Superman Has Always Been an Immigrant Story

The DC universe is launching its comeback this weekend with the release of James Gunn’s Superman, which has been met with the franchise’s best reviews since 1980’s Superman II. It’s a much-needed win for Warner Bros., who desperately need a major blockbuster hit, and especially for DC, since their last attempt at a cinematic universe proved polarizing among fans and saw its last several installments bomb due to lost goodwill.

But not all of the recent buzz has been positive. Earlier this week, James Gunn called Superman an “immigrant story”, and in maybe the most predictable response of all time, right-wing commentators freaked out, with Fox News labeling the film “Superwoke.” A Monday segment saw Kellyanne Conway assert that people “don’t go to the movie theater to be lectured to and to have somebody throw their ideology onto us” (a particularly amusing statement since they always go out of their way to praise releases that align with their politics). Yet this backlash misses the entire point of Superman as a character.

Ever since his first comic book appearance in 1938, Superman has consistently served as a subtle commentary on the immigrant experience. To begin with, the creators of the character, Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, were the children of Jewish immigrants who had fled the Russian Empire. As such, there’s a quiet power to the fact that Superman has evolved into an icon for America; what is America if not a land founded by immigrants?

Even more telling is that Siegel and Shuster created the character 14 years after the passage of the Immigration Act of 1924, which severely restricted immigration from Asian and Southern/Eastern European countries through a quota system. And in an era filled with prejudice, most obviously towards but not limited to Jewish people, an aspirational character like Superman, who fought first and foremost for the downtrodden, was the perfect embodiment of the positive side of the immigrant experience.

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But the immigrant angle isn’t just subtextual: it’s literally the character’s backstory. Born Kal-El (in an apparent shoutout to Siegel and Shuster’s Jewish heritage, “El” is Hebrew for “of God”), and later given the Anglicized name Clark Kent, Superman is regularly defined by his struggles to reconcile his alien origins with his efforts to assimilate into American culture.

While most incarnations of the character haven’t engaged with this idea beyond the surface-level text, there does exist media that commit to the allegory. Frank Miller’s Superman: Year One emphasizes the immigrant parallels to a degree that’s impossible to miss, while a Smallville episode, “Subterranean,” saw Clark reflect on his origins when a neighbor is revealed to be hiding an undocumented migrant worker.

The Right-Wing ‘Superman’ Backlash Misses the Point

Superman has long served as a figurehead for American values. Around the time the US entered World War II, the government began using his image to sell war bonds, while the comics departed from his scrappier roots, focusing on the oppressed, and depicted him fighting Nazis while adorned with American iconography. It got to the point where the official SS newspaper denounced the character as Jewish propaganda. That openly patriotic image stuck for years, as an entire generation has since associated him with “truth, justice, and the American way.”

So the right-wing media apparatus accusing James Gunn of making the character “woke” isn’t just stupid, it’s objectively wrong — the character has always been inescapably political, even if said politics have manifested in different ways over the years. But maybe it’s an inevitable reaction in a time in which faith in American democracy is reaching unprecedented levels of division. Younger generations are openly questioning the concept of patriotism when our long-standing institutions are in active peril, and many have rightly pointed out that while, yes, America is a land of immigrants, its founding was colonialist.

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Part of what makes Gunn’s new film so impactful is that it explicitly engages with this division. Lex Luthor uses the Man of Steel’s status as an outsider to stoke fear in the public upon learning that Krypton may not have been the paragon of virtue that many believed. This tactic also directly benefits his evil plan, which involves deliberately allowing an invasion of a Middle Eastern country before claiming half its territory, all while claiming that he’s looking out for American interests. Yet Superman, while shaken by learning the truth about his parents, comes to realize that his true heroism (which is better representative of positive American values than anything else) comes not from his past mistakes, but his willingness to fight for a better future.

It’s an incredibly clever new wrinkle to a cultural icon, and it represents Gunn’s biggest masterstroke with the film. He illustrates that an immigrant might better represent the values that America should aspire to be than many natively born citizens do today. If the right-wing media want a Superman that stands for jingoism, well, they already have that with Homelander in The Boys. Superman is playing in theaters on July 11.