Splat: James Gunn's Superman

Superman (David Corenswet), looking glum. (Warners Brothers.) 

The beginning of James Gunn’s new iteration of the Man of Steel is somewhat promising: Superman (David Corenswet) has intervened to prevent a foreign war, and Lex Luthor (Nicholas Hoult) is running a successful PR campaign to convince people the supposedly apolitical Supe took sides and broke international law. But things rapidly devolve from there. A giant robot machine thingy from the aggressor country is terrorizing Metropolis, except it’s really not a giant machine robot thingy, it’s regular sized, and it’s not really a robot, it’s a supervillain under Luthor’s sway. I’m sure the supervillain’s name was mentioned, but I missed it, and he’s sort of indistinguishable from Luthor’s attack squad, The Raptors, who are either robots or superbeings themselves. Luthor breaks into the Fortress of Solitude and discovers that the message from Jor-el (Bradley Cooper) and Lara (some woman I thought was Lady Gaga but wasn’t) that Superman can only listen to half of—because the second half was damaged—is actually a message telling the Man of Steel to enslave the earth and rule over it. (I’m pretty sure that’s not canon.) Luthor also has a private prison in a “pocket universe” where he keeps his enemies and ex-girlfriends, and there are portals in and out that are in danger of decaying and becoming black holes that could destroy Earth. I think the guards in this prison realm are also Raptors but they might not be. When Superman is captured and put in one of the cells in the pocket universe, there’s a superbeing in his cell who can turn his body into Kryptonite, which is how Supey is kept under control. The superbeing is kept under control because his alien baby is in a cell opposite with someone else who will kill the alien baby if the guy in Superman’s cell doesn’t do what Luthor wants—which, as stated previously, is keep Superman under control. Lex is, of course, a combination of Elon Musk and Donald Trump, and it turns out he’s in league with the aggressor country because he wants to develop the lesser one as Trump wants to do with the Gaza Strip. Also the Justice League, which consists of Green Lantern (Nathan Fillion) and some really deep cuts from the DC stable, Hawkgirl and Mr. Terrific, is around to help Superman out when needed. Maybe. Green Lantern refers to the group as the “Justice Gang,” and Hawkgirl objects to the name, which you’d better find funny because it happens 87 times. I have no idea what Mr. Terrific’s superpower is, but he’s really good with tech stuff. Not to mention another supervillain called the Engineer—not sure what her powers are either—and a murderous clone of Superman, just for fun. Exhausted yet? I sure am.

Hauntology: Spectral Realism in Literature, Film and Art

(University of Texas Press.)                                   (Duke University Press.)

“What remains to be said about an absence that cannot be undone?”

Ulrich Baer, Spectral Evidence

“The secret story is the one we’ll never know, although we’re living in it from day to day.”

Roberto Bolaño

One dark and storm night, I wanted to find way into the densely obscure and hermetic writing of the late Spanish novelist and essayist Roberto Bolaño and I made it halfway there by sating my obsession for the late American novelist and essayist David Foster Wallace, his brother from another mother. They were temporal siblings of sorts, eminently talented thinkers and hyperactive writers who ravished their readers with words calculated to astonish and exhilarate. Both were writing concurrently on opposite sides of the world, the first in Chile originally and the second in multiple locations in America. The rest of the way into Bolaño’s gorgeous and terrifying literary dimension I was vouchsafed, as usual for me, via the most unexpected of alternate routes. An additional signpost leading to the capital city of both Bolaño’s and Wallace’s heart was the twin apparition of two books that pointed the circuitous way further in: Haunting Without Ghosts by Julia Martinez and Baroque New Worlds, edited by Lois Parkinson Zamora and Monika Kaup.