Superman Was Always an Immigrant

You’re not going to believe this, but the superhero whose most famous slogan is “Truth, justice, and the American way” comes saddled with political baggage. James Gunn’s new Superman film, the sixth live-action iteration of the character, hasn’t altered the superhero’s famous origin story in any significant way. But in referring to Superman as “an immigrant,” as Gunn did in an interview last week, the director appears to have scandalized conservative media, who decried the film as a “super-woke” attempt to insinuate liberal “ideology” with viewers.

For anyone remotely familiar with Superman’s origins, this must all seem like lunacy. He was created in 1938 by Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, Cleveland-born kids of Jewish immigrants, and written from the very beginning as a refugee sent to Earth by his alien parents as a toddler. This story is as set in stone as Batman’s mother having her pearl necklace scattered in an alleyway. But what are facts in the face of a good rage cycle? This one’s proving to be especially disingenuous. Let’s recap who’s said what so far.

What exactly did James Gunn say?

In an interview with the Sunday Times published last Friday, the director claimed that Superman is the story of America: “An immigrant that came from other places and populated the country, but for me it is mostly a story that says basic human kindness is a value and is something we have lost.” When asked if the film plays differently to liberal and conservative audiences, he responded in the affirmative, adding, “But it’s about human kindness and obviously there will be jerks out there who are just not kind and will take it as offensive just because it is about kindness. But screw them.”

People were normal about this, right?

Wrong. Talking heads on Fox News invoked something called a “moat of woke” and joked about the character having “MS-13” branded on his cape, rather than his iconic S.

But Superman is (and has always been) technically an immigrant, having come to Earth from a distant, dying planet. One can argue that, in order to care for him, his small-town Kansas parents likely committed all kinds of immigration fraud to give him an American identity — but those specifics might not matter to naysayers in today’s racially charged climate. At a time when organizations like ICE have been accused of detaining Latinos merely suspected of being undocumented immigrants, regardless of their actual immigration or citizenship status, the phrase itself, “immigrant,” has become racialized to the point of hysteria. So of course, the white, blue-eyed, American-accented Clark Kent doesn’t fit the narrow image of a migrant those currently in favor of mass deportation might have.

How did Gunn and the cast respond?

In red carpet interviews with Variety, Gunn, his brother Sean (who has a brief role in the film), and Green Lantern/Guy Gardener actor Nathan Fillion were all asked about these right-wing reactions. The director was diplomatic but firm, saying that while he wasn’t going to judge anyone, the movie is “about kindness, and I think that’s something everyone can relate to.”

Sean Gunn was similarly supportive but more direct: “We support our people, you know? We love our immigrants. Yes, Superman is an immigrant, and yes, the people that we support in this country are immigrants and if you don’t like that, you’re not American. People who say no to immigrants are against the American way.” Fillion, meanwhile, laughed off the outrage, much as his character might: “Aw, somebody needs a hug. It’s just a movie, guys.”

Has anyone else of note said anything about the controversy?

Of note? Not really, but Lois & Clark: The New Adventures of Superman actor Dean Cain recently chimed in, agreeing that Superman is in fact an immigrant story, before going on a bizarre tirade about the film (which he had not yet seen) aligning with an ethos he described as “I want to get rid of all the rules in America, because I want it to be more like Somalia.” It’s not exactly befitting of an actor who once played the Man of Steel, but invoking the East African nation unprompted as shorthand for lawlessness does expose the nativism and fervent racial aggression at the heart of this debate.

This also isn’t the first time Cain has criticized modern Superman for supposedly shedding “the American way.” In a 2020 interview with Fox News, he claimed he “wouldn’t be allowed to say” the character’s iconic “Truth, justice, and the American way” phrase if he played the character today. This, of course, was swiftly rebuked by comics writer Tom King, who had used the phrase in a Superman comic that same year. (The White House meanwhile, posted a Photoshopped version of the official Superman poster on Friday, with Donald Trump’s head in place of Corenswet’s, and the “American way” motto in place of the movie’s actual tagline, which is “Look up.”)

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What’s the deal with “the American way”?

Comics faithfuls will know that the iconic motto has never really been a constant. Superman’s radio serial introduced the phrase “Truth and justice” to his mission statement when it debuted in 1940, but shortly after the U.S. entered the Second World War, the show added “the American way” to the hero’s motto in 1942. This longer version would be popularized by the George Reeves Adventures of Superman series during its run in the 1950s, a period of rising Cold War tensions, and the iconic Christopher Reeves version of the character would even utter it in the 1978 film Superman: The Movie. However, it never appeared in a comic until 1991, and a mere 20 years later, the character was already seen wrestling with its meaning, to the point of renouncing his U.S. citizenship lest he be “construed as an instrument of U.S. policy.”

What does Superman have to say about undocumented immigrants?

In the TV series Smallville, Tom Welling’s Clark Kent famously protects undocumented Mexican immigrant Javier (Tyler Posey) from the police and refers to himself as “an illegal immigrant.” Gunn’s film isn’t as explicit about this parallel, but the charged language thrown at his version of Superman (David Corenswet) by billionaire Lex Luthor (Nicholas Hoult) leans in this direction. Luthor uses Superman’s alien-ness not only to dehumanize him (he refers to him as “it”) but also to paint him in the media as a corrupting force and to strip him of his civil rights. This is where the movie gets almost directly confrontational with its politics.

Luthor — with the backing of the U.S. government — traps both aliens and political opponents in an off-site prison, located in a pocket dimension. The film makes the prisoners’ civil-rights violations explicit as these vulnerable characters are dropped into legal and temporal limbo and are denied the right of due process, an ongoing conversation in light of recent deportations.

Are there other political parallels in the film?

A recent Letterboxd review that was widely shared on social media gave people the impression that Gunn’s Superman was “anti-Israel.” While there are events in the film that can be read as parallels to Israel’s occupation of Palestine, the movie’s geopolitical allusions aren’t quite so specific. In the grand tradition of DC and Marvel, Superman features made-up countries whose real-world analogues aren’t exactly cut and dried. The militarized nation of Boravia and the poor country it invades, Jarhanpur, are both drawn from the comics. In the movie, the former is designed along the lines of a former Soviet state, while the latter seems to be vaguely West Asian, though its people speak with American accents.

Gunn has stated that Israel and Palestine weren’t on his mind when writing this story, and the film doesn’t really shed light on the political impetus behind Boravia’s attacks, beyond U.S. allyship. The situation mostly serves to complicate things for Superman, who seeks to intervene but has to circumvent diplomacy in order to save people. When Lois Lane (Rachel Brosnahan) challenges him on this dilemma, he’s adamant about choosing altruism over governmental red tape, setting up a story where he helps save the people of Jarhanpur from Boravia’s military, despite the bureaucratic nightmare it would cause (though ultimately it’s his friends the Justice Gang who undertake this mission while he’s on the other side of the globe in Metropolis).

Does the movie live up to Gunn’s political promises?

Gunn said the movie is “about human kindness,” and his version of Superman has traits that absolutely align with this ethos. When Metropolis is attacked by a fire-breathing kaiju, the hero can be seen not only saving civilians but trying to talk his superhero rivals the Justice Gang out of using lethal tactics on the monster. The next time we see the Gang deal with a major threat (an “inter-dimensional imp,”) they appear to remember Superman’s words and attempt to thwart the giant monster without killing it.

However, this being a superhero movie, there are inevitable third-act flaws. While Superman generally strains to find the gentlest solution to each conflict, and even tries to talk a few villains onto the straight and narrow, he does allow one of them — Ultraman, a clone of himself — to get hit by a bus and fall into a black hole without really trying to help him. It goes by rather quickly, but it might bring to mind the climax of Batman Begins, in which the Caped Crusader (Christian Bale) lets the villainous Ra’s Al Ghul (Liam Neeson) fall to his death, declaring: “I won’t kill you, but I don’t have to save you.”

It’s not really the most “Superman” of conclusions, especially in a film filled with lofty speeches about seeing people’s humanity. But it’s just one fleeting instance in a movie otherwise filled with at least nominally political gestures, about the U.S. government tacitly approving ground invasions into vulnerable countries and allowing people to be stripped of their basic rights on flimsy pretexts.

Superman has plenty of flaws. But when it comes to Gunn’s approach in the realm of politics and “the American way,” the film is simple and straightforward in a way the character himself always has been. Pretending otherwise is disingenuous.