You are how you read Returns

I saw Superman Returns with my brother motza"sh and was fairly impressed. One shot in the movie caught my particular attention, however. Towards the end of the movie we see Lois Lane pining for her lost love while the camera moves through her study (it might not be hers, but she looks awfully comfortable there). The angle starts low and proceeds through two bookshelves, opposite one another, chock full of books. Not binders or legal books but paperbacks and hardcovers, different sizes, shapes and publishers. There must be six five-foot cases all told. Lex Luthor, to contrast, is seen to own a boatload of sets, the kind of thing you pick up to fill shelves that you will not actually read (self-irony noted, if not intended).

While I think the latter choice says less about Luthor, I really think Bryan Singer crafted the scene with Lois. Lois was never portrayed as a brainy one in the past, but I think Singer composed the scene with the bookshelves to help cast a more contemporary interpretation on Lois as a really smart, contemplative (and, gasp, even intellectual) journalist who is also independent; with or without Superman (why do books=independence? Non-trivial question, with a set of trivial answers; also has to do with the scene--her pining contrasted with her Pulitzer, which she won definently wo/ Superman). Whether Kate Bosworth communicates that is a different issue...