Lessons Learned from Columbo and Perry Mason

I've learned some important life lessons watching Columbo and Perry Mason and "Murder, She Wrote".

• Don't be the biggest asshole in your family or social group. You'll get murdered.
  
• If you find a dead body, call the police and your lawyer immediately. Do not call your brother/cousin/uncle whose first notion is to hide the evidence and dispose of the body. It makes you look really guilty, and it's probably a felony.
  
• If you find a dead body with the murder weapon laying next to it, don't pick up the weapon! If you do, someone will inevitably barge into the scene and witness you standing over the dead body with the murder weapon in hand.
  
• Don't make death threats, even casually. If you do, someone will inevitably overhear you and tell the cops about it after the person you threatened turns up dead.
  
• Don't blackmail the murderer about their crime. They've already killed someone once; no reason not to make you number two. (Seriously, every time someone in either Columbo or Perry Mason blackmails the murderer, they get murdered. Every Single Time.)
  
• If you're the murderer and you've constructed what you believe is the perfect alibi/frame-up, don't double-down on the frame when Columbo starts questioning your alibi/frame. Just pretend you have no clue why things don't add up--the world is weird that way, isn't it, Lieutenant? Also see next entry.
  
• If Columbo (or J.B. Fletcher) keeps turning up to ask questions about "one more thing", get a very good criminal defense lawyer on retainer, and follow his advice (which will be "Shut the fuck up!"). I recommend Perry Mason. You'll need them.
  
• If J.B. Fletcher or Columbo show up to confront you about the murder, don't add to your felonies by threatening violence. Fletcher and Columbo ALWAYS bring backup of the armed and official variety. Perry Mason does his confrontations in the courtroom, so you have no hope in violence there.
  
• Don't bother faking your alibi by time-shifting the tapes or staging fake phone calls to dead people. Columbo has seen that too many times.
  
• Don't bother threatening Columbo with your friends in high places. They're not going to pull his badge on your say-so, because he has a far higher clearance rate on "homicides committed by rich, influential assholes" than you do.
  

One more thing I've observed watching these shows: Columbo is an idealized police detective. He's courteous, patient, and gets warrants for searches. Likewise, on "Perry Mason", Lt Tragg is another idealized detective: he won't plant evidence, he gets warrants, he doesn't rough suspects up, and he got very angry with one of his sergeants who tried to get rough with the lawyer. Hamilton Burger, the DA, is also an ideal: he's a zealous prosecutor, but not overzealous: he wants justice, not convictions. When he realizes that Perry Mason is right and someone else is the murderer, he drops the case; he doesn't double down. He has openly said that he cares about justice more than scoring convictions, and that convicting an innocent would be unjust. He does sometimes take a lot of convincing that he's wrong, though--he brings charges based on evidence and/or witcnesses, after all.

Justice League: Totality

I recently borrowed the "Justice League: Totality" graphic compilation and read it, along with "Dark Knight: Metal". One, Scott Snyder loves his non-linear story-telling (and I wish he'd be a bit more linear); two, Lex Luthor has been handed the functional equivalent of the One Ring by an unknown evil power.

In Totality, I'm pretty sure Luthor is an Unreliable Narrator--I mean, he's a lying, scheming S.O.B., why should he be telling the truth now? Especially when he's assuring all and sundry that he's really, truly telling the truth! Pull the other one, Lex; it's got bells on.

Either he's lying about his trip to the far, far future and his epiphany there, or he's having some really good delusions. He said himself that he'd pushed himself to his physical and mental limits, travelling up and down the timestream. He was presumably exhausted--and then he so conveniently falls into a distant millon year future where the locals are not just recognizably human, but wearing costumes based on 21st century supers? And they have a giant image of Lex Luthor, and know his personal history as the guy who discovered "the Truth" about humanity? Right. Sure. That's just the kind of delusion a narcissistic sociopath like Lex Luthor would have--one where he's been proven right about everything by all of humanity in the end. He then wakes up back in his lab, which definitely makes me think he dreamed or hallucinated that whole sequence.

He finds the doorknob that's the key to the rest of the story arc. It apparently has the power to kill Vandal Savage, and with it in hand, Lex is strangely persuasive to people who would otherwise try to kill him for sport. He's convinced by the doorknob of Doom (literally, it has the Old Martian emblem for Doom/Fate on it) that not only is all humanity really like himself, deep down, but that the entire universe is designed to be evil, cruel, and selfish. That's a helluva projection there, Lex!

The people who get caught up in Luthor's Legion of Doom are the same kind of people--narcissistic, sociopathic, evil, and they inevitably agree that their internal vision of humanity is the natural bent of the universe. Of course they do.

I am reminded of Sauron, who cannot imagine that someone would willing destroy the One Ring rather than use the power it grants. The Legion of Doom are unable to imagine a universe in which people are not all selfish assholes like themselves, starting with and especially including Lex Luthor. To Luthor, there is no other possibility--and, like the One Ring, the One Doorknob seems to feed Luthor's delusions about the universe and inflate his own sense of power. The Rings of Power that Sauron handed out purported to grant visions of things both Seen and Unseen, but ultimately what the user saw were the delusions and phantoms of Sauron's devising. I think that's what the One Doorknob is doing to Lex and his Legion: feeding them delusions and ideas based on someone's evil and selfish ethos. Who is that someone--Barbatos, Darkseid, Luthor himself? Don't know, haven't read beyond that.

However, I think the writer of this saga very cleverly used the One Doorknob as the functional equivalent of the One Ring, or of the Witch-King of Angmar's Ring, and showed what it did to powerful, evil leaders. It seduces them with megalomanic visions and delusions of the "Truth" of reality, and made them very persuasive rulers of men.

Is my interpretation correct? I don't know, but it's interesting.