REHEARING THE SUPERHERO IN THE 21ST CENTURY: Superman, Wonder Woman, and Music

The two most recent incarnations of DC’s Superman and Wonder Woman in their solo films, Man of Steel (2013) and Wonder Woman (2017) both employ scores that play against traditional superheroic musical tropes, resisting the conventional, implicitly colonial superhero narrative of a benign external force taking control and solving the problems of a society. Both scores engage critically with gendered tropes of what a powerful man or woman “sounds” like. Man of Steel’s score brings unaccustomed ideas of gentleness, hesitation and effortful striving to a character who, in previous incarnations, appeared God-like in his effortless power and infallibility; and shares his themes with other characters. Wonder Woman avoids the sonic tropes of classic femininity without succumbing to the hyperaggressive music often written for female heroes, such as in the TV theme tunes for Xena, Buffy, and Syndey Bristow (Alias) and, indeed, for Wonder Woman herself in the score for Dawn of Justice (2016), in which the main theme appears to model itself on Led Zeppelin’s “Immigrant Song”. This song is used in other films in ways that further inform the arguments around superheroes, gender and power. The two main film scores under discussion strive to create superheroes for the 21st century, and music plays an active role in allowing their central characters to play against gender tropes, genre expectations and assumptions around the nature of power, whilst remaining evidently superheroic.