None of that means Superman should be dragged into the muck with us. The character would never surrender to a world of bleakness and cynicism, and his creators shouldn't either.
DC Movies - To Infinity and Beyond
- Thread starter dahj
- Start date
The 70s had Dirty Harry, The Godfather, Taxi Driver, Midnight Express, which were all at least as popular as the titles you mention, the Cold War was going on, the Vietnam War ended with America in defeat, there were coups in Chile and Iran, among other places, New York had a legendary crime wave, environmental issues spread into public consciousness, there was an oil crisis and a stock market crash, and Richard Nixon had to resign over the Watergate scandal. Add to that the divisions that were still fresh in people's mind from the 60s, from race equality, to emancipation, and the sexual revolution.
And that was the state of the world when the first Christopher Reeve Superman movie became a smash hit.
Your argument is invalid.
Edit:
Almost forgot, I actually came here to share this new piece of art from Jerry Ordway:
They’re both ‘fish out of water with strong moral values’ stories though. And that’s the crux really.
General audiences love fish out of water stories.
Superbly stated.
Anyway, there seems to be an assumption among some posters that "good" equals "one-dimensional." But as I went out of my way to note, in the interview scene alone, Reeve's Superman is "sexy, sly, knowing, and playful." He's not an automaton spouting platitudes, but a personality with whom audiences can engage. Elsewhere in the film, he's conflicted, frustrated, grief-stricken, and enraged. He's not emotionless or inhuman, he's just not controlled by selfishness, greed, dishonesty, hatred, or any of the other worst aspects of humanity. And that's why he's Superman, and not some other character.
Why do people assume that good people can't be complex? I think that's getting it backward. Evil is very simple -- bad people just act on their baser urges, their selfishness and anger and fear, and don't have qualms over it. And they don't worry about moral dilemmas because all they care about is themselves. Good people feel that same selfishness and fear and negativity, but must constantly control those things within themselves and not succumb to them. And they have to wrestle with situations where there is no clear, simple right answer, where somebody will be hurt either way. It's much harder and more complicated to be good.
Superman's goodness is anything but simple. Remember the "World of Cardboard" speech from the animated Justice League? He's so powerful that interacting with human beings is like trying to handle soap bubbles without breaking them. He has to maintain absolutely rigid control over his every motion at every instant, or people could die. That must be incredibly difficult. But he doesn't have the option to relax his guard. He can never just let go.
This was handled well in the episode "Mine Games" in the syndicated The Adventures of Superboy back in 1990. Superboy and Lex Luthor were trapped in a caved-in mine with kryptonite and were forced to work together to escape. There was some great dialogue (written by Luthor's actor Sherman Howard) as the two of them really had a heart-to-heart verbal confrontation for the first time, and when Lex goaded Superboy to reveal what he really wanted from life, Superboy admitted that he wanted a normal life without powers -- "The freedom to compromise."
It would be easy to be the most powerful man on Earth and just do what you want without caring who you hurt. There are a lot of deconstructions of Superman that think they're being clever by portraying their Superman analogues that way, but it's boring and obvious. It's much harder to have that kind of power and not abuse it. Superman's commitment to kindness is a contrast to the destructive potential of his power, and that's what makes him interesting. That was Siegel & Shuster's whole idea in the first place. They were responding to the Nietzschean idea of the ubermensch/superman being "beyond good and evil," powerful enough not to care about conventional morality, by asking, what if someone that powerful instead chose to be extra-moral, to fight for others instead of just indulging his own ego? That is not an obvious or simple thing. It's more nuanced than the Nietzschean alternative.
Thank you. If you like dark and bleak then watch Batman. Superman should always be hopeful ,optimistic and represent good. That is who the character is.
And if anyone doubts the popularity of that message, well, there IS a very popular franchise called Star Trek..
The current societal climate dictates that the things that sell, nine times out of ten, are things that reflect, rather than ignore, said societal climate.
Is there a chance that Gunn's vision of Superman ends up bucking that trend? Sure.
I just don't think that chance is very high.
Star Trek is not anywhere close to being as popular now as it was in the 90s, and none of the IP's current installments lean into the kind of old-fashioned values that Gunn thinks Superman represents and that he's trying to sell with Superman: Legacy.
Is there a chance that Gunn's vision of Superman ends up bucking that trend? Sure.
I just don't think that chance is very high.
Star Trek is not anywhere close to being as popular now as it was in the 90s, and none of the IP's current installments lean into the kind of old-fashioned values that Gunn thinks Superman represents and that he's trying to sell with Superman: Legacy.
Why does this only come up with Superman? I don't see people calling out for Spider-Man or Shazam to go down this road.
I guess it's the alien ubermensch, some people just can't accept such a being could be benign.
I guess it's the alien ubermensch, some people just can't accept such a being could be benign.
Nahh, I think it's just that Superman has been a more prominent target of such criticisms for decades longer, and a lot of people just want to hop on a popular bandwagon.
Both this and the long complicated history of the character. Also, the idea that someone would use power positively is not something within many people's experience so they are looking for the other shoe to drop.
There was a time when cynical deconstructions of wholesome superheroes were daring and innovative, a challenge to cliches. Somehow, a lot of people think it's still daring and innovative 40 years later, even though it's become the cliche itself by now. These days, the idea that Superman doesn't need to be edgy and cynical is the subversive one.
Okay, let's try to reason this out a different way.
The examples you posted were all TV shows, and of a specific genre for a mature audience. What about movies? Specifically big blockbuster action/adventure movies, like Superman: Legacy is aiming to be. What have been the most popular of these in the past decade or so?
Well, the MCU, obviously, comes to mind, and most of their characters at least try to be good people, even if some are flawed.
With DC, well, the Box Office king of DC is currently Aquaman, and while that particular version of Aquaman may be deeply flawed, the movie was all about him becoming a better version of himself.
The Jurassic World trilogy ... okay, characters didn't play any part in this particular franchise's popularity, but still, it's not like Chris Pratt's character would be considered an anti-hero by anybody.
Star Wars, well, those new movies lived mostly off of the brand recognition, but again, the hero characters were indeed heroic. The one that is even remotely debatable is Luke Skywalker in The Last Jedi, and I still hear people complaining about how that movie destroyed the character.
I mean, honestly, the one big tentpole franchise that actually has anti-heroes in the lead is the Fast & Furious franchise.
Because Superman's never been really a character, he's really more an archetype.
There's a reason there's only been ONE truly good movie about him, and even that movie had problems.
Can't agree with this. I think he's very much a character in Lois & Clark and Superman & Lois, for example.
In fact, there may be a pattern here -- Lois makes Clark more dimensional by the way he sparks off her energy and humanity. Certainly, Henry Cavill and Tom Welling never seemed more alive on screen than when engaging with their respective Loises.
That may be true, but they're still not the complete and utter failures that Trek God 1 likes to make them out to be.
I think the fact that our society is like that right now just gives us a greater need for more positive heroes. And like @Kai "the spy" pointed out, we seem to be heading back in more of the Superman direction right now than Dirty Harry.
It’s been long enough since works like Watchmen and DKR that there are creators who grew up on them or on the works inspired by them. For them, superheroes as an allegory for the system or authority or status quo or neoliberalism or whatever ISN’T a subversion or deconstruction. It’s just how superheroes are (or at least one of the modes of the genre). And fair enough. It does serve as a very effective symbol for that sort of thing.
Mind you, Superman wasn't the one-in-a-million exception of an optimistic hero character in a tentpole movie back in 1978, either, considering it was also the time of Star Wars' Luke Skywalker and Roger Moore's James Bond.