Superman returns to the big screen (again) today. Presumably, this adaptation will be like the rest: Americans will be saved by the star-spangled superhero’s mighty powers; theatergoers will swoon over his big muscles and dishy smile. All will be well in Metropolis until the next villain emerges. The problem with Superman stories has always been the unyielding trap of superhuman perfection. How are you supposed to craft a compelling narrative when the hero can smash his way through walls, shoot heat beams from his eyes and fly? It was with this in mind that I reached out to the writer Junot Díaz, whose fascination with comic books and apocalyptic stories swirls through much of his fiction writing. I asked him to take the measure of Supes in this moment. Superman’s contradictions have dogged Díaz since childhood; squaring the hero’s multitudinous identities became a puzzle he couldn’t quite put down. For Superman is not simply The Man of Tomorrow and his bespectacled alter ego, Clark Kent, Díaz says, but also an undocumented migrant to this country, whose yearning for his ravaged homeland is often eclipsed by his determination to save this world, over and over and over again. “For an immigrant like me,” Díaz writes, “who didn’t want to think of himself as an immigrant but was in no position to deny it to anyone, Superman was an unwelcome portent. 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.” Here’s what we’re focusing on today:
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