"Superman Comes to the Supermarket" is divided into six sections, each with its own subject headings. Mailer arrives in Los Angeles in 1960 to report on the Democratic convention which would nominate John F. Kennedy who would go on to defeat Republican
Richard M. Nixon. Mailer proposes to unravel the mystery of the convention which "began as one mystery and ended as another." The first mystery was Kennedy himself: young, Catholic, and physically attractive, in all those ways unlike any who had ever become the nominee of a major political party. The convention, he recalls, was largely devoid of drama owing to his domination of the primary elections, and yet its importance could not be overstated because "America was in danger of drifting into a profound decline," the result of
Cold War paranoia, conformity, and encroaching totalitarianism. In
Section 1, Mailer begins with his sense that the Democratic delegates and party bosses who had come to Los Angeles were in a state of panic because they were about to nominate a man they did not altogether understand. They understand that Kennedy's money and organization have enabled him to win the primaries and that his politics are conventionally liberal, and yet, Mailer writes, "the candidate for all his record, his good, sound, conventional liberal record has a patina of that other life, the second American life, the long electric night with the fires of neon leading down the highway to the murmur of jazz". Mailer this introduces a theme, "the second American life", which he will develop throughout the essay.
Section 2 begins with "the pastel monotonies of Los Angeles architecture". Mailer develops one of the two metaphors in his title: "the spirit of the supermarket, that homogeneous extension of stainless surfaces and psychoanalyzed people, packaged commodities and ranch homes, interchangeable, geographically unrecognizable, that essence of a new postwar SuperAmerica is found nowhere so perfectly as in Los Angeles' ubiquitous acres". He then offers a series of brief character sketches of some of the key players at the convention such as
Lyndon Johnson,
Adlai Stevenson, and
Eleanor Roosevelt. Mailer begins
Section 3 with the crucial insight: "the Democrats were going to nominate a man who [was] going to be seen as a great box-office actor, and the consequences of that were staggering and not at all easy to calculate. He identifies the greatest threat facing the nation as Cold War conformity and totalitarianism, but the saving grace for American society might be its ability to resist social and cultural homogenization because "America was the land where people still believed in heroes" like John F. Kennedy. Hollywood created a breed of heroes who lived in this American myth, or what Mailer refers to as a river of heroic possibilities. However, the conformity of the Cold War years had forced that river back underground while "the myth continued to flow, fed by television and the film". To realize this hidden potential once again, America needed a hero like Kennedy who could "capture the secret imagination of a people" and embody a heroic fantasy all Americans could imagine as their own. In
Section 4 Mailer offers a portrait of Kennedy based on a couple of face to face encounters with the candidate and his wife
Jacqueline, during one of which Kennedy flatters Mailer's vanity by telling him that he had read his novels, mentioning specifically not the one for which Mailer was most famous,
The Naked and the Dead (1948), but the lesser-known
The Deer Park (1955). He recounts some of Kennedy's biography, including his legendary heroism during WWII. He extends his metaphor of Kennedy-as-actor, comparing him to
Marlon Brando. Mailer concludes this section optimistically, feeling that "With such a man in office the myth of the nation would again be engaged". In
Section 5 Mailer speculates on what might have happened at the convention had Adlai Stevenson, a popular favorite among Democrats, more proactively pursued the nomination, and he praises
Eugene McCarthy's speech introducing Stevenson to the convention crowd. He shifts into narrative mode as he details events on nominating day, and he comments on the coincidence that Kennedy shared not only the name Fitzgerald with the great American writer
F. Scott Fitzgerald but something of the iconic
Jazz Age style. Mailer begins
Section 6 by stating that he did not attend the subsequent
Republican convention; rather, he watched it on television. The televised event reinforced his understanding of the kind of people who typically associated with the Republican Party, and he lists a wide variety of types. He also offers this assessment of their candidate,
Richard Nixon, who "would be given the manufactured image of an ordinary man . . . whose greatest qualification for President was his profound abasement before the glories of the Republic, the stability of the mediocre, and his own unworthiness." Extending his analysis of the collective American psyche, Mailer ruminates on "the power of each man to radiate his appeal into some fundamental depths of the American character". Mailer constructs Kennedy and Nixon as polar opposites and anticipates that: "One would have an inkling at last if the desire of America was for drama or stability, for adventure or monotony". He concludes the essay on a note of ominous uncertainty: that if Nixon were to succeed, Americans in the eastern half of the country might go to bed on election night unaware of what would happen out west, "at three o'clock in the morning on that long dark night of America's search for a security cheaper than her soul". His reference to a "long dark night" echoes a quote by F. Scott Fitzgerald from
The Crack-Up: "In a real dark night of the soul it is always three o'clock in the morning". ==Analysis==