Issue #90: Super Power 🏈

Awards season is creeping up, but that’s not our business. Yet. For now, eyes on your own paper. There will be a pop quiz.

This week we’re rewinding to the Halcyon days of July 2025, (and also September) to grapple with two films with a lot of potential. First, Cate on the exquisite failure of Justin Tipping’s not-quite supernatural horror film Him. Then, Zosha on the loose politics of James Gunn’s latest entry in the Superman canon.

Do enjoy!

Him is not a particularly good film necessarily. Its themes are a little scattershot, its plot doesn't quite work, and truthfully it's more tone poem than movie. But it's also an impressive experiment in authorial style and vision. 

Director Justin Tipping’s latest project centers on Cam (Tyriq Withers), a young college quarterback preparing for the NFL scouting combine. When an attack on the field leaves him with a serious concussion, he's forced to sit it out. But he gets a second chance at his dream when he's invited to spend a week training with his childhood idol: long-time San Antonio Saviors quarterback Isaiah White (Marlon Wayans). Naturally, things soon start going off the rails. 

The major issue with Him is that it never quite closes the circles on its thematic exploration. Broadly speaking, the film is about – among other things – the weight of toxic masculinity, the risks athletes take with their bodies to succeed, daddy issues, and familial obligation. They're all genuinely interesting ideas to tackle and explore in the context of a story about America's favorite sport. Unfortunately, Tipping never stays with any idea long enough to give it real narrative weight or significance. The result is a vaguely incoherent story that doesn't add up to much, and never answers the questions it asks. A tighter focus could have helped the film sing. 

But what excites me about Him is how ambitious it is. In some sense, the movie feels like a number of beautiful tableaus loosely strung together with dialogue. But the tableaus themselves are beautiful and striking. Him rejects the usual totems of a sports thriller and borrows from the art world, experimental film and the annals of history. 

Wayans thankfully brings a steely, unnerving presence as the film's villain, at once tormentor  and tormented. The film demands a lot from him, but he easily slips between menace and pathos. He's a stabilizing presence, and the one unimpeachable element of the film. It's thrilling to watch him work. 

One of my favorite genres is something I call a “social graces thriller.” These are movies where the plot mines its tension from a breach of the social contract. Think mother! or Speak No Evil. In those situations, our protagonist is subjected to wildly anti-social behavior from the antagonist or some other character. What our hero is then faced with is a choice: acknowledge the inappropriate behavior, or stay silent. But addressing the situation is an additional breach of the social contract – we're socialized not to make a scene. It's the same impulse that makes it easier for bad actors to groom and abuse victims. Reasonable boundaries are eroded one by one. Death by a thousand cuts. 

Tipping exploits that dynamic to exquisitely unsettling effect, and it's one of the few things in the film that operates as intended. Cam’s obeisance makes him a perfect target for Isaiah’s nefarious intentions, and an easy puppet for his ritualist motives. He's in awe of his idol, and reticent to raise objections. So when, during practice, another player  volunteers to have his face beaten bloody by footballs spit out by a jugs machine, Cam quickly learns that it isn't something he should complain about. No one else in the room seems disturbed. Other scenes play on the same dynamic, and the scenarios ratchet up the stakes each time. The film might be a little loose, but it also means that some of its best scenes genuinely come out of nowhere, and it makes for a tense but fun surprise. 

While Him has more than a few problems, the film Tipping perhaps intended to make is still treading water somewhere in the morass of ideas he's thrown onscreen. The vision is clearly apparent, but Tipping would do well to spend some time refining his taste. Him reveals a budding stylist at work, but it's clear that he hasn't quite figured out how to translate what's in his head to the screen. If he's committed any offense, it's that his film is perhaps too vainglorious for its own good. In future, Tipping might do well with a more parochial approach – especially in the scripting. 

Him gestures at the vision Tipping wanted to realize and express, but he hasn't quite figured out the kinks. Problems aside, it's a fictive world I'd love to revisit once he's managed to do precisely that.

The rumors you’ve heard are true: Superman is in the culture war. This is somewhat by intention — writer/director James Gunn hasn’t been shy about how he wants to frame his man of steel as the immigrant to America that he is — and somewhat overblown; I don’t really think that Gunn or anyone involved with the story can make a good case for this actually being all that “political” a movie. Which is more or less fine!

Within the movie, Clark Kent/Superman (David Corenswet) is under fire from Lex Luthor (Nicholas Hoult) on all sides, though he doesn’t know it: Lex is behind an attack from “the Hammer of Boravia,” a fellow metahuman who’s mad at Superman for stopping an invasion by Boravian military. He’s got goons staking out where Superman’s Fortress of Solitude is so he can invade it and find dirt on him. And as we find out later, he’s (via a million monkeys on computers) behind the deluge of negative Superman posts online.

At first, though, Clark doesn’t really know any of this. What he knows is he was sent to Earth to do his best, help humanity, and, lord willing, love Lois Lane (Rachel Brosnahan). So he’s just as surprised as anyone when Lex releases the full tape from his parents — telling him to procreate with Earth women to help keep Krypton alive — and humanity starts questioning if he’s just been “grooming” them (their words!) this whole time.

And so, Superman (2025) stakes its claim and its vocabulary. Anyone who’s been paying attention can make connections between the warring states, land rights, cancel culture, and technocratic bullshit that Lex Luthor is spinning, which has meant Superman exists in a sort of uneasy place with its politics. It has Superman saying (yelling, defending, even inspiring) heroes are the people who do things, not the ones who debate politics. And it has to accept that such platitudes divorced from any grounded reality don’t amount to much; technically “the guy who did good because no one else would” is a staple of action movies, ranging from Die Hard to 13 Hours. The philosophy isn’t meaningless, but it can only be as inspirational as its audience makes it. See: The Incredibles and American Sniper. It’s one of the things that’s made Superman’s rollout — and Gunn sticking to his guns on its apolitical intentions — so interesting: People are inclined to read what they want into Superman, even if he, and the movie, won’t give it.

Because Superman doesn’t really have much to say to all this. In fact, its central setup and resolution of its conflict are a bit at odds, unless you buy into Superman’s non-answer. When Lois goes in on Clark/Superman’s presumption that he knows what’s best and can charge in to do what he believes is right, international law be damned, Clark gets defensive; he doesn’t represent America he represents ideals. Nothing about the scene reads like she’s accusing him of being a CIA plant, so much as asking him to think through the implications — and potential consequences — of his actions, beyond just how he hopes to be perceived by the public.

The issue is, the movie lets him be bested by this in the moment, and then still has his arc anchored in the court of public opinion. When Lex puts out the video of his parents, society turns away from him, even as he does what’s right. And when The Daily Planet publishes their expose on Lex’s war crimes, pundits everywhere backtrack and say they were wrong about Superman. Superman has the problem many movies about the internet do, which is the blindspot of people as a force easily swayed by whatever is in front of them. What it has no answer for is its own problem: Technically all it shows the citizens of this world is a series of corrupted leaders who owe them some explanation.

Superman wants that explanation to be in the actions of its hero, both in terms of how he fights (for justice), inspires (getting the “Justice Gang” to step in and do what’s right), and how he will always choose resolute goodness (justice). But that answer wasn’t good enough for Lois, and it’s unclear why now it should be. In the end, Superman doesn’t give Superman a chance to step up and explain; he just does what he does.

Now for my own contradiction: I’m not sure I mind! Overall, I found Superman to be a pleasurable, peppy, even legitimately funny superhero movie. If it’s not always a great movie it’s a fairly consistently great blockbuster. There are times when it looks bland and awful (the prison on the other other world is rainbow barf), but it’s nice to see someone actually trying to make a fictional world look like something. Brosnahan makes a meal out of a thinly drawn Lois, in a performance that actually builds on the cultural footprint and adds a real spice to her connection with Clark. Corenswet is fun and wholesome, while Hoult, at times, carries more than the movie should really be asking him to. I don’t need Superman to be much more than that.

Still, I wish the movie had taken a chance with its politics — not because I need a blockbuster lecturing more specifically about politics, but because I think there’s more to say about Superman’s character. We are in need of saviors and people who do good, those who put their money where their mouth is and those who take a risk. What that means for our resident übermensch should be more complicated than just “be best.”

“A personal library is more about the future than the past.” Diane Keaton’s legacy is her idea of beauty. Help: Everything! is becoming! Bank! How do you engage with writing, let alone creativity, when processing grief? Podcasts are not television — and this distinction actually matters.

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Zosha + Cate <3