Man of Steel (2013)

Just as Superman cannot resist kryptonite, so apparently no movie critic can resist comparing Zack S

nyder's new Man of Steel to Jesus Christ. 

Entertainment Weekly:

Why the Superman of 'Man of Steel' is the Jesus we wish Jesus would be

Daily Beast: Man of Steel, the latest cinematic take on Superman, helmed by Zack Snyder, portrays the "last son of Krypton" as Christ.

"Superman, like Christ, is a figure trapped in his own mythology"

LA Times: He's a bird, he's a plane, he's... our savior? 

How "Christian" is Superman?

There is a great speech in Quentin Tarantino's Kill Bill, Part 2, where Bill unspools his reading of Clark Kent as a character played by Superman.

"

What Kent wears – the glasses, the business suit – that's the costume. That's the costume Superman wears to blend in with us.

Clark Kent is how Superman views us. And what are the characteristics of Clark Kent? He's weak… He's unsure of himself… He's a coward.

 

Clark Kent is Superman's critique of the human race.

"

Superman is other than us. The 1978 Superman film by Richard Donner and the new Man of Steel begin by reminding us that Superman is an alien. Whereas Batman is often very noir, Superman belongs in a sci-fi universe. This is where Man of Steel breaks free from the Christopher Nolan influence: the Krypton sequences are genuinely fantastical, otherworldly, closer to Avatar than to any other superhero movie.

The Daily Beast review notes: "Here, Superman isn't human at all." But in that case, all comparisons to Christ should be dropped as irrelevant troping. Christ is entirely human. That's the whole point. Unlike Superman, he can be whipped, he suffers, he dies. There is a line in Man of Steel where Martha Kent, Superman's adoptive mother, warns her husband that people "will kill him." This isn't possible for Superman, but it is the entire story of Jesus. His father sent God here, and we killed him. (Of course, we couldn't recognize him as God, because he wasn't wearing a cape, but came from Nazareth.) As Kierkegaard points out in Training in Christianity, Christ is so far from being all-powerful that he looks like he needs OUR help.

The Daily Beast goes on: "In Man of Steel, there's no clue as to why this brooding, relatively humorless alien wants to save these people, aside from the fact that his daddy told him to."

But Christianity doesn't have an answer to "why should Christ want to save these people," either. The great puzzle of faith is not that it is easy but that it is hard. Scorn, not gratitude, met Christ. Why should he want to save these people? This is a real question, not just an answer that is missing. 

Man of Steel does have the problem that we don't understand Superman's wanting to save humanity, at a dramatic level. The filmmakers seem to understand that the point isn't that Superman is a nice guy, that he just cares about people because he's so upstanding and affable. But the expectation that Christianity has a take-away, decisive answer to this question, and one that we would be able to understand, is totally mistaken. 

Christianity takes an abysmal view on humanity. Christ's wanting to save us is not something easily represented. In Man of Steel, Superman takes a "leap of faith" in trusting humans, and then saves us. Christ gets completely betrayed by humanity, and he doesn't "save the earth." 

Christ's story shows how we repay kindness with treachery and shameful resentment and ignorance. To make a "Christian" Superman movie, we would have to show an utterly vulnerable, mortal Superman being rejected by humanity and murdered, with people refusing sympathy to his dying body, and with no apparent "motive" on his part for allowing this to happen. 

I am not interested in "defending Christianity," but I do think the Christian story is more dramatically compelling than any superhero story. Or, it could be. There is a great deal standing in the way of seeing Christ as a "character" in a dramatic situation. The way that the Bible is formatted on the page does not help. There have only been a handful of good movies about Jesus: Ben-Hur, The Last Temptation of Christ, Life of Brian.

How does Superman understand his time on earth? Has his father left him a real choice/any difficulties, in his mission here? Can Superman understand us, or is he in some way autistic regarding our morals and weaknesses? Man of Steel is interested in these questions only about 1/3 of the time, and that is the interesting 1/3 of the movie, dramatically. There is one really excellent fight scene, but I think the movie is most gripping when Superman is treated like someone trying to understand people from the outside.

In contemporary culture (secular and religious), we refuse to let Christ have that same problem.

How Green Was My Valley

The first time I saw this movie was on a TV screen, which even now seems quaint. It was sentimental, stuffed with clichés (the Welsh always have a song in their heart), and ultimately anti-climactic (a sudden mineshaft collapse and then it's over).

Today I watched it on the big screen at the Museum of Modern Art and sobbed uncontrollably for the entire two hours. I would now rank it among John Ford movies only behind The Grapes of Wrath, My Darling Clementine, and the Searchers--and in the same rank as masterpieces like The Quiet Man, She Wore a Yellow Ribbon, and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance.

How Green Was My Valley is a story of the decline of a Welsh mining community, the encroachment of a sterile and heartless capitalism into the childhood memories of the narrator. The accent and heartstring-tugging music has to be taken with a certain dramatic irony, in voice-overs like this:

In those days, the black slag, the waste of the coal pits, had only begun to cover the sides of our hill. Not yet enough to mar the countryside, nor blacken the beauty of our village, for the colliery had only begun to poke its skinny black fingers through the green.

*Already* the countryside has *begun* to be marred, the green has retreated under the implacable filth of industrial mining. And by the end, nothing will be left. The beloved family has broken apart, love has been wasted and come to nought, a promising youth has run aground, brothers have died and been scattered across the world, a community has turned sour and cannibalized its virtues. It is Ford's genius to represent this bleakest series of defeats through the eyes of a child's nostalgia and memories of "happier days." 

Of Ford's films, How Green Was My Valley is closest to The Grapes of Wrath and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, in relating a historical vision of an unstoppable, dialectical capitalism that remakes the cultural and physical landscape, chewing up men and tearing the old classes asunder. The narrow provincial prejudices and the (idyllically-drawn) old Welsh character will both fall with the growing borders of this world, just as in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance literacy, democracy, and statehood push out the indecent violence of the big ranchers. And, along with the Grapes of Wrath, this is one of the great works of American leftist populism: the simplicity and humanism of Ford's sympathy with the workers as they are helplessly ground down by the mine owners, giving their bodies up to a thankless and indifferent apparatus that looms in the background of nearly every shot. We are told early on, by the father, that the mine owners are "not savages," but "men like us." No, the five Morgan sons reply---not like us. This misplaced trust costs the family grievously. Nothing too radical takes place in the film, and I think that is the point: by the end, after holding out hope and dying by inches, nothing is left but death, hate, and black slag in this village.

Like any Ford movie here, there is plenty of singing, drinking, fighting, and a slew of lovable eccentrics at the margins. But unfamiliar here is the sensitive portrayal of childhood, through the youngest, most delicate son (Roddy McDowall). When he loses the use of his legs, and is confined to bed all winter, there is a small miracle at work: the preacher brings him copies of Ivanhoe, Treasure Island, and the Pickwick Papers to read. I don't know who would not burst into tears when the teacher, consoling him, says that he would switch places with the frightened, ailing child, just to be able to read Treasure Island again for the first time.

The last images of the film are heartbreaking in their simplicity--scenes from earlier in the picture, when the entire family was still together. We had lost track of how many tragedies pulled them all apart, of how much has been lost. (The last scene of the Godfather, Part II has a similar effect.)

I should also mention the cinematography of Arthur Miller, also well-known for his work on The Ox Bow Incident. Of especial note is a brief scene of Walter Pidgeon working in a downpour, one of the most senior workers being intentionally humiliated by the mine operators for speaking against a wage cut.