The Man of Steel, Not Of Tomorrow

(THERE ARE TOTALLY SPOILERS FOR MAN OF STEEL IN HERE)

If you look over the last few posts in this blog reaching all the way back to September, you'll notice a couple of themes which sort of overlap. They're basically:

A) People are hungry for (and are producing) new and interesting takes on old stories, probably due to the absolutely bonkers amount of media available in modern life.
B) Many big budget movies and games of a genre that frequently paint the protagonist (and the player) as a shining beacon of heroism have started to question that role. See: DMZ, Zero Dark Thirty, Spec Ops: The Line.

It's pretty obvious how these themes can overlap, and together they add up to a lot of media that are primarily concerned with deconstructing whatever it is they're depicting. This means critically examining aspects or tropes of a work that people usually take for granted and trying to apply them to something more closely resembling reality. The result usually is not-strictly speaking-fun, though when done well it can be quite engaging. In some cases it can even perform a necessary function, as when Spec Ops managed to make a lot of video game players and creators realize that maybe making games where the central mechanic is shooting people in the head as realistically as possible isn't the best way to depict heroism.

As far as comics go, the gold standard for deconstruction was Watchmen. It presented an alternate universe where superheroes exist as a fact of life, eventually being outlawed as vigilantes, and these heroes were in turn depicted as people who turned to that life due to ridiculously messed-up personalities. The comic also featured Dr. Manhattan (the blue guy in the picture up there), the only character in this altered history with actual superpowers. He's depicted as a god in the story, and his mere existence is enough to tip the scales of the Cold War in the 80s much farther than they ever went in real life. A character in the book remarks, "The superman exists, and he's American." Later he admits that this statement was altered from its original content, with "superman" standing in for his original phrasing, "God".

So, Man of Steel.

That chin. My God...

I went to see the movie a couple weeks ago with my friends and my mom. It's an origin story for Superman, and in many ways is concerned with updating the character and the story around him for our modern age. In this respect it succeeds, and that's not necessarily a good thing. Or at least not an entirely good thing. The problem doesn't lie in updating the character but rather in how the movie goes about it. For instance, in this film a huge portion of the tension in the film derives from the idea that Superman begins as something of a reluctant hero, as it's clear that if the people of Earth were to learn of this god-like superhuman in their midst and what he was capable of, the ramifications would be profound and far-reaching. And that's cool! That's an interesting angle to take on the character, because as Watchmen explored almost twenty years ago, having a being with legitimate superpowers inhabiting our planet would mess up a whole lot of stuff, and that's not even touching on the fact that he's also an alien. When this tension is front and center, as it is for most of the first half of the movie, it gives us some really good character moments. I'm not the first to say it, but it's worth it to reiterate that the flashbacks in this movie with Supes' dad Jonathan Kent (played by Kevin Costner) are easily the best parts of the movie.

But the filmmakers wanted to have their cake and eat it too. They didn't just want the character of Superman to be updated for the current era, they wanted his actions to reflect it as well. As a result, the last half of the movie (though it felt like more) is essentially one extended action scene, with just a few perfunctory story beats sprinkled in throughout. As a quick aside, one can note that speaking on just a functional level, this already isn't that great: there are at least two different climaxes in the movie, and since the action is almost uninterrupted, it tends to blend together. By the time Zod and Superman are throwing satellites at each other, it's kind of hard to care.

The real problem with the movie, however, runs much deeper. Much has already been said of the fact that Superman isn't very heroic in the last part of the movie, particularly since so much of the finale involves what must be the deaths of hundreds, if not thousands, of innocent bystanders. There are arguments that could be made that this is an early Superman, still getting to grips with his role, but those don't really hold up. After all, we see him saving people throughout the first half of the movie, both as a kid on a schoolbus and into his adulthood as a drifter. It's not like he needs to have the concept of nobility and using his powers for good explained to him, as he's clearly had those values instilled in him by his adoptive father and later a projection of his real one. But outside of pure story logic, there are more fundamental reasons why Superman in Man of Steel isn't as heroic as he should be.

Nolan's Batfilms led to the idea of big-budget superhero movies that could treat their subjects more seriously than the campy affairs that had dominated screens up to that point. A big part of why that worked is because Batman is the perfect character for that treatment, as he isn't really superhuman like other DC characters are. He's a really smart and really rich guy who has access to cutting edge tech and he fights crime, but he does so totally outside of the law and in ways that invite a hell of a lot of ethical questions. Those aspects are all central to his character. He operates in the shadows and is accountable to no one but himself.

Now think about Superman. He flies high in the sky for all to see. He's an ideal humans are supposed to strive towards, a symbol of hope and compassion tempered by humility. His feats are performed for all the world to see, and his secret identity isn't maintained so he can keep being a hero, but instead is there to protect the ones he loves. Batman as a hero is all about vindication and delivering justice, while Superman is all about kindness and offering protection.

Now contrast that with the guy we got in Man of Steel.

As noted in the articles linked to above, once the punches start flying and real danger is introduced to the world, this Superman doesn't spend a whole lot of time saving people. In fact, the way he fights makes it clear that he isn't paying much attention to the safety of people who might be caught up in the conflict. Or maybe it's just the way it's shot. The spectacle that's on display takes center stage to the detriment of all the people who are supposedly getting killed just off-camera. The buildings they're hiding in are merely props to be used and abused by the supermen fighting before us. Superman's strength and all the cool moves he can pull off are almost fetishized by the filmmakers, and practically all the attention is focused on them. As a result we lose sight of the people caught up in all this as the camera lovingly focuses on the impossible chin and rippling muscles of the son of Jor-El.

And this gets really troubling when one realizes that this is the guy who's being presented to us as an almost perfect being, an ideal to which we should all aspire (and I mention that line again because it's pretty much integral to Superman as a character, spoken almost verbatim by his Kryptonian father). Not once during any of the three final battles does he take time to actually save people. He lets the military bomb the shit out of a small town and smashes Zod through buildings people must have been hiding in, causing them to collapse. At the end, he's forced to kill Zod before he fries a family with eye lasers, and though this causes Superman great anguish, it feels almost like the family is inserted there just to give Superman an excuse to snap Zod's neck. After all, why should the audience care what happens to them when it's clear that so many more have died, many due to negligence on Superman's part?

None of this would matter if it weren't for the fact that the intention of the filmmakers here is so clearly pointing in the other direction. They want us to rally behind this guy and believe in him as the champion of Truth, Justice, and the American Way. This is a tentpole picture aimed at introducing people to the character who basically defines the term "superhero". But in doing so, they clearly think the way into the hearts of modern audiences is by showing how hard Superman can punch a dude and how he, too, can operate outside the bounds of the law.  One of the last things he does in the film is take down a military surveillance drone as a way of showing the General who sent it to spy on him that he's on their side, so he should just trust him to do the right thing already, despite the whole "killing thousands of Americans in Metropolis" thing that happened like two minutes of screen time ago. That isn't Superman behavior, that's Batman's style. For Superman to mean anything, he has to be a character who realizes that just because flaunting the laws of man can make his job a bit easier doesn't make it the right thing to do.

As my mom and I drove home after the movie, she was very distressed over what she'd just seen. She actually holds Superman near and dear to her heart, having grown up watching the old black and white TV series, and what she saw on screen was such a bastardization of the character that she couldn't stand it. Her reaction is in fact what compelled me to write this post. I pointed her towards Superman: Red Son, one of my favorite comic books ever, as a prime example of how to re-envision a character without changing him completely. Just because Superman landed in the Ukraine instead of Kansas might change some key facets of his character, but it doesn't change who he is as a character. We recognize him as Superman, just different.

The Man of Steel is hard to recognize as Superman though. There are bits and pieces that make sense, but the character changes so drastically in the last part of the film that he could just as easily be called Punchguy, the Guy who Punches So Hard And Can Also Fly, and not much would be that different. The last act of the movie stands as a troubling portrait of what people might see as what "heroism" means in our day and age. The Man of Steel is a hero because of how powerful he is, not because of what he chooses to do with that power. That's not how you describe a hero, that's how you describe the ubermensch. And that's not who Superman was ever supposed to be.