What if one of the goofiest Superman films actually held the clearest blueprint for what to do when you’ve lost your way?
Superman III doesn’t top many Best Of superhero movie lists.
The first Superman basically created the genre. The second one kept it going. The third? Starts with a slapstick street scene that feels like a rejected Pink Panther gag reel and gives Richard Pryor as a computer genius sidekick more screen time than the man of steel.
It’s a mess. But somehow, weirdly, it’s also one of the most unintentionally wise superhero films about losing your way and getting back on track.
I grew up a huge Superman fan and watched all the movies endlessly. Superman III was always my least favorite, except for one scene that stuck with me as a kid (more on that later). But rewatching it as an adult, this ridiculous sequel ended up cementing an idea I first heard in mindfulness meditation. I use it constantly. Every day. Sometimes multiple times a day. Especially when I’m trying and failing to stay on track.
If you’ve ever tried to meditate, you know the struggle. You sit down, try to focus, and come to seven minutes later realizing you’ve been thinking the whole time and getting frustrated.
When you’re learning to meditate, the instruction is simple. Don’t dwell on the distraction or the frustration. When you’ve lost your focus, just notice it and begin again.
It doesn’t need to be heavy.
You don’t need to lean into shame or frustration or that sense of messing up before you’re allowed to continue toward what you’re trying to do. That principle of beginning again has been really influential in my life outside of meditation.
I’m very hard on myself. Constantly feeling like I’m not achieving or doing or creating or accomplishing what I think I want to. Before begin again, I’d do everything you’re not supposed to do when you realize you’re distracted. I’d beat myself up. And under the surface, I think I believed that was necessary to change my behavior.
But what I realized from that meditation instruction is that not only is that not true, it’s the opposite of what you’re trying to do.
If you’re trying to stay motivated, and you realize you’ve gotten off track, beating yourself up and spiraling into not-good-enough thinking doesn’t move you forward. It just keeps you stuck.
What’s wild is that, as ridiculous as it is, Superman III role models this perfectly.
If it’s been a while since you’ve seen Superman III, here’s the gist:
Pryor plays Gus Gorman, a down-and-out guy who lands a job at a major corporation run by a ruthless CEO obsessed with power and money. Gus learns computers, notices fractions of pennies disappearing when paychecks are calculated, and writes a little code to pocket those tiny amounts. He ends up with a huge check, something Office Space famously copied years later.
When his scheme is discovered, he’s blackmailed into villainous plots, including creating synthetic kryptonite designed to destroy Superman.
But when they analyze what kryptonite is made of, there’s a small percentage the computer can’t identify. “Unknown compound.”
Gus, under pressure and trying to finish the job, looks at a pack of cigarettes, sees the word “tar” on the label, and uses that for the unknown part.
The kryptonite still looks the same. When they give it to Superman, it doesn’t seem to hurt him. They’re confused and think it didn’t work. But soon we discover it’s changing him.
That’s what I thought as a kid, simply that Superman becomes evil.
Watching it as an adult, I see he becomes untethered from what makes him good.
What follows is this slow collapse into pettiness and selfishness. Superman indulges cravings. He ignores responsibility. He flirts with Lana Lang instead of running toward danger.
He vandalizes landmarks for fun, like straightening the leaning Tower of Pisa. He blows out the Olympic torch during a relay. There’s a bar scene where he gets drunk and flicks peanuts into a mirror. He slams into an oil tanker just to impress a woman, causing a spill and helping the villain.
And here’s what I never noticed: after the bad kryptonite shows up, Clark Kent disappears.
As a kid, I didn’t care. Clark was always the slow part before the cape and the lasers. I often fast forwarded through the other Clark parts.
But here, his absence is the point.
Clark Kent is the part of Superman that wants to do the right thing. Smallville values. The old-fashioned stuff. Grounded and humble.
Without him, Superman is just raw power. And that’s where it gets interesting.
Power without values becomes reckless. Values without power don’t go anywhere. They just worry and overthink and freeze.
That shows up in real life too.
You want to help a friend who’s struggling. But you don’t know the perfect thing to say, so you say nothing.
You want to start working out. You research the perfect plan, obsess over protein ratios, read five conflicting articles on what the science says, and never end up going.
You mess up, and instead of doing something about it, you get stuck in your head.
That’s what I tend to do. Spiral and replay everything I did wrong. And stay stuck.
Which brings me to my favorite scene in Superman III.
The junkyard scene
After a big portion of the movie of watching Superman just go straight off the rails, the tension comes to a head in the film’s most awesome, but head scratching scene.
Superman crash lands in a junkyard and physically splits into two beings. Dark Superman, the embodiment of selfish, unchecked power, and Clark Kent, the voice of morality and values.
In the gritty, chaotic scene of a junkyard, the two halves fight in a literal and symbolic battle for control.
I can’t help but picture the studio pitch meeting where the writer lays out a grand epic in the style of a Greek myth, getting shut down by the bean counters until the writer reluctantly agrees to create a significant, comedic role for then stand up powerhouse Richard Pryor in favor of salvaging the Greek hero’s journey.
And the mash up of these two promises is why this movie is just so wild.
In any case. At first, Clark is easily overpowered. He’s thrown into piles of scrap metal and crushed under debris.
Clark doesn’t yell or pound his chest, but as the symbol of our values, he keeps getting back up, even though Superman’s power just keeps flinging him like a rag doll across the junkyard.
All of this symbolizes how our values can feel overwhelmed when faced with unchecked impulses and outside forces, but Clark slowly finds his strength. He stands back up, grapples with his darker self. And finally gains the upper hand by choking Dark Superman into submission.
As a kid, I thought Clark somehow killed Dark Superman, and with him gone, got his powers back.
But as an adult (who, if it’s not already obvious, studied film in college and loves making a lot out of nothing), I see now this scene doesn’t show him destroying a part of himself.
He’s reclaiming and reintegrating it.
When Clark rips open his shirt to reveal the Superman emblem, it’s an iconic visual declaration that his power and values are back in alignment.
The fact that a major Hollywood superhero movie in the infancy of the genre had a full on symbolic fight scene with the main character, literally fighting the head trash of his mental demons–in a junkyard arena no less–is crazy to me.
The movie didn’t really work out, but you got to respect the attempt.
Superman’s journey here illustrates that even the most powerful person on earth sometimes gets distracted from their values in ways that we would have never thought possible. After reintegrating, Superman doesn’t wallow in guilt over his mistakes or beat himself up for how far he strayed.
He flies back to the leaning tower of Pisa and returns it to its iconic slant. He goes back to the oil tanker and uses his super breath, laser vision and strength to force the oil that he has spilled back into the tanker and weld it shut to the amazement of the crew. And he goes to take on the evil supervillain and the now out of control killer robot machine that they’ve created.
Instead of being consumed by remorse, he moves forward with ownership, addressing the harm he caused with humility and purpose.
This approach mirrors the teaching of mindfulness. When we stray from who we want to be, the most important thing isn’t dwelling on how we’ve messed up. It’s immediately returning to what matters and taking steps to act with integrity now.
Don’t misread this as suggesting that people shouldn’t apologize or be held accountable for their actions. We’re planting a flag between productive accountability and the paralyzing spiral of guilt and self-criticism. Marinating in internal shame doesn’t prove you care. The focus is on righting the ship, not sinking with it.
We think beating ourselves up is how we stay on track. If we are hard enough on ourselves, we will finally change. We picture ourselves as Clark in the junkyard, standing up for what is right and fighting our way back to who we want to be.
But most of the time, it is the opposite.
That voice in your head replaying what you did wrong, saying you are not disciplined enough, not present enough, not good enough is not Clark doing battle.
That is Dark Superman taunting Clark that he’s not strong enough.
And the more we listen, the more we forget who is actually trying to get back up.
Everyone loses focus. Everyone drifts from who they’re trying to be. The question is what you do when you realize it.
Maybe you’ve been snapping at your kid or partner. Maybe you’ve been numbing out at night and telling yourself it’s fine, even though part of you knows it’s not. Maybe you’ve spent months scrolling instead of being present with the people or parts of your life that matter to you.
Whatever it is, you don’t fix it by dwelling on it or pretending it’s not happening.
You have to realign your values and your power and simply
begin again.
