The Patriot Post® · In Brief: The Death of Superman

The Left, Dennis Prager has often argued, ruins everything it touches. Even super heroes, says Stephen Miller.

In 2003, the Scottish comic book writer Mark Millar penned a three-part illustrated series for DC Comics titled Red Son. In it, he creates an alternate Superman universe that hypothesizes what would have happened had the Kryptonian orphan’s rocket landed in Soviet-occupied Ukraine, instead of Kansas, in 1953. Superman becomes a state agent for Joseph Stalin’s Kremlin. Instead of saving the world in the name of “truth, justice and the American Way,” he fights as “the champion of the common worker,” for socialism and the expansion of the Warsaw Pact.

Millar’s series took the usual fantastical comic-hero twists and turns, but the premise gets to the heart of what America means, and what Superman means to America: a concept that Hollywood has all but killed with a recent flood of generic comic book adaptions, as Marvel and DC Comics attempt to world-build. Something has been absent in recent times in the adaptation of film and art — the idea of a fundamentally American hero. Superman, as a character, is ultimately about why America is good, and Hollywood simply does not believe America is a force for good. “Truth, Justice and the American Way” as it exists in mass media today has given way to “My Truth, Social Justice and White Supremacy.” Hollywood does not appear to be headed for a course correction, either on Superman or America.

Americans, Miller argues, no longer have a common enemy like the Soviet Union for movie villains. Instead, new sensibilities prohibit using Islamofascists or the Chinese to fill this gap in movies. So, back to Superman.

Filmmaker James Gunn, of Guardians of the Galaxy and The Suicide Squad fame, has been newly tasked with rebooting the DC universe on film, again. Superman: Legacy is slated for a July 2025 release. It is a chance for Hollywood to get Superman right again. Whether Gunn and Co. will take it is another matter. At the time of writing, Hollywood is experiencing a historic writers’ and actors’ strike that has frozen not only current projects, but all future projects as well. DC and Gunn should use that time to re-evaluate the main character and American icon. Gunn has cast David Corenswet, who is set to step into the cape in place of Henry Cavill.

Gunn’s general comments about how he is rethinking the character have been focused on race and gender and suggest he will miss the opportunity. Missing is any sign of an understanding of the grassroots history of who Clark Kent is: as a person, but more importantly, as an American.

Miller insists that Hollywood is the real problem here.

Hence why Hollywood has the very idea of Superman backwards. Superman knows what American exceptionalism is; Hollywood and our media struggle with accepting the same idea. Instead they view him as a symbol of imperialistic and misguided patriotic propaganda, and therefore, he must be reinvented, reimagined and rewritten. It is why Hollywood has failed to top Richard Donner’s 1978 Superman film.

But to ignore the American propaganda aspect of Superman and similar comic heroes is to betray their entire reason for being.

He concludes:

The world may have changed around him, but Superman is constant, and should be understood as the quintessential American hero. It is not Superman who struggles with his identity. He knows what his purpose is. Despite its failings, America is a global force for good, like Superman. We struggle, we falter, but our ideals remain a constant. They are everlasting. It’s not Superman and America who need to be re-imagined. It’s Hollywood.

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