The most domesticated figure in Superman (2025) is the one draped in a cape that pretends to flutter against power.
The False Rebellion of the Cape
On its surface, the film dresses itself in the iconography of uprising: a god from the skies who questions authority, a journalist who exposes corruption, crumbling skyscrapers and televised unrest, a metropolis on the brink. Yet the deeper one follows the currents of its images and narrative couplings, the clearer it becomes that Superman and Lois Lane are the least punk figures in the film, precisely because they are the most perfectly integrated into the media‑political machine that the movie itself extends. In the cracks of that polished machine, however, another figure moves: Eve Teschmacher, whose small acts of treachery and misalignment carve out the only genuinely punk trajectory available to a human in this cinematic universe.
To see this, one has to stop looking at characters as psychological individuals and start tracing them as nodes in an assemblage of images, institutions, and affects. Desire in Superman (2025) does not originate in the “hearts” of characters and then radiate outward; it circulates in loops among news feeds, skyscraper boardrooms, laboratories, alleys, and the open sky, intermittently condensing in bodies and then dissolving back into the flows of capital, security, and spectacle (Deleuze & Guattari, 1983). Superman, Lois, Eve, and the monsters are all produced as intersecting machines whose outputs are not interior feelings but modulations of public discourse, flows of belief, fear, and obedience.
A punk, in this configuration, is not simply someone with a certain haircut or soundtrack; it is a function that interrupts, derails, or corrupts the pre‑programmed flow of the narrative machine, especially its tendency to turn revolt into content. The surprise is that the figure most associated with rebellious power—the superhero—is the one who does the least to jam this machine.
Allusion as Soft Policing of Rebellion
The narrative is saturated with allusions: religious iconography, echoes of classic war photography, invocations of protest movements, and references to earlier Superman texts. Each shot calls upon the audience’s memory of other images—news footage, religious paintings, past superhero films—so that the new film is never just itself, but a carefully curated gallery of pre‑digested associations.
Superman silhouetted against a burning skyline recalls both the savior and the bomber pilot; his hovering above riot police invokes both the angel of justice and the eye of the surveillance state. The cape is forever caught between cross and corporate logo.
This dense allusive web functions like a soft form of policing. It ensures that every potential rupture already comes with a ready‑made interpretive channel: “He is Christ‑like,” “He is a tragic god,” “He is the conflicted American empire.” The viewer is permitted to oscillate between these positions but never to ask the more obscene question: Why must there be a Superman at all? The film invites debate about how he should intervene, never about whether his existence is itself the central political problem.
In this sense, the film does not merely depict Superman as a hero; it deploys him as a relay connecting disparate mythic and political codes. His punk potential—the capacity of his power to abolish or reconfigure institutions—is neutralized by embedding him in a mesh of references that always already know what he must do. The more the film flaunts images of disorder, the more tightly it binds its central hero to the task of reimposing an order that looks suspiciously like the one we started with, only re‑legitimated by crisis (Deleuze & Guattari, 1983).
Lois Lane is caught in the same web. As an investigative journalist, she seems on paper like a natural figure of dissent. Yet her exposés become part of the same apparatus: her revelations about corporate malfeasance or governmental overreach are narrated through a stylistic framework that cushions the blow, translating structural critique into consumable scandal. Her stories may topple individual villains, but they never puncture the larger machine that needs the spectacle of scandal to prove its own self‑correcting virtue.
Thus both Superman and Lois function as guarantors of a system that presents itself as perpetually self‑reforming. Their rebellion is always rebellion on behalf of the order that must ultimately survive.
Narrative Grammar and the Capture of the Hero
To call Superman and Lois “least punk” is to say that, within the film’s narrative grammar, they are maximally over‑coded.
Superman is the Subject pursuing multiple Objects: the safety of Metropolis, the truth about his own origin, the protection of Lois, the restoration of justice. Lois is a hybrid Helper and secondary Subject, gathering information and moral clarity that Superman then enacts. Even when the film hints at moral ambiguity—Superman hesitating before intervening in a foreign conflict, or Lois debating whether to publish a story that could destabilize the city’s fragile economy—the tension is always framed as a temporary internal crisis that resolves back into action within the established moral architecture.
What makes this non‑punk is not the presence of doubt but the predetermined resolution of doubt. Twists and revelations retroactively reorganize our understanding—Lexcorp is more deeply entwined with the state than we thought, the monsters are not alien invaders but homegrown experiments—but they always end up re‑affirming the necessity of the same central Subject. The twist never permits an interpretation in which Superman should not restore order; it only deepens the sense that his doing so is tragically difficult, morally complex, but unquestionably required.
Punk, by contrast, would mean allowing the twist to open a space where the entire hero function is delegitimized, where the most honest act might be refusal, sabotage, or complicity with the monstrous. The film flirts with this but never consummates it. Instead, it doubles down on its central actants, tightening the grip of narrative grammar. Superman and Lois become the main arteries through which the film circulates its controlled doses of critique and reassurance.
Clark Kent as the Ideal Employee of the Myth Factory
If we follow the logic of desiring‑machines, Superman/Clark is not simply a person but a relay station for multiple machines: state power, corporate capital, media spectacle, and the libidinal economies of fandom (Deleuze & Guattari, 1983). On one axis, he is the immigrant alien whose very body is surplus power; on another, he is the small‑town American raised in a pastoral fantasy of decency; on yet another, he is the metropolitan professional working inside a news corporation that itself participates in the manufacturing of consensus.
Each of these dimensions could become a line of flight—a path along which the character might break from his assigned functions. Instead, they are folded back into a coherent brand: the modest, morally serious, slightly awkward man who uses his godlike strength in strictly delimited ways. The film makes this clear in its staging of Clark’s workplace.
The Daily Planet’s open office, with its glass partitions and omnipresent screens, is both a space of frantic activity and a carefully monitored environment where stories are selected, framed, and edited to fit the network’s image. Lois pushes against editorial pressure, but Clark never does; his rebellion is always physical, extra‑institutional, spectacular. In the newsroom, he is the perfectly compliant employee, the one who feigns incompetence to avoid responsibility, whose secret power is never deployed against the corporate narrative machine.
This is the opposite of punk. It is not even passive aggression; it is an active agreement to restrict one’s disruptive capacity to sanctioned domains: the fight against designated villains, the defense of the city during orchestrated crises. His desire is re‑routed into the most boring of tasks: being who the myth needs him to be, at all times. His alien otherness does not fracture the strata of job, citizenship, and species; it reinforces them, providing a transcendent guarantee for their continued existence (Marx, 1990).
Superman becomes the dream employee of ideology: infinitely powerful and infinitely willing to leave the infrastructure of exploitation intact.
Lois Lane and the Journalism of Managed Dissent
Lois Lane occupies a more ambiguous position. She is framed as oppositional, a woman in a male‑dominated newsroom, willing to risk her career for the truth. Her scenes are often shot with handheld cameras and rapid cutting, giving her investigations an aesthetic of urgency and danger. In theory, this aligns her with traditions of muckraking journalism and whistleblowing.
Yet Superman (2025) is itself a media product that commodifies dissent. Lois’s exposés serve a similar function within the diegesis: they dramatize the appearance of fearless truth‑telling, while their content ultimately reinforces the legitimacy of the broader system. She uncovers collusion between a defense contractor and a corrupt politician, but the revelation leads not to structural change but to a spectacular showdown in which Superman neutralizes the immediate threat. The world is left “basically good,” in need of vigilant guardians but not of fundamental transformation.
Formally, the film undercuts Lois’s radical potential by coupling her investigative breakthroughs almost immediately to Superman’s interventions. Each time she opens a line of critique, the narrative reroutes it into a call for heroic action. Her files become maps for his punches; her words are prefigured as coordinates for his flight.
This is why Lois, despite her verbal defiance and investigative drive, is structurally non‑punk. She operates as the system’s conscience, not as its saboteur. She believes in transparency, not in rupture. Her dream is a world where truth leads to reform; punk dreams of worlds where truth, once seen, makes reform impossible, leaving only exodus, refusal, or the joyous embrace of monstrosity. The film never allows Lois such dreams.
Her romance with Clark seals this. The couple forms a heteronormative anchor, a point where all wild flows are domesticated into the recognizable narrative of love that survives crisis. The kiss after catastrophe is the purest anti‑punk gesture: it converts collective trauma into private reassurance. The city burns, but they are okay.
Eve Teschmacher: Secretary as Saboteur
Eve Teschmacher appears, at first glance, as a side character in the orbit of power: assistant, fixer, intermediary between Lex Luthor’s schemes and the bureaucracies he manipulates. She answers phones, schedules meetings, shreds documents. If Superman and Lois embody the film’s idealistic face, Eve belongs to its cynical underbelly.
But it is precisely this proximity to the machinery of corruption—and her refusal to remain a loyal cog—that makes her the film’s most punk human figure.
Eve is written and performed as an assemblage of incompatible vectors: desire for security, attraction to danger, moral disgust, and a sharp, mocking intelligence that cuts through the bombast of the men around her. She is the interface where corporate, criminal, and governmental machines meet, but the flows that pass through her are not wholly obedient (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987).
Her pivotal moments are small but decisive. She “forgets” to send an email that would green‑light a catastrophic test. She leaks a file to Lois but does so through an untraceable channel, ensuring that the scandal cannot be easily contained or spun by Lexcorp’s media allies. She misdirects Superman during a key confrontation, not to help the villain but to keep the hero from unknowingly reinforcing a false‑flag narrative. None of these acts are announced as heroic; the film often frames them as mistakes, quirks, or ambiguous choices.
What matters is that Eve repeatedly interrupts the smooth functioning of the machine. Her sabotage is neither purely altruistic nor nihilistic; it arises from a disgust at how thoroughly everyone else has accepted their roles. In one of the film’s quieter scenes, she watches a news broadcast celebrating Superman’s latest victory while the ticker at the bottom announces layoffs at a factory owned by the same conglomerate that funded Luthor’s projects. The look on her face is not admiration but recognition: different heads of the same hydra congratulating each other.
Punk, in this context, is not the loud declaration of opposition but the cultivation of misalignment, the refusal to let one’s actions be predictable according to the grammar of the narrative. Eve is unreadable to both Luthor and Superman. Luthor cannot fully trust her, sensing that her loyalty is conditional, but he cannot operate without her organizational genius. Superman initially misidentifies her as just another disposable henchperson, but later scenes force him to acknowledge that his victories depend as much on her quiet acts of interference as on his punches.
Where Superman and Lois channel their discontent into officially recognized pathways—heroic rescue, investigative journalism—Eve’s discontent corrodes the pathways themselves. She does not expose corruption to the public; she jams it from within. She does not wear a symbol on her chest; she hides her intentions even from those she helps. That opacity is precisely what keeps her from being absorbed into the film’s allusive matrix, which relies on clear moral signifiers. The cape and the press badge are such signifiers; Eve’s only emblem is the blankness of her personnel file.
Eve’s Micro‑Acts of Betrayal and Distributed Guilt
The film is obsessed with “big events”: city‑wide blackouts, monster attacks, televised speeches. Yet its real engine is a swarm of micro‑acts—forms signed without reading, safety checks skipped, small bribes accepted, harmless lies told to keep the project on schedule. The catastrophe is a cumulative effect of tiny, boring decisions.
Eve’s punk singularity emerges precisely here, at the level of these micro‑acts. Everyone participates in producing the disaster, but almost everyone does so in the direction of obedience: “I’m just doing my job,” “This is above my pay grade,” “We can’t afford delays.” Foucault’s microphysics of power is at work: command does not descend only from the top; it is reproduced in the capillaries of everyday compliance (Foucault, 1977).
Eve flips the polarity of these capillaries. Her “mistakes” push in the opposite direction: introducing friction, delay, noise. She signs a delivery form with the wrong time, subtly breaking the chain of custody that would have made it easy to blame a single scapegoat. She tells a technician, “The boss said run it at 60%,” when she knows he actually demanded 100%, trading spectacle for relative safety. These are not grand gestures of conscience; they are petty betrayals of the instruction set.
The film’s ethics of responsibility becomes interesting here. No one gets to claim innocence simply by appealing to their place in the hierarchy. The junior engineer who doesn’t ask what the reactor is really for, the police officer who follows an unlawful evacuation order, the news editor who spikes a story about corporate negligence—all are implicated. Eve is implicated too, but she alone systematically misuses her implicatedness.
Punk is not purity; it is the decision to let one’s contamination work in the wrong direction, to become a bad conductor for power.
Love, Loyalty, and the Anti‑Punk Couple
The film’s insistence that Superman and Lois love each other is not just romantic padding; it is a crucial mechanism of reterritorialization. Desire that might have scattered across the social field, connecting Superman to dissident movements or to the monsters themselves, is redirected into a stable dyad (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987).
The Clark–Lois couple serves several functions:
Narrative Closure. Their relationship provides a thread that can be knotted at the end, regardless of political outcomes. As long as they kiss, the film feels complete.
Moral Alibi. Superman’s most dubious actions—extra‑legal detentions, unilateral interventions—are framed through Lois’s gaze as necessary burdens. Her belief in him stands in for our own.
Domestication of Risk. The stakes are habitually personalized: “If he fails, she dies,” “If she publishes, he is exposed.” Collective risk (whole neighborhoods, entire species of life) is subordinated to this melodramatic focus.
Punk desire is anti‑couple not because it rejects intimacy but because it resists being locked into a two‑person circuit that stabilizes the social order. Eve’s relationships in the film are notably non‑dyadic and non‑secure: half‑flirtations with Luthor, half‑alliances with Lois, glances toward Superman that mix fear, contempt, and curiosity. She is never anchored in a single relational contract.
This is not romantic freedom in the liberal sense, but a refusal of the narrative comfort that comes from “at least they have each other.” Eve has no one, and so her gestures cannot be reduced to the logic of protecting or fulfilling a love story. Their reference point is the machinery itself.
Superman as Re‑territorialization of Punk Energy
The monsters, the riots, the whistleblowers, even Luthor’s megalomania—these are all eruptions of deterritorializing energy, challenges to the existing distribution of power and visibility. The role of Superman in the film is to re‑territorialize this energy, to capture it within a frame where every explosion, every scream, every betrayal becomes part of a narrative about why the world needs its super‑cop (Deleuze & Guattari, 1983).
Punk is often thought of in terms of noise, distortion, chaos. The film certainly gives us that: collapsing buildings, feedback‑like sound design as the monsters roar, glitchy broadcasts as the city loses power. But each of these noises is eventually mastered, mixed down into a harmonious final chord of restored order. The scream that does not get smoothed out belongs to Eve—specifically, the silent one in a late scene where she realizes that by delaying a critical alert, she has saved lives but enabled Luthor to escape blame.
Superman’s presence ensures that even genuine acts of resistance are retroactively framed as “challenges that made us stronger.” He is the perfect figure of what Žižek calls cynical ideology: the system knows very well what is wrong with it but continues anyway, mobilizing critique itself as fuel for its survival (Žižek, 1989). The more we see the cracks, the more impressed we are by the hero who keeps taping them together.
Eve is the grain of sand that prevents this perfect reterritorialization. Her sabotages produce outcomes that even the narrative struggles to absorb: Luthor disappears into the shadows rather than facing public disgrace; a monster attack is averted off‑screen, robbing Superman of a spectacle; a leaked file circulates online without clear authorship, making it impossible to craft a neat media narrative of villainy unmasked.
Her punk is not heroic victory but the introduction of irreversible glitches.
Eve Between Human and Monster
If Eve is the most punk human character, it is because she stands nearest to the monsters without becoming one.
The monsters are the products of the same technoscientific and military apparatus that employs Luthor and requires Superman’s interventions, yet they exceed any of the system’s predictive models. They embody a kind of raw, unthematizable deterritorialization. Flesh becomes weapon, city blocks become battlegrounds, infrastructural grids are carved open as if by a blind geological force. They have no manifesto; their punk is purely functional: they make it impossible for the world to continue as before, regardless of who “wins.”
In a crucial mid‑film sequence, Eve watches surveillance footage of an early monster “prototype” escaping its containment. Unlike the scientists, who speak in terms of failure and liability, she wordlessly leans toward the screen, eyes reflecting the creature’s contorted form. The shot links their faces—her behind security glass, it behind reinforced glass—two beings that the system needs but does not fully understand.
Eve is not “on the monsters’ side” in any sentimental way; she fears them, and some of her sabotages are attempts to prevent their release. But unlike Superman, she does not treat them as pure negativity. They are, for her, the truth of the project: a truth to be managed, maybe delayed, but not to be completely denied. She knows that if you build a machine like this long enough, something monstrous will emerge. The monster is the system’s unconscious made flesh (Laing, 1960).
Her position between human and monster is what allows her punk to be legible to us. The monsters are punk to the point of incommunicability; they cannot be “role models,” only disasters. Eve, by contrast, shows what it means to be a not‑quite‑monster inside the institution: to twist one’s necessary complicity into an engine of sabotage.
Responsibility Without Innocence
One of the most striking ethical moves the film makes—perhaps in spite of itself—is to distribute responsibility so widely that no one can plausibly claim innocence. The board members who approve vague “defense contracts,” the technicians who bypass safety protocols “just this once,” the politicians who look the other way as long as the economic indicators stay green—all these micro‑acts co‑compose the disaster long before any monster appears.
Superman’s interventions tend to obscure this distribution. By isolating villainy in singular opponents—a mad scientist, a rogue general—he allows the rest of the network to imagine itself as victim rather than co‑producer. Lois’s journalism occasionally widens the frame, but rarely enough; even her most daring pieces usually end with a named perpetrator.
Eve’s punk function is to insist, silently, on responsibility without innocence. She knows she is part of the machine; her attempts at sabotage do not absolve her. Punk here is not the fantasy of standing pure and outside, but the decision to act from within without hiding behind “just following orders.” Reich’s notion of character armor—the layers of habitual submission that shape our bodies and gestures—finds in Eve a partial dismantling (Reich, 1949). She does not strip off all armor; she loosens specific plates so that power no longer slides across her surface as smoothly.
In a late confrontation with Superman, she refuses his offer of redemption through confession. He wants her to testify, to become a witness whose truth‑telling will fit back into the legal‑moral apparatus he implicitly serves. She declines, not out of cowardice but out of a bleak clarity: any tribunal capable of judging Luthor is already too compromised to be trusted. Her refusal denies the narrative the comfort of catharsis.
Here, punk is also a refusal of narrative satisfaction.
Coda: Learning to Fail the Narrative
By the end of Superman (2025), the city stands, scarred but functioning. The skyline has a few new holes; the corporate logos have been rearranged; emergency protocols have been edited. Superman and Lois, bruised but in love, look out over Metropolis from a height that only they can inhabit. Order, in a new key, has been restored.
Eve Teschmacher is elsewhere: not dead, not imprisoned, not vindicated. Her final image is of a woman walking away from a bus stop, unremarkable in the crowd, carrying a flash drive she may or may not ever use. The monsters have been either destroyed or moved to “secure locations,” which is to say, the conditions of their production remain intact.
If Superman and Lois are the least punk characters in the film, it is because they never really fail the narrative that claims them. Their doubts are integrated, their losses are motivating, their traumas are meaningful. They are rewarded with legibility and love. Their rebellion is the rebellion that power has pre‑authorized: the heroic repair of the very order that maims them.
Eve is punk because she fails the narrative. Her actions do not culminate in a speech, a trial, a statue, or a grave. They fray plot threads rather than tying them up. They make things slightly worse for the story but slightly better, perhaps, for the anonymous bodies who do not know she intervened. She is the one character whose line of flight does not return to the point of departure (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987).
And the monsters—those warped embodiments of a world that cannot stop weaponizing everything it touches—stand as the absolute limit of punk within the film: a non‑human refusal that the narrative both needs and fears. They are what happens when all the Eves fail, when sabotage is not enough, when the only critique left is the collapse of the laboratory.
To learn from Superman (2025), then, is not to emulate the cape or the camera but to attend to the secretary who keeps misfiling the apocalypse. Punk, here, is the art of failing the story that has already decided who we are supposed to save.
References
Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F. (1983). Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and schizophrenia (R. Hurley, M. Seem, & H. R. Lane, Trans.). University of Minnesota Press.
Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F. (1987). A thousand plateaus: Capitalism and schizophrenia (B. Massumi, Trans.). University of Minnesota Press.
Foucault, M. (1977). Discipline and punish: The birth of the prison (A. Sheridan, Trans.). Pantheon Books.
Laing, R. D. (1960). The divided self: An existential study in sanity and madness. Penguin Books.
Marx, K. (1990). Capital: A critique of political economy. Volume I (B. Fowkes, Trans.). Penguin Books.
Reich, W. (1949). Character analysis (T. P. Wolfe, Trans.). Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
Žižek, S. (1989). The sublime object of ideology. Verso.
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