Cancel Culture Monkeys and Military Industrial Menaces: James Gunn's Superman Is a Silly Delight
Superman is not "Superwoke."
The first and most important thing to say about James Gunn's Superman is that there's a really cute superdog, Krypto. Like Superman himself, he's fundamentally good at heart, but sometimes struggles to behave. What if your loveable-but-not-particularly-well-trained pooch had super strength and the ability to fly? It's cute. If you like the idea of a sidekick super pet, you'll probably like this movie.
But since the conversation around the movie has shifted to its right-wing critics, who are upset that Gunn described Superman as an "immigrant," let's take a step back.
Imagine, for a moment, that a superhero actually existed in something like the real world, and that comic scenarios—giant monsters attacking cities, super-powered fist fights above major metros, alien invasions, and so forth—were a regular part of our lives. It is impossible to imagine such scenarios without immediately understanding that they would be viewed as political events, with political consequences. If guys in capes were knocking down tall buildings with any sort of frequency, the government would surely have something to say.
In superhero comic books themselves, this has been understood for decades. Just to name a few examples: Alan Moore's Watchmen was premised partly on the political realignment that would come from a real-life superpowered figure, Frank Miller's Dark Knight Returns positioned Superman as Batman's true enemy and a tool of Reaganite overreach, and Mark Millar's controversial run on The Authority dealt with a super-team that intervened in global political affairs, to the frustration of actual elected officials. All of these stories took for granted that superpowers were an inherently political force, whether or not for good.
But superhero movies have largely avoided the political implications of superheroes and superpowers, even in films like The Batman or Captain America: Civil War, where politics were ostensibly invoked. Those movies, whatever their other strengths, mostly gestured vaguely at the idea of politics while painstakingly avoiding saying anything specific about them or even treating them as live concerns in the world.
So it's refreshing to see that writer-director James Gunn's new take on Superman takes the political connotations of Superman as a given, understanding that the Man of Steel would exist in a political context in a political world, with all the mess and moral complication that entails.
And yet despite trolling critics suggesting that—and it makes me so exhausted to type this—it's not Superman but "Superwoke," this movie does so in a way that never comes across as lecturing or hectoring or gratingly preachy. There's no psuedo-stirring Aaron Sorkin monologue to wrap things up, just a nifty little speech about what it means to be a decent human, even a super one. Gunn's Superman is a pleasantly light cartoon fantasy about the struggle for common decency.
We get brief scenes in which the villainous Lex Luthor tries to sell weapons to the Department of Defense and get official permission to kill his super nemesis. There's a moment when Superman is arrested—he turns himself in—and is informed that he has no rights, simply because he's an alien. The movie's plot revolves around the invasion of one fictional country by its authoritarian neighbor, an invasion that Superman tries repeatedly to stop. On cable news, Luthor asks who put "unelected metahumans" in charge of the nation's foreign policy? Lois Lane, both a newspaper reporter and Superman's girlfriend, asks a version of the same question: Who is he to intervene, to make policy, to decide?
Meanwhile, Superman's world now includes the chaos and cultural detritus of modernity, and all the unpleasantness that comes with it. There's a funny aside about how Green Lantern, a supporting hero who steals every scene he's in, has taken a vow not to get involved in politics: when challenged on the specifics of the vow, he fumes that it's clearly implied.
Gunn's Superman is not a figure of pure adoration: as a public, politicized figure in the modern world, he inevitably has haters online, and they have organized around a profane nickname that drives him nuts. As it turns out, the haters are not bots, but computer-controlled monkeys Luthor has hidden in an unstable pocket dimension, apparently with internet access, who post incessant social media garbage designed to poison public discourse and turn opinion against the hero. If infinite monkeys can create Shakespeare, they can also create Twitter mobs.
Yes, Luthor's plan is to have Superman canceled on social media—not a particularly surprising plot point, given that Gunn himself was at one point briefly canceled over his own years-old, gross-out social media provocations.
Gunn nodded to this in his previous DC Comics feature, The Suicide Squad, in which the villain used mind-control to brainwash the public into a mindless, murderous conformity. The deep earnestness of Superman's hatred for the mean hashtag suggests that Gunn has probably been quite aggravated by online name-calling too.
This might sound like a ripped-from-Twitter Superman, entirely embroiled in of-the-moment triviality, but I promise it's not.
Gunn's Superman is only a good enough movie. It's overstuffed with plot and somewhat frantically paced. While it blessedly avoids the origin story trap that has plagued so many superhero movie reboots, it probably relies a little too much on preexisting knowledge of DC Comics lore. Yes, I watched the triumphant '90s animated series, so I'm familiar with the lesser-known characters—but how many viewers already recognize Metamorpho?
But if Gunn's movie is only good enough as cinema, it's a great take on Superman—upbeat, earnest, cartoonish, brightly colored, more than a little silly, but enamored with the idea, and challenge, of human goodness and decency in a world that wants to bring him down. That Superman is an alien, an outsider, and, yes, an immigrant from another world only makes him see the challenge more clearly, without the jadedness that comes from familiarity.
Gunn's Superman, the character, is a superhero who tries to be good in the world as it exists, which is to say a world of politics and politicization, a world with cancel culture monkeys and various military industrial menaces. Gunn's Superman, the movie, tries to be good and decent in a real world that can't help but politicize everything. The film's irritable political critics clearly couldn't manage that feat. What makes this Superman super, despite its flaws, is that in this difficult task, it largely succeeds.
