Latepass on this one on a day full of screeners. But I really, really love that the new trailer for Man of Steel presents Superman as a story that Lois Lane is tracking down:

I’m not super-crazy about her giving Clark Kent his nom de guerre. But I really appreciate her being the audience surrogate, the one who frames the mystery of who Clark Kent has tried to be and who—and what—he actually is. Superhero stories have been very, very weighted towards internal journeys and self-discovery in recent years. Man of Steel is right to acknowledge that the emergence of people with superpowers would be an even more seismic change for the rest of us who have to live in the world changed by their presence.

Over at The Mary Sue, Jill Pantozzi passes along a cool rumor. Man of Steel director Zack Snyder, who already switched the race of Clark Kent’s Daily Planet editor Perry White from white to black with the casting of Laurence Fishburne, may have turned Jimmy Olsen into a woman:

Actress Rebecca Buller is listed as Jenny Olsen on the Man of Steel IMDB page. You can’t always trust the information there but when you add in this still from the trailer of Fishburne running with Buller, things get a bit firmer. She doesn’t have red hair but then, Lois does this time around so I guess a swap was in order there too. Perhaps Snyder is trying to make a point that we need to start breaking the mold when it comes to comic adaptations.

Jimmy Olsen has had a lot of interesting character morphs in old Superman comics and while he’s dressed up as a woman for undercover work several times, he’s never actually been a woman. Again, this whole thing could be totally off. Buller could be any Daily Planet employee, or just a friend of Perry’s, there’s no way to know for sure since neither Warner Bros. or Snyder have mentioned Jimmy Olsen but what do you think of the possibility?

I wouldn’t be surprised by this. Snyder, whose wife Deborah is his long-time producer, had always seemed more interested than a lot of his action-directing brethren in female characters. He managed to get the underrated Sucker-Punch made at a time when there was an unofficial Warner Brothers’ ban on movies with female main characters in place. The performance he got out of Lena Headey in 300 is the best thing in that arguably racist mess of a film, and he did a nice job with Malin Ackerman, an actress I’ve never found particularly compelling in other circumstances in Watchmen, too. And Man of Steel is also rumored to feature a Kryptonian supervillainess in addition to General Zod.

None of which is to say that I think Snyder has all of his ideas about women worked out in a particularly coherent way. And it doesn’t exactly help that some of his earlier projects were adaptations of sexually violent source material by authors—Frank Miller and Alan Moore—who have significant issues of their own to sort through. But I keep coming back to his work because at least he’s thinking about things like women and self-sacrifice, and friendship, and loyalty. He’s no Joss Whedon. But if Jimmy Olsen’s become Jenny, and Snyder’s become one of the only superhero directors willing to tweak a fandom with a decision that questions the invoilate nature of canon, it’ll be another reason to keep an eye on Snyder if only because I want to see what his female characters are eventually going to evolve into.

Lots of folks have joked, on seeing the trailer for Zack Snyder’s newest movie, that they’re excited to see Terrence Malick’s Man of Steel:

The thing that actually strikes me as most powerful about this trailer, though, is that Pa Kent’s speech is one a mortal man could easily give his human son. Our superhero movies have gotten kind of disconnected from masculinity in general. Bruce Wayne has a particular violent experience in childhood that spurs him to superheroism, and even more particular resources with which to finance his ambitions. Peter Parker may be the only person to be bitten by a radioactive spider, but great responsibility doesn’t come only with great power—sometimes that relationship is crushingly inverse. The X-Men are valuable precisely because they’re a metaphor for otherness. But the truth is that white men are more likely to possess money and privilege, the currency that can purchase or convey the closest things we have to superpowers, and how they use it matters.

It’s easy to treat Superman as an alien, or even as a kind of bodhisattva. But he’s potentially even more interesting as a man, a kind of sober Ron Swanson, a vision of masculinity divorced from contempt for women or concerns about heterosexual credibility. I don’t know that there’s anything in Snyder’s ouvre that suggests he’s up for that. And after The Dark Knight Rises, I have significant concerns about David Goyer’s ability to handle big ideas with much in the way of deftness or commitment. But it’s a thought, and I’ll be curious to see if either of them rise to the occasion.

I’ve been thinking about this a lot since the finale of the first season of Homeland, which I enjoyed, but I gather a lot of people were vexed by in various ways. But Carrie’s decision to undergo electroshock treatment, even at the cost of her memory and some valuable analysis, reminded me the theme of self-sacrifice in Sucker Punch. As I wrote at the time:

This is a distinctly female story. And I’m surprised no one’s discussing the ending, and the complicated themes of self-sacrifice at its core. Going into the movie, I expected a bunch of sexy asskicking. I didn’t really expect Snyder to pull a Joss Whedon. In the course of this movie, three of the main characters die, and their deaths are genuinely shocking. Malone throws herself in front of a knife to save Cornish, playing her sister. Vanessa Hudgens’ and Jamie Chung’s characters are murdered. And, that moment between Abbie Cornish and Emily Browning? At the end of the movie, Babydoll sacrifices herself to save Sweet Pea, gives herself up to Jon Hamm’s lobotomist as a distraction so another woman can run away. They all choose collaboration. The price of getting just one woman to freedom is so high. And while that’s less dramatically true in the world at large, I think it’s still true

I wonder if there’s something to both of these stories that’s an interesting anecdote to the Strong Female Character nonsense, and to the triumphal narratives of action movies in general. There’s a difference between tearing your female characters down before building them up, the process Tad Friend described in his critically important profile of Anna Faris last summer, and recognizing that it’s extremely difficult to win. Particularly if you’re a woman. It is harder to beat a man of equal fitness in a fight. It may be harder to convince people of something terrible that’s happened to you or your family — or to the country — if you’re at risk of being dismissed as a crazy, hysterical woman whether that’s an accurate description of your brain chemistry or not. Women may be more accustomed to compromise, to accepting outcomes that are less than ideal for them if they think it’s the best deal they can get. That might not make for action movies or thrillers that are satisfying in the straightforward ways that most stories in that genre are. But they could be the basis for something more complex and uneasy, and very interesting.

One of the best things about writing about multiple media is that you’re not subject to the tyranny of Best Of lists. I could no more decide between Shame and Hugo for a numbered slot than I could pick between Revenge and My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy (though can we please get Kanye writing rhymes for and about Emily Thorne? I need an update on Snoop Dogg and his Sookie Stackhouse obsession). However, there were a lot of things that made me happy this year, and because Oprah’s not rockin’ it anymore, here is a semi-chronological-but-unranked list of my 26-odd favorite things to consume or discuss in 2011. A similar list of my least favorite things will follow tomorrow.

1. Frank Ocean makes us all hurt so good: I’m more irritated than anything else by the antics of Odd Future Wolf Gang Kill Them All. But it’s worth it for Frank Ocean, who rocks specific melancholia like nobody’s business. “Novacane” was one of my favorite songs of 2011.

2. Zack Snyder’s Sucker Punch: Before y’all accuse me of getting all Armond White up in the business, let me be clear. I don’t think Sucker Punch is an affirmatively good movie or that Snyder is a visionary director (though I appreciate that he actually has a distinctive visual style). But as aestheticized meditation on the horrors of lobotomy, a frightening and overlooked part of American mental health history, I found it unexpectedly moving. Plus, Snyder circumvented a ban on female leads with the movie.

3. Cedar Rapids sets Ed Helms loose: Up In the Air, but for people who actually live in flyover country, and Parks and Recreation with a deeper undercurrent of bitter darkness and isolation. There should be more popular culture about the struggle to be fundamentally decent.

4. War photographers movie The Bang-Bang Club and HBO’s biopic of the Louds, Cinema Verite: After the death of Tim Heatherington and as Joao Silva recovered from his injuries, The Bang-Bang Club offered a look at what it takes not just to put yourself in danger as a war photographer, but at what it means to be an observer rather than someone who intervenes. Conversely, Cinema Verite went back to the invention of reality television to explore what it means to be watched — and dissected — by a mass audience.

5. Game of Thrones is brilliant, and even the frustrating A Dance With Dragons is grist for the mill: I worry that George R.R. Martin’s universe is spiraling completely out of control, too big for any series to contain. But the first season of the HBO adaptation featured great performances, particularly by a host of very young actors and a smart sense for cuts and world-building. I don’t know if we’ll reach the end of this fascinating, maddening saga any time soon. But the ride looks like it’s going to be delightful.
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Up to New York Comic Con today. The bridge is yours.

-Ten imperfect things Apple released under Steve Jobs.

-Snow White: killing motherfuckers.

-Is Superman no longer a journalist? Who will I look up to now? Curse you, Zack Snyder!

-Please, please tell me that Renee Zellweger’s new show is basically Valley of the Dolls.

-Love me some Glenn Close-as-butler:

This rather generic description of the plot of Zack Snyder’s Superman has some folks in the Internet perturbed that we’re going to get Smallville rather than an original story:

In the pantheon of superheroes, Superman is the most recognized and revered character of all time. Clark Kent/Kal-El (Cavill) is a young twentysomething journalist who feels alienated by powers beyond anyone’s imagination. Transported to Earth years ago from Krypton, an advanced alien planet, Clark struggles with the ultimate question – Why am I here? Shaped by the values of his adoptive parents Martha (Lane) and Jonathan Kent (Costner), Clark soon discovers that having super abilities means making very difficult decisions. But when the world needs stability the most, it comes under attack. Will his abilities be used to maintain peace or ultimately used to divide and conquer? Clark must become the hero known as “Superman,” not only to shine as the world’s last beacon of hope but to protect the ones he loves.

If I have one wish for the movie that is unlikely to be fulfilled, it’s that Clark Kent’s journalism career be something other than background noise, an excuse to be in and out of the office. One assumes that Lois Lane’s Pulitzer in Superman Returns was for commentary, rather than investigative journalism, given that she’s writing about why Superman’s unnecessary, but who knows? If this is a story about Superman’s journey from neutrality to partisanship, from working as a mild-mannered journalist to joining forces with the U.S. Army against the forces of General Zod, journalism might actually be a decent way for Clark to work through who he wants to be.

The idea that journalism is, or should be, a purely neutral exercise is a silly one, and overemphasized in our current discourse. Reporting out a story generally leads you to a conclusion, and good journalism doesn’t just mean presenting both sides in equal measure—it means explaining why that conclusion is true, and hopefully, to action by the people who can take it. It’d be nice to see Clark’s reporting lead him to a conclusion that triggers his decision to put on the cape and tights, to see an actual interaction between the alter-ego and the superhero.