Heroism and Superman II

Our thoughts on Superman often parallel our thoughts on the president. This came to the foreground with the widespread references to President Obama in Supermanian terms during the days of his first campaign and early term. And it was no coincidence that Bill Clinton was referred to as Superman when he facilitated the release of two Americans from North Korea a while back.

But I don't want to write about the presidency today--not about broken promises (is a hero someone who always keeps a promise, no matter the consequences?) or exceptionalism or fascism or hope and change. I'm going to write about the Fortress of Solitude.

In Superman '78, a teenage Clark Kent hurls a green crystal into the Arctic ice and witnesses the rise of a place where he can go to be alone, to learn and become the sort of person he wants to be. In the comics, he often does experiments there, and keeps souvenirs and trophies; it's a place of history moreso than anything else. Its purpose is fulfilled when  he takes flight for the first time, returning to the world to help it realize its potential. He stops criminals, rescues a cat from a tree, saves Lois Lane.

I see so much rhetoric about both American exceptionalism and isolation, as if keeping the rest of the world out will transform a country into a paradise. I can't help but think of the Fortress of Solitude in that context. Yes, Superman became a hero by isolating himself, but only for a little while--and he wasn't really isolated. He had with him all the learning of his birthplace. He had, in the Fortress, the capacity for change. I worry that isolation (true isolation, as is being proposed; separation from the world itself in an attempt to put America first) will have the opposite effect. Isolation can breed stagnation. After all, if Superman had never left the Fortress, that cat would still be stuck up in the tree.

I'm always wary of any tradition that counsels disengagement from the world. 

Heroism and Superman

I think about Superman: Earth One a lot, primarily because I do not like it at all. But in light of recent Superman stories, maybe I'd be better off rephrasing: These days, Superman isn't for me. Smallville, the various DC comics, Man of Steel--looking at what the stories have in common is instructive, leading me to figure out why I don't particularly care for Superman these days.

What's the biggest difference between George Reeves in Adventures of Superman and Tom Welling in Smallville? What separates Earth One from All-Star? Man of Steel from Superman: The Movie?

The answer could be multi-faceted; we could talk about mood and tone, about narrative sophistication, about musculature, about time frame, etc. But for me, the difference comes down to conflict. George Reeves, Christopher Reeve, Grant Morrison, Richard Donner...all these versions of Superman are confident in their role, they don't have any internal conflict over what they should do. Tom Welling, Henry Cavill, Zach Snyder, and J. Michael Straczynski...they all show us a Superman who hesitates, equivocates, and sometimes just plain doesn't want to be a hero.

I'm not saying that Superman shouldn't be allowed a few moments of doubt, or of weakness. Neither am I saying that there shouldn't be stories about heroes who are reluctant or who flinch in the face of difficult choices.

What I'm saying is that I don't care for Superman in that role. I don't need to see him trying to figure out his morality. I don't need to see him wandering, second-guessing himself or his place.

But that's just me. My Superman was fully formed after a single page of exposition written by Jerry Siegel and drawn by Joe Shuster. Even when they had chances to expand--such as in the Superman ongoing series that debuted soon after, or in the newspaper strips--they didn't depict Superman as hemming and hawing about whether or not he'd be a hero. He just is one.

Apparently, a sizeable chunk of the audience does want to see him trying to figure things out, questioning himself. Evidently there's a market for a Superman who is also Spider-Man. That's fine; it's just not for me.

The interesting thing about this, about the current versions of Superman, is to place him into larger contexts. What can we infer about, say, the mentality of the United States based on the version of Superman that dominates pop culture right now? 

For one thing, the United States has a confidence problem. It's no longer sure of its identity. It wants somebody to tell it what to do. Sadly, that somebody seems to be military in nature. This lack of self-confidence and the military nature of our appeal for help  probably reflects the origin of the nation in both genocide and civil war. When in doubt, charge into battle. This nation is not missionaries, it is not compromisers, it is not negotiatiors.

A while back, when I was in full research mode, I went through All-Star and counted up the total number of panels devoted to violence. It's something around fifty (though I'm not going to look for that page of notes within the thousands that are weighing down my filing cabinet). It's not a story about fighting. It's about finding other ways to solve problems, through unity and sympathy. Whole issues go by without a single punch thrown.

In short, I don't think the United States has always been this way. It's tied to 9/11, of course, and reflected in the dominant stories of our time (as stories have always reflected their tellers' situations). Stories like Superman/Batman and Civil War seem to be meditations on how the United States should use its power. As far as I can tell, they're literally arguments between people about this topic that turn into violence.

Wait a second. Are these movies really about gun control?

I guess I'd have to watch them to find out. I might just reread All-Star instead.

September 11

There's a book called The Terror Dream, by Susan Faludi. It's a book about what the American responses to 9/11 revealed about us as a nation. It's also largely about the myths we tell to get us through crisis. These myths aren't always healthy, as Faludi demonstrates with overwhelming evidence. It's fascinating.

A while back I posted some fan art of Superman grimmacing in pain because of his impotence in the face of the attacks on the world trade center. Here's some more.

It's called 'And Where the Hell Was Superman?' by Hardy Ecke. It seems to be on display in DC somewhere, but my information may be out of date.

Ecke explains the picture on his website: What causes me to fix the catastrophe in a painting is not that an attack on the civilized world is surrounded by unanswered questions, but insted that the saviour of the world became too tired to protect America from evil anymore....A Rambo and a McClane with all the other Hollywood comics cannot rescue the world because if they cannot reach victory with the brain they cannot succeed with the sword.

It's an interesting image, though I don't think it conveys the ideas (at least to me) that he wanted it to convey. I see in this painting an image of a symbol of heroism that is dated and tire, one that can no longer save us, which is evidently what he wanted to paint. But maybe my concept of Superman is different from his. Superman is different that Rambo and John McClane--both reference in his explanation. These guys are all muscle and tactics. Superman is violent, to be sure, but he stands for something more.

This is from Gregoy McNeill, writing on the Superman Homepage: Since then [9/11], our concept of what a hero is has changed. Living with the fear of future terrorist attacks and uncertainity has made us ask "Where's Superman?" The truth is he does exist. It's not the powers nor costume that defines Superman, it's the morals. Superman has evolved from the embodiment of America to what we as human beings can strive to become if we can constructively use our talents and potential in a positve light....All of us are superheroes when we take a stand against injustice. All it requires us to have is courage and faith. Superman is within us, it's our choice to decide whether or not we want to use it.

I think Superman as a moral exemplar is a more common conception than Superman as a brute. There's a therapeutic technique named for him, "What Would Superman Do?"; an English professor counsels the same thought exercise, There's Valerie D'Orazio's blog, Occasional Superheroine, where she titles a post, "Why Superman not Telling a Lie Had Such an Impact on My Life." She ends the post with the question, what would Superman do? (it's at the bottom of the page here). A Google search of "What would superman do" reveals over 5000 hits, though not all of those are immediately relevant, they're interesting.

And I return, as so often, to All Star Superman. A running theme is Brain Vs. Brawn, Luthor vs. Superman. In Issue 12, Morrison reverses it, when a weakened and dying Superman outsmarts Luthor and says, "Brain beats brawn every time," a line Luthor uttered several issues earlier (Issue 1, maybe). Of course, Superman is punching Luthor when he says it.

but back to Terror Dream...Faludi titles a chapter "The Return of Superman." This book would have been published about a year after the film Superman Returns. There's a lot to the book, about how 9/11 affected women in particular. The chapter relevant here is about how we had to search for heroes after the attacks. When none presented themselves in an obvious manner, we (meaning, largely, the media and government) had to invent them. We invented them in a mold that we had long held to be valuable and glorious, a mold cast on cowboys and superheroes. Into that mold stepped Bush and his cabinet, Giuliani, and others.

Also cast in that mold were the men on United 93. We sought evidence that the mold fit, and we found it in statements such as this one, spoken of Lou Nacke on Dateline: "When he was a little boy, he love Superman. And he'd actually had a cape on and went through a glass window pretending to be Superman." He also had a tattoo on his shoulder. So he must have been a hero.

I do not question Nacke's heroism. Nobody really knows what happened on that plane. When Congress tried to award medals to four of the men, whom the media had decided were the heroes who overthrew the highjackers, others protested. Eventually, all the passengers on the flight were given posthumous medals. Lots of other people, too.

Faluid writes that this search for heroes and the apotheosization of them reveals "a deep cultural unease beneath the hero worship." We were constantly looking for new heroes after attacks that "left us with little in the way of ongoing chronicle or ennobling narrative. So a narrative was created and populated with pasteboard protagonists whose exploits would exist almost entirely within the realm of American archetype and American fantasy. There was a danger to being honored with such manufactured laurels, particularly for the tragedy's survivors; for the fantasy to hold, citizens would have to stay in character, never mind that their roles were constrained and deforming, never mind that the command performance prevented them from expressing what they really had witnessed and suffered that day."

There's a danger in casting real people as imaginary characters. They can never deliver fully on the promise of the role. None of these people is Superman (neither, seven years later, was Obama), who would have saved the day. That's why the moral example is so much more important than the warrior. Faluid calls superhero stories the fantasies of adolescent boys, but that only refers to the power the character possesses. If the Superman who returned after 9/11 had been the embodiment of morality instead of the misguided muscle of the governmental reaction, things would have been different indeed.

No real link between the different links.

One of the reasons I became interested in Superman, intellectually speaking, is the way kids respond to the character. I'm working on compiling a bibliography for this site, in which I'll have sections devoted to all sorts of topics--one of which will be the way kids pretend to be Superman. This post, from the Examiner.com, is sort of related to that. It's about heroism.

Heroism is perhaps the most important aspect of the Superman theme. Or meme. Or mythos. I'm working on the right term to describe the stories and thoughts that surround the character. I guess it's a mythology, in which there are subversive strains, and in which grow several memes that manifest themselves in oral tradition and popular culture as well as mass-mediated art. I'm thinking of the "superman isn't perfect" meme that has been the subject of most of my writing on Superman so far.

Anyway, one of the things that writers like to do is compare Superman to human heroes. Like this, from the article I linked to above:

We all try to aspire towards our heroes. 'I wanna be like Superman' is usually the types of phrases that we hear. Our children always want to be the cool, superhero types. What if I were to tell you that a modest 'superhero' type of person lived in New York City and did the most unselfish thing in the world? He saved a man's life from the nasty subway tracks.


This is an interesting fan site, Superman Fan Podcast. It's a lot of comics history, very thorough, from all appearances.

Doing all this research reveals something new all the time, little bits of information that may or may not become useful. For example, there are Canadian awards for comics work called The Joe Shuster Awards. Recently, they posted the final interview with Shuster, who, you should recall, was the man who drew Superman. Here's a bit of it, with another interesting slice of information.

Superman, with his heroic physique and glowing optimism, was patterned largely after Douglas Fairbanks Sr. And Clark Kent his name derived from movie stars Clark Gable and Kent Taylor was a combination of timorous, bespectacled Harold Lloyd and pale, mild-mannered Joe Shuster himself.

And I just have to post more about Obama being Superman. Here's a link to a video. I think my favorite part is the Joker.