“People were going to die!“
David Corenswet’s Man of Steel stopped a war in James Gunn’s Superman. It was an act so objectively good in every way that it seems impossible anyone could have argued against it. The fact that everyone did exactly that made it the best, most important idea in Superman, because the world has forgotten that when it comes to human life, the difference between right and wrong really is simple.
Clark Kent’s exasperation with Lois Lane’s Superman interview wasn’t just about having to answer tough questions from a relentless reporter. It was that she was questioning his actions in Jarhanpur at all. She wanted to know if he’d consulted with politicians and generals before unilaterally intervening. Lois wasn’t just asking as a journalist, either. In this Superman scene, she personally wasn’t sure if he’d done the right thing. Somehow, for reasons Clark couldn’t understand, everybody thought saving innocent lives was not the correct course of action.
To Clark, that was absolutely absurd. It’s why he got so angry in Superman. Diplomacy, hurt egos, political alliances, legality, laws, history, and consequences weren’t considerations for him because nothing else matters when people were going to die. There’s no worse consequence than that. You can amend treaties, and you can renew friendships. You can’t bring people back from the dead. For the world’s most powerful being, it was that simple because it is that simple. Saving lives and stopping an armed conflict—which we later learned was really a false pretense for Boravia to commit genocide, something politicians and analysts all seemed to conveniently miss/ignore/deny—was wholly a good thing. The right thing to do in Superman. Full stop. It was objectively and inherently good for all the reasons war is objectively and inherently bad.
It’s so obvious, yet somehow only Superman could see that. He was the only person on the planet who didn’t see Boravia like a politician, as an ally. He didn’t look at Jarhanpur and see an adversary with a problematic past (whatever that meant). Superman only saw people. The powerful alien from a distant world only saw their humanity. And he saw that when literally no one else could, because somehow the world of the DCU is just as blind to obvious truths as our own. The lives of the Jarhanpurians were just as important and worth saving as anyone’s. For Superman to save them was the right course of action. They deserved a chance to live. It was wrong to kill them. It was right to save them.
Clark was right about something else, too. Superman’s kindness, his ability to see people as people and not political pawns of the powerful, is punk rock. It was anti-establishment to stop a war that everyone else thought was okay to let happen. And through his unwavering goodness, Superman inspired others to heroism and to do the right thing. The Justice Gang, an arrogant band of corporate glory boys, stepped up when Jarhanpur needed saving again. Without Superman’s goodness as a shining symbol of righteousness, showing the way, the Justice Gang would have remained on the sidelines. And people, blameless women, children, and men alike, would have died.
The world is a complicated place. Life is complicated, both for each of us individually and for all of us together. But saving lives is not complicated. Whether to stop a war or not is not a difficult decision. Both are easy. People were going to die. That was the only thing that mattered. You shouldn’t have to be a super man to recognize that. We all should.
Mikey Walsh is a staff writer at Nerdist and he is on Superman’s “War Is Bad” team. You can follow him on Bluesky at @burgermike. And also anywhere someone is ranking the Targaryen kings.
Content shared from nerdist.com.