My wife and I went to see Superman Returns last night. No, I don’t intend to write a full-blown review here. Suffice it to say that while the plot inconsistencies do seem to surface quicker than Lex Luthor’s proto-crystalline continent, Bryan Singer does an admirable job in resurrecting the Big Blue Guy. Quibble all you want about the details, but Brandon Routh was Superman, and that’s just about all that matters.
But here’s what I really want to discuss.
About twenty minutes into the movie — right about at the point where Lex Luthor starts fingering those crystals he finds at Superman’s Fortress of Solitude — the couple next to me started a rather lengthy whispered conversation. After a minute, I realized that the woman simply didn’t understand what was going on. Where are they? What are they doing? What’s the deal with that crystal-powered CPU thing anyway?
It occurred to me that we take a lot of baggage in with us when we go to see a Superman movie. I’m not necessarily talking about the “can Brandon Routh fill Christopher Reeve’s shoes” kind of baggage, much less the “can Kevin Spacey fill Gene Hackman’s shoes” kind of baggage. (And for the record, the answers to those questions are “yes” and “no.”) I’m talking about the narrative baggage.
We all know that Superman disguises himself as mild-mannered Clark Kent. We all know that Superman has this icy fortress in the Arctic (or is it the Antarctic?) where he likes to retreat. We all know that green glowing meteorites mean trouble. Some of us even know how to get Mister Mxyzptlk banished back to the fifth dimension. And so on.
But what if Superman Returns was your first exposure to the Man of Steel? What if you were completely ignorant of the superhero genre? What if (to get all skiffy) the DVD of Superman Returns got buried in a time capsule and became the only record of the entire superhero milieu to survive? Or what if (to put it in more mundane terms) you grew up on a remote farm in China with only a vague idea of what a superhero is, and during a trip to America one of your hosts took you to see Superman Returns?
This brought home to me the fact that, while some genre conventions are universal, most of them are rooted to a particular time and culture. This goes for science fiction and fantasy as well as for superheroes (or mysteries or westerns or any other genre you can think of). When you put a laser-shootin’ space pirate or an axe-slingin’ dwarf or a gin-swiggin’ private detective in your work, you’re anchoring your story firmly to the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Anyone picking up your novel, say, two hundred years from now simply won’t get the reference without copious footnotes. Likewise, there’s no guarantee that the remote farmer in China — or the woman sitting next to you in the movie theater — will have these genre conventions in her cultural lexicon.
Yes, it’s true that genre conventions change and evolve over time, and few of them exist in isolation. Superman takes his cues from iconic characters going back as far as Gilgamesh and Hercules, and J.R.R. Tolkien didn’t invent the dwarf. But I’m pretty certain that our idea of a dwarf won’t square up with our great-grandchildren’s idea of a dwarf — just as Tolkien’s would seem odd to the original Scandinavians who thought them up.
I’m not saying this is a bad thing at all. It just seems to me that we would be wise to know what parts of our stories speak to the universal human experience, and what parts speak to our unique human experience.
Why? Because cultural norms shift with the wind, while human nature doesn’t change. Much.