Here's To Diseased Maniacs
This essay was originally posted to Twitter between April 3, 2021 and April 4, 2021. It was composed of 356 words across eight tweets.
Note: The following is adapted from a post originally written for my personal account.
It's often said that Lex Luthor in SUPERMAN is a weak villain. He's snide, he's fast-talking, but he's not particularly threatening.
Nay, I say to this. He may not pose the physical threat of, say, General Zod in SUPERMAN II. But physical strength isn't what makes a villain a worthy foil for a great hero. Luthor is not only a great villain. He's the best villain.
How do you thwart Superman? Sure, there are villains who can match his power. (Zod, again.) But assume that you can't just beat him in a fight.
Here's what Luthor does: he engineers a disaster. No, he engineers many disasters, all happening at once. He overwhelms Superman.
If this were chess, Luthor makes all the right moves, boxing Superman in and leave him with no safe options. The one thing Luthor doesn't count on is betrayal from within. Rather than surround himself with competence, he's chosen lackeys who he can bully, berate, and belittle.
His right hand woman, Miss Tesmacher, realizes that her own mother will be in the path of destruction. Realizing that Luthor has no humanity to appeal to, she releases Superman from Luthor's underground lair in the nick of time to attend to the disasters and save everyone.
Luthor accounted for all of Superman's powers and natural instincts. What he didn't count on was the intervention of ordinary people. It never occurred to him that his own ally would choose her mother over his grand scheme. It was humanity, not superhumanity, that foiled him.
And isn't that a better story, and a purer distillation of the quintessential themes of the superhero genre, than an alien-on-alien slugfest? Isn't it better for a villain to be undone not by superior power, but by his own lack of understanding of humanity--his fatal flaw?
A gaudy self-styled genius who surrounds himself with total nincompoops, who fancies himself the greatest criminal mind of our time, defeated by the humanity of regular people--humanity which he neither possesses nor understands. It feels resonant in these times.
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Published 3/9/2024
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