What kind of movie is SUPERMAN?
This essay was originally posted to Twitter between March 16, 2021 and March 17, 2021. It was composed of 541 words across 12 tweets.
What kind of movie is SUPERMAN, anyway?
That's easy. It's a superhero movie.
What's a superhero movie?
You tell the character's origin story, throw in a pivotal "great power, great responsibility moment," love interest, colorful villain.
Boom. You're done.
Except that template didn't exist at the time SUPERMAN was made. Sure, there were comic books, cartoons, radio, TV, and low budget theatrical serials that brought the story of Superman to life. But nobody had ever retrofitted that kind of storytelling into a big budget movie.
So what did the filmmakers do? They borrowed.
Like a series of short films, SUPERMAN kicks off with a bit of lavish mid-'50s science fiction a la Forbidden Planet. Next is a more or less standalone western pastoral sequence, detailing young Clark Kent's life in Smallville.
After a brief interlude that revisits the science fiction element, the next episode in the movie is, of all things, a workplace comedy. Not just in the rat-a-tat rhythms of the Daily Planet scenes, but in the juxtaposition of the long-suffering Luthor and his incompetent lackeys.
Whether the Luthor comedy is of a reasonable boss who manages the screw-ups of his employees, or of two regular joe-schmoe employees who manage the whims of their overbearing boss, is a matter of opinion.
(Where you come down probably depends on how many bosses you've had.)
There's a bit of heist movie, which details the step-by-step process of Luthor and his lackeys hijacking the rockets. This is unusual, as the details of the supervillainous scheme would go on to be treated as a mystery in the plots of most superhero movies going forward.
There's a heavy dose of traditional romantic melodrama. Superman and Lois have their meet-cute in an admittedly unorthodox way--she's plummeting to her death, he catches her, a helicopter is falling above them, he snatches it with one hand.
You know, typical movie romance stuff.
They have their first date. He takes her on a flight around New Yor--ahem, Metropolis--which is a stand-in scene for anything ranging from their first dance to their first time going to bed. She recites some poetry, the one moment of the movie that does not work for me.
And, of course, in the final half hour, it becomes a contemporary 1970s big budget Hollywood epic--heroes bustling around while things explode, fall down, flood, crack open--which brings it squarely in line with the pre-superhero action/adventure cinema of the time.
In the mid-1970s, when pre-production on SUPERMAN commenced, top-grossing hits included monster movies like Jaws (Spielberg, 1975) and King Kong (Guillermin, 1976), as well as disaster movies like Earthquake (Robson, 1974) and The Towering Inferno (Guillermin, 1974).
It's worth mentioning that Star Wars (Lucas, 1977), the closest cousin to SUPERMAN at the time, didn't premiere until SUPERMAN was already in principal photography. Because of this, SUPERMAN could be considered the last of the pre-Star Wars mode of action/adventure movies.
This was the model for SUPERMAN, or, at least, the closest thing SUPERMAN had to a model: a crosshatched structure, with story elements culled from various Superman-related media running one way, and fragments of genres of contemporary cinema running another.
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Published 3/9/2024
"365 Days of SUPERMAN"
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