We Are Superman

Superhero films are strange things. For all that we’ve been inundated with in that bloating genre ever since Bryan Singer’s first X-Men movie kicked off the contemporary rush, it’s easy to forget just how unlike everything else these kinds of films are. They’re sort of like other blockbusters, sure — only of course we all know they’re not. Each new superhero flick, in these days of superhero exhaustion, serves as an opportunity to step back, and consider just how strange it is that the last 25 years of American culture have seen us drowning in fantasies of wearing tights, capes, and technosuits while beating the ever-living hell out of each other. It’s not merely that superhero films have helped generate our queasy “end of cinema” climate — in which risk-averse studios continuously spit out new sequels and reboots of the same characters and stock situations — but that they are really the perfect medium for this state of affairs. New universes, alternate castings, a reenvisioning here, a retconning there: just as comic books constitute the apotheosis of the never-ending serial, the movies based on them have a similar infinite-endedness, the same sense that all a director or writer need do is return to one character, reach back into a particular world, shake it up like an Etch A Sketch, and start all over again.