Lois & Clark Forums Forums General Discussion Lois & Clark Clark's vs. Superman's appearance

I want to preface the question I am about to ask with a little background: Although I have not been officially diagnosed with it, I strongly suspect that I have at least a mild case of prosopagnosia (face blindness)...I am sure I processes faces differently than most people. I have a much harder time than most in distinguishing people on the basis of their faces; instead, I rely on other visual cues (overall physique, posture, hair cut, etc.) as well as on recognizing their voices and the context in which I usually see them. The hardest thing about my job as a college instructor is learning to identify students by name...I always hope for very visually diverse classes...And to avoid being accused of being any sort of an "-ist," let me say right now that I have just as much trouble distinguishing people who look similar to me as I do people who are visually dissimilar. No matter how well I know someone, if they change their facial hair (grow or shave off a beard or mustache or change their hair cut), I will have a difficult time recognizing them at first, especially if I see them in a place I don't usually see them. I have often commented that two people looked so much alike to me that they could be sisters or brothers, only to have the person I am talking with give me a strange look and tell me that they don't think the people look at all alike. I've learned over time to stop making such comments.

I say all of this to let you know that I am very serious in the question I am about to ask; I am not trying to be flippant, nor am I being galactically stupid.

With all of that as background...Is it just me (and I realize that it very well may be), or does Clark's face actually look quite different than Superman's, even beyond the glasses and hair style? To me, Superman's face looks much fuller; Clark's face looks a lot thinner. Did the makeup and lighting people do something to achieve this effect, or is it just my visual processing playing tricks on me again?

Just curious,
Lynn

That's fascinating, Lynn. I didn't even know such a condition existed.

For myself, I have to agree with you - there was a distinct difference. What caused it now, that's a different kettle of fish. I have no idea. I always assumed it was the severe, gelled back, off the face hairstyle that Superman sported that made his face look fatter than Clark's. But that could be complete nonsense for all I know.

LabRat

I could be completely fooled by a pair of glasses. I really could. It takes me about 3 separate encounters before I can pick anyone out of a crowd, so if you change the hair and the eyewear, I'm a goner. :p

JD

An very interesting discussion of prosopoagnosia was in neurologist Oliver Sack's book, "The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat".

Originally posted by IolantheAlias:

Oh, I love that book!

(My favorite real-life story from that book is the one about the elderly twins diagnosed with autism or something, whose one joy in life was to tell each other prime numbers - you know, the numbers that can only be divided by themselves and by the number one, like 1, 3, 5, 7, 11, 13, 17, 19, 23, 29 etc. Well, it's easy when the prime numbers are low, but how do you know if 2,568,931 is a prime number or not? The twins knew, and they would tell each other ever higher prime numbers, lobbing them between themselves like a pair of tennis players hitting the ball. Until some bureaucrat or other decided that the twins needed to be separated so that they could learn to deal with real life. Wasn't it cruel?)

Like Lynn, I have a bit of prosopagnosia myself. I remember having a class with two very blond girls, and even if they weren't that similar, it took me many weeks before I stopped mixing them up. That was awful! Unfortunately I'm also relatively uninterested in names. What's in a name? A rose by any other name would smell as sweet. And a blond girl by any other name would be another blond girl by any other name....

Originally posted by LabRat:

That's exactly it - Superman's face looked fatter than Clark's. Maybe Dean's Cain's face was the kind of face that just looked much better with glasses and a looser hair style? There really is a difference in attractiveness when you compare Dean's Clark Kent with his Superman. Ummm, Lois, how could you fall for the slightly "fat-faced" superhero and dismiss the "bespectacled-angel-faced" heart throb?

Interestingly, in the larger Superman mythos it is Clark Kent who has the gelled back, severe hair style and Superman who has the little lock falling down his forehead. At least it was that way in the classic comic books.



Here you can see Christopher Reeve's Superman and Clark Kent looks. Note the distinctive Superman forehead lock. Clark Kent's hairstyle is stricter. (The glasses don't look too good, or what do you say? And it must be a bother to change the parting of his hair from the right side to the left side every time he changes from Clark to Superman, no?)



Here you have the classic DC Comics Superman and Clark Kent. Usually Clark Kent's hair was a bit stricter than it is here. On the other hand, in this particular comic book Superman lost his powers when he put on his Clark Kent clothes, and he decided to give Clark Kent a chance, so Clark started dating Lois! I loved that comic!

It was Joe Shuster who invented the Superman forehead lock right back in the beginning. I read somewhere that it was Shuster's genius to give Superman that hairstyle. The lock looks endearing and very non-threatening, even childlike. A character like Superman could so easily appear threatening, but the little lock of hair down his forehead assures us that this is a good guy. I have read an essay which claimed that it was Superman's lock of hair that really convinced everybody that Superman is a good guy!



Joe Shuster's Superman, hair lock and all.



Baby with lock of hair.

Ann

Ann, I love that you post such great comments with illustrations!

(Sorry to hijack the thread, just had to give you props!)

Originally posted by IolantheAlias:
Sacks has written some terrific books.

Very cruel indeed. Especially since from all we know of the inner lives of people on the spectrum, they often desire social interactions, just as neurotypical (non-autistic) people do; but they typically lack the social and possibly also the linguistic skills necessary to make and maintain friendships easily. The twins were obviously able to relate well to each other, and probably greatly enjoyed each others' company. That they would be denied that pleasure is barbaric.

Interesting. AFAIK, I've never met or even communicated with anyone else who has the condition. I can definitely relate to what you wrote about the blond-haired girls. Give me two people of the same gender with approximately the same build, complexion, hair colour and style and type of glasses (if any), and I'll have a really tough time distinguishing them.

Originally posted by LabRat:

My favourite look for him was Clark's hair style but no glasses. (I've never liked gel in hair; although in Superman's case, it at least looks tolerable.)

I wonder why they changed that for LnC? Perhaps because by that point hair gel had fallen out of style, and they figured that since Clark would get far more air time than Superman, they wanted his hair to look better?

BTW, Ann, I love all the pics you come up with to illustrate your points. They do make for fun viewing. And the points about the lock of hair were fascinating, as well. :-)

cheers,
Lynn

Originally posted by Lynn S. M.:

Absolutely, I think they wanted Clark to look better than Superman in LnC. It was Clark who was the real person and the male lead in this show, unlike every other Superman production where Superman has been the main character. (Oh well, I guess Clark is the main character in Smallville, but in that show Superman doesn't even exist. And Clark did get a lot of attention in the comics in the nineties, when the comics were very romantic and comparatively relationship-centered.)

But another FoLC who has not been here for a while - hi, Nancy! - once pointed out that due to his partly Asian heritage, Dean Cain has the sort of hair that won't easily form a forehead lock. According to Nancy, the LnC people tried to form Dean's hair into a lock, but they gave up. And since they had to make Clark's and Superman's hairstyles look different, they were left with the option of making Clark's hair look attractive while slicking down Superman's hair so that it looked as if it was glued to his head.



Dean Cain with a forehead lock. I guess his hair was meant to look like this on the show. It stayed this way for a photo session, but I guess it wouldn't cooperate when Dean had to move around on the set and be Superman.



Hmmm, I guess this photo is a fake. And the story too. Lois wouldn't be proud to work for this rag, I bet. Still, look at the hairless alien. If it did have any hair, I bet it would be slicked down to its head. Indeed, it may be so slicked down that it has merged with the skin of the head. Maybe this guy has hair, even though we don't see it. And maybe the LnC producers wanted Superman look alien??? (Naaahhhh - I guess not, but I had to try anyway!)

And thank you so much for the kind words about my pictures, IolantheAlias and Lynn!

Ann

But I think there may be another explanation for Dean Cain's Superman hairstyle than that there would be something "wrong" with his hair. I think, instead, that the "lock of hair" hairstyle is difficult to create and maintain on a small budget. It's one thing to make a movie and have millions of dollars to do it and many months to shoot the scenes. It's another thing to create a weekly TV series and have to produce forty of fifty minutes worth of Superman-related adventures every week. It may be just too time-consuming and too much of a bother to try to create and keep up that perfect hairstyle all the time.

In the fifties there was another Superman TV series, The Adventures of Superman with George Reeves as the Man of Steel. The producers of that show didn't give Reeves a lock of hair, either.



George Reeves as Superman.

Ann

Just to hijack the thread again, that "Alien Backs Clinton" headline from the Weekly World News (of sainted memory) is one of my favorites.

A couple of the others:

(A story about a man born with three arms who makes a living by shaking hands with people at a circus sideshow): "Man With Three Arms Makes Money Hand Over Fist"

and

"Siamese Twins Lead Strange Double Life"



(BTW, in the 1992 presidential election, I knew that Bill Clinton was going to defeat George Bush Sr. when I saw that "Alien Backs Clinton" headline. Clinton even had the alien vote.)

Speaking of weird tabloids reporting weird news, and speaking of prosopagnosia, I'll never forget something I read in, I think, The National Enquirer in the 1980s. In the 1960s and early seventies, one of the best-known reporters in Sweden was a man named Arne Thorén:



Okay. In the seventies, Sweden's new king Carl XVI Gustaf, then a young man barely into his thirties, started dating his future wife, Silvia Sommerlath. This is what Carl XVI Gustaf looked like in those days:



There is undoubtedly a certain physical similarity between Carl XVI Gustaf and Arne Thorén. That doesn't mean they looked like twins by any means.

Back in the seventies Carl Gustaf was dating his future queen, Silvia Sommerlath, and you can probably understand that he needed a bit of peace and quiet to get himself and Silvia into the properly romantic mood. So, according to the National Enquirer, reporter Arne Thoren had agreed to help the king by being his stand-in! Not that anyone would notice, of course, since the two men looked so alike! So when the king needed to get away to cuddle Siliva, Arne Thorén stepped in and filled the king's shoes, officating at various ceremonies, cutting blue and yellow ribbons, pinning medals on people and giving speeches, all the time pretending to be the king. Usually large crowds of people were present to look at the king. Of course no one noticed that the king wasn't quite himself!

(I may add that Arne Thorén was about twenty years the king's senior, had a very different posture and a distinctive voice and speech pattern which was completely unlike the king's, etcetera.)

Hows that for a national case of prosopagnosia? Not a Swede in existence could tell the difference between their own king and one of the best-known reporters in their country, a man who was often seen and heard on TV as star reporter Arne Thorén?

Incredible! Or maybe National Enquirer got it wrong, or what do you think?

Ann

I have to say, I think it is definitely easier to change the look of a face if it is rounder. My face is very round and I notice that when I wear bangs, my face looks completely different than if I wear my hair straight back.

I notice though, that with people with a longer, thinner face, the bangs don't affect their look as much.

Also, when Deborah Joy Levine did the pilot, she made the decision for no S-curl (which, btw did not sit well with the comic book fans and Dean took a lot of flack for it. He addresses this in the commentary version of the pilot.)

One thing that I have argued is that now that they have that "faces" software that they use to recognize criminal's faces when they change their hairstyle and such, wouldn't someone have used that to connect Clark w/Superman? My husband says that in the comics, whenever he is in one of his guises (can't remember if it's Clark or Supes)he vibrates slightly when photographed. So I guess that explains how that hasn't happened.

But I do agree with you that Dean definitely looks more different in his two roles than some of the others did.

There was a fanfic where Jimmy did just that. I wish I could remember the title or the author; perhaps someone else can?

cheers,
Lynn

Being one of the only superman fans that I know in my everyday life, I tend to get a lot teasing and one thing that always comes up is how it doesn't make any sense that he hides his identity with just a pair of glasses. My mother is one of the people always saying that.

I mention it because I remember way back when they used to still give reruns of LnC on cable here in the states. I was watching AKA Superman and my mother walks in right at the scene where Jimmy go gets help superman comes in leaves and Jimmy comes so Penny assumes he must be superman. My mother turned to me and asked if he (jimmy) was superman (I replied "no, he doesn't even wear glasses").

If it's so easy to mistake two people who dont even look that much alike for the same person based solely on context, why is it so hard to believe that one person can so easily pass for two?

I've personally always thought that the genius in the disguise was its simplicity. No one sees that Clark is Superman because no one thinks he could be. I personally think that everyone in Metropolis who's met both has commented on how much Clark looks like Superman and then thought nothing else of it. (Except for Lois because shes in denial)

I work at an elementary school where I see a lot of faces, and it often takes me weeks or even months to tell kids apart when they look remotely similar (same hair color/length, especially.) Then I'm usually okay with their names -- until, like the above poster mentioned -- I see them out of context. Then, forget it.

I also have had two (so far) instances in my life in which I have known someone fairly well (childhood friend, and a classmate) who I have then encountered later in life (classmate, co-worker, respectively) and NOT recognized them. Even though all the clues were there -- same faces, same hair colors -- not to mention knowing their names -- I didn't connect it for a long time.

The more extreme example was with the second girl. She and I were classmates for 2 years in elementary school. I remember having a rivalry with her. I had her class photo which I have looked at over the years and if you'd asked me about that little girl, her face would've sprung right into my mind. But when she starting working at my place of employment (with a new married last name) I didn't even realize it was her. Same first name, of course. Same face, just older. Still kind a short person. But it wasn't until about 4 years after we met again that I finally made the connection. I was thinking about her name, as I'd just heard it in a movie. I thought to myself "interesting that the only other person I've known with that name was that girl in eleme--HEY WAIT A MINUTE!" Even then, I was in denial at first, because I couldn't believe I'd been so "blind."

This is one of several reasons why I can believe Lois could be blind to Clark/Superman... at first. And it seems reasonable that it could take her 2 years to figure it out.

The only thing that kind of doesn't work for me with that is -- remember how in "Vatman" she knows the Superman clone IS a clone because of the way he kisses? She tells Clark, "I've kissed Superman, I know what it feels like.... that was definitely NOT Superman." Yet does Clark kiss her any differently in Lucky Leon, WWW, HiM, etc.?

"The way you just kissed me!" would have been a more interesting revelation moment, hehe. Nah, I like the way they did it on the show.

Meanwhile, if anyone's familiar with the current animated Superman show/movies, THAT one makes me giggle. Superman has a big, hulking torso... but so does Clark Kent. He'd have to turn sideways just to get through a door. Forget phone booths! I wonder how Lois doesn't see that the two hugest men on the planet are, you know, the same person.

I just found it: It is Wendy Richard's
Sex, Lies, and Photographs

cheers,
Lynn

At the moment facial recognition software doesn't really work much better than human powers of recognition, less well on some common features, with a beard, with glasses, etc.. The figures I've seen that I actually believe are about a 95% chance of successful recognition (e.g. spotting the person you actually want) with a 1% incidence of false positives (spotting someone else who looks sufficiently like the person to give an erroneous result. That's under controlled conditions, of course, probably not so good if the lighting isn't so good or the person isn't looking directly at the camera. Or is wearing glasses etc...

Ignoring the real world requirement, 95% / 99% still sounds pretty good, but what it means is that in a crowd of say 10000 people, one of them the one you're looking for, you will identify about a hundred people as your suspect - of whom one MAY be the right person but the rest are not. In a city of say a million people you end up with 10,000 suspects.

And since nobody is denying that Clark and Superman look a lot alike it really doesn't help much anyway. All of the tricks he's used to "prove" that he isn't Superman will still be just as effective. Of course someone could have the bad manners to jab him with a pin or something, but that's always been a risk he runs.

Having aaid that, one of the reasons why I never wrote a Las Vegas crossover (despite Dean Caine playing the casino owner for a while) was that the casino security surveillance team in that show used facial recognition software in every episode - and it appeared to work a LOT better than it does in real life, say 99.9% accuracy with no false positives except one episode where a lot of people were wearing plastic masks designed to give the same facial recognition results.

Small PS on the facial recognition thing - I do a lot of OCR work, and that technology is a LOT more mature than facial recognition. I'm using software that's only a year or so old, and I still expect to fix at least a couple of errors per page on a book with clear printing, a lot more on something with small type etc. Let's say that a typical 4-5 page magazine article is 1000 people, the fact that it gets say 5 words wrong per page on clear print is NOT very encouraging - it's about 20-25 words or a 2 to 2.5% error rate. And the features used for OCR are a LOT clearer than those used for facial recognition.

At the moment facial recognition software doesn't really work much better than human powers of recognition, less well on some common features, with a beard, with glasses, etc.. </font><hr /></blockquote><font size="2" face="Verdana, Helvetica, sans-serif">As I recall, in the story Jimmy had already suspected that the Clark was Superman. He was not using any facial recognition software. Instead, he used PhotoShop (or a similar program) to manipulate the image of the one (adding/removing glasses, changing hair style, etc.) and, in essence, produce the image of the other. It was that photo manipulation that convinced him beyond a shadow of the doubt of the superhero's alter ego.

edit: I quickly re-read the story. Jimmy had used PaintShop to manipulate a picture of Superman to confirm his strong suspicion that he was in fact CK.

cheers,
Lynn

hi guys. sorry i'm late.

@Lynn S.M.: you sure you're not a reincarnation of Lois Lane? it's canon -- it's been known to happen. Seriously, I think Clark is way cuter than Superman, so yeah, there's a big difference. I'm sorry I am not as technical...

@IolantheAlias: What kind of hat did the guy mistake his wife for? Just curious. XD Seriously, I'd hate to be mistaken for any inanimate object, no matter how pretty.

@TOC: I hope I don't get slammed for this, but I hate, hate, HATED Chris Reeves's Clark. He was such a dork. Dean Cain's Clark... somebody get the fire extinguisher! (btw, I'm not just saying this because we could possibly be related. i'm risking hell by being here at this message board at all, gushing over him.) lol

@Labrat: I saw a pic of Dean with glasses when he wasn't playing Clark. he was with his son in Disneyland then. I think that he does look his best wearing glasses. He was so hot doing RIPLEY'S BELIEVE IT OR NOT.


Would this be a good time to confess that I am set on acquiring original DVDs of everything Dean Cain's been in?