Man of Steel

Man of Steel isn’t bad for a superhero blockbuster—which is to say that it does a good job of not being terrible despite the twin handicaps of having Christopher Nolan and Zack Snyder attached to it. Their movie is a work of popcorn theology—supersized, with extra butter, and a couple pillars of salt; but, as its faith is as widely practiced and sanctioned as any in our culture today, its message is as worthy of scrutiny as that of a televangelist. It’s no secret that the ur-hero, who came to Earth from Krypton to save us from a fallen angel named General Zod, has been resubstantiated as a Christ figure. His conception was the opposite of immaculate: Kal-El is the first of his kind in centuries to be born of copulation rather than bred into a destiny like his scientist father, Jor-El (Russell Crowe), and Krypton’s generalissimo Zod (Michael Shannon). When the advanced planet, starved of resources, blows up, Kal floats down the Nile to Kansas in his space bassinet, and is raised by a farmer named Kent (Kevin Costner) with a bumper crop of moral fiber. Kal (Henry Cavill), whose name is anglicized to Clark, has godlike powers in this new environment, but a hypersensitivity to it, too. His Joseph figure teaches him restraint for his own safety’s sake—humans aren’t ready for the Second Coming; we don’t even have a cross of kryptonite to nail him to. The way he hangs around truck stops during his post-high school years, if Clark wasn’t a closet superhero, I’d expect this saintly lumberjack to be a closet something else. But he’s essentially a free-agent Good Samaritan, without branding. When Zod and his junta, exiled from Krypton and thus its only other survivors, arrive on Earth, Clark has to save his adopted people from his bloodthirsty compatriots, who are angling to strip-mine our planet and turn it into a new Krypton. Like a transplanted sports fan, Superman is torn between home teams.

What Man of Steel makes clear, which previous iterations of this franchise (which dates back to 1938) may have glossed over, is that doing the right thing is a choice. Granted, I need to brush up on my Bible, but the immediate parallel that occurs to me isn’t in Scripture, but Scorsese’s The Last Temptation of Christ. When, way back in the Captain America period, Superman stood for Truth, Justice, and the American Way, it was as much about choice as being drafted into World War II was. It was about duty. No questions asked. Virtually all superhero movies are about choice on some level, but the immaculate, unearthly Superman may be the only one for whom this solemn peroration is appropriate. Nolan’s Batman was a mortal in the real world, even if the director gave no evidence of familiarity with it; Nolan’s Superman is in a real-ish world, too—but, here, the setting is even less stylized than Gotham, and serves as a contrast between men and this god among them. Or at least it should. There is an idea behind Nolan and David S. Goyer’s conception, and that counts for something; but, as usual, it gets as worn down as the Metropolis skyscrapers that are battered by Zod. If the material were really to be brought up to date—and, on top of that, made intellectually respectable—Superman must guide his new neighbors down a path that allows us to avoid the self-destructive fate of Krypton. If that planet stagnated because its population was deprived of choice, surely it’s on the filmmakers to demonstrate how humans are saved by their capacity for choice—and not simply by a Caped Crusader: the deus ex machina of childish escape fantasies. Making him a Christ figure—even making him human—is an easy way out, because the humans aren’t compellingly human, but are mere pawns in a spectacle that is likely much more cynical than Goyer or Nolan anticipated it would be. Our foremost faculty, it is implied, is not our liberty but our helplessness. Marx’s line about religion being the opiate of the masses is often misunderstood, but the logic behind the misunderstanding clarifies why makers of blockbusters are now mining the Church for material: superheroes once provided escapism; they now stand for ritualized self-delusion.

It must be disheartening to the filmmakers that neither Man of Steel‘s positive (the production design of Krypton; the cleverness, and tenderness, of the Kryptonians’ sensitivity to Earth’s climate) nor negative (the commercial for the American military that doubles as a witless demolition-derby climax) nor even underdeveloped (Zod’s status as a stateless man, a tragic hero robbed of purpose) attributes have any relevance. Even confirmation that Crowe is now in the same phoning-it-in period of his career that Brando was when he played Jor-El doesn’t do much to tickle the old fancy. No matter what it does, or how well it does it, a movie like this cannot be extricated from its unseemly relationship to every form of capitalist vice, and every bad habit that proffers apocalyptic doom. Man of Steel is folk art from Hollywood’s One Percent; a placebo fantasy; a too-big-to-fail gambit to attract the global market which edges out resources that might otherwise be spent on films that have some connection to human experience. I can fault people like myself as much as the shortsightedness of businessmen with no technological foresight that the DVD market has dried up; and Hollywood is at the mercy of the markets as much as anyone else—but that is just further demonstration that this sleeping giant just won’t wake up. The helplessness that Man of Steel is grappling with is the same that drives bobos to make their own food, their own music, their own beer, etc. And while cutting out the middleman isn’t always desirable—especially if one, like me, does occasionally like to curl up with an expensive blockbuster—the industry’s lowest-common-denomiator approach has been to cut everything but the fat. (To make matters worse, lazy pop intellectualism has served as an ennabler rather than a counterbalance to this degeneration, giving mediocre filmmakers something more prestigious to stand on than box-office receipts.) Trends change as fast as broadband—remember the Harlem Shake?—and yet the movies have—for more than ten years!—grown increasingly dependent on superheroes. This Kryptonesque depletion of brand-name resources is toxic no matter how thoughtfully or self-deprecatingly they’re exploited.

It would be easy to dismiss my argument by assuming that I assume that people are stupid for enjoying a movie like this, when, in fact, movies like this are industrially designed to slake our most primitive thirsts. Everyone should have the privilege to go all-out spud on their couches once in awhile, and that holds especially true in Imax theaters and car seats, if one has the further privilege of being near a drive-in. We all like to think we’re immune to the illusions being fed to us; it’s part-and-parcel of modern narcissistic media savvy. But certain illusions have a monopoly on our multiplexes, which amounts to a monopoly on our imaginations—and this oppression has been enough to turn people away. Harmless daydreams are one thing. They are the soil from which most of what is great in movies has sprouted. But it’s something else altogether when our illusions become unsustainable.