By WILL LEITCH
For a character who has been central to American
pop culture for more than 80 years, Superman, it really must be said, is pretty
darned boring. Since 1938, he has worn the same outfit. He has worked the same
job. He has hung out with the same people. He has even kept the same haircut,
except for a month or two in the 1990s, when a few strands poked out a bit
behind the ears, an offense for which Superman can be forgiven, considering
that he had recently died.
Superman is a fictional character who, by his very
nature, cannot change, which would be fine were he a supervillain bent on
global domination, a tortured ad man facing dramatic cultural change at the end
of the 1960s or simply a wisecracking rabbit. But Superman can't change in a
specific, creatively crippling way: He must be absolutely perfect at all times.
He cannot lie, he cannot kill, he cannot pirate music. He cannot be anything
other than the ideal beacon for us all to aspire to be, to admire from below.
Superman is always saying that he is a shining
example of what humans can be, but we humans know better: He is the embodiment
of what we are not and never were. He is a lack of frailty personified. He can
leap tall buildings in a single bound, but we can't relate to that. A vigilante
like Batman, who wants to put a fist through some creep's face, that we
can understand.
Larry Tye's "Superman: The High-Flying History
of America's Most Enduring Hero" attempts to track the history of an icon
that has no real history. The story of his creation, by high-school friends
Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, is in many ways the beginning and ending of his
journey. From Superman's first appearance in Action Comics No. 1, the basics
were all there: the cape, the exploding home planet, the dorky Clark Kent alter
ego (modeled by Siegel and Shuster on themselves), the physical invincibility,
even Lois Lane. There were a few important additions made along the
way—Kryptonite was actually introduced by the radio show, not the comic, and
Lex Luthor was in fact an afterthought modeled after Siegel's and Shuster's
earlier, evil vision for a superman. Forgettable characters like Superdog came
and went. But, mostly, Superman was Superman initially and forever.
The main reason for this was that Superman was an
instant smash, the best-selling comic the week that it was released and just
about every week since. (Most of the early buyers were schoolchildren, but Joe
DiMaggio, then only in his second year in baseball, used to ask his
less-recognizable Yankees teammates to buy copies and sneak them to him when no
one was looking.) Any good capitalist knows that you don't mess around with
your flagship product; this success, more than his status as a platonic ideal,
explains why Superman remains so constant.
The biggest news that Supes has made in the past 20
years was in the early 1990s, when DC Comics briefly killed him in
"Superman: Doomsday," a terrific series of comics that nevertheless
were irrelevant two years later, when he inevitably came back to life. (They
filled the two years with stories of superheroes mourning, replacement
superpeople failing to fill his shoes and finally the buildup to the hero's
return.) The series was a huge smash, if only because killing Superman was sort
of the only story option DC had left.
Mr. Tye, rather than craft a thesis that explains
how such a static character has remained so popular through so many different
eras, overloads the reader with anecdotes. The story of how DC obtained the
rights to Superman at a Dutch-buying-Manhattan price—the original sin of
American comic-book history—is rich enough to be a book of its own (it is,
actually, 2005's "Men of Tomorrow"), but Mr. Tye merely touches on it
before getting bogged down in arcane contract details. The tale of poor doomed
George Reeves, the television actor who played Superman in the 1950s before
either committing suicide or being murdered (depending on which conspiracy
theory you subscribe to), has been made into a feature film
("Hollywoodland"). It's all neatly summed up by Mr. Tye in two
paragraphs. One minute Reeves is a star, the next minute he is dead.
Even Christopher Reeve, the affable Broadway actor
who became the embodiment of Superman in a way no one had before, is glossed
over. Reeve, like everyone who has played Superman, became so connected to the
role that he never escaped it, something he came to embrace late in his life.
His Superman was basically Cary Grant—witty, funny and noble, harking back to a
beloved type from an earlier era. But Mr. Tye spends more time discussing
producer Ilya Salkind's money woes than Reeve's reinvention. And he spends even
more time that giving plot summaries.
Mr. Tye relentlessly keeps his focus on the
fictional character of Superman, but real-life stories keep popping up all
over. I kept hoping that he would dispense with the endless Wikipedia-esque
plot summaries of various Superman comics and get back to the human beings who
created this character and were so profoundly affected by him. After all, they
are capable of change.
Yet Mr. Tye is so close to his subject that he has
trouble seeing anything else. There is no question that Superman has served as
a symbol of American power, strength, ideals and resolve, but he is, after all,
just a cartoon character. Mr. Tye sees changes in the culture and attributes
them to Superman just because he happens to be writing a book about him. I have
no doubt that kids were inspired to eat their cereal and brush their teeth at
an increased rate by listening to Superman implore them to do so on the radio.
I do highly doubt, however, that when America, reeling from Waco and the World
Trade Center bombing and Rodney King, "needed a break and a hero in the
fall of 1993" it was TV's "Lois & Clark" that provided
"a great escape." And I wish I would have known that, when the later
Superman TV show "Smallville" hit the air, its "launch in the
wake of 9/11 gave America a hero it could believe in when it needed one."
That might have helped, I think.
The theme of Superman's relationship to America is,
in fact, an important one, which Mr. Tye clumsily tackles but can't quite get
his arms around. Superman reminds us of who we once were (or, more accurately,
who we like to pretend we were). The difference of his world and ours is
precisely the point. The first two "Superman" films with Reeve worked
because they contrasted his square-jawed do-goodnickism with a Metropolis that
resembled the New York of "Taxi Driver" far more than that of
"An Affair to Remember." Bryan Singer's less successful
"Superman Returns" was overly reverent toward those Reeve films,
stacking one level of nostalgia on top of another.
The next step for Superman is another big-screen
reboot, "Man of Steel," due out around this time next year. Starring
Henry Cavill, Amy Adams as Lois Lane, Kevin Costner as Pa Kent and Russell
Crowe as Jor-El (Superman's dad), the film continues the movie tradition of
casting bigger stars to play the supporting characters than the man in the blue
tights himself. It is fitting that the producer of the film is Christopher
Nolan, who reinvented Batman in the "Dark Knight" movies. One
suspects that he'll have less luck with reinventing Superman.
As is the case with Mr. Tye's book, Superman is a
black hole at the center of every story. Because he is invincible, because he
can do everything better than anyone else can do anything, you run out of
things to do with him.
Publicado en The Wall Street Journal, 16/06/2012
Ilustración: Curt Swan/Superman (1960)
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