The Four Color Media Monitor

A writer at Breitbart talks about how Superman can represent the importance of having children, and this was an important subject at the time of the Great Depression, around which time the Man of Steel originally debuted:

When Superman first appeared in Action Comics #1 in 1938, America wasn’t grappling with border policy or multiculturalism. It was staring down something more existential: a collapse in fertility. [...]

Superman’s origin story has been framed in recent decades as a tale of immigration. He came from another world, embraced American values, and found his place in a new society. And that’s the way James Gunn, the director of the latest Superman film, is spinning the story.

That's right, in recent times it's been described as "immigration", not prior to the 21st century. If anything, Kal-El was a refugee from a destroyed planet, and such a description could also be used for somebody who fled a volcanic island or a forest fire that destroyed homes, like the recent tragedies in Lahaina, Hawaii, and Los Angeles, California. And the columnist notes the following that Gunn told the press:

“We support ‘our people,’ we love our immigrants, and yes, Superman is an immigrant… if you don’t like that, then you are not American,” Gunn said.

But this is a retrospective overlay—a way of projecting contemporary cultural debates onto a much older and more intimate myth. A retcon, as they say in the comic book world.

Exactly. This is what's become the norm on the left in at least a decade, sadly enough, to take Superman's premise all out of context for the sake of pushing the whole platform of illegal immigration, regardless of whether the interlopers are violent or not. The hijacking of an iconic character created by Jews by ideologues who're otherwise ungrateful for conceiving the Big Blue Boy Scout in the first place, all for the sake of heavy-handed propaganda, is just sickening.

In the original 1938 telling, Clark Kent wasn’t an outsider trying to assimilate. He was a boy raised from infancy by a childless American couple, the Kents, who lived in the moral center of the country. His powers were alien, but his values were thoroughly local. He didn’t adopt American ideals later in life—he was shaped by them from his very first step.

He arrives as a baby—a foundling in the heart of Kansas. The Kents didn’t take him in to make a point about migration. They took him in because they had no children of their own—and suddenly, one was given to them. They raised him right. They taught him restraint, justice, humility. And because of their love and discipline, he became the protector of the American way of life.

This matters, because it places Superman in a different symbolic category. He is not a metaphor for migration. He is an emblem of providential arrival, of unexpected parenthood, and of the power of family formation to preserve civilization. He appears at the very moment when many Americans were quietly beginning to wonder whether the future had room for children at all. [...]

This resonates more than ever today. Fertility in the United States has fallen again—below 1.6 children per woman, far beneath the level needed to sustain population without immigration. Economists worry about shrinking workforces, collapsing entitlement ratios, and the long-term stagnation of innovation and consumption. Countries like Japan and South Korea have already entered demographic death spirals. Europe is not far behind.

America, too, is running out of children.

That’s why it’s worth recovering the original meaning of Superman. In a time when biological parenthood was slipping out of reach for many, his arrival was not political—it was redemptive.

Correct. There may have been stories featuring figures like politicians, both crooked and honest, but what was written during the Golden Age was far from overtly political in the sense that conservatives would be identified as villains, and made to look as though only they could possibly be bad. What also needs to be recovered is the more logical description of what Superman actually was - a refugee, not an immigrant. Why, what about many Holocust survivors who were lucky to flee the National Socialists and make it to countries where it was safer? Those are also refugees, and whether they sought citizenship in other countries they reached, that doesn't contradict what they were when they fled the Nazis. Oddly enough, the Jerusalem Post, when they brought this up, almost correctly acknowledged this, but then immediately contradicted themselves:

While pundits on Fox News dubbed the movie “Superwoke,” historians note that Clark Kent’s journey has always mirrored that of Jewish refugees in the 20th century. Here are five facts that put the debate in perspective.

1. Gunn’s reboot leans into the immigrant theme

In an interview with The Times of London, Gunn said his movie is “about how basic human kindness is a value we’ve lost” and framed Superman as an immigrant who embodies that ideal.

Wow, they sure knew how to screw things up, all for the sake of their own leftist politics, as their jab at Fox News indicates. Which explains why I haven't had much respect for such a paper in years. So they raise the refugee theme, and come to think of it, based on their anti-Fox News bias, practically hollow out the point even before the part where they normalize the immigration propaganda. For shame.

Anyway, since we're still on the subject, here's another review from the Times of Israel, and 2 things I think I'll comment on:

But do the character’s Jewish roots or actor Corenswet’s background factor into the storytelling in this new adventure? No, not really. There aren’t any subtle winks that I picked up on, which was a smidge disappointing, but perhaps to be expected. There are, however, ample parallels to important current events.

Superman is, of course, American pop culture’s most famous immigrant, and the US government’s distrust of him is a constant source of conflict. The film’s release just a week or so after US Congress passed Donald Trump’s “One Big Beautiful Bill,” packed with a $100 billion increase in spending for Immigration and Customs Enforcement, is a coincidence that could not be more fitting. The movie’s perspective is far from subtle in rejecting the Trump position.

The plot of “Superman” begins when (off-screen) the Man of Steel prevents the somewhat Russian-like nation of Boravia from invading the somewhat Pakistani or maybe Iranian-like nation of Jarhanpur. Even though Boravia is technically a US ally — and Superman’s loyalty is to the nation that adopted him — he uses his interventionist might to prevent the hostile action. He bashes tanks, harming no one, but saves lives. Sure, he admits, the Jarhanpur nation has never been the best friend to the United States, and the Boravian propaganda machine said they hoped to liberate the county from rotten leaders, but innocent people were going to die — and the government was going to let it happen.

Well, I guess that says all you need to know what's going wrong with this picture. Whether or not Trump was the intended target of the filmmakers, it's certainly an assault on conservatives' politics. As for lack of allusion to the Jewish roots of Superman's creation, should it be any surprise a film produced by a man who once made offensive remarks about the Holocaust may not have anything of the sort written up in the screenplay? Why, what if the invading army was a metaphor for Israel's military warring against the Hamas in the Gaza strip following October 7, 2023? Shudder.

Now, here's an Indiewire review, which, unlike the prior example, is negative:

On the one hand, Superman is an undocumented immigrant who becomes a scapegoat for all America’s problems, and his nemesis — played by Nicholas Hoult, who transforms a dull villain role with a touch of the blinkered sociopathy he perfected on “The Great” — is a billionaire technocrat who doesn’t trust that anyone so powerful could ever be pure at heart, and publicly accuses Superman of “grooming us.” On the other hand, Lex Luthor creates an intra-dimensional pocket universe to jail his ex-girlfriends and manipulates public opinion with an army of enslaved monkeys who blast anti-Superman propaganda onto social media. (It should be funny how brainless the masses are in this movie, but Gunn’s irreverent streak runs dry whenever his “Superman” threatens to brush up against satire.)

One of the film’s interlaced but awkwardly layered plots finds a trio of corporate metahumans (“The Justice Gang”) fighting to contain an adorable baby kaiju as it stomps around Metropolis. Another of them hinges on a lopsided conflict between a cosmopolitan empire and its Middle Eastern neighbor, the former supplied with cutting-edge technology by interested parties, while the latter is in danger of being wiped off the map.

Wow, the way that's set up makes it sound like Superman's supposed to be a stand-in for a leftist accused of supporting child abuse like transsexual surgeries, while what Luthor is written doing with gal pals sounds like a stealth assault on Trump, accusing him of doing nothing but bad to his ladyfriends. Good grief, what's the world coming to? And the metaphor for the USA (and Israel) is made to look like the advocates of barbarism, and we're supposed to believe Islamofascists couldn't possibly do anything horrific to women and children? These reviews, for now, are decidedly enough to explain why I'd rather not spend money at the movie theater anymore for blockbusters, because they long degenerated into political pandering of the worst kind. Something even Zack Snyder's films did.

I have no idea what the box office intake for Gunn's Superman film will be. If filmmakers wish to draw from cartoony ideas like anthropomorphic dogs and monkeys, that's okay, but the kind of political metaphors and allusions employed in this movie are exactly what sink even the ability to appreciate that much. It's honestly time for Hollywood to move away from so much reliance on pop culture products like Saturday morning cartoons and try more drama instead. And to show a willingness to discuss the history of say, Betty Mahmoody, once the subject of the film Not Without My Daughter in 1991, but who in Tinseltown would truly be willing to explore such history now? There's just so much gone wrong with entertainment, it'd take an epoch until it could be tidied up.

Update: Breitbart reports James Gunn retracted his previous statements where he insulted half the country. But it's coming awfully late now, and I for one long grew weary of superhero movies, as mentioned before.

Labels: dc comics, Europe and Asia, golden calf of LGBT, history, islam and jihad, misogyny and racism, moonbat writers, msm propaganda, politics, Superman, terrorism