the passion of the kal-el

[sophiaserpentia]

Saw Superman Returns with cowgrrl last night. I'll give it 2 1/2 stars out of four. The movie was engineered to feel very much like a direct sequel to the first two Superman movies with Christopher Reeve. It was too long. Special effects were good, acting was passable. The action scenes were the most engaging parts of the movie.

So, about that plot.

I personally thought that the plot had so many parallels to the passion narrative in the gospels that it was practically plagiarized. cowgrrl didn't see it, so it could be that i'm just extra-sensitive because i've studied the gospels so much and have political concerns (see the next paragraph). Plotwise and characterwise there were a few differences, one quite significant, but i thought there were too many similarities for it to be coincidental.

Superman has, in the last ~70 years, become a specifically American, mass-media-and-corporate-profit-friendly kind of myth, like Coke and football and Santa Claus. Since i am concerned that America is turning exceedingly theocratic, perhaps i am being overly sensitive to suspect that Superman is now being turned into a gateway for mass-media-and-corporate-profit-friendly fundamentalist Christianity.

[Poll #767612]

Comments

[legolastn.livejournal.com]

I have not seen it yet, but a friend who did, and is not particularly steeped in Christian culture, definitely picked up on the Christ narrative.

[daoistraver.livejournal.com]

I haven't seen it yet, but I always felt that Superman was an attempt to create a modern Christ-like figure.

Of course he got co-opted by the poison mythos pretty early on.

Which is why I like stories where humans successfully defeat or neutralize him. (ala Dark Knight Returns)

[sophiaserpentia.livejournal.com]

Yeah. It is intriguing and meaningful that Superman is not a match for Batman.

In the movies, why the heck is Superman surprised that Lex Luthor has a talent for locating kryptonite? This should not be a surprise, it should be an operational presumption. He should assume, as a matter of course, that Lex would not act unless he thought he had a darn good chance of getting past Superman. Maybe his near omnipotence makes him overconfident? Or maybe he's just not that smart.

[xephyr.livejournal.com]

You do know that the pair of Jewish teens that created Superman did so with the Jewish Messiah and Hellenist Hereclian mythos well in mind. No mistake, the Jesus template is really there. So are the Krishna, the Buddha, and the Orpheaic templates. Superman hasn't been watered down, he's a deliberate conflagration of heroes.

[sophiaserpentia.livejournal.com]

I don't think that Superman was meant from the beginning to be Jesus. I think he has been turned into that somewhat recently, especially with the advent of movies about him.

[xephyr.livejournal.com]

No, not Jesus. A secular messiah, or a Moses, perhaps. Later radio and comic books greatly deified his presence more so that the movies: I would say that until this latest movie, the most godlike versions existed in the comics.

[x-bluerose-x.livejournal.com]

As an Orphic Hellenist that fascinates me....

[juliansinger.livejournal.com]

Mind you, there were things in this thing (like the adoption stuff) that had nothing to do with Christ narratives.

[pretzelsalt.livejournal.com]

I answered the poll but have not seen the movie and don't plan to for exactly the reasons you state.

I have never enjoyed superman. Couldn't relate as a little girl - looking back I realize I (as is normal) tried to identify with whatever LL dame he was rescuing - and doing so did not encourage me to jump off sofas with a blanket wrapped around my neck.

The red white and blue stuff is gross.

That stupid sitcom that has been on for years makes my nostrils twitch.

The ultimate good guy - helpless stupid public that needs saving from themselves by an all american white male shit is yuck.

I don't like ANY superheros anyhow - and he is at the bottom of that list.

His history in this country - the number of decades he has been a MR USA hero of the all american white boy is brain numbing.

I did enjoy Richard Pryor wearing skis on a rooftop.

------

sorry my comments were made while talking on the phone. Very disjointed.

[arcanum-dogma.livejournal.com]

nothing unconscious - collective or otherwise - about it. we design our mythic heroes the same way we design our deities: larger than life versions of ourselves.

[pooperman.livejournal.com]

I haven't seen this movie yet, so I'll restrict my comments to the Reeve versions and their relation to Jeebus.

I'm wondering if we were to compare the American misconceptions of Jesus to the kind of selfless limited almost-omnipotence of Superman, would we see not Jesus, but "Jesus of suburbia" (with a nod to Green Day)? My other thoughts would be to compare Aslan from Narnia to these images and stories.

I mean, really--Jesus of scripture really didn't pull off hugely crazy miracles. All of them can be easily reinterpreted as exaggerated commonplace events, or hyperbole/metaphor of significant but reasonably imaginable events. Superman and Aslan were simply much more powerful than Jesus ever was, on a steady-state basis, so they are exaggerations of exaggerations and exaggerations of the wrong aspects of the gospel story.

Of course, The Passion of the Christ is a movie about the most uninteresting three hours of the life of Jesus, also an exaggeration of an exaggeration, and an exaggeration of the wrong aspects of the gospel story.