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Maybe it’s impossible to go on living in this world without some sort of delusion. The jaded reporter at the centre of A Man Who Was Superman (A Man Who Was Superman (슈퍼맨이었던 사나이, Chung Yoon-chul, Syupeomaenieotdeon sanai) has built a career out of following eccentric people, but in a slightly uncomfortable way akin to a nature documentary as if she were making a spectacle of them. There is, however, something that prevents her treating “Superman” in the same way in that his desire to help people seems to be genuine and is in the end what gives his life meaning. Though she comes to the conclusion that his life is in danger without medical treatment, a doctor seems to suggest that that may not actually be the best thing for him. He’s happy living in his dream world and being dragged back to this one with all of its trauma, greed, and selfishness might not do him any good.
There are constant references on the radio to yellow dust blowing in from Mongolia as a kind of metaphor for a more spiritual kind of corruption that’s sweeping across the country. What seems to have bothered Superman is that in his past he asked for help and no one came. People just stood by and watched until it was too late while he could do nothing on his own. He says that he has a piece of Kryptonite stuck in his head that prevents him from using superpowers, but we gradually come to learn that the foreign object in his head is a symbol for the trauma stemming from the Gwangju massacre in 1980 in which troops opened fire on democracy protestors as part of an authoritarian crackdown. In his current persona, Superman fears men in white, seeing them as villains who want to erase all his memories echoing the ways in which news of Gwangju was initially suppressed, though also perhaps his own fear of remembering why he was placed in a psychiatric institution to begin with.
Despite herself, Soo-jung is drawn to Superman’s story and begins to sympathise with him along with his messages about helping others and protecting the planet. For him, protecting the planet takes on an environmental belt in which he battles the yellow dust and protests about climate change, complaining that he once lived in the North Pole but had to move because of the ice caps melting. He likens himself to a whale who was caught after the glaciers melted and hit in the head with a spear but went on living until he was 130. This superwhale will apparently come to the rescue if Jaws comes calling.
Superman does however envisage being able to cure himself through kindness. According him, the more endorphins he produces through feeling good after helping people, the faster the kyponite in his brain will be pushed out. Just like Superman in the movies, he hears his father’s voice telling him that him everyone has the ability to help others and that he has to go on helping them until they remember that. That was perhaps what his father was trying to do when he went out protest in Gwangju and never came back, telling his son he’d return if he made sure to be good like Superman.
Perhaps it seems naive to suggest that kindness can save a society, but there is indeed something that’s been forgotten in an increasingly capitalistic society where everyone’s busy working all the time. Superman’s small acts of kindness such as helping an old woman with her bags did improve the general quality of the world around him. When he encounters another potential tragedy, he is at first unable to help having received psychiatric treatment that turned him into a kind of zombie suppressing his compassion, but once he decides to so, others start to help too. He couldn’t lift a car on his own, but five or six together could lift it enough to make a difference. In essence, he couldn’t survive in this indifferent world in which it’s normal to ignore people in trouble. Ji-soo remembers watching a nature documentary and being angry with the filmmaker for just filming rather than trying to help a rabbit that got eaten by a lion. She does try to help Superman in some ways, but also perhaps comes to the conclusion that there’s not much else she can do for him than bear witness, taking his lessons to heart and trying to heal the earth with small acts of human kindness to beat back the encroaching yellow dust of human indifference.
International trailer (English subtitles)
Windows on Worlds 