While many of us are wondering when Superman became an immigrant, given that he’s a fictional alien from another planet with almost godlike powers and is not usually associated with either border policy or migrant workers, Hollywood once again reveals that they have nothing but contempt for half the country or more.
Once upon a time, Superman stood for truth, justice, and the American way, but those days are long gone. The current Superman stands for truth, justice, and a better tomorrow, whatever that may mean, and in the latest comic book iteration, is homosexual or at least bisexual. Hollywood, however, was apparently not content to limit Superman’s potential for social commentary to sexuality, and in their infinite wisdom, decided the fictional superhero can also be repurposed as an avatar for progressive ire about President Donald Trump’s immigration policies, which are supported by somewhere just shy of 60% of Americans according three recent polls from even unfavorable outlets such as The New York Times. Thus, the latest several hundred million dollar production, intended to reboot the floundering DC Comics universe onscreen, reimagines the titular hero as an immigrant who is ultimately locked up in a gulag for intervening in a potential war and crossing the military industrial complex led by Lex Luthor. I kid you not and the creators, for their own bizarre reasons, seem to feel movie goers should be thrilled with this approach, acting as if this has always been the approach, we just didn’t know it yet. “I mean, Superman is the story of America,” director James Gunn said during a profile in the Times of London. “An immigrant that came from other places and populated the country, but for me it is mostly a story that says basic human kindness is a value and is something we have lost.” If there was any doubt these comments were targeted at Republicans and what he really wanted to say was that the Make America Great Again movement has taken even “basic human kindness away,” his brother, Sean Gunn, an actor in the film, expanded on these comments, claiming “My reaction to [the backlash] is that it is exactly what the movie is about. We support our people, you know? We love our immigrants. Yes, Superman is an immigrant, and yes, the people that we support in this country are immigrants and if you don’t like that, you’re not American. People who say no to immigrants are against the American way.” Bizarrely, another actor in the film, Nathan Fillion insisted that claiming almost 60% of the country is against the American way was no big deal, nothing we should worry about in the least. “Aw, somebody needs a hug,” he said. “Just a movie, guys.” In other words, we’re free to say whatever we want, repurpose and adapt whatever we want with a political message specifically designed to insult whoever we want, but then when someone dares to question their genius, it’s somehow that person’s problem, not their own.
Not surprisingly, many of the critics seem to agree, lauding the movie for its relevance in addition to its action scenes. According to RottenTomatoes.com, the critical consensus is “Pulling off the heroic feat of fleshing out a dynamic new world while putting its champion’s big, beating heart front and center, this Superman flies high as a Man of Tomorrow grounded in the here and now.” John Campea, from The John Campea Show, described it as “A Superman who not only entertains, but inspires his audience to want to be better human beings. The Superman of hope, kindness, empathy… the real American way.” Karen Gordon of Original Cin wasn’t big on the film, but managed to call out the “modern themes” anyway, “Mixing superhero stuff with modern themes including social media, immigration and fascists, greedy capitalists teaming up to take over smaller and less economically prosperous countries. It’s a lot for one film to do, and often comes off just silly.” Calum Cooper, Cinerama Film, noted “James Gunn’s Superman is an ode to the timeless character, which, while rocky in places, proves to have as much entertainment value as it does heart in its emphasis on the importance of humanity.” NPR, which until recently received public funding for what amounts to progressive advocacy, claimed “Every era gets the Superman it needs. Richard Donner’s grand, mythic, unapologetically hopeful Superman: The Movie (1978) arrived in the wake of Vietnam and Watergate, when America had sunk into a defensive cynicism. Gunn’s Superman arrives at yet another time in American history when everything that we ostensibly stand for — bedrock American principles like justice for all, defending the defenseless, helping those in need — feel out of reach.” RogerEbert.com’s Richard Roeper was somewhat lukewarm on the movie, but was perhaps most direct on the politics. “There are a number of well-executed, dialogue-driven scenes sprinkled among the CGI mayhem and the existential wailing and the chuckle-inducing cameos, and writer/director Gunn admirably leans into the narrative of Superman as the embodiment of the classic American immigrant story—but this first entry in the new DC Universe left me with a cinematic fast-food vibe.” Later in the review, he noted “When Superman is detained and roughed-up by masked agents who slam his face into the pavement before locking him up in a detention center alongside hundreds of other prisoners, including a separated family and a woman whose ‘offense’ was writing a negative blog about Luthor, the modern-day, real-world parallels are striking—and legitimate social commentary.” Ultimately, the message is clear either way: Those who support a more aggressive approach to dealing with immigration, particularly supporters of President Trump lack humanity and seek to bring us to a darker, more barbaric place, while those who oppose him up to and including Superman himself are defenders of all that’s good, righteous, and American.
In the meantime, many of us are wondering when Superman became an immigrant in the first place, given that he’s a fictional alien from another planet with almost godlike powers and is not usually associated with either border policy or migrant workers. Some have pointed to an episode of the popular TV series Smallville, where a young Clark Kent tries to protect illegal immigrant workers on a nearby farm. There is even a meme floating about that shows Clark and his mother, Martha, after she discovers that he has been harboring a child in the family barn. “I want to help this boy as much as you do, but I took an oath to uphold the law,” she said to him, referencing her oath as a Senator from Kansas. “All he’s trying to do is find his mom,” the future Superman replies. “I know, but we have to go through proper legal channels,” Martha insists, only to have Clark protest, “Was it legal when you forged my adoption papers? I’m an illegal immigrant, mom. You’ve been harboring me for over seventeen years.” “Your situation was entirely different,” his mother declares for obvious reasons, yet for just as obvious reasons this statement somehow doesn’t make the meme, making it seem like Clark Kent as migrant worker has been a longstanding phenomena. Others have pointed out that the original Superman, first appearing in Action Comics Number 1, way back in June 1938, was the creation of two Jewish immigrants, Jerry Siegel and Joel Shuster. First, this isn’t even true. Jerry Siegel was born in Ohio, the son of immigrants. Joel Shuster was born in Toronto, Canada to a Jewish family. Second, the first appearance of Superman defines him specifically as an orphan. On the first page of Action Comics, we see an infant Superman sent to Earth by his father in a “hastily-devised space ship” from “a distant planet,” which remained unnamed at the time, but which “was destroyed by old age.” When the space ship lands on Earth, “a passing motorist, discovering the sleeping baby within, turned the child over to an orphanage.” In the orphanage itself, the baby lifts a large chair overhead, making it the first of his remarkable “feats of strength.” This was before he received his powers from the yellow sun, and instead was conceived as being from a much larger planet with much higher gravitational forces. When he grows up, he discovers he can leap an eighth of a mile, hurdle twenty story buildings, “raise tremendous weights,” run faster than a train, and “that nothing less than a bursting shell could penetrate his skin.” Therefore, Clark Kent decides that “he must turn his titanic strength into channels that would benefit mankind, and so was created ‘Superman,’ champion of the oppressed.” His immigration status doesn’t enter into it, and even if it did, assuming one could apply immigration law to a fictional alien, US immigration law actually has a special case for unaccompanied minors with no records discovered on American soil that bypasses the refugee or other processes. According to 8 US Code 1401 (f), an infant of unknown parentage up to the age of five is automatically considered a US citizen if no evidence to the contrary appears before their twenty-first birthday. Thus, Superman has always been and will always be a US citizen.
Moreover, it would be one thing to reimagine the character’s story as one of an alien assimilating to a strange world, caught between the place of his birth and where he grows up, subject to the angst of never truly belonging, which Smallville rather admirably leaned into during its ten year run. That, however, is only a piece of what they have done. From there, they have taken another, far more unforgivable step, and used it to smear half the country as un-American barbarians without compassion or care for their fellow human beings. The message is not simply that we should care for strangers in a reasonable way, that all of us, Republicans and Democrats, conservatives and progressives, should aspire to the better angels of our nature when it comes to those who come from different places than we do, or that sometimes laws, however well conceived at the time, result in injustices that need to be corrected. It is instead that those who voted for a particular presidential candidate are no longer human in their eyes and worthy of contempt. It’s an insult, funded by hundreds of millions of corporate dollars and yet another example of how Hollywood believes every property, however revered or however beloved, is merely another pawn in their progressive march. It also reveals exactly how much they hate us, willing to sacrifice an almost century old property on the altar of their loathing of half of America along with their increasingly stunning lack of self awareness. For all their talk of care and compassion, the lax border policy they espoused, resulted in the disappearance of somewhere between 200,000 and 300,000 minors, 233,000 of which the Department of Homeland Security failed to enroll in immigration proceedings of any kind under President Joe Biden. If anything, these are children like Superman who are in desperate need of our help, but who were abandoned by the government in pursuit of a mass immigration policy. In other words, they were willing to sacrifice the children themselves for their (relatively) open borders goal. Meanwhile, under President Barack Obama legitimate journalists like James Rosen were spied upon by the FBI, “at the very least, either as an aider, abettor and/or co-conspirator” in a 2010 espionage case against State Department security adviser Stephen Jin-Woo Kim, suggesting that if we were concerned about journalists ending up in the gulag, more than a decade ago was the time to say so. Hollywood, needless to say, said absolutely nothing at the time, so why should any of us care now when their hatred and contempt keeps getting so fully revealed?
Confessions of a Conservative Atheist 