Caution: this article contains spoilers for James Gunn’s “Superman.”
Right from the first scenes of James Gunn’s new film “Superman,” we know what the film’s villain, Lex Luthor (Nicholas Hoult) is up to. Naturally, Luthor hates Superman (David Corenswet), and has been using a cadre of computer experts, supervillain sidekicks, and a masked vigilante of his own to pummel the Man of Steel into the ground. Luthor, before the film has even begun, knows the secrets of Kryptonite, and has carefully studied Superman’s fight moves, allowing him to best the superhero in hand-to-hand combat (via the remote-controlled villain Ultraman).
Lex Luthor is also depicted as a tech billionaire with his hands deep inside the world’s media. There are brief montages in “Superman” showing pundits parroting Luthor’s anti-superman rhetoric on a Twitter-like social media site. Luthor doesn’t necessarily own the social media, but it’s easy to see the parallels that Gunn is drawing between Luthor and Elon Musk. According to the world Gunn has built, the Daily Planet is one of the few remaining news outlets that is interested in hard-hitting, honest journalism. It remains untouched by Luthor’s tainting influence.
This dovetails with a subplot about Lois Lane (Rachel Brosnahan) and her Daily Planet compatriots investigating Luthor’s shadowy involvement with a war that is about to break out between the fictional countries of Boravia and Jarhanpur. Although it remains unclear how, Luthor is certainly manipulating the conflict for his own benefit. Superman’s ability to stop wars is lousing with one of Luthor’s many schemes. By the end of the movie, Lois and her co-workers will uncover the truth, and Luthor’s villainy will be brought into the public eye. Luthor is subsequently shamed, his evils now laid bare for all the world to see.
This, sadly, is the least realistic part of “Superman.” And this is a film with Green Lantern in it. As we know all know from the last 15 years, using the truth to shame a villainous billionaire has hardly any effect.
The Clear and Present Danger effect
Gunn is borrowing from a long screenwriting tradition about the power of truth in a dishonest world. One might recall Phillip Noyce’s 1994 thriller “Clear and Present Danger,” the second Jack Ryan film to star Harrison Ford. In that film, Ryan found out that the president (Donald Moffatt), unbeknownst to the public, was involved in a shadow drug war in South America. The plot reflected several scandals that wracked the Ronald Reagan administration. “Clear and Present Danger” climaxed with Jack Ryan discovering the truth and confronting the president. At first, he is defensive: “How dare you bark at me! I’m the President of the United States!” Jack Ryan, a resolutely moral man, merely shoots back with “How dare you, sir!” The catharsis lands. The schemes of a lying president have come to light, and the day is won.
The unspoken outcome is that the truth is so damning, so terrible, so utterly irredeemable, that the president will have to apologize for it, openly confessing to his shame in the matter. Perhaps he will even change his ways, or resign in disgrace. This is the same implication that Gunn is leaning on for “Superman.” If Lex Luthor’s evil is brought to light by the press, then he will have to confess his evils, express actual shame, and slink back into the shadows.
Of course, this kind of twist only works in a world with shame. Thanks to the brazen lies, criminal actions, and gleeful evils of a certain administration that shall go unnamed, we now know that shame doesn’t exist anymore. When crimes are being committed in the open, no journalistic revelations will stop the evildoers. We live in a world where the president can just say that a negative story about him, however truthful it may be, is “fake news.” He may also, additionally, say that the story is true, but whatever, he did it, and he’s not going to apologize.
In 2025, the truth no longers sets up free
If Gunn wanted to tell a more accurate story of the modern media landscape, he would know that Lex Luthor would have had the ability to manipulate stories in his favor. Or, at the very least, bury the Daily Planet’s lede in a sea of online B.S. Or, perhaps most accurately, say that the story was true, but that it was good, actually, and it’s exactly what the American people want Luthor to do. One can see this dynamic play out every day with Elon Musk, who bought Twitter.com and transformed it into a haven for extreme right-wing blithering. One might know how his A.I. chatbot, Grok, recently praised Hitler for his genocidal ideas. Musk has yet to face any consequences for this sort of thing, and likely won’t.
One might recall the story of Jared Yates Sexton, the journalist who was looking into Russian influence in the 2016 Donald Trump campaign, something the Trump camp denied. Sexton looked into the secretive meetings between Trump’s team and Russian oligarchs for a year, and began finding actual connections. Then one morning, Donald Trump, Jr. admitted openly on Twitter that, yes, they were meeting with Russians. Was it a conflict of interest? Of course, and Trump didn’t care. He was just going to be corrupt. “I … worked on this story for a year … and … he just … he tweeted it out,” Sexton wrote.
These days, the fantasy that a journalist can attack and disarm a villain with the truth feels churlish and dated. James Gunn’s “Superman” may be a silly fantasy about supernaturally powerful aliens, pocket dimensions, giant monsters, and flying dogs, but the most outlandish fantasy is that modern journalism would have the power to take down a villain like Luthor. It’s a comforting fantasy, of course, but it makes “Superman” feel like it comes from a former, more innocent era. We may want journalists to have the power to take down the powerful, but that sort of thing only works in a cartoon world.