I Might Have Killed Superman

Super/Man: The Christopher Reeve Story appears in theaters on October 11. I have a confession to make, and I’ve often thought about writing it down. This seems like the appropriate time. Here goes. I think I might have killed Christopher Reeve. There, I feel better already. I should say that I meant to kill Superman but that I killed Christopher Reeve instead. It was intentional in some respect, but the indirect outcome and the extended period of suffering before his demise would suggest that I was not entirely responsible. So, I killed Superman, but maybe it was an accident. I have always felt awful about it either way. I hope sufficient time has passed for me to talk about it without offending anyone. After I overcame my initial panic, I felt awful about it then, too. It messed me up for several months, maybe more.

Nobody should get the wrong idea. First, I’ll tell how it occurred to me to kill Superman, and then I’ll show how I went about it. These two things are different. One involves imagining, the other doing. The idea itself, for example, first took shape in my mind one morning a month before Superman fell off his horse and broke his neck. But then it took me the rest of the day to figure out how I would articulate that idea.

Around 9:30 am on February 26, 1995, I had an 8-inch black-and-white TV on in the background of my kitchen. I was frying two eggs and a sausage link. Alcohol would be a sad excuse for what happened. Here I am, willing to admit that our inner demons play roles in life and that being drunk on a Sunday morning at the age of twenty-eight excuses very little of what comes next.

I lived in a narrow two-story row house on the National Register of Historical Landmarks. I assume it still is. Some of Jefferson’s slaves lived there. Its wooden floors squeaked when you walked on them. It was painted bright yellow inside and out, with white trim everywhere else—gutters, shutters, doorframes, bookshelves, handrails, and baseboards—all white. It looked like an old wedding cake facing the railroad tracks across from the University of Virginia Hospital in Charlottesville.

The McLaughlin Group resembled a belching match at a frat party for political reporters. A half-hour interview followed it. “From Washington, DC, John McLaughlin’s One on One, an unrehearsed, probing inside exchange with and about the people making the news. Sponsored partly by the Archer Daniels Midland Company—ADM, supermarket to the world—and by the Mutual of Omaha Companies—protection for your changing world. Here’s the host, John McLaughlin.” That late winter morning in 1995, John McLaughlin, all jowls, wrinkles, spittle, and big bony fingers, sat down with Christopher Reeve and Lynne Cheney—wife of Dick and mother of Liz. The House had just cut $5 million from the budgets of the National Endowment of the Arts (NEA) and the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH).

On the issue of funding the Arts and Humanities, one might expect a graduate student in literature to agree with an activist actor and not a conservative politician. But the interview didn’t make me happy with Superman. Superman wanted more funding for the arts. He wanted the government to resist the dangerous effects of autonomous donors. Superman argued that even though the private sector funded the arts to the tune of $9 billion, and even though federal funding contributed only $167 million, the government’s role was still critical. The federal government could “identify,” he said, pointing at McLaughlin, “on a national level, a standard of excellence that shows, A, that this government cares about the arts, that it cares about the vision of the future in terms of our artistic and—our soul really, as a culture. And, two, it’s not a handout, is another important thing to point out, is that it’s money that immediately has a return.” This seemed muddled to me and in more ways than one.

Superman, faster than a speeding bullet, makes lame, grammatically loose arguments about how the government has good taste and ought to set artistic standards. Superman, tossing out bogus figures like unicorn points in kindergarten. I found myself nodding along with Lynne Cheney at every turn. Take Superman’s claim that the Frank Lloyd Wright home in Chicago somehow drew $26 million into the local economy. That number, said Cheney, “assumed that every visitor to the museum would not have visited Chicago unless the Frank Lloyd Wright home were there.” She was right. Absurd. Superman was not just full of s**t; he was peddling a flaming bag of s**t.

On top of all that, McLaughlin’s questions were sophomoric.

At one point, he rattled off a list of obscenities masquerading as masterpieces and asked Superman if anyone should consider them art. “Karen Finley smothering herself with chocolate? The Mapplethorpe exhibit? Ron Athey’s blood-stained towels? Piss Christ by Andres Serrano?” Superman was adamant, “Of course, it’s not art.” “It’s not art?” McLaughlin swiveled and lunged forward, almost falling out of his chair. He raised his pen like a tiny hammer, “It was a mistake?” “Absolutely a mistake.”

In less than ten minutes, I had listened to Superman imagine the government as an arbiter of artistic perception and ability. He argued further that the government could stimulate the economy by taking money from the rest of us and giving it to artists. So many problems bubbled up through those culverts of my mind typically devoted to the digestion of such ideas that I finally stood up and began shouting at the TV. “No, Superman, no! That’s wrong, double-Dutch wrong! And you know it! Shame on you! Superman! … No!”

McLaughlin feigned concern over just who in Washington watches over who’s watching all the artists whitewashing Washington. “And you’re right, John, that’s all in Washington!” roared back Cheney, not appearing to understand him. Her solution was to allow charitable deductions to continue to divert tax money toward the arts. “Let individuals make that decision, not the federal bureaucrats.”

But Superman thought he had a better answer. A regulatory board at the NEA: “An artist who receives public funds must be able to go in there and show how his work is in the public interest!!! On that basis alone, Mapplethorpe and Serrano would have failed.”

“On that basis alone?!” McLaughlin now straightened his shoulders and leaned back for the close. After an awkward cut, the camera zoomed in on his face. After another awkward cut, he spun toward Superman. “We’re running out of time here, Superman.” An unconscious slip? Was he mocking him?! “The question is this. Do you see a role for the U.S. government that goes beyond the economic potential that you see in underwriting artists?”

“Yes,” Reeve fired back. Silence followed. McLaughlin glanced down to admire his socks, expecting Superman to carry on at some length. He recovered, sitting up again. He shot his cuffs. “What is it?” Superman’s answer made no sense. A tangent torched by something illogical: “It is all great nations support the arts. That is just a fact around the world.” “A fact around the world,” I muttered after him.

McLaughlin came to Superman’s rescue, though, by asserting more than asking, “You mean the symbolism of it?!” “Yes.” Superman’s eyes relaxed a bit, and then he went on, still a bit off script, out of cadence: “Yes. This, it says that among the things that we care about for a life of our country, our spiritual growth, or artistic growth, who we are as a people, how the future’s going to remember us, is going to have to do with whether or not we encourage the arts.”

This was more difficult to follow than it needed to be. A mouthful of rhetorical stunts. Still, what did I just watch? According to Superman, the arts and humanities were about “our soul really,” “our spiritual growth,” and Piss Christ was “absolutely a mistake,” and Superman was ready to save us all from economic stagnation and bad taste by taking our money and funding the arts. This ticked me off all day. All day I was ticked off. Kicking rocks and muttering s**t. I thought about it as I changed the oil of my car. I thought about it as I crossed the tracks over the bridge to the Corner. Twice that afternoon I said out loud, “Superman, no!” startling myself in the process.

That evening, I wrote a dialogue between Christ and Superman. I’d been reading the Platonic Dialogues and certain masters of the form from the Spanish Renaissance, like Antonio de Guevara. On the one hand, it was just a novelistic exercise, academic nonsense; on the other hand, it was some sort of voodoo or witchcraft, a moral purge. Something more characteristic of Massachusetts or the Caribbean than Virginia. But I was not happy with Superman. The idea of that level of superhero placing his left thumb on the scales of art was absurd. It was so doggedly un-American that I briefly considered running for political office somewhere. Here’s the dialogue.

*

“Christ Gets Pissed: A Dialogue on the Superlative Nature of the Arts”

Superman announced to the world that he was bored by having to save the human race from so many disasters, many of them self-inflicted, he was quick to note, and so he was now retiring to his Crystal Palace at the North Pole. He had decided to become an art critic. He wanted to write clever reviews of good art everywhere while savaging all the bad art. Jesus of Nazareth learned of Superman’s intentions and went to see him in a last-ditch effort to save humanity from another ungrateful a**hole. They strolled together among the many frozen forms. Giant sheets of ice from ages past sparkled around them.

Superman punches Jesus of Nazareth directly in the eye. Jesus quickly recovers and pins Superman against the wall of ice behind him. Jesus then rips Superman’s arm out of its socket. He then grabs his throat. Superman grimaces one last time and mouths the words “F**k you!” Jesus then strangles Superman. Jesus strangles Superman slowly and with obvious murderous intent—The End.

*

Three months later, on Saturday, May 27, 1995, Christopher Reeve’s horse made a refusal at an equestrian event about an hour northeast of Charlottesville. The next day was a Sunday. I was walking through the parking lot of the hospital on my way to work. News trucks were lined up in perfect parallel, all with parabolic disks aimed at the same spot in the sky. I glanced up in that direction, and I instantly felt foolish. Did I expect to see a satellite? I saw the remnants of a single vapor trail but no plane.

I asked a reporter what happened. “You didn’t hear,” he noted, monotonal as if confirming an answer to a question he hadn’t asked. “Christopher Reeve broke his neck yesterday at a vaulting event in Culpeper.”

I must have looked confused. He tried to clarify by producing a list, “Halfway between here and Fredericksburg. Fell smack on his head. Critical condition. Damaged spinal cord. Fractured top two vertebrae. Broken wrist and finger.” As he rattled off all this information, the reporter was pulling down hard on the back of his own neck.

When I heard the words, “Christopher Reeve broke his neck,” I felt dizzy. “Wait. Superman? What’s a vaulting event?” I tried to fold my arms, but I stumbled instead. “Is he going to make it?” I was fighting panic now. The reporter rolled his shoulders into a shrug, his eyes bulging.

I ran the rest of the way. I told Jim Roland, the owner and the manager on duty that morning, that under no circumstances could I work. “I killed Superman!” “What are you talking about Graf?” Jim didn’t even look up from his calculator in the tiny office behind table number five. “Okay, I didn’t just kill him, because I wrote the dialogue like two months ago, but the thing is he just broke his neck, now he’s at the hospital, and so there’s no way I can work.”

Jim looked up and squinted. He spoke smoothly, “Shut up, Graf. Get the bar ready.” Jim was not impressed by anything related to dialogues, writing, or yesterday. He had a big brunch in mind. Groups of reporters had already reserved all three twelve-tops all day long. But I wasn’t the only bartender scheduled for brunch that morning. Jim finally agreed that if Roelofs wanted to work the shift alone, then I could go home. I peered around the door of Jim’s office. “Chris, I told you the one about Superman and Christ, remember? You know I can’t work, right?”

“Yeah. Weird, no? Okay, I got it. No problem. Take my Thursday night.” I relaxed, “Okay, thanks.” When I looked up again, Chris was smiling but shaking his head as if he’d changed his mind about Thursday night. “What?” I said, emerging from the office, “I cannot work. I’ll cover any other shift you want. All next week. I feel like I’m on acid. This is turning into a panic attack.”

Chris was not impressed.

“Dude, you’re giving yourself way too much credit. I mean, so far, you’ve only paralyzed him.” “Ah!” I felt something out of place again in my stomach. Chris laughed. “No, right, sure. Chill. I believe you.” He held up both hands and nodded. “That would mess me up too.” After a pause, he added, “Just don’t write about me, okay? I mean, not unless I get to go over the story with you first.”

Image “Happy Superman Day 2023” by DonDonP1 on Deviant Art