Tuesday, June 18, 2013

Faora Doesn't Get Evolution

I admit, I’m a strange bird. I’m always keeping an eye out for content for this blog which has me coloring even the most secular interactions in my day-to-day as metaphors for religion. When I see something that inherently does have religious themes, I’m so distracted about how to leverage it into a post that I stop living in the moment. This weeks opening movie, Man of Steel, has inherent Christian themes--yet I barely realized until retrospection. This goes to show, as much as I think about Jesus, I think even more about Superman.

Spoilers follow.


Sure, Man of Steel depicts Kal-El as a miraculous birth who grows up to stand beside stainglass windows of JC and float out of space ships crucifixion-style, but as I said before, I barely noticed in the awesomeness that is Superman. The only thing that bothered me enough to take me out of the flick was a mid-fight speech in which General Zod’s right-hand woman waxed poetic about the merits of evolution over morality. To sum up, she said that their military core of Kryptonians had evolved past the more primitive concept of morality and that history shows that evolutionary progress always wins. *Heavy sigh.* Can’t we save the evolution talk for the X-Men? It’s kinda their thing.

Faora, Zod’s follower, has an oversimplified view of the Theory of Evolution that I would expect from a Christian fundamentalist, but not so much from a member of a highly advanced civilization. First off, it’s nonsensical to say that only Zod’s sect is lacking in morality seeing how Kryptonians at large clearly have morals--see exhibit A, Jor-El. Evolution doesn't so dramatically effect a threesome of criminals and leave out the general pop. It just doesn't work that way.

Second, Zod has a sense of morality, just not the sense of morality. He clearly cares for the people of Krypton in that his purpose until the final battle is to either save them or repopulate them. It could be argued that Zod only cared about certain bloodlines, but then so did Jor-El. Super-Dad opts to save his own bloodline while Zod, presumably, could have saved many, just not all. (I realize that Jor-El allowed for future generations of Kryptonian bloodlines through the Codex in Kal-El’s cells, but that eventuality is a long-shot compared to Zod's pro-active use of the Codex.)

And third, the message is oversimplified to the point of falsehood. “Evolving past morality” implies that we also evolved to morality. This means, to her villainous logic, that altruism is a trait that was once selected for survival, but then stopped being selected. I can’t think of how that such a change could have occurred within the Phantom Zone--especially when only a single generation was trapped. If I didn’t know better, I’d say Feora was victim of a Texan education.

Of course, I’m over thinking this, but propagating a message that couldn’t be true in their world or ours to a theater-going public that already largely buys into it is a bad thing. It’s made worse when churches are capitalizing on it by quoting the film as part of their Jesus was the first superhero campaign. I just hope Man of Steel 2 isn’t subtitled “The Passion of the Clark.”

13 comments:

  1. Kal-El? I thought it was Cal-El. I clearly need to read more comic books.

    As to the evolution thing, yeah, that bugged the crap out of me too. Do you know the leanings of whoever wrote the script? It struck me as "she's evil, she should be an evolutionist!"

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    1. He is Jewish, not sure how Jewish.

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    2. Wait, Superman's Jewish? That explains his trouble with the ladies.

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    3. Heh, the script writer is Jewish.

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  2. Faora, Zod’s follower, has an oversimplified view of the Theory of Evolution that I would expect from a Christian fundamentalist, but not so much from a member of a highly advanced civilization.

    She has the view of evolution which one would expect from a Hollywood scriptwriter. This is an omnipresent problem with this kind of movie. Except in rare cases where the writer or director has consulted with someone knowledgeable to get their information straight, aliens representing super-advanced civilizations in the movies tend to sound like ignorant goobers when talking about science. The real thing would go over the heads of most of the audience, or (in the case of evolution) might even offend them -- so why bother?

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  3. O.K. Grundy...being a native Texan and damn proud of our education system, except for the part Gov. Perry played in fucking with funding, you are going to have to explain, "If I didn’t know better, I’d say Feora was victim of a Texan education."

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    1. I'm sure a Texas education is perfectly fine in most respects, but it is ground zero for the many attempts to teach Creationism in the classroom and add Intelligent Design to science textbooks. That's what I was referring to.

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    2. True Grundy...there are a lot of "Conservative" fruitcakes here including our dumb governor, but by the time my children and grandchildren entered the University of Texas and Texas A & M, they were all well aware of all the options and wise enough to choose with logic and smart enough to graduate Agnostics with honors.

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  4. To your first paragraph, I happened to be listening to some Christian talk radio today, and one of the hosts was talking about Superman commending Hollywood for producing a movie with such strong Christian themes, despite all of the violence. He didn't touch the evolution thing, but rather one of the other hosts grabbed the "violence" comment and used it to remind the listeners how a continual, violent battle was raging behind the scenes of our lives, the battle between the forces of good and the forces of evil. He lamented how most people are completely oblivious to this struggle.

    My thought was, "Ghee, if everyone is unaware of this epic battle raging all around them, why would you think that there actually is one?" :-)

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    1. I love when they try so hard to bring in some movie reference. This reminds me of what was probably the stupidest sermon I ever heard, it was when Ms. Doubtfire was in the theater. In the movie, when Robin Williams needed to come up with a name, he glanced at a headline that said something like "police doubt fire was arson". Our preacher lamented the wasted opportunity, he should have talked about Thomas, who first had doubt, but then was on fire for God. It was totally brutal, and he stretched that premise out for like 20 minutes.

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  5. Nice article. I watched the movie the day after it opened. I took note of the Christian elements and Faora's twisted Social Darwinist view of evolution. However, the obvious connection between them didn't become apparent until I started reading similar blog entries days later. I blame the fact that I put my brain on silent mode when I entered the theater. I find this helps when watching movies like this because I tend to pick them to pieces if I don't. I think it's sad that the filmmakers had to stoop this low just to satisfy the creationist demographic.

    I've written an article on mentions of evolution from the film that might interest you. I focus on the "codex" and compare it to genomic cataloging of humans and our primate cousins. I also rebut the creationist response to Faora's line from her fight with Superman.

    http://apeimmortal.wordpress.com/2013/06/19/evolution-in-man-of-steel/

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    1. "I put my brain on silent mode"

      Then what are you? who is, You(I)? you said "I put my brain on silent mode) are you suggesting that you can Control your brain?

      If so, you aren't your brain.

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  6. First, I think everyone that sees religious themes in Man of Steel, is reading WAY TOO MUCH into it. Accept it for what it is, a super hero movie. I've lost count of the number of times I've seen it already. And religion has never crossed my mind. Not once.

    Secondly, we don't even know if Faora believed what she was saying about evolution. She knows that Kal El grew up on Earth, so her assuming that his knowledge of Krypton being limited isn't exactly crazy thinking. She's from a super advanced civilization. Maybe she was just trying to fuck with his head. Using a little psychological warfare on her adversary.

    I mean, would it really be shocking for a advanced civilization to use psychological warfare in conjunction with conventional warfare?

    But, what do I know...

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