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Building a mystery and choosing so carefully
I just finished watching Superman: The Movie (1978) and Superman II (1980), neither of which I had ever seen before, and my reaction is essentially thus: damn that Christopher Reeve died.
I hadn't expected to like these movies so much. Granted that neither of them was the best story I've ever seen commited to cinema, but with the exception of the first half-hour of the first film, I enjoyed myself the whole while. Even through the twelve-year acid trip that he spends in the Fortress of Solitude. And not to discount Margot Kidder as Lois Lane, who screamed a little too much for my tastes, but whom I found otherwise plausible as a crack reporter, I place most of that reaction onto the shoulders of Christopher Reeve. He made the character work. Clark Kent is a gawky überdweeb in horn-rims, whose prose is crisp but who's a handful of thumbs in person, but he's not unbelievable; and an immortal, invulnerable, near on divine Superman should be the most boring person on the planet, and yet he's not.* And there were all sorts of small moments I loved—in particular, the frustration with which Clark casts around at a moment of crisis for a proper phone booth in which to change, and his smile when he unfolds his hand to reveal the bullet he has saved Lois from, caught in mid-shot, when she only thinks her milquetoast co-worker had fainted. I could even deal with him spinning the planet to run time backwards, and the presence of people named things like Non and Zod. (Gesundheit.) I only wish I'd had some popcorn.
And now I too can watch Superman Returns in Reeve's shadow . . .
*Look, my obsessions are masks and selves and identities; I would have liked to see more time devoted to the interplay between Superman, Lois, and Clark—and Kal-El, in a sense. "I don't even know what to call you," she says in the second film, as though "Superman" and "Clark Kent" are insufficient names; each only half of the man she loves. But he never does tell her his birth name . . . I'm nitpicking, I suppose. What there was made me very happy. But this is why I'm not the scriptwriter.
I hadn't expected to like these movies so much. Granted that neither of them was the best story I've ever seen commited to cinema, but with the exception of the first half-hour of the first film, I enjoyed myself the whole while. Even through the twelve-year acid trip that he spends in the Fortress of Solitude. And not to discount Margot Kidder as Lois Lane, who screamed a little too much for my tastes, but whom I found otherwise plausible as a crack reporter, I place most of that reaction onto the shoulders of Christopher Reeve. He made the character work. Clark Kent is a gawky überdweeb in horn-rims, whose prose is crisp but who's a handful of thumbs in person, but he's not unbelievable; and an immortal, invulnerable, near on divine Superman should be the most boring person on the planet, and yet he's not.* And there were all sorts of small moments I loved—in particular, the frustration with which Clark casts around at a moment of crisis for a proper phone booth in which to change, and his smile when he unfolds his hand to reveal the bullet he has saved Lois from, caught in mid-shot, when she only thinks her milquetoast co-worker had fainted. I could even deal with him spinning the planet to run time backwards, and the presence of people named things like Non and Zod. (Gesundheit.) I only wish I'd had some popcorn.
And now I too can watch Superman Returns in Reeve's shadow . . .
*Look, my obsessions are masks and selves and identities; I would have liked to see more time devoted to the interplay between Superman, Lois, and Clark—and Kal-El, in a sense. "I don't even know what to call you," she says in the second film, as though "Superman" and "Clark Kent" are insufficient names; each only half of the man she loves. But he never does tell her his birth name . . . I'm nitpicking, I suppose. What there was made me very happy. But this is why I'm not the scriptwriter.
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Some of the best scenes in the entire story (taking the two movies as one piece, which is what they felt like to me), I thought, were the ones with Clark and Lois at Niagara Falls—her attempts to prove that Clark is Superman, and his attempts simultaneously to save her and convince her otherwise, and what happens when inevitably she finds out. For all that I've read "Man of Steel, Woman of Kleenex," I didn't really buy the idea that a physical relationship between them is impossible until he's given up his super-powers. It's mythic—Semele saw Zeus in his true form and was burnt to ashes—but I saw no real reason for it beyond plot complication. I was sort of pleased, therefore, to see that in current comics continuity, they're married. It makes character sense.