We offer below another excerpt from Reviews for Non-Existent Movies by Eric Goulden Kimball, available here!
It is beyond cliché at this point to note how Superman is a Christ figure (certainly anyone with fond memories of the 1978 Richard Donner films is aware of the obvious parallels). Lest often noted however is how much the comic-book Superman deliberately undercuts the Nietzschean concept of the Ubermensch that was in currency during the era of Superman’s debut back in the 1930s. The Nazis then in ascendancy in Germany were fond of exploiting Nietzsche’s concept of the Superman–that is, the iron-willed philosopher who transcends human morality–in order to rationalize and justify their own racism, sadism, and viciousness (with the cruelest irony of all being that Nietzsche, whatever his other personal flaws, was adamantly opposed to antisemitism–even willing to break off a friendship with Richard Wagner at the height of his celebrity over it).
The American Superman, by contrast, does not transcend human morality, but fulfills it. He uses his nigh-omnipotent powers not to dominate humanity, but to serve it. It is perhaps no accident that Superman’s creators, Jerry Siegel and Joe Schuster, were the sons of Jewish immigrants–nor that they bring a Jewish sense of ethics and messianic morality to the character. It is this sensibility which Hollywood has so recurrently failed to realize in the 21st century (certainly we are not the first wise-acres to point out that if Hollywood can’t figure out how to make the story of a working-class immigrant taking on an evil billionaire resonate with the youth of America, then that is very much a them problem); it is hence this version of Superman that Eric Goulden Kimball has attempted to sketch out in this latest excerpt from Reviews for Non-Existent Films.
Review: Clark Kent Knows When It Shouldn’t Soar (Grade: B)
The surprise billion-dollar success of Joker in 2019 has apparently pushed DC/Warner Bros. in a sudden new direction entirely: rather than continually trying (and failing) to chase that MCU expanded universe dream, they are now experimenting with smaller, grittier, self-contained comic book stories. And no one can accuse them of not going whole hog on this new format: their next installment has been a modest-budget version of none other than Superman himself.
It is fairly uncontroversial to state that there has not been a widely-loved Superman flick since the first two Christopher Reeve installments of the late-‘70s (which, in terms of comic book adaptations, is downright pre-historic). What all subsequent film versions have had to struggle with, is how to render this absolute Mary Sue of a god-man interesting? Although the idea of Supes has always proven irresistible to our collective sense of childlike wonderment, there is in retrospect very little actual drama to be gleaned from a man with literally no weaknesses. Inevitably, every film version has had to figure out how to de-power the Man of Steel—even if only temporarily—which has typically been accomplished through that old standby Kryptonite (a trope so hoary that the word is now virtually synonymous with “only weakness”). Kudos to Clark Kent, then, for at last finding a more elegant solution to this old dilemma: by shifting the focus from Kal-el to his alter ego.
For the figure of Clark Kent has typically been treated (by both film and comic-books alike) as either a comedic relief or a non-factor entirely. Superman has always been in disguise as a mild-mannered reporter after all, not the other way around. His day-job as a reporter for the Daily Planet has likewise been largely rendered a plot-device, as merely a way to explain why he is always at the right place at the right time. But nowadays, especially in our era of the catastrophic collapse of the newspaper industry, Kent’s increasingly anachronistic job has been treated as downright embarrassing. Yet what Clark Kent does instead is lead into the skid, by positing: what if Clark Kent is a newspaper reporter not merely because that cut-throat career in a dwindling field is somehow a convenient disguise, but because he is actually a highly skilled and committed investigative reporter? That is, what if Superman moonlights as a journalist because he actually believes in it, and thinks he can do just as much good exposing corruption in high places through investigative journalism as he can through his superpowers? In Clark Kent, Superman’s alter-ego as a reporter is every bit as much his calling as his flying around the world is. And it is in the interest of preserving his other calling that the film forces him to temporarily de-power.
What happens is that Kent is investigating EPA violations by Luther-Corp (the film refreshingly skips the origin story that everyone’s got memorized by now), which leads to him trespassing onto company property in order to get the scoop for his upcoming expose. He has brought along photographer Jimmy Olsen—so already, he has put himself into a position wherein he cannot exercise his powers openly. After picking a lock and entering a warehouse, they find that someone has tipped off the police; Clark Kent helps Jimmy escape, but he himself is soon surrounded by police officers. Going peacefully, Clark soon finds himself arrested and charged; Lex Luthor’s lawyers press charges, but drop the felony charge after a public outcry following the Daily Planet’s exposes. Nevertheless, the lawyers still refuse to drop all charges, so Kent is still sentenced to 30 days in county jail. Suddenly in the center of the public eye—and with Lex Luthor taking a keen interest in the case—Kent must behave as though he were his usual mild-mannered self for a month straight, in order to protect his secret identity.
From there on out, Clark Kent becomes, for the most part, a sort of fish-out-of-water tale. When a large prisoner sucker-punches him in the face on the first day in order to establish prison-yard dominance, he must go down in a way that looks like he is hurt. When he is later assaulted by gang-bangers who have clearly been paid off by Luthor to have him killed in jail, he must behave as though he has been physically beaten—while still “accidentally” knocking away a shank in a plausible way that does not raise suspicion, lest they find their knives shattering on his bullet-proof skin. And when (in the film’s single most controversial scene, which first caused a stir at Cannes), he is surrounded in the shower by criminals intending to sexually assault him, he is faced with the impossible dilemma as whether to allow himself to be so violated and traumatized or to fight back murderously.
As gutsy moves, keeping Superman out of his suit for the majority of the film’s run-time is up there; yet what is most fascinating about this approach is that, well, he actually is in just a county jail! He has not been locked up with secret super-powered villains or monster from outer-space: these really are just low-level inmates, people who made dumb decisions either out of desperation or socio-economic circumstance. (Bruce Wayne even gently teases him about it during a visiting hours session wherein he assures him that the Justice League will keep things safe while he’s on this little “vacation”—the running gag throughout the film is that explosive, Blockbuster-level Justice League action is being reported on prison TVs in the background, without ever being directly shown). Clark Kent’s greatest task isn’t how to battle gods, but how to passed unnoticed among us mere mortals.
The danger in a film of this kind is for Kent to become either some cheap white-savior figure: either inspiring these (predominantly-minority) prisoners to the better angels of their nature through his beatific example (leaning even more heavy-handed with the Jesus imagery than usual); or conversely; learning from these poor, beaten, trodden upon how to better appreciate his own humanity—as though they were all just background characters in his own story.
Give Clark Kent credit, then, for how it threads this particular needle: earlier in the film, before his arrest, while waiting for a bus to work, a random stranger sits next to him, and just starts unloading her personal problems on him. He listens; the stranger even apologizes for unloading on him, saying she doesn’t normally do this, she just somehow sensed he would listen. “You can just tell sometimes,” she says. Notably, he doesn’t try to solve her problems, nor offer advice, or even offer much in conversation: he simply listens, because somehow he likewise intuits that that is enough. In this quick scene, the film efficiently establishes that Kent/Kal-el does not need to learn to appreciate humanity, because he already does; hence, when he arrives in county jail, he swiftly establishes a similar presence. Men in orange jumpsuits just want to sit by him in the cafeteria; they don’t even want someone to talk to per se, just someone to listen. Prison guards, too—including ones clearly paid off to look the other way when he’s surrounded—seem to take an easy shine to him, too. He becomes a sort of Andy Dufresne figure from The Shawshank Redemption, someone people easily gravitate towards in their lowest circumstances.They instinctively can tell that he alone does not seem to posture, that he does not judge, that he has nothing to prove, that they can at last be at ease around him. After each of them talk for a couple minutes while he silently munches or simply sits in his narrow cell, they thank him for the chat, and promise to look out for him.
That is, Clark Kent doesn’t merely make Superman inspiring, it pulls off a far more deft maneuver: it makes Superman genuinely likeable.
These scenes are initially played for mild laughs, but they have pay-off: when the gang-bangers have him surrounded, it is the other prisoners who come and scare them off. When a paid-off prison guard aims his rifle at him, he doesn’t pull the trigger not because he suddenly realizes he’s Superman or even because he has a crisis of conscious; it’s simply because he likes him. And in the notorious shower-rape scene (SPOILER ALERT), Kent is saved at the last second by the man who sucker-punched him on day one: they have since become friends in his short time there, and he scares off the would-be assaulters. Kent finds himself, for the first time, thanking someone else for saving him, and that sincerely—albeit not in the way that his savior likely intended it, though the friendship expressed between the two of them is real.
It is almost a shame, then, when Supes inevitably dons the cape again (in what was likely a studio-mandated “pay-off” they assumed audiences would demand), as a rogue fusion-powered AI-driven Mech breaks out of Luther-Corp, short-circuits all of Metropolis’s power-grid in a power build-up, knocks out the entire Justice League in an energy burst, and then goes on rampage—carelessly smashing the walls of the county jail as it does so. In the anonymity of darkness, Kent of course rips open his orange jumpsuit to reveal the iconic blue and red, and flies off to save his jail-mates from this unstable menace. What follows of course is yet another CGI knock-out in the sky that is ostensibly supposed to be a crowd-pleaser…but one senses a missed opportunity. Clark Kent was so charming as a small-scale prison drama about the beauty of humanity even at its lowest, that to see it suddenly transform into yet another super-hero battle royale can’t help but feel jarring, like a letdown or a step back. The counter-intuitive idea to go small with Superman had been paying off big dividends up to that point; the decision to make him larger than life again feels like a betrayal of life.
Friederich Nietzsche had first coined the term Superman, or ubermensche, well over a century ago, as a way to describe someone of superior ability and intellect who was no longer beholden to the narrow morals of common society; what Clark Kent reminds us is that, what actually makes someone a Superman, is not when they transcend the common fellowship of humanity, but embody it. The low and put-upon are as much his people as the mighty and powerful. He is superpowered not because he is the most alien among us, but the most fully human. Lex Luthor has pretentions to be the Nietzschean sort of superman, but he in the end is who loses control of his own creation, not Clark Kent. And when Kent gets back to the Daily Planet, the first article he writes is about his experience in county jail, a plea for prison reform, and an appeal to our common humanity—a mere rhetorical turn-of-phrase for most, but meant with genuine feeling by Clark Kent.