Revisiting Superman

And also myself from 2025

It’s been a year since the Gunnverse set sail with Superman and I’m mostly thinking about how much I struggle to recognize the person — me, also a year ago — who made the case for Superman’s utility as a metamodernist text. I still stand by every point I made, to be sure, but I can also now see the parts where I took the easy way out. Where I let my communicative anxiety get the better of me. Where I let a few too many flowers into the language.

I think the reason we say “flowery language” as a pejorative is because a picked flower — though nice to look at — is dead.

Leave the flowers in the grass, though, and the cycle of nutrients in an ecosystem is maintained; empirically beneficial, and at no cost — for those who listen — to the beauty’s legibility. To avoid picking flowers with your language is an act of trust.

This is a deeply ordinary experience for a writer, of course; we look back on some of our older work and seize up. Not even necessarily because we think it’s bad, but because it’s disorienting to appear as a stranger to yourself, and stranger still to understand how important they were to arriving at who you are now. Just as well, because in this way and others, I think writers are deeply ordinary people. I know Superman is.

Anyway, I’m gonna do a bit of riffing on my Superman review here…

But first, some news:

• Last week I revealed my involvement with Intrinsic Entertainment Collaborative’s bid to purchase 60% of Letterboxd, in that I was recruited to brainstorm a strategy for how we could use the infrastructure of Letterboxd to create a healthier paradigm for film criticism. I shared many ideas and plan on having many more; take a gander!

  • Also, our Seed & Spark impact campaign has reached 51% of its goal at the time of writing; drop a few dollars if you can!

• I finished reading Antkind and have since canonized it as a key conspirator in collapsing my criticism brain. I kid you not, folks; upon reflection, this new normal of mine started right around the time I cracked open Antkind for the first time. Then, the very same day I finished reading it, I watched a movie¹, and could feel my film criticism neurons start firing again. It’s gonna be a while yet until I’m back to full strength², but it’s at least nice to know for certain that the esoteric sealing of that door is impermanent. Damn you, Charlie Kaufman; just you wait until my screenplay adaptation of Antkind lands on your desk.³

• Anyway, after Antkind I blitzed through Jon Claytor’s graphic novel Nowhere, and nowadays I’m on the tail-end of The Ministry of Time, though I imagine I’ll be on to my next read by the time this post goes live.⁴ I’m fond of it; a lot of my more recent sci-fi reads mistook rigorous insider dexterity for effective storytelling, so it’s refreshing to read something that’s clearly just as well-researched and also knows the aforementioned distinction. I have certain suspicions about the narrative utility of the POVs that I hope prove to be accurate.⁵

• And, oh yeah, I got commissioned to write a miniseries. It’s been a blast; will share more when I can.

Now, Superman:

In hindsight, Superman is in a pretty remarkable conversation with Man of Steel in the sense that Zack Snyder’s movie rendered the Superman story with premodern emotional logic while simultaneously making to deconstruct the hero in a fit of blind postmodernity⁶, while Gunn’s movie recognizes these lenses — these ways of thinking — as means rather than ends, both of which are necessary to wield in pursuit of a better world in the same way that a smoragasbord of perspectives and skills and people are.

There’s so many nodes in Superman for a lens of metamodernist championing to hone in on; Lex’s destructive emptiness evoking an abuse of postmodern thought, Lois Lane’s more altruistic use of it via deconstructing Superman’s romanticized Kryptonian ideals, and the Justice Gang’s collective arc being powered by those very same ideals, just to name a few.

Personally, I consider Krypto to be the most fascinating piece of this puzzle; as Superman sulks over Lois’ attempt to deconstruct his ideals via framing his actions through a lens of geopolitical consequence, he also finds himself frustrated by the antics of Krypto in the same way that governments are frustrated by Superman’s interference with Boravia-Jarhanpur, despite Krypto being one of his most crucial allies in a none-too-different way that Superman’s saving of Jarhanpurian lives is understood to us as an absolute good.

In other words, Krypto is the means through which Superman can understand that his ideals alone aren’t sufficient to build a better world, as Krypto’s rambunctious benevolence — Superman’s own instincts at their rawest — tends to create as many problems for Superman as it solves. Hence, for instance, the Daily Planet being the X-factor in Lex’s downfall, rather than Superman.

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1. Rebirth of Mothra

2. Also I have no clue what “full strength” would even look like on me now.

3. I actually am going to try.

4. As the wolves foretold. Currently cruising through Absolute Batman, will probably tackle The Wizard of the Kremlin or Dr. No next.

5. They kind of were!

6. The mistake here being that Snyder doesn’t seem to realize that Superman’s warmth/heart is the deconstruction.