A Turbo-Nerd

I've covered how weirdly controversial it is to ask "what is Superman's motivations?" before. You get all sorts of reactions from "Superman is a nice guy! Is it that hard to believe people can want to do good things?” to the vitriolic “It’s sociopathic to ask why people are nice without benefit! Lex Luthor mindset”. The distillation of Superman from a character with basic motivations and thematic interiority to a company mascot means the inevitable de-politicization of the more radical characterization of Superman as an undocumented immigrant. In my Why Superman Is Boring Sometimes writeup, I discuss how this unwillingness to define Superman's motivations inevitably leaves him up to conservative interpretation.

But I want to analyze this phenomenon from a different perspective. The popular empty response to "what is Superman's motivations? Why does he believe in what is right and wrong" is “Superman is a good man who upholds American values because he was raised by good Kansas parents”. This insufficient answer has always fascinated me. Why do people think "mom and dad told me what's right and wrong" is at all applicable to a grown adult superhero? Did Clark never rebel against his parents? Question their generation's authority? Did he ever come into his own politics as an individual?

I've discussed the inherit conservative root behind the belief that Liberal Christian American values are universal and inherit to human nature. And that itself comes from a fetishized idea of purity. In my personal opinion, children are innocent but they're not "pure". They don't come into existence with an internal set of perfect beliefs, they're impressionable. But to the conservative, children are pure until they find out what "transgender" is. Children were raised by their perfect parents and then become corrupted when they leave that bubble set by the correct adults. When children express agency and autonomy outside of their parents' desires, they have to be controlled.

Children are a marginalized group. They're weaponized as politicized pawns for "think of the children" fear mongering. To invest in them and their education is to invest in the future. But kids also have no agency over how they're largely treated. In the process of their innocence being turned into fetishized purity, children get dehumanized as property owned by their parents. Through this, children exist as mere extensions of their parents.

In the badly researched trans-fear-mongering book, Irreversible Damage, we never get the perspective of the trans children most of the case studies in the book are about. The author is content to keep the perspective of the book solely from that of the parents of these trans kids. This choice comes with an implicit message; that parents know their children better than children know themselves. So we don't need to hear how the kids feel. The parents are the ultimate authority. Through their objective perspective, it's like their children just snapped one day when they got corrupted- regardless of observable dysphoria.

[Brandon Breyer from Brightburn]

Brightburn portrays our Superboy-stand in's corruption much like that of the trans children in Irreversible Damage. It sticks closely to the perspective of the parents, but whenever we do get insight on the child in question, they're depicted in this warped way. Brandon may have been a bit nerdy, quiet and moody, but the second he's seduced by the foreign alien calls of his origin planet, it's like he snapped into becoming a different person. We know Brandon seeks to feel in control of his life through newfound power, but he's not given the empathetic lens of other sympathetic horror monsters. He's the trans kid who visited a GSA one time and seized to be the kid you raised.

But I've misled you a bit there, most of the subjects in Irreversible Damage aren't children anymore. As of the book's writing, they're adults who sought out transition after escaping their parents. So why is the book still uninterested in their perspective? Well, it's because we can weaponize how we infantilize marginalized groups. The full title for Irreversible Damage is "The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters". Trans men are confused women, and women are pure like children. These silly kids fell for a "craze" like it's some sort of trend. They have been seduced and corrupted. "Our Daughters" dictates ownership of them. It doesn't matter that certain marginalized people grew into adulthood. If needed, we can still project a retained childhood status onto them to rob adults of their agency.

So you might think of something like Superman 2025 as a rebuttal to all this. It's not just the Kents who traditionally help define Superman's morals after all, it's the hopeful message Jor and Lara (Clark's foreign Kryptonian parents) send to their son too. So wouldn't a film that has Clark reject his biological parents break out of this conservative mold for the character? Well no, because Jor and Lara are written like the living embodiment of Replacement Theory and Yellow Peril caricature. So this only ends up solidifying the film's xenophobia. What about the Kents?

We have this scene much later in the movie where Clark is sitting with Pa Kent during a dark night of the soul moment. Clark idealized his foreign parents, and just found out they weren't the good people he thought they were from the incomplete message they gave him. Pa Kent tells Clark this:

"Parents aren't for telling their children who they're supposed to be. We are here to give y'all tools, help you make fools of yourselves. All on your own. Your choices, Clark. That's what makes you who you are."

Sounds good enough on the surface, right? But like most things in the film, it's lip service. Clark doesn't actually form his own opinions in the movie, he just ends the story replacing the foreign parents he put on a pedestal with his American ones. Idealizing them instead. Superman's character is static in this film. Clark doesn't grow, he just needed to be affirmed that his inherit purity was already on the right track. After all, it's his Kansas-Parents-infused upbringing that made Clark assume such a charitable interpretation of an incomplete Call To Conquer message from his foreign parents.

We have no idea why Superman is pro-Jarhanpur, an opinion so deviant from the American conscious of the narrative- that even his fellow co-workers at the Daily Planet are confused as to why Superman is against Boravia as an American ally. So somehow we're to assume he got this radical opinion from his parents too. After all, we have no evidence that Clark has opinions of his own outside of some parental figures' vague mission statement. Once you start looking back at the film through this lens, you'll realize that Superman is a deeply infantilized character. Not infantilized as in he's a character you want to cuddle like he's a helpless child. No, I mean Superman has become a politically infantilized character.

There's a reason why Lois comes around to Superman's ways by looking around his teenage boy-coded bedroom back in Smallville. Even though this scene has nothing to do with the couple's heated political disagreement, the film invokes childhood purity and innocence as a vague solution to their fight.

"When I was writing the scene of her looking around in his room, it was initially more just about the childhood of it all. [...] It's her seeing his parents being so sweet to him. And for me, that's a moment in which I think we see Lois understand who he is..."

-James Gunn in a Rollingstone interview.

We have authorial admission from the director that he meant to invoke childhood vibes initially, but ultimately landed on the theme of parental care in this scene. Despite Superman being a full grown adult, he still needs his parents nursing him back to health like a child. Please forget our grown up political debate, I'm a little kid with sweet parents. Argument over.

Earlier in the movie, we see Clark Kent go to his job at the Daily Planet while taking a video call from his parents on his phone. The Kent parents are portrayed as old fashioned. They relatably struggle with tech and yell too loudly over the phone all while Clark doesn't really pay attention to them as he greets his young friends at work.

Clark is distracted by the hustle and bustle of city life. By the time he's tired out and has his dark night of the soul moment, Clark's reminded that he almost got corrupted by the world outside of Kansas. In a way, Smallville is representative of pure innocent childhood and Metropolis is adult life with its complications. That's why Kansas farm life is portrayed so romantically in the movie. In the big city, Clark's superhero peers are chill with murder and his co-workers at the Daily Planet are all centrists about Jarhanpur and Boravia. It's like being a kid dealing with peer pressure. Clark needed mommy and daddy to tell him that his own beliefs are cool too. Punk rock, even.

To bring this all back to Gunn, it fits so neatly into his "we've lost the American way" mindset.

"I mean, people did value kindness in the past. That was an American value, was kindness. And it doesn't necessarily seem to be that way to me anymore."

-Gunn in an Entertainment Weekly interview.

We're all children who are corrupted and confused. What we need now more than anything is to return to the unquestioned, universal, inherit, and most of all pure, good of our conservative parents. Don't worry, you're choosing to idealize your parents, so it's almost like having agency. If that's not convincing enough, we can lampshade it with some dialogue about being your own person. Geez, don't think about it too much!

I, and likeminded fans, like to interpret Martha and Jonathan Kent's adoption of a baby Kal-El as a defiant act against conservative America. The two of them agreed to adopt and protect an undocumented immigrant as if he was their own. But it would be disingenuous to say that every incarnation of Superman's adoption follows that lens. After all, the Kents adopt a baby from a culture they don't know about or have access to. They have no choice but to raise Kal El as Clark Kent, with Christian American culture and values. Kal may be foreign, but he's still a white passing baby. Adoption, while a loving act, is also historically a tool for settler colonialism and cultural assimilation of the foreign Other. It's not unheard of for Superman stories to play into this notion of an American couple civilizing a savage foreign baby.

"The message of the Superman movie is *not* "rah, rah, immigrants!" it's "look at the amazing values, ethics, and morals someone not from here, no matter their native land, can learn from people who are good and kind Americans." how is that not the most patriotic message imaginable?"

-Mark Waid, facebook post

"The whole point of the movie is that a child came to America with nothing and no knowledge of how to act, and he learned what is good and noble and right by growing up here. How is that possibly anti-American?”

-Mark Waid, from a Forbes aritcle

I don't mean to imply that a rebellious childhood is an inherently progressive thing to write. It's totally fine to write stories about characters with nice upbringings through kind and grounded parents. But children are not their parents. Children aren't paper cut out clones of their parents. Children aren't just extensions of their parents, they are their own person.

This rhetoric applies to adopted kids as well. Superman, even as a baby Kryptonian, is more foreign than any human adopted child. He's from another planet. If even kids butt heads with their bio parents, then how come a foreign child from outer space can't have any conflict with his adoptive parents? Does it get too close to home when a foreigner starts questioning and challenging his American parents? When his foreign existence can't be assimilated away by the tight grip of protective parents?

[panels from Superman Smashes the Klan]

Superman's coming of age is ripe for conflict and drama. Writers who aren't afraid to write Clark's relationship with Ma and Pa Kent as flawed and even antagonistic at times will ultimately find themselves with stronger characterization for Superman. Because this means Superman's beliefs aren't Copy Pasted from the Kents. Superman's ideals come from his unique circumstance and existence as an adopted undocumented immigrant.

There is a strange irony at the heart of Superman 2025. It's a film that desperately wants to prove to the viewer that Superman is human. It does this by having Superman assert his humanity through the rejection of his foreign alien heritage. By placing America at the center of universal human kindness, the film argues for xenophobia and the assimilation of foreigners.

[panels from Superman Smashes the Klan]