Well, Dave, I'm not the one who should start this thread, because you and I look at Lois and Clark differently. You probably see most of all an eternal stranger, cloaked in loneliness, carrying the weight of the world on his shoulders and clinging precariously to his brittle lifeline of warmth, Lois Lane's love for him. For myself, I mostly see a woman deceived by a man playing a cruel identity game with her, wooing her and rejecting her at the same time, forever lying to her.
In your new vignette, Clark has apparently been married to Lois for three years and never told her that he is Superman! I could rant and rave about his awful cruelty and contempt for her feelings and disdain for her needs, but that would be to refuse to see the lonely, scared man that your vignette is about. The existentially lonely man who is prepared to give almost anything to the world, but who needs, who craves, the love of a woman to keep him going. And this lonely man has concluded that this woman whose love he needs would not stay with him if she knew who he really is. If she knew that he isn't just a handsome and charming reporter from Kansas. If she knew that this reporter, her husband, really is the lonely stranger who keeps saving the world, and who has kept the truth of his double life a secret from her. He has concluded that she would not stay if she knew, and if she left him, if she rejected him, he would be swept in loneliness and covered in death, just like he is covered in the mud and dirt of death in all of this vignette. And only the loving arms of Lois can warm him and really keep him in the land of the living.
You will forgive me, Dave, for nevertheless focusing on Lois in this vignette, and wondering what her life as Mrs Clark Kent for the last three years must have been like. It is obvious that she must have accepted that he wouldn't tell her his big secret, the secret that had him forever running away from her. Even so she decided to marry him. She must have known that he would keep disappearing after they were married, too. She must have told herself that she would pay that price. She must have said to herself that she trusted Clark, that she knew that he wasn't being unfaithful to her, and he wasn't involved in any criminal activities, and that would have to be enough for her. Even so - didn't she ever ask him, after they were married, where he was going? And if she asked him, did he keep offering her lame excuses, such as returning a book to the library or picking up his Cheese of the Month shipment? Or did she just stop asking, and did he just stop offering excuses? Did his constant disappearances become that big elephant in the room that everyone could see but no one would talk about?
Didn't anyone else wonder? Didn't anyone else ask her where her husband was? Did she have to come up with the same kind of lame excuses that Clark had always been feeding her? Did she tell Perry, or Jimmy, or Lucy, or her parents, or Henderson, that Clark had had to run off right now because he had forgotten to water their plants? Or did she repeat like a parrot that he had gone to see a source?
Clark must have kept disappearing from her almost every day. Certainly several times a week. During their three years of marriage, he must have run out on her during the middle of the night many times. Didn't she wake up? Didn't she ask? Maybe she had conditioned herself to sleep even more soundly if she became aware that Clark was leaving their bed. That way she didn't have to know. That way she could pretend that he had stayed by her side all night.
Didn't she know the truth after all? Hadn't she figured out that he was Superman after all this time? I don't get that impression from your vignette, Dave. Surely Lois wouldn't be so frantic about her husband's whereabouts if she had known that he was Superman and she could see him live on CNN, helping out at the earthquake site?
To me, this is a vignette about lies, denial, unreasonable fear, and the kind of desperate love that does not offer or demand the truth. More than anything else, it is about a man who is desperately, unreasonably frightened of losing his loved one, and he will keep lying to her daily for three years in order to keep her by his side. And it is about a woman whose love for her husband is so great that she will allow herself to be continually lied to and deceived in order to stay with her husband and love him, and feel his desperate need for her.
Ann
