It’s a bird! It’s a plane! No! It’s a woke, anti-Trump, anti-Israel metaphor! Such, at any rate, has been the cry of many critics who have reviewed the new Superman film. I think they need to have their eyes checked. Warning: spoilers follow.
Played by David Corenswet with a refreshing, low-key earnestness, Superman is back in yet another reboot. The comic book character, created in the 1930s, has a familiar mythos that the movie recounts. An alien from the distant dying world of Krypton, he was sent as a baby by his Kryptonian parents as the last son of Krypton to Earth, the planet where he could “do the most good” by serving humanity. He crash-landed in Kansas and was raised by his adoptive parents, Jonathan and Martha, who instilled in him traditional American values. The film picks up following his life as Clark Kent in Metropolis, where he is trying to balance a double life as a journalist alongside girlfriend Lois Lane while also finding time to feed his superdog, Krypto. When he needs healing, Superman repairs to his secret ice fortress, where he takes solace in his deceased Kryptonian parents’ garbled last message to him, who counsel him to do good and serve mankind.
As in the comics, Superman’s principal foe is Lex Luthor, the billionaire businessman and genius who sees Superman as an alien threat to humanity. “He’s not a man. He’s an It,” Luthor growls. Luthor—played by Nicholas Hoult, in probably the best performance of the film—infiltrates Superman’s fortress and hacks into his computer, recovering his parents’ last message. Then comes the plot twist: The garbled part of the message that Superman had never heard before is restored. It turns out Superman’s parents tell him that human beings are dull and fit to be conquered. They counsel him to destroy anyone who stands in his way, breed with as many Earth women as possible to restore the Kryptonian people, and rule Earth.
This of course is an edgy and subversive take on the mythos of Superman’s parents, who are portrayed as villains rather than self-sacrificing heroes—and it throws Superman into an identity crisis. But the subversiveness is then sublimated into a strikingly traditional, virtue-centered message about individual moral responsibility and the meaning of family.
When Clark gets injured again, this time he goes not to his ice fortress but back to his boyhood home in Kansas to convalesce. Clark tells his dad that he is not really who he thought he was, one whose mission is to put his supernatural abilities in service of others. Mr. Kent embraces his son and tells him, “Your choices, your actions: that’s what makes you who you are.”
This is not, as some Catholic commentators have suggested, an apologia for voluntaristic liberalism. It is rather an affirmation of the traditional philosophical-anthropological idea that each person, as an imago dei, bears individual responsibility for his actions. Moreover, in the context of the plot, the statement is strikingly anti-racist (in the genuine sense of that term). Superman’s parents sent him as a Kryptonian agent to physically and genetically conquer humanity, in the name of the “superior” Kryptonian race. But Jonathan Kent channels the common sense Judeo-Christian belief that the equal dignity of all rational creatures lies in the individual responsibility to shape one’s destiny, telling his son that it is not his parentage or his race that determines his destiny. Not only is that message not woke—it is the anti-woke teaching of the Judeo-Christian tradition (cf. Joshua 24:15; Deuteronomy 30:19—20; 1 Kings 18:21; Galatians 5:13).
Superman’s identity as sharing in the human condition is underscored by the final confrontation with Luthor. Luthor is driven by a fear of the Kryptonian’s threat to humanity, emphasizing his alienness. (This is a bit different tack than the Zack Snyder reboot, which emphasized Superman’s godlikeness—but both underscore Superman’s difference.) Superman asserts that he shares key human attributes, including limited knowledge, proneness to theoretical and practical errors, and the need to choose on a daily basis to exercise one’s moral freedom well. In other words, while the Kryptonian rational animal has the powers of superstrength, flight, and heat vision, none of that suffices for moral excellence. He shares with the human rational animals something much more elemental: their spiritual condition, their fallenness. The story of Superman is one thought experiment about what an alien, bodily, and rational species that is also fallen might be like. Hence, Kal-El did not arrive on Earth perfect in knowledge and virtue. He needed to be brought up in the traditional American virtues of the Midwestern farm and small town, to be the kind of person who could use his gifts well. In that sense, Superman’s story is a metaphor for every human story.
None of this is to say that the film is perfectly on key. It is unevenly paced, and the contribution of the supporting characters is hit-and-miss at best. Nor is it to say that it is a great film. It clearly falls short of the standard for greatness in superhero films, DC and otherwise, set by Christopher Nolan’s Batman trilogy. Nor even is it to say that one cannot find political metaphors in the film. But I submit that, for the most part, such parallels are in the eyes of the beholders who want to find metaphors for criticizing Trump or Israel or whatever.
To take one example, Superman turns himself in, and the government has contracted out detainment of Superman to Lex Luthor’s group of metahumans, Planet Watch. Superman asks, “Aren’t you going to read me my Miranda rights?” The official responds, “There are no Miranda rights for aliens.” He is then imprisoned in a pocket universe, Lex Luthor’s own personal black site.
While a motivated viewer might see a metaphor for the US deporting unlawful aliens to jail in prisons in El Salvador, the disanalogies seem more glaring. Superman is falsely accused and turns himself in anyway. This is not the typical profile of a violent criminal illegal alien like Jose Antonio Ibarra, the Venezuelan national who entered the US illegally in 2022, committed multiple crimes for which he was not deported, murdered the young college student Laken Riley whilst on her morning jog, then fled. Moreover, unlike Superman, who is questioned under torture, alien residents who are detained by ICE typically have the right to remain silent, to claim a basis for asylum, to legal counsel, and to make their case before a judge.
“Your choices, your actions: that’s what makes you who you are.”
A more thoughtful critique of the film is that it misses or ignores the linchpin virtue of the original Superman, the virtue of patriotism. Patriotism, which Superman lore underscored by the traditional motto of “Truth, Justice, and the American Way,” is what makes the Kryptonian essentially different than what he would have been had he crash-landed in Russia, as the Superman comic Red Son imagines.
While I am sympathetic to this critique, I don’t think it is fatal. The target audience of the film includes the least patriotic generation by polling data, Gen Z, in which only 41 percent are “extremely” or “very proud” to be American. This is due largely in part to miseducation of this generation about what Americanism is. The promotion of individual dignity, liberty, and traditional family values of the film is American. But perhaps for the frequently miseducated younger generations, the recovery of those values qua beautiful is the precondition to the recovery of patriotism, which will require the recovery of sound civic education.
In the final scene, Superman’s robots ask if he wants to listen to the recording of his parents, to soothe him—and he agrees. In the background is Teddybears’ song “Punkrocker,” referencing an earlier conversation in which Lois and Superman debated the meaning of “punk rock.” She equated it with the cynicism she saw in herself. But in Superman, Lois saw a man who optimistically sees beauty in everyone he meets. “Maybe that is true punk rock,” Superman replied.
As the chorus repeats, “I’m a punkrocker, yes I am,” the walls light up with the old family videos of Clark’s childhood in Kansas, being raised by Jonathan and Martha Kent. So it wasn’t that Superman autonomously chose Truth, Justice, and the American Way in a vacuum. He grew up in a home with an intact marriage of loving and devoted parents, who instilled in him the idea that every human being is beautiful, of intrinsic worth and dignity.
The montage is a moving testament to the idea that a loving, married mother and father is what every child needs to have his best shot at becoming the hero rather than villain of his own story.