Monthly Archives: February 2022

Superman II 2.16: The Fall of Man

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If the Superman movies have taught me anything so far, it’s that people fall out of stuff way more often than you would imagine. We’ve seen Lois fall out of a helicopter, and get herself strapped to a plunging elevator, and if you watch the Donner Cut, she even throws herself out of a Daily Planet window on purpose.

There’s also a cat burglar falling down a skyscraper, Air Force One about to crash, and Lex Luthor hanging from a high shelf in his library, and at the moment, the Phantom Zoners are gently drifting down through the upper atmosphere. In the end, it’s all about altitude.

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Superman II 2.15: The Symposium

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Okay, so we’ve currently got Clark Kent and Lois Lane locked up in a fuzzy pink honeymoon box, and we’re planning to keep them there until they make some progress on their relationship. It’s tough love, for sure, but they’ve spent more than forty years avoiding the obvious, and unless we do something about it, Lois is going to start throwing herself off of things again.

But this is a major turning point in the Superman/Lois relationship, and you can’t take that step lightly. In fact, in 1977 — a year before the first Superman movie was released — a panel of Superman writers, artists and editors were assembled to take part in a Super-Symposium.

It was such a big deal that they gave it four text pages in DC Special #5, asking the question: “SHOULD SUPERMAN MARRY LOIS LANE?”

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Superman II 2.14: How Suite It Is

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So here’s something that Superman II isn’t about: a honeymoon racket in Niagara Falls.

“I think this kind of thing should be exposed,” says the big blue boy scout in the big pink boudoir. “See, they get kids here just starting out in life, and then they take them for every cent they can get! That’s what Mr. White says.”

That may be true, for all I know. Maybe honeymoon hotels were the NFTs of the early 80s, just a big honeypot trap waiting for gullible marks to come along and get digitally swindled. I don’t recall reading any spicy exposés of the honeymoon hotel industry in the news back then, but maybe every reporter who was assigned to the story got distracted when they discovered that a close acquaintance had superpowers, so nobody ever wrote the story.

The only thing I know is that the plight of those swindleable kids has nothing to do with the story of Superman II. We don’t meet any young couples starting out in life except for Lois and Clark, and the only hotel employee that we see is the bellboy, who sneers his way through 75 seconds of screen time and then passes from our lives forever. In fact, twenty minutes from now, when Lois collects enough plot coupons to achieve enlightenment, she and Clark are going to fly off to their own private ice palace, and the Niagara honeymoon racket will continue, unimpeded.

So, the question is: what are we doing here?

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Superman II 2.12: The Nice Guy

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The thing is, everybody thought that Superman would fail: it would look silly, the flying wouldn’t work, it would collapse under the weight of its own budget. Most importantly, everyone thought it would be too square for the seventies: a man in a cape fighting unironically for truth, justice and the American way, in an America that had lost its taste for unsullied superheroics.

So when Superman turned out to be an enormous hit, it knocked us back a step, forcing us to look in the mirror and ask ourselves: are we as cool as we think we are? Do we believe that truth, justice and the American way is a workable ethic in this fallen world, and that an individual with power and talent would ever choose to commit himself to the general good?

Those are difficult questions to answer, and in our time of need, we turned to the nicest TV star that we could think of, who wasn’t currently on public broadcasting.

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Superman II 2.11: Kill the Moon

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One of the central themes in 1980s American cinema is the question of how much we care about murder. 1981 is right in the middle of the Golden Age of slasher films, when franchises like Halloween and Friday the 13th are just starting to establish themselves. Raiders of the Lost Ark offers us heroes who don’t mind gunning people down or pushing them into airplane propellers if they won’t get out of the way, and we’re just a year away from America embracing the depressingly quintessential ’80s hero — a Vietnam vet named Rambo, who works out his emotional issues through the medium of machine gun fire.

But so far, the Superman series has been remarkably restrained in its attitude towards death and destruction, if you don’t count an entire planet exploding, which is more of a tragedy than a crime. In the first movie’s car chase sequence, people shoot off a lot of guns — bangity bang bang bang, they go — but the bullets don’t hit anybody important, as far as we can tell. The only on-screen murder we’ve seen so far is Lex Luthor pushing a police detective in front of an oncoming train, and that hardly counts; Superman hadn’t even put on his costume yet.

The important thing is that under Superman’s administration, everybody gets rescued, including reporters, train passengers, presidents, cats, goats, schoolkids, the 7th arondissement and the population of Tinytown.

But now we’re about to see the first three victims that Superman fails to save: a trio of international astronauts, engaged in research projects on the moon. Fortunately, it doesn’t seem like anybody’s going to miss them.

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Superman II 2.10: Meanwhile, in 1981

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And meanwhile, on the newsstands, Superman fights for truth and justice against the forces of evil, including Adolf Hitler, asshole aliens, millionaire date-rapists, his own clone, and the tendency of young women to fall out of windows.

Here’s a rundown of what was happening in Action Comics in 1981, while Superman was battling Kryptonian criminals on the big screen…

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Superman II 2.8: Orange You Glad

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Okay, orange juice.

I mean, if you need a scene where Clark and Lois chatter for a minute so that the audience understands their relationship — and yes, this is the correct moment for a scene like that — then they have to chatter about something, and it might as well be orange juice.

It’s 1981, and the current fads in the United States include the Scarsdale Diet, the Beverly Hills Diet and the Grapefruit Diet, so given the need to generate some low-friction conversation filler, it’s natural that David and Leslie Newman would choose Vitamin C as the fashionable topic under discussion. There were other options, of course — Rubik’s Cube, Pac-Man, the Mount St. Helens eruption — but making Lois obsessed with fad diets helps to signal her acceptance of traditional gender roles, which I guess is what they wanted.

No, the really surprising thing about this sequence is the way that Lois has apparently set the land speed record for messing up her shitty little office.

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Superman II 2.7: To Get to the Other Side

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Let us speak, then, of comedy.

When people talk about the difference between Richard Donner’s work on Superman: The Movie and Richard Lester’s work on Superman II, they often say that Lester was a comedy director, and that he turned Superman II into a comedy. There’s some truth to that — there is a different sensibility between the two directors — but it’s not the difference between serious and comic. It’s the difference between two different kinds of comedy.

Donner’s comedy was mostly verbal. Basically, as soon as the film sets foot in Metropolis, everyone starts wisecracking and never stops. Everyone at the Daily Planet is funny, all of the villains are funny, the big scene between Superman and Lois is a romantic comedy sequence. Everybody talks fast, and they talk a lot.

Lester’s comedy is more visual than verbal, and the best example that I have is the scene that just happens to be coming up right now, when Superman crosses the road and causes a traffic accident. In many ways, this scene embodies Lester’s approach to the film, and the fact that it sucks does not bode well for the future of the franchise.

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