“Why the World Doesn’t Need This Superman.”
A woman's opinion:
By Lucia Bozzola, Jul 11, 2006
Look, up in the sky! It’s a bird! It’s a plane! No, it's a... Jesus action figure?
Here’s what I learned about Superman in Superman Returns. He’s impervious to everything (fire, airplanes, flirtation, Kevin Spacey’s acting) except groovy green kryptonite. He gets really, really mad if you touch his crystals. He can see and hear everything, but he won’t use his x-ray vision to peek up Lois Lane’s skirt. He has blue contact lenses capable of stopping a speeding bullet. He wears more pancake makeup than a drag queen. And oh yeah, he’s Jesus. He’s our Lord and Savior, sent by his father to rescue humans from their weaknesses (which would make Marlon Brando God, I suppose). Or maybe Jesus is Superman. I’m not sure. Ooowee, Nietzsche must be spinning over this one.
I’m having a little trouble getting on board with this new Superman (and spare me the specious argument that one has to read the comics in order to “get it”—if he’s going to be turned into a movie super hero, then he’d best be able to stand on his cinematic own). This might seem strange at first glance, because I rather liked the 1978 Superman, I adored Superman II, and it’s quite apparent that director Bryan Singer et al. are intent on resurrecting that rendition of Superman. I can just hear Brandon Routh pondering, “What would Christopher Reeve do?” before each take, because that’s what he then attempts. He’s the simulacrum Superman, a copy of a copy. Maybe that’s why he looks so shiny and plastic. And maybe that’s why he leaves me cold.
I’m not alone in this, either. I can’t help wondering who is going to be hung out to dry because they overestimated the appeal of the Man of Steel in a movie market where Johnny Depp’s inebriated, epicene pirate Jack Sparrow has become a larger draw than even Superman’s comic book brethren Spider-Man. This isn’t to say that Superman Returns is a failure and Singer will never work in Hollywood again. It’s just that when a movie costs $200 million+ to make, a $100 million opening week is not perfectly respectable (especially when Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest beats that in one weekend). Cue the analysts: is it the movie? Is it the hero? Or is it this movie’s rendition of the hero? Well, the movie’s too long and Superman is rather square. The much-noted transformation of Superman fighting for “truth, justice, and the American way” into “truth, justice, and all that other stuff” says a lot about the ways that the Superman myth may no longer jibe with the current culture. Nevertheless, a hero who is incapable of lying could be a rather appealing figure to anyone who is wearying of the rampant dishonesty emanating from our government in its own quest to allegedly promulgate the “American way.” No, I don’t think it’s Superman’s fault per se. And despite its excessive length, the movie itself is a study in picturesque craft and skillful action sequences. Yep, my vote’s for problem #3. Instead of calling her Pulitzer-worthy essay “Why the World Doesn’t Need Superman,” Lois Lane’s piece should have been titled “Why the World Doesn’t Need This Superman.”
Also, perhaps, Lois Lane should have been recast. Kate Bosworth’s performance as the prize-winning reporter and mother of a five-year-old boy brings to mind Katie Holmes’s turn as a district attorney in Batman Begins. That’s not a compliment. Really, Bryan, you couldn’t find another actress in her twenties who could and would play Lois? Who might be believable as either a reporter or a mother? Because Bosworth doesn’t cut it on either level. As a mother, she looks like she had to have been knocked up in high school, and as a reporter, she comes off as more of an irritating lightweight than a serious, tenacious journalist. Since it’s her love affair with Superman that is supposed to humanize him, this instance of miscasting matters a lot. He already looks like a mannequin, so it doesn’t help that his most meaningful relationship with an earthling becomes a bunch of gooey, unconvincing moments with a stick figure dressing up in Mommy’s big girl clothes and brunette hair style. Note to all directors of male super hero movies: if the hero isn’t going to be a hot, brooding, Christian Bale type in black (and the villains aren’t going to be played by the equally yummy Cillian Murphy and Liam Neeson), then you’re really going to have to cast a female romantic lead to whom the female audience quadrants can relate (because if you’re going to spend $200 million+, you’d better attract at least one of those female quadrants). Why should we care whether Reporter Barbie changes her mind regarding our need for Ken doll Superman? The actual Barbie dolls in Todd Haynes’s cult classic Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story have more humanity than Bosworth and Routh.
Indeed, that’s precisely the problem with this particular Superman. Yeah, we like super heroes because they have super powers we don’t possess, but we also like them because they remain human on some level (partly because most of them are humans—genetically and/or psychologically messed up humans, but still human). Superman isn’t. As we are reminded over and over (and over) in Superman Returns, he’s an alien…although he does bear an uncanny resemblance to Homo sapiens and he is able to impregnate Lois without a problem. Anyway, he is Not Us. Christopher Reeve’s Superman, though, still seemed capable of earth-bound emotions and a visceral connection with Margot Kidder’s raspy-voiced, vaguely neurotic Lois Lane. He has to give her up, but he could still get down and dirty with her (or down and dirty for a PG comic book fantasy) in the Fortress of Solitude’s big silver Barbarella bed. No such luck for Routh’s hero. He has to remain chaste whether he wants to or not, because Lois now has a fiancé (and it’s Cyclops!), and she still refuses to notice that nerd Clark Kent looks an awful lot like her beloved Superman. Whether he is angry or jealous or whatever about this state of affairs doesn’t really register on his face. If anything, he evinces a detached sadness. Besides, anything as physical and messy as sex and passion would get in the way of Superman doing his duty as, you guessed it, our Savior.
Yes, probably the biggest miscalculation, besides the casting and that horrific makeup, is the Jesus thing. I can’t call it a subtext—it’s too obvious for that. First, the holy ghost of Marlon Brando’s Jor-El appears to pontificate about how he is sending his only son Kal-El to Earth to help humans see the light they possess in their hearts. The phrase “the father and the son” gets thrown around a few times for good measure. Brando also reminds Kal-El that he himself is not human (in case we all forgot that mere humans aren’t capable of stopping planes with their bare hands). Then there’s Superman’s preferred pose for floating down to Earth or hovering in the cosmos listening to all the voices of the world crying for his help: arms out from his sides, feet together. Add some nails and wood, and you’ve got a crucifixion. But wait. It still may not be clear, so why not have Superman correct Lois’s mistaken assumption that the world doesn’t need a “savior” by replying that every day he hears people calling out for one all over the world. Still, that might not be enough to get the point across, so yes, let’s have Lex Luthor’s henchmen scourge the weakened Superman as he crawls through the grey crystals of Luthor’s new kryptonite island while Mary Magdalene, sorry, Parker Posey looks on and weeps. He sees and hears all. He’s “always around.” We get it! Enough already. We get that we supposedly don’t need to see what (if anything) Lois writes in her new essay “Why the World Needs Superman” because Superman’s messiah status speaks for itself.
But what kind of messiah is he? Does he actually spend his time solving humanity’s real problems? Does he feed the hungry, heal the sick, protect the weak, fix New Orleans, slap Dick Cheney silly, or reverse global warming? Nope. He captures bank robbers. He stops a runaway car. He prevents a plane from crashing into a baseball game. He keeps the United States real estate market intact (he’s a savior for capitalism: discuss). Big whoop. This is standard super hero stuff, not messiah material. With that sort of build-up, no wonder Superman turns out to be a bit of a disappointment. He’s been shined up, de-sexed, and rendered so superficially and psychologically flawless that he’s Dullsville as a character, yet all that perfection seems to be used more in the service of preventing the actions of one bad man (who gets away) than in genuinely elevating humanity. We already have plenty of super heroes who do the standard super hero stuff and actually display a whiff of personality and recognizable, believable, human emotion while they do it. We also have plenty of plastic dashboard saints. We don’t need another one.
Guy Movies is a biweekly analysis of machismo cinema from the perspective of a woman.