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How NOT to Write Your Superman - Forgetting the Meek Alter Ego
In the last ten years, we have had two supermen—three if you count Brandon Routh’s return to the role for the CW television event “Crisis on Infinite Earths. (The Flash Season 6, Episode 9). And I do count him because, although his appearance was short, he alone avoided the Alter Ego Holding penalty. To be fair, his Clark Kent in the 2006 film Superman Returns was meant to be a direct emulation of the Superman GOAT, Christopher Reeve. And by the time Routh reprised the roll as a nod to the Kingdom Come Superman, he had nailed the meek personality of Clark.
Incredibly, every other incarnation of Superman has done away with the key ingredient to Clark Kent—meekness. I could penalize every version, but this essay would become a novella. Tom Welling’s Clark on Smallville, and even the Dean Cain version of Superman in 1993’s Lois and Clark: The New Adventures of Superman, made Clark sexy and confident in dangerous situations. Don’t get me wrong, those Clark Kents still felt like a man who grew up in a small town, but they were still missing an essential bumbling clumsiness and naivete to Clark.
Even though there have been some incredible Superman stories over the years; the juxtaposition of the meek Clark Kent versus the ideal persona of Superman has been missing. The conflict of being a god versus being human has been done decently, but the meek version of Clark Kent goes beyond this theme. Writers have either forgotten its importance, or perhaps the thought is a meek Clark Kent won’t attract audiences.
To simplify this discussion, I am throwing the penalty flag on the last decade of Superman—played on the big screen by Henry Cavill and on the small screen by Tyler Hoechlin in Superman and Lois. They both are guilty of failing to capture the proper demeanor of the alter ego.
I would not be surprised if I get a lot of Red Challenge flags thrown my way on Tyler Hoechlin’s portrayal of Clark / Superman, and to be fair his show gets a high score on the Super-meter. The writers of the show clearly know what makes Superman unique, and sometimes Hoechlin’s Clark even seems out of his element. But the intrigue here is this particular Clark is in a different place in his life than we have ever seen him before. He’s learning to be a parent of teenagers. As a result, the human side of Superman is tested in ways we have never seen.
However, I would not call this Clark properly meek. If anything, when he isn’t struggling with being a father, he is even more confident as Clark than either Dean Cain or Tom Welling. And yet, I still find it hard to penalize the Superman and Lois show because most of the time Clark is around people who already know his secret. This means the main offender of the Alter Ego Holding Penalty is Henry Cavil and the Snyderverse Superman.
The Snyderverse Superman reigns from the 2013 film Man of Steel, to yes, even his ill-fated cameo at the end of the recent Black Adam film. And this Superman gets a lot right, especially if his story arc includes the Zack Snyder cut of Justice League. However, it also gets a lot wrong, and it has been discussed to death for a decade. I am very late to the party here. However, I don’t see a lot of discussion concerning the lack of meekness from Cavil’s Clark. Mostly the penalties of this Clark concern the decision to have him hide his powers from the world to such an extent he would let his father get killed by a tornado. The Man of Steel Clark is shown dealing with bullies, discovering some of his powers in a traumatic event, then using his powers to save a bus full of his peers, but the idea of wearing glasses to disguise himself as Clark Kent is sort of given to us only as a tongue-in cheek moment at the end of the film.
The extended cut of Batman v Superman shows us Clark with good investigative journalism skills, but he is also a confident Clark who stands up to his boss in front of his peers. Popular culture often jokes about how silly a pair of glasses seems as a disguise, but when Clark Kent acts as confident as Superman, the disguise becomes even more laughable. The glasses aren’t really the disguise. It’s the demeanor. Christopher Reeve showed us brilliantly in a single moment in Superman 2, and nobody else has ever come close to a performance showing audiences how important meekness is to the persona of Clark.
But the meekness isn’t merely important as a disguise. And, no, Bill’s speech about Superman in Kill Bill Part Two is not correct either. Clark is not how Superman sees humanity. Rather, it is how we see ourselves, and Kal El knows this about humanity. Deep down we all struggle with our imperfections. We are goofballs, weaklings, and unsure of ourselves. Confidence comes with practice, even for the most skilled extravert. We all face the struggle to be accepted. Clark Kent isn’t simply a mask. It is a declaration that Superman knows what we are going through, so that when he takes his God-like form and dons the red cape, we know he is someone to be trusted.
A friend.
And that’s why Snyder’s Clark Kent gets a big fat penalty flag for dismissing the alter ego as less important than the question of Superman’s humanity. Let us hope James Gunn’s Superman will restore the meekness to Clark. When audiences fill theaters to watch Superman: Legacy, we will likely meet his Clark Kent first. If that Clark has a bumbling slouch to him, then we will know we are probably in for a treat. But if the Clark is sexy and confident . . . it will be a red flag bigger than Superman’s cape.
Heavily Penalized – Stories Lacking the Flawed Alter Ego
Introduction
Hello Story-Fans. This blog series will cover a major penalty of modern story telling.
The Alter-Ego Holding Penalty.
In 1903, in a small theater in Nottingham, England a stage play opened which would launch a new mythology into the mind of popular culture. Set in the early stages of the French Revolution in 1792, the play is about a daring English swordsman who rescues individuals sentenced to death by the guillotine. This hero is a master of disguise, an imaginative planner, and a quick-thinking escape artist. With each rescue he taunts his enemies by leaving behind a card showing a small flower—a scarlet pimpernel. To hide his true identity, as the Scarlet Pimpernel, Sir Percy Blakeney presents himself in everyday life as a dim-witted, foppish playboy. Sound familiar?
That’s because Baroness Emma Orczy’s play (and later series of novels) would go on to inspire heroes like Zorro, The Shadow, Batman, Superman, and so many other heroes with an alter ego. These “Super Heroes” would not only capture the imagination of popular culture, they would time and again find ways to break or even reverse the patterns of classical mythology. Thus, this discussion assumes some knowledge of Joseph Campbell’s model of the hero’s journey as outlined his famous work, The Hero with a Thousand Faces.
It is important to disclaim; scholars agree the superhero has become in many ways our modern version of mythological figures. A few of them, like Marvel’s Thor, are even lifted directly from those ancient poems and legends. In Campbell’s model, the hero of myth could cross the threshold of the normal world into the supernatural world and would never return until the journey was complete. Marvel’s Captain America fits this mold nicely.
But Baroness Orczy added something special to myth. Now a potential “Hercules” could hide and live as a regular man. A Prometheus could escape his punishment from the Gods by disguising himself so no one would know where to find him. Plenty of Gods had disguised themselves as mortals before, but hardly ever to live two different lives for long. Usually it was either to manipulate some poor soul as a trickster, or to get busy with a mortal woman and then ghost her. (Looking at you, Zeus).
In this new mythology, the hero could cross the threshold into the supernatural and return to the normal world at will. Arguably, the best “Superhero” stories explore the consequences of breaking the Campbellian mold—the conflict created by attempting to find balance between the ego and the alter-ego. And many authors, from those seeking to debut to big budget million-dollar modern superhero movies, get this conflict terribly wrong. Over the next few weeks, we will be looking at the right way and the wrong way to create a juxtaposition between the hero and his alter ego, and there is no one better to begin with than the last son of Krypton, Superman.
Week 3 – She-Ra and He-Man - The Naïve and the Lazy
Week 4 – Spiderman – The Jerk