World Superman Day

“Oh, Superman, where are you now?”

Genesis

Strap yourself in, Kemosabe, we’re taking off faster than a speeding bullet.

I don't like to confuse things with metaphors more powerful than a locomotive. Yesterday was "Superman Day" according to Dean Cain, but having done a titanic job playing Superman on "Lois & Clark: The New Adventures of Superman," he ought to know, don't ya' think?

Saw it on X. X is usually just a giant hate-fest. It’s yummy feel-good flamin' by solitary psychotics and Qatari bots. Nobody there seems to have much good to say about the, ah, "Zionists." (Superman was created, incidentally, by two Jewish guys, Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, who ironically happened upon a term used by Nietzsche and embraced by Hitler—the "Übermensch," "Overman," SUPERMAN.)

I'm not going to comment here, one way or another. I don't suppose Superman, though, would be out on behalf of Iranian Mullahs that stone women to death, shoot protestors, support global terror, what-have-you. But that's enough of that for this space.

I found out about Supes as a wee tyker—it was just Dracula, Santa Claus, Jesus, Superman, and The Elephant Man that occupied my wee tot of a developing mental landscape. I suppose I also had Smurfs living rent-free in my baby noggin', but I digress.

Superman: The Movie, a cinematic Seventies blockbuster classic that flew in hot on the heels of Star Wars, Close Encounters, and other big-budget special-effects knock-'em-outs, stars ill-fated actors Christopher Reeve (living out arguably the same "Curse of Superman" that did in George Reeves—note similarity in last names, even), the suicided Margot Kidder, Gene Hackman, who died under arguably mysterious circumstances, Ned Beatty, Valerie Perrine ("Eve Teschmacher") most recently—okay, cast mostly dead now.

It was directed by Richard "The Day the Earth Stood Still" Donner, from a story and screenplay adaptation by Mario "The Godfather" Puzo. It's an all-American roundup of what is best and brightest in epic superhero cinema of the era—Reeve is too handsome, too charming, soap-opera Hollywood hunkenstein. Marlon Brando ("Jor-El"), no stranger to tragedy before his death decades later, comes off as a stern heavenly father reconstructed in what passed for the AI of the era; Margot Kidder is spunky, raspy, feisty, very much a liberated woman of the period.

Gene Hackman is deliciously comic-book bad (and bald), epitomizing the role of Luthor to such a degree that many, such as moi, find it damn near impossible to read modern Superman comics and graphic novels WITHOUT hearing the distinctive, somewhat gravelly murmuring baritone of Hackman, or imagining him filling the four-color shoes. Beatty is a perfect comic foil, borrowed from a Forties film or comic strip, always getting his foot caught in a bucket or forgetting the nuclear code's final number because he couldn't write the whole thing on his arm. He gets his boot-in-the-rear drubbing from the condescending, cruel, and cuttingly snarkily verbose "Mistah Loo-tor."

Jimmy Olsen (Marc McClure) doesn't have much to do here except give an updated corn-pone presentation of himself and get rescued by Superman. Margot Kidder is the clueless romantic love interest of Supes and teases him with X-ray vision and a panty shot. Reeve, ever the gentleman, plays himself as a stumble, bumble dweeb transplanted from 1958—a curiously hackneyed hombre blancque stereotype that stutters nervously and gets caught in revolving doors. He's straight-up sitcom, the alternate version of himself as the badass, blue and red clad heartthrob with the restrained, polite behavior.

Lois Lane falls for the latter, but she is clueless as to the dual identity of the former. Because, well, he wears horn-rimmed glasses, for one thing.

Superman is cast, like a babe in the bulrushes, from the dying moments of fabled Krypton (which is very distinctively arctic, white, with a technology that seems to be all New Age crystals and long glass tubes—very distinctive retro-futuristic look, but it doesn't do a lot to suggest a titanic space population) through space, aging while in his escape capsule.

He finds himself, as per the fabled comic-book origin story, the infant son of John and Martha Kent (Glenn Ford and Phylis Thaxter), who raise the boy to be a proper small-town Iowa farm boy, hiding the fact that he can do such things as outpace a locomotive (there's a small cameo in this scene by TV's original Lois Lane Noel Neill) and make a touchdown on the football field every time. Already he's living in the alternate-universe iconic wonderland of vast, rolling American plains, right before flying in, after Jonathan Kent succumbs to his heart condition, to become the dweebish Clark Kent, who, Lois Lane feels, is never going to be able to quite compete with the Man of Steel.

Superman, who journeys to the Krypton-like South Pole to take possession of the "Fortress of Solitude," which emerges from beneath the icy flow, hearing the voice-over narration of Father Jor-El Brando, reborn as a holographic construct. Kal-El, the Last Son of Krypton, has a mission to perform: save the human race. Presumably, from itself, we might add.

To that end, Hackman Luthor, ensconced as comic-book villain cum comic relief in his supervillain headquarters beneath Grand Central Station there in Metropolis, hatches a hare-brained diabolical scheme to nuke California and start an earthquake so he can level L.A. after the San Andreas fault goes and, and... I never did quite wrap my head around it all. Supes previously stops a helicopter and jetliner from crashing, while saving Lois from a catastrophic fall, and then literally halting a massive flood, fixing a fault line... you get the picture.

He also goes nuclear missile chasing.

His love for Lois, not having the time to be fully developed here, is still made poignant by their dual flight set to the romantic musical strains of John Williams, and a poetic voice-over narration from Kidder. Later, this love explodes in the movie's most dramatic and really emotionally stirring moment. Lois, dead beneath an avalanche in her car, breaks Superman's heart and his stoic resolve. Erupting in a howl of utter psychic rage and despair, like some mythological Greek tragedian, a god-like hero rebelling against the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, he shoots like a missile up above the world, flying rings around the planet at such fantastic speeds that he literally turns back the hands of time.

Superman (1978) Turning back time scene

And he's still doing that now. You pit him, his Boy Scout naivety, his sense of Truth, Justice, and the American Way up against the Berlin Wall of our cynicism, nihilism, and modern despair, and you have a hero that refuses to die. Because he represents all that is most noble, and also that is most child-like in us, ourselves. Our rebellion against death; our rage at what Dylan Thomas called the "dying of the light."

We want to be Superman. We may be Clark Kents. We may be Lex Luthors.

A scene in the film Nixon with Anthony Hopkins, directed by Oliver Stone, comes to mind. Nixon walking through the West Wing, I suppose, comes upon a portrait of Kennedy. Looking at it meditatively, he says:

"When they see you, they see what they want to be."

Then he says:

"When they see me, they see what they are."

In closing, April 18th is Superman Day. April 20th, of course, besides being smoke-'em-up day for chronic potheads, is Hitler's birthday. Superman busted old Hit's hairy ass innumerable times over the last eighty years.

Happy Superman Day!

Superman: The Movie (Trailer)

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