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.

Little Light on Twitter has a good meditation on Superman as an immigrant:

Honestly I’d love a story where the folks at the Daily Planet reveal they knew Clark Kent was being squirrelly about his ID but they checked his legal records, assumed he was just an undocumented immigrant from elsewhere on Earth, and respected / protected his privacy and safety. They’re all investigative journalists or whatever. Maybe they knew Clark was being evasive and facts weren’t adding up and he didn’t need those glasses but figured it was just to hide from La Migra and chose not to look into it further. Mystery solved. He’s a decent guy, lay off.

In the modern era of the Internet and all, it makes way more sense. And it establishes them as both competent and kind. “You think he’s Superman? Shoot, no, step into Perry’s office for a minute, keep your voice down, we can explain. We checked up on all of this a while ago.”

Why doesn’t he ever do the employee physical? Why is he always running off to take care of vague stuff without good explanations? Why does he claim to be from “Smallville,” which is obviously made up, and never mentions any relative but his parents, who don’t look like him? Whenever there’s the kind of crisis where the police would show up, Clark’s nowhere to be found. He never goes to the doctor. He’s so shy. He works so hard and never really has anyone over to his place. And we all choose to leave it at that, because we care about him.

What does a quiet, hardworking, hyper-polite guy who knows a lot about farm work look like to you? A guy who pays a lot of attention to when sirens go off? Who has secrets, but who never seems to do anything unethical or wrong, who is an exaggeratedly model citizen? Just saying.

Maybe Clark doesn’t even know this is why his secret identity has been working this well, because nobody wants to freak him out, until a Dreamer intern or something gives him a friendly “Your secret’s safe with me, brother, we’ve got to look after each other” at the copy machine.

And then you get a story of Clark finding community and kinship and solidarity with all the human beings whose parents also sent them, with desperate hope, from catastrophe-wracked homes to somewhere there might be a better life, who understand him better than maybe anyone else.