Superman will soon be leaving us, and not a moment too soon. After racking up an impressive opening week with his latest adventure, Superman Returns, he got his ass kicked by some dead men’s chests or somesuch.
So let the man go away for a while. Five years at least, maybe forever. We don’t want him around. Lois Lane got it right in her Pulitzer Prize-winning editorial the last time that loser left Earth: The world doesn’t need Superman, or at least this one.
If we’re comparing Superman and Christ, let’s not ignore what seems a fairly blatant artistic reference in the current campaign for Superman Returns, to Salvador Dali’s Christ of St. John of the Cross (top) and Crucifixion (bottom):
(I’m not the first to note the similarity.)
Jim Emerson directed me to this fascinating article from The Journal of Religion and Film.
The piece is remarkable less for its topic — a comparison of Superman to Jesus Christ — than its approach. In its analysis, the thorough, sometimes smart, and often laughable article uses the first two Christopher Reeve Superman movies as its text for the Man of Steel. That’s akin to using the movie The Last Temptation of Christ as the authoritative source on Jesus’ life. It comes across as really lazy, a corner cut to avoid having to read decades of comic books.
Perspective and the Past