Superman
As some of you know, I’ve been binge-watching Smallville like crazy. And while I’m primarily watching it because it’s fun and I like having a show to knit and relax to, it’s also given me a lot to think about. So I’ve been thinking about the nature of stories converted to shows/movies, spoilers, and whether a myth is a myth if it feels the same.
Even without being a reader of comic books, there are certain things it feels that everyone knows about Superman. We know that Superman wears mostly blue and a red cape, we know that he and Lois are a couple, we know that Clark Kent is the “mild-mannered reporter” who is also Superman. But beyond that, how much can a teller of mythology alter and have it still be Superman? Probably quite a bit, actually. Every incarnation of the Superman story changes him some. Like in some, Clark Kent is the invented personna of Kal-el (Superman). In others, and the version I’m more familiar with, Superman is the invention of Clark Kent.
Smallville, somewhat of an origin/backstory of Superman, gets to play with the mythology of Superman. Like, traditionally Lana Lang is the teenage love interest for Clark. TV loves to thrive on romance, so they have Lana and Clark be together and break up and be together and so on. And if it were an independent story, the viewer roots for Lana and Clark to end up together forever, like they’re “obviously” meant to. But it’s not an independent story, and when they introduce Lois, what are we to think? There’s no reason for Lana and Clark to break up and him to drop everything and go off with Lois, but at the same time, knowing how the story ends up, we kind of want that to happen. So Smallville surprises us by having Lois and Clark have a clear dislike of eachother. Eventually they evolve to a place where they can take their role as a couple as they were always meant to. But as a telling of the story which knows what the outcome of that story must be, they can play with it as they go.
In some ways, many myths play with this expectation as well. Everyone who went to see Oedipus Rex knows that Oedipus sleeps with his mother and kills his father. So Sophocles’ job is not to tell you that. His job is to play with how it happens, how we lead up to the moment that Oedipus himself realizes it.
The audience is not surprised when Lois and Clark start dating, or when Oliver Queen is revealed as the Arrow, or when Lex Luther is revealed as the villain. We know these things, even if we aren’t overly familiar with the traditional comics that have built these things up. But shows like Smallville get to decide what to do with these basic tenets and how to evolve them into a bigger story.
Classic writers of myth do this too. One might consider a work like Ovid’s Metamorphoses. Ovid has all or many of the versions of the myths up to that point. In gathering them together in one work, he has to decide which parts of the story he’ll embrace. Is Odysseus the son of Sisyphus or Laertes? How did Tiresias become blind and prophetic? And so on.
Smallville gets to knowingly play with foreshadowing of the future, much like Vergil does in the Aeneid. So Smallville will sometimes have jokes, like, “What are you going to do, fly around the earth backwards so fast we go back in time?” which sounds absolutely ridiculous, but is something Superman actually does in the comics. Or they can talk about how Superman will be a symbol of hope, and when they have visitors from the 31st century, they can say everyone has heard of Lois and Clark and Lana. So too does Vergil, most notably in Book 6 when he’s detailing the entire line-up of people who will be born and how famous and influential they will be.
I guess my main thought on this is how much wiggle room there is in the telling of a story with as varied a background as these sorts of things. Both Superman and classical mythology have to deal with the fact that there are many different versions of the events leading up to whatever the current incarnation of the story is. The current myth-teller then has to decide how to deal with those versions, whether by simply ignoring all but one, somehow reconciling the differences into one amalgamous story, or forging some brand new path. The resulting story is then new, but not entirely new, because it has a history, most likely tied to the time and place in which it was created.