James Gunn Vs. Clark Kent’s Glasses

Here we go again, kids.

For all the talk of embracing the goofier nature of comic books into James Gunn’s Superman By James Gunn, director James Gunn apparently can’t get his head around the idea of how Superman pulls off the “Clark Kent” persona. He joins not only a long list of people who seem to misunderstand how Clark’s trick works but other comic book favorites nobody questioned. James Gunn himself altered Peter Quill’s “Starlord” outfit while Sam Raimi could explain how Peter climbs wall (and a better one than comics actually gave us…some nonsense about gravity control or something if memory serves, while Rami had little “hairs” that worked together to help him stick to wall) but somehow “teenage science geek with a special interest in chemistry and engineering creating an instinctual substitute for a spider’s webbing” was too much for him. This always bugs me.

So James Gunn, working with Tom King (that’s was your first mistake), decided he needed to “fix” how the glasses work. As I’ve said on this site time and again it’s not just the glasses that allows Clark to pull off his dual identity, but of course the guy who admitted that it took him a long time to come up with anything he liked as far as a Superman story in his style has to do it the hard way. The comic cover above shows that what he and King came up with is technically canon in the Bronze Age pre-Crisis version of Superman, but it’s a lame explanation…which explains why they went with it, I guess.

The discussion comes from an interview by Comic Book.Com regarding Gunn’s problem…well, this one, anyway…with the glasses and the solution they embraced, which the article refers to as “hypno-glasses”.

“That’s canon in the comics,” Gunn said of the hypno glasses protecting Clark Kent’s identity. “It’s kind of been forgotten but that’s from the comics. I was sitting with Tom King, the comic book writer, and I was like, ‘you know the thing that I just don’t really know how to reconcile in myself is the glasses because the glasses always bothered me as a kid.’ They bothered me because I just don’t have that much suspension of disbelief to believe that.”

Really? Really? Superman’s powers, many of which go against the laws of science (how about explaining where he gets propulsion to fly and can hover above the ground, James?), are okay for him but a lousy pair of glasses is his “web-shooters”? That’s some lame disbelief suspending there, Superman adaptation director.

Gunn also noted that while Corenswet’s Clark Kent does actually look different from his Superman, the canonical glasses that hypnotize people to protect Superman’s identity is true to the character.

“You know, they’re two different people even though I think out of all the actors that have played Superman, Corenswet looks the most different as Clark Kent to Superman, even more so than Chris Reeve. But he said, ‘you know, there’s an answer for that in the comics, it’s canon that they hypnotize people.’”

This is Kirk Ayan, who played both Clark and Superman in both of the 1940s serials. I think he did a better job than even Reeves did, and he didn’t need his hair to look like a lame wig or whatever they did to Corenswet. It wasn’t just a pair of glasses and a hat (everyone forgets the hat because they stopped giving him one…I miss the hat). Ayan gives both “characters” different voices and body language. It’s the same way Bud Coyer, Beau Weaver, and other voice actors did it in radio shows and cartoons. Even Danny Dark on Superfriends tried to make them distinct but he didn’t have the range Coyer and Weaver did, possibly because he took on the identity so rarely in the show.

And Gunn isn’t wrong — or rather, King isn’t. Superman (Vol.1) #330 from 1978 established that Superman uses “Super-Hypnosis”, combined with his glasses, to trick people into seeing Clark Kent as a distinctively different person than Superman. It’s a little goofy, but it’s a concept that has been used a few times since.

I know. I reviewed it. It was an overly complicated idea then and it still is now. In the story, Clark’s glasses gets its glass from his spaceship so it can withstand the heat of his x-ray and heat visions. Fine, I’m okay with that.

The story involved Superman using “super hypnotism” on the whole city to stop Spellbinder (not quite the same guy you might know from Batman Beyond) from mind controlling Metropolis. The explanation is that he was doing this subconsciously when it came to his dual identity, the glass from baby Kal-El’s ship boosting this unintentional whammy so that his desire to seem like different people, to seem more frail and weak as “Clark”, worked so well that even pictures of Clark with the glasses on could induce this effect, plus they made him a TV reporter for a time and it even went through the TV screen. It’s stupid, it’s unnecessary, and it’s what Gunn and King decided to go with. They aren’t some magic glasses that warp your perspective, and it doesn’t have to be.

Take it from a real world bespecticled man. Glasses alter your head shape by how the “image” is altered in the lenses themselves as well as the shape of certain frames, and you do look a bit different with them versus without them. You may not realize it if you see someone without their glasses because you expect it and you know it’s them, but most of Metropolis and the world doesn’t. Speaking of hats, I once went into my local comic store, someone who saw me almost every week for years didn’t recognize me because I didn’t have on one of my baseball style caps (with geek stuff instead of sports stuff) on that day for whatever reason I can’t recall. He may or may not have expected me at that particular time (it’s not like I arrived on the dot each week) but he didn’t expect to see me without a hat because I usually wear one. I wasn’t even trying, nor did I act differently. Then there’s Henry Cavill posting this around the time Man Of Steel was being promoted.

In the video on the Instagram page, Henry wasn’t even wearing glasses, walking around the city with promos all over the place and a Superman shirt with the version of the logo on it, and nobody recognized him. This wasn’t even his first big production. It’s just nobody expected the big movie star would be walking around without some kind of disguise. While with many celebrities this would be a blow to the ego despite going out in “normal” clothes and sunglasses specifically to not be recognized and go around outside. Cavill was trying to prove a point. Bounding Into Comics, where I got both of these links, even noted that there’s more to “Clark” that putting on glasses and a hat. Speaking of comic stories, there’s one where Lex Luthor scraps a very expensive computer because he refuses to believe that someone as powerful as Superman would take on such a weak guise, and from what I’ve seen on the internet, you don’t have to be a power-crazed businessman to have that point of view.

And in putting the frosting on this entire Super-cake, that Gunn is tripping over himself to explain away the glasses debate is particularly ironic given that Superman takes heavy inspiration from the All-Star Superman comic book series, whose author Grant Morrison has infamously gone on record to state that none of this matters.

“People say kids can’t understand the difference between fact and fiction, but that’s bullsh-t,” Morrison told Rolling Stone in 2011. “Kids understand that real crabs don’t sing like the ones in The Little Mermaid. But you give an adult fiction, and the adult starts asking really f–king dumb questions like ‘How does Superman fly? How do those eyebeams work? Who pumps the Batmobile’s tires?’ It’s a f–king made-up story, you idiot! Nobody pumps the tires!”

The article I linked to (not the Rolling Stone article) even shows Clark and his parents in Superman: Birthright creating the identity and ways to keep them separate. For one thing, he hides his muscles in bulky shirts, but also explains them away with a set of weights in his home and being a farm boy from Kansas. There’s a reason most of them are tanned and muscular. Apparently this is nothing new for Gunn:

From dressing Star-Lord in a painfully generic costume rather than either his original or Annihilation-era garb in Guardians of Galaxy, to depicting the canonically psychopathic Vigilante as a relative goof-ball in Peacemaker, to this awkward scramble to answer a Superman lore question that no one was asking, it’s unclear what chip Gunn has on his shoulder, but it’s getting ever harder to not notice it.

We’re supposed to believe he follows the comics. Comic Book.Com even mentions him using his super breath to push a dog out of the way of a kaiju in one of the clips (they call it his “freezing breath” but does the dog freeze in ice?–seems less than helpful AND talking about powers that make no sense but nobody questions), but here he is altering Star-Lord and Vigilante from the comics for the sake of his vision, a vision (no pun intended) that includes needing to explain the glasses in the most confusing, unnecessarily complex reasoning possible without straining all credibility. Somehow public perception is harder to accept than “hypno-glasses”.

The more I hear about this movie the less excited I get as a Superman fan, and it’s coming out around my birthday. What a weak birthday present.