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typicalwhitegrill · 7 days ago

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Okay, I need to talk about 2025 Lex Luthor because he so perfectly captures the moment in history we're living in and he gives us just. Just. Such a fantastic encapsulation of the banality of evil and how it's expressed in the modern day.

A sizeable chunk of this movie is about the deconstruction, disempowerment, and even emasculation of Lex Luthor as a powerful and dignified supervillain. This movie came for Lex with a goddamn guillotine, and the result is sheer perfection.

All of the spoiler warnings for Superman (2025).

There is a temptation to treat evil as if it is a sense of cruel pragmatism. We see this reflected in how we talk about fascism. You know, Mussolini allegedly made the trains run on time. To quote Hbomberguy, Hitler created a lot of job openings for Nazi Germany; I wonder. How he did that.

Culturally, for a long time, we've been in love with this idea that evil is callous, it is heartless, it is amoral, but it gets results. It gets things done. When you live under The Dictator, you might get shot for shoplifting but public transit runs like clockwork, food and resources are plentiful and supply lines are never disrupted, healthcare is plentiful. It's callous, but it's efficient.

Historically, that has never really proven to be the case. Mussolini didn't make the trains run on time. Train improvements were already underway before he seized power, and there were still problems even under his dominion. If you think Mussolini made the trains run on time, I'm sorry but you fell for Mussolini's deliberate propagandizing to take credit for other people's work.

That is the real face of fascism. When you peel back the sleek, dignified curtain of the Empire, you find a bunch of idiots and shitheels climbing over each other in a mad scramble to cosplay as the Most Serious-est of Strongmen. Fascism is a vibe that insecure manchildren play at to feel special.

And that is precisely what this movie gives us in Lex.

Lex Luthor is a character that has been interpreted and reinterpreted a billion times over. He's the archnemesis to the granddaddy of the superhero genre. He's kind of a big deal.

He's a billionaire industrialist. He despises Superman. He is so very bald. Those are pretty much the constants. The rest? You can fill in the blanks how you will, and writers do. Sometimes he hates Superman because, as a child, Superboy made him bald. Sometimes he has a scheme to make him rich and Superman is standing in the way of that. Sometimes he and Superman are best friends torn apart by distrust and paranoia.

Sometimes he just has a grudge against Superman for being in the way of his schemes. Sometimes he has high-minded philosophical ideals for why Superman's existence is making humanity lesser in one way or another.

But no matter which way you slice it, the one thing Lex Luthor always is, is dignified. Whether using his capital resources to destroy Superman for ideological reasons or trying to destroy Superman for the sake of his capitalist gain, Lex Luthor is the archnemesis and is always treated with serious gravitas.

But the Lex Luthor of Superman (2025) is a child.

He pours money and resources into an elaborate cloning and super-soldier setup, spent time and energy memorizing a series of commands, all so he can play Mortal Kombat at Superman. Literally sets up what amounts to a video game where he gets to input commands for his video game avatar to carry out. And the character he chose to play when he loaded up the game is Superman.

He is a fundamentally unserious person. To him, carrying out an ethnic cleansing in a region of the world and trolling Superman on the internet are the same.

But the lengths the film goes to deny him dignity go beyond that.

The film doesn't just attack Lex as a serious threat. The one thing, the one thing every interpretation of Lex agrees upon, is that he's a brilliant mastermind. Superman has all the power, but Lex has the superior intellect he needs to challenge such an immeasurably powerful man.

Superman (2025) comes for him there too.

When he's on top of the world, Lex screams "BRAIN BEATS BRAWN" at Superman like the most pathetic little pissbaby. He's just so proud of himself for memorizing the combo to make his avatar do a Hadoken. And yet he isn't beaten by Superman's powers. He is outsmarted and outplayed at every turn.

For all his resources, Lex just isn't as smart as he thinks he is. This isn't an accident. They make a point of having Mr. Terrific take one look at Lex's pocket dimension setup and then call Lex a reckless idiot. They want you to see him as a self-important dipshit.

Lex locks Superman away in his extrajudicial torture prison under guard of a man who isn't loyal to him and wants out of torture prison too. He doesn't even think twice about walking away and leaving them unsupervised together for great lengths of time so that he can go kidnap Clark Kent.

He presents Superman with a sadistic choice to either save Jarhanpur or save Metropolis. He thinks this will break Superman, this will tear him apart no matter what Superman chooses. Superman just phones some of his pals and together they do both. Superman solves Lex's unsolvable conundrum so easily, it's not even funny.

Even with the ultimate threat of Ultraman, Superman doesn't beat Ultraman by hitting him harder than Lex can account for. He assesses the situation, isolates a flaw in Lex's design, and exploits that vulnerability for maximum damage. Superman vanquishes Lex through critical thinking and clever application of situational circumstances, which are traditionally supposed to be Lex's advantages over him.

The film really does say that Superman isn't just powerful and invulnerable, he's smarter than Lex too. But not just Superman.

At the same time they're saying that Lex isn't as smart as he thinks he is, they also come for him through his relationship with women.

Lex is dating Eve, a bubbly blonde bombshell who flits around his operations being constantly ignored as she takes selfies and doesn't participate in any of the goings on. From the moment you meet her, it's clear what Lex likes about her. She probably makes him feel so fucking smart every time he talks to her. He can explain quantum physics to her and she can go "But what does THAT mean?" and he can feel proud of himself because he understands advanced concepts.

And he's such an insecure little baby man that he can't even make relationships like that work. She's the latest model in a series of ex-girlfriends, all of whom end up thrown into his torture prison when those relationships inevitably go sour. Because of course that's what an insecure baby man would do to make himself feel better over the fact that he purposefully dates women who won't challenge him intellectually and then can't even satisfy them.

But the real kicker is that Eve outplays him too. Eve Barbie Movies Lex. She lets him think she's a useless little fop, lets him be proud of how smart he is, lets him dismiss her as beneath his concern, while taking extensive accounts of his machinations that she can use as insurance to protect herself from him. And when he comes for her, she destroys him with it.

While Lex is being outsmarted and outplayed by Superman at every turn, his bimbo girlfriend plays her Checkmate and ends his entire career. When Lex pushes Eve, this woman he just keeps around to make himself feel smarter, she locks horns with him in a battle of wits and Lex comes up short.

...

But wait! There's more! The film comes for Lex as a serious archvillain. It comes for Lex as a genius. It attacks and belittles his sincerity, his intelligence, even his masculinity. But even more than that, it comes for Lex as a narrative figure. It comes for the very idea that this baby man is capable of standing in his position as the central antagonist of a plotline. It undermines and undercuts him at every turn.

Lex manages to get inside the Fortress of Solitude and the thing he's looking for is just sitting right there. And it doesn't even need to be tampered with or manipulated. He expects to use what he finds here to concoct some master scheme to destroy Superman and instead the Win Condition is just handed to him. It's kind of disappointing. He thought he'd get to do a whole thing here and he is DENIED.

When the gun goes off and kills Mali, it's darkly funny but also shocking. And, for Lex, tremendously disappointing. He's as surprised as the audience, and it completely kills the tension. He wanted trying to do this whole tense interrogation scene and he is DENIED.

Then he shows his entire ass by walking off bragging to Superman that he's going to kidnap Clark Kent, again reinforcing that he's not half as smart as he thinks he is.

His fatal mistake with Jarhanpur and with Ultraman ultimately comes down to the fact that he is so blinded by tunnel vision that he. Like. Doesn't. Think about other people existing. His plans are torn down by the Justice Gang and Krypto and Eve and Mr. Terrific and Lois, all factors that Superman utilizes to great effect and that Lex never accounted for.

Because Lex wanted a boss fight. Himself by proxy of Ultraman versus Superman. Two rival figures, two deadly foes, locked in combat together until one of them comes out on top. He wanted his epic final showdown with Superman. And he is DENIED.

The deconstruction of Lex Luthor as the villain of the film continues all the way through the end. Through the final confrontation between Superman and Lex. Superman gets to say his piece, to tell Lex why he sucks so bad. And then it's Lex's turn to make his final statement on who he is as a villain. He opens his mouth to speak and is mauled by a fucking dog.

Our last impression of our pissbaby antagonist is a set of undignified shrieks as Krypto bites off his nutsack and that is the ultimate statement the film has to make about the caliber of a man and a character that Lex Luthor is.

The film just aggressively refuses to afford Lex even a modicum of dignity. And in that way, it almost feels like a postmortem on the character. Like, I don't know if I'll ever be able to look at Lex Luthor the same way again after experiencing this film. I kinda feel like the last word has been had. Like.

Yeah. You did it, James Gunn. You have made the definitive takedown video of billionaire techbro and self-proclaimed super-genius Lex Luthor. I don't know what more there even is that can be said about the character. I feel like he's done.

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typicalwhitegrill · 2 years ago

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I’m watching that documentary “Before Stonewall” about gay history pre-1969, and uncovered something which I think is interesting.

The documentary includes a brief clip of a 1954 televised newscast about the rise of homosexuality. The host of the program interviewed psychologists, a police officer, and one “known homosexual”. The “known homosexual” is 22 years old. He identifies himself as Curtis White, which is a pseudonym; his name is actually Dale Olson.

So I tracked down the newscast. According to what I can find, Dale Olson may have been the first gay man to appear openly on television and defend his sexual orientation. He explains that there’s nothing wrong with him mentally and he’s never been arrested. When asked whether he’d take a cure if it existed, he says no. When asked whether his family knows he’s gay, he says that they didn’t up until tonight, but he guesses they’re going to find out, and he’ll probably be fired from his job as well. So of course the host is like …why are you doing this interview then? and Dale Olson, cool as cucumber pie, says “I think that this way I can be a little useful to someone besides myself.”

1954. 22 years old. Balls of pure titanium.

Despite the pseudonym, Dale’s boss did indeed recognize him from the TV program, and he was promptly fired the next day. He wrote into ONE magazine six months later to reassure readers that he had gotten a new job at a higher salary.

Curious about what became of him, I looked into his life a little further. It turns out that he ultimately became a very successful publicity agent. He promoted the Rocky movies and Superman. Not only that, but get this: Dale represented Rock Hudson, and he was the person who convinced him to disclose that he had AIDS! He wrote the statement Rock read. And as we know, Rock Hudson’s disclosure had a very significant effect on the national conversation about AIDS in the U.S.

It appears that no one has made the connection between Dale Olson the publicity agent instrumental in the AIDS debate and Dale Olson the 22-year-old first openly gay man on TV. So I thought I’d make it. For Pride month, an unsung gay hero.

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