Superman music

I am seduced by hype for James Gunn’s forthcoming Superman film and want to capture a thought about the music.

If you have seen any of Gunn’s Guardians of the Galaxy movies, you know that he is shameless and effective in using music.

This week, to hype the movie, first they released a “motion poster”, which is ordinarily a hokey marketing thing.

I was among the nerds surprised to have feelings about it, because of something very cunning going on the music. Moviebob, my favorite pop-geekculture media commentator, said earnestly:

This particular filmmaker understands what he’s been handed with this character at this moment, to do something very special and transcendent and important.

For a slightly-animated image with one minute of music?

Well, the music starts with the barest hint of Hans Zimmer’s Superman theme from Zach Snyder’s Superman films, featuring Henry Cavill as Superman.

Snyder’s films have some charms — that score among them — but I am among those who deeply hate them as misunderstanding what Superman is about. They even got Superman’s hair wrong, which sounds like a small thing but I think it is actually important. Snyder give us a “gritty”, pessimistic Superman, which is just plain wrong.

So I heard a Message from Gunn in how after that whisper of Zimmer, it turns to a new arrangement of John Williams’ Superman March from the films featuring Christopher Reeve as Superman.

Hope. Joy. Fun. Sunshine.

That’s what hooked me, and Moviebob, and plenty of other nerds.

And then, because everything is marketing decadence, the following day there was … not a proper trailer, not even a teaser trailer, but a teaser for the teaser trailer. It did the same thing with the music again! And the theme sure as heck was hope, with the tagline “look up”.

I am a sentimental nerd and I watched this a lot of times. And I noticed a second thing about the music, which reminded me of another John Williams theme dear to my nerdy heart: the Force theme from Williams’ opera cycle Star Wars, which I think is the best work of Williams’ amazing career as a film composer.

I think that part of the secret of the Force theme is that Williams never completes it. It always just drifts off, unresolved, producing a feeling of longing, most apparent in its use with young Luke gazing into Tattooine’s binary sunset in the original Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope.

The music for both the Superman poster and the teaser-teaser did that same thing, not quite finishing the Superman March.

So I made a prediction. We know that Gunn’s movie will not just re-use Williams’ score and themes; Gunn has described his excitement at the original score that composer John Murphy has created. But I think the use of Williams’ theme is not just for this marketing material. I expect the score for the new film to sprinkle it in at key places … and every time it will tug at our heartstrings by not completing it. After the teaser-teaser, I imagined that Gunn might even defer completing the Williams’ “Superman March” to a later film.

But then we got the full teaser trailer, including yet another new arrangement of Williams’ theme.

And I am a sentimental nerd and watched that a lot of times. If you want to see a bunch of nerdy adults feeling like kids again, YouTube is full of people recording themselves watching it. Music is not the only thing hooking us — there is a lot going on in two almost-wordless minutes — but it plays a big part.

It seems at first that this trailer completes the Williams theme, but it actually stops just short of that, hiding what it is doing under a crescendo echoing Superman whistling in the middle of the trailer. Given the context, that delivers all the warmth and hope one could ask for. But. It is not quite the same thing as closing the theme.

This makes me pretty sure that I was right about the forthcoming film toying with us by using Williams’ March without completing it.

I’m going to place a marker on an even more specific prediction. We will finally get the March completed over the last shot of Gunn’s film, when the story has earned it. Then the closing titles will start, and just as the 1978 Superman film opened with a proper overture over the titles, turning from the horns of the March to strings and such playing out all of the musical leitmotifs (starting at 2:15 in this capture of those titles), so too the closing titles of Gunn’s 2025 Superman will transition smoothly to all that film’s themes. I bet there will even be a bit more of Williams in there.

I also predict that Gunn’s Superman is going to make me cry like a baby. He understands the assignment.

Fashy flags

Capturing a long-running Twitter thread about weird flags flown by the far right in the US.

This started when I needed a flag image for another long thread of mine about American fascist iconography more broadly —

We should not pretend that we do not know what these signify.

Führerprinzip

This flag started my quest, because I had seen it obliquely in photos of a pro-Trump street action. What, precisely, do Trump and police “keep America safe” from? Fascism promises to rescue the nation from corrupting influences. Followers don’t need to say who.

The personality cult of Trump inclines toward fascism. He is the nation.

A fantasy of Trump as hyper-masculine hyper-violent warlord, in defiance of democratic institutions.

Trump as a Totenkopf symbol of a literal supervillain, representing ruthless vigilante violence against those he sees as corrupting society. This is also, perversely, reflective of support for police violence, as police have embraced the Punisher skull.

The anti-democratic impulse laid bare. Note that the rifle-bearing knights which flank King Trump evoke the Crusades, an image favored by the far right to reflect the need for war for “Western values” …

Christian nationalism

To much of the far right, the truth behind the nation is revealed to be Christianity, as manifested specifically with American Evangelical imagery. The claim that the fundamental truth of the nation is Christianity is fascist Christian Nationalism.

The Hospitallers’ Cross reflects the far right’s fascination with symbols of the Crusades, hunger to “defend” with violence “the West” against foreign corruption encroaching on what they claim to be their territory. Para-fascist sentiments again.

An aside about kitsch

It is tempting to laugh at a variation on that theme like this and dismiss it, but it is important to recognize a pattern here. Not all kitsch is fascist, but one should recognize how the fascist sensibility is attracted to kitschy & schmaltzy over-sentimental imagery, and they enjoy how the leftish intellectuals they hate dislike it.

The thin blue flag

A lot of these flags include a reference to the Thin Blue Line flag, representing “support for police” in opposition to the Black Lives Matter movement.

Jacob said the flag was not a direct reaction to the first Black Lives Matter protests — an idea suggested by a previous origin story in Harper’s — but he allows he may have first seen the thin blue line image after those protests spurred the circulation of pro-police imagery online. “That’s maybe why it came to my eyes,” he said.

As Jacob built the company, a “Blue Lives Matter” movement was growing in the wake of news stories of multiple officers shot to death in Baton Rouge, Louisiana; Brooklyn, New York; and Dallas, Texas. Meanwhile, Donald Trump, as a presidential candidate, called police “the force between civilization and total chaos.”

Harper’s has a (paywalled) article about the developing symbolism of the Thin Blue flag from the indispensible Jeff Sharlet. Antifascist leftist Gwen Snyder wrote a Twitter thread outlining the cultural politics well:

So the blue line has always been a combination of funereal and problematic.

It’s Friday night and I’m going off memory and a little wikipedia for this, so don’t take this thread as high-level research, but here’s the deal in broad strokes.

To understand why the thin blue line is problematic, you kinda have to grok why American policing is problematic.

American police forces essentially have their roots in a combination of slave patrols and, to a lesser extent, strikebreaking forces.

Policing was an institution designed to violently enforce inequity on behalf of capital. As #blm made clear again, that dynamic that persists.

The imagery of the blue line comes from a 1911 poem praising the blue-uniformed police as holding down a “thin blue line” between order and chaos.

An awful lot of the “chaos” the police were suppressing in 1911 had to do with black folks resisting lynching & demanding dignity.

An awful lot of the “chaos” police forces were used to surpress right then were black folks who, ahem, “didn’t know their place” and also pesky workers who kept insisting that they shouldn’t be locked into firetraps and perish in sweatshop infernos.

It wasn’t a high point.

Still, the blue line became a go-to verbal and visual symbol for police in general, and that symbol entered police mourning culture, as epitomized by the blue line armband.

So the blue line came to represent two things simultaneously: the broad and deeply problematic institution of modern American policing, but also — quite viscerally for the families & colleagues of fallen officers — the loss of a loved one.

So, there’s always been a tension.

When #BlackLivesMatter hit, right wing opportunists who didn’t give a fuck about anything except maintaining class division responded with “all lives matter,” pretending as though saying that black lives matter implied that white lives didn’t.

“All lives matter” was a white kneejerk response to “black lives matter.”

This is my favorite cartoon on the subject. Black kids were getting shot over bags of skittles and their community was like, our kids’ lives aren’t worthless.

What #blm means is, “our lives matter, too“

All houses matter, but you emergency-address the one on fire.

And black lives were being burned on the pyre of white supremacy.

As they always have been in America.

A sub-category of the “all lives matter” reactionary response to #blm was, “blue lives matter.” The right wing media-promoted premise was, well, if we’re talking about people getting killed, cops get killed a lot, too. Why aren’t we talking about that?

And a few hardcore folks might disagree with me here, but I think even on the kinda far left, consensus tends to be, no one wants anyone to die, including cops.

But, becoming a cop means deliberately assuming a certain amount of risk voluntarily and getting compensated for it.

Black folks don’t voluntarily assume the extremely heightened risk of getting murdered by paid agents of the government (cops) for being black. They can’t opt out. They don’t get a middle class, family sustaining wage for it, or a pension.

They just get to die.

The reactionary “blue lives matter” movement adopted the thin blue line, and the blue line flag, as their symbol.

And, it also continued to represent individual officers’ loss of life outside the “all lives matter”/”black lives matter”/”blue lives matter” discursive battles.

So there are folks who see and understand the blue line flag as specifically a solemn reminder of lost loved ones. But in the wake of #blm especially, it was also a symbol externally (and, let’s be real, internally) leveraged against black communities’ demands for basic respect.

American fascism often presents superficially as anti-authoritarian, but the embrace of a police state is telling.

Here we get our themes combined: nation defined by guns for vigilante violence, support of the state’s agents of violence, Maximum Leader. Which opens another theme …

Gun fetishism

The naming of weapons as central to the soul of the nation is enthusiasm for violence.

Often literally just guns

More explicitly fascist sensibilities

Far right use of “We the People” bends the democratic sentiment to hint that they are the only true American people. The nation is white conservatives and their instruments of violence. A para-fascist sentiment.

This flag brings our themes together to tell us that the True American People are defined by their adherence to true religion plus their enthusiasm for violence, which is necessary because they face unnamed threats. This is a fascist sentiment.

This flag combines far right symbols with only a hint of the US flag remaining. The “III” is a reference to Three Percenters, far right paramilitary gun nuts who say that only 3% of Americans who took up arms for the Revolution against England.

This variant is not simply a claim of popular support. It is a threat.

Additional flag vocabulary

This inversion of normal US flag symbolizes the sovereign citizen movement, a far right conspiracy theory which holds that the US government is illegitimate. If you have ever had someone rant about gold fringe on a US flag and admiralty law, you have encountered them.

This is the “no quarter” flag symbolizing a fascist desire to mass murder their political enemies.

This flag from the Whiskey Rebellion — y’know, the one that was put down when President Washington personally rode to Pennsylvania at the head of an army — has been turning up a bit, reflecting a sentiment of violently rebelling against the Federal government in rejection of its legitimate right to tax citizens.

Two symbols for the same thing appear on this flag. The “Hawai’ian” floral print evokes a “big luau”, which rhymes with both “big igloo” and “boogaloo”, reflecting the far right militias eager to fight in “Civil War II: Electric Boogaloo”.

More on fashy American aesthetics

I eventually need to capture this post’s sister thread on Twitter. For now, I’ll just add the single best thing in it, a link to Nate Powell’s sophisticated meditation on American masculinity and far right aesthetics, About Face.

And I’ll end with this flag, which has it all. If you don’t recognize the Greek, it means “come and take them”, a reference to the right’s fantasy that the Government Will Come Take Our Guns.

Sacrifice play

This is sort-of a spoiler, but really you need to know the things already to recognize them.

A while back I saw a terrific little movie scene in which a character who has been set up as extraordinary only in his decency ends up on the phone with the Action Heroes as they walk him through defusing a nuke.

Absurd thriller stuff, but well-executed in a way that was legitimately moving.

As things of course go wrong, the Action Heroes look increasingly worried but put on a brave face — er, voice — over the phone to Ordinary Guy. “You’re doing great. Here’s what we are going to do next.”

When time runs out Ordinary Guy has to reach in and just pull out the nuke’s core. The Action Heroes know that they are telling him to expose himself to a lethal dose of radiation. Ordinary Guy has no idea.

I was very impressed that the filmmakers trusted the actors to communicate to us how this would kill him without putting it in As You Know Bob dialogue.

The actors delivered the goods. The scene is poignant, and the story puts a button on it when the Action Heroes finally get to the Ordinary Guy.

“Did I do okay?”

“Yeah. You did … great.”

I’m not crying. You’re crying.

This story worked. The Action Heroes had to make a hard, ugly choice. The Ordinary Guy’s quiet heroism, demonstrated earlier, turns into these melodramatic heroics.

But. I felt it failed to pay off the work it had already done establishing that Ordinary Guy would not hesitate to commit his life to protecting other people. I wonder whether someone in the writers’ room wanted a different version:

We see the bomb’s LEDs counting down …

3:20	Ordinary Guy: “Whoa. That sphere is the part that explodes, right?”
3:03	Action Hero: “Yes, that’s plutonium. Now remove the casing over the bundle of wires.”
2:41	Ordinary Guy: “It’s sitting right there. Can’t I just … pull it out?”
2:28	Action Hero: “That would work, but with direct contact, radiation from the core will kill you. Tell me when you have the detonator exposed.”
2:04	Ordinary Guy: “We’re running out of time.”
1:57	Action Hero: “Relax. You’re doing fine.”
1:48	Ordinary Guy [pulls out the core]

The friend who turned me on to this story says:

ugh, yes. you know it would have played out like this. (this is now canon for me)

I was so sure it was going to show us how this was actually an easy choice for him.

“You didn’t have to do that, D.”

“M, you know that I did.”

Partly this is just me being a dead sucker for Horatius At The Bridge. Romantic bullshit that gets me every time.

Partly I think of how Heinlein did a version of that in “The Long Watch”. The internet tells me that in his novel Space Cadet, a would-be Space Patrolman argues that the protagonist of “The Long Watch” was wrong to disobey orders … but another cadet responds with a regulation, saying “the responsibility of determining the legality of the order rests on the person ordered as well as on the person giving the order”. Dude’s politics were twisty.

Partly I wonder whether American popular media is too enthusiastic about characters refusing to compromise, too enthusiastic about making characters sweat tough decisions, too rarely giving us characters demonstrating who they are when they do not hesitate to accept a hard sacrifice.

Why health insurers refuse to say what they cover

I do research-driven system design. In the early 2000s I did a project for a major US health insurance company who wanted to know what they could do to make their plan members hate them less.

So I interviewed dozens of people with “good” employer-sponsored health insurance about their encounters with their insurers. I handed over a big thick research report and talked the executives through the highlights, the way you do.

One of the key findings was “People Are Frustrated That They Cannot See The Costs Of Their Choices”.

A high-ranking executive vigorously objected. “The last thing people care about with their health is what it costs!”

(It would later emerge that we had a miscommunication. He thought I was saying that patients were concerned with what it would cost their insurer, rather than themselves. That this seemed to him like the obvious reading of what I meant is itself a lesson in where his head was.)

So I said, “I’ll tell you a particular story from the research.”

One couple we spoke to were prosperous and had good insurance. They did not need the honorarium we paid them for participating in the study, but they were eager to talk to us because they wanted to tell their story.

They had a kid who was born deaf and was a good candidate for a cochlear implant. It’s a procedure that costs about ^$10,000 if you pay out of pocket. In the kid’s case it had about a 50/50 chance of working.

Their insurance paid for it. It didn’t work. But for the kid’s condition, it was possible to just try it again; they could in principle attempt the proceedure repeatedly with the same odds each time. They were wary of pressing against bad luck and ending up putting their kid through surgery several times, but taking a second bite at the apple seemed like it might be sensible. As they were thinking about it, they called an agent at their insurer to see if they would cover another attempt.

The same logic which had them hesitant to put their child through repeated surgeries had them sympathetic to the possibility that the insurer would refuse; it seemed fair to them that their insurance policy would have to draw a line somewhere. And they were close to deciding that they would just pay for it out of pocket if the insurer said No.

Their insurance rep confidently told them that a second surgery would be covered the same as the first. The couple asked if there was a pre-authorization they could get in writing, but the agent said that it did not work that way. But not to worry, it was definitely covered!

Of course you can guess what happened.

They had to pay a big bill, which they would have done with a smile had the insurer just not jerked them around. As a result of this misadventure, they became obsessed with hating that insurer, and talked about how they look for every possible opportunity to tell their story, which is how they wound up talking to me.

The executive looked sincerely mortified by this example. He said, “That’s horrible. Who was their insurer?”

And I smiled. Because I got to tell him, “Oh, that was you. Your company screwed those people.”

(When I tell this story, people usually ask me who the client was. Having already bent my NDA enough, I will not reveal it. Plus — and this is important — it does not matter. This is characteristic of how all US insurers operate.)

“Understand,” I added, “we talked to people with much worse experiences than that. We talked to people hit with financial impacts they could not afford. We talked to people whose insurers’ decisions had awful, lasting medical impacts.”

In the course of that project — since I was looking at systems design — I learned why this happens. It does not come from trying to screw insurance plan members, it comes from trying to screw doctors and hospitals.

Insurance companies write deliberately obfuscated contracts with healthcare providers: Rule 122.7.14b combined with Rule 37.4.9 combined with Rule 71.16a/7 mean that the doctor only gets paid for part of Proceedure X. This creates such complexity in evaluating how a healthcare provider will get reïmbursed for what they do, so many dependencies on super-specific particulars, that the insurer cannot run the hypothetical on what their own systems will do! The machine simply cannnot produce an answer.

That does not make this inability to make commitments innocent. These are design choices. Insurers have smart people working hard all day every day to figure out inventive ways to screw doctors and hospitals. They prioritize doing that over enabling patients to make clear decisions.

I think of this whenever defenders of the private insurance system in the US talk about stuff like the virtues of copayments, the small fees patients make when getting a proceedure or medication which their insurer does cover. This is meant to create incentives which prevent patients from making frivolous use of medical services, as part of giving patients “skin in the game” in managing costs, in making trade-offs about when it matters to them to get resource-intensive care. But even if that design reasoning made sense — and I do not think it does — the capriciousness of costs which the insured actually experience makes it entirely useless.

There is no fixing this class of problem in private insurance. It is inherent in the incentives insurers face.

This is one among many reasons why there is no fixing private insurance. I advocate for single payer public healthcare — best known by the slogan “Medicare For All” — because there is no legitimate argument against it.