Fear and going to the movies

I’m not sure what this emotion exactly is that I’m feeling right now, but it is most closely aligned to fear and it keeps coming out in the form of hostility. See, Man of Steel opens tomorrow and as you may know, I’m a huge Superman fan, so seeing this movie is more than a big deal for me. Yes, I’m sure there are other comic book fans that feel the same way and it would be foolish for me to claim that they don’t feel the way I do, but they don’t.

The opening weekend of Superman Returns, I was in Tennessee accompanying my father on a business trip. My dad is too cheap to buy a car with a CD player and he isn’t the kind of guy who wants to fuss with finding radio stations in places he’s never been to, so once KGBX was out of range, we spent the rest of the drive from Springfield MO to somewhere in Tennessee in silence. Sure, we talked a little bit, but my dad frequently gets lost in thinking about unknowns on a trip. Also, he comes from the generation that feels there is something powerful about long silences spent with another person in the car and I’m of the mindset that if someone isn’t talking, then they are mad at me.

Anyway, my dad was going to a retailer’s expo and I was just going to hang out in the hotel room and read comics until he was done. Then, we went to a movie theater at a mall and watched Superman Returns together. As I sat through the previews, I began to wonder if I would cry in the movie. Superman has always been an emotional subject for me and I think it’s because he is so wrapped up in my childhood, so I become nostalgic.

When I was four, some kids in our neighborhood stole my peddle tractor and promptly tore it apart in their yard. My parents talked to their parents who said, “We didn’t know anyone owned it” which is probably the strangest and worst excuse for stealing something I’ve ever heard. In the end, my parents did nothing about it, but looking back, I don’t know what I would do either. At the age of four, however, my sense of justice was much more definite and I distinctly remember saying, “Let’s just go and beat them up. Dad, you can fight the daddy. Mom, you can beat up the mommy, and I’ll beat up the two kids.”

“We can’t just go and beat them up,” my parents probably said.

And then I said something so melodramatic that it could only be uttered by a four year old and still be considered acceptable and still very sad. I said, “Well, when I grow up, I’m going to become Superman and I will beat those kids up and use my heat vision to fix my tractor” and then I thought about it for a moment and burst into tears as I said, “But then I’ll be too big to ride it.”

Now, I know that logically, that memory has NOTHING to do with Superman Returns nor Man of Steel. But the character of Superman is a symbol for being able to fix anything no matter how broken and that idea is so very powerful to me that it still causes a lump in my throat when I think about it. And while it has NOTHING to do with either of those movies, it somehow has something to do with the comic All-Star Superman and to a lesser-extent, Grant Morrison’s run on Action Comics because both are crafted upon a love for the hero and they depict Superman as timeless rather than always forcibly trying to make him modern. My mentality at four was that I could just grow up and be Superman and that Superman was unknowingly the Superman that Morrison writes about.

Wait, where was I again?

Oh yeah, in a movie theater in Tennessee.

I was wondering if I was going to cry in the movie just as the final trailer ended. Then, the theme to Superman Returns hit and I lost it. I started crying thick, heavy sobs and I had no idea why. My dad never asked me if I was okay, but that was probably because he was embarrassed that I was crying about literally nothing. I haven’t burst into tears like that since, and I had only ever felt that way about a title theme once before and that was years and years prior when the X-Men animated series was on TV. For some reason, on an unspecific Saturday morning when the X-Men theme hit, I started weeping uncontrollably. I have no idea what the episode was about, but I suspect that if I rewatched it, I would be disappointed.

I didn’t cry for the rest of the movie and I generally liked it until I started talking about it with other people. Friends of mine complained for various reasons and I won’t go into them because you’ve heard all of the same arguments by now, but for me, it was a Superman movie, so I didn’t care. It was still Superman.

Sure, Superman had a kid and that seems a little weird, but Superman has always been this complex set of emotions where boys see their fathers in him and also themselves and also an older sibling that they want to become. Father, son, brother, best friend – not to mention hero, savior, god – all of these things encompass Superman and Superman Returns hit most of those notes even if the hero never threw a punch at anyone.

It’s years later and the day before Man of Steel comes out. I normally avoid reviews, but this time, I’m too scared not to read little bits – mostly to see if people just like it. I don’t want to know anything about it, I just want someone to tell me if it’s good or not. The general consensus so far is that it isn’t.

And even though I’ve not watched the movie, I want to defend it. I want to fight everyone who says it’s a bad movie because maybe my sense of justice at 28 isn’t so different from my sense of justice at the age of 4 (only instead of physical violence, I want to resort to twitter violence which is really no better).

I probably won’t write a full review of the movie mostly because I don’t like writing reviews anymore because the whole exercise seems pointless to me. In the end, the result is 50/50 – I either liked something or I didn’t and you don’t need me to tell you whether or not something is good or not. This is why I never wrote a review for Avengers, because all I could say about the movie is “I liked it” but then I completely contradict myself as I felt it was completely necessary to tell you why The Dark Knight Rises was so awful and why you were a bad person because you liked it. Yes, it’s strange that I want a website that will just say “yes or no” to a movie, yet I don’t want to be that voice, but that’s the way it goes.

What was I saying again?

Oh yeah, fear and going to see Man of Steel.

I’m not really afraid of seeing the movie, I guess. I just feel like I really need it to be good. Yes, that previous sentence is perhaps the most entitled fan thing to say, but I just want to believe that a good Superman movie can be made and that audiences can love it. I don’t have a specific story in mind and I don’t care about the color of Perry White’s skin. I just don’t want them to mess up.

Is that too much to ask?