Superman | First One Through

The newest Superman movie incarnation is out and critics and journalists have grabbed a pen even before a seat. Their reflections on modern society will inform how they view the characters and plot more than the cinematic quality of the film.

An interesting take was made in The New York Times opinion section called “My Problem With Superman.” The guest essay was written Junot Diaz, an immigrant from the Dominican Republic who teaches creative writing at MIT. One would imagine the story of Superman would resonate with this first generation immigrant but Diaz makes clear that he never liked Superman as originally presented to the world.

He recognizes that Superman was brought into the world as a story of a foreign refugee who escaped his dying world, something with which he should be able to relate. Diaz is well versed in the storyline in which Superman’s powers were used to fight for good in a mad world.

Yet it does not resonate for him. Not through his eyes when he was young, nor in looking at society today.

Because for Diaz – and possibly (presumably?) many immigrants like him, Superman is a force unlike any around him, a body of permanent power inequality. He might be a refugee but the dynamic is irrelevant in a progressive worldview obsessed with inequalities and power.

In today’s environment, Superman is internalized not as an individual but a nation. For Democratic-Socialists, the United States is not a “shining city on a hill,” but a monstrous force convinced of exceptionalism which wreaks havoc on the Global South.

*Diaz article in The NY Times “My Problem With Superman”*

In this mindset, the “annihilating exceptionalism” of power IS the evil. It is neither a force for good nor an aspiration or inspiration. It is an unnatural entity in a society intoxicated by a mission of massive redistribution of wealth and power.

Diaz makes his point clear, quoting Frederick Douglass in a call for a revolution of “fire, thunder and earthquake” to mobilize a nation of people to combat the “world in peril” from a sick governmental order.

The citizens of Metropolis are voting for Democratic Socialists like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Zohran Mamdani who believe that “billionaires shouldn’t exist.” Exceptionalism is viewed as inherently racist and/or enabled by a society which is deeply corrupt. Capitalism is tarred as deeply unfair. All of the power structures are fair game for targeted assassination – whether political, financial or moral.

Superman – and many of the superheroes of the era like Spiderman, Captain America and Batman – were created by young Jews before the start of the World War II and the Holocaust of European Jewry. They were young immigrants who wanted to survive in a world which had cast them out and marked them as forever different. The creators of these superheroes wrote stories of good defeating evil in a world which saw little support for the underdog. Evil was everywhere, and the only way of balancing the world between sparks of good and an inferno of evil was to oversize the good. Good needed to be extra – extra-powerful, extra-moral, and yes, extraterrestrial – to gain the upperhand.

That narrative spoke to Americans watching Nazi Germany incinerate Europe. It continued to capture the West’s attention in the following decades.

But now?

Much of the world is not looking at morality in the plain sense of the last generation. It is defined first – no, only – by equity. In this framework, without a balancing of power and wealth there can never be a good society. DEI (diversity, equity and inclusion) for progressives is the only solution, and a nation which strips those initiatives is attempting to install a permanent dynamic of inequalities. Democratic-socialists are seeking to dismantle such America via a revolution of the masses.

The two Jewish writers and illustrators who created Superman – Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster – might be amazed that their creation finally has a Jewish actor, David Corenswet, playing the part in a major movie. If alive today, they might imagine that such milestone would mark a blessed society which finally welcomed the stranger, the immigrant, the survivor of the destruction of his old world. Embraced him as someone kind and noble who fought for justice for all.

Alas. Imagine their amazement, the horror, if they could time travel to today, to see the target audience for their stories – immigrants in America – turn on Superman as a grotesque to be liquidated. Not because of White nationalism of Nazism that they faced a hundred years ago, but for the sin of exceptionalism in a society hell-bent on equity.