Lex Luthor as a Role Model

There are (sometimes overlapping) fads in movies and popular entertainment: the noir of the 40s/50s, the Westerns of the 50s/60s, the scifi following the success of Star Wars, and so on. Examples of each genre turn up after its fad generally has passed, to be sure, but those examples stand out just for that reason. Since 2000 comic book-based superhero movies have consumed ever larger studio budgets and generated (despite the occasional bad miss) ever larger box offices. A few are solid works of art by any standards, but most are at best forgettable even if entertaining in the moment. It is remarkable just how long-lived this fad has been. A slew of films with budgets in the hundreds of millions of dollars are in production and post-production at this moment, while comic book publishers explore new characters in hopes of creating the next massive franchise. Superheroes must speak to something in 21^st century public psychology. Fantasy and wish fulfillment are at the bottom of it of course, but that is the case in every genre of entertainment. Plenty of psychologists and social observers have tried to identify what the current appeal of superheroes in particular might be. I don’t have any special additional insights, so I’ll leave the head-scratching about it to them.
 
I do insist, however, that it is the villain who makes a superhero movie watchable at all. (Not an original view, I know, but true.) The villain provides the necessary challenge and is almost always the better role. The best written ones are not mindless thugs, sadists, or psychopaths. The real world has a full share of those, and they cost us dearly without any upside. The best fictional villains are understandable on some level. Some are even sympathetic. Dr. Horrible is a case in point. Four years before he was handed 200,000,000 studio dollars to write and direct The Avengers, Joss Whedon whimsically made the silly but enjoyable Dr. Horrible's Singalong Blog for virtually zero dollars and then gave it away for free on the internet. The hero, Captain Hammer, is a pompous posturing ass, while Dr. Horrible just seeks love and respect. Dr. Horrible is still on the wrong side, but we the viewers can’t help liking him more. So, too, with villains with better studio funding. It’s not enough for one to say “I want to rule the world” to be interesting. Rather, it’s more understandable to hear, “I want to rule the world to make it a better place, and it will be a better place when everyone just shuts up and does what I say.” This is every bit as villainous as the simple egotism of the former quote, and in many ways scarier, but we get it. After all, reader, wouldn’t the world be a better place if everyone would do what we say?

Becoming a superhero is a little out of reach. There is never a radioactive spider when you need one, and getting belted by gamma rays won’t make you the Hulk. It will just kill you. Fortunately, award-winning comics writer Ryan North tells us that it is entirely possible to become a supervillain in the real world in his book How to Take Over the World: Practical Schemes and Scientific Solutions for the Aspiring Supervillain. No superpowers are required. Money is. However, all the schemes in the book together add up to a cost of some 56 billion dollars. This is a lot, but not more than Congress commonly tacks on to some existing spending bill just as an afterthought. (One of the schemes in the books involves hacking elections, so that is one indirect way to raise the cash.) He makes a point of sticking to the scientifically possible, albeit often difficult: e.g. cooling the climate with high altitude sulfates (as volcanoes do naturally) with all the blackmail possibilities that suggests. He distinguishes between practical and possible. A secret lair, for example, is most practically and economically hidden in plain sight as a sublevel under a commercial building or even a private home, but it is possible to float a high altitude sphere for your lair. This idea actually dates to 1958. Buckminster Fuller noted that the cube volume law (volume increases according to the cube of linear dimensions, so a person twice as tall as another will have eight times the volume if relative body proportions remain the same) means that if you made a geodesic sphere large enough, the mass of the structural elements would become a mere rounding error when calculating the total mass including the air inside. Heating the air inside (transparent greenhouse panels would do the trick) would make the whole object lighter than the surrounding air at normal altitudes and up it would go. North calculates a sphere 1.6 kilometers in diameter would work great. However, one can see how a 1.6 kilometer floating sphere would make a pretty easy and fat target.
 
North says his book “identifies hitherto unexploited weaknesses in our global civilization… In other words, this is a book of non-fiction about becoming a literal supervillain and taking over the world.” Since North himself hasn’t tried any of his schemes (to my knowledge), I suspect none is easy. But it is nice to know it can be done. Anyone have $56 billion to spare?
 

Theory of a Deadman – Villain