An Old-Fashioned Superhero for Our Modern Times

By Adam B. Giorgi

Editor’s Note: A version of this story first appeared in The Good, the Bad, and the Elegy, a newsletter from the Daily Yonder focused on the best, and worst, in rural media, entertainment, and culture. Every other Thursday, it features reviews, retrospectives, recommendations, and more. You can join the mailing list at the bottom of this article to receive future editions in your inbox.

Among his many monikers, Superman has been called the “big blue boy scout.” The label, in contrast to others like “the Man of Steel” or the “Man of Tomorrow,” is often invoked to speak to a passé reputation Superman has gained over the years. The thinking goes, here’s a superhero who is too corny, too old-fashioned, and too goody-goody, not complex enough to hold interest in our modern world.

For more than a decade now, big screen adaptations of Superman have tried to distance themselves from that boy scout version of the character, giving him a darker edge targeted at more current tastes. It’s impossible not to see the latest Superman film, released on July 11, as a reaction to and reversal of that trend. Fortunately, among the many interesting things the new “Superman” has to offer, one of its biggest charms is how it holds onto the old-school sincerity of the character and considers the value of those principles within a recognizably contemporary context.

Origins

You’d be similarly hard pressed to separate Superman’s old-fashioned reputation from his small-town origin story. The boy scout characterization descends directly from his upbringing as Clark Kent, the orphan boy raised by farmers Ma and Pa Kent in the fields of Smallville, Kansas.

“Superman” doesn’t belabor this point; it joins the story in the middle and dispenses with any backstory or flashbacks, aware that most viewers are familiar enough with the character that some on-screen text at the onset is enough setup to get us oriented. Within this framework, our introduction to Ma and Pa Kent is admittedly ham-fisted, lacking any subtlety or nuance and showcasing a pair of country folks who appear exceedingly guileless and behind the times relative to Clark’s friends and colleagues in Metropolis. Things stabilize after that shaky start, fortunately.

It’s a short stopover in Smallville, but an effective one; by the end of the film, Clark’s relationship with his adoptive parents comes through as one of the main emotional payoffs that ties everything together.

These scenes also represent a crucial moment in the arc of Clark’s relationship with Lois Lane in this telling, and it’s through their pairing that we get the most meaningful consideration of Superman’s values in a world beset by 24/7 media noise, rationalized indifference, and organized meanness.

Legacy

Lois and Clark’s romantic entanglement and their professional experience working together as reporters at The Daily Planet are an important throughline here, because if the spirit of Superman is old-fashioned, the challenges he faces in this adaptation are anything but. There is the usual array of comic book obstacles, of course, from giant monsters and super-powered minions to dimensional rifts. But he’s also confronted with xenophobic social media smear campaigns, political corruption, a military conflict between two neighboring nations across the globe, and a private detention center that subjects its prisoners to brutal conditions against the backdrop of a legal (and interdimensional) no man’s land.

Tech and weapons tycoon Lex Luthor is the common thread that connects all these evil ends, and his villainy is presented with a gleeful lack of restraint. He’s transparently corrupt, bigoted, and sociopathic, casually eliminating anything or anyone that stands in the way of his self-serving ends.

Some audiences might chafe at some of the real-world parallels here, and the online outrage machine has certainly taken a crack at ensnaring “Superman” within the culture war discourse. But superhero stories, escapist fantasies though they may be, have always held up a mirror to our own times and offered a space for philosophical and moral explorations of concepts like authority, power, and justice.

In this “Superman” we have a hero who has been returned to his old-fashioned, idealistic roots. If we set him against a similarly old-fashioned or idealized world – a socially and politically sanitized one – what new would come of that story? What would we get out of it today, that we haven’t already before?

“Superman” makes the savvy choice by filing the edge off the hero, but not doing the same to his world; it keeps the character’s values consistent while bringing his challenges into today’s lexicon. That combination yields another key benefit: it gives us a hero who struggles, who is tested and beaten down. The boon of super strength and super speed doesn’t necessarily make it any easier to keep being good in the face of hardship, to do the right thing when the chips are down, or to be kind even when it’s not expected or rewarded.

That’s the enduring moral of Superman, and his latest film understands it and puts it to good use. Instead of asking the big blue boy scout to change and be more like our modern world, it posits that maybe we ought to ask our modern world to be a bit more like the big blue boy scout. As the title of one classic Superman comic book asked, “What’s so funny about truth, justice, and the American way?”

Superman is currently playing in theaters.

This article first appeared on The Daily Yonder and is republished here under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

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Previously Published on dailyyonder.com with Creative Commons License

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