Superman IV: The Quest for Peace, unanimously reviled for both its unconvincing visuals and cornball story, inadvertently accomplished the theretofore unrealized dream of scores of nefarious supervillains when it was released on this date in 1987: It killed Superman. (Or at least put the cinematic franchise into two-decade dormancy.)
But a closer examination of the film suggests its objectively subpar storytelling might in fact be far more faithful to the spirit of the source material than today’s fanboy culture would care to concede.
Thirty-five years ago today, my mother took me to see Superman IV: The Quest for Peace (1987). Afterwards, we met up with my father at Doubleday’s, a neighborhood bar and grill that was the last stop on Broadway before you’d officially crossed the city line into Westchester County. The restaurant had a hot-oil popcorn machine in the far corner, and when I went to refill our basket, I spied a man seated at the bar, nose in a copy of USA Today, the back panel of which boasted a full-page color advertisement for Superman IV.
When he caught me studying the ad, he asked, “Gonna go see the new Superman?”
“I just did.”
“Yeah? How was it?”
“It was amazing,” I said, and I absolutely meant it. Sensing my sincerity, the gentleman pulled the ad from the bundle of folded pages and handed it to me as a souvenir. When I got home, I taped it up on my bedroom wall.
Sidney J. Furie’s Superman IV: The Quest for Peace is not amazing. It is, in fact, commonly regarded as one of the worst comic-book movies ever made—if not the worst—in eternal competition for last place with Batman & Robin (1997) and Catwoman (2004). It suffered from a notoriously troubled production: After the diminishing returns of Superman III (1983) and spin-off Supergirl (1984), series producers Alexander and Ilya Salkind sold their controlling interests in the IP to the Cannon Group, the schlockmeister studio responsible for the American Ninja, Missing in Action, Breakin’, and Death Wish franchises—not exactly the optimal custodians of a series that had started out, against all expectation, so magnificently.
Richard Donner’s Superman: The Movie (1978) was and remains the finest specimen of superhero cinema ever presented, at once ambitiously epic and emotionally relatable. It pulls off the impossible in so many ways, first and foremost that it absolutely made us a believe a man could fly, which had never been credibly accomplished before. Credit for that goes not only to the VFX team, which won the Academy Award for its efforts, but to Christopher Reeve, who delivered the movie’s most timeless special effect: endowing profound dignity and genuine vulnerability to a spandex-clad demigod. Even the lesser Superman films—and we’ll talk more about those soon enough—are elevated by Reeve’s extraordinary performance, which occupies a lofty position, right alongside Bela Lugosi’s Dracula, in the pantheon of defining interpretations of folkloric icons.
What’s also so remarkable about Superman is how many different tonal aesthetics it assimilates. The opening sequences on Krypton with Marlon Brando feel downright Kubrickian; Donner somehow channels the cosmic splendor of 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), only to then transition us to Smallville, as warm and fertile as Krypton was cold and barren, which evokes the same spirit of sock-hop Americana George Lucas conjured to such success in American Graffiti (1973).
The remainder of the movie shifts fluidly from His Girl Friday–style newsroom comedy (the scenes at the Daily Planet) to urban action thriller à la The French Connection (the seedy streets of 1970s Metropolis) to Roger Moore–era 007 outing (Lex Luthor’s sub–Grand Central lair, complete with comically inept henchmen) to Irwin Allen disaster film (the missile that opens up the San Andreas Fault in the third act and sets off a chain reaction of devastation along the West Coast).
Somehow it coheres into a movie that feels like the best of all worlds rather than a derivative Frankenstein’s monster. Up until that time, superhero features and television, hampered by juvenile subject matter and typically subpar production values, seemed inherently, inexorably campy. The notion that a superhero movie could rise to the level of myth, or at least credibly dramatic science fiction, was unthinkable. Superman is the proof-of-concept paradigm on which our contemporary superhero–industrial complex is predicated.
Alas, the elegant storytelling on display in Superman: The Movie did not last long. With three quarters of the first sequel in the can, Donner was unceremoniously fired, and replacement director Richard Lester was recruited by the Salkinds to hastily finish the movie, which included reshooting pretty much any sequence that didn’t involve Gene Hackman’s Lex Luthor (as Hackman had shot all his scenes for both movies simultaneously, and was under no obligation to return for reshoots). Though wonderfully epic, with Superman facing off against three supervillains from his home world of Krypton, the tonal stability Donner brought to the project—his guiding creative principle was verisimilitude—is undermined by Lester’s slapstick sensibilities.
(Fortunately, Donner was given a chance to rectify this in 2006, when Warner Bros. had him supervise a brand-new edit of the film using primarily the discarded footage he’d shot almost three decades earlier, marketed as Superman II: The Richard Donner Cut. It isn’t a precise representation of the movie he would’ve made had a been able to finish it as intended, as certain key sequences were never filmed, including a new conclusion—since the climax that was meant for Superman II, with Superman turning back time by reversing the rotation of the Earth, was appropriated for the first film on the presumption they’d devise a new ending for the sequel when production resumed under Donner’s direction—but it restores crucial plot points and incorporates unused scenes scripted and shot with Brando, which give the bookending films a much more coherent emotional throughline and appreciably stronger narrative causality.)
If Superman II (1981) bears the competing fingerprints of both Donner and Lester, the standalone Superman III is all Richard Lester: the second sequel is an incongruous (if dubiously effective) mix of slapstick and cynicism, from an ill-conceived script that’s equal parts mediocre comic-book adventure (featuring Robert Vaughn as an off-brand Lex Luthor) and Richard Pryor star vehicle.
I personally found all that in poor taste. I missed Donner tremendously, and what we’d created just two years earlier. I did enjoy the sequence in which Superman has become an evil version of himself and tries to kill Clark Kent in an automobile junkyard. That scene stands alone; I think the rest of Superman III was mostly a misconception.
Christopher Reeve, Still Me (New York: Random House, 1998), 199
I completely concur with that assessment. And yet when I saw Superman III in theaters at seven years old, none of that occurred to me, let alone concerned me. I was just happy to see Superman, personified by the great Christopher Reeve, on the big screen once more. And I was just as happy to see him yet again, at age eleven, in Superman IV:
Menahem Golan and Yoram Globus, the owners of Cannon Films, produced and financed Street Smart on the condition that I play Superman in at least one more sequel. They had bought the rights from Ilya Salkind and his father, Alexander, the financier, over dinner in Cannes the previous May. While we were filming in Montreal, the writers Larry Konner and Mark Rosenthal were busy churning out the script for Superman IV. The premise this time (based largely on input from me, I’m sorry to say) was that Superman would intervene in the nuclear arms race. Superman had been used as a morale booster for the troops in World War II. Now, when President Reagan was referring to the Soviet Union as “the evil empire” and summit talks with Mikhail Gorbachev were at an impasse, I thought the character could be used effectively in the real world once again. Big mistake.
We were also hampered by budget constraints and cutbacks in all departments. Cannon Films had nearly thirty projects in the works at the time, and Superman IV received no special consideration. For example, Konner and Rosenthal wrote a scene in which Superman lands on Forty-second Street and walks down the double yellow lines to the United Nations, where he gives a speech. If that had been a scene in Superman I, we would actually have shot it on Forty-second Street. Dick Donner would have choreographed hundreds of pedestrians and vehicles and cut to people gawking out of office windows at the sight of Superman walking down the street like the Pied Piper. Instead we had to shoot at an industrial park in England in the rain with about a hundred extras, not a car in sight, and a dozen pigeons thrown in for atmosphere. Even if the story had been brilliant, I don’t think that we could ever have lived up to the audience’s expectations with this approach.
ibid., 218
As such, Reeve never again played Superman. (Though Superman II: The Richard Donner Cut did in fact supply us with a final, feature-length, mostly-never-before-seen performance from Reeve as Superman—and Brando as Jor-El—which, I will confess, gave me the same giddy thrill at thirty that The Quest for Peace evoked at eleven. That Reeve and Brando had both passed away only two years prior to the release of the Donner Cut gave the entire experience an otherworldly resonance, as though they’d been resurrected to redeem the franchise itself, which is oddly apropos, given the Christ-image allusions in the Donner films, a theme that is only more apparent—and dramatically fulfilling—in the restored edition of Superman II.)
The series’ precipitous decline in quality—it fell further from grace with each subsequent sequel (including Supergirl), if you’ll pardon the hacky religious analogy—seemed to bottom out with Superman IV. And yet when I rewatched the film in preparation to write this post, I was struck by a number of virtues that have gone all but unacknowledged in the three-and-a-half decades since its release.
First and foremost: It’s not a boring movie. (Which is considerably more than can be said for Superman Returns, Bryan Singer’s morose, spectacularly misguided 2006 homage-cum-sequel to the quartet of Reeve films.) Yes, it’s a low-budget affair with subpar special effects—it plays at about the level of a TV movie from the same era, like the Incredible Hulk and Six Million Dollar Man/Bionic Woman reunion telefilms of the ’80s—but it’s supported by a perfectly serviceable story that allows Reeve and Hackman (returning as the villainous Lex Luthor), neither of whom phone in their performances, to embody their roles to perfection yet again, and face off with note-perfect adversarial dynamism.
To that point, the characterizations are remarkably consistent with the previous installments, in stark contrast with many other superfluous sequels, including the third Star Wars trilogy, Dead Men Tell No Tales (2017), Beverly Hills Cop III (1994), and the latter three Die Hard films. Reeve’s Superman had always been a hero frustrated by his inability, despite his godlike powers, to prevent relatively ordinary instances of misfortune, like the sudden death of his adoptive father on the farm one afternoon, when Jonathan Kent simply dropped dead from a heart attack. It was the tragic death of Lois Lane at the end of the first Superman that prompted him to flip his shit and defy Jor-El’s explicit prohibitions to turn back time, a decision that, after having been summarily ignored in the theatrical version, carries enormous—and irreversible—consequences in Superman II: The Richard Donner Cut.
What Superman IV lacked in budget it more than compensates for in moral imagination, demonstrated in scores of little moments throughout the movie. In the opening sequence, a cosmonaut is stranded in outer space after an accident aboard his station. Rather than portraying these characters as stereotypically humorless and/or hostile “Russkies,” they are established as cheerful and good-humored, and when Superman returns the wayward crewmember to his station, he converses with the cosmonauts in fluent Russian.
Unlike other pro-American action heroes of the era—here’s looking at you, Pete “Maverick” Mitchell, you vintage right-wing G.I. Joe action figure, so egregiously undeserving of the patriotic immunity bestowed upon you by awestruck critics and audiences (too many of them self-identified liberals, at that)—Superman treats these folks not as agents of Gorbachev’s “evil empire,” but as citizens of the world. He shows them kindness and consideration. Imagine that.
Back on Earth, Clark makes arrangements to sell the Kent farm, but turns down a cash offer from a commercial developer, telling his realtor the last thing anyone needs is another shopping center. Aiding the commies and now overtly snubbing capitalism in Nineteen Hundred and Eighty-Seven, in the year of Gordon Gekko? Fuck me running—Superman’s gone socialist! My God—no one tell Dean Cain, else this’ll be the top story on Fox News.
He even gives away his old baseball and mitt to his realtor, a gift to the man’s grandchildren, demonstrating a lack of sentimentality for material objects that can still be useful elsewhere. We should’ve known, based on the spartan set-design of Krypton in the original movie, that the enlightened Kryptonians were minimalists!
After stopping a runaway subway train—carrying Lois Lane, natch—Superman pauses on the platform to assure the riders it “is still the safest and most reliable means of public transportation,” exactly the kind of pro-bureaucracy PSA you’d expect from a car-hating socialist. (This was also an effective way for the screenwriters to acknowledge they’d exploited an improbable scenario for dramatic effect, but that it should not unduly influence the viewer’s perception of real-world public transportation, which—speaking as a citizen of Metropolis myself—absolutely is the best and most reliable way to get around.)
The new owner of the Daily Planet, a Rupert Murdoch–esque media tycoon, explicitly prioritizes profit over social responsibility, and takes steps to rebrand the Planet as a sensationalistic tabloid over the objections of his adult daughter (Mariel Hemingway), who warns that kind of irresponsible journalism could foment disaster. (Spoiler alert: It does.) That particular exchange takes on chilling new resonance in the midst of the January 6 committee’s recent public hearings.
On the subject of Hemingway’s character, it’s awfully sweet that she—unlike Lois and just about everyone else—is taken with Clark, not Superman. Like Annette O’Toole’s Lana Lang in Superman III, she sees him. That he’s a “dorky nice guy” is precisely what she finds so appealing, so heroic. The scene in which Hemingway and Lois have a double date with Clark and Superman—with Reeve whooshing in and out, switching personas with each reappearance—is exactly the right kind of comedic set piece for a Superman story, to offer a little breather between big-action sequences. There is no room for moments of lighthearted humanity like that in Zack Snyder’s Man of Steel (2013), which is far too high on its own endless supply of somber angst to ever let Superman be fun.
Distressed over the U.S. president’s escalation of the arms race, a classroom full of grammar-school students is encouraged by the teacher to write their congressmen. A young boy—who was probably about my age when the film came out—dismisses that suggestion in favor of appealing for help from the only person who can actually do something effective about the crisis: Superman. It’s noteworthy that the screenwriters brought Superman into the arms race at the petition of a child, a point I’ll get back to shortly.
In response to the boy’s pleas, Superman—always a sucker for intervening in earthly affairs easily remedied by his superheroic talents (and once again over the stern admonitions of the holographic Kryptonian elders that humankind should not be encouraged to put their faith in any one man)—vows “to do what our governments have been unwilling or unable to do”: rid the planet of all nuclear weapons. Accordingly, he rounds up the world’s supply of armaments and hurls them into the sun.
Unbeknownst to the Man of Steel, however, Lex Luthor, who has promised to make the world safe for war profits, has stowed a science experiment aboard one of those warheads: a genomic plasmid encoded with Superman’s DNA (extracted from a stolen strand of his hair). Activated by the sun’s radiation, this dish of cells instantaneously matures into a superpowered humanoid called Nuclear Man, who returns to Earth with a straightforward mission: Destroy Superman!
In creating Nuclear Man, the screenwriters return Lex Luthor to the purest version of himself: the “mad scientist” archetype as he was portrayed for the first several decades of his pulp-magazine existence, before morphing into more of a business executive–cum–crime boss in Reagan’s pro-corporate America. Lex even includes a scrap of fabric in the container with his genetically engineered protoplasm, which he explains to teen sidekick Jon Cryer will be augmented by the computer “to maintain the high moral standards that I’ve always subscribed to.” Hey—at least a silly explanation for Nuclear Man’s comic-book outfit came couched in a pretty good joke, proving the filmmakers were consciously working within the realm of “superhero logic.”
Nuclear Man emerges from the sun fully formed—and fully clothed in his self-creating costume just as Lex predicted!—and challenges Superman to a clash of the titans straight out of a Saturday-morning cartoon: They tumble into an arm-in-arm freefall over the Empire State Building! They duke it out in space before taking the fight to the Great Wall of China! Nuclear Man triggers a volcanic eruption that threatens to wipe out a provincial Italian village! He drops the Statue of Liberty out of the sky into Midtown Metropolis! The movie’s climactic slugfest occurs on the surface of the moon, before Superman conclusively disposes of Nuclear Man in the reactor core of a power plant!
If you were a devoted reader of Action Comics in the 1980s—and I was—this is precisely the kind of set piece–centric plotting you expected and received in exchange for your sofa-scrounged seventy-five cents. True, the mythopoeic grandeur of the Donner films was a distant memory by this point, but it had been replaced in Superman IV by a pulpy, cartoonish, low-rent sensibility that was very much in keeping with the juvenile spirit of the source material, hard as that may be for some adult fanboys to confront. I daresay Superman IV might even be the most “comic-booky” superhero movie ever produced.
What I’m about to say is criminally punishable sacrilege, especially for a Gen Xer, but comic books have always been, with exceedingly rare exception, crap: ephemeral entertainment whose particular storytelling restrictions often inspired visually inventive illustrations in support of necessarily formulaic plotting in order to meet the publishing schedule of a new 22-page issue every month. Accordingly, emotional depth, logistical believability, and thematic complexity were not creative criteria for comic books.
While it is absolutely true that my generation elevated storylines like “The Dark Phoenix Saga” and “A Death in the Family” and “The Death and Return of Superman” to Essential American Literature, I encourage any pro-comic dissenters to go back, as I have in the past few years, and give those “classics” a sober reread. They are, each of them, improvisationally plotted, logically nonsensical, psychologically shallow, and loaded with clichéd dialogue—balloon after balloon after balloon of it—that expresses the same Are you following all this? exposition and one-note emotional reactions again and again and again and again.
Like I said: crap. But not necessarily bad crap, same as Superman IV isn’t necessarily, despite its cultural reputation, bad crap. (Top Gun, by contrast, is decidedly bad crap.) Back then, superhero stories were speaking to a very specific audience for a very specific purpose, though unequivocally not the same audience or purpose as they do today:
[Superheroes] don’t mean what they used to mean. They were originally in the hands of writers who would actively expand the imagination of their nine- to 13-year-old audience. That was completely what they were meant to do and they were doing it excellently. These days, superhero comics think the audience is certainly not nine to 13, it’s nothing to do with them. It’s an audience largely of 30-, 40-, 50-, 60-year old men, usually men. Someone came up with the term graphic novel. These readers latched on to it; they were simply interested in a way that could validate their continued love of Green Lantern or Spider-Man without appearing in some way emotionally subnormal. This is a significant rump of the superhero-addicted, mainstream-addicted audience. I don’t think the superhero stands for anything good. I think it’s a rather alarming sign if we’ve got audiences of adults going to see the Avengers movie and delighting in concepts and characters meant to entertain the 12-year-old boys of the 1950s.
Stuart Kelly, “Alan Moore: ‘Why shouldn’t you have a bit of fun while dealing with the deepest issues of the mind?’,” The Guardian, November 22, 2013
Alan Moore, author of the celebrated two-issue Superman story arc “Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow?” and the superhero-deconstructionist masterpiece Watchmen (both 1986), is right. Comics and superheroes served a purpose once upon a time, but it wasn’t to amuse commercially infantilized adults. As a kid, I used to watch syndicated reruns of the animated Aquaman series from the late ’60s, which is what first got me interested in the oceanic ecosystem—the wondrous kingdom of life that exists beneath the waves. I’d bring my Aquaman action figure into the community pool with me, and make up stories about his deep-sea adventures. But that was long before hacks like Gen-X geek god and morally deficient filmmaker James Gunn turned the character into a profane jerk made to defend himself against implicitly credible accusations of—how’s this for hilarious?—copulation with fish. Yup.
Hell, two years after Superman IV, we got Tim Burton’s Batman, which fortified the permanent rebranding of Bob Kane’s character from the Caped Crusader I’d adored as a young boy—the senior half of the Dynamic Duo who’d race into Gotham at the first sign of trouble, Robin riding shotgun (“To the Batmobile!”)—to the Dark Knight I abhor as a grown man: the grim, humorless, solitary, self-righteous grievance collector he remains to this day, thanks to vomitously cynical writer/artist/filmmaker Frank Miller, whose fascist vigilante fantasies have influenced every iteration of Batman since, even and especially those by ostensibly liberal writers and filmmakers like Christopher Nolan and Matt Reeves. This is what happens when superheroes are brought into the adult world, which is where they exist nigh exclusively these days. It’s a shame. It’s our shame.
So, when I look at Superman IV, made exactly at the moment the readership demographic—and raison d’être—for superheroes began to shift, I see a film that knows just what it’s about and who it’s for. Christopher Reeve was absolutely correct when he observed that the cheapie production values and half-assed special effects didn’t meet the standards of the series or ambitions for the material, but I submit he was being unfair—to the movie and to himself, as one of the project’s key creative contributors (he receives a “story by” credit)—when he criticized the attempt to use Superman to address, however simplistically, real-world geopolitics. Consider Superman’s closing statement at a press conference outside the Daily Planet—yet another lesson for the Man of Steel in humility—delivered by Reeve with the same solemnity you’d expect an actor of his caliber to invest in a Shakespearean soliloquy:
I thought I could give you all the gift of the freedom from war. But… I was wrong. It’s not mine to give. We’re still a young planet. There are galaxies out there—other civilizations for us to meet, to learn from. What a brilliant future we could have. And there will be peace—there will be peace when the people of the world want it so badly that their governments will have no choice but to give it to them. [Sighs] I just wish you could all see the Earth the way I see it. ’Cause when you really look at it, it’s just one world.
From Superman IV: The Quest for Peace, screenplay by Lawrence Konner and Mark Rosenthal
It’s worth noting here that this scene was scripted (and shot) to be immediately followed by a coda in which Superman arrives in the hometown of the schoolboy who’d guilelessly issued the story’s call to action, and takes him on flight above the atmosphere to see the world from a bird’s-eye view for himself. The boy wasn’t intended to be merely a narrative herald; he is in fact the target audience’s surrogate.
Superman IV is the kind of comic-book movie that would never be made today, for better and definitely for worse: one meant to appeal strictly to indiscriminate eleven-year-olds, the moral of which—oversimplified though in no way wrongheaded—is that messianic saviors can’t solve the ills of society; for that, our best hope is a collective of legendarily powerful beings known as engaged citizens.
For this reason, it’s absolutely staggering to me when I see the sheer amount of intellectual energy expended and digital ink spilled on meaningless shit like What If…? and Superman & Lois and Obi-Wan Kenobi—mining for Easter eggs and reconciling continuity inconsistences and debating what may or may not be “canon,” an exercise in forensic fandom that seems far more insidious than the mere “colossal waste of time” it was (humorously but not inaccurately) deemed to be by William Shatner in 1986.
In light of the advancing assaults on democracy and reproductive rights, to say nothing of the ever-more-imminent existential threats posed by climate change, that any grown adult would give anything more than a passing fuck—if even that—to whether Doctor Doom might appear in Black Panther: Wakanda Forever or if Henry Cavill will be announcing Man of Steel 2 at San Diego Comic-Con this weekend is disquieting, if not downright dispiriting. As Alan Moore put it:
To my mind, this embracing of what were unambiguously children’s characters at their mid-20th century inception seems to indicate a retreat from the admittedly overwhelming complexities of modern existence. It looks to me very much like a significant section of the public, having given up on attempting to understand the reality they are actually living in, have instead reasoned that they might at least be able to comprehend the sprawling, meaningless, but at-least-still-finite ‘universes’ presented by DC or Marvel Comics.
Pádraig Ó Méalóid AKA Slovobooks; “Last Alan Moore Interview?,” blog entry by Pádraig Ó Méalóid, January 9, 2014
From that perspective, Superman IV doesn’t represent an ignoble end to the Salkind series so much as a fitting one: Reeve’s Superman used his final cinematic opportunity to tell his preadolescent audience, “These stories were about inspiring your sense of the possible, and encouraging you to be a compassionate person who at least tries to do the right thing, even and especially when it’s hard. To care about the world, and to always do your best. Take those lessons with you now into adolescence and then adulthood.”
That’s what we were meant to do: take the lessons forward, but leave the superheroes behind. But we badly got the order reversed. And when I think about that middle-aged man at the bar in Doubleday’s all those years ago, who graciously gave me the Quest for Peace advertisement—the kiddie stuff—because the parts of the paper that concerned him had to do with the actual quests for peace, it seems to me he understood there was an audience for superhero stories, and he wasn’t it. I suppose if I could revise my answer to his question, with the benefit of thirty-five years’ hindsight, I would say: “Superman IV is not amazing. But it sure as hell was a special privilege to not know any better at the time.”
Next month, we’ll talk a bit more about the Kryptonian virtue of minimalism, and how it’s depicted in the HBO Max miniseries The Girl Before.
Enjoyed this. I’ll have to revisit Superman I. I grew up addicted to the TV series starring George Reeves. 🙂
There are three versions of Superman: The Movie available, Dana. There’s the 1978 theatrical cut (at 143 minutes), the 2000 special edition (151 minutes), and the three-hour TV version (188 minutes). The “extended television cut” of the movie is to be avoided at all costs. Tons of rightly excised material was greedily cut back into the film, over Donner’s objections, in order to make it a “special television event.”
What I would suggest you do is get a copy of the 2000 special edition (approved by director Dick Donner), and make it a double bill with Superman II: The Richard Donner Cut from 2006. Watch them back-to-back, and you will see that it’s really a single story arc told across two feature films. (The Donner Cut of II is not perfect, as Donner himself readily admitted, but it’s a vastly superior alternative to the theatrical version.) If you can’t find the 2000 special edition, the 1978 theatrical version of Superman: The Movie will suffice. Do that if you can: Watch the special edition of Superman followed by the Donner cut of Superman II. It’s mythic stuff!
Like you, sir, my mother loved the George Reeves series, too, and I watched the syndicated reruns of it on local TV as a kid at her suggestion. I think she delighted in taking me to see the Christopher Reeve films — the first live-action movie I recall seeing in theaters was Superman II — because it became a way for her to “pass down” the character from her generation to mine. (She took me to see all three sequels as well as Supergirl.) But that was before adults had even thought of — let alone institutionalized — the possessive hoarding of those characters, children be damned. Now grown adults excitedly go to see Justice League and The Batman — and leave their children at home! But I just don’t know how we put the toothpaste back in the tube at this point; I don’t think the cultural reputation of superheroes can be reformed or redeemed. I’m just grateful I knew them when they were still innocent. Superheroes were really wonderful once. Thanks for reminiscing with me, Dana!
Very interesting take on this Superman–and you’re probably right. I just missed all of that, got caught up in a feel good story (I didn’t dislike Russians then–actually studied the country and culture in college, visited it for a summer). I used to go to all the Marvel and DC Comics movies. Now they’re too depressing. Sigh.
I also find today’s superhero movies depressing, Jacqui, though I think that’s actually an aesthetic choice — one fans and filmmakers (unironically) call “grimdark”! The superfans of these franchises are (largely though not exclusively) miserable people, who want their superheroes to be as miserable as they are. Mission accomplished.
You got to visit/study Russia in college, eh? I’m envious. Having come of age in the waning years of the Cold War, when virtually all of our action-movie villains were “commies,” Superman IV is to be commended for refusing to buck to that trend. It’s not a great movie, for all the reasons I outlined above, but there is an innocent and guileless spirit of joy to The Quest for Peace I find charming and, in light of recent Superman movies, even refreshing. Its heart was in the right place, and that’s worth acknowledging — even celebrating a bit.
Thanks for reading and commenting, Jacqui. Hope you are enjoying your summer thus far.
I can forgive a lot about these early entries–because they were at a time where the genre was relatively new and special fx were limited compared to today–but I can’t forgive Batman Vs. Superman and its ridiculously long fight sequences (what is the point of having two people who can’t kill each other fight for the majority of the film) and the ridiculous deus ex machina (which really wasn’t one at all for anyone who knew anything about the characters) that their mothers had the same name, and THAT’S what makes them stop fighting? Jeez. Talk about dreck. Sorry for the rant, lol. It just seems like lately, all these movies are just one long excuse for fight sequences and that bores me to tears!
I should probably state for the record, Suzanne, I have never seen Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice (either the theatrical release or R-rated “ultimate edition”), but I have read all about it — including that oft-mocked “Martha” plot point. In the 1970s, DC published a bunch of oversized comics with pulpy titles — you may very well remember them! — like Superman vs. The Flash: The Greatest Race of All Time! (1976), Superman vs. Muhammad Ali (1978), and even the Marvel crossover Superman vs. The Amazing Spider-Man: The Battle of the Century (1976). These were pure dime-fiction ephemera, explicitly designed to appeal to an exclusively juvenile readership, not cater to the violent yearnings of developmentally stunted manboys.
Superman: The Movie and Superman II (particularly if you watch the special edition of the former and Donner cut of the latter, as I advised Dana above) tell a really good story that spans a wide spectrum of human emotion; they’re not trying to bludgeon the audience into submission with nonstop superhero spectacle. Comic-book movies might be appreciably darker these days, but that doesn’t make them commensurately deeper. Oddly, as the audience for comic books (and comic-book movies) has gotten older, the stories themselves have only gotten more emotionally/psychologically shallow. How could they not? They were only ever intended to be simple morality tales for children, whereas now they serve as vicarious wish-fulfilment fantasies for adults. To echo Alan Moore’s sentiment, I think it’s a very sobering thing when we have hundreds of thousands of grown adults showing up to Comic-Con, many in costume, and champing at the bit to hear the latest bit of news about the MCU or the “Snyderverse” or what have you.
And for the record: You never need to apologize for ranting here on my blog! I refer, rather generously, to the hundred-plus posts on this site as “essays,” but I think they could be more accurately classified as “rants”! Rant along with us, wherever you are out there!
Interesting that you say the Donner cut is better, and on Twitter you tweeted about an article about the Snyder cut of Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice
BTW I saw BvS:DoJ. That line about “Martha” was just about the only thing I liked! It was also just about the only thing true to the spirit of the original comics
BTBTW, I wanna rant about Miller’s Dark Knight! There’s a dramatic moment where Batman calls out Superman, saying “‘Yes’—you always say yes—to anyone with a badge—or a flag.” Yeah, but it’s BATMAN the cops could summon w/ the Bat-Signal or the Bat-Phone
And Bats makes a big deal about him, no powers, nearly beating Superman. Except many of Supes’ enemies, including LEX LUTHOR, are unpowered humans. I believe more than once Supes only survived because Batman saved him
Okay, but here’s the part that pisses me off. Seriously, I’m getting angry as I type this. At one point Batman’s followers mutilate a clerk who was robbed, because the clerk did not fight back against the robbers. This is presented as though the followers did the right thing! I worked at a convenience store. STORE POLICY is to cooperate w/ the robber; you don’t have to get killed protecting about forty bucks or so, money that’s insured anyway!
Has Miller ever been threatened w/ violence and robbed while working a register? Because I have! At that same convenience store. The robbers, who were… let’ say… not the swiftest bunnies in the burrow, were regular customers and didn’t wear masks, I knew who they were and the cops recognized them from the surveillance tape (the cops were familiar w/ them), and they were arrested w/in the hour
How would that have gone better if I’d fought back and got myself killed?
Oh, boy, Dell — have you gone and opened a can of worms!
You probably know a lot of this already, but I’ll explain it here for the general record: The original two Superman movies were scripted and shot as a single production, but scheduling/budgeting overruns compelled the filmmakers to necessarily cease shooting any further footage for the second movie — at that point, they still needed to film the supervillains’ arrival in the Midwest, the Niagra Falls sequence, and the battle royale in Downtown Metropolis — and concentrate exclusively on finishing the first movie, reasoning that if it was a hit, they would have the money and muscle to resume production on II. Back-to-back sequels, though a customary Hollywood practice later (Back to the Future, The Matrix, Pirates of the Caribbean, The Lord of the Rings) were far less common at the time, and I think the Salkinds realized they’d perhaps bitten off more than they could chew, and the immediate priority needed to be the first movie.
Though superficially the histories behind the Donner cut of Superman II and the Snyder cut of Justice League seem similar, a closer examination illumines several key differences. BvS severely underperformed at the box office and was received quite poorly, at least initially, by mainstream critics, general audiences, and even the hardcore fan base, the latter of which subsequently zealously championed the #RestoreTheSnyderCut campaign after the release of Joss Whedon’s Justice League.
(Superfans seem to have notoriously short memories: They also forgot they’d hated Hayden Christenson as Anakin Skywalker before they were beside themselves when he appeared in Obi-Wan Kenobi. They’d despised The Phantom Menace, the movie that “ruined their childhoods,” and yet exhibited only masturbatory nostalgia last month when Liam Neeson surprise-cameoed in Obi-Wan as Qui-Gon Jinn. They also wrote off Andrew Garfield’s Spider-Man as “the worst” before he returned in No Way Home, at which point they celebrated his “cinematic redemption.” And they hated Brandon Routh’s Superman until he reprised the role for the Crisis on Infinite Earths crossover, which inspired squeals of delight. Such is the power of the nostalgia–industrial complex: It makes us nostalgic for things we didn’t even like the first time around. Christ almighty, I bet if the producers of the upcoming Flash movie had the multiverse-traversing Flash cross paths with Nuclear Man, reprised by Mark Pillow, there’d be cheers of joy at Comic-Con! It’s not at all a stretch to envision such a pathetic scenario. Anyway, I digress.)
When Warner Bros. saw that Snyder was doubling down on the same grimdark aesthetic that had yielded such unfavorable results for and responses to BvS, they fired his ass from Justice League and tried with feverish desperation to salvage the project — and the DCEU itself — by bringing in Whedon, who’d made magic out of The Avengers for Marvel. Alas, lightning did not strike twice.
At this point, the demented fan base convinced itself there was a “perfect version” of JL sitting in a vault that they’d been denied the pleasure of seeing (there wasn’t, it turned out), and if only they could get #JusticeForZackSnyder, all would be right in the world. Snyder, it would seem — per this damning report that appeared in Rolling Stone last week — tyrannically weaponized his fan base against the studio, and is alleged to have personally funded the bullying tactics that allowed him to finally finish his version of Justice League. Alas, it wasn’t really at all surprising to learn that the same spirit of cynicism that animates contemporary superhero movies — kiddie entertainment repurposed for adults — underpinned the exceedingly ugly campaign to #ReleaseTheSnyderCut.
Now let’s look at the story of Superman II: The Richard Donner Cut. It’s essential to bear in mind that Superman was not produced by a studio; the Salkinds financed it, and Warner Bros. merely distributed it. With Superman, the Salkinds were sitting on an IP that they knew had value, they just didn’t know what to do with it. They were looking for a filmmaker to impose a vision on the project, which is exactly what Donner did. (This is something we talked about re: Masters of the Universe in the comments section of “Grounded and Elevated,” if you recall.)
Unlike BvS, Superman: The Movie was an enormous hit, both critically and commercially. But rather than valuing the elements that made that unlikely success possible — namely Donner — the Salkinds felt empowered to fire Donner and take creative control of the franchise, reasoning that now that they had an established hit, what did they need Donner for? Donner had provided the road map they’d needed, but now that they had it, he could go fuck himself.
And not just him: Marlon Brando, too. Rather than pay Brando his percentage of the profits from the sequel, they cut Jor-El’s role from the film, and reshot those scenes with Susannah York at a greatly discounted cost. Brando had been cast in the first movie, after all, to lend it credibility — he receives top billing — but that was no longer necessary now that Superman was a bona fide hit in its own right. (And once they brought Richard Lester in, naturally he was going to want to impose his own ideas — his own ego — on the project, bringing it further and further from the movie as it had originally been envisioned: not a sequel so much as a second part of a continuous story arc.) Obviously, the Salkinds’ short-sighted thinking incrementally killed that franchise, one second-rate sequel at a time.
Anyway, the Salkinds sold their interest in the IP in the mid-eighties — by that point Donner had moved on to the enormously successful Lethal Weapon series for Warners — and the rights to Superman were eventually acquired by Warner Bros., who controls them, and all the DC Comics properties, to this day. In 2000, Donner oversaw the restoration of Superman: The Movie for the DVD release, which entailed sifting through miles of old footage (including stuff shot for II), and a few years after that, Christopher Reeve died, and there was a lot of talk about maybe finally releasing the “Donner cut” of Superman II — which didn’t actually exist; there was only archived footage from a movie that was never completed. Donner himself was openly skeptical about it, because he’d never even finished making the movie, and there was no opportunity to do that now, with all of the cast either aged-out or deceased. Could he really assemble a coherent movie out of only a partially filmed screenplay?
And then Superman Returns happened. Because that movie is set in the same continuity as the Reeve films, director Bryan Singer had Warner Bros. make the legal and/or financial arrangements necessary with the Brando and Salkind estates to use audiovisual material of Jor-El from Superman: The Movie in Superman Returns. All of a sudden, a key piece of the Donner version of Superman II — the off-limits Brando footage — was now available to use for the first time! It may be a shitty movie, but it’s only because of Superman Returns that we have Superman II: The Richard Donner Cut at all.
Accordingly, the Donner Cut features discarded footage he shot in 1977, reedited footage Richard Lester shot for Superman II (used in order to preserve narrative continuity), and even some screen-test footage of an absolutely crucial scene Donner never got the chance to film, but that could nonetheless be recreated, however crudely, using Reeve and Kidder’s casting tapes. So, the resulting movie isn’t a finished film, per se, merely a rough-edged representation of the film Donner would’ve made had he been able to complete it as intended. It’s more of a glimpse into an alternate universe than a finished product unto itself, but it is so worth seeing.
For those reasons, Superman II: The Richard Donner Cut is more like a genuine cinematic artifact — a “lost movie,” if you like, like Orson Welles’ Don Quixote or, say, Sean Carlin’s Lost Boys II(!) — than Zack Snyder’s Justice League, which is the ego-animated hellspawn of a deeply cynical (and dubiously talented) filmmaker and his radioactively toxic (and petulantly entitled) fan base. (Over two decades ago, when we were both still in advertising, I worked directly with Deborah Snyder for several years; she produced corporate videos and TV spots that I cut. She is in no way qualified to be producing major motion pictures, and she certainly shouldn’t be producing her husband’s movies. A filmmaker needs a good producer the same way an author needs a good editor: to push back, on occasion, against some of their worst instincts. Zack’s wife does not do that.)
With all that said, let me amend my earlier statement: The Donner Cut isn’t necessarily better than the theatrical version, it merely represents what would’ve been a better movie than what was released had it been completed as originally conceived. As a student of cinema and of storytelling, I find the Donner Cut intellectually fascinating, and as a Superman fan, I find it emotionally affecting. There really aren’t many other examples — possibly none — of a director being given an opportunity to finish, to the extent that was possible, a movie he’d started decades earlier. The Donner Cut isn’t like Apocalypse Now Redux or The Godfather Coda: The Death of Michael Corleone or Blade Runner: The Final Cut or the Star Wars special editions; those films were all completed and released by the filmmakers who’d initiated them, and only much later did they go back and make revisions. The Donner Cut is a very different beast — a new film by a different director, incorporating some of the footage seen in the theatrical cut. In that sense, I guess it’s the one thing (besides the character of Superman) the Snyder Cut has in common with the Donner Cut. But that’s it.
Given how lengthy this reply already is, I won’t go on about Frank Miller, other than to say I echo every sentiment you express above, Dell. I talked in “In the Multiverse of Madness” about how I was still reading and collecting comics years after I’d stopped enjoying them. If I could point to a single thing that shocked me out of my hypnotic trance — that finally made me “see the light,” as it were — it would be Miller’s All-Star Batman & Robin, the Boy Wonder. I remember reading that comic when it was released — because I always read Batman — and thinking for the first time in my life that I absolutely hated a comic book. Hated it. And while few comics are as hateful as All-Star Batman & Robin, I slowly began to accept that I had just outgrown all that crap, and I began the process of learning to let it all go. So, immoral asshole though he may be, I guess I have Miller to thank for that!
And if you’ve never read it, check out Fred Van Lente’s essential blog post “DARK KNIGHT RETURNS: A Storytelling Landmark — Whose Cracks Show 35 Years Later.” I think you’ll find it cathartic.
Gotta mention this line:
>the idea that Batman could exist in the real world without racking up a massive bodycount is, literally, childish
Yeah, the WHOLE IDEA of superheroes is childish! That’s the point!
Okay. Moore did a decent job of looking at superheroes “realistically”, but he still accepted the basic tenets. He did not try to use realism to spoil the fun. Snyder did
>I bet if the producers of the upcoming Flash movie had the multiverse-traversing Flash cross paths with Nuclear Man, reprised by Mark Pillow, there’d be cheers of joy at Comic-Con!
You also betting that water is wet and fire is hot? ‘Cause those bets are just about as risky…
One thing I wanna say
https://m.facebook.com/bizarrocomics/photos/1548950485137999/
This cartoon is funny, because Batman looks so out of place in the old West. But, as you argued, he doesn’t really look right in modern times, except that we accept it. This was a major part of the fun of Batman ’66, Batman being serious and dignified in that ridiculous costume. As I said, the more realistic they get, the sillier the effect
This actually relates to that post I’d linked to a while back: Batman in the Operating Room. Superheroes work as melodrama or satire, usually. Snyder desperately wants them to be drama, but all he does is to put Batman in that operating room
This reply is longer than I’d meant it to be. You’re contagious!
Exactly, Dell: With Watchmen, Moore presented an indisputably “comic-booky” world — he wasn’t going for realism — he just reframed superheroes themselves as sociopathic rather than heroic. He was basically saying, “If you insist on making superhero stories for adults — with themes and content inappropriate for younger readers — then you have to face the inconvenient truth those ‘mature’ treatments lay bare: that anyone who would moonlight as a costumed vigilante would not be a virtuous or well-adjusted person. More likely, they would be egocentric, narcissistic, sociopathic, psychopathic, authoritarian, fascist, violent, emotionally damaged, or criminally insane — or any toxic combination thereof.”
Basically, by trying to take this stuff seriously, you’re inadvertently exposing how conceptually and inexorably silly it all is! Which isn’t an inherently bad thing — silly and juvenile stories are great! — but when you treat Super Friends like mythic drama, as Snyder does in Justice League, it leaves us in this very weirdly incongruous place where we’ve got a bunch of brooding characters in Halloween costumes. Which is precisely what Watchmen was! One cannot argue straight-faced that Moore intended for us to take, say, Nite Owl, who was never anything more than an off-brand Batman, seriously as a superheroic character.
Moore’s Watchmen — certainly not Snyder’s, which is faithful to the style of the source material, sure, but not its soul — was an impassioned case against what Frank Miller was pursuing at that same moment with The Dark Knight Returns: bringing superheroes into the adult world. Frustratingly, though, those works became seen by the fandom as companion pieces rather than antithetical manifestos. I’ve said before that Watchmen might very well be the most misunderstood/misinterpreted piece of fiction in the entire 20th-century American literary canon.
But in the three-and-a-half decades since Watchmen and Dark Knight and The Killing Joke (which Moore wrote years before it was published and immediately disavowed) and A Death in the Family marked the point of no return for superheroes, we’ve actually completely forgotten — as a culture, I mean — that these were ever children’s stories in the first place! Case in point: A mainstream film critic (Owen Gleiberman) in a mainstream entertainment publication (Variety) just two days ago wrote an article actually titled “‘DC League of Super-Pets’ Review: Why Shouldn’t a Superhero Film Be a Kiddie Cartoon? That’s What Most Superhero Films Are Anyway.” Here’s an excerpt:
Gleiberman spends half the review assuring his readership that the very idea of a superhero movie for children is conceptually precedented, and not nearly as novel as they might think! We’ve officially reached the point where that’s something that needs to be explicitly stipulated these days: Superheroes — they’re not just for adults anymore!
I know I use borderline-pretentious terms like “superhero–industrial complex” a lot on this blog, but that’s only because it is worth remembering that there is an entire generation — Gen Z — that grew up in a world in which 90% of their entertainment options were these billion-dollar, intertextual superhero franchises. They have no memory or concept of a reality in which adults weren’t the audience for — and in some cases, the most rabid audience for — comic-book movies. They have no idea that adults used to crave thoughtful dramas (like Jerry Maguire) and avant-garde indies (like Pulp Fiction) and even intelligent action movies geared toward mature sensibilities (like The Fugitive and In the Line of Fire). They know none of that.
Anyway, I’ll stop here before I accidently produce an independent blog post! (If it isn’t already too late, that is.) I don’t know, my man, there’s something about this blog that inspires looooong responses. My wife told me years ago I should change the tagline of the site from “Writer of Things That Go Bump in the Night” to “Highly Academic Discussions about Really Dumb Shit”! But I do appreciate that you always engage me so passionately in those conversations!
Great analysis and take as usual. I agree that perhaps the enthusiasm and fandoms some adults have for the Superhero movies are rooted in a retreat from difficulties of modern existence. It’s fine to appreciate any sort of film for its merits or message, but not get too wrapped in who may cameo in what film, etc. There’s way too much going on for any adult to care way too much about these sort of films.
Thanks, AB! I spent a few years on this blog exploring that question — Why is it so many grown adults, particularly those born in the 1970s, are so psychoneurotically addicted to superhero “universes”? — in a series of essays. I think I more or less cracked the code in last year’s two-part post entitled “In the Multiverse of Madness: How Media Mega-Franchises Make Us Their Obedient Servants.” The first installment outlines the three engagement strategies the mega-franchises use to keep us watching/purchasing each new product; the second installment explores the ways in which Generation X was targeted in the 1980s by a deliberate campaign to condition us to exist in a perpetual state of “commercial adolescence.” My hope is that once we realize how we’ve been made “hostage buyers” of all this crap, we’ll be empowered to let this stuff go — presuming that’s what we wish.
I was once someone who thought I’d subscribed to those media franchises for life, and very much felt the pressure to keep up with each new offering. But since learning to let go of all but the Star Wars movies that mean something to me (the original trilogy), the Indiana Jones movies that mean something to me (the original trilogy and the television series), the Ghostbusters movies that mean something to me (the two Ivan Reitman films), the Scream movies that mean something to me (just the first one), and so forth, I’ve actually reconnected in a very powerful way to what I’d enjoyed about those things all those years ago. Now that I no longer have to keep up with Batman, I can look at the Adam West show, and aspects of the first three movies (Batman ’89, Batman Returns, and Batman Forever), and say, “That’s Batman as far as I’m concerned.” I don’t need a thousand more iterations of him for the rest of my living days…
I can do the same now for Superman and James Bond and Buffy (I really only have fondness for the original 1992 movie — the one everyone else hated — and the rest of that franchise can go fuck itself): I keep the ones that actually mean something to me close to my heart, and I no longer keep up with those interminable franchises. I’ve let them go. And by doing that, I was able to reappraise movies in those franchises I’d been taught as a “true fan” I had to hate — like Superman IV and Batman Forever and the Buffy feature film and the Pierce Brosnan 007 movies — and say, “You know what? I’m not going to insist any of those are good movies. They aren’t. But they have meaning to me (mostly because of the time in my life with which I associate them). They’re ‘canonical’… to me. The rest of it is free to belong to anyone else who wants it.”
Once I’d learned to do that, I’d been liberated from the Multiverse of Madness. And I’ve never been happier.
Did you mention Dean Cain because he played Superman in Lois & Clark: The New Adventures of Superman?
Just looking at the pics of Reeve as Superman and as Clark… Those are two different people!
Yes, call the Dean Cain reference an Easter egg, if you like!
Christopher Reeve, in his brilliance, somehow makes those two personas seem like different people altogether. He allows you to suspend your disbelief and say, “Yeah, I can see how Lois and Jimmy, et al., wouldn’t put two and two together on that.” Maybe fifteen years ago, my wife screened Bringing Up Baby for our young niece — we were trying to expose her to all manner of cinema — and I’m sitting there watching Cary Grant’s performance as David Huxley when I go, “Holy shit — he’s Clark Kent!” It seemed so apparent that Reeve looked to Grant in Bringing Up Baby as the model for his Clark Kent. (Wikipedia confirms this… for however much faith you want to put in that.) Reeve was so brilliant, because he really gave those two characters different ways of speaking, of walking, of holding themselves upright. He makes them two different people. It’s the richest interpretation of Superman in any medium.
The whole “glasses disguise” worked in a 1940s comic book because of the limitation of facial detail on the printed page, but like so much about comic-book logic, it becomes questionable (if not laughable) when it’s brought into the real world. But that’s why I called Reeve’s performance the movie’s “most timeless special effect”: He made you believe this shit. Him. That performance is just the gold standard. Dean Cain, by comparison, offered zero contrast whatsoever between his Clark and Superman. Neither of ’em, for that matter, even had a personality to differentiate one from the other! Brandon Routh wasn’t much better, quite frankly, and neither — here comes the sound of the convention hall at SDCC exploding in outrage — is Henry Cavill. (And Kate Bosworth and Amy Adams were appallingly bad Lois Lanes, though in fairness to them both, they were saddled with piss-poor characterizations on the page.)
We’ve discussed superhero films quite a bit, but what struck me about this piece was your mention of “The Dark Phoenix Saga” etc. You’re absolutely correct—the sheer amount of exposition and on-the-nose dialogue in those storylines is overwhelming. It makes for quite a slog when reading. Maybe that’s the reason why the Phoenix Saga has never been done “right” on screen—the whole thing is just too ludicrous?
Even in modern comics, writers often fall into expository dialogue, which is strange because it is such a visual medium.
During the six-month period in which I was getting ready to move from Los Angeles to New York, I was reading through a lot of books I owned “one last time,” with the intention of donating them to the LAPL before I left. There was just a lot of stuff I didn’t want to drag with me across the country, into my new home — into my future, quite frankly. One of those books, Jeff, was a trade-paperback edition of “The Dark Phoenix Saga.” I figured it would take me a day, maybe two, to read, so I might as well give it one last whirl before I parted with it forever.
I made it — painfully — to some point in the second issue (of ten in the collection) before I could no longer continue punishing myself. It was that bad. Mind-numbingly unreadable. Just capital-C Crap. I couldn’t figure out what I had ever responded to in that story! (I felt the same when I reread “Crisis on Infinite Earths,” “Knightfall,” “The Death and Return of Superman,” and “A Death in the Family.” The first three are stupid but harmless, but rereading “Death in the Family” — which I’d obsessed over as a kid — I was slackjawed over what a trashy, cynical, hateful piece of shit it is. I promptly — and happily — ridded myself of all five of those books.)
I suppose “Dark Phoenix,” like “Death of Superman,” was driven less by elegant plotting than it was propulsion, with the month-to-month-to-month momentum pushing the “story,” such as it is, along to the next turn of events before you think too hard about the last narrative development. It was pure cliffhanger entertainment for indiscriminate readers, meant to be experienced in monthly installments: The more incrementally you read these sagas, in fact, the more enjoyable they were… because Great Caesar’s Ghost! they do not withstand so much as a modicum of critical scrutiny when reviewed in their totalities.
To my view, these cherished comics are emblematic of the difference between a story we fondly remember versus one that is actually good. And I suspect you are on to something, Jeff, when you say that when those Gen X fanboys grew up and turned “Dark Phoenix” into a feature film — more than once, always unsuccessfully — it just laid bare everything that was fundamentally ludicrous about it. We’d elevated that saga to the level of American myth over a period of 40 years, but it was only ever pulp ephemera, meant to be read and almost immediately forgotten way the hell back in 1980.
To that point, I’ve got friends (contemporaries) who still talk about the 1986 Transformers animated movie like it’s Citizen fucking Kane; I watched it again recently, and it is nothing more than a nakedly cynical, 90-minute toy commercial! But for a generation of guys my age, who unironically “wax poetic about how back in our day, Hollywood knew how to make a real movie about giant, alien robot warriors,” it carries all the dramatic weight of The Godfather. As story consultant Flint Dille himself said about The Transformers: The Movie on the Blu-ray documentary Til All Are One: Looking Back at Transformers the Movie:
He’s right. There was something about that moment in time — something I explored in “In the Multiverse of Madness” — that inspired the ten-year-old boys of the 1980s to pledge lifelong devotion to all of their childhood movies, cartoons, comics, and videogames, à la the pathetically brainwashed protagonist of Ready Player One. It’s an idiopathic phenomenon I find absolutely, endlessly fascinating. You might even say I’m as obsessed with it as some of my friends are obsessed with The Transformers! Maybe I’m the unhealthy one, after all!
Just found this
Thought you’d be… amused
https://blog.pricecharting.com/2022/07/300-increase-in-boob-size-on-comic-book.html
Definitely amused… though not at all surprised. If you ever needed evidence that comics have incrementally shifted their target audience from preadolescent boys to developmentally stunted men, that article tells the whole story, doesn’t it? No character exemplifies this sad trend more than fan-fave Harley Quinn:
I agree, but would actually take that appraisal one step further: Those kids grew up and decided they wanted to fuck Harley Quinn. This was a theme I briefly touched upon in “Here Lies Buffy the Vampire Slayer: On Letting Go of a Fan Favorite — and Why We Should.” I know everyone adores Margot Robbie in that role, but all I see in that character is a very sad, pitiable Millennial fuck doll, not an amusing antihero. Truly — she gives me douche chills. Nothing epitomizes the shame I feel about what we’ve done to superheroes like Harley, a sexual-assault victim–turned–onanistic man-child fantasy. Disgraceful.
I’ve just realized that Batman in the Operating Room and Double Hocus Pocus are basically the same thing
We prepare to accept certain levels of reality, and adjust our expectations accordingly
When Batman strides into the operating room or the aliens land in Sunnydale, our expectations are shattered, our suspension of disbelief destroyed. The “reality” of the presentation is ruined
As you’ve said, this can sometimes be done deliberately to great effect
BTW. when I first read BitOR, my first thought was Klinger making a Batman costume. Jamie Farr would not have been playing Batman, or even someone who thought he was Batman. He’d be playing someone who wants other people to think he thinks he’s Batman. Copyright issues aside, this would be familiar territory for all the actors, and we viewers would have had no problem accepting this
Indeed, sir — they are merely different ways of expressing a similar dramatic principle. Terminology notwithstanding, the tenet itself remains the same.
I mentioned in passing in the post above that Donner’s guiding creative precept for every aspect of the Superman production — from the casting to the production design to the special FX — was verisimilitude. He had that word printed on signs and hung in the various production offices. This stands in stark contrast to the approach Joel Schumacher took with his Batman movies, where he was known to say through the bullhorn right before he called action: “Remember, people, it’s a cartoon!” To be clear: I’m not making a judgment here as to whether one aesthetic is preferable to or better than the other, merely demonstrating that Donner consciously made all of his creative decisions through the lens of verisimilitude.
I should note here that verisimilitude doesn’t mean “realistic.” Here’s how it’s defined by Wiktionary (pay particular note to the third definition):
1. the property of seeming true, of resembling reality; resemblance to reality, realism
2. a statement which merely appears to be true
3. (in composing a fiction): faithfulness to its own rules; internal cohesion
Now, I have not watched the Superman movies with their commentary tracks in probably fifteen years at this point, but I specifically recall Ilya Salkind justifying the constant use of never-before-demonstrated powers in Superman II (like the “magical kiss” that erases Lois’ memory, or the cellophane S-emblems on Superman’s chest that he can throw at an enemy as a sort of “shrink-wrap trap”) as perfectly in keeping with the “rules” of superhero fiction — that, in other words, you are allowed and even obligated to keep coming up with new abilities for a superpowered character like Superman.
Wrong. What you’re expected to do is clearly establish a defined set of capabilities — flight; heat vision; cold breath; super strength; etc. — and then find new uses for and new permutations of those established powers only. That’s why I believe characters like Superman (and the Flash and Spider-Man, et al.) can’t really be franchised indefinitely (unless, of course, they’re speaking to a new juvenile audience each decade, which we know is no longer the case), because eventually you do run out of new ways to use old powers, and one of two things starts to happen: 1) The writers begin repeating themselves, or 2) they find themselves relying on Double Hocus Pocus in desperate effort to mine new creative ground. And part of the reason ongoing comic-book “universes” are subject to periodic (and ever-more-regular) continuity resets is because the writers have either gone over the same ground (for the same aging readership) too often or, alternatively, have hopelessly entangled the mythology with Double and Triple and even Quadruple Hocus Pocus so thoroughly, the only option is to start again from a clean slate.
(Though now the “multiverse” conceit gives the creative custodians of these franchises the best of both worlds — there are rumors Christopher Reeve’s Superman might make a cameo in The Flash — but that’s not without its own creative challenges and complications, to say nothing of the fact that such narrative devices are often more about exciting/appeasing a fickle fan base than serving the story, such as it is.)
I’ve had friends over the years who watched the Donner Cut on my recommendation, and their response to it is almost universally the same: Rather than commenting on the improved narrative causality or the sublime scenes with Reeve and Brando (so much more powerful than the Susannah York substitutions in the Lester cut), their first and pretty much only reaction to the movie is this: “That was so fucking lame that Superman turns back time by reversing the rotation of the Earth again.”
Sigh. Yeah — Donner acknowledges that, too. But what was he supposed to do? Unlike Snyder, he couldn’t go script and shoot new footage; he was beholden to what had been filmed thirty years earlier. He shot an ending for Superman II that was appropriated for the climax of Superman: The Movie on the assumption that they’d devise a new conclusion for II when production resumed. But the new conclusion — the “magical kiss” — wasn’t conceived by Donner, but rather was scripted and shot long after his termination. So, when assembling the Donner Cut, he had a choice between the ending he’d already filmed (and used a version of in Superman I), or Richard Lester’s magical kiss, which violated Donner’s mandate of verisimilitude. So, he made a choice between the lesser of two evils, knowing full well that neither was entirely satisfying.
Such is why I say the Donner Cut isn’t in itself a better film than the theatrical version of Superman II, merely that it provides a window into what would’ve been a really satisfying, narratively cohesive, tonally consistent two-movie adventure — more or less unprecedented at the time, though commonplace now — had it been completed as conceived and intended. But if you’re gonna watch The Richard Donner Cut and bitch about its imperfections — flaws Donner himself was the first to concede — than you’re kinda missing the entire point of this cinematic experiment.
As a storytelling principle, I think Double Hocus Pocus — or Batman in the Operating Room, or however one prefers to label it — is one of the precepts going by the wayside in our new landscape of “anything-goes” narrativity — precisely what you wrote about, Dell, in “The Last Walking Infinity Throne Corrupts Infinitely.” For a generation raised to view franchises like Game of Thrones and the MCU as the paragons of storytelling excellence, there just isn’t an appreciation any longer for the kind of disciplined narrativity to which previous generations were exposed.
Case in point: I just spent this past weekend at a wedding with a number of cousins and relatives my age, and all of them were bemoaning the fact that they’ve tried to show their children the movies they loved growing up — like Jaws and Halloween and The Sixth Sense — and how within ten or fifteen minutes the kids are so bored, they’re back to scrolling on their phones, and at some point in the middle of the movie, they just up and leave the room — sans announcement or apology — to go do something else. Generations Z and Alpha are bored senseless by standalone, closed-ended stories. If it isn’t part of an intertextual “universe,” or a series like GoT with 50,000 concurrent plotlines, kids today quickly and unreservedly opt-out. They look at something like The Shawshank Redemption and dismiss it as boring, whereas as I look at Multiverse of Madness and dismiss it as pointless. Pop culture right now is emblematic of an absolutely yawning generation gap, and I don’t know if the old ways will ever come back or find relevance anew. I don’t know.
I think about how much fun I used to have going to the movies — being taken to see the latest Superman by my mother, or when my wife and I would spend hours at the two-dollar theater in Hell’s Kitchen as penniless college students — and I kind of ache for those days. The last movie I saw in theaters was Knives Out (at least it wasn’t Last Blood, which was the movie I saw prior to that!), and I don’t imagine I’ll ever set foot in a movie theater again. Why would I? The pandemic notwithstanding, theaters aren’t a “thing” anymore, nor for that matter are movies. At this particular time of year, though, I really find myself yearning for that seasonal thrill of going to see the latest summer blockbuster at the movies. But those days are gone… and never coming back. It’s a weird thing to think that I outlived the movies, and that all the cartoons and comics on which I came of age are now considered high culture. Christ help us all…
I don’t remember the movie being bad. Then again, I saw it at a pretty young age. Interesting post!
Indeed, Priscilla, Superman IV serves a welcome reminder to me that some stories are explicitly intended to resonate with us at a particular time in our lives — a particular age — and are not meant to be taken with us into adulthood. Heroes such as Superman and Aquaman, much like childhood itself, are something we leave behind as we mature, with gratitude in our hearts for what they meant to us… once upon a time.
For reasons I’ve written about extensively on this blog, though, Hollywood has succeeded, quite nefariously, at trapping Gen X in a state of “commercial adolescence,” or what I’ve come to call the Multiverse of Madness — i.e., the strategic selling and reselling of 1980s nostalgia through the endless recapitulation of all our childhood faves, including Star Wars and Ghostbusters and Halloween and Transformers and the superheroes of Marvel and DC Comics. I would love nothing more than if my generation would leave all of that stale ephemera behind, but… if we won’t, I will!
Thanks for popping by for a visit, Priscilla! I’m grateful for your time and attention.
I love it that you explore the then and now of film-making, what worked, what didn’t, and what the next generation needs to look like to address our evolutionary growth. I think you’re moving into middle age, Sean. Sorry. Lol. Superheroes need not apply.
“Our best hope is a collective of legendarily powerful beings known as engaged citizens.” I love that line, and I love movies that motivate us to be champions versus ganstas.
More great lines: “To care about the world, and to always do your best. Take those lessons with you now into adolescence and then adulthood. / That’s what we were meant to do: take the lessons forward, but leave the superheroes behind.”
Unfortunately, the superhero fantasies are here and stronger than ever. I think it feeds the mentality that no action is require on the major issues threatening the planet. Somehow, someone/something is going to save the day in the end and no effort is required on the part of humanity. Texas has been over 100 degrees for 22 days and no one’s concerned enough to address it. In Oregon, more air conditioners is somehow the solution. I think we’re waiting for Superman.
Great post.
I love that you so completely “get” this blog, Diana — the way I like to look at filmmaking and celebrate what works and learn from what doesn’t. If you were to skim through many of the posts just from this past year, you’d see I can cite flaws and blessings in nearly everything I analyze, from Desperado to Young Indy to Fury Road and now The Quest for Peace. Thank you for always engaging me so willingly.
Alas, however, I do think at this point it’s safe to say I’m more of a “longtime resident” of middle age as opposed to a “new tenant”! That’s all right — it’s a reasonably comfortable place to live! And certainly one of the themes I’ve persistently explored on this blog — one of the central intellectual and cultural preoccupations of my forties — has been how my generation was insidiously seduced by the comforts of “commercial adolescence” over the complexities of adulthood, how we were sold on the idea that “adult responsibility” (or “adulting,” as they unironically call it now) is a lifestyle choice, not a developmental inevitability, and why would we opt for that over puer aeternus?
And I submit what the world needs more of — or quite possibly at this point any of — are grownups who see responsibility as a privilege, not a sucker’s game; folks who understand, to the point I make in the closing line of this post, that enjoyment of superheroes (and that includes the comics and videogames and action figures associated with those characters/concepts) was a right (and a rite) of childhood, and that putting away childish things is something we should want to do, because it opens us up to new experiences — new stories and more complex ideas and richer emotional states and rewardingly sophisticated relationships — which promotes intellectual, emotional, and personal growth. Holding on possessively to superheroes retards us — and I mean that in the purest sense of the word.
To Maher’s point — and Alan Moore’s, as well as yours, too — I absolutely believe the habitual (and certainly obsessive) consumption of superhero fiction (in any medium) inculcates a mindset of inferiority, of impotence, of lack of self-agency — much the way scripture does. Superhero stories, ultimately, are savior narratives, after all.
And to be clear: Superhero stories are entirely benign when used as intended — to “actively expand the imagination of their nine- to 13-year-old audience” — but when “we’ve got audiences of adults going to see the Avengers movie and delighting in concepts and characters meant to entertain the 12-year-old boys of the 1950s,” suddenly everything conceptually (and morally) problematic about superheroes is laid bare.
I’ve done a few pieces now on the superhero–industrial complex — “The Great Escape” (in 2016) and “Tim Burton’s Batman at 30″ (in 2019) — and I consider “Superman IV at 35″ my most nuanced dissertation on the subject to date. To your observation, though, as a culture, our widening embrace of — and continual fascination with — superhero fantasies only seem to be growing deeper and more institutionalized, more normalized. I think it’s a very lamentable thing that today’s kids have not only been denied the right (and the rite) to play in the world of superheroes by themselves, apart from the adult world, the way I did, but that superhero fiction as adult entertainment is completely par for the course. They don’t know a world in which comics and cartoons were “kiddie stuff.” Therefore, I’ll likely still be bitching about this for years to come! Haha! Hopefully I’ll keep finding something new to say…
Thanks for reading, commenting, and encouraging, Diana. I hope your summer has been an enjoyable and productive one thus far.
Sean
On December 20, 2024, a reader by the name of “Benny” found this post, read it, and sent a comment to me directly via e-mail. Benny’s remark raised an intriguing topic I have not, as it happens, addressed anywhere else on this blog: the theft of intellectual property, particularly as it pertains to Hollywood screenwriting. It’s a fascinating subject — and largely misunderstood by those outside the entertainment industry. Since there is no private or personal information in Benny’s e-mail, I have reproduced the full text of it here, followed by my reply:
This was my response:
Perhaps in 2025 I’ll publish a full-length dissertation on this subject…