A new incarnation of Superman hit the screens of the world, and now we all can refresh our childhood memories. Most people have at least some idea of this particular character of international mythology, the boy from the planet Krypton who turned out to be a superhuman hero.
A new incarnation of Superman hit the screens of the world, and now we all can refresh our childhood memories. Most people have at least some idea of this particular character of international mythology, the boy from the planet Krypton who turned out to be a superhuman hero.
It is said that Superman’s story is only a childish fantasy, but when it comes to that we have all been children once, and woe is the one who has forgotten that part of their life.
Superman has impressed lots of different people from lots of different countries. I know a pious Muslim from one of the central Asian countries for whom Superman was the key experience of his early years. He and his family had just settled down in America, and the boy still felt foreign in the new country, knowing little English at the time, and probably even traumatised by the troubled life in his home country. But then he was taken to the pictures to see one of the films of his new country. It was one about Superman, and the child immediately forgot about his loneliness when he saw the man on the screen flying between skyscrapers and using his infrared eyes against the bad guys.
When he told me about his impressions, he already was a married man with three children, but still his eyes lit up in a different way, when the little boy in him came alive again.
Myself, I made my first acquaintance with Superman through comics when I was 11 years old. A couple of years after that I saw the first film; at that time, the role was played by Christopher Reeve, who was to end in such a tragic way.
I lived in a small provincial town, and I was lonely enough, as you could expect from a child interested in things more intellectual than athletics. Someone who wasn’t particularly respected by people his age, and who didn’t find friends or companions among them, obviously needed escape and escapism. And of course Superman was first-rate escapism: in your heart of hearts you could feel like a Superman while all the other young people thought you were just Clark Kent.
The Superman character was created by Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, two American Jewish boys whose parents came from Europe to America – probably fleeing from the hard life of the ghettos in eastern Europe. This background obviously influenced the biography of the hero: he is the last of the Mohicans, the only survivor from Krypton, emigrating to the United States, and although he is a man of extraordinary abilities, he must establish himself in American life the way other immigrants do.
Indeed Superman can be taken seriously as a metaphor of the immigrant’s destiny in the States, and maybe that’s kind of how Siegel and Shuster meant it.
Panu Höglund is a Finn writing in Irish with healthy respect for popular culture, with a new novel in Irish about to be published.
