April 26, 2007
Kryptonite Found! Posted by Fredric Smoler at 08:00 AM EST The BBC’s web site had an odd little story yesterday: Someone has found kryptonite at the bottom of a mineshaft in Serbia. If you spent own your childhood at the bottom of Serbian mineshaft, you may not recall kryptonite, but if you spent it anywhere else, you will recall that this mineral was the detritus of the planet Krypton, home world of Superman, and the only thing that could endanger the Man of Steel. When as a smallish boy I switched my loyalties to Spiderman, I thought one of the great mysteries of mass culture was why anyone had ever been furiously absorbed by Superman comics, although I had to admit that I had never met anyone who hadn’t been, however briefly. After jumping ship, I decided that the problem with the comic was that an invincible hero was peculiarly unlikely to generate dramatic interest. The mortal heroes of the Iliad are inevitably more heroic than the immortals can ever be, because they can die, and my guess is that this dramatic defect in the premise of Superman comics produced the necessity for kryptonite. The presence of kryptonite, which in its original version was fatal to Superman, usually glowed a virulent green (although it was originally red, when it first appeared in the comic in 1949, and in 1950 it was at one point purple). Since kryptonite seemed to be the only source of danger to Superman, the plots of the comics were either furiously dull or involved kryptonite, and were hence pretty repetitive. The authors must have realized this, for they duly produced a second version of kryptonite, which was red and had unpredictable although invariably transient effects, but these, too, palled, and DC comics introduced gold kryptonite, which permanently suppressed Superman’s powers and was hence an almost unusable plot device. Various plots, however, involved a less permanent effect of this kind, and I remember a preteen literary critic sneering at a comic book I was reading and venturing the sardonic surmise that its plot would be “the day Superman lost his powers.” He may not have been alone in this attitude, for the authors of the comic series soon provided kryptonite in a number of other colors with different effects, most of which appeared after I stopped reading: white, blue, black, and so forth. The BBC story is, of course, less startling than its headline suggests. The newly-discovered mineral at the bottom of that Serbian mineshaft is sodium lithium boron silicate hydroxide, which turns out to be remarkably close to the formula for kryptonite as described in one of the Superman movies, although apparently the stuff in the movie also contained some fluorine, which the new mineral does not. A scientist searching the Web for any substance resembling the Serbian find was astonished to discover the reference to the formula for kryptonite, and a whimsical little color story was born. The lovely title of Thomas Disch’s history of American science fiction—The Dreams Our Stuff Is Made Of—points out how much of the future was imagined in the pulp magazines of the 1930s, but Superman comics, which came along at the end of that decade, did not, to the best of my knowledge, predict much that actually came to pass, and kryptonite is no exception. But the BBC story, surely not primarily intended for a U.S. audience, may suggest how wide an empire even our most rubbishy and obsolete mass cultural productions still command. An old saw, I think eighteenth-century, held that if you could make all the ballads, you would not care who made the laws. That is not true, but neither is it pure nonsense—and when weighing up what it might mean, we should remember that we have made better and more haunting ballads than the ones about the Man of Steel.
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