They have been attempting to revive Superman in Superman Lives for years. Tim Burton flirted with then dumped the project in 1998. He turned a great idea into a reasonably bad movie, Big Fish. Who knows what he could have done with a bad idea. That was before the X-Men franchise, before Spiderman, before Hellboy, the Punisher, and before the seriously lackluster Incredible Hulk. Meanwhile, Hollywood is still trying to get Superman off the ground.

There’s no question Superman is the archetype of the hero. It’s perfectly sensible, too, that he was born in 1938 amidst the rumbling of the coming world war. While America might have continued to avoid the war for years, the infallible hero for truth, justice, and America’s Manifest Destiny might have just been the perfect answer to the Fuhrer. That was then.

In the early years, Superman grew both in popularity and infallibility. Superman didn’t fly at first. In fact, it took some effort to hoist that car over his head. But it wasn’t long, as WWII spread, before the greatest American hero grew considerably in power.

Now pushing 70, Superman is most seriously past his prime. He has lost credibility and, what’s more, feasibility. So what’s wrong with Superman? Nothing. That’s exactly the problem. He is ruined by his own infallibility.

After the Dark Knight series and the original Batman movie, we have learned to prefer our heroes much darker and much more fallible. And now we have, not just a new rogue’s gallery of heroes, but also a new language and a new shared consciousness of what the hero is. Batman, the nocturnal, angry, and orphaned champion of consumerism and capitalism. And Spideman, less angry arguably, but thoroughly fallible. Geeky and unconvinced of his own heroism. The X-men brought us super-charged mutant freaks living and fighting in a fury of freakophobia, a great idea for the comic-collecting outcast geek. Hellboy was engineered to bring cataclysmic evil but, raised Catholic, learned to serve good and, presumably, God. And there’s nothing much more fallible than a devil-spawned Catholic hero. The Punisher, complete with a dead family and really big guns, fights for good and, more notably, revenge. And of course, the Hulk, the radioactive hero of wrath. But not just the comic-spawned. Jason Bourne is the angry and reluctant anti-Bond.

Can we save Superman? Clearly he needs to be more fallible. Let’s lose Lois in ropes and the kryptonite. As an adopted son, as an alien on earth, as someone who outlives his enemies and couldn’t possibly keep a girlfriend, he could quite easily be recreated lonely and troubled. Superman could also have a hero complex where he feels he has to save the world and of course, because he can’t save everyone, he could become compulsive and obsessed with his own powerlessness. Or he could find himself in a society where he is unpopular and less-beloved, as he is, where other superheroes have better costumes, better marketing, and much more charisma, and he has to face his own unpopularity. We could give him a disease. He gets his power from the sun. How about melanoma? At least it’s a 50s staple. They always kill the aliens with a cold.

Whatever Hollywood does to try to save Superman, I expect to be disappointed.

SS