Doctor Doom

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Movie and comic book villains, some songs, weekend plans, and a slightly improving mood

Well, it’s Friday at long last, the end of the “official”* work week.  My mood is at least somewhat better than it has been previously this week; starting midmorning yesterday, my mood increased and I even became somewhat playful and a bit silly.  This was, hopefully, thanks to certain interventions I have undertaken, and not just because of some low-grade cycling of my mood.

As far as I know, I don’t have any form of bipolar disorder; certainly no therapist has even mentioned considering that as one of my issues.  Then again, none of them (to my recollection and knowledge) considered the possibility of undiagnosed ASD.  But I have, apparently, done quite a good job at masking over time.  Or so I believe.

Anyway, I’m not going to be working tomorrow after all (my improved mood long preceded my learning this fact).  In fact, I’m going to be getting together with my youngest to have a late Father’s Day outing.  That also came about hours and hours after my mood had improved, and after I had learned I would not be working.

That’s about as good as my life gets, and has gotten, in nearly a decade and a half, but it is quite good.  The only thing that might be better would be if my son were also coming, but I cannot get my hopes up about such things.  He does as he must.

I’ve lately taken to rubbing Aspercream™ with lidocaine all over the MCP joints and the interphalangeal joints of my thumbs, and it seems to be doing at least a little to ease the pain of my arthropathy therein.  This helped make me willing at least to try to play guitar (and sing) a little bit yesterday.  I was still a bit stiff, but it wasn’t too bad.  Mind you, I didn’t do anything particularly fancy; the Bach piece I’ve mentioned was the most challenging part of the session.

I have a whole repertoire of songs I can sing and for which I can play chords from memory.  It’s not a big playlist, but it’s there.  Ironically, it doesn’t include any of my songs, which I would have to relearn at this point!  That’s kind of sad, really.  But it is a weird thing that I’ve noticed, that once I’ve made and shared a video (or even just audio) of me doing a song, I tend to stop playing it at all.  It’s quite strange, at least to me.  Have any of you encountered anything like this?

This shouldn’t be confused with the general anhedonia I’ve been experiencing lately (not for the first time); that makes me not really interested in playing anything.  I also have not been able to find anything that I can keep reading for more than 10 or, at most, 20 minutes before getting bored of it**.

I’m trying to read something different now, so I downloaded some Star Trek and Star Wars novels from Kindle Unlimited, and we’ll see how they go.  Currently, I’m reading the novelization of Into Darkness, which I think was an underrated movie.  Did it play fast and loose with certain aspects of important characters from TOS?  Absolutely!  Even so, the surprise was fun, and the casting, I thought, was very good, as were the performances.

The book is by Alan Dean Foster, who is one of the most reliable science fiction authors out there.  He has written quite a few of the best novelizations of science fiction movies.

I also downloaded the novelization of The Wrath of Khan, one of my favorite movies.  I’ve read the book before (by Vonda McIntyre, who is at least as good, if not as prolific, as Foster), a long time ago, and it was good, so hopefully I’ll enjoy it again.

On a somewhat related note, as a very big fan of Doctor Doom, I am rather nervous about how he will be portrayed in the upcoming MCU movies.  He has been badly written so far in the movies that have featured him, though I thought Julian McMahon (RIP) was well cast and did what he could with the role.

But I’ve long said that if anyone wants to know how to portray Doom onscreen, there is a nearly perfect performance on which to model one’s acting, and that was Ricardo Montalban as Khan, especially in the movie (though the original Trek episode Space Seed is also great).  Khan is a lot like Doom, though he has a more sentimental, romantic aspect to his character (it’s the death of his wife that leads to his wrath in the movie, after all).  Still, the charisma, the brilliance, the arrogance (and, alas, the overconfidence and the tendency to be consumed by vendetta) match the best-written aspects of Doctor Doom’s character.

To be fair to Khan, he is kinder to his subordinates than Doom sometimes tends to be.  This, I think, is one of Doom’s biggest flaws.  Then again, I suspect Doom is “on the spectrum”, so he doesn’t necessarily really get how to manage people at a personal level, though as a national leader he is unsurpassed.

I know, I know, I’m being fanciful, but I really do love these characters.  They are bad guys, certainly, but they are not really evil, or at least not psychopathically selfish and shallow the way, say, Voldemort is.  I’ve said before, Doom and Batman are in many ways very similar characters.  Both have similar tragic backstories and are obsessively driven, implacable, indeed all but unstoppable, and neither of them has actual super powers (contrary to what was represented in the first two Fantastic Four movies).

I wish Julian McMahon had a chance to play a well-written Doctor Doom, because I thought he was an excellent casting choice (and I’m pretty sure Ricardo Montalban was not available).

Okay, I’ll draw things to a close for the day and for the week.  As a parting “bonus”, I’ll embed below some old audio files (NOT high quality recordings – lots of clipping and some flubs and occasional pitchiness) of songs I have recorded me practicing and singing, just for fun, in case you’re interested.

I hope you all have a nice Friday and a good weekend.  There’s a big sporting event on Sunday, I think; if you like those kinds of things, why not take that in?

Sore dewa.

Nothing Compares 2U – originally by Prince

Karma Police – Radiohead

Just the Way You Are – Billy Joel

Here, There, and Everywhere – the Beatles

Here Comes the Sun – the Beatles

Desperado – Eagles

Fake Plastic Trees – Radiohead

Julia – the Beatles

*I’m not sure what exact office might be involved in that determination, but whataya gonna do?

**Though I have been doing some exercises on Brilliant dot Org lately, focusing for the moment on vectors and working into matrices and related stuff, with an eye toward General Relativity.

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Is it possible to choose not to care, if you do?

It’s Friday again.  I won’t say “Thank God it’s Friday” or “Thank Batman it’s Friday” or anything of that sort.  Of course, I’m glad that we’re ending what has been a terribly long work week, which has provided only a few moments of accomplishment, apart from the trivial and the usual (i.e., working).  But that’s not saying much.  In general, for me, the weekend is just another two empty, lonely days coming up before the start of another work week.

I’ll be glad to get some rest, of course, since on the weekend I can knock myself out because I don’t have to worry about being able to do anything that requires mental effort the next day.  I find that terribly useful.  Also, I intend to try to get used to riding my new bicycle more over the weekend, especially since my right heel and the ball of my right foot now have new blisters from walking yesterday, and these will make further walking painful and somewhat counterproductive for the immediate future.

Other than that, though, there’s really nothing else going on.  I had thought—earlier in the week, when lack of foreknowledge allowed me to be stupidly optimistic—that maybe this weekend I would ride my new bike to the movie theater and see the new Fantastic Four movie, since I’ve always been a fan of the FF, and of course, I hear that the new Doctor Doom makes a post-credit appearance.  I’m an even bigger fan of Doctor Doom than of the FF.

I have mixed feelings about how they’re doing Doom.  He is (usually) my favorite villain across all fictional universes, and I’ve been very disappointed—mostly—by the way the movies have failed to portray him.

To be clear, I thought Julian McMahon (RIP) was a very good cast as Doom.  But the script of that first FF movie all but completely ruined his character, though it and he were still enjoyable.  I’ve long said, if someone wants to see a movie with a nearly perfect portrayal of how Doom should be, they should watch Star Trek II:  The Wrath of Khan.  Ricardo Montalban’s performance as Khan, and the way Khan is written, is almost perfect for Doom.

Anyway, all this is really neither here nor there.  I’m almost certain that the MCU is going to fuck up in trying to bring Doom to the screen—not least because they’re using RDJ to play him.  The means they’re going to somehow link Tony Stark and Victor von Doom.

While I admire Downey’s portrayal of Iron Man, which made him much more interesting in the movies than he ever was in the comic books, Tony Stark does not so much as deserve to polish Doom’s boots, let alone be somehow incarnated as Doom.  RDJ could have played Doom de novo, probably—he’s a very good actor—but to link those characters annoys me.

I don’t know why it matters to me.  It really shouldn’t.  I don’t know why much of anything matters to me.  I don’t know why I bother writing this stupid blog or doing anything else.

I want to rest.  I feel like I can never just clear the tension from my system.  Maybe if I actually stopped caring at all, I could do it.  But it’s very difficult to make yourself stop caring, because you already do care, and to be able to reprogram that particular function of your being, you would have to be able not to care about the fact that you would no longer care.

This is a conundrum that has long haunted or at least worried AI researchers.  If you program an AI with a particular terminal goal—the one that motivates it above all, to which all other goals are instrumental, subordinate goals—it becomes nigh impossible to make it voluntarily submit to changing that terminal goal.

If this seems obscure and abstract, consider a man (for instance) who deeply loves and cares about his family, more than he cares about anything else, or even everything else, in the world.  And then imagine asking him to submit voluntarily to some procedure by which he will be made to stop caring at all for his family.  Can you imagine such a person agreeing to that?  Would you agree to that?

If you don’t love or care about your family, try to think of something else you dearly love and feel justified in loving, like, I don’t know, Nascar or some particular political movement or some such.  Then imagine submitting yourself to some procedure or medicine or whatever that changes that, not because you have come to think that it’s a bad thing to love, but just because not caring about it would be simpler.

I’m not sure what point there is to this post.  Probably there is none.  I just need to shut it down for now, and hopefully over the weekend I’ll at least get some rest.  I don’t know what to say about anything else.  But please, do have a good weekend.

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My heroes have always been villains, Episode IV: Victor von Doom

Hello and good morning.  It’s time at last, after a month-long hiatus, to give you the latest iteration of “My heroes have always been villains.”  Today I discuss one of my personal favorite villains:  Dr. Doom.  The fact that he is a comic book villain may make him seem a less than respectable choice of character to discuss, but the popularity of movies depicting such villains—including situations in which these depictions have been critically acclaimed (e.g. Health Ledger’s role as The Joker in The Dark Knight), and the immense success of movies involving villains such as Loki and Thanos in the Marvel Cinematic Universe—makes me feel that Doom is a worthy subject of discussion.

Those of you whose only exposure to Doctor Doom comes from the theatrical versions in the Fantastic Four movies could be forgiven for thinking that he isn’t very interesting, but those movies did no justice whatsoever to the character.  I liked the casting choice in the first two movies (I didn’t see Joseph Culp’s version), but Julian McMahon was simply not given a good script with which to work to portray this most riveting (and riveted) of all comic book villains.

One difficulty in discussing a comic book villain is that the characters, especially long-standing ones, are written and interpreted by many different people over time, often with wildly varying quality and depth.  I will here focus primarily on Doom as portrayed by such greats as John Byrne (probably the best of them all) as well as such stand-outs as Jim’s Shooter’s Doom in Marvel Secret Wars, Chuck Dixon’s Doom, and, of course, the work of Doom’s creators, the inimitable Stan Lee and Jack Kirby.

Over the years, I’ve come to see Doom as a sort of anti-Batman.  The two have similar back stories.  Differences in their life courses seem dependent almost entirely upon specific details of the events which shaped them, but the events and outcomes are similar in many senses.  Doom’s parents, like those of Bruce Wayne, were killed when Victor was quite young, and at least one of them died in his presence.  Of course, Doom was a gypsy, and Bruce Wayne was born fantastically wealthy; perhaps these facts are fundamental to their different specific career choices.  Doom was a member of an oppressed and marginalized minority, his family hounded by, and his parents (at least his father) killed by, the “powers that be”.  Wayne, in contrast, was born into power, and his parents were killed by a low-level criminal.  So, perhaps predictably, Wayne became a protector of the order of society against elements of chaos.  Doom, on the other hand, grew to seek vengeance against those in power, to strive always to take that power for himself, and if possible, to assume control over fate, to become more powerful than anyone or anything else in the world.  Of course, in comic books, all things are possible, and Doom has achieved this goal on an occasion or two, only to lose it…largely through the tragic character flaws that made him a villain in the first place.

One central aspect of Doom’s mystique is the fact that his features are terribly scarred, certainly from his own point of view, and are always covered by his baleful gray armored mask.  But really, I don’t want to dwell too much on the issue of Doom’s visage.  As has been insightfully said about Bruce Wayne’s identity as Batman, the mask is the character’s true face.  The flesh and blood beneath is the façade.

One thing that’s always intrigued me about Doom is that, like Batman, he has no superpowers.  His “powers” are all self-created, the products of his incomparable mind and (apparently) unlimited will.  Yet, despite being an “ordinary” human in a universe populated by beings of almost unimaginable power, Doom remains one of the most potent forces in the Marvel universe, and he has challenged the good and the great on many occasions, defeating those who should be far beyond his power through cunning, intelligence, and nerve.  This is another trait he shares with Batman.

Also like Batman, Doom is pretty screwed up in the head.  It’s hard to see how he couldn’t be, given his childhood experiences, but at least some of Doom’s mental dysfunction seems to be inherent.  He is intensely egotistical, and this is probably congenital to at least some degree, though it’s perhaps also a learned defense mechanism against the chaos that he faced in his formative years.  It’s also somewhat justified, for Doom is a fantastically brilliant scientist and inventor.

One could be forgiven for speculating that Doom might have at least a mild case of Asperger’s Syndrome.  He certainly has difficulty connecting with other people emotionally, almost always preferring the company of his robots to that of any lieutenants, sycophants, or courtiers, let alone comrades or friends.  His only close human contact is with Boris, his father’s friend, who took care of Victor—to the degree such a notion has meaning—after Werner von Doom died.  Certainly, there is no one else in the world that Doom trusts, and he doesn’t even trust Boris in the sense of relying on him.  He also doesn’t connect well with his subordinates as real human beings with feelings and identities, killing some of them if they make even trivial mistakes, or if they accidentally question his genius and infallibility.  “Doom needs no one,” he says, quite typically, before destroying an errant robot, practically quoting “Another brick in the wall, Part 3.”

Also fitting the Asperger’s model, Doom definitely qualifies as having restricted and repetitive behaviors and interests.  His life centers almost completely around three basic goals:  1) to free his mother’s soul from Mephisto’s Hell; 2) to conquer and rule the world; and 3) to destroy the Fantastic Four, especially Reed Richards.  Even the possibility of restoring his own face is a distant afterthought—the mask, even to him, really is his true face.

Another interesting aspect to Doom’s character is that he’s not actually that terrible a villain in terms of what he does when he achieves power.  He’s willing to do almost anything to achieve his ends, and God help you if you get in his way (though he has a weird code of honor:  he misleads, deceives, tricks, and otherwise manipulates people in endless ways, but he seems allergic to telling any direct, blatant, knowing lie, at least a petty one, and he will never, ever break his word of honor; if Doom makes a promise, he’ll keep it or die trying).  Once he achieves power, however—as in his control of his native country of Latveria, and on those occasions when he’s achieved temporary dominion over the world—he treats his subjects well, and almost always makes things better than they were before.

I don’t know if this is an expression of benevolence on his part or is rather a function of his insatiable ego:  if he’s going to do something, then you’d better believe he’s going to do it better than anyone else ever could, and that includes running the world.  The average citizen in the Marvel universe could be forgiven, frankly, for hoping that Doom would triumph over all those stupid, wishy-washy heroes who keep everything messy and violent, under the control (if one can dignify the state of things with that word) of lesser minds.  Doom is not one of those villains who wants to watch the world burn.  He wants to put out the world’s fires; he just thinks he’s the only one good enough to do it.

He may be right.

Doom is a complicated character, certainly, and that’s one of the things I like about him.  Though insane, violent, and dangerous (certainly!), and with an arrogance that is only acceptable at all because he lives up to at least some of his own hype (eat your heart out Kanye West), he is very human, and very tragic.  Though certainly evil by most sensible definitions of the word, he is not Evil, if you take my meaning.  He is self-reliant to a fault, with absolute conviction in his own point of view and in his personal capacity to achieve any goal on which he sets his sights.  In focus, willpower, determination, and related synonyms, he is unmatched by any character except, again, Batman.  Like Batman, in Doom this attribute is central to his success, and is also not uniformly good, even for him.  It is, in a way, terrifying.  Doom makes the Terminator look like a vacillating dilettante.  He absolutely will not stop, and he will never, ever, give up.

This is not a good thing.  Sometimes the only sane, reasonable, logical thing to do is to call something a bad job and let it go.  Great deeds can be done by those who set their sights on their goals and never waver from them; also, terrible deeds.

The inhabitants of the Marvel universe might really be better off if Doom were in charge, but the cost of achieving that state would be gargantuan, not least to Doom himself.  But, of course, the nature of comic book villainy is such that Doom is never likely to be allowed to mellow out and settle down, get married, have kids, write his memoirs, and make unsurpassed scientific contributions along the way.  On behalf of the characters involved, we can call this a shame.  But for those of us reading—at least for me—we will be endlessly grateful.