Four-Colour Commentary

Superman Returns

There's been some negative feelings about this movie from people I've talked to, but I have to say that I was pretty thoroughly entertained the whole time, and I saw a certain thread of the story that absolutely grabbed my attention.

SPOILER ALERT. If you haven't seen the movie yet, I'm about to give away all the surprises. You have been warned.

One of the big complaints is that Lois has little, if anything, to do. She's blank, lacking in texture. Margot Kidder's Lois might have turned into a giggling teenager whenever Superman was around, but that was in contrast to how she acted around everyone else: tough, strong, in control, and professional. You got the sense that Kidder's Lois had grown up in the big city and didn't take crap from anybody. Kate Bosworth's Lois, to steal the words of a few friends of mine, was just angry and bitter. She didn't have the texture, the internal differences, that made Kidder's Lois more interesting.

But here's a reading that, I think, demonstrates why Bosworth's Lois is the way she is. It's not an excuse, mind you, but it might serve as an explanation of what they were going for. By the time Superman Returns happens, Lois has given up on ever seeing Superman again. She's written her "Why the World Doesn't Need Superman" article and it's her crowning achievement as a journalist (Pulitzer!), but she has lost her strength, the fire in her belly that, presumably, attracted Clark to her in the first place. Still in love with a man who left a long time ago and whom she's given up on ever seeing again, and in a relationship with a man whom she cares for but doesn't feel passionately about, she's moved to the 'burbs, symbolically and literally shedding her urban attitude in the process, and generally given up on her life. Without Superman around, she's barely alive at all. This reading doesn't redeem her character, and is not exactly music to the ears of a feminist like myself, but it at least explains her flatness.

Which makes it all the more difficult to understand why Clark is still so obsessed with her, but that, too, has a corresponding explanation in the script. If his love for her seems odd, misplaced even (why still feel so strongly about this empty woman?), it's because he's not in love with her so much as he's in search of a family, a secure place in a world that left him behind. He was so obsessed with finding an identity within the vastness of the universe that he travelled through space for five years to find Krypton, but when he got there it was a "graveyard." It completely failed to fulfil his desire for an identity. He's like an adopted child who goes to find his birth parents only to discover that they're dead, and that he was actually orphaned.

There's an interesting missed opportunity, there, to locate himself in the reality of the Kent farm. His mother assures him that he's not alone, that he has a family and a home, but he doesn't seem to take any solace in that. In fact, he immediately goes back to Metropolis even though he doesn't have anywhere to live there, literally no home, and Martha Kent[1] is symbolically cut out of his life when he lies in the hospital. She's forced to wait outside because she has no public relationship with 'Superman,' while Lois Lane is waved through because she's his 'girlfriend,' despite the boyfriend and the kid. The Superman identity overshadows the Clark Kent identity. But before all of that happens, Clark renews his quest for Lois after returning to Earth. He presumably expects, assumes even, that she'll be single and available, just like she always is (and has been since the 40s). Instead, she's built a family around herself, but one that leaves her dead inside.

So, Lois is empty because she has resigned herself to living in the absence of Superman, and 'Kal' is chasing an identity as Superman rather than finding one in Clark Kent. These two idiots would probably have kept running around in circles if not for Jason. Lois is still left empty, pining away for Superman despite her stable family life, so again, she's kinda flat. However, Superman has gained an identity, all of the sudden. He's a father. Because of his (ahem) 'god-like' Kryptonian father, and in no small part because of his dead human father, he takes on that paternal role with full gusto. It is the sense of placement in the universe that he was looking for, and we can tell because he stops chasing after Lois at that point. He doesn't go to their house to stalk her anymore. Instead, he goes to visit his son (or stalk his son, depending on how generous you are about it).

By that point, he's also symbolically rejected his Kryptonian heritage by tossing the crystal island into space, along with all the data shards of Jor El. The character has three names, Superman, Clark Kent, and Kal El. The first denotes the superhero, the saviour. The second denotes the human inside the suit, or alternatively, the disguise the superhero wears. The third, often forgotten one, denotes the alien. By the end of Superman Returns, he's chosen the Superman identity because in that identity, he is Jason's father. Clark Kent can't be paternal towards that child, but Superman can. It's his and Lois' (and presumably eventually Jason's) secret family. Meanwhile, he's allowed his Clark Kent identity to basically wither and die. He ignores his mother and more or less gives up on Clark's job or his chances with Lois (I'm assuming a little bit there, but I think it fits). Finally, the Kal El identity has been tossed into space (though he could go and retrieve those crystals if he worked fast).

The movie is, then about finding a new place in a world that left you behind. The life he had before, the stable but excruciating love triangle between Clark, Lois, and Superman, simply isn't an option anymore. Instead, he finds a new place in a new, weird kind of family. There are some threads left hanging, and it's not entirely healthy for Lois, who's still dead inside, and Clark, who has no life to speak of, but I think we can trust Brian Singer enough to believe that he'll return to them later.

There are two other thoughts I have to express, unrelated to the above. First, more than a few people have complained or otherwise rolled their eyes at the really heavy-handed religious over-tones of the film. Jor El's speeches, taken from the original Mario Puso script and read by Marlon Brando, are dripping with messianic implications. They're not quite Christian, there are saviours in almost every religion and if you believe Joseph Campbell they all act the same way, but in our ostensibly Christian culture, it's hard to read them any other way. This film's plot, as yet another friend pointed out, follows the basic cycle of the life of Jesus: coming from a kind of obscurity, he becomes a hero, saves everyone by sacrificing himself, and rises from the dead. We could even say that he spreads the knowledge he gains from his heroic journey if we see his having a son as symbolically passing his divine powers onto humanity by interbreeding with them (which is a little Neitzschean). Couple that with the explicit references to his being a saviour in the script, and his cruciform pose after lets go of the island in space and flapping, wing-like cape, and the implication is pretty hard to deny.

However, the overtness of the references to being a saviour transform a fairly simple bit of symbolism, 'Superman stands for Jesus,' into a kind of commentary. Although by the end of the movie, he's once again saved everybody, Lois still can't write her "Why the World Needs Superman" editorial, which is what she was originally trying to write but couldn't when she created her Pulitzer-prise winning "Why the World Doesn't Need Superman" piece. (That bit of business is explained in the four-issue prequel mini-series, plotted by Singer). Even Superman himself phrases it as a question during his trip into the sky with Lois: "If the world doesn't need a saviour, why do I hear them asking for one?" In terms of concrete plot details, the threat to the world that comes up in that film only exists because of Superman's presence on it; Lex builds his island out of Kryptonian crystal technology, so Superman only manages to save the world from a threat that he introduced into it (and then failed to contain by leaving in the arctic where, relatively speaking, and damn fool could find it). Finally, as I have argued, Superman does not find his identity as a specifically Christian saviour figure at all; he becomes the Father, not the Son. The religious overtones are most certainly there, but they're not nearly as cut-and-dry as 'Superman = Jesus.' The whole thing is generally left hanging or introduced as questions without answers. Is he a saviour? Isn't he? Do we really need one? The movie's plot elements don't provide us a ready-made answer.

And one last complaint that points out something interesting about this movie. There is no knock-down, drag-out fight at the end of this film. The airplane rescue is pulse-pounding fun, but that's about all you get for 'action.' The rest of Superman's appearances show him either stalking Lois (creepy!), or displaying his feats of strength, and that latter element is my real point. Superman in film isn't much of an action character. In the comics, he gets into serious fights all the time, as is true of the cartoons. The DC universe is populated with characters who have the sheer strength to take him on. In the films, though, his only supervillain is Lex Luthor, who meets Superman's brawn with brains, and usually obviates the fight in which he would undoubtedly lose. So if Superman can't be an 'action' hero in that setting, he becomes something else, something more like Gilgamesh, Odysseus, or Beowulf. His saving Metropolis and tossing the crystal island into space isn't 'action' in the contemporary sense. They are, instead, heroic deeds. They are awe-inspiring because they're big and even impossible. "Managed to outsmart the Cyclops," sounds a lot like "Won the swimming contest in sub-zero ocean while wearing full armour," which in turn sounds a lot like, "Lifted an entire island of kryptonite above his head and threw it into space." These kinds of events are not the spectacle of battle, as in the three-way fencing match in Pirates of the Caribbean: II, but the spectacle of awesome power, and mighty strength. Being disappointed at the lack of a Big Fight to end the film is actually (which I was!) is actually a misapprehension of how this film worked.

[1]Ever notice that Bruce Wayne and Clark Kent's mothers are both named 'Martha'? Was that just a stereotypically motherly name in the 50s, which is when those characters were given names? Is it just that 'Martha' kind of sounds like 'mother'? These things keep me up at night.

Posted by orion at July 10, 2006 4:51 PM