By Noel Vera
TRYING to get the bad taste of Zack Snyder’s latest out of my mouth, I took a peek at arguably one of the worst if not the worst entry in the franchise, Superman III — y’know, the one with Richard Pryor on skis flapping a pink cape.
The film opens with a chain of coincidences precipitating a disaster — and immediately you know you’re not in the world of “verisimilitude” director Richard Donner tried so hard to establish in the first movie. But what’s realism, really? Superman in 1978 (Christopher Reeve in all three versions — plus a fourth of which the less is said the better) was introduced as a god rising into the air to the accompaniment of John Williams and the London Symphony Orchestra; in this third installment he enters as Clark Kent, walking the streets like any other New Yorker (sorry, Metropolite, accent on the second syllable). In place of Donner’s rather strained attempts at myth-making, director Richard Lester (who also did Superman II) gives us an earthier Man of Steel, concerned not so much with changing the planet’s very spin as with nudging everyday life back on course (while keeping his identity secret, of course).
“But what about all the slapstick? What about Pryor and his mugging?” Lester has been criticized for the film’s more humorous tone (as opposed to what, the first sequel?) but I’m thinking most folks mistake the absurdism in Lester’s work for lightheartedness, his characters’ nonchalance for callowness.
Equally misunderstood is Lester’s worldview. His Metropolis is actually grimmer than anything Donner (or Snyder for that matter) imagines: instead of supervillains and extraterrestrial threats Lester focuses on unhappy relationships and — yes — poverty (early on we see an unemployment line); instead of superhuman feats of strength he allows the camera to stray and capture little moments experienced by “little” people — a blind man looking for his straying dog, for example, or Pryor’s six months out-of-work Gus Gorman trying to pick up his check at the Welfare Office (“The only other employment you found was in a fast-food joint which lasted 28 minutes. Well that’s some kind of record!” “Man them people were crazy. How they ‘spect you to learn all that jive on the first day?” “Do you know what you are?” “Don’t call me a bum — I ain’t no bum!”).
Seen this way, the casual manner in which Lester’s characters face adversity seems less comic than heroic — confronting widespread destruction (or rather widespread recession, a far likelier prospect) with mulish defiance and a stubborn grin.
Does the film seem smaller, less magical, more random as a result? Yes, also more intimate, truer to life, more vulnerable to happenstance — the real villain in any Lester film.
Key to understanding the film is Pryor’s Gus — an unemployed black man with a hitherto unsuspected gift for computer programming, promptly snapped up and exploited by multimillionaire Ross Webster (hilariously deadpan Robert Vaughn). Gus doesn’t get to interact much with the Man of Tomorrow — who’s a god after all — but does interact with Ross, who asserts his (self-assumed) godlike superiority by ancient right and (white) privilege. Gus bows and scrapes before Ross; as Pryor plays him, he’s our worse notions of servile obsequiousness (with a dash of criminal fear) come to quivering embarrassing life (“Gus, Webco… is a family-owned cartel; a little magnesium here, a little zinc there… do you know what I want now? I want coffee!” “Black or regular?”).
Gus grows, however (Lester is all about chaotic surfaces obscuring hidden designs); he actually has a character arc, from cowering minion to resentful hireling to reluctant rebel, and the development is surprisingly persuasive despite (because of?) the mugging, which has you either chuckling (or wincing) till you realize you’re looking at a reasonably whole if faulty human being. In comics and movies, Superman was often given sidekicks — Jimmy Olsen, Lois Lane, Lana Lang, Lana’s son — but these innocent intermediates often came with their own halo of nobility, as if they were refracted aspects of the Kryptonian; I submit Gus is the most flawed most complex foil our hero has ever had on the big screen, and all the stories of production troubles and withering reactions from critics has distracted us from this realization.
Did I call Superman a god? Why yes, one that Lester yanks off his pedestal. More than Lex Luthor (skip the rest of this article if you plan to see the film!), more than Batman, more than some silly CGI construct dubbed Doomsday (I have a 30-pound cat with more threatening demeanor), Superman’s ultimate nemesis should be and is himself. Confronting anything after that — even a swiftly evolving supercomputer designed by Gus himself — would be anticlimactic (though this trend of facing a human rival and then a computerized one seems prescient).
Is this picture the best of the franchise? It’s not the most expensive — the original script had Brainiac team up with Mr. Mxyzptlk, and Supergirl helping out the Bright Blue Schoolboy — but Lester does the best with what he’s got, down to recycling special effects and footage from the first movie, at one point depicting a battle between Superman and Ross as a cheap-looking videogame. Mind you, Lester wanted the cheap look — had the effects folk redo the footage because it looked too real — which may suggest that Lester was obsessed with pinching pennies but suggests to me that he’s willing to uglify his film to make a satiric point: that superhero movies are but a step above videogames, and while we’re bashing superheros with their own dark side we might as well bash their movies with a game developed by Atari (which oddly was never released, an unrealized bit of market potential).
The film is over and Gus bids Superman farewell and — what d’you know? — there’s genuine affection in Gus’s voice. Pryor was reportedly roped into doing this movie because he once expressed on a talk show the desire to appear in a Superman movie; he later confessed that the script they gave him was so bad he didn’t want to do it — but the pay was $5 million. Imagine Ross with his arm around Pryor, talking into his ear and you have an image of life lampooning art.
I, for one, am glad Ross gave him that talk; the surprisingly poignant parting completes the wayward course of the film’s narrative structure, completes the even more wayward arc of Gus’s development, finally giving us a glimpse of the decency hidden under all that buffoonery. Is this the best of the franchise? I say it’s easily the oddest, with Pryor and Vaughn parodying the slave-master relationship and Reeve parodying his goody-good persona (the scene where Superman gets tipsy in a cheap dive is about peerless) and Lester parodying superhero movies while still doing a pretty good facsimile of one, inventive battles and slapstick sequences and surreal psychodrama and all. It also has the most effrontery – — a survey of reviews past and recent reveal an indignation that has yet to abate — and I submit that Lester possessed considerable courage provoking that indignation.
Is this third picture the best? Probably not — the second had the most deftly balanced mix of light comedy, emotional sophistication, oversized action. But it’s better than Snyder’s steaming pile of digitized kryptonite.
