The virtues of Superman

A medieval movie review

I saw Superman with my kids in the cinema this summer and had some thoughts.

Since the film will be released on physical media today, and on a streaming site at some point soon, I am sharing a review.

It is a good superhero movie: not a film for you if you cannot tolerate the flaws of the genre (parenting obsessions, redundant apocalypses), but one that will appreciate if you can indulge these inbuilt features. It is well made, well acted, and funny — and offers some fine points of political theory.

The first of these has to with virtue.

Superman, in the film, is an innocent superhero. This character type goes back to Siegfried in the Nibelungslied. The medieval Germanic hero is as strong as twelve men, he can become invisible, and is invulnerable except for a single spot between the shoulder blades. And he is too good for the world. He uses his superpowers to help his non-superpowered friend gain a superpowered wife (puzzle this out yourself, or wait a couple of paragraphs), and is repaid by jealousy. The government turns against him. He walks into an obvious trap and dies with a spear through the back.

It is no spoiler to say that Superman is not killed in this movie. But the crux of the innocent superhero predicament is the same. He is too good. He does too much for people. His innocence cannot save him from jealousy about his sexual power. He walks into an obvious trap and is imprisoned, cut off from the sun which he needs for his health, and exposed to the kryptonite that can bring about his death.

Siegfried, the saga hero, has to die because of gossip, because of his extraordinary abilities and because of the human ability to believe the worst. Superman, in the film, is vulnerable to social media. No matter what he actually does in the world, it can be respun into ridicule, selfishness, and villainy a billion times even before he returns at superspeed to his Manhattan apartment and checks his feeds. Siegfried had to deal with actual trolls; Superman with our version of trolls. (There is a good joke in the film about this, among other good jokes; these I will not spoil!)

Like Siegfried, Superman is a complicated position vis-à-vis women generally and in a confusing relationship with one woman in particular, facts which his manful innocence prevents him from appreciating.

Why not date the reporter when you are the news? Why not give her an interview at a critical point in your romantic relationship, on an evening when you are hungry, want sex, and are on the edge of a fight? What could go wrong? We are all good people here. Superman only falls into that moment because he feels abused by the social media coverage, understandably; but there is no clear way to defend himself, the more so as the girlfriend, Lois Lane, has imbibed the internet toxicity herself.

It is here, in the interview that gets out of control, that Superman’s innocence takes on depth. With Lois he seems naïve, even childish, and in some way he is. But he makes a point. She thinks that to be a reporter is to question everything. He says that there is truth, hard though it might be to find. They end up yelling at each other, charmingly I thought, about the era in which they grew up in America, about how to interpret the late twentieth century, about what punk rock really means. For Lois it is cognitive nihilism, bottomless doubt. For Superman it is the faith that there is a basic human truth behind the web of social lies. I would bet my Fugazi cassettes that Superman was right.

In the Nibelungslied, Siegfried is an alien, coming from a faraway land, joined by friendship and marriage but not by biology to the local authorities. His troubles begin, as do Superman’s, with sex. Siegfried did not actually go invisible and use his powers to have supersex with his friend’s superbeloved while pretending to be his friend in order to woo her for his friend. But he did do something that was rather like that, just with an unbelievable dollop of virginity right smack in the middle. Superman, likewise, is not actually using his curly locks and other super attributes to spread his gene pool among all human women – which, as it turns out, his Kryptonian parents wanted him to do. But it is easy to be suspicious.

In the film, the jealous leading man is Lex Luthor, an oligarchical supervillain with tech and sidekicks and tech built into sidekicks. The plot line is oligarch versus alien. Luthor is sure that he is right to pursue and humiliate Superman, for example by spreading the news of Superman’s Kryptonian parents’ designs for him and by kidnapping Superman’s dog (or his cousin’s dog). It follows for Luther that since he wants to kill Superman it must be the right thing to do. He has the Econ 101 view of morality that characterizes not a few real-life American billionaire libertarians: if I feel it, it must be good, since all of us behaving selfishly will somehow sum up to a good outcome for everyone. Luthor says so explicitly: it is right for him to express his envy of Superman as murder, because that envy is the force that will save everyone from aliens.

The US government, in the film, gets no breaks, and reasonably not. It is too close to the oligarchs, and it takes just a nudge for it to succumb to Luthor’s wishes. Superman, as an alien, is ruled to have no rights at all in the United States (that is not what Constitutional precedent holds; but we can imagine that in the fictional DC universe we have the Roberts court). So the government hands him over to Luthor to be imprisoned in a black-site (pocket-dimension, for you multiversalists out there) private prison, in a cell with kryptonite. He escapes in a way that requires some sentimental suspension of disbelief, but not before some good points are made about prison. The Americans imprisoned along with Superman are the designated enemies of the oligarch, not people who have broken any law. And once in prison, they are for the most part tamed and terrified. They are inclined to denounce one another rather than to cooperate.

Superman’s victory, in the end, is crowned with an argument about humanity. For Luthor, humanity is genetic. He is human because he is genetically so. And whatever he does is therefore human, in the interest of humanity. The better it feels, the more human it must be. Superman counters with an ethical definition: to be human is to be humane. It is to try to do what is right. It is to take risks and pains to try to find the truths, including about oneself. Luthor, naturally, laughs at all of this.

Luthor has himself raised a super-clone of Superman to be loathsomely obedient. But whose point does that really prove? Superman was genetically the child of parents who wanted him to take over the earth in a display of his own genetic superiority. But he was raised by kind people and became a kind person. Parenting, it turns out, makes the difference.

Which is, of course, a welcome conclusion, if perhaps not quite really deserved, for a father who takes his children to see superhero movies.