Look, up in the sky!

Soon there will be a new movie about Superman. The trailers give me shivers.

Partly, it is the use of the original John Williams music—and Superman (along with Star Wars) is John Williams at his very best, emotionally evocative almost to the degree of being propoganda, but just short of being manipulative (as Williams tends toward at his worst). Even with my eyes closed, the sounds of the Superman Returns teaser trailer gives me goose bumps.

But there's more to it than that. Superheros play an important role in our mythic landscape. And of all the comic book superheros, Superman is undoubtedly the greatest.

I don't want to get into one of those Superman vs Batman vs Spiderman vs Wolverine vs Green Lantern vs Plastic Man vs Ghost Rider vs Silver Surfer who is the best superhero ever debates. Although I do find that kind of thing fun sometimes, what I'm trying to get at now is not that Superman is the best superhero in the sense of who would win in a fight, or even of who is the most fun to read stories about.

Superman is almost certainly the most iconic and culturally the richest of superheros, with the most depth of influence upon culture as a whole, who resonates most deeply and fully with the human condition and with our yearning for salvation. And Superman fills a cultural, narrative, mythic niche which is not filled by any of the other major¹ superheros.

Batman and Spiderman are both examples (in very different ways) of humanity saving itself. They are models for us, who demonstrate the heights to which humanity can rise. They give us hope in ourselves. Superman, at the heart of his story, exemplifies something quite different. Superman is not one of us. Clark Kent is the costume, and Superman is the real him. He is alien, not merely in the sense that he is from another planet (and I think the best presentations of Superman downplay the sci-fi little-green-man extraterrestrial alien connection) but in that he is outside our experience².

Superman is help from beyond. And as such he is a Christ-figure in a very different way than, say, Spiderman is. Spiderman is a Christ-figure in that he is a man who suffers for his fellow men. Superman is more closely analagous to a God who descends to dwell among us for our salvation. Neither, clearly, is a full metephor for Christ (and I would suggest that the only story that adequately captures the complexity of Christ's function is the story found in the Gospels), but each represents different aspects of a human need for salvation³.

It's been five years since the United States experienced an attack which shook it to its foundations and fundamentally altered dominant worldview of its culture. In the second trailer for Superman Returns, there is a clip of Superman saving a plane. Superman flies out of the blue and keeps an airplane from crashing. It occurs to me that the past five years have seen a re-emergence of the superhero movie. It occurs to me that it is about time Superman returned.



1 I know that there are examples (like J'onn J'onzz the Martian Manhunter) of superheroes who are, like Superman, alien in one sense or another, but as I have said I'm mostly concerned here with the level of cultural impact. I've never heard any songs about the Martian Manhunter.

2 Yes, a guy who can stick to walls, a guy with blades that come out of his hands, a woman who can control the weather are also outside our experience, but what I'm talking about is not the power but the origin. Other superheros (including mutants) are fundamentally human, however altered. Superman is not one of us.

3 This need is shown in all of human storytelling, in all myth. So why do we call it "Christ-figure", when clearly some of the stories predate Jesus of Nazareth? C.S. Lewis once said that in Christ myth was made fact, just as God was made flesh. Only in Christ do we find the myth fully realized and also made fact.