July 18, 2025

I am well aware that by using the new Superman film as a pretext for exploring the mystery of why superheroes came into existence in relatively recent times, I risk losing the interest of those who have no use for them. I loved the movie, but have no desire to defend it, much less push it on people who aren’t interested. However, the advent of superheroes represents something new in the history of the imagination, something unexpected that is worth pondering.

There is of course a continuity with the previous history of literature. The superhero is a version of what Joseph Campbell calls the hero with a thousand faces. Essay 1 of Northrop Frye’s Anatomy of Criticism categorizes stories according to the “hero’s power of action, which may be greater than ours, less, or roughly the same” (33). If superior in kind to other people, the hero is a divine being, a god. If superior in degree, he or she is a hero of romance, including the popular form of romance known as the fairy tale. If superior in ability (my wording), the hero is a leader, as in epic and tragedy. If heroes are ordinary and average, they belong to the realistic genre of the novel. Since “heroic” means exceptional, we may think of such characters less as heroes than as “protagonists.” If heroes are less than average, somehow limited, they belong to the genres of irony and satire. According to this simple and useful definition, superheroes are a popular efflorescence of the genre of romance. At first glance, that seems natural enough. Romance is the genre of wonders and marvels, in contrast to our commonplace existence. That certainly describes the world of superheroes, the only difference being that the wonders are now usually ascribed to something pseudo-scientific rather than magical or supernatural. But there is still a question here that does not even seem to be noticed, much less addressed.

What is remarkable about superheroes are their super powers. A hero of romance may have greater than average strength. When Priam visits the Achaean camp in Book 24 of the Iliad, the god Hermes opens the gate for him. Homer remarks that it takes three men to open the gate, but that Achilles could open it by himself. The greatest of all Greek heroes, Hercules or Herakles, is known precisely for his tremendous strength. Beowulf is capable of preposterously unrealistic feats such as winning a contest by swimming for days while carrying ten suits of armor. But heroes of romance don’t generally have powers, although they may employ various agents, from enchanters to magic animals, who do. They may also employ swords and shields with supernatural properties. But those who have powers themselves are not heroes but gods. Each deity has his or her own characteristic power. Zeus, originally a storm god, wields lightning bolts as his weapon. Poseidon is god of sea and earthquake. Aphrodite wields the greatest power of all, the madness of desire, to which even the gods are vulnerable. The Olympian pantheon is very much the model for the Justice League and the Avengers: an assemblage of figures of diverse powers. Superheroes have powers that are literally godlike—and yet they are usually common people, not members of an aristocratic warrior elite like the Achaeans and Trojans or the Arthurian knights of the Middle Ages and Renaissance. Something is going on here.

There are exceptions to this rough definition of “superhero,” but they are exceptions that prove the rule. The second most famous DC comics superhero after Superman is Batman, and he has no super powers at all. Batman was originally a crimefighter, whereas superheroes typically go up against supervillains, who also have powers. It would be easy to say that he is not really a superhero but more like, say, Dick Tracy—except for the costume. Batman assumes another identity, becomes another self—and that self is not that of an ordinary human. It is archetypal, numinous with a strange aura, which is why it strikes fear into the hearts of criminals, who are, as the formula always said, a superstitious lot. An exception in the other direction is Marvel’s Thor, who actually is a god. But he is a god who has descended, gotten off his Asgard, so to speak, and come down to earth and become the handicapped physician Donald Blake. This is not a disguise but a genuine incarnation. When Thor stamps his hammer, he actually becomes a weak human being, or at least did in the early years. Later, his secret identity was more or less dropped. Which brings us to Superman, the first superhero of them all.

In the comic-book collecting heyday of my teens, Superman was not a great interest of mine precisely because, during the time I was reading him in the 60’s, he was far and away the most godlike of all superheroes, possessing a vast array of powers with very few limits. His powers seem to have been increased gradually from what they were originally. Those of us who remember the Superman TV series of the 1950’s (yes, I’m that old) with George Reeves, may still have the opening voiceover in their (very) long-term memories: Superman was “Faster than a speeding bullet. More powerful than a locomotive. Able to leap tall buildings with a single bound. Look! Up in the sky! It’s a bird, it’s a plane—it’s Superman!” This already made no sense. The original Superman of 1938 was a building-leaper but could not fly. But why the TV producers chose to include that phrase is a puzzle, because, as the next sentence makes clear, Superman by that time could fly. By the time I was reading of him, Superman could not only fly but exceed the speed of light and go back in time; he was completely invulnerable to anything but kryptonite; he had the strength to move entire planets; he had X-ray vision, heat vision, super hearing, microscopic vision—even super breath, for heaven’s sake. As for his strength, one of my favorite moments on the TV show was Superman squeezing a lump of coal so hard that it becomes a diamond.

However, Superman’s near-omnipotence ultimately meant that he was boring, because he was more or less invincible, so, as I remember it, fight scenes, the staple of superhero comics, were at a minimum. Instead, the atmosphere, as I remember it, was of a lighthearted game, as the writers strove to find ingenious ways to generate a story. The atmosphere, in other words, was as much of satire as it was romance. This spirit became incarnate in the wacky figure of Mr. Mxyzptlk, an imp from the 5^th dimension who could alter reality itself, a Trickster figure who was not evil, merely bored. The only way he could be defeated is by out-tricking the Trickster and getting him to say his own name backwards. Then there was Bizarro, a double of Superman—but a mirror-image double, reversed. Superman could not defeat him in battle because it was like battling himself. But where Superman was handsome and noble looking, Bizarro had chalk-white skin and rough-chiseled features clearly meant to evoke the movie version of Frankenstein’s monster. Like Mary Shelley’s version of the “monster,” Bizarro began as a figure of pathos, alone and rejected.

But somewhere along the line the mood shifted, and the Bizarro stories began performing one of the primary functions of satire: showing how much of what we think of as reality is simply a set of conventions that we think of as normal because we have grown up inside of them. Eventually there was a whole race of Bizarro people, living on a cube-shaped planet called “Htrae,” “Earth” spelled backwards, living absurd lives in which everything is backwards. The exuberant absurdism of this world somewhat resembled that of Bill Griffith’s great comic strip Zippy the Pinhead, whose character sports a mumu and a topknot and lives a life of surrealist absurdity. The point about Zippy is that he is happier than all the “normal” people straitjacked by conformist social conventions. Likewise, the Bizarro people were at least as happy as we are, and “Tales of the Bizarro World” eventually became one of the most popular Superman spinoffs, and is still remembered fondly by some of us.

The problem, however, remained that there can be no heroic battles when the hero is virtually omnipotent. Milton attempted in Paradise Lost to subvert the whole genre of heroic epic, with its endless battle scenes, by turning the uprising of the rebel angels into farce. For two days, good and evil angels battle to a standoff, being equally matched. On the third day, the Son of God enters the fray, and defeats the rebels merely by riding his chariot onto the battlefield. He is so overwhelmingly powerful and awesomely terrifying that the rebels are routed, not even attempting to fight, jumping voluntarily into the pit of hell to escape this juggernaut. It is a brilliant satiric reversal of perspective, as we suddenly realize that all those titanic speeches of magnificent defiance in Books 1 and 2 were lies, an attempt to deny what really happened. At most, Superman’s writers could imagine a villain equal in power to him, but what then? It was from Superman stories that I first learned the paradoxical question of what happens when an irresistible force meets an immovable object. In a major reboot of 1986, Superman’s powers were greatly reduced. Yet in the new film, although not able to move an entire planet, he can stop a skyscraper from falling (which makes no scientific sense—his hands ought to punch right into the concrete or stone, but never mind). Also, the film retains one past attempt to limit Superman’s powers, by turning him into a rechargeable battery. Because his powers derive from the light of earth’s yellow sun, they begin to run down in the dark, and he has to be rejuvenated by being bathed in yellow light. This is also scientific nonsense, but in service of archetypal truth. Superman is truly a solar hero, a shining beacon in more than one sense. Critics and some fans have complained that some of the sci-fi plot devices are gratuitous, but Lex Luthor’s “pocket universe,” appropriately created by a black hole, is clearly an underworld into which Superman must descend and come very near to death at the movie’s turning point. There was an old myth that the sun, when it set in the west, descended into a series of caves as into a tomb, to be reborn in the east the next day. Luthor’s pocket universe is a hell in which he sadistically torments his enemies and his ex-girlfriends.

Far from being incoherent, as some viewers have complained, the various plot elements, while setting in place characters and plotlines to be developed in later films, do function thematically within Superman. There is an intricate pattern of doubling throughout the story, a mirror-doubling that is not at all the playful absurdism of the Bizarro world. In Jungian terms, the theme of Superman is the confrontation with the shadow, the dark alter ego. Luthor is of course Superman’s shadow. Superheroes fight many villains, but often there is one arch-villain over and above the rest. For Batman, it is the Joker; for Superman, Lex Luthor. Luthor had been a Superman villain since the 1940’s, but it wasn’t until 1960 that he was given the back story that I grew up with. In this version, when they were teenagers, Lex was an admirer of Superboy. A genius, he hoped to rival Superboy’s physical powers with his mental powers, and embarked on an experiment to create artificial life. The experiment went wrong and set the lab afire. Superboy rescued him, but Luthor became permanently bald from the fumes of the chemical fire, for which Luthor blamed Superboy ever after. When I was young, I thought this was totally dumb. You become a lifelong villain because you went prematurely bald? I was too naive to realize that the baldness was only a pretext, like Iago’s flimsy excuses for his visceral hatred of Othello. Luthor envies Superman, feels inferior to him, and copes with his humiliation by turning it into hatred. Freud would no doubt say that the baldness is a castration symbol.

Some viewers on discussion boards are understandably uncertain about what Luthor is saying in his climactic speech. I risk a spoiler here because I think understanding that speech will increase its impact. In his own perverse way, Luthor wants to be a savior. He sees the love that the common people have for Superman because they recognize his self-sacrificing devotion to them, and his feeling of inferiority is unbearable, so he has conducted an elaborate campaign of character assassination. At the same time, his meddling in politics has been directed towards establishing an entire country turned into a research center for somehow remaking the world. Details are sketchy, but at this point Luthor is clearly modeled on Elon Musk, a man with elaborate “scientific” plans to “save” the part of humanity he thinks is worth saving, but a man so envious of a genuine rescuer, the diver who saved children trapped in a cave, that he called him “pedo-guy.” Superman’s quest into the symbolic underworld of the pocket universe turns on the rescue of a child who is being held hostage. It is one of the triumphant moments of the film when Luthor, whom we have seen as ruthless and sadistic, blurts out to his rival in his despair his real hidden feelings, and we realize with shock that there are tears running down his face. While it is true that in mediocre superhero films the elaborate plot twists and weird images are merely to keep the action moving, the better films are far more coherent and artistic than many people think they are.

There is doubling everywhere in Superman. Luthor has his pocket universe underworld; Superman has his Fortress of Solitude. Luthor gains access to the Fortress of Solitude because he has a clone-double of Superman who has the same DNA and can therefore pass the Fortress’s security system. Some of the doubling is of course built into the Superman myth. Like all immigrants, Superman is someone of two worlds, and, like many immigrants, feels at times that he belongs to both of them and at other times that he belongs to neither. As Clark Kent, he has friends, a lover, a job—yet he builds a Fortress of Solitude in the Arctic or Antarctic (it varies in different versions). I remember being troubled when young at that image. How lonely do you have to be to live in such a place? In Theodore Sturgeon’s classic science fiction story “A Saucer of Loneliness,” two lonely people discover is a UFO, which they come to realize is the interstellar equivalent of a message in a bottle. We think of aliens as having super-intelligence, one of them says. Does it ever occur to us that they may have super-feelings as well? In a way, the UFO alien inadvertently plays matchmaker. The couple bond as an instinctive reaction to a cry of profound loneliness across the dark sea of the stars. “Ah, love, let us be true to one another,” Matthew Arnold says in “Dover Beach,” for the world

Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.

Superman is an alien with super-feelings as well. It is his painful loneliness that is the source of his real superpower, which is his empathy. Superman is utterly, openly goodhearted, with no defenses. It astonishes and mystifies his lover, Lois Lane. As she explicitly tells him, she is his opposite—more doubling—a sophisticated, tough, punk-rock kid. She makes fun of what Clark thinks is rock music, which she says is just pop pablum. Her skepticism has made her an investigative reporter, and she clearly struggles against cynicism. Yet she is fascinated, and tries to understand a man who is alien to her in a way that has nothing to do with coming from another planet. She ought to dismiss him as merely naive, but she cannot. She knows that at the same time that they are alien to each other, they are kindred spirits, and it makes for a chemistry between them that is believable and not just Hollywood love interest. When these two kiss, they mean business.

There are two main women in the movie, and they too are opposites, yet doubles. Lois is contrasted with Eve Teschmacher, Luthor’s girlfriend. Lois is the competent post-feminist woman. Eve at first comes off as a Barbie in the wrong sense, the silly, narcissistic bimbo who is such an over-the-top self-parody in the early part of the film that the performance seems excessive. But we gradually realize that it is a performance—Eve’s own performance. She is playing a part—the part that a girlfriend of Luthor’s has to play. His insecurity needs a hot babe as a status symbol trophy, but one that he can at the same time despise, the genius contemptuous of the empty-headed flake. It is Donald Trump psychology, but in fact it is information supplied by Eve, cleverly disguised, that is key to bringing Luthor down. I think she is probably quite intelligent, but, like many women around men of power, has learned to act dumb. She is being used callously by an immature Jimmy Olsen, who sees her only as an information source to get a big story, but in the end he has promised to date her, and she might help grow him up a little and get him out of his male selfishness. I like her a lot, because her real self is open, emotional, and warmhearted. Okay, she’s labile and over the top—but so is Krypto, and he steals the show whenever he’s on the screen. I am not putting her down by comparing her to a dog. The pattern is thoroughgoing. Krypto is comic relief, but Shakespeare’s comic-relief sub-plots repeat the main theme in the key of absurdity. Krypto is one of those badly behaved dogs, an obedience school flunkout, who is irresistibly lovable, and again the theme is emotional openness.

Patterns of similarity, patterns of contrast. Superman is doubled by a whole team of other superheroes, the Justice Gang, and they are indeed a gang and not a league. They are a Gang of Three, minor characters from elsewhere in the DC Universe who are clearly being repurposed and positioned for future movies, but their purpose in this film is to provide an ironic contrast with the main hero. They not only lack Superman’s nobility but reverse it. To put it bluntly, while not evil, they are nobodies and losers who are into being costumed superheroes out of egocentric motives. When Luthor unleashes a Godzillla-style monster on Metropolis as a distraction, the Justice Gang join Superman in attacking it, but they are only interested in winning, as if the fight were a huge video game, and in getting the glory afterwards. Superman is quickly diverted into trying to save people endangered by the battle, an endangerment that the others are simply oblivious to. The Justice Gang belongs to Frye’s ironic mode, and reflect the kind of cynicism that that became fashionable after Allan Moore’s brilliant Watchmen (1986). It became a widespread premise that there were no heroes, only anti-heroes. Moore showed how, if there really were costumed people playing at being superheroes, they would be at best social misfits, at worst outright psychotics. Moore was an Englishman alienated and outraged by the ruthless neoliberal Social Darwinism that took over under Margaret Thatcher. He wrote V for Vendetta, about a lone Trickster-rebel against a dystopian society like that which he saw England becoming, and admitted that he came close to leaving England for the sake of his child.

But the dark, anti-idealistic attitude was pervading American comics as well. In 1986, the same year as Watchmen, Frank Miller produced a 4-issue mini-series that redefined the character of Batman, turning him into the “Dark Knight.” The good news was that Miller rescued the character from the campy satire of the silly Batman TV show of the 60’s. The bad news, at least in some people’s opinion, was that he made Batman a violent, nearly psychotic extremist. The Dark Knight Returns is set in a dystopian near-future in which a 52-year-old Batman comes out of retirement to fight a hopeless battle against the violent elements of a society that is decadent and disintegrating. Miller’s political affinities are not punk-anarchist but right wing, and in later years he became outspokenly right-wing libertarian. He has said in interviews that his series was inspired by Clint Eastwood’s 1983 Dirty Harry film Sudden Impact, a film that vindicates vigilante violence because the police and the legal system are either helpless, corrupt, or both. Dirty Harry, like Batman, operates outside the law when it suits him, and he is violent on the grounds that the end justifies the means. This is the movie that gave us the phrase, “Go ahead. Make my day.” In The Dark Knight Returns, the world that a middle-aged Batman lives in is exactly the sort of urban hellscape that Donald Trump obsessively claims that American big cities have become, in flagrant defiance of the facts. Batman first goes back into action against the Clockwork Orange kind of psychotic violence of juvenile gangs who are terrorizing common citizens. There is an irony here, for what we now call a “moral panic” over “juvenile delinquency” led to a crusade by a fanatical psychologist, Frederic Wertham, in the 1950’s, resulting in Congressional hearings about the violence and immorality supposedly purveyed by comic books, which were allegedly grooming future juvenile delinquents. This resulted in the Comics Code Authority beginning in 1954, a censoring body along the lines of the film censorship that had been imposed on Hollywood since the 1930’s.

So there, in 1986, was Frank Miller up in arms about the same type of juvenile gang violence as Werther—only using violent comics to attack the alleged gangs. Miller’s Batman is a costumed version of Martin Scorsese’s Travis Bickle in Taxi Driver (1976), who is also consumed with rage over a decadent, corrupt, and violent society—a society that largely exists only in their own troubled imaginations. I go on about this at some length because these products of popular culture track trends in the American social imagination. The Dark Knight Returns clearly harks back to the disillusioned, ironic vision already evident in the hard-boiled detective novels of the 30’s and film noir in the 40’s. Miller’s later series, the hyperbolically dark and decadent Sin City, seems to acknowledge that influence. In the other direction, Miller looks forward to the right wing populism that Trump tries—successfully—to whip up into a frenzy of fear and hate against urban Black people and immigrants, who are all “violent criminals” that liberals are letting into the country and then supporting, where honest, hard-working people are left to survive on their own.

The disillusioned, antiheroic mood in comics has been paralleled with a trend in fantasy towards what is called “grimdark,” which is about what it sounds like. Again there is a skepticism that dismisses governments as incompetent and corrupt, and heroes as invariably flawed. Life is dystopian and Social Darwinist, with no hope of improvement. I find it disheartening that literature with this attitude towards life has been very popular with my students over the last few decades. They have loved The Hunger Games series, Game of Thrones, and a new type of psychological rather than supernatural horror horror fiction—a type that is more akin to Hitchcock’s Psycho than to H.P. Lovecraft’s “cosmic horror.” If you offer a course on dystopias, it will fill quickly. The devastation of the young, who were traumatized by 9/11, then by the financial meltdown of 2008, which deeply wounded their families financially, and now by Trumpism, has been deep and long-lasting, to which of course we may add the unending succession of school shootings and the toxic effect of social media, which has taught them that the world is totally awash in hate and outright insanity. This is the environment into which James Gunn’s idealistic and hopeful movie has been born.

As I have said, I come neither to bury nor to praise Superman, though I liked it very much and admit to a bit of favoritism, since Superman was created here in my home town of Cleveland by two Jewish teenagers, Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, and Cleveland scenery appears in its background. But it already had its detractors even before its opening weekend. On the discussion board of the New York Times review, I would say that at least 30% of the comments were negative. A large number of the negative comments came from people who had not seen the film but disapproved of it on principle. These included (1) those who disapprove of all superhero movies as Hollywood commercialism appealing to an audience that is immature and refuses to grow up; (2) those who disapprove of remakes; (3) those for whom Christoper Reeve and the 1978 Richard Donner version were definitive, all other versions being necessarily inferior; (4) those who saw the trailer, thought it was “corny” and sentimental, and assumed the rest of the film would be the same. I don’t think any kind of argument would persuade these types, and I will not attempt any such persuasion, except for pointing out that remakes are hardly unique to superhero movies. As one respondent pointed out, The Treasure of the Sierra Madre and A Star Is Born have been remade numerous times. As to the charge that that’s just commercialism, why is every new production of a Shakespeare play not a “remake” open to the same dismissal? A remake is potentially a re-imagining of a story according to the imaginative vision of a new director, updating the story to reflect modern concerns.

But what interests me is that with which I began, with superheroes as a cultural phenomenon pointing to a collective re-imagining of the age-old pattern of the hero myth to reflect something new in the modern situation. The first thing that appears in Superman is an introductory text saying that “metahumans” first appeared in the world about three centuries ago. “Metahuman,” as I have learned, is now the word in the DC Universe for those with super-powers. I am intrigued by that particular dating. It would mean that there have been superheroes since about the mid-18^th century. There is quite possibly back story here of which I am unaware, but I can’t think of any super-powered being who preceded Superman’s appearance in Action Comics in 1938, not even one whose origin has been back-dated much further. That particular dating piques my interest, because it coincides with the vast complex of social changes, culminating in the Romantic Era, that brought into being the modern world with its new, conflicting ideologies and, underlying those ideologies, a new mythology that began displacing traditional mythology. I think that superheroes are one product of the new, post-Romantic mythology. Heroes have always been the saviors of their people, but they have been subordinate to divine beings who created and rule the cosmos. What characterizes modern times is the increasing awareness that such divine beings are projections of the human imagination. The fundamentalist factions of the various modern religions are a hysterical backlash to this realization, an attempt to remain in denial. But most people have heard the news that the gods are fictions and that God, as Nietzsche said, is dead—meaning, the idea of God can no longer be believed in literally. This means that humanity must save itself. Traditional heroes, however, were limited in their power, and most of them ended tragically. So the collective imagination began to cast about for figures that were more than human, were metahuman.

Or a part of it did. Actually, the 17^th and 18^th centuries were the point at which popular culture and so-called “high” culture began to divide. The more educated world stopped looking for salvational figures, even within Christianity. Deism, the form of religion adhered to by a number of the Founding Fathers, postulated a God who created the world but who, since then, has merely sat and observed. The genre of the realistic novel appeared in the 18^th century, a mode of storytelling that did not admit even of human heroes, let alone divine ones. The realistic novel reflects the ordinary experiences of common people. It has sometimes emulated the objective detachment of science, which, like the Deist God, simply observes. It accepts what Freudianism calls the reality principle, which is always on guard against the temptations of the imagination. The imagination clings to the childish immaturity of the pleasure principle. What it offers is wish-fulfilment fantasies. In Civilization and Its Discontents, Freud called art a “narcosis.” High culture for the most part rejects, or at least is constantly suspicious of, wish-fulfilment and the pleasure principle. It distrusts both the heroic and the sense of wonder. To cling to these is to refuse to grow up. Maturity consists of a right and proper disillusionment. This is the attitude of those who reject popular culture in general and superhero comics and movies in particular.

But the common people were not educated into this kind of disillusionment. When I was in graduate school at the University of Toronto, I took a course in Nineteenth-Century Drama from the major Canadian writer Robertson Davies. Davies was a novelist, but not in the line of what the critic F.R. Leavis called “the great tradition,” namely, that of the great realists and ironists. He was more of a latter-day Dickens, a writer who was rooted in popular culture, and who because of it had been excluded by Leavis from belonging to the great tradition. Davies also, however, was an actor and playwright. He was steeped in the popular theatre of Dickens’ time because he understood and sympathized with its audience. When he was invited to deliver the distinguished Alexander Lectures in 1982, he daringly chose Nineteenth-Century Theatre as his subject, and spoke of its audience in a way that I think is relevant to not only the audience for superhero films but for popular literature and culture generally:

But who were the people who were faithful to the theatre throughout? They were the poor, the more emancipated portion of the middle class, and people of artistic sensibility who, like the others, found in the theatre something without which they could not live completely. | What was that? It was the quality of fulfilment people seek in their amusements, and which may be found in dancing—which is physically delightful—or gambling...or music—or the theatre....All of these pleasures satisfy deep instincts and drives, and bring the pleasure-seeker into touch with what is numinous, enlarging, emotionally and spiritually rich, in lives which may otherwise be overwhelmed by commonplaces. (21)

What did the theatre offer to those who needed it?

It meant a world in which the spectator—poor workingman and his female counterpart, or bourgeois citizen toiling to keep his place in a hurrying world—could equate himself with the Hero, the Heroine, or the Villain in a world of Myth, a world in which these archetypal figures worked out their destiny in an atmosphere where Poetic Justice, however tardy, would manifest itself after many trials and vicissitudes. It was a world of romance. (22)

I assure you that Marxist critics would roll their eyes at this description, muttering about the opiate of the masses. To such critics, popular art can mean nothing but “Keep them drugged with junk entertainment so that global capitalism can milk them for all they’re worth.”

So the common people might still believe in “the Hero, the Heroine, or the Villain in a world of Myth,” and might still yearn for “Poetic Justice.” That is the description of, among other things, the world of superheroes. There have always been heroes, but superheroes have the powers of gods because they have inherited the task of redeeming this suffering world. Superheroes are not Christ-figures. Christ said that his kingdom was not of this world, and as for poetic justice, all he said was render unto Caesar. But Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster were Jewish, and the Jewish people were and are awaiting not an otherworldly figure offering otherworldly redemption, pie in the sky when you die, which is perhaps the real opiate of the masses, but the Messiah. That word has been Christianized, yet the Jewish Messiah is not Christ but a redeemer who will come and redeem this world. Whenever times are bad and the shadows gather, hope flares up that the Messiah this time might come. I have never heard that Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster were particularly religious, but our imaginations see through the lenses of the myths they have been imprinted with. Their hero descends from the skies with the power of a god, and is brought up in humble circumstances. He grows up and espouses the cause of the downtrodden of the earth, those who were suffering in the 1930’s from the Great Depression brought on by the greed of the rich and powerful, but also suffering from the hate and fear of the “other,” directed against all immigrants, but especially against the Jews, who were shortly to endure attempted genocide at the hands of the Nazis.

And who were the Nazis? Believers in the myth of the Superman whose coming was preached by Friedrich Nietzsche. For there exists what Northrop Frye once called “the war of myths in time.” Nietzsche did not think in terms of super powers, but he did preach the coming of a new, master race through a self-overcoming by which humanity would transcend itself. By the way, I do not see that “Superman” is an inaccurate translation of Nietzsche’s Übermensch. Walter Kaufmann, who tried to rehabilitate Nietzsche’s reputation and remake his philosophy into a kind of existentialist individualism, insisted it should be translated as “Overman.” But the prefix super- means “over”—your supervisor is the one who is over you; the supernatural is the realm over or beyond the natural. Kaufman was merely trying to detach Nietzsche from the association with fascism and Nazism. His new term was not in the interests of accuracy, merely PR. Nor do I think Nietzsche was the kind of humanist that Kaufmann thought he was.

At any rate, in the 1930’s, the idea that the human race must save itself linked up to a theory of progress born of the scientific revolution, and that in turn linked up with ideas about evolution born of Darwinism. Hence the idea that humanity must save itself by evolving into a new and higher form of being. There were more or less positive forms of such an evolutionary myth, such as that of George Bernard Shaw in Man and Superman and Back to Methuselah. There were simply addled ones, such as, in science fiction, Slan and The World of Null-A by pulp writer A.E. van Vogt. But there were also sinister ones, such as Odd John by Olaf Stapledon, the British science fiction writer who was a follower of Nietzsche. In that novel, Odd John the superman figure is a “mutant,” for it is at this time that mutation enters the picture as a source for “metahumans.” Odd John is more like Professor X than he is like the rest of the X-Men: he is a super-genius with mental rather than physical powers. In this he is like the Slan and Null-A heroes of van Vogt. He is also very much akin to Victor Frankenstein in the past—and Lex Luthor in the near future. These people all suffer from the megalomania that Jung calls “inflation.” Overwhelmed, intoxicated by the energy of the unconscious, they are drunk on the prospect that they shall be as gods. In other words, there are evil metahumans—the super villains.

There is a typology of comic book villains. Not all of them are super: some of them are just villains. Before World War II, Superman’s foes were mostly just crooks of various kinds, even unscrupulous landlords. Soon these were joined by a second group, psychos without powers. But many of these psychos, possessed by the unconscious, began to develop bizarre alter egos that made them seem inhuman, somehow archetypal: the Penguin, the Joker, 2-Face, Dr. Doom, the Red Skull, and so on. Luthor is a borderline case, a ruthless corporate figure, but able to fund the creation of any number of super minions. Third are the psychos with powers, whether physical or created by technology: the Sandman, Elektro, the Green Goblin, Magneto and his Evil Mutants. Finally, there are the cosmic villains, whose powers and villainy are of godlike proportions: Thanos, Galactus, Darkseid. Both classes of psychos and the cosmic villains qualify as “super villains.” One identifying characteristic is the way they talk, in an inflated, bombastic rhetoric, as if they were archetypes rather than human beings, which in fact they have become: “Puny humans! You dare oppose the cosmos-destroying powers of the mighty Galactus! I will squash you like the insects that you are!” Nineteenth-century theatre audiences would recognize this bombast: it is the declamatory rhetoric of “melodrama,” the chief non-comic genre of the 19^th century stage. Characters who speak this way are larger than life, the energy animating them amplified by music, as the name “melodrama” implies. Melodrama was thus poor-man’s opera, and its stylization was carried over into much early silent film, and later into the sub-genre of science fiction known as “space opera,” to which Star Wars is a nostalgic homage.

Superheroes, however, talk like the ordinary, unassuming people that they are, for all their mighty powers. That is the point: they are regular guys and gals, and do not let their powers go to their head. That is the psychological reason for their secret identities. A small number of superheroes—the Fantastic Four, for example—do not have secret identities. But the overwhelming number do. Given the implausibility and flimsiness of their disguises—and Superman’s most of all, since it basically consists of a pair of glasses—one wonders why they bother. But the secret identity grounds them, keeps them in touch with their common humanity. Some of them have had to learn the hard way—most famously Spiderman—that with great power comes great responsibilities.

I have often thought that, in their simple way, the superhero comics and films have understood more about the nature of evil and the crisis of the modern world than many of the literary critics and political pundits. The batshit-crazy conspiracy theories of Satan-worshipping pedophiles and Jewish space lasers; the strutting megalomaniacal posturing of Trump and all the mini-Trumps; the evil geniuses with plans to save the earth even if they have to destroy it first for its own good like Elon Musk; the howling rabble of January 6, shitting on the White House floor, led by a shaman—we are living within a superhero story, of a sort that the comics understood many years ago. It is suddenly the sophisticated theories of the intellectuals that look naive and inadequate, precisely because they are rational and what is unleashed in the world is a tidal wave of psychotic irrationality. Half the United States and a good part of Europe have gone over to the dark side of the Force, which is the power of the Jungian shadow, taking people over through their personal shadows, as the archetypal shadow always does.

Those who dismiss this explanation as Jungian mumbo jumbo should be asked what they have to offer in its place. “Global capitalism” might explain Thatcher and Bush, but it does not touch what we are living through now. I revere Martin Scorsese—he is one of two or three filmmakers whose every film I have seen and collected. He has denounced superhero films as anti-art, but his own films are an analysis of rational evil and corruption. Whereas, of the superhero films, it may be said what is said of the comic relief characters of Dogberry and the watch in Shakespeare’s Much Ado about Nothing: “What your wisdoms could not discover, these shallow fools have brought to light.” And what have they brought to light? A plot right out of melodrama by the moustache-twirling villain Don John, who tries to destroy an entire society because he is a “bastard” and people are mean to him, or so he thinks. A super villain plot.

The most moving moment in Superman, as others have also attested, is that in which Superman, shattered and in despair because it turns out that his biological parents might have been alien fascists, is comforted by his foster father, Pa Kent. The comfort consists not only of Pa’s saying, “I’m proud of you, son,” but of his reminding Superman of the real myth of America: that we are the country that, at its best, believes that you are not determined by your origins but by what you choose to make of yourself, by what ideal you choose to be dedicated to. A generation ago, after 9/11, I taught the myth of the hero and asked my students who today’s heroes are. A number of them said the rescuers who died running into the burning buildings to save others—not relatives or loved ones but perfect strangers. Jesus too taught the myth of the hero. It is called the parable of the Good Samaritan, and Superman lives by it, whatever his Kryptonian-Jewish heritage. This is a man who won my heart forever by pausing to save a squirrel amidst the chaos of falling buildings.

The real super powers are inward. Traditional mythology knew this in its way. The knights of King Arthur’s court in Spenser’s Faerie Queene are really the Justice League or Avengers of their time. Each exemplifies a virtue: the Redcrosse Knight is the knight of holiness; Sir Guyon of Temperance, Sir Calidore of Courtesy, and so on. A virtue is an inward power, a gift of vision—but etymologically, “virtue” meant a kind of energy or force. We choose our path, our hero’s quest, according to the myth we choose to live by, in Joseph Campbell’s phrase, and we do so using the virtues, the gifts we have been given. Pa Kent on his farm looks for all the world like the kind of rural voter with a huge Trump sign on his lot when it isn’t even election season. I drive by them all the time. Instead, he chooses decency. Superman operates on the assumption that there is something good, potentially decent, buried in everyone, even in those crazed with fear and hate. And that is why his father is proud of him. It has nothing to do with metahuman powers, but rather with the one power that makes us all potential superheroes, that of love. Having faith in this is the only faith there is.

References

Davies, Robertson. The Mirror of Nature. The Alexander Lectures, 1982. University of Toronto Press.

Frye, Northrop. Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays. Princeton, 1957.