My Own Worst Nemesis
What the year 2020 and Magic Mike XXL (2015) brought me
That star athlete from a rival high school.
The classmate with the same crush.
During a recent team-building activity at work, we were asked to share our nemesis. Few things bond people more than petty mutual disdain. As their digital frames lit up in the Zoom window, my colleagues shared familiar adversaries, the perennial thorns in sides.
Insects.
Flat tires.
Xfinity.
After one person on our team looked up the definition of nemesis—according to Google’s first definition: “an inescapable agent of someone’s downfall,”—she said her children.
Then came my turn.
For a long time, I’d yearned for a true nemesis. My actual bane—diarrhea in the middle of meetings—lacked the quippy banter one expects from their archenemy. Woe was I, to have never tasted non-toilet-based villainy. Where was the Joker to my Batman? Where was my Grendel, my MacDuff? There was no Magic to my Bird. No, for a long time, there was no magic at all.
Then, when the Year 2020 descended upon a jejune Earth, with it arrived Felix Marcellus Fang.
That summer, I didn’t so much meet Felix as much as we occupied the same virtual space. It was an online “presentation party” where participants were invited to give a PowerPoint presentation on anything from why dolphins are evil to a five-minute summary of the Fast and the Furious franchise (a “Fast Five” so to speak). Non-presenting participants, like myself, were present as mere patrons of the comedic arts, there to enjoy lectures like “Who would Harry Potter characters vote for in the 2020 U.S. election.”
Of all the presenters, Felix stood out as being the most prepared. His thesis, “Why Magic Mike XXL (2015) is a True Hero’s Journey,” posited that the sequel to Magic Mike (2012) embodied the arch-narrative of a hero’s journey, what literary scholar Joseph Campbell referred to as the “monomyth.”
Magic Mike XXL, which bestowed such lines as “It’s not bro time, it’s showtime” and “Tomorrow we start the pilgrimage to Myrtle Beach,” was no different from Ulysses or The Hunger Games; according to Felix’s summary of Campbell’s work, all hero myths and great stories follow the same basic plot.
Because we watch Channing Tatum for the plot.
Thus, in the second entry of the Magic Mike Cinematic Universe, Michael “Magic Mike” Lane was none other than a shirtless Odysseus, a six-packed Captain Ahab, a tantalizingly gyrating Frodo.
Felix’s presentation was clever (a sharp literary analysis on what some scholars consider the magnum opus of mainstream male stripper cinema) and dry (as if he were defending his senior thesis at Sarah Lawrence.) To boot, he is also handsome and very tall; his cheekbones high, his jaw angular. Not only did he possess creative Magic, he himself was XXL.
Because I am a goblin, I speed-googled him during the presentation and saw that, per his Twitter bio, he was a writer. A real writer. He had published articles for the web versions of magazines I’d seen on the shelf at Hudson News. Felix Marcellus Fang, this man who appeared younger than I and who lived in the same city as I did, had everything I envied.
Bylines. Height.
As his Zoom presentation wrapped, he might as well have looked into each of our frames at our cold, thirsty, COVID-isolated eyes and asked: “How much for the Cheetos and water?”
During the thunderous applause of handclap icons, Felix took his rightful bow to the computer’s webcam and added as an aside that “there was an article about this too if you wanted to read more.” Most people missed it. It was a toss-away comment. Yet, since I had already begun to fashion myself an acolyte of Felix (a self-dubbed “Flut”) I googled “Magic Mike XXL” and “hero narrative” because this Adonis had mentioned it.
I couldn't believe what I found.
Lo and behold, the first search result was “Magic Mike XXL is Basically the Odyssey but with Butts,” an (excellently-titled) essay published by Helena Fitzgerald nearly two years prior. As I read the article, familiar words flooded at me in Felix’s comforting voice. I scrolled further. The images that accompanied her piece, like the cover of Joseph Campbell’s book, were identical from images I’d just seen on a PowerPoint slide.
This idol I’d crafted but minutes ago was burnt to a crisp. It’d been ground into a powder and scattered into the seas of my disillusionment along with my Beanie Baby Market Valuation guidebook and Shiba Inu Coin. (I, it appears, am not cut for speculative creature-based currency.)
Felix had plagiarized a woman’s entire essay, spent most of his five-minute oratory smarmily parading it as his own, and then only cited her work, not even her name, as a dismissive line at the end. Properly citing Fitzgerald’s work would have cost him nothing and, even then, he couldn’t give her proper credit beyond a parenthetical aside. In that case, why even mention her then? Lean into your criminal enterprise at that point. Was this yet another instance of men pilfering the work and credit of women, even in the smallest of incidents? Did a brazen agent of the patriarchy striketh yet again? Don’t trust the charmers.
There was, however, a more rational way to look at this situation.
The stakes were incredibly low. This event wasn’t being streamed anywhere and its non-neurotic participants surely would not remember this one video chat among a year-long wilderness of video chats. So why bother with a proper citation? It’s all for fun. As an artiste, Felix also may have simply considered his presentation a new creative work like a screenplay adaptation of a book. Furthermore, even if this were an infraction upon the infinite chords of justice, it would be cosmically minor. A victimless crime. Not so much as a butterfly effect on the universe. The outcomes wouldn’t change at all either. Felix would still have his bylines and his height; I would still shotgun King-size bags of Fruit Snacks before dinner. The world would go on.
Yet, long after the event ended and everyone had moved on with the COVID-shadow version of their lives, Felix’s transgression still haunted me. What kind of person would do such a thing? I tossed and turned in the night. My wife would ask me what I was thinking about while I stared vacantly into an empty kitchen sink.
That’s when I knew it. There could only be one reason. Felix was my nemesis.
For the remainder of 2020, I’d harbored, nay, fomented, this fury in my heart. I scratched at it every now and then, recalling the inciting incident to see if it still enraged me. It would. It did. I’d go to the Popular Mechanics website and hate-read his most-liked articles like “Top Thirty Gifts to get your Dad for Pearl Harbor Remembrance Day”. But, otherwise, I did nothing.
Now that I’d found my nemesis, what should I do?
So, leading up to my work team-building activity in the summer of 2021, I, like my colleague, did my homework. I needed to know what made for a true nemesis. If I were to name my nemesis, I had to understand him first.
Nemesis, by Alfred Rethel (1837)
Despite the common usage of “nemesis” to mean an enemy, the word originates from ancient Greek religion. According to one source, “Nemesis was the goddess of indignation against, and retribution for, evil deeds and undeserved good fortune. She was a personification of the resentment aroused in men by those who committed crimes with apparent impunity, or who had inordinate good fortune.”
“Nemesis, winged tilter of scales and lives,” the second century Greek poet Mesomedes wrote (translated here by A.Z. Foreman). “Justice-spawned Goddess with steel-blue eyes, you bridle vain men who roil in vain against your adamantine rein.” Most famously, she led the conceited and proud Narcissus to a reflecting pool where he fell in love with his own reflection and stared at himself until he died.
Nemesis, whose name derives from a Greek term that translates roughly as “to give what is due” was not so much anyone’s antagonist; she was a goddess of divine retribution. Of course, to those who would think themselves undeserved of such retribution, Nemesis would appear the enemy, a harbinger of doom.
And that’s when I realized, clicking through these search results just before my staff meeting. Felix wasn’t my nemesis.
I was his nemesis.
In that Zoom team-bonding activity, it was I who was destined to bring justice to Felix.
It was I who would exact Helena Fitzgerald’s unsolicited and unknowing revenge, to publicly denounce Felix’s theft, to expose his underhanded misogyny to the world.
Everyone on my eight person team would know the name of Felix Fang. The foul and failing fraud. Forever he would be strapped to a figurative cliff where figurative eagles would eat Felix’s figurative liver.
But then I thought of his thousands of Twitter followers: the avid readers of Men’s Health Lithuania and The Sackler Family Defense Fund Newsletter. And I cowered. My pride shrank, the cowardly lion mewling inside my tissue-paper carapace.
Felix isn’t even his real name.
“Human Resources,” I sputtered, to a chorus of muted, nodding Zoom heads.
My heart wept for Helena and for Nemesis, the two women I’d failed. My abdomen gurgled with shame, a soupy bowel movement rearing its ugly rear. “I can never win with those guys,” my defeated spirit explained.
I never do.