James Gunn’s new Superman has sparked a lot of excitement and criticism since its release last week. The controversy is about the movie plot that appears to upend the typical superhero formula, with a new geopolitical framing.
Gunn has brought a fresh take to the tired old America-is-best cliche of US blockbusters, although he is not the first to explore the dangers of military-technological capitalism.
Some viewers are reading Superman as a not-so-subtle attack on Israel, with the US-allied white European regime of Boravia, led by a David Ben Gurion lookalike, attacking its poor, non-white neighbour Jarhanpur. (Spoiler alert)
The visual symbolism of key scenes – with a heavily armed army confronting unarmed protestors at a security fence – speaks strongly of Israel’s separation fence with Gaza and its repeated invasions of the Palestinian territory.
For right-wing commentators, this is a step too far, with conservatives accusing the film of “going woke” with its politics.
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Gunn began working on the film in 2022, so its germination predates the Hamas attack of October 2023 and subsequent Israeli onslaught against Gaza.
The chief villain of the movie, Lex Luthor, is portrayed as an Elon Musk-type billionaire who has designs of carving up Jarhanpur with Boravia, and is supplying it with billions in weapons.
So far, so 2020s Middle East geopolitics. Superman is a naive good guy who loves his super-dog Crypto and saves squirrels from giant city-destroying monsters.
Gunn has denied the film is about the Middle East, and in the original comic, the conflict was actually set in Europe. There are strong shades of Russian accents and Putin-style dictatorship in Boravia, which blurs the case that it is supposed to be a Jewish state (although the east European origins of many Israelis fuels the idea of this being an Israel-Palestine plot).
Superman the peacemaker
Superman’s girlfriend-reporter Lois Lane interviews him for the Daily Planet about his intervention to stop a Boravian invasion of Jarhanpur. She points to the repressive nature of the regime there, and Superman immediately responds that this is not an excuse to invade the country.
This interchange is where the real contemporary political arguments are laid out against US intervention and regime change wars.
Superman confronts the more serious problem of how he can save the world when the enemy of world peace is a rogue USA and its aggressive ally
A later scene of Boravia’s invasion of Jarhanpur is what most viewers have focused on, with a young boy hoisting the national flag as tanks and heavily armed troops advance menacingly and unarmed protesters flee under fire.
The scene speaks to the Gaza Great March of Return protests along the Israeli separation fence in 2018 and 2019, when more than 200 Palestinians were killed and over 8,000 injured by Israeli sniper fire.
Superman was created as a symbol of American power in the run-up to World War Two. While superheroes are not all direct cyphers of US imperialism, the idea of a “superpower” that enables a character to defeat its opponents through prolonged bouts of combat is the essence of the American way. Superheroes are F-35s in human form.
Compared to the slacker comedy vibes of Gunn’s breakout Guardians of the Galaxy franchise, this Superman is your typical wholesome all-American hero, and there are even jokes at his expense when he claims to like lame pop bands that he thinks are punk.
And yet, here Superman confronts the more serious problem of how he can save the world when the enemy of world peace is a rogue USA and its aggressive ally. His intervention to save a poor Global South country from invasion is seen as unwarranted intervention against a US enemy.
He is demonised as a dangerous alien (by an army of literal Twitter monkeys controlled by Luthor), accused of having a harem of wives to take over the planet and turn humans into slaves. Shades of the great replacement theory. Once the story breaks, the people of Metropolis turn against him and he is arrested and imprisoned.
Superman hits the limit of geopolitical critique Hollywood style: the whole thing must be neatly wrapped up, with baddies defeated at the end of the last reel
The film also takes a swipe at the military-industrial complex and its links to settler colonialism, with Lex Luthor arming Boravia in order to get his hands on a chunk of territory, like Trump’s dream of owning a “Riviera of the Middle East” on the rubble of Gaza.
The heroes of the film, aside from Superman, are the Justice Gang trio of corporate-backed superheroes, who reluctantly join the fray against Boravia and the billionaire, and the plucky editorial team of the Daily Planet.
And this is where Hollywood reaches the limit of blockbuster geopolitical commentary. Rather than portray the military-technology complex as part of a larger imperial-political-media complex, in the film, the evil enterprise to seize a colonised territory is the work of some bad players.
Once their scheme is exposed, the media and the corporate superheroes do the right thing and move to end the dastardly plot. The US government is almost a passive bystander being played by Luthor.
Ordinary heroes
To be fair to Gunn’s script, in the film, a South Asian man in Metropolis comes to the rescue of Superman when one of Luthor’s clone super soldiers injures him.
The man is immediately profiled by Luthor’s operation room surveillance system, and is later captured and used as a hostage to get Superman to reveal the location of his lair. His fate is the fate of all ordinary super humans who lay down their lives for others in the face of a brutal imperial machine. This is probably the most truthful moment in the movie.
No wonder that Israel and its backers have taken a strong dislike to the film. Arch Israel propagandist Ben Shapiro merely wrote: “Not Good.”
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Yet if the movie was going to make more than a nod toward the themes that it has used as a backdrop for the usual explosions, monster fights and midair punch-ups, it would need to go deeper.
The idea that a New York Times-style paper of record, and a mainstream TV broadcaster would turn around and expose plans to invade and annexe territory by a US-backed settler regime is wholly incredible.
Instead, they would conceal the truth by portraying the victims as terrorists and describe Boravia as merely “defending itself”.
Superman hits the limit of geopolitical critique Hollywood style: the whole thing must be neatly wrapped up, with baddies defeated and the people saved at the end of the last reel.
The idea of a US team of crack superheroes casually destroying a US allied army in the Middle East to save the indigenous people from invasion is, of course, for the birds. And for that reason, it doesn’t really land dramatically.
Palestinians are not waiting for any western superheroes to save them. Their allies are the hundreds of millions of people around the world who demand their liberation and an end to genocide. The superheroes are the people risking their lives on aid convoys, and the Palestinian medical and aid staff trying to save lives under Israeli siege.
Perhaps this goes without saying, but one day, we might actually see these heroes in a Hollywood movie. I won’t hold my breath.
The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Eye.
