New DC head honcho James Gunn has found his Superman and Lois Lane, casting David Corenswet and Rachel Brosnahan in the iconic roles for his reboot of the franchise, Superman: Legacy. The choices seem surprisingly predictable for the off-the-wall Gunn, who reportedly had considered Nicholas Hoult for the cape. Instead, we get a rising star who has the physical look of Henry Cavill Jr. and an established actress in the Emmy- and Golden Globe-winning Brosnahan, who seems tailor-made to portray a wisecracking stronger Lois type.
Cavill’s tenure as Superman was frustrating for many fans and the actor as well. He seemed hampered by the movies built around him — Man of Steel with its controversial death toll, Batman v. Superman which used him as a blunt instrument then discarded him, then Zack Snyder’s off-screen tragedy that turned Justice League into an absolute mess for all involved. Much as Cavill looked the part, he came across as bored and distant without being interesting — a contrast made apparent by how he reveled in the role of Geralt in The Witcher. Even the end of Cavill’s tenure came out of left field, right after he filmed a cameo in the ill-fated Black Adam, only for Gunn to announce a new direction for the character.
“I completely relate to Superman because he’s everything I am,” Gunn told the Hollywood Reporter a few months ago when asked about the move. “He’s somebody who is an outsider who feels like an alien, but also the ultimate insider, because he’s fucking Superman. And that’s kind of like what I feel like.”
Is it though? Much as Hollywood loves to go back to the Batman well of dark, gritty action in the night, they struggle with depicting the sunshine hero of truth, justice and the American way. Telling the ultimate immigrant story has proved a challenge for them, and prior reboot efforts have failed or never got off the ground.
Where Gunn has had success with heroes, as he did with the Guardians of the Galaxy films, it’s often been through accessing the effects of extreme trauma — you could particularly see Peter Quill’s arc in Guardians 2 as a story touching on Superman-like themes. Perhaps unlocking some of that would help connect the alien to the human.
It was David Mamet who understood Superman as a fable “not of strength, but of disintegration”:
Superman’s two personalities can be integrated only in one thing: only in death. Only Kryptonite cuts through the disguises of both wimp and hero, and affects the man below the disguises. And what is Kryptonite? Kryptonite is all that remains of his childhood home.
It is the remnants of that destroyed childhood home, and the fear of those remnants, which rule Superman’s life. The possibility that the shards of that destroyed home might surface prevents him from being intimate — they prevent him from sharing the knowledge that the wimp and the hero are one. The fear of his childhood home prevents him from having pleasure. He fears that to reveal his weakness, and confusion, is, perhaps indirectly, but certainly inevitably, to receive death from the person who received that information…
Far from being invulnerable, Superman is the most vulnerable of beings, because his childhood was destroyed. He can never reintegrate himself by returning to that home — it is gone. It is gone and he is living among aliens to whom he cannot even reveal his rightful name.
What Gunn seems to intend is for a Superman who can go from the farmboy to the Metropolis reporter in a believable way. But telling a story that is inherently pro-American is something we haven’t seen him do yet. He’ll have to prove that part.
