The movie “Supergirl,” critics from several corners say, is a massive flop.
Film buffs say it’s downbeat and dispiriting, a far cry from the joy ride that last year’s “Superman” was. MAGA culture warriors complain that it’s too “woke,” whatever that means.
Almost no one seems to like the fact that Milly Alcock, the young actress playing Supergirl, depicts the heroine more as a lost urchin than as a goddess in the making.
All this tells me is that many of the folks who don’t like the film understand neither the Supergirl story nor the themes her tale explores.
The conventional wisdom is that, long ago, the comics industry gave birth to Supergirl so the books would have a truly mighty female superhero, a distaff counterpart to the biggest hero of them all, Superman. They wanted a powerful superheroine who could speak to a largely untapped market of girls and young women who might, become comic book readers.
There is some truth, but it is far from the full truth.
DC — the comic publisher of both Superman and Supergirl — already had Wonder Woman on its roster, then and now the most prominent superheroine in both comic books and in culture. She, along with Superman and Batman, was part of the trinity that defined the early golden age of comics.
So, if DC already had the bestselling female comic book character in the world in its company of characters, why did it need Supergirl?
Maybe because she allowed and continues to allow the writers and artists who tell her story to explore different paths than Superman’s saga did and does.
For good reason, Superman has been called the ultimate immigrant success story. The last son of a dying planet and civilization, he rockets to earth as an infant, landing in the American heartland where he grows up to be the embodiment of “truth, justice and the American way.”
His is a story of hope, of fresh starts and new beginnings.
That is why darker takes on his character — the attempts by some storytellers to depict him as haunted or despairing — never have worked. He draws both his strength and his disposition from the earth’s sun and his smile is every bit as powerful as his x-ray vision.
But hope, new beginnings and fresh starts are only a part of the immigrant saga.
Before anyone who came to this country arrived here, they had to leave somewhere else — and they had to have a reason for leaving.
People who were happy in their old countries rarely left them. No, they came here because something wasn’t working. Often, they left after a loss or a tragedy.
Their departures weren’t tales of uplift. They were stories of doubt, fear and desperation.
Superman could not explore those feelings with any plausibility. He left Krypton, his dying planet and civilization, as a baby before he was even aware of his surroundings.
Thus, he could embrace his new life and his new beginning in America without grief, regret or longing.
Things are different for Supergirl. In most tellings of her tale — including the one in the movie — she grows to adolescence or even young womanhood before she is forced to flee her old world and her old life.
She is old enough to know what she has left behind.
What she has lost.
And she struggles with that.
We are an immigrant nation, regardless of what the Stephen Millers and Steve Bannons would tell us. Even those now called Native Americans or indigenous had ancestors who likely traipsed here from elsewhere a millennium or two ago.
We like to see our national story as something like Superman’s. We view America as a place where we or our ancestors began anew and fresh possibilities flowered.
That’s one side of the American coin.
The other side is Supergirl’s. It is a saga of people who came here not in hope but out of despair.
They were people who had to come to terms with letting go of what had been old and dear to them before they could embrace anything new.
We are a nation of hope and resilience built by many people who fled fear and failure.
That is a truth as fundamentally American as the Rocky Mountains, the cornfields of Iowa or the plains of Kansas.
We are both Superman and Supergirl.
No matter what the critics say.