Superman's Primal Scream

Rating: 10/10 (17 June 2013)

(Note: on a second viewing of Man of Steel yesterday, 7.10.13, I counted seven primal screams by Kal-El.) For Nicole.
Just when I was ready to consign Superman to the cultural dustbin as a washed-out dream of American exceptionalism, a symbol of U.S. technological dominion and an arrogant rationale for our self-imposed role as world super-cop, along comes a fresh incarnation of our national myth. Man of Steel offers a vision that owes very little to 1938, U.S. Steel, or the Allied victors of World War II, the so-called "greatest generation."
Of eleven movie reviews sampled by CBS News online, only one excerpt has anything good to say about Tyler and Nolan's Man of Steel. Stephanie Zacharek of the Village Voice acknowledges "greatness in this retelling of the origin of Superman, moments of intimate grandeur, some marvelous, subtle acting, and a superhero costume that's a feat of mad mod genius." Even the redoubtable Kenneth Turan calls it a "dark end of the street extravaganza" whose effort to join "epic vision" with "dramatic heft...hasn't quite worked out that way."
All these reviewers, a number of which seem mired in nostalgia for their own childhoods, have utterly missed the point of Man of Steel. This movie reflects not tradition but a breaking away from tradition, the sort needed if we are going to successfully transition from fossil fuel to sustainable renewable energy for everyone on the planet, avert the worst catastrophes of global warming, and replace an economic and industrial system that is rapidly destroying the natural and human resources of earth. Man of Steel is, if not an allegory, a mirror that lets us see ourselves in potent and resounding images of what is both worst and best about our man-made world, especially as represented by the United States of America. There is a reason that Michael Shannon's feral General Zod speaks with an American accent, while his fellow Kryptonian, Jor-El (Russell Crowe), has a British accent. Zod with his advanced technology, especially the mercilessly destructive "world engine," will recreate Krypton and its atmosphere in Earth's place, annihilating the entire human species in the process. In other words, Man of Steel is responding to exactly the same ultimate exigencies that humankind faces in the 21st century.
If General Zod represents our nature's dark side, Kal-El shows us what is best about ourselves: our fragility, vulnerability and potential for courage, that is, our willingness to step "out of the box" and risk trying something new. This is, after all, the real meaning of America, its experience and history. Henry Cavil's hero, Kal-El, conveys these qualities with subtlety and vigor. If he seems aloof at times, well—he is an alien, after all, a "stranger in a strange land." Kal-El's good fortune in the adoptive parents that find him and his struggles growing up in Kansas, like his search for identity as he strives to figure out how he could best contribute to his world are existential issues that will resonate with present adolescents and millennials alike, as well as with every generation that truly remembers what it was like to be young.
By my count, Cavil's superhero utters a primal scream seven times throughout Man of Steel (this may be what Zacharek has in mind when she says that, inside Man of Steel, there is "an actual movie... crying to get out"). In each instance, Kal-El's scream occurs when his strength, fortitude and possibly his own mortality are being tested. His final scream occurs just after he has killed Zod, the last member of his own Race of Kryptonians. The symbolism and its meaning are palpable and plain: to renew and save the world, the old regime and its technology must pass out of existence and into the storehouse of memory we know as history.
Maybe that Kryptonian "S" really does mean: hope.