I hate Superman

It’s not that I didn’t enjoy the Christopher Reeves movies. I did. And it isn’t that I have issues with X-ray vision, or super strength, or solid steel flesh. Like anyone else, I'm no stranger to omnipotence fantasies. In fact, what I really hate isn’t Superman at all. What I really hate is that I don’t hate Superman. I hate that the gimmick works on me.

Superman, after all, is a disempowering myth, and, unfortunately, it works. As with most feel-good movies, the Superman series doesn’t make me happier to be alive. It makes me sad that the real world isn’t more like the movies. It makes me wish I had superpowers. Moreover, it makes me tolerate the dullness of reality by encouraging a regression into make-believe and pseudo happiness. Like Clark Kent, I’ve dealt with abusive bosses, inconsiderate women, and bully male coworkers. But unlike Clark Kent, I can’t put a cape on and have all my problems go away. What I can do, though, is go to the movies. I can indulge in fantasy. I can watch someone else put on a cape and make his and the rest of the world's problems disappear. In the movie world, at least, we know we're safe.

Yeah, I understand that Superman, once he dons his cape and tights, fights evil and injustice non-stop. He doesn’t run away. True. But he doesn’t exactly fight the system, either. It doesn’t matter whether you’re talking about the movie or the comic book or the tv shows, Superman never takes a political stance—he preserves the status quo. Goody, well-assimilated immigrant that he is, he protects Metropolis from the enemy aliens who haven’t bought into the American way of life the way he has. In short, Superman is nothing more than a status fantasy. By day, he’s a mild mannered mistreated and incompetent reporter, but none of that matters, because Clark Kent isn’t real (just as “normal” Harry Potter or Scott Parker isn’t real); it’s all an act. Superman, after all, is the true identity. In other words, the workaday world with its mores and values doesn’t matter; it isn’t real. What’s real is the mythic fantasy. And this, no doubt, is what Americans want to believe—that their private, juvenile, fantasy-embodying, escapist selves are real and the guy who goes to work 40 to 60 hrs. a week with 10 to 20 hour commutes tagged on is the fake. The real me isn’t the “me” that exists in the here and now; it’s the inflated me that I know someday I’ll become—the “me” that is promised by the system and “the American Way”, that will have everything he wants, that will live entirely in a world of fantasy, abstraction, and cybernetics.

So let’s face it, Superman doesn’t fight for the little guy—for people; he fights for the powers that be—for Metropolis (a city, like all cities, dependent on imported goods that it hopes to control the supply of by whatever means possible). When he strays from this goal, as he did in Superman Four when he tries to eliminate nuclear weapons, his audience goes cold. What Superman fanatics really want is a guy who preserves all the hype and adolescent power fantasies of the American way—a myth that makes America look like what it says it is rather than what it ACTUALLY is. In a sense, Superman is America—the most boring, meekest, modest and pure-intentioned (in the out-of-ignorance aspect) person on the playing field: an ordinary mild-mannered reporter on one level, an everyday joe, but an invincible hero when sacrificed to a higher power—to the American way. Rephrased: because you in yourself are weak, empty, boring, and timid, you need to identify yourself with something greater—a higher power—such as your religion, America, the Party, the race, God, the movies, or the myth of Superman.




The chief enemy of morality--and art--is fantasy.
Iris Murdoch