Paul Fairchild applauds Zack Snyder’s new film for forgoing the glowing green rock, calling it a lame trope and reviewing its increased abuse in the comic series:
Red kryptonite was a lump of the good, old-fashioned green stuff that passed through a radioactive cloud of some sort on its journey to earth. Every piece was different. In one issue it caused Superman to endure psychedelic, mind-bending hallucinations. In another it morphed the hero into embarrassing shapes. Each piece of red kryptonite affected Superman for only a day, at which point he returned to his normal state (no doubt because his writers couldn’t find a graceful exit from these crappy plots). … Author and comic writer Peter David put the nail in the lead coffin of kryptonite’s absurdity with his invented send-up in Supergirl #79: pink kryptonite, which makes Superman gay. …
]]>For us mortals, “kryptonite” works without the cape and the big red “S.” It’s a moral weakness, a character flaw. It’s the idea that we’re powerless in the face of this vice or that guilty pleasure. It sounds cool when we describe our shortcomings this way, appropriating Superman’s virtue for ourselves: “cigarettes are my kryptonite.” This kryptonite is metaphorical, a weaker, abstracted copy of a space rock that serves as a totem. But it makes more sense as a metaphor than as an object that’s just a cheap, flimsy deus ex machina.