Drink Kryptonite

I love when people talk about slash/’shipping in an ~academic manner

haamer:

Especially when they talk about my OTP. (I feel I’m too old for this kind of stuff, but my recent Smallville marathons have not managed to leave me cold about Clark/Lex. It’s magic.)

Choice quotes from “They Cavort, You Decide” Transgenericism, Queerness, and Fan Interpretation in Teen TV by Louisa Ellen Stein (the whole thing is readable, also discusses The OC’s Seth/Ryan at length.)

“Two lives, forever linked by fate. Bound by a destiny neither can escape.” So proclaimed the WB’s promotional spot for Smallville’s third season. While this phrasing might bring to mind iconic romantic figures such as Romeo and Juliet, the two lives in question belong instead to the teenaged Clark Kent, Superman to be, and Lex Luthor, his eventual archnemesis. Smallville maps the growing pains of Clark and Lex against epic fantastic narratives of victims and saviors, heroes and villains.

/—/ To start with the most obvious: Smallville slash fans share their readings of Lex Luthor as a hard-to-miss queer figure in various online venues such as fanforum, livejournal, and slash fan fiction archives. While the Smallville text periodically reasserts Lex’s heterosexuality, viewers point to multiple signs linking Lex with otherness—his baldness, his wardrobe, his penchant for the color purple, and rumors of his wild urban past.

/—/ Furthermore, Smallville presents Lex as acutely aware of his own difference. Toward the end of Smallville’s third season, Lex begins to wonder whether he is a meteor mutant, a recurring metaphor for otherness throughout the program. He voices this concern to Clark as he wonders, “Maybe I am a freak.” Smallville slash fandom draws on all of these elements, including Lex’s self-proclaimed “freakishness,” to embrace Lex as an overtly queer figure. /—/

As a confused and marginalized alien teen, Clark’s plight is read by many slash fans as a metaphor for gay teen experience. A commonly retold Smallville slash fanfiction narrative depicts Clark coming out to Lex as both gay and an alien in the same conversation, thus rendering explicit this metaphoric representation of alienation as queerness, framed within sympathetic adolescent coming-of-age angst. /—/

For example, in the pilot episode, Clark saves Lex from drowning to the romantic swell of extradiegetic music.* Smallville producers Al Gough and Miles Millar describe this moment as Clark and Lex’s “meet violent,” a twist on the romantic comedy’s “meet cute” (and, perhaps not so incidentally, they also describe the depiction of Clark performing CPR on Lex as “kissing.”) With such romantic generic terminology being used by the program’s producers to describe Clark and Lex’s relationship, perhaps it is not surprising that many fans read the friendship between Clark and Lex as romance.

[*The Calling - “Unstoppable”. Interesting choice.]

Smallville is much more ambivalent in its portrayal of Lex’s queerness, rendering Lex as an extremely sympathetic figure and yet at the same time punishing him with a disproportionate level of violence. In the season three Smallville episode “Shattered,” Lex turns to Clark for help, certain that his father is trying to commit him to a mental institution. When it is revealed that Lex may indeed be crazy, with a history of psychosis perhaps due to the accidental murder of his baby brother, Clark finds Lex singing a lullaby and clutching a “baby” which is in truth a flannel blanket. The resulting vision is a strikingly queer one, undermining expectations of masculinity, positing Lex as maternal figure, and casting the three of them (Clark, Lex, and flannel baby) as tragic nuclear family.

In the next episode, “Asylum,” Clark goes against the explicit wishes of his parents and friends when he decides to break Lex out of the asylum. Here, from the slash fan viewpoint, we have the homoromantic in all its unabashed glory, as Clark defies his parents, choosing his love for Lex over his love for his family. “Asylum,” however, also suggests a more schizophrenic relationship to the queer in Smallville, exacting violent punishment on the frequently beaten Lex through the excruciating depiction of electroshock therapy.

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