Because of the implication that Superman=good just because.
That is all. And if I misread then I apologize.
DC Movies - To Infinity and Beyond
- Thread starter dahj
- Start date
That is all. And if I misread then I apologize.
I feel the same argument is being made on the other side. Except somehow that carries some kind of weight of realism that we are just supposed to accept at face value.
Which, IIRC, he succumbs to because of Lois Lane's death -- which is standard issue for the bullshit tropes Christopher mentions.
Few people are more committed to the depth of Clark and Lois's love than I. But the idea that Clark would abandon all moral sense because of her death is ridiculous. Putting aside his own strength of character, it would be an utter betrayal of her memory and of her faith in him, so it's a non-starter for that reason if no other.
For that matter, there's also a story that reverses the trope, an entry in DC's puerile "Dark Multiverse," in which Lois gains superpowers after Clark is killed and goes on a vengeful murder spree. It's crap. Lois Lane would never do that, any more than Superman would, and for many of the same reasons. (Apologies in advance for Lois being yet another implausibly good person.)
I really don't understand the whole "Superman is too good to be portrayed in an interesting way".
Chris Evan's Captain America is about as decent of a human being as you can get, and he was well-received by audiences. Was he perfect? No. But neither should Superman be either. Nobody wanted Dark Evil Angsty Captain America, so why is it that Superman gets treated as an impossibility?
Chris Evan's Captain America is about as decent of a human being as you can get, and he was well-received by audiences. Was he perfect? No. But neither should Superman be either. Nobody wanted Dark Evil Angsty Captain America, so why is it that Superman gets treated as an impossibility?
I don't find either particularly realistic.
"Accept this!"
"Why?"
"'Cause!"
That's why I question it.
I suspect it's partly because people invested in the idea of Batman as a grim 'n' gritty character see Superman as a "Boy Scout" contrast and like to put him down for being that; it's been trendy in some circles to do that ever since Frank Miller's unflattering portrait of Superman in The Dark Knight Returns. Captain America doesn't have a contrasting antihero in the same way; there are plenty of darker Marvel characters like Wolverine and the Punisher, but nobody who's paired off with Cap as routinely as Batman with Superman. So Cap doesn't get defined as one half of a pair of opposites in the way Superman does.
This was reinforced by Zack Snyder offering a version of Superman that was embraced by the people who only respect "dark" heroes, and intensely scorned by others. It intensified the polarization that already existed.
And I find that a deeply unrealistic caricature. Nobody is actually saying anything of the sort. You're just making up a cartoonish straw man because it's easy for you to knock down.
To some extent, I'm okay with that idea.
I don't necessarily think Superman should be a psychologically realistic character. Just like the Joker is not a psychologically realistic character but is instead an archetype embodying madness, malice, and/or anarchy, I think Superman works best as a hopeful, optimistic, aspirational archetype embodying a children's fantasy of benevolent power.
Part of the issue has to do with tone rather than with the question of whether the hero should kill per se.
The film Man of Steel presents to us a Superman who is angsty and resentful and whose parents urged him to let innocent people die, then depicts the Kryptonian invasion as representing violence on a nearly-incomprehensible scale of horror, and then presents Superman's killing of Zod as itself a horrible tragedy (while ignoring all of the people who plausibly would have been killed by Superman's tactic against the Kryptonians). In the world of Man of Steel, the social order is inherently a morally dire Dionysian order rather than a morally justified Apollonian order; villains represent an acceleration of that darkness that rather than a deviation from it. Superman may hold back the worst of the flood, but everyone is still wading knee-deep in water everywhere they go.
By contrast, the MCU movies do not present us with the kind of nihilistic tone that Man of Steel uses. Instead, they present us with a hopeful, optimistic tone in which Dionysian adversaries represent departures from a morally just, Apollonian order and whose deaths are morally justified rather than indicators of fundamental tragedy and failure on the part of Captain America. Indeed, Captain America: The First Avenger actively frames the killing of Hydra members and Nazis as a moral good to be celebrated.
Similarly, Superman II (whatever its other flaws might be) does not present Superman's killing of Zod, or Lois's killing of Ursa, as a morally ambiguous event or as a moral failing. The deaths of the Kryptonians is presented as a moral good to be celebrated. And almost nobody complains about Christopher Reeve's Superman killing someone -- because, again, Superman II rejects any sort of nihilistic tone, and instead embraces a combination of romance and adventure; the social order is a morally justified Apollonian order (it literally ends with Superman restoring the American flag to the roof of the Oval Office and telling a heroic character credited only as "The President" that he'll always protect the world), and the Kryptonians represent a Dionysian disruption to that order.
That's really what it boils down to: The traditional Superman is a child's power fantasy about an Apollo figure figure representing a morally justified order, who acts to defeat Dionysus figures representing some form of deviation from morally just order.
The Superman of Man of Steel is defending a social order that is, at best, morally ambiguous; there are ways to do Superman in a morally ambiguous social order, but the way to do that is to show Superman transforming that social order into a morally just one, yet Superman makes no effort to do that in Man of Steel.
Contrast this with Captain America: The Winter Soldier, where the moral power fantasy figure [Captain America] realizes he has been defending a morally corrupt social order [literalized by the revelation that Hydra has infiltrated SHIELD and the American government] and therefore acts to overthrow that social order [in the form of overthrowing SHIELD to defeat Hydra. Darkness is presented but then is overthrown and a morally righteous new social order is asserted.
So you can do a version of Superman who kills sometimes. It has been done. It's all about tone and framing; if you frame the killing as a morally just action, you can make it work. The problem with Man of Steel as I think about it these days is not that Superman kills Zod; it's that Man of Steel presents a nihilistic tone in which a dark and fallen world is going to remain dark and fallen even if the bad guys are defeated, and that's the best we can hope for. It's fundamentally nihilistic. Which is fine, if you're making almost any other superhero. But Superman? No. This is a character who's supposed to be for children, and children deserve better than to be told that the world is awful.
I wouldn't mind a return of Superman-as-social-justice-warrior like his early comics. But again, I think in such a circumstance he needs to represent the triumph of a morally just order over a morally unjust order; if you're presenting an unjust social order, then it's not enough for Superman to save the world from the Kryptonians. He needs to overthrow the unjust social order in some manner (an example of which, again, would be Captain America overthrowing the Hydra-infected SHIELD). Maybe Man of Steel should not only have featured Superman defeating the Kryptonians, but also overthrowing a morally unjust figure of governmental abuse -- there are a couple of different plot devices that could have achieved that theme; maybe a corrupt U.S. President eagerly collaborates with or facilitates Zod's invasion and Superman proves his crimes or something.
For me, a lot of it has to do with what Superman meant to me as a child. This is a character who's right up there with Santa Claus, Mickey Mouse, and Mister Rogers for me.
This comment strikes me as very misleading. Snyder's Superman was embraced by those who only respect "dark" heroes? You know this as a fact? Because this feels as if you're trying to compartmentalize all DC fans in a rather rigid manner.
That's not how I feel whenever I watch "Man of Steel". Not once have I ever felt that way after watching the movie.
No. People are saying Superman is good. Period. To me that sounds like asking for blind acceptance. That this is baked in to the character and above questions. Any other take is cynical.
The issue with Superman being a child's fantasy is that he--from the start in 1938--was read by adolescents and adults as well. At the time, comic books and strips were not targeted exclusively for or stigmatized as entertainment strictly for kids. Creators knew this, hence the reason so many early superhero characters were designed to be fairly serious, and occasionally brutal or lethal in their methods. That appealed to a population who were living in a very lawless period of American history and could exercise their feelings about crime through characters such as The Spectre, Batman and Superman, to name a few.
Man of Steel finally brought a live action Superman into situations that would feel as if he were a part of the real, often chaotic world the audience recognized, including the position of not having to check to see if his reactions did not come into conflict with some absolutist set of rules etched into marble walls. The Cavill Superman was barely on the job, so he had to use his still-growing perceptions of the world and how to deal with it, as he was experiencing a near extinction event, for which no one could prepare him to face in any prescribed manner. The film illustrated a real world belief that there are no clean and easy solutions every step of the way--that all of the hopeful approaches to life one cares to believe will not always address nor solve problems that ignore or trample over wishful thinking, as in the case with Zod's attempted murder of the family.
The job--the purpose of Captain America and Superman was to stop villains from causing global catastrophes, which--by the nature of heroic fiction--are supported or cheered on in any case, no matter the tone bringing the hero to the conclusion that death was the only option. We the audience support the villain's death, but in-universe--no matter how much I feel the first Cap film is one of the few great MCU entries-at the end of his story, he's not left as deeply complex character as Superman, who was dealing with psychological stresses of drafting himself into the role of protector, knowing there was no way he was going to be able to protect everyone, but he would try. When everything was down to a split-second of consideration, as in the fight to stop Zod from killing the family, he was left with no options, except one.
Moreover, the expression on Superman's face the moment he killed Zod was not one of the victor, dismissive of a lost life, or dark satisfaction. He killed, but he did not celebrate it, instead, he fell to his knees yelling out in despair, because the DCEU Superman was designed to kill as his default position--which is the point. Superman can kill and will do so when necessary, which does not make him the "dark" hero as argued by exaggeration-prone, lazy minded individuals (not referring to you).
No, he does not know that by any stretch of the imagination, but he cannot make that kind of sweeping condemnation of innumerable audience members unless they--the audience--are framed as being of the worn "grimdark" mentality.
They didn't kill anyone. There's a deleted scene showing that the depowered villains were fished out of the water and carted off by the authorities at the end. The argument that nobody could realistically have survived a fall into freezing water makes no sense in Superman II's cartoony universe where the powerless Clark is somehow able to walk through the most forbidding parts of the Arctic twice, even though the whole point of the Fortress of Solitude is that it's inaccessible to anyone without superpowers. And when supervillains are defeated by falling a great height, they always survive and come back; that's been part of the rules of comic books since the earliest days of Superman and Batman.
The Supergirl TV series achieved that pretty well (sometimes better than others, admittedly).
Then you're hearing it wrong. You're hearing what satisfies your prejudices and are deaf to what's actually being said.
Both sides are right about some stuff, and wrong about others. There, solved.
With a display of fairness on that level, you have my vote for whatever you're not running for in 2024.
All we see of the end of the Phantom Zone villains in Superman II, is that they disappear into a mist in Superman's Fortress. There's no sound of hitting water or ground: they just vanish. To assume that Superman and Lois (who knocked Ursa into the mist) killed them in cold blood once they were powerless is in no way consistent with the tone and previous events of the movie.
Anecdotally, I never saw or heard the interpretation that Superman killed them until much later, usually in conjunction with an argument supporting Byrne and Snyder depicting Superman as killing.
Anecdotally, I never saw or heard the interpretation that Superman killed them until much later, usually in conjunction with an argument supporting Byrne and Snyder depicting Superman as killing.
While the inevitable back-and-forth on this point promises to be incredibly tedious, derailing the thread for the next several pages with much stupid from the usual suspects, this is as succinct and accurate a summation as one could ask for.
Yes, exactly. This was a kids' movie, for Pete's sake. This was nearly a decade before Tim Burton's Batman introduced the idea of "gritty" superhero stories. I never got the impression that the Phantom Zone villains suffered anything worse than being trapped in the lower levels of the Fortress until Superman could deal with them at his leisure.
Yeah, it's really confounding how many people have forgotten just how bloodless almost all superhero violence was until the mid-80s and the decades of comic book stories where bad guys fell from great heights only to miraculously survive.
Ok.....
If I'm out of line here, the moderators can let me know..... But there is a dedicated Superman thread. Maybe this can belong there? Because this entire topic is no longer about the DC movies and beyond but only about Superman. I like to check this topic on anything new relating to that.
I know there's also the new topic, but that's purely about the James Gunn era. There's still other DC stuff happeing (new Joker movie, new Pattinson Batman movie) that we could talk about.
Again, mods.... If I'm out of line, just let me know.
If I'm out of line here, the moderators can let me know..... But there is a dedicated Superman thread. Maybe this can belong there? Because this entire topic is no longer about the DC movies and beyond but only about Superman. I like to check this topic on anything new relating to that.
I know there's also the new topic, but that's purely about the James Gunn era. There's still other DC stuff happeing (new Joker movie, new Pattinson Batman movie) that we could talk about.
Again, mods.... If I'm out of line, just let me know.