Fittingly at a time when the world is run amok by Hollywood stars in superhero movies, this week a celestial body from someplace else in our universe forced its way into the limelight – or should that be low light or dim light, or sky’s night, or Earth’s satellite? Because the phenomenon which we are talking about here is the Moon, which on Monday turned super.
Superhero movies spurt out each summer, with franchises rebooted every handful of years, but this was the biggest and brightest Moon since way back in January 1948. The Moon only utilises such special powers and shows itself in this particular guise when it is full, and orbiting especially close to Earth.
Its full superhero name is ‘perigee full moon’, perigee being the closest point to Earth on the Moon’s elliptical orbit, but for shortness and the sake of a suitable entrance, it simply goes by ‘Supermoon’. We won’t see another one like this until November 2034, by which time Christian Bale will be playing the role of Alfred in Batman, and Marvel Studios will have accrued enough money and science to forge a real-life Incredible Hulk.
Indeed nowadays lonely young men the world over seek solace and succour from the superheroes which inhabit, via Netflix or torrents, their oversized television screens. Whatever their political persuasion, whether they aspire to the philanthropy of a Bill Gates or the megalomania of a Donald Trump, these movies offer simplified odes to rugged individualism and awkward male self-worth.
In times past however, melancholic young men turned to la Lune. Whether Paul Verlaine or Claude Debussy, Guy de Maupassant or Jules Laforgue, for the French in the 1800s, the pale moonlight symbolised the sobbing soul. Tales of Moon travel extend back to Lucian’s True History in the 2nd century, and at the onset of film Le Voyage dans la Lune by Georges Méliès gave the fledgeling industry a prod in the eye.
A couple of decades later Fritz Lang conceived of a woman in the Moon, and its next cinematic depiction would have to wait another seventeen years, before it was lassoed by George Bailey in It’s a Wonderful Life. As friend or foe, the site of sinister military bases or solitary exploration, the Moon today is never far from silver-screen view, but under threat from a new breed of comic book science fiction, who knows what the emboldened Supermoon will choose to save or subdue?
