Question of the Week
Recently, the Illuminati (Hoboken Chapter) decided to bless my little town with a movie theater. It’s not huge (5 screens) and it’s located on the butt end of town right under the shadow of the world’s rustiest overpass, but hot damn, a real-life movie theater in walking distance! The last time I had a movie theater I could even theoretically walk to I was 12 and sneaking in R-rated movies in the State Theater in Journal Square, Jersey City. Since then it’s been a depressing series of suburban and mall gigaplexes, swamped with shitkickers and a good half hour’s drive under ideal conditions. So: HOT DAMN, a real-life movie theater!
As a result, The Duchess and I have gone to several movies recently that we would not have seen until pay-per-view some months from now. The modern moviegoing experience is tragic: Overpriced, overcrowded, and stuffed full of kids who have more money to spend in one Saturday night than I had my entire childhood. Bitter? Not me. I just despise children. Don’t hold it against me.
So we don’t make it out to too many movies these days, trying to avoid sitting in a darkened room with assholes. We’ve tried going to movies at 10AM, but this just replaces young assholes with elderly assholes. Trust me: The whole world is populated with assholes, and assholes ruin everything. But the fact that we can walk to the Hoboken theater is too great a lure, and we’ve seen 2012, Avatar, Sherlocke Holmes, and It’s Complicated there within the last month. That’s a record for us. And we only had one asshole moment in those four movies (a group of kids who found their conversation too delightful to end, but they were literally stared into terrified silence by a man a few rows down from them). I can guarantee you we wouldn’t have seen 3 of those movies if we’d been forced to gas up the car and drive to them.
So here’s my Question for the Week: If you suddenly had super evil SuperVillain powers (or, why not, SuperHero powers) would you a) actually put your time and energy into dominating/destroying/saving/protecting the world, or would you just spend your time making a nice fortune and possibly turning loud kids in theaters into toads?
Me, I’ve never understood the assumption that people who develop super powers of some sort (either genetic, magical, or technological) would immediately give up their lives of desperate labor to take up . . . desperate lives of labor. I mean, taking over the world is tough work: You have to seize trillions in assets, hire yourself an army and staff it properly, monitor your minions for betrayal, build underwater bases – whew, I’m exhausted just thinking about it. Now, I can better understand superheroism once the Super Villain is in place: I can imagine someone with psychic powers just making a nice comfortable life for themselves until a Super Villain starts mucking everything up, and then, after a good nap and a sandwich, the Super Hero decides, well, this guy’s ruining my stock portfolio, better take him down. But the Super Villainy just mystifies me. Not the idea of using your powers for your own gain, but the idea of putting so much drama into it. Why not just use your powers to start a really cool Ponzi scheme?
Sure, everyone likes to picture themselves in a cool costume, lording it over an army of redshirts, but the work, man, the work involved! I mean, if I can use my super evil powers to get free drinks at the local bar, all well and good. But administrating a mercenary army of thousands? Who wants the headaches? And then, after it’s all said and done, what have you accomplished, really? You’ve made yourself CEO of a corporation. An evil corporation, sure, but a corporation nonetheless. I’d rather nap in the afternoons.