Superman Immigrant Backlash Is Comically Misguided: Jason Bailey

Few movies this year have as much riding on them as James Gunn’s Superman.

Jason Bailey, Bloomberg Opinion Guest Columnist, film critic and historian joins Bloomberg to discuss his piece and what this shows about the future of movies.

First and foremost, it attempts to relaunch the Man of Steel onscreen after the grim slogs of Zack Snyder’s iterations. But the movie, perhaps more importantly, is also a reboot of the entire world of DC Comics on film (in the midst of seemingly endless upheavals at Warner Bros. Discovery Inc., which controls the screen rights to those properties). Gunn has plenty of skin in the game; he’s not only the writer and director of Superman, but also the new co-chairman and co-CEO of DC Studios, the public face of the DC Universe’s reset.

So, unsurprisingly, Gunn is doing a lot of press, detailing the picture’s inception, creation, themes and messaging. “Superman is the story of America,” he recently told the London Times, “an immigrant that came from other places and populated the country.”  Those seemingly innocuous comments have kicked off the kind of backlash we’ve come to expect from the far-right rage machine. This is something of an ongoing trend in MAGA world, where any film, television show, book or music video that doesn’t conform to their narrow worldview is seen as suspect and reactive — even if, as in this case, it’s as steeped in decades of iconography and mythology.

And that’s what makes this particular controversy seem even more calculatedly ginned-up than your typical “[insert cultural product here] has gone woke!” backlash. The idea that Superman is a previously apolitical character who has been co-opted by the political left for cultural indoctrination is comically ignorant. The character’s creators, writer Jerry Siegel and artist Joe Shuster, were both children of Jewish immigrants. Before the US even entered World War II, they crafted a two-page story for Look magazine called “How Superman Would End the War,” in which the Man of Steel literally takes Adolf Hitler by the throat.

After the war, the Adventures of Superman radio show presented a 16-episode arc called “Clan of the Fiery Cross,” in which Superman took on the Ku Klux Klan. It used real inside information about the KKK, gathered by undercover activist Stetson Kennedy, and exposing the terrorist organization’s secrets and methods to a nationwide audience. These aren’t ideological one-offs; throughout his history, the character has stood for “truth, justice, and the American way,” and for diversity and against racism.

But the “anti-woke” crowd isn’t much for historical precedent or ideological consistency. This isn’t even the first time in recent years that it’s been up in arms about this specific character. A 2017 edition of Action Comics, in which Superman saves a group of undocumented immigrants from a murderous White supremacist, prompted Breitbart to sneer at “Social Justice Supes” and Fox Nation to decry the character’s use as “a propaganda tool for the defenders of illegal aliens.”

Gunn knew what he was getting into with his Superman, predicting in the London Times interview, “it’s about human kindness and obviously there will be jerks out there who are just not kind and will take it as offensive just because it is about kindness. But screw them.” Fox News hosts have predictably gone all in; on Monday’s edition of The Five, co-host Jesse Watters sneered, “You know what it says on his cape? MS-13,” referencing a criminal gang. His co-host Kellyanne Conway insisted, “We don't go to the movie theater to be lectured to and to have somebody throw their ideology onto us.”

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