Huh? What am I doing out here freezing my butt off?
CLARK KENT :
Oh, you wanted some fresh air.
LOIS LANE :
That's ok.
I don't want to catch a cold.
I feel kind of weird.
I feel like I have jet lag.
CLARK KENT :
Jeepers.
LOIS LANE :
Isn't that crazy?
CLARK KENT :
Yeah.
LOIS LANE :
How about you?
You still down?
CLARK KENT :
Nope. Things are pretty clear.
LOIS LANE :
Good — Too much thinking wears down your batteries.
Clark —You got to go with your gut.
The Power of Love
in its purest form.
Fairy Tales, especially the edited Disney versions, usually have a few things in common:
The Rule of Three,
and
The True Love's Kiss.
Finding your true love will cure 99.9% of magical maladies and curses, restores memories and washes your windows, or your money back!
Except in the case of the page quote, where you'll get turned into a polyp.
This trope is so ingrained in the psyche of western audiences it will never really be discredited, but often subverted.
It's actually a Dead Unicorn Trope that's Newer Than They Think — notice how many of the original versions of the stories listed below had nothing to do with a "kiss".
It is also often modified to True Love's "First" Kiss as an Anvilicious lesson about chastity.
"Fifties Superman found himself domesticated at the heart of a strange nuclear family of friends, foes, and relatives. Weisinger had taken his lessons from Captain Marvel and his Family.
Many of his favorite writers, like Otto Binder and Edmond Hamilton, had contributed to the Captain Marvel mythos and were able to adapt that style to suit a new kind of dream world that was more pointed, angular, and paranoid. This was the nuclear family glowing in the dark.
No longer the last survivor of a lost alien civilization, Superman was joined by an entire photo album’s worth of new supercompanions. He’d already gained his own superdog, named Krypto, and now discovered that he had a pretty blond cousin named Kara Zor-El, who’d also managed to survive the destruction of Krypton, along with a supermonkey, Beppo. There were stories of Superman as a boy (Superboy) and as a comically superpowered infant (Superbaby).
Lois Lane was popular enough to graduate to her own monthly comic book.
So too did Superman’s Pal, Jimmy Olsen.
The young Olsen had no sooner installed himself within the pages of his own title than he began to experience a series of fantastic physical contortions typical of the Silver Age. A sampling of stories from Olsen’s solo title showed the results as he metamorphosed into a porcupine boy, a giant turtle, a wolfman, Elastic Lad, and a “human skyscraper,” with no pause for reflection. These transformations never produced any lasting ill effects or neuroses.
So great was the intrusion of the fantastic into the everyday that even Superboy’s small-town sweetheart, red-haired Lana Lang, the hometown girl deluxe, began her own dual career as Insect Lass, using an “alien ring” to reorganize the slim-legged, petite figure of a Kansas homecoming queen into the bulbous abdomen and crawling feelers of a giant wasp or monster moth, with a shapely human torso and head that made it ten times more disturbing.
Like Jimmy, Lana experienced no body horror or psychological trauma when she inflated her trim teenage stomach into a monstrous spider belly, clacked her chitinous forelegs together, and played out superhard silk from spinnerets where her normal midwestern buttocks should be.
Had Franz Kafka’s mild-mannered accountant Gregor Samsa been born to the sunshine of the emergent DC universe, he might have pressed his incredible new cockroach powers into action in the fight against crime and injustice.
Before too long, he would have been invited to join the Justice League.
Kafka never once paused to consider that his outcasts could be heroic like the X-Men, freakishly glamorous like Jimmy Olsen, or as gorgeous as trendsetting Pulitzer Prize winner Lois Lane.
When not under alien influence, Jimmy Olsen could barely stand to be himself for more than five pages and maintained a much-resorted-to “disguise kit” in times of emergency. Prefiguring David Bowie or Madonna, his life became a shifting parade of costume changes and reinventions of identity. And long before those two performers were challenging the boundaries of masculine and feminine, Olsen was deconstructing the macho stereotype in a sequence of soft-core gender-blending adventures for children that beggar belief when read today.
The three unforgettable transvestite Olsen tales, including “Miss Jimmy Olsen,” can be summed up by the following heart-fluttering caption that opens the lead story in Jimmy Olsen no. 95:
IF YOU EVER WONDERED TO WHAT EXTREME LENGTHS JIMMY OLSEN WOULD GO TO GET A NEWSPAPER SCOOP, WAIT TILL YOU SEE JIMMY IN OPERATION AS A MEMBER OF THE FAIR SEX! YES, READERS. SUPERMAN’S YOUNG PAL UNDERGOES A DRASTIC CHANGE OF IDENTITY AND PUTS HIS HIGH-HEELED FEET INTO A HUGE MESS OF TROUBLE WHEN HE BECOMES THE SWEETHEART OF GANGLAND.
These words accompany a picture of Jimmy mincing past a mailbox in a green dress while a group of admiring men whoop and check out his ass.
“HA! HA! THOSE WOLVES WOULD DROP DEAD IF THEY KNEW THAT UNDER THIS FEMALE DISGUISE BEATS THE VERY MASCULINE HEART OF PLANET REPORTER JIMMY OLSEN!” read the smirking, transvestite Olsen’s thought balloon.
The salacious, winking quality of the phrasing suggested an immaculate deconstruction of the masculine adventure genre into the arena of showbiz, shifting identities, and anything-goes sexuality.
Jimmy became a mobster’s moll, even joining a chorus line and proving that he could high-kick with the best of the showgirls. Bestiality reared its shaggy head when Jimmy was forced to substitute the lips of a slobbering chimp named Dora for his own during a tense romantic moment in a dimly lit apartment. Believing the mouth of the ape in question to be the fragrant glossy red lips of Jimmy Olsen, racketeer Big Monte McGraw melted into the simian’s lewd embrace while Jimmy made a hasty getaway. The level of derangement was high. These were stories that could never happen in the real world, even if there was a Superman. This was now a world all its own, living inside our own, growing, getting smarter and more elaborate.
Artist Curt Swan drew the cub reporter as outrageously attractive in his makeup and a red wig. In heels and stockings, Olsen looked like he’d wandered in off a Pussycat Dolls video shoot. And there were a few gloriously disorienting panels where, sans wig, he was seen talking to Superman while still casually dressed in a pink dressing gown, fluffy slippers, and movie star makeup.
And yet, if it was okay for Olsen, wasn’t it okay? I grew up with this idea of the disguise kit and the performance, the idea of both body and identity as canvas. When I adopted as a role model the shape-shifting, bisexual assassin Jerry Cornelius from Michael Moorcock’s novels, I was following in the footsteps of Jimmy Olsen. Olsen played in bands, and so did I. Olsen was freewheeling and nonjudgmental, even in the fifties, and so was I. If it was cool with Superman’s pal, it was A-OK with me.
Clearly these stories were written by perverts with an intent to pervert the young. They were entirely successful.
The transvestite Olsen stories seem deeply rooted in the underground world of mimeographed porn mags and the bondage comics of Eric Stanton, whose studio also employed a certain Joe Shuster, Superman creator. The language used recalls stories like Panty Raid (discussed at length by Robert J. Stoller, M.D., in his 1985 book Observing the Erotic Imagination) and other 1950s transgender tales in which hunky young jocks got more than they bargained for when a trip to the sorority house turned into a forced initiation into the pleasures of female underwear and makeup.
The difference being that Olsen was fully in control of his transformations and could hardly wait more than a couple of pages to get them under way.”
The Extreme Lengths to which Our Boy has gone to Make Himself Strongare powerful indicatorsof The Weakness he feels that he mustovercome.
That Weakness is still there, inside.
-- Hurt.
Doctor Simon, Hurt.
He's Daddy's Evil Twin --
And Your Own.
"Samson’s Hair.
Achilles’ Heel.
The oddly elaborate gymnastic contortions that exposed the vulnerable spots of Celtic superwarriors.
Even the greatest heroes needed a weakness,
or there would be no drama, no fall or redemption.
If nothing could hurt Superman,
what could hurt him?
In fact, Weisinger and his writers understood
The Most Important Thing
about Superman:
That His Heart
was vulnerable,
and
His Self-Esteem
could be fragile.
The Super was just
The Icing on The Cake,
The sugar coating :
These were stories about
Man and His Role
in A New World.
But now that The Man of Tomorrow had achieved near-divine heights of omnipotence, The Need for some kind of convincing Physical Vulnerability was becoming greater.
Or so goes the prevailing opinion.
The glowing green killer mineral Kryptonite had been introduced in the 1943 Superman radio series.
The contaminated remains of Superman’s Home Planet fell to Earth in meteor form—much more often than the debris of A Distant World might reasonably be expected to fall, and in sufficient quantities to threaten Superman’s Life on a regular basis.
As a weapon, it had a certain symbolic resonance:
The notion that radioactive fragments
of Superman’s Birth World
had become toxic to him
spoke of The Old Country,
The Old Ways,
The Threat of The Failure
to Assimilate.
Superman was a
naturalised American.
The last thing he needed
were these lethal reminders of
Where He’d Come From;
That he, The Son of Lordly Scientists,
had been reduced to
Toiling in a farmer’s field or
Minding the general store.
Weisinger knew how his young readers’ minds worked
and stretched the idea a little further:
If there was Green Kryptonite,
couldn’t there be other colors too?
The prismatic splintering began
with the invention of Red K,
The Cool Kryptonite --
Possibly because it made literal
The Master Silver Age Theme
of Bodily Transformation.
It was mineral LSD for Superman,
affecting not just His Mind
but also reshaping His Body
into A Playground of Fleshly Hallucination.
No two trips on Red K
were the same, in-story
logic promised.
Red K would affect Superman
in a different way every time
and theoretically might never become boring.
So, under its influence, Superman might develop
The Head of An Ant, scaling The Daily Planet building as
The Commander of a Nightmarish Army of
Giant Insects —
“BZZ-BZZZ …
WE MUST CAPTURE LOIS LANE …
SHE WILL BE OUR QUEEN!”
— or split into Good Clark, Bad Superman,
or even become goofy for forty-eight hours.
Red K and The Silver Age are inextricable.
Red K was LSD for superheroes, and under its influence
Superman could unclench
his entire beingand
Walk The Razor’s Edge
of Joyous Self-Abandonment
and Ego-Annihilating Terror —
An American Pioneer.
Red-K served equally as a handy metaphor
for the adolescent hormonal shifts, physical changes,
and weird moods of elation and despair
that were being experienced by its readers.
Other Kryptonite variants were created
as plot mechanics demanded
rather than with any eye to longevity.
That’s Why --
Gold Kryptonite
removesSuperman’s Powers permanently,
Blue Kryptonite
affectsonly Bizarros,
and
White Kryptonite
is deadly to plants,
which makes it about as interesting
as matches, DDT, or a stout spade.
But, of course,
Superman’s Ultimate Weakness
was his Secret identity.
Why wouldn’t shy Clark Kent
choose to tear open his shirt
and reveal to his unrequited love
The Potent God-Man behind the buttons?
Instead he hid The Truth from Lois Lane,
devising deceptions that became so elaborate as to be cruel :
The Ghastly Tricks of Semantics
a Man-Boy might play on a Child-Woman,
all in the guise of
“Teaching Her a Lesson.”
A story like “The Two Faces of Superman” showed the hero promising to marry Lois Lane but only if she met him at a particular time outside the church.
When she met his conditions,
he contrived to seal her car door with his heat vision so that she couldn’t get out.
Unable to marry him at precisely the correct hour meant that Lois forfeited her chance.
A relieved, chortling Superman took to the skies, having hoodwinked the predator once more.
Like Rumpelstiltskin, Tom Tit Tot, and the other creatures of folklore who knew that
names held power
and kept theirs secret,
Superman maintained his distance
from Clark and vice versa.
Their paths rarely crossed.
He hid His Heart in a plain suit,
behind glasses.
For Lois, A Girl, to know Who He Was would be The End.
She’d only pressure him into exchanging his gaudy suit and life of adventure for something less embarrassing, more domestic.
She would expect him to be home for dinner, when there were stricken ocean liners to rescue.
In the end, his self-deceiving fantasies of one day carrying Lois up the aisle were just that, and if he married Lois, he’d be Clark forever.
It wouldn’t matter how strong or fast he was, he’d be Clark racing around the globe to pick up groceries. "
TRINITY sits alone on the tip of an impossibly high finger of rock. It looks like it sits on the rooftop of the world. All around her, as far as the eye can see, lie mountains. Their snow-capped peaks are pink in the sunset light.
She looks into the sunset. Heavy thoughts weigh on her mind.
A hand appears on her shoulder. It’s NEO. How he got on the finger of rock is anyone’s guess.
NEO
Boo.
TRINITY grins slightly and pulls on his arm.
There is only enough room for one on the end of the rock, so he sits down behind her.
TRINITY
"Don’t lose your balance."
NEO
It doesn’t matter if I do.
TRINITY
So, you can fly.
NEO
Yes.
TRINITY
Do you think I can?
NEO
I think you can do anything you want, if you believe.
TRINITY
Like you?
NEO
"I don’t know.
I don’t know exactly what I can do."
TRINITY half turns.
TRINITY
"Will you teach me to fly?"
NEO
"I don’t know if I can."
TRINITY
"Free your mind of doubt."
NEO stands, and steps in front of TRINITY. He’s on the very, very edge
of the rock. He extends his hand down to her. She grabs it, and he
hauls her up. Her eyes dart to the ground, thousands of feet below the
finger.
TRINITY
"In this construct program, the ground can kill."
NEO
"I won’t let you fall. Ever."
THEY look into each other’s eyes. Despite the trauma they’ve been
through, and not even truly knowing one another, there’s a connection.
NEO suddenly backs away. He walks on the air with perfect traction, as
though he’s on an invisible plane of glass. He leaves TRINITY standing
precariously on the edge, wobbling a bit as she maintains balance
against nerves. She breathes deep, and looks back up at NEO,
maintaining her cool even as she eyes the spectacle.
NEO stands a few feet away from her, completely at ease as the high
altitude winds ruffle his hair.
NEO extends a hand to her.
NEO
"It’s not real, Trinity. You’re not standing there. Step out. I can do
it. You can, too."
With one last glance at the infinite drop, she steadies herself and
stares straight into his eyes. Blue meet brown. Breathless, she steps
straight out.
She takes one step in the air. For a breathless second, as she steps
off the edge, she is stable. When she takes her foot off the edge,
though, she sways, and her foot slips, as though she’s on a greasy
surface bobbing up and down. She corrects herself, tries another step,
sags further.
TRINITY
"Shit."
SHE glances down, then locks eyes with NEO. Then drops like an anvil.
NEO
"Whoops."
HE dives down, shooting like a missile. TRINITY is calm, falling
backwards, watching NEO come for her. The rocky ground looms behind
her. She makes no effort to reach for NEO as he draws close to her. HE
reaches for her with all his might.
NEO
"Grab me!"
TRINITY makes no effort to save herself, even as collision is seconds
away. She stares at him intently.
NEO
"Grab on to me!"
SEEING she is doing nothing, he goes beneath her and scoops her up,
Superman style. He barely accomplishes this before he slows and
settles onto the rocky ground.
They are in a twilight glade shaded by the mountains.
NEO
"What the hell were you doing?"
TRINITY smiles slightly. Her madness has a purpose.
TRINITY
"Showing you, Neo."
NEO
"Showing me what? You nearly gave me a heart attack."
TRINITY
"I want you to know how much faith I have in you."
NEO
"Oh. And this requires acts of insanity?"
TRINITY smiles. She looks him up and down. She moves intimately close.
"So, you really are Superman."
NEO
"Only when I’m plugged in."
TRINITY steps away. NEO grabs her shoulder and turns her to him. He
attempts a
kiss, but she turns her face, letting it land on her cheek.
NEO
"What?"
TRINITY looks at him, then up at the sky.
TRINITY
"It’s not you. Just, not here."
NEO doesn’t understand. TRINITY rolls her eyes.
TRINITY
They’re watching us, you big dope.
Do you know how horny computer geeks get?
INT. MAIN BRIDGE
CHOI, RAZOR, DUJOUR, and CIRCA are sitting around the operator’s
console, feet up, eating. On the screens are patchy images of TRINITY
and NEO standing together in the GLADE. It’s like they’re watching a
soap opera.
TRINITY and NEO are looking in their direction.
ON THE interface chairs, the bodies of TRINITY and NEO lay supine.
EXT. GLADE (CONSTRUCT)
TRINITY grabs NEO by the arm.
TRINITY
Over here."
SHE leads him into the shadows.
INT. MAIN BRIDGE
THE VOYEURISTIC crewmembers collectively groan as the lovers disappear off the screen and into the darkness.
RAZOR puts his hand on CIRCA’S shoulder and sighs.
RAZOR
So romantic.
CIRCA calmly pats his hand and removes it, holding it in front of him.
CIRCA
I’m sure Mary Palmer will appreciate your mood more than I.
EXT. GLADE (CONSTRUCT)
IN the blue twilight shade, NEO and TRINITY kiss tentatively, slowly, then quicker as they give in to their feelings for one another.
WE move around them slowly, then pan into the shadows, a natural fadeout.
“We’d spent many enjoyable hours in conversation, working out how to restore our beloved Superman to his pre-eminent place as The World’s First and Best Superhero.
Following the lead of the Lois and Clark TV show, the comic-book Superman had, at long last, put A Ring on his long-suffering girlfriend’s finger and carried her across the threshold to holy matrimony after six decades of dodging The Issue — although it was Clark Kent whom Lois married in public, while Superman had to conceal his wedding band every time he switched from his sober suit and tie.
This newly domesticated Superman was a somehow diminished figure
All but sleepwalking through a sequence of increasingly contrived “event” story lines, which tried in vain to hit the heights of
“The Death of Superman”
seven years previously.
Superman Now was to be a reaction against this often overemotional and ineffectual Man of Steel, reuniting him with his mythic potential, his archetypal purpose, but there was one fix we couldn’t seem to wrap our collective imagination around: The Marriage.
The Clark-Lois-Superman Triangle —
“Clark loves Lois.
Lois loves Superman.
Superman loves Clark,”
as Elliot S. Maggin put it in his intelligent, charming Superman novel Miracle Monday — seemed intrinsic to the appeal of the stories, but none of us wanted to simply undo the relationship using sorcery, or “Memory Wipes,” or any other of the hundreds of cheap and unlikely magic-wand plot devices we could have dredged up from the bottom of the barrel.”
- Grant Morrison,
SuperGods
“Here’s another horrifying example, an aspect of American culture, The Continued Pussification of The American Male in the form of Harley Davidson Theme Restaurants.
What the fuck is going on here? Harley Davidson used to mean something.
It stood for biker attitude; grimy outlaws in their sweaty mamas full of beer and crank, rolling around on Harleys, looking for aGood Time – Destroying Property, Raping Teenagers, and Killing Policemen… All very necessary activities by the way.
"And I wonder, too, like how much of the antipathy towards. . .
These are dark musings. And I would say, how
much of the antipathy towards men that’s being generated by, say,
college-age women is deep repugnance for the role that they’ve been
designed, and a disappointment with the men. . . You know, you think of
those. . . I can’t remember the culture.
The basic marital routine was to ride into The Village and grab the bride and run away with her on a horse.
It’s like the motorcycle gang member who rips the too-naive girl out of the bosom of her family.
Paglia: Yeah, there used to be Bride Stealing. It was quite widespread.
Peterson: Right,
so I kind of wonder if part of the reason that modern university women
aren’t so angry is because that fundamental Feminine Role is actually
being denied to them.
And they’re objecting to that at a really, really fundamental level.
Like a level of Primitive Outrage.
“There's Two Things that the Postmodern NeoMarxists are full-scale assaulting :
One is Categorisation, because They believe that
The Only Function of Categorisation is POWER.
The other is,
There's a War on Competence -
Because, if you admit that there are hierarchical structures that are predicated upon Competence,
then you have to grapple with the issue of Competence,
and you have to grapple with the issue of Valid Hierarchy.
If All Hierarchy is Power
and
All Power is Corrupt
and
All Corrupt Power is Tyranny
then, you can't admit to Competence.
But the downside is, there's a terrible price to be paid for that, because
Every Value System Produces a Hierarchy.
So if you dispense with the hierarchy,
You dispense with The Value Systems.
“The rise of the new feminism, the protest movements of ethnic, national and sexual minorities, the anti-institutional ecology struggles waged by marginalized layers of the population, the anti-nuclear movement, the atypical forms of social struggle in countries on the capitalist periphery — all these imply an extension of social conflictuality to a wide range of areas, which creates the potential, but no more than the potential, for an advance towards more free, democratic and egalitarian societies.”
The Point is that these new Groups of People could be Useful.
Douglas Murray,
The Madness of Crowds
[We finally find Peter lying on a mat and doing sit-ups. Ned is holding his legs in place for him.]
Ned:
Hey, can I be your
Guy in The Chair?
Peter:
What?
Ned:
Yeah. You know how there’s
A Guy With a Headset
Telling The Other Guy Where to Go?
[Peter’s face contorts into a weird expression. He is still doing sit-ups faster than any other student.]
Ned:
Like, like if you’re stuck in a burning building, I could tell you where to go.
Because there’d be screens around me, and I could, you know, swivel around, and...
‘Cause I could be your
Guy in The Chair.
Peter:
Ned,
I don’t need a Guy in The Chair.
Coach Wilson:
Looking good, Parker.
[The teacher points at Peter as he passes the mat that Peter and Ned are working out on. Peter glances at him, then frowns and takes a huffing breath, trying to look as if the exercise is really taking a toll on him.]
“That’s another issue I want to bring up, because one of the things I cannot figure out is the alliance between the postmodernists and the neo-Marxists.
I can’t understand the causal relationship.
Tell me if you disagree with this, okay, because I’m a psychologist, not a sociologist.
So I’m dabbling in things that are outside of my field of expertise. And there is some danger in that.
But The Central Postmodernist Claim seems to me that because there’s a near infinite number of ways to interpret a complex set of phenomena - which actually happens to be the case - you can’t make a case that any of those modes of interpretation are canonical.
And so, if they’re not canonical, and if that canonical element isn’t based in some kind of Reality, then it serves some Other Master.
And so The Master that it hypothetically serves for The Postmodernists is
Nothing but Power,
because that seems to be Everything That They Believe in.
They Don’t Believe in Competence.
They Don’t Believe in Authority.
They Don’t seem to Believe in
An Objective World,
because everything is language-mediated.
So it’s an extraordinarily cynical
perspective: that because there’s an infinite number of interpretations, none of them
are canonical.
You can attribute everything to
Power and Dominance.
Does that seem like a reasonable summary of the postmodern. . .
Paglia:
Yes, exactly.
It’s a Radical Relativism.
Peterson:
Okay, it’s a Radical Relativism.
Now, but The Strange Thing is, despite. . .
Okay, and so what goes along with that is the demolition of Grand Narratives.
So that would be associated, for example, with the rejection of thinkers like Jung and Erich Neumann, because of course they’re foundational thinkers in relationship to the idea that there are embodied Grand Narratives.
That’s never touched.
But then, despite the fact that the Grand Narrative is rejected, there’s a neo-Marxism that’s tightly, tightly allied with postmodernism that also seems to shade into this strange Identity Politics.
And I don’t. . . Two things.
I don’t understand
the causal relationship there.
The Skeptical Part of me thinks that Postmodernism was an
intellectual. . .
It’s intellectual camouflage for the continuation of the kind of pathological Marxism that produced the Soviet Union, and has no independent existence as an intellectual field whatsoever.
But I still can’t understand how The Postmodernists can make the “no grand narrative” claim, but then immerse themselves in this Grand Narrative without anyone pointing out the self-evident contradictions.
I don’t understand that.
So What Do You Think About That?
Gamora:
What was that story you once told me about Zardu Hasselfrau?
Quill:
Who?
Gamora:
He owned a magic boat?
Quill: [long pause]
David Hasselhoff....?
Gamora:
Right.
Quill:
Not a Magic Boat —
A Talking CAR.
Gamora:
Why did The Car talk again...?
Quill:
To help him FIGHT •CRIME•,
and to be •supportive•!
Gamora:
As a child, you would carry his picture in your pocket… and you would tell all the other children… that he was your father, but that he was out of town.....
Quill:
...shooting Knight Rider or touring with his band in Germany.
I told you that when I was drunk.
Why are you bringing that up now?
Gamora:
I •love• that story.
Quill:
I •hate• that story. It’s so •sad•...!
As a kid, I used to see all the other kids off playing catch with their dad.
And I wanted that, more than anything in The World!
