Is it woke to be nice? That’s essentially what Superman director James Gunn is wondering regarding conservative backlash to his latest contribution to the DCU. “I’ve heard people say it was woke, and then I’ve heard a lot of people say it’s not,” he said in a recent interview with Entertainment Weekly. “I am curious as to what in the movie is considered woke.” Gunn theorized that the controversy may have been sparked after a July 4 article in The Times of London in which he was asked whether the film would be an immigrant story like its comic-book source material. Several right-wing pundits (and former TV Superman Dean Cain) were rankled by the interview, which came amid protests against immigration raids in the U.S. “I said, yeah, it’s a story about an immigrant,” Gunn recalled, “but mostly it’s a story to me about kindness, which it is.”
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To Gunn, kindness would impact “everything” from the way people vote to how many people die from road rage, he suggested to EW. “I mean, people did value kindness in the past,” he continued. “That was an American value, was kindness, and it doesn’t necessarily seem to be that way to me anymore. So that was always the center of the movie for me, and it wasn’t about anything other than that.” Despite viral tweets and impassioned Letterboxd reviews, Gunn previously denied that he was thinking about Israel and Palestine when writing the script. “It’s an invasion by a much more powerful country run by a despot into a country that’s problematic in terms of its political history, but has totally no defense against the other country,” he insisted. “It really is fictional.”
