I just discovered this piece on CNN and thought it was relevant to the issue of religion and SF. http://religion.blogs.cnn.com/2013/06/14/superman-coming-to-a-church-near-you/
Christ imagery is not surprising, of course, but I was put off by the fact that the studio was so blatant in marketing the movie as a Christian allegory. To my mind, there is a profound difference between religious symbolism (employed in many great SF novels, such as Arthur C. Clarke's "Childhood's End" and Stanislaw Lem's "Solaris") and religious propaganda. The former employs the vocabulary of the numinous and the sacred to ask profound questions about man's role in the universe. The latter is anti-scientific, anti-rational and politically dangerous. So now I have a justifiable reason to dislike the movie!
I have to confess, however, that Superman IS a Christ-figure. What were those Jewish creators of him thinking? Well, the same question applies to the Jews who wrote the Gospels... I guess we're our own worst enemy.
Christ imagery is not surprising, of course, but I was put off by the fact that the studio was so blatant in marketing the movie as a Christian allegory. To my mind, there is a profound difference between religious symbolism (employed in many great SF novels, such as Arthur C. Clarke's "Childhood's End" and Stanislaw Lem's "Solaris") and religious propaganda. The former employs the vocabulary of the numinous and the sacred to ask profound questions about man's role in the universe. The latter is anti-scientific, anti-rational and politically dangerous. So now I have a justifiable reason to dislike the movie!
I have to confess, however, that Superman IS a Christ-figure. What were those Jewish creators of him thinking? Well, the same question applies to the Jews who wrote the Gospels... I guess we're our own worst enemy.
Superman is a crappy Christ figure. While both saviour/messiah characters, Superman is at his core a man of action, while Jesus' thing (which Mahatma Gandhi copied) is the whole passive, non-violence, sacrificial lamb suffering for the world's sins shtick. Bryan Singer's Superman film had lots more Christ-like imagery (death and resurrection), but (thankfully) Man of Steel's Superman sticks to punching his troubles away.
ReplyDeleteAs for what Superman's Jewish creators thought, it has been pointed out that Superman is a fantasy of assimilation: two Jewish kids' wish-fulfillment story about being powerful, popular and Goyish. And JC is probably the most successful example of an assimilated Jew there ever was...