I’ve been thinking a lot about the Joe-El and Lara Lor-Van twist. It’s one of the few things that bother me a bit about the film, but I think I need to see the whole movie again to fully form my opinion on it. I saw some posts about it being offensive and xenophobic towards immigrants and I can’t fault anyone for seeing it that way, even if I didn’t. I don’t ant to try and invalidate anyone’s feelings about that plot point because it certainly isn’t my place to do so, especially as a white, male, descendent of immigrants to the U.S. I’ve never had to flee a country for my safety (though as a vocally queer liberal, I’m thinking about fleeing this one right now). So I can’t speak to those experiences and all I can do is try to learn how immigrants and refugees feel and what they’re going through, particularly right now in this sadly hate-filled country.
And it is problematic if the message that the movie wants you to take away is that a refugee like Kal-El only turned out “good” because he was raised by a couple of white midwesterners who live in a (probably) red county. But I don’t think that’s what Gunn was saying here. In the moment with the Kents, I think a lot of that was Gunn’s own frequent messaging about found family and that “blood” means less than the people who are really there for you regardless if you are actually related to them.
The way I view those scenes are more that it’s Kal-El himself who is a good person and while his upbringing with the Kents certainly helped shape him, it’s also important that he was also motivated by what he thought was the overall message that his birth parents sent him, as well as other experiences there obviously wasn’t time to show. All of these things collectively helped him to determine the hero he was going to be. But also, I don’t think the movie was trying to say that Kal-El is “one of the good ones” as a***hole xenophobes would say, but instead that people simply shouldn’t be persecuted because of where they come from, regardless of what humans (in this case) might PERCEIVE about that place (which is usually fueled by disinformation).
But to dig deeper here; we don’t know if his birth parents are representative of Kryptonian society as a whole, and I hope we get some insight on this in Supergirl. I don’t want it to be a major plot point in that movie and it probably shouldn’t be, but since Kal-El has Kara to ask, maybe we’ll find out that her family left for Argo City for a reason. But if that’s true, then perhaps Kara doesn’t even know because she was only with them for the first years of her life. Anyway, I don’t want to see it retconned or instantly negated the way Marvel has annoyingly done immediately with some important plot points (Thor you don’t need a weapon! The power is within you! But yeah, go build yourself a big axe because that’s something you’ll need to kill Thanos! Oh and regrow your eye in between movies.).
But anyway though, Superman is both an immigrant story and sci-fi story, and I took the message from Jor and Lara to lean more into the sci-fi side. I’m thinking that Krypton (or at least the area of Krypton they hail from-Kandor I suppose) is very much the cold, analytical society of the Byrne version. We’re talking about a technologically advanced planet thousands of light years away that we know very little about at this point. Perhaps they had a change of heart after they sent Kal-El off, or maybe Gunn could do some sort of time dilation thing where Kal could get a message to them in the past and learn more about their motivations and/or show them that they were being as xenophobic towards humans as some humans would be to them. Maybe Jor-El in this version created Brainiac (with the best of intentions originally) and the rogue AI corrupted the message (or actually corrupted Jor and Lara somehow) in a way that no one would ever be able to tell. Admittedly that would feel like a cop out but I want to see Brainy so badly at this point that I’ll take it.
But on the immigrant story side, I think what Gunn also was trying to show here is that xenophobes tend to point to problematic stuff in the history of cultures they fear as justification for their xenophobia. Republicans do it with Latino people and Middle-Eastern Muslims constantly, as if people fleeing El Salvador are all members of drug cartels and people fleeing Gaza all support what Hamas did on Oct. 7. Similarly, Luthor uses Jor’s and Lara’s message to tell the public, “See! They’re all evil and he must be too!” When in actuality, we don’t even know the full context of the message and if Jor and Lara had more to say or if they ultimately changed their minds. Granted, what they said was BAD and it would be hard to rationalize it but you can’t condemn an entire culture based on a five-minute message from two people. And even if their ideals are indicative of Krytonian society in general (or the Kryptonian ruling class), there are always people who disagree. many Palestinians don’t support Hamas. Many Israelis don’t support Netanyahu. It will be interesting to see where Argo City falls into all of this.
Anyway, that’s just my uninformed take. If that plot point upset you and if it ruined the experience as a whole, I’m sorry. But my hope is that the overall positive response the movie has gotten is that its themes of hope, kindness and acceptance are resonating with people. For me at least, this is the first Superman movie that’s come out in my lifetime that actually inspired me and I desperately want to see more. I want to see THIS Superman lead the Justice League and inspire the people. And I think we’re going to get it, finally.
