Breaking into the Man of Steel: Richard Donner's Superman
Donner can tell Lois Lane’s story because it can be told in short, pulpy bursts while Superman’s can’t.
Grade: E
Richard Donner’s 1978 origin story for the Man of Steel has endured in pop culture long enough to be marvelled as a jewel of Superman’s canon. Yet, it’s not because of the film’s brains or heart, for it has very little of either, but its clothing. Donner is a comic-strip filmmaker unable to translate Superman’s origin into dramatic cinema, but he fluffed up his failure by wrapping it in archetypal imagery and thus saved his film from sinking down into oblivion. His Superman sticks in your brain and has stuck in pop culture memory despite its shallow corniness because Donner knows just how to yank at your anthropologically spawned mythic instincts.
“This planet will explode within thirty days,” Jor-El (Marlon Brando) tells the Council of Krypton. It’s roughly eleven minutes into the film and a planet’s going to explode. The Council doesn’t believe Jor-El, so he and his wife send their only son Kal-El off in a ship, shaped like a crystalline star, out into the universe on a course for Earth to save him from dying with the rest of their people. Donner doesn’t mind tossing one catastrophe after another at you without warning. It gives Kal-El plenty to do when he arrives on Earth and becomes Clark Kent, alias Superman (Christopher Reeve) and sets out to fight for “Truth, justice and the American way.” His girlfriend Lois Lane (Margot Kidder) boards a helicopter that falls from the sky as soon as it takes off and only a few minutes later, a single lightning bolt strikes and destroys an engine on Air Force One so Superman can swoop in to save the plane and with it the President of the USA. You may not be a meteorologist, but you’ll be uttering a sympathetic “hmm” and wondering how one bolt of lightning could blow up a whole airplane engine.
Later, the villain’s ego maniacal villain Lex Luthor (Gene Hackman) bombs the San Andreas Fault and causes the West Coast to start sinking into the sea and Superman dives down into the Earth to lift the tectonic plates back up into place. Most of these fantastic feats take no longer than it takes Superman to rescue a cat named Frisky from a tree. There’s no buildup to any catastrophe. Donner just makes them happen, snap, like that so Superman can then fly over and fix the place up as quick and easy as you could run a cup of sugar next door to your neighbour.
When Superman’s parents send him to Earth, they muse on how “He will be odd…different…isolated…alone.” His adoptive human father on Earth Jonathan Kent (Glenn Ford) tells him how he is “here for a reason.” Thus, Donner pays lip service to your expectation that the film will be about more than just Superman saving Lois Lane and stopping Lex Luthor’s evil plan and will reveal why a young man who discovers he is an alien should decide to fly around saving people in some bright red tights and a cape. The most outsider-ish Superman ever gets is being excluded from after school parties and by the film’s end, it will still elude you why Superman chose to use his powers to fight for “Truth, justice and the American way” and why he chose to do so in Metropolis under the guise of socially awkward Daily Bugle reporter Clark Kent. Donner wooshes through the film from one disaster to the next without pausing to gaze into the character whose origin story this film’s supposed to be.
Donner gets away with it due to his skill with symbolism. Krypton is a planet made of crystals and its people wear metallic clothes that burn your eyes like an angel’s halo. The last son of this advanced race from the stars, this band of gods, falls down from the sky to Earth and then he becomes a god on Earth who literally ascends into the Heavens as our saviour. It’s an interesting blend of Lucifer and Christ. Remember, Superman’s ship that carries him to Earth has a star’s form. He is a scion of the stars dropped upon Earth as a priest fells a water drop on a baby’s brow in a christening. To discover who he is, Superman must leave his pastoral idyllic childhood home in Kansas on a farm and venture to the wasteland of the arctic. There, he throws a long and translucent crystal bequeathed to him by his father Jor-El into the water, a reversal of the Lady of the Lake bequeathing Excalibur to King Arthur, and out of it springs a forest of crystalline spears to form the enchanted crystal palace Superman will call home: his Fortress of Solitude. When he lifts the San Andreas Fault back into place, Superman descends down into the bowls of the Earth and they are filled with glaring molten lava. The hero must descend down into Hell to save the day. Superman uses all the tropes that have made stories compelling down through the centuries. Without them, the film would be positively insufferable. With them, it achieves a sneaky, subconscious likeability that’s impossible to throw off even as you roll your eyes.
Superman really offers a better origin story for Lois Lane than Superman. When Donner first introduces her, she’s polishing off a story on a serial murderer and casually asks another reporter in the Daily Bugle newsroom “How many ‘t’s in bloodletting?” Margot Kidder plays her with a grungy, working-class girl manner and you expect her to start swearing like a sailor at any moment. Her voice sounds perfect for it, but it’s also sped up with a beat reporter’s zing. Kidder’s tomboyish in a far less refined and less fierce than Carrie Fisher was in Star Wars. She seems to be going out of her way to make herself as un-feminine as possible. She moves and talks like a woman who lives doped up on strong and hard black coffee. That’s the point. She’s Lois Lane. She’s the tough, works 24/7 journalist who races into trouble to write about it. “Don’t you ever let up?” Clark asks her as they’re leaving work. She’s told him that she’s going to jump on a helicopter, fly to the airport and interview the president when he steps off Air Force One. And they’ve just gotten off the clock! “What for?” she asks him. “I’ve seen how the other half lives. My sister for instance: three kids, two cats, and one mortgage. Yuck!” Kidder spits out that “Yuck” like an elongated trail off phlegm. You get the sense that Lois has tried what was a ‘normal’ life for women in the mid 20th century, marriage, kids and dutiful housewife, and found it revolting. She spends her time writing about murderers, Air Force One and shady real estate deals in the California desert because she finds it’s a better life.
That’s why she’s always running into the trouble Superman has to save her from. That’s half of what makes her Superman’s girlfriend. When she melts before him in their first interview/date, you can see the other half. Her beat-hitting bravado falls to the floor. She laps up the mere sight of him, and she asks him in a daze if all his “bodily functions are normal” (can he have sex), before bailing and clarifying what she really meant was does he eat. Lois is so dopily love struck that she seems to still want something other than work and that she’s still carrying girlhood dreams of meeting Prince Charming which she’s buried beneath the rough ace-reporter. “Story of my life,” she says when she thinks Superman’s stood her up, “Cinderella bites the dust.”
Donner can tell Lois Lane’s story because it can be told in short, pulpy bursts while Superman’s can’t. Superman’s story is just too big for Donner’s artistic sensibility. When she interviews Superman, Lois Lane mirrors Donner’s weakness. Donner isn’t love sick for Superman like Lois, but he doesn’t do any better than her at breaking into the Man of Steel. She asks him how much he weighs, how tall he is and how old he is and not “Why are you here?” “Where do you come from?” or “Why do you save people?” Like Donner, she avoids the big questions she seems incapable of asking.