Can’t help but muscle in Photograph: Landmark Media
| NEW YORK | 4 min read
I T is hard to take a man in blue tights and red briefs seriously. But in a new movie, released on July 11th, Superman has taken on the extremely serious job of being the world’s policeman. The Man of Steel (David Corenswet, pictured, snapping on the Spandex for the first time) stops one country from invading another. He has done a good thing, he feels, and saved lives. Yet Lois Lane (Rachel Brosnahan, who brings a welcome spikiness to the role) is sceptical of unilateral action: does Superman stop to think about the consequences of getting involved in other countries’ conflicts, she wonders?
Such geopolitical musing might seem out of place in a superhero film, usually a vehicle for rippling muscles and elaborate stunts. But many have also been parables of how America feels about its role in the world. This is particularly true of stories about Superman, whose stated aim is to defend “truth, justice and the American way”. Clark Kent has endured for almost nine decades because he is handsome, bland and adaptable—able to reflect whatever “the American way” means at any particular moment.
Rick Bowers, author of a book about Superman, calls him the “ quintessential American ”. Though the hero arrived in the country from the planet Krypton as a baby, he was brought up in the Midwest, learned to love hard work and became the only American who can literally lift himself up by his bootstraps. Superman was created by Jerry Siegel, the son of Lithuanian Jewish immigrants. Siegel, an awkward child, spent his formative years making up stories. He was close to his father, who ran a second-hand clothes shop in a rough part of Cleveland. After his father died during a robbery, Siegel’s imaginings cohered into a character with superhuman strength. In the first tale, his hero rescues a middle-aged man from an assailant.
The public met Superman in June 1938 in “Action Comics 1”. On the first page, Superman realises “he must turn his titanic strength into channels that would benefit mankind”, and ever since he has exuded square-jawed goodness and noblesse oblige. Initially his focus was domestic—in that first story he saves an innocent woman from going to the electric chair—rather than international. America was isolationist at the time, despite Franklin Roosevelt’s growing concern about Nazi Germany.
Siegel and his colleagues faced a dilemma when America entered the second world war. The character’s sense of justice would undoubtedly have led him to intervene on the Allies’ side. But even the fearsome Luftwaffe would have been no match for the caped wonder. They worried that soldiers would be dispirited by tales of Superman’s easy victories. Some 80% of the American army’s reading material was comics, with Superman atop the charts.
So they had Clark Kent, his civilian alter ego, rejected from the army after failing an eye test. Superman spent the war fighting villains, some of them German and Japanese, elsewhere. He was still used as a symbol of Americans’ valour and righteousness. A cover of a comic in July 1944 depicted Lane arm-in-arm with servicemen, declaring: “You’re my Supermen!”
Later Superman grappled with whether he should interfere in earthly affairs. In “Superman II” (1980) he forsakes his powers in order to live a normal life with Lane, which leaves America, and the world, vulnerable to the ambitions of General Zod, a belligerent expansionist. (It is not hard to parse the message of this cold-war-era story.) Naturally the film ends with Superman recovering his strength, returning to his duty as global protector and reinstating the American flag above the White House.
Comics and films of the late 20th and early 21st centuries depict Superman as increasingly nervous about overstepping when it comes to foreign intervention and questions of sovereignty. “What right do I have”, he asks at one point, “to impose my values on anyone?” He aims to achieve as much as possible with as little force as possible, using surgical strikes to eliminate terrorist cells. This mirrors America’s policy, since 2002, of killing individual foes with missiles fired from drones.
Now the Man of Steel has been recast to fit today’s politics. The new “Superman” film has the usual hokey dialogue and planetary peril. But—without giving too much away—it reveals that the conflict that he has rushed into is a setup. This is, more or less, how some of Donald Trump’s foreign-policy team feel about skirmishes elsewhere: that America loses by getting involved. It may seem odd for a man who can do anything to contemplate doing nothing. But it makes for a timely film. ■
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