Superman's hair

Over on Twitter, this still of Henry Cavill looking handsome and dashing in curly hair for a new film inspired me to unleash a Superman Hair Rant which I had been biting back for some time.

As Superman in Zach Snyder’s films, his hair bothers me. They considered doing it right but then decided on this.

Superman’s curly forelock was a component of his character design from the very beginning, before creator Joe Shuster settled on how to draw the S.

It has been part of his look for decades. It is an integral part of his costume — which for a superhero makes it part of his identity.

When Frank Miller sweated down Superman to his absolute minimum iconic fundamentals, he emphasized the forelock.

Without it, he is not Superman. Slicking down his hair is part of his disguise as Clark Kent.

Aside from this being some fun superhero nerd-ing, Superman’s hair matters for another reason: Superman is Jewish. Check out the Ashkenazi Jewish teenagers who created him in the 1930s.

They invented Superman as an immigrant who escaped the destruction of his people by his doomed parents sending him across a vast gulf to America. He moved to the big city, abandoning his Hebrew name to use the WASPy name “Clark Kent”. Nobody knows who he really is. And they gave him the same dark, curly hair they had … and to keep his secret, they had him slick it back, often hiding it under a fedora.

Roy Schwartz’ book Is Superman Circumcised?: The Complete Jewish History of the World’s Greatest Hero tells us:

They based their hero’s origin story on Moses, his strength on Samson, his mission on the golem, and his nebbish secret identity on themselves. They made him a refugee fleeing catastrophe on the eve of World War II and sent him to tear Nazi tanks apart nearly two years before the US joined the war. In the following decades, Superman’s mostly Jewish writers, artists, and editors continued to borrow Jewish motifs for their stories, basing Krypton’s past on Genesis and Exodus, its society on Jewish culture, the trial of Lex Luthor on Adolf Eichmann’s, and a future holiday celebrating Superman on Passover.

Oh, and he defeated the Ku Klux Klan. Not in a story. For real.

It is worth noting that Superman starts as a second-generation immigrant fantasy. Fully assimilated and a hero to the world he inhabits not in spite of what he inherits from the old country but for expressing it fully. In the Silver Age, Superman engages more fully with his Kryptonian heritage than Siegel & Shuster’s Golden Age Superman could because he is a step further removed from their assimilation anxieties.

My friend Tori says:

Watching Superman become a muscular Jesus is so painful. I have not been able to watch the Superman movies with any joy at all. I guess I liked him better as a comic or as a 60s TV star. Most of the films raise the stakes too high, without any social consideration at all. I know I say this a lot, but Superman was like my grandparents’ generation — enamored with the American dream, thankful for a home, and unable to ever return to where they were born because their birthplace was lethal.

Max Landis is a creep but he is smart about Superman and he said this well:

The question of Superman can never be “am I special, how special am I, am I worthy.“ Those are Batman questions, because Batman wants to control. Superman doesn’t want to control, he just wants to help. He can’t be the chosen one; the “last of an alien race” thing is most interesting when it’s incidental.

To me the question always has to be “am I loved? am I giving love? Am I doing the most with the tools I’ve been given?” He’s not the messiah, and him not being the messiah is the heart of the character. He has to be just some normal alien, he shouldn’t be alien royalty, all that dilutes it.

Because it’s an immigrant story. It’s about being true to yourself, making that work, and then carrying that truth and love to be truthful and loving to everyone else. Superman is Clark doing his best.