Superman takes on the media

Before Superman has to fight with kaiju, robots, metahumans and whatever other nonsense Lex Luthor throws at him, he first has to take on his greatest enemy of all – conservative media pundits. The director of the new Superman movie, James Gunn, said in a Sunday Times of London interview that “Superman is the story of America. An immigrant that came from other places and populated the country.” He also said that the movie is about how “basic human kindness is a value and is something we have lost.”

To the right, this was tantamount to playing politics with God. Sports writer and pundit Clay Travis, the founder of Outkick, tweeted, “I’m going to skip seeing Superman now. Director is an absolute moron to say this publicly the week before release. America is desperate for apolitical entertainment and Hollywood is unable to deliver it.” If you lose Clay Travis, then you lose Clay Travis’s readers, many of whom are named Clay, or Travis. On Outkick, one of Travis’s reporters wrote, “Gunn is obviously upset that President Donald Trump is deporting illegal immigrants by the millions. He views Trump’s conviction to protect America as unkind.”

While there’s no version of infinite Earth where James Gunn isn’t a raging lib, it’s going a little far to take such an anodyne quote and spin it into an ongoing meme about “Woke Superman,” as Fox News has been calling the movie. It’s not as though Gunn said Superman was “queer,” in which case, OK, you’d have a talking point. As a matter of history, comic-book artists Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster created Superman in 1938 in part as reaction to nativist American bigotry against Jewish immigrants, as well as the burgeoning Nazi menace abroad. Michael Chabon correctly interpreted this origin story in his novel The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Klay. For his Jewish creators, Superman was a kind of golem, a superbeing created to protect the innocent from powerful forces that sought to destroy them. Technically, Superman is an immigrant from a faraway galaxy, who America took in and assimilated. Thanks to the “American Way,” he turned into the ultimate gee-whiz hero against the forces of evil.

Those themes may underpin the new Superman movie, though as Gunn also pointed out in the interview, one of Superman’s co-stars is a flying dog who wears a cape, a character from 1950s Superman, after America had won the war and our culture turned silly and superficial. The movie has a bright color palette and a cartoony, campy aesthetic that serves as an antidote to the self-seriousness of 21st-century comic-book adaptations by directors Zack Snyder and Christopher Nolan. Kal-El is hardly going to be lining up with antifa to set fire to ICE vans. Saying we’ve lost “basic kindness” and saying that murder is bad – in a Superman movie – is hardly a political statement worth a boycott, or even a minor fuss. It’s as mainstream as a movie can get; Krypto the Super-Dog has a product tie-in with Milk Bone.

Gunn seemed to anticipate this criticism by saying, “Obviously there will be jerks out there who are just not kind and will take it as offensive just because it is about kindness. But screw them.” He dangled this unkind comment as bait. His critics took that red meat, gulped it down and gave his new movie two extra days in control of the entertainment news cycle.

MAGA has assumed and remained in power largely on its strength of “80-20” issues where it preaches popular common sense despite loud fulminations of online critics and politicians from the left. These include: deporting illegal immigrants with criminal records, trying to reign in Big Pharma price gouging and banning transgender athletes from women’s sports. But it doesn’t always get pop culture right.

Superman is no Disney live-action reboot of Snow White, a disastrous production that suffered countless hilarious setbacks. In its efforts to cater to every leftist identity subcategory, Snow White ended up pleasing no one, meeting a well-deserved critical and box-office fate. Gunn’s Superman has met with no production delays, no stories of backlot shenanigans and no controversy at all until this past weekend when the director gave a slightly goofy interview. It’s not going to be the best-reviewed movie of all time, but it’s certainly going to be one of the year’s biggest blockbusters, whether it’s about an “immigrant” or not. Anti-woke pundits may be gearing up for a battle, but the Man of Steel is going to be their kryptonite.