Power
This essay was originally posted to Twitter between May 31, 2021 and June 30, 2021. It was composed of 4,293 words across 95 tweets.
March 1933: N*zi Germany established as a single party state.
March 1936: Antisemitic paper Social Justice launches in United States.
April 1938: Action Comics #1 released in United States.
September 1939: Germany invades Poland; World War II begins.
It's important to understand that, though the preconditions of the Holocaust were developing abroad, the creation of Superman was a response to inequality in the United States. Jewish Americans, especially immigrants, bore the brunt of heavy discrimination here at home.
(For further remarks on this topic, read "Christopher's Body.")
The Superman media of the time--comic books, radio episodes, cartoons, weekly movie serials--avoided topics related to antisemitism or the Holocaust.
Notable exceptions include comic book covers and cartoons that reference World War II, plus a particularly interesting comic story produced for Look Magazine in 1940--prior to America's entry into the war. In this story, Superman personally apprehends H*tler and Stalin (!).
Would our Superman (the one from the movie) have handled this the same way as Siegel and Shuster's original Superman?
Hauling H*tler and Stalin to Geneva to stand before the League of Nations echoes strongly in the way movie Superman hauls Luthor and Otis to prison at the end.
The Luthor of the movie, while not an overtly political figure, recalls certain traits of fascist leaders in the way he styles himself and operates.
(Read "Here's To Diseased Maniacs" for more remarks on this.)
On the other hand, apprehending H*tler and Stalin is an expressly anti-authoritarian action, a recognition that leaders of the world can spread harmful ideology from their high platforms. In such cases, they are a source of danger to common people and must be removed.
Apprehending Luthor is not anti-authoritarian. Luthor, in the movie, isn't a politically important or influential figure. He's a criminal--a threatening deviation from the status quo. Here, justice is as simple as taking him to jail and trusting the authorities to handle him.
This is par for the course for the superhero genre. The anger and frustration that gave birth to Superman (and therefore the superhero) were entirely justified, but they were never going to produce the sort of deep tissue analysis necessary to solve the problems of society.
When you feel wronged, your first instinct isn't to follow the trail of preconditions that led to that harm. Your first instinct is to find the bad guy (or a bad guy) and strike back. The bigger the bad guy, the more force is necessary to commit that act of retaliation.
Superman's slogan was "truth and justice," but truth and justice don't come from force. And what purpose was he invented for, if not as a font of potentially infinite force? To be a longer, more heavy-handed arm to round up all the bad guys, no matter how powerful they are?
I have the sinking feeling that movie Superman, with his cozier relationship with the authorities, would not be so quick to act upon H*tler and Stalin, and my reasoning is this: we, here in the United States, are presided over by our own home-grown brand of authoritarianism.
He entrusts the unambiguously criminal Luthor to a justice system with managers who are, themselves, authoritarians. Does he bear in mind that, whatever its virtues may be, the United States also has unclean hands? That it, too, is also organized around structural inequality?
The best way to make sense of this is that Superman is a fantasy character. Whichever version of him you're looking at, he exists in a corresponding fantasy version of the world where the rules are different. In the rules of the movie, the authorities are implicitly trustworthy.
What would Siegel and Shuster's Superman do about World War II? We know already. He finds the bad guys, rounds them up, and brings them before the League of Nations. (Surely, there were no problematic authority figures presiding there!) It's right there in Look Magazine.
What would movie Superman do? Perhaps he would ask the president, played by E.G. Marshall in SUPERMAN II with more preternatural grace than any real life president. But then, do bad world leaders even exist in this fantasy universe where there's such a thing as a good one?
What makes a world leader bad, if not the power that comes with the position, and the mentality that makes people seek that power out? (Superman, importantly, did not seek to become a powerful person.) What causes oppression, if not a rigid hierarchy of powerful and powerless?
In real life, it isn't that powerful people are good by default unless something goes wrong. Real life power comes from amoral, greedy behavior--for example, billionaires profiting from a pandemic. Superman, who became powerful purely by accident, is the ultimate fantasy.
We could suppose that if there are good authorities in the movie universe, there may be bad ones as well, but do we ever actually see them? If our homegrown leaders are implicitly good and trustworthy, perhaps foreign leaders are, as well--or, at least, neutral entities.
I hesitate to say that World War II didn't happen. But, in the movie, if world leaders aren't drivers of problems at home, if social problems exist for reasons independent of the activities of powerful people, maybe that's the answer. Maybe they never had a World War II.
Believe it or not, this might be a good thing. Unless the storytellers are willing to fully reckon with the implications of a superhero getting involved in real world geopolitics, superhero stories shouldn't incorporate real world problems as big and complicated as World War II.
Yes, this means Siegel and Shuster shouldn't have done that story about H*tler and Stalin for Look. It's well-intentioned, and it's very much within the anti-authoritarian ethos that Superman initially had as a character. But problem-solving by force is why war happens at all.
Watchmen is a superhero comic book that hews to reality as closely as possible, except as necessary to support the fantasy conventions of its characters. It takes seriously the effects that superheroes would have on real world geopolitics. It's an important theme in the story.
Wonder Woman 1984, a more recent example of superhero fiction that incorporates real world geopolitics, fails utterly. It's not just the technical faults--it's that this isn't a kind of story that superheroes are good for telling. (Watchmen is an exception that proves the rule.)
To suggest that superheroes are the best choice to solve a problem is to suggest that force is the best choice to solve that problem. This is a dangerous proposition when writing fantasy--indeed, when fantasizing--about superheroes swooping in to bring wars to a swift close.
If an application of superior force is all that's needed to end conflict, then every act of war by a better-equipped side against a lesser-equipped side becomes justifiable. Pursuing this logic will raise plenty of horrifying real world examples of this strategy in action.
Superheroes are uniquely suited to represent whichever side is supposed to be the winner, which simplifies the conflict. It dehumanizes regular people and erases the true cost of war. The closer superheroes get to real life war, the more their stories devolve into propaganda.
For another thing, the superhero genre depends on certain conventions, just like any other fantasy genre. The more closely their conflicts come to resemble the complexities of real life, the more absurd and ineffectual the superhero becomes. Those conventions cease to function.
Watchmen, a genre outlier, doesn't just reckon with the implications of superheroes entering into real world geopolitical conflict--it's the story entirely. A superhero committing acts of war would be destabilizing, an escalation of conflict even greater than the atomic bomb.
Imagine a superhero, acting on behalf of one country, unilaterally jailing the leader of another. Imagine the crisis that would erupt. It becomes clear why hauling H*tler and Stalin off to jail isn't quite the feasible solution that it is for fantasy supercriminal Lex Luthor.
Each issue of Watchmen includes an epistolary document, one of which is "Dr. Manhattan: Super Powers and the Superpowers," by Dr. Milton Glass. (Yes, you were supposed to read these!) Dr. Manhattan, Watchmen's superpowered hero, is promised by the U.S. government to "end wars."
Glass argues instead that Dr. Manhattan has escalated the arm's race, and that the U.S. government is incorrect in assuming that their unearned strategic advantage will cow the Soviet Union into submission--that the Soviets would live permanently in such a state of indignity.
The crux of Glass's essay (and, for my money, one of the most chilling things in the story) is that the Soviet Union would resort to mutually assured destruction, rather than live in a condition of endless subservience to the United States and its accidental superweapon.
Compare this to Wonder Woman 1984, which takes a superhero-appropriate scenario--the monkey's paw--and applies it to, among other things, a Middle Easterner wishing to drive colonizers from their territories. The movie doesn't reckon with the fallout. It doesn't even try.
Instead, the movie relegates this to one of the many subplots it attempts to juggle. Imperialist conflict and human suffering are just a source of shallow power fantasy storytelling. Eventually, Wonder Woman fixes everything by fighting bad guys and delivering an inspiring speech.
The lesson here is clear: if you want to deal with this kind of story, you have to deal with this kind of story. Otherwise, stick to the Lex Luthors of the fantasy villain canon. Let the resonance of the story come from theme and character, rather than a cheap veneer of reality.
SUPERMAN tells the kind of story that is uniquely suited to the superhero: a fantasy on its surface, but a parable underneath. SUPERMAN resonates more, reflects the human spirit better, than Wonder Woman 1984, without cannibalizing real world conflicts. It stays in its lane.
But the movie Superman, or at least a version of him, did trammel in the activities of the superpowers and their war machines. In SUPERMAN IV: THE QUEST FOR PEACE (yes, I know), Superman is confronted with the possibility that the Earth might be destroyed, just like Krypton was.
After ruminating on his role in the conflict between nuclear-equipped superpower nations, he decides that his duty to intervene outweighs his duty not to interfere. He faced a similar choice in the first movie, where he decided that it must be his role to help when he can.
Superman's argument is that if he's to bring an end to war, the solution is to bring an end to the implements of war. He rounds up all the nuclear weapons on Earth and chucks them all into the sun. (The sun is apparently our garbage dump now, thanks to Superman. Sorry, sun.)
A consortium of war profiteers, led by Lex Luthor, sees this as an opportunity to make money. How they do it isn't important, because it's not that kind of movie. The point is, the impulse that drives them is common to the wealthy and powerful, in the movie as in real life.
SUPERMAN IV is widely disliked by critics and fans, and for good reason. But this is where I have to go to bat for it. It's cheaply made, and the way it dramatizes the issues of nuclear disarmament and profiteering is ludicrous, but the story concept is fundamentally good.
With Superman, it's never a question of whether or not he has enough power to intervene. Of course he does. The question is whether or not he should--what right he has to make decisions that affect so many people, what inadvertent harm he might do unilaterally on our behalf.
And perhaps if SUPERMAN IV had approached this scenario from a more realistic, less fantastical angle--or, hell, if it had just plain been a better movie--then maybe it would have encroached on the uncanny valley where the inherent unreality of superheroes hurts the story.
Humanity doesn't have many Luthors, but the Luthors have an outsized influence on our development. At the end of SUPERMAN IV, Superman discovers that destroying the weapons of war won't end war itself. It won't end the warlike impulse that sometimes overpowers our better angels.
Was SUPERMAN IV a wise application of the superhero to real world issues? It's a bad movie for a lot of reasons, but, when it comes to confronting ages-old human conflict, it does perhaps a more respectable job than others, precisely because it takes a fantastical view.
We don't see nations re-equipping themselves. We don't see cold wars getting hot as the balance of power realigns itself. What we do get is a bad, nuclear powered version of Superman, whose main role in the story is to oppose Superman and help Lex Luthor execute his agenda.
Furthermore, the question isn't "How does Superman stop war?" It's "Should Superman stop war?" In a more meta-textual sense, it's "Should superhero stories be about stopping war?" At the end of the movie, Superman very pointedly declares that peace isn't something he can give.
He might as well be looking straight at us when he says this.
(We know he knows we're here and that he can see us. Read "Dream a Little Dream Within a Dream With Me" for more remarks on this!)
In the first SUPERMAN, and in most superhero movies, the hero defends the status quo against an agent of chaos who threatens to upend the established order. This is also a concern in superhero comic books, which run for decades by continuously re-establishing the status quo.
This is an acceptable method of fantasy storytelling about superpowered characters, provided they don't encroach too closely upon reality, where the status quo itself is the source of a great many of our problems. Remember the status quo that Siegel and Shuster lived under.
Quasi-real world superhero stories, where power is used to preserve the status quo. are problematic to say the least. This is especially true for superhero stories that pretend that this isn't what they're doing. For example, the vast majority of the Marvel Cinematic Universe.
It's tempting to imagine a superhero story that inverts this issue--a superhero who uses power to destroy the status quo. But this is deceptive. Disruption by the actions of powerful people IS the status quo for a majority of people around the world, including many in the U.S.
Does Siegel and Shuster's original version of Superman solve anything by roughing up the occasional politician or crooked landlord? It may be satisfying to read those stories, but, left unaddressed, the conditions of oppression will always shift to accommodate new obstacles.
In the world of the movies, Superman consistently chooses to intervene, even when he maybe shouldn't. And, in the mostly-realistic Watchmen, superhero intervention kickstarts an apocalyptic scenario on multiple fronts.
So what's a hypothetical real life superhero to do?
Would the world of a quasi-realistic superhero be better off if the hero didn't intervene? And is there a good story lurking in that idea? Most of our examples of superheroes choosing not to act are a morality lesson in why inaction is wrong. Spider-Man, for example.
There is one superhero story, though, or at least a superhero-adjacent story, where the idea of a non-interventionist superbeing is treated seriously: Swamp Thing, specifically the 1980s run of Swamp Thing comics produced by Alan Moore, Steve Bissette, John Totleben, et al.
In Swamp Thing--spoilers follow, if you haven't yet read this terrific series of comics--there is a subplot where Swamp Thing's search for his origins leads him to a place called the Parliament of Trees. There, Swamp Thing communes with his predecessors, who share their wisdom.
When Swamp Thing asks them how he should best use his powers in a coming crisis, they respond: "Power is not the thing. To be calm within oneself, that is the way of the wood. Power tempts anger, and anger is like wildfire. Avoid it... Flesh doubts. Wood knows."
(Continued) "If you wish to understand evil, you must understand the bark, the roots, the worms of the earth that is the wisdom of an erl-king. Aphid eats leaf. Ladybug eats aphid. Soil absorbs dead ladybug. Plant feeds on soil... is aphid evil? Is Ladybug evil? Is soil evil?"
Finally, they ask him, "Where is evil in all the wood?"
Most superhero stories put this kind of speech near the end, with the hero on the cusp of achieving wisdom. Crucially, Swamp Thing hears these words early on, before he's ready for them, before their meaning is clear.
It takes Swamp Thing some hard lessons before he begins to understand what the Parliament was trying to tell him. He goes through various stages--confusion, loneliness, arrogance in his mastery of the world around him, the pain and sorrow of finding out just how wrong he was.
The Parliament's words hang over him like a dark cloud through all these subsequent stories in which he learns these lessons, but the metaphor, at least, is clear. There is a balance in nature, which power disrupts. That's the easy part. That's the part anyone can understand.
The hard part is when someone is handed incredible power, and they're confronted with their own ability to disrupt that balance as they see fit. They very easily imagine themselves as the lucky ones, the ones whose mastery is so great that they can be trusted to tip that balance.
That's every superhero. That's also our our billionaire businesspeople, our politicians, our armed authorities. Bestowed with great power, convinced that they're the ones who can be trusted to intervene in the affairs of the world. Even Swamp Thing, for a time, believes this.
It isn't a coincidence that both Swamp Thing (this version, anyway) and Watchmen are written by Alan Moore, an author whose preoccupation with the responsible use of power and the long term effects of the actions of powerful people have driven many of his most enduring stories.
What would our Superman, the one from the movie, do about World War II? If he were transplanted to the real world, how would he navigate the choice to intervene? And, if he chose to intervene, how would he?
(Hopefully, for all our sakes, he would stay out of it, but...)
The most optimistic answer is, he wouldn't fight. War thrives on legitimization by powerful people. With the full awareness of the significance of having power and choosing not to use it, he would make an active, intentional, and public demonstration of choosing not to fight.
One might argue that if he didn't fight, the Holocaust would continue unimpeded. But it's one of the great misconceptions of history that World War II was a reaction to the atrocities being committed by the N*zis. Like all wars, it was a conflict of land, resources, and power.
Remember Siegel and Shuster. Remember that anti-Jewish sentiment abroad was readily matched by anti-Jewish sentiment in the United States, even as the war ground on overseas. Only with the benefit of retrospect did the true stakes of N*zism become clear to many Americans.
It is crucial not to confuse the humanitarian with the imperialist. The Holocaust, an evil in itself, could be addressed without enveloping all industrialized nations in a conflict that would end up killing 3% of the world's population and herald the horrors of nuclear weaponry.
Perhaps a Superman who actively chooses nonviolence, who campaigns for a more intellectual, philosophical approach to things like land conflict, resource management, and xenophobia, would be a more effective Superman than one who takes the necessity of war at face value.
If the leaders of the world called upon him to join the fight and he said no, how would that change people's view of the war? Remember, Superman is no mere celebrity. Some see him as their champion; others see him as their weapon. Some (Luthor again) see him as a threat.
There's nothing anyone can threaten him with, no way to twist his arm. He has nothing to lose by speaking the truth, loudly, publicly, without regard to the self-styled power of the leaders he speaks to. This is one way in which his superior power can be used to nonviolent ends.
Imagine Superman, the man who can be anywhere and do anything, providing non-government community aid, marching, participating in strikes. And, if it came to that, he could resort to ways of disrupting the war effort that don't involve contributing to the harm to others.
Imagine how many hungry mouths Superman could feed, how many sick people he could bring medicine to, how quickly he can build safe and sound houses for people who need them. Justice isn't about punishing evildoers, but about making sure everyone has what they need to live.
One might also argue that improving people's material conditions would be irrelevant to the progress of the N*zi war machine. And it is true that, once an army has been raised, it probably won't be stopped by the mere feeding of hungry mouths. But how does fascism begin?
Fascism is a figment of the age of capitalism. It's hard to foment resentment between groups of non-powerful people when their material needs are satisfied. Fascism makes easy promises for the laziest and most indulgent among us, but it fails without a critical mass of support.
There needs to be a clear-cut social hierarchy in order for people of the dominant culture to feel so aggrieved that the hierarchy is being upended. Such hierarchies are shored up by institutional exclusion and economic exploitation. Superman could dispel that singlehandedly.
And, should Superman overlook fascists long enough for their ideology to take hold, it isn't an act of war to rescue people unjustly imprisoned in camps, plantations, or occupied territories. In fact, it's his defining impulse: he finds people in danger and keeps them safe.
In the movie, Luthor sums him up effectively enough that it could be a blurb on the Blu-Ray. "I know you'd never accept an invitation to tea. But a disaster with people in danger, people who need help... well, I just knew you couldn't resist the chance to sort of pitch in."
Superman intervening in war is a thorny question. Superman rescuing people in distress and protecting them from danger is not. It may be the most consistently written trait of any character in fiction. It's hard to imagine him witnessing victims of state violence and not acting.
But even then, isn't this pushing it? Doesn't it warp humanity for a literal demigod to protect us from a crucible of our own making? Maybe, but, from the perspective of humanity, it would seem monstrous if he chose not to. One can hardly blame him for giving it the college try.
What are the long term consequences to human history? Is Superman going to be around forever? If not, if he were to die or abandon Earth, how would things shift in the event of his absence? Would we return to our pre-Superman ways? Would we start up the same old shit?
Perhaps the true value of an activist Superman isn't in providing us with all our wants and needs, but to set a good example, and to cause a sea change in our priorities. To be a powerful person who shows us that we don't have to be what other powerful people tell us we are.
Siegel and Shuster grew up in a time beset by powerful people who didn't do much but take advantage of powerless people. They invented the most powerful person of all, who expressly took the side of the powerless. There are ways to do this without resorting to strong-arm tactics.
Again, this isn't to say that Superman stories shouldn't be about action and adventure. But they're stories. They take place in a fantasy world created to support their existence, where the rules are different from our own. Force, as a fantasy element, is perfectly acceptable.
As All Star Superman writer Grant Morrison once told Newsarama, "Superman would never turn the other cheek; Superman punches out the bully. Superman is a fighter."
And it's important that he uses the word "bully." We may not have supervillains in real life, but we do have bullies. It's a good word for all those billionaires, politicians, and armed authorities--the big ones, with the fewest qualms about using force to get their way.
That's what Siegel and Shuster were responding to in the first place. It wasn't supervillains that made them despair, that made them react by wishing into existence the most powerful being of all, who came to the regular people of the world with a friendly face and open arms.
It was the crooked politicians, the dirty cops, the heartless landlords, the spouses who committed domestic abuse behind closed doors, the publishers of antisemitic newspapers, the titans of industry who stopped the careers of young Jewish artists before they got started.
If Superman had been created in the time of Stonewall, he wouldn't have rounded up the rioters and handed them over to the cops. The people protesting weren't the bullies--the cops were. The same goes for Black Lives Matter. The same goes for the occupation of Palestine.
That's one of the biggest differences between reality and the fantasy world of the movie, and the determining factor in how Superman would respond if he were transported from the latter from the former. The bullies would change. But he would know them when he saw them.
Grant Morrison's indispensable 10-part All Star Superman interview can no longer be found on Newsarama, but it is archived at the following links:
Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
Part 4
Part 5
Part 6
Part 7
Part 8
Part 9
Part 10
Previous: Zoptical Illusions
Next: At The Movies
Back to contents.
Published 3/9/2024
"365 Days of SUPERMAN"
site and contents
© 2024 Ken Alleman.