We Are Superman

On James Gunn’s 'Superman'

Kirk Alyn and Noel Neill as Superman and Lois Lane, Photograph, 1948, Getty Images

Superhero films are strange things. For all that we’ve been inundated with in that bloating genre ever since Bryan Singer’s first X-Men movie kicked off the contemporary rush, it’s easy to forget just how unlike everything else these kinds of films are. They’re sort of like other blockbusters, sure — only of course we all know they’re not. Each new superhero flick, in these days of superhero exhaustion, serves as an opportunity to step back, and consider just how strange it is that the last 25 years of American culture have seen us drowning in fantasies of wearing tights, capes, and technosuits while beating the ever-living hell out of each other. It’s not merely that superhero films have helped generate our queasy “end of cinema” climate — in which risk-averse studios continuously spit out new sequels and reboots of the same characters and stock situations — but that they are really the perfect medium for this state of affairs. New universes, alternate castings, a reenvisioning here, a retconning there: just as comic books constitute the apotheosis of the never-ending serial, the movies based on them have a similar infinite-endedness, the same sense that all a director or writer need do is return to one character, reach back into a particular world, shake it up like an Etch A Sketch, and start all over again.

Traditional movie-making has always operated uncomfortably in this paradigm. In their contemporary phases, Marvel and DC movies have largely split the difference between young directors with new, quasi-authorial visions, and a very old-fashioned, old-Hollywood kind of intensive producer oversight. It’s a state of affairs which probably dates back to Tim Burton’s first two Batman films in 1989 and 1992 — which, along with Richard Donner’s original Superman and Sam Raimi’s first two Spider-Man films, seem to me to be the only superhero films that truly deserve to be called classic pop cinema — the tension inherent in superhero films is always one between corporate management of IP and the desperate hope that some fresh filmic artist with a good idea can jumpstart, restart, or continue the franchise in question. Just look at Marvel’s recent trend of hiring young “indie” directors such as Chloé Zhao to helm their films — only to micromanage many of them into oblivion — to see how impossible that juggling act often is.

James Gunn may be the first person in the history of the genre to straddle this distinction. The man occupies an unprecedented position in this kind of cinema: Steven Spielberg’s co-founding of DreamWorks may be the only comparable situation as far as producer-directors go. As co-CEO of DC Studios, Gunn now has total oversight of the “DCU,” focused on recouping DC’s prestige after more than a decade of losing out to Marvel. As a director, he’ll have a level of control over his sets and stories which no director of superhero movies has ever had.

Now, whether or not this produces good films — let alone the DC renaissance many are hoping for, now that Marvel appears to be floundering as it makes its way to Doomsday — remains to be seen. And whether that even matters remains to be seen by people other than me. Call me fatigued. Call me a glutton for punishment, too: I keep turning up to the next one, hoping it’ll somehow provide the kind of popcorn thrills I always hope for from any good blockbuster. Yet the track record of the super-studios, as producers of interesting films, has never been a good one. Every MCU movie has dated terribly, and only Gunn’s own Guardians of the Galaxy movies (the first two, anyways) and Taika Waititi’s Thor: Ragnarok are any fun, because they frequently escape the superhero nonsense and settle for being old-school buddy comedies in science-fiction dress. Most superhero films since the first Iron Man have been dour, gray, CGI-slop behemoths, buttressed by constant exposition and laced with enough quippage to distract the viewer from the fact that they’re watching yet another film that pretended to be “about” something — only to climax in more scenes of sardonic demigods slamming into one another, or yet another sci-fi sky-beam threatening to destroy the innocent population of another colorless city.

Of course, on average, DC has been much worse. The Snyder era was exactly as grim and pretentious as we all remember it being. Even Christopher Nolan’s Batman movies seem weaker to me these days, though they are moving, well-written, well-acted, and obviously better than the dozens of gritty reboots which followed in their wake. My personal heresy here is that I genuinely found Matt Reeves’ recent The Batman the most compelling superhero film since Raimi’s Spider-Man 2. It’s overlong and silly, but it has a look, an ambience, and a sense of basic mise-en-scène that even Nolan’s frenetic films are missing. (Nolan never met a scene he couldn’t cut up until all sense of space and continuity grew as jumbled and unsure as a Michael Bay movie.) Like Spider-Man 2 — which remains the high point of the genre — Reeves’ film had a sense of exactly what kind of spectacle superhero movies alone are capable of putting in front of an audience. It understood how to show the audience the exact kind of fantasy that was being handled on screen, and showed few signs of having to pander to any rabid, unhappy fandoms.

Though it’s far from a great film, Gunn’s Superman understands this, too. At its best, it’s zippy and uncomplicated. A little goofy. A little earnest. These are good qualities in a film about a god-man. Audiences and fans seem to be enjoying the film immensely; even my own boomer parents thought it was pretty “fresh.” When it works, it’s largely because David Corenswet seems like a born movie-star. When the film isn’t dealing with him, or Nicholas Hoult’s Lex Luthor (also great), it begins to drift slowly into CGI dullness. Though it at least boasts a few colors besides tan and gray, and remains easygoing throughout, it still ends up in a long, exhausting CGI-addled climax which is depressingly similar to every other long, exhausting CGI-addled superhero movie climax.

Yet Gunn’s tonal approach is incredibly savvy — and a bit brilliant. He’s clearly aware of the general fatigue with the form, aware that his old employers at Marvel have over-extended themselves betting on their multiverse-and-streaming-TV racket, and attuned to a general sense that gritty “realism” is both exhausted and exhausting. The entire sentimental, embrace-the-cringe, kindness-is-the-real-punk reframe is clearly meant to be a breath of fresh air in a stale world of predictable and depressed comic book characters. And the general public’s sense that Superman remains the proto-superhero — or at least the most representative of the genre as an historical phenomenon — gives Gunn a shot at some good old-fashioned slate-clearing.

As a director, Gunn is still largely incapable of staging a particularly interesting shot. He’s one of many, many contemporary directors who seem to actively chafe at the existence of the camera’s pictorial frame. He gets so obsessed with smashing between individual focal points in a scene that he abandons any sense of a legible frame in between these moments. He’s simultaneously addicted to his steadicam and reliant on haphazard, unmotivated cuts within certain scenes. And, like many contemporary films, these are clearly culled from coverage, rather than thought through from the start. He also favors wide-angle lenses on large format digital cameras like the ARRI Alexa LF and RED V-RAPTOR — two of Netflix’s “officially approved” digital cameras, which is why the un-lit daylight scenes in the film only barely escape the same poorly-colorated dullness that plagues so much contemporary cinema and so many streaming TV shows. The effect is often that the audience is viewing the action through a kind of manic, roving fishbowl.

Both Luthor and Mr. Terrific have their little fleets of portable drone-cameras: given Gunn’s style in the film, this strikes me as a clue to his own fantasies as a filmmaker. He loves trying to follow Superman in flight with an ostensibly “unmoored” camera, using CGI to transition a bit too smoothly through fight sequences in careening long-takes, where the camera apparently banishes gravity and slaloms at will. If anything, his Superman is a fantasy about camera technology — a dream of a kind of frictionless fluidity of movement through space — the fantasy of an infinite tracking shot and the abolishment of the need for a cut — something plenty of directors have fantasized about, from F. W. Murnau to the Watchowski sisters. This puts sequences of the film more in line with video games like God of War or The Last of Us Part II, where the “camera” avoids cutting by smoothly snaking through the computer-rendered environment, over and through obstacles, always locked intimately with the movements of the playable character. At times this yields interesting experiments, though it still has a half-baked quality. Gunn doesn’t seem to have really thought through the point of moving towards such a style, only to have vaguely recognized that it might be an interesting way of portraying a Superman uniquely unbound by normal human movement. And of course, when he does get back to the “real world,” his filmmaking becomes so blandly conventional it does nothing to illuminate the scenes in question.

Still, Gunn’s Superman doesn’t really have to be a technical achievement to accomplish what it’s set out to accomplish: the tricky feat of steering comic book movies back into confidently sincere territory, unafraid of corn and sentiment — though perhaps not yet comfortable again with camp, something these films haven’t done well since Burton. In this way, I suspect it’s going to be successful. The film is a perfectly decent example of a medium that has grown wearisome; yet there’s a genuine, felt difference, and it’s almost entirely to do with Gunn’s tonal calculations. What audiences seem to be responding to is a film which doesn’t want to elicit anything from them other than to entertain them, making Superman the smartest and most genuinely enjoyable pivot we’ve seen so far in the era of superhero fatigue. And yet this situation demonstrates the greater meta-issue at stake in these superhero films — one of the things I find makes it harder and harder to encounter them as films whatsoever. That is, in a climate of cultural strip mining, where box office earnings feel increasingly harder to squeeze out of people, and getting bodies into theaters remains an unpredictable business, each superhero film increasingly takes on the burden of representing superhero films as a genre — making an argument to audiences that the genre is still worthwhile and important.

Unlike films whose primary concerns lie more along the axis of artistic expression — or even just awards and prestige for writers or actors — all blockbusters, by their nature, have to solve a problem: generating audience interest, and figuring out how to sustain it. With comic book movie fandoms, this is a bit more easily done through tie-ins (though even that gets exhausting, as Marvel has demonstrated) and staging important events in whatever canon those audiences care most about. For the rest of us, it has to fulfill the traditional blockbuster need, which is to give us a fantasy we might want to go along with for a few hours. So what’s ultimately most interesting about Gunn’s Superman is how it reveals these fantasies have changed.

A great majority of superhero films have been discreetly — though usually not so discreetly — “about” American foreign policy. Yet Superman marks a decisive move away from the themes of the War on Terror, to those of far-off wars and a general American helplessness. It plays the hits as far as interventionist debates go: Like The Avengers and the Nolan Batman films, Superman’s plot points serve as something of a proxy for debates about American foreign entanglement and domestic spying, and whether an empire wielding the most powerful military technology ever set loose on the world can ever be truly good or benevolent (the fantasy being that it can). Of course, none of these superhero films ever manage to say anything very provocative about said issues — given the sheer amount of money the American military often puts into them, how could they? Still, they generally manage to say something about how Americans currently see themselves (and the things Americans want to be saved from).

In Superman’s case, the fears seem pretty legible, beginning with worries about an American government that is entirely cynical and self-interested — happy to abstain, literally, from the destruction and military intervention it once engaged in directly, instead delegating it to private corporations with their own shadowy plans and loyal armies of young fans and cultists. In the case of Luthor, think Thiel, Palantir, Raytheon, and Musk. One of the truest strains in Superman is just how young and nerdy Luthor’s minions are: the young, angry, and tech-obsessed are the new cult members of tomorrow. In a plot point involving the release of damning footage from Superman’s Kryptonian parents, the film even satirizes the easy pendulum swings of performative 24-hour news media. (In the film’s hierarchy of public institutions, only print journalism gets a naive pass as essentially trustworthy.) Then there’s Luthor’s “pocket universe,” which resembles an interdimensional Guantanamo, where he can imprison nearly anyone he wants under an approved government contract. The parallels with the Trump administration’s new concentration camps are obvious.

And then there’s the film’s staging of an invasion of the fictional state of Jarhanpur by the also fictional state of Boravia. Many people have pointed to certain images in the film as clearly reminiscent of the destruction of Gaza — though given that the film’s archetypally war-torn country of righteous, impoverished brown people is being invaded by a vaguely-Slavic post-Soviet country (run by a cartoonish Putin stand-in), it’s really a convenient fusion of the two great ongoing horrors of our moment: the eradication of Gaza and the outright military invasion of Ukraine. Collapsing the two into the same category of violence certainly seems instrumental and naive. Still, it’s interesting: it suggests that what’s causing many Americans the most pain right now is no longer our involvement in unnecessary foreign conflicts but that we’re fundamentally helpless to stop the murder of innocents overseas, while remaining very aware that this murder directly benefits many of the most powerful people in the world. The fantasy has shifted: Gunn’s Superman delivers its audience the catharsis of seeing superpowered beings step into our current moral vacuum, saving the kind of innocent, beleaguered people we’re all watching die on screens in real life, every day, while our own government sits around and allows it. Does this make the film left-wing? Not particularly. But it does signal a change in our collective anxieties, one which no amount of online right-wing anger will be able to deflect.

Superman signals a shift towards a different register in the superhero movie — perhaps in blockbusters on the whole. One that includes a central, potentially destabilizing, naiveté — which is why it likely won’t be embraced by left-wingers, either. Yet I suspect general audiences will embrace it; in fact they already seem to be. People long for a time in the past — an unspecified time, which may never have existed — in which Hollywood films spoke directly to the masses, and unified them in a sense of shared humanity. Superman aims its own slightly awkward, subtly calculating, and somehow ultimately believable naiveté in this precise direction. And in the true tradition of American cinema, whether this works or not isn’t ultimately up to the people who make movies. It’s up to the people who go to see them.

Sam Jennings is an American writer living in London. He is the Poetry Editor at The Hinternet, and he also runs his own Substack, Vita Contemplativa. For those interested, his Letterboxd account can be found here.