EPT
As we saw a bearded Jor El jump atop his flying, insectoid mount, I heard the first sniffling gasp. With the unsteady camera weaving through the strange protuberances of Kryptonian architecture, he knuckled the tears from his eyes and snorted back the tide of overwrought emotions.
It wasn’t so bad, I suppose, until the introduction reached its peak and we saw a soon to be orphaned Kal El bundled into his escape pod by reluctant parents. At that point, the weeping climbed in volume until it was, doubtless, audible to people in the surrounding rows. We were assaulted by the subtle tutting of people who I presume were only barely too polite to voice their distaste. He was spared this by virtue of the volume of his own emanations.
![[image loading]](http://i.imgur.com/H9r0koI.jpg)
This incident has inspired me to make my own Superman movie.
I began to piece together an impression of this man from his responses to what was happening on the screen. Given how distraught he'd been at the collapse of the House of El and their sacrifice for their son, I could only guess that this was a man who had lost both parents, or perhaps someone who had been given up for adoption at birth. These seemed like things that would engender this sort of response. My heart swelled with pity for him, and for just a moment I could understand why he might tear up.
He was wracked by profound sobs, his breath coming to him in tiny, mewling gasps between the heaves. I listened, no longer able to focus on the film itself, fascinated by the man two seats down from me. He was a friend of a friend, but I hadn’t spoken to him beyond exchanging pleasantries before the movies.
His weeping became a series of choked back murmurs and continued throughout the movie. The death of pa Kent was accompanied by a soft silence in the soundtrack, which ensured that the only sound we heard as Clark soundlessly screamed for his adoptive father was the wet snuffling of a man trying, and failing, to quietly clear his nose. My supposition that he had been orphaned was strengthened.
From then on though, gaps appeared in the theory.
- As Superman pled for his life in the face of the Kryptonians, he wept.
- As Zod made his case for a destructive rewriting of the Earth’s environment to suit new, Kryptonian inhabitants, he wept.
- As Lois Lane learned to disable the alien terraforming machine from the digitised ghost of Russel Crowe... you get the picture.
With the movie nearing its climax and the city-destroying conflict of the Supermen drew on, I was forced to revise my opinion. Perhaps this friend of a friend was... I drew a blank. There was no unifying feature to the things that had had a profound emotional impact on him. At this point, the only explanations I could come up with were that he was either:
- Just a little strange, or
- An alien orphan marooned on Earth by parents who loved him enough to let him go, only to be orphaned a second time by the death of his earth parents, who had also had some issues with an oil rig, and a dangerous run in with the last of his species as they tried to claim his new homeland in the name of their doomed race.
I don’t like to make assumptions about people, but the latter seemed like it would be an almost ridiculous coincidence. Either way, having watched Man of Steel with this man (of steel?) had a profound influence on the way I appreciated the movie. It lent things a heft they might not otherwise have had. I won’t say that it was a necessarily better experience, but it was something I appreciated.
For those of you who can’t just take the mystery for what it was, he informed us late in the evening, through eyes red from crying and still welling with tears, that he suffers terribly from hayfever.
