Super Villains, Evil Geniuses and Mad Scientists: A Case Study in Salman Rushdie

Pop culture is riddled with stories of geniuses and psychopaths, the exceptionally brilliant pitted against the raving loonies. It’s a standard story structure: Batman uses his superior intellect and gadgets to catch the bad guy, and the day is saved until the next costumed lunatic surfaces to pester Gotham. Of course, the famous super-hero villains are usually sharper than their over-the-top gimmicks suggest; a strategic or technical astuteness underlies the mental instability implied by their alter-egos as mutant penguins and serial-killing clowns. True Super Villains—and most infamous real-life serial murderers—possess a cruel cunning, a sinister yet analytically brilliant criminal mind. For example, the Joker may be a homicidal killer with permanent circus-clown make-up bleached onto his skin, but his intelligence helps him consistently outsmart even the Dark Knight. Everyday psychopathic ax-murderers who lunge around hacking people up don’t quite qualify as super-villains because they don’t stick around long enough-- it’s tough to continually elude law enforcement when your sole criminal assets are a battle-ax and your own dementia.

Heath Ledger as the Joker- Crazy or Misunderstood?

Thus, the “Super Villain” title is reserved for evil geniuses, the botanical biochemists, District Attorneys, and cryogenic scientists who, for whatever reason, snap (think Ted Kaczynski). The background stories of these criminal masterminds have been written in by comic book authors, showing their tragic downfalls from brilliant, successful scholars to homicidal maniacs. This is the same logic that must be applied to Salman Rushdie’s “Harmony of the Spheres” in asking how such an exceptionally bright young man as Eliot Crane can “lose balance” and become a babbling schizophrenic. Just like “Two-Face” and “Mr. Freeze,” Crane is a brilliant thinker who has allowed an obsession—in his case, investigating the occult; in their case, exacting revenge on a bat-dressed vigilante—to destroy his balance between madness and reality.

Eliot Crane describes losing one’s mind as “a simple chemical imbalance,” the remark of a man of science explaining something that seems so illogical and intangible to the uneducated person. This response is ironic, because “science” in the Middle Ages (and probably in many places today) attributed mental illness to demons taking control of the victim’s body. Crane opts for the modern scientific theory, but this certainly is not a rejection of such dark concepts as demonly possession—Crane’s fixation with “the Hidden Arts” immerses him in practices even more ludicrous and hair-brained. He casually speaks of “cloaked and urine drinking sorcerers,” of “Pentagles, illuminati, Maharishi,” of Martians and “space fiends.” He even interprets a bizarre electrical malfunction as a sign of the Devil inhabiting his home: “‘Apage me, Satanas.’ Get thee behind me Satan” (135).

This is the true irony of “Harmony of the Spheres”: While neurotically regarding the people he meets as alien invaders and otherwise examining the world as a labyrinth of Occultist conspiracies, Eliot Crane still thinks of himself as a rationalist. His balance between Cambridge-educated scholar and obsessive witch-hunter has been irreparably skewed, but he retains and applies the Scientific Method to his supernatural fantasy world. This is what makes Eliot Crane dangerous—while he’s actually on a raving, destructive downward spiral, his intelligence deceives him into a false sense of rationality; of science. His encyclopedia of 19^th Century Occultist groups, Harmony of the Spheres, supposedly constitutes a “scholarly study,” but somewhere along the way Crane ceases to be just an objective academic. Says the narrator Khan, “Eliot was not the hyper-rationalist he claimed to be… His immersion in the dark arts was more than merely scholarly” (136). Crane is a “Super Villain,” even if only to himself, because his undeniable genius has been undermined by a maddening, malignant obsession. He’s Colonel Kurtz in Apocalypse Now!, a once-brilliant military strategist and future-general driven to insanity by his own mania of war and power. “It’s Judgment that defeats us,” Marlon Brando’s Kurtz says, which is exactly the mindset that leads to his demise. The “defeat of judgment” ruins Eliot Crane.

Col. Walter E. Kurtz- A Simple Chemical Imbalance

The mind’s descent into madness is terrifying, as the individual is rendered helpless by the sudden onset of mental illness. The truly intriguing battle, however, is between the exceptionally gifted—the Genius—and the plague of insanity. Perhaps it’s the person’s brilliance in itself that leads to mental illness, as someone like Eliot Crane—so used to easily comprehending the world’s most complex problems—is suddenly faced with something beyond his understanding and control. The more he seeks to apply logic and reason to the illogical, the more he falls short, until the Occult—the imaginary realm of Martians, devils, and haunted houses—becomes a science project; a reality. Growing obsession with something he cannot possibly explain (because it isn’t real) leads to growing paranoia and insecurity, until Crane can't distinguish between fantasy and reality at all.

The significance of a “simple chemical imbalance” afflicting a Genius is that it makes for a very different mentally-ill individual than your average Vietnam Vet. When a normal person loses his or her mind, they sit in a subway in urine-drenched rags, drinking malt liquor out of a McDonald’s cup and yelling about the end of the world. When someone of exceptional brilliance loses his or her mind, however, the capacity to do exceptional things is not necessarily diminished. Crane's perception of the world—his judgment—is misguided by the disease, while his intelligence remains intact. Here’s an analogy: Albert Einstein sees Mars Attacks! (a very stupid ‘90s alien film) and eats a few too many Twinkies, his mental state declining to the point of madness. He abandons the Theory of Relativity and adopts a ludicrous, illogical theory of a Martian strike, dedicating his life’s work to preventing the imminent invasion. Einstein may be a raving, misinformed lunatic, but he remains a genius—he’s not going to go piss himself on a bus somewhere, he’s going to continue his work. This is the case of Eliot, and this is what makes the “mad scientist/ evil genius” mold dangerous and compelling. Eliot’s genius and madness combine to make him doubly-threatening: not only is he crazy enough to believe his best friend is a Martian invader, but he’s intelligent enough to try to rationalize this and act on it.

Kevin Spacey’s creepy serial killer John Doe in the film Se7en demonstrates the relationship between brilliance and insanity perfectly. While he’s sick-in-the-head enough to design a leather sex-suit equipped with a dagger where the male sex organ normally protrudes—and then force a man to wear the costume during intercourse with a woman—he is able to orchestrate an elaborate, impeccably planned criminal “symphony” of murder acts that demonstrate his stance on the Seven Deadly Sins. John Doe hears voices and schizophrenically perceives God talking to him, but that doesn’t make him the typical “reading Guns and Ammo, masturbating in your own feces” loony that Brad Pitt’s character in the movie writes him off as. Regardless of his mental disability, John Doe fills the void that his religious obsession has created with his cold, calculating intelligence. This is what Salman Rushdie brings to light in “Harmony of the Spheres.” Eliot Crane’s obsession with the Occult drives him into insanity, but his brilliance makes him an enthralling, unique, dangerous figure, even in madness. While he refrains from the mass murder that defines a comic book Super Villain, Crane becomes nearly as dynamic as a maniacal circus clown in his absurd, misinformed acts of genius.

John Doe: "The Lord Works in Mysterious Ways."