A still from the newest Superman movie 'Man of Steel,' which brings its audience back to a simpler time, intentionally or not.
A rusted Radio Flyer lay on its side in front of a Kansas farmhouse set deep amongst the sprawling cornfields. An ancient Chevy pickup sat in the driveway, and the camera awkwardly panned through the dandelions to a young boy, dressed in blue jeans and a white t-shirt, wearing a red cape around his neck, his fists planted defiantly at his waist as he stared at his panting dog.
The scene, from the new Superman movie "Man of Steel," is a lovely mixture of old Americana and the superhero that its people created. It’s clichéd, no doubt, but it’s an important cliché, because it tells us that no matter what is going on outside that movie theater, inside it, things are still normal.
We need that now. Back when the ideas for these comics — the Batmans and Captain Americas, Avengers and Supermans — were first put to paper, we knew who the bad guys were, and we knew that we were on the other side. And we were right, because the bad guys were just so damned bad and we didn’t do anything that resembled what they did.
In Germany there was genocide and concentration camps. In the Soviet Union there were gulags and government controls. But our leaders didn’t murder their associates when they felt threatened by them, and our outspoken citizens didn’t disappear during the night. Those comics, of course, served to reinforce the idea that things like "truth" and "justice" were indeed the American way (even when they weren’t) and the people who wrote them were a product of that national spirit.
Things are rarely so clear anymore. We’ve traded the use of flags and armies for microphones and earpieces, and we no longer know who our enemies are until they’ve struck, often when our guard is lowest. What’s worse, the villains are anonymous. It could be that guy you sparred with up in Boston, or your next-door neighbor in Colorado, or the man who used the library computer in your very own town to purchase a very important set of plane tickets.
No matter what the politicians and pundits say about the "strength" of America — they’re fond of telling us how tough we all are — these things have made us at least as scared of each other as we ever were of any foreign threat.
Maybe that’s the reason we’ve responded so strongly to the movie remakes of these stories, even though today’s world is so vastly different than the one they were created in: They’ve allowed those of us who the Bible just doesn’t do it for to have some sort of mythology, some sort of hero that can fit into our world and bring us back to what we’re supposed to stand for, as a nation and as individuals.
Just for an hour or two, we drift off to that time where there was a black-and-white definition of what "good" and "evil" meant and get to ignore the varying shades of gray that so often color the backdrop of our lives.
But even in the movies, that relief is fleeting. Watching the final battle in "Superman" destroy a city that looks very much like New York brought back awful memories of the day that our real-life monuments to human ingenuity fell from the sky in a glass-and-metal shower. And, as always, I could not relax for a second in the theater.
As I walked out, though, mulling these many thoughts, I could not help but think that maybe "Man of Steel" had served its purpose, because for a second, I did believe that somewhere, a place like Smallville, Kansas must exist — it has to, because they filmed the movie somewhere.
Who knows who lives there, though. Superman definitely doesn’t. But then, maybe believing that he might is more important than knowing that he can’t.
Email: janoski@northjersey.com
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