Kellyanne Conway, former senior counsellor to Donald Trump, was recently on Fox News objecting to the supposed wokeness of James Gunn’s Superman. “We don’t go to the movie theatre to be lectured to and have somebody throw their ideology on to us,” she bellowed.
Trust me, Kellyanne, you will be grand. You can attend the big stupid superhero flick with no fears of encountering spittle-flecked agitprop. Few will confuse it with a social-realist rebuke in the style of Ken Loach or with Maoist propaganda of the Jean-Luc Godard school.
Not since the McCarthyite witch hunts have right-wing commentators worked so hard to find subversive material in Hollywood pabulum. The stakes are now much lower, but the noise is much louder. There are so many more platforms from which to shout. The paranoiacs have so many more deranged friends at the head of government.
[ Superman review: Utterly charmless. And as funny as toothacheOpens in new window ]
Another of this week’s film stories (we’ll keep you in suspense for now) puts the silliness in perspective. There is a sense that the current spat is a playground game – one in which Gunn seems happy to participate. “Superman is the story of America,” he told the Times. “An immigrant that came from other places and populated the country.”
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There should not be anything controversial in that. The notion of Superman, refugee from the planet Krypton, being an immigrant, is far from a new one. In a recent article for the Hollywood Reporter, Andrew Slack and Jose Antonio Vargas recalled a campaign they launched in 2013 that asked Americans to reveal their immigration stories while declaring “Superman is an immigrant”. Batman was the borderline fascist vigilante; Superman was the do-gooder who identified with the huddled masses.
Back in 1987, Christopher Reeve only donned the cape for a fourth time on the condition he have some creative control. Superman IV: The Quest for Peace, an anti-nuclear parable, ended up as the wokest ever superhero flick – nothing comes close – some 30 years before the w-word colonised dunderhead right-wing discourse. Evil millionaires take over the Daily Planet. Superman piously addresses the United Nations. The villain really is called Nuclearman. We can forgive the younger Kellyanne Conway for missing that one. The film was so atrocious it banished the franchise to the Fortress of Solitude for close to 20 years.
Never forget that Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, the creators of Superman, were second-generation Jewish immigrants and that the character emerged as the Nazis were taking over Germany. On the very first page of Action Comics, the publication that launched the man of steel, he is described as “champion of the oppressed!”
[ From the archive: Superman flies into right-wingers' wrathOpens in new window ]
None of this dissuaded Dean Cain, who played Superman on the TV show Lois & Clark, from getting his tights in a twist. “I think that was a mistake by James Gunn to say it’s an immigrant thing, and I think it’s going to hurt the numbers on the movie,” he said, apparently forgetting that, in season four of Lois & Clark, an antagonist (satirically, one assumes) calls the immigration cops on the man in blue and red.
Might Cain be proven correct? What about continuing complaints from right-wingers that – denied by Gunn – the global conflict at the film’s centre is modelled on the current Middle Eastern conflict? Might Superman, to parrot an unavoidable saw of the era, go broke by going woke? Not a bit of it. Gunn’s film landed with a $217 million opening weekend. That is the third-biggest debut of the year to date. By one measure this is the best-ever opening for a solo Superman picture.
The message here is not, alas, that audiences are on the search for politically charged mainstream entertainment. But nor are they, like Ms Conway, terrified that the superhero will begin lecturing them on agrarian reform or dialectical materialism. Ninety-five per cent of the audience pays absolutely no attention to the disputes that so inflame the attention of social media. The supposedly wokearific Snow White failed because it looked like a dud. The allegedly radical Superman (which I thought ghastly) succeeded because folks were hungry for the title character.
Meanwhile, another gloomier corner of cinematic discourse was reminded that one of their saints really did have views worth abhorring. Stellan Skarsgård wasn’t saying anything we didn’t know about Ingmar Bergman, but his confirmation was stark and direct. “Bergman was manipulative,” he told us earlier in the month. “He was a Nazi during the war and the only person I know who cried when Hitler died.”
One can only imagine how TikTok would have reacted if it had been around at the time of Bergman’s The Seventh Seal or Persona. The conversation would have been exhausting, repetitive and unenlightening. But it would have been about something that actually mattered.
Almost nobody really cares if Superman is a communist or not.
