Superman Returns, For the First Time
David Louis Edelman July 4th, 2006
My wife and I went to see Superman Returns last night. No, I don’t intend to write a full-blown review here. Suffice it to say that while the plot inconsistencies do seem to surface quicker than Lex Luthor’s proto-crystalline continent, Bryan Singer does an admirable job in resurrecting the Big Blue Guy. Quibble all you want about the details, but Brandon Routh was Superman, and that’s just about all that matters.
But here’s what I really want to discuss.
About twenty minutes into the movie — right about at the point where Lex Luthor starts fingering those crystals he finds at Superman’s Fortress of Solitude — the couple next to me started a rather lengthy whispered conversation. After a minute, I realized that the woman simply didn’t understand what was going on. Where are they? What are they doing? What’s the deal with that crystal-powered CPU thing anyway?
It occurred to me that we take a lot of baggage in with us when we go to see a Superman movie. I’m not necessarily talking about the “can Brandon Routh fill Christopher Reeve’s shoes” kind of baggage, much less the “can Kevin Spacey fill Gene Hackman’s shoes” kind of baggage. (And for the record, the answers to those questions are “yes” and “no.”) I’m talking about the narrative baggage.
We all know that Superman disguises himself as mild-mannered Clark Kent. We all know that Superman has this icy fortress in the Arctic (or is it the Antarctic?) where he likes to retreat. We all know that green glowing meteorites mean trouble. Some of us even know how to get Mister Mxyzptlk banished back to the fifth dimension. And so on.
But what if Superman Returns was your first exposure to the Man of Steel? What if you were completely ignorant of the superhero genre? What if (to get all skiffy) the DVD of Superman Returns got buried in a time capsule and became the only record of the entire superhero milieu to survive? Or what if (to put it in more mundane terms) you grew up on a remote farm in China with only a vague idea of what a superhero is, and during a trip to America one of your hosts took you to see Superman Returns?
This brought home to me the fact that, while some genre conventions are universal, most of them are rooted to a particular time and culture. This goes for science fiction and fantasy as well as for superheroes (or mysteries or westerns or any other genre you can think of). When you put a laser-shootin’ space pirate or an axe-slingin’ dwarf or a gin-swiggin’ private detective in your work, you’re anchoring your story firmly to the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Anyone picking up your novel, say, two hundred years from now simply won’t get the reference without copious footnotes. Likewise, there’s no guarantee that the remote farmer in China — or the woman sitting next to you in the movie theater — will have these genre conventions in her cultural lexicon.
Yes, it’s true that genre conventions change and evolve over time, and few of them exist in isolation. Superman takes his cues from iconic characters going back as far as Gilgamesh and Hercules, and J.R.R. Tolkien didn’t invent the dwarf. But I’m pretty certain that our idea of a dwarf won’t square up with our great-grandchildren’s idea of a dwarf — just as Tolkien’s would seem odd to the original Scandinavians who thought them up.
I’m not saying this is a bad thing at all. It just seems to me that we would be wise to know what parts of our stories speak to the universal human experience, and what parts speak to our unique human experience.
Why? Because cultural norms shift with the wind, while human nature doesn’t change. Much.
My first experience with this was with the movie, Ben Hur. It was so odd; the woman and her daughter watching the movie with us — it had recently hit TCM or one of those networks — U.S. citz all their lives, had no idea at all what was happening with the Crucifixion. They didn’t even know who Jesus was! That’s what I call living with blinders on beyond anything I can even image.
OTH — You might be surprised at what that Chinese woman in a remote agricultural region might recognize. I’ll share something with you from last year.
When the animated film of Howl’s Moving Castle arrived we went to see it with a dear friend, who is both a well-known artist and, now, also a houngan. His wife is Haitian. She’d never been anywhere outside Port-au-Prince’s slums her whole life. She speaks Kreyole. At that time, though she’d been studying English, she’d only been here since the end of January and itwas now June.
She had no trouble whatsoever following Dianna Wynne’s tale, though she has no background at all in English anything.
“Demons,” she said. Her own culture has demons all right, including the human as well as the spiritual ones.
It has more to do with how well-made a work is, and how open the receptive imagination has, it seems, than anything else.
OTOH, as They Say — you know you belong when you get the jokes, and you get them in the language they are told.
Love, C.
I experienced this one when coming out of Fellowship of the Rings a couple of days after it opened. My son thought the elves, so briefly glimpsed, at first, were ghosts, and Frodo was dead. But he was just a little boy.
What really struck me was the comment by the woman a few years older than I, who commented to her spouse, “No, I hated it–all it’s about is fighting monsters.”
The woman in rural China would have no trouble with superheroes. They’re called The Eight Immortals over there. But the newspaper office of Clark Kent would definitely require some explanation.
The axe-wielding dwarves and the elves are hardly limited to genre fantasy! Tolkien didn’t make them up, you know — he got them from the deep river of earlier European mythology. Similar beings exist in Asian cultures. (There are even Chinese “hobbits”, little people who live in tidy underground dwellings.) Fairies, demons, and the like are even more universal.
Now, the science fiction tropes — those are the ones that won’t travel well.
As a writer, it’s not just genre tropes that you have to think about when it comes to reader understanding. My copyeditor just queried me about passage where I describe human corpses bloating in a village street after a massacre.
Anyone who has ever seen a dead dog left by a roadside in the heat for a while knows that a carcass can end up looking like a blimp about to burst, but my editor wondered if readers might be puzzled by this. In our modern cities, do people ever actually see a dead anything left in the sun?
And how much do we have to take ignorance of cultural baggage into account anyway? Do we explain, and drive more savvy readers into terminal boredom, or just hope that the uninformed will love the challenge of trying to understand? We have to achieve the right balance between the two, but it’s difficult - because we don’t really know who our audience is going to be, let alone the range of our readers’ knowledge.
Just another challenge along the road for any writer…
I would say: Don’t write “down” to your readers. And get your details right.
A lot of people read fiction as a painless way of learning about the world- especially about situations they expect never to encounter, whether it’s dead bodies beside the road or being stranded on a mountain top or whatever. Not that this is always a good idea (see all the fantasy writers who learn about horses from bad fantasy!) But at least we as deep genre writers can contribute to the general education by writing as “authentically” as our story allows.
Carol
Of course Superman Returns was billed as picking up where the Christopher Reeve Superman II left off, as opposed to being an opening salvo. Thus it had the some of the same issues as any sequel. How easy is it for anyone to pick up the second or third book in a series and understand everything that’s going on? (That is one of my biggest time sinks in writing.) But certainly some other films have done a decent job of introducing the superhero concept, whether or not the viewer was familiar with the particular canon. (Spiderman, Batman Begins, or the first Reeve Superman, for example.)
Perhaps a more subtle cultural distinction than the problem with the green crystals or such carryover details in this particular film, is the “comic book” narrative style, for those who’ve never indulged in superhero comics (See Sin City for the ultimate example). In many ways Superman Returns struck me as more of a fantasy than a comic book movie. I won’t indulge in spoilers, but I’ll be interested to hear if anyone else agrees. (I loved it, BTW, and agree with you about Brandon Routh. Of course, I also liked Spacey better than Hackman, which might have something to do with the “comic” thing.)
Carol
I’m looking forward to the movie. I did like Superman comics as a kid although of all the classic superheroes Superman was the one I grew bored with first.
It’s worth noting that Superman wasn’t the first hero created by Shuster and Siegel. They had a very superman looking but non superpowered hero called Slam Bradley. Slam loved fighting, mostly ridiculously stereotyped foriegners, always won but didn’t go in for the costume or any superhuman abilities. The similarity in appearance to Superman is uncanny though.
http://www.thrillingdetective.com/slam.html
the question of narrative baggage is a fascinating one and one that i feel as though i’ve struggled with — as a lit critic, as a teacher, and more recently, as a writer — for many years. northrop frye — a big time lit classic crit from canada — argues that there are only 4 ways to tell a story, and certainly from a western point of view that seems to be right. and yet, if we look at the narrative tradition of say, Japan, or Africa, there are huge differences in how plot works, how characters work, and what constitutes a gripping aesthetic experience. a cultural studies feminist type critic would say that the reason so much of this superman type stuff “feels” universal is because of capitalism, imperialism, racism, and patriarchy. so what constitutes a “good” story? Damned if i know, but it may have something to do with psychological intensity (which we may indeed be hardwired to appreciate). duh… maybe.
Well, since we’re already into comments, I’ll assume SPOILER ALERTS have been given and go ahead and discuss the film.
Just came back from Westercon yesterday, and on the drive back, stopped at the Universal City Walk to beat the heat for a bit and arrived at the perfect time to see the movie in occasionally 3-D IMAX.
I’m thinking of how to describe the film. Perhaps, THE MAN OF STEEL’S ASTHMATIC LOVE-CHILD. That was something I was not precisely expecting, especially since I missed the first two Superman movies except for snippets caught during various reruns–remember, I’m forty, and since I was a kid when they came out, I had perfectly valid reasons for missing them. In some ways I’m in the exact same boat as the twenty-somethings whose experience of the backstory is an occasional snippet of a butchered showing of an embarrassingly dated seventies move, mixed with having watched Smallville and the occasional incongruent rerun of Lois & Clark.
What else? Oh yes, THRILL AT THE ALTERNATE UNIVERSE WHERE WEALTHY WIDOWS CAN SIGN VAST FORTUNES OVER TO WELL-KNOWN VILLAINS ON THEIR DEATHBEDS WITHOUT NOTARIES WITHOUT HAVING IT CONTESTED IN COURT. Admittedly it was a fun, comic-booky scene, but I decided that actually Lex did a good thing, because apparently the family was so greedy that when they didn’t get any money, they just left grandma’s corpse upstairs to be devoured by the pomeranians, one of whom later ate the other ones after the family locked them in the house after Lex had already left the mansion. Unless of course that was in accordance with the old lady’s wishes?
Oh yes, then there was also WATCH THE WORLD BE SAVED BY LEX’S GUN MOLL KITTY, WHO DECIDES SHE’D RATHER NOT BE PART OF KILLING SIX BILLION PEOPLE. There were certainly many bits of heroism in the film, but that was the only one which not only boiled down to a personal moral decision, but also had the biggest net saving-the-world effect.
But most of all WONDER WHETHER LOIS BEGAN IMMEDIATELY SHAGGING RICHARD THE SECOND SUPERMAN LEFT, OR IF HALF-ALIEN LOVE-CHILREN HAVE A LONGER GESTATION, OR IF RICHARD IS SIMPLY UNABLE TO COUNT AND SO ARE AN ENTIRE OFFICE OF REPORTERS NINE MONTHS AFTER LOIS WRITES AN ARTICLE TITLED “MY NIGHT WITH SUPERMAN.” Of course, these are the same reporters who can’t simply line up a couple photographs to figure out Superman’s identity, but oh well.
I have to admit that the Tucker Carlson vibe from Jimmy Olsen was entertaining, but that’s hardly a big deal. What is/was more of a big deal is that this read like a random Superman issue pulled off the shelf in the middle of some chronology with a new artist, new author and new inker, but the same old storyline.
Also, I have to say that in Superman’s reality, geophysics has odd rules. I remember Gene Hackman showing how to drop California into the ocean and turn Nevada into beachfront property, but now he expects us to believe that growing a large crystal in the middle of the Atlantic will somehow suberge the eastern seaboard but not anything else from the rest of the world. I’m supposing that these crystals somehow gain mass from nowhere, rather than just transmuting water into their matrix (and thus the need for the water) because if it used the ocean water, rising a spire would cause a drop in sea level if anything. And if it added mass to the Atlantic, all the other water would flow around and drown coastlines worldwide. Really. There are these people who’ve done whole “what happens when the ice caps melt” scenarios and have really thought about it.
Also, note to Lex, if you’re going to drop supercrystals into the ocean, have a better plan than doing it from a boat with just a short-hop helicopter. You would have starved to death on Crystal Island much sooner than you would have on Coconut Atol. Next time, try looking for a rich old widow with a personal zeppelin.
I’m thinking that SUPERMAN RETURNS is not accurately calculated to resonate with today’s kids, who probably haven’t read as many Superman comics as previous generations did. There’s just too much backstory that they won’t recognize.
So it instead becomes an exercise in nostalgia for Boomers and thirtysomethings — fun for them, but the kids will just go “Huh? Why doesn’t Superman just kill Lex Luthor with his heat-vision?”
Good point, A.R. The pacing of the first hour of the film was really quite slow, too — certainly not something that little kids would sit still for.
If I were to enter the movie theater to watch the new Superman movie as a viewer with no knowledge about the character, there is one glaring thing that would warn me that there will probably be things in the movie that a viewer would be expected to already know:
The title: Superman Returns
Unlike the recent Batman Begins, I should realize that I am being expected to have seen or read some Superman already since I am heading into the theater to watch a movie that is clearly not the start of the character’s timeline.
That said, it would have been nice to have had an explanation for certain things, if for no other reason than to keep the “talkers” in a theater quiet.
Personally, I enjoyed the movie. It stayed close to Superman and Superman II, but I guess I shouldn’t be surprised at that since I did read somewhere that this movie takes the place of Superman III and creates an alternative universe for us to follow the character — or perhaps banishes the 3rd and 4th films to that Phantom Zone with Zod as extra punishment on top of his banishment.
Which leads me to a question for the authors on this site:
Just how much “what went before” information do you put into books in a series?
Do you prefer a synopsis at the beginning?
Do you prefer to work a paragraph or page into the story?
Or do you simply hope the reader will look at the inside of the book or the cover to realize that this is Book X of Y of a series?
The movie ’superman returns’ is the best movie I have seen yet. It’s so captivating and gripping, not to mention Brandon Routh a.k.a superman is hott. I think the movie was beautifully crafted and excellently captured. The actors and actresses were spot on and I admire their talent. Even if the other older superman movies did differ a bit from this new one, I like the fresh new take on it. In the movie Lex Luthor describes what superman’s fortress is for and what the crystals do. Anyways, I would recommend it to anyone who enjoys great movies!
Rachel