Lois & Clark Forums Forums Fan Fiction Fanfic Related "The Dying Dandy" and the LnC deathfic

Just recently I saw a reproduction of a famous Swedish early 20th century painting, "The Dying Dandy" by Nils von Dardel. The painting is here:



At the center of the painting there is a slender young man with spiky black bangs, elegantly dressed in green, holding a mirror in his right hand and resting his left hand over his heart. His face is pale, but his features are almost angelic. His eyes are closed and his expression is dreamy.

He is dying, and he is beautiful.

Three young women tend to him. They look calm and solemn, almost as if they were officiants at a religious ceremony. The smallest of the women holds a pillow under the dying dandy's head, so that he will die comfortably. One woman is preparing to cover the dandy with an opulent blanket of some kind. She has a ghost of a smile on her face, like a mother tucking her little boy in for the night. The middle woman is looking straight down on the dandy's face, untroubled, calmly tender and almost smiling.

These women aren't feeling too bad at the dandy's passing, but they enjoy officiating at his demise. In the left hand corner of the painting, on the other hand, is a young man who is putting on a very exaggerated show of grief at the other man's death.

Interestingly, there exists another version of Dardel's painting:



Here the three women who tend to the dying dandy have been replaced by two young men and a young boy. The grieving man in the left hand corner is gone. The dandy has a fan in his hand instead of a mirror, and he is even more physically beautiful here; interestingly, we see more of his legs here than we did in the other picture. One of the young men who tend to him tenderly touches the dandy's face and smiles down at him.

What do these pictures tell us about death and grieving? First of all, who is the dying man, and what does his death symbolize? Is it Dardel himself who is dying in these pictures? No, I don't think so, because the dandy's hair is too black to be Dardel's. This is how Nils Dardel painted his own self portrait:



No, I don't think that the dandy is Dardel himself. On the other hand, the dandy could represent certain aspects of Dardel. For example, Dardel was clearly bisexual, but after these two paintings were completed Dardel had relationships with three women. It could be that Dardel "was saying good-bye" to the homosexual aspect of himself, as it were. If so, the three male figures tending to the dandy could be three different versions of himself "putting the homosexual dandy away", as it were. Or at least, they are "covering him up", and it is the sternest one of them who is in charge of the cover-up.

In his lifetime, Dardel was criticized for being too much of an aesthete, of caring too much about the exaggerated beauty and elegance of certain things. In the picture where a man is crying for the dying dandy, it could be that Dardel is grieving for his own inner aesthete who couldn't find acceptance anywhere, and the three women who tend to him could represent the surrounding society whose dismissal of Dardel was somewhat similar to the way a mother is "dismissing" her son when she sends him to bed.

In any case, the pictures represent the death of a male character, and the only person who is really grieving for him is also male. This is an all-male tragedy.

By contrast, most LnC deathfics are Lois deathfics, where the person who dies is therefore Lois. But while the dying dandy himself is at the center of the pictures carrying his name, Lois herself is rarely at the center of Lois deathfics. Instead, it is the man in the left hand corner who is at the center of the Lois deathfics - that is, it is Clark and his grief that are square in the middle of the Lois deathfics. As for the people tending to the dying dandy in the paintings here, no such people are usually to be found in Lois deathfics. In other words, no other people pay much attention to Lois's death. Lois, in other words, is not an important player in the Lois deathfics. Instead, the Lois deathfics are extremely Clark-centered fics. And in that respect the Lois deathfics are very similar to the tableaux described in Dardel's paintings: they are extremely male tragedies.

There are two versions of the Lois deathfic. The most common one is the relentless tragedy. This is the kind of story where Clark can't stop grieving for Lois. The tragedy is not that Lois is dead but that Clark can't stop grieving.

The other kind of Lois deathfic is the "sort-of-happy-ending" deathfic. Here Clark is able to stop grieving for Lois and turn his attention back to the world again. Clark is feeling better again, and since the tragedy was always about his feelings and not really about Lois's death, things are looking up again.

In any case, I think it is revealing to look at Dardel's paintings to see what the LnC deathfics are and what they aren't.

Ann

Hmm, interesting. o_o

I don't know how many deathfics I've actually read, but yes, the heart of the tragedy would be Clark's feelings. It likely wouldn't be Lois herself per se, since she being dead has either gone to a better place or, at the very least, "feels no more pain"; however, there is something to be said for the impact she should have left on the world, and the Lois-shaped gap she'd leave behind.

Comparatively, what fics I've read in which Lois is a ghost, and thus grieving for herself and her life lost, tend to either not be tragedies or not stay that way; because as long as Lois is somehow able to participate in the story, we know that somehow she and Clark will find their way to each other, either in life or in death.

I'm less sure that the 'heart of the tragedy' would be Clark's. That's sort of Clark-centric and trivialises the actual process of death - Lois's emotions and physical suffering. It
s her life that she loses. She becomes a prop in these death fics - to show us that Clark Suffers.

c.

Wow, Ann.

This is true; however, one must acknowledge that, female value aside, making the tragedy Clark-centric is simply easier. As Lois' soul-mate, her death impacts him the most. As a sensitive guy, her death impacts him keenly. As a still-living character, her death impacts him longer. Clark is easy to milk for angst.

Ergo, my comment that the heart of the tragedy is Clark's reaction. That is where you'll get the most meat right away. Making a sufficiently interesting death-fic that somehow does not center around Clark (whether because he is grieving, or because he is dead and the world must now cope without Superman) would take, I think, substantially more thought and effort.


I'm not saying it's right or wrong; I'm merely saying it is.

It may be, too, that because many of us here are female we like to think of the female protagonist as having been important enough and loved enough to cause Huge Grief when she dies, and maybe too that we want to skip the horrific bedlam that death is. Or maybe it's because, as women, we've been conditioned to see our self-worth not as intrinsic but as something that is conferred on us by others. So Extreme Grief and Suffering is the ultimate validation.
It's a pre-feminist notion but probably still out there.

c. (who is pleased to see that Pam has gone over to the Dark Side and embraced the Bad Pun - "beat the dead horse" )

btw no Black Beauty corssover deathfic please.

Of course, you can always argue that having Lois and not Clark as the victim of the LNC deathfic is canon.

From Swear To God:

Of course there's nothing to say that Myrtyle or Voyle are right - perhaps they'd judged Clark and Lois's relationship all wrong.

LabRat

Originally posted by LabRat:

Yes, that is my impression. But it could be because I have judged Lois and Clark's relationship all wrong myself.

You know that I am at least partly an LnC illiterate, LabRat, so maybe you can enlighten me. The way I remember TOGOM, Lois shows a lot of grief for Clark in that episode, so there seems to be nothing wrong with her ability to grieve. Clark, on the other hand, never shows much grief over Lois, at least according to my limited understanding of LnC. For example, Clark came very close to killing Lois in ATAI, but he wasn't too upset about it, not the way I remember that episode. I can understand that he didn't have time to be shocked or horrified at himself while he had to concentrate on saving Lois, but he didn't seem too upset at himself afterwards, either, when he had time to think about what he had almost done. He seemed to feel much worse about the fact that Lois didn't immediately accept his proposal than about his own near-killing of the woman who would give her life for his parents.

So is it really fair to think of Clark as more sensitive and more "talented" at grieving for Lois than Lois would be at grieving for Clark? Or is it just my lack of familiarity with the LnC show that makes me think that Clark didn't show much talent for grieving in the show, or at least he didn't show many signs of being good at grieving over Lois?

Ann

If you could see him searching for her during the ARGH [no she wasn't dead but missing and with Lex], you might change your mind... He sits on an outcropping on a building and wraps his cape around him and looks like he could cry [though I don't think we ever actually saw him cry? Not macho enough? dunno why but he often does in fic...]

Edit:

She wasn't with Lex yet - again. She'd been with him, escaped, hit her head and woke up thinking she was Wanda. She was near the docks being Wanda Detroit singing at the Ace o Clubs. Clark knew he was with a clone but had no clue where Lois was or if she was even still alive. He flies around looking for her but can't find her.

I thought the reason Voyle said that was because of a confrontation between Lois and Voyle - Lois realized what Voyle was up to and so Voyle manipulated Myrtle into changing her target to Lois by telling her that Clark suffers better than Lois. That's why he is 'feigning surpise.'

ML

Thank you for the picture, Carol. It does show that Clark will grieve for Lois.

It doesn't show that he will grieve for her more than she will grieve for him, however.

It could be that many people are more touched and impressed when a man is obviously grieving for his wife than when a woman is grieving for her husband.

Or it could be that I'm all wrong about that, and that most people feel the same amount of sympathy for the bereaved one, regardless of this person's gender. But in fiction, it could be that the widower is seen as slightly more interesting than the widow. At least it struck me a year ago or so that there seemed to be a whole spate of new movies about men who had lost their wives and children who had lost their mothers. (The only "widower-movie" that I can remember the title of is Pixar's animated "Up", but there were many others.) During the same period there seemed to be no new movies at all about women who had lost their husbands or children who had lost their fathers. (At least there weren't any such movies that I noted.)

Of course, most movies are about men in the first place, and therefore most movies about a main character suffering bereavement will naturally be about a man having lost his wife, because if it was the other way around the movie would have to be about a woman.

I think it is fair to say that people who create fiction are "encouraged" by the surrounding society to make their main character a male person, because that is how it is usually done. Therefore stories about "bereavement" will more naturally be about men grieving for their women than the other way round.

Ann

P.S. As I said, there are few Hollywood movies whose main characters are females. Once recent such movie, however, directed by Peter Jackson, was a movie about a young girl who was... dead! The movie was basically about her happy life as a dead person, after she had been murdered! But only her parents were the victims of her murder, because she herself was as happy as could be!

So judging from Hollywood movies, the best thing a woman or a girl can do to "set off fascinating stories" is to die. And if she does, she herself is never the one we should feel sorry for.

Unlike you, Ann, I started watching LnC at the age of 13, long before I started reading fanfic. Judging from season 1 and 2, I never really understood why Clark fell for Lois anyway. She was behaving badly and most of the time, I identified with Clark more than I could with Lois.

About ten years later, I discovered the boards and became hooked to all those wonderful fics out there. Most of them were trying to explain why Lois was behaving so badly, they were portraying her fear so much better than the show ever could.

The way the show is written, I guess, we're supposed to believe that Clark's love for Lois runs deeper than her love for Clark. Throughout the show Clark constantly says how much he loves Lois, it's mentioned in almost every episode. We see it in his eyes, his love is clearly visible.

Lois on the other hand hides her feelings, she ignores them, tries to push them aside. In my opinion, ToGOM is the first episode in which Lois really shows how much she loves Clark.

Until then, we've seen a whole season of Clark suffering from unfulfilled love. I think that clearly influences how we perceive their relationship.

Speaking of deathfics - I don't like them. I've always stopped reading a fic, however well it may have been written, when a main character was killed of. I like well written angsty stories, but this is a theme I will neither read nor ever write.
But thinking of the dramatic impact, I understand why a griefing Clark is portrayed more often than a griefing Lois.

1. A griefing Lois was part of the actual show. We already saw how much Lois suffered from Clarks supposed death. Knowing how devastated Clark was when he lost Lois to Lex, a griefing Clark is an interesting perspective.

2. Dramatically, a widower is more interesting than a widow. Judging from the common roles in marriage, she cared for the kids, she cooked, maybe she even went to work and earned money. So when the wife is left alone, she deals with her grief, but otherwise she already knows how to organize her life. Lois would certainly be one of those women.
When he is left alone, he doesn't really know how to keep the household, he probably needs to build up a real relationship with his kids because he always went to work.

3. Clark would suffer because he - Superman - couldn't save Lois.

4. And judging from the writer's point of view: It's easier to kill Lois, plain and simple - you don't need a decent A-plot to explain her death. She could die of a disease - having a villain is not essential.
And being a writer I know that a villain, particularly a new one, is hard work. You need to portray him, explain his motivation. Where did the kryptonite come from...

Ann, I think most of us are here because we like reading about Superman--in this case, Superman in a relationship. Or in the case of a deathfic, Superman mourning the loss of a relationship. The contrast between his being the physically most powerful person in the world and his emotional vulnerabilities is what makes the story so interesting.

To be honest, I'm not here primarily to read stories about a female investigative reporter. There are a lot of other good mystery stories and series out there with female protagonists, but that is not what brings people to the LnC show.

I like Lois as a character, I probably identify with Lois in some ways, but she is in the stories because of her relationship to Clark. Without Clark/Superman, there would be no story, or it would be something completely different, a grown-up Nancy Drew.

That's really interesting, Ann. Because it reflects something I sometimes think about.

There is another recent thread on this board about stories we will never write. And in one of mine, Lois dies sometime after Lois and Clark are married and have small children. So far, your typical Lois deathfic.

Clark grieves, cutting himself off from the world around him, unable to connect with his children or continue his Superman duties. Not even his parents can get through to him.

However, in this fic, after a short intro where we see Clark grieve, the rest of the story focuses on Lois - making use of the show's idea of soulmates.

Lois is going towards the light when she becomes aware of Clark's pain. She stops and looks back. Mike (the angel) shows up and tells her she has to continue towards the light - that her next life awaits her. But she refuses to leave Clark. (And we all know how stubborn Lois can be when she knows she's right )

The rest of the story is about Lois finding a way to help Clark continue to live. Of course, first she has to find a way to let him know she is still there - that even death hasn't parted them. (And, although I don't know how, it would be more of a connection than just a 'feeling' - I guess it would be more like a 'haunting' ) I suspect that at first, Clark will probably think he's losing his mind. But once he comes to realize that Lois is really there, he's able to go on - always with her help and support.

The story ends with Clark's death - and him meeting up with Lois on the other side and them going together towards the light, to their new lives.

Anyway, that's the story I will never write - but still play with in my mind sometimes. .(Boy, it's much harder to explain a story line than it is to just write the story ) Not even sure if the story is 'politically correct', but then I never think about political correctness when writing a story. I just think about the story.

That's interesting, cookiesmom, because that isn't what attracts me to the show. I've never been a Superman fan. I am a Lois and Clark fan. I put up with Superman because I adore Lois and Clark. (After all, Superman uses far too much gunk in his hair - can you imagine running your fingers through that? - yuck ) Still, I must admit that Superman is a very convenient plot tool to get Lois and Clark out of some sticky situations or into others. And I've come, over time, to sort of like the big guy, too, because of my feelings for Lois and Clark.

ML

Me too. For me, Lois Lane is intrinsic to the myth - in many ways she is more heroic because it's she who implicitly risks her life for "Truth and Justice". Superman does, too, at times, but because of his powers he rarely risks his life.

I guess I'm trying to say it's easier for him to be heroic.

As well, I bring a feminist perspective to it. Lois Lane matters as much as the guy does - she sets the agenda as often as he does. She doesn't stand aside and hold the top hat while he pulls the rabbit out of it.

I guess for me what is special is that Lois Lane gets to be heroic and Superman gets to human. True Magic

c (plus she can't cook!!!!!)

Intersting thoughts, everyone. Thank you for your input.

Let me point out, however, that fictional portraits of bereavement and grieving haven't always been about tragic men trying to survive without their women. Remember the movie "Ghost"? Where Demi Moore's female lead character was mourning her dead husband (or possibly boyfriend), played by Patrick Swayze? Wow. A woman's bereavement was interesting enough to make a movie about. And a man could be portrayed as dead!



Of course, the movie is from 1990. Those were the days.

(Yes, there's also "The Sixth Sense", a brilliant movie, but not the same kind of "death story" as "Ghost". In any case, "The Sixth Sense" is also from the nineties, from 1999.)

Ann

P.S. There is also "The Gift" with Cate Blanchett. That movie is not from the 1990s, but it is still ten years old, since it is from 2000. The movie is about a widow trying to raise her three sons by herself, supporting them by working as a fortune teller. A dead man plays an important role. So back then it was possible to make stories about women trying to deal with widowhoood and stories about men being dead. But something has happened to our cultural climate.

Carol, I love the way you put that. It really encapsulates magic of the show, of *this* version of a very old story. That's the crossover characterization that puts them so firmly on the same level, true equals, who together can be more than either of them could be, separately.

re: Clark crying -- didn't really ever happen, and the way I heard it was that Dean Cain refused to cry on camera.

However, I'd point out the scene in DTOSC where Clark (dressed as Superman, I think) watches a video the Lakes made, to make it look like Lois was killed. He didn't cry, but he did punch out the TV. We know how much self-control has been emphasised for Clark all his life, so it took something big for him to lose it like that.

And then of course there's the whole scene in the "zoo" where Superman agrees to be captured in order to save Lois's life. Because he needs her, and he's convinced that he couldn't go on without her. I guess some people see that as a challenge, to write through the process of how he would have to cope if the worst happened, since grief doesn't actually kill you, most of the time.

There are also a few Mary Sue fics in which the author bumps off Lois so that Clark can fall in love with their character, but this fandom is pretty much all 'shippers, so Mary Sues tend to be cousins or something, and not get between Clark and Lois.

PJ

When I read the latest "Lois dies" story, I told the author that she needed to get ready for an "interesting reaction." Well, here it is.

Look, people, if you don't like to read Lois Lane deathfic, then don't flippin' read them! No one is making you take in those stories. You have every right not to like such tales, and you have every right not to read such tales.

But you DO NOT have the right to criticize such stories solely because you don't like their content, nor do you have the right to try to intimidate writers to stay away from content you don't like. Ann, Carol, ML, we all know that y'all don't like stories where Lois dies. There are FOLCs on the board who don't read ANY story where someone dies. That is their right, just as you have the right to dislike stories where Lois dies.

But you don't have the right to insist that everybody cater to your preferences. You don't have the right to tell people what to post or not post, as long as it's within the board's guidelines. If you really, really, REALLY believe that no Lois deathfics should be posted, then you should get the guidelines changed on the board instead of wasting time protesting (however indirectly and elegantly) a story theme you don't like.

Kill them all! And let Deborah Joy Levine sort them out!

Well, technically we *do* have the right to complain and generally be annoying (Hooray for Free Speech! ) But yes, I see what you mean.

Telling people not to write Lois Deathfic: Yes, this is poor sportsmanship. Or ficsmanship. I don't know the right word here.

However, it *is* worth bringing up as a general point of discussion with an aim to encouraging more variety and thought in fic.

For instance, this very thread has me now contemplating a Clark Deathfic. Can it be done? Can it be made to be Lois-centric while still maintaining enough of the Superman/LnC elements to keep it from being an Alice and Bob story with the names changed? What would be required?

So yes, I agree that it's silly/futile/mean to say "I don't like X, so please don't write anymore of it." However, it's perfectly valid to say "I'm tired of X. What else have you got?"

Eh, my 2 cents.


Of course, Clark's uncle ran into trouble when he tried to put that philosophy into practice. Now let us never speak of him again.

Ah, but we de have the right to discuss themes that are raised.

Discussion rights are surely not limited because a fanfic has been written on any given theme. I don't read deathfic. Period. But do I have views on the ease with which we kill off female protagonists and gush about the suffering of the entitled male?

You betcha.

c. (long live the American BIll of Rights, the Canadian Charter of Rights, etc)