New York Diary (Books)

birds 'n planes 'n moral indecision

What a splendid weekend! Friday featured a high-scoring and victorious softball game. Saturday, I awoke early early and went with Bean and Ned to hike a bit of the Appalachian Trail. (Railroads, incidentally, are spectacular inventions. We took the Metro North up to the trailhead; the stop was literally a platform about 6 feet by 3 feet in size. Imagine how comical, then, this enormous commuter train looked pulling up at the stop and opening the door--one, single door--to let some 5 or 6 hikers out to make their way into the wooded, flooded wilderness.) It felt good to walk, though I was surprisingly slogged by the end of it all.

Sunday I had brunch with friends out near Columbia, and then N and I tromped off to see Superman Returns. Now I'm sitting on my balcony (with my computer, thanks to the magic which is wireless networking), enjoying a cool breeze and a laid-back New York evening before the Fourth of July holiday. Tomorrow I plan on going to a ballgame and seeing some fireworks. Hot dogs may also feature prominently.

This is the good life.

But this post was meant actually to be about Superman. N and I considered that Superman is a problematic hero. He himself is morally uncomplicated: Superman is a defender of right, good, and justice. Where Spiderman struggles internally with his powers and considers using them for revenge and personal gain, Superman remains always unequivocally good. We are meant to see his actions as invariably heroic. When Superman goes wrong, it is with the best of intentions and the purest of hearts. When he has to choose between Lois Lane and Gotham City, he always casts a wistful look in her direction and then saves the rest of the world instead. (And then, because he's Superman, he goes and saves her too.) The Superman of the movies, at least, is always a a sympathetic character. He has no internal struggles.

Superman Returns flirts with, but never fully draws out, the problems inherent in this heroic conception. There's something more than a bit distasteful about Superman as lovestruck temptation to marital infidelity, after all, and putting Lois Lane into a serious relationship is therefore an inspired move. It's not a move the film is prepared actually to make with any spine, however. What we see instead is a watered-down version that allows Superman a relatively easy way out of any moral or emotional conundrum: we are talking here only of near-marital fidelity, though the movie would have been better for an honest-to-goodness marriage that we couldn't wrong-headedly rationalize away as immoral or unimportant (relative to Superman's own great love, of course). Adding a child to the mix is similarly inspired, because it makes the right course of action so painfully clear and so painfully contrary to Superman's desires (and actions--he's never quite blatantly inappropriate, but confessing one's love to somebody in a committed relationship, with a kid, knowing she loves you back, is inadvisable and even manipulative). Making that child (so very predictably) Superman's son completely undoes the interesting twist that his presence proides, however. Instead of feeling more uncomfortable with the way that Superman is disrupting Lois's life and the life of her partner (because there's a child involved), we now feel less uncomfortable (because it's Superman's child, and so he suddenly has a much greater right to continued involvement with this formerly happy family). The moviemakers nearly manage bring in the tension of a competing love interest without the attendant moral quandary that the situation so obviously prompts.

But the Superman stories oughtn't so easily escape that quandary. (It's a different question whether Superman himself would be a better character if he was ever confronted by moral misgivings, or whether it's enough for the audience to sometimes recognize an irony or inconsistency in his savior-like charicature (played up particularly in this latest film) and his human-like actions and reactions.) When one is cast as the embodiment of good in a black-and-white, good-vs.-evil kind of world, surely the moral considerations follow.

Can you have a Superman who isn't always right, who isn't always good, if only because he lives in a world in which "good" isn't always clear? I'm not sure. But it seems to me a worthy lesson that sometimes questions are hard, and answers non-obvious. Given the way the movie sets this up, it's a shame they back away from it so emphatically by the time the credits roll.

posted by Skay @ 9:16 PM