Lois Lane in James Gunn’s Superman cracked me up and annoyed me at the same time. My initial take on the 2025 version of Lois (played by Rachel Brosnahan) was that she’s an absolutely terrible journalist. Even by the standards of a comic book movie featuring a woman who can turn her hands into buzzsaws (because something-something nanotech, don’t examine it too closely), Lois’ idea of reporting in this movie seems hilariously unrealistic.

That’s nothing new for movies, which pretty much never get journalism right — or any other profession, for that matter. Screen interpretations of real-world jobs are almost always simplified and superficial at best, outright ridiculous at worst. Scientists usually laugh at movie science, lawyers don’t recognize anything about real law in courtroom dramas, and so forth. Movies and TV even get highly specific jobs like forensic pathology radically wrong in an attempt to goose the drama levels and keep the action moving.

For most viewers, that’s fine — a story that accurately depicted the slow, incremental, years-long process behind scientific research or a significant court case would generally be pretty dull. Generally, audiences will prefer the amped-up, imaginary, dramatic version of a given job. It’s just harder to ignore a laughable break from reality when it’s your job being done incredibly badly on screen.

Still, there’s another read to Lois’ actions in Superman. It’s possible she’s the worst interviewer on the planet (or at the Daily Planet), wasting an incredible opportunity to dig into one of the most important, powerful, and enigmatic figures in the world. It’s also possible that she’s more devious — or self-destructive, or daring — than Gunn ever openly admits or explores. And I admit I like that option a whole lot better.

The crux of the question comes in a scene not terribly far into the movie, a sequence highlighted in Superman’s first full theatrical trailer. Lois has been dating Clark Kent/Superman for about three months. During that time, Clark has been writing news stories about Superman where he quotes himself, presenting those quotes as “exclusive interviews” Superman has given Clark. Lois rightly points out that this is unethical for a journalist, so Superman invites Lois to interview him, instead. As the trailer shows, the interview goes wrong quickly.

[Ed. note: Spoilers ahead for how this one specific scene turns out in Superman.]

Lois seems to be trying to offend and alarm her subject. She doesn’t try to establish any kind of rapport with him. She takes a confrontational tone from the start, with leading questions that imply there are “correct” answers, instead of neutral questions designed to bring out information. She doesn’t listen to the answers she’s getting, and she openly judges Superman for everything he’s trying to say. She twists his words in ways she knows he doesn’t intend, and throws them back at him while he’s still forming them. But her cardinal sin is that she doesn’t even let Superman answer her questions. Even when she’s getting information no one else knows, directly from the source, she interrupts him and speaks over him.

This is all unbelievably bad technique — or at least, it is if she’s actually trying to interview Superman. Given how it all goes, and assuming James Gunn wants us to see her as an actual professional journalist, it’s possible she’s trying to do one or more other things.

The simplest option here is that Lois is just confronting Superman with the fact that he isn’t media-savvy at all. He’s been tossing himself softball questions to answer, and that’s the extent of his interaction with the media. He’s clearly never faced another journalist before, and he’s too trusting and confident in his own intentions to realize how volatile an actual public interview could get. It’s possible Lois is just stress-testing him, preparing him for what it’s going to be like if he ever really faces the press. That would be an easy enough interpretation if she actually followed their confrontational conversation (I can’t really call it an investigative interview) with any warnings for him, or insight into her intentions.

The less savory option is that consciously or unconsciously, she’s trying to sabotage her relationship with Clark. She’s already made it clear at this point that she has her doubts about them dating, though we don’t know much about what her concerns are. She seems to think relationships are a bad idea in general, and that she’s failed at them in the past. It would be easy to infer that she has some reservations about dating a space alien with super strength. (Much less sleeping with one; see Larry Niven’s classic tongue-in-cheek essay on that subject, “Man of Steel, Woman of Kleenex.”) She may just feel that it’s unethical to be dating someone she is inevitably going to be covering in the news. She doesn’t spell it out.

But given that Superman clearly doesn’t share her reservations — and clearly only sees the best in her, the way she gripes that he sees the best in everyone — it’s possible that she’s consciously or unconsciously trying to force any mismatch between them to a head, that she isn’t trying to interview him for an article so much as she’s trying to start a fight.

That’s just supposition. Lois is a bit undercooked in Gunn’s Superman script, as anyone but an ally who doesn’t turn on him or give up on him when so many other people do. Most of the motives viewers could ascribe to her are based on vibes and inference, not specifics. But the idea would mesh with her ambivalence and indecision about the two of them as a couple. Even if she isn’t expressly trying to force a breakup, she may be trying to test his boundaries, his limits, or his temper, to see what he does when someone he cares about — not the mob online that he’s trying to ignore, not strangers or enemies, but someone important to him — challenges his actions and withholds their approval. If that’s what she’s trying to do, she’s walking a dangerous line.

Given her lack of real follow-up with Superman, either about continuing the interview or continuing the relationship, one further interpretation is that even she doesn’t fully, consciously know what she’s doing by baiting and embarrassing him. It’s possible that she’s acting on instinct — putting her doubts about him into direct action without having any express, clear goal. Acting out emotionally without thinking through every possible reason or goal is a thing real-life people do all the time. It’s just rarer in blockbuster filmmaking, where every line, every scene, is meant to have a goal moving the audience closer to dramatic confrontations and big spectacles. (Though James Gunn demonstrably doesn’t always follow that model.)

All of which leaves the version of Lois we see in this Superman somewhere between intriguing and baffling. She’s clearly working through some issues. She’s clearly confident in her profession, if not in her relationships. (I have to admire her apparent ability to pilot Mr. Terrific’s ship and dictate editorial copy at the same time, though I’m pretty dubious about her getting the marquee Daily Planet exposé piece based on someone else’s source and someone else’s research.) But it isn’t always obvious who she is as a person, besides Superman’s romantic interest and narrative enabler.

I’ll tell you one thing, though: a great journalist would have prioritized making the most of an exclusive interview opp — really digging into what Superman believes, why he does what he does, and what that means for humanity — over any personal concerns, no matter how emotional or instinctive her agenda was. Granted, a great journalist also wouldn’t actually be sleeping with her subject. That’s another thing movies famously get wrong all the time. Maybe Lois was really just trying to dodge the cliché by breaking up with him before finishing that interview?

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