(Part 1: Intro)
Symbols have the power to become essential staples in the collective zeitgist, and in the modern age, film is one of the most powerful mediums through which these symbols play out. Superman has become the essential example of how a character can come to represent the ideals of a society. Has Superman become a cornerstone of American culture because what he represents inspires us to embody those same values in our lives? Or is it because Superman plays into the secret collective fantasy that someone somewhere will save us in our darkest hour?
If we take these stories and symbols at their face value, their attractiveness can easily remain within the realm of entertainment. We like seeing superhero movies because it feels good to see the good guy win, in the same way we like watching our favorite athletes sweat, perservere and triumph. But perhaps there is something deeper; when the music swells and the hero steps out from the rubble to rise again just when all hope seems lost, something essential within us is moved.
When deep emotion and narrative are at play, part of the profundity of the experience comes from the sense -whether conscious or not- that we are touching something universal and timeless, even if the movie itself is thoroughly modern.
Enter the realm of the Archetype. In contrast to our conventional modes of thinking, an Archetypal lens allows us to connect cultural stories (can we call “Superman” a modern myth?) to a deep sense of meaning in our own lives.
I like to think of this Archetypal lens as a type of pattern recognition, something that allows us to see one instance of a character, a symbol, or a story, and relate it to other instances where we’ve seen that character, symbol or story before. What this recognition of a pattern then allows us to do, through triangulating those different examples, is to apprehend something essential about that pattern. The idea behind an Archetypal viewpoint is that if a certain type of character, or symbol, or story, can be found throughout history and across cultures, perhaps that pattern is an expression of something fundamental to our human structures of meaning- a clue into how we make sense of the world, both around us and within us.
In this context, we’ll explore the Archetypal relevance of Superman on two interrelated dimensions of meaning; the Personal and the Collective.
Created by two Jewish Americans in 1938, the context of Superman’s conception gives us major insights into the archetypal function this symbol played in the collective zeitgeist of the time. In other words, what was the climate of the world at that time whose conditions led to the necessity of Superman and his subsequent popularity?
During one of the darkest periods of modern history, a character is popularized who exemplifies the ultimate Super hero – strong, invincible, virtuous, dependable- there to protect those in need and defeat evil, even of supernatural and alien proportions. Not much excavation or analysis is needed to make the case that Superman is a symbol of salvation, a messiah come to rescue humanity in its darkest hours.
Those familiar with dream interpretation know that symbols often arise in dreams as an antidote to the tensions and turmoil in one’s psychological landscape. The same is the case on the collective level. Superman himself as a cultural symbol – as a modern savior archetype – brings the promise of an ideological antidote to our societal illness. Now is this savior symbol naive “wish fulfillment”, as Freud might say, or might there be a deeper archetypal medicine in the symbol?
So what is the medicine of the savior archetype? How can this character move from an abstract source of generalized hope to a practically relevant and motivating force?