birds 'n planes 'n moral indecision
What a splendid weekend! Friday featured a high-scoring and victorious softball game. Saturday, I awoke early early and went with Bean and Ned to hike a bit of the Appalachian Trail. (Railroads, incidentally, are spectacular inventions. We took the Metro North up to the trailhead; the stop was literally a platform about 6 feet by 3 feet in size. Imagine how comical, then, this enormous commuter train looked pulling up at the stop and opening the door--one, single door--to let some 5 or 6 hikers out to make their way into the wooded, flooded wilderness.) It felt good to walk, though I was surprisingly slogged by the end of it all.Sunday I had brunch with friends out near Columbia, and then N and I tromped off to see Superman Returns. Now I'm sitting on my balcony (with my computer, thanks to the magic which is wireless networking), enjoying a cool breeze and a laid-back New York evening before the Fourth of July holiday. Tomorrow I plan on going to a ballgame and seeing some fireworks. Hot dogs may also feature prominently.
This is the good life.
But this post was meant actually to be about Superman. N and I considered that Superman is a problematic hero. He himself is morally uncomplicated: Superman is a defender of right, good, and justice. Where Spiderman struggles internally with his powers and considers using them for revenge and personal gain, Superman remains always unequivocally good. We are meant to see his actions as invariably heroic. When Superman goes wrong, it is with the best of intentions and the purest of hearts. When he has to choose between Lois Lane and Gotham City, he always casts a wistful look in her direction and then saves the rest of the world instead. (And then, because he's Superman, he goes and saves her too.) The Superman of the movies, at least, is always a a sympathetic character. He has no internal struggles.
Superman Returns flirts with, but never fully draws out, the problems inherent in this heroic conception. There's something more than a bit distasteful about Superman as lovestruck temptation to marital infidelity, after all, and putting Lois Lane into a serious relationship is therefore an inspired move. It's not a move the film is prepared actually to make with any spine, however. What we see instead is a watered-down version that allows Superman a relatively easy way out of any moral or emotional conundrum: we are talking here only of near-marital fidelity, though the movie would have been better for an honest-to-goodness marriage that we couldn't wrong-headedly rationalize away as immoral or unimportant (relative to Superman's own great love, of course). Adding a child to the mix is similarly inspired, because it makes the right course of action so painfully clear and so painfully contrary to Superman's desires (and actions--he's never quite blatantly inappropriate, but confessing one's love to somebody in a committed relationship, with a kid, knowing she loves you back, is inadvisable and even manipulative). Making that child (so very predictably) Superman's son completely undoes the interesting twist that his presence provides, however. Instead of feeling more uncomfortable with the way that Superman is disrupting Lois's life and the life of her partner (because there's a child involved), we now feel less uncomfortable (because it's Superman's child, and so he suddenly has a much greater right to continued involvement with this formerly happy family). The moviemakers nearly manage to bring in the tension of a competing love interest without the attendant moral quandary that the situation so obviously prompts.
But the Superman stories oughtn't so easily escape that quandary. (It's a different question whether Superman himself would be a better character if he was ever confronted by moral misgivings, or whether it's enough for the audience to sometimes recognize an irony or inconsistency in his savior-like charicature (played up particularly in this latest film) and his human-like actions and reactions.) When one is cast as the embodiment of good in a black-and-white, good-vs.-evil kind of world, surely the moral considerations follow.
Can you have a Superman who isn't always right, who isn't always good, if only because he lives in a world in which "good" isn't always clear? I'm not sure. But it seems to me a worthy lesson that sometimes questions are hard, and answers non-obvious. Given the way the movie sets this up, it's a shame they back away from it so emphatically by the time the credits roll.
posted by Skay @ 9:16 PM
6 Comments:
"Can you have a Superman who isn't always right, who isn't always good?"
No, because then he would be Not-so-superman, or Not-quite-superman. Part of Superman's kitsch is purity of heart/mind/spirit.
Does the movie put Superman in Gotham (Batman's city)? In all the other movies, comic books, and TV shows, it is the cleaner and futuristic-sounding Metropolis. (I am aware both are supposed to be New York).
I don't find DC characters are all that nuanced. Batman is a much darker figure, but remains clear-cut... his parents were killed by a criminal when he was a child and he is driven by vengence.
The two are an interesting comparison, as Superman makes the right moral decision in any situation, and Batman is an "ends justifies the means" antihero.
I find Marvel comics are metter storywise, especially the X-men and their many deriviatives. Though the movies never get into it (being far more concerned with summer box office blockbuster returns) the comics deal with responsibility, the use of power (or authority), racism, and other issues. The characters and the solutions are less clear cut (remembering , of course, we are talking about comics here, so don't expect a Shakespearean understanding of the human condition, or Dickensesqe layering of plots and characters).
Beg pardon, I forgot.. Happy 4th, Skay!
Yeah, but Metropolis is New York at day, and Gotham is New York at night.
Or something.
Batman is a much more interesting character -- he's a superhero who isn't super, just a guy who has the motivation to train himself up to be the biggest, baddest mother on the block (and, y'know, the money for all those cool gadgets, too).
I do want to see the Superman movie, though. Maybe next week. Mattinee.
Gotham and Metropolis are two different cities. In the DC continuity, they both exist in addition to NYC...Metropolis is in Delaware, and Gotham is in NJ. Malnurtured Snay is right that Metropolis has been called NYC at day, and Gotham NYC at night. They've also been characterized as NYC from 20 stories up, and NYC from 20 stories down, respectively. Skay made a minor mistake in putting Superman in Gotham, but the movie does mention Gotham in passing (suggesting, I guess, that Batman can't do everything himself).
I have a couple of points to make here. Yes, Superman is portrayed as ambiguous, but in the most recent film, and in MANY other Superman adaptations, the question is raised of whether Superman is really good thing for the world at all. After all, Luthor wouldn't have had those crystals if not for Superman, right? In effect, Superman is left having to clean up a mess that he (inadvertently) created. In Superman 2 (to which Superman Returns is a sequel), the world is terrorized by three Kryptonian criminals who only survived Krypton's destruction because Jor-El banished them to the Phantom Zone. Superman, then, effectively had to clean up his father's mess. And so on.
Seen in this light, the Jesus allegory (and let there be no mistake, there were TONS of Jesus parallels in there) can be put together with a "we cannot have good without evil" Miltonian allegory. Would we rather have a world in which nothing happens, or one in which we have an exciting caped hero who's a total do-gooder but inadvertently sometimes leads to the near-destruction of the world?
My other point is that I think you, Skay, would really like the graphic novel Kingdom Come. It explores, to a great extent, how Superman's black-and-white dogooder view of the world doesn't really fit in with today's standards and morals. In short, it imagines a futuristic world in which Superman comes out of retirement and reassembles the JL in order to deal with the new breed of superheroes, who are really reckless. He tries to impose order in a classically Superman way, but he finds that imposing his way on a totally different world can lead to more harm than good. Comparisons to current US foreign policy abound (even though the book was written in 2000, I think).
Remember the origional (I think) superman movie? The one where he spins the earth the other way to reverse time in order to save Lois? I'm pretty sure he knew that would just kill everyone and he was taking his vengence out on the world. That end part was probably just a dream or something.
Crag and others, you're all right of course: it's Metropolis, not Gotham.
And Snay: you're right about Batman. I've always found him intriguing (insofar as I find comic book heroes intriguing at all). Batman is a comic book realization of the kid who reads comic books. We see Superman or Spiderman or the X-Men and say, "Oh man, I wish I had superpowers." Well, and that's what Batman does, too. He is a comment on superheroes as much as he is a superhero himself. It's a very clever and interesting idea.
Finally, Donovan, I love your reading of Superman as cleaning up the very problems that he has created. I find this compelling and really fascinating as a statement of how the good and bad sides are so closely bound together. Nonetheless, it's important that these problems are inadvertent; to some extent, Superman (and the world) is a victim of circumstance. It's not his fault, after all, that super crystals from his homeland are on earth, or that his world otherwise intrudes--for better and worse, into our own. In some ways, this suggests to me a Thomas Hardy-like moral scheme, in which it's intention, and not the actual effects of one's actions, that matters.
One could also posit an interesting theological implication, given the strong evocation of Superman-as-god in this film, at least. His intervention is good, but it is also he that has enabled all the problems in the first place.
I've always thought of Superman as very much a modern deus ex machina, a god who descends from the sky when the world needs him most and fixes all the world's problems, no matter how intractable or unsalvageable the situation seems. I mean, as Benton rightly points out, in the really old movies, he can even reverse time to bring good people back from the dead...
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