This article contains spoilers for Man of Steel. And technically also World Trade Center….
Why is the Superhero film so prevalent in today’s age? There are two ideas to explain their success. One, that technology has finally caught up with comic books’ imaginations. And two, that the Iron Men and Dark Knights are really modern day Western heroes.
From the 1930s right through to the 50s, Hollywood provided an endless stream of Westerns. They were as plentiful as Superhero films are today. And both genres share a fundamental core. Essentially, they’re about Good Guys vs. Bad Guys.
In a post-9/11 world, such simplicity is welcome. A clear antagonist replaces the unknowable, omnipresent threat and strong heroes stand up where political leaders have often proved inefficient or frustrating. Captain America gets the bad guy. And he does it without a decade-long wait.
Zack Snyder’s Man of Steel is the most recent example of the Superhero movie, and possibly the most overt reenactment of 9/11 in its genre thus far. The Avengers might have levelled Manhattan, and Sam Raimi’s first Spider-Man film was haunted by its ghosts (the Twin Towers were edited out of the 2002 movie), but the 2013 Superman offers more parallels to the American Nightmare than any other.
“A good death is its own reward,” proclaims Faora-Ul (Antje Traue) to Colonel Nathan Hardy (Christopher Meloni) in one of Man of Steel’s many action sequences. It’s a familiar sentiment, one of martyrdom, regurgitated in many forms by either Game of Thrones characters or religious fundamentalists.
Switch the ‘religious’ for ‘planetary’ in that sentence, and you have Man of Steel’s chief antagonists, a group of Kryptonians led by General Zod (Michael Shannon). They’re convinced their way of life is superior to that held on Earth. They have more than an ideology to force upon its residents – they have the very consciousnesses and DNA of their own homeland in the Kryptonian Codex. It’s yet another echo of 9/11. People dying for what they believe in is one thing. Killing others while they do so…those are the bad guys.
And what’s a more visual reminder of terrorism’s most famous example? Buildings falling to the floor. Dust clouds covering the streets. People in suits running panicked around a city that looks very much like New York. Man of Steel has it all in Metropolis, right down to the yellow cabs abandoned helplessly in the road.
The Kryptonians don’t stop at targeting the United States’ perceived financial centre, either. They go for America’s heart itself. The movie’s first Kryptonian attack is in Clark Kent’s (Henry Cavill) hometown of Smallville. As Superman later reminds General Swanwick (Harry Lennix), “I’m about as American as they come…I was raised in Kansas”. It’s a clear positioning of the Kryptonians specifically targeting America, and, more significantly, her ideals.
“A good death is its own reward”. It’s the same line Faora-Ul spoke earlier to Nathan Hardy, but this time the roles are reversed. Flying a Herculean jet to drop the Phantom Zone onto Metropolis, to once again trap the Kryptonians, the plane becomes irreparably damaged. Hardy’s only way out is to fly the aircraft into the giant Kryptonian ship protruding with impossible height from the cityscape (sound familiar again?). That’s when he utters the line.
If films are dreams acting out society’s subconscious, an American General in an American plane – a symbol of the country’s military might – crashing a jet into a giant alien structure, not dissimilar to a skyscraper, in a city very much like New York, that’s an ironic form of revenge. To stay in keeping with the dream interpretation, Freud would diagnose Man of Steel’s climactic sequence as ‘wish fulfillment’.
In blockbuster action films, skyscrapers tumbling to the ground is expected. With powerful beings like Superman and Zod, a citywide destruction makes sense. And flying planes into things is nothing new. Hardy’s sacrifice could’ve flown in right from Roland Emmerich’s Independence Day, a film made five years before the events of 9/11.
Perhaps cinema isn’t imitating real life. Perhaps it was real life imitating cinema on September 11th, 2001.
Oliver Davis is one of Flickering Myth’s co-editors. You can follow him on Twitter @OliDavis.
Originally published June 24, 2013. Updated November 28, 2022.
