The Punk Rock Hope of James Gunn’s ‘Superman’

I try to keep this blog focused on either what I am trying to do to spin up possible sources of revenue or personal analysis of trends in what I supposedly do for a living. Neither political commentary or pop culture analysis is appropriate for the audience I’m trying to cultivate here.

But it creeps in every once in a while, despite my best intentions – and this is going to be one of those occasions.

The idea of a hick kid from Kansas telling his street-smart big city girlfriend that his capacity for hope and optimism makes him ‘punk rock’ is corny enough, without that hick kid being Superman. Throw that part in, and add in an epically appropriate closing soundtrack featuring the vocals of Iggy Pop… and you have the incredibly positive ending to a movie that manages to hit all the right emotional targets – and possibly revive a cinematic genre that has been circling its own personal black hole for most of the last five years.

At a time when it seems all too likely that our media ecosystem is actually dominated by rage-tweeting monkeys enslaved in a sociopathic billionaire’s personal pocket universe, it is incredibly cathartic to see that hick kid, his party girl cousin’s dog, and a mutant freak or two, defeat the cinematic billionaire sociopath – not to mention the sociopath’s fascistic tyrant partner in a project to turn someone else’s country into their own private fiefdoms.

Of course, the rage-tweeting monkeys are incredibly offended by all of this, and disparage this hopeful optimism with the epithet in their limited vocabularies: it is, of course… ‘woke’.

I have no problem with that. If being awake is a possible antidote to the creeping despair of being a captive participant in a broken system circling its own personal black hole, I am so there. If there is some small amount of joy to be had from a goofy summer comic book movie, some momentary distraction from systemic collapse under the parasitic weight of real-world billionaire sociopaths… sign me up, please.

Unfortunately, there are no real-world superheroes capable of taking on the sociopaths. We are going to have to do that on our own. And even though entertaining storytellers like James Gunn are indisputably our allies, all we can count on from them is inspiration.

But right now, as all my social media feeds are full of despair, displacement, and disillusion… that is not a bad place to start.

Go see the damn movie. You’ll be glad you did.