remind him that he is special, that he has a destiny unlike that of the weaker beings to whose planet he has been sent. But these Kryptonians speak a tongue we cannot understand, and their words, too, seem strange. Their son’s job, they tell him, is not to fight for truth and justice but to “live out Krypton’s truth,” and even the way they express their affection for their only child lands a little oddly: “We love you more than land.”
Damaged in transit, the parents’ message cuts off midway through, and though every single person in the theater knows that the rest is bound to be unscrambled in the movie’s back half, they are unlikely to foresee what it turns out to be. Superman’s parents, in this telling, are not beatific souls spreading their gospel to less enlightened corners of the universe, and their son’s true task is not to protect humanity. Instead, according to his parents, his duty is to dominate it—to preserve his superior race by impregnating as many women as he can, and if any leader should try to stand in his way, he is to conquer them without hesitation or remorse. In other words: Take the world.
This is as much of a shock to Superman as it is to the audience, especially because of how the information is unveiled: on a cable-news show by his archenemy Lex Luthor (Nicholas Hoult). Hoult’s Luthor is a resentful tech bro who has spent years cooking up a plan to destroy his nemesis once and for all. (The Hammer of Boravia turns out to be, among other things, a paid employee of LuthorCorp.) He’s even assembled an army of social-media posters to skew online sentiment, so that when Luthor eventually does kill Superman, the public will applaud him for it. But in what, from a villain’s point of view, turns out to be an enormous stroke of luck, he doesn’t need to manufacture evidence that Superman is up to no good. His own parents’ words are all it takes.
In the past week, Gunn has faced a trumped-up online backlash of his own for referring to Superman as “an immigrant,” even though that has always been a part of the character’s origins, both on and off the page. (The character’s creators, Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, were both part of the first generation born in North America after their families fled the rise of antisemitism in Europe, and Superman himself is as not-from-here as it gets.) Although they don’t use Gunn’s word, Superman’s bad guys, who include several high-ranking members of the U.S. military, are at pains to underline their adversary’s foreign origins: He’s “the Kryptonian,” or “the alien,” or “an extraterrestrial organism.” As Luthor says, “He’s not a man.He’s an it.” And as it turns out, they’re not wrong to be suspicious. Superman does come from a place whose values are not like our own—or at least, not like the values we profess ourselves to hold. And if there’s even a chance he might follow his parents’ instructions, he’s too dangerous to run free.
As Siegel and Shuster initially conceived of him, Superman was, indeed, a super-man: stronger and faster than a normal human, but not in an entirely different category. As the years passed, though, he was no longer simply foiling bank robbers and purse snatchers, and his powers grew accordingly. The less like a circus strongman and the more like a god he became, the thought became inevitable: What if he changed his mind? Might not an all-powerful being come to conclude that the only way to stifle humanity’s propensity for bloody conflict was to install himself as its ruler? And if he did, how would we stop him? Alan Moore, the author of Watchmen and V for Vendetta, played this scenario out to its ultimate end in his 1980s comic-book series Miracleman, which ends with its title character ruling Earth as a benevolent tyrant. Ever since, it’s felt like other versions of the story are just trying to dodge the question.
Gunn, however, runs right at it. As his story begins, Superman has just prevented a war from breaking out between the countries of Boravia and Jarhanpur—partly by smashing up their tanks and planes, and partly by grabbing Boravia’s bellicose leader and flying him out into the desert, with a warning that he might not let him down so easy next time. Perhaps not surprisingly, the world’s most powerful country and its richest man take this as a threat. And while Corenswet’s guileless do-gooder seems incapable of forming so much as a malevolent thought, not even his girlfriend Lois Lane (Rachel Brosnahan) is sure he’s done the right thing. What gives him the authority to intervene in world affairs without so much as a word to anyone? Who is he to decide what’s best? And isn’t it a little terrifying that one person can wield so much power, even if, or especially because, he believes he’s always in the right?
The thing is, though, this Superman isn’t always in the right—and more importantly, he knows it. As he tells Lex Luthor in his climactic speech, what makes him human isn’t that he was raised on Earth, but that he screws up—constantly—and keeps going anyway. Like his faithful dog, Krypto, he means well but doesn’t always know what he’s doing, and he’s so strong that the slightest misstep can cause chaos and destruction. And, like Krypto, he’s a mutt (as well as a very, very good boy). Superman isn’t just an immigrant, he’s an adoptee, born on one world and raised in another, and that cross-cultural mixture is the key to who he becomes. He draws his superpowers from being out of place, made invincible by the switch from Krypton’s red sun to Earth’s yellow one, and both the original Superman and Gunn’s movie hinge on whose example he will follow: his birth parents’ or his adoptive family’s. “Your choices, your actions,” Gunn’s Pa Kent (Pruitt Taylor Vince) tells his son. “That’s what makes you who you are.”
Superman is a fundamentally lighthearted movie, more so than any since Christopher Reeve hung up his cape. But Gunn also understands, better than any director in the field, how comic-book stories can tap into social currents without trivializing them or tripping over their own profundities. Superman’s birth parents are racial supremacists, and Luthor is a tech billionaire who believes his superior intellect entitles him to govern the fate of whole nations. But Superman chooses to be a part of the world rather than try to control it, and embraces the idea that it matters far less where you come from than who you choose to be once you’re there.
Slate
