Get meta with me

[slinkling]

bop_radar had a wonderfully thoughtful post recently about this long article about "queer secrecy" in SV. And boppy had a bunch of smart things to say, and the article is an interesting if frustrating read (a little repetitive and laden with academic jargon), and I don't have coherent conclusions but just thought I'd add a few thoughts.


On Lex's name
The article makes the point that "Lex," in addition to being short for Alexander (with all the allegorical baggage that that implies), "is also a version of the Latinate word for 'language.' Lex himself is a word, and a word that is constantly being renovated and redacted, always changing, submitting to the ethical/editorial attempts of Clark and his friends."

Which is a really interesting read, but I think it falls short. Because if we're going to talk etymology, it seems worth noting that while lexis is Latin for word (and thus where we get terms like "lexicon"), lex is Latin for law. Boppy agrees that "Lex is in a constant state of flux," but proposes that as the series progresses, he "become[s] more rigid and inflexible, less willing to concede -- most notably with Clark, but also with others. In his lingual status, he is moving towards prescriptive rather than evolving." I'd argue that over the course of the series, we're seeing Lex develop from a word -- which is accessible to everyone, and has many possible interpretations -- into a law -- which has the force of authority, is seen to be inflexible, and is accessible only to the privileged few who have the education to understand it. (Of course, it's also true that laws are still subject to interpretation and amendment... but still, I think the analogy holds.)

On allegory vs. normality
From the article: "As comic book characters, [Clark and Lex] have always been iconic. But Smallville does its best to complicate that iconicity by insisting simultaneously that Clark and Lex can never be wholly 'normal,' yet they can never be completely allegorical, either."

And that, in a nutshell, is why I fell in love with this show. I am a complete sucker for any story about characters who have to be both individuals and archetypes. Have any of you out there seen "The Book of Life," an hour-long film by Hal Hartley that's set on December 31, 1999, and involves Jesus coming back to the world and having to decide whether or not to unleash the apocalypse? It's an odd but completely mesmerizing film, and what makes it so compelling is its portrayal of Jesus as someone who can never stop being aware that he's both a man and a god. He has loyalty to both sides. When he first appears, there's no halo, no heavenly music; he comes back as a guy in a suit who can blend into the crowd. And he's on a divine mission (as he says in the narration, "I was about my father's business"), but he can't help rooting for humanity; people amuse, disgust, and amaze him, and he's tortured by the notion of ending it all.

I first saw this movie a few years before I ever saw Smallville, and while I hesitate to compare them, I'm not sure I would have gotten so sucked into SV if I hadn't seen "The Book of Life" first. The way Clark is constantly at war with himself, torn between his overwhelming desire to be a normal guy and his ability/responsibility to save the world; the way Lex (especially in early seasons) is always struggling to define himself as an individual, and not just the iconic conqueror or villain that he's apparently destined to be; the way these two recognize and glom onto each other from their earliest meetings, unable to let go of the only other person in their lives who seems to be fighting the same inner battles between light and dark, between private self-hood and being what the world demands that they be -- these are the aspects of SV that clang in my imagination like it's an echo chamber, that I can't stop amplifying and dissecting and playing with.

I had a professor in grad school who said that all writers are obsessed with something, and we write about that thing our entire lives. For me, that thing is the stories we tell ourselves, the narratives we construct to make sense of our lives. When those stories get complicated by pre-existing narratives -- like when a character feels himself to be part of some overarching story that he can't control -- I practically start to salivate. When he tries to rebel against that overarching story, I'm in love.

Which is not to say that I'm necessarily rooting for the character. Because, after all, I'm an author too, and I want my characters to go where I tell them to go. Arguably it's my own divided loyalties here that make these stories so compelling for me. As another writing professor of mine once said (he may have been quoting somebody, I can't remember), "Convict yourself. First, because you'll never be able to do so whole-heartedly, and that in itself will introduce powerful complexities. Second, because you're the person you have the most evidence on."