Poll for BYOM WAL
Superman/Batman: Public Enemies
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I’ve never read The Prince by Michiavelli. I’d love to hear your thoughts on that. [ x ]
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The BYOM WAL will be 5:00pm est on Friday November 27th.
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Did you make the thread? When you do, try to put it on the calendar.
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.bump.
o.0
“President? President? Do you know how much power I’d have to give up to be President?” Lex Luthor - JL/JLU
I think that this comes the closest to what it would be like in our universe. Would Luthor really step away from the resources and privacy available to him at LexCorp? Would he put control and and his shares in LexCorp in a blind trust?
I can’t see him actually doing that. That’s a lot for a schemer like Lex to walk away from. And to him spending 75 million on a phony presidential campaign just to tick Superman off. That’s the Lex we know and love. That really fits his canonical psychological profile.
Yet, there is an instance where he actually became President. So the question remains, why?
Power, control, and petty revenge are what fit the bill.
As we see in his presidential appearances in the Superman comics, he takes glee in having Superman help the government, which in Lex’s mind equates to having Superman work for him. This is a dream (or delusion) come true. Lex has always wanted to be above Superman. Making him a cog in Lex’s machine.
We see this play out even further in Public Enemies, both the mini series and the movie.
Here we see Lex gain control of other superpowered heroes. His use of Metallo to frame Superman and make him a fugitive instead. Again, this is a Lex dream come true. I am sure Lex daydreams about Superman behind bars. A fitting role reversal in his mind. And maybe, just maybe, the death penalty for a murder Superman didn’t commit. This is Lex’s dream come true.
Yet, in all these cases, it is his obsession with taking down Superman that topples him. He just can’t stop himself. I often think that Lex is more obsessed with killing Superman than the Joker is obsessed with getting Batman to break his moral code. So, it goes to show that of the two, Lex is more psychotically unhinged than the Joker. A theme we don’t often see play out and that’s a shame. Because it is all there in the pages of so many comics over the decades.
As president we Luthor’s machinations change. His schemes change. Using Superman’s patriotism against him, due to holding the office of president. But, in the end, Luthor is still not fundamentally different. The trappings of presidential power don’t change Lex. It is all a facade. A character that Lex becomes to enable him to try a different strategy against Superman. His obsession causes him to step over the powers of the presidency.
In the final analysis, The Question is the one who understands Luthor the best, as we see in JLU: Question Authority.
Question: “Although my distaste for you is Brobdingnagian, what I’m about to do isn’t personal. Everything that exists has a specific nature. Each entity exists a something in particular and has characteristics that are part of what it is. “A” is “A”, and no matter what reality he calls home, Luthor is Luthor.”
President Luthor is interesting in that he exchanges one set of tactics to destroy Superman for another. However, it’s just one of many schemes he has employed over the years. However, this scheme relies on Superman being Superman and his respect for the laws of the country that adopted him. Truth, Justice and the American Way. Perhaps as damaging to him as kryptonite.
And let’s not forget what President Luthor said in the opening of Justice League: A Better Workd.
President Luthor: “You need me. You wouldn’t be much of hero without a villain and you do love being a hero, don’t you. ‘The cheering children’, ‘the swooning women’. You love it so much it’s made you my most reliable accomplice. … You could have crushed me anytime you wanted and it wasn’t the law or the will of the people that stopped you. It was your ego. Being a hero was too important to you.”
It is one shining insight we get from President Luthor. In a sense he’s right. Superman has been Lex’s most reliable accomplice. That, in and of itself, is a great victory for Lex. It is arguably what I think motivates him the most.
In President Luthor we see Lex’s greatest asset as a villain. It’s not his vast resources or his genius scientific intellect and technological inventiveness. It’s his ability to manipulate his greatest foe’s emotions. To make Superman his dupe in his schemes. In that sense, even when he eventually “loses” to Superman, he actually gets some semblance of a psychological victory. He’s yet again put one over on The Man of Steel. That is what drives him. That is what makes his obsession tick.
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Interesting notion that Lex is more obsessed than Joker. Moreover, the idea that Lex is motivated by getting one up Superman is intriguing because it makes sense why he’s okay with “losing,” because it’s worth it. The cost of time, money, and resources are worth spending to get a psychology victory.
[ x ]
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Some folks distill Machiavelli dine to “ends justify the means”. But it’s more than that. It’s more about how to be a benevolent dictator.
As a monarch or dictator because you have absolute rule and even for a country leader, such as President Lex. Over time you need the good will of the people to keep you in power.
You need to tell your citizens the truth the vast majority of the time, so they will believe you when you lie.
You need to act in the country’s best interests the vast amount of the time do when you want to act in your best interests over the country’s, you can lie about it, because you don’t lie much, and you stand a much better chance of getting them to believe what is really in your best interests is actually in the best interests of the country.
That is often the strategy employed by President Lex. He can keep this up fit a while, but eventually his lies and motivations because of his Superman obsession, make it clear he is lying and operating in his best interests, not that of the nation.
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