The Marvelous Miss Teschmacher
This essay was originally posted to Twitter between August 18, 2021 and August 27, 2021. It was composed of 984 words across 21 tweets.
I'd been meaning to do one of these about Miss Teschmacher for some time. (Miss Teschmacher is Lex Luthor's moll, played to perfection by Valerie Perrine.) What's put me off, this far into my year of doing this microblog, is that I didn't have an angle.
Luckily, Matt Zoller Seitz (@mattzollerseitz), accomplished movie journalist and all around insight-haver, wrote a piece on SUPERMAN (1978) with some good Miss Tesmacher stuff. I thought I'd do a react piece.
The MZS piece concerns itself in part with the way Superman inspires goodness in those he encounters--his transformative influence, his truest superpower.
(Jor-El's voiceover, though only semi-audibly, foretells this with the line "Your leadership can stir others into action.")
MZS provides multiple examples, but the one that stood out for me is Miss Teschmacher in the swimming pool--both because of my own difficulty in finding an inroads to talk about the character, and because, by MZS's analysis, I see her as the best illustration of this theme.
Miss Teschmacher, at first blush, isn't the deepest character. The impression she creates in the first shot she appears in, with Valerie Perrine's luminous eyes and cavernous cleavage, is that she's on hand to keep the parents amused while their children enjoy the superheroics.
I first saw SUPERMAN when I was too young to appreciate titillation, so the purpose of partially exposing Perrine's breasts went over my head.
(I first understood titillation with Return of the Jedi [Marquand, 1983], when I was just old enough to be made uncomfortable by it.)
Her turning point as a character is in coming to understand that Lex Luthor, her paramour (or sugar daddy, if you prefer), is taking his diabolical plan out of the realm of the hypothetical. He's about to do something really awful, and she has to decide if she can live with that.
It's no longer an edgy game, a source of thrills. She listens to the sounds of a man drowning in the swimming pool, she turns over in her head the name "Hackensack, New Jersey," and her loyalties shift. Perrine has no dialogue here, but her physical expression is everything.
MZS's description of Miss Teschmacher is that she "landed one of the evilest, wealthiest men in the world but seems disappointed at how easy it was, and makes wisecracks about how Lex wooed her with promises of a Park Avenue address but gave her one '500 [sic] feet below.'"
Fittingly, MZS shifts from calling her "Miss Teschmacher" to calling her "Eve" at the point in his essay where she betrays Luthor and rescues Superman. Her reasons are complicated; she is allowed to be selfish, because all fully realized human beings are capable of selfishness.
MZS: "[Eve realizes that] Superman really is that good, it's not a bit, he means it. And this leads Eve to measure Lex against Superman and realize that (1) she's gotten into a relationship that's... based around money and clothes and jewelry and material goods and [power.]"
"[2] She doesn't respect herself (probably because she's been with a lot of guys like Lex, though probably without the money); and (3) a guy like Superman will never be within Eve's grasp because she's not trying hard enough to be the kind of person Superman would respect."
Perhaps we identify with Clark, the everyday buffoon who, on the inside, contains a specialness that the rest of the world simply won't see. Or Superman, our aspirational figure, who does the things we hope that we might do if we had the same power to affect the world as he does.
But Miss Teschmacher? She might be the most human character in the film. If Superman is what we aspire to be at our best, she's what we fear we are at our worst. Not a supervillain--just weak, venal, self-loathing. Someone capable of doing better, which only makes her feel worse.
Superman, as a cultural figure, is a dare of sorts. To look upon the problems around us, to think about our role in our communities, our own capacity to help. Our own powers. He dares us to examine ourselves and find the super being lurking underneath the flawed human exterior.
If Horace dared us to be wise, Superman dares us to be good.
(And here is where I won't countenance any claims that Superman is a morally simplistic character, because there is nothing more morally complicated than being good in a world that constantly encourages us not to be.)
This is the turning point of the movie, when Superman cannot save himself, and thus, cannot save the world. He's at the mercy of one Eve Teschmacher. For once in her life, she gets to make the pivotal choice that changes everything, and the choice she makes is the right one.
It's the moment she accepts Superman's dare.
MZS: "[Eve] does not, for the most part, respect herself. Which makes that moment where she dives into the water and saves Superman's life so powerful. We're seeing Super-Eve: a woman releasing her suppressed potential for goodness."
These are mere extracts in the service of writing a piece specifically about Miss Teschmacher, but I encourage anyone with an interest in the movie to read MZS's entire piece. One again, that link is here.
Aside from the Miss Teschmacher stuff, I enjoyed the way MZS conceptualizes Superman as more than a mere cipher, but as a character with tremendous inner life and motivated decisionmaking. It brings further vitality to this already rich action-adventure text.
P.S. Looking back over my document of ideas for this project, last updated almost half a year ago, one item on the list is "Miss Teschmacher: Stirring Others Into Action."
I don't remember what motivated me to jot this down, but it was an idea waiting for its time.
Previous: Can you read my mind?
Next: Super Movies
Back to contents.
Published 3/9/2024
"365 Days of SUPERMAN"
site and contents
© 2024 Ken Alleman.