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Friday
Julia and I attended the new Superman movie yesterday and, while I’m not a fan of the superhero genre, I enjoyed the movie’s politics. Actually, the movie is political only if it’s political to prefer kindness to cruelty, multiculturalism to racial cleansing, authoritarians to democrats, and good guy computer geeks to billionaire technocrats that want to rule the world. A few years ago people would have been calling these preferences not “woke” but “American.”
In the course of the film we see Superman battling a Silicon Valley Lex Luthor, who seems a blend of Peter Thiel and Elon Musk; and a foreign strongman who could be Vladimir Putin or Benjamin Netanyahu. Superman, who works quietly and selflessly to make the world a better place—think of the ethos promoted by Joe Biden—is outflanked by Luthor’s publicity machine, which convinces the nation that Superman is an immigrant intent on domination.
The movie would be a bit more charged if Superman didn’t look quite so much like Trump’s “right kind of immigrant”—he’s even been raised in what looks like rural white Trump country—and I imagine that the rightwing accusations of “woke” would have been far louder had he been cast as a person of color. (Think of the storm of protest over the casting of Halle Bailey as the little mermaid.) Nevertheless, the film suggests both that people can become anti-immigrant very quickly if their fears are triggered and that they can turn back to their decent selves when they recognize that the real enemies of American democracy are the Thiels, Musks, and Trumps. The public in the movie takes Superman’s protective shield for granted until he’s captured, at which point it’s “Oh shit!” time. We see their buyer’s remorse for having rejected someone genuinely interested in their well-being.
That an anti-fascist message can be read into Superman means that the movie is being true to its roots, the character having been created by two young Jewish men in the late 1930s. I didn’t realize this until I read Michael Chabon’s Pulitzer-Prize winning novel The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, in which a Brooklyn Jew and his Prague cousin–who has barely escaped Hitler’s takeover–create “the Escapist.” Designed as a Superman spinoff, the Escapist battles with Nazis and pulls off miraculous Houdini-like escapes. Chabon acknowledges Joe Schuster and Jerome Siegel as the inspiration for Kavalier and Clay by giving us a quick history lesson:
Then, in June 1938, Superman appeared. He had been mailed to the offices of National Periodical Publications from Cleveland, by a couple of Jewish boys who had imbued him with the power of a hundred men, of a distant world, and of the full measure of their bespectacled adolescent hopefulness and desperation.
Chabon points out that it was the daring artistry as well as the character that made the series:
[Artist Joe Shuster] seemed to understand from the first that the big rectangular page of the comic book offered possibilities for pacing and composition that were mostly unavailable in the newspapers; he joined three panels vertically into one to display the full parabolic zest of one of Superman’s patented skyscraper-hops (the Man of Steel could not, at this point in his career, properly fly), and he chose his angles and arranged his figures with a certain cinematic flair. The writer, Jerome Siegel, had forged, through the smelting intensity of his fanatical love and compendious knowledge of the pulps and their antecedents, a magical alloy of several previous characters and archetypes from Samson to Doc Savage, one of his own unique properties of tensility, hardness, and luster. Though he had been conceived originally as a newspaper hero, Superman was born in the pages of a comic book, where he thrived, and after this miraculous parturition, the form finally began to emerge from its transitional funk, and to articulate a purpose for itself in the marketplace of ten-cent dreams: to express the lust for power and the gaudy sartorial taste of a race of powerless people with no leave to dress themselves. Comic books were Kid Stuff, pure and true, and they arrived at precisely the moment when the kids of America began, after ten years of terrible hardship, to find their pockets burdened with the occasional superfluous dime.
Elsewhere in the novel Chabon also finds an antecedent for Superman in the Golem of Prague, a mythic Jewish legend of a superhero of clay that will rise up when the Jewish people need him most. (See my post on that here.
At first Kavalier and Clay have difficulty selling “The Escapist” because its potential financial backers worry that it’s too anti-German. (America has not yet entered the war at this point.) Joe Kavalier, however, insists on his vision, finding a visceral satisfaction in having the Escapist punch Hitler in the face:
Nothing that Joe had painted had ever satisfied him more. The composition was natural and simple and modern; the two figures, the circular dais, the blue and white badge of the sky. The figures had weight and mass; the foreshortening of Hitler’s outflying body was daring and a little off, but in a way that was somehow convincing. The draping of the clothes was right; the Escapist’s uniform looked like a uniform, like jersey cloth bunched in places but tight-fitting, and not merely blue-colored flesh. But most of all, the pleasure that Joe derived from administering this brutal beating was intense and durable and strangely redemptive. At odd moments over the past few years, he had consoled himself with the thought that somehow a copy of this comic book might eventually make its way to Berlin and cross the desk of Hitler himself, that he would look at the painting into which Joe had channeled all his pent-up rage and rub his jaw, and check with his tongue for a missing tooth.
From that point on, Kavalier and Clay unleash their hero on Nazi Germany:
Over the course of the last week, in the guise of the Escapist, Master of Elusion, Joe had flown to Europe (in a midnight-blue autogyro), stormed the towered Schloss of the nefarious Steel Gauntlet, freed Plum Blossom from its deep dungeon, defeated the Gauntlet in protracted two-fisted combat, been captured by the Gauntlet’s henchmen and dragged off to Berlin, where he was strapped to a bizarre multiple guillotine that would have sliced him like a hard-boiled egg while the Führer himself smugly looked on. Naturally, patiently, indomitably, he had worked his way loose of his riveted steel bonds and hurled himself at the throat of the dictator. At this point—with twenty pages to go until the Charles Atlas ad on the inside back cover—an entire Wehrmacht division had come between the Escapist’s fingers and that gravely desired larynx. Over the course of the next eighteen pages, in panels that crowded, jostled, piled one on top of the other, and threatened to burst the margins of the page, the Wehrmacht, the Luftwaffe, and the Escapist had duked it out. With the Steel Gauntlet out of the picture, it was a fair fight. On the very last page, in a transcendent moment in the history of wishful figments, the Escapist had captured Adolf Hitler and dragged him before a world tribunal. Head finally bowed in defeat and shame, Hitler was sentenced to die for his crimes against humanity. The war was over; a universal era of peace was declared, the imprisoned and persecuted peoples of Europe—among them, implicitly and passionately, the Kavalier family of Prague—were free.
Kavalier has one moment of doubt, however, that is worth paying particular attention to. When he discovers that the strip has fans amongst American Nazis, who have a love-hate relationship with the Escapist, he realizes that there can be fascist elements in anti-fascism.
Then, abruptly, it was his turn to feel ashamed…for having produced work that appealed to such a man. Joe Kavalier was not the only early creator of comic books to perceive the mirror-image fascism inherent in his anti-fascist superman — Will Eisner, another Jew cartoonist, quite deliberately dressed his Allied-hero Blackhawks in uniforms modeled on the elegant death’s-head garb of the Waffen SS. But Joe was perhaps the first to feel the shame of glorifying, in the name of democracy and freedom, the vengeful brutality of a very strong man. For months he had been assuring himself, and listening to Sammy’s assurances, that they were hastening, by their make-believe hammering at Haxoff or Hynkel or Hassler or Hitler, the intervention of the United States into the war in Europe. Now it occurred to Joe to wonder if all they had been doing, all along, was indulging their own worst impulses and assuring the creation of another generation of men who revered only strength and dominance.
This should come as no surprise to us as we watch the Jewish Stephen Miller borrow from Hitler as he attempts to turn ICE into Trump’s Gestapo.
It’s worth noting that the latest Superman movie goes out of its way to present us with a sensitive and caring protagonist, one who is the very opposite of vengeful brutality. I think there’s only one death on his watch in the movie and that’s an act of pure self-defense. For the most part, he’s saving women, babies, and, at one point, a squirrel.
Sadistic fascists will be disappointed.
