Superman
Friday, June 30, 2006
A few words about Superman
Superman was conceived as a sort of democratic Gilgamesh, a buffer between the often referenced "little guy" and the nearly magical technological and bureaucratic forces lined up against him. He was the embodiment of big government at a time when big government worked. In his earliest incarnation Superman was as likely to rescue trapped miners and hang the bosses on telephone poles in retribution for their shoddy safety regulations as he was to foil the independents--bank robbers and their ilk.
The letters from fans started arriving in the 50's, and Superman's Mailbag answered them all: why doesn't Superman's cape get burned when he flies into the sun (the material was from Krypton)? Exactly how much Kryptonite exists on the planet Earth (it's all powering a single robot, since dismantled)? What is Luthor's first name (Lex, in continuing the double-L tradition started with Lois Lane, etc.)? These were questions asked by idle children for the sake of something to do, and each one was answered on the fly, but systematically, and with complete authority. These answers, bewildering in that their cast-aluminum logic led back to so soft and idle a source, locked the character into a mythology. The great red S was just a fun design choice. Knowing, as we do now (because we watch Smallville, or used to) that the great red S also harkens back to some ancient Native American prophecy makes the whole thing pointless and mysterious, that is to say, powerful.
The end result has been that Superman, like, say, the philosophy of Leo Strauss, is arbitrarily bursting with information, worshipped just short of religion, and in groping for meaning and relevance is devoid of either. Certainly there is a Superman for leftists and a Superman for ultraconservatives because there must be in a system which forces all meaning--and all superheroes--through a clarifying ideology. For the middle class, however, there are at least two Supermans. There is the Superman who is a rational (we hope, rather than ideological) gateway through which meaning is pushed. This Superman is a little bit like The New Yorker. He is for something big like world peace and acts on it instead of talking about it. They get meaningful results, too, since both Superman and the New Yorker have large subscription bases. And can hurl Nuclear bombs toward the sun. At least, as far as we know they can: after all, they are the best among equals and therefore know best. They absolve us of responsibility, since whatever we have to say about the issue of Nuclear Bombs is better better vetted by those who come from either an Ivy League school or Krypton anyway. It's a reflexive ideology, a bulwark against the two extremes, defined by being never quite as clarifying as the enemies that surround it but demanding fealty anyway. This Superman is essentially John Kerry.
The other Superman is less coherent, but it's the one I suspect we go to the movies to see. It harkens back to the original comics. As his alter ego Clark Kent he truly is weak--there's a strange way in which he's not just faking it. Hence, his indignation when the red S bursts out of his shirt and he starts throwing around car parts and bullies and mine owners. He gets caught up in faulty gates and pushed around by corrupt gatekeepers and then, the beauty of it is, he wakes into his true identity to smash them all, fantastically. No one would argue that this is a healthy fantasy. But the trick of having a liberal democracy has been and is one of keeping these unhealthy fantasies in equilibrium with one another, not in destroying or diluting them altogether. Only part of democracy is rational.
By the time Roy Lichtenstein caught up with comics--this is 40 years ago--Superman had long ago become information rich, which is to say it became unbearably stupid, unnecessarily rational. Even the kids had become bored with it. It seemed admirably spartan of Lichtenstein to strip comics of their literary context and to plug them into an art context, where at least a few people might have been as excited to see them. In a stroke he made them mean something, elegantly, just as ideology demands. This is the Superman Anthony Lane is thinking of when he says he wants it to be a "frothy entertainment" instead of what it is. But at the same time Lichtenstein was just getting noticed, the first batch of Marvel Comics were released, created in large part by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby. They gave their characters Wagnerian-adolescent emotional states. They made hundreds of them and threw them all in the same universe, where they could battle meaningfully by representing, each of them, just a few priorities. Stan Lee and Jack Kirby were greater artists than Lichtenstein because they refused to filter meaning through a single source, instead doing the rare work of creating a universe where different ideas could play. It's something we now see in rival DC comics--home of Superman--that wasn't there before Marvel Comics or Lichtenstein. Every ten years or so DC rolls out something called "The Crisis on Infinite Earths," in which the DC world is struck down and the characters forced to take on new identities. You may have read that Batgirl recently became a lesbian: that's how that worked, and it's quite brilliant. Superman is still the most information-heavy filter DC has, and thus harder to reform, in spite of John Byrne's attempt to scale him down back in the 80's. Today he constantly hovers between being the sort of reputable middle-class signifier who gives orders and one who acts freely within, around and against the limitations of others.
Anyway, the question here is, is Superman Returns any good? No, not much. He's just as top heavy and managerial as you'd expect a hero to be in the post 9/11 world. But in that moment when he sees that the jumbo jet on television is doomed, and he reacts in a crowded bar as everyone else reacts, and then disappears, and then there he is suddenly in tights, in tights!, yanking on the doomed plane's wing some 40,000 feet above the earth, well, there are some moments in the movies that just work, and this is one of them.
posted by Greg Purcell @ 2:16 PM,
