Supergirl (Movie Review)

The Tragedy of Carelessness

Supergirl appears to be a movie about whether it matters to keep your room clean.

From the early scenes we learn that Supergirl is a slob. Her residence -- the inside of a spaceship she is taking on a pleasure tour-- is a mess. Her dog eats licks the unwashed bowls and then urinates inside. The medium of film -- just sights and sounds -- protects us from the stench of her life.

Supergirl is messy, we are told, because of trauma. Her own planet Krypton slowly perished in a natural catastrophe and she (along with her cousin Superman) is one of the two survivors. This is perhaps unfair to survivors of disasters and atrocities, who react in various ways, but not in general by refusing to wash dishes.

But then the story offers us a different reaction to trauma. A much younger person, native to the planet where Supergirl has come to party for her 23rd birthday, sees the murder of her brother, mother, and father. Ruthye, a girl of thirteen, has to bury the three of them. Unlike Supergirl, she keeps her composure, and her things in order. She has a clear idea of what she must do: avenge her family.

After the two meet, Ruthye asks Supergirl questions about her past and her family; Supergirl never asks Ruthye anything. Supergirl tells he that she should not avenge her parents, although she is vague as to why not.

The story flounders here on a question that troubled the Greek tragedians, the authors of Icelandic sagas, and the founders of the French and English contractarian traditions: how does one seek justice when there is no law? The planet on which Supergirl has chosen to party is lawless. If there is a murder, what next then?

The Greek and the Scandinavian storytellers, like many many others, were aware that revenge killings, no matter how apparently justified, could have consequences that spiraled our of control, over communities and over generations. They were also aware that the alternative was law, and that law is not easy and takes orderly work to build.

Supergirl does not represent order, and so her opposition to revenge does not rest on any alternative that she is able to present to Ruthye. Nor does Supergirl have an alternative way of dealing with the situation -- spoiler alert, she later kills the murderous brigand herself from motives that look a lot like revenge (and she kills quite a few other people).

At that first meeting between the two, Supergirl does save Ruthye when the girl appears at a bar seeking information about the murderer and loses her sword. This sequence of events is unrealistic, since the plot conceit is that Supergirl is on a planet with a red sun in order to get drunk, and so would not have been able to defeat a powerful entity who has stolen Ruthye’s sword.

In the conventions of these stories, the color of a sun determines the level of a Kryptonian’s powers. Under a yellow sun, as on Earth, Supergirl is very powerful. Under a red sun, as on her native Krypton and on Ruthye’s planet, Supergirl has no powers. Under a green star (yes, I know), she will sicken and die.

The plot, unintentionally I think, hinges on a difference between carelessness and care. Ruthye’s family are killed despite being prepared for intruders, whose spaceship they destroy. Ruthye then tries to care for their memory by avenging them. This no doubt would have failed, but the effort represents an attempt to act within and reinforce a certain moral universe. Supergirl, by contrast, enters the main story because of carelessness.

Because Supergirl is nonchalant about her possessions, the interplanetary criminals (”brigands”) who killed Ruthye’s family are able to walk through her spacecraft’s open door and steal it. Because she has not trained her dog, it ignores her commands, and attacks the thieves, one of whom shoots it with a poison dart.

This makes no sense. There was no reason to shoot the dog, who posed no threat to a brigand “with the strength of a thousand men.” The poison turns out to be a valuable chemical. The brigands, who also have its antidote, use to torture people by first administering the poison and then demanding information in return for the antidote. Why would they use this agent on a dog?

Supergirl is brought into the main story by her unclean residence and untrained dog. If she had kept her doors closed or gone to the trouble of training her pet, none of this would have happened. Rather than reflecting on any of this, our heroine gives Ruthye to understand that the sick dog is more important than the girl’s murdered parents. This is another point where the audience can feel understandably uneasy.

Supergirl has to gain the antidote for the poison, which requires her to follow the brigands to another planet. She does not make appropriate preparations for the journey, unless we count further lectures to Ruthye about how the girl should manage her grief. She should stay at home. While one takes the point that direct revenge has its moral and practical problems, Supergirl is wrong that doing nothing and being lonely is the best reaction to trauma. People do better when they find a way to recover their own agency and take action with others.

Fortunately for Supergirl, Ruthye ignores the platitudes, and joins her on an interstellar bus. The two of them reach a planet where the brigands are kidnapping girls and women for mass rape and reproduction, which involves killing the female children in an unspecified way. Like the treatment of trauma, the treatment of mass sexual violence and femicide seems careless, even trivializing.

We now know that Ruthye, if captured, will live a life of repeated rape and forced childbirth, involving the murder of any girls she might bear. But this knowledge is somehow both there and there at the same time. On this planet, with a yellow sun, Supergirl is very powerful. Given the setting, we might think that the dog mission would give way to the mission of saving hundreds of girls and women from rape and slavery, but it doesn’t. The issue of rape and femicide is there to establish that the brigands are evil, but neither the plot not nor the heroine takes the evil seriously.

Instead, Supergirl then proceeds to put Ruthye at risk by trusting the first person who talks to her at a bar. She allows herself to be poisoned by this stranger, even though poison is at the center of the story and would presumably have been on her mind. By falling into an obvious trap, she puts Ruthye in an unsafe place; they escape only because the poisoner, somewhat oddly, helps Supergirl to vomit, so that she can defeat the brigands.

The brigands then fly off to a third planet with the enslaved women and girls. Supergirl follows them to get the antidote.

It would seem to make sense for Supergirl to check what sort of planet she was visiting. Only if it is yellow will she be able to use her powers. If it is red, she won’t be able to defeat the brigands, and so her journey would be pointless and self-destructive -- the brigands would either kill her or enslave her. If the sun is green she will just die.

In keeping with character, Supergirl does not pay any attention to where she is going. And so when she steps off the spaceship, she falls down and begins to die under the planet’s green sun. The brigands have set a simple trap and she blunders into it.

Fortunately for her, if again implausibly, Ruthye has stowed away on the transport and is able to slip out; she pulls Supergirl into a cave, where she will survive longer. Supergirl is now thirsty but has brought no water. So Ruthye has to go look for water (among many plot failures this one stuck out: Ruthye is exactly the kind of person who would have a water bottle).

Because Supergirl doesn’t take the trouble to check what sort of planet she was visiting, she forfeits her life; because she doesn’t pack water, she puts Ruthye’s in danger. Once the girl leaves the cave to search for water, Ruthye is discovered by the brigands and imprisoned. Mysteriously, the brigands, who are looking for Supergirl, do not then apply the poison which is at the center of the plot in order to torture Ruthye for the information.

What sort of story is this? It is a quest story, in which oddly-matched people must seek a totem in a faraway place. But Is it a tragedy, or a comedy? For the story to make sense as a tragedy, Supergirl would have to die in that cave. She is there because of her tragic flaw: she is too self-involved to take care of her possessions, to make plans, or to listen to anyone else.

It is instead a comedy (in the traditional sense of the word), because something miraculous happens to bring about a happy ending. The planet has a second, yellow sun; it rises as a deus ex machina; Supergirl becomes powerful; she kills the bad guys; she seizes the antidote (miraculously undamaged in a colossal battle in which countless armored vehicles are tossed into the air and explode) from the corpse of the brigand who shot her dog; the dog is saved.

I fear that this was not a film about the importance of keeping your room clean, at least not in the intentions of those who made it -- although I am going to insist that this reading of the film works better than the one that is forced upon us by its ending. The message is that it does not matter how unprepared and narcissistic you are; you win in the end because you are strong and the stars align for you.

This is an American way of seeing things. Our disastrous war in Iran was fought on Supergirl principles: our house was not in order; we made no preparations; we condescended to people who were making more sense than we were. In the real world, of course, being strong does not mean that you win the war. The tragic flaw (hubris, say) matters more; and so Iran won the war.

Supergirl as a story is comedy; as a movie production, though, it is a tragedy.

It probably wasn’t meant to be a film about carelessness and care, but at a deeper level it is, malgré soi. The plot turns out to be comic but the plotting is tragic-- again, in the technical sense that it emerges from a flaw that the flawed person or people cannot themselves see.

Because the makers of this film were so careless in the plotting, they cannot have seen that carelessness is the center of their story.

We are meant to understand Supergirl as an anti-hero; but she isn’t; she’s a slob who mindlessly endangers herself and others. An anti-hero is someone who represents virtues that are in tension with the established order; it is not someone who is just unhappy and who, when the stars align, can beat up everyone else.

The Athenians who gave us the notion of tragedy believed that art allowed us to see a flaw in others and thereby recognize the possibility of unseen flaws in our own character; we should therefore be careful in our judgements, because the reality of freedom depends upon the practice of self-criticism.

Later, in their decadence, the Greeks gave way to the idea that everything was written in the stars, that gods and heroes rise or fall with this heavenly body or that. Gilbert Murray called this the “failure of nerve.” We are meant to be joyous when the yellow sun emerges, but should we celebrate our submission to careless powers?

PS: Please also see my positive review of Superman).

PPS: Next week, likely Wednesday July 15th, will see the rollout of the public version of my University of Toronto course “Hitler and Stalin Today.” The ten-lecture class will be accessible free of charge to anyone around the world.