“Supergirl’s darkest storyline Is the one it ignores
by Scott Douglas Gerber · The Washington TimesOPINION:
A healthy culture knows how to tell the truth about evil. A decadent one turns evil into entertainment.
The new “Supergirl” film, for all its cosmic spectacle and familiar superhero tropes, offers a revealing test of which kind of culture we are becoming.
Beneath the CGI and the quips lies a storyline far more unsettling than anything involving capes or heat vision. The movie’s central villains, the Brigands, are not merely marauders. They are traffickers who abduct girls across the galaxy to perpetuate their “all‑male race,” a detail the script acknowledges and then promptly abandons.
It is the film’s most morally serious idea — and the one it refuses to confront.
Hollywood often congratulates itself for “raising awareness,” yet when it comes to trafficking, the industry routinely reduces a real‑world crisis to a plot device. “Supergirl” is no exception. The film gestures toward the horror of exploitation, then rushes past it to return to the safer terrain of CGI battles.
The victims remain abstractions. The machinery of abuse is never shown. The audience is never asked to grapple with what trafficking actually is: not a science‑fiction trope, but a system built on coercion, grooming and the deliberate destruction of childhood.
This avoidance is not merely an artistic failure. It reflects a deeper cultural one. Ordered liberty depends on a society willing to name moral wrongs clearly and confront them honestly. Trafficking flourishes where institutions fail, where communities look away and adults abdicate their responsibility to protect the vulnerable.
A culture that cannot tell the truth about exploitation on screen is unlikely to muster the seriousness required to confront it in real life.
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That gap between Hollywood’s shorthand and the real world’s complexity is precisely why I turned to storytelling. During my service on a federal civil rights advisory committee, I listened to victims describe how exploitation begins — not with dramatic kidnappings, but with the slow erosion of boundaries by adults who knew exactly what they were doing.
One survivor’s testimony affected me so deeply that I realized data alone could never convey the truth. Fiction, paradoxically, can sometimes illuminate reality more clearly.
“Supergirl” hints at this truth but never follows it. Kara Zor‑El’s mission is framed as an interstellar quest to save her poisoned companion and protect a young girl from becoming a killer. Those are legitimate emotional stakes. But the deeper story — the trafficking of girls — remains largely untouched.
The Brigands’ crimes are mentioned, then overshadowed by cosmic fistfights and a climactic showdown in which the bounty hunter Lobo steals more attention than the victims ever receive.
That imbalance matters. A culture that treats trafficking as a narrative accessory risks convincing itself that it has confronted something meaningful when it has merely skimmed the surface. Trafficking is not a backdrop. It is not a storytelling shortcut. It is the third‑most profitable criminal enterprise on Earth, and it thrives not in distant galaxies but in ordinary neighborhoods.
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In the real world, traffickers do not resemble space pirates. They look like medical residents, coaches, family friends — even relatives. Up to 44% of juvenile victims are trafficked by someone they know.
And while the film imagines villains speaking an alien language, the truth is far more uncomfortable: the buyers fueling this market are often people with stable jobs, respected titles, and the means to pay for what they grotesquely treat as a commodity.
That narrative gap is precisely why I wrote “The Trafficker.” In the novel, I tried to do what the movie does not: Center the victim, expose the systems that enable exploitation and force readers to confront the fact that trafficking is not a distant threat. It is happening right now — in motels, in homes, in online spaces, in communities that believe it could never happen there.
Superhero stories often tell us that extraordinary individuals will save us. But trafficking is a crisis that demands something different: ordinary people who refuse to look away.
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Policymakers cannot treat trafficking as a narrative accessory. Funding, enforcement and victim services must be sustained long after the headlines fade.
If “Supergirl” encourages even a few viewers to ask harder questions about the world we inhabit, then its darkest storyline may end up being its most valuable contribution.
• Scott Douglas Gerber is the author of the award‑winning novel “The Trafficker.”