The Psychosexual Implications of Superman's Relationship With Lois Lane and the Search For the True Depth of Fiction
Most of us know the story; A child comes to Earth from Krypton and is raised as Clark Kent by his adoptive parents. When he develops superpowers, he takes his family's solid moral values and becomes Superman.
Conceived in 1933 by writer Jerry Siegel and artist Joe Shuster, the Superman story was first published by DC (Detective Comics) in 1938. Since then literally hundreds of writers and artists have contributed to the mythology and made it one of the most expansive, and long-running, stories in human history. Is it just the superpowers that keep people coming back for more though?
If we concentrate on the roots of the story and step past Superman's, super-weak, disguise (which of course hinges on a pair of glasses) then we are soon met with a story of heart ache and confusion. Clark Kent is in love with Lois Lane but Lois Lane is in love with Superman. Whose head wouldn't be messed up by the idea that their alter ego was desirable but not them? Imagine standing in line for someone else's affections and being directly behind yourself. Or being two out of three people in a love triangle.
Ouch! A psychological explosion ensues.
Following this, we see one of the most morally upstanding men in fiction routinely lie to the woman he loves. In turn, Lois Lane views the extremes of his personality in such a polar way that Kent / Superman ends up in crisis about who he is and what he wants to be. Separating the seemingly inseparable aspects of his personality causes a turmoil which, perhaps surprisingly, many people seem to relate to.
Superman also provides one of the best illustrations of how we are all vulnerable in love. Indomitable Kryptonian or regular human being, emotional hurt is the same for us all.
Without these aspects the Superman mythology is a procession of elementary detective work and villains who identify clever chinks in Superman's invulnerability. With them, there is room for a deeper emotional aspect to the man of steel.
So, one of the world's best loved comics involves a complex, and intriguing, psychological mess with psychosexual implications. (For clarity, we are using the term psychosexual broadly, to refer to the connection between our psychology and physical relationships, not just the early stages of fixation originally presented in Freud's model of Psychoanalysis.)
Some of you might scoff at such suggestions, believing that this is over analysing a simple, children's story and that is exactly my point.
Good stories are a mirror to ourselves. Beyond the particulars of the plot lay explorations of character which touch upon our personal outlook on life. Some of us want to be a hero and a detective, others prefer to be a good friend and advisor, but we all engage with things at the level which most fits our point of view. However, whether we see far-fetched silliness or psychosexual subtexts is ultimately down to us.
The expression; 'Beauty is in the eye of the beholder', says more about the nature of our perceptions than it does the nature of beauty. Just as what we see is dictated by the limited range of the electromagnetic spectrum in which our eyes operate, so it is for our minds, but the limitations of our minds are harder to pin down.
Most of the false assumptions that we gather throughout our lives arise from only understanding a single aspect of something. Whether or not anyone has ever had the ability to understand every aspect of the world around them is probably a debate for the renaissance but it is important for us to be aware that we don't see it all. In literature and the arts, there will always be a divide between the understanding of the creator and their audience and no one can say whose opinion is more valid. Sometimes an audience sees something in a work which makes it more meaningful and sometimes they bypass such things in favour of light-hearted fun.
Whatever the case, we all see things from our own perspective and the angles that we choose to see things from shape who we are as people. Shallow minds are born from an inability to shift their focus beyond one point of view but the shallow experience occurs in the mind of the beholder, not that which they are beholding.
From a writer's perspective, all of our words are important. Spoken or written. Television script or theatre classic. Comic caption or tombstone engraving. Pay attention to all of those things which ordinarily pass you by and you might be surprised to notice where literary greatness is hiding.
Endlessly, Perpetually, Something,
L-J
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