The 2025 iteration of Superman is worth a watch if the subject matter at all catches one’s eye. Eschewing a decade of attempts to twist the character into darkness, this reboot embraces the morality at the soul of an American icon.
Gone are the attempts at a moral middle ground or a blurring of the story in an attempt to subvert tropes. The film’s heroes are unquestionably morally good. Its villains are unquestionably depraved. In short, it represents a cinematic return to normalcy.
That is not to say that Superman deserves no criticism. Leaving the classic slogan “truth, justice, and the American way” unsaid was an unfortunate decision. However, political analyses of the film from either side of the spectrum often read more politics than necessary into the film.
Many of my compatriots on the right were quick to denounce director James Gunn for calling Superman “an immigrant” in a pre-release interview. Gunn wasn’t wrong, per se. His status as an alien from Krypton is often referenced by his on-screen nemesis Lex Luthor. The minor comment was unfairly blown out of proportion by most political observers in an attempt to coddle or cudgel the director.
Superman is all-American, and he chooses to be so. This theme resonates throughout the film, eventually culminating in several examples of him choosing the Americans that raised him over the alien parents he never knew. Choosing the forebears of America and her values is an essential part of the integration of newcomers and their descendants.
Other conservatives critiqued a storyline where a dictatorial nation suggested to be a U.S. ally invades a hapless neighbor, whose unarmed populace sport hijabs and Afghan caps. The victims were certainly based on Gaza, but the invaders speak in a Russian accent. Hollywood’s choosing to incorporate elements of current conflicts with enough vagueness to allow anyone to read their preferred analogy into things is not worth spilling much ink over.
Meanwhile, the idea that Superman is a fascist remains throughout the world of left-wing commentary. Others have attempted to claim him, pointing to his origins and the political beliefs of his creators. The White House’s X page and The Free Press both provided reasonable approaches that recognized the film was fundamentally about fun, not partisan warfare.
That a character as universal to the perception of American culture as Superman would be the subject of such political banter is in and of itself remarkable.
The titular character was the creation of New Deal liberals Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster. Though the New Deal began a tectonic shift, this era of American liberalism still largely claimed Jefferson as its forebear, not Marx or Marcuse. A farming family from Smallville, Kansas, was still the ideal for all within the Overton Window of the American political spectrum.
Superman was built to have the universal cultural touchstones of America. He comes from space to be raised among a normal family in the heartland. This tale in which a power beyond this world becomes a child in a working class mother’s arms is a reference to the once-universal American possession of Christianity as a cultural touchstone.
From Kansas, Superman becomes the apostle of Norman Rockwell’s America to the America of the modern age. He is the incarnation of small-town American values running up against the big city, inevitably intended to set the big city straight. A particularly hopeful iteration of the American spirit carried the story to uniquity.
Any avid student of the history of American conservatism will recognize that our movement’s favorite authors of the New Deal era were, with few exceptions, generally bitter men who wrote with a despairing sarcasm. Superman was birthed by an optimistic sense of Americana. At the time, this vision was most found in the rhetoric of mid-20th century American liberals such as Arthur M. Schlesinger or John F. Kennedy.
This understanding was fundamentally reversed in the 1960s, when the previously marginal Marxists of America began their ascension to power across key cultural institutions. The New Deal liberals had given Superman to America, right and left alike, but key elements of his identity were rejected by the leftist movement as it radicalized.
William F. Buckley Jr.’s flash onto the stage of the American Right in 1951 and the eventual rise of Ronald Reagan turned things around. The “happy warriors” of conservatism, The American Spectator’s own R. Emmett Tyrell Jr. conspicuous among them, reclaimed celebratory and optimistic Americana for the right just in time.
The once universal touchstones of American identity, Midwestern farmers and patriotism, are now only conspicuously embraced by the Right. The cultural zeitgeist has shifted such that joyful Americana now distinctly conjures the politics of Ronald Reagan or Donald Trump, not any Democrat of the modern era.
Therein lies the centerpiece of this puzzle of perception. Superman was the creation of a team of liberals, but the Right conserved the America he represents where the mainstream Left came to reject any notion of the exceptionalism of American values.
Superman came to Kansas from Krypton and chose to embrace the salt-of-the-earth morality of America. His story and his principles are meant to be unifying touchstones for us all, if only we all would choose them.
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