Superman Saved Me
I’ve been in a funk all summer. I recently read all my LexPoMo poems for the last decade and that put me into even more of a funk about this year’s LexPoMo poems. My husband made the case for this being my first non-working summer in more than two decades and I admit that I thought that as well. The struggle to learn how to relax is real, folks, and the pressure is even higher when we both view this summer as a dress rehearsal for retirement (privilege acknowledged). But everything came into focus for me on Thursday. In the morning I listened to Pantsuit Politics (A Simmering Rage) and that helped me understand so much of what is going on with me: Overwhelming dread, helplessness, and hopelessness. Children are dying, women are kidnapped by government goons off American streets, and I don’t even know if I can get a covid booster before heading back into the classroom to prepare my students for an unknown future in this end-stage-capitalistic-hellscape of an economy. And that is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to my fear and dread. That was my mood when I headed off to see James Gunn’s Superman. I was looking for an escape and I found hope. I was excited to see this movie but I did not expect to love any movie as much as I love Superman. I have been talking about Superman with everyone who will listen. While my husband (who did not see the movie) has requested I stop, everyone else has been talking about it too for so many good reasons so clearly he is in the wrong here. However, I’m writing this blog post to save my marriage. I don’t want to talk about why Republicans are right to dislike the new Superman because that will wreck my buzz, but instead I want to lean into all the reasons I love using pop culture as inspiration for writing and learning (see everything I’ve written about rhetorical analysis and zombies).
One of the reasons we write (and AI can go suck eggs) is that creating helps us better understand our humanity and what it means to be human. Books, movies, and our own writing are thought experiments that set our brains on fire when they are done right and Superman does just that. Superman is a story about what it means to be human and I love that the most human character in this movie is an alien with superpowers. This story inspires us to think about nature vs. nurture and what it means to be a parent as well as what we owe our parents and what we owe ourselves. The parent-child relationship is one of our most formative experiences and that alone is worth writing about until the end of time. The theme running through this movie is the human connection that Superman makes with so many creatures from his very-bad-dog to the Kaiju destroying Metropolis. Superman reminds us that we should value all life and not just treat conflict (or crime) like the trolley problem. But Superman also teaches us to look for the good in others, to trust others, because more often than not that goodness and trust will save the day. That is what I needed to re-discover and I hope you find Superman just as inspiring. Even if you cannot bring yourself to watch a superhero movie I hope you find the ideas it is throwing into the zeitgeist worth thinking about because we all need hope to survive this moment in time.
Note: Looking for more hope?
