The Why of Henry Cavill's Superman.
As Zack Snyder gets to release his cut of Justice League and Cavill's portrayal of Superman is gaining more appreciation lately, I still feel there's some things gone misunderstood about his Superman.
Superman is the epitome of the ideals men, women and children should strive towards. A shining example of honesty, decency, justice and unity. He is the symbol of hope for all and the idol people look up towards to do good. That is who Superman is. That is who Henry Cavill’s Superman is.
While Man of Steel is starting to gain much more appreciation these days, its release in 2013 got off to a rocky start with complaints over the amount of destruction within the last half of the film, inaccurate portrayal of Superman, Snyder’s direction and Goyer’s story. There were problems. And honestly that didn’t help win me over much either at the time. I wasn’t always a Superman fan. I was of the camp that thought he was overpowered, unrelatable, not very interesting, doesn’t have any weaknesses etc. that crowd. I was painfully ignorant of him. So I went into seeing Man of Steel with very low expectations. I came out of it actually really liking it and realising “Oh, that’s what Superman is about…” I sympathised when he was forced to kill Zod (and I will always argue his killing of Zod was justified), his feeling alienated from everyone else, the being bullied and beaten down and yet still trying to do the right thing. I adore this film and I love Zimmer’s score to it too. It’s, so far, the first and only film soundtrack I’ve ever bought and I got it at a time when things personally were very difficult for me and needed some hope and optimism to get me by.
I had seen the Christopher Reeves films as a kid and enjoyed them but didn’t get super into him as I did Spider-Man for example. I thought they were very entertaining with great effects, imaginative, and it was innocent fun. Apart from Superman 3. The ending where that woman gets sucked into the computer and turned into a robot, that scared me and gave me nightmares as a kid. Fuck that pseudo-Braniac nightmare thing. But I do remember watching it over Christmas around 1998 and in the junkyard fight scene imagined what would happen if Spidey was there.
I had watched some of the Lois and Clark TV series with Teri Hatcher and the Superman animated series in the 90’s as well and gotten a toy or two of the series. I had the quick change superman where Clark’s outfit was just this shell you stuck on the front and hid his cape in a backpack you clipped on the back and with the pinch of his arm (or leg?) he’d fling off the shell. It was neat.
But anyway, after all my 21 years of being exposed to Superman I was never into him. Until I watched Man of Steel. That showed me what Superman is and Cavill’s portrayal of him attracted me to him.
About a year or so later I gave reading the comics a try. I’d seen the recommendations to read things like Kingdom Come and Grant Morrison’s All Star Superman. As much as I like Alex Ross’s work and know it’s good I cannot look at his art. It’s too bright and gives me a headache. I read All Star Superman and… it was okay. It’s fine but that didn’t win me over either. And I was told that wins over new Superman fans without fail. Well, it failed. Maybe one day I’ll give it another try now I love Superman and get him way more but either way I didn’t care for it. I feel All Star is much more for seasoned fans of Superman, long time fans who have spent years with him and is a celebration of the character for the older crowd.
What comics won me over with Superman was Superman: Last Son of Krypton by Geoff Johns and Richard Donner, John Byrne’s Man of Steel run and sequential runs, Brian Azzarello’s For Tomorrow, Secret Origin, and Birthright. Those are the Superman stories that won me over. To understand him better as well I wrote and illustrated my own Superman origin story for a college project that used Parasite as the villain. Which, next to Brainiac, Parasite is one of my favourite Superman villains.
Alan Moore’s and Curt Swan’s Whatever Happened To The Man of Steel ending the pre-Crisis Superman leading into post-Crisis served for me as a great love letter ending that chapter of his early days segueing into the new era. It was an education for me on the high point of his character right until that end. That told me what I needed to know for that era of Superman and it left elements of the character that I could see were carried on in later stories.
Azzarello’s For Tomorrow helped show me Superman’s self-doubt and insecurities in himself. It showed me that for all the power you could have you still cannot do everything, you still cannot save everyone as much as you may want to and as hard as you may try. But still you must try.
I could go on longer talking about the comics but the point here is Cavill’s Superman! Why the criticisms? The underappreciation? The complaints, and what has gone misunderstood?
Well, as has been evident the past couple of years, Cavill gets Superman. He understands him. He is the perfect person to play Superman and fully understands him. One common complaint is he doesn’t get the right material to play with to be the Superman that he can be, that people want him to be.
But here’s the thing with Cavill’s Superman. His Superman exists in a world that is a reflection of our own. His is a contemporary Superman that lives in a cynical world, a harsh and hateful and bitter world where it is hard to be good and hopeful because we live in an information age that magnifies the negativity we feel. The internet is obviously the guiltiest culprit of this. Every negative thing said and done can drown out positive things so easily and it makes it just as easy to lose sight of what is good and joyful.
Cavill’s Superman is someone who has grown up knowing he is so very different from everyone else and has been bullied for it. He’s never fit in, he’s always felt unwelcome and yet, because of his lovingly adoptive parents, he’s been taught that despite all that oppresive hate and ignorance and indifference he and others recieve to not let that stop him from doing the right thing and to help others.
And here’s the one thing that I’ve always thought that many people have failed to question; has anyone stopped to think that perhaps Cavill’s Superman suffers from depression?
He has exhibited a lot of times, particularly with Batman v Superman, signs of self-doubt, insecurities and depression. It’s one thing to complain about not seeing Superman smile enough or being as bright and chipper as Reeves’s Superman that everyone wants him to be, but that is an incredibly unfair thing to ask. And as we all know you can’t just say to a depressed person “Just get over it. Just smile more, you’ll feel better.” No. It doesn’t work that way.
Signs of his doubting himself were shown right from the start in Man of Steel. More explicity, Faora Ui spelled it out for us. “You are weak, son of El. Unsure of yourself.” She could plainly see how he doubts himself. It is and has always been a lifelong problem for Superman.
And that’s the other thing with Cavill’s Superman and Superman in general. His greatest weakness isn’t kryptonite or magic. It’s his heart. His spirit, his morals, his knowing what is right and sticking to it. His convictions. That is not only his greatest weakness but his absolute greatest strength too. Doesn’t matter if he can fly faster than a speeding bullet or lift entire buildings. Doesn’t matter if he’s invulnerable and can shoot lasers from his eyes. All of that means nothing if you don’t have a good heart. And that is Superman’s greatest strength. Bruce Wayne echoed this in Justice League, saying that he was more human than he ever was. He had a job, fell in love. He knew what it meant to be a good person and he set that standard for everyone.
Considering that, who could be the best villain to prey on that weakness of his? Lex Luthor. Clearly his portrayal by Jesse Eisenberg is incredibly different to what we’ve grown up with knowing compared to Gene Hackman’s and Clancy Brown’s and proved to be very divisive. But Eisenberg’s Luthor is perfect against Cavill’s Superman and I’m going to always defend that. So what if he’s not a suave silk voiced charm? So what if he’s not the cooky criminal mastermind? What makes Eisenberg’s Luthor so great is he is the absolute opposite of Cavill’s Superman. His Superman is physically built like a tank while Luthor is scrawny and meek. Superman fights for good and brings out the best in everyone while Luthor sees the ugly in others and fights to bring that out of others. He relishes in showing the ugliness of man. Luthor is exploitative, cunning, manipulative, cynical, xenophobic, entitled, bitter and very, very dangerous. He is a reflection of everything that is wrong in today’s modern world against the ideal of how people should be.
Luthor preyed and manipulated on Superman’s kindness and insecurities and exploited and used what the world already was against him. The world continued to look for any reason and excuse to pin Superman as the bad guy, to find a reason to reprimand him and condemn him. Doesn’t matter if he literally held the weight of the world on his shoulders and saved it from a genocidal maniac that threatened to eradicate the whole world. It doesn’t matter that he has saved lives countless times from disaster. This world is a thankless and sceptical world. It is suspicious and untrusting at the slightest act of kindness and thinks it is only done for selfish wants. A man so powerful that he could rule over the world as a god and says he only wants to protect us all? They don’t buy it. When that is not the case, clearly. It is done because it is the right thing to do for the betterment of all. It is a selfless reason to help others. But that is the world that Clark is fighting against, one that is very much like our own, unfortunately.
So with a world questioning Superman’s motives, and Superman still doing the right thing despite the world heavily questioning him and despite his own misgivings and self-doubt, Luthor exploits this against him. He manages to convince Batman to go and kill him through manipulation, which is something else for another time. But Luthor managed to twist things around Superman to drive these insecurities of his further. He turns the world and himself against him.
A man who was innocently caught during his fight with Zod ends up trying to condemn him too only to then be used as a pawn to kill hundreds around him. And Superman being, naturally, the only survivor in that room would absolutely crush his spirit. Who wouldn’t be hurt and traumatised as everyone around you in a room is reduced to fire and ash and only you survive? Even though there are protests outside condemning Superman, he still does the right thing to save who he can in that explosion, even though he would get glaring disapprovals from those around him and blame that it was his fault for the attack.
Even though he is inches from death at the foot of Batman he still pleads for him to do the right thing.
Even though the world is angry and hateful, he still fights and strives to do the right thing. Until Luthor gets into his head enough to the point where he’s driven his insecurities so high and self-doubts so much that Superman of all people believes no one stays good in this world. Lex Luthor brought The shining becon of hope and absolute ideal of mankind down to its lowest, to be as cynical as the rest of the world he is trying to save itself from. That shouldn’t be and yet Luthor did that. He beat Superman in a way no one else could.
You don’t like that Superman became so dark and depressing that not even Superman himself can be hopeful? Good! That’s the entire goddamn point! Hate that moment. Hate that Luthor poisoned him so.
But you know what? Even though Luthor beat him, even though Batman nearly killed him, even though the world was thankless towards him, Superman still did the right thing right until the very end. And if he wasn’t trying to do the right thing he was trying to get others to do the right thing too. Superman died doing the right thing, protecting the world from a hideous monstrosity even though the world was suspicious and doubting of him. It took his death for the world to wake up and realise just what he did for them and the good he did for it. His death then inspired hope. It made Batman realise men are still good. It made Wonder Woman come out from hiding after a century of isolation. It made the world change for the better and hope again.
As Stan Lee said- “The person who helps others simply because it should or must be done and because it is the right thing to do, is indeed without a doubt, a real superhero”. And to practically quote The Dark Knight, Cavill’s Superman is the superhero the world didn’t deserve but absolutely needed. And no matter what Superman would always do the right thing and help others do the right thing as well.
And I believe that’s rather upsetting that it has taken so long for people to catch up on Cavill’s Superman and that Warner Brothers is not capitalising on it. A Superman who is depressive that continues to fight against a horrible, hateful, unforgiving and ignorant world, who in the face of such adversities continues to do the right thing. His whole being and his actions inspires hope and it should do. But I feel people misunderstood that and didn’t see that because of the world his Superman exists in, because of the world that we exist in. The other problem is people have their own nostalgic view of Superman and because of that they have high expectations of how he should be.
But also like Jor-El says in Man of Steel- “You will give the people of Earth an ideal to strive towards. They will race behind you. They will stumble, they will fall. But in time, they will join you in the sun, Kal. In time, you will help them accomplish wonders.”
Cavill’s Superman is a Superman that we need for our time. He is our modern day Superman. A Superman who fights the same internal problems that we all do daily and yet shows us all the ideal that no matter what the world throws at us or how it is, no matter what we put onto ourselves or struggle through, we should always do the right thing. We should continue to fight for what’s right, for honesty, for decency, for justice, for the betterment of all and be the hope to make the change we all desperately want and need in our world.
