Superman

Richard Donner's Superman arrives from the late 1970s as a product of its era, which is to say it arrives almost entirely untouched by the social consciousness that would later come to define prestige cinema. The film is a triumph of spectacle and sincerity, a genuinely thrilling piece of entertainment that treats its subject matter with appropriate reverence. Christopher Reeve's performance remains one of cinema's great heroic turns, and the film's technical achievements were genuinely revolutionary for their time. Yet from the perspective of contemporary cultural analysis, Superman is a museum piece, an artifact of an era when films could be made about saving the world without interrogating the structures of the world being saved.

The film's gender politics belong entirely to the 1970s, which is not to say they are offensive by that era's standards but rather that they fail to engage with any modern conception of feminist consciousness. Margot Kidder's Lois Lane is written as a professional and an equal, yet the narrative ultimately positions her as an object to be rescued, a prize to be won by Superman. She exists to admire the male hero and to motivate his heroism through her peril. The supporting cast is uniformly white, a reflection of Hollywood's casting practices at the time instead of any deliberate statement about representation. Lex Luthor, played with theatrical malice by Gene Hackman, is a villain motivated by personal ambition and wounded pride, not by any systematic critique of wealth or power. He is simply evil because he is evil.

What remains striking about Superman is precisely what remains absent from it: any impulse to use its narrative machinery for contemporary political commentary. The film tells a story about a god-like being choosing to serve humanity, and it tells that story with complete earnestness. There is no lecture, no message beyond the simple proposition that heroism consists of helping others. This is not a fault, merely an observation. Superman is a film from before the contemporary era, and it wears that temporal displacement with dignity.