WHATEVER HAPPENED TO THE MAN OF TOMORROW?
AN ESSAY ON SUPERMAN, IMMIGRATION AND OUR PERILOUS FUTURE
I published an essay on Superman this week in the New York Times. Below is the uncut version.
Superman might be one of most recognizable characters in the world, but before I immigrated to the United States I didn’t know him at all. Never saw his likeness even once my first six years — such were the times, such was my Dominican childhood — but in the States of course I got more Superman than you could shake a cape at. Couldn’t get away from him, what with the Superfriends cartoon firing full blast and his comics on every damn spinner rack.
And then a couple years later — while I was still trying to wrestle my English into something approaching fluency — Donner’s Superman arrived and blew the zeitgeist up like Krypton itself. A box office sensation that ushered in the superhero movie as we know it, Superman resurrected Supes back from the crypt of irrelevance and turned even non-comic folks like my mother into fans.
You might think an immigrant kid like me, who loved comic books and studied them for clues as to how I should comport myself in this new world, an immigrant kid who was as bedeviled by his lost homeworld as Clark Kent is bedeviled by his spectral connection to Krypton, an immigrant kid who also thought of his island as a Krypton of sorts (destroyed not by cosmic apocalypse but by the banal logistics of immigration in the 70s), who also labored under a tridentity1 (I was someone in the outside English world of America, someone else in my Spanish-only family apartment, and someone else in my memories of the DR), you would think I would have fallen hard for Superman.
I didn’t, though. Not like I fell for Spider-Man or the X-Men or Star Wars. In fact I was something of the neighborhood anti-Superman. Always first to clown on the Last Son of Krypton. What can I say? Dude just rubbed me the wrong way from day one. There was the obvious stuff, like how goofy Superman was as a hero, how ridiculously dated his star-spangled patriotism was — Supes loved a country I’d never seen, my landfill America was way more supervillain territory.
You would think Superman's immigrant/refugee background would have been our one point of connection, but even that rankled me. Sure we were alike in terms of our otherworldliness, but Clark Kent’s complete assimilation, his total passing-ness seemed to me as impossible as flying fast in order to reverse time. Superman might be the Man of Tomorrow, but it was a tomorrow that didn’t seem like it would ever arrive for someone like me who got spat on the street by complete strangers, called the n- word and the s- word on the daily, people literally snarling when they saw my brown face or heard my Spanish accent.
But if I had just disliked Superman, full-stop, that would have been easier (and I wouldn’t be writing this essay). The problem was that while dude hit me in a lot of wrong ways, he also hit me in a lot of weird ways that I couldn’t just brush off. I ran my mouth about Superman, but I also couldn’t quite get quit of him, no matter how hard I tried.
In retrospect, no surprise. For all his four-colored squareness, Superman is a perversely fraught figure, ambivalent, unstable, multiple, contradictory, and yes, uncanny. He is the most human of humans but he is also an actual extraterrestrial with godlike powers. He is bumbling Clark Kent and supreme Superman and haunted Kal-El, and each identity simultaneously reinforces and simultaneously erases the others. He’s an alien invader who fights alien invaders, a child of the apocalypse who repetitiously saves the world and himself from apocalypse, apocalypses masterminded by his villains and the apocalypse he himself represents and is haunted by.
He is a figure of cataclysmic agency who is constrained from experiencing or enacting real change, who is trapped in what Umberto Eco described as an oneiric climate2, a “temporal paradox” that forbids systemic transformations of any kind. (That’s why the all-powerful Superman doesn’t end all war and the emergence of Wakanda alters zero about its world.) He’s a Mr. Rogers who is also deeply melancholic, who mourns lost Krypton endlessly, a mourning he is never allowed to complete. He is the true Angel of Immigrant History, blown by an exterminating storm into a new world but always straining to glimpse the catastrophe behind him.
And because I was an immigrant who didn’t want to think of himself as an immigrant but was in no position to deny it to anyone, Superman was inevitably too close for comfort, an unwelcome portend. Other people might note his alien-ness and quickly forget it, but I couldn’t unsee it — and because I couldn’t unsee his, I couldn’t unsee mine.