As Superman stands overlooking his own funeral while delivering the beginning of a monologue that spans the length of an episode and evokes the noirs of Billy Wilder in more ways than one, the first thought is that The Late Mr. Kent is an ambitious genre exercise. But as the plot unfolds, one may very well get the even stronger impression that the writers are taking advantage of a breach in censorship enforcement for bold, politically conscious directives, a wave of social critique towering above the series’ usual ripples of action fantasy that somehow takes precedence over its own narrative stylishness. Following Prototype, which glorified an instrument of hi-tech militarism, The Late Mr. Kent treats its charged subject matter with a frankness and seriousness that is disconcerting for any viewer, let alone its intended audience, and it is this audaciousness that makes it the series masterpiece, even among works of equal quality.
All throughout The Late Mr. Kent, many surprising series firsts abound, and the most integral to an assessment of the episode’s politics and how its politics tints our perspective of series convention is its treatment of everything beyond Superman’s existence as a real-life phenomenon. Instead a super villain, the antagonist is a corrupt cop, that essential American archetype that didn’t even rear its head in the grimy streets of Gotham. In confronting his real-life adversary, Superman functions primarily as his real-life counterpart, Clark Kent, acting on his exclusive knowledge that small-time thief Ernest Walker is not, in fact, guilty on one count of murder, his strenuous efforts to exonerate the innocent man reminiscent of the portrayals of Woodward and Bernstein in All the President’s Men and all that that film did to revere ambitious, moralistic journalists as the keys to dismantling political corruption. Shots of Clark working late in the empty pressroom surely arise from the film’s milieu of vast, empty interiors dotted only by the two tireless heroes thanklessly working away. The Late Mr. Kent is more engaging, devoid of ‘historical relevance’ but full of introspection that raises moral questions about the volatile commingling between the altruism and self-righteous opportunism inherent to using one’s prestigious occupation to right a wrong. Clark’s ego peers through the cracks in his one-upmanship with Lois and desire to drive straight to the governor’s office to claim a victory for his career when Superman could have cleared the man with far less of a hassle.
The device of Clark delivering a monologue about his investigation, another first, is not merely an implicit way of gaining stature for narrative exceptionalism, but it also permits a voyeuristic identification with the series protagonist not to be found anywhere else. The results simultaneously engage our sympathy for our victim of investigative shortsightedness in following the efforts of his benefactor and create uneasy questions about the egocentricity that his status as both superhero and professional journalist entails. In clearing Walker, he finds an opportunity to claim an intellectual victory instead of a superheroic one, and this achievement means more to him than his moral objective. In fact, neither Clark nor Superman seems to show much warmth or sympathy toward Walker, as if he is following an ideological procedure without demonstrating any care for the person in jeopardy.
This is almost nothing compared to the less-than-admirable depictions of Lois and Jimmy. In the only moment that doesn’t quite ring true due to Lois’s typical skepticism of corporate and political higher-ups, she and Jimmy succumb to a bout of conservative complacency, writing off an innocent man’s execution because he ‘probably’ did it. Given that the supposed killer is a black ex-con living in a low-rent apartment, the class observation couldn’t be any more acute. With implicitly shady moral judgments of our usual heroes, screenwriter Stan Berkotwitz calls attention to deep-rooted social biases and ambivalences in people we tend to accept as the good guys and allows us to meditate on how ingrained certain social ills are in our society without ever quite placing us in disquietude.
The crux of the episode is the announcement of Clark’s death, which in addition to posing some nice psychological queries about how living the life of a human is key to Superman’s psychological and presumably moral well-being, it also gives Superman, the only fantastical element in an otherwise real-world episode, incentive to intervene. His intervention begins to jigsaw our straightforward imaging of how Superman’s immense power meshes with the convoluted mainframe of legality and political legitimacy. Further still, this pivotal moment acts as a counterpoint to the off-screen murder of the woman supposedly killed by Walker; if her death is unable to garner our emotional involvement, then Lois’s reaction to Clark’s death fills the void, and continues to ground the story in a kind of grim, fatalistic world where death is a reality, despite what convention tells us, and the institutions we tend to trust can very well be what brings it about.
After Superman regains the upper hand and learns that Bowman is the true killer—an ingenious move given that Bowman has appeared in the series before and therefore possesses some precursory reasons for the audience to doubt his culpability—he shows up at the governor’s house to clear Walker only for us to encounter yet another sting against the political establishment: the governor has chosen to attend the execution to gain votes for an upcoming election. This chilling touch that deftly comments on our society’s obsession with violence and the equivalencies we draw between supporting carefree killing and possessing the image of stern authoritarianism, immediately segues into a panorama of politicians staring indifferently at Walker as he awaits execution. If the action has already climaxed at the helicopter battle, then our dramatic investment climaxes here, at a pictorial assault on our willful negligence of the ruptures in a system that can very well put innocent men to death and the inhumanity with which we approach these cases that fall through the cracks. Perhaps Clark Kent’s minor transgressions against corrupt authority were never adequate to bring a man to justice, given that the final solution, after so much meticulous investigation, is for Superman to barge right into a government facility, a superheroic victory after all.
We then witness Bowman’s death at the hands of the law, a mirror image of Walker’s near-execution that draws a kind of parallel. One may see this doubling effect as Stan Berkowitz’s way of juxtaposing black and white abstracts of innocence and guilt so as to reward the audience with the gratifying killing a man who finally ‘deserves’ it, and yet the retainment of the same cold row of political figureheads and absence of any dramatically affirmative cue of finality endows this final death with the same air of eerie tranquility. Though none of the good guys end up dead, the philosophical underpinnings of The Late Mr. Kent dictate that someone has to die, and it is up to us to determine whether this is a necessary return to equilibrium or a somber reflection on the way the world works. The final gesture can hardly be said to be celebratory.
As Clark Kent’s monologue begins, he chooses to discuss luck and make the kind of hard-boiled overarching observations that come across as some kind of pretentious stipulation for prestige. And yet what he says about luck’s predominance is hardly irrelevant to the story, which is about chance in all its extremities and interpolations. We entrust the development of all stories to Superman’s deterministic action, and yet The Late Mr. Kent reminds us of how much luck factors into every little incident that allows him to come through in the end. And it’s not just Superman’s luck. While he is lucky that the fisherman had bad eyesight and that his childhood sweetheart was around to help with a cover story, Walker is equally fortunate that the reporter working on his case just happened to be Superman in disguise and that the pizza place actually had delivery records. In an episode where the events that transpire are troubling enough, we are nudged to wonder how things may have turned out were it not for the convenient reversals of fortune that ultimately win the day.
In the end, The Late Mr. Kent offers us the fullest realization of the clash between an interplanetary being and the struggles people face on a day-to-day basis, demonstrating that our imperfect social and political systems can stand as hindrances to even the most super powered being and that there is a wealth of real world problems that can’t be chalked up to the usual preventable, physical chaos. For every catastrophe that requires swashbuckling heroics, there is one that hinges even more on everyday happenstance and amid all the fluff that diverts the viewers’ eyes from the hard facts about the world we’re living in, there is a rare twenty-minute action cartoon that dares to say something.
No comments:
Post a Comment