Eau L.A. L.A.! 11 fragrant spots for Angelenos to find — or create — the perfect scent
March 4, 2025 3 AM PT
The perfume capital of the world might still be Grasse, a small town on the French Riviera that has shaped the fragrance industry since the late 18th century. But in the United States, a renaissance of perfumery is happening right here in Los Angeles.
In the 1980s, L.A. was the birthplace of bold, opulent fragrances, from Giorgio Beverly Hills to Bijan by Bijan, the olfactory equivalent of a power suit. But in the past two decades, the city's fragrance scene has blossomed even further, thanks to a wave of independent makers, schools that teach the art of scent and niche perfume boutiques ('niche perfume' simply means it's not made by a designer brand like Gucci or Yves Saint Laurent).
In the 1990s, perfumer Sarah Horowitz-Thran, one of the pioneers of independent American perfumery, moved to the city and subsequently began teaching perfume classes at the Fashion Institute of Design & Merchandising. Then in 2012 the perfume education nonprofit Institute for Art and Olfaction opened its doors and the city's fragrance scene blossomed. (Full disclosure, I serve as a volunteer member of the IAO board of directors.) The niche perfume market made over $2 billion in sales in 2023 and is expected to quadruple that by 2032.
Now in L.A., there's a biennial celebration called Scent Week, organized by the IAO, which happens this year from May 24 through June 1. It will feature perfume and smell-related activations all over the city.
For me, scent is more than a fascination — it's a part of my life. In addition to being a journalist, I'm a perfumer and olfactory artist.
For Scent Week or any time of year, here's a guide to help you smell your way through experimental perfume studios, luxury scent retailers, candle ateliers and even an incense shop where you can take a hands-on workshop. Maybe you'll find the scent you've been dreaming of — or create it yourself.
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Downtown L.A. Perfume Shop
There's a real argument to be made that Luckyscent is the reason why niche perfume is so popular in America. Founded by Franco Wright and Adam Eastwood in 2002, the e-commerce site has thousands of perfumes to choose from, often perfumes with vivid descriptions like, 'This is the scent of an incandescent lightbulb — the yellow glow of the hot bulb, a layer of dust gently baking on its surface, illuminating the dry, cracked pages of a well-loved paperback book in a suburban rec room where the curtains still carry the faint trace of indoor smoking, while a soft vanilla wafts in from the kitchen.' (Clue's 'Warm Bulb,' if you're so inclined.)Scent Bar is Luckyscent come to life. With L.A. locations in Hollywood and at the Row in downtown, Scent Bar is a destination for niche perfume lovers.
When you walk in, you're greeted by walls and walls of various types of perfume, as well as a friendly, knowledgeable staff. The shelves are categorized by type — one has a sign that says 'Cult Feminine,' while another reads 'Creamy/Powdery.' Perfumers range from the small-batch Slumberhouse to bigger companies like D.S. & Durga, purchased by a venture capital firm last year. One afternoon, several shoppers park at the main counter, while Steve Gontarski, Scent Bar's manager, pulls down bottles for them to smell.'Scent Bar is a place where people can spend a lot of time with a 45-minute consultation,' says Gontarski, 'but we actually prefer it when the discovery is self-guided.'
When you're done, you can even take a small sample bottle with you — no purchase required — because perfumes can take some repeated wearings before you're ready to buy a whole bottle, which usually runs between $150 and $300 (and sometimes higher).
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Tujunga Craft Studio
If incense is on your mind, Hyungi Park's Goyo is a hub where scent and craftsmanship meet. This small Tujunga shop, open only on Sundays (1 to 5 p.m.), offers unique incense burners, bookbinding tools and Park's extraordinary incense — some made with sustainably foraged materials.Education is central to Goyo. Around a wooden table seating six or seven, Park teaches students how to make forms of incense such as cones, incense paper (paper dipped in a scented concoction that contains saltpeter in order to slow the burning process) or incense pellets that are warmed rather than burned. You select what you want your incense to smell like and then Park takes you through a step-by-step process. Your final product may not come out as beautifully crafted as hers — like with every skill, making incense takes a lot of practice.Park, who also runs a specialty tattoo operation out of the studio, takes a good deal of inspiration in the relationship between incense and ritual. 'Incense was a precursor to perfume,' says Park, who recently opened a second Goyo location in Brooklyn. 'Often it had more of a functional aspect, whether it was rubbing it on as perfume to mask bad smells or to measure time like a clock. It's important to teach the different aspects.'The classes are a communal, joyful experience, and in the end, you go home with incense you made with your own hands. Whenever it fills up your home with the warm toasty scent, you'll feel an extra sense of accomplishment. Route 10064 Commerce Ave., Tujunga, California 91042
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Fairfax Perfume Shop
'Functional fragrance' refers to perfumes with benefits beyond scent — for example, using essential oils like lavender for mood enhancement. Capsule Parfumerie's co-owner Linda Sivrican has been making functional fragrances since the brand's inception, which is before the term even existed.'That is a buzzword, but it's been that way for us since day one,' Sivrican says.Sivrican and her husband, Mike Sivrican, turned to healing scents after their 3-year-old son suffered damage to his brain in a near-drowning accident. 'I was doing some research and found that certain essential oils help with the brain and memory, like frankincense,' she says. 'That's when something clicked for me.'Originally designers, the couple launched Fiele Fragrances and later developed seven micro-brands under Capsule, each with a unique story. Parallax Olfactory's Nimbus, described as 'blue iris, vibrating violin strings, violet ozone rays and paste,' won an Art and Olfaction Award in 2020.Between Capsule's boutique and studio is a room filled with perfume materials, where Sivrican teaches 'Scent Assembly' workshops ($195 per person for a two-hour session).'When I teach workshops here, people always ask, 'Oh, do you have to be a nose?' and I say, 'No, it's a muscle. You can train it, just like you can train your voice and your ear,'' she says. 'It's just practice and passion.'FYI: Linda Sivrican also offers 'Tailor-Made' scent alteration sessions where she'll take a perfume that doesn't quite fit you and adds materials to revitalize it to your liking.
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Echo Park Candle store
P.F. Candle Co.'s L.A. flagship isn't just a shop — it's a place to vibe. With a couch and a TV playing a candle-production video, the shop is set up like a living room. It's a perfect distillation of the brand, nodding to its minimalist, earthy paper labels that themselves evoke a deeply 1970s Californian feel.Founded in 2008 by Kristen Pumphrey in Austin, Texas, the company has grown from a small-scale craft fair operation to a beloved brand embedded in the fabric of Los Angeles. Alongside her husband, Thomas Neuberger, Pumphrey relocated first to Long Beach and then to L.A., where the business found its footing.
California has become P.F. Candle Co.'s inspiration: There's an Ojai Lavender candle and a Los Angeles candle that Pumphrey describes as 'saltwater jasmine.' The brand has collaborated with legendary SoCal skateboarder Ed Templeton's Toy Machine, the Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles and L.A. Times Plants (launching three candles inspired by California native plants). A partnership with Peanuts is inspired by camping. 'Our happy space is creating nature-inspired scents,' says Pumphrey. The boutique has several of these limited-edition collaborations (snap up a Peanuts 'Marshmallow Roast' candle while you can). It's also the only place where customers can explore the entire P.F. Candle Co. line — the Classic, Alchemy and Hi-Fi collections — as well as the Secret Stash project, small-batch candles housed in reused glass jars. While the company is known for its candles, it also offers reed diffusers, room sprays, incense and car air fresheners in most scents.
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Beverly Hills Perfume Shop
Alan Berdjis grew up in Beverly Hills Perfumery — literally. In the '80s, his parents, John and Jila Berdjis, ran two separate perfume boutiques before he took over and consolidated the family business a block from Rodeo Drive in the mid-2000s. 'Almost 40 years in the neighborhood now,' Berdjis says, surveying the long, narrow 2,500-square-foot space packed floor-to-ceiling with perfumes, complete with library-style ladders to reach the top shelves.The perfume scene has changed. Designer fragrances have long attracted the Birkin-carrying clientele, but while Berdjis still stocks legacy French brands like Houbigant and Annick Goutal, he's expanded into luxury niche lines such as Xerjoff, Roja Dove and Amouage.Some things remain: Beverly Hills Perfumery still caters to wealthy visitors from nearby five-star hotels. Another vestige: At the back of the store, a table filled with designer fragrances — some discontinued, like Ralph Lauren's Safari — are arranged by decade, all available to sniff. 'I call it the 'perfume timeline,'' says Berdjis, who has been called a vintage perfume expert by perfume blog Ça Fleur Bon.But there are shifts. Berdjis estimates that 20% of his clientele is now younger men.'They don't want Jordans anymore; they want a niche fragrance that's $300 for their birthday or graduation,' he says. 'Their parents come in and they're shocked — they don't even understand how their kid knows about this stuff.'
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Hollywood Perfume School
The Perfumer's Studio, housed in a converted Hollywood home, is a hub for independent perfumers, offering hands-on training, fragrance development and raw materials. Founded by Chris Gordon and Alex Moskin in affiliation with Perfumer's World, it has become central to L.A.'s fragrance scene.In 2021, former student Tianna Blue Mockett took over, now teaching courses like Perfume 101, where students create their own fragrance. She also leads a natural-perfume-making class — her specialty — and teaches formulation techniques.Gordon, now on the East Coast, still returns to teach. Beyond training, the studio fosters connections. Mockett often sees students exchange information and continue a relationship. 'Those relationships are invaluable; students find peers and inspiration in each other,' she says.The studio is an important resource, and one of the reasons why L.A. has so many upstart perfumers. 'There's more access to information in Los Angeles surrounding perfumery, and with that is the growing community,' Mockett says.Still, many beginners underestimate the complexity of perfume creation. Students quickly learn that perfumery is an intricate balance of art and science — and that it's not so easy. 'Sometimes with the 101 courses, people come in thinking they'll re-create a fragrance they love or develop the next bestseller on their first try,' Mockett says. 'They think it's just a matter of following a recipe, or that it's less involved than it is.'
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Downtown L.A. Clothing Store
Dover Street Market might be L.A.'s chicest store, home to inventive, trend-defying fashion. Naturally, its perfume selection is just as cutting-edge.
Founded by Rei Kawakubo of Comme des Garçons and company president Adrian Joffe, the store features many of Comme's own radical fragrances. A new book, 'Comme des Garçons Parfums 1994-2025,' details the brand's experimental scents, from the Olfactory Library's Tar, Garage and Soda to abstract yet wearable creations like Odeur 53 and Wonderoud. Comme des Garçons constantly pushes fragrance boundaries, says James Gilchrist, vice president of CDG and Dover Street Market Americas. 'The result is an incredibly diverse group of fragrances — some described as anti-fragrances — that are all unique and challenging,' he says. 'People tend to have a strong reaction; they love a specific one or two and wear them religiously, or they can't stand others. For us, that is a very good thing.'Elsewhere, the store showcases perfumes from punky fashion brand Chopova Lowena, L.A. streetwear label Brain Dead and luxury cosmetic house Edward Bess in gallery-like displays.
'I find so many people in Los Angeles are drawn to the rare or niche rather than the known or usual,' says Gilchrist. 'Our clients approach scent as a collection rather than a signature, always looking to add something special to their rotation.'
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Chinatown Perfume non-profit
It's hard to quantify the impact the Institute for Art and Olfaction has had on perfume in Los Angeles since opening in 2012. I began my own journey into the world of scent at the IAO and serve as a volunteer member of the board of directors.
Running out of a small space in Chinatown, the IAO has an outsized place in the world of perfume in general. The organization's Art and Olfaction Awards, held every year since 2013, might be akin to the Golden Globes of global perfume. (The Fragrance Foundation's FiFis, held in New York, are the Oscars).
The nonprofit has an art gallery and a library with over 1,300 perfumes and nearly 600 books, as well as other scent-related ephemera. But the real mission of the IAO is education. Founder Saskia Wilson-Brown created the institute after struggling to access materials for her own scent-based art. Today it offers a wide range of classes, from history and culture to hands-on blending taught by experts like Grasse Institute of Perfumery alumni Ashley Eden Kessler and Julianne Lee. Among the most popular offerings is the two-hour 'Open Session,' a $60 beginner-friendly workshop where participants explore raw materials. When I sit in on a class, instructor Minetta Rogers hands out scent strips dipped in synthetic ambergris (real ambergris, formed in the digestive system of sperm whales, is a prized perfume ingredient that's exceedingly rare and illegal to purchase or own in the U.S. under the Endangered Species Act of 1973).Wilson-Brown says these types of classes are fun because you can connect with people in a unique way — through the senses. 'It's very much about getting people excited about smelling and learning how to smell and learning the language of smell and opening up that rabbit hole,' she says.
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East Hollywood Perfume Shop
Walking into the Scent Room in Larchmont's main shopping district, you'll be greeted warmly by staff eager to guide you through over 500 perfumes from 50-plus niche and independent brands. Among the shelves, placards invite you to 'Please smell the art.'Co-founder Sam Clark opened the Scent Room in Dallas in 2019 to fill a gap in the market for curated, hard-to-find fragrances. In 2023, he expanded to Los Angeles, calling it 'the last puzzle piece' for creative people who already have great wardrobes, cool hair and body art. 'Now they're discovering they can smell like concrete after rain, pure syrupy honey or a salty rose,' he says.Clark encourages customers to explore perfume their way — whether with expert guidance or on a solo 'play and spray' journey. 'The feedback we get is that it's like a playground, a library, a classroom, a museum,' he says. 'People can learn about perfume without pressure or feeling followed around.'Part of that discovery is breaking free from gendered fragrance norms.'Every day, people ask, 'Where's the men's stuff?'' Clark says, pausing the interview to warmly send off a departing customer. 'In Dallas, women buy more ouds. Right now, men buy more roses. Dismantling those boxes has been exciting. Now it's OK to see a 6-foot, super-ripped man want to smell like candy.'
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Downtown L.A. Perfume Shop
Santee Alley and the Toy District downtown are mostly known for their wholesale fashion and toys, respectively. But there are many, many perfume shops as well — when I walked up Los Angeles Street, Santee Alley and Maple Avenue, I counted nearly 20. Most offer designer scents at prices better than department stores.Perfumes Los Angeles stands out. Owned by KB Roowala, it's split into wholesale and retail sections, with staff in different-colored shirts depending on their role. The narrow space is packed floor to ceiling with gift sets and over 4,000 bottles, from designer staples to niche brands like Bond No. 9, Kilian Paris and Francis Kurkdjian's cult-favorite Baccarat Rouge 540. It also carries several lines of Arabic perfumes, which are popular due to their quality and lower prices.Annie Ouzonian, chief data and technology officer at Perfumes Los Angeles, says most customers come for a deal, but many are 'side hustlers' reselling perfumes to their networks or on TikTok Live. 'We had nurses and fast food workers asking if they could sell,' she says. 'Now some have quit their jobs to do this full-time.' But if you want to start hustling, there's a buy-in: resellers must make a $500 purchase to get the wholesale pricing and other perks of the membership.For those not about to become perfume slingers or even buy a whole bottle of perfume, Perfumes Los Angeles has a program where they'll make small trial sizes for $10 to $20, depending on the cost of the full bottle. But if you do pull the trigger on a bottle or two, you'll depart with a gift bag.
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Mid-Wilshire Perfume Fair
Part of Scent Week, the fourth edition of Scent Fair L.A. will be one of the easiest events for the public to come and check out a bunch of perfumes. Held on May 30 through June 1 in the outdoor courtyard at the Craft Contemporary in Miracle Mile, Scent Fair is wall-to-wall booths and tables filled with the offerings of small, cutting-edge perfume makers.The fair is a sensory-rich affair where attendees can explore unique, hard-to-find fragrances while enjoying a drink or two. Curated by Darin Klein, Saskia Wilson-Brown and Andres Payan Estrada, the fair also features hands-on workshops, a keynote talk and an opening-night party with guest DJs.'We want to create something that is not just a fair,' says Payan Estrada, the creative director and curator at Craft Contemporary.And during this year's fair, says Payan Estrada, the museum will preview an exhibition of 'olfactory art' — a term for art that centers scent — curated by Wilson-Brown, the founder of the Institute for Art and Olfaction. The show will feature art objects that deal with the 'materiality of scent, as well as storytelling and narratives around identity politics — these are broad ideas about what scent can be,' says Payan Estrada.
The 2023 edition featured SoCal-based brands like Jazmin Saraï and Travertine Spa Collection alongside international favorites like Tanaïs and Perfume.Sucks. Many of the brands are only carried in a few small boutiques and online, so this is a rare opportunity to smell their perfumes before purchasing them. Attendees can meet perfumers, sample their work and gain insight into the artistry behind each bottle. FYI: The opening-night party on Friday is $30 to attend, while Saturday is regular museum admission ($9 for adults, $7 for adults 65+ and students) and Sunday is 'pay what you wish.'
Full disclosure: The author serves as a volunteer member on the board of the Institute for Art and Olfaction.
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Elon and the Genius Trap
The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here. Subscribe here: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | YouTube | Overcast | Pocket Casts Was Elon Musk ever a genius? Yes, he revolutionized the electric-car industry and space travel. Yes, he once seemed to represent America' restored American confidence in its ability to innovate at the cutting edge of technology. But Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web, and he doesn't regularly appear in headlines as a prominent tech genius. In fact, many well-informed people probably don't even know his name. So what makes one man merely wildly accomplished and another a genius? And which descriptor makes a man more likely to engage in an ego-crushing battle with the president? In this episode of Radio Atlantic, we talk with Helen Lewis, author of The Genius Myth: A Curious History of a Dangerous Idea. Explaining how Musk tanked his reputation has many ways: First, he alienated environmentalists by teaming up with Trump, and then he alienated Trump fans by insulting their hero. Another way is clear by looking at American culture's historical relationship with 'genius,' and how it tends to go wrong. Genius, it turns out, is less a series of accomplishments than a form of addiction. It traps the men who indulge it, and they often end up, like Musk, depleted. We talk with Lewis about what Musk has in common with Thomas Edison, how the psychedelics fit into the archetype, and what the possible paths are for Musk moving forward.[] News clip: The bromance is over. President Trump and Elon Musk trading barbs today over Republicans' 'big, beautiful bill.' Hanna Rosin: Well, last week, something no one could have expected to happen finally happened. The president of the United States and the richest man in the world had a spectacular falling out. News clip: A pretty intense back-and-forth between Donald Trump and Elon Musk— News clip: Musk now claiming he won Trump the 2024 election to Trump threatening to cancel Musk's federal contracts— News clip: Elon Musk tweeting within the past one minute: 'Time to drop the really big bomb: @realDonaldTrump is in the Epstein files. That's the real reason they have not been made public. Have a nice day, DJT!' Rosin: The feud between Trump and Musk escalated at a bewildering pace. Donald Trump: Elon and I had a great relationship. I don't know if it went well anymore. I was surprised. Rosin: Trump may have been surprised, but to a lot of us watching, a partnership of two egos this huge was doomed to break up. This week, Musk has tried to patch things up, saying he regrets some of what he said, without specifying what exactly. But Trump is more or less not engaging, and it looks like, for the moment at least, Musk's reputation has hit rock bottom. I'm Hanna Rosin. This is Radio Atlantic. Today, we consider the long arc of Elon Musk in the context of other historical figures who, like him, were given the revered title of 'genius.' Not that long ago, Musk was considered a visionary by Americans across the political spectrum, an inventor solving climate change, space exploration, and, really, whatever he set his mind to. But as we all know, the last few years have seen his reputation crater on the left: His support of Trump, his buyout of Twitter, his online presence, loaded with memes and conspiracy theories. Basically, anything to troll the libs, many of whom had been his fans. Now his fallout with the president is making him suspect on the right, leaving him a constituency of no one. So how do we understand the arc of Musk, someone who could have gone down in history as one of the great tech geniuses but, instead, used his reputation to get himself more and more attention and, in the process, seems to have torched that very reputation? As it so happens, staff writer Helen Lewis has a very timely book out next week that helps explain this pattern. It's titled The Genius Myth, and Musk is its quintessential modern example. As Lewis argues, societies build myths of individual geniuses, and often those geniuses overstay their welcome, having second or third acts as they try to be experts in every field or to simply keep the attention they're accustomed to. I asked her to put the week's Musk news into a wider picture, and to explain why she thinks we should avoid the label 'genius' altogether. Here's our conversation. [] Rosin: Helen, welcome to the show. Helen Lewis: Thank you. Rosin: Sure. So I wanna start before this feud between Trump and Musk, maybe even before Musk bought Twitter. So let's say it's 2020, and this is when Trump publicly calls Musk 'one of our great geniuses' and compares him to Thomas Edison. What is it about Musk that qualifies him for that rarefied public title of genius? Lewis: At the time, I think the assumption was that he had revolutionized not just one but two industries, which is very rare. You know, in driving down the cost of space parts, he undoubtedly challenged, essentially, the kind of government-funded monopoly and the slow way that space exploration was going. You know, there was this humbling period for America, where it couldn't even get its own astronauts up into space. It had to rely on, you know, hitching a ride with the Russians. And he managed to, in that sense, restore a kind of American pride in itself. And then, obviously, you have Tesla and its electric vehicles, and turning electric vehicles away from their previous reputation, which was the Toyota Prius, which is a sort of thing you bought as a kind of hair shirt, right— a hair shirt with wheels on to say, I'm sorry for killing the planet—into the idea that an electric car was something you might have because it was cool and it was a good car. And both of those really did remind me actually of Thomas Edison, because both of them are kind of—the nickname that Edison had was the 'American Prometheus.' They were both about an idea of America as a place that still is at the white-hot edge of technology. You know, a place you can still build things and do things. Rosin: Okay, so Elon has these amazing accomplishments. He restores a certain kind of American confidence in itself. But is a genius just someone who accomplishes great things? Like, in the book, you make a really interesting comparison to Tim Berners-Lee, who's thought of as the actual inventor of the World Wide Web. So why does one get to be a genius, and the other is a man who just does a lot of amazing accomplishments? Lewis: Well, you have to also, I think, be prepared to play the role of the genius in public and inhabit that role. And you know, Tim Berners-Lee has had a lot of acclaim. He's got a knighthood here in Britain. He's an honorary fellow in lots of places. But he doesn't swagger about like he's a kind of special sort of human, a class apart, which is I think what Musk, you know, has accepted for himself—that, you know, and has again, like Thomas Edison done, driven a lot of that mythology himself. You know, Thomas Edison notoriously worked through the nights at the laboratory in Menlo Park with his team. And Elon Musk had a similar mythology, which is all about the fact that, you know, he never sleeps. You know, he would have a sleeping bag on the floor of the factory because he was so dedicated. And, like, he was just relentless, and everybody had to be 'extremely hardcore.' So the argument in the book is that achievements are one thing, but we're also into this idea of a kind of mythology around a person. There's this kind of embrace of specialness. And the line that I give that's the, kind of, classic example of this is, you know, Elon Musk currently has—where are we now? I mean, who knows by the time this comes out how many acknowledged children we have, but I think we're currently at 14, and they're called things like Romulus and X Æ A-12. And, you know, Tim Berners-Lee's kids are called Alice and Ben, right? Rosin: (Laughs.) Lewis: This, to me, is just, like: One of you is just a normal person who happens to have done some cool stuff, and one of you has decided I'm gonna try and, like, optimize everything in my life to be a really great story to sound special. Rosin: Right. So the key ingredient of genius is that you're willing to step into the role or mythology of genius. You're willing to sort of lean into the story about yourself as a public genius. Lewis: Right. And you also become a symbol of something bigger. That's what I mean about—becoming a national symbol is a very obvious version of this. William Shakespeare is not just a brilliant playwright—I think that's unarguable—but he became, over the course of the 17th and 18th centuries, an argument for the English language at a time that Britain was expanding its ambitions abroad. You know, this was the kind of high point of the British empire and, therefore, we needed a playwright to match. And I think you can actually see a similar thing with maybe someone like Chinua Achebe, who becomes a kind of symbol of the nation, or Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie for Nigeria now. You know, she's writing novels that are concerned with the Nigerian experience or the Nigerian American experience, inhabiting that bigger role than just being another writer. Rosin: So when you think of Musk in these terms, like how he has successfully styled himself as this very special category of person—the genius—how did that play into his relationship with Trump? Lewis: Well, if you have two people who are both convinced that they're geniuses, it doesn't usually work well. And actually, maybe this is something that Musk should have known, because the car company he owns—obviously, Tesla—is named after Nikola Tesla. And Nikola Tesla, an absolutely brilliant engineer, walked out of working there. He just couldn't get on with Thomas Edison. The story goes that he had a bet, and he won it, and Edison refused to pay up, which bizarrely has an analog in the story that Sam Harris, the former member of the 'Intellectual Dark Web,' tells about having a bet about COVID deaths with Elon Musk. And Sam Harris won, and Elon failed to pay up. So, you know, I think the trouble is genius is always a story about ego, and I don't think I was alone in predicting that the Trump-Musk relationship would at some point explode, because you have two giant silverback-gorilla egos wrestling for dominance, and that is a tension that simply can't be sustained. Rosin: Right, right. And it is true that Trump called himself a genius. He doesn't call many people geniuses, but he did refer to himself as a genius. In the book, you write about how if we declare someone a genius, we believe they have magical powers to do anything, as opposed to, say, specialized skills to do a few specific things. I was wondering if that contributed to Musk's downfall—this idea (that maybe Trump had also) that he could fix any problem, like inefficiencies in the government, just whatever. You set the genius loose and the genius fixes everything. Lewis: Yeah, DOGE is a story of enormous hubris. I think everyone would agree that the American government, like all governments, has a certain amount of waste and inefficiency built into it. But the idea that you could do what Musk did—which is go in with a small cadre of lieutenants, lock everybody else out, and start deleting things based on simple-keyword searches—and that this would not have any negative or unintended consequences is laughable. And the reason that I think Musk thought that worked is that, to some extent, it had worked, particularly at Twitter—which, in the book Character Limit, his takeover there is chronicled. And he did exactly what would then become the DOGE playbook there: you know, brought in his lieutenants, cut the head count, told everyone that they were lazy and that only super, 'extremely hardcore' people could stay. And, you know, sure enough: Twitter is not what it once was. And I thought his tenure at Twitter would be a disaster, and I think probably in economic terms it has been. But what it did was it bought him the attention of Donald Trump. And that looked like it was a very good bet because he was then in a position to make sure he had extremely preferential access to the government in terms of his contracts. That's now a more questionable outcome, given the falling out between him and Donald Trump. Rosin: It's very interesting how you describe the history of Twitter, given your book, because even though his management of Twitter was not genius-level successful, it does seem to have increased his mythology as a genius. Like, he sort of spread the word and myth about himself via Twitter, even as he was doing, you know, less-than-genius things at the actual company. Lewis: The original title for the book, working title, for a long time was The Selfish Genius, which I liked as a pun and, it turned out, no one else got. But it did go to this idea that you are more likely to be held as a genius if you run a kind of election campaign for it. So, you know, one of my examples would be Isaac Newton, undoubtedly a brilliant mathematician but also extremely keen that he got the credit for calculus rather than his German rival, Gottfried Leibniz. You know, these things don't necessarily happen by accident. Often, the genius themselves or their fans, you know, run a kind of publicity campaign for this idea of them as a genius. Rosin: Right. Part of being 'the genius,' like, with quotes around it, is being your own PR around the genius. Like, you just have to be good at that. Lewis: Yeah. Or you have to go and sit in obscurity and kind of let other people create the mythology for you. Rosin: Right. And I guess Musk does both. I mean, he's able to rally an army of fans, stans, and to also do his own PR. Lewis: And there's a phrase that Manvir Singh, the anthropologist, uses about shamans in traditional society, which is that they cultivate an air of 'charismatic otherness.' And I think that also very helpfully describes what geniuses do, or the people around geniuses do. I can't remember who it was who said that every Silicon Valley startup essentially functions like a cult. You know, there's this mission, and there's this one guy at the top of it who's leading everybody on the mission. And I think probably, in the case of Musk's earlier businesses, when he was trying to, essentially, solve climate change and solve space exploration, people did want to join the Elon cult. It's just when the mission is Let's turn Twitter into a more effective vehicle for racism and videos of people losing their shit on street corners, who wants to join that mission? Who wants to, you know, sacrifice their weekends to believe in that? Rosin: Well, this is such an interesting moment because as the breakup is happening—and we're in the middle of it, so we don't know where it will land and what will happen to Musk's reputation, but—the language and the reputation is shifting in real time. So Trump has now reportedly referred to Musk as part genius, part child—he adds the word child—but also crazy. And I'm just wondering if there's some moment where, you know, it's the one drop in the milk that curdles the milk—like, some line where what people used to perceive as eccentricities of the so-called genius suddenly seem like, you know, real negatives, not fake, charismatic negatives, but actual negatives—and if you've been tracing that line. Lewis: The danger for Elon Musk now is that, having alienated basically anyone on the broad left of politics, you know, his original constituency—back when he was a Democratic donor and he was talking about electric vehicles as necessary for combating climate change—they're all gone. He's now alienating anybody on the right who is loyal to Trump, which is, on the surface, everybody. You know, who knows how they feel in the secrets of their hearts, but ostensibly the Republican Party is the Trump party, so he doesn't really have a kind of caucus who want to advance him as an argument. This is what I mean in the book, about genius being an argument for something. Calling someone a genius is often a way of making an argument. And the argument that Elon Musk, as lionizing him, was making, is the idea of: Government is slow and sclerotic and holds back innovation. You know, You need to let Tesla do its thing. You need to let SpaceX do its thing. That's the only way we get to the future. And of course, that's a partial story. Tesla makes a lot of money by trading carbon credits to other car companies. It makes a lot of money from government subsidies from electric cars. You know, these stories are very rarely as rugged and 'Randian' as they appear on the surface. But, you know, Elon Musk was used as an argument for the singular innovative genius, and that's a right-wing argument predominantly in America as it currently stands. But having lost the left, he's now just quite spectacularly lost the right, and you look at his approval ratings, and they are in the Mariana Trench—I mean, just could not be lower. Rosin: When we're back, I ask Helen what happens when a reputation craters like Musk's has, and what the myth of genius can leave out of the story. That's when we're back. [Break] Rosin: And so that's what we are witnessing in real time now with Elon Musk, the kind of deconstruction of whatever mythology he had built around himself, and we just still don't know how it will play out. So once he no longer effectively represents that argument, maybe the sort of glow fades like he's not a genius anymore, because genius needs a purpose—like, a political or social purpose, the label 'genius.' And when he's not doing it effectively, Trump is less interested. Lewis: Well, yeah. I mean, that's the point, isn't it? Musk is no longer as useful to Trump. Not least, I think the biggest thing that he did that was a mistake was to give his interview to Mishal Husain of Bloomberg and say, I'm not going to give any more money in the midterms, at which point, your reason for stifling your doubts about why this guy is toting his kid around and, you know, jumping in the air, and doing mad posts, and all that stuff is just taken away, right? There was a lot of Shut up and, like, We need his money. And as soon as you say, I'm cutting off the money, then people are free to air the opinions that they've clearly always held in the background anyway. Rosin: Right. Like, the news about Musk's drug use, which had been bubbling up but is now pretty voluminous—although, we should say that Musk recently said he's not taking drugs and simply tried prescription ketamine a few years ago. That said, I could imagine a world where, previously, people would look at his reported psychedelic use and kind of excuse that as the habits of an eccentric genius. And now they look at it more—now that the 'genius' label is fading—as more just genuinely dysfunctional. Lewis: Yes. I mean, you are right to mention, you know, the drug use, because it's interesting that, again, genius is a sort of connection with the divine in a secular society. It's a promise of something superhuman. And so it's not surprising, to me, that you see lots of these tech guys talking about going to Burning Man, talking about doing ayahuasca, talking about altered states of consciousness—because that, again, positions them as modern shamans. You know, they're in connection with something that is outside of the experience of ordinary mortals. I have this line in the book that genius transmutes oddness into specialness. And I think what happens is a lot of reverse engineering, where somebody gets anointed a genius, and then their whole biography is kind of combed through for things that confirm the theory. So it can be, you know, Oh, look at his childhood. In the case of Elon Musk, the things we hear about his childhood was that he would have these reveries, where he would drift off, and that he was badly bullied. And those are, funnily enough, the same things that you hear about Thomas Edison's childhood. He was deaf and seemed to be spending a lot of time in the world of his own. Now, that's true of lots of children, most of whom don't go on to greater achievements. But because you've put this label on someone, we look back and read everything through that prism. Rosin: Right. Okay. So what does the template leave out then? Like, in the case of Elon, you know, there's a template. It leads to your rise in success. What parts are not told? What people get left out of a story like this? Lewis: I mean, all the support staff, really, and all the people who kind of grease the wheels for the great man get slowly downgraded—you know, all the collaborators. You know, I still regularly catch myself and copy wanting to write 'Elon Musk, founder of Tesla.' And, of course, he wasn't, right? It was founded by two other guys, and he took it over. I mean, he was an early investor, but he got the title co-founder as part of a legal settlement. You know, and the fact that X—you know, he was forced out of PayPal by Peter Thiel and the board. You know, he had failures along the way too. All of that stuff kind of gets hastily kind of airbrushed away. Like, I always think of it a bit kind of like a scaffolding around the kind of statue of David, right? And we knock away the scaffolding, and then we just got the perfect statue. And that's the way that we tend to look at geniuses. You know, all of that kind of stuff. And, you know, I have a chapter in the book, obviously, about wives. You know, having somebody who is both your kind of domestic partner and somebody who is maybe a muse or maybe your kind of collaborator, but happy to take a secondary role, that's a huge, huge advantage to you. And also, material conditions: You know, why did Elon Musk move from South Africa to America? Because he wanted to study at the best university, where people were doing the most interesting stuff. He wanted to get funding from venture capitalists who are based in Silicon Valley. You know, Elon Musk could not have been Elon Musk in Pretoria. If he'd stayed there, he might have been a very successful businessman, but he wouldn't be who he is today. So this is what I find deeply irritating about the people who think that, you know, it's all them and they're this unique success story. Elon Musk's success story, credit to him—he has a great deal to do with it. But it is also a story of universities, of American culture, of American wealth, of everything that [Silicon] Valley built up over the course of more than half a century. There are a lot of other bit-part players in the story who shouldn't be, you know, downgraded so we can focus only on the protagonist. Rosin: You know, I deeply appreciated your chapter about wives because one fact that always breaks my brain is how, across the decades and even up until now, we so closely associate the term genius with men. And you created a very simple formula, which is that a genius needs a wife, and it's much less often that a woman has a wife. And so, you know, that's part of the mythology. Lewis: Yeah, I mean, Gertrude Stein had Alice B. Toklas, and that worked out pretty well for her. But it's been throughout history, yes, I think straight women have particularly suffered. I remembered this from writing Difficult Women, my previous book, which was about feminism. I had a chapter on the suffrage movement in the U.K., and there was a quote from the suffragette Hannah Mitchell that said, No cause was won between dinner and tea—which, to translate that into American meals, that's actually lunch and dinner. But her point was that if you had domestic responsibilities, your thinking time was disrupted, and actually not just, you know, in sheer volume of hours, but just in the amount of your kind of brain space you could dedicate to having big thoughts. And it's really interesting that so many—you know, look at the MacArthur genius grants now. They are about taking away money worries and domestic concerns, in order that people can excel to their fullest potential. We all acknowledge that it's really, really hard to manage that kind of big, demanding career as well as being a primary caregiver. In fact, it's pretty much impossible. I mean, Marie Curie managed it, just about, but very few people do. Rosin: Yeah. Yeah. Now, Elon's interest in propagating little Elons—in your book, you describe a long history of geniuses being very interested in the continued propagation of geniuses as a special class. How does he fit into that history? Lewis: Well, it's the propagation of people like themselves, really. I think that's the thing. Rosin: But isn't it also this idea that you can propagate yourself? I mean, it's almost like trying to sort of take this idea of the genius and reduce it to some kind of perfect science? Like, you can just replicate it or clone it. Lewis: Yeah, it's hardcore belief in the power of hereditary genius, which that's the title of the book, the 19th-century book, by Francis Galton, the eugenicist, Hereditary Genius, in which he attempted to categorize all of Britain into different classes, which he all gave a different letter to and worked out how many people fitted in each one. Which, you know, to me, now that obviously sounds like a sort of deranged plan, but this was at a time when people were obsessed with classification and, also, because of the recent discovery of evolution by natural selection, a real interest in breeding and its effect on animals and, therefore, humans. And from that, as you say, you do get this horrific legacy of eugenics, as practiced by both the Nazis and in lots of America, including California. But it persists in these soft forms about people wanting to have smart kids. Now, that's something that everybody would like to do at a kind of basic level. But there is this often-recurrent belief among supersmart people that their children will be supersmart. And actually, statistically, the issue with that is that there is a very common phenomenon known as 'reversion to the mean,' which means that, you know, if you are very smart, you are an outlier—you've probably got the kind of best version of all of the genes that influence intelligence—and that your children are not likely to be outstanding to the exact level that you are and the exact way that you are. So it's, to some extent, you know, a delusion, but it's a very recurrent one. And the story of the genius sperm bank, which there's a book by David Plotz about it, which I highly recommend to people. Essentially, an eccentric millionaire called Robert K. Graham, who made his money inventing shatterproof plastic lenses for spectacles, decides that he's going to go and collect the sperm of a load of Nobel Prize winners, in order to kind of breed a sort of, you know, better, superior race of Americans because America was getting very degenerate. I mean, this is the bit that is always—the side adjunct to it is: Why do we need these geniuses? And the answer usually comes back, Modern culture is degraded. Everybody's lazy. Everybody's degenerate. Often that comes with racial overtones. You know, it's no longer pure (read: white European). And you know, so he said that he got three Nobel winners to donate, including William Shockley, who won the Nobel Prize for the invention of the transistor, and then embarked on an enthusiastic second career as a scientific racist and eugenicist. And I think, you know, Shockley is an interesting template for a kind of proto-Elon Musk in the 20th century, in that he had an undoubtedly distinguished first half of his career, and then the second half of his career was spent saying increasingly radical things to enormous pushback, which he then presented as him being whatever the 1970s word for 'canceled' was. You know, as if the reaction itself proved that he was doing something right. And also, in both cases, about a feeling that maybe the creative juice of the career had run dry but, you know, the attention tap needed to stay on. And that's something that I think you see with lots of people who talk about this kind of breeding of geniuses, is that they know that they're putting their hand on, you know, a hob that is still hot. They know people react enormously strongly to these discussions about race and intelligence, and, therefore, they can't stop themselves from dabbling in it. Rosin: Right. Okay. So that's where we are now with Musk. Now he's a little bit of a different case study than some of the historical geniuses you write about, because he's alternately a genius and a juvenile idiot. Like, he attracts genius sycophants as much as genius debunkers. What does that mean? Like, none of these other geniuses existed in the age of social media, where you had so much controversy around someone. Do you think that points to a different path for him? Lewis: He's certainly a much more unfiltered genius than you've got in the past, but there are precursors to that. One of the reasons Thomas Edison is so famous is that he was operating in Menlo Park in New Jersey, which was a short train ride away from New York, which meant that if you were an enterprising young reporter on a big New York paper, you could get on a very easy train and be there in a couple of hours and stroll into his laboratory—where he would spin you a yarn about the latest thing that he was creating—and go home, write it up, and everybody would be, you know, excited. Being Thomas Edison correspondent was a good gig. And so you did get a lot of him being publicized by a whole cadre of people whose careers came to depend on him. And as you say, in his later career, after his great success helping the electricity grid be put into New York, he did really run dry. He did some very badly received experiments with ore mining. By that point, he'd moved out of the kind of useful phase of his career into the kind of oracle phase. And people would come, and he would, you know, talk to them about intelligence and the spirit world and his plans for world peace. And that is the phase—I think you're right—that Elon Musk is currently in. The only difficulty is that he doesn't have that filtered through a load of newspaper reporters in whose interest it is to present him in the best and most interesting possible light, you know, to perpetuate the myth of this kind of savant. What we have, instead, is him posting pictures of himself, like AI-generated images of him as Kekius Maximus, the gladiator, which makes it slightly harder to maintain the kind of genius mystique that you might hope for in those situations. Rosin: Right, right, right. Yeah. I think the phrase you used about Edison was coasting on the fumes of his own publicity, and it made me see very vividly the possible future paths for Musk. Like, you can see a future where he just goes on and fixes Tesla and, you know, does some useful things for space exploration, as you mentioned. But there's this other path, where he's just increasingly a meme—like, increasingly ridiculous. Lewis: He's at a crossroads right now. And, you know, Joe Rogan, the podcaster, who is a personal friend of his, said on his show last week, I think Elon needs to put the phone down. And I think at that point, when, you know, your extremely anti-woke friend who says—you know, I watched Joe Rogan do standup for the piece I wrote for The Atlantic last year, and he said, you know, Elon's so intelligent. He makes me feel like a man and his dog when I talk to him—if that friend is the one saying to you probably time to put the phone down, you have to hope that he would listen. But I don't know if he will. But that is the great paradox of Elon Musk—is that, you know, he has two futures ahead of him: One, beloved sage who got us to Mars; one, vile shitposter who burned away a promising reputation while still maintaining a huge amount of money. You know, this might be a sort of delightful bump on the road in the Musk story. You know, this might be the sort of Rocky-style montage, where he was at his worst low, and from that he rebuilt. Because these are stories and they're, therefore, you know, flexible. And, you know, then they could be rewritten. But you can almost feel everything bending towards the shape that the story wants to be. That's how I felt when I was writing this, is that we have these templates and the facts end up being nudged towards them, and people end up acting in ways that do that actively too. Rosin: Right. Let's move into an alternate universe, which is something that Musk likes to do, where Elon is not subject to the genius myth. How should we think of a person like Musk? Would you be just evaluating accomplishments? Like, would you say something a person did is genius, but you would not step into the trap of calling a person a genius, because that triggers so much else mythology—but it would be reasonable to say, Oh, this company or this decision that a person made was a genius decision? Like, would that be a better way to use that term? Lewis: That's, ultimately, how I see it. It's better to talk about moments of inspiration, of fingertip touches with a divine, if you want to see it like that. You know, I don't want to be a killjoy who crushes people's appreciation of— you know, I write in the book about looking at the paintings of Van Gogh, which I just absolutely love, and you know, the fact that he melded together impressionism and Japanese woodblock prints in this completely new synthesis. And the paintings, you can just feel the emotion pouring out of them and the brush work is so distinctive. I just—you know, I love them, and I'm bowled over by them. And I don't want to cheapen that by being, you know, grubby about it and saying, It's just a painting. My 5-year-old could have done that. No one's better than anyone else. No, I do think that those paintings are some of the best expressions of genius, in the sense of being kind of unfathomable. But I do think that the mythology itself is essentially marketing, you know, in the case of Van Gogh, very much created by his sister-in-law. So his posthumous reputation is bolstered by the idea of him as the tortured genius. And I think you're exactly right. In the case of Musk, it would be more interesting to read an appraisal of Tesla as a company or SpaceX as a company, and just take him out of the equation entirely, because I think that he's there looming over it and maybe, really, clouding people's judgment about those companies. Tesla is, you know, is paying him vast amounts of money, to the extent that it is currently in court about how much they want to pay him, because they believe that having a genius at the helm is so vital to what they're doing. And that may be profoundly distorting the reality of Tesla's market position. So yeah, I think it would be a healthier story to just try and put aside the mythology and see what's actually happening. Rosin: Right. Well, that is so helpful, Helen. Thank you so much for helping us understand this moment through the lens of genius. And congratulations on your book. Lewis: Thank you. [] Rosin: This episode of Radio Atlantic was produced by Kevin Townsend. It was edited by Claudine Ebeid. We had engineering support from Rob Smierciak and fact-checking by Michelle Ciarrocca. Claudine Ebeid is the executive producer of Atlantic Audio, and Andrea Valdez is our managing editor. Listeners, if you like what you hear on Radio Atlantic, you can support our work and the work of all Atlantic journalists when you subscribe to The Atlantic at I'm Hanna Rosin. Talk to you next week. Article originally published at The Atlantic
Yahoo
14 minutes ago
- Yahoo
The Singer Who Saw America's Best and Worst
The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here. It's a real American moment out there: battle lines drawn, tear gas drifting, charity and gentleness on their heels. Turn inward, inside ourselves, and it looks even worse, the mind's landscape pocked and blackened with destruction. Can somebody please bring the beautiful music, to carry us up and out? Someone like Sly Stone, who died on Monday at the age of 82. Sly was a born transcender, a natural synthesizer of situations, a raiser of elements to their highest state of possibility. Black, white; R&B, rock; politics, carnival; great taste, screaming excess; heaven and Earth: He put it all together. On a tight curve of musical euphoria, he led his people—which was everybody, or so he claimed—out of conflict. The opposing force was in him too, equally strong as it turned out: drag, downwardness, drugs, isolation. Who in the world would ever have the power to shut him down? Only Sly himself. It's remarkable that he lived as long as he did. But in his glorious and self-consuming prime—'68 to '71, roughly—he harmonized the energies that were tearing and would continue to tear this country to pieces. Dangerous work, highly exposed, but he made it look like a party. And in the floating jubilee that was his band, the Family Stone, he gave America a vision of itself: racially and emotionally integrated, celestially oriented, if not healed then at least open to healing. What to listen to, right now, as you're reading this? You could start with 1969's 'Stand!' A circus crash of cymbal, a burlesque snare roll, and away we go: 'Stand, in the end, you'll still be you / One that's done all the things you set out to do.' The vocals are airy, haughtily enunciated in the high hippie style, and embellished with happy trills; the melody chugs along with a nursery-rhyme simplicity that is somehow underwired by knowingness: innocence and experience conjoined. (The Beatles were very good at this too, but Sly's true peer in this area, oddly, was a later songwriter: Kurt Cobain.) And the lyrics are classic Sly: a pinch of psychedelic double-talk—'You have you to complete and there is no deal'—and an ounce of street knowledge. The song rises and falls, jogging on the spot as it were, but with a building gospel crescendo of a half-chorus—'Stand! Stand! Stand!'—that seems to presage or demand release. And release is granted, unforgettably. It comes out of nowhere, with less than a minute of music left: a sudden loop of chiming, uplifted, militant, and taut-nerved funk, resolving/unresolving, tension and deliverance together, guitars locked; the drummer, Greg Errico, is thrashing out an ecstatic double-time pattern on his hi-hat (and doing it, if you watch the live footage, with one hand). [Read: The undoing of a great American band] From 'Stand!' you might go to 1970's 'Thank You (Falettinme Be Mice Elf Agin).' Everything in America is one year worse, one year more violent and bummed-out, and although the music stays celebratory (with a finger-popping bass line from Larry Graham that famously invented the next two decades of funk playing), lyrically, Sly is darkening: 'Lookin' at the devil / Grinnin' at his gun / Fingers start shakin' / I begin to run.' He quotes himself, his own (very recent) hits, his own nostrums of positivity, in a charred-by-time kind of way, 'Different strokes for different folks' right next to a new observation, 'Flamin' eyes of people fear burnin' into you.' We're on course here for the Sly-in-ruins of 1971's There's a Riot Goin' On, his woozy sayonara to the years of greatness. Druggy and drum-machined, with a rippling American flag on the cover, Riot is the album that most directly connects him to the present situation. Decades of obscurity followed—which is a cliché, but he lived it, as durably and intensely as he had lived the cliché of superstardom. 'The pure products of America go crazy,' as William Carlos Williams said. And now he's left us, when once again brutality is massing behind its shields, and once again compassion has acquired the nobility of true folly. All very familiar to Sly the avatar. I can't stop thinking about these lines from 'Stand!,' so wistfully prophetic, so half-encouraging, so dead-on predictive of our mass retreat into the space behind our eyes: 'Stand, don't you know that you are free / Well, at least in your mind if you want to be.' Article originally published at The Atlantic
Geek Tyrant
28 minutes ago
- Geek Tyrant
James Gunn Explains Why Superman Is a 'Terrifying Creature' in His Movie and The Purpose of His Red Trunks — GeekTyrant
In James Gunn's upcoming Superman film, truth, justice, and the American way come wrapped in red crape, trunks, and a interesting new direction with the story as everyone knows Superman's not from Earth. Gone is the secret identity tension that's long defined Clark Kent. In Gunn's DC Universe, the public already knows Superman is an alien, and they're understandably a little freaked out by him. Gunn puts it bluntly: 'He shoots beams out of his eyes, he can blow things down with his breath, he's sort of this terrifying creature.' And that's where the red trunks come in. Yes, the much-debated briefs are back, but not just for nostalgia's sake. David Corenswet, who's stepping into the heroic role this time around, explained to Fandango that the costume, goofy red underwear and all, is part of a larger strategy to put humanity at ease. Corenswet shared some insight on that, saying: 'My thing was, maybe they're supposed to look a little silly. Maybe the reason he wears them is to look a little silly. Basically to undermine how powerful he really is.' Gunn, who reportedly went back and forth on whether to keep the classic comic book look (even consulting Zack Snyder for perspective), was ultimately convinced by Corenswet's take. Gunn added: 'David saying that was like… But he really likes kids, and human beings, and people. He wants kids not to be afraid of him. And so that was the thing that made me decide to keep the trunks.' This is a design choice that hints at how this Superman might be a little more vulnerable, more thoughtful, and more self-aware of the impact his presence has on Earth. The red trunks become a disarming gesture, a kind of alien humility. Sure, why not!? The latest trailer that was released shows Superman going full superpowered Kryptonian blasting heat vision, soaring into orbit, and casually lifting skyscrapers. There's no doubt about the power level we're dealing with, but Gunn's version wants us to see the man before the myth… even if he is a 'terrifying creature.'
