The latest Superman film, while enjoying critical acclaim, has faced an undercurrent of far-right attacks. But this "tantrum" goes beyond the typical "anti-woke" freakout of the right at anything in pop culture or corporate America that promotes inclusion or liberal values, wrote Amanda Marcotte for Salon — it's something more fundamental and alarming.
On the surface, she wrote, it's just more of the same: "The ultimate goal is to persuade people to reject movies, music, TV and other cultural artifacts as 'woke' or 'Satanic,' and turn exclusively to MAGA influencers for their entertainment needs. Ben Shapiro’s Daily Wire even has a movie studio where they turn out subpar content that only has an audience because they’ve convinced right-wingers to eschew quality films as too 'liberal.'"
But there's something a lot more "sinister" in the specific attacks they're making against Superman, Marcotte continued. It's "part of a larger effort by the right to completely rewrite history, so they can pretend that being a patriotic American means embracing authoritarian values."
Specifically, they are enraged that director James Gunn described Superman as "the story of America" because he's "an immigrant that came from other places and populated the country.” This is factually true on all levels — America's population and demographics were built by immigration from around the world over centuries, and Superman, an alien being who crash-landed on Earth at a young age, has been described as an immigrant, and pro-immigration, from the outset in the comics.
"Jesse Watters of Fox News 'joked' that Superman should have 'MS-13' on his cape," wrote Marcotte. "Co-host Kellyanne Conway agreed, wondering if the movie would fail on the assumption that American audiences also hate kindness and immigrants. Dean Cain, who played Superman on TV before finding a job better suited to his acting talents — right-wing punditry — was also mad. 'How woke is Hollywood going to make this character?' I don’t remember Cain’s version of Superman, so maybe he did go around kicking dogs and sexually harassing women like a proper MAGA superhero. But honestly, I doubt the studio would have allowed that."
What makes this so disturbing, Marcotte continued, is that Superman being an immigrant is one of the big things everyone knows about him. Fox News is "asking their audience to deny not just the facts, but a fact we all grew up with, something woven into the DNA of our American identity" — and it ties in with a broad-based GOP effort to attack any history that promotes diversity or immigration, from defunding museums to censoring books in libraries to "spreading Christian nationalist lies that the U.S. was founded as a functional theocracy, when it was intended to be a secular nation."
Superman, in essence, is proof that the liberal, multicultural vision of America has been in our pop culture since long before most members of the MAGA movement were even born, wrote Marcotte, and the effort to erase those values shows how far they are willing to go to remake this country in their vision.
"We don’t just see our family histories in the immigrants who are now being rounded up by right-wingers, who threaten to feed them to alligators," wrote Marcotte. "We see our ancestral stories reflected by characters like Superman. By trying to rewrite the history of the character that everyone knows, MAGA pundits are asking their audience to join in a collective lie, one whose purpose is to dismantle the core understanding of what America is — and replace it with their dystopian, fascistic vision for us instead."
