Cancel Culture Monkeys and Military Industrial Menaces: James Gunn’s Superman Is a Silly Delight
The first and most important thing to say about James Gunn’s Superman is that there’s a really cute superdog, Krypto. Like Superman himself, he’s fundamentally good at heart, but sometimes struggles to behave. What if your loveable-but-not-particularly-well-trained pooch had super strength and the ability to fly? It’s cute. If you like the idea of a sidekick super pet, you’ll probably like this movie.
But since the conversation around the movie has shifted to its right-wing critics, who are upset that Gunn described Superman as an “immigrant,” let’s take a step back.
Imagine, for a moment, that a superhero actually existed in something like the real world, and that comic scenarios—giant monsters attacking cities, super-powered fist fights above major metros, alien invasions, and so forth—were a regular part of our lives. It is impossible to imagine such scenarios without immediately understanding that they would be viewed as political events, with political consequences. If guys in capes were knocking down tall buildings with any sort of frequency, the government would surely have something to say.
In superhero comic books themselves, this has been understood for decades. Just to name a few examples: Alan Moore’s Watchmen was premised partly on the political realignment that would come from a real-life superpowered figure, Frank Miller’s Dark Knight Returns positioned Superman as Batman’s true enemy and a tool of Reaganite overreach, and Mark Millar’s controversial run on The Authority dealt with a super-team that intervened in global political affairs, to the frustration of actual elected officials. All of these stories took for granted that superpowers were an inherently political force, whether or not for good.
But superhero movies have largely avoided the political implications of superheroes and superpowers, even in films like The Batman or Captain America: Civil War, where politics were ostensibly invoked. Those movies, whatever their other strengths, mostly gestured vaguely at the idea of politics while painstakingly avoiding saying anything specific about them or even treating them as live concerns in the world.
So it’s refreshing to see that
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