"Let belief take hold:" Shakespeare and James Gunn's Superman

“You’ll believe a man can fly,” promised the tagline for the 1978 Richard Donner film Superman, which starred Christopher Reeve as the titular refugee from the planet Krypton “who came to Earth with powers and abilities far beyond those of mortal men” (part of the iconic opening narration of the TV series Adventures of Superman that I know almost as well as “To be or not to be”). Almost 50 years and decades of superhero movies later—and in the same way that Shakespeare’s audiences believed in fairies and witches and didn’t need to have them explained—we already believe people can fly and that alternate universes are a thing, and we know Superman’s origin story almost as well as we know our own. All this allows James Gunn, the writer and director of this summer’s Superman, to jump right into his fantastical storyline without a lot of narrative throat-clearing, something he might well have picked up from scripting the infamous Shakespearean parody Tromeo and Juliet.

I had reached the advanced age of just last month when I learned (from his interview in Rolling Stone) that Gunn’s first professional film experience was adapting Romeo and Juliet for Troma Entertainment, the low-budget independent film studio, in 1995. Gunn’s screenplay leans obnoxiously into and underscores the actual transgressive nature of Shakespeare’s tale of two star-crossed early adolescents. Tromeo and Juliet’s notorious reputation makes it an ideal subject for academic study—Douglas Lanier calls it “an example of that time-honored genre, the Shakespearean burlesque”—so I was shocked to discover that the Folger hasn’t devoted more critical attention to this much-maligned work.

Then I watched it.

For whatever levels of satirical insight it aims for (and it hits several), Tromeo and Juliet is a thoroughly unpleasant film, something very much in keeping with the Troma aesthetic established by co-founder (and Tromeo director) Lloyd Kaufman. Greg M. Colón Semenza argues in The Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies that “Tromeo rejects entirely the cuteness of Shakespeare,” which in my view overly dignifies the film, but he ain’t wrong. Awash in bodily fluids, gratuitous nudity, kinky sex, and a Titus Andronicus-level of graphic violence and dismemberment, Tromeo and Juliet sets its titular lovers within two Manhattan filmmaking families, the rich Capulets and the poor Ques, but the film is mostly an excuse to subject Shakespeare to the demands of the Troma house style, which creates cheap B-movies in the horror comedy genre. These include such classics as The Toxic Avenger (1984), Nuke ‘Em High (1986), Poultrygeist: Night of the Chicken Dead (2006), and Troma’s 2020 satire of the opioid epidemic, Shakespeare’s Sh*tstorm, which features the excremental effects of whale laxative amongst dueling pharmaceutical companies and is inspired (if that’s the word) by The Tempest.

Buried under Kaufman’s excess, however, are the seeds of Gunn’s cheeky explorations of text and character, and his impertinent flair for dissecting the truth of his subject matter. Like his source, Gunn’s screenplay begins Tromeo with a rhyming prologue spoken by a Chorus (played by the late musician Lemmy of Motörhead) that lays out the characters and backstory; all the Chorus’s subsequent narration is also spoken in rhyme. I don’t think I’d ever noticed that the word “dream” appears 18 times in Romeo and Juliet, but Gunn seizes on that theme and uses dreams and nightmares as a recurring motif. And given Shakespeare’s premise of Verona grownups sexualizing 13-year-olds, Gunn manages to have it both ways: He and director Kaufman indulge in exploitative teenage sex scenes while also underlining the horror of the original play by making Juliet suffer assault and imprisonment by her abusive father, and offering tasteless jokes about the Friar Laurence character’s sexual fantasies about the young boys in his charge.

Gunn soon moved on to more mainstream Hollywood fare, writing the screenplays for the live-action Scooby-Doo (2002), its 2004 sequel, and Dawn of the Dead (2004). He eventually graduated to the superhero world, writing and directing Guardians of the Galaxy (a critical and commercial success, it became the third-highest grossing film of 2014) and its two sequels for Marvel Studios, then moving over to Warner Brothers to write and direct The Suicide Squad (2021) and the 2022 HBO series Peacemaker. In all these projects, Gunn demonstrates his love for writing about unlikely teams of misfits, a template I always associate with the rude mechanicals from A Midsummer Night’s Dream who improbably succeed in performing Pyramus and Thisbe before the Duke of Athens.

In Superman, Gunn surrounds his hero with friends and allies that include the squabbling members of the Justice Gang (“just a working name,” insists Hawkgirl), robot servants, regular average citizens, and the staff of the Daily Planet. Superman also begins with a written prologue that’s part Shakespearean preamble—important backstory laid out in easy-to-follow and rhetorically elegant units of three—and part pure comic book in that it requires, you know, reading. As NPR’s Linda Holmes observes, “other versions of this [story] would take a literal hour of movie and show everything that’s on that card,” but Gunn wisely skips all that and gets right to where the story actually begins, the moment where things become (in Holmes’s phrase) “emotionally complicated.” Here, Lois Lane already knows that Superman and Clark Kent are the same person, which allows Gunn to jump to the far more interesting part of their relationship where they squabble and challenge each other like a modern Beatrice and Benedick, and, most importantly, have each other’s back. In this version, Lois comes to Superman’s rescue more than he comes to hers.

Happily, Gunn also follows Philip Henslowe’s advice in the film Shakespeare in Love and adds “a bit with a dog” in the form of Superman’s canine companion Krypto, a fluffy white bundle of energy who wears a red cape and steals every scene he’s in. “It was Krypto,” Gunn revealed, that was “the first thing I wrote” and set “the tone of the whole movie.” Krypto’s rambunctious spirit animates the movie and embodies Gunn’s chaotic and impolite approach that embraces a Shakespearean mixture of tones—comic, tragic, earnest, horrific—in the same film.

I wouldn’t say that Gunn’s work has matured since Tromeo and Juliet—as he himself confesses, “I still like black comedy. I still have edges”—but now, his jokes and provocations are in service to character and story. Gunn’s dialogue ranges from comic banter to heartfelt expressions of theme that some critics call “corny” (in a positive way) and others call “simplistic.” (I’m sure some critic at the opening night of A Midsummer Night’s Dream sniffed that Puck’s line “Lord, what fools these mortals be” was also too on the nose.) As Gunn acknowledges, “In my heart, I’m pretty sentimental,” but he grounds his fantastical tales in belief. “Everything for me has to come from a place where I believe it,” he says, “outlandish as it is.” Whether it’s a talking raccoon in the Guardians of the Galaxy films or how a simple pair of glasses manages to protect Clark Kent’s identity, Gunn has to “let belief take hold of him” before he can convincingly write his story.

Finally, given how absurdly politicized the film has become, it seems important to point out that Superman has always been an immigrant story. (“That is not an opinion,” says Glen Weldon, author of Superman: The Unauthorized Biography. “That is not a take. That is not woke. That is a statement of fact.”) Superman personifies “The Stranger’s Case,” the speech from The Book of Sir Thomas More that Shakespeare may have had a hand in writing and argues that we should “imagine” a more humane treatment of refugees. Superman himself was once a “wretched stranger,” an orphan named Kal-El who was given “an abode on Earth” and “harbor” here in America, and who in Gunn’s film stops “a nation of such barbarous temper” from “breaking out in hideous violence.” If I may combine Superman’s epic TV intro with the Shakespearean language of “The Stranger’s Case,” I confess that in these troubled times, it’s a balm to see this “strange visitor from another planet [who] fights a never-ending battle for truth, justice,” and against the world’s “mountainish inhumanity.”