This article contains spoilers for this weekend’s new Superman movie.Truth, justice, and the American way. These words, which were first uttered in a 1942 Superman radio show, do not appear in James Gunn’s Superman movie released 83 years later. Yet their spirit and intent are in such vivid technicolor in the finished film that it borders on subversive given our current political climate. Nowhere is this more self-evident than among the purveyors of perpetual outrage and bellicose vitriol. Indeed, ever since writer-director Gunn said in a Times interview that “Superman is the story of America” where “an immigrant came from other places and populated the country,” Fox News and talk radio reactionaries have had a week-long conniption fit.cnx.cmd.push(function() {cnx({playerId: "106e33c0-3911-473c-b599-b1426db57530",}).render("0270c398a82f44f49c23c16122516796");});“We don’t go to the movie theater to be lectured to and to have somebody throw their ideology onto us,” said Kellyanne Conway, a former Donald Trump spokeswoman and current The Five talking head. Fellow paid malcontent Jesse Watters agreed when he referenced a Salvadoran gang and sneered, “You know what it says on his cape? MS-13.” Meanwhile talk radio host Clay Travis signaled it was time to raise the culture war banners when he tweeted, “I’m going to skip seeing Superman now. Director is an absolute moron to say this publicly the week before release.” But to reiterate, the original inciting incident was to suggest that Superman is an immigrant story; and that so is America. Somehow the sentiment is both surprising and radical to the descendants of non-Indigenous Americans, who ironically also complain that the new movie doesn’t feature Superman saying he is here to protect “the American way.” Of course that “way” appears under duress right now, largely thanks to the folks who really just want to see the guy in the red cape also wave their flag.The term “truth, justice, and the American way” is again believed to have first appeared in a September 1942 broadcast of The Adventures of Superman, a radio show recorded at the height of World War II era patriotism and less than a full year after the surprise attack on Pearl Harbor. However, even before the turn of phrase was enshrined into Superman lore, by design the character was created to celebrate the immigrant experience—and specifically the Jewish immigrant experience—in an era when many Americans wanted to turn a blind eye to the plight of Jewish Europeans being rounded up across the Atlantic.Created in 1938 by Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, the real fathers of Kal-El hailed neither from Krypton nor Kansas. Siegel was born in Cleveland, Ohio, and Shuster in Toronto, Ontario (he later moved to Ohio). But both of their parents were turn of the century immigrants who fled Europe, with three of the four parents escaping out of the Russian Empire during the era of Antisemitic Porgroms in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.Siegel and Shuster were authentically American, Midwestern kids, but only by way of adapting to an American culture that was still fairly skeptical and prejudiced against Jewish people at the time. Hence their Superman creation was both a power fantasy, with the all-American superhero being actually an alien sent like Moses to live as a baby among a strange people for his own safety, as well as an avatar for what Siegel and Shuster viewed as 1930s American values. Their Last Son of Krypton was originally conceived as a New Deal warrior who would drop mine owners into their unsafe, caved-in work conditions so they could get a taste of what their organized labor went through. In another issue, he’d rescue orphans from an illegal child labor workshop.While James Gunn and David Corenswet’s Superman is not nearly so radically active in his domestic politics, their film unmistakably reflects the politics of its moment by virtue of having Superman do what at a glance seems morally right: such as stopping a genocide occurring between two countries, even if the aggressor is an ally of the United States.Domestically, meanwhile, Gunn and Corenswet’s Superman is depicted as embodying values that a decade ago would have seemed remarkably uncontroversial and benign. He is compassionate to fellow immigrants, even if they are of a different complexion from himself, on the streets of Metropolis; he is concerned about the health and happiness of his dog; and he hopes the girl he loves, Lois Lane (Rachel Brosnahan), will one day soon say “I love you” back to him.He is simply living the all-American life as a good citizen in a big American city. And yet, somehow, in 2025 that is treated as radically offensive off-screen and on, particularly by the film’s most sinister villain, Lex Luthor (Nicholas Hoult).Like Zack Snyder’s reimagining of Luthor with Jesse Eisenberg from about a decade ago, Hoult and Gunn’s Lex isn’t just a billionaire but specifically a young one who apparently made his fortune in tech. He’s thus cultivated the persona of a genius and has a cult of personality that extends into influence on Capitol Hill. But whereas Snyder’s interest in this shift stops at the irony of having the guy who famously played Mark Zuckerberg also be Lex—and offer pseudo-philosophical babble for his motivations for hating Superman—Gunn and Hoult are a lot plainer and to the point.Hoult’s Lex Luthor is a billionaire narcissist who has a deep revulsion toward Superman because he views him as an unworthy immigrant. He’s “the alien,” as Luthor sneers more than once in the film. It doesn’t take much squinting to see an overlap between this Lex’s disdain for immigrants and “illegal aliens” and the billionaire who became the once and future President of the United States by preying on xenophobia and scapegoating immigrants for much of the nation’s problems. Ten years ago, it was considered preposterous and offensive in the press when Donald Trump rode down an escalator and announced he was running for president because he believed many Mexican migrants were “rapists” and drug dealers, before begrudging that maybe “some are good people.”Nowadays, however, cable news personalities shamelessly and gleefully equate the term “immigrant” with “MS-13” in a grotesque attempt at humor.Still, when Gunn shot Superman last year, he likely could not predict how prescient the comparisons between his screenplay and a Trump restoration to the White House would become. After all, the film was already well into production when an actual tech billionaire with his own social media app, Elon Musk, went all-in on supporting the strongly nativist presidential campaign of Trump (an irony given that Musk himself was born outside of the U.S. before immigrating to this country).Serendipitously in Superman, we learn that Lex Luthor’s plan began by poisoning public opinion against Superman by building bot farms to twist social media engagement against Kal-El. We even learn the mindless workforce of online agitators are literal monkeys Luthor has employed in front of computer screens in a perfect bit of Gunnian humor. Undoubtedly this dig against Twitter was inspired by the filmmaker’s own run-in with bad-faith keyboard warriors in the 2010s, who used social media to pressure Disney to fire Gunn from Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3. However, it’s now dovetailed into how the social media app (rebranded X) was used in the 2024 election cycle to convince some people that legal Haitian residents in Ohio were eating dogs, a lie the future 47th President of the United States repeated on national television.The last six months similarly resemble the plot of Superman since Luthor’s master plan is to find a way to turn public opinion so against Superman that the kindhearted, undocumented American resident will turn himself over to the American government, which in turn will allow Luthor to imprison the superhero in an extrajudicial scenario: inside of a pocket universe where Luthor has Superman tortured with kryptonite poisoning. He also demands Superman to name names of any accomplices who hid him in the U.S.It’s proved eerily predictive of an era where Trump has sent his own laundry list of undesirables and illegal immigrants to a maximum security prison in El Salvador and had Homeland Security build a detention center (or: a camp with a concentration of so-called aliens) in a deliberately grueling environment by the Florida Everglades. It’s been happily nicknamed “Alligator Alcatraz.”It should be noted that according to the Trump administration, many or all of those deported to the El Salvador prison are criminals with alleged ties to criminal gangs. But since their cases have been expedited without significant judicial review or due process, the validity of that claim leaves a lot to be constitutionally desired (while others in the administration have tepidly admitted at least one man was deported by mistake). Meanwhile many and more seem to be increasingly rounded off the street despite reports that they have worked and peacefully lived in this country for years or decades.All of these seem an affront to what have long been the pluralistic and democratic ideals of the “American way” that Superman was created to represent. The kind that led American poet Emma Lazarus to pen, “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free” in 1883; a sentiment so intoxicating even in the crucible of late 19th century nativism that it would 20 years later be cast in bronze upon the Statue of Liberty.For the record, Stephen Miller, the current White House deputy chief of staff and reported mastermind behind the Trump administration’s aggressive immigration policy, previously lamented, “[Lazarus’ poem] was added later and is not actually part of the original Statue of Liberty.”In other words, the “American way” ideal that Superman was intended to represent since his 1938 inception is now under review; an add-on that may no longer apply. Conversely, billionaires and some government officials have a slice of gruesome terrain, be it in the Everglades, El Salvador, or a pocket universe, where they’d love to send those yearning to breathe free. It raises the question of just who exactly is behaving like an unAmerican?The post James Gunn’s Superman Celebrates an American Way That Is Vanishing appeared first on Den of Geek.