[Note: I started this essay last year, shortly after the movie Brightburn came out on DVD. However, the movie so inflamed my opposition that I found it impossible to complete this review at the time without being un-Christianly cruel. Now, after several months, I have been able to finish a more moderate and appropriate version of this essay.]
The 2019 film Brightburn is, quite simply, the worst movie I have ever seen, and the world needs to know. Now, when I say this, I do not mean that it is a product of poor craftsmanship; I mean that this film is—not to put too fine a point on it—morally evil. It is the sort of work that shows just how far our civilization (Western, Anglophonic, American, what-have-you) has fallen.
The list of possible accusations against this film is long, but first, a brief summary for those with the good fortune not yet to have seen it: Brightburn sets out to reimagine the origin story of the first and greatest superhero—Superman—as a horror film. Kyle and Tori Breyers (the very name seems to bring up the briar patch, and so helps to characterize them as the hicks they are clearly presented as being throughout the film) find a baby boy in a spaceship which crashes on their farm in Brightburn, Kansas; they take him in and raise him as their own. They name him, of course, “Brandon Breyers” (of Brightburn, no less), a fitting name for a superhero.
Unfortunately, a hero is not what the boy becomes. Shortly after his twelfth birthday Brandon begins to manifest both extraordinary abilities and frankly sociopathic tendencies (although, in a rather inconsistent manner, his parents say that he has never so much as bled, suggesting that he has always been a little superhuman). What happens next answers the question: what happens when you combine godlike powers, a 12 year old sociopath, and a town full of cowardly, stupid adults who are all completely unfamiliar with the tropes characteristic of horror, science fiction, fantasy, and superheroes? Answer: a horror film with plenty of gore and death, but none of the tension or suspense of good horror. A series of foolish actions by the idiotic inhabitants of Brightburn, along with an encounter with the alien tech which brought him thither—which forthwith urges him to play the dangerous space alien and “Take—the—world”—precipitates a predictable dénouement of violence, death, and destructiveness by a boy with Superboy-level powers (including murderously destructive heat vision).
All of this, however, fails to truly frighten or disturb in the manner of quality horror. Instead of scaring us, this film merely desecrates the memories of Jerome Siegel and Joseph Shuster. In its treatment of the mythology of Kal-El, last son of Krypton, Brightburn is neither homage nor satire nor parody (not even demonic parody). No, the only result I can see in this film is simply blasphemy.
Now, since those who make movies in this country are generally too ignorant of the culture which birthed them to understand the meaning of words such as blasphemy and heresy (see the otherwise excellent 1997 comedy For Richer or Poorer for one cringe-worthy example of the confusion of the two), let me just explain that blasphemy is simply slander, although the former word, derived from the Greek, is often applied specifically to the slandering of holy things. In this case, the slander is against Kal-El of Krypton, better known as Superman (or Clark Kent), a great figure in American popular literature and culture for the past eighty-two years (and one with multiple resonances with both the Jewish and the Christian religious traditions); by extension, it is a slander against both superheroes and extraterrestrials in general.
The root cause of all the deficiencies of this film is mere vulgarism, the inability of some to suffer anything good and wholesome being present in our cultural tradition without taking it out and performing some act of public desecration upon it. Now, we have seen plenty of parodies of superheroes and comic books before—but this film doesn’t feel like that. This film feels like an act of personal insult aimed directly at Clark Kent, Smallville, the House of El, the planet Krypton, and all extra-terrestrials of any sort.
Those among us who are mere materialists may scoff at the mention of extra-terrestrials, thinking that by that we mean such creatures as Martians and Vulcans, and the creatures people claim to encounter during supposed alien abduction experiences.[1] However, one need not invoke such ideas. For we who worship the God of Abraham, of Isaac, and of Jacob, we know that the answer to that Great Question “Are we alone in the Universe?” is: of course not! The spaces beyond our globe are far vaster and fuller than our secular materialist friends can possibly imagine. And if that were not enough, they too—after a fashion, at least—belong to the House of El; for, as two good Jewish boys in 1938 no doubt knew (even if they spelled it with just one letter at first), “El” is Hebrew for “God,” and in His house are many mansions (if it were not so, we would have been told). And among those many mansions dwell, not monsters that burn farms, as in the film under consideration, but great heroes and warriors with names like Gabriel (Gabri-El) and Michael (Micha-El).[2] On behalf of these innumerable brothers[3] of mine, I must object this perpetuation of an old stereotype: that those that come down from the heavens are inevitably monsters.
That the heavens are filled with innumerable hosts of holy angels is a commonplace of the Christian religion, though many who claim to wear that name may have forgotten it, as they have forgotten so much else of their ancient and venerable religion; and I see no reason why our Jewish and Muslim friends would see things in any sense otherwise. One clear articulation of this commonplace truth is found in the “Catechetical Lectures” of St. Cyril of Jerusalem in the fourth century. These lectures were given to instruct new Christians in the rudiments of their faith, not in the sort of deep learning reserved only for doctors of theology. In these introductory lectures, St. Cyril says of angels:
"They are the ninety and nine sheep, but mankind is the single one.[4] For according to the extent of universal space, must we reckon the number of its inhabitants. The whole earth is but as a point in the midst of the one heaven, and yet contains so great a multitude;[5] what a multitude must the heaven which encircles it contain? And must not the heaven of heavens contain unimaginable numbers? And it is written, thousand thousands ministered unto Him, and ten thousand times ten thousand stood before Him;[6] not that the multitude is only so great, but because the prophet could not express more than these" (15.24).[7]
So, yeah; extra-terrestrials is not an empty category. Quite the contrary.
Of course, its blasphemy is not the only flaw of this film. Several other charges could be leveled against it, starting with the way it plays upon that old fear of sports and changelings; of foreigners and aliens, and those some might consider aliens among us: the adopted.
But wait! Aren’t we past this yet? That is one of the great things about Superman: he is a counter-example to all those old clichés about foreigners, aliens, the adopted, the genetically different (and if anyone thinks that having their own biological children is somehow not inviting a strange and alien creature into their home, they obviously are not paying attention. As much as children can resemble their parents, by just as much they can also be very different.). What Brightburn does is to undermine all that by presenting a super-powered extra-terrestrial in a way that simply reinforces all our fears about those who are different.
What remains to be said? Having vented my spleen about the utter blasphemy which is the great sin of this film, I might note that it also embodies two of the great prejudices so common in Hollywood: racism, and bigotry against all those not fortunate enough to come from major coastal metropolises.
Superman came from a small town in Kansas—it was literally named “Smallville.” But it was a nice town, with good people like the Kents, Jonathan and Martha, and sweet girls like Lana Lang. On the other hand, Brightburn, Kansas embodies every big city cliché about dumb hicks from small towns. Tori Breyers is characterized as having been a teenage hillbilly slut, much like that other embodiment of coastal prejudice against “the ones in the middle”: Penny Hofstadter from The Big Bang Theory. Her husband is a coward who cannot talk to his son about any sort of difficult subject; when he finally broaches the topic of girls, the only thing he can muster to say is the advice to “act on your impulses,” the worst advice you can give a potentially confused 12-year-old. And after 12 years of raising this boy, they still are too stupid to understand that when a kid says of a situation “it’s cool,” it is most definitely not cool.
But I can deal with the regional bigotry. The worse sin of this movie is its embrace of the idea that is the very definition of racism: “you are what you are by nature.” Brandon is presented as being a monster from space who needs but one brief encounter with the ship he landed in to undo twelve years of upbringing as a human and make him the murderer he is by birth. So once again, we are confronted with this uncomfortable truth: Hollywood is racist (just ask Chloe Wang; oh wait, you can’t, because she changed her last name to “Bennett” to get her career started—because Hollywood is racist).
Bottom line: Brightburn is a morally evil film. There is no redeeming value in it. It fails as a horror film. It embodies the racism and regional bigotry of Hollywood (in a film based on a character invented by two young Jewish boys during the rise of Nazism). It slanders one of the great heroes of American popular culture, and through him the very real denizens of the heavens. This movie is an example of the impulse some feel to desecrate the good wherever they find it. I for one regret having ever seen it. If you have not seen it yet, don’t. Life is too short, and the purity of your soul is too precious.
[1] I mean no insult to those who have had such experiences, nor do I intend to imply that they are not—as experiences, at least—quite viscerally real; but it is wise, until we understand such experiences better, to keep them separate from the topic of extra-terrestrials, which is only one possible—and in my own opinion, not the most plausible—explanation for them. See Albert Budden’s Electric UFOs: Fireballs, Electromagnetics and Abnormal States for a great examination of the subject which neither invokes alien clichés nor trivializes the experience.
[2] See chapters 8-12 of the Biblical book of Daniel for appearances by both these mighty warriors.
[3] In the scriptures, the angels refer to us as “our brothers” (Revelation 12.10).
[4] Cf. Matthew 18.12.
[5] 7 billion or so, now.
[6] Daniel 7.10
[7] If one cannot easily consult a copy of St. Cyril’s lectures, the relevant passage is quoted in Michael Pomazansky’s Orthodox Dogmatic Theology 118-19.
