Just watch the movie!

Sometimes shit happens that just makes you go "huh?" It happened this morning, as I heard someone say  they'd seen "The Man of Steel" last night. We'd seen it several days ago and liked it fairly well, so I said, "How'd you like it?" The answer: "Too much theology; I didn't 'preciate it."  Now I'm a fairly perceptive kind of guy, but whatever I saw other than the ubiquitous  good  vs evil story , which is the crux of every superhero movie ever made, wasn’t theology.  I asked where he saw it , he said it was all through the movie. I had nothing else to say. I suspect this person has a very hazy definition of theology and confuses it with morality and philosophy, neither of which he really understands either. If you really want the tortured, morally conflicted superhero looking for his role in the world look to the night sky over Gotham City.

Superman, and all the accoutrements of the story surrounding his origins were invented as a  comic book superhero created by writer Jerry Siegel and artist Joe Shuster, high school students living in Cleveland, Ohio, in 1933. Superman helped to create the superhero genre and establish its status as paramount  within the American comic book culture of my youth (late 40s-to mid 50s.)

The origin story of Superman, as invented by Siegel,  relates that he was born Kal-El on the planet Krypton, before being rocketed to Earth as an infant by his scientist father Jor-El, moments before Krypton's destruction. Discovered and adopted by a Kansas farmer and his wife, the baby boy  is raised as Clark Kent and through the adopted parents develops  a strong moral compass. Very early he started to display superhuman abilities, which upon reaching maturity, he resolved to use for the benefit of humanity. Superman,in his alter ego of  Clark Kent,  lives and works  in the fictional city of Metropolis. As Clark Kent, he is a journalist for a Metropolis newspaper called the Daily Planet. All these details are consistent with the movie, and all were well established by WWII.

Why go into all this? I do so because instead of the above mentioned religious connotations, tenuous at best, the real story is Superman’s immigrant   status!   In the most recent movie we see the character as pushing the boundaries of acceptance in America.  His extraterrestrial origin  challenges  the notion that Anglo-Saxon ancestry is the source of all that is good and right.  Through the use of a dual identity, the Superman story  allows  immigrants to identify with both their cultures. The mild mannered, thoroughly Americanized Clark Kent represents the assimilated individual, allowing Superman to express the immigrant’s cultural heritage for the greater good.  Others might  argue that some  other aspects of the story reinforce the acceptance of the American dream, since the only thing capable of harming Superman is Kryptonite, a piece of his old home world.  

In spite of all this literary analysis, the simple truth remains. It’s a friggin’  comic book story,  made up by high school kids in the depression to make money for food.