I grew up believing in Superman the way other kids believed in Santa Claus. You would, too, if you saw Superman save your aunt and your family’s life savings and probably your whole damn town.
It’s 1985 or 1986. The timeline is hazy, but the memory is in 4K. I’m standing with my dad across the street from National State Bank when an alarm bell screeches. Masked men toting pistols and bags heavy with stolen cash burst out the front doors. The robbers make a break for an idling getaway car, waving their guns at the gathering crowd.
I’m four or five years old at the time, and I’m terrified. My aunt Karen, who is two years my mother’s junior and lives down the street from us, works as a teller at National State. Our family’s whole life savings is probably in those purloined moneybags. We’ll all be poor—whoever among us survives this criminal scourge, anyway. I latch onto my father and begin to cry, but he’s not panicking for some reason. Nobody is. Instead he laughs as he scoops me up in his arms. He says, “Look, over there!”
It’s neither a bird, nor a plane. It’s Superman. The Superman, in all his red-caped glory. He doesn’t descend from the clouds so much as step out of the alleyway next to the bank, but this is no time to quibble.
One of the thugs grabs a bottle off the ground and smashes it over Superman’s head. I can hear the tinkle of glass falling to the sidewalk. Superman just smiles. Another fiend fires off a volley of shots—Blam! Blam! Blam! An ugly, gray flower of smoke blooms from his pistol’s hot muzzle. Superman never breaks stride. He dispatches the marauders with a flurry of punches. Then he bends a metal bar, as easily as if it was a piece of rubber, around the wrists of the gang’s leader, trapping him in homemade handcuffs.
The crowd roars and the police arrive to haul the robbers off to jail. Superman shakes the cops’ hands, then gives us all a little salute before he gathers up the sacks of cash to return to the bank and, hopefully, to check on my aunt Karen.
This sort of thing happens all the time where I’m from. I lived in Metropolis.
Metropolis, Illinois, that is, population of around 7,200 at the time. It was built near the site of a fort constructed by French settlers in 1757 and formally declared a town in 1839, optimistically christened “Metropolis.” An hour south of Metropolis lies Cairo, Illinois—the one-time jewel of the region once celebrated in the writings of Mark Twain—now a depleted, literally bankrupted municipality where stately 19th-century manses decay on riverside cliffs.
To avoid the same fate as Cairo, that riverbank necropolis, the town needed a hero. And in 1972, it found one—the greatest American hero, in fact. The United States’ answer to Hercules and Achilles and Sampson, the epitome of our national aspirations. Most days Metropolis is a somnolent little roadside attraction tucked among fields of corn and soybeans, where pregnant women have to cross the river bridge into Kentucky when their contractions begin because the local hospital doesn’t have a maternity ward, so that nobody is actually born in Metropolis except by accident. It’s the pleasant middle of nowhere dressed up as the imaginary American Everywhere.
The local newspaper changed its name to The Metropolis Planet. One of the streets was renamed Lois Lane. The chamber of commerce office sold emerald-green-painted “Kryptonite” rocks. Eventually, a gleaming 15-foot-tall statue of Superman would be built in the town square (replacing an earlier, shorter fiberglass version, which seemed to compel locals to shoot at it, leaving our hero frequently pockmarked with bullet holes). Images of Superman adorn billboards and murals. He’s emblazoned on the town’s water tower.
The zenith of the excitement is the Superman Celebration, an annual festival celebrating all things Kryptonian. There’s a beauty pageant and a 5K and vendor booths and celebrity appearances. It’s inevitably sweltering in the July humidity, and perfumed with the scent of funnel cake and cotton candy. The highlight: sightings of Superman himself, usually portrayed by a reasonably buff actor from out of town, during which the Man of Steel would stop some kind of staged crime or protect the town from an outside menace before declaring the celebration underway. Like that time I saw him save the bank.
And while the “Hometown Of Superman” designation was bestowed almost a decade prior, the Superman Celebration kicked off in 1979, following the fervor around the release of the first blockbuster Superman film starring Christopher Reeve, who became an iconic hero to the entire world, but looked awfully familiar to the 7,000 of us.
***
When I was still a kid thrilling to the sight of Superman saving our small-town bank, my favorite among the Superman movies was the first sequel. The original film takes its time with the Kryptonian prologue and first-act origin story. We don’t catch a glimpse of the red cape and tights for a good 45 minutes. Superman II not only gets to the Superman action right away, it also provides three super-powered villains with whom he can duke it out. Superman II was the first movie to ever feature a big-budget version of the kind of superhero vs. supervillain battle that is the stock in trade of comic books. What I’ve grown to appreciate is that it’s really a movie about the necessity of Superman as an American myth—about the very meaning of Superman—and it’s a battle that would take place both in front of and behind the cameras.
Superman II is a curiously constructed film, largely because its construction was significantly improvised. When father-and-son producing duo Alexander and Ilya Salkind purchased the film rights from Warner Bros. for $4 million, they brought with them an innovative approach. The Salkinds had a hit with the 1973 adaptation of The Three Musketeers as well as the 1974 follow-up, The Four Musketeers, which they filmed simultaneously. The Salkinds planned to use the cost-cutting Musketeers gambit for their new Superman franchise, which they conceived as a series with semi-regular installments, like the James Bond films. The Salkinds even courted Bond director Guy Hamilton to helm parts I and II, although the job ultimately went to Richard Donner, who had scored a big hit with The Omen (1976).
Donner not only took Superman very seriously, he took his time. That led to an increasingly long—and increasingly expensive—shooting schedule to capture the double-sized screenplay that had been conceived by Godfather scribe Mario Puzo and then rewritten by David Newman and Robert Benton, who had penned the book for the short-lived 1966 Broadway musical It’s a Bird…It’s a Plane…It’s Superman.
Sensing trouble with Donner, the Salkinds hired their Musketeers director Richard Lester to look over Donner’s shoulder and lead the second unit. The decision was eventually made to pause production and remix the footage already shot to accommodate Superman: The Movie’s planned 1978 release, which meant not only shuffling around some of the Kryptonian origin story but also using the big climax—Superman’s now famous (or infamous) reversal of time in order to resurrect a dead Lois Lane—as the end of the first movie rather than the finale of the whole two-part spectacle. The Salkinds also used this interlude in the two-movie production as a convenient way to bump Donner off the project, leaving Lester, screenwriter Newman, and Newman’s wife Leslie to craft a sequel out of footage Donner already had in the can, plus a combination of new and re-shot scenes, including a whole new climax.
The re-worked opening of Part II, which was initially to have been a sequence in the first movie, is a flashback to Superman’s father, Jor-El (Marlon Brando). Jor-El is tasked with handing down the final judgement on a trio of Kryptonian criminals, General Zod (Terrence Stamp) and his acolytes Ursa (Sarah Douglas) and Non (Jack O’Halloran). For the crime of attempting a coup, these inter-galactic J6ers are sentenced to life imprisonment in a giant, floating pane of space glass that splits the difference between Stanley Kubrick’s monolith and a very crowded phone booth.
Years later, back on Earth, Superman foils a terrorist plot on the Eiffel Tower. He flings the bomb into space to explode harmlessly, except the detonation accidentally shatters the floating glass prison, freeing the three seditious Kryptonians. They attack a group of astronauts on the moon en route to Earth, which they intend to rule thanks to their newfound superpowers.
The bulk of the film is the lead-up to the big showdown between Superman (Reeve) and his father’s sworn enemy. Zod & Co. test out their new powers, force the American president (E.G. Marshall) to surrender, and cross paths with Lex Luthor (Gene Hackman), who is all too happy to sell out the human race for the low, low price of Australia. Meanwhile, Superman, in the guise of his bumbling alter ego Clark Kent, is sent on assignment to Niagara Falls with Lois Lane (Margot Kidder), where, after years of improbably failing to recognize the Clark-Superman connection, she somehow even more improbably discovers his secret. A love-struck Superman has a chat with a hologram of his mother and decides to forsake his powers so he can become a human and marry Lois. He hops into a crystal De-Supermanning chamber and emerges 100% Clark Kent, just in time to find out that only Superman can save the world from total domination.
Superman II is decidedly goofier than its predecessor, hearkening back to the gee-whiz wonder of the Silver Age and the comedy-forward approach of the comic books in the first few years after World War II.
Donner’s stated motto while making the first film was “Verisimilitude.” He kept a notecard with the word written on it at his desk, according to Superman On Film, Television, Radio, and Broadway author Bruce Scivally. Donner’s Superman is plenty whimsical and fantastic, but by taking the fundamental elements of the character and his relationships with his human counterparts seriously, Donner allowed audiences to embrace the most outlandish elements of the story, like the single Kryptonian crystal growing into an enormous arctic Fortress of Solitude, or our hero being able to reverse the earth’s rotation to turn back time. Richard Lester, on the other hand, is in search of a laugh at almost any expense, and seemingly views any storytelling obstacle as an excuse to invent some wild new power for a character who can already do the impossible. It winds up begging the question: What does Superman even mean?
***
Those same tensions existed in the Superman Celebrations back home in Metropolis, Illinois.
I’d rarely been so jealous as when my best friend, Brett, was cast in one of the Superman skits. Brett’s father worked at the bank. In that year’s production, Brett would join his dad onstage as the bank presented an oversize novelty check to a local charity. The audience gathered to see the ceremony would be surprised when a group of armed goons charged the stage to hold Brett, his dad, and the others hostage to extract a hefty ransom.
Their nefarious plot went south. This time the fake gunshots weren’t only directed toward Kryptonians. One of the locals caught a bullet. Bright-red blood soaked the downed man’s shirt. People were in real danger here, until Superman flew down—well, okay, actually he kinda dropped down from a tree above the stage—dispatched the gunmen, and then helped whisk the wounded into an ambulance.
It was pretty much the coolest thing I’d ever seen. Gunshots! Blood! Superman saving my best friend! I was near dizzy with jealousy when Brett explained how the wounded man had a little plastic pouch of fake blood taped to his stomach that he popped when he got “shot.” But apparently some of the townsfolk were less than thrilled with the violent production, which featured gunplay, gore, and children in mortal peril. So the following year, in an effort to change the tone, Superman…played tug-of-war against the California Raisins.
For anyone born in a generation after X, the California Raisins were a brief, baffling commercial fad, a musical group of anthropomorphic raisins who shilled for raisins by singing classic-rock covers like “I Heard It Through the Grapevine” (get it?!). What the California Raisins could possibly have against the citizens of Metropolis, Illinois, remains entirely unclear, but at the next year’s Superman Celebration, a group of dudes in big purple California Raisin mascot costumes showed up, were generally jerks, and challenged Superman to a game of tug-of-war. Superman won, of course, and all was right with the world. The scolds who were upset about the violence of the previous Superman appearance got their way, but a young Bryan Miller was not thrilled. Though I was too young to say so without risk of grounding, I thought it was total bullshit.
The theatrical cut of Superman II is a tug of war between Donner and Lester, the latter of whom is unceremoniously represented by the California goddamn Raisins. In 2006, Donner was finally able to release Superman II: The Donner Cut, which featured some incomplete sequences and effects but largely restored his far superior vision of the film. But you don’t really need the Donner Cut to discern which bits of Superman II are his and which are Lester’s; you need only to watch the fully Lester-controlled Superman III, a movie so full-tilt awful that it made our hero seem low-rent and Richard Pryor seem unfunny.
***
So, Superman definitely means…something, though exactly what that is has been debated for almost 90 years at this point.
Quack psychologist Dr. Fredric Wertham, who kicked off a nationwide anti-comic-book panic in 1954 with his book The Seduction Of the Innocent, saw nothing but ill omens of fascist idolatry. Wertham wrote that “Superman has long been recognized as a symbol of violent race superiority,” and dryly noted of the S shield on his chest, “we should, I suppose, be thankful that it is not an S.S.”
That would come as a surprise to the actual Nazi SS, which published an anti-Superman editorial in its Hitler-approved newspaper in 1940. Glen Weldon’s book Superman: The Unauthorized Biography quotes the Nazi newspaper’s unambiguous headline: “Superman Is A Jew!” Among the slurry of anti-Semitic vitriol, the editorial claimed of Superman co-creator Jerry Siegel, “The inventive Israelite named this pleasant guy with an overdeveloped body and an underdeveloped mind ‘Superman.’ He advertised widely Superman’s sense of justice, well-suited for imitation by American youth.”
It might be the only true thing ever printed in that vile rag. Superman indeed became a symbol of American resistance to fascism, and plenty of people, including many of the writers and artists who worked on the stories, did think of him as an essentially Jewish creation. In Harry Brod’s book Superman Is Jewish? (his answer, condensed: yes), the author lays out the parallels: “The story is the tale of Moses, sent off in a small vessel by his parents to save him from death and destruction facing his people. He’s then raised among people to whom he is really an alien, but who do not suspect his secret identity, and he grows up to become a liberator and champion of the oppressed….”
And yet Richard Donner and Superman: The Movie co-writer Tom Mankiewicz—listed as a “creative consultant” for Writer’s Guild reasons—came to believe that Superman was, at its core, a retelling of the Christ story. As Scivally explains in his book, “Like Jesus, Kal-El comes to Earth from the heavens as a baby…sent by the wise, god-like Jor-El, who is sending to earth his only begotten son. He is reared by a humble family…and performs miraculous deeds. … And like Jesus reviving Lazarus from the dead, Superman revives Lois Lane…”
Superman’s literal creation story isn’t so singularly metaphorical. Writer Siegel, working with artist pal Joe Shuster when the two were just Cleveland-area high schoolers, concocted the first Superman story in a self-published 1933 science fiction fanzine, splicing together a number of fairly direct inspirations including Doc Savage, Popeye, and Philip Wylie’s 1930 novel Gladiator. They re-imagined their own character for the first comic-book appearance in Action Comics No. 1 in 1938. The story was tinkered with and retold over years of radio, TV, movie serials, feature films, newspaper strips, comic books, and cartoons, gradually amalgamating the defining elements of the character. So much of the iconography—Kryptonite, the Daily Planet, Lex Luthor, “Truth, justice, and the American way”—was added later. The broadness and the elasticity of the story combine to create its polyoptic mythical power, so that Superman seems to reflect you, from wherever it is that you stand.
Superman has to re-discover his own significance in Superman II, which he comes to doubt when he finally makes it official with Lois. Does he not also deserve a normal life? It would be a more interesting existential question if his decision to give up being Superman lasted literally longer than the drive home. On the way back from the Fortress of Solitude, a de-powered Clark stands up to a bully in a roadside diner and gets his un-caped butt kicked. In one of the movie’s more subtle filmmaking touches, the diner is lit a sickly Kryptonite green, as if the whole world is now radioactive to our hero. There he sees General Zod preening on television before a kneeling president.
One quick trip to the Fortress of Solitude later, Superman has regained his powers and flies to Metropolis for the big showdown. Lester stages this pretty admirably, even though there are a couple of shots—one in particular of a poorly animated Superman landing on an unapologetically chintzy miniature skyscraper—that look B-movie cheesy. Donner might have gone over budget, but all of his finished footage shows the care he took.
Still, the showdown with the three evil Kryptonians is thrilling. They punch each other through buildings, fling themselves through electrified signs in a Metropolis approximation of Times Square, and display their awesome powers on an epic scale. It’s de rigueur summer blockbuster stuff now, but in 1981 it was movie magic. What keeps it compelling 45 years later is the strength of the characterization in the rest of the movie around it, particularly with Lois and Clark, anchored by Reeve and Kidder’s timeless performances. Donner’s earnest myth-making, even interspersed with Lester’s smirking camp, still brings gravity to the story of a man who can defy it. It’s whimsical but not frivolous, and unapologetic in its comic-book iconography. As Elvis Costello once sang, “What’s so funny about peace, love, and understanding?”
***
I moved away from Metropolis, Illinois in the mid-1990s and haven’t been back in a couple years, since my dad died of a grim, protracted illness at a rehab facility at the edge of town. All these years later, Metropolis still looks mostly the same, even if much has changed elsewhere.
I left a small town to become a writer for a big-city newspaper in an office located high up a glassy skyscraper. (Sound familiar?) I live in Minneapolis now, and during those years when I worked at the newspaper high up in the Capella Tower, I often thought of phone booths, falling helicopters, and heroes flying across the skyline.
Meanwhile, the country has fallen under the sway of a man who will forever remind me of Lex Luthor—a cynical, narcissistic, power-mad billionaire hatching plots from a big building with his name on it. The residents of Metropolis overwhelmingly support him; Massac County, where the town is located, voted almost 75% to 25% for him in 2024. (Truly not much changes there; that’s almost the exact ratio they voted against Abraham Lincoln in the 1860 presidential election.)
We reached true levels of comic-book villainy when that Lex Luthor wannabe dispatched a small army of masked, armed goons to terrorize my Minnesota neighbors earlier this year. To add insult to injury, one of ICE’s most prominent supporters was a one-time Superman himself, TV’s Dean Cain. The ICE henchmen targeted the most vulnerable among us and gleefully violated the rights of anyone who dared speak up. I was only a few blocks away, writing in the same South Minneapolis coffee shop where I’m putting this essay together, when Renee Good was murdered on Portland Ave. by the thugs dispatched by the White House. Seventeen days later, my South Minneapolis neighbor Alex Pretti was shot dead by masked agents on Nicollet Avenue, not far from my house.
When I saw the video of the Pretti murder, I couldn’t help thinking about Superman. Alex came to Nicollet Avenue to help protect immigrants, people from a far away land. He saw an armed, masked man throw a woman to the ground. In his final moments on this earth, he was kneeling down to help lift her off the frozen concrete, putting his body between her and danger. If that’s not exactly what Superman would do, I don’t know what is.
In the weeks and months that followed, I watched my whole community rise up in resistance, often placing themselves in danger or hauled off to a fortified detention center without charge. When I saw the faces of the people of all ages, races, and backgrounds coming together to bring food to families afraid to leave their homes, or ferrying children to school and then forming human shields at school drop off to protect them from random abduction, I thought about Superman, too. The Man of Steel’s cartoonish feats are best left to the comic-book pages and blockbuster movies, but the myth of Superman remains essential. It’s about fighting greed and cynicism and intolerance wherever you find it, no matter the cost. It’s about helping wherever you can. It only sounds corny until you really need it.
The American way, that I’m not so sure about. But what’s so funny about truth and justice?