The Morality of Super Time Travel
This essay was originally posted to Twitter between March 12, 2021 and March 15, 2021. It was composed of 1,778 words across 38 tweets.
"Krypton gives him his scientific clarity of mind. Earth makes his heart blaze." - Grant Morrison, writer of All Star Superman
"If we can get 'em to root for these two kids, we've got a movie." - Tom Mankiewicz, uncredited screenwriter of SUPERMAN
The following concerns the arc of the first two SUPERMAN movies--both as they were originally intended and as they ended up when they were finished.
For the purposes of this piece, these two movies will be referred to as SUPERMAN I and SUPERMAN II, or simply I and II.
In the original plan for SUPERMAN I and SUPERMAN II, the climactic time travel sequence would have occurred towards the end of II, rather than the end of I. The story function of Superman traveling back in time was originally somewhat different from what it ultimately became.
In SUPERMAN II, Superman and Lois Lane confess their love for each other. Faced with his potential for corruptibility--the dilemma of serving all of humanity with an even hand or dedicating himself to one person--Superman chooses to renounce his powers and be with Lois.
Unbeknownst to him (but knownst to us), Zod and his small band of Kryptonian criminals have been freed from the Phantom Zone, and they've set their sights on Earth.
The chain of cause and effect laid out in the original double-screenplay is intriguing.
At the beginning of SUPERMAN I, Jor-El, Superman's biological father, imprisons the criminals in the Phantom Zone. The irony is that their life sentence in space prison will spare them the destruction that awaits everyone else. In a deleted scene, Jor-El acknowledges as much.
In one of the last events of Jor-El's life--surely one of the last memories ringing in his head as he dies--Zod vows to visit revenge upon his heirs. This is the last thing Zod says before he and his entourage are vacuum-tubed into the Phantom Zone and transported away.
Had Jor-El and the Council opted to impose a lighter sentence by holding Zod and his cohorts on Krypton, they would have died with everyone else, guilty or innocent. Instead, for whatever reason, they handed down the maximum sentence of eternity in the Phantom Zone.
Jor-El and the Council knew that no Kryptonians would remain alive to maintain responsibility over their captors.
(Maybe they do mandatory minimum sentencing. That would track, given their apocalypse denialism.)
At any rate, casting away Zod and Co. is Jor-El's original sin.
In I, Superman's arrival in Metropolis coincides with Lex Luthor's scheme: to hijack a nuclear missile and fire it upon the American west coast, destroying everything between the ocean and the desert. Luthor immediately recognizes the potential for Superman to disrupt his plans.
Luthor thinks on his feet. He adds a second missile to his plan, to be fired in the opposite direction, as a sort of insurance policy. Plan A: weigh Superman down under a rock of kryptonite. Plan B: fire two missiles, hurtling at top speed in opposite directions from one another.
Luthor wisely plans for the possibility that Superman--the slippery guy--might somehow escape. In this event, Luthor reasons that Superman will be stymied by the sadistic choice between missile #1 and missile #2. He'll turn Superman's unerring moral compass against him.
Perhaps because Miss Tesmacher releases Superman earlier than Luthor had anticipated, perhaps because Luthor consistently overestimates himself and underestimates everybody else, perhaps because desperation reveals a greater level to Superman's powers, Superman triumphs.
Superman captures one missile and diverts it into space. The other one, the one intended for the west coast, hits home.
He can't stop it, but he can scramble to contain the ensuing havoc. He dams a mighty river, straightens out crooked train tracks, rescues a bus full of kids.
In one of the most arresting images of I, Superman dives below ground and pushes the sinking tectonic plate back into place. After a whole movie of spectacular but relatively minor rescues, Superman moves the Earth itself. He takes the weight of the world onto his shoulders.
Every choice is fraught with consequences--the bigger the choice, the more consequential. In the original double screenplay, the missile that Superman diverted into space explodes, somehow tearing open the portal to the Phantom Zone. Zod and Co. escape, sights set on Earth.
Superman acted quickly, but he could not have accounted for the sins of his father. His best intentions and selfless use of his powers nevertheless trigger chaos that awaited him from the moment he was born.
That he wasn't warned was a bit of an uh-oh on Jor-El's part.
In the final version of the SUPERMAN I and II arc, this chain of events happens differently.
Superman's scramble to contain the havoc comes too late to save the life of Lois Lane, who perishes in a yawning chasm opened up by the earthquakes caused by the explosion.
His heart shattered, Superman travels back in time. He returns to a point in the events where he can intervene. In the ultimate desperation move, he successfully stops Lois Lane from dying. The look on his face when he sees her alive again is that of a man witnessing a miracle.
His memories of Jor-El's teachings warn him against meddling in the course of human history. His memories of his adoptive father, Jonathan Kent, remind him that he's on Earth for a reason. After a moment's hesitation, Superman tosses caution to the wind and makes his decision.
Mere minutes after shouldering responsibility for the world, he throws away his unerring moral compass for the sake of one person he cares about above the rest. It's an absurd but enormously romantic gesture, which ends up prefiguring his decision to give up his powers for her.
The other missile passes harmlessly into the cosmos. (Hopefully. For all we know, it wreaks unknown havoc offscreen. Oh well!) The story function of the villains getting free from the Phantom Zone is accomplished by an unrelated explosion at the beginning of SUPERMAN II.
Either way, the villains find their way out of the Phantom Zone and attack the Earth, at almost the very moment Superman renders himself unable to stop them. A tragic coincidence, a collision of separate courses that started with the very first events of the first movie.
Superman turns his back and Zod wrecks his world. Superman feels every bit as responsible for the destruction as if he'd done it himself.
He crawls back to the Fortress of Solitude, begging the A.I.--in the form of dispassionate recordings of his parents--to restore his power.
Once Zod and his colleagues are defeated, Superman is once again faced with a dilemma. He can't deny his feelings for Lois Lane, but he can never bring himself to forsake the Earth again. He must give up his most personal relationship, and the only way to do it is to erase it.
Here's where the original double screenplay and the final versions of these two movies diverge one more time.
In the original plan, the end of II is when Superman resorts to time travel. All at once, he erases the arrival of Zod, the destruction, and his time with Lois.
From that reset point, the world simply turns as it would have, with Superman the only being in existence to know that it might have happened differently.
This is the curse he carries for being Superman--the knowledge of the life he could have had. His last temptation.
This is especially unforgettable for him, given that he sees Lois Lane every day at work. She'll look at him and not know anything of it, but he'll look at her and never forget.
Not only heartbreaking, but probably a little bit awkward--Clark randomly sad at work for no reason.
The final version of SUPERMAN II attempts this tragic twist in a less successful way.
Clark kisses Lois, invoking an apparently new superpower that erases her knowledge of their romantic liaison. Let's not read too far into some of the more unfortunate implications here.
Perhaps the memory-zapping kiss solves the problem of the lingering romantic feelings between them, but the destruction wreaked by Zod on Earth remains. It seems like Lois Lane will be awfully confused when she goes outside, sees these effects, and can't remember their causes.
Questionable story choices aside, the message seems to be that love, as an attachment, is incompatible with superheroism.
But is it?
There is a tension between love and responsibility, to be sure, and reconciling the two is the material of heroic stories from time immemorial.
Superman did not make a mistake by falling in love. Consistently, love is the downfall of Superman's foes. Miss Tesmacher's love of her mother motivated her to betray Luthor and rescue Superman. Superman's love of humanity motivated him to regain his powers at any cost.
It was love that motivated Jor-El to send baby Kal-El to Earth to spare him from the destruction of the planet Krypton in the first place. Yes, this made Earth a target for Zod, but imagine Zod being unleashed on some other planet that didn't have a protector to stop him.
It's a supervillain's fatal flaw to view humanity as a mechanism to be taken over and controlled. It's love that makes humanity far too chaotic and unpredictable. If a supervillain can't understand love, they can't account for its effects when they put their plans into motion.
Responsibility guides Superman's actions, but love stirs him into action in the first place. It's love that makes the difference between a supervillain and a superhero. Again, love makes Superman a hero--it keeps him from being a predictable mechanism in the schemes of others.
Superman needs to be the hero willing to move the entire Earth, whether it's for all of humanity or for just one person.
Notably, in the final version of SUPERMAN I, when Superman decides to rewind the timestream to save Lois, listen to the musical cue that strikes up.
Rather than the more heroic "Superman March," the love theme plays instead. And when the credits roll, after a suite of musical selections, a rendition the love theme plays us out in the final minutes. A not so subtle signal of what this whole thing was about all along.
According to Fred Rogers, TV's Mister Rogers, the number "143" stands for "I love you." I (one letter) love (four letters) you (three letters.) Next time you're on Wikipedia, or leafing through the 1978-2006 box set, check out the runtime for the theatrical cut of SUPERMAN.
Regrettably, at this point of the 365 Days of Superman project, I had not yet figured out how to spell Miss Teschmacher's name. I am eternally embarrassed. Later installments will feature the correct spelling; for now, I preserve it here uncorrected.
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Published 3/9/2024
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