Superman returns to Earth, in Superman Returns, after a long hiatus; both in the fictional and the actual world. Where has superman been all this time? He’s been in outer space indulging himself with personal introspection while the world he has sworn to protect has been smouldering, always that much closer to consuming itself in a ferocious fist of crackling fire.
Consider this image: Superman’s iconic burning pod lands again on the idyllic Midwestern farmstead where he was raised. He surrogate mother, who has been busy baking apple pies for the union since Superman left, sees the fireball streak over her house and land in the distant field. She goes out to greet her child and there he is, sitting, as buff and delicious as ever, beneath this sculpted mass of burning mud and grain. How very much the tripartite erection resembles the charred remains of the World Trade Centre.
While Superman has been gone the world has never needed him more. He has come home for no more significant reason than to save the world from its exhaustion with postmodernist disaffection. We need grand narratives to believe in because we need to believe in ourselves if we are going to fight something as unflagging and unambiguous as evil. There can be no shades of grey at the tips of our bullets, men. Superman is back.
I haven’t watched the whole movie yet (it’s the kind of thing that is only manageable in small doses) but I have been struck already by the power of the pure country versus the impure urban imagery that pervades the film; and is in effect the entire underpinning of the superman mythology. Superman, after all, (following his arrival on the planet) becomes an American where it counts: out on the prairies under the big sky, raised with simple traditional values of goodness and morality and it is with this psychological equipment that he makes his journey into the urban centres of the world. It is always the city that needs saving, mind you; it is always the city that dabbles with sin by indulging the whims of the evil, industrially minded, money hungry Lex Luthor.
Luthor, the anti-Superman, espouses a kind of evil that is insidious not only because of the fact that it is self-motivated and indifferent to the suffering of others, but because it is a rejection of the rural simulacrum from which Superman’s morality emanates. The city is a tangle of capitalist desires and complex emotional entanglements, the way forward in the city is never clear; for every route is blocked by buildings and hidden from the sun. How easy it is for urban dwellers to become lost in the jumble of towers and alleys and dead-ends and noise and madness. Superman, raised in the clear air and able to see for miles, swoops easily between the buildings and keeps his attention on everything. Superman reminds people, after they have been appropriately spanked for worshipping yet again at Luthor’s golden calf, what really matters in this world.
How different Superman is from Batman (who is by far the more popular of the two characters, I believe). Batman is a product of the city, a product of wealth, a product of the very system which he wishes to cleanse. This makes Batman complex and troubled, it makes him essentially a character who can only do good by doing evil to himself; and this kind of thing is the basis of every great identity crisis. With Superman, though, there is no identity crisis. Superman is as alien to the city as he is to the planet itself. Superman’s citizens to be saved are like sheep who have strayed from the path of righteousness, they are like the citizens of Sarah Palin’s true America who have nevertheless ended up in the city of the Sirens and forgotten the way their lives used to be. Superman, country boy, brings them home again. For Batman, though, there is no home, there is only another night of unresolved darkness.
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