Spencer and Patrick dissect Superman's 1930s origins by Joel Schuster and Jerry Siegel, contrasting Nietzsche's "Übermensch" with Hitler's racial ideology in Mein Kampf. They argue the character opposes fascism despite early depictions of him confronting Hitler and Stalin. Analyzing the 1978 film, they critique the Clark Kent/Lois Lane dynamic for inadvertently reinforcing incel-like beliefs about female choice. Ultimately, the hosts affirm Superman contradicts fascist principles, rejecting narratives that label him a Nazi stand-in while addressing modern reality-denying movements. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: CohereLabs/cohere-transcribe-03-2026, WAV2VEC2_ASR_BASE_960H, sat-12l-sm, script v26.04.01, and large-v3-turbo
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Nietzsche's Übermensch Misinterpretation00:14:43
And we're back with Truth Unrestricted, the podcast that is creating and interpreting the language of the disinformation age.
I'm back again today with my friend Patrick.
How are you doing, Patrick?
Good, Spencer.
How are you doing?
Good.
Patrick is the person that I have played the most games of chess against.
I think that's the same for me with you.
Yeah.
No other single person has played more games of chess against me than.
Than Patrick.
That's some good chess.
Another odd little factoid.
Yeah.
We're not talking about chess today, though.
We're talking about Superman, the concept of Superman.
But before I start, I want to mention that any comments, questions, complaints, concerns about anything that you hear on this podcast, you can send that email to truthunrestricted at gmail.com.
And also, before I forget, a special thank you to Jeff Powell for the intro and outro music for this podcast that he handcrafted with his very Hands and various guitars.
So, talking about Superman, the concept today.
So, this is just two aspects of the concept of Superman.
But the first of those, I mean, not related, by the way, not in any way related.
The first of those is sort of like a tale of three Supermans.
Okay.
So, Superman was first developed as a character, it was first developed in the 1930s.
In the United States of America, by two young Jewish men.
Joel Schuster and Jerry Siegel, I believe, were their names off the top of my head.
Pretty sure that's right.
They had a couple of goes at making the character and making it a thing that was going to be for sale to audiences, and it took them several years.
They started in 1933 ish, and they ended, and I think they were published finally in 1938, was the first year that.
That there was a Superman that was on the page for sale in a comic book store or whatever.
So there were some other things going on in the world in the 1930s that was catching a lot of attention.
A time of the planet that we look back to because there are a lot of things happening in the world now that seem to be happening in a similar fashion.
So we harken back to that time.
And a lot of people, Talk a lot about the things that were going on and different ways things are related.
And there is a tie in with Superman to all of that stuff.
These were two young Jewish men who were making this character in the 1930s.
Okay.
I don't know how much more on the nose I want to put that, but obviously there is a connection here to Hitler.
As many things connected to Hitler in the 1930s.
So, but to.
Tell the tale of three supermen.
It actually relates to a guy named Frederick Nietzsche.
Probably heard of him too, right?
The philosopher, German philosopher Frederick Nietzsche.
In 1883, uh, we were like the third 50 ish years before these two young Jewish men, nearly boys at the time, were originally shaping their character, coming up with the character name that they would call Superman.
Um, Frederick Nietzsche wrote.
Several sort of, I think they're labeled books.
I don't know how long they really are.
I didn't read them.
I don't even know their names.
But in them, he wrote about a fictional character archetype called an Übermensch.
This is the thing that he called it.
And for his perspective, so this is one of the Supermen, is his Nietzsche's Übermensch.
Nietzsche's Übermensch was a character concept that was probably the touchstone in our English speaking history.
That most closely represents it is probably the main characters in Ayn Rand's novels.
Never read any of her stuff.
Never read.
Oh, that's interesting.
Okay.
So Ayn Rand wrote novels.
She had a philosophy of individual pursuits of greatness that were underpinned by a belief that selfishness itself.
Was a moral good that everyone individually should pursue.
And that's generally speaking, you know, she used many more words than that to describe the concept.
Okay.
In her main novel, which was Atlas Shrugged, I think the main character at the end of the book has a single speech that lasts something like 80 some odd pages.
Yeah.
She was wordy, much more wordy than I am with this.
She was influenced by Nietzsche's and Nietzsche's Übermensch idea.
Nietzsche's Übermensch was a person, to him, it was a man, but it doesn't need to be a man, just that he lived in a world in which only men ever succeeded at things.
So, to him, it was a man who put all of morality behind him, all of the good versus evil stuff.
He just took the whole thing, crumbled in a ball, put it aside, and then moved to a higher plane.
After that.
And a lot of Nietzsche's sort of sets of beliefs about this were about the greatness of atheism, how God is a concept that holds us back and sets us into many paradigms about good versus evil.
And that leads to a lot of this class warfare that was also being talked about by Karl Marx at the time and the time shortly before that.
And To him, it was all a thing we could put behind us if we went through the evolution, the philosophical evolution that he saw forming and possible through his Übermensch idea.
Übermensch, so the German word for German word uber, it literally translates to over, but usually over in a sense, not like physically over, but like placed above or higher or superior in some way.
Right.
Ubermensch, the superior man.
And to him, it was all philosophical.
There was nothing about war or strength or genealogical greatness, eugenics.
Nothing of that was a part of it.
Any person could become an Ubermensch if they followed the philosophical concept to put behind all the vagaries of good versus evil and all that stuff and move to this higher plane.
Generally speaking, I'm.
Drastically reducing a lot of his words down to very few here.
But this was one of the sort of the first idea of a superior man, this thing.
And this idea greatly impacted many parts of the world.
I mean, obviously, many, many decades later, in the 1930s and 40s, this influenced Ayn Rand many decades later.
And it also influenced a guy named Adolf Hitler, who directly took, he read actual Nietzsche in the actual German, and he took those ideas and he changed them.
Warped them into a new idea.
So he took the idea of an Übermensch and he discarded this idea of good versus evil and all this stuff.
And he took the idea of class as it was in Nietzsche's idea of class.
People who were born to a higher level of class were resented by those of the lower class.
And that when you got to People of the lower class moving to a sort of a greater level of influence, they were able to warp some parts of the attach different valuations to the things that would make you superior, like not superior, but like this higher class.
So, like richness and driving people to produce more and all the rest of it.
And they were sort of, they became the many numbered sheep who overcame the wolves of the situation.
And I mean, this was, I'm also paraphrasing a lot from Nietzsche, but this was generally what he said.
This became, in Hitler's view, the idea that the Germans were the Übermensch.
So this is obviously not what Nietzsche said, but this is what he interpreted from it.
The German people were the Übermensch.
Already, they just were because of their genealogical greatness, and that the smaller people of the world were the Jewish people who were attempting to say that everyone else should be equal and all this stuff.
And the Marxist ideas that were so powerful about the people not making very much money should have a greater share of the wealth and all that stuff.
That was this idea that the Ordinary that the Jewish people were infecting the world with these negative moral valuations so that they could overcome the Ubermensch, Hitler's superior people.
And this, so this is taken directly from Nietzsche and then warped and twisted and turned around so that he adds in the eugenics factors and he.
Does a lot of this stuff.
And this stuff, a lot of this is in Mein Kampf, which was, what was the publication date of Mein Kampf?
1929 ish.
But many people who were translating Nietzsche were, as of the early 1900s, translating Nietzsche into English were directly translating the word Übermensch into Superman.
Like superior man, and just slurring it into one single word, Superman.
And this was sort of in English language, this was synonymous with Nietzsche's idea of Übermensch.
Among people who discussed this, this wasn't everyday dinner conversation for most people, right?
Very, very few people in the United States would have been reading Nietzsche even up to and including the 1930s, right?
It would have been only philosophy students who would have ever read this.
But some very curious people who had a lot of time on their hands might have.
As well.
So these ideas eventually made their way into things like plays and that sort of thing.
There was a play, I can't remember who had the play, but it included the name Superman as part of the play in 1903.
And this was generally seen as popularizing this word as part of the concept of Superman from Nietzsche.
So in Nietzsche, we have one idea of Superman.
Hitler, we have a different idea of a Superman.
And so, into this mix, we also have Joel Schuster and Jerry Siegel, who have their own Superman.
And once you sort of see this, people have wrapped these all together and they've said, well, it's obvious that these two young Jewish boys were, and they were explicitly, they've said in interviews that they were explicitly pushing back against some of the ideas that were coming from.
Germany at the time.
I mean, they were developing this character from about 1933 to publication 1938.
And this ring of what was going on in Germany was just getting louder and louder this whole time.
The 1936 Olympic Games were in Berlin, and there was a lot of bad things happening there.
Jesse Owens wins three gold medals, and Hitler is forced to pin all three or hang all three gold medals around his neck.
And he hates it so much that he starts publishing.
Propaganda against uh uh black people while Jesse Owens is in Berlin for the Olympics, like it's published in newspapers, right?
Like uh eugenic stuff that that says that they are uh more directly inherited, uh uh uh more closely ancestrally related to uh gorillas than his ubermensch are.
That was, I mean, that that was a thing that Jesse Owens saw in the newspaper when he was in Germany for the Olympics, like you know.
Picture of him and a gorilla, and with the supposedly some you know scientific looking things that are meant to point out differences or similarities or whatever.
Uh, Hitler was a bad guy, very bad guy, yeah.
Hitler's Distorted Superman Image00:07:22
Uh, but through all these ideas, we had these two guys creating Superman, and a lot of people think that Superman, the character Superman that they created, was a direct takeoff from.
Hitler's ubermensch.
That they were directly mocking his ubermensch idea, or sometimes they interpreted that they were playing into his ubermensch idea, that it was an ubermensch for America.
So, at various times, different groups, different neo Nazi groups, white supremacist groups in the United States have attempted to say this.
And we need to, so we need to like exactly lay out the ideas that are at play here.
That you know, and why they're just not from each other.
It's likely, I've read a bunch about this recently because I wanted to know.
It's likely that these two guys who made Superman the character just picked up on the name from some other media that was shown.
I mean, it wasn't a very popular name to have, but it was around.
And they liked this idea.
They did want to.
Throw some sand at Hitler.
Some of the earliest comics of Superman that were occurring during the war, at the very start of the war, before Russia was on the side of the Allies, there are comics where Superman himself flies in and grabs Hitler, and then he goes and grabs Joseph Stalin, who at the time had a pact with Hitler, and he tells them how they're very bad people.
And he, you know, I can't remember how the comic ended, but he, he, That's a thing that was in print in, you know, like 1940.
Straight about.
Yeah, yeah.
I mean, this idea was a popular thing to do in comics.
After Superman becomes popular, a lot of other comics start to come out that are also popular where they're doing this too.
And a big one, of course, was Captain America was fighting the Nazis shortly after this time.
But they weren't directly cribbing from Hitler's idea of Übermensch for their.
Hero character.
Their hero was, he was an alien who traveled to Earth after his entire race was sort of destroyed.
So, this is the idea that someone kills all the Jews, but one of them escapes and comes and, you know, so this idea that he's a refugee from a race of people who are dead.
This is an idea that rings really true for a pair of young Jewish men in the 1930s who are worried about people of their cultural heritage who are having a very bad time in Germany, across all of Europe eventually, but not yet as of 1938.
And so they, like I say, they do want to push back against Hitler.
But they don't just take his Ubermensch and just flip it and just make it a Superman for themselves.
That wasn't really what they were doing.
Also, the idea that Superman is also a fascist is also fairly ridiculous in so many ways.
Some people have tried to say this before that he's just like an American fascist character or whatever.
He's, you know, the character of Clark Kent was far too.
Wholesome and aw shucks and gee whillikers and all that stuff.
Gentle, yeah.
To ever be that.
And also the fact that, as the great Canadian band Crash Chess Dummies said, Superman never could have smashed any bank in the United States and he never did.
Like he could have taken all the wealth that he wanted.
Yeah.
He had the ability, but he just never did because that would be anathema to his set of beliefs.
And he was held back by his set of beliefs from doing that.
Which also circles us back to Nietzsche because Nietzsche's ubermensch is individualistic, he is not superior in strength.
That wasn't a thing that Nietzsche wrote in there.
He's not muscular at all.
There was nothing, you know, as far as I know, he never described his frame or anything like that.
He was just superior in morality.
And being individualistic and being only sort of self serving, he was able to shuffle off much of the burdens of society that society would otherwise place upon him.
And in this way, Superman is very much not Nietzsche's Ubermatch because Superman is directly seeking out more burdens from society.
He is offering his services to save people.
From various things that they suffer from.
He's fighting crime.
He's voluntarily partitioning.
Yeah, yeah, right.
Putting himself into harm's way.
Although, how much harm is anyone ever doing to this man because he's ridiculously overpowered?
But that's a whole different story.
But yeah, ostensibly, he's putting himself in harm's way to save people.
And that's never a thing an ubermensch would do.
An ubermensch would only ever be self serving.
Yeah.
So, yeah, I think I have all three laid out.
Describe, what do you think?
Am I making any sense here that we got three, but they're not actually related?
They're only related in the basic name that's being used here?
Yeah.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
No, totally.
Although I'm not, it's not yet clear to me, I guess.
Aside from what you said that, you know, They undertake some storytelling that involves, you know, Superman going over there and kind of roughing up the bad guys and stuff like that.
I don't know if there's anything else that comes to light as being like philosophically significant about the whole, you know, story or, you know, more specifically.
Well, of Superman as a response to what's happening in.
Pretending Truth for Power00:03:40
Well, he was meant to be like.
At no point in the comics do they ever mention anyone being Jewish.
That's got to be a conscious choice.
Maybe someone said, a Jewish superhero is never going to fly.
But in many other ways, aside from the fact that he's got extra powers or whatever, he is a lot like the Jews in that he's running from a land that was destroyed.
Right, this has sort of been the story of the Jewish people since Moses, um, always having to leave their current home and all this stuff.
Um, it's almost their entire story if it starts at Moses, right?
That's one of the very you know, it's like the third major story in Genesis, it's the creation and then Noah and then Moses, right?
Like, um.
So, in that respect, there is this aspect of, you know, this taking on aspects of the Jewish cultural heritage.
But also, this idea of him being about freedom.
I mean, I think he lists his truth, justice in the American way, right?
And these are all things that are flying in the face.
I mean, these are all things that the Nazis would have pretended to have, not the American way, but truth and justice.
They would have pretended those things, but absolutely would not have had them.
Truth and justice would have used those things to advance their other causes.
Yeah, they would have pretended that those things were happening to advance their cause, and that's it.
It would only have been a pretense.
But him being actually and honestly.
For those things was a direct, not so much a political, but more like a social idea that, you know, you don't have to be like that.
No one has to be like that.
No one has to be like a Nazi.
I mean, it might feel good for some people to get to push some other people around or whatever, but you don't need to do that.
Well, and also to have that balance of like Superman having the ultimate powers that he does, that does not, even with that.
You know, you could say whatever his biology is, with his biological superiority does not come some sort of entitlement to pick and choose.
And like you said, the idea that he's fascist, fascism isn't nested in capability, it's nested in action, right?
Like it's revealed as people act in fascist ways, misusing power.
So I can see how it's a direct contradiction to see how Superman acts with that power.
To compare and contrast that with how the Nazi ideology about this genetically superior race somehow entitles them to commit all these atrocities.
Yeah.
Nazis were bad and still are.
Costumes and Contradictions00:10:32
Yeah.
But I have another aspect of, pardon me, the Superman character that I'd like to talk about.
It's kind of a sharp.
Turn from this first one.
The first one, it's all of that origin is interesting, and the whole bit about Nietzsche and all that stuff.
It is interesting that it's not even two.
Like some people look at those situations like that, and they think, oh, Superman must have been about one or the other because everything always comes down to one or the other.
But it's not.
There's three individual things, and they're all different from each other.
And so, yeah.
But this one is a twist.
So, how do I go about this?
What's the best way?
Well, okay.
This movie, I mean, I said we're talking about just the character, but if we're referencing a movie, I want to reference the 1978 Superman movie.
Did you watch it?
Yeah.
Yeah.
What did you think of it?
Did it hold up?
It was a nostalgic walk in the park, that's for sure.
There was a right.
I feel that they were just, they were really enjoying the special effects that, you know, Hollywood was unlocking around that time.
They, I mean, there's some effects that you can see through now that are more on the nose, right?
That it, yeah.
And it's, it's a little bit, it breaks the illusion a little bit.
For me, it doesn't because I love it so much that I'm whatever, watch as a kid, all that.
You take it as it is, too.
Yeah.
This movie has a lot of tie in with Star Wars, actually.
Many of the cast members of Star Wars did audition for various parts.
Carrie Fisher was at one point auditioned for the part of Lois Lane.
Harrison Ford did audition for the part of Clark Kent.
George Lucas was considered as a director for Superman movie, but he opted to not do that so that he could do Star Wars.
They were filming at the same time.
Actually, and this movie took two years to film, whereas the Star Wars movie only took like one year to film.
So this came out the year after Star Wars rather than the same year as Star Wars.
But a lot has been made of the secret identity factor of Superman and how it's really not much of a secret identity.
He's just wearing glasses, right?
In a way, yeah.
Yeah.
So, this movie, in this movie, I mean, Christopher Reeve got paid $250,000 to make both this one and the second movie.
Oh, because they were being filmed at the same time.
That was one reason why it took so long.
They were both planned together and they're getting filmed at the same time.
So, he got paid for both movies, grand total, quarter million dollars.
Hmm.
Is that that's a lot back then?
That was not even all that much.
Like, he's he is the movie, like, he is.
Except that there was another guy, Marlon Brando, who'd insisted on getting paid way more and getting first billing and all that stuff, and whatever.
In my opinion, they didn't need Marlon Brando, they could have had anyone, whatever.
Yeah, but they got him and paid him way too much and then didn't pay him what they promised him, and then he sued them, and it was this whole thing.
Wow, it led to all kinds of problems.
But Christopher Reeve did a lot of things in this movie to make the identity more solid.
Like it was his acting.
So some people credit him with being the one to come up with the idea to wear glasses.
I actually thought that for a very long time, but it's actually not true.
I looked this up.
There's a lot of older Superman comics in which Clark Kent is wearing glasses, while of course Superman would never wear glasses.
Um, but Christopher Reeve did several things for this film that make it seem more believable that this would work.
So, first of all, he's always slouched when he's Clark Kent, he always hunches a little bit and slouches a little bit.
Yeah, um, he parts his hair on the opposite side when he's Clark Kent as he does when he's Superman.
Very subtle, yeah, but of course, the Superman also has got that little.
Swirl that stands out.
It's kind of another little sign that, you know, it looks different.
It's visually different.
Cheeky little lock of hair.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And when you can move that fast, I guess you can just do your hair whatever, anytime you like.
And so a lot of people would look at it on the face.
Some comedians have even tried this, say, you know, he's only got glasses.
Everyone should see through this.
Lois Lane should see through this.
She works with him every day.
And then she looks into his face and she should see that he's the same person.
But that's actually, that aspect is actually what I want to get to here, which is that Lois Lane.
Is not all that into Clark Kent, is she?
No.
No, not really.
I mean, in this film, he kind of makes, he kind of, you know, wants to go on a date with her, Clark Kent.
I mean, he is also Superman, so, you know, it's a little weird, but if he wasn't Superman, he was just Clark Kent.
He's just a guy that she works with who's never going to get with her.
She's just not into him.
Yeah.
And he's asking, you know, and he's a nice guy.
Yeah, he's a nice guy.
Yeah, um, but you know who she is into?
Spoiler alert, Superman.
She's into Superman.
Yeah, yeah, so she doesn't really like Clark Kent much, she really likes Superman.
Yeah, what's the difference between Clark Kent and Superman?
Well, besides their mannerisms, or yeah, I mean, they might, uh, uh, Yeah, I mean, Clorkant slouches more than Superman, right?
Superman holds his chest.
When Superman is just being Superman, you know, he's got a very kind of charming confidence, right?
Like he's got kind of like a little smirk and a little light in his eye.
It's a good one.
Yeah.
If you can, you know, fly and you're impervious to bullets and all that stuff, it's easy to be confident.
In that situation, you can lift entire buildings, maybe.
I don't even know what the limit of Superman's strength is.
He's just incredibly strong.
It's easy to be confident when you have those physical properties.
So, confidence definitely is a factor.
But they look really similar.
Sure.
Yeah, sure.
They look really similar.
Do you know why?
Same guy.
Because they're the same guy.
They're the same guy, man.
They're the same guy.
By the way, another note here that's interesting is that in 1978, what Superman looks like was considered to be peak male human form.
Like the absolute best a human male could look, essentially.
Charlton Heston in Planet of the Apes was out 10 years before this, whatever.
This is more or less identical to what Charlton Heston looked like in that movie.
Michael Douglas's dad, Kirk Douglas, was in Spartacus.
This is more or less identically his build also in that movie.
This was in Hollywood the ideal human male form.
Was not the.
Also worth noting that this is just before a guy named Arnold Schwarzenegger.
Began appearing in films.
And he changed the aesthetic for what people should consider a peak human male form to be, which after he showed up should absolutely be bulging biceps, much more round shoulders, very, very large pectorals, like just all that stuff.
Human balloon animal.
Yeah.
Yes.
Yes.
Human balloon animal.
Yeah.
But before that, it wasn't that at all.
It was this.
Which to some viewers now, I think, looking back, if they didn't kind of live through that time or whatever, it does feel a little weird.
Why does anyone consider this to be a Superman?
But you mean, besides the flying laser eyes and stuff?
Yeah.
Well, yeah, yeah.
But like, oh, he looks, it looks all right, right?
But you know, he's not, you know.
But that's a part of the way the Overton window is moving here.
And, you know, times change.
And, but yeah, in that time, he was.
Just as delicious as any of the, you know, as, as, who were the people in Avengers?
Hemsworth, any of the Hemsworth brothers, right?
And, you know, like he was considered to be peak form, right?
Objectification vs Reality Denial00:03:27
No.
But, you know, he has the same general shape as Clark Kent.
Clark Kent, you know.
It's a difference in costume, though.
I mean, when you're wearing tights, it accentuates, you know, your musculature as versus the, The business suit, sure.
He's he's Superman himself's got to be a little more objectified than Clark Kent is being, yeah, for sure.
Uh, but essentially the same form, and in fact, many people uh have said that they like men in suits, but Clark Kent's in a suit, and she's just not that into him.
Well, he's hunting, he's gonna straighten up at work, yeah, yeah.
Uh, but he types faster than anyone else, Patrick.
Yeah, no one types faster than this guy, yeah.
But to anyone who's maybe still in the dark on what I'm slowly beating around the bush at here is that the Clark Kent Superman dynamic with respect to Lois Lane is something that I think could be a part of how popular fiction portrays.
what women want.
In a way that leads to and unhelpfully leads to ideas like what are in the incel movement now, in which you get, for anyone who's hiding under a rock, incel is involuntarily celibate.
It is an actual movement, actually, of young men who feel like they aren't attractive enough to get.
To find a woman and they would like one, but they're not attractive enough.
And that the attractive men get all the women and they get multiple women, and then therefore there's none left for them.
And yeah, ideas like this one, where you have, I mean, they weren't, you know, the makers of this whole thing were not trying to say anything.
Particularly about men or women or feminism or any of this other stuff, really, when they made this dynamic between Clark Kent and Superman and Lois Lane.
Like, Joel Schuster and Jerry Siegel weren't.
And as far as I can tell, none of the other people, the director of this movie, wasn't.
It's just how these characters come together.
And it's sort of in the way they just sort of said makes sense in a lot of ways.
If you had a choice between Clark Kent and Superman, Well, it seems like he should choose Superman, right?
Although Clark Kent does have a job, and Superman doesn't appear to have a job that pays any money.
So that's a thing you might want to think about.
If you're going to have, you know, Lois Lane's going to have to pay for dinner every single time because Clark Kent refuses to break into that bank, man.
He just won't do it.
Yeah, am I making any sense here, Patrick?
Incel Ideologies in Pop Culture00:05:14
What's your thoughts on this?
Not at all.
I don't make any sense.
Okay.
Well, okay.
So, what I know, but what I am curious about then is like, what are we looking at for the aspect of unreality?
How is this?
Well, incel is a form of unreality.
It's a reality denying ideology.
It's not as specifically reality denying as like flat earth or anti vax.
But these are young men who are.
In a place of their lives where they are insisting that something is true that just isn't.
And it's ideologically based and it's a very dangerous set of beliefs.
There have been several young men, including one in Canada, that have done acts of violence about this, some of them murders.
And it's hard for me to wrap my head around what the idea of.
Of calling them a movement is like I can well, it's I can definitely see that there's community, I can see that there's like a commiserating that's how movements sit, though, right?
They're but a movement kind of also has to propose some change, doesn't it?
Well, uh, uh, I don't think we want any of the changes that are proposed by the incel movement.
Are there proposed changes?
Do they like assigned marriage?
I mean, aside from a lot of angst and violence, you know, they would support.
They tend to follow along with a lot of the ideas that come from a lot of also unhelpful male influencers like Andrew Tate and I can't think of any others off the top of my head right now, but Andrew Tate's probably the biggest one who.
Have a very misogynistic view of the world and the dynamic between men and women.
And that the idea is that you just have to exert your superiority over the women, essentially, is the general concept.
That you have to take what you want, sort of thing, which is leading to some very bad stuff.
They would also, although I don't have a lot of knowledge about this, but I bet you they would nod along.
Strongly with a lot of the ideas that come from people in the quiverful movements, like the quiverful movement that has the idea of trad wives, where wives are sort of subservient to their husbands and there to make as many babies as possible,
and they're going to live a traditional lifestyle and all this stuff, because that would lead to more of these pairings.
This would get rid of the idea that.
Uh, the attractive men are having you know more than their fair share of the women involved.
Um, all of that is bad.
All that is bad.
We did all this work so that women could have a greater number of choices and a set of ideas that would set that back, I think, is one that we don't want to go along with.
I don't think we should.
No, fair enough.
Yeah.
Um, but that's uh, those are all ideas that would come from that.
Um, There's a lot of anecdotal stuff related to this from things like teachers and what they experience from their male students versus the girl students about how they'll get treated or that sort of thing.
It's not something that's pervasive across all of society.
I mean, every young man has lots of influences, right?
They have their parents.
They have other people in their communities.
They have, I don't know, other TV shows and whatnot.
But they also have these online influencers who are definitely trying to push as many people into their follower column as they can.
And in some cases, buying supplements or whatever, or coaching groups and shows.
Coaching groups teach you how to pick up women or whatever.
Yeah.
All that stuff is terrible.
It's a whole lot of terrible.
But this to me is a reminder that some of the ideas that are used to justify beliefs like the incel movement are available in our popular culture.
One-Dimensional Character Writing00:02:44
I don't want to call Superman sloppy writing, but in the aspect of the relationships between Clark Kent, Lois Lane, and Superman, it is definitely one dimensional writing.
Mostly because that's not their focus.
But now, so if I can interject here, I didn't watch the second Superman.
Have you seen it?
I have.
So, in the second one, I mean, I haven't, I shouldn't say I haven't watched it.
I watched it like when I was a kid, but I haven't watched it recently.
Doesn't Lois Lane eventually confront the fact that Superman and Clark Kent are the same person?
Yeah.
It's been a while since I watched it too.
So.
I feel like at some point that's resolved.
It's a lesser movie.
Let me just put that out there.
It's a lesser movie.
This movie was directed by a guy named Richard Donner.
He was a very good director.
The producers of this movie were a couple of sleazebags who were ripping everyone off and trying to make a buck.
And they got into many disagreements with Richard Donner during the making of this movie.
What would have been the making of this and the next movie?
But they made this one.
And then.
That was the moment where everything broke down, and he was about two thirds ish of the scenes from the second movie were already shot.
And then he quit.
So another guy took over, a guy named Richard Lester, who was involved in some portions of the production of this movie, but wasn't a main force.
But when he took over, he reshot all the footage that the previous director had shot, and he added all kinds of additional things in there, like all kinds of zany ideas.
He was a A guy that liked zany things, so as much as this movie had a couple of zany ideas that was you know not all that great, like I love this movie, but I don't really like that he you know turns the earth backward a day or whatever it is to turn time back, like that's a zany idea, you know what I mean?
Yeah, oh yeah, uh, whatever, I don't know, doesn't matter.
The rest of the movie's great, uh, but there were a lot more of those in the next two movies, he directed both of them.
Parts two and three, and a lot more sight gags, a lot more slapstick stuff.
It was that really dragged down both those movies, and they're just lesser movies because of it.
I'd rather just not talk about them.
Christopher Reeve is in them, and he's great.
Aryan Tones in Lex Luthor00:04:48
And Margot Kidder, the great Margot Kidder, was Lois Lane also in.
Well, she wasn't in the third movie, but she was Lois Lane in the second movie for sure.
I believe she did, in the context of that film.
Learn or discover who the nature of the dual identity of Clark Kent and Superman, but as part of his uh zany ideas, at the end of the movie, uh, Superman hypnotizes her into forgetting that she knows what his true identity is, and this works.
Um, yeah, it's just uh, like a time when we thought uh, hypnosis was like something you could do to like mind control people or something, yeah, yeah.
Wave your fingers in someone's eyes.
Yeah, that was pretty much.
Yeah.
And I was like, I remember I had a couple of old Superman comics, and hypnosis was also used in a couple of those in a way that we're just kind of like, okay, whatever.
It's the MacGuffin that moves the plot along.
Yeah.
Sometimes not even needed, right?
Like, I remember distinctly there was a comic where Superman was in the middle.
He's not just a reporter anymore.
At this point, he's a television broadcaster.
And He's so he's essentially like the Peter Manns Bridge, right?
He's on the television and he's reading the news or whatever, and there's a crime happening or whatever.
So he has to go solve the situation.
So he, at super speed, mind you, he, during the commercial break, he grabs Jimmy Olsen, hypnotizes Jimmy Olsen into impersonating Clark Kent.
Uses makeup to like make him look identical to Clark Kent, places him in front of the camera, and then has Jimmy Olsen read the news as Clark Kent while Superman goes and fights the crime.
Yeah, yeah.
And I was like, doesn't even seem necessary, man.
Like, a little over the top.
I don't know, but it was a comic book.
It's definitely for kids.
Yeah.
Whatever.
Superman's amazing.
This movie was the best Superman movie ever made.
I don't care what anyone else says.
Don't even try to convince me.
It's not happening.
You didn't like the modern adaptations that much?
I liked them.
Yeah, they were good.
They were just not as good as this one.
Christopher Reeve is the best Superman that's ever been.
Doesn't matter.
Cool.
I think all the other guys who played Superman would also agree.
I like the guy from the TV show.
The one that was on the WB, right?
The Smallville?
I think so.
That was like late 90s or mid 90s or something like that.
Yeah.
I remember that.
That was a good time.
That was a good adaptation.
I like that one too.
It was like 10 seasons.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I remember the Lex Luthor character was a little more subtle, but also.
Well, they had more episodes to flesh out a lot more character development and everything.
And I do think that that was a good view of the Superman character that was interesting and good.
Yeah.
Just, you know, it was good.
Just wasn't as good as this movie, yeah.
So that's just my opinion.
That's just my opinion.
Um, so uh, yeah, cool.
That's it.
That's all we have.
We don't need to go for an hour.
That's it.
No, it's good.
Okay, so uh, um, if anyone uh wants to uh fight with me about uh whether they think another Superman is better, you can find me on Twitter at SpencerGWatson and uh, um.
Other than that, you can send me an email at truthunderstrictedgmail.com.
You have anything else to add to this?
No.
Superman was not a Nazi.
No.
Superman was not a Nazi.
He wasn't a secret Nazi.
He wasn't a stand in for Nazism, nothing like that.
It's just not true.
He would have been a little blonder, I think, if he was.
Yeah, if they were doing that on purpose, they would have done that.