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Superman Was Always an Immigrant
Conservative media is scandalized by James Gunn’s Superman, which speaks to our current political reality in unexpectedly vivid ways.
In the TV series Smallville, Tom Welling’s Clark Kent famously protects undocumented Mexican immigrant Javier (Tyler Posey) from the police and refers to himself as “an illegal immigrant.” Gunn’s film isn’t as explicit about this parallel, but the charged language thrown at his version of Superman (David Corenswet) by billionaire Lex Luthor (Nicholas Hoult) leans in this direction. When Lois Lane (Rachel Brosnahan) challenges him on this dilemma, he’s adamant about choosing altruism over governmental red tape, setting up a story where he helps save the people of Jarhanpur from Boravia’s military, despite the bureaucratic nightmare it would cause (though ultimately it’s his friends the Justice Gang who undertake this mission while he’s on the other side of the globe in Metropolis). It goes by rather quickly, but it might bring to mind the climax of Batman Begins, in which the Caped Crusader (Christian Bale) lets the villainous Ra’s Al Ghul (Liam Neeson) fall to his death, declaring: “I won’t kill you, but I don’t have to save you.”
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