What Trump knows about ‘Superman’ — that Hollywood doesn’t

The new “Superman” movie isn’t an attack on President Donald Trump’s immigration policies, but it reveals how alienated from America many liberals, in Hollywood and politics alike, now feel.

Every kid used to know Superman fights for “truth, justice and the American way.”

That slogan has been around since the “Superman” radio show of the early 1940s, and featured in the 1978 film starring Christopher Reeve that inaugurated the modern comic-book movie blockbuster.

James Gunn, director of the Man of Steel’s latest flick, has his own take.

“‘Superman’ is the story of America,” he told The Times of London. “An immigrant that came from other places and populated the country, but for me it is mostly a story that says basic human kindness is a value and is something we have lost.”

Conservatives feared this hinted Gunn’s film would pit the hero from Krypton against Trump’s immigration crackdown.

It turns out the bigger problem is the rest of what Gunn said: His Superman is a man from nowhere whose creed is simple sentimentality, not “the American way.”

In Gunn’s film, America is nothing special. Neither, for that matter, is Superman.

This bland and demoralizing vision isn’t just the director’s, however; it’s rather all too typical of liberals today.

Gunn declared on Twitter during Trump’s first term, “We’re in a national crisis with an incompetent president forging a full-blown attack on facts and journalism in the style of Hitler and Putin.”

Perhaps it’s good he directs comic-book movies when his politics are at such a stereotypical comic-book level. He might as well have likened Trump to Superman’s archenemy Lex Luthor.

In the movie, he does, up to a point.

Luthor colludes with Russia — sorry, “Boravia” — and runs a social-media troll farm dedicated to smearing Superman, who gets sent to a super-Gitmo when the US government authorizes Luthor to take the hero into custody.

That’s about the extent of the parallels between Luthor and Trump — or George W. Bush, however.

Despite the villain’s constant references to Superman as an alien, immigration isn’t a theme of the movie.

Indeed, assimilation is more of a theme than immigration is — but assimilation into what?

The young Superman is sent from the dying planet Krypton in a rocket that crashes in Kansas, where this powerful alien is brought up with good Midwestern values.

That’s where his devotion to “the American way” comes from.

Last year Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, as Kamala Harris’s running mate, demonstrated just how hard it is for today’s liberals to sound authentically zealous about Midwestern values.

The new motive portrays Superman’s adoptive parents, Jonathan and Martha Kent, as ludicrously folksy stereotypes that would give a Hallmark movie a bad name.

After Superman discovers to his horror that his biological parents might not have had benign intentions toward Earth, Pa Kent advises him to “be yourself,” regardless of your family’s background or beliefs.

There’s nothing necessarily wrong with that — except this Superman has no self: He’s no more a Kansan or an American than he is an invader from outer space.

This Superman doesn’t utter a word about “the American way,” and when he confronts Luthor at the film’s climax, he insists his failings are what makes him human.

The movie is a mirror of liberal psychology.

First, no one is extraordinary — Superman is just one of a crowd of superbeings in this film, and he’s not even the only “Superman”: three other iterations of the character appear onscreen, one of them a dog.

Second, sentimentality takes the place of patriotism — Superman hasn’t assimilated to America, but to an unplaceable idea of niceness and self-affirmation.

Third, and ironically, it portrays liberalism’s own ideals as doomed.

The thing that distinguishes Superman from other superhumans in this crowded film is his refusal to kill; violence, if necessary, must not be lethal.

Maybe this Superman wouldn’t defund the police, but he might take away their guns and certainly wouldn’t support the death penalty.

Yet Superman gets humiliated at every turn for adhering to this code: Other heroes have to put down a Godzilla-scale monster terrorizing the city, and the Boravian warlord Superman spares is left alive to start more wars.

Worst of all, Superman watches powerless as Luthor shoots a man in the head.

Gunn’s defenders claim “Superman” isn’t a cynical film, but it is — its mixture of cynicism and denial is rather like what the Democratic Party has become.

What viewers want in Superman is a hero who knows why he stands for America, one who doesn’t kill not because he’s weak, but because he’s so strong he never has to.

Trump made a joke with a serious point by putting his own face on the movie poster: He understands Superman better than James Gunn does.

Daniel McCarthy is the editor of Modern Age: A Conservative Review and editor-at-large of The American Conservative.