How Superman went from righteous to dangerous
‘Batman v Superman’ is about the Man of Steel’s modern disregard for collateral damage
By Tim Townsend
For 75 years, Superman refrained from taking a life. Then, in 2013, he snapped a dude’s neck.
Right there, up on the big screen — in 3D and 50 feet tall in IMAX — more than 30 million Americans watched as the first superhero saved a family from a couple fiery-eye-death-ray-things by killing the evil General Zod.
The climactic scene of Man of Steel freaked out some fans. There are some Superman rules you don’t violate, they said. Chief among them, the guy in tights and a cape doesn’t kill.
And it wasn’t just the superkilling. In the prior scenes, Superman and Zod bounced around the skyscrapers of Metropolis, demolishing a good part of the city. Superman and collateral damage don’t belong in the same sentence, fans said.
The filmmakers behind Man of Steel and its sequel Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice heard the criticism, and embraced it. The narrative engine of the new film, which opens March 25, suggests Batman is as concerned as Superman’s fans about the Man of Steel’s willingness to leave all manner of destruction in his wake.
As a literary device, internal conflict “is as archetypal as it gets, from Gilgamesh on up,” Benjamin Saunders, a professor of English at the University of Oregon, said in an interview. “Even Jesus has his moment of doubt. [But] Superman is distinctive in that the character has come to emblematize goodness in an almost Platonic way.”
By giving a good character some bad juju, a writer can make the character easier to relate to. The device can be traced back the dime novels and pulp magazines of the 1930s and 1940s — the major influences on the very creation of comics and superheroes. Characters like the Spider, the Shadow, the Avenger and the Black Bat were “rooted in darkness,” said Michael Uslan, the originator and executive producer of the Batman/Dark Knight film franchise, including Dawn of Justice.
“The pulp heroes were created during the Depression, it was a dark time in America,” Uslan said. “The Nazis were coming to power, and public enemies were on the loose here. The country was devoid of heroes. When the comic book heroes are created years later, these were primary sources creators were drawing from.”
But first there was Superman, brought to life by two young men originally from Cleveland — Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster — a decade into the Depression, as war clouds gathered over Europe. In his book, Do The Gods Wear Capes: Spirituality, Fantasy, and Superheroes, Saunders points out that Superman’s original enemies were 1 percenters.
Siegel and Shuster had him fighting “a greedy, corrupt social elite.” The original Superman was battling oppression in a world where justice was “less a matter of individual rights than a matter of the distribution of wealth.” At that early point in his superpowers development, Superman could still feel the Bern.
Regardless of who he was fighting, Superman was all about protecting the little guy. He didn’t kill, he didn’t quit, he didn’t lose. And as he became more popular, his powers increased, as did his incorruptibility and fortitude.
But true goodness can also get truly boring. As writers worked to outdo one another and surprise fans with Superman’s ever-more-impressive powers, they assembled a concept more than a character.
“His million-decibel yell had enough intensity and pitch to topple tall buildings,” wrote Larry Tye, in Superman: The High-Flying History of America’s Most Enduring Superhero. “What if a building fell on him? A tickle at most. His nostrils were super-acute. His typing was super-fast. … His gaze was intense enough to hypnotize a whole tribe of South American Indians at once. He could converse with a mermaid in her native tongue and beat a checkers expert his first time playing.”
Comic book sales doubled during World War II, due largely, according to Saunders, to readers in the US military. By the 1950s, Superman had completely shed his progressive political leanings and symbolized America itself. Now on TV, he stood for “truth, justice and the American way,” which, Saunders writes, were “encapsulated by the image of a happily assimilated superpowered alien, dressed in a red-and-blue body stocking.”
But the post-war years also lacked a clear bad guy. Sales of superhero comic books fell as the characters felt less relevant to readers.
“The superheroes that emerge in the ’50s and early ’60s get these saccharine, morally unambiguous stories,” said Christopher Robichaud, who teaches ethics and public policy — sometimes using comics — at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University.
Even Batman, a totally different kind of superhero with a dark, psychologically complex backstory, had been tamed since his first appearance in 1939, just a year after Superman’s creation.
“Batman’s origin story was primal,” said Uslan. “It was about revenge and darkness. This kid’s parents are murdered in the street right in front of him, and over their bloody bodies, he sacrifices his childhood, dedicating his life to pursuing the murderers.”
But just as some of the older superheroes began losing relevance in the late 1950s and 1960s, comic book writer Stan Lee saw opportunity in the dark themes of Batman’s origins, and he created a new universe of characters for Marvel who were human — not gods from other planets — and who dealt with pressing social issues of the day (drug abuse, civil rights).
“Lee’s magic was that he started down the path of darkening superheroes,” said Robichaud. “They were no longer archetypes. Peter Parker was a geek. The Fantastic Four was a bickering family. X-Men were outcasts. He took heroes and showed them doing non-heroic things.”
It would take decades for Batman to reclaim the bleak environment of his origin story, at least as a live-action character. The sense of foreboding which was conveyed by early Batman artists through their drawings evolved through the decades into what has become an impassioned dread internalized by the character — especially obvious in Christopher Nolan’s Dark Knight trilogy of films.
“Trauma is a big thing — that’s our culture now,” said Robin Rosenberg, a clinical psychologist, who writes about the psychology of fictional characters and author of Superhero Origins: What Makes Superheroes Tick and Why We Care. “We don’t want aspirational. Wonder Woman and Superman are gods. They always know the right path, how do right thing, and they don’t have a lot of angst. But this is an angsty time, and we want superheroes who are relatable.”
Is there a limit to that relatability? If some fans were troubled by the killing scene at the end of Man of Steel, maybe that’s because the 1950s Superman who represented the “American way,” is the version of the character that still resonates with most Americans.
Superman “both captured and flattered the gaze of the nation with an idealized vision of itself,” writes Saunders. He is “a moral agent who acts always out of his commitment to ‘the good.’”
Watching that Superman — the one who embodies an older, romanticized America — snap a bad guy’s neck forces his fans to acknowledge the damage that doing good can cause. And it’s a point the filmmakers behind Dawn of Justice are apparently willing to push.
“There’s a yearning for a time when things were morally more simple, and the fact that that plays out in superhero movies isn’t surprising,” said Robichaud. “I don’t think it’s an accident that during this election year — with partisanship at an all-time high and people getting punched in the face at campaign rallies — we’re going to the movies to watch our superheroes fighting each other in a civil war.”
