Why MAGA Is REALLY Freaking Out About Superman
Superman has always been woke; they're mad about other things.
I’m not a comic books guy, and I’m increasingly not a comic-book movies guy. Including superhero movies. As a kid, I’d watch Christopher Reeves’s Superman whenever I happened upon it channel surfing. In adulthood, I’ve enjoyed Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man, Jon Favreau’s Iron Man, and really liked the Christopher Nolan Batman movies. But beyond that, not so much.
Perhaps there’s a distinction here between movies drawn from comic-book stories, and movies made for people who read a lot of comic books. Stories that are at some level about humans first-encountering and then grappling with the existence of alien or supernatural life transcend genre—they’re cinema friendly and can be profound. Stories about worlds where comic book shit just happens all the time and everyone’s inured to it are drained of that tension.
In any case, if you asked me to critique the Superman reboot, that’s what I’d point to as a drawback. It’s for nerds more than for people with my cool-dude sensibilities.
And yet I really liked it.
I liked it despite not having the first clue about most of the non-Superman characters drawn from the larger DC Comics universe, and despite finding it hard to suspend disbelief—to imagine a major American city carrying on ho-hum while plagued by science-fictional menace week in, week out. And I liked it despite the fact that it’s fairly drained of nostalgia. Lois and Clark are well past the honeymoon phase and into petty bickering. Jimmy Olsen’s apparently got a weird thing going with women who look like Mar-a-Lago groupies. Ma and Pa Kent are practically bit characters. It’s set in modern times, so everyone’s suffering viral media mania.
But the political allegory is important. It’s unsubtle and lib, as you might expect in a Superman movie, but it’s also very au courant. I understand why conservative elites hate it and don’t want people to see it. But I don’t think their fixation on the movie’s “wokeness” and pro-immigrant sentiment has much to do with their scorn. Those are classic Superman themes, and it’s hard to credit, say, former Superman actor turned right-wing crank Dean Cain with simply not recognizing them before 2025.
No, Republicans have glommed on to those old thematic elements in this case because they’re close at hand. They provide a convenient, topical way to signal to Trump supporters that they should not see or support this movie. But they wanted it to fail at the box office not because it’s a Superman movie, per se, but because it’s a doctrinaire resistance-style takedown of modern right-wing tech-fascism. And saying “don’t see this movie, because it really cuts to the chase about how evil we are,” isn’t a very impressive critique.
SMOKING GUNN
On a literal reading, the right-wing Superman backlash began in response to director James Gunn, who recently said, “Superman is the story of America … An immigrant that came from other places and populated the country, but for me it is mostly a story that says basic human kindness is a value and is something we have lost.”
Republicans lashed out.
"Another film we won't be seeing," said Fox News' Laura Ingraham.
Speaking over the bold-text chyron “SUPERWOKE,” Kelleyanne Conway lamented, “We don’t go to the movie theater to be lectured to, and to have somebody throw their ideology on to us.”
Jesse Watters, with all his wit, mused that Superman’s cape should read “MS-13.”
These immigration-driven attacks come just as the country turns hard against right-wing immigration politics. Republicans are apparently slow to recognize that they’ve lost the upper hand, that a movie about the basic humanity of immigrants might be unusually appealing at the moment. The critique even fails on a literal level as,
demonstrated in this fun-nerdy breakdown of Superman’s status as a matter of law.But I think they’re less taken aback by a slow-minded realization, decades later, that Superman = immigrant. I think they’re mad about the second thing Gunn said. “Human kindness is a value and is something we have lost.”
Gunn went on, “it’s about human kindness and obviously there will be jerks out there who are just not kind and will take it as offensive just because it is about kindness.” And holy shit was he right.
He was right on two levels. First, as to the familiar and depressing way Trump-era conservatives interpret all morality tales as implicit attacks on Trump, and by extension themselves. Trump is anti-virtuous in such a panoramic way that it’s become hard to promote any virtue, no matter how unobjectionable, without implicitly criticizing something he’s infamous for. Nazis are bad, you say? You must be referring Trump’s remarks about Charlottesville, you partisan hack. Treating women as equals, and people with disabilities kindly? Why are you obsessed with locker room talk and lamestream media hoaxes?!
But the actual plot of the new Superman is actually, and unapologetically, about specific things Republicans have done to U.S. and global politics that have made the world a worse place. The critique is barely implicit, and barely thematic. It’s about the bad people who have all the power in real life at the moment, and why they deserve to be defeated.
BUT HIS EMAILS
Some spoilers follow.
Superman (2025) depicts arch-nemesis Lex Luthor as a villain who combines the worst vices of Donald Trump and Elon Musk: Trump’s geopolitical and self-interested scheming; Musk’s over-mighty wealth and globe-spanning threats to state sovereignty; their shared wrath and insecurities. Perhaps this is a chicken-egg thing and Trump and Musk resembled Lex Luthor before their characters merged. But the characterological resemblance1 isn’t subtle.
Both Superman and Luthor upend the normal relationship between citizen and state, but where Superman freelances with his power to stop wars, Luthor offers to team up with the state to contain and even kill Superman;
The United States has aligned with the right-wing Eastern European dictator of “Boravia,” who wants to invade and occupy a weaker neighbor, Jarhanpur;
Luthor has cut a secret, crooked deal to arm Boravia, in exchange for control over half of Jarhanpur after the war is over.
After Superman stops the war, Luthor steals his digital communications, and leaks them out of context to turn the public against him.
When Superman is arrested, he complies with the rule of law; when Superman is vindicated, Luthor decides he’d rather destroy Metropolis than see his enemies win.
Again, not terribly subtle. And this, I think, is what makes the movie anathema to Trump loyalists. It portrays their values and their very recent, unethical conduct in deservedly harsh light, which, in a mass market movie, is dangerous to them. They alit on immigration as a way to brand the movie “woke” and not worth watching to limit its reach and damage.
Immigration is good, nativism is bad; kindness and empathy are good, cruelty, vanity, and selfishness are bad. But this is more specifically a movie about how modern right-wing bids for power and control are manipulative, corrupt, and antithetical to self-rule.
Republicans can’t like Superman, because if the movie is good, their movement and leader are bad by implication—which is also why an anti-Trump liberal who doesn’t much care for comic book movies can still get a lot out of it.
Physically, Nicholas Hoult’s Lex Luthor looks like the lovechild of Billy Corgan and Tom Cruise, creepy and yet somehow far better looking than either Trump or Musk.
Made me wonder what fables/stories they used to teach their kids morals. Then it dawned on me; the Bible, and likely only the Old Testament. Yikes! Even as a kid I rejected those stories; what kind of god would do that, was my most common reaction. No wonder we're where we're at.
Yeah, as a comic book guy, it's gratifying to see a modern film that reasserts these qualities that I've read in Superman stories for a while now. I think, along with a sizeable chunk of people who *do* read comics, it was en vogue for some time to think of Superman as uncool because he was too powerful and therefore uninteresting as a character, as if his was a story of wish fulfillment and having zero adversity in the face of so much power. Of course, most apparently didn't read Superman before coming to those conclusions, so I'm very hopeful that Gunn's film at least inspires folks to rethink that take (and heaven forbid, actually read some Superman!); that amidst the never-ending parade of superhero films, that maybe Superman is the one we need right now. (As an aside, if I were to recommend one and only one Superman story for anyone and everyone to read, it would be Grant Morrison's "All-Star Superman." It's probably the best display of the qualities that make him a benevolent sun god from a far away land who just wants to make sure we're all okay while he's here on Earth--not unlike a certain religious figure that a lot of people say they're really into, but I dunno', seems like they haven't actually read the book about him.)