by Dean Cain, as you may have read, is very upset about the new Superman. The former Man of Steel, who played the last son of Krypton on TV in Lois & Clark: The New Adventures of Superman from 1993 to 1997, believes that James Gunn, with his description of Kal-El as “immigrant, comes from other places and populated the country” in the new DC film.
In conversation with TMZ, Cain thought: “How does Hollywood bring this character? How much will Disney change your Snow White? Why will you change these characters [to] exist for the time? “
Here is the thing (and you may think that Cain took up this because he actually played the guy) Superman has actually woke up since 1938. From two Jewish teenagers from Cleveland, Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, he was a child of great depression, which were against Nazis for the little guy (and corrupt politicians). In many ways, he represented the ultimate imagination of immigrants: assimilated, revered and powerful enough to completely beat the injustice in the next week.
In fact, superheroes (and recently superhero films) were always the genre equivalent of a protest sign in a wind tunnel: loud, loud, colorful, occasionally difficult to read, but to try a lot to say something. Captain America was literally invented to secure the first edition of Captain America Comics’ Comics’ Comics’ Comics #1 in the jaw to socket Hitler – months before the United States officially entered the Second World War. If this is not a performative virtue signaling, I am not sure what it is.
In 1946 (on the radio) Superman decreased a thinly veiled version of the KU Klux Klan in a 16-piece plot with the title “Clan of the Feure Cross”. The authors of the show used real Intel of the anti -racist activist always Kennedy, who infiltrated the clan and passed on details about his secret codes and rituals. It is widely planned as one of the earliest and most effective examples of mass media activism and certainly a lot of politically brazen than anything Gunn plans.
And yes, in the 1950s it could be a short time in which cap seemed strange as Joseph McCarthys Commie-Bashing boy (in the comics). But this whole era was so awkwardly jingoistic that Marvel finally fully rejected it and accused everything on a fraudster.
When superheroes switched to the large screen from the end of the 1970s, the original Superman film in 1978 was created in the middle of the postwatergated, all-American desire for a hero who neither log, cheating, contaminated, wireless, bombing, or in shame with lines full of self-mantle and a cuddly full of uncertainty and an uncertainty.
In the early 00s, X-Men had transformed its spandex into a metaphor tax system and given us a mutated civil rights allegory, so that it was basically out of the opening loan on the nose. Regardless of whether it is Magneto as a militant separatist, Professor X as an integrationist who uses a wheelchair, or teenagers who were grilled by their DNA in the living rooms, this was identity policy in Lycra, with just enough laser eyes to distract from social realism. Nobody seemed to disturb the fact that Mystique changed sex at will, Rogue needed gloves to avoid unwanted intimacy, and the entire film played like a coming-out parable in leather-den, despite his subtext, the spectacle fans still delivered.
And then of course there was the actual Marvel Cinematic universe and began with Iron Man from 2008. Here is a film in which Tony Stark, from Robert Downey Jr., basically has a revelation in which the shoulder -assembled death machines for unstable warlords may not be the most ethical retirement plan -and somehow this moment of conscience becomes the property of the entire MCU. Watched blows again!
At this point we should probably acknowledge that this is exactly the kind of things about which Cain complains. The shade, the fault, the weak hint of accountability in a billion dollar franchise. The lack of the kind of “all -American” values, which were recently seen in a deleted scene from Team America, which was regarded as too on the nose. And ultimately, when it is not about undermining the powerful in superheroes, thinking the outsiders to the outsiders and pushing moral cowardice in the jaw, what exactly is the point?
Related: Superman Review – Is it a bust? Is it a pain? James Gunn’s weak restart is both
This does not mean that there have been no fascinating rights of superheroes over the decades, although it is rare that one of these like someone who would trust with a moral compass. Take the comedian of the watchmen and casually go beyond Vietnamese villagers like a changing nightmare of national militarism, which was turned to 11, and was enough to flame. Or Gunn’s own peace founder, a warning story about what happens when you mix a very dark man with a blind devotion to “peace through strength” and a preference for the patriotism of the middle value. Then there is the boy’s homelander: an authoritarian, populist psychopath in stars and stripes.
Of course, Cain et al. Really see a superman who reflects all of these tendencies without the obviously bad things: the fascist overtones, laser-eye-jingoism and genocidal meltdown. The only problem here is that there is no such character or at least would be quite boring to see it. Because if you take off the truth, justice, compassion, doubt and an indication of moral complexity, it is not a superhero with which you are: it is a Maga-friendly screen saver with heat vision, great hair and absolutely no feeling of irony.
