The Other Interesting Thing About “Superman”

This was pointed out to me in an article, and set me to thinking about expectations and analysis.

Lex Luthor is the “bad guy” of the movie. But, unlike previous iterations of the villain on film (or in the comic books, IIRC), Lex has supporters and eager participants who help him carry out his plans. A roomful in one side, a camp full on another. And all happy to be doing the job. Cheering supporters who rejoice in their victories. They aren’t working out of fear. They want to be a part of the project(s).

Now pivot that to reality. Conditioned by movies where Alan Rickman is a bad guy commanding minions ready and willing to die but otherwise just cannon fodder, we think the bad guy rules alone, and at best his “gang” are just willing employees. Luther’s people are active participants wanting the outcome, not the robbery payoff. So it’s insistently not Luthor alone. Indeed, how could it be? That’s not the way the world works.

But we apply the lesson of action movies and comic books to reality, and assume Trump is acting alone or terrifying Congress to do his will. But maybe even Murkowski actually agrees with Trump; or thinks her voters do. It’s far more reasonable to think the GOP Congress is wholly supportive of Trump than that they are responding out of fear. Especially the way the OBBB moved through Congress despite all the reports about the support the bill didn’t have; until it clearly did.

We tell ourselves stories about reality based on the stories we call fiction. A lot of conspiracy theories are just tropes from fiction, most of them no more realistic than the action Twain mocked brutally in the Natty Bumpo stories of Fenimore Cooper. But while we all admire Tom Sawyer and the lesson of the white washed fence, or the adventures if Huckleberry Finn, what sticks in our mind are the improbable exploits of the Deer Slayer, and the absurdly incompetent Native Americans who try to get on that flatboat in the scene Twain dissects, being slowly towed down a canal. But it’s not the absurdity we remember, it’s the danger to white people Cooper describes. No surprise, really. Even a Tarantino movie shows “Hollywood” damage from gunshots or samurai swords; not the spray of viscera and bone and organs such weapons would produce. We like our reality neat, tidy, and simple. Leave the awful reality of GSW’s to the ER’s, where we don’t have to see it.

And leave the evil that people do to one person’s actions, the easier for us to think we would never fear an alien immigrant like Superman; only Lex Luthor alone would ever be that bad. So much more comforting to think the bad guy is, in the end, always alone.