Superman has been 'woke' as far back as Krypton
Few movies this year have as much riding on them as James Gunn’s “Superman.”
First and foremost, it attempts to relaunch the Man of Steel onscreen after the grim slogs of Zack Snyder’s iterations. But the movie, perhaps more importantly, is also a reboot of the entire world of DC Comics on film (in the midst of seemingly endless upheavals at Warner Bros. Discovery Inc., which controls the screen rights to those properties). Gunn has plenty of skin in the game; he’s not only the writer and director of “Superman,” but also the new co-chairman and co-CEO of DC Studios, the public face of the DC Universe’s reset.
So, unsurprisingly, Gunn is doing a lot of press, detailing the picture’s inception, creation, themes and messaging. “’Superman’ is the story of America,” he recently told the London Times, “an immigrant who came from other places and populated the country.” Those seemingly innocuous comments have kicked off the kind of backlash we’ve come to expect from the far-right rage machine. This is something of an ongoing trend in MAGA world, where any film, television show, book or music video that doesn’t conform to their narrow worldview is seen as suspect and reactive; even if, as in this case, it’s as steeped in decades of iconography and mythology.
And that’s what makes this particular controversy seem even more calculatedly ginned-up than your typical “[insert cultural product here] has gone woke!” backlash. The idea that Superman is a previously apolitical character who has been co-opted by the political left for cultural indoctrination is comically ignorant. The character’s creators, writer Jerry Siegel and artist Joe Shuster, were both children of Jewish immigrants. Before the U.S. even entered World War II, they crafted a two-page story for Look magazine called “How Superman Would End the War,” in which the Man of Steel literally takes Adolf Hitler by the throat.
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