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By Root 5580 0

American boy. But when, as a teenager, he has his first embarrassing encounter with a girl, he feels the need to show off, and runs home faster than a car or train. His earthly `father, just before dying, tells him he must have been sent to earth `for a purpose'. Hearing voices in the night, he is drawn to the barn, where sees a magical rod of crystal glowing in the darkness of a hole in the ground. It is a sign of his awakening destiny as a man, and he goes off, after a touching farewell to `Mom, on a long journey to the North Pole, where in caves of ice he meets a vision of his real Father, to undergo an initiation rite into manhood.

In fact, he emerges less confident and manly than before, as Clark Kent, the gauche newspaperman in the great city of Metropolis. He is particularly ill-at-ease with Lois, the girl reporter to whom he is attracted. But when Lois gets trapped on top of a skyscraper, in a helicopter which is just about to topple into the street, we see him for the first time transformed into Superman. He swoops up to snatch her from death, in a feat which leaves everyone in the city stunned. Who is this amazing `Superman'? Lois interviews him in his Superman role and they float around in the clouds, exchanging gooey sentimental platitudes.

We now meet the story's Monster-figure, a super-criminal who lives in a luxurious lair beneath the city, plotting an immense and diabolical crime. He plans to redirect two nuclear rockets to land on California, one targeted on the San Andreas fault, intended to trigger off such an earthquake that the coastal strip of the state will collapse into the sea. Having bought up much of the land to the east of the fault, he will then be fabulously rich. While Lois is away in the desert, investigating his secret land purchases, Superman falls into the super-villain's clutches, and is only rescued from death in the nick of time by the villain's girlfriend, Eva, who is attracted to him. After his `thrilling escape' he zooms off, too late to stop one of the rockets exploding, setting off huge earthquakes. By a superhuman feat he manages to stop the San Andreas fault splitting apart, but he cannot stop Lois being engulfed and crushed to death. And at this point the archetypal symbolism of the story finally goes completely haywire.

Superman has at least saved most of the `kingdom, but he has not overcome the `shadow' and the anima is dead. In this sense the `shadow' has won. But Superman then uses his supernatural powers to save Lois, as his new subsidiary anima-figure, only to realise to his horror that he has done the one thing he has been forbidden to do by his Father. By saving Lois from destruction, he has `interfered in human history'. In shame he spirals off up into space, and the film ends on an image of him whizzing round the Earth spinning far below. Even in superficial terms, none of this makes sense. Why should saving Lois constitute interference in human history, any more than Superman's other feats? What had he been sent to earth for in the first place, except to interfere in history? And what sort of an ending is it that, having lost one anima-figure and saved another, he cannot then be united with Lois but must hurtle off into space to behave like the Flying Dutchman?

The key, of course, lies in the fact that, despite his outward guise as Superman, the hero has never been properly a man at all. He is just a two-dimensional fantasy figure, spun out of infantile make-believe. He is unable to relate in any grown-up way to the feminine, either in his gauche Clark Kent persona or in his make-believe Superman-role: which is why it is entirely logical that he should end up losing his anima to the `shadow', even though he then saves a second anima-figure with whom he does not end up united. In terms of archetypal symbolism, such a hopeless lack of resolution makes it entirely logical that the story should end on the image of this little `boy hero who cannot grow up' spiralling in futile circles round the Earth, because this is precisely what he has become: a split-off ego circling