Raising the Clark Bar

National Review Online, January 13, 2002

The last months of last year were a frightening time for this country. Former certainties seemed shifting and elusive, no more substantial than the dust of two towers once destined to stand for centuries. In their search for reassurance many Americans seemed to turn to the security of a sometimes imagined past, with all its perceived strength and sense of a now lost normality. Televised tributes to Carol Burnett and Lucille Ball were surprise successes, while the usually youth-oriented WB network enjoyed high ratings for a new show dedicated to a hero first spotted in a quiet town in Kansas over 60 years ago.

You remember him. That tall dark-haired fellow with a firm jaw and rock-solid principles, a little staid, perhaps, even if he did wear tights, but always someone who it was good to have around in a moment of peril. Well, just when we need him, Superman is back. He has not yet made it to Metropolis, but WB's Smallville is proving a perfect venue for the Man (or, at least, High-School Student) of Steel.

This latest incarnation, as has often been the case in Superman's somewhat tangled biography, involves a considerable reworking of his previously known history, but this is unlikely to worry a fan base which has previously weathered conflicting versions of, amongst other minor points, their idol's powers, family, childhood, vulnerability to kryptonite, and (poor Lois!) marital status.

WB's take on the myth centers on a young Clark Kent, growing up in the unambitiously named Smallville, Kansas. This Smallville is, as in earlier versions of the super saga, a nostalgic slice of the Heartland, a dreamscape of rolling prairie, grain silos, and red-painted barns, but brought subtly, and undidactically, closer to early 21st-century realities. The coffee shop serves lattes, many of the local farms are in financial difficulty and the high-school principal's last name is Kwan. Clark's social circle is also more diverse than in the past, and now includes feisty, and vaguely feminist, Chloe (Allison Mack). Meanwhile, two familiar characters, redheaded love interest Lana Lang and blond Pete Ross both appear to have taken a spin in Dahr-Nel's Plastimold (a machine which, Nixon-era geeks will remember, was used by Lois Lane to alter her ethnicity in a 1970 story, the remarkable I am Curious (Black)). These days, likeable Pete (Sam Jones) is African-American and Lana (Kristin Kreuk) is played by a raven-haired beauty of partly Asian heritage.

Mild-mannered Clark himself is largely unchanged, although in a skilful performance the almost ludicrously handsome (this is the WB) Tom Welling manages to portray him without the nerdiness that will make his adult self the laughing stock of the Daily Planet newsroom. Other basic plot details follow the traditional pattern. The emerging Superman is still the orphan from outer space being raised by the kindly Ma and Pa Kent (in an enjoyably anarchic piece of casting, the role of Martha Kent is filled by Annette O'Toole, Lana Lane from Superman III). Clark's unusual talents continue to remain a secret, carefully hidden from a dangerous world by his protective adoptive parents. On occasion, however, he has to use these powers, for idyllic Smallville is not as safe as it first seems. Clark's capsule was not the only galactic debris to have landed near this tranquil Kansas town. The same night as Clark's earthfall, the whole area was bombarded by other remnants of his shattered planet in a meteor shower of such ferocity that Lana Lang's parents were killed and a nine-year-old Lex Luthor became a candidate for Rogaine. Even worse, twelve years later, fragments of Krypton are still scattered all over the neighborhood with, all too often, the nasty habit of endowing someone who encounters them with unpleasant, and usually lethal, powers.

It is a clever narrative device, rooting the action firmly in Clark's hometown. Like Buffy The Vampire Slayer's suburban Sunnydale, farm-belt Smallville becomes an appropriately sized arena for a superhero on training wheels. A fireball-tossing football coach is extinguished, a high-voltage villain is short-circuited, and an insect boy's sinister schemes are nipped in the bug, but these are all relatively small fry, vaguely believable so far as super-powered human mutants go. The same could never be true of the far greater evildoers that Clark Kent will encounter later in his career, which is why, when it came to the bad guys, Christopher Reeve's Superman movies tended to descend into camp. By contrast, like most successful science fiction, Smallville can be, and is, played straight.

This low-key approach also leaves more room to explore the nature of Smallville's inhabitants. There is little of the sort of characterization usually labeled, well, "comic book." Even the twentysomething Lex Luthor (Michael Rosenbaum) is presented as a complex, complete individual. He is a fairly sympathetic figure, fruitlessly trying to work out "issues" with his megalomaniac father, while at the same time being unfairly snubbed by the rather stern Pa Kent (John Schneider, no longer so easygoing as in his days as Hazzard County's Bo Duke). Only when Luthor encounters a clairvoyant are viewers given a warning of the horrors to come. Of course, as would be expected from the Dawson's Creek network, much of the drama revolves around adolescent angst. There's a hint of Archie about this Superman. In a nice touch, shy Clark finds that his adored-from-afar Lana quite literally makes him go weak at the knees (her kryptonite necklace is to blame), a perfect metaphor for the awkwardness of high-school romance. Lana, meanwhile, thinks that she loves the dreadful Whitney (Eric Johnson), a WASPy jock with the sort of preppie good looks that will almost certainly ensure him a future role as the date rapist in a Lifetime movie.

But the core of the show is, properly enough, Clark, and a great deal of its charm comes from the degree to which we are shown a very human side of the man who will be steel. There are, as one of the writers has explained, "no tights [and] no flights." Young Clark's powers are underplayed and the red cape, mercifully, is absent. We are free, instead, to concentrate on Clark Kent himself. This is only right, for it is the existence of his very human alter ego that has always helped make Superman the most enduring and endearing of all comicdom's superheroes. In Smallville, as elsewhere in the canon, Superman is shown living an ordinary, rather humdrum existence among the rest of us, concealing his extraordinary abilities until the arrival of those dangers that call upon him to use them. Job done, he then returns to his everyday routine. Adding to his appeal is the fact that this is also an archetypically American story. Superman is an immigrant, a refugee from a ruined older world, who successfully adopts the values of the corn-fed heartland that becomes his real home.

Much of the interest in Smallville itself comes from the fact that the early signs of what lies in store for Clark are already becoming visible. He is on Earth, the Kents repeatedly explain, for a purpose, even if that destiny is still not yet manifest. The easy option (football stardom, in one episode) is not for him, and nor, it is understood, is the dark side. This Superman will be no Nietzschean lout. In the meantime Clark wrestles with the conundrum as to who he is, and what he will become. In the end, of course, we know that he will embrace his humanity, his extraterrestrial strengths, and the responsibilities that come from both. Except in the most literal sense, it is not Superman's powers that make him special, but what he chooses to do with them.

It is a potent, and benevolent message, and one that should always find an audience in this most optimistic of nations. Its traces were even visible in a New York Post cartoon published in the bleak days immediately after the World Trade Center attack. It shows a Ground Zero fireman being asked for an autograph by an awestruck clutch of superheroes. These include Superman, which should be no surprise. As Clark Kent would always agree, heroism can take many forms. Yes, some heroes may leap over tall buildings.

But, in real life, others run into them.