“Maybe That’s the Real Punk Rock:”

This study examines how James Gunn's film Superman (2025) reframes punk rock, translating the genre's rhetoric of defiance into an ethic of empathy and moral decency. A pivotal exchange between Lois Lane and Superman crystallizes this shift: Lois remarks, "You think everything and everyone is beautiful," to which Superman replies, "Maybe that's the real punk rock." In this moment, punk is redefined as kindness, empathy, and integrity, with these values presented as countercultural virtues.

Where punk has historically been associated with confrontation, nihilism, and collective politics, the film recasts punk as civic optimism and decency, echoing the liberal rhetoric of Kennedy's New Frontier and Obama-era appeals to "hope" and "change." My analysis situates this translation against the rhetoric of older punk songs, including Crass's “White Punks on Hope,” which rejected liberal reform and positioned punk as an oppositional politics of rupture.

The soundtrack underscores this translation. The prominently featured song "Punkrocker" by the Teddybears, featuring proto-punk icon Iggy Pop, declares, "I’m a punk rocker, yes I am," yet its pop-inflected production, with steady mid-tempo beats, synthesizers, and polished vocals, resembles early new wave more than insurgent punk. This musical mismatch neutralizes the song's claims of punk rock rebellion into glossy retro texture that mirrors the film's shift from political rupture to aesthetic posture.

I argue that punk in Superman surfaces as a ghost of itself, stripped of collective politics and reappearing as individualized sincerity and a softened aesthetic of hope for a disillusioned left. To analyze this repurposing, I examine the sonic texture of "Punkrocker"—its tempo, instrumentation, and production choices—alongside comparative readings of late 1970s punk rhetoric. My framework draws on Mark Fisher's concept of hauntology, defined in Ghosts of My Life as the lingering echoes of lost futures, where the radical potential of past social movements is evoked but never fully realized. Situated within the cycle described by Greil Marcus in Lipstick Traces and Dick Hebdige in Subculture: The Meaning of Style, in which radical aesthetics are repeatedly commodified and neutralized, the study shows how Superman sentimentalizes punk, with "Punkrocker" functioning as retro pastiche and aestheticized escapism.