The New <em>Superman</em> Is Involved in Several Controversies at Once. Someone Saw It All Coming.

This article contains spoilers for the new Superman .
In James Gunn's Superman , Clark Kent, the Last Son of Krypton, must fight giant monsters, other superhumans, and armies of armored shock troopers—you know, the usual stuff. It's the hashtags that piss him off.
Naively agreeing to be interviewed by Lois Lane, his fellow reporter at the Daily Planet, Clark Kent (David Corenswet) puts on his Superman voice and lets Lois (a canny Rachel Brosnahan) start up her digital recorder. As we've learned moments before, Lois is also Clark's secret girlfriend, and is fully aware of his dual identities, but the exchange quickly turns prickly. Lois is not going to let her own romantic feelings get in the way of her own journalistic duties, and Superman's straightforward moral framework of helping people in need is not always compatible with the realities of international geopolitics. Things get heated, but what ultimately makes Supes blow his top aren't the allegations that he illegally interfered in a foreign nation. It's the hashtag #supershit. He really hates that one.
Gunn's take on the Last Son of Krypton, jam-packed with delights and eager to zip from one colorful scene to the next, is far from the first to be written during the social-media era, but never has a Superman film been so concerned with such hashtags. The citizens of Metropolis are online and posting, and many of them aren't very nice. Midway through the movie, it's revealed that this is all part of the master plan of Superman's archnemesis, Lex Luthor (Nicholas Hoult): In a 21 st -century spin on the infinite-monkey theorem, the tech billionaire has an army of genetically engineered primates, all wired up to computers, typing up bile under sock-puppet accounts 24 hours a day, spamming hashtags like #supershit. Luthor's goal is to overwhelm Superman with both psychological and physical threats, but it's the culture war that's most effective and that sends him running home to his adoptive mommy and daddy.
Luthor's smear campaign includes out-of-context viral videos, stolen footage, and cable news appearances that accuse Superman of “grooming” the citizens of Earth because he intends to turn despot. It is, pointedly, the modern right-wing playbook, so much so that the cable news chyrons it currencies to lampoon the conservative media apparatus are indistinguishable from the real thing. Indeed, that same apparatus has already begun stirring up the exact same sort of headlines about the movie itself.
Few blockbuster directors are better acquainted with this particular outrage machine. The story of Gunn's rise to DC Studios co-CEO and Superman writer-director is inextricable from the time his career was nearly ended by right-wing culture warriors. When Ben Shapiro's Daily Caller and far-right trolls Jack Posobiec and Mike Cernovich resurfaced unsavory jokes Gunn had made online about pedophilia and sexual assault—jokes that were resurfaced only after the director had dared to criticize President Donald Trump— Disney immediately fired Gunn from his next Marvel gig, Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 . Gunn, who has long been contrite and frank about his history as a gleeful provocateur, a byproduct of his early career in the schlock-horror scene , immediately apologized . Gunn's statements about how he had changed as a person held water—and the recirculation of the tweets was plainly politically motivated. He was rehired by Marvel a year later, but not before Warner Bros. came calling about him directing a DC film, The Suicide Squad .
Gunn has spoken with candor about the period in advance of every big project since—including in a Rolling Stone interview last month, ahead of Superman . In it, he attributes his dark night of the soul as essential for him to be able to take on Superman in the first place. “There's no doubt that without that experience, I don't think that I would've written the Superman that I wrote,” Gunn said of his experience getting fired from Guardians and the outpouring of support he received afterward. “I just don't think that a character that pure would've quite appealed to me.”
While Gunn is speaking about how the worst year of his life allowed him to shift from being someone who loved deconstruction and snark to someone who could embrace earnest mythmaking, it's hard to look at Superman and not see it as Gunn taking aim at what he thinks truly ails us. What makes Luthor's smear campaign stand out from his other efforts is in how powerless it renders his superpowered enemy. Superman cannot express his anger or frustration without bolstering Lex's bad-faith attacks. It's as potent, and as draining, as any hunk of Kryptonite.
The best or most interesting franchise films bring something personal to the table. For Gunn, that happens to also be one of the most bedeviling aspects of contemporary culture. It's personal, and gives the “groomer” slur lobbed at Superman a bit more bite, because—in response to a few puerile jokes—it's one that's been lobbed at Gunn too. This is a surprisingly thorny, complex issue placed right at the heart of Gunn's breezy comic-book movie—and one that extends beyond the film, as op-eds fired back and forth over the weekend wage a war over what Gunn's movie is supposed to be about. Or, more accurately, what it shouldn't be: “woke.”
In the context of Superman , the wokeness in question involves Gunn asserting in the Times that the film's hero is “an immigrant,” inviting those who take issue with this foundational fact to shove off. “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,” the director said in the July 4 story. “But screw them.”
Right-leaning media is always primed to respond to anything with a patina of progressivism, but it's really activated by anyone who dares to be confrontational about it. And for a film that really is about kindness, as Gunn says, it is also confrontational in its anticipation of rightward attacks, pointedly casting Michael Ian Black as a Tucker Carlson analog fearmongering about Superman's status as an alien with alleged designs on domination.
Gunn's role in Hollywood is an unusual one; few filmmakers also co-chair a major studio. As such, he has to juggle what he wants to say as an artist (“screw them”) with what he must say as a businessman (consider his less confrontational posture at Superman ’s premiere). Wiser and more compassionate though he is now, it is clearly impossible for him to avoid any kind of controversy short of shutting up entirely. (Even earlier this month, when Gunn was asked to discuss the difficulty of not paying attention to online controversies, he accidentally triggered another, miniature online controversy .)
And there will always be controversy with a Superman movie, because to some, Superman is culture war. In 2006, woke were not yet conservatives' slur of choice, but they did, as they would nearly 20 years later, get mad about a Superman movie. That spring, the promotional tour for Bryan Singer's Superman Returns was well underway, with a trailer showing Daily Planet editor Perry White (Frank Langella) asking his reporters to find out if the long-absent Man of Steel still stands for “truth? Justice? All that stuff?” Shock and public outcry followed, lamenting the supposed erasure of “the American way,” as did measured responses to the cheeky revision—the quote wasn't so much a heavy-handed rewrite of canon as a winning acknowledgment of changing times. This is something every Superman film since Richard Donner's has struggled with: how to have its classic paragon of a hero believably respond to changing times.
Throughout Superman , Clark Kent tries to insist that none of the chatter gets to him. That he doesn't read social media or pay attention to what's being said. He is frustrated that his years of work saving lives doesn't count for more, that the masses are easily swayed by a few choice clips and select talking points. He wins in the end by revealing the villain's other plots, the more conventional ones that we go to a superhero film to see vanquished. The Man of Steel can't find a way to win the culture war; he just forges ahead and hopes doing the right thing will be enough. The conflict doesn't resolve. It's ongoing as we speak.