Truth, Justice, and the Cynical Way – Gage Klipper

What makes a great superhero film?

It’s the billion-dollar question that largely keeps Hollywood afloat. While big budgets, A-list casts, and over-the-top CGI explosions land butts in seats, that still doesn’t answer the question—because the precondition to any worthwhile superhero film is crafting a hero who is himself great.

Simply put, the greatest heroes know who they are. They know their strengths, as well as their weaknesses; they have principles they believe in, and evils they reject. These take concrete forms beyond vague feelings and emotions. And heroes have the courage of conviction to stand by their choices without equivocation or today’s all-too-common irony. For nearly a century, Superman has been the quintessential hero in this mold, but the latest installment in the franchise, simply Superman, devolves so far from the ideal that our hero, like the country he’s meant to serve, seems to have forgotten his legacy entirely.

There’s little need for a thorough plot summary; you already know it well enough. Superman, played by a fresh-faced but ultimately bland David Corenswet, navigates his dual identity as a Kryptonian and human while working as a reporter for the Daily Planet. He faces public backlash after intervening to stop a war, which his perennial nemesis Lex Luthor (Nicholas Hoult) capitalizes on to take him out for good. With the help of Lois Lane (Rachel Brosnahan) and a clown car of other “metahumans,” Superman battles to restore his image, defeat Luthor, and save Metropolis.

There’s nothing wrong with the story, per se; it’s a classic Superman arc. And yet, every aspect of it seems designed to fit on a Prius bumper sticker: be kind, end war, diversity is our strength. It’s all there, and it’s almost entirely meaningless.

Luthor is a cut-out for the progressive establishment’s greatest foes: he colludes with the fictional “Boravia,” a composite country clearly based on a mix of Russia and Israel. Its leader could be Ben-Gurion’s twin, who lives in a presidential palace a la Putin, and invades the neighboring country of ambiguously ethnic desert tribes in a war of aggression.

In the media, we have a Daily Planet that’s filled with good people who are nevertheless constrained by rigid institutional objectivity. Lois is frustrated because she knows Boravia is bad, but she can’t prove it, so she can’t print it—the progressive refrain endlessly leveled against more centrist fellow travellers. It doesn’t help that, with wavy black hair and a boho-chic aesthetic, she’s styled after former WaPo princess, Taylor Lorez.

Yet it’s Superman himself who faces the real injustice.

When the world first met Superman as America struggled against the Nazis, his belief in “Truth, Justice, and the American Way” actually meant something, a credo of universal appeal that nevertheless belonged to a particular time and place. Over the decades, the “American Way” evolved to a “Better Tomorrow” and then “Peace for all Mankind,” before settling into its final form, “the Human Way,” in the latest installment. With each step away from a concrete tradition, Superman has fallen further into the vague do-gooderism that drives our politics and culture today.

Corenswet’s Superman wants to be human, to assimilate into and be accepted by Earth’s culture, but has no concept of what that means beyond being a generally nice guy. He wants to have “faith in humanity,” but cannot articulate what’s good about humanity beyond people generally being nice back. But if being kind doesn’t even set him apart, what’s really Super about him at all? He wants earnestly to “do good”—no one can question that, even in this installment—but his actions are driven by knee-jerk emotions without any regard for second-order impact. Is single-handedly stopping a war in a far-off land necessarily “good”? Real geopolitical decisions aren’t that straightforward, and nearly always come with collateral damage—despite the film’s attempt at wishing them away. It’s not ultimately an effort to deconstruct Superman, as many on the cultural right feared it would be, but an exercise in bland delusion.

The film frames this faux-humanitarianism as a rebellious posture against a cynical world. Superman and Lois repeatedly discuss their shared love of punk rock in what becomes a ham-fisted metaphor for being the outcast, underdog, and rebel.“ Maybe that’s the real punk rock,” Superman responds, when Lois questions his boundless love for humanity.

Although this is certainly not an outcast view, it becomes impossible not to see oneself as such when the only solution to the evils of the world is all-encompassing human empathy. It’s a zero-sum game, after all; kindness to one can, and often does, harm another, as Superman learns the hard way. But like the progressive bureaucrat who whines about the raw might of right-wing populism or the six-figure DEI officer who still sees endless oppression, Superman will always feel trounced by his unachievable goal. And that makes him the cynic.

More so than Batman (the antihero), Ironman (the egoist), or even Captain America (the underdog), Superman represents America coming into its own.

So the characters fall into another characteristic of the leftist yuppie class, a ubiquitous irony, snark, and pathological unwillingness to take anything or anyone seriously. “Do you think this is going well?” Lois asks Superman as she repeatedly presses him in an interview about his actions in Boravia—obviously implying it’s not. “Well, I think I’m doing a good job,” he retorts with an inflection right out of vaudeville. The interview devolves into pure marital bickering, a tiresome beat of snarky one-liners each rebuked by the next as soon as it lands, until Superman explodes. “People were going to die!” he screams, but even his moral outrage feels contrived, like a politician grandstanding for the camera. The viewer senses an implicit wink and a nod. It’s all a performance.

This comes part and parcel with a lack of real belief; scroll through any social media feed, where validation is fleeting and judgment severe, and you’ll see this rudderless cynicism on full display. There is a palpable fear of being proven wrong, regarded as foolish, or both, if you ever take yourself seriously enough to care about something in an age when nothing is sacred. Yet “doing good” requires sticking to something, a mix of guiding interests and principles. Superman has none, so it’s no surprise that everything in his world is one big joke. The biggest problem with Superman, which often makes it hard to watch, is that not a single one of them lands.

As we reach the climax, and Lois rushes off to rescue Superman with the fate of the world hanging in the balance, the filmmakers still couldn’t resist deflating the stakes with a painful joke about a garage door opening too slowly. Even Redditors didn’t like it, precisely the cringe-humor demographic seemingly targeted. 

It’s this incoherent mix of earnest but ineffective altruism, along with a defensive irony, that drives the film, and indeed American culture today. This is a modern phenomenon insofar as it pervades American life, a shallow sensibility certainly detached from the historic “American way.” However, it’s exactly what director James Gunn wants you to believe “the American story” is.

“People did value kindness in the past. That was an American value, was kindness, and it doesn’t necessarily seem to be that way to me anymore. So that was always the center of the movie for me, and it wasn’t about anything other than that,” Gunn explained in an interview.

Gunn is categorically wrong: while kindness can be, and often is, an American value, it takes anchored values to understand what “kindness” even is in the first place. Letting in infinite migrants might be kind in the abstract, but is it kind to those who are exploited in the journey north, the local communities and economies they disrupt, or the legacy of generations of Americans who fought and died for the legal right to call themselves American citizens? Beyond the quickest hit of moral satisfaction, there’s no way to truly judge without a basis in core principles. Yet Corenswet’s Superman would simply let them all in, bypassing both tradition and any deeper concept of kindness with the common modern snark: How does this affect you, bigot?

Historically, Superman has been a stand-in for America itself at a time when Americans had a firm belief that their nation stood for something noble and worth preserving. More so than Batman (the antihero), Ironman (the egoist), or even Captain America (the underdog), he represents America coming into its own, a mature nation’s confidence in its strength and goodness, and a measured assessment of what responsibility that entailed. “Truth” and “justice” were built around a common culture, one we felt worth defending. No one could understand, let alone anticipate, these concepts being sneeringly reframed as a cover for power politics, as the mainstream leftist understanding goes today. “The American Way” was a distinct way of life—the continuance of Anglo traditions in legal order, personal liberty, and limited government. The average American may not have been able to articulate this, but he nevertheless understood it intuitively, especially in contrast to the arbitrary totalitarianism dually embodied in fascism and communism. And he knew his personal fate and legacy depended on fighting for it. Did America fight the Nazis out of kindness? No, the kind route would always lead to pacifism; we did it instead out of a noble mix of interest and principle, with an achievable, self-serious goal in mind. When filtered through core principles, America rejected unanchored kindness, and instead pursued something much greater.

The story of American heroism is one of unwavering belief in our own particular power for good, and the decline in heroes today is less a rejection of heroism than it is an erosion of belief altogether. Like Superman, we still want to think of ourselves as the good guy. We just no longer have any idea what that means.

The contemporary Marvel malaise is not so much driven by politics or the left’s conscious effort to subvert culture and history, as the right-wing criticism typically goes. Rather, it comes from a cynical fog drawing culture to the path of least resistance, culminating in an art form that no longer serves as art, even politicized art, but simply as a mass commodity. Heroes fight for nothing, represent nothing, they’re merely a replaceable widget; any “good guy” will do.