Superman (2025) follows faithfully in a long fascistic tradition, now 110 years old—Birth of a Nation hit the silver screen in 1915—of caped crusaders saving the soul of America from its not-so-subconscious enemies. And let’s not dance around the issue at hand like the film does; Superman is, and always has been, a stand-in for the United States of America. His heroic challenges are unsubtly drawn from the flavor of the week crises that afflict this oh-so-great nation. But where real American ubermenschen fall short, Superman always triumphs, and we can purge our guilt, our shame, and our rage in his vicarious glory. Relive the Challenger disaster in a world where our invincible friend swoops in and saves the day—and the baseball game. Your popcorn comes drenched in salty, molten absolution.
Stand-ins are a fun trick, a smoke-and-mirror show with a wink to the audience. You would have to be either dense or delusional to miss the point. The issue is, of course, that the audience of today is precisely that. At least Captain America (peep the name) has the decency to dispense with the pretense and fight actual fictional Nazis. Superman is stuck with Boravians. During the Golden Age, they were an obvious nod to WWII Germany, but in a post-Cold War world, who are they supposed to be? The answer, to an intelligent, news-reading viewer, seems to be Israel, though mostly due to juxtaposition with their sworn enemies, the Pale-I mean Jarhanpurians, a backward, underdeveloped, vaguely Islamic people (I saw at least one woman with a hijab-like headscarf) who have no other defining features beyond their undeserved victimhood and unsavory government. They also happen to be, despite their distasteful obsession with invading defenseless neighbors, a great ally to the actual fictional United States (though not to Superman, its moral representative). Boravia’s actual aesthetics, however, place them firmly in Eastern Europe. Their language and accent is undeniably Slavic, their name merely a letter off from Moravia, and their leader a caricature of Putin.
So what does it mean for Superman to go to war with a nation that simultaneously represents our “greatest ally” and our old enemy? The manifestation of the United States both reinforces and undermines its real-world ideology. He embodies the hypocrisy at the core of U.S. foreign policy; territorial conquest, targeting of civilians, the flouting of international law are all impermissible as a matter of principle and at the same time impermissible to criticize when done by strategic allies. This internal contradiction is stated more literally in Kal-el’s instructions from the homeworld. He (we) thought that his (our) purpose was to protect the world. But as it turns out, all along, the destiny laid out by his (our) ancestors was to conquer it, to be fruitful and multiply, and spread his (our) seed across the globe. It is no simple plot device that Boravia’s “metahuman” is a super-clone; throughout the film, America’s self-image is fighting himself. So how do we know that we’re rooting for the right Superman? Well, aside from the fact that one of them is being controlled by a pathetic, insecure, vindictive billionaire inventor who nevertheless has immense success and inexplicable access to the highest echelons of the U.S. government, and most certainly does not correspond to anyone in real-life.
Thank god for Ma and Pa Kent, those simple, down-home country plot devices whose moral authority is completely abdicated to former iterations and hopefully positive associations with those descriptors. They remind us—I mean Superman, or is he Clark right now? Kal-el? Shit, I don’t know, what America-man was created to do doesn’t define him-us, but our decisions! The fact that we/he are on the right side now, that we help people now. Which is what makes the scene of poor brown children begging for Superman’s salvation so obscene. We, the real America, are choosing every day to back the real-life slaughter of those kids and their parents. It sure is relieving for Clark that his mistakes make him human, and it’s implied that we ought to extend that same self-forgiveness to ourselves. Unfortunately, the oppressed peoples of the world are not hoisting makeshift American flags nor chanting our names. They are not waiting for us to come save them, first of all because we are the ones they would need saving from, but more importantly, because they are not waiting for anyone to save them—by fighting back against us, they are saving themselves.
Irony Poison 