[COLUMN] Supergirl Brings True Grit to the Superhero Genre | by Darren Mooney

Note: This piece contains spoilers for Supergirl, which is in theatres this weekend. If you’re looking for a quick review, I thought it was mostly fine. It is a little clunky in places, suffers from the same computer-generated noise that affects the climax of most of these movies, could commit more strongly to its bolder ideas, and is paced a little awkwardly. However, I quite admired its commitment to its surprising melancholy, enjoyed it as another Craig Gillespie movie about a constructed woman, and appreciated its portrayal of its two leads. So, that warning out of the way, let’s get up, up and away into the essay.

Supergirl begins in a familiar way.

Young Ruthye Marye Knoll (Eve Ridley) witnesses the murder of her father, Elias (Ferdinand Kingsley), on the family homestead at the hands of wandering criminal Krem of the Yellow Hills (Matthias Schoenaerts). Taking a weapon in hand, the 13-year-old girl marches off to the nearest saloon in the hopes of hiring a bounty hunter to track Krem down and to offer Ruthye satisfaction from the immeasurable loss that she has suffered.

This is not a typical opening beat for a superhero film. It is, however, very consciously mirroring True Grit, the 1968 novel written by Charles Portis and adapted twice to film, by Henry Hathaway in 1969 and by the Coen Brothers in 2010. True Grit tells the story of young Mattie Ross (Kim Darby, Hailee Steinfeld), who sets out to avenge the murder of her father by the wandering criminal Tom Chaney (Jeff Corey, Josh Brolin) by hiring bounty hunter Rooster Cogburn (John Wayne, Jeff Bridges).

This is no surprise. Supergirl is very heavily influenced by Tom King and Bilquis Evely’s Supergirl: Woman of Tomorrow, a miniseries explicitly influenced by True Grit. One of King’s magic tricks is building these miniseries around familiar and classic American cinema. His Rorschach is riffing on Citizen Kane. His Superman: Up in the Sky is very clearly The Searchers. His Danger Street is doing Fargo. Even his extended Batman run includes homages to 12 Angry Men and It’s a Wonderful Life.

This is part of what makes King’s work so interesting. At a time when it can feel like so many modern comic books are effectively “comics about comics”, King makes a point to situate the comic book medium in general and the superhero genre in particular in the largely context of American popular culture. This used to be the norm. Will Eisner was heavily influenced by film and animation in his work on The Spirit. The Joker was inspired by Conrad Veidt in The Man Who Laughs.

Supergirl makes a couple of changes to the basic structure of True Grit. It is set in outer space rather than the wild west. Krem is not just a drifting murderer, but the leader of a bunch of interstellar pirates. Ruthye does not just lose her father, but also her brother (Bruce Lennox) and her mother (Emily Piggford). And instead of hiring a drunken, disillusioned bounty hunter named Rooster Cogburn, Ruthye travels alongside a drunken, disillusioned superhero Kara Zor-El (Milly Alcock), also known as Supergirl.

Supergirl makes concessions to the demands of modern blockbusters, but they are often the weakest parts of the film. It is less willing to trust Ruthye to carry the narrative than True Grit is to let Mattie Ross take center stage, which – in the Coens’ adaptation – led to one of the finest performances by a teenager in the history of cinema. Supergirl is at its worst when doing what a superhero film is expected to do, as at the big bombastic climax in which Kara destroys the pirates’ ship.

However, the film is at its most interesting when it is very consciously riffing on the language and the conventions of the classic western story. Early on their adventure, the space bus that Kara and Ruthye are travelling on is attacked by a bunch of scavengers, effectively a science-fiction twist on the classic stagecoach robbery. Later, it is revealed that Krem is taking women from various outposts, riffing on another cliché of the classic western, typified by The Searchers but dating back to 1899.

On the backwater planet of Bilquis, Kara and Ruthye even come across their own drunken and unreliable bounty hunter, the Czarnian Lobo (Jason Momoa). In some ways, Lobo is even more like Cogburn than Kara. He is drunken and unreliable, striking a delicate balance between being remarkably capable in the art of violence but also easily flummoxed and eventually impressed by the precocious Ruthye. Lobo is amoral and chaotic, the ultimate expression of a lawless frontier.

And, ultimately, the film’s resolution feels more heavily influenced by the classic western than by the modern superhero film. After Krem has been defeated, Kara convinces Ruthye to spare the brigand’s life. However, rather than taking Krem into custody or handing him to the authorities, Kara opts for frontier justice. She executes the mass murderer by plunging a knife into his throat. “That’s for what you did to that little girl,” she tells the villain. It’s a classic western coup de grâce.

Supergirl is very obviously not the first superhero movie to be inspired by westerns. The entire superhero genre could be seen as the spiritual descendent of the cowboy, the vigilante hero who represents the rugged individualism of the archetypal American character. Cowboys were popular comic book heroes in the early days of the medium, some surviving until the 1960s. Even past that, both DC and Marvel have deep benches of western heroes like Jonah Hex or the Rawhide Kid.

This influence did carry over into the superhero movies. It is possible, for example, to argue that the central conflict of Captain America: Civil War between the needs of the state and the autonomy of the individual is one of the foundational tensions of the western genre. Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight ended with a riff on the “print the legend” ending of The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, as Batman (Christian Bale) fashions a lie preserving the myth of Harvey Dent (Aaron Eckhart).

However, the superhero film with the heaviest debt to the western is undoubtedly James Mangold’s Logan, which makes sense given how heavily The Wolverine had leaned into the iconography of the samurai film. Mangold took influence from classics like Shane, Unforgiven and The Cowboys, with the film itself extensively quoting from Shane and making a conscious parallel between the mythology of the old west and the classic comic books depicting Logan’s (Hugh Jackman) heroism.

Still, Supergirl exists in an interesting space. Logan was an R-rated artisanal superhero film that released in March even produced a black-and-white cut. In contrast, Supergirl is a much more conventional superhero film, with a PG-13 rating, a prime June release date, and no sign of an artsy black-and-white cut on the horizon. Supergirl is clearly intended as a much more straight-down-the-middle film than Logan, which makes this influence so interesting.

In some ways, Supergirl is drawing a clear evolutionary link between the modern superhero genre and the classic western. After all, the character’s arc over the course of the film is towards accepting her place as a superhero on Earth alongside her cousin Superman (David Corenswet). It perhaps makes sense that this journey should involve Kara making her way through the structure and narrative framework of a western, beginning as one sort of vigilante hero before becoming another.

However, there is also an interesting tension. Supergirl is not a conventional western. It is a space western, evoking something like Peter Hyams’ Outland or Joss Whedon’s Firefly. It is set across a variety of planets through deep space, with only a few brief flashbacks and the closing scene set on Earth. Part of what is interesting about Supergirl is that, in contrast to the western framing, so many of these worlds seem closer to their end than to their beginning.

This makes sense, reflecting Kara’s origin. Kara is a Kryptonian. She is the child of a dead world. However, unlike her cousin, Kara has memories of her lost planet. She grew up in the floating city of Argo, a remnant of Krypton that fled to the stars. However, even that life was marked by death and destruction, as the city’s residents inevitably succumbed to radiation poisoning. Kara watched her mother (Emily Beecham) waste away, before leaving her Argo and watching another world die.

Kara and Ruthye follow Krem to the planet Bilquis, a rotting and decaying slum where the brigands pick through the wreckage. From there, Kara chases Krem to the dead planet Barenton, a relic of Silver Age continuity, a planet with a green sun that is actively toxic to Kara. On their first trip off-world, Kara and Ruthye take a space bus that is attacked by scavengers who live off spare parts. Leading them away from the bus, Kara flies through a debris field, the remains of other victims.

As he carves his way across the cosmos, Krem leaves a trail of dead bodies – including multiple children – in his wake. The brigands are explicitly the remnants of dying race, stealing women as breeding stock. There is a sense in Supergirl that Kara and Ruthye are navigating a dying universe, one that is in the process of unravelling. Entropy takes hold. The universe of Supergirl is perhaps so far gone that it is beyond salvation. It’s an interesting tension within the film.

There is an obvious metatextual reading of this as a commentary on the relationship between superhero films and westerns, an acknowledgement – akin to Marvel referencing “superhero fatigue” in promoting Wonder Man – that the superhero genre is perhaps past its peak of cultural relevance and in decline like the western eventually was. Given that every superhero film last year was outgrossed by The Devil Wears Prada 2, perhaps the sun is setting on the superhero genre.

There is also a sense the future of this attempt at a shared cinematic DC universe overseen by James Gunn and Peter Safran may already be doomed. The company has yet to announce a release past next year’s rushed follow-up to Superman, Man of Tomorrow, and the creative team’s original ambitions seem to have been discarded. Regardless of what the team are saying publicly about David Ellison’s plans, the upcoming merger with Skydance has to be a source of anxiety. Supergirl and Ruthye may already be journeying across a dead universe.

However, all of this risks straying into the realm of “comic book movies about comic book movies.” There is perhaps something else simmering behind this tension within Supergirl, the genre cocktail of a postapocalyptic superhero western. After all, the superhero and the western are quintessentially American genres, they reflect something fundamental in the American character. They represent a sort of pulp American mythology, archetypes that speak to how the nation sees itself.

Superman, in particular, has long been an avatar of American self-image, fighting for “truth, justice and the American Way”, a slogan that was deprecated but has recently been re-established. Like other heroes who come by their powers by birth or chance, Mark Smylie contends Superman could be seen as “a manifestation of America's self-image as a reluctant or accidental superpower”; the kind of hero who unilaterally decides to intervene in foreign wars without international consensus.

Although Craig Gillispie is an Australian director, his films do have a recurring – and occasionally quite grim – vision of America. His 2011 remake of Fright Night unfolds in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, in the vast and eerily empty suburbs in the desert outside Las Vegas, where people can just vanish in the midst of a “transient” community. However, Gillispie’s films would become even more pointed in the context of the Trump administration.

Released in 2017, I, Tonya positions the story of Tonya Harding (Margot Robbie) as a fable about the fracturing of a consensus reality in contemporary America, with the character warning in her closing monologue, “there’s no such thing as truth.” Dumb Money is a recounting of the GameStop short squeeze of January 2021, albeit one that emphasizes the ways in which – even in those circumstances – the system is designed to protect the most powerful and the most wealthy.

If the western and the superhero film are genres that speak to something quintessentially American, then it makes sense that Supergirl should find an apocalyptic anxiety lurking at the intersection of those two genres. In some ways, this is the heart of Supergirl, it is a western-influenced superhero movie that stands at the end of American exceptionalism, a meditation on worlds and mythologies crumbling to dust in real time. As the world falls to pieces, where is there to retreat to but a more primal mythology?