perfidy

For some reason known only to the now-deceased html gnomes charged with properly posting the text of this post, only the picture and the title survived. Which made my post seem rather cruel. Which was not my intent. Here, as best I can reconstruct it, is the original post:

Superman is dead. Christopher Reeve died Sunday at the age of fifty-two from complications arising from an infected bedsore. The superman movies seem dated, hokey and schmaltzy now - but that is not so much the fault of the movies but the penalty of viewing the past through our green-hued spectacles of jaded hindsight. We are unable to watch Superman without remembering what came after - the brilliant gothic epic that was Batman, the snazzy special effects of the X-Men movies, and the host of lesser superhero movies that would never have seen the dark of a movie theater but for Superman. Like its comic book forerunner, the movie superman paved the way for what came after. Other superhero movies might be more clever, better drawn, more whatever, but Superman is always first.

Christopher Reeve made that movie a success. Superman in the early eighties was a clean cut, muscular, cheerful, diffident and even (dare we say) a bit fey. Reeves gave us a Superman with no ironic overtones, no sarcastic asides, no incestuous self-referential humor, no gloomy cityscapes no five o'clock shadow; in short, none of the things that we now absolutely require in order to suspend our disbelief. We can't watch movies like this anymore. But we should.