Current mood:	awake
Entry tags:	fours, smallville

Lex Luthor on Smallville
I know, I know, my very first archived article for Star Trek & the Enneagram in its new LiveJournal home is not Star Trek. But there's reasoning behind it: I want to move first the remainder that is still housed on Homestead pages, so that I can shut the Homestead site down. All the Trek stuff is on my friend Noah's site, and thus is safe and secure.

So here we go, kicking off with ...

“Everyone I Know Goes Away in the End”
Charting a Four’s Fall from Grace

I came to the TV show Smallville with a near-complete ignorance of the Superman world. I’ve never read a comic, or seen a movie, TV show or cartoon. The bare essentials I knew were what one could pick up simply by living in American culture: the secret identity of reporter Clark Kent, the deleterious effects of Kryptonite on Superman ... and that Lex Luthor is a villain.

When it comes to Smallville, that last point has become of particular interest. Maybe in the prequel’s future Lex Luthor is destined to become evil, but in the show’s here and now that’s not who he is. On the contrary, he struggles to be good, to do the right thing. But with the surety of a Greek tragedy, every action he takes seems only to bind him more closely to his fate.

I’ve since done some cursory research into the comic book Lex Luthor. As near as I can tell, Smallville’s Lex has little in common with comic book Lex (who shares traits and back story with the Smallville-only character of Lionel Luthor, Lex’s father). Do I think Smallville Lex can plausibly turn evil? Yes, but springing from how this new Lex is written and acted, I imagine him taking a different route to archvillainy, with different underlying motivations than his comic book predecessor.

My ideas are formed in part by an enneagram interpretation of the character. I think that Smallville’s Lex is a Four: So how does a Four become an archvillain? Will Lex’s path follow the downward trajectory of a disintegrating Four? I can’t predict specific events, but I’ll try an exercise in the enneagram as character arc prognostication.

But first, a look at where Lex has been and is now.

* * * *

The interrelated Four themes of feeling rejected and abandoned are reflected in Lex’s parental relationships. Lionel and Lillian are set up as opposite forces in their son’s life: one representing Darwinian cruelty and constant criticism, the other compassion and unconditional love.

If a Four internalizes the belief that something inside is defective, making them unworthy of love, Lionel has done much to foster that in Lex. An Eight with an “only the strong survive” ethic, Lionel’s attempts to toughen up his son can be read as love from a certain Eight-ish point of view. (“I’m showing you what the world is like and teaching you what you need to survive.”) But Lex clearly doesn’t see it that way, believing his father’s actions are indicative of unleavened contempt and rejection.

Lex’s adult relationship with his father alternates between battles and attempts to win his approval still. Lex’s customary way of talking to Lionel is biting sarcasm — a typical Four expression of rage. And all throughout there’s a lot from Lex of what Clarence Thomson describes as the Four speech pattern of lament: recounting how hard they’ve had it. To see what I mean, watch the first season episode Reaper, in which Lex’s every scene features him complaining about Lionel’s shortcomings as a father.
As I was writing this, Thomas Condon posted on his website a new essay on Fours and one paragraph jumped out at me as fairly descriptive of Lex’s interaction with Lionel — in the first season especially:

As with other enneagram styles that tend to see themselves as victims, it’s important for Fours to connect with their power of choice. It especially helps Fours to get in touch with their anger, which may be that of a sulking, punishing child. In the trance of their style, Fours can unconsciously see themselves as descended royalty; not kings and queens but princes and princesses, privileged sons and daughters rather than powerful responsible adults.

Lex’s mother Lillian we only know through other people’s perspectives. She died when Lex was 13, and the impression we are given through his recollections is that she was everything Lionel is not — offering him unconditional love, pride in his abilities, and a moral compass.

While Lionel’s rejection can be seen as a figurative abandonment of his child, Lillian’s death was literal. It made very concrete a feeling that Fours often have: “There was a time when I had perfect love, but somehow I lost it, and I will never feel that happy again.” The Four feels cast out from the Garden of Eden, and mourns its loss still. It doesn’t matter whether Lillian was in fact the ideal that Lex remembers — what is important to his character is that her death marked his expulsion from the garden. (Accompanying that event was the additional abandonment by Pamela, Lex’s caretaker whom Lionel sent away after his wife’s death.)

The subconscious question that arises from the Four’s experience of emotional or literal abandonment: “Why wasn’t I worth it?” This question finds its echo in Lex’s friendship with Clark Kent, his relationship with the Kent parents, and his obsession with Clark’s secret.

* * * *

Lex’s association with the Kents begins with the car accident in the pilot episode, in which Lex hits Clark head-on over a bridge. Clark rescues the unconscious Lex from his submerged car, but then has to lie about his own amazing survival: Lex didn’t hit him, Clark insists. “If you did, I’d be dead.”

In some ways, Lex’s consuming desire to investigate the crash is reflective of a self-preservation subtype Four: They are the risk-takers of Fours, stirring up emotions through recklessness (note Lex’s careless driving; his wild, pre-Smallville youth in Metropolis; and even his oft-disastrous business and personal battles with his father). They are caught up in the grand drama of life and death and feel more alive through cataclysmic events. Similarly, for Lex, the car accident becomes a mystery of his own life and death. It is the second time, in fact, that he lived when he should have died. The first came when the meteor shower hit Smallville, injuring the 9-year-old Lex and leaving him with his baldness, a trait that in typical Four fashion he characterizes as both his “curse,” causing others to look on him as a “freak,” and “my gift — the thing that defined me, that gave me strength.” That is to say, what makes him both an outsider and what makes him special. (His third life-defining brush with death and catastrophe comes later, when his plane crashes and leaves him marooned on a deserted island.)

Aside from his risk-taking and life-and-death concerns, Lex shows other traits that dovetail with a self-preservation subtype, most notably a protectiveness that runs through the self-preservation subtype in all enneagram styles. “I’ll do anything to protect my friends,” Lex declares in Zero, and he has proved that in action, especially when it comes to women (undoubtedly reflective of his bond with Lillian) and to the Kent family. (His frequent offers of help and extravagant gifts also stem from the Four’s connection to Two.)

Lex may be primarily a self-preservation subtype, but it’s possible that another subtype can still have an influence, and in a young person especially, the intimate (sometimes called sexual) subtype can dominate in close, one-on-one relationships. And when it comes to Clark specifically, Lex’s reaction to the entry of this person into his life paints a fairly accurate picture of the intimate Four. “We have a future, Clark,” Lex tells him in the pilot. “And I don’t want anything to stand in the way of our friendship.” It’s an oddly intense statement considering that it’s their first real conversation. But an intimate Four in particular can that quickly attach himself to a person — or rather the idealized person he has created in his imagination.

This person is idealized for qualities the intimate Four admires but feels he lacks. For Lex, Clark is a kind of moral touchstone, whereas Lex himself is all darkness, complexity and shades of gray. Lex would rather himself make moral compromises to keep Clark uncorrupted (again, the protectiveness, too). It’s as if Lex is trying to recreate the moral influence that Lillian was to him. And that brings us back to the original loss, as the intimate Four looks for someone who can fill the void left when he was dispossessed. And in some ways, Clark lives up to that role well — at least, like Lillian, Clark has steadfastly believed the best of Lex despite the barrage of criticism and doubt of his character that come from other quarters. (Clark is a Nine, and this easy acceptance of others is on the high side of that enneagram style.)

Lex also idealizes the Kent family as the polar opposite of the only thing he has left from his own family’s (in Lex’s words) “tragic history” — Lionel as a father. The final scene in Jitters sums it up: Both Clark and Lex have escaped from a life-threatening situation, and Lex, near tears, confronts Lionel, who had been willing to sacrifice his son’s life to protect corporate secrets. In the last shot, Clark is in the embrace of his overjoyed parents, while Lionel gives his son a fake hug for the cameras — as Lex looks sullenly over at the Kents’ happy reunion. In a later episode, Lex says it straight-out to Jonathan Kent: “If I’m guilty of anything regarding your family, it’s envy.” And it’s envy that is considered the traditional “sin” of Fours, rooted in the feeling that other people have the happiness and love that the Four has been denied.

Unfortunately, if Clark can be seen as a mirror of Lillian, Jonathan may be a mirror of Lionel. Where Clark believes the best of Lex, Jonathan assumes the worst and makes that clear, metaphorically slamming the door in Lex’s face time and again. And yet Lex keeps coming back for more — a Four’s propensity to pursue relationships that are doomed to fail and leave them feeling abandoned again. (Lex has all but admitted this pattern when it comes to romantic relationships: his knack for “falling for the wrong women.”)

To return to the car accident, the clues left in that inexplicable event lead to Lex’s suspicions that Clark is more than just a normal, simple teenage boy. He carries out a covert investigation, but it is clear that more than anything, he wants to be told. He wants Clark to trust him enough to let him in on the secret. This was the other issue that strongly reminded me of intimate Fours, who when they believe they’ve found that connection with someone, they desire to be the most important person in the other’s life. (“Our friendship is going to be the stuff of legend,” Lex promises Clark.) And to be told Clark’s secret — that would be proof of how much a person counted to him. And if it doesn’t ever happen, again that question: “Why wasn’t I worth it?”

* * * *

Imagining Lex’s future, we can look at what the enneagram says happens to Fours when they become unhealthy. I’ll have to start by dismissing the more common, yet perhaps less dramatic, trajectory for a disintegrating Four: into depression and, paralyzed by emotions, inaction. If Lex is to become the archvillain of the Superman world, we’ll have to assume that he will act, he will not retreat from the world, at least not literally.

But another scenario is possible, and still in keeping with the Four personality style and the direction Smallville seems to be taking the character. Fours’ behavior can take a turn for the worse in the outer world when when they, in effect, give up on trying to be good — they have suffered so much that they come to believe morality should not apply to them; and when their envy and idealistic love turns to hostility. In Smallville plotting, the parallels to these two points seem destined to be found, respectively, in the relationships with Lionel and Clark.

Unhealthy Fours define their identity around how much they have suffered. Much of that suffering is based in the Four’s psychological perception of events, but in Lex’s case, the Smallville writers have made it literal by piling on the abuse. In this season alone, he has survived an attempt on his life by a wife whom he loved but who turned out to be a murderous gold-digger; and then the whole sequence of events in Shattered and Asylum, in which Lex was drugged into insanity, beaten, institutionalized, and subjected to electroshock therapy that wiped out six months of memories — all carried out through the maneuverings of his father. At the time of this writing, Lex is trying to recover those memories, and he clearly strongly suspects that whatever happened to him, it was something horrible that happened at Lionel’s hands. If even your average real-life Four with a less operatic scale of suffering might come to think that their travails have made them exempt from the ethics that bind normal people — would it be any wonder when Lex unravels what has happened to him (added to the tragedies of his life that he does remember) if he falls into the same belief? As the conflict with Lionel continues to escalate, moral behavior will undoubtedly count less and less to Lex in his pursuit of revenge, a disposition that will begin to influence even situations in which Lionel has no part.

The irony, of course, is that Lex would then be following in Lionel’s footsteps. The enneagram difference is that while a Four thinks he is exempt from, or above, law and morality because of his suffering, an Eight like Lionel believes that he is stronger than law and morality.

The other part of this equation is the end of the friendship with Clark: from best friends to archenemies. As the Smallville writers hammer home the idea of Lex’s wish to know Clark’s secret, it’s obvious they mean that to play a part. Though Lex proved his trustworthiness when he learned the truth in the Shattered/Asylum story, those memories were wiped, and Clark continues to keep the secret from Lex — mostly, it seems, out of habit and parental pressure (and there you’ll perhaps find a downside of his Nine style). And as I hypothesized, not being let in on this important part of Clark’s life says to Lex: “I wasn’t worth it.”

Of course, the other problem is that idealization inevitably leads to disillusionment, and envy twists into a desire to take away from others the happiness of which the Four has been deprived. The idealistic veneer has already started to wear off Clark in Lex’s eyes, bit by bit. In those moments, Lex takes on a certain chilly hostility. That rage increases as the Four comes to feel that the person he once looked on as his salvation has let him down, left him hurt and alone again. Whether Clark will actually be guilty of anything in this regard (and after the episode Memoria, I’m convinced he will be, or already is) is almost immaterial if Lex takes the road of the unhealthy Four who will sabotage the relationship himself, in a kind of controlled way of creating the abandonment he expects will happen anyway.

Love turns to hate in the Four who feels he has been bitterly wronged. But for this to have some emotional resonance when in the future Lex Luthor carries a vendetta against Superman, he will have to know that his old friend Clark and Superman are one and the same. And then, as enneagram author Helen Palmer puts it, a Four who has fallen out of favor “can develop a thirst for vengeance that matches any Eight’s.”

When I read about the Kryptonite ring that Lex Luthor wore as protection against Superman, until it poisoned him and led to the amputation of his hand (alluded to on Smallville in the seer Cassandra’s vision of Lex’s future), it struck me that with the comic book Luthor, the ring seems to be merely a surface thing — it’s a defensive weapon. But for Smallville’s Lex to wear such a ring, with the knowledge of exactly who Superman is, it suddenly packs an emotional wallop of a message to Clark that says, “I would rather endanger my health and life than to ever let you get close to me again.”

Yet just as I can imagine Lex becoming this vindictive and vengeful toward his former friend, I can also imagine that his years in Smallville will join his mother’s memory as an Eden that he has lost. Especially the first year: Although various events may have made him miserable at the time, it won’t matter, anymore than it matters if Lillian was not in fact a perfect mother. He will remember that year, and his friendship with Clark when it was new and Clark implicitly trusted him, as the time that he could say, “I was happy and loved, and then somehow I lost it.” Cast out from the garden again.

I don’t really know exactly what Lex Luthor does in the Superman story to earn the imagery of a field of corpses and blood raining from the sky that Cassandra saw in her vision in the Smallville episode Hourglass. Whatever happens, I can’t imagine hating him enough to erase the feeling of pity his story inspires right now, watching his slow but seemingly inevitable slide into losing the better part of himself — that part he has invested in Lillian and Clark. The tragedy of that future is almost predicted, with a Four-ish cast, in the Johnny Cash song “Hurt,” which was used at the end of Shattered, with Lex knowing Clark’s secret at last, but alone and driven into madness at his father’s hand:

What have I become
My sweetest friend
Everyone I know
Goes away in the end
And you could have it all
My empire of dirt
I will let you down
I will make you hurt
If I could start again
A million miles away
I would keep myself
I would find a way
(Lyrics by Trent Reznor)

Note: As you can probably tell, I’ve flip-flopped on the issue of which subtype Four Lex is before mostly settling on self-preservation. Check out Clarence Thomson’s descriptions and weigh in on the debate: self-preservation or intimate? Let me know what you think.

* * * *



I wrote this in April 2004. Canon has left me behind, and I left the show behind (for the most part), but based on what I've seen when I've checked in, I'll still claim Lex is a Four!