Superman vs. The Elite begins with writer Joe Kelley asking an interesting question: What if Superman's non-interventive, no-murder morality were held up against that of The Authority, who are happy to use their powers to kill people who they identify as morally corrupt (largely because those villains make ethnic cleansing their trade). Would the world value Superman's endless optimism, even when people have to be sacrificed to it, or would they side with a group who would rather just kill Lex Luthor and call it a day?
It's a debate that could open up all sorts of possibilities for interesting storytelling, if only Joe Kelley had the slightest bit of interest in exploring them. He doesn't, though. Instead of making an impassioned case for Superman's point of view, he simply makes The Authority (pseudonimized as 'The Elite' for purposes of lawsuit-avoidance) simplistic villains so that their way can't be taken seriously as an option.
Am I being too harsh in saying that Joe Kelley uses hack writing to undercut his own characters so that they won't ever be a legitimate threat to Superman's ideals? You tell me. Here is literally the first thing we see them do as a team:
They kill a dog. For barking at them.
Because, you see, only monstrous psychopaths could ever consider killing a supervillain as a solution. Monstrous psychopaths like Barry Allen.
The problem with the movie - and why I'm being so hard on the writer (although who knows how much of this is his fault, I haven't read the comic he adapted this from - although he's the writer of that, too...) - is that the movie completely fails to make Superman look like the good guy. I mentioned earlier that it fails to make an impassioned case for Superman's morality, but that's not entirely accurate - it fails to make any case at all.
This is the Atomic Skull. The film introduces him as he walks through downtown Metropolis, killing anyone who gets within arm's reach. For no reason other than he likes seeing people die. Superman jails him in 'Stryker's Island', but he escapes soon after, killing at least fifty more people. At that point the Elite announce that they've had enough of the supervillain's nonsense, and explode his head, ensuring that he'll never again escape from prison and murder dozens of people.
The film shows Superman having a problem with this, but it can't explain why anyone else should. Manchester Black (the team's male stand-in for Jenny Sparks) announces that Superman doesn't take villains seriously enough because he's functionally immortal, and he can't relate to the way regular people fear for their lives around the kind of super-powered serial killers who plague the DC universe. Black believes that Superman has the luxury of his morals because he's never in any real danger.
To the film's credit, this is an incredibly good point. To the film's brutal discredit, it never in any way offers any reason to doubt Black's reading of the situation. Superman is completely out-of-touch with the experience of being someone fleeing from a murderer. From seeing your father brutally murdered and desperately wanting someone to ensure that no one else ever has to suffer the way you have. A prominent educator is murdered by the Atomic Skull, and it's only with his teenage son's go-ahead that Black finally executes the helpless villain. Superman is so far above the average citizen of Metropolis that it never occurs to him how it looks to them that he's always careful not to hurt the people who just got finished killing scores of innocent bystanders. All he has to offer are platitudes about not wanting to lower himself to the level of villains - implicitly making the argument, of course, that every police officer who's ever killed a criminal is as bad a person as the criminal they killed.
So, with the film seemingly stacked so heavily in The Elite's favour, how does it turn the story around to make Superman the 'hero' of the piece when the credits roll? Simple - by attempting to undercut The Elite in two distinct ways. One of them actually backfires, and the other is just contemptibly stupid.
First, the backfire. This comes with the Manchester Black character's backstory. An abused and dirt-poor child, he resorted to petty crime in order to care for his little sister. While the police were trying to arrest the little girl she wound up pushed in front of a train, and Black used his recently-acquired telekinetic powers to stop the train, saving her life. A perfectly serviceable origin story, right? The movie then tries to give it a darker hue by having Lois Lane dig into the facts of the case, which seem to have been erased from history. She's handed a file by a woman claiming to be Black's grown-up sister which tells the true version of the story - when Black stopped that train, he killed more than a dozen people! And the rest of the Elite were super-powered criminals before the government put them on the payroll as Black-Ops operatives! Shocking, right?
Actually, no. The crazy thing here is that the 'darkened' version of the story actually strengthens Black's rhetorical position, rather than weakening it.
So Black killed a bunch of people when his powers first manifested. It's a tragedy, but it's not like he had control over them or knew what he was doing. What happened next is the key part. Was he punished for this accidental crime? No - in fact, the exact opposite happened. The Government scooped him up and said 'don't worry - you're powerful, so you can be one of us now. Go kill the people we want you to kill, and don't ever think about that train. In fact, it never even happened.'
I don't know if the writer fully intended this, but it's the government's decision right at the beginning of Black's career as a powered individual that sets the stage for his later rebellion. The UK government only cared about power, and utterly disregarded the 'little people' who were harmed along the way. It's this exact entitled attitude and obsession with control at all costs that Black and The Elite are rebelling against later in life. Rather than invalidating his beliefs or making him look worse, all Lois Lane has done by exposing Black's backstory is let the audience know that he has a profound personal connection to the kinds of abusive power that he's now deciding to fight against. Which, if anything, makes him more heroic.
Also, what's his sister's motivation for giving Lois the story? Assuming, of course, that she actually is the sister, rather than just another government spook.
In any event she works for the government, and seemingly believes in defending the status quo at all costs, even if it means sacrificing the brother who gave up everything to protect her. Yet Black is supposed to be the bad guy. In what way?
A little background is required before we get to the contemptible stupidity. A running plot in the film involves two warring eastern European nations, who each seem desperate to wipe the other off the map. They yell at each other on the floor of the UN, go on news programs to threaten one another - it's a mess. And the countries' military leadership are especially brutal. One side unleashes bio-monsters, while the other intends to use jets to level a major city. Both sides actually seem to go out of their way to ensure civilian casualties.
The Elite state their desire to resolve the conflict, but Superman seemingly beats them to it, disarming an entire wing of fighter jets, then announcing that he's going to force the two countries into peace talks. One problem - the Elite have already killed the two countries' leaders, believing that this will stop the conflict, and arguing (not unpersuasively) that anyone who would order the mass-bombing of a civilian hub probably had it coming. Superman is so infuriated by the news that he actually punches Black - an image captured for all the world to see by Black's omnipresent camerabots. At this moment The Elite have everything they want. The world at large prefers their way of doing business. Superman has just made an unprovoked attack on the world's most-admired man. They can now continue doing whatever they like to 'save the world' confident that Superman will be unable to do anything to interfere with them without forever crippling his own credibility.
So what do The Elite announce that they're going to do with all this newfound political capital? They're going to kill Superman. But why? They have no reason to do so - they have good enough tech that he's not a real threat, and he can't stop them from their work without the world turning on him. By attacking Superman they'll make themselves look like villains, and if they succeed the world will hate them for killing a man who's literally saved the lives of everyone on Earth multiple times. They have nothing that could possibly be gained by killing Superman and everything to lose - so why do they do it? For the most contrived reason of all: the story needs a clear villain, so four characters start acting villainous, even though they have no motivation for doing so.
The real problem with this interaction? The writer missed a golden opportunity to actually argue for Superman's point, and he missed it by not showing the consequences of the Elite's actions. Black announces that the two countries are now 'free' because their warmongering leaders have all been executed. That's great and all, but why would it necessarily lead to peace? It's not like countries generally just go to war because the President/Prime Minister/Potentate announces that it's going to happen. To build up to this kind of regional conflict you need decades - even centuries - of resentments brewing between factions. Does anyone seriously think that there was an ethnic cleansing in Serbia because Milosevic was just a really bad guy? That there was a Holocaust solely because Hitler had especially convincing oratory to offer? Just because the leaders of these countries are dead there's no guarantee that their people won't go on fighting. Who's to say that the country went to war because the wrong people were elected? Perhaps the right people were elected because both those countries wanted to go to war.
Showing the countries descending into chaos and mass slaughter would have been a bracing dose of realism for The Elite to deal with. They'd have learned that there are a great many problems that simple violence can't solve, and that fixing the world isn't as simple as killing the right people. Sometimes negotiations - backed by the threat of Superman-level enforcement - have to take place, and people must be deprived of what they think they want in order for everyone to move forward together.
As I've mentioned before, though, the writer of this particular story had no interest in actually making a case for Superman's value, so instead of a lesson in the way the world works, we get a nonsensical fight.
The irony is that The Elite actually had it all backwards - at a key moment they announce that they'll be fixing the world from now on while Superman can feel free to busy himself with costumed creeps and mad scientists. In actuality their skill sets are perfectly matched for the opposite tasks. Superman's endless well of optimism and practical dedication to social justice (along with the ability to intervene and stop major conflicts) is the kind of force that could change hearts and minds, leading to a better world for everyone further down the line. The Elite's raw power and flexible morality makes them the perfect choice to wipe out whatever Doctor Lights and Deathstrokes who might pop up around the world from time to time.
The problem with Superman's morality is that it's meant to inspire people in our world, rather than his own. In a world where prisons work, and serial killers are sealed away forever, people have the luxury of being against the death penalty. In the world of DC, where mass-casualty psychopaths are essentially allowed to roam free, killing countless numbers of innocent people, being against finality in punishment essentially counts as a mental illness. Superman was created to fight bank robbers, mad scientists, and occasionally japoteurs. Back then, Superman killed some of them. Later the government would announce that Superman wasn't allowed to kill people, so the stories changed along with that edict. Through the 50s and 60s Superman had fantastical, low-threat adventures, helping out on alien planets and playing elaborate pranks to trap soviet spies. After the 80s, when content restrictions were fully lifted, writers decided to amp up the threat level - instead of villains who had bold plans but were thwarted in the nick of time, suddenly every recurring villain was gifted a three-digit bodycount.
Unlike the last time the tone of Superman's stories was drastically changed, this time Superman's character didn't change along with it. Now he's an absurdly pacifistic boy scout standing alone among a crowd of Ted Bundys. As writers made the stories more and more extreme - Darkseid wiping out whole planetary populations, evil Reed Richards blowing up an American city - Superman was left behind, rigidly unchanging and becoming less relevant with each passing atrocity that he let occur without a proportionate response. Superman vs. The Elite attempts to address this problem, and make a case that DC's failure to allow Superman to grow and change along with circumstances that define his world was really a principled stand being taken against the dangerous direction that society has moved in, rather than just simple cowardice on their part.
It's not a convincing case.
It's a debate that could open up all sorts of possibilities for interesting storytelling, if only Joe Kelley had the slightest bit of interest in exploring them. He doesn't, though. Instead of making an impassioned case for Superman's point of view, he simply makes The Authority (pseudonimized as 'The Elite' for purposes of lawsuit-avoidance) simplistic villains so that their way can't be taken seriously as an option.
Am I being too harsh in saying that Joe Kelley uses hack writing to undercut his own characters so that they won't ever be a legitimate threat to Superman's ideals? You tell me. Here is literally the first thing we see them do as a team:
Because, you see, only monstrous psychopaths could ever consider killing a supervillain as a solution. Monstrous psychopaths like Barry Allen.
The problem with the movie - and why I'm being so hard on the writer (although who knows how much of this is his fault, I haven't read the comic he adapted this from - although he's the writer of that, too...) - is that the movie completely fails to make Superman look like the good guy. I mentioned earlier that it fails to make an impassioned case for Superman's morality, but that's not entirely accurate - it fails to make any case at all.
This is the Atomic Skull. The film introduces him as he walks through downtown Metropolis, killing anyone who gets within arm's reach. For no reason other than he likes seeing people die. Superman jails him in 'Stryker's Island', but he escapes soon after, killing at least fifty more people. At that point the Elite announce that they've had enough of the supervillain's nonsense, and explode his head, ensuring that he'll never again escape from prison and murder dozens of people.
The film shows Superman having a problem with this, but it can't explain why anyone else should. Manchester Black (the team's male stand-in for Jenny Sparks) announces that Superman doesn't take villains seriously enough because he's functionally immortal, and he can't relate to the way regular people fear for their lives around the kind of super-powered serial killers who plague the DC universe. Black believes that Superman has the luxury of his morals because he's never in any real danger.
To the film's credit, this is an incredibly good point. To the film's brutal discredit, it never in any way offers any reason to doubt Black's reading of the situation. Superman is completely out-of-touch with the experience of being someone fleeing from a murderer. From seeing your father brutally murdered and desperately wanting someone to ensure that no one else ever has to suffer the way you have. A prominent educator is murdered by the Atomic Skull, and it's only with his teenage son's go-ahead that Black finally executes the helpless villain. Superman is so far above the average citizen of Metropolis that it never occurs to him how it looks to them that he's always careful not to hurt the people who just got finished killing scores of innocent bystanders. All he has to offer are platitudes about not wanting to lower himself to the level of villains - implicitly making the argument, of course, that every police officer who's ever killed a criminal is as bad a person as the criminal they killed.
So, with the film seemingly stacked so heavily in The Elite's favour, how does it turn the story around to make Superman the 'hero' of the piece when the credits roll? Simple - by attempting to undercut The Elite in two distinct ways. One of them actually backfires, and the other is just contemptibly stupid.
First, the backfire. This comes with the Manchester Black character's backstory. An abused and dirt-poor child, he resorted to petty crime in order to care for his little sister. While the police were trying to arrest the little girl she wound up pushed in front of a train, and Black used his recently-acquired telekinetic powers to stop the train, saving her life. A perfectly serviceable origin story, right? The movie then tries to give it a darker hue by having Lois Lane dig into the facts of the case, which seem to have been erased from history. She's handed a file by a woman claiming to be Black's grown-up sister which tells the true version of the story - when Black stopped that train, he killed more than a dozen people! And the rest of the Elite were super-powered criminals before the government put them on the payroll as Black-Ops operatives! Shocking, right?
Actually, no. The crazy thing here is that the 'darkened' version of the story actually strengthens Black's rhetorical position, rather than weakening it.
So Black killed a bunch of people when his powers first manifested. It's a tragedy, but it's not like he had control over them or knew what he was doing. What happened next is the key part. Was he punished for this accidental crime? No - in fact, the exact opposite happened. The Government scooped him up and said 'don't worry - you're powerful, so you can be one of us now. Go kill the people we want you to kill, and don't ever think about that train. In fact, it never even happened.'
I don't know if the writer fully intended this, but it's the government's decision right at the beginning of Black's career as a powered individual that sets the stage for his later rebellion. The UK government only cared about power, and utterly disregarded the 'little people' who were harmed along the way. It's this exact entitled attitude and obsession with control at all costs that Black and The Elite are rebelling against later in life. Rather than invalidating his beliefs or making him look worse, all Lois Lane has done by exposing Black's backstory is let the audience know that he has a profound personal connection to the kinds of abusive power that he's now deciding to fight against. Which, if anything, makes him more heroic.
Also, what's his sister's motivation for giving Lois the story? Assuming, of course, that she actually is the sister, rather than just another government spook.
In any event she works for the government, and seemingly believes in defending the status quo at all costs, even if it means sacrificing the brother who gave up everything to protect her. Yet Black is supposed to be the bad guy. In what way?
A little background is required before we get to the contemptible stupidity. A running plot in the film involves two warring eastern European nations, who each seem desperate to wipe the other off the map. They yell at each other on the floor of the UN, go on news programs to threaten one another - it's a mess. And the countries' military leadership are especially brutal. One side unleashes bio-monsters, while the other intends to use jets to level a major city. Both sides actually seem to go out of their way to ensure civilian casualties.
The Elite state their desire to resolve the conflict, but Superman seemingly beats them to it, disarming an entire wing of fighter jets, then announcing that he's going to force the two countries into peace talks. One problem - the Elite have already killed the two countries' leaders, believing that this will stop the conflict, and arguing (not unpersuasively) that anyone who would order the mass-bombing of a civilian hub probably had it coming. Superman is so infuriated by the news that he actually punches Black - an image captured for all the world to see by Black's omnipresent camerabots. At this moment The Elite have everything they want. The world at large prefers their way of doing business. Superman has just made an unprovoked attack on the world's most-admired man. They can now continue doing whatever they like to 'save the world' confident that Superman will be unable to do anything to interfere with them without forever crippling his own credibility.
So what do The Elite announce that they're going to do with all this newfound political capital? They're going to kill Superman. But why? They have no reason to do so - they have good enough tech that he's not a real threat, and he can't stop them from their work without the world turning on him. By attacking Superman they'll make themselves look like villains, and if they succeed the world will hate them for killing a man who's literally saved the lives of everyone on Earth multiple times. They have nothing that could possibly be gained by killing Superman and everything to lose - so why do they do it? For the most contrived reason of all: the story needs a clear villain, so four characters start acting villainous, even though they have no motivation for doing so.
The real problem with this interaction? The writer missed a golden opportunity to actually argue for Superman's point, and he missed it by not showing the consequences of the Elite's actions. Black announces that the two countries are now 'free' because their warmongering leaders have all been executed. That's great and all, but why would it necessarily lead to peace? It's not like countries generally just go to war because the President/Prime Minister/Potentate announces that it's going to happen. To build up to this kind of regional conflict you need decades - even centuries - of resentments brewing between factions. Does anyone seriously think that there was an ethnic cleansing in Serbia because Milosevic was just a really bad guy? That there was a Holocaust solely because Hitler had especially convincing oratory to offer? Just because the leaders of these countries are dead there's no guarantee that their people won't go on fighting. Who's to say that the country went to war because the wrong people were elected? Perhaps the right people were elected because both those countries wanted to go to war.
Showing the countries descending into chaos and mass slaughter would have been a bracing dose of realism for The Elite to deal with. They'd have learned that there are a great many problems that simple violence can't solve, and that fixing the world isn't as simple as killing the right people. Sometimes negotiations - backed by the threat of Superman-level enforcement - have to take place, and people must be deprived of what they think they want in order for everyone to move forward together.
As I've mentioned before, though, the writer of this particular story had no interest in actually making a case for Superman's value, so instead of a lesson in the way the world works, we get a nonsensical fight.
The irony is that The Elite actually had it all backwards - at a key moment they announce that they'll be fixing the world from now on while Superman can feel free to busy himself with costumed creeps and mad scientists. In actuality their skill sets are perfectly matched for the opposite tasks. Superman's endless well of optimism and practical dedication to social justice (along with the ability to intervene and stop major conflicts) is the kind of force that could change hearts and minds, leading to a better world for everyone further down the line. The Elite's raw power and flexible morality makes them the perfect choice to wipe out whatever Doctor Lights and Deathstrokes who might pop up around the world from time to time.
The problem with Superman's morality is that it's meant to inspire people in our world, rather than his own. In a world where prisons work, and serial killers are sealed away forever, people have the luxury of being against the death penalty. In the world of DC, where mass-casualty psychopaths are essentially allowed to roam free, killing countless numbers of innocent people, being against finality in punishment essentially counts as a mental illness. Superman was created to fight bank robbers, mad scientists, and occasionally japoteurs. Back then, Superman killed some of them. Later the government would announce that Superman wasn't allowed to kill people, so the stories changed along with that edict. Through the 50s and 60s Superman had fantastical, low-threat adventures, helping out on alien planets and playing elaborate pranks to trap soviet spies. After the 80s, when content restrictions were fully lifted, writers decided to amp up the threat level - instead of villains who had bold plans but were thwarted in the nick of time, suddenly every recurring villain was gifted a three-digit bodycount.
Unlike the last time the tone of Superman's stories was drastically changed, this time Superman's character didn't change along with it. Now he's an absurdly pacifistic boy scout standing alone among a crowd of Ted Bundys. As writers made the stories more and more extreme - Darkseid wiping out whole planetary populations, evil Reed Richards blowing up an American city - Superman was left behind, rigidly unchanging and becoming less relevant with each passing atrocity that he let occur without a proportionate response. Superman vs. The Elite attempts to address this problem, and make a case that DC's failure to allow Superman to grow and change along with circumstances that define his world was really a principled stand being taken against the dangerous direction that society has moved in, rather than just simple cowardice on their part.
It's not a convincing case.
1 comment:
Beautifully argued. Great post.
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