[Severian]

The Evolution of Good
By JOSÉ ALANIZ, ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR, UNIVERSITY OF WASHINGTON

“What is the ape to man?
A laughingstock or a painful embarrassment. And man shall be just that for the overman:
a laughingstock or a painful embarrassment.”
—Friedrich Nietzsche. Thus Spoke Zarathustra, 1883
Thus spoke German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche in advancing his concept of the übermensch (“overman,” more commonly translated as “superman”). The evolution-tinged language, not uncommon in Darwin’s late 19th century, speaks to the threat of our eventual obsolescence, of outmoded humanity yielding to some Homo Sapiens 2.0. Such is the superman, the superior being who would withstand the burden of history’s “eternal recurrence” to rise above the herd and ful ll the species’ potential.
Nietzsche’s thought, often misunderstood and distorted, had a tremendous in uence on such moral maladies of Western culture as eugenics, Social Darwinism and fascism. It taps deep modern anxieties over our replaceability in
a fast-changing world, both by machines (the increasing mechanization of life) and by those younger, faster, smarter or otherwise more t. Yet one could say the philosopher’s ideas—with their language of “ful ll,” “rise above,” “over” —hint also at our greatest aspirations: of unboundedness, triumph—a dream of ying.
Leave it to popular culture then to translate that optimistic wish into accessible dramatic terms. The “superman” slowly ltered into the public mind, helped by George Bernard Shaw’s 1903 play Man and Superman, which prepared the soil for the word’s acceptance. Some 30 years later two teenagers
from Cleveland, Ohio, Jerry Siegel and Joe Schuster, started peddling a novel idea in the burgeoning eld of comic books. In 1938, the publisher National (later DC) nally took them up on it, despite the dubious sci- premise: a colorfully-garbed strongman with amazing powers, come from another world to save Earth from all manner of menaces. To everyone’s surprise, Action Comics No. 1, featuring the rst appearance of Superman, ew o the racks and launched a new industry: superheroes. (Siegel and Schuster’s success led Nietzsche scholar Walter Kaufmann to atly declare in the 1950s that the idea of the superman had become indelibly “associated with Nietzsche and the comics.”)
Ostensibly stripped of the übermensch’s more troubling aspects, Superman represents the best of our human form (“faster than a speeding bullet!”) and also the best of our human morality. As University of Oregon English professor Ben Saunders put it: “Whatever we collectively imagine ‘good’ at any given time, Superman must strive to be that, too.” He is not just ultra-powerful and godlike; Superman as conceived was a moral exemplar as well.
But over 78 years of history, times change—a lot. What does the concept of “good” mean today? As with all Superman stories, this is the question that Batman v Superman: Dawn
of Justice seeks to answer. The lm’s immediate predecessor, 2013’s Man of Steel (by the same director, Zack Snyder) rebooted the character (played by Henry Cavill) for a bleaker, gloomier, post-9/11 age. Its palettes of greys and blacks (even his costume got murkier) seemed out of keeping
with the hero’s bright four-color image, while its ethical breaches (Metropolis destroyed! Superman kills the bad guy!)
translated into box-o ce gold—but also alienated legions of fans who had trouble accepting this version of “good.”
Superheroes in general have certainly gotten more “adult,”
in part to shake o their camp associations; in a February
Los Angeles Times Review of Books essay, Jackson Ayres notes that since the 1980s “a shift toward darker themes, graphic violence, sexual explicitness and a generally cynical tone, an approach commonly summed up by professionals and fans with two words: grim and gritty.” (See rival studio Marvel’s recent hit Deadpool, about an R-rated superhero who delights in ultraviolence and sardonic snark.)
Many yearn for Superman as the exception, though. If Christopher Nolan’s successful Dark Knight trilogy of Batman lms—with their thematic explorations of terrorism, government overreach and madness—represents the nightmares of 21st-century USA, Superman should stand for something higher, brighter, more transcendent. But no: Man of Steel showed that not everyone minds a “darker” take on America’s rst superhero.
And judging from the new lm’s ad campaign, dark is what
we will get. “Pointedly, in these trailers Superman never once smiles,” remarked Asher Elbein in a recent Atlantic article. The storyline, in which the man of steel shares top billing with
the dark knight, deals with the impact a real demi-god would have on human society (the premise of Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’ 1986 Watchmen), as well as the repercussions of the previous lm’s casual approach to ultraviolence as “cool.”
We return to Nietzsche’s übermensch, to the appeal of the overman (awed by the hero’s power, some choose to worship him) and to “obsolescent” man’s struggle against it (embodied by Batman/Bruce Wayne, played by Ben A eck). The lm,
in fact, takes much of its visual look from Frank Miller’s
1986 series The Dark Knight Returns, which climaxes with a showdown between the “S” and “Bat” logos. (Both DKR and Watchmen are seminal works of the “grim and gritty” school.)
Another way of putting it: Batman v Superman blows wide open the fascist underpinnings of the superhero genre, of stories whose allure lies in vigilante überbeings outing the law for the sake of what they call “justice.” And being adored for it!
In his 2000 novel The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, Michael Chabon cuts right to this dilemma facing the creators of superhero comics (many of them Jewish-Americans) in
the lead-up to World War II. One of them wonders “if all they had been doing, all along, was indulging their own worst impulses and assuring the creation of another generation of men who revered only strength and domination.” In 1954, psychiatrist Frederic Wertham would go further, testifying before Congress that superhero comics harmed children
by facilitating a “Superman complex,” with its “fantasies of sadistic joy in seeing other people punished.”
Heavy material for a comic book movie!
On a lighter note, Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice represents DC Entertainment’s ploy at franchise “universe- building” on the scale of its rival, Marvel (maker of the Avengers series, among others). The movie introduces Wonder Woman (Gal Gadot) and Aquaman (Jason Momoa), seeding future lms.
But in viewing this work’s confrontation with the double- edged superhero’s übermensch appeal, we may nd ourselves recalling Nietzsche’s contemporary Lord Acton, who in 1887 penned the sobering adage: “power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.”