I am Superman. I’m thirty three.
Same age as Clark Kent/Kal-El in the film, Man
of Steel. I cannot fly, can’t heat anything up with my eyes except the
temper of a fifteen year old whom I’ve already told to put their phone away,
nor am I invincible against bullets, knives, or the worst weapons of all,
words. I have feelings. I’m a high school teacher, you see, and I’ve been told
every nasty thing in the book and then some. I roll with it and shrug it off
like a SCUD missile planted firmly in the chest of Superman. Except I’m not
Superman, my feelings do get hurt, but students will never know that. Nor will
they ever know about how excited I was to finally watch the film and completely
devastated I was during an extremely important scene.
My wife and
I are raising our niece as our foster daughter, a long story for another time,
but, knowing how life is going right now the conversation between young Clark
and Pa Kent before a certain tornado scene hit me in the face. I realized, as
boy scout Clark Kent tells his adopted father that he can’t really say anything
to Clark since he’s really his dad. Most people in the audience, I’m assuming,
just passed that comment off like a dis, but for me, well, that’s what made it
difficult. You see, I’ll eventually have that conversation with my niece. We’ll
be sitting somewhere, or driving, or walking, and it will come out. And it will
break my heart. Not because it’s true, but because of the context in which it
will be verbalized. Teenagers hurt without meaning to, yes, even the “bad”
ones.
This was
also when I realized that Batman is a character I love even more now than I
ever did as a kid growing up in the Boyle Heights area of East Los Angeles
where there were no heroes swooping in to stop the gang warfare, only LAPD
helicopters and police with barking dogs. There was only my dad, uttering words
of encouragement and wisdom much like Bruce’s father’s “Why do we fall?”
speech. But there was also the sense that anyone
could be Batman. All it took was a drive and training, gadgets or no
gadgets, I could be Batman. As I’ve grown older and more aloof from my family
that feel very much like the scheming Bluths of Arrested Developmet, I’ve come to the realization that knowledge
was all he could truly give me. There comes a time in each man’s life when he,
sadly, realizes how much more he’s done than his father. I’ve seen and felt how
much more I’ve done than both my father and my grandfather. It is my hope that
my son, a beautiful two month old child now, does not wish to be like me, but
rather better than me. That would
make me the proudest father in the multiverse.
I had an
interesting conversation with a friend of mine who also has children of his
own, he is a die-hard Superman fan and he was crushed to see the Man of Steel,
Spoilers folks, spoilers, snap General Zod's neck to save some humans. He was
shocked and utterly disappointed that his hero had been reduced to killing
another living being. We debated about why this Man of Steel is different, and in some ways better than the
versions we've had in our heads for so long. We need a superhero to save us,
someone like Batman, not a super powered hero, like Superman. What we debated
he kept using the same reasoning, "I want my son to know there's always a
solution to our problems and violence can't solve them all."
I, for the
most part, agreed, but explained to him that I never bought the idea that Clark
would never kill. If you are a Superman, it would eventually happen, whether
planned or not. Now Clark had no reason to kill again. He had, after all,
destroyed the genetic material of all of Krypton and killed the one super
powered being besides himself that would not stop until humanity was crushed
under his heel. I'd say that's pretty extreme circumstances that would allow
for another person to be taken out. It would have been what Jor-El would have
done to Zod to begin with if left with no choice.
And that is
what is really at the heart of both the Dark
Knight Trilogy and Man of Steel,
fathers and sons. Both the loss of the fathers and how their sons deal with
this loss. One man decides to better his city by waging a one man war on crime,
becoming a high-tech Sherlock Holmes while the other embraces his status as
resident alien in order to bring about mankind’s ascension into the post-human
era. In the end what has been done with these two characters, these monolithic
icons of culture now, is revolutionary. They have been placed in our world of
creeping government agencies making us paranoid and yet with smiles on our
faces when the Man of Steel tells them stop trying to spy on me because you can’t. Or when his time as his
city’s avenging angel has come to its end Wayne brings closure to his tale and
allows another to begin his own.
One day
I’ll have to do the same with my son and niece, let them tell their own
stories, and embellish them like I try to do. What will matter the most will be
what they do with the knowledge they've gained and how they kill their past,
because there is nothing that says they can’t be both Superman and Batman.
