I Went to See Superman As an Escape from Reality—Reality Was Still There

Why what I thought was going to be two hours of mindless fun ended up feeling so familiar and so important.

Photo by The Left Chapter editor Michael Laxer from a Superman screening in Toronto

By Melissa Garriga, Common Dreams

I am not going to pretend I know exactly what Director James Gunn’s intentions were with his recent adaptation of Superman, which was released in theaters last week. But I didn’t need the 72-feet wide and 50-feet tall IMAX screen to see clear connections to the hate directed toward immigrants here in the United States, as well as the horrific genocide in Gaza.

To take a small break from the emotionally draining work I do, and to celebrate my son’s recent graduation from high school, we drove the hour and 40 minutes from our home in Mississippi to an early screening of Superman in New Orleans last week. As an avid fan of superheroes and comics, the release of Superman was the highlight of the summer for my son. For me, it was just a chance to unplug and disconnect from the harrowing news for a bit and spend some time with him doing what he loves the most. So you can imagine my surprise when what I thought was going to be two hours of mindless fun ended up feeling so familiar and so important.

[I guess this is the part where I should announce spoilers. So SPOILERS!]

The Immigrant Justice Message

Even though I do not have the vast knowledge of superheroes and comics that my son has, I did grow up with the old Christopher Reeve Superman movies, so that is my frame of reference. At the core of those earlier movies was the idea that Superman was an “illegal alien” in our world—something he felt he always had to hide for his protection. Superman has always been billed as an alien orphan, but somehow this reference in Gunn’s latest, where he is vilified as “alien,” has some of the worst people trying to swallow massive amounts of cope. The idea that the person deemed “illegal,” the person who is “not from here,” could be the good guy, contradicts everything bigots are trying to peddle these days, but that underlying message has always been there. What critics don’t like about the storyline this go-around is that it rightfully pegs them as the “evil” Lex Luthor. Hit dogs do holler, I guess.

In the latest film, another very obvious reference to the current authoritarianism and inhuman treatment of immigrants is the establishment of the character Ultraman, who was tasked with bringing down the world’s most famous “illegal alien.” Ultraman is part of a masked security force that operates outside of normal law enforcement with no public accountability. It is not hard to draw the line between the evil, masked, lawless security force and Immigration and Customs Enforcement, which now has a budget larger than most countries’ militaries and is given a free pass to rain down terror without due process on the migrant community, or people they simply don’t consider “one of us.” Then came the ironic and very telling reveal that Ultraman shared DNA with Superman—a nod at the idea that we have more in common with those we deem “different,” with those we are told we are supposed to oppose, than with the people who are playing us against each other in the first place.

Needless to say, no one should have been shocked or caught off guard that a movie about a child from another world who was sent to the United States by his parents because their Indigenous land was being destroyed and their civilization was dying, who ended up being the ultimate good guy (questionable journalistic ethics aside), had a pro-immigrant message. That was always the story. However, what was a little surprising, at least in this current political environment, was Gunn’s portrayal of the fictional countries of Boravia and Jarhanpur.

The Palestine-Israel Message

As I already mentioned, I cannot speak to James Gunn’s intentions with his new take on Superman. There is a lot of debate going on right now about that. But you really can’t deny the similarities between Gunn’s fictional Boravia and Jarhanpur, which are central to the story, to Israel and Palestine. While the drama in the United States between the falsely accused and vilified Superman was playing out, across the globe was the story of a very powerful, heavily militarized country of Boravia that was working behind the scenes with evil fascist Lex Luthor to manufacture consent for the invasion and occupation of the very unarmed, Middle Eastern, brown-skinned population of Jarhanpur.

Some will tell you Boravia was supposed to characterize Russia, I guess, somehow implying that Jarhanpur is Ukraine. However, that comparison falls short when you finally get to the scene where Boravai’s military, with every weapon of war available to them, knocks down the border fence separating the Jarhapurans from them. On the other side of the fence is the Jarhapuran population, who very much look like Palestinians and are only armed with nothing but their fists, a few handheld objects, and a lot of hope and resistance. While watching the movie, and this scene in particular, I couldn’t help but conjure up images of slingshot-wielding Palestinian children defending their homes and lands against the deadly, militarized tanks of Israel.

Even without X-ray vision, the visual representation in this climactic scene, intentionally or unintentionally, very clearly captures the decades-long struggle of the Palestinians against Israel. And what is that struggle and the fictional battle between Boravia and Jarhhanpur about? At the center is land, or the desire to take someone’s land through military force.

Just like the immigrant justice messaging, this mirroring of Israel as the evil army of Boraiva and Palestine as the innocent, disarmed population of Jarhapur has a lot of folks crashing out. In my opinion, that says more about them than the movie. It tells me that their whole ideology relies on lies and disinformation, on distortion and projection, and when a movie, whose message has been obvious for years, exposes their contradictions, they sulk and cower, as Lex Luther’s character did at the end of Gunn’s Superman.

The Most Important Message

When I took off work last Tuesday to go see Superman, I thought I was leaving behind the reality of all the injustices that, through our work, we’re forced to confront every day. But what I realized is that we are surrounded by a world of injustice, and no matter how hard we try, no matter how hard we may want to sometimes, we cannot look away. I can escape into a dark theater for a couple of hours, but that doesn’t stop the fact that thousands upon thousands of people are currently being hunted, illegally detained, and often beaten by rogue pseudo-police forces. It doesn’t stop the bombs and bullets that are constantly raining down on innocent children who are only left to defend themselves with a small rock. James Gunn may not have intended to make a pro-Palestinian film, but I believe that, since we live in a world where a genocide is impossible to ignore, he subconsciously made one. Because at the end of the day, through all the millions of dollars worth of propaganda created to obscure truth and reality, our psyche cannot deny the obvious.

I could end this piece reaffirming the very obvious connections to immigration justice and the genocide in Gaza and occupation of Palestine (two issues that are very deeply connected in real life as well), but I would be remiss not to include another take on the film—one that I value a lot and one that everyone should walk away with.

When I told my son I was writing this, he asked if he could give me just a couple of notes. First, he asked that I try to stay away from the stupid argument over whether the film was “woke” or not because, as he explained, that word “woke” just gets thrown around without any meaning and distracts from the real message. That message, he said, is that at the end of the day, Superman is a story about hope—even when it feels like the world is against you.

Thinking about the immigrants trying to survive in a country that wants to vilify and imprison them, or the children in Gaza with nothing but innocence and heart facing down an army of hate, it is hope in the collectivity of goodness that gets us through, even in the face of all that insurmountable despair. Because, as history (and the Superman series) has proven time and time again, bad people do get exposed, evil empires do eventually fall, concentration camps can be freed, and defenseless populations, filled with hope and resilience, do find a way to protect the people and the planet.

Melissa Garriga is the communications and media analysis manager for CODEPINK. She writes about the intersection of militarism and the human cost of war.

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