The philosophy of Superman

A.C. Grayling

05 July 2006

The story, so far as there is one beyond a revisit to the two obsessions mentioned, is that Superman has been gone for five years, seeking any evidence of the remains of his home planet, Krypton. Unsuccessful in this quest, he returns to Earth, oddly enough in a spaceship which makes a very bumpy landing near his adoptive mother’s humble farmstead. He gets his job back at the Daily Planet (crusty editor Perry White still in charge) only to find that Lois Lane, severely annoyed that Superman had left without saying goodbye five years earlier, has a partner, a son and a Pulitzer Prize for an article entitled ‘Why The World Does Not Need Superman’. The movie is, roughly, about why she changes her mind.

For aficionados, the film’s real interest lies in the evolution it represents in the Superman persona. It is a forgotten fact that the very first, very short-lived Superman back in the early 1930s was a bald-headed villain seeking to destroy the world. In that brief avatar he was a parody of the Nietzschean übermensch (Nietzsche’s übermensch was then understood only in the Nazi parody of the idea). But the Canadian artist Joe Shuster and the American writer Jerry Siegel quickly reinvented him as a good guy determined to uphold ‘Truth and Justice’ (a motto that later, in the 1940s, became ‘Truth, Justice and the American Way’).

In the first decade of Superman’s existence he could run as fast as a speeding train and leap an eighth of a mile, but during the 1940s he progressed to flying and, moreover, as fast as a bullet. For decades he was a rugged, muscle-bound thirtysomething, but in recent films he has become an increasingly svelte twentysomething.

In this movie the evolution has taken what is popularly miscalled a quantum leap. For here Superman has progressed from being an updated amalgam of Greek mythological heroes — principally Hercules and Perseus, the latter with Hermes’ winged sandals and Athene’s impenetrable shield — to being Jesus Christ.

In the first DC Comics we are told that his parents sent him into outer space from the planet Krypton, as it perished, in order to save his life; and that he fell to Earth by accident, benefiting from its lower gravity and yellow sun. In this film we are told that his father Jor-El sent him to earth specifically to be its saviour. Jor-El’s encouraging message to him is, ‘I am always with you’, and that ‘the father is in the son, and the son is in the father’. More fully, Jor-El’s message to him is that human beings can be a great people, and ‘only lack the light to show the way. For this reason above all — their capacity for good — I have sent them you, my only son.’