In 2009, a very badly cut and substantially different version of this article was published in a collection by Continuum Press. It had what I felt was the most original material removed without my input, and ended up being the only article not about film in a film collection, with essentially only the literature review remaining. I was told the cuts had been sent to me for approval, and had not responded - with the old ‘it must have gone in your junk mail’ excuse. I was told, ‘if you don’t like it, we’ll just leave it out of the collection.’ Because academia is publish or perish, I just said okay. Who cares if it’s any good, right?
I’m presenting a version here because I remain truly gutted about it. I’d been researching and teaching on Superman for ages. Also, it had some really good dick jokes which I always hate to waste. (Although they had perhaps understandably all been cut early on, which I do not begrudge). Anyway, the article has that awful snotty tone that academics are taught to use; sorry about that. But I think it’s worth a read.
Superman is the Faultline:
Why the Man of Steel will always be cracked
Alex Evans, 2007
According to an advertisement in early 2005 on the US Federal Business Opportunities website, ‘In order to achieve long-term peace and stability in the Middle East, the youth need to be reached. [..]’ With this in mind, the US military’s advertisement sought applications to create an original comic book series for young people in the Middle East, since ‘a series of comic books provides the opportunity for youth to learn lessons, develop role models and improve their education’ (‘US Army to Produce Mid-East Comic’, 2005). Production was to take place at Fort Bragg, home of the Psychological Operations (or Psy-Ops) group. Comic books were about to become an official part of the battle to win ‘hearts and minds’ in the global war on terror. The interrelation of popular form and explicit political content here will do nothing to dissuade those who still tend to distrust popular culture as an always hegemonic imposition, a propagandistic cloaking of the common mind - as, well, a psychological operation. Indeed, the populism of the superheroic, crime-fighting, wrong-righting comic book - the central role in which would be played here by US military forces – may indeed make this a potentially powerful deployment by the ideological war machine of capitalist imperialist forces, perhaps another triumphant military use of popular culture along the lines of the US Army’s online computer games used to seduce American teenage boys into giving their all to Uncle Sam.[1]
If all this might seem to confirm yet again that comic book heroism, in the post-9/11 world, is a tool of hegemony and imperialism, there is certainly much truth in this assertion. As Robert Jewett and John Lawrence suggest in two important books which mix critical theology, political and cultural studies (2002; 2002a), the superhero is ubiquitous enough in what they call the American civil religion to make it a ‘monomyth’ (2002a: 28): a term which suggests monologic intransigence, monolithic politics, perhaps even a monoculture. Aspects of comic book heroism since the attacks, as we will see, certainly seem to confirm their damning assessment of the genre. And yet, while the ubiquity of the myth might be read in itself as monolithic, just as its occasional tendency to be used to justify hegemonic and imperialist projects of domination might suggest that it is innately reactionary, the superhero has always been, and continues to demonstrate, a good deal of ideological battle across its myriad surfaces: it is not just a tool of hegemony and imperialism, but also a site of considerable resistance and conflict. What close study shows, I would suggest, is just how fraught – and, perhaps, fragile, the ideological unity of even mainstream American popular culture is, and even in the wake of seemingly endless attempts at right-wing ideological unity in the Bush era. My feeling is that the real ideological work, and, hence, the real signs of splinter and dissent, are to be found at, so to speak, the coal face of hegemonic, mainstream, populist texts, and as such, instead of concentrating on supposedly oppositional, ‘traditionally’ subversive or ‘counter-cultural’ comic books such as, say the recent work of Art Spiegelman, this chapter analyses conflicts in the figure of Superman – the oldest, and surely traditionally considered the most hegemonic, central, quintessentially American of superheroes.[2]
Mythology
Myth, says Roland Barthes, is ‘frozen speech’, which ‘at the moment of reaching me… suspends itself, turns away and assumes the look of a generality: it stiffens, makes itself look neutral and innocent’ (2000: 125). Myth, in other words, is a dehistoricising discourse, designed to elide the contingency of ideological constructs. It would be hard to think of a stiffer, more frozen discourse than the hugely popular comic art of Alex Ross. Ross’s hyper-real images, drawn from life with the use of models and uniquely stylised lighting effects are even collected in a hagiographic compendium entitled, incredibly appropriately, ‘Mythology: The Comic Book Art of Alex Ross’. A detailed three-dimensional statue of Superman designed by Ross in particular is, to this viewer at least, viscerally terrifying (see Kidd and Spear 2005: n.p.): overtly patriarchal, an elder statesman, thick-necked, intransigent, an ageing good ol’ boy. And in particular, from the beefy somatotype of the model (who seems to recall the George Reeves incarnation), to the cut of his hair, to the regular return to an earlier (in fact, 1930’s) costume style, the Superman of Alex Ross is also the Superman of an American always.[3] This is the Superman of your father’s generation – but as such, it is also, for Ross’s generation, the Superman who is your father. In the visual return to a nostalgic past, in terms of historical references to earlier versions of the hero, and to a patriarchal protector untroubled by the passage of time, this seems to seek to construct a Superman divested of the historical and political developments and fads of the last half century. Superman is returned to safety in the ideological and historical fixity of mytho-poeic Americana, an American where it is always the 30’s, the 50’s, where Dad and Superman are always right, always strong, and always the same.
This is of course precisely a response to the tendency for Superman to change with the times, and particularly since the early 1990s. Conservatives have long feared that the ideological changes of history will undo their hero: Republican conservative activist Herbert London, for example, opined on the death of Superman (a development in the mythology in the early 1990’s, interestingly just as Clinton came to power) that
‘it is understandable that Superman must go. His assets were inconsistent with an era of moral ambiguity and androgynous sexual leanings. [..] Superman is after all an anachronism, a model of a bygone era when virtue mattered, when morality wasn't relative […] After all, Clark Kent was a simple man with a basic middle-American sense of justice. In his Kent persona Superman could be confused with Tom Sawyer, a kind of American Adam. [..] Superman was indeed a figure towering above the others, a hero to emulate. [..] Superman will be missed, but the virtue he embodied will be missed even more’ (London, 1993).
This is the kind of conservatism that would no doubt have delighted 1950’s anti-comic book campaigner Frederic Wertham, who equally feared the rise of such moral relativism and sexual androgyny,[4] and such overt dehistoricisations of Superman are intended to serve as a bolster against the vicissitudes of shifting moral and political values (and in particular, the legacy of the 1960s). But certainly, by the time of London’s writing, this is part of a rear-guard manoeuvre by conservative ideology – a manoeuvre that, as we will see, continues as part of a wider battle for ideological control of a particularly valuable piece of American mythology. Superman is always in danger of getting away, becoming morally relative, un-American, or even, as we will see, a homosexual.
On closer inspection, we find that, whatever London may think, the Man of Steel has in fact always shifted with an astonishing alacrity between political positions. Before US involvement in World War II in 1939, Superman is strongly opposed to embroilment in Europe – a distinctly anti-capitalist imperialist hero (created, after all, by left-leaning New York Jews) foils a plot by fat-cat arms dealers to embroil nations in war: ‘But why should we fight?’ asks one European leader, ‘We’re not angry at each other,’ says another. ‘Gentlemen, it’s obvious you’ve been fighting only to promote the sales of munitions! – Why not shake hands and make up?’ suggests Superman (Siegel and Schuster, 1939: 50). By 1940, before the US has signed up to battle Hitler, Superman is bringing der Führer and Joe Stalin to trial before the League of Nations (Siegel and Schuster, 1940); by 1941, he is enthusiastically supporting the war: beaming, he strides arm in arm with two cheerful military men on the cover of Superman #12, looking for all the world like he’s got Super-Lucky. As mainstream US opinion has shifted at this point, so has Superman’s – and indeed, Superman is part of the apparatus being used to shift - and hold - that opinion.
Years later, our hero’s position takes a more disturbing turn when in the early 1990s, a union-busting Superman must defeat Demolitia, a Latin American, possibly lesbian, freedom fighter – that is, terrorist – who seeks the destruction of an armaments factory to stop the flow of US-made devices into the hands of the brutal military dictatorship in control of her home country. Cue much wagging of Kryptonian fingers: to close the arms factory, Superman says, would be to put good, honest Americans out of work. So while the factory owner is, says Demolitia to an Average Joe worker trying to stop her advance, ‘an evil monster,’ whom he ‘should be ashamed of trying to protect’, the working man counters:
‘Lady, what I’m tryin’ ta protect -- -- is us! All we’re doin’ is our jobs! We got mortgages, kids ta put through school! But your idea of justice is wreckin’ this factory – an’ our livelihoods with it! How’re we supposed to survive, huh? Dijda think of that?’ (Micheline, Dwyer & Rodier, 1996: np.)
Superman, then, is protecting ordinary Americans and their livelihoods, not just the interests of gigantic corporations profiting from human misery - since of course the interests of the working class man and the capitalist warmongers are, in fact, the same.
But the pages of Superman comics have also been a site of perhaps truly subversive conflict over American domestic political power and the role of capital in its assignment. In the 1990s, Lex Luthor was redrawn as, not a mad scientist or petty criminal, but a multi-billionaire Machiavellian capitalist. And then, soon after the 2000 presidential election, who should suddenly find himself in the Superman universe’s White House but said evil genius and Machiavellian capitalist Lex Luthor? (De Matteis et al. 2001).[5] It would be very hard not to read this as some kind of critique. These are redolently subversive parallels with reality to say the least – even if the real-life Machiavellian capitalist president in question is by no means a genius, and was not, after all, democratically elected.
What we are seeing here, at the very least, is a certain ambivalence. And such a position has also been insistently present in renderings of Superman’s geopolitical urges. Before the fall of the Twin Towers, in 1999 – when the US was of course already bombing and terrorising its military inferiors, and, lest we forget, had already suffered an abortive attempt to bring the concrete giants crashing down - Ross and writer Paul Dini collaborated on a series of large format story-book style works, one of which was Superman: Peace on Earth (1998). As Henry Jenkins notes, these works are almot prescient in their questioning of America’s global role, and although my sense is that their political positions are far more problematic than Jenkins allows a clear movement within hegemony of sorts, are very much visible. [6] After the fall of the Towers, the superhero became a figure of some focus for those seeking to express their grief, anger, and fear in the wake of the attacks. Galleries on superhero fan websites began to fill with home-made images of Superman – culled from various comic-book incarnations, or sometimes featuring already-fallen superman Christopher Reeve – portrayed standing ghostly and defiant by the still-standing Twin Towers (Azie, 2002), or mournfully by their iconic wreckage. One shows Superman carrying a dead firefighter, titled ‘Farewell to a real hero’ (Konrad, 2002). Of course, it is all too easy to baulk at the sentimentalism of such outpourings of grief and mourning. But while much of the grief and outrage these images express is, let me be clear, quite real and appropriate, what discomfort over these images and other aspects of popular mourning since 9/11 proceeds from is an intertextual knowledge of their problematic interrelation with discourses of hatred and violent retribution so central to many popular US cultural items since the attacks – as well as their material practice in global policy.
And such an interrelation is clear in Heroes: The World’s Greatest Superhero Creators Honor the World’s Greatest Heroes. 9.11.2001. (2001), a Marvel comics production designed to produce income for the Twin Towers Fund shortly after the attacks, features many short pieces by well-known comic book artists. Some of these are of a fairly gentle mourning / nurturing/ heroic type, featuring superheroes and firefighters working together to help those fallen in the attacks (Campbell and Hi-Fi. 2001; Haynes et al. 2001), or telegrammatic images of loss (a woman waiting by the phone for her pilot husband to call [Romita and Udon Studios 2001]). Others show a social renewal in liberal-pluralistic unity (children of all races coming together to remember the lost [Salvador, 2001]; all races – including species from other worlds - giving blood together [Allred and Allred, 2001]; or schoolchildren ‘Ellen McKenzie’ and ‘Fatima Jaffal’ holding hands and crying together as they see the towers burn on TV in class [Zircher et al. 2001]).[7] Others, however, take on a more chilling tone. In perhaps the most disturbing entry of this collection, Captain America stands, a ravaged flag fluttering still-erect in his hand, with an inscription by comics legend Stan Lee (creator of Spiderman and many others):
A day there was of monumental villainy. A day when a great nation lost its innocence and naked evil stood revealed before a stunned and shattered world.
A day there was when a serpent struck a sleeping giant, a giant who will sleep no more. Soon shall the serpent know the wrath of the mighty, the vengeance of the just.
A day there was when liberty lost her heart – and found the strength within her soul. (Lee, Notz, Hi-Fi 2001: plate 51)
What this imagery and text most uncomfortably recalls is the confluence of sentimentality with intolerance and brutality, alongside a tendency to speak in lofty near-meaningless transhistorical abstracts, most characteristic of cultural aspects of fascism. Since 9/11, there have been what we might read as, perhaps anxious, attempts to fix and stabilise the Superman mythology. From early on, Supes became an occasional poster boy for the forthcoming war on terror, and the Anne Coulter-esque bravado of Stan Lee’s Captain America piece quoted above pales by comparison with DC artist Neal Adams’ image of Superman prepared for one of 2 DC comics coffee-table editions responding to 9/11.[8] ‘Support your Red Cross’, it suggests, above the flag-holding Superman, standing again in front of the iconic WTC rubble. To his left is Uncle Sam, sleeves rolled for business. At his feet is a plaque: ‘FIRST THINGS FIRST. THEN WE COME FOR YOU’.[9]
And then, the redoubling of such efforts seems particularly overt on the cover of the 600th anniversary issue of The New Adventures of Superman, in March 2002. This striking image features Superman, again in a costume which returns to its earliest incarnation, hypertrophically proportioned and oleaginously bequiffed, carrying Old Glory, an offset clutch of serifed text reading:
‘NOW MORE THAN EVER –
FOR TRUTH, JUSTICE AND THE AMERICAN WAY!’
We might be forgiven for a momentary shudder. But the cover is by Daniel Adel, a professional caricaturist. There is everything to suggest that this is mythologising of the most quintessentially Barthesian sort: the transhistorical connection between Now and Ever reinforced at a clear point of the passage of time (an anniversary) – which is yet all the more tremulous and clearly vulnerable for its hysterical insistence - and yet, the parody is so accurate that it could almost be one of Barthes’ own quintessential mythic sketches, designed to undermine and unnerve the objects he analyses. This image is surely a carnivalesque exposition of the underside of Alex Ross’s Superman – itself no less bizarre, and infinitely more disturbing. And so, just at a point where ideological coherence might be expected to be strongest – and be ideologically required to be so - subversive forces take over, parodically transforming to-the-letter conformity through figurative and textual hyperbole. While we might suggest that different readings of this cover are taking place – that perhaps ‘real’ Superman fans read it as sincere - well, we should note that comics readers are not as dumb as some might like to think:
Oh, I'm sure the sophisticated Cool Cats of the Rolling Stone Magazine set enjoyed the cover's air of delicious irony, since the patriotic sentiment looks as flat-out foolish as Superman himself. But as for Superman fans at the time, it's fair to say most of us were pretty disappointed (Engblom 2006).
They knew they were being had. But perhaps some of them – like me – rather liked it. Inside, the comic sees Superman still undergoing a crisis of conscience over Lex Luthor’s presidency, only six months post 9/11 (Casey et al., 2002: 30).
Faultlines
As a mythic palimpsest, the superhero is a particularly useful source for cultural studies: the tendency for the most popular figures in the genre to last for many years and go through various incarnations and revisionist ‘reboots’ of their mythology (see Klock, 2002), as well as the connected fact that continuities in the comic book world are multiple and flexible – often making use of multiple divergent ‘universes’ in different runs of a title and its offshoots – means that complications and contradictions become all the more possible and indeed, clearly visible. Of course, Marvel and DC go to great lengths to control these universes and ensure that they remain coherent across titles, and yet, we have long been persuaded, after all, that texts are impossible to control; that their meanings are deployed across their surfaces and as such, impossible to centralise or constrict. This is surely all the more the case as the number of surfaces, and the ‘size’ and spread of a text, increases all the more rhizomatically.
As cultural materialist scholar Alan Sinfield points out, the neo-Gramscian turn in cultural studies was designed in part to break the stranglehold of the ‘entrapment’ model popularised by French late structuralist thinkers, and particularly Louis Althusser (Sinfield, 1994: 24). This has provoked a necessary complication of our understanding of the ideological assignment of power. While the ruling ideas are indeed those of the ruling class, what this work has consistently reminded us is that, first, no ideological domination is total, and second, that even hegemony itself is constantly fragmented, fraught, and in danger of losing its grip (Williams, 1980: 38). As such, it requires constant reinforcement, realignment, and defence, since, at the same time, we find that counter-hegemonic influences themselves are always struggling to achieve dominance. My feeling is that in popular culture in particular we are able to see this process in action, and most of all, perhaps, in those cultural texts which repeat – texts we might call myths, or archetypes, or ‘generic’. The reason is that their persistent (but flexible) shape and clear structural delineation allows us to see more clearly the points of breakage and shift in ideological formation that inevitably occur over the period of repetition. Indeed, rather than assuming that such texts are all the more monolithically ideological for their repetition, those texts are ironically the ones that allow us most clearly to recognise, first, the processes of history, and second, connectedly, of shifting and contested ideological structures. In particular, in versions of Superman, we can see processes of dissidence, rupture, containment: dead-Superman meets Herbert-London-Superman; Alex-Ross-Superman meets Daniel-Adel-Superman.
Sinfield takes just such an approach in his seminal work, Faultlines: Cultural Materialism and the Politics of Dissident Reading (1992), proposing that we pay attention to what he calls ‘faultline stories’: stories or mythologies that serve as a crisis point, and hence, a focus, for culture’s ‘awkward, unresolved issues [that] require most assiduous and continuous reworking; they hinge upon a fundamental, unresolved ideological complication that finds its way […] into texts’ (Sinfield, 1994: 4). In particular, Sinfield’s is an attempt to find a way out of, first, models which presuppose the individual agency of an independent rational (or transhistorical) mind as a way of explaining the processes of cultural change, and secondly, out of the aforementioned ‘entrapment’ model (1992: 41). Sinfield proposes instead that culture itself produces its own problems and contradictions, which manifest themselves in culture as sites of anxious repetition: the stories must be retold, reworked, rethought. At this point, they may be either returned to, and recuperated by, hegemonic ideology, or instead, may be sizeably refigured by non-hegemonic readings – or rewritings - in such a way that they actually produce some kind of cultural change. Sinfield’s ideas are also greatly influenced by Foucault (Sinfield, 1994: 26), and his proposal of multiple sites of resistance rather than a single ‘great refusal’ – the question, then, is where exactly these sites of cultural resistance can – and should – take place. The faultline story is one persuasive answer to that question.
The importance of Sinfield’s faultline theory, to my mind, lies in its foregrounding of reiteration as a site for historical analysis of cultural, and particularly, ideological change, and this most of all in its potential to demonstrate more clearly than other forms of analysis the battleground nature of culture: a single site can be occupied simultaneously, or at least, consecutively, by numerous opposing readings and rewritings of a narrative and its attendant ideological formation. The task then becomes the analysis and cataloguing of those opposing formations – the trick in all cases is to analyse complexities, conflicts, breaks and dissonances, as well as superficial coherences and repetitions. As I will suggest at the end of this chapter, such analyses also help us to work out the way that those shifts in formation might be harnessed to effect further social change. Faultline stories, after all, might be seen as a highly useful place to direct cultural activism, since they are, by definition, points of weakness as well as points of contestation, in dominant ideology. And the superhero has always been – and remains – exactly such a point, even since what we might see what we are encouraged to see as the ideological watershed of 9/11.
Superman returns?
What neo-Gramscian work shows us, then, and what Sinfield’s work emphasises, is that ideological hegemony itself is always split and divided, and always a temporary yoking together of disparate groups and interests. This means that we are always likely to find far more conflict and ambivalence at the centre than we might otherwise have imagined. Despite Jewett and Lawrence’s use of Marvel comics’ American icon, Captain America, as the quintessential example of monolithic cultural hegemony, and even despite Stan Lee’s disturbingly vengeful salvo quoted above, such conflict and ambivalence has become central to the mythology: Cap has equally upset right-wing critics in daring to suggest that America may well have sown the seeds of terrorism elsewhere, in the Captain America: The New Deal series:
We might expect such blame-America logic from Hollywood activists, academic apologists [yes, us], or the angry protesters who regularly fill the streets of European capitals (and many major American cities). When such sentiments turn up, however, hidden within star-spangled, nostalgic packaging of comic books aimed at kids, we need to confront the deep cultural malaise afflicting the nation on the eve of war (Medved, 2003).
And perhaps such a deep cultural malaise – or rather, a sense of changing political nuances, a deeply disturbing sense for the power elite that America may not be as ideologically centralised, harmonised, controlled as they would wish – has been in evidence in the Superman world too. More and more visibly, even the very central parts of the mythology are full of more possible faultlines and ideological fragmentations than we might imagine. Of course, it is debatable whether comics are really a mainstream form – Henry Jenkins, in his article on comic books post 9/11, makes the distinction that they are ‘popular’ (that is, using the generic language of mainstream culture and being produced for entertainment), but are now, not mainstream, but a fringe medium that appeals mainly to college students and college educated professionals (2006: 72-73). So it might be worth, then, considering a more resolutely mainstream venue for superheroism, that is, film, since, after all, the superhero’s comic book form is so much less culturally pervasive, perhaps, than its incredibly popular cinematic appearances. And here again we find considerable fragmentation and conflict.
This fact was in remarkable – and often disturbing – evidence in the run-up to the release of Superman Returns in 2006, where panicky rumours and urban myths began to circulate in right-wing media circles. A battle began over potential readings, and recent re-writings, of the mythology. Would the new Superman be a deadbeat dad? Gay? An illegal immigrant? Perhaps a Jew? (He always was!) Simply un-American? Or perhaps, fingers-crossed, Jesus Christ?[10] Superman fans reacted with some unease at the appointment of openly gay director Bryan Singer, already widely credited with ‘introducing’ gay subtexts into the marvellous recent X-Men movies (as if they weren’t there already). And it was surely a very basic homophobia that produced rumours that Singer would be casting a gay man as Superman, who would then come out as part of the publicity campaign for the film. Right wing attack-blogs were in quite a froth over this (eg. Hank, 2006), especially when US gay news magazine The Advocate published an arresting cover story: How Gay is Superman? (2006). The story itself was the wizened journalistic chestnut about secret identities, costumes/ frocks, and alienation, and yet the very headline managed to plug perfectly into the mood of anxiety already at work in the rumour mills of comic/ fantasy film ‘geek’ fan-sites (themselves so often havens for the most outrageous homophobia) over Singer’s involvement. The putative sexuality of Superman’s actor was regularly questioned, and earlier, even his codpiece had become the site of mass homosexual panic, producing increasingly elaborate stories about airbushing, negative padding, and then, no really, CGI effects being used to disguise his imposing penile dimensions.[11] None of this would have been raised, one suspects, without the involvement of Singer, and what this reveals in its panicky compulsion is surely a truly phobic homophobia: Superman, we discover, has a cock - it must be the work of homosexuals.[12] Routh, it later somewhat predictably transpires, cannot please the real men of the right: ‘We have a hard time relating to wonderboys like Brandon Routh or Tobey Maguire’ says a reviewer at Libertas ‘because [..] while they probably look great in Zegna suits on the cover of GQ they don’t look like they can take a punch’ (Apuzzo[?], 2006).
But anxiety over Superman’s possibly-gay-penis or potential lack of punch-resistance is only part of a wider right-wing fear about what might have happened to the hero – and one cannot help but wonder if the feared homosexuality also feeds into a sort of crisis of imperial masculinity; a fear of geopolitical castration – ironically brought on partly by a supposedly over-empowered member. I say this because the other great scandal – this time based on the actual, rather than pruriently imagined, content of the film - was the panic over Superman’s motto, refigured now in the mouth of Frank Langella’s Perry White as "Truth, justice and … all that stuff", dropping the traditional ‘American way’. Writers Dan Harris and Mike Dougherty told journalists that they found the term problematic – suggesting instead that Superman was a superhero for the whole world, not just America (see Wolf, 2006).[13] But, in the age of the global war on terror, a jingoistically Americocentric Superman was not going to fly in foreign markets. And why indeed should he? Not only can there surely be few figures who speak so overtly of American cultural hegemony, but the girded body of the invulnerable, forcibly-interventionist Superman also speaks so much of directly, violently oppressive military, economic and imperial hegemony in a way that, say, Mickey Mouse does not. Indeed, one might have questioned the market wisdom of producing a Superman movie at all at this stage for these very reasons. Right-wing bloggers, critics, and many Superman fans, already smarting perhaps from Adelman’s #600 cover (where the ‘American Way’ text may indeed be heavily ironic) were of course indignant at Superman’s apparent turn toward multilateral politics at a time when the idea of, say, international law is considered increasingly ‘irrelevant’.[14] ‘It could be worse,’ said one talkback poster at Free Republic, the ‘premier conservative news forum’, ‘they might have made Superman dedicated to truth, justice, and the Kyoto Accord’ (TLB, 2006).[15]
In fact, the elision of the ‘American’ portion of the slogan may well be part of Superman Returns’ need to sidestep questions of domestic or international politics for market reasons – it returns us, for example, to Lex Luthor as thief and mad scientist, rather than president or capitalist.[16] But for an overseas, or even domestic, audience to know this – or that Superman was not gay - would involve them actually coming to see it. The same would go for foreign audiences, perhaps understandably expecting a film replete with Superman’s return to chauvinistic American propaganda at a time when such discourses are so globally visible. But there is disagreement and conflict even over the question of who exactly did see the film. Was the film a ‘flop’, as right-wing bloggers and news outlets (‘Behind Liberal Lines’ 2006), including Fox News (Friedman, 2006), would gleefully have us believe? Or was this itself wishful thinking, or rather, more performative reading, this time of statistics through the lens of wider cultural politics: another deployment in the Superman myth, designed to undo the damage of removing the ‘American way’ and deter other liberal re-writings? Then again, if indeed the film was commercially disappointing, might we propose that it is the very conflicted nature of the Superman myth that has produced this economic problem?[17] Too right wing, macho, imperialist, and jingoistic for Blue States and global markets; too incipiently progressive, geopolitically multilateralist, possibly queer, un-American, and well-hung for Red States?
What we see in debates over the reading of Superman are heated battles, sometimes almost disturbing in their ideological fervour - and I suspect they are so often so ferocious because it is realised that this is one very promising place where cultural change might happen. We see here a constantly developing, constantly fragmenting, mythology of Superman as it plays out in public discourse in arguments over meanings of pre-existing texts, and this is precisely the kind of process that Sinfield maps out in his Faultlines. But one of the benefits of Superman over, say, Sinfield’s focus, Shakespeare, is that the primary texts are still to play for, can be changed, reproduced and rewritten directly. There are political battles of reading – performatively, publicly – between fans, bloggers, journalists, but there are also those between, say, traditionalist and revisionist writers and artists. As Jenkins reminds us, we ought not to forget that often artists working within popular culture work for political ideals as well as economic imperatives (2006: 98) - perhaps these revisionist superhero writers really are, as Silver Age hero artist Jim Steranko angrily suggested, ‘cultural terrorists’ (in Jenkins, 2006: 79). I prefer the term ‘cultural activists’, but it is interesting to hear such a loaded term being used - if the bandying about of ‘terrorist’ in the context of comic books does not speak of the terrifyingly expandable nature of such a categorisation in Bush’s America, I don’t know what does.
The work Sinfield does with literary superhero Shakespeare can be just as persuasively done with Superman – and indeed, it may be rather more pressing. And in its insistent return of a text to a history of ideological change, Sinfield’s cultural materialist methodology always strikes me as a particularly useful in response to myths of the Barthesian persuasion (in its forcible return of the myth to history), as well as an encouraging way out of the potential entrapments proposed in cultural theory by French structuralists, or even the problems of ideological centralisation rightly noted by Jewett and Lawrence – the trick in all cases is to analyse complexities, conflicts, breaks and dissonances, as well as superficial coherences and repetitions.
What this might tell us is not simply that studying faultline stories is a useful way of mapping and analysing ideological change, but that acting upon, writing around faultline stories, is also precisely the kind of place that cultural activists might want to concentrate their attention – and indeed, clearly have done so: most obviously in the case of right-wing bloggers, but also for liberal film-makers, fans and reviewers, and gay activist publications such as The Advocate. One thing that is particularly interesting is that the readings of Superman Returns I have covered here often have so little to do with the film. Instead, they have much to do with the pre-existing, and yet, constantly developing, constantly fragmenting, mythology of Superman as it plays out in public discourse in arguments over meanings of pre-existing texts (this is why I have concentrated on Blogs and news fora, given their tendency to show both a cross-section, but also in certain cases, particularly politically focused, range of opinions). But this doesn’t mean we should concentrate solely on dissident ‘reading’ per se – indeed, this is something I find slightly frustrating about Sinfield’s Faultlines. Rather, one of the benefits of Superman over Shakespeare is that the primary texts are still to play for, can be changed, reproduced and rewritten directly. There are political battles of reading – performatively, publicly – between fans, bloggers, journalists, but also between, say, traditionalist and revisionist writers and artists. As Jenkins reminds us, we ought not to forget that often artists working within popular culture sometimes work for political ideals as well as economic imperatives (2006: 98) – perhaps these revisionist superhero writers really are, as Silver Age hero artist Jim Steranko angrily suggested, ‘cultural terrorists’ (in Jenkins, 2006: 79). I prefer the term ‘activist’, but it is interesting to hear such a loaded term being used - if the bandying about of ‘terrorist’ in the context of comic books does not speak of the terrifyingly expandable nature of such a categorisation in Bush’s America, I don’t know what does.
The neo-Gramscian and Foucauldian turn in cultural studies, and in particular, in Sinfield’s work was after all designed to tell us, at a point when resistance seemed futile – we were ‘entrapped’ – how resistance might be produced and directed. Because, even if culture itself produces the faultlines, it is real men and women who will have to stick a spade in them, so to speak. A faultline story - with the potential it offers splinter ideological groups to performatively re-read, or indeed, rewrite that story to gain some kind of leverage, to stake a claim to the hegemony through the (re-) production of meaning - might be precisely where these cultural battles are most productively, if always awkwardly, anxiously, pursued. Overall, what I have tried to suggest is that, while some may imagine that the myth of Superman will heal America and repair the damage of any earth-shaking disaster, including the splinters and fissures of ideology, we find instead that Superman himself is a faultline. We find here a continuing story of dissidence and containment, and ongoing battles for control of his cultural and political energies may give us hope, and perhaps, direction, in the pursuit of truth and justice - for all.
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Notes
[1] See http://www.americasarmy.com/ (but be careful what you sign). The success of the strategy no doubt depends on whether the comic book turns out to be as popular a part of teenage male Iraqi culture as it is in similar American milieux. There may be some US-centric cultural imperialist hubris at work here.
[2] This work complements other studies of Superman and his ideology (eg. Gordon 2001) and work on comic books post-9/11 (eg. Jenkins, 2006, a less overtly politically-oriented article than my work here).
[3] Superman’s costume here has a black background to the trademark insignia, as first drawn in Siegel and Schuster’s comics, rather than the yellow introduced later.
[4] See Medhurst (1991: esp 150-154).; Wertham (1955).
[5] In the President Lex series, 2001-2002, repr. in De Matteis et al. (2003).
[6] It would be impossible after all to leave unchallenged the notion that Superman, as a symbol of American interventionist might, is always acting with the ‘best intentions’ (in Kidd and Spear, 2005, n.p.) just as we might baulk at the suggestion that world hunger is part of the human condition – it is very much shaped by unfettered global capitalism.
[7] Jenkins’ suggestion is that it is these nurturing works which dominate responses (2006: 79) – and yet, I cannot help but suggest that we must also take heed of the more problematic images given their obvious intersection with mainstream political discourses at this point.
[8] Anne Coulter: ‘We should invade their countries, kill their leaders and convert them to Christianity. We weren't punctilious about locating and punishing only Hitler and his top officers. We carpet-bombed German cities; we killed civilians. That's war. And this is war’ (Coulter, 2001).
[9] This surely attests to the sense of personal unassailability in popular rightist American discourses, their interpellated subjects always safe in the knowledge that this ‘you’ will always be someone else, even in the days of the Patriot Act and Guantanamo. Or in this instance, subjects perhaps oddly not interpellated – are ‘the terrorists’ likely to be reading this comic, in order to be so addressed?
[10] See, for example Tapper (2006); Hank (2006).
[11] This rumour began in a UK tabloid, but swiftly spread through the fan community. See Gough (2005).
[12] Singer was forced to issue denials: see ‘Superman Returns director gets defensive about gay rumors’ (2006). Along these lines, we might also consider what right-wing bloggers called the ‘deadbeat dad’ sub-plot: said John Byrne, a writer credited with ‘revitalising’ the hero in the 1980’s, ‘I am sick to death of ...finding...that I, and those who think like me, have been wasting our time for the past twenty, thirty, forty years, working on superhero comics. None of the lessons we have tried to teach have sunk in. Superman can desert the Earth. Lois can have a bastard kid. Doesn't matter. Just make it fast and loud and shiny’ (qtd. in Hank, 2006). It seems hard to argue, however, that Singer’s film is particularly fast, or loud – indeed, it seems positively Kubrickian in its resolutely unhurried gravitas, full as it is of pregnant pauses and ominous silences.
[13] As he began, in fact – I find no evidence of the ‘American Way’ part of the motto in Superman’s earliest cinematic appearances in the Fleischer brothers’ cartoons, for example.
[14] According to red-blooded American hero, Donald Rumsfeld (2002).
[15] And yet, this is in fact, appropriately enough, a return of Superman to such an approach to the world: he drops Stalin and Hitler off to receive justice at the League of Nations in 1940, after all – surely the behaviour of a cheese-eating surrender monkey, not a red-blooded American hero.
[16] Luthor’s money is even fraudulently inherited from an elderly paramour – not ‘earned’ through exploitative and semi-legal industrial practices as in his Machiavellian capitalist incarnation.
[17] As of June this year, Superman Returns had made a worldwide gross of $391,081,192, while Batman Begins, released a year earlier, had made $371,824,647. This said, domestic gross for Superman Returns was $200,081,192, while Batman Begins had grossed $205,343,774 at home, suggesting that American concerns over Superman Returns were more problematic than foreign ones. Superman Returns’ production budget – although not advertising budget -was much greater, however (Production Budget: $204,000,000, Advertising Budget: $41,000,000, to Production Budget: $150,000,000, Advertising Budget: $44,400,000 for Batman Begins) and its returns – even factoring in the extra year of revenue, DVD sales and the like - may not reflect this positively. See Box office information for Superman Returns and Batman Begins (2007).
