The Accent of Evil: How Gunn's "Progressive" Superman Still Codes Latina Villains as Foreign
- Christopher González
- Jul 30
- 7 min read
There is a moment in James Gunn's Superman, released this summer to both critical acclaim and conservative outrage, when the film's moral universe reveals itself with startling clarity. Hawkgirl, played by Isabela Merced, executes a foreign dignitary with clinical precision, then delivers the line that has since become among the movie's most debated: "I'm not Superman." The words emerge in flawless, unaccented American English—the voice of a Peruvian-American actress whose first language was Spanish, speaking as a character whose moral complexity has been rendered linguistically invisible.
Meanwhile, across the narrative chasm that separates hero from villain, María Gabriela de Faría's The Engineer punctuates her schemes and Lex Luthor's orders with Spanish expletives, her Venezuelan accent serving as an audible reminder of her outsider status. Forget for a moment that Superman is actually the ultimate outsider here.
In this way, Superman—a film that its director has positioned as "the story of America"—inadvertently maps the persistence of Hollywood's most enduring hierarchy: the sounds of heroism versus the sounds of Otherness or, frankly, evil.
The distinction might appear incidental, a byproduct of casting choices rather than ideological architecture. Yet it reflects something more profound about how American popular culture continues to negotiate the relationship between linguistic authenticity and moral authority. Gunn, who has described his Superman as a deliberate response to contemporary anti-immigrant sentiment, seems genuinely invested in creating an immigrant narrative for our current moment. I'd like to give him credit for that.
The film arrives festooned with progressive credentials: a diverse cast, a director known for his commitment to inclusion, and a storyline that explicitly challenges xenophobic sentiment. When Fox News branded the movie "Superwoke" and commentators like Jesse Watters made predictably inflammatory jokes about MS-13, Gunn responded with defiant pride. Yet for all its conscious commitment to representation, Superman remains curiously unable to imagine heroism—or villainy—that sounds like America.
The Sound of Heroism
Gunn's failure to recognize the aural nuance of the nation strikes hardest when considered alongside the film's genuine achievements. Both Merced and de Faría deliver performances of considerable depth within roles that could easily have devolved into flat stereotypes.
In the screen time she gets, Merced's Hawkgirl navigates moral ambiguity with a complexity that recalls the best traditions of superhero cinema, while de Faría, who has a more substantial role, brings genuine pathos to a character who might, in less capable hands, have remained merely functional. The problem lies not in their individual contributions but in the larger framework that determines which voices may speak for heroism and which must remain forever marked as foreign.
The genealogy of this framework extends back to the advent of talking pictures, when Hollywood first confronted the challenge of linguistic diversity in an industry suddenly aware of the sound of speech. One recalls this played up for laughs in Singin' in the Rain (1952). More seriously, the transition from silent films to "talkies" in the late 1920s marked a decisive shift for Hispanic performers, many of whom had flourished during cinema's wordless era but found their voices—quite literally—deemed unsuitable for leading roles.
As film historians such as Chon Noriega have documented, the industry's response was to establish what became known as the "accent hierarchy": a system that reserved heroic roles for actors capable of what casting directors called "standard American" speech, while relegating accented performers to supporting parts, comic relief, or unabashed villainy.
This taxonomy persisted with remarkable consistency throughout the twentieth century, adapting to changing political climates while maintaining its essential structure. Its capacity to survive even within productions that explicitly set out to challenge it testifies to the intractability of the film industry.
The USC Annenberg Inclusion Initiative's comprehensive analysis of Latino representation in major studio releases reveals the statistical dimensions of this phenomenon: 27 percent of Hispanic characters speak English with what researchers classify as "detectable Spanish accents," and 39 percent of top-billed Latino characters are depicted as criminals. The correlation functions less as conscious prejudice and more as inherited habit—the accumulated weight of nearly a century's worth of casting decisions that have naturalized the association between accented speech and moral alterity.
The Irony of Inclusion
Gunn's Superman participates in this tradition despite its director's stated intentions to transcend it. Yet when it came to imagining how actual immigrants might sound within this narrative framework, the film's imagination faltered in precisely the ways that countless other "progressive" productions have stumbled: by assuming that heroism requires the erasure of audible difference.
The irony deepens when one considers the biographical details that inform both actresses' performances. Merced, born in Cleveland to a Peruvian mother, has spoken movingly about her early struggles with English and her determination to maintain connections to her heritage. She records music in both Spanish and English, changed her stage name to honor her late grandmother Yolanda Merced, and represents precisely the kind of bicultural fluency that defines contemporary Latino American experience.
De Faría, meanwhile, arrived in Hollywood from Caracas with the accent she retains today, having built her early career in Venezuelan telenovelas before transitioning to English-language productions. Both women embody forms of American identity that have never required linguistic uniformity for their validity.
But in Superman, only one of these linguistic identities proves compatible with heroic status. Merced's Hawkgirl speaks in the unmarked tones that mainstream audiences have been conditioned to accept as universal, while de Faría's Engineer is permitted her accent because her antagonistic role allows the film to indulge in the familiar pleasure of coding linguistic difference as moral deviation. Some accents work this way, especially in speculative cinema. Recall the original Star Wars trilogy, where representatives of the Empire all spoke with British accents.
The consequence of a Spanish accent can now be a form of representation that celebrates diversity while unconsciously reinforcing the terms on which that diversity may be accepted. It's a devil's bargain, especially for actors like de Faría.
The Commercial Compromise
The contrast illuminates the peculiar bind in which contemporary Hollywood finds itself: audiences clearly hunger for genuine representation done well, yet the industry's marketing apparatus remains convinced that such authenticity constitutes commercial risk. The result is a compromise formation that includes Latino actors while requiring them to navigate predetermined linguistic hierarchies—a form of diversity that celebrates inclusion while quietly insisting on assimilation as its price.
Both actresses succeed within the constraints imposed by Hollywood's linguistic imagination, delivering performances that transcend the limitations of their narrative contexts.
None of this diminishes the considerable talents that both Merced and de Faría bring to their roles, nor does it suggest conscious malice on Gunn's part. Both actresses succeed within the constraints imposed by Hollywood's linguistic imagination, delivering performances that transcend the limitations of their narrative contexts.
Yet these individual achievements exist alongside, rather than in opposition to, the larger patterns they inadvertently reproduce. In a film industry genuinely committed to linguistic democracy, Merced might have been free to explore how a bilingual hero navigates between cultural worlds, while de Faría could have embodied moral complexity without carrying the representational burden of foreign threat located almost entirely on the shibboleth of how words are pronounced.
The United States is home to more than 60 million Latinos, the vast majority of whom navigate multiple linguistic worlds with the fluency that comes from lived experience. They code-switch between languages, retain accents, and embody forms of American identity that have never required linguistic uniformity for their authenticity. Yet popular culture continues to operate as though heroism must sound a particular way—as though the cape and the accent exist forever in fundamental opposition.
The Weight of Representation
De Faría speaks of sharing arepas with the crew, of the accent that "carries Venezuela with her everywhere." That she must do so while playing a villain reveals Hollywood's failure, not hers. Meanwhile, Merced navigates the complex terrain of bicultural identity, describing how "Spanish was my first language" and her ongoing commitment to maintaining connections to Peru, yet is permitted to express none of this linguistic heritage in her heroic role.
The solution to this dilemma is neither technically complex nor politically revolutionary: it requires simply allowing heroic characters to sound like the people they are meant to represent. It means embracing code-switching as a natural element of bilingual experience, presenting accents as markers of heritage rather than otherness, and recognizing that linguistic diversity enriches rather than threatens narrative authenticity. More fundamentally, it means abandoning the assumption that American heroism requires the sonic erasure of difference.
Until such a shift occurs, we will continue to encounter films like Superman—productions that sincerely aspire to inclusivity while remaining unable to envision what genuine linguistic democracy might actually look like. We will have immigrant stories that celebrate diversity while requiring assimilation, representation that includes Latino actors while perpetuating Latino stereotypes, and progressive narratives that challenge every form of prejudice except the ones they cannot quite recognize within themselves.
The accent doesn't just mark difference; it justifies moral hierarchy.
What makes this particularly galling is the deliberate nature of these choices. De Faría didn't accidentally slip into Spanish—Gunn wrote The Engineer as explicitly Latina before casting began, complete with those Spanish expletives that unambiguously mark her as Other. The message becomes crystalline: to be worthy of Superman's world, one must sound sufficiently American. The accent doesn't just mark difference; it justifies moral hierarchy.
A Metaphor for Our Moment
In this sense, Gunn's Superman offers us an apt metaphor for contemporary American liberalism: earnest in its aspirations, sophisticated in its techniques, saccharine in its invocations of hope, yet persistently limited by assumptions so deeply embedded that they function as natural law rather than historical contingency.
The film genuinely believes in the possibility of a more inclusive America while remaining unable to imagine what that inclusion might actually sound like. It is, perhaps, the perfect superhero movie for our particular cultural moment—progressive in its intentions, conservative in its imagination, and inadvertently revealing in its contradictions.
Like Superman himself, true representation hovers perpetually just beyond our grasp!
That such limitations persist even within Hollywood's most consciously inclusive projects suggests that the real work of representation—the kind that transforms rather than merely includes—remains as elusive as the heroic ideal itself. In the end, we are left with a film that soars through the skies while remaining earthbound in its vision, reaching for transcendence while anchored to the very hierarchies it seeks to escape.
Like Superman himself, true representation hovers perpetually just beyond our grasp, visible enough to inspire hope, distant enough to remind us how far we still have to fly.
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