Superman’s identity crisis

When Superman returns to the big screen after a nearly 20-year absence, it will be to a vastly changed movie landscape. During his last tour of duty -- the Christopher Reeve cycle -- he was still the only

comic-book superhero to have enjoyed the full, big-budget Hollywood treatment. Now, after five Batman movies, three X-Men films, a couple of Spider-Mans, the Fantastic Four, the Hulk, Daredevil and a small army of others, he’ll be just another face in a super-powered crowd.

Will the first and most elemental of superheroes be able to reassert himself as the paragon of the form, the hero that every other elastic-wrapped champion of justice can only yearn to be? Or will he be perceived as merely one more franchise along the entertainment superhighway? Or worse yet, will he come off as too simple, too old-school, even too corny for today’s hero-savvy crowd?

There were costumed crime-fighters in the newspaper funny pages and on radio before Superman appeared. There were interplanetary travelers with astounding powers in science fiction stories. But until Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster unveiled the last son of Krypton in 1938, no character had pulled together the whole package of superhuman powers, skintight costume, double identity and lifelong battle against evil. Before him, hardly any product of the shaky new comic book medium sold more than 100,000 copies. Within a year, Superman was selling more than 1 million. Within another year, he’d become a star of radio and movie cartoons, inspiring dozens of imitators and creating an industry.

He also was the simplest and purest of his type. Primary colors. No mask. The most basic little-kid wish-fulfilling powers. A superman from birth, who used “Clark Kent” as a pretense, rather than a man with all the idiosyncrasies of normality before being transformed.

And that name! Superman! From there, superheroes could only become more elaborate, more specialized, less perfect variations, shadows distorted on the wall of Plato’s cave.

Not that he was always so morally or emotionally simple. In the early days, Siegel and Shuster allowed him a cruel sense of humor as he dangled thugs off skyscrapers to make them talk or tricked Lois Lane with humiliating pranks. They tossed him up against wife-beaters and crooked mine owners as well as mad scientists. But as would-be competitors such as Batman and the Human Torch staked their turf among the grimier city streets and the grayer areas of heroic behavior, Superman found his greatest success with a good-humored smugness and an ethical system as primary as his costume’s palette.

For a while, that was all to his benefit. By the 1950s, the initial superhero fad had blown through and Superman was the last commercial success still standing. The George Reeves TV show institutionalized him as an icon of wholesome juvenile entertainment. Then the decade turned -- and what else did pop-culturists do in the ‘60s but throw caustic and ironic counterpoints at whatever had looked most reassuring in the ‘50s?

Spider-Man, the Fantastic Four, the X-Men and the other creations of the new Marvel comics (the chief rival to Superman’s DC Comics) were everything the Man of Steel wasn’t: jealous of their fellow heroes, unsure they were doing the right thing, driven as much by vanity and anger as by purer motives and generally feared and loathed by the masses whom they regularly snatched from the maw of annihilation.

Teenagers loved them, for what teenager doesn’t glory in feeling tormented, incomprehensibly complicated and cruelly misjudged? They sneered at Superman as the commander of what Marvel’s editor, Stan Lee, called “the Bubblegum Brigade.”

Modern comics fandom was born, and whatever hero wanted to stay on top of the market had to swing with the times. Batman, despite decades of emulating Superman, was oddball enough to turn dark and edgy and stay on top of the market. Efforts to retrofit Superman would never pay off so well. His publishers would try killing him, resurrecting him full of vengeful rage, even letting him grow a beard (the last-ditch effort of the nice, suburban white guy who wishes he could develop an edge -- just ask Al Gore). But in the eyes of the world he would always be the old-style one, the simplistic one. Maybe it’s just that name. Or maybe it’s that we need a cornball against whom our current favorites can look hip.

That very corniness, of course, was half the secret to Superman’s big-screen triumph in 1978. After a decade and a half of disastrous war, murdered and disgraced presidents, crime, inflation, drugs, cultural upheavals -- in short, maybe the longest stretch of relentlessly nerve-shredding experiences in our history -- Americans were overjoyed to allow an impossibly perfect hero to swoop from the neglected shelves of childhood memory and snatch us briefly from resignation. (“No sir. Don’t thank me, warden. We’re all part of the same team.”) Serious comics geeks were uneasy with Reeve’s Boy Scout, but there weren’t yet enough of them to matter to Hollywood.

Unwittingly, however, our hero had kick-started a recirculation of his experience in the comics. The cycle of blockbusters he helped inspire had, by the late ‘80s, created a new audience of adolescents and twentyites willing to accept superheroes as cool enough for the movies -- but in that post-punk age, they wanted their heroes edgy, and challenging and hip. With Tim Burton’s “Batman,” the modern comic-book movie was born, and Superman was rendered instantly quaint. (“You’re not exactly normal, are you?” the girl reporter asks. Says Batman, “It’s not exactly a normal world, is it?”)

Our mass entertainment today is mostly based on irresolution, on cliffhangers and endlessly unfolding mysteries whose apparent answers are undermined by new questions. And that’s not surprising these days, when life is distinguished by war against untraceable opponents, slowly manifesting global disasters and a growing premonition of national decline.

The superheroes who currently rule the cineplexes are living embodiments of that irresolution. Batman will never get over his rage at the thug who killed his parents. Spider-Man will never get over the guilt of letting his Uncle Ben die. The X-Men will never get the world to accept them (and, as true adolescents, don’t really want it to). Superman, on the other hand, was all about resolution. He resolved to use his powers for the good of mankind because his dear old dad wanted him to. When his dad passed away, he left the farm for the city, took on bad guys, beat them, and that was that.

Now director Bryan Singer faces the challenge of returning this longest-lived, best-loved and most-scorned hero to the ultimate arena of pop-culture validation, the big screen. I can’t help feeling that they’ve taken on responsibility for more than Warner Bros.’ several-hundred-million-dollar investment. A cultural legacy is on the scales.

Can Superman still thrive in a Batman-and-Spider-Man world -- and what will have to be surrendered to make it happen? It’s already clear that the makers of “Superman Returns” have eschewed the lighthearted and the cornball. But will they turn their Man of Steel into just another young pretty boy grimacing as a middle-aged maniac tries to end the world as we know it? Or will they find a way to return him to his seat at the pinnacle of the spandex pantheon?

The answers should give us some clues to what definitions of heroism we Americans can find plausible now, and what sorts of dreams we allow ourselves to dream.