It's not addressed directly in the film, but in
this interview with Esquire the following was said:
"
ESQ: Except for when they do. True. What's the story behind Superman's black suit?
Snyder: It comes from Death of Superman of course. But I'm also into this Robert Bly book The Red, White, and Black. The white of naivety, the red of anger, and the black of humanity. I just felt like the black suit is really symbolic of that as well.
But also, frankly, I flew him straight up to the sun to charge him up. I like the black suit as a practical thing of there needing to be a way for Superman to charge up quickly and be stronger than he was. So it works in a theoretical and symbolic way."
That's really interesting. I've never heard of Robert Bly, but according to Wikipedia he was a leader in the
"mythopoetic men's movement" of the 1980s and 1990s. In reading the summary, they honestly seem like they were diet misogynists -- they don't outright condemn feminism, but they have this notion that being around women more than men somehow damages masculinity and makes men too feminine, and that feminism dilutes men's voices.
I don't want to overstate this, because from looking at that article and at
the entry for Bly himself, they weren't like the modern Incel or "Men's Rights" movements -- Bly was anti-Vietnam, he organized conferences to celebrate the archetype of the Great Mother, the mythopoetics did leave room for the validity of the idea that women are oppressed and feminism is a valid response to that oppression. But still, these ideas about women as damaging to men in some way -- and the gender essentialism it's based on, which strikes me as something that would inevitably lead to becoming transphobic if this system of thought were to even acknowledge the existence of transgender people -- do strike me as being a form of misogyny.
This does seem consistent with Synder's presentation of Superman's world, wherein the only women are not exactly objects to be fought over, but also don't exactly have full agency independent of their relationships to men.
This ties into something I realized last night. A few things that struck me in re-watching
Batman v. Superman last night about the role of women in Snyder's work:
- Bruce's vision of a nightmare world in which Superman reigns as a fascist leader under the implied paramountcy of Darkseid
- The Flash's prophecy: "Lois Lane is the key! You were right about him [Clark]!"
- Snyder saying that even before he left the film, he had wanted to do (but was prevented by Warner Bros. from doing) a storyline in Justice League wherein Bruce and Lois have fallen in love and gotten together, but Bruce faces a "dilemma" when Clark is resurrected over whether or not "give her back." This of course opens the question of why he's treating Lois as an object to be given from one man to another, and of why there would be any more of a "dilemma" than if Lois had simply broken up with Clark and chosen to date Bruce instead.
- The entire "Superman comes back wrong"/"Superman-in-black" thing from the Snyder version of Justice League
- Jonathan Kent's ghost scene in Batman v. Superman is essentially all about this idea that it is futile for men to try to be good, and that only the love of a woman makes the idea of goodness attainable or desirable
- Clark refers to himself as alienated from the world after the Capitol bombing and runs away. Then at the end, evoking his father, he declares that Lois is "his world" and sacrifices himself specifically to save her.
So it seems to me that in Snyder's ideal world, the storyline would have been that Bruce and Lois have begun dating during Clark's death. Clark comes back, Lois does not immediately dump Bruce and start dating Clark again, and Clark has somehow gone bad/wrong. The dystopian vision Bruce had comes true, until the Flash is sent back in time to tell Past!Bruce that Lois is the key to keeping Clark from going fashy. Bruce reluctantly "gives" Lois back to Clark, and Clark's love for Lois redeems him.
That's... well, there's a hell of a lot to unpack there. There's the casual sexism of treating women as something men "give" to one-another as though they don't have their own agency. But even beyond that, there's this deeply misanthropic and misogynistic notion underlying that storyline, introduced by the Ghost of Jonathan Kent in BvS and reinforced by the mechanics of the plot, that goodness is futile and men will naturally embrace nihilistic violence without a woman's affection. And there's this notion that Lois Lane is
literally the only thing keeping Superman from becoming a genocidal dictator.
This is the kind of storyline a guy with some deeply problematic and toxic views on human empathy, violence, and how men and women relate to one-another, creates. This is a plotline that, consciously or subconsciously, represents a bias towards fascistic, misogynistic beliefs about the world.
All this is, of course, fully consistent with Snyder's prior depiction of Lois, Martha Kent, and Martha Wayne as objects who exist to provide Clark and Bruce with motivation rather than as independent moral agents in their own right. In
BvS, the only woman who has an emotional life of her own outside of a man is Diana; Snyder mostly presents women as, to paraphrase Paulo Frierie, "beings-for-others."
It's in Beavis. "Be their hero, Clark. Be their monument, be their angel, be anything they need you to be ... or be none of it. You don't owe this world anything."
That's actually one of the reasons I enjoy the interpretations of the Kents in Snyder's films. I don't agree with the idea that characters "need" to follow certain archetypes or patterns in any particular adaptation; let the characters stand on their own, and if you have enough fuel behind a new direction for them, then, fuck it, take it. That's why the "Maybe" scene in Man of Steel works so well for me: Jonathan is a genuinely good man, the moral center for his son to emulate, but he's also completely fucking overwhelmed by the fact that he's raising an alien boy with super powers that are utterly incomprehensible to him, and all he has to fall back on is his traditional small-town values. So, yeah, of course he'd try to minimize the attention and disdain his son gets.
Martha's the same way. She knows that Clark is a genuinely good man, because Jonathan taught him to be one. But she also knows that Clark's very existence, the fact of him being A Thing in this world of humans, is something that would boggle pretty much every mind. She doesn't know what she would do in his position, so all she can do is offer her love.
And one of the beautiful things about Snyder's films is that it shows that a mother and father's love ... can actually be enough.
I would be onboard with that interpretation -- that the Kents aren't a perfect emblem of Small Town Common Sense Morality, that they're totally overwhelmed and don't always know the right thing to do -- if they weren't literally advocating for innocent people to die and for Clark to abandon the idea of having a moral responsibility towards other people. I'm sorry, but that crosses a line from being "dang, they're really overwhelmed but they love their son" to outright immoral. You've literally got the Ghost of Jonathan Kent arguing that it's futile to try to be good in the world (unless a woman loves you) and Martha Kent saying Clark has no moral obligation to help anyone but himself, and then you've got, as I noted above, this idea that Clark doesn't care about the world, only Lois -- the end result is a toxic and immoral message, that says that nobody has any obligations to anyone outside their loved ones and the world can go hang. It's pretty sick.
His "personality"? Um....what? Because he wasn't rattling off safety statistics or saying "And remember kids.......(fill in the blank with "eat your vegetables"...or..."take your vitamins"?) I used to be on a volunteer fire department out in the sticks as a teenager. Most of these guys showed up, did the job, and left. To the people in this community, these people were heroes. Like this Superman, that they did this of their own free will, on their own free time, with no thought of thanks or reward spoke enough of what their "personality" was. That's a heroes "personality" to me. YMMV
I mean, that's great, but Superman was not designed to be psychologically realistic. He was designed by Siegel and Shuster to be a children's moral power fantasy. Turning him into a sullen, alienated dude who doesn't really care about the world, is only motivated by the love of one person, and is honestly kind of resentful of the people he's helping for needing to be saved? It's gross.
At literally no point does Jonathan talk about how the world can't handle someone as "superior" as Clark. His fear was how the world would react to something as *different* as Clark, an actual alien.
And he vacillates between talking about how "different" Clark is and then talking about how Clark has a destiny to change the world. The idea that Jonathan views Clark as superior is the clear implication of the combination of talking about how he's different and how he's got a destiny to change the world.
Because people are largely fearful creatures and plenty are hateful to boot.
This is an incredibly misanthropic, nihilistic view that opens the door towards intellectually justifying abusive behavior and ideological justifications for fascism. It is a completely inappropriate message for a
Superman movie with a large children's audience to endorse.
The last four years of Trump showed that whatever delusions of progress and enlightened thinking we may have had about this country have been shown to be bullshit. Hate crimes at an all time high, a resurgence in White Nationalism, attempts to restrict voting in minority areas...fear mongering by Trump and his propagandists about immigrants and people who were seeking asylum from actual tyranny.
This is starting to veer off-topic, but I'm just going to say this: You are absolutely right to cite all of the abuses of Donald Trump and to point out that these abuses demonstrate that there's something majorly wrong with an unacceptably large percentage of the population. BUT. The simple, unavoidable fact is that
Donald Trump never had the support of a majority of the American people. Ever. Not once. The American people
rejected Donald Trump in 2016, and the only reason he got into the White House was that an
anti-democratic relic of our government, the Electoral College, put him into power against the will of the people. At no point in his presidency did Donald Trump enjoy the support of more than 50% of the population. And a great many of the abuses he committed in power were either the direct consequences of, or were indirectly enabled by, other anti-democratic/counter-majoritarian features of the U.S. Constitution as it presently exists.
If we lived in a society that
trusted the people and that practiced real democracy, Donald Trump would never have won the White House. In fact, if the Republican Party primaries had used a more democratic electoral method like ranked-choice voting instead of first-past-the-post, Trump would probably have never won the nomination in the first place.
And again: the very idea that the people are a mob that cannot be trusted is the origin of fascism. Trump is a prime example: He and his followers do not believe that black people, Latino people, or Asian people can be trusted -- individuals may be trustworthy but those populations as collectives are framed as dangerous threats rather than as equals with whom solidarity is possible. And mentally painting huge populations as untrustworthy is what opens the psychological door to dehumanizing them and abusing them -- of framing them as "others" against your in-group. And that opens the door to fascism.
He literally didn't do that either as evidenced by the fact that he didn't say "yes". He said "maybe" as in "maybe...I don't know." Like any honest person who knows they don't have the answer to a tough question.
It's not a tough question. You save the kids. Treating the option of letting a bus of children drown as valid is deeply immoral.
He also goes on to essentially say "the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few" by saying "there's more at stake here than just our lives".
Which is intellectually incoherent, since really the only life whose needs might hypothetically be damaged is Clark's and his family's. Saying that Clark should let a bus full of kids die to protect him, Jonathan, and Martha is actually arguing that the needs of the few outweigh the needs of the many to survive.
Proof of actual alien life would be revolutionary in so many ways and would effect massive social upheaval. Go watch "Contact" for just a taste of how humanity would react. It's not going to be like it was in Superman: The Movie where "I'm from an alien world" is no different than if he'd said "I'm from Fresno".
I really don't think finding out aliens exist would be this big social revolution. I'd
love to imagine that the
Star Trek view, that it would be revolutionary and inspire humanity to solve all its major problems, would be true, but I don't think it is. But I also don't think the idea that it would cause riots in the streets or major social unrest is true, either -- we've been telling stories about aliens for over a hundred years now. The concept is familiar to the overwhelming majority of the population; this is not something that would be a huge shock.
And heck, the history of intercultural first contacts is full of cultures that initially viewed one-another as non-human. That didn't necessarily cause those cultures to undergo major unrest or damage. (
Colonialism did, but that's not the same as merely having contact.)
Feels isolated? Probably.
Angry? No. Sounds like projection, as does "resentful of having to help people."
I don't know how else to interpret that permanently sullen look on his face throughout the flashbacks, or his periodic acting-out and passive-aggression.
And who said he "had" to help people?
Anyone with a sense of moral decency.
The fact is, unlike the Christopher Reeve Superman, this one was helping people since he was a kid. Meanwhile Reeve Superman doesn't do jack shit to help a single person
I don't think that's a fair comparison, because
Superman: The Movie does not depict Young Clark as being in a position
to provide emergency assistance. Smallville is presented as a world where nothing serious ever goes wrong until Jonathan's heart attack, and Young Clark sets off into the world specifically to seek out emergencies where he can help.
until he goes to the Fortress and gets his marching orders from his Space Daddy. Who tells him who and what he's "supposed" to be. While Cavil Superman, with the exception of once, is shown defying those who tell him or caution him not to help people. Even Lois Lane tells him, in one of the most pivotal scenes in MoS, that she could sense that not helping was NOT an option for him. It wasn't a bombastic moment, no long winded speeches, no swelling music, but it summed up who Superman is better than any filmed iteration.
I do agree that
Man of Steel's Present-Day Clark is a great deal more empathetic and less anti-social than his flashback selves.
Angry, resentful people don't waste time helping people.
People are more than capable of helping folks and then building up resentments around it.
They spend years on websites complaining about movies they didn't like.
Oh, c'mon. I literally gave
Man of Steel a B+. I liked it. But analyzing why a work of art fails, and analyzing the moral and real-world implications of the ideas that drive a story, is a perfectly fair way of evaluating art and its impact on the world.
Essentially "choose the path you feel is right, I'll support it" which is what any non-asshole parent tells their kid. They don't railroad them into being something they don't want to be. But she knew, based on the fact that he helped people, non-stop, even before he was Superman that he was going to continue to help people until the day he died, even if it killed him, and it did. Before Zod came to Earth, she could live with the belief that nothing could hurt him and he would die of natural causes. Now she saw that he could be hurt. That he could be killed. That, because he's operating in public, he could be smeared and torn down, relentlessly by either fearful people or those with an agenda. As a mother, she didn't want him getting dragged into the mud by hateful or fearful people, but she supported his decision even though as a mother, she probably didn't like it.
Which would be great, except at no point does
Man of Steel or
Batman v. Superman present Martha as undergoing a shift in perspective as a result of Zod's arrival or realizing Clark's potential mortality.
He's doing this on his own free time, of his own free will with no thought of thanks or reward.
He seems pretty fucking resentful during his entire saving-people montage. He's pissed he's being attacked, but he's also pretty pissed when people thank him.
When people are
dying around him in the Capitol, he just stands there with a sullen look on his face instead of immediately setting about the process of rescuing the survivors or trying to reassure the public outside.
Instead, he runs off to Lois and declares: All this time, I've been living my life the way my father saw it. Righting wrongs for a ghost. Thinking I'm here to do good. Superman was never real. Just the dream of a farmer from Kansas." When Lois replies that that dream gives people hope and the icon of Superman means something, Clark replies, "It did on my world. My world doesn't exist anymore."
I'm sorry, but this dude is a sullen, resentful guy who doesn't really want to help the world (or else he wouldn't be doing it to appease his dead father) and resents Earth for not being Krypton.
(Re: "My world doesn't exist anymore." Recall again Clark's subsequent declaration that
Lois is his world, and Ghost!Jonathan's declaration that doing good is futile and only a woman's love makes life worth living, and the foreshadowing from Future!Flash that Lois was the key to stopping Bruce's vision of Superman-as-dictator, and Snyder's avowed desire to do a storyline where Bruce has fallen for Lois but has to "give" her back when Clark returns, and we have, again, the setup for a deeply messed-up story about women only existing to prevent men from turning into nihilistic monsters.)
So no, he doesn't owe the world a thing.
No, he absolutely does. That's Randian bullshit. What makes him Superman is that he recognizes his moral obligation
and is happy to pay it. He recognizes an obligation
and it is his desire to pay it. Whereas Snyder!Superman resents the whole thing.
And in Smallville and in most previous versions the Kent parents as well as Clark *have been* concerned about Clark protecting a secret identity and personal life.
Sure! But never at the expense of other people's lives.
Edit: Kind of Off Topic, but how come pretty much no one complained about Objectivism in The Incredibles?
I absolutely
cannot stand that movie, precisely for that reason.
But also
The Incredibles is 16 years old and will turn 17 in November. A child born the day that movie was released is old enough to have a driver's license. I think that
might have something to do with why it hasn't gotten as much attention recently as Snyder's work.
