I saw Superman last week with the family and liked it.
But then, I liked Man of Steel for what it was. One of the things I enjoy about Superman as a property is how it tends to bring out the best in me. I can appreciate the stuff each interpretation does well and love it for that individual expression. Heck, I even liked (parts of) Superman Returns. There was that part where he lifted that heavy thing. And then, a little bit later, he lifted something slightly heavier. (And also, Brandon Routh was a great Superman and a great Clark, the scene with the piano was tense and great, it clearly loved the first two movies and you could see flashes of brilliance with what it was trying to do.)
The very first comic book I remember reading was a supermarket checkout aisle digest collection of the Legion of Super-Heroes. If you're not familiar, it's the adventures of Superboy with other teenage superheroes, a thousand years in the future. I worked at a comic book store before the internet was widely available, so instead of looking my phone all day, I read comics all day. I'm well-acquainted with Superman and have been all my life, is what I'm saying. So I was well-positioned to recognize the broad strokes of the movie as they unfolded. (That's certainly not a dig against it. If a well-informed and highly motivated viewer can spot the beats of your movie, well that's a feature, not a bug. It means it's been structured well.)
I would say that it's impossible to tell a completely original story about Superman after nearly 100 years of continuous publication, except Superman Smashes the Klan did it in 2019.
This has probably replaced All-Star Superman as my favorite Superman story.
We're going to get into spoilers about now, so beware.
BEWARE
BEWARE
BEWARE
BEWARE
"Bewarb?"
Good stuff:
Outstanding supporting cast. Nicholas Hoult, Rachel Brosnahan, and Skyler Gisondo were born to play their roles. I saw David Corenswet in the Politician years ago, and while I hated it, I had the same thought everybody did on seeing it, "Holy shit, this guy needs to play Superman!"
It had humor. After the movie, I went online (as one does) and saw that Luthor's sidekick Otis was credited as Otis Berg. That's actually hilarious.
It wasn't embarrassed about about being a comic book movie. I love the X-Men movies of the 90s, but it started the "mature" trend of sneering at the source material that it believes the audience has outgrown (or should have).
I overall liked the movie, and I didn't want to open up with critiques, so I'm going to try the compliment sandwich format here. Good-bad-good. Taking a break.
Some bad stuff (or at least stuff I didn't like):
As much as I enjoyed seeing Clementine Pennyfeather,
You're new. Not much of a rind on you.
and this is a personal issue, but I don't like Superman's space mom and dad being evil. And maybe we'll get a qualifier or additional context, but it rubs me the wrong way.
I see the Kents as his parents, and, along with his Lois, the most important people in his world. Lara and Jor-El are an important part of his backstory, but not his parents in the way the Kents are. I think this is an especially egregious misstep particularly since the narrative leaned heavily into the immigrant angle. I believe that they are people who deeply loved their son and sacrificed to give him a better life they would not live to see.
Instead, the subtext is that Superman is one of the only good ones, the extraordinary member of an outsider group that is otherwise universally bad.
And speaking of his parents....I'll buy that some kind of handwavy nanotechnology super-nonsense allowed the Engineer to decode/repair the message. I'm suspending my disbelief, but it's there. She's a polymath. She does both hacking and handstands. If it's so easy that puny, incompatible Earth science fixes it in about ten seconds, then maybe Clark could have had his robots look into at some point over the past two decades.
That's not the part that bothers me, though. Translation is hard. Languages are not a cipher where one word in English corresponds to a one word in another language. When translating something you have to keep in mind the context and the intention. For an earlier post, I looked into Baudelaire's poetry. He did most of his writing from the 1840s-1860s, so the language hasn't changed monumentally in that time, and English borrowed a lot from French. But as you can see from this link, there are a number of very different translations of his work. And these are from experts who have had all the time they needed to explore it and I think it's fair to say we have a much better understanding of French than we do of Kryptonian.
I get what they're trying for, but that very quick, absolutely universal acceptance of the authenticity of the message is another weak point. Experts take a long time to validate something unusual and this seemed to have been completed in hours. Quickly enough that none of Mister Terrific's pals who did the investigating thought to reach out to him. Yeah, it's a picayune complaint in a movie about flying aliens, pocket universe gulags and super-powered dogs, but it's another thing that bothers me.
I don't like a reckless Superman. I loved Grant Morrison's angry young man interpretation
With his working class ties and his radical plans...
but in the movie, it just seemed like he didn't think through the consequences of his actions. I like a Superman who will take a principled stand even though he knows there will be consequences, not one caught unawares by the entirely predictable blowback from his actions.
I want a Superman who stands up for the weak and knows and accepts that there are sometimes consequences for it. (Fortunately, we get him later in the movie)
Ugh, this negative part is getting bigger than I had hoped. One more thing. The ending speech was a little flabby. "I'm as human as anyone. I love, I get scared. I wake up every morning and despite not knowing what to do, I put one foot in front of the other and I try to make the best choices I can. I screw up all the time, but that is being human. And that's my greatest strength."
It was fine.
You said it, Mister Fantastic!
And sometimes good enough is good enough, but not at the climax of the movie. It wasn't the best version of itself.
Okay, back to stuff I like. I already mentioned Jimmy and Lois. But they were just so good. They were the best versions of themselves. I liked her understated purple color scheme, hearkening back the S:TAS. They were great together and great on their own or with others.
The movie had a lot of heart. His parents, the Kents, were perfect too. In a lot of ways, the Kents are the bellwether for how a Superman adaptation is going to be. Small role, big impact.
I love the janky secondary level of the Superman mythology that's usually too weird to include, like the Bottle City of Kandor or Krypto. I'm glad that he's there. I'm even happier about the real world consequences of his presence, that shelter dog adoptions have surged.
He also leads to the best exchange in the movie.
Superman: I'm gonna turn myself in. Maybe they'll take me wherever they took the dog.
Lois Lane: It's just a dog.
Superman: I know, and he's not even a very good one. But he's alone... and probably scared.
Percy said that felt like a line I would write and I wish I had. There is so much of Superman in that line.
It was good. It wasn't perfect. But maybe that's what I need to take from the movie. Things don't need to be perfect.
1. For a Breath I Tarry – A Shropshire Lad by A.E. Housman 2. The Last Defender of Camelot – Sir Galahad by Alfred, Lord Tennyson 3. Eye of Cat – A Blessing by Luci Tapahonso 4. Godson – Because I Could Not Stop for Death by Emily Dickinson 5. Creatures of Light and Darkness – The Second Coming by W.B. Yeats 6. The Doors of His Face, The Lamps of His Mouth – The Kraken by Alfred, Lord Tennyson 7. Divine Madness – To His Coy Mistress by Andrew Marvell 8. Comes Now the Power – Still I Rise by Maya Angelou 9. Damnation Alley – Invictus by William Ernest Henley 10. Nine Princes in Amber – Ulysses by Alfred, Lord Tennyson 11. A Rose for Ecclesiastes – Ecclesiastes 12. Lord of Light – The Upanishads 13. And Call Me Conrad (This Immortal) – Ode to the West Wind by Percy Bysshe Shelley 14. Jack of Shadows – Kubla Khan by Samuel Taylor Coleridge 15. The Guns of Avalon – La Belle Dame sans Merci by John Keats 16. The Changing Land – The Haunted Palace by Edgar Allan Poe 17. Home is the Hangman – The Tyger by William Blake 18. 24 Views of Mt. Fuji, by Hokusai – Death poem by Bashō 19. He Who Shapes – The Lady of Shalott by Alfred, Lord Tennyson 20. Isle of the Dead – When You Are Old by W.B. Yeats 21. The Graveyard Heart – Love After Love by Derek Walcott 22. The Force That Through the Circuit Drives the Current – The Force That Through the Green Fuse Drives the Flower by Dylan Thomas 23. Roadmarks – Roads by Edward Thomas 24. Doorways in the Sand – When I Heard the Learn’d Astronomer by Walt Whitman 25. Permafrost – What Lips My Lips Have Kissed, and Where, and Why by Edna St. Vincent Millay 26. Deus Irae – God’s Grandeur by Gerard Manley Hopkins 27. The Courts of Chaos – Correspondences by Charles Baudelaire 28. Donnerjack – The Distance That the Dead Have Gone by Emily Dickinson 29. Love is an Imaginary Number – Paradise Lost by John Milton 30. A Night in the Lonesome October – Ulalume by Edgar Allan Poe
Overall, it wound up being more difficult than I expected, but I broadened my horizons as part of the process and I'm happy for having done it.
And after all, Ulalume gave the story its name. It’s only fair.
The parallels are baked in. Both the poem and the novel take place in a landscape shaped by grief, memory, and moonlight. Both are narrated in first-person by someone (or something) keeping secrets. Both rely on rhythm, atmosphere, and slow-building dread.
Poe’s narrator wanders through the haunted woods of October. Zelazny’s characters do the same, though their woods are filled with familiars, rituals, and the threat of something larger breaking through. Ulalume is dreamlike and mournful; Lonesome October is playful but melancholy underneath. They rhyme in tone, if not in structure.
It’s a perfect closing for April, even if the month doesn’t quite give us all the time we want. Cruelest month, indeed.
The skies they were ashen and sober;
The leaves they were crispéd and sere—
The leaves they were withering and sere;
It was night in the lonesome October
Of my most immemorial year;
It was hard by the dim lake of Auber,
In the misty mid region of Weir—
It was down by the dank tarn of Auber,
In the ghoul-haunted woodland of Weir.
Here once, through an alley Titanic,
Of cypress, I roamed with my Soul—
Of cypress, with Psyche, my Soul.
These were days when my heart was volcanic
As the scoriac rivers that roll—
As the lavas that restlessly roll
Their sulphurous currents down Yaanek
In the ultimate climes of the pole—
That groan as they roll down Mount Yaanek
In the realms of the boreal pole.
Our talk had been serious and sober,
But our thoughts they were palsied and sere—
Our memories were treacherous and sere—
For we knew not the month was October,
And we marked not the night of the year—
(Ah, night of all nights in the year!)
We noted not the dim lake of Auber—
(Though once we had journeyed down here)—
We remembered not the dank tarn of Auber,
Nor the ghoul-haunted woodland of Weir.
And now, as the night was senescent
And star-dials pointed to morn—
As the star-dials hinted of morn—
At the end of our path a liquescent
And nebulous lustre was born,
Out of which a miraculous crescent
Arose with a duplicate horn—
Astarte's bediamonded crescent
Distinct with its duplicate horn.
And I said—"She is warmer than Dian:
She rolls through an ether of sighs—
She revels in a region of sighs:
She has seen that the tears are not dry on
These cheeks, where the worm never dies,
And has come past the stars of the Lion
To point us the path to the skies—
To the Lethean peace of the skies—
Come up, in despite of the Lion,
To shine on us with her bright eyes—
Come up through the lair of the Lion,
With love in her luminous eyes."
But Psyche, uplifting her finger,
Said—"Sadly this star I mistrust—
Her pallor I strangely mistrust:—
Oh, hasten! oh, let us not linger!
Oh, fly!—let us fly!—for we must."
In terror she spoke, letting sink her
Wings till they trailed in the dust—
In agony sobbed, letting sink her
Plumes till they trailed in the dust—
Till they sorrowfully trailed in the dust.
I replied—"This is nothing but dreaming:
Let us on by this tremulous light!
Let us bathe in this crystalline light!
Its Sybilic splendor is beaming
With Hope and in Beauty to-night:—
See!—it flickers up the sky through the night!
Ah, we safely may trust to its gleaming,
And be sure it will lead us aright—
We safely may trust to a gleaming
That cannot but guide us aright,
Since it flickers up to Heaven through the night."
This is one of the stories where the poem came first.
Love is an Imaginary Number isn't one of Zelazny's best known or most loved stories, but there is something about it that calls to me.
I do love Milton's writing. When I started putting this list together, one of my favorite phrases in the English language came to mind: Awake, arise, or be forever fallen. That line alone might have been enough to get Paradise Lost on the list. It’s a rallying cry and a warning, all at once.
Zelazny draws from the same well. He calls on Loki and Lucifer to populate Love is an Imaginary Number with their metaphors. It’s a story about defiance and identity, about the masks we wear and the roles we’re handed. It’s brief, strange, and deliberately slippery.
Milton gives us a devil who chooses rebellion over submission. Zelazny gives us something less straightforward but just as sharp. The pairing works not because the story tries to match Paradise Lost in scope, but because it glances in the same direction and smiles.
He call'd so loud, that all the hollow Deep
Of Hell resounded. Princes, Potentates
Warriers, the Flowr of Heav'n, once yours, now lost,
If Eye of Cat is the story I don't like as much it deserves, then Donnerjack is its antithesis, my affection for it out of proportion (some would say) with its actual merit.
Those who say such things are wrong.
Today's poem is another by Emily Dickinson.
The Distance That the Dead Have Gone reflects the themes of digital afterlife, separation, mourning, and blurred boundaries between the living and the dead that Donnerjack explores. I do love this book. The generational sweep of it gives it a more epic feel than I believe the originally intended trilogy would have had.
