Supergirl
Can We Live Again?
One thing about Supergirl is that she does some implausible stuff. The history of implausible stuff goes way back. I mean it goes so far back. It goes back to Homer: the whole story about the Cyclops—that’s implausible—the whole story about the Scylla and Charybdis—that’s implausible. Moving up more to the modern cinema is the Man with No Name doing his gun fu, shooting apples off trees while feathering the hammer on his pistol, and shooting the hangman’s rope to free his partner-in-crime Tuco in The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly. Luke Skywalker shooting TIE fighters while bucking-bronco-busting on a gun that swivels around in all directions, a device he’s never used and received no obvious instruction on—that’s implausible. Luke learning how to use a sword in a really fast timeline—that’s implausible; a light saber, not just a sword; he learns how not to cut his own leg off, right? That’s pretty important, but he learns it and becomes an expert swordsman—implausible.
And so, when it comes to a female character doing implausible things, there’s not a higher bar she has to clear. She can do implausible things if her character aligns with that. The way the Man with No Name’s character aligned with shooting apples off trees; the way his plan goes down in For a Few Dollars More, or A Fistful of Dollars—it’s all implausible, that’s what I mean to say. Implausibility is the heart of literature, not realism. If all I read were books that seemed to match the world I live in, I would not be experiencing anything new. A dream that sets us free of the real world and makes us believe it is other than it is, and so with the literature called cinema. They expand our world by showing us what we had not previously taken as real.
Her first fights are implausible. She has no powers at the red-sun dive bar, and she gets beaten in a way even director Sergio Leone decided the Man with No Name could not stand up to. But he wasn’t a Kryptonian. Her fight scenes sans powers are not plausible, but they are in alignment with her character, that she can take a beating. She is Supergirl. Superman deserves the same cinematic charity. When the green sun threatens her life, she doesn’t will her way out of it. That would be both implausible and not in alignment with her character at that point in the story.
The beginning of Supergirl is disgusting. It’s a young woman drinking herself into oblivion, waking up hung over, day after day. Going to disgusting places with people who don’t seem like good people. Having no apparent way to bathe, brushing her teeth on the video phone, leaving food containers all over: half eaten cereal for Krem, the villain, to eat in a most disgusting way. The movie is filled with disgusting scenes, disgusting characters, disgusting acts, and disgusting objects. But then so are many movies. This is not a Disney Star Wars movie. This is a grimy, gross movie, and if that’s a problem, I believe it’s only made one because the main characters are female. If it were men as the main characters, the good guys, it would be taken for granted.
Kara Zor-El (Supergirl) is familiar with these disgusting places. She goes to these dive bars on different planets. One question I have is about where she got her wonderful little bungalow in a beautiful valley, in a field, with her miniature RV spaceship with no obvious technical implements required for space travel other than boosters. This is not a problem. This is a comic book. Comic books are where the implausible goes to have a rampage.
It is Kara’s unhygienic worldliness that saves the well-being of Ruthye, her sidekick-in-training, whose family was brutally murdered for no good reason, as if there could be a good reason for such a meaningless murder of innocents. Ruthye is out for revenge, and she is driven and she is not quite in her right mind, given how bold she is as she accosts people she knows nothing about, and thrusts herself into their faces. She is nearly burned with a cannon-caliber cigar. The cigar that Jason Momoa’s character smokes is always the same stub, always at the same length, always the same level of burning, as if it’s just an electronic prop—which it may have been—and it produced surprisingly little smoke. Momoa stole every scene he was in. It’s as if his entire role in the movie was to be a rollicking, maniacal cameo.
These three encounter each other all alone in a dive bar, Kara warns Ruthye off approaching Momoa’s character, and things nearly get ugly until Kara goes into Metropolis “ditz” mode, as Momoa’s character might say, and pulls the wool over his eyes, telling him that she and Rylie are mere tourists out for a lark from Metropolis on Earth. Momoa’s costuming reminded me of Rob Zombie’s. I think it’s an appropriate casting.
So, Supergirl starts off, losing herself passively in whatever she’s drinking that intoxicates her like whiskey, which is what she calls it—and one drink she says she doesn’t even know the identity of. As the story moves on and she becomes more involved with Ruthye and the plight of women who are kidnapped and raped to produce children for the band of bad guys who are thoroughly repulsive and evil, the emotions that Kara seems to be experiencing are surfacing. She is not drinking. She is sober through all of this. This is not what she is used to, and in one scene she lets out a silent scream in space, a deliberate, premeditated sending out of fury, grief, and rage, and not just a careless venting. Here she feels the feelings she has been subduing with intoxicants. Here, in a controlled way, she focuses the emotions that are boiling up inside of her and lets them out in a teardrop. She has just witnessed a family being murdered by Krem, the ultimate bad guy. She saved Ruthye but she didn’t save the family. How American: we don’t get one or the other, we get one and the other. This might’ve been the first time young Supergirl, at 23, has experienced this kind of either/or, the first time she has earnestly applied herself to work for the good, to fight for the good, and not in nice ways.
This scream is a turning point in Kara’s story arc. She is really involved this time, and she had not intended to become involved at the outset. She resisted Ruthye’s call to fight for the good.
The similarity between Kara’s little spaceship and the camper-trailer spaceship in The Chemical Brothers video for the track “Live Again,” may be coincidental, but the effect is similar. The spaceships appear completely unsuited to the rigors of space; there are household amenities in the spaceships; the spaceship Kara drives around in is like a little camper. And Supergirl is an answer to the question that is the song’s chorus, “Can we live again?” She lives again, after that scream. She goes after the bad guys, she meets with misfortune and pain, and she fights for her friends and her dog, and for the good. She vanquishes her foes with aplomb, knocking down even Krem, the villain who somehow has superhuman powers. Superhuman strength. Superhuman brutality. Superhuman amoralism. He is inhuman (he is not human, he is an alien, but you get the idea).
When Ruthye makes her decision to call off her hunt, she has released the rancor that drove her mad, that drove her up the wall and led her into murderous rages. Though in a way she still gets her revenge, she is loosened enough from the rigid, serious, hyper-moral child she was as she pursued vengeance for her family. And she’s ready to live. She’s ready to let go. She’s ready to open her heart again to the good things and fun things (not always good things) of the world. And Supergirl has developed: she has learned how to care again. And to fight plausibly, even!