WHY are superhero stories such a staple in the American imagination?

What do the assorted men, so proud in their eye-catching tights, signify? What, beyond the fetish with spandex and leather, and the corresponding confusion with dual identities, is with all this super-dee-do business?

It’s a question worth speculating on, since it doesn’t seem a month passes when we are not confronted by the spectacle of one supernaturally endowed, exhibitionist American or another jumping up and down at your nearest cinema.

And now Superman Returns, courtesy of Bryan Singer, and Superman, as we are all know, is the most iconic of the freaky lot of them. So what’s the story, Clark Kent – morning glory?

Superman is a paragon of the American ideal: supremely confident, self-righteous, virtually invincible, morally beyond reproach, and, yes, loud. (Of course, he is loud. Anyone who wears his underwear on the outside must be.)

But what does Superman and his fellow fashionable American saviours signify?

I’m inclined to think of the quintessentially American story of the superhero as a story of Empire, a natural product of the American Century just past, where America dominated the world culturally, politically, and economically.

To wit: the superhero is the American’s sense of himself, his privileges and burdens, his special place in the world.

To be an American, it would seem, is to grapple with the fate of the world, which nobody can say is untrue.

A major theme of the superhero tales is the protagonist’s struggle with his profound and newfound powers. As poor Uncle Ben says, “With great power comes great responsibility,” which is a reminder to the powerful but relatively young man (nation?) to beware of that dog-eared but ever-present danger of absolute power corrupting absolutely.

If Peter Parker is powerful and a bit naïve, then Superman is powerful and pure. They are the same in that both are basically innocents, as Americans usually are, to their own minds, relative to the disturbing world out there. This is another great theme in the American collective: their innocence.

It is something that is evident in the American-in-peril-abroad stories (like Hostel) and it is certainly a characteristic of many a superhero. Innocence is what sustains Americans through horrific mistakes, misadventures, and even atrocities, whether they be 19-year-old troops in Vietnam and Iraq, or the imaginary Deuce Bigelow in Amsterdam.

Americans, even in their worst hours, are incapable of evil or malice; rather they do what they do because they have suffered the death of innocence. The myth-making of Superman, et al, consolidates this national belief in America’s inherent goodness in exercising awesome power.

This is a movie review?

In a very broad sense of it, yes, and then maybe only just. But why not?

Bryan Singer’s new Superman movie is not a reinterpretation; rather, it is a continuation of the 1978 movie starring Christopher Reeves. It is, in fact, practically a sequel, even utilising old footages of Marlon Brando as Superman’s father.

The movie opens with a space-pod crashing into the Kent farm. But it carries not the baby Kal-El but a grown Clark Kent (Brandon Routh), who has returned from a five-year journey to the galaxy of his origin. Finding nothing, and convinced once and for all that Earth is the planet for him, Superman decides to get back into the groove of things.

Except, Lois Lane (Kate Bosworth), already engaged, has moved on.

And perhaps the rest of the world has too. Kent is none too happy to read Lane’s Pulitzer Prize-winning (yah, right) article, “Why the World Doesn’t Need Superman.”

Or does it?

And is she really over him? We get an inkling moments later: Lois survives being thrown about like a rag doll in a crashing plane without so much as a scratch, but promptly swoons and faints at the sight of Superman.

Is she so over him or what?

Meanwhile Lex Luthor (Kevin Spacey) has been released from jail and is cooking up more mischief. Spacey plays Luthor with all the campy menace of an Austen Power villain. He’s more amusing than menacing.

Old Jimmy Olsen? He is once again glad to be Kent’s smarmy colleague. And the Daily Planet finds it can function like a proper, serious newspaper again, now that Superman is back.

In truth, Superman Returns feels like an unfinished piece of work. It’s like a television pilot because the filmmakers are mostly intent on laying down the foundations for the Man of Steel’s further adventures. Which means the love triangle is not resolved, and Luthor is not quite put in his place.

Till the next instalment, as it were.

It must be said, though, that Superman’s flying scenes are very impressively done. But the special effects are not always very special, with some scenes being clearly computer-generated.

What’s more interesting about Superman this time around – for me at least – is the subtext.

Some Americans see in Superman’s story, of a saviour who is sent to Earth by his father from a distant galaxy, a thinly disguised gospel of Christ and the Lord above. It’s easy to see how they came to this conclusion, but perhaps non-Americans will see another kind of claim to “specialness”.

Superman reaffirms America as God’s Country, after all, and what is the all-powerful Superman if not a symbol of Manifest Destiny?

He will thwart evil wherever he is needed, even when he is not needed – just like America, truth be told. W