Early on in Superman, Clark Kent (David Corenswet) agrees to sit down for an interview as his superhero alter ego with Lois Lane (Rachel Brosnahan). It’s one of the high points in the movie thanks in part to Corenswet’s and Brosnahan’s gift for exuding the distracted chemistry of two people who are still very psyched about the sex they recently started having together. Lois and Clark, at this point, have been dating for three months and have worked together at the Daily Planet even longer — they know each other, and, more important, she knows all about his dual identities. When their flirty banter gives way to an impromptu grilling, it takes Clark a beat to realize how seriously Lois is taking this. “Miss Lane,” he begins, playfully dropping a few notes into his Superman voice without realizing that she is effectively now in character herself, no longer his maybe-partner but an investigative reporter interrogating a mysterious metahuman who has taken it upon himself to intervene in international affairs.
He pushes back on her characterization that he has “come under a lot of fire” for stopping the fictional country of Boravia from invading its neighbor Jarhanpur and makes a face when she refers to his “actions” rather than “stopping a war” — framing what he did not as an accomplishment but as something detached from any result. And after she says she would question herself in the same situation, while he sees what he did as a straightforward good, he blows up and leaves the apartment in a huff.
Clark was clearly not expecting tough treatment; he’s the Daily Planet’s chief Superman correspondent thanks to his incredible ability to secure softball quotes from himself. He’s not the only superhero with an ethically questionable approach to a newspaper day job. (Where would Peter Parker be at the Daily Bugle without his ability to secure snaps of Spider-Man?) But journalism, in its rarely achieved ideal, exists to question the narratives of those in power. In that scene between Clark and Lois in James Gunn’s latest film, Clark is discomfited to find himself treated as one of the powerful and denied the kind of accommodations that people in power come to expect. Despite knowing full well what it means to be on the record, and being aware of Lois’s digital recorder running on the coffee table between them, he keeps trying to edit the interview as it’s happening. (“That part was an aside!”) If he assumed the interview would be a friendly one with his girlfriend (who, as George Gene Gustines pointed out in the New York Times, probably should have recused herself as well), what he got was one that gently but firmly questioned his certainty about being right.
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He is right, of course, because he’s Superman, champion of the oppressed, and attempts to portray him as a villain turn out to be the manipulations of the nefarious billionaire Lex Luthor (Nicholas Hoult). Lois, meanwhile, relies on certain squirrelly tactics familiar to anyone who has ever done an interview with someone they know will eventually get mad at them: ramping up to the confrontational questions, framing some around her own experiences, and outsourcing others to the faceless masses of the internet (“You’ve gotten a lot of heat on social media lately”). This view-from-nowhere approach can be exasperating, especially in the context of an invented conflict that manages to evoke Ukraine and Gaza in equal parts. And in trying to call out the complexities of the situation, Lois threatens to downplay the death and suffering Superman averted. But she’s also not unjustified in her line of questioning. After all, Luthor, like Superman, is just as convinced he’s on the side of righteousness, and he rips the universe in half in pursuit of the greater good, which for him conveniently matches up with whatever his own desires might be. Real journalism should not be a friend to anyone, which is why Lois wonders if she’s fundamentally unfit to make a relationship with a superpowered idealist work.
Of course, real journalism is down bad these days. Watching Clark in the bustling newsroom of the Daily Planet has become a curiously bittersweet experience, given that Superman’s historical day job is threatening to become as obsolete as milkmen and switchboard operators. Despite, or maybe because of, all that, Superman is a surprisingly strong journalism movie, from Lois’s pointed inquiries in that interview to the whole third act, which is as swashbuckling as reporting can get. It’s an All the President’s Men finale for the comic-book set with Jimmy Olsen securing damning evidence from a highly placed whistleblower and typing a bombshell exposé about LuthorCorp directly into the Daily Planet’s CMS (leaving the copy desk to presumably backread it from whichever bunker the staff has been evacuated to). The most outlandish aspect isn’t that the intrepid team pulled off the investigation but that the public cares about it. The exposé is as instrumental for taking down the film’s antagonist as any superheroics; sentiment quickly turns against Luthor as a direct result of the article, and he faces immediate legal consequences. Superman’s most poignant fantasy isn’t a morally upright alien savior but the idea that modern journalism, in an era when what the truth is has become a matter of tribalism, can still take down a powerful oligarch. Easier to believe a man can fly.
