The New Superman Movie

and the sacred spaces that hold us

When we were kids, the imaginary Man of Steel was my brother, Mike, and I loved him.

no cape here, in Louin, Mississippi (our grandmother’s house), on his birthday… I surmise he received a camera.

He was 15 months younger than I — still is. My mother, a steel magnolia, told me once that she was not about to have two kids in diapers, so she made sure I was potty trained before my brother was born. I think this explains a lot about me.

My favorite images of Mike in my mind are of a barefoot redhead wearing shorts and no shirt, his belly well fed, his smile wide, his tongue lolling through his teeth, and, often, wearing his cape — aka one of Mom’s bath towels — that was safety-pinned at his neck and flowing out behind him as he leaped tall buildings in a single bound! from the backyard swing set or even the treehouse ladder (so his cape would fly) and ran off to save the day.

This weekend, I thought about that little boy I knew, when Jim and Zach and I went to the Tara Theater here in Atlanta on opening night to see the new Superman movie (article at ScreenRant that includes the trailer). While I am not a superhero movie fan, my boys are, and — wonder of wonders for me, reluctant superhero movie watcher — the movie is good!

James Weldon’s NPR review of Superman gets it just right. Among many other virtues he extols (including the revival of the classic red Superman trunks that “resemble nothing so much as granny panties. Deal with it”), he writes: “Superman is an ideal. He represents the best we can aspire to be.” And: “The feeling of watching it is similar to that of perusing an individual comic book — it's bright, colorful… it's inviting you into a universe that you may want to spend more time in.”

Bingo. The movie reminded me so much of the comic books Mike and I used to read by the dozens when we were, oh, nine and ten, ten and eleven, eleven and twelve (as I grew out of them) during the three years our family served as caretakers of a rustic, isolated cabin (no plumbing or running water, but yes to electricity), in the woods and mountains of Luray, Virginia, while Air Force family friends who owned the cabin were stationed in Germany.

Mom packed the car and Dad drove the five of us to Luray, a two-hour car trip from Washington, DC and Camp Springs, Maryland (Countdown territory), where we parked in the woods as close as we could get to the cabin and then humped all the gear Mom had packed up a hilly path to the glory of that patch of open sky and a bunch of logs arranged like a house that we’d call home on weekends.

Dad mowed the grass, took Mike fishing — and one year, hunting (I refused to eat squirrel) — and did Dad tasks. For Mom it was relentless work. Hot in the kitchen with a wood stove for cooking, and constant meals, clean up, making up beds or airing linens, marshalling three kids (and keeping the toddler out of the creek), and generally running herself ragged with it all. Still, even for Mom, the place held a veneer of glamour for a girl who had grown up in the Depression and now could escape to the country but come back to her hard-won middle class life in civilization whenever she wanted to.

Mike and I reveled in these trips to the cabin. Days were for exploring the woods, for carrying water from the creek, doing dishes and taking baths outside (both activities involving a huge tin tub and absolutely freezing water), catching crawdads in a creaky silver bucket, picking sour apples from an old tree in the small clearing of the front “yard,” and trying to avoid the hornets who had a nest in the outhouse.

But the best prize waited for us at night. The sons of these family friends collected comics and kept them stacked under the double bed in the bedroom Mike and I shared. The entire space under the bed was taken up with stack after stack after stack of comics featuring Archie and Jughead, Betty and Veronica — I liked those — and The Flash, Spiderman, Fantastic Four, Green Lantern, Justice League, Batman, Incredible Hulk, and so, so many more.

And, of course, Superman. I don’t remember my brother wearing a cape in those cabin days — maybe he had grown out of that phase by then — but I do remember those comics. This new movie, helmed by James Gunn, is a reboot of the DC Comics film franchise. For me, the storytelling, the atmosphere it creates, and the energy it generates bears all the earmarks of those halcyon summer days full of comic books.

It puts me in mind of Mike and me, released from family doings, tumbling in our pajamas into that big bed at night with our evening’s chosen comics stacked between us, and that one yellow light in the room, above the bed, that glowed just enough for us to read by until we got sleepy. We could hear our parents snoring and our little sister, Cathy, fidgeting, the three of them sleeping in the other bedroom in this tiny house made of wood, in the middle of the 1960s, and in the middle of our lives together as a family.

I write a lot about families. I write about families of choice and chance, and the ways that we care for one another. I write about community and kinship and the lassos we toss — gently — around one another in order to hold ourselves close through thick and thin (lots of both), and the charm that is held in creating those moments, memories, and meaning I write about so much.

It’s funny to think of the new Superman movie as a movie about family of choice and chance and community, but it felt that way to me. The Justice “Gang” (lol) shows up to help Superman; the Daily Planet gang (Jimmy Olsen among them) pulls together to write about the wrongs of Lex Luthor and inform the public; and the chosen family of Ma and Pa Kent and their adopted son, Clark, is the most touching of all. Then there is the chosen universe of DC Comics, set to rival the Marvel Cinematic Universe, who knows.

The Tara Theater is also a chosen community. It’s a stand-alone art-deco-modern building in a shopping center in Atlanta, that originally opened as Loew’s Tara, and debuted with a 70mm stereophonic screening of Gone With the Wind. It was the South in 1968. It went through various metamorphoses under subsequent owners, and when I came to know it in 2004, it was a Regal Theater with four screens.

I took this photo from my car on the rainy night we came to see Belfast.

I was charmed by it. Foreign films, blockbusters, arthouse premiers, documentaries, quiet indie films (we watched Belfast, with our masks on, in an almost-empty theater in 2021), epic experimental films (we saw Terrence Malik’s The Tree of Life there in 2011 and had a friend walk out of it, lol; it was an acquired taste and I loved it), the Tara showed them all, and within such a communal atmosphere, with a retro snack bar and two busy ticket windows outside… a destination it was, until it wasn’t.

In 2022 Regal Cinemas shuttered Tara “as part of a broader real estate optimization strategy.” What a community loss. But, as Uncle Edisto tells us in Each Little Bird That Sings, life is lived in the opposites. You don’t have yes without no, up without down, in without out, and dark without light.

The light for the Tara came in 2023 when Christopher Escobar, who owns the Plaza Theater in Atlanta, became the new owner and driving force behind a community (Friends of Tara) purchase, renovation, and reopening of the beloved Tara Theater in 2023.

We have since taken our anime-obsessed granddaughter to see My Neighbor Totoro (complete with bento box meals offered for purchase in the lobby — this is “event-driven cinema"). This same grandgirl and I went on a date to the Tara to see Wicked recently, also on an opening weekend.

This opening night, my local AMC theater’s showings of Superman were sold out. I thought about the multiplex crowds, the noise, the lines, the frenetic energy that used to be part of my (happy, actually) movie-going experience, and how, these days, they seem to be a community I’ve grown away from… which is also what happens to us as life goes on. We morph and change — if we’re lucky. We take different paths. And sometimes that means separate paths.

At the Tara, I was greeted at the concession counter instead of the window. There was no line. I showed my pre-purchased tickets on my phone. I bought buttered popcorn and Coca-Colas. We found seats easily. The energy — from film buffs to young families excited to be there — was communal, even joyful, as we laughed at the funny parts, groaned at the awful parts, and — something I don’t often experience at the movies anymore — the audience clapped and cheered at the end! Together.

The physical spaces where we gather are like churches, sacred spaces that anchor our collective identity. They are time folds, as they tell the history of a family, a home, a community, a country… a universe… within those spaces.

“What I’m getting with the Tara is fifty-five years of history,” Christopher Escobar told Garden & Gun magazine. “Yes, it’s a movie theater, but it’s also a bank of memories and stories and love.”

And isn’t that what all of this life is? A bank of moments, memories, and meaning. That’s what James Gunn is aiming for with his Superman movie, and the reboot of the DC film universe. That’s what those cabin years with my family were about: moments, memories, meaning. That’s what every story is all about — the stories you write, the stories I write, the stories we read, the stories we see on a screen, the stories we imagine.

What we know, what we feel, what we can imagine: that is the recipe for every story ever told. Stories told around a fire or carved on cave walls or rendered as comic books or graphic novels or documentary novels or picturebooks or mysteries or non-fiction or — you could go on, right?

Stories fold time. They are also sacred spaces. They represent the best we can aspire to be. They hold us in the palms of their hands.

I cup my hands and imagine my little brother Mike with his knobby knees and his easy smile, a Man of Steel, his life untouched by the vicissitudes of the future, his towel cape rippling behind him as he runs free in those backyard moments, saving humanity, saving himself.

I imagine us both as children, unfettered as we were in that time and place, in that little log cabin in the woods, at ease with each other, fishing for crayfish, and reading comics by lamplight.