Man of Lead (A Post-Credits Postmortem)

Every week during the Summer of Superheroes, SuperMike Matthews breaks down the ins and outs of a current superhero franchise. Spoilers may follow, so read at your own risk.

                                      

This Week: SUPERMAN! 

Okay guys. Time for my secret shame.

For as much as I pretend to know about superheroes, I actually have very little firsthand experience with Superman. I’ve never read a Superman comic, I’ve never seen a full episode of a Superman TV show, and until this week, I’d never even seen a Superman movie from start to finish.

That’s not to say I don’t know anything about Superman. I have vast reserves of affection for all of American pop culture, and Superman is far too big a part of that to fall by the wayside. He simply belongs to the long list of properties for which that very real, very strong affection fails to translate into emotional investment*. All the same, even if I was capable of remaining my usual, trivia-dispensing self this week, putting the Super-mythos into its proper context would require a lot more work than in previous posts.

 * This list also includes the Ninja Turtles, whose new movie I will be seeing next month, no matter what you may claim it’s done to your childhood. 

See, comics have a well-deserved reputation as a difficult medium for newcomers to get into, but Marvel and DC contribute to that reputation in very different ways. While Marvel sports an extremely dense, 70-plus-year history, the fact that it has remained consistent means it can be summarized, at least in theory. DC, on the other hand, has more explicit entry points for new readers, but has gone through several company-wide reboots since they got their start, making it difficult to latch onto a definitive version of any one character. For this week’s post, for instance, I went to look up Pa Kent’s official cause of death, and came back with four equally valid answers. He’s never been ‘resurrected,’ per se; he just kind of died four different ways in four separate continuities, with each new one overwriting the last. Which version of events to you defer to in a situation like that? The first, or the most recent? It’s questions like those that make it difficult for someone – no matter how experienced – to feel like they have a real grasp of the DC Universe.

For those reasons, I was tempted to write this week’s post on Man of Steel from an outsider’s perspective, judging the plot strictly on its own merits and not taking into account the fact that it is, specifically, a Superman movie. Unfortunately, I literally do not have the self-control to sustain such a perspective, so we’ll have to compromise: there will be some discussion of how to best utilize Superman as a character, but there will be no links, no footnotes, and no shop talk beyond the stuff that everyone already knows. Sound fair?

All right.

If you weren’t already aware, Man of Steel was something of a controversial movie, and not just because of its suspect level of quality. It’s been subject to a higher-than-usual level of nitpicking, which may be another symptom of premeditated malice towards reboots, but there are also a number of fans who, for very valid reasons, felt that the movie was a complete disservice to its title character. We’ll get to that topic later, but to start off, as someone who was able to go this into film with no emotional baggage besides the opinions I’d heard, what did I think?

It was okay. Little long.

See why I couldn't do the outsider thing?

Let’s see if we can expand on that a bit.

One of the main things that stuck out to me immediately after watching Man of Steel was that the first real plot point doesn’t occur until around the 40 minute mark, when Lois Lane is finally introduced. That’s not okay in any movie, let alone a summer blockbuster. Up to that point, the film is just Superman’s origin story – which, again, I feel like everyone probably knows already – and a series of little vignettes from Clark’s past and present. I’ll admit that those vignettes are all cool moments*, but the order in which they come is completely disjointed, with no intuitive links between them. It all reads as though the writer decided to skip Clark’s childhood and go straight to the character as an adult, only to then realize that, no, actually, he didn’t want to do that.

 * I especially loved the scene where Clark’s powers suddenly activate themselves while he’s in the middle of class; it’s a wonderful depiction of what it must be like to have Superman’s abilities 24/7, and made me sympathize with the character for the first time in… well, ever. 

I just can’t help but feel that if this film had spent its first act with Lois, beginning with her first cryptic encounter with Clark, and then following her investigation of his past, it would be much more engaging. After all, one of the main questions the movie raises is what mankind would do if it found out that someone like Superman existed, so why not take some time to actually explore that? We don’t really need that Krypton nonsense (with apologies to Russell Crowe), and painting Superman as a mysterious, unknowable figure in the opening scenes would make the audience more invested by inviting them to connect some of the dots themselves. Viewers like to have their intelligence respected, which is something Man of Steel kind of opts out of. As opposed to ‘show, don’t tell,’ its motto seems to be ‘show, then tell, then tell again, just in case.’ If you cut out the telling – and some of the showing – the movie becomes shorter and more digestible without losing any real substance. Plus, each stop Lois makes on her way to Smallville corresponds to one of the flashbacks anyway, so you get to keep them around, and have the added benefit of putting them in a reasonable order.

Refreshing as it would have been to focus on Ms. Lane for a bit, I doubt that any studio would have been willing to make Man of Steel without Superman firmly seated as its true main character, and that’s… fine, I guess?

Little known fact: Lex Luthor is a strong proponent of feminism.

That’s not what I’m here to argue, in any case. The point is, this is a story about Clark Kent, and if the movie is going to succeed, we need to care about what happens to him. I’m not sure if Man of Steel really achieves that, and if it doesn’t… well, that alone is sufficient to condemn the overall film. I think that if you found the movie lacking in that department specifically, it was for a combination of two reasons: Agency and Stakes.

Clark’s emotional arc within the film is established early on, and is set up well enough: is Earth is ready to accept him, and if it isn’t, should that prevent him from helping people anyway? For a long stretch of the film, the first question is treated as the more important one – something that left a bad taste in my mouth, and the mouths of many others, by the sound of it – but in the end, Clark decides that the first question is irrelevant, because the answer to the second question is a resounding NO. The trouble, then, is that I never believed that Clark was in the right headspace to reach that conclusion of his own free will. Instead, he's completely reactionary, with all of his big choices being made basically at gunpoint, spurred on by the arrival of General Zod and his various ultimatums. From the moment Zod starts issuing threats, Clark’s binary switches from “Do I reveal myself or not?” to “Do I save the Earth or not?” Assuming both are viable options in that second case, you’d have to be a pretty massive dick to choose to do nothing, regardless of who you are or what you might need to sacrifice.

Pictured: Pretty Massive Dicks

A choice like that becomes even less difficult for Superman, due to the fact that so few things are capable of harming him, let alone killing him*. That can be used as an interesting narrative tool, to be sure, but if you try to make use of conventional tropes, it robs the story of any sense of stakes or danger and becomes a weakness. When Superman is caught in an explosion, you’re never left wondering “is he okay?” because he’s almost always okay. In fact, Zod is one of the few villains that can match Superman physically, meaning that things from here on out will only get easier for him.

 * Besides the well-known Kryptonite, Superman also has a notable vulnerability to magic. With a writer like David Goyer helming the franchise, though, we’ll see magic make an appearance on the same the day that our yellow sun finally burns itself out. (See Sidebar) 

Superman’s most significant weaknesses, then, are those that he imposes upon himself. As a being with unspeakable levels of power, he is constantly showing restraint, and his true heroism lies in his ability to maintain that restraint, even under extreme circumstances. Comic-book Superman, when given the choice between saving lives and making things easier for himself, will always choose the former, and he always abides by a strict ‘no-kill’ policy.

And there we have our problem.

Many, many fans of Superman were devastated by the hero’s apparent lack of concern regarding the collateral damage that he causes in Man of Steel’s second half, saying that the real Superman would never allow fights like those to go on in populated areas. At the very least, he would prioritize keeping the population safe over actually defeating his opponent, something that this Superman certainly doesn’t take into account. Prominent comic book writer Mark Waid wrote an excellent piece summing up that side of the argument, but if you don’t feel like taking time away from this Man of Steel blogpost to go read another Man of Steel blogpost, his basic point is this: presenting Superman as someone who undoubtedly killed thousands of people, accidentally or otherwise, only increases the size of the middle finger that is given to the audience when Superman snaps Zod’s neck to save the lives of a single family.

Spoiler Alert

I largely agree with that, and until I saw the film myself this week, it was pretty much the only Man of Steel talking point that I had at my disposal. However, I do think there are some legitimate counterarguments, especially when you don’t take preconceived notions of Superman into account, so I’m going to play the devil’s advocate here.

For one thing, we know that Zod is just as powerful as Superman, and therefore can’t possibly be detained or incarcerated. With nothing left to lose, he will not, under any circumstances, give up his killing spree, so, at least as presented in the final draft of the script, there’s really nothing you can do with him besides kill him.

The other argument is that Superman isn’t quite Superman yet. He’s inexperienced, his moral code hasn’t solidified, and he hasn’t learned the full extent of his power, so he doesn’t know how to minimize the damage he causes. And most importantly, let’s not forget that Clark spent his whole life up to this point hearing his father tell him that other people might have to die if saving them means making things harder on you. That is LITERALLY the polar opposite of everything that Superman is supposed to stand for, but flawed characters are not the indication of a flawed writer. In fact, they’re often the opposite. Throughout this film, Clark is relearning his core morality from scratch, so if all those deaths are anyone’s fault, they're Pa Kent’s, and maybe David Goyer’s for thinking that a moral like that was even a remotely good idea.

Ideology aside, it's still a bad choice simply from a dramatic perspective. A Superman with no secret identity to protect and no strong feelings about loss of life gives us absolutely nothing to invest in, because it's hard to imagine an outcome that our hero would consider unsatisfactory. Films like The Dark Knight or The Winter Soldier are so great because they aren't afraid to make their heroes suffer. Sure, they may not lose outright, but their ideals are strong enough that what most would call a victory can still feel like a failure in their eyes. Superman's closest thing to a stated goal in Man of Steel is "make the bad guys go away," which is both broad enough that he can't possibly fail, and vague enough to feel hollow when he inevitably succeeds.

I think the most optimistic way to look at Man of Steel is as a kind of Superman: Year Zero deal, with the next film being the first true appearance of the entity we all know and love as Superman. After all, it's not until the very end of the movie that we finally get Clark-Kent-as-alter-ego, and any way you slice it, Man of Steel doesn't boast a particularly joyful or triumphant ending - the most positive thing you can say about it is that "not everybody died." If that ends up as being representative of the DC house style... well, the rest of this franchise is going to be a real slog. But if DC's next film plays off all the destruction, forcing Superman to reconsider how he uses his abilities, perhaps allowing someone like Lex Luthor to use the damage in a smear campaign against him, and motivating him to reinvent himself as the inspirational hero he's always been meant to be, it would prove a really interesting direction for all this to go. So far, publicity photos from said next film, sporting the uplifting and not-at-all grim title of Batman v. Superman, don't inspire much confidence that that will be the case, but all we can really do for now is wait and see.

A Word on the Screenwriter

David S. Goyer is an extremely successful writer of comic-book movies (having worked on both Man of Steel and the Dark Knight trilogy, among others) who, for some inexplicable reason, seems deeply embarrassed by his own line of work. His projects are characterized by a stripped-down, ‘realistic’ approach to whatever character he’s writing, and he isn’t afraid to toss out any elements that he deems too silly, like say, iconic costume elements, or the character’s actual superhero name. Goyer is the reason there was so much crap about Kryptonian science in Man of Steel’s first half; he was trying to justify the logic behind Clark’s origin, as if a story about a super-powered space baby who crash-lands in Kansas will ever be believable. I’m a pretty level-headed person, but I nearly lost it when I saw that Henry Cavill is billed in Man of Steel’s credits as “Clark Kent/Kal-El.” Take a second to consider the implications of that.

THE ACTOR PLAYING SUPERMAN IN THIS SUPERMAN MOVIE IS NOT BILLED AS SUPERMAN. THAT IS HOW BADLY DAVID GOYER WANTS HIS MOVIES TO NOT BE COMIC BOOK MOVIES.

I hate to keep making comparisons between DC and Marvel, especially since it’s pretty clear which side I come down on, but there’s a moment in the second Thor movie where a group of people gather around to watch a fight in the middle of London. Most of them are recording it on their phones, and when they’re warned to get out of the way, one replies: “You’re crazy, right? That’s Thor out there! He’s swingin’ his hammer around and everything!” It’s a supremely silly moment, but it’s able to accept the character for what he is, while still feeling as genuine and real as anything Man of Steel has to offer.

Anyway.

Whatever Happened Will Happen to the Man of Tomorrow?

In a word: Batman. In a substantially larger number of words: Batman, and Lex Luthor, and Wonder Woman, and Aquaman, and Cyborg.

Man of Steel was the beginning of DC’s attempt to replicate the MCU (the DCCU, or Dikku, if you will), and by the looks of things, the company has no intention of easing themselves into it. Superman’s next film appearance will be 2016’s Batman v. Superman: Dawn of Justice, an increasingly crowded film that will not only feature the two title characters, but also all of the heroes and villains that I listed in the above paragraph. We don’t know too much about it yet, but it appears that Batman’s arc – and definitely his look – will be borrowed largely from Frank Miller’s The Dark Knight Returns. Also, it’s gonna have Aquaman played by Khal Drogo, so I already bought my ticket.

Hell to the yeah!

Following that is a Shazam! movie (perhaps starring The Rock), followed by Justice League, Wonder Woman, a Flash/Green Lantern team-up, and then, finally, Man of Steel 2. It’s a distinct approach from Marvel’s, in that DC seems to be introducing as many core characters as they can, as fast as they can, and only then exploring those characters either as individuals or in small groups. Some see it as a desperate move, and I've yet to pass up an opportunity to make fun of the exponentially growing roster, but in truth, I'm willing to give DC the benefit of the doubt. Maybe it will work, maybe it won’t, but either way, I'm excited to see what happens. Especially if we get a Flash/Lantern movie out of it.

Yale Stewart's JL8, everybody. You're welcome.

 Next Week: Coming Soon to a Theater Near You!