Man and Superman

"Superman" and the politics of punk

Ever since I saw the play “Stereophonic”, I’ve been dressing like Stevie Nicks. It’s not my natural fashion choice but as someone once recently said to me, when you’re an old lady you have two choices: butch lesbian or hippie witch, so here I am. Anyway, I was reminded of how my fashion choices shape my mental life when I heard the song “Punkrocker” at the end of the new film “Superman.” The song, from 2006, was originally recorded by a Swedish band called Teddybears, but it’s sung here by Iggy Pop. “I’m listening to the music with no fear,” he sings. “You can hear it too if you’re sincere…”

because I’m a punk rocker yes I am

well I’m a punk rocker yes I am…

but is he??

Funnily enough, when I got home and googled it, some dumb AI chat came up claiming it was by P.J. Soles and was in the film “Rock ‘n’ Roll High School,” and I, a human, can tell you, no it was not. I was obsessed with that film and my proudest thing I ever owned was the same leopard print spandex shirt she wore in it, only mine was turquoise and hers was pink.

I don’t feel qualified to write about movies, especially “Superman,” but I do feel qualified to muse at length about the brief but apparently important reference to punk rock that is threaded throughout “Superman,” because I am the (co) editor of the Oxford Handbook of Punk! If the movie had confined itself to the brief exchange between Lois and Clark/Superman, where she says she’s a punk rocker and he says he likes punk rock too, and then she mocks the bands he names that he likes, saying, “that’s not punk, that’s corporate pop sell out stuff!” (or something like that), then I might just have passed on by. The exchange seems to be shorthand for character-building: Lois is supposed to be edgy, and Clark is supposed to be square. And maybe that is the purpose of the exchange, although if so, I still think it’s kind of interesting that the term ‘punk’ has taken on that shading. But later the theme continues when Clark announces to a skeptical Lois that exuding kindness is being punk rock.

I feel like that’s a lot of air-time for the idea of punk, at least in a movie that has nothing to do with punk, and who’s original texts predate the genre by many years. My friend Marie, who is associated with DC Comics, tells me that the director James Gunn used to be in a punk band, which may explain his interest in inserting this concept here, and I appreciate that impulse. I have all these great ideas (and scripts) for movies about those days, and I know, and James Gunn knows, there’s no actual market for them. Punk has to be inserted like a virus into other texts for it to have resonance.

this is the director’s band

But what is being punk, or rather, what does it mean NOW, as opposed to then? People have always accused punks of being phony in some way, because of the way they dress - and the subsequent revelation that it is actually more “punk” to not be punk is another oft-bandied about interpretation of the genre. In some ways Superman’s defensive words are just a gloss on that, but it also touches on what I have always thought was a major a part of punk philosophy: in the world of punk, all the outsiders (and let’s face it, being an alien from outer space makes Clark Kent the ultimate outsider) are now on the inside, and here on the inside, love will prevail.

This is what democracy looks like

True, it didn’t always work like that in practice, but I think that love was always at the core of punk…love of community, love of music, love of the other fans…united by a hatred of those who hated it. In those days, everything about the real world seemed so cruel and mean, and that’s even more true today. Initially punk’s violence was all a reaction to square people’s bigoted need to attack them: Indeed, “they started it” could have been punk rock’s motto. And “they started it” is clearly Superman’s excuse for interfering in world affairs. Square people have a lot to answer for these days.

I am still not willing to buy that Lois Lane was a punk rocker in her youth, but it does ring true that, if she was, then her subsequent comments on how lame Clark’s taste in music is would be a natural reaction. To be honest, though, that whole dialogue about to sell-out or not to sell-out used to bore the crap out of me when I had to report on it endlessly (at the insistence of certain artists, like Sonic Youth). I felt at the time that there was no such thing, since seeking an audience at all is already selling out, but no one agreed with me, in fact I got a lot of grief for saying it.

Moving on though, in the context of this film, there is a (fake) band called the Mighty Crab Joys, that is apparently supposed to be fake punk, like Blink 182 or something. Clark has a poster of them on his childhood bedroom wall, and “they” play a song at the end of the film. Marie told me that they’ve been inserting Mighty Crab Joys posters into backgrounds in DC Comics as an homage. It’s all very meta, isn’t it, which seems fitting since in the film, Superman is described as a metahuman. No one asked me, but I think it’s a fun film, in that it mocks all the things I like to see mocked, like selfies, tweets, secret prisons, megalomaniacs and needless warfare. As with all superhero films, it probably wouldn’t do to look at its actual politics too closely, but the politics of punk in it are A-OK.