Superman Returns: A Pre-Review

I now posess tickets to Superman Returns, for tomorrow night, 9:55. This has been a long time coming. It goes back to 1997, when Tim Burton was going to dress Nicolas Cage in black leather and give him some guns and call that Superman. (And that, scarily enough, was one of the better ideas.) But here we are in 2006 and the Man of Steel is just as he should be, complete with red undies and spit-curl.

For two years I followed the production via message boards and blogs and set reports and interviews. I remember when Bryan Singer, who I knew from X-Men, came on board to direct. I remember when Christopher Reeve died, and, by a coincidence that made it seem like myth unspooling, a few days later Brandon Routh was plucked out of some Iowan cornfield and put in Reeve's red boots. The unveiling of the suit. The casting of Lex Luthor. The first photos of the Kent farm -- I watched the corn grow. And now...

Deep breath. I don't want to hyperventilate here.

I've wondered why it is that I care so much about this. I've always liked Superman, but it used to be that I thought he was cool, his powers were cool, he could fly. Now it's that I need him. I look around and everything is shit. Religion often seems to bring out the very worst in people. Our government right now is despicable. Sure there are good people to be found, but there is no grand, exciting idea that isn't rife with corruption.

The S is one of the few symbols that hasn't been stained. Sure it's a cartoon symbol, but everyone knows it means "truth, justice and the American way" -- terms vague and elusive enough to still actually mean something. I see a cross, and the good it's supposed to represent is tarnished by what it really means when people carry it around. It's never done to welcome. Even when I see an American flag my patriotism isn't what it used to be because I'm ashamed of so much of what has been done with it lately. Ideals, pure and valuable as they may be, have a hard time overpowering what I see their representatives doing every day.

So that's why I need a comic strip hero. Because here is a messianic god-on-earth story mediated by blue tights and a red cape. Because the "American way" Superman fights for still means what the Founding Fathers intended. Because everything else sucks.

Call me an alienated Christian and a disenchanted American.

And I don't think I'm the only person who feels that way. I read one review somewhere (I wish I could find it again), where the reviewer said, "I didn't realize how much I missed Superman until he was back."

People treat him like he's real. Some people even argue that he is. From a Wired article by Neil Gaiman:

About a decade ago, Alvin Schwartz, who wrote Superman comic strips in the 1940s and ‘50s, published one of the great Odd Books of our time. In An Unlikely Prophet, reissued in paperback this spring, Schwartz writes that Superman is real. He is a tulpa, a Tibetan word for a being brought to life through thought and willpower.

An Unlikely Prophet brings up an important question about Superman: What makes people want to meet him so badly? It’s tough to imagine a similar book about, say, Green Lantern or Captain America. Superman is different because he doesn’t really belong to the writers who’ve created his adventures over the last 68-plus years. He has evolved into a folk hero, a fable, and the public feels like it has a stake in who Superman “really” is. We retell his tales because we wish he were here, real, to keep us safe.

And that's it. We want a protector. "You wrote that the world doesn't need a savior," Superman tells Lois in the new movie, "but every day I hear people crying out for one."

Obviously I don't worship Superman, and maybe that's the key. A good story can suffer under the burden of people believing it's true. Truth is controlled and fought over, while fiction (especially money-generating fiction) is spread as wide as possible. So that's where I disagree with Mr Schwartz about Superman being a tulpa. Not that I don't think there's enough collective willpower to spring Superman into existence, but rather that it's better for him to stay a story. I think, if he exists in our imaginations, and if we can find some happiness in the idea that someone will swoop out of the sky and save us while knowing it will never really happen, that's good enough. To accept something as fiction and to be un-deterred by that is something special.

I would even suggest that maybe, possibly, that's faith.