GARY
ENGLE
What Makes
Superman So Darned American?
When I was young I spent a lot of time arguing with myself about who
would win in a
fight between John Wayne and Superman. On days when I wore my cowboy hat and cap
guns, I knew the Duke would win because of his pronounced superiority in the
all-important
matter of swagger. There were days, though, when a frayed army blanket tied
cape-fashion
around my neck signalled a young man's need to believe there could be no end to
the potency
of his
being.
Then the Man of Steel was the odds-on favorite to knock the Duke for a
cosmic loop. My
greatest childhood problem was that the question could never be resolved because
no such
battle could ever take place. I mean, how would a fight start between the only
two Americans
who never started anything, who always fought only to defend their rights and
the American
way?
Now that I'm older and able to look with reason on the mysteries of
childhood, I've finally
resolved the
dilemma. John Wayne was the best older brother any kid could ever hope to
have, but he was no Superman.
Superman is the great American hero. We are a nation rich with legendary
figures. But
among the Davy Crocketts and Paul Bunyans and Mike Finks and Pecos Bills and all
the rest
who speak for various regional identities in the pantheon of American folklore,
only
Superman
achieves truly mythic stature, interweaving a pattern of beliefs, literary
conventions,
and cultural traditions of the American people more powerfully and more
accessibly than any
other
cultural symbol of the twentieth century, perhaps of any period in our history.
The
core of the American myth in Superman consists of a few basic facts that remain
unchanged
throughout
the infinitely varied ways in which the myth is told--facts with which everyone
is
familiar,
however marginal their knowledge of the story. Superman is an orphan rocketed to
Earth when
his native planet Krypton explodes; he lands near Smallville and is adopted by
Jonathan and Martha Kent, who inculcate in him their American middle-class
ethic; as an
adult he
migrates to Metropolis where he defends America--no, the world! no, the
Universe!--from
all evil and harm while playing a romantic game in which, as Clark Kent, he
hopelessly
pursues Lois Lane, who hopelessly pursues Superman, who remains aloof until
such time as Lois proves worthy of him by falling in love with his feigned
identity as a
weakling.
That's it. Every narrative thread in the mythology, each one of the thousands of
plots in the
fifty year stream of comics and films and TV shows, all the tales involving the
demigods of
the Superman pantheon--Superboy, Supergirl, even Krypto the superdog--every
single one
reinforces by never contradicting this basic set of facts. That's the myth, and
that's
where one
looks to understand America.
It is impossible to imagine Superman being as popular as he is and
speaking as deeply to the American character were he not an immigrant and an
orphan. Immigration, of course, is
the
overwhelming fact in American history. Except for the Indians, all Americans
have an
immediate sense of their origins elsewhere. No nation on Earth has so deeply
embedded in its social consciousness the imagery of passage from one social
identity to another: the
Mayflower of
the New England separatists, the slave ships from Africa and the subsequent
underground
railroads toward freedom in the North, the sailing ships and steamers running
shuttles
across two oceans in the nineteenth century, the freedom airlifts in the
twentieth.
Somehow the picture just isn't complete without Superman's rocket ship.
Like the peoples of the nation whose values he defends, Superman is an
alien, but not just
any alien.
He's the consummate and totally uncompromised alien, an immigrant whose visible
difference
from the norm is underscored by his decision to wear a costume of bold primary
colors so
tight as to be his very skin. Moreover, Superman the alien is real. He stands
out
among the
hosts of comic book characters (Batman is a good example) for whom the
superhero
role is like a mask assumed when needed, a costume worn over their real
identities
as normal
Americans. Superman's powers--strength, mobility, x-ray vision and the like
--are
the
comic-book equivalents of ethnic characteristics, and they protect and preserve
the vitality
of the
foster community in which he lives in the same way that immigrant ethnicity has
sustained
American culture linguistically, artistically, economically, politically, and
spiritually.
The
myth of Superman asserts with total confidence and a childlike innocence the
value of
the
immigrant in American culture.
From this nation's beginnings Americans have looked for ways of coming to
terms with the
immigrant
experience. This is why, for example, so much of American literature and popular
culture
deals with the theme of dislocation, generally focused in characters devoted or
doomed to
constant physical movement. Daniel Boone became an American legend in part as
a result of
apocryphal stories that he moved every time his neighbors got close enough for
him to see
the smoke of their cabin fires. James Fenimore Cooper's Natty Bumppo spent the
five long
novels of the Leatherstocking saga drifting ever westward, like the pioneers who
were his
spiritual offspring, from the Mohawk valley of upstate New York to the Great
Plains
where he
died. Huck Finn sailed through the moral heart of America on a raft. Melville's
Ishmael,
Wister's Virginian, Shane, Gatsby, the entire Lost Generation, Steinbeck's Okies,
Little
Orphan Annie, a thousand fiddle-footed cowboy heroes of dime novels and films
and
television--all
in motion, searching for the American dream or stubbornly refusing to give up
their
innocence by growing old, all symptomatic of a national sense of rootlessness
stemming
from an
identity founded on the experience of immigration.
Individual mobility is an integral part of America's dreamwork. Is it any
wonder, then, that
our greatest
hero can take to the air at will? Superman's ability to fly does more than place
him in a
tradition of mythic figures going back to the Greek messenger god Hermes or
Zetes
the flying
Argonaut. It makes him an exemplar in the American dream. Take away a young
man's wheels
and you take away his manhood. Jack Kerouac and Charles Kurault go on the
road;
William Least Heat Moon looks for himself in a van exploring the veins of
America in
its system
of blue highways; legions of gray-haired retirees turn Air Stream trailers and
Winnebagos
into proof positive that you can, in the end, take it with you. On a human
scale,
the American need to keep moving suggests a neurotic aimlessness under the
surface of
adventure.
But take the human restraints off, let Superman fly unencumbered when and
wherever he
will, and the meaning of mobility in the American consciousness begins to reveal
itself
Superman's incredible speed allows him to be as close to everywhere at once as
it is
physically
possible to be. Displacement is, therefore, impossible. His sense of self is not
dispersed by
his life's migration but rather enhanced by all the universe that he is able to
occupy. What
American, whether an immigrant in spirit or in fact, could resist the appeal of
one with
such an ironclad immunity to the anxiety of dislocation?
In America, physical dislocation serves as a symbol of social and
psychological movement.
When our
immigrant ancestors arrived on America's shores they hit the ground running,
some
to homestead
on the Great Plains, others to claw their way up the socioeconomic ladder in
coastal
ghettos. Upward mobility, westward migration, Sunbelt relocation--the wisdom in
America is
that people don't, can't, mustn't end up where they begin. This belief has the
moral
force of
religious doctrine. Thus the American identity is ordered around the
psychological
experience
of forsaking or losing the past for the opportunity of reinventing oneself in
the
future. This
makes the orphan a potent symbol of the American character. Orphans aren't
merely free
to reinvent themselves. They are obliged to do so.
When Superman reinvents himself, he becomes the bumbling Clark Kent, a
figure as
immobile as
Superman is mobile, as weak as his alter ego is strong. Over the years
commentators
have been fond of stressing how Clark Kent provides an illusory image of
wimpiness
onto which children can project their insecurities about their own potential
(and,
hopefully,
equally illusory) weaknesses. But I think the role of Clark Kent is far more
complex than
that.
During
my childhood, Kent contributed nothing to my love for the Man of Steel. If left
to
contemplate
him for too long, I found myself changing from cape back into cowboy hat and
guns. John
Wayne, at least, was no sissy that I could ever see. Of course, in all the
Westerns
that the
Duke came to stand for in my mind, there were elements that left me as confused
as
the paradox
between Kent and Superman. For example, I could never seem to figure out why
cowboys so
often fell in love when there were obviously better options: horses to ride,
guns
to shoot,
outlaws to chase, and savages to kill. Even on the days when I became John
Wayne,
I could fall
victim to a never-articulated anxiety about the potential for poor judgment in
my
cowboy
heroes. Then, I generally drifted back into a worship of Superman. With him, at
least,
the
mysterious communion of opposites was honest and on the surface of things.
What disturbed me as a child is what I now think makes the myth of
Superman so
appealing to
an immigrant sensibility. The shape-shifting between Clark Kent and Superman
is the means
by which this mid-twentieth-century, urban story--like the pastoral,
nineteenth-century
Western before it--addresses in dramatic terms the theme of cultural
assimilation.
At
its most basic level, the Western was an imaginative record of the American
experience
of westward
migration and settlement. By bringing the forces of civilization and savagery
together on
a mythical frontier, the Western addressed the problem of conflict between
apparently
mutually exclusive identities and explored options for negotiating between them.
In
terms that a
boy could comprehend, the myth explored the dilemma of assimilation--marry the
school marm
and start wearing Eastern clothes or saddle up and drift further westward with
the boys.
The Western was never a myth of stark moral simplicity. Pioneers fled
civilization by
migrating
west, but their purpose in the wilderness was to rebuild civilization. So
civilization
was both
good and bad, what Americans fled from and journeyed toward. A similar moral
ambiguity
rested at the heart of the wilderness. It was an Eden in which innocence could
be
achieved
through spiritual rebirth, but it was also the anarchic force that most directly
threatened
the civilized values America wanted to impose on the frontier. So the dilemma
arose:
In negotiating between civilization and the wilderness, between the old
order and the new,
between the
identity the pioneers carried with them from wherever they came and the identity
they sought
to invent, Americans faced an impossible choice. Either they pushed into the New
World
wilderness and forsook the ideals that motivated them or they clung to their
origins
and polluted
Eden.
The myth of the Western responded to this dilemma by inventing the idea
of the frontier
in which
civilized ideals embodied in the institutions of family, church, law, and
education
are
revitalized by the virtues of savagery: independence, self-reliance, personal
honor,
sympathy
with nature, and ethical uses of violence. In effect, the mythical frontier
represented
an attempt
to embody the perfect degree of assimilation in which both the old and new
identities
came together, if not in a single self-image, then at least in idealized
relationships,
like the
symbolic marriage of reformed cowboy and displaced school marm that ended Owen
Wister's
prototypical Virginian, or the mystical masculine bonding between
representatives
of an
ascendant and a vanishing America--Natty Bumppo and Chingachgook, the Lone
Ranger and
Tonto. On the Western frontier, both the old and new identities equally
mattered.
As powerful a myth as the Western was, however, there were certain limits
to its ability to
speak
directly to an increasingly common twentieth century immigrant sensibility.
First, it was
pastoral.
Its imagery of dusty frontier towns and breathtaking mountainous desolation
spoke
most
affectingly to those who conceived of the American dream in terms of the
nineteenth-century
immigrant experience of rural settlement. As the twentieth century wore
on, more
immigrants were, like Superman, moving from rural or small-town backgrounds to
metropolitan
environments. Moreover, the Western was historical, often elegiacally so.
Underlying
the air of celebration in even the most epic and romantic of Westerns--the films
of
John Ford,
say, in which John Wayne stood tall for all that any good American boy could
ever want to
be--was an awareness that the frontier was less a place than a state of mind
represented
in historic terms by a fleeting moment glimpsed imperfectly in the rapid wave of
westward
migration and settlement. Implicitly, then, whatever balance of past and future
identities
the frontier could offer was itself tenuous or illusory.
Twentieth-century immigrants, particularly the Eastern European Jews who
came to
America
after 1880 and who settled in the industrial and mercantile centers of the
Northeast--cities
like Cleveland where Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster grew up and created
Superman--could
be entertained by the Western, but they developed a separate literary
tradition
that addressed the theme of assimilation in terms closer to their personal
experience.
In
this tradition issues were clear-cut: Clinging to an Old World identity meant
isolation in
ghettos,
confrontation with a prejudiced mainstream culture, second-class social status,
and
impoverishment.
On the other hand, forsaking the past in favor of total absorption into the
mainstream,
while it could result in socioeconomic progress, meant a loss of the religious,
linguistic,
even culinary traditions that provided a foundation for psychological
well-being.
Such
loss was particularly tragic for the Jews because of the fundamental role played
by
history in
Jewish culture.
Writers who worked in this tradition--Abraham Cahan, Daniel Fuchs, Henry
Roth, and
Delmore
Schwarz, among others--generally found little reason to view the experience of
assimilation
with joy or optimism. Typical of the tradition was Cahan's early novel Yekl,
on
which Joan
Micklin Silver's film Hester Street was based. A young married couple,
Jake and
Gitl, clash over his need to be absorbed as quickly as possible into the
American mainstream
and her
obsessive preservation of their Russian-Jewish heritage. In symbolic terms,
their
confrontation
is as simple as their choice of headgear--a derby for him, a babushka for her.
That the
story ends with their divorce, even in the context of their gradual movement
toward
mutual
understanding of one another's point of view, suggests the divisive nature of
the
pressures at
work in the immigrant communities.
Where the pressures were perhaps most keenly felt was in the schools.
Educational theory
of the
period stressed the benefits of rapid assimilation. In the first decades of this
century,
for example,
New York schools flatly rejected bilingual education--a common response to the
plight of
non-English-speaking immigrants even today--and there were conscientious efforts
to
indoctrinate
the children of immigrants with American values, often at the expense of
traditions
within the ethnic community. What resulted was a generational rift in which
children
were openly embarrassed by and even contemptuous of their parents' values,
setting a
pattern in
American life in which second-generation immigrants migrate psychologically if
not
physically
from their parents, leaving it up to the third generation and beyond to
rediscover
their ethnic roots.
Under such circumstances, finding a believable and inspiring balance
between the old
identity and
the new, like that implicit in the myth of the frontier, was next to impossible.
The images
and characters that did emerge from the immigrant communities were often
comic. Seen
over and over in the fiction and popular theater of the day was the figure of
the
yiddische
Yankee, a jingoistic optimist who spoke heavily accented American slang, talked
baseball
like an addict without understanding the game, and dressed like a Broadway dandy
on a
budget--in short, one who didn't understand America well enough to distinguish
between
image and
substance and who paid for the mistake by becoming the butt of a style of comedy
bordering on
pathos. So ingrained was this stereotype in popular culture that it echoes today
in TV
situation comedy.
Throughout American popular culture between 1880 and the Second World War
the story
was the
same. Oxlike Swedish farmers, German brewers, Jewish merchants, corrupt Irish
ward
healers,
Italian gangsters --there was a parade of images that reflected in terms often
comic,
sometimes
tragic, the humiliation, pain, and cultural insecurity of people in a state of
transition.
Even in the comics, a medium intimately connected with immigrant culture, there
simply was
no image that presented a blending of identities in the assimilation process in
a
way that stressed pride, self-confidence, integrity, and psychological
well-being. None, that is,
until
Superman.
The brilliant stroke in the conception of Superman--the sine qua non that
makes the whole
myth
work--is the fact that he has two identities. The myth simply wouldn't work
without
Clark Kent,
mild mannered newspaper reporter and later, as the myth evolved, bland TV
newsman.
Adopting the white-bread image of a wimp is first and foremost a moral act for
the
Man of
Steel. He does it to protect his parents from nefarious sorts who might use them
to
gain an edge
over the powerful alien. Moreover, Kent adds to Superman's powers the moral
guidance of
a Smallville upbringing. It is Jonathan Kent, fans remember, who instructs the
alien that
his powers must always be used for good. Thus does the myth add a mainstream
white
Anglo-Saxon Protestant ingredient to the American stew. Clark Kent is the
clearest
stereotype
of a self-effacing, hesitant, doubting, middle-class weakling ever invented. He
is
the epitome of visible invisibility, someone whose extraordinary ordinariness
makes him
disappear in
a crowd. In a phrase, he is the consummate figure of total cultural
assimilation,
and
significantly, he is not real. Implicit in this is the notion that mainstream
cultural norms,
however
useful, are illusions.
Though a disguise, Kent is necessary for the myth to work. This uniquely
American hero
has two
identities, one based on where he comes from in life's journey, one on where he
is
going. One
is real, one an illusion, and both are necessary for the myth of balance in the
assimilation
process to be complete. Superman's powers make the hero capable of saving
humanity;
Kent's total immersion in the American heartland makes him want to do it. The
result is an
improvement on the Western: an optimistic myth of assimilation but with an
urban,
technocratic setting.
One must never underestimate the importance to a myth of the most minute
elements which
do not
change over time and by which we recognize the story. Take Superman's cape, for
example.
When Joe Shuster inked the first Superman stories, in the early thirties when he
was
still a
student at Cleveland's Glenville High School, Superman was strictly beefcake in
tights,
looking more like a circus acrobat than the ultimate Man of Steel. By June of
1938 when
Action
Comics no. 1 was issued, the image had been altered to include a cape,
ostensibly to
make flight easier to render in the pictures. But it wasn't the cape of
Victorian melodrama and
adventure
fiction, the kind worn with a clasp around the neck. In fact, one is
hard-pressed to
find
any precedent in popular culture for the kind of cape Superman wears. His
emerges in a
seamless
line from either side of the front yoke of his tunic. It is a veritable growth
from
behind his
pectorals and hangs, when he stands at ease, in a line that doesn't so much
drape
his
shoulders as stand apart from them and echo their curve, like an angel's wings.
In light of this graphic detail, it seems hardly coincidental that
Superman's real,
Kryptonic
name is Kal-El, an apparent neologism by George Lowther, the author who
novelized the comic strip in 1942. In Hebrew, el can be both root and affix. As a root, it
is
the
masculine singular word for God. Angels in Hebrew mythology are called benei
Elohim
(literally, sons of the Gods), or Elyonim (higher beings) . As an affix,
el is most often
translated
as "of God," as in the plenitude of Old Testament given names: Ishma-el,
Dani-el,
Ezeki-el,
Samu-el, etc. It is also a common form for named angels in most Semitic
mythologies: Israf-el, Aza-el, Uri-el, Yo-el, Rapha-el, Gabri-el and--the one
perhaps most like
Superman-- Micha-el, the warrior angel and Satan's principal adversary.
The morpheme Kal bears a linguistic relation to two Hebrew roots. The
first, kal, means
"with
lightness" or "swiftness" (faster than a speeding bullet in
Hebrew?). It also bears a
connection
to the root hal, where h is the guttural ch of chutzpah. Hal translates roughly
as
"everything"
or "all." Kal-el, then, can be read as "all that is God," or
perhaps more in the
spirit of
the myth of Superman, "all that God is." And while we're at it, Kent
is a form of the
Hebrew kala.
In its k-n-t form, the word appears in the Bible, meaning "I have found a
son."
I'm suggesting that Superman raises the American immigrant experience to
the level of
religious
myth. And why not? He's not just some immigrant from across the waters like all
our
ancestors, but a real alien, an extraterrestrial, a visitor from heaven if you
will, which fact
lends an
element of the supernatural to the myth. America has no national religious icons
nor
any
pilgrimage shrines. The idea of a patron saint is ludicrous in a nation whose
Founding
Fathers
wrote into the founding documents the fundamental if not eternal separation of
church
and state.
America, though, is pretty much as religious as other industrialized countries.
It's
just that
our tradition of religious diversity precludes the nation's religious character
from
being embodied in objects or persons recognizably religious, for such are
immediately
identified
by their attachment to specific sectarian traditions and thus contradict the
eclecticism
of the American religious spirit.
In America, cultural icons that manage to tap the national religious
spirit are of necessity
secular on
the surface and sufficiently generalized to incorporate the diversity of
American
religious
traditions. Superman doesn't have to be seen as an angel to be appreciated, but
in the
absence of a
tradition of national religious iconography, he can serve as a safe,
nonsectarian
focus for
essentially religious sentiments, particularly among the young.
In the last analysis, Superman is like nothing so much as an American
boy's fantasy of a
messiah. He
is the male, heroic match for the Statue of Liberty, come like an immigrant from
heaven to
deliver humankind by sacrificing himself in the service of others. He protects
the
weak and
defends truth and justice and all the other moral virtues inherent in the
Judeo-Christian tradition,
remaining ever vigilant and ever chaste. What purer
or stronger
vision could
there possibly be for a child? Now that I put my mind to it, I see that John
Wayne never
had a chance.