Is God an Englishman? A century ago, maybe he was, but these days he is more likely to be an American, writes Declan Kiberd.
Interviewed in this newspaper last Friday, film-director Bryan Singer insisted that his new version of Superman presents a truly global hero, as likely to save people in Paris or Beijing as in New York. But, despite such good intentions, globalisation always seems to be Americanisation. Somehow, the New World elements in this reconfiguration of the life of Jesus just won't be denied.
The life of Jesus? Well, of course. The ruler of the planet Krypton sends "my only son" to Earth to redeem its fallen people. The boy is delivered (rather than conceived and born in the conventional sense) to an earnest and rather elderly couple out in the plains, where he grows up believing in truth, justice and you-know-what. Then he goes down to the big city where, when he isn't being humiliated, he works amazing miracles.
In Superman Returns, he is shown early on in a Pieta pose, the suffering son held protectively by a loving mother. She marvels at the fact that nobody knows where he comes from. Cut to Metropolis, where his best girl (Lois Lane) tut-tuts that her bumbling admirer and fellow-reporter at the Daily Planet still hasn't found himself a place to live ("The Son of Man has no place in which to rest his head"). Near the end, Superman lies seemingly dead in a tomb-like city hospital, but when the nurses come to check, his body has vanished. He is already ascending into heaven.
There are lots of stories like this in the mythologies of the world. Our own Cúchulainn was of uncertain parentage, seeming to come out of the sun. He died strapped to a pillar, prefiguring the death of Jesus on the cross.
And there are elements of the Superman legend borrowed from classic children's literature. When the great man flies over the skyscrapers of New York with Lois, there is a clear flash-back to those magic moments when Peter Pan brought Wendy to soar over the rooftops in London. And the same frisson.
But, ultimately, this story is an attempt to reimagine the life of Jesus for Americans, a large percentage of whom, even in their materialistic culture, still call themselves Christian. Superman was first begotten (not conceived) in 1939, as a comic-book antidote to the Depression. He was a fantasy-figure for underpaid, desk-bound clerks who found that there was no frontier left to tame but who wanted to feel special.
This is where his double identity comes in, for the Superman story is also a myth of migration. Like so many Americans, he comes from another place, which could offer no hope. But, by hybridising himself and taking on a new identity, he becomes omnipotent. In the old world, he would have been ineffectual; in the new, he is utterly exceptional.
In most early versions, Clark Kent achieved this transformation by donning his cape in a phone-booth. How many journalists of the 1930s felt the same surge of power, as they stepped into such a booth to phone some earth-shattering story back to their newspapers? Not far beneath the surfaces of this tale is the old journalistic fantasy of omnipotence. Lois Lane not only gets to spend a night with the hero but helps him in the very act of giving history a shove. Reporter turns player-participant in the ultimate dream of the modern media - and then gets a Pulitzer Prize for turning on the "god" she canoodled with.
According to Superman Returns, Lois got her prize for writing a revisionist piece called "Why the World Doesn't Need Superman". The movie takes a playful cut at the willingness of journalists to bite the hand that feeds them. But Lois has a good point. It was made even more tersely some decades ago by Bertold Brecht, who had one of his protagonists answer the charge, "unhappy is the land that has no heroes", with the comment: "No, unhappy the land that needs a hero."
For all that scepticism, Superman does answer a felt American need, not so much for heroes as for a saviour.
Those migrants of the past century who started life in one part of the world and ended it in the US might see in Superman their very ideal. Like plants taken from faraway locations and spliced with more familiar growths to produce something new and different, Superman's own hybridisation has led to energy and innovation. "That's a bad outfit," say mockers in earlier versions, but nobody ventures such put-downs in this one. The US, after 9/11, can't afford to jeer at the last sacred hope.
By the way, the begetters of Superman in DC Comics, Joe Shuster and Jerry Siegel, got the princely sum of $130 for the film rights. Split two ways, of course. They ended their days as frustrated Clark Kents, but truly their analogy was with Superman, creator of newness. Mind you, if you go about the task of inventing a new religion for a still-new continent, money might well be the last thing on your mind. But then the business of America is business.