I’ll happily leave commentary on the quality of the new Superman movie to our film experts here at American Spectator, Lou Aguilar and Bruce Bawer. I haven’t seen it, and I have no intention of seeing it. Life’s too short, and I have better things to do than waste several hours watching warmed-over superhero fare.

But I grew up on Superman in the 1950s — yes, I’m old — watching the TV show, reading the comics, and, as a grown-up, I was enticed into the theater for the delightful 1978 Christopher Reeve classic. That sufficed for me then, and I’ve never felt the need to return to its successors or any other superhero franchises. I prefer to find my heroes in the real world, and, when in fiction, in characters firmly grounded in real-world challenges. (RELATED: Supermen Not Wanted in Leftist Bizarro World)

Still, I can’t allow the “framing” of this new version by its director and lead actor to pass without comment. We’ve been invited by the director, James Gunn, to view Superman as an “immigrant” and, obviously, given the circumstances of his arrival by rocket ship on the planet, “undocumented.” Clearly, Gunn means to plant the super thumb firmly on the scales of the current immigration debate, while thumbing his own nose in his public comments at anyone who might find this objectionable.

Worse, the actor who portrays Superman, David Corenswet, has gone out of his way to amend the classic Superman tagline. Instead of “Truth, Justice, and the American Way,” Corenswet seems to believe that Superman should simply stand for “Truth, Justice, and Good things.” It’s hard to misunderstand his point. Once upon a time, the “American Way” was widely understood as a “Good Thing,” and not just among benighted American deplorables.

Back in the day, living in England and then in Germany, my friends might poke fun at some of our national foibles, but good-naturedly, and with an unmistakable underlying admiration. They understood that, however much we might sometimes struggle to live up to our ideals, the “American Way” captured ideals worthy of the deepest respect and, in our striving to live up to those ideals, America in the world represented something to be appreciated.

Gunn and Corenswet remind us that we’ve come a long way in the last several decades, and entirely in the wrong direction. Back in the 1990s, I still listened sometimes to NPR on my long morning commute. One morning, on the D.C. affiliate, I listened to an infuriating interview with a prominent local political activist, who delivered herself of the emphatic opinion that “no country in human history has had a worse civil rights record than the United States.”

This deserved to be challenged outright. At the very least, I expected that the host might politely demur. This was not long after the Holocaust Museum had celebrated its opening to near-universal acclaim, an event that NPR had celebrated. Instead, the host allowed the comment to pass with a verbal nod that could only be interpreted as agreement. Never mind the willful ignorance displayed by the activist, who evidently knew nothing of the procession of vile regimes in every epoch of human history. This was, in context, both Holocaust denial and a calumny directed at the many sacrifices made by generations of Americans on the altar of human freedom and dignity. I changed channels and, disgusted with the acquiescent interviewer, never again listened to NPR.

So what are we to make of all this? Injecting anti-Americanism into the Superman narrative represents little less than a perversion. If one wishes to make a deliberately anti-American superhero movie, as many in Hollywood seemingly want to do, then have the guts to come out and do it honestly. Perhaps you could create “Hamas man,” and replace Truth, Justice, and the American Way” with “Rape, Murder, and Hostage-Taking.” Looking around the world today, the possibilities are endless. Antifa man, anyone?

As for director Gunn, making Superman an avatar for illegal immigration also represents a perversion. Ironically, what Gunn seems to be about is identifying the “American Way” with a mindless endorsement of our current immigration nightmare. Superman, in this reading, is the ultimate American hero. Superman is also an undocumented immigrant. Ergo, undocumented immigrants should be regarded as potential American heroes.

Let’s parse this briefly. Superman, properly, wasn’t an immigrant, but a refugee, rocketed away by his father from his home planet, Krypton, to save him from the planet’s imminent destruction. Viewed in that light, he’s something very different from those who flood our border seeking economic advantage. We’ve seemingly lost the ability to differentiate between refugees and immigrants, to our great cost as a polity. And fudging the distinction, as Gunn seems determined to do, places expensively produced popular entertainment in the service of a pernicious narrative. (RELATED: South Africa’s Refugees Expose the Left)

There is more, much more, and here we return to the “American Way” that Superman once represented. The infant from Krypton absorbed the values of his Smallville adoptive parents, Ma and Pa Kent. As he came to terms with his superpowers, he dedicated himself to placing those powers in the service of those quintessentially American values. His defining purpose wasn’t to get ahead as a reporter for the Daily Planet or to build a good life for himself with Lois Lane.

It’s significant that one of Gunn’s directorial decisions reportedly involves dispensing with Superman’s origin story in favor of something trite involving his dog, Krypto. Smallville, after all, isn’t incidental to the Superman narrative. The “American Way” isn’t a philosophical abstraction, as some on the left would have it. “Truth” is truth, not “your truth” or “my truth,” and “Justice” is something immediately recognizable to the average American, not something we need schooling on from Marxist professors or activist judges.

And this is critically important in the present moment, when immigration has moved from a question of policy, becoming a cudgel being wielded by those who hate the very concept of an American citizenship. Regardless of how the baby Superman arrived on this planet, regardless of Gunn’s facile equation of this with “illegally” crossing the border, in all essential respects, young Clark Kent followed the path we expect of all legal immigrants to this country. From his first moment on this planet, in America, he did all the things that comport with U.S. citizenship.

I have a young friend who just recently completed her path to U.S. citizenship after years of study and hard work as a legal immigrant. She did things the right way, following a path that demanded much of her, a path that she honored along with others like her, both those with whom she finally shared her citizenship ceremony, and the countless others who followed a similar path in the past and, God willing, will follow such a path in the future. She honored her new American citizenship, and she deserves to be honored in turn. To diminish this by lumping her in with those who chose a lesser path is an outright insult. She deserves our respect because she has earned it.

Over at National Review, Giancarlo Sopo has watched the new Superman movie and invites us to chill out, suggesting that Gunn’s Superman, philosophically, sits “squarely in the mushy middle,” that it sits squarely within classic liberal American ideals, “Atticus Finch in a cape.” That may be, but that’s very thin gruel for a project meant to be the summer’s blockbuster hit, and more, the entertainment event that will bring us all together in the theaters.

And it’s very hard to dismiss the comments of Gunn or Corenswet as “misunderstood” or “taken out of context,” when neither individual made any meaningful effort to walk them back. Perhaps they weren’t as noxiously aggressive as those of Snow White’s Rachel Ziegler, but, contra Sopo, I think conservatives have every right to be insulted, and to call them out as fresh examples of a Hollywood culture gone desperately wrong, not simply detached, but subversive.

American Spectator’s Lou Aguilar is currently part of a growing effort to reclaim the movies and TV for those of us who love our country, those of us for whom “Truth, Justice, and the American Way” still comports with its time-honored meaning. There are others like him, a growing force in the battle to reclaim our culture from those who would destroy it. If that effort is to succeed, we might start by refusing to accept gratuitous insults or even the “mushy middle” as an acceptable $400 million investment. It’s time to start asking, nay, insisting, that such dollars be spent upholding our values rather than undermining them.

It’s not enough to simply turn our backs and refuse to go into the theaters, and it’s no “grift,” as Sopo would have it, to condemn the insult that Gunn and Corenswet have offered. If we refuse to push back, we have no reason to complain as we continue to allow ourselves to be pushed around. So let’s stay home from Superman, and clamor loudly for more worthy fare, from creators who actually believe in “Truth, Justice, and the American Way.”

READ MORE from James H. McGee:

The Mission Is Never Accomplished

Frederick Forsyth: The Better Craftsman

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James H. McGee retired in 2018 after nearly four decades as a national security and counter-terrorism professional, working primarily in the nuclear security field. Since retiring, he’s begun a second career as a thriller writer. His 2022 novel, Letter of Reprisal, tells the tale of a desperate mission to destroy a Chinese bioweapon facility hidden in the heart of the central African conflict region. A soon-to-be-published sequel, The Zebras from Minsk, finds the Reprisal team fighting against Chinese and Russian-backed terrorists who’ve infiltrated our southern border in a conspiracy that ranges from West Virginia to the forests of Belarus. You can find Letter of Reprisal on Amazon in both Kindle and paperback editions, and on Kindle Unlimited.