A pop-culture icon and a real-life hero

By Ted Anthony
The Associated Press

HULTON ARCHIVE / GETTY IMAGES Christopher Reeve is shown as Superman in the Warner Bros. film "Superman II," released in 1981.

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NEW YORK — One could bend steel with his bare hands; the other insisted, over and over, that "nothing is impossible." One took to the skies heroically and effortlessly; the other was grounded tragically and battled to stand again.

The oddly intersecting worlds of an American myth and an American celebrity — Superman and the man who brought him to life for millions of people, Christopher Reeve — reveal how a nation consumed with creating fresh heroes finds its role models.

"Christopher Reeve became a cultural icon himself," said M. Thomas Inge, a popular-culture historian and author of "Comics as Culture."

American heroes are usually rugged individuals linked to the Horatio Alger archetype — plain folks from humble, often rural beginnings who react gracefully to the hands they are dealt or achieve the impossible against the odds. But Superman was extraordinary from infancy, the survivor of a doomed world, and he didn't have to overcome any odds. His vulnerability wasn't self-doubt or human intransigence, but a glowing green rock.

"What else is there left for Superman to do that hasn't been done?" Reeve said in 1983 after donning the cape for a third movie. But the actor would find a new purpose 12 years, a horse-riding accident and two fractured vertebrae later.

In comics, it's the Batmans and the Spider-Mans who adhere to the American citizen-soldier notion — reluctant superheroes pressed into service by the murder of parents or the happenstance bite of a radioactive insect. They're self-doubting and intense, but ultimately they prevail.

Real American life has long coughed up similar, if less melodramatic, hero tales. Abe Lincoln emerged from the Kentucky woods determined to become a statesman. A frail, deaf kid from Ohio named Thomas Edison willed himself into being a genius inventor. And in the media age, Pfc. Jessica Lynch, a small-town West Virginia girl, returned from her terrifying Iraq hostage ordeal to instant celebrity.

It doesn't hurt their reputations if they perish before their time. "This thing of being a hero, about the main thing to it is to know when to die," Will Rogers said.

Reeve fit that more common mold — someone who had to rebuild from the ground up, whose contributions are forever linked to the hand he was dealt and how he dealt with it. But shaking the back-story of pop-culture heroism that the Superman movies infused in him — "escaping the cape" — was never easy.

"He didn't really have a choice of how he wanted to portray his ordeal," said M.G. Dunn, a sociologist at Roanoke College in Virginia.

"A lot of people would expect him to make the connection between someone who is playing a superhero and someone who has to deal with a superhuman tragedy," Dunn said. "People are going to want to know how Superman feels in this situation."

It wasn't just Reeve's fighting back that captured imaginations, though. It was his unyielding, deeply stubborn attitude that the body could heal with the right therapy and treatment, that things deemed medically impossible could be achieved through force of will.

Not everyone appreciated the approach — some said it raised patients' expectations cruelly — but the heroic flavor of his quest resonated. He didn't exactly discourage it, either, with his public advocacy, his paralysis foundation and his intense expressions of determination.

"I want people to know that I kept at it," he said in 1997.

The blurred lines of heroism and tragedy weren't new for "Superman." George Reeves, TV's Man of Steel in the 1950s, shot himself in the head in 1959. The headlines were less subtle then: "Superman dead."

These days, a decade after DC Comics published a graphic novel called "The Death of Superman," Clark Kent's alter ego is still around and more human than ever. He deals with insecurities, failed relationships and his place in the world. He grapples with his dual identity. He wonders whether things would be better off without him.

"Who is a hero?" author Peter Gibbon wonders in his 2002 book, "A Call to Heroism: Renewing America's Vision of Greatness." To answer his question, he quotes a Russian proverb: "He who hangs on for one minute more."

That fits Superman throughout his seven-decade history. And, for the years until his death, it fit Reeve, too.

Copyright © 2004 The Seattle Times Company

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