Lex Luthor Did Nothing Wrong*

*Except for shooting a guy, kidnapping a space baby, being abusive to his girlfriend and workers, and opening a black-hole rift or whatever that was.

When I say that Lex Luthor did nothing wrong, I mainly mean his treatment of Superman. Yes, this is a movie that needs a villain, so he's evil by genre standards, but he's also the only one who doesn't clap like a monkey for this alien sent to Earth to dominate us.

I'll admit, I wasn't in the best frame of mind when I decided to go see Superman last week. A friend of mine had recently broken off with her boyfriend and had been bugging me for weeks to hang out. I guess she needed to get her mind off things. The important thing here is that the decision was made for me.

So, she basically forced me to watch Superman, a film that I would've never watched. Maybe that's why during the movie I kept thinking, 'Damn, Lex Luthor has a point'. By the end, I was convinced everything he did made sense.

Watch out, because I'm gonna spoil the hell out of this movie in more ways than one.

I'm a human because I have doubts

During their final confrontation, Superman storms into Lex Luthor's super villain headquarters and delivers a speech about how human he is.

I'm as human as anyone. I love, I get scared. I wake up every morning and despite not knowing what to do, I put one foot in front of the other and I try to make the best choices I can. I screw up all the time, but that is being human. And that's my greatest strength.

 

First of all, I think there's a critical misunderstanding of what actually makes someone human. The problem here is that Superman's view is incredibly limiting.

If you don't love, you're not human? If you feel you know what you're doing, you're not human? If you stop trying altogether, do you stop being human? He thinks we are just all good natured and willing to try and fail and try again. That's only a percentage, my man, and it changes constantly.

The things Superman says are definitely human, but no one would agree that those things are what make us human. In fact, were I to venture a guess, that's what an alien would say humans are after consuming very large amounts of American pop culture. He's just parroting lines he's heard on TV.

Or the point is that making mistakes and still trying to make the best choices is the human part? Yes, among thousands of things, that's human too. The thing to notice here is that the guy speaking is a god. Even when the movie shows us how vulnerable he is in the first minute, he's healed by the sun and a super dog in the next scene.

He's immortal, and human morality and intellect only mean anything in the context of how fragile and finite our lives are. Because of that built-in safety net, Superman could never understand the very fundamentals of being human. He lacks the fragility and limits that can sometimes force us to make the wrong choices willingly.

Lex gets it

Lex Luthor, on the other hand, is a human, and a pretty successful and intelligent one. He's also the only one who seems to be grounded in real human fear and logic. For example, at one point, he goes a bit crazy and starts yelling at Superman.

I'm aware that envy consumes my every waking moment. I know when they mention Galileo or Einstein or one of these other twits in the same breath as me, I feel a tide of vomit burn the back of my throat! But at least Galileo did something. He wasn't some dopey Venusian catapulted onto this planet just to have the world fawn over him! Because his strength illuminates how weak we all really are! So, my envy is a calling! It is the sole hope for humanity, because it is what has driven me to annihilate you!

 

Now this is some real humanity. That's normal, human insecurity in the face of some cosmic being who has everything handed to him. But it also shows the desire to earn greatness without that safety net.

Yes, we should feel envy of the gods that live among us. Lex is very much into that Paradise Lost mentality of "Better to reign in Hell than to serve in Heaven".

When an alien being shows up and decides to fix every problem we have, then what are we good for? That's the end of History; there will be no more fundamental changes to come after that, no more progress or regression, just stagnation. All of Luthor's plans, like the rift and the Superman clone and the army of metahumans, are just his attempts at trying to match Superman's powers with human means. It's desperate, but that's just another emotion Superman will never fully understand.

What's the plan here?

Superman is a god trying to prove he’s human. Lex is a human trying to stop a god. He's the tragic hero of the movie, the only one thinking about how Superman could just turn around and step on us like ants, so I'd say he gets a pass for all his prophetic paranoia.

Also, the big supertwist of the movie is that Superman's parents sent him to Earth to enslave humanity and have a bunch of super babies. Clark Kent grew up thinking that he was sent to Earth to be a nice guy, but Lex discovers the missing part of the message containing all the genocidal stuff.

Even if Superman's been good so far, now we know why he was sent here in the first place, and it's a pretty shitty reason. And yes, he's a good guy (more on that later). But this is not about Superman being wrong, it's about Lex being right.

Lex is the one thinking about the future. What if Superman changes his mind? What if his version of “good” doesn’t match yours? Lex is right to investigate and distrust him. Lex is vouching for intellectual and moral emancipation from a god.

Let us fuck up, Superman; you weren't even invited.

Who decides what good is?

Another thing Superman does is assume humanity is monolithic. He's from another galaxy, but his moral compass is whatever his parents from a small farm in Kansas told him. There's nothing inherently wrong with that, but the problem is that he never stops to think what the right thing is in an ethical way.

He just knows. He is presented with a situation and he knows what's right, and luckily, for him, the right way involves punching a bunch of things. Isn't that the most American thing ever?

He simply knows what's wrong in the world and how to fix it. And he has absolutely no intellectual curiosity to expand his view of what's ethical or not. He just assumes that his small-town American way of thinking is what's going to solve whatever problems the world might face.

Everyone talks about how this Superman is just a regular guy doing what's right. Maybe that's it: regular guys with regular minds shouldn't have that much power. If he was concerned with doing any good, he would spend his entire life studying ethics before ever using that power. Instead, he just punches shit.

Lex is very much on humanity's side, at least ontologically. Yes, he does all the shitty things he does, but he's seeing the bigger picture. He's flawed in an existential way because, suddenly, he's the only human capable of standing against a god. Of course he's gonna have some issues.

What hope do normal people have, if Luthor with all his money and power can't compete against Superman? Yes, he's fueled by an impossible ego that turns his own grievances into political unrest across the world, but how is that different from what Superman does? Lex doesn't want power without resistance, he wants humanity to stay in control of itself.

In the same way my agency was taken away when my friend forced me to watch a movie I didn't want to, Luthor understood humanity would always be chained to the moral whims of a god.

In the end, Lex is right, but it doesn't change a thing. Under Superman's simple-minded moral compass, humanity will grow ethically lazy and stupid. He would end up forcing every country on Earth to follow his moral code while claiming he's as human as everyone else. On the other hand, Lex Luthor is a petty man full of envy and war crimes, but he's still the only one who believes we should be able to decide for ourselves.