Superman Is About the Anti-War Vibe Shift
Supervillains used to be foreign enemies. Now the villain is a defense contractor who wants to start a regime change war.
Superman has always been about politics. The superhero's creators, Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, originally wrote the character as a rebuke to Nazi racial ideology. The Kryptonian boy emigrated from his homeland in a way that paralleled the Jewish experience and became the greatest defender of "truth, justice, and the American way."
So it's no surprise that audiences have been trying to figure out the political message in the latest Superman movie. After all, the backdrop of the film is a war between the fictional nations of Boravia and Jarhanpur that Superman is trying to stop. Boravia has a clear Eastern European aesthetic, and Jarhanpur has a clear Middle Eastern aesthetic. (Everything past here is a spoiler, by the way.)
Left-wing online streamer Hasan Piker said that the movie was clearly an "analog for Israel and Palestine," while a Jerusalem Post column argued that the movie was written with "obvious metaphors about Russia vs. Ukraine" with some Middle Eastern references thrown in. Of course, all of these things can be true at the same time. The movie is a pastiche of everything going on in international news, and trying to read a specific reference to a specific foreign crisis is a mistake.
But perhaps the lack of specific references lets the movie tell a more general story about foreign policy: Fighting terrorism or tyranny has become a pretext for the U.S. government to support war overseas, often against the sympathies of the American people. The fact that a campy comic book takes this attitude is a sign that American political culture has really shifted, given the war on terror politics of superhero movies in the past couple of decades.
Superman director James Gunn insists that he didn't have any real-world conflict in mind for the movie. More likely, he had several. Boravia, the aggressor country, has leaders who speak a vaguely Slavic language and live in a capital with Russian architecture. Unlike Russia, but like Israel, it is a cherished U.S. ally that uses American-made weaponry. Jarhanpur, the victim country, is an oil-rich desert nation with a tyrannical yet weak government, which reads like any recent U.S. regime change target in the Middle East.
Lex Luthor, the American supervillain, is a more straightforward metaphor. He manufactures creepy surveillance technology, is gunning for U.S. military contracts, and thinks he's smarter than everyone on Earth. In other words, he's an on-the-nose parody of modern-day Silicon Valley.
Just compare Superman to Iron Man, the first movie of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Tony Stark, a genius defense contractor, is the hero. The story revolves around Stark's fight against an Afghan terrorist group. Although Stark has a moral crisis about manufacturing weapons, it is because those weapons fall into the hands of U.S. enemies. In the end, he offers his services to a U.S. government agency, SHIELD.
In Iron Man 3, the villain is an anti-American caricature named The Mandarin, who rants about the genocide of Native Americans as he blows up U.S. bases in the Middle East. He turns out to be in league with a subversive conspiracy within the U.S. government. The villain of Black Panther is Killmonger, an African nationalist revolutionary who fights against the CIA. The world is filled with people who hate America for incoherent, hypocritical reasons and must be stopped by well-funded, globetrotting government operatives.
It is possible to read Superman as a parable for global intervention, in its own way. "Ultimately, Superman is about a guy raised to do the right thing and act decently by a nice married couple from Kansas whose belief in his own righteousness turns him into the world's policeman," writes Sonny Bunch in The Bulwark, the standard bearer of neoconservatism. "And if that ain't American Greatness, well, what is?"
But Superman does not make the case that the U.S. government itself can or should be that policeman. Boravia, again, is emboldened to do evil because it is a U.S. ally. Superman is offended at the idea that he should act as a representative of the White House, and Pentagon officials are suspicious that superheroes operate outside their control. Planet Watch, the Superman equivalent to Marvel's SHIELD, turns out to be a front for Luthor to seize more power for himself.
At the same time, Superman is not an anti-American movie. America regains its innocence from within. Enterprising journalists expose Luthor's plot. The Pentagon gives up trying to stop Superman and the Justice Gang from saving the Jarhanpurian resistance. In the end, Superman renounces the megalomaniac plans of his Kryptonian parents and embraces his humble, adoptive Kansas family.
What's really interesting is the fact that Superman's moderate, upbeat message of reform caused more of a pop culture stir than other, potentially more subversive blockbuster films. The Avatar series has viewers cheer for native insurgents as they kill and smash symbols of imperial military power. The Dune series is based on a novel about the victory of galactic jihad.
On the other hand, those stories are pure fantasy. American audiences can put some distance, as Avatar director James Cameron did, between themselves and the spacefaring megacorporation attacking Pandora. The war on terror will not end like Dune 2, with a Bedouin horde breaking into the imperial palace with nuclear missiles and giant worms.
Superman, as goofy as it is, is set against the backdrop of real-life America with its real-life problems and dilemmas. And the surface-level, comic book understanding of the U.S. government is no longer that it is a protector against a world of sinister enemies. The problems, and the solutions, are right at home.
