Superman

The latest big-screen incarnation of the Man of Steel defies some dominant conventions of superhero movies, while concerning itself explicitly with corporate power, geopolitics, and polarisation.

An injured Superman (David Corenswet) whistles for his dog, Krypto, while lying prone on the Antarctic ice in Superman (Warner Bros. Pictures).

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This post is part of the regular ‘One Take’ series analysing the politics of a film currently showing at the cinemas.

Note: Given that, at time of writing, Superman is still showing in UK cinemas, this analysis only lays out as much of the film’s scenario as is necessary so as to avoid spoilers. It is therefore suitable to be read either before or after watching the film, while hopefully still enriching the viewer’s appreciation of it either way.

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In this latest cinematic version of Superman, its titular superhero (David Corneswet) is one of a number of ‘metahumans’ operating on Earth. He covers his own exploits in the guise of alter ego Clark Kent, reporter for Metropolis’s The Daily Planet, where he works with colleagues including girlfriend Lois Lane (Rachel Brosnahan), Jimmy Olsen (Skyler Gisondo), and editor Perry White (Wendell Pierce). Hailing from the now destroyed planet of Krypton, he has a secret headquarters in the Antarctic, the ‘Fortress of Solitude’, also inhabited by a team of robot helpers, and the unruly superpowered dog, Krypto. On display there is a damaged holographic recording of his late parents Jor-El (Bradley Cooper) and Lara Lor-Van (Angela Sarafyan), apparently instructing him of his duty to serve and protect the people of Earth. His ageing adoptive parents Jonathan (Pruitt Taylor Vince) and Martha Kent (Neva Howell) dote on him from their home in Smallville, Kansas, where Clark grew up.

Superman protects Metropolis in collaboration with ‘The Justice Gang’, comprised of the pompous Green Lantern (Nathan Fillion), deadpan Mr. Terrific (Edi Gathegi), and acerbic Hawkgirl (Isabela Merced). Yet his engagements further afield, particularly intervening to prevent the state of Boravia from invading its poorer neighbour, Jarhanpur, have proven seemingly more divisive, causing concern in the US government. Boravia’s hawkish President Vasil Ghurkos (Zlatko Burić) is in league with American tech billionaire Lex Luthor (Nicholas Hoult). With the aid of his own metahuman allies, including the technologically enhanced ‘The Engineer’ (María Gabriela de Faría) and the mysterious ‘Hammer of Boravia’, Luthor plots to exploit the Boravia-Jarhanpur conflict, and Superman’s own ambiguous status as Earth’s alien guardian, to ruin Superman’s reputation and put a permanent end to his escapades.

Superman, narrative, and comic book universes

Putting a distinctive spin on the Superman story is no easy feat. This is a character who made his comic book debut in 1938, who has been a transmedial phenomenon for most of his existence, and whose almost messianic backstory is incredibly widely known. Just as the original comic set the mould for other (never quite so high-powered) superheroes, so the 1978 film version, in which Christopher Reeve played Clark/Superman, and its three sequels established a template for subsequent comic book blockbusters.¹ Later highly successful television serials Lois and Clark: The New Adventures of Superman (1993–1997) and Smallville (2001–2011) further fleshed out the character’s romantic adult life and adolescent backstory respectively in ways particularly suited to the medium.

We have since seen a paradigm shift, whereby relatively self-contained short film series – such as the 2002–2007 Spider-Man trilogy, or the 2005–2012 Batman one –gave way to Marvel’s and DC’s extended cinematic universes, comprising inter-referential films and television serials connecting each franchise’s stable of heroes. An overlapping logic slightly in tension with this is that of the reboot, whereby reviving and recasting a particular character for a new series of films about them usually involves discontinuing prior timelines, and commencing with the telling of a new version of the hero’s (or villain’s) origin story.

Both tendencies were at play when Warner Brothers commenced the DC extended cinematic universe with 2013’s Man of Steel, starring Henry Cavill as Superman. Like 1978’s Superman, it began with the story of Superman coming to Earth as an orphan, growing up with is adoptive parents, and becoming a superhero. This was followed by films such as Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice (2016) and Justice League (2017), connecting Superman with other D.C. heroes. Yet the franchise proved decreasingly commercially and critically successful. Now DC Studios, a reorganised production company within the recently merged Warner Bros. Discovery conglomerate, co-headed by writer-director James Gunn and producer Peter Safran, is rebooting the DC cinematic universe with a greater focus on storytelling and overall cohesion. Gunn’s own Superman is its first fresh feature film entry.

Yet in a refreshing, almost startling move, the new Superman does not follow the reboot convention of beginning by retelling the hero’s origin story at length. Instead a quick succession of intertitles provide a rapidly advancing history of metahumans, Superman’s arrival and time on Earth, his involvement in the Boravia-Jarhanpur conflict, and his recent beating at the hands of the Hammer of Boravia – before our bloodied hero plunges into the Antarctic ice as swiftly as we have been plunged into this version of his world. No drawn out exegesis, no flashbacks: Gunn trusts that the audience know this character well enough, and what we do not know, what is novel this time around, we can pick up easily enough along the way. There is a symbolic, lightly self-aware familiarity to it all, not least when Lois subjects Clark-as-Superman to a bruisingly confrontational interview, a wholesale inversion of the extremely softball one in the 1978 film.

States, superheroes, corporations, and geopolitics

The Boravia-Jarhanpur dispute pits two fictional nation states against each other. Boravia first appeared in the second-ever issue of the Superman comic back in 1939, as a central European country wracked by civil conflict (a routine trope of interwar popular culture). Jarhanpur, an apparently Asiatic dictatorship, debuted in the Justice League of America comic in 2002. Juxtaposing them geographically in the new Superman film, Boravia explicitly Europeanised, militarised, and with strong ties to the US, Jarhanpur orientalised and seemingly defenceless, has unsurprisingly been widely interpreted as a commentary on the Israel-Palestine conflict, despite Gunn’s denial. President Ghurkov’s two-dimensional villainy speaks to a broader might-makes-right tendency in contemporary regional politics, but Superman’s minimalist approach to narrative originism provides little scope for exploring warfare’s ideological and societal underpinnings, beyond the whims of powerful individuals.

Superman’s role in the conflict is far more interesting. His naïve defence of his actions when grilled by Lois echoes elements of 1990s US foreign policy thinking, that unilateral action by powerful actors in other (distant) states’ affairs with the noble intention of stopping bloodshed ought to enjoy universal approval. Lois’s adversarial line of questioning comes from a sort of liberal realist position, emphasising the complexity of international relations, the importance of following rules and procedures, and above all the question of deference to American political authority. As a metahuman, Superman troubles American sovereignty: he inhabits and protects the country, but does he represent it, and is he entitled to act independently of it?

There is a parallel with Luthor, whose combination of wealth and technological achievement likewise places him in a position of autonomy in national and international affairs. The character’s resemblance to real tech billionaires wielding outsized ideological and material influence in the US and beyond is patent. What is especially striking in Superman’s portrayal of corporate power and the workings of the military-industrial complex is its driving logic is not capital itself, so much as the egos, conceits, and insecurities of those who possess it. His collaboration with the Boravian government and, more uneasily, that of the US, nods to a paradoxical relationship between tech-optimists aspiring to transcend the limitations of the nation state and nationalists seeking to extend its hegemony.² This is epitomised in Luthor’s creation of a pocket universe beyond the territorial bounds of the state, but also serving as a space for wielding untrammelled power in its interest.

Superman and the two Americas

Superman also inevitably reflects upon the polarisation of America into two versions of itself: liberal versus conservative; coastal big cities versus small-town or rural heartlands; diversity versus homogeneity. The hero himself in many ways embodies the former version. He is an arrival from another world entirely, with powers that make him visibly not like others. His capacity for rapid flight enables him to involve himself in affairs beyond US borders. Superman’s own personal origin myth – as apparently related posthumously by his Kryptonian parents – is that of the ‘good immigrant’. He is based in an urban environment inhabited by other immigrants with whom he interacts positively (such as food vendor Malik Ali (Dinesh Thyagarajan)). His alter ego works within that epitome of urban modernity, newspaper journalism, with its emphasis on speed (of news gathering and reporting, but also of dialogue).

These qualities render Superman, and this version of America, problematic to the conservative mind, with its proclivity to scepticism and fear rather than trust and hope. They motivate Luthor’s loathing and the US government’s suspicion of him. The presence of metahumans in Metropolis coincides with the persistent threat of its destruction, which evokes not only a negative association of diversity with danger, but also a post-9/11 isolationist concern with the risk of blowback from US adventurism.

However, the film also counters these sentiments by incrementally rooting Superman through his adoptive parents. The Kents stands for a traditional America of simple values and homespun wisdom. At first their habits and affairs are played for laughs through their incongruity with Superman’s world, encapsulated by a comical hurried telephone conversation with Clark while he is at work. However, as the plot advances, it becomes clear that their ideals are what truly underpin Superman’s mission, and the version of America he stands for.

Superman is simultaneously troubled by the sources of the polarisation its protagonist provokes and negates: a fragmented public sphere in which disinformation and abuse are easily spread, upon which opinion fickly and swiftly turns. It overtly blames this on social media, but also on television, or more specifically unscrupulous talk show hosts, portraying both as easily exploited by the likes of Luthor. Yet the film simultaneously retains hope in a liberal yet nostalgic notion of the media, of broadsheet newspaper journalism manifested in the Daily Planet. It promises that ethical motivations and a commitment to truth-telling retain the capacity to deploy new technologies, and change essentially benign American minds, for the better.

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Otherwise, please show your appreciation by sharing this post more widely, and referring the newsletter to friends.

You might also enjoy these posts from the Academic Bubble archive:

1. It is worth giving a listen to these two excellent recent episodes of the The Next Picture Show podcast covering the 1978 and 2025 films, and the comparisons between them.

2. This piece by Henry Farrell for his Programmable Mutter newsletter explores this dynamic in the contemporary American right extremely well.