What Superman Could (And Maybe Should) Be
A few weeks ago, I made someone audibly gasp during a conversation about superheroes. We were talking about the different kinds of heroes and what impact they had on what stories got told. And this person asked “Well, who’s more interesting, Batman or Superman?” And I replied instantly, “Superman.”
It’s true, I admit it, you’ve caught me. I prefer Superman. I find him more interesting, likable, and complicated than Batman. I like his costume more (with trunks, please), I like his backstory more, I like his best stories *far* more than those of Batman. This shocks people. Most people I talk to are convinced of Superman’s irrelevance by default. They automatically assume that he’s old-fashioned, out of touch, and flat out boring. They couldn’t be more wrong.
Let me clarify here that Superman is as close as our current moment has to a contemporary Hercules, and as such, there are a myriad versions and interpretations of the character. Many artists and writers see Superman as a big wall of dumb muscle. Some see him as a hokey grandfather type, some see him as a god, some just don’t care either way.
In the present, attempts have been made to “modernize” the Man of Steel by darkening his colors, taking away the trunks, making him smile less and punch more, that kind of thing. And that’s fine. If you see Superman as the kind of guy who is always burdened by his godlike abilities and hates the responsibility they force upon him, that’s cool. But my vision of Superman is a little different.
See, there’s this nature vs. nurture dichotomy you can use to frame most discussion of this guy. He’s an alien, but he’s also from Kansas. He can fly over the speed of sound and shoot beams of heat from his eyes, but he also really loves his mom. These days, most people usually think about those former qualities. They see the big, strong, indestructible alien holding up the weight of the world with really impressive biceps. And that’s totally valid as a vision of Superman. It falls in line with the famous Superman speech given by David Carradine’s character in Kill Bill Vol. 2, where he says that Clark Kent is Superman’s disguise and that he represents how Superman sees humans. He sees them as sad and weak and blah, blah, blah.
I just don’t personally buy that. If you ask me, Clark Kent is who this guy actually is. Sure the glasses are fake and the stumbling and stuttering is all performance. But everyone performs. We all act in social settings differently than we do in private. We all try to be funnier in front of our crush or braver in front of our kids or more articulate in front of our boss. Clark is just trying to appear believably as someone who *definitely* isn’t Superman.
Everything else, the tense care for everyone around him, the strict journalistic devotion to truth, the fawning crush on Lois Lane, that’s all 100% genuine Kansas-bred Clark Kent. To me, that’s central to the character. He’s not an alien, he’s barely an immigrant. Clark Kent is just a guy who can do more deciding to do more. Not for love, not for fame, not because he sees some condescending need to shepherd humanity away from danger, but because it would be wrong not to save a cat from a tree, or talk a girl off a ledge, or save the world from alien invaders.
In All-Star Superman, probably the best Superman story that will ever be told, Grant Morrison perfectly threads the needle between Clark’s power and his kindness. He’s not a general, he’s just the big kid. He knows a little more, he can do a little more, and he’s right more often than he’s wrong. And his role on Earth isn’t to be better than humanity, it’s to help humanity become better than they are. Clark inspires (and in some case directly contributes to) massive scientific advancements and social progressions. Even while dying, he changes the world around him by living as an aspirational figure and by working to directly improve lives. He also smiles sometimes.
This is really at the heart of Superman for me. Clark decided to become Superman before he knew about Krypton, or Jor-El, or even the Justice League. He had his mom make him a costume so he could go out and save lives because he knew he could do it, and thought he should do it. Clark isn’t Superman because he has to be, he’s Superman in spite of the fact that he doesn’t have to be.
So, I hear you asking, how does this make him more interesting than Batman? Well I see it this way: when Batman is fighting a villain, he’s doing it because deep down he knows what violent crime does to its victims. He knows that it hurts. So, he has decided to mitigate that pain as much as possible, taking a sort of utilitarian view: “less crime means less pain means better world”. But when Superman is facing a villain, he’s exercising pure, unadulterated goodness. And that means that the result isn’t always that the bad guy gets thrown in jail. It means that if the bad guy is just in trouble, Superman saves them from themselves and gets them help. If they’re beyond reason, he stops them. If they’re right, but going about things the wrong way, he learns from them, and then allows them to learn from him. Every encounter is a new opportunity for Superman not just to save lives, not just to mitigate pain, but to actively improve the world.
Much of the recent conversation around this character has been colored by the bold Zack Snyder interpretation of the Man of Steel as portrayed by Henry Cavill. I’m going to go into detail as to what works and doesn’t for me here, and I am going to edge a little into politics, so warning in advance…
Snyder’s Superman is completely valid. It’s just not my cup of tea. Snyder chooses to focus on a popular allegorical comparison, that being the comparison of Superman with Jesus Christ. Both are supernatural saviors sent to change the world for the better and both are seen as being somewhat punished for this. So in Snyder’s view, Clark is primarily a godly alien with a mandate that he can choose to follow or not. And that’s fine, but it leads to issues.
Personally, I’m put off by the notion of Pa Kent telling a young Clark that he can let innocent children die in an accident just to protect his secret identity. I’m not a fan of Ma Kent telling Clark that he doesn’t “owe” the human race anything. I don’t think Superman should be looking for compensation for doing good. I don’t think he should be grappling with an issue as simple as “do I let children die even though I can prevent it easily?” It’s fine to paint a younger Clark who struggles to find a place to use his skills, who resists the call to become a hero. That makes sense. And it was done well in J. Michael Straczynski’s Superman: Earth One, a retelling of Superman’s early days in a more modern DC Universe, upon which most of Snyder’s Man of Steel is based. But by the time the cape is on, it seems like Superman should have figured out whether he thinks mankind “owes” him anything for being a hero.
Snyder has always seemed to be more interested in the kind of hero that Batman is. And that’s pretty clear when you know a little about his personal politics and moral philosophy [to be clear, I think Snyder is a gifted filmmaker and doesn’t deserve any kind of vitriol for any of his personal beliefs, much as I may fundamentally disagree].
Snyder is on the record as something of an objectivist, a follower of the moral philosophy crafted by author Ayn Rand. The basic gist is a kind of moralized selfishness, the notion that one’s only true goal in life should be to further one’s own personal happiness. Under this philosophy, it makes sense that Superman would debate whether or not to save innocent people or stop destructive mad men based on whether it would benefit or hurt him personally. If Superman is a Christ-like savior, his own personal judgement is clearly more important and authoritative than that of we measly human ants.
The political continuance of Objectivism is essentially the notion that superior people, those who are smarter, more able-bodied, and more moral will automatically succeed, thrive, and achieve power as long as the systems of society don’t interfere. Hence, the preference for laissez-faire capitalism and deregulation. So this is a Superman who, obviously superior to his contemporaries, is owed a position of power, authority, and respect based on who he intrinsically is, not on any of his actions or relationships to others. Snyder’s Superman dates Lois Lane because the strongest man gets the prettiest girl. He beats Lex Luthor because Lex Luthor is human and weak. And when he does do things that are beneficial to humanity, he hates it. He hates saving people from floods and thugs and bombs. He hates being Superman.
Of course, this take is totally reasonable. Being Superman is a very time consuming, often thankless, and not terribly safe task. I’m sure its no walk in the park. But what does this do to that other side of Superman, the aspirational figure from Kansas who loves his mom saves cats from trees? It makes him impossible. And it tells the audience that if you’re capable of doing good, you should check to see what you can get out of it first. To me, that’s tragic.
Morrison’s Superman, Straczynski’s Superman, my Superman does good because his parents told him that its good to do good things. He helps people because they need help. He does everything he can and he doesn’t ask for anything in return, because one day, everyone will do exactly that, and if everyone is helping someone else, nobody needs anything in return.
Superman should exist as a force that moves humanity toward a better state of being. He should be a Utopian figure. The question isn’t “what would it be like if Superman existed in our world?” its “what would our world be like if Superman existed?”
Further, the grim objectivist Superman just doesn’t have all that much story potential. Every encounter with a bad guy just boils down to whether Superman thinks this fight will tarnish his reputation. Every time he saves a city from a natural disaster, he’ll just sigh through it and wonder when he’ll start getting paid. Faced with a moral dilemma like “Save Lois or save the bus full of children”, this Clark will just shrug and save Lois because he likes Lois and she’s pretty and he’s never met those kids. Or, even worse, he’d save the kids because mathematically its technically more saving that way, and that looks better in the press.
A Superman that is driven by the need to do good for goodness’ sake provides endless narrative potential. The aforementioned dilemma is so much more interesting when Clark has to weigh the good Lois does as a journalist against the morals of allowing the children to die and, more importantly, he figures out how to save both, because that’s the right thing to do.
In that situation, Batman just saves the kids because that will cause less pain. He just grimaces at the bad guy and then says “She died for the greater good.” And then he goes home to his mansion and tells his butler what a bad day he had. Superman saves everyone by sheer force of will. It may be less dramatic, but its so much more interesting. This is why the Christopher Reeve portrayal is so iconic. That Clark literally reverses time just to save Lois after having saved the entire planet. He refuses to let any losses slip through and he uses every ounce of everything he has to make sure that everyone makes it. That’s a hero.
So, the next time someone says that Superman is boring or old-fashioned or simple, consider why they think this. Ask yourself when being aspirational, thinking forward, and doing good for the sake of doing good became “boring” and “old-fashioned”, and then go rescue a cat from a tree.
P.S. Tyler Hoechlin is doing incredible work on exactly this kind of earnest and kind Superman on the CW of all places! Check out Superman & Lois!
