No Ordinary Man
This essay was originally posted to Twitter between July 16, 2021 and August 2, 2021. It was composed of 1,629 words across 36 tweets.
Superman is the ultimate man, who has no use for the superfluous concerns of ordinary men. In addition to the power to accomplish physical feats that others cannot, he has no reason to shoulder the baggage that others feel they must carry. He can transcend.
Humans have a habit of constructing social norms, then discouraging (often punishing) people who visibly deviate from those norms--whether in appearance, tastes, behaviors, or what have you. So did Kryptonians, going by the uniformity of their architecture and flowing robes.
Superman, as a constructed identity, differs consciously from both. Not only does he differ, but he takes an intentional pride in that difference. He literally wears that pride as colors, draped from his shoulders, splashed across his chest. "Watch me while I don't fit in."
Our adherence to norms--the way we dress, the way we conduct ourselves, the shorthand assumptions we make about one another by sight--hinges on the faith that norms are natural and inevitably correct. Superman sets a high profile example that they are anything but.
Superman is a living counterexample, an argument against the normal ways of being. If no one can meaningfully hinder you, why would you live by anyone's dictation but your own?
This tracks all the way down to the core of his being--his masculinity, his gender, his sexuality.
Clark Kent is one facet of Superman's identity. Superman himself is another. If Superman is the self-actualized ubermensch, for whom norms simply don't apply, Clark is a code that he switches to, a shell formed by those norms that he wears like a costume and sheds at will.
Clark, who crams his unruly essence, his beautiful body, into a three piece men's suit that doesn't quite fit. Clark, who goes to work every day, who strives to please his gruff, remote boss. Clark, who takes fleeting joy just from being near two women having a spirited chat.
Clark, the suit of heteronormativity, the closet of everything he learned to be during his upbringing on Earth. Something that, presumably, he later discovers is not the wholeness of his being, but merely one component of a more luminous, unified self. A transitional construct.
If you discover that you're wearing a shell, that you don't need the shell, that you can wear it when it helps and discard it when it hinders, wouldn't you come out of it? Perhaps you wouldn't, if you were vulnerable to harm without its protection.
But what if you weren't?
Growing up, Clark wore his constructed earthly identity all the time, no matter how poorly it fit him, no matter how much he chafed against it. His adoptive father Jonathan, a spit 'n' grit Midwestern farmer, could have showed him tough love, but chose gentleness instead.
Lex Luthor could have been a superman himself--immensely capable and willful, with no apparent limit on his ambition. He ages into a uncomfortable, narcissistic man whose only relief is surrounding himself with people whose sense of self he can diminish anytime he needs.
Luthor's own father was not gentle. We don't learn much about him, except that he told his son "get out"--familiar words to many sons who aren't growing into the kind of man befitting the norms that their fathers expect of them. Failed by gentleness, Luthor finds bitterness.
Luthor can't take off the ill-fitting suit, can't show the world the fullness of his being. The only way he can communicate his passion is through dominance and violence that he learned were the appropriate modes of expression for a man--the norms under which he was socialized.
Imagine, as Luthor, how inflammatory it would be, how damaging to your sense of self, to behold the arrival of a man with just as much capability as you, who was able to actualize himself in a way that you never could. Who navigates life with a set of tools you were never given.
The chip on your shoulder might grow ever wider. You might use the only tools you were given--hurt, abuse, trauma. You might see to it that those things, passed to you from your father, were in turn passed onto the world, and onto this colorful man you missed out on being.
Imagine Luthor expressing care. Imagine him loving someone, anyone, with the fullness of his being. Imagine Luthor, with all the strength in the world, handling another human being with a light, tender touch. Hell, imagine him standing before the world in a colorful dress.
Superman does all of these things--even down to the dress, after a fashion. His cape, boots, and tights bring out a delicateness, an elegant femininity, in his powerful brick shithouse physique. He wears this cocktail of characteristics unembarrassedly, with pride and style.
SUPERMAN is never afraid to demonstrate the characteristics of its hero that differ from the norms of masculinity. It never treats them as a joke or distances them with irony. It holds Superman with sincerity as a man who finds his strength in sweetness and tenderness.
Then and now, action and adventure movies are not known for doing this, particularly as the superhero genre has come to dominate our popular imagination. We are awash in superpowered men whom we value mainly for their physical power, their rationality, their agency.
This is, of course, a deeply conservative framework. Superhero movies generally function as an extension of the white supremacist thinking upon which much of the developed world is founded. They reinforce the values of powerful people, because powerful people typically make them.
(For more remarks on the confluence of retrograde social values and the figure of the superhero, read "Christopher's Body.")
Perhaps SUPERMAN would be unremarkable, if not for the paucity of tenderness in these movies.
How many superhero movies can you name in which the love interest feels perfunctory, as if the character was added as an afterthought to check off an item on a spreadsheet? In how many of them does the interaction between hero and love interest just kind of feel... forced?
Uniquely, SUPERMAN was designed from the ground up to be about the relationship between Superman and Lois Lane, with the rest of the story concerns built around them.
(Read "The Morality of Super Time Travel" for more on this!)
Superman and Lois form an apparently conventional hetero pairing, this much is true. But consider each character not as roles in a conventional framework waiting to be filled, but on the basis of their own characteristics, and on what each of them brings into the relationship.
Lois Lane is not easily impressed by men, perhaps because her experiences with them have left her dissatisfied. The only way to take her by surprise, to show her something new, is someone else--if not someone who isn't a man, then, at the very least, a different kind of man.
Many people of non-normative sexualities don't discover this aspect of themselves until spending years in normative relationships, having normative relations, that leave them dissatisfied and disengaged on all levels--physical, mental, emotional, spiritual, and others yet.
Only then, do they begin to understand that their sexuality is non-normative, that letting their lives be guided by normative scripts will only leave them jaded. Cynical. Impossible to impress. Always on the move. Going "bananas in a week" in their normative relationships.
Superman leaves her flustered. And, where she might have left other men feeling insecure by her intellect, her ability, her unwillingness to settle, Superman is instead intrigued. She is not the conventional love interest, he not the conventional hero, hence their attraction.
And then there is Jimmy Olsen. Aside from Lex Luthor, and perhaps Perry White, Jimmy is Clark's closest same sex relationship in this movie. Jimmy is also the first person to introduce himself as an act of friendship, rather than of formality, on Clark's first day at work.
Jimmy could be this way with anyone new. But maybe he senses in Clark a kindred spirit--a safe haven, someone who sees him in his full personhood, as more than just a copyboy or budding photographer. Like has a way of seeking like, of craving sources of community.
The Jimmy/Clark connection is only touched upon briefly in the movie, but they are unflinching moments of homosociality. There is nothing backbiting or "no homo" jokingly homoerotic about their relations; Jimmy just seems to really like Clark, and Clark likewise likes him.
This is, at the very least, a softened sort of masculinity, which would have been unusual in 1978 and would be downright bizarre in the action and adventure movies of today. SUPERMAN does not "no homo" its way out of expressions of care between two men, fleeting as they are.
Maybe Jimmy is just being friendly--and, of course he is. This is big budget American cinema, after all. But the only reason we assume this normativity where none is specifically indicated is that this is how normativity works: it wouldn't occur to us to assume anything else.
Finding the non-normative subtext in movies such as SUPERMAN is a way of challenging common notions about normal ways of being.
(Also, if the subtext can be found via a good faith interpretation of the movie, it doesn't matter if the subtext was put there on purpose or not!)
It also benefits marginalized audiences, who, without the normalizing representation of marginalized people in mainstream entertainment, must recognize those themes in other ways. It's not about inventing it where there is none, and it isn't about taking the dangled bait.
It's more about giving popular culture a closer look.
P.S. Sometimes, the subtext IS there on purpose. Read Molly Ostertag's (@MollyOstertag) excellent essay, "Queer readings of The Lord of the Rings are not accidents."
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Published 3/9/2024
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