Why Does the World Need Superman?

My first article on this site was about Superman.  I wrote an article about Man of Steel, released in 2013. Today, we have a new Superman, 2025.  Superman has been part of my life for as long as I can remember, so I have feelings about this heroic character that has oscillated over the years.  Idealism, morality, right and wrong, and what stuck with me is that he didn't change; the world around him changed, and then forced him into that world.  He arrived here from a destroyed planet circa 1938, Action Comics.  An orphan from a distant world was left to grow and adapt to 'our' ways, no different from any other child, yet he was different; he was powerful, strong, and alien.

Superman would later discover how to control his strength and where he gains his power from the sun.  He would learn loneliness, being bullied, and kindness, but he understood solitude, which helped him focus on the big fights.  Superman became a symbol of how we all ought to be as humans and how we should ideally treat humanity.  He became the outside observer that we should all look up to.

There has been, for many years, this problem with Superman, that he is/was too idealistic, he wants kindness and goodwill.  Most of us have become too cynical for kindness and goodwill, so we criticize Superman for being what we can't.  We stopped believing in him and the way he looks at the world.  He became something, an idea, that we have given up on, for the most part.  His biggest and strongest superpower is that he doesn't want anything from us.  Nothing.  That's the only thing about him that frightens us because we live in a world where people only want something from us, sometimes it feels damn near parasitic.  

Superman, at his core, wants to solve problems, moral problems mostly, but also must face structural problems.  What is good?  What is right?  Superman is human; he suffers from the same moral dilemmas that most of us do.  He suffers and loses, he wins, and he is celebrated, not that he is into affirmation.  He aspires to ask the question, 'what is more?', what more can he be, inspires us to think about, 'what more can we be?'.  That's what Nietzsche, Einstein, Freud and Homer, and so many others wrote about: We are beyond our own lack of imagination.

Reality is the stain we try to avoid, yet it marinates into our consciousness like a villain trying to destroy the (our) world.  Language helps to fight it off, but reality is beyond our own ability to manipulate it; it is here, even if we are not.  Reality doesn't care about us because it's not about us.  Understand, we are travellers, we are guests, we are visitors, yet here we are, perspective is an option, but yet - here we are.

Superman is our ideal, a muscled-up, superpowered version of what 'we' want.  We are not going to get it.  Now we know that, but then Superman helps us believe, he helps us reach up and be 'more than we can be', but it didn't turn out that way.  We now suffer from all his downsides, we are alone, we are feeling like we are in a foreign land, we are feeling like orphans in many cases.  Superman, originally, appeared to do the opposite: you are not alone, you are feeling patriotic, you feel like you belong.

Why does the world need Superman?

Superman first appeared on the cusp of World War 2, being born out of World War 1.  He started in between the World Wars and fought his way through comic books, trying to inspire people to fight, for good and against what was morally wrong.  A hero at that time, none of us could imagine.  Superman has lived on through the decades, a name just as recognizable as Jesus around the world.

Here we are, Superman is in his late 80s, and yet we still need him.  These movies and comic books bounce around what he is and what he could or should mean, but we know, deep down, what Superman is........ It's so simple in psychology, especially Jungian psychology, Superman is what we want to be, and yet we are the - shadow. 

Dante, Sisyphus, and the Übermensch fought through darkness to get to some form of light.  Life is climbing this hill, no matter what happens, the headlights move forward.  Willingly entering the Inferno, pushing endless boulders up the hill, or crossing that bridge and peering into that abyss to see what might be looking back is why we need Superman.

Superman whittles the world down to its basic components. Why be good?  We chose to not be good?  Why be confused about what 'good' you think 'good' is?  Superman shows us through actions what good is.  People should never tell other people that they are 'good'.  Actions collapse words into politics; actions are the only fight against words.  Superman, symbolically, is active in his morality; he shows it.  That is why he will live in our dreams and minds as a force that asks nothing from us, only to look up.

 

The Fantastic Four: First Steps and Where Seeing is Believing

First off, I was so mixed about even watching this movie, why you ask, social ‘they’re brainwashing us to death’ media.  This movie was being given its do - or dragged through the trenches of ideological social justice.  For at least the last decade, we have been bombarded with this ideological programming that cynicism has seeped in and corrupted our own objectivity, dramatic, I know, but it did.  I admit it, I got duped about this movie because social media said so, and that pisses me off.

I was thinking this wasn’t worth the bother of even seeing it, I mean, how many times have we been burnt over the last couple of years, with promises of a ‘return to form’ and ended up getting more Star Wars failures and Marvel disappointments?  The Fantastic Four: First Steps appeared, according to the mass media machine and its social media lapdog, as a mess.  It suffered from mixed messaging, it turned out.

The movie was fine, adventurous and exciting, not without its problems, but a good piece of entertainment.  The characters all had chemistry, and the plot was simple but effective at establishing the First Family as a reliable and competent team.  The actors all worked, the visuals were great, and the end was a first step, as Marvel brings this family into the fold of their ‘re-imagining’ of the future of their franchise, which has suffered through a couple of years of dark (woke) times.

The Fantastic Four was established in the movie early on, quite cleverly, letting those of us who don’t know of their accident in space, yet keeping it moving exciting, for us who do know how these Fantastic Four gained their powers.  We got to know Dr. Reed Richards, his wife Sue Storm, her brother Johnny Storm, and their friend Ben Grimm, as a charismatic team that has already been on multiple adventures for the last four years.  Yet, the subtitle of the movie is – First Steps.  We’ll get to that later.

The movie ended up exploring the perils of parenthood in uncertain times, where the world could end, but we still must fight to bring about a better world for the next generation. It told us that kids simultaneously bring out the best in all of us and remind us of what matters most – family.  This film, inspired by the nuclear family, reminds us to refocus our values toward the family.  The family has been attacked in our culture in the last decade for being toxic, for being irrelevant, for being ‘traditional’ in this modern, big-pharmaceutically-addicted world.  Yet, this movie supports the family, cherishes it in fact.

The retro-futurism in the movie is the best kind of eye-candy 2025 has offered.  The cars are cool, the clothing is cool, and the technology, in this alternative reality, is, well, cool.  There is a little play on the Jetsons here and our pre-50s World’s Fairs, where there was so much positive possibility.  Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry was heavily influenced by these dreams of a future where man and machine could work side by each harmoniously, and not turn into what we are living in today, where we have become its pet.  It feeds us and we obey its every command, we bark when it wants us to bark, we sleep when it wants us to sleep, we eat when it wants us to eat, and we are always under the threat that if the machine turns off, we all starve to death.  I guess that’s why we plug into so much technology, because our reality is often too much to psychologically bear, so we let technology own us now.

This movie has been caught up in our current ongoing culture war, which is attempting to divide us, by design, toward a more homogenized, trans-human future, where the human being is more predictable, more technologically obedient,
and less human than human.  The Fantastic Four movie seems to be aware of this unpopular trajectory and decided to not participate in the propaganda machine, designed to help us all walk into digital handcuffs and mindless servitude because the Elite, our owners, would like it better that way for their human cattle.

First Steps is an apt subtitle to this movie.  We are led to believe that it’s the Fantastic Four’s ‘First Steps’, yet it is more to do with their baby and symbolically, stretching here, our way back to traditional values and reclaiming our humanity from these satanic elites who seem hell bent on depopulating us.  Or, maybe without all the symbolism and politics, it’s meant to be a damn good piece of entertainment.