When I saw the amount of serious attention being given to the political subtexts of the new Superman movie, I was taken aback.
But I shouldn’t have been.
After a recent visit to the US, I heard enough to convince me that there is no facet of American life that is not being politicized, so why not the Man of Steel?
Amid the scenes of aerial battles, destruction of cities, snarky repartee, romantic moments, and all-around guys vs. bad guys, there is plenty of political sermonizing going on.
There are obvious metaphors about Russia vs. Ukraine and the US government’s involvement in this conflict, as well as on the crackdown on immigrants in America, the influence of a certain billionaire on the US government, and, as many have noted, the Israel-Hamas War.
Most of it is rendered as Hollywood prefers to deal with all genuine issues: with a certain vagueness meant to stop short of offending or upsetting anyone. But some of it isn’t so vague. For many, the movie is being taken as a critique of Israeli and US policy towards Gaza.
Director/screenwriter James Gunn shares the writing credit with the creators of the Superman comics, Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, two American Jews born to immigrant parents who channeled their experiences into a superhero who fought for the country where their families chose to make their home. The original Superman fought for “truth, justice, and the American way.” But that was then.
Spoilers ahead
From this point on, there may be a few spoilers, so if you haven’t seen the movie yet, now is the time to stop reading and come back later.
The core of the movie is about Lex Luthor (a shockingly bland Nicholas Hoult), now an Elon Musk-like megalomaniac who controls US policy, persecuting Superman (a predictably bland David Corenswet) and stirring up public sentiment against the superhero because he is literally an alien – he’s from another planet.
But since the one tenet of the original story that remains untouched here is that Superman is truly the embodiment of all things good, from his dedication to saving humanity and his love for his parents, both the outer-space couple who birthed him and his cornfed Midwestern adoptive family, you know from the opening scene who will end up triumphing.
But there is quite a bit about a border conflict between two countries, and Superman and Luthor’s involvement in it.
The country that is planning an invasion and occupation of its neighbor is called Boravia, and it is clearly modelled in every detail on Russia and its leader on Putin, although the Boravian leader is given a mane of wild gray hair.
Before the movie opens, Superman went rogue to prevent Boravia from invading its neighbor, Jarhanpur, a desert country with oil that the Boravian leader and Luthor scheme to occupy and divide up.
( Just an aside, but this made me sorely miss Gene Hackman’s Lex Luthor from the much funnier Superman movies of the late 70s and 80s so much, where Luthor was obsessed with acquiring beachfront property, and in Superman II, promised to lead the evil alien invaders to Superman in exchange for Australia.)
Given that Boravia is obviously a stand-in for Russia, Jarhanpur should be similar to Ukraine, and a newscaster states that the conflict is taking place in Eastern Europe.
However, logically, the Jarhanpur population should resemble Slavs, like the Boravians, but they have been cast and costumed to resemble Middle Easterners. In one scene, a few men are garbed like Afghan mullahs, so perhaps Jarhanpur is meant to be Afghanistan.
Perhaps. But there are scenes of confrontations along the Boravia-Jarhanpur border, with heavily armed Boravian soldiers, their faces covered by military headgear, facing darker-skinned Jarhanpur residents, many of them women and children, who fight a phalanx of military might with sticks and stones.
Critics claim movie is anti-Israel
These are the scenes that people are referring to when they talk about the movie being anti-Israel. Krystal Ball, a US podcast host, said of the film: "Feels like a major cultural movement that Israel is quite clearly the bad guy villain country in a big budget Hollywood movie. Going in, I thought it would be subtle, but it was not subtle. My mind is blown.”
Hasan Piker, the popular Twitch streamer who is consistently anti-Israel and who was banned from the streaming service for a day after he posted support for Elias Rodriguez, who murdered two people at the Jewish Museum in Washington this year, said on one of his streams: “[Superman] is the most obvious f*** Israel thing I have ever seen in my whole life." Adult actress Mia Khalifa wrote on X: “Superman that freed Palestine is my fav movie of the year so far.”
Influenced by these influencers, many have posted similar sentiments on social media. In one scene, which many mentioned, an unarmed child cowers as a Boravian soldier advances on him, about to shoot to kill, until a superhero character intervenes.
I would guess that in early drafts of the screenplay, it was clear to everyone involved that Jarhanpur was meant to be a Ukrainian- or Afghanistan-like country, but that when it came time to film the movie, in 2024, the filmmakers realized that they could generate press by creating images that resemble Gaza.
While in some scenes early in the movie, Lois Lane (Rachel Brosnahan of The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel) and Superman discuss how Superman previously stopped what sounds like a Hamas-type invasion by the Boravians of Jarhanpur, which the US wanted to ignore.
Superman felt he had to prevent this attack to save lives, so he went rogue and intervened without the approval of the US government. At first, it seemed that if there were any analogy, it would be that Boravia was a Hamas- or Iran-like dictatorship. But those thoughts lasted until I heard the Boravians sounding and looking so Russian.
Obviously, most of the audience comes to a movie like this for the cool effects. There is even a cute dog that gets a lot of screen time, and that’s all that most viewers will retain from it. And as the preceding paragraphs make clear, the movie tries to take all sides, except in those few scenes of the border conflict, but even those are muddled by the fact that brutal soldiers are clearly Russian.
The audience at the screening of the movie I attended in Jerusalem was about half ultra-Orthodox, and many clapped at the end of the film.
Evening screenings of the film have been selling out in advance, so clearly Israelis are not avoiding Superman. But it would have been nice to have been able to enjoy it as pure entertainment, without having to weigh what those headline-grabbing border scenes were meant to evoke.