Some (Spoiler-Filled) Thoughts on Man of Steel

A Superman Childhood

I was four when the first Christopher Reeve Superman movie came out. And I was six when Superman 2 arrived. I think that those movies are burned directly onto the inside of my skull, and they probably still form a lot of the internal architecture of my mind.

I have vague memories of what Superman meant to me as a kid. There are the obvious things like how to be good when being good is difficult. And smiling in recognition of how annoying but strangely appealing girls could be. I remember thinking of Superman when struggling to get home from school in the middle of a snowstorm. Superman was a good source of extra reserves of willpower. And of course there were symbols and totems to keep you safe, like stickers and blankets and t-shirts and capes and underoos. It was easier to get through childhood when you could pretend to be invulnerable.

But there were also more subtle thoughts. It always struck me as a child how much of an immigrant Superman was. Or maybe more the child of immigrants, because he was just a few minutes old when he left Krypton. He was from a world and culture that everyone else thought of as weird, a culture that he was drawn to and protective of, but that he never grew up with and wasn’t fully comfortable in. He was a bit of a faux Kryptonian and something other than human, whether he was a kid in Smallville or a man in Metropolis. And the deepest chord in this mythology was that this was a character with three different names, all of which were truly him.

So Superman was introduced into my system while my skull was still soft. And he meant a lot to me. I really wanted to love this new Superman movie. So maybe it isn’t a surprise that I adored it so much that I almost didn’t know what to do when I watched it in the theatre for the first time.

Superman Movies

Superman movies are so difficult to construct. When you have god-like powers, seemingly every story told about you has to be an extinction-level event. When The Scarecrow is terrorizing Gotham City or Doc Oc is running around Manhatten, you don’t call Superman. When someone is trying to obliterate the planet, or enslave humanity, then you call Superman.

And a Superman origin story has its own challenging requirements. It needs to be part sci-fi movie (“alien vistor from the doomed planet Krypton!”), part pastoral, Norman Rockwell image of the American heartland (Smallville) and part “will they/won’t they” big city workplace relationship narrative (Lois Lane and the Daily Planet). Those are three very different types of stories, and combining them all successfully seems essentially impossible.

The first few Christopher Reeve Superman movies did a famously good job of balancing all these requirements and also managed to create a main character who was alien and god-like but also relatable and a possible role model.

Although I’ve grown to like and admire it, I wasn’t fond of the 2006 Bryan Singer-Brandon Routh movie Superman Returns when I first saw it. It took me a long time to understand why. That version of Superman was so vulnerable and so alone it was, on some level, painful to watch. The movie was really the living nightmare of the immigrant child.  More real than the Christopher Reeves Superman movies, but much less comforting.

The Superman of Superman Returns belongs nowhere. He leaves Metropolis for years to find Krypton, but learns that it is now rubble. He comes all the way back to find that Lois is married, had a child and hates Superman. And this isn’t just a cheap easily disposed of marriage. She married a guy who actually seems more noble and kind and handsome than Superman himself! Superman left for years without even saying goodbye. He doesn’t deserve Lois and he will never have her. And the child is likely his, but he will never be allowed to raise him. And Lois still finds Clark ridiculous and awkward. So this just leaves Smallville, which he doesn’t seem very drawn to, and the Fortress of Solitude, which Lex Luthor finds and effectively steals.

The movie reminds me of that Sun Tzu quote from Joss Whedon’s Firefly movie Serenity – “When the enemy goes to ground, leave him no ground to go to.” There is nowhere Superman can go for solace, nobody that understands his complicated identity, and nowhere that he can call home. He isn’t truly welcome anywhere. And all the iconic images of the movie are of him as a man alone. Plummeting to earth in the first few minutes of the film. Catching the Daily Planet globe in the middle. Carrying the kryptonite continent into space alone at the climax. There is nobody like him in the movie and nobody who wants to take him into their life. Even the scenes in which he is saved by Lois or her husband make it clear that he can’t be absorbed into their closed but happy community.

Superman Returns embeds Superman in a series of disturbingly real and complicated relationships. Lois loves him, but resents him, and is already married to a good man. Lois’ husband is in some ways the stealth hero of the entire movie and can’t be hated. He is more admirable than Superman himself. He sticks around even when the relationship becomes difficult. Even Superman’s likely son can’t know about his father and can’t have a meaningful relationship with him. This Superman is a man who is, and always will be, structurally alone. And the last scene of the movie involves him sneaking into Lois’ house at night to gaze at his son, like a husband and father who has been expelled from his family for his crimes. We last see him flying into the night, alone. Maybe he’ll check into a cheap motel room and watch tv and drink some beer and cry himself to sleep, alone.

The movie was punishing and upsetting in the realism and complexity of its relationships and its total unwillingness to give us easy answers to the problems of finding a place for ourselves. That is an extraordinarly brave thing to do in an expensive superhero movie, and I wonder if the director was trying to teach us something about being an adopted child. Maybe some things just can’t be put back together in the way that you want and you need to learn to make peace with that.

Instead of giving us a super powered villain to challenge Superman, Superman Returns cuts straight to his heart. How do you bring down a god? You skip the indestructable skin and shred his soul into pieces. But because it is so emotionally challenging, Superman Returns was never a movie I could watch for fun or solace. It hurts me to watch it. Man of Steel, on the other hand, left me postively giddy.

Women

Amy Adams plays a very different type of Lois Lane in Man of Steel. She isn’t endlessly busting Superman’s chops. She isn’t rolling her eyes dismissively at Clark Kent. She isn’t trying to figure out Superman’s secret identity. She isn’t particularly alarmed by Kryptonian stuff. She seems to help him out more than she needs saving. In a lot of ways she seems way more like a mature adult life partner than a distant object of affection or a source of stress or humiliation. In fact, she is someone who makes Superman’s life easier. And someone who knows him better than most people do.

Amy Adams doesn’t have many lines in this movie, but she is absolutely amazing in this role. Her last scene with Henry Caville as Clark Kent is fantastic. She looks at him with warmth and recognition as she says “Welcome to the Planet”. And then we cut to Caville’s ludicrously beaming smile. Man of Steel simply surgically removed one of the major foundations of the entire Superman mythology, the endless relationship triangle where Clark/Superman is his own competition. Clark loves Lois. Lois loves Superman and ignores or feels sorry for Clark. Lois spends her time trying to uncover Superman’s secret identity while Clark stands next to her, pining away but invisible.

I feel like I should be outraged by such a radical departure. Heresy! But it worked so well that it filled me with waves of gratitude.  This is a Superman who isn’t existentially alone. Where Superman Return begins with Superman alone returning to earth and ends with him alone in the night, Man of Steel begins with him as an infant surrounded by loving parents, spends long stretches with his human parents who don’t want to let him go and the Kryptonian villains who want him to join their family.  And the movie ends with him locking eyes, smiling and chatting happily with his future wife at the office.

Watching Amy Adams at Kent farm look at Henry Caville dressed as Superman and shout “Clark!” moments after being immersed in a Kryptonian civil war and shooting the shit with Kal-el’s father was astounding. I almost went into convulsions.  Here was a totally new Lois. One who was at ease with all three of Superman’s identities, and who saw one coherent man when she looked at him. She may have been the one character in the entire movie who understood and was comfortable with all three sides of him. Isn’t that some kind of immigrant kid’s deep, secret dream?

But of course women are so marginalized in superhero comics and movies that the final produce can never really be fully admired. None of the women in Man of Steel are sexually objectified in the way that they are in the new Star Trek movies. But all major female characters in superhero movies play essentially the same role. They are mother and love interest. There to create you, comfort you and be saved by you. A twelve year old boy’s version of women. The movie begins with Kal’s mother giving birth to him. And at the movie’s climax, when Superman has killed General Zod, he lets out a wail of confusion and despair, and then burrows his head quietly into Amy Adams’ stomach as she strokes his head. 

This movie doesn’t try to challenge our inherited ideas of gender roles. I wonder if any superhero movie has tried? I assume that everyone involved must think it is just too financially risky.  Young boys won’t watch a movie ten times in a row if it challenges or confounds or questions them. Maybe we need a new generation of comic book heroes and filmmakers to resolve this issue? Maybe we need a new generation of boys?

Bad Guys

Terence Stamp plays General Zod in the old Christopher Reeve Superman movie, and he is brilliant and iconic in the role. But that character was written very differently than the General Zod in Man of Steel. Stamp’s Zod wants to rule humankind. He is power hungry and likes to dominate others. So it is up to Christopher Reeve’s Superman to stop him. He is a great comic book bad guy.

Michael Shannon’s General Zod is far more similar to Superman in Man of Steel. He also wants to protect his people and he wants to belong. To him that means building a new Krypton on the ruins of Earth. Giving the unborn children of Krypton a place to grow and a way for his civilization to continue. Superman is the irritating one in this scenario, holding the entire future of the Kryptonian race and culture in his hands but not exhibiting any particular urgency about figuring out how to avoid total racial and cultural extinction. No wonder Zod wants to beat the crap out of him.

Shannon is a great and terrifyingly intense actor. But what elevates him to the top of the canon of superhero villains is that he has an earnest and relatable goal.  He isn’t simply interested in power and domination for its own sake. I think Zod, like Heath Ledger’s Joker, is scary and memorable because they touch on some basic, unnerving truth. In the case of Zod, do you really care what happens to a bunch of people you don’t know as long as you can save your own family?

And the parallels with Superman work beautifully. The best line of the entire movie sums up the point of the whole production quite nicely. At some point in the film Superman says nobly “I can’t be a part of this” and General Zod screams, exasperated, “Then what CAN you be a part of?!!” Yes, what can you be a part of Superman, you war refugee, quasi-orphan, adopted and bullied child, loner drifter, careerless, triple-named, coconut, girlfriendless homeless person? Grow up and commit to something.

Some Reservations

I gather that lots of reviewers thought Man of Steel was humourless, bleak, dehumanizing and pretty much wall to wall Michael Bay-style mindless, numbing violence. I didn’t feel like that at all. Sure, it was brutally violent, but every punch had some real emotion behind it and told us something about the characters involved. This wasn’t like watching armies of pixels shoot at each other in the Phantom Menace or transformers punch other transformers. I think that the first punch Superman throws is in Smallville, when Zod threatens Ma Kent. And after an hour or so of watching young and grown up Clark get bullied and his two dads die, the violence of the last hour felt like well-earned catharsis.  

But yes, the violence was troubling. The movie uses all the modern American action movie tropes to get the audience emotionally involved. Little children almost drown when their school bus goes into the river. 9/11 references are everywhere as skyscrapers come crumbling down to the ground around us. And women in particular are constantly under the threat of brutal violence – your mother and your girlfriend in particular. I don’t know. Maybe you can’t make an engaging action movie now without these types of scenes? Still, I feel like Joss Whedon in particular is better at navigating this territory of violence and gender politics for thrills and entertainment.

Even more troubling is that these Christopher Nolan-run DC Comics movies are so dark! What must children think of them when they watch these movies? The movies read like they were written by an American police state under endless siege. What do these DC films teach us? Sometimes everyone will hate you, but you’ll know you are doing what needs to get done to keep the people safe (Dark Knight). Like torture bad guys (Dark Knight). And broad-based invasive monitoring of all electronic communications, without court orders (Dark Knight). And killing bad guys, because some times that’s necessary to keep people safe (Man of Steel). And so is occasionally leveling entire towns and cities to defeat the bad guys, killing lots of innocent by-standards in the process (Man of Steel).  And nobody should be able to monitor or regulate you, because you are a lone and benevolent superpower and everyone should just shut up and trust you (Man of Steel).

Is DC Comics trying to raise an entire new generation who will build an authoritarian police state for the good of the population? Or maybe a generation who will quietly acquiesce as their government strips them of their rights in the name of security or goes to war with everyone it can?

And beyond the issue of violence and power, how do so many massive summer blockbusters get away with having an environmental message at their hearts? Krypton died because its people over extracted its natural resources? And Superman is supposed to inspire us to avoid that doomed planet’s fate? Really? Let me consider that important message while I play with my Man of Steel action figures and keychains and baseball caps and dvds and commemorative mugs and iphone cases and lego and Halloween costumes. 

And how cynical must you be to lecture your audience about environmentalism while jamming as much product placement as possible into every frame of your movie? These franchises may entertain and inspire us, but at their hearts they are the products of a deeply dehumanizing and environmentally degrading global capitalism that exists solely to make massive amounts of money for a handful of international investors who will say anything to win our affection.

So I loved Man of Steel, but not uncritically. It has disturbing things to say about the role of women, the uses of violence, and the abuse of power. And in many ways it is deeply disrespectful of its audience. Still, I think it is by far the greatest superhero movie ever made.

Or maybe I’m overthinking it a bit. After all, this is only a comic book movie. One with something like a 53% approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes, directed by the man who made Sucker Punch and written by the guy who wrote Jumper. Ha ha. I hope this isn't a Superman-accelerated mid-life crisis.