A god raised on a farm in Kansas

I'm biased. I love Superman. The extent to which I love Superman has me believing that it’s blasphemy to wear a Superman T-Shirt with the “S” on your chest. It always seemed like a dodgy declaration of your physical prowess. It’s saying, “I’m as buff as Superman.” But it also misses the point that what makes him super is the sort of person he is and that makes your declaration even more daring. You might see a T-Shirt, I see someone saying that they are physically an Adonis and morally the best we, as people, can be. It’s a hard look to carry off.

In Kill Bill 2, David Carradine, the Bill of the title, tells Uma Thurman’s The Bride, that her walking away from a life as a great assassin to live a normal domestic life is like Superman hiding behind his Clark Kent persona. He should be like a God and not the fumbling clumsy friendly giant that he is. She should be a killer, not this weak version of herself. It’s hard to know what Tarantino thinks of Superman. After all, the Superman monologue comes from the bad guy. He’s wrong about Beatrix Kiddo the Bride. Is he wrong about Superman and Clark? Oh yeah. Absolutely. He totally misses that Clark is where Superman’s strength comes from. Kal-El is as much Clark as he is Superman. He’s actually more Clark, has spent more time being Clark and is more human than he is Kryptonian. He was raised by farmers in Kansas.

James Gunn seems to understand something fundamental about Superman. It's the Kansas farm boy persona that makes Supes special. For me, the thing with Superman is that he is more powerful than anyone on the planet. To us mortals he seems godlike. And if he hadn’t grown up with good honest parents, with Ma and Pa Kent, he’d no doubt have a different view of things. Would he have grown up with aspirations of being a god? Instead, he’s a human who is able to use his abilities to help his adopted planet. Godhood isn’t even on his radar.

The reason he represents the best of all we can possibly be is because he has his life as Clark. Being raised like us changes everything. If he is one of us, then how can he be so and do the right thing all the time? I don’t think most people would. That’s not to deny the goodness in people but Kal-El, as Clark or as Superman, is a hero because he chooses to be one of us and being one of us isn’t the easy option. It involves care and consideration for all others. It involves putting others first. Being that best version of us is hard work, particularly when you don’t have to be. If you could fly, were bulletproof, had x-ray vision, heat vision, super hearing and were pretty much invulnerable, how restrained would anyone be? Restraint might be one of his greatest powers. 

One interesting idea that I often throw into the ring, and one that Gunn partly tackles from a different angle in his film, is that most problems in life do not come down to hitting things with a punch that could move a planet. This often comes to mind when I think of the relationship between Batman and Superman. Almost all of Batman’s problems could probably be solved in a day if he just asked Superman to visit Gotham. They don’t have to kill anyone, just beat them into submission and throw them in Arkham. Easy. It doesn’t fix Gotham though, because Gotham’s problems can’t be solved by hitting the bad guys and locking them up. There would be new threats to beat up and lock away and probably some collateral damage and maybe a death or two, and that’s not what Kal, Clark or Superman does. That may also explain some fan outrage when Henry Cavill’s Superman snapped General Zod’s neck in Man of Steel. It’s not something he would do. It’s a cheap, non-Superman-like answer to the story. Brute force alone is never the best answer.

One of the best things about the James Gunn film is when David Corenswet’s Superman, being battered by his evil clone, controlled by Nicholas Hoult’s Lex Luthor, smirks as the clone has a tight grip around his neck. Luthor, who has taunted Superman with his idea that “brain beats brawn,” asks what he’s smirking about in the face of his own death and Superman throws his, “brain beats brawn” right back at him, saying it quietly through the strangled smirk.  He's not going to outthink Lex in a straight up battle of brains. What he does realise is that Lex and the evil Superman clone are two separate elements. The brawn is nothing without the brain. The clone is only brute force. Lex is only the mastermind and he’s controlling the clone with tech, with small tennis ball sized drones. Destroy the tech and you destroy the link. And how better to destroy the links than to give a whistle and call in your super dog, Krypto? He’s stolen many scenes in the film already. He deserves to be part of the finale.

When whistling for his dog he seems the most human, the most relatable. In that moment he is Clark. He has a pet dog. The dog’s going to play “fetch the toy” and win the day.

What would you do with the powers of Superman in the James Gunn film? You could fly into Boravia, and to stop their invasion of Jarhanpur, take out the whole country, destroy Boravia and their crooked leader, and that’s film over in super quick time.  But what kind of solution is that? How is that being the best of us? That only makes you the biggest bully in the playground. Thankfully, Clark would never do that. But I know who would.

Modern takes on the godlike superhero holds up a sick and twisted mirror with characters like Homelander from The Boys and Omni-Man from Invincible, showing us what would happen if someone were to have those powers but not the right character to use them for good. Homelander is a sick, narcissistic, emotionally damaged individual, raised by a soulless corporation. Omni-Man, on the other hand, is perhaps worse, in the sense that he’s Superman if he’d been raised on a different planet and everyone from that planet believed they were better than everyone else. Because Superman has this iconic status it is very difficult not to look at Homelander and Omni-Man and not think of Kal-El. Both are reminders that Superman's abilities are not what make him special. The remarkable thing is that he has all of that power and never becomes anything like those two. Superman is not remarkable because he can do whatever he wants. Superman is remarkable because he chooses not to be Homelander or Omni-Man. That’s the Kansas farm boy for you.

During the Second World War the rhetoric of, “truth, justice and the American way,” was synonymous with Superman. But Kansas aside, the truth and justice part of the equation is what’s important. He has no political position. He is driven by what he knows, what Ma and Pa Kent have taught him about what is right and wrong.

James Gunn gets this. In his film, Superman chooses to stop the Boravian invasion of Jarhanpur, not because he has taken sides, not in the name of anything or anyone and not because his country asked him to, but because it’s the right thing to do. Kal-El or Superman, whichever name you choose to call him, has powers that explain what he can do. Clark Kent explains why he does it. Stopping a war is the right thing. It so happens that he is also able to, in a way that no human can.

In the Zack Snyder films the central conflict comes from a distrust of the alien with godlike powers. All antagonists focus on what he can do and ignore what he actually chooses to do. They see Superman and don’t know Clark. That speaks to a distrust of power. It echoes our belief that power corrupts. We, as humans, are very wary of any one individual having so much power. In comic book lore Batman trusts Superman because he knows Clark and knows the person he is and all the good that he will do with his superpowers.

It’s easy to see the Kansas upbringing as the grounding in humanity that our hero needed. But it’s more than that. Clark is where Superman’s strength comes from. There’s a strength of character. It’s because of Smallville, Kansas and the Kents that Kal-El knows what to do with his powers. Kansas taught him to be a hero. Kansas gave him a connection to humanity. Kansas made him care. Clark is not Superman’s disguise. Clark is who Kal-El was raised as. From a storytelling point of view, it isn’t the superpowers that make things interesting. It’s the person.

Encoded in every Superman story is a question about what qualities actually matter in a person. I’m pretty sure that doesn’t cross anyone’s mind when they pull on that T-Shirt with the “S” on the chest. I understand that’s a silly “me thing.” I think that those who love the character, love the person before they love the powers. The powers explain what he can do. Clark Kent explains why he does it.