zvi likes tv

Generally, seeing slash in a television show is a question of queerly reading a bond most of the artists involve intend to be read as fraternal or filial. Alternatively, slash thrives by deliberately taking small hints and intuiting that two characters have a deep, if murky, emotional tie.

In other words, most tv shows are not big gay romances, and most slash fans know that the story the show is telling is not a big gay romance. Whatever final image Chris Carter intended us to walk away from The X-Files with, it's not a meditation on the deep, abiding love between Reyes and Scully. Star Trek: Voyager was not, in the final analysis, the Love Song of Tom & Harry, or an epic concerning the seduction of Seven of Nine by Captain Janeway. As slash fen, we understand this fundamental television truth.

Sometimes, there's a show that's different. It's a show which is largely devoted to the relationship between its same-sex protagonists, and also seems blatantly homoerotic, not only to those of us used to teasing out gay subtext with a fine tooth comb and magnifying glass, but also to the public at large. Xena: Warrior Princess is probably the most well-known of this type of show, but Smallville also fits this mold.

In a lot of ways, I view Smallville as The Incredibly True Adventures of Two Boys in Love. That's the story that the Powers That Be, by whom I mean not only the executive producers (and didn't Al say he mostly told love stories between guys with guns?), but also the writers, directors, editors, and actors are telling. Smallville's slashiness is different from most television dramas in quantity, quality, and internal consistency.

Let me count the ways.

The Change in the Mythos

Clark and Lex on Smallville. They hang out together. They're best friends. They're, well, buddies. Kinda like Starsky & Hutch or Kirk and Spock. Buddies are always slashy. But this buddy thing is particularly piquant in the context of the Superman myth.

Usually, Superman is the tale of a man essentially alone. Kal El is an alien, the last of his species, and Clark Kent is a mask which must keep his social ties simple to avoid revealing his double identity. Millar & Gough have re-imagined this story of a Solitary Hero to be something more dualistic. Smallville, instead of being merely the tale of a once and future king, is the tale of the dark brother and the light brother. Think Osiris and Set or Jacob and Esau. Clark is younger and lauded and good; Lex is older and villifed and on a slide towards, at the least, a dark ruthlessness.

Slashers often read this sort of dichotomous opposition as sexual if there is a strong emotional component. Clark and Lex' unusually strong friendship in the first season, and their probable falling out in the future, is just the sort of strong emotional tie which provokes us to slash.

Smallville is an unusual show in that it hints both at future enemy-slash but begins in the grand old tradition of buddy slash.

The Friendship of Legends (and Improbability)

Here's why buddy slash usually works without being gayer than a thing that is majorly bent: the premise of the show is that an outside force makes these guys buddies. Most often, a buddy show is about a law enforcement, intelligence, military, or paramilitary organization. Not only has an outside agent placed our heroes in close proximity for many hours daily, it also puts them in life-threatening situations in which the partners are forced to depend upon one another for survival.

In other words, we're working in an emotional attachment petri dish with a prime nutrient mix for lots of heavy duty male emotional bonding. These are situations where straight men regularly form close emotional ties, even if they do not usually involve direct sexual contact.

In those shows which do not posit an assigned partnership, the pilot episode typically depicts one partner possessing some unique skill or knowledge which the other partner requires. In The Sentinel, Sandburg is the only person on Earth who can help Ellison protect himself from and gain control over his senses. In Fast Lane, Hayes is the brother of Ray's slain partner, so each requires the other's unique need for vengeance.

Clark and Lex don't have that driving impetus towards friendship. Lex' investigation of Clark's role in the accident on the bridge takes place almost entirely outside of his friendship with Clark; he doesn't need Clark in his life to find out what happened. In fact, his friendship with Clark leads him to abandon the investigation.

But it's not merely that there's no buddy setup for their friendship to begin, there are a number of reasons their friendship should have halted before it began:

• Differing socio-economic backgrounds

Lex is not just well to do, he's fabulously wealthy. There's a wing at the Metropolis Art Museum named after his family, he blows cash in a weekend in Hong Kong that is more than equivalent to the amount required to trigger an embezzlement investigation by his father, he's been intimately involved with European nobility, and he's used to a very urban environment.

Clark's a kid from a struggling organic farm. He's lived in Smallville all of his life that he can remember. He doesn't have any real experience with the world outside Kansas (perhaps not even the world outside Smallville).

• Differing lifestages

However little difference in their ages (and Clark could conceivably have a legal age of 18), Lex is undoubtedly several lifestages ahead of Clark. He's: completed high school, completed his bachelor's, completed a master's (if we believe the Luthorcorp website), and is now holding down a full-time management job. Clark's just finished his freshman year. In other words, Lex is a grown up, and Clark is not.

• Outside opposition

A number of important people in Clark's life are opposed to his relationship with Lex. Not only his father, but also Pete, blame Lex for the business misdeeds of his father. Chloe comes to be jealous of Clark's relationship with Lex. Further, Lana (the girl on whom Clark has a crush) views Lex with some disapprobation in the beginning of the season.

It's hard to tell whether Lionel's disapproval would function as a goad towards or away from his relationship with Clark, but it is clear that Lionel, should he discover the relationship, would disapprove. He wants Lex to have no emotional ties to people who are not him, to Smallville, or to things which distract him from strengthening his position (e.g., discontinuing the investigation of the accident because of friendship).

The Proposal of Insanity

So, if Clark and Lex' first coming together is unlike other buddies, what is it like?

Love at first sight.

If you listen to the commentary track on the DVD, someone talks about how romantic comedies often have a "meet cute" where hero and heroine are brought to one another's attention in some unlikely and amusing fashion. The wreck at the bridge is described as a "meet violent." These would just be the inane ramblings that make a commentary track a hit-or-miss proposition, except that at their very next meeting, Lex proposes a lifelong emotional connection.

Lex is given to grand gestures, yes. The truck is perfectly in keeping with his style. His interactions with other people are typically more guarded and suspicious, however. While he is initially enthusiastic at his meeting with Kerry Castle, he quickly mistrusts her motives. To offer, even on a superficial level, his alliance, with a little known quantity is unlike Lex. (The variable here, of course, is just how much investigation of the Kents Lex has managed in the 18-36 hours between the accident and the return of the truck. Certainly enough to find out their address, but not enough to realize Jonathon wouldn't allow Clark to accept the truck.)

Although Lex certainly feels positively towards Clark because of the rescue, it is highly unusual, in real life or on television, for people to become best friends with those, like firemen or EMTs, who rescue them from near certain death.

What is even more striking is Clark's reaction. Clark tacitly accepts and is pleased by Lex's unusually effusive proposal, despite his father's admonishments about the Luthors, despite the fact that Lex hit him with a car, despite Lex throwing an epee in his general direction on their second meeting.

The Chemistry in Casting

Michael Rosenbaum and Tom Welling have fantastic chemistry. TW beams when MR walks onto a scene. MR's focus is redirected towards TW whenever he walks into a scene. The palpable connection between them reminds me of the first few seasons of The X Files or the wary fascination between Garak and Bashir in the early days of Deep Space Nine.

The Vision of The Crew

If we start with the premise that Tom Welling has a straight-boy crush on Michael Rosenbaum, it's possible that the longing looks and the glowing are the least gay-looking shots the directors can coax out of Tom, who is an inexperienced actor.

This doesn't explain playing Lex as if he's got a crush on the prettiest young thing in Smallville. MR is a wonderful actor, and as we see in some of the scenes in Drone, he is able to turn the sexual chemistry down in a favor of a more brotherly vibe. If someone told MR to be a lot less gay, he could be. But no one is.

Another direct cause, and this attributable to editing, is the deep, lingering gazes between Clark and Lex. It's fairly easy for editors not to cut an exchange of gazes to last tens of seconds. Even if the actors gaze longingly at one another, the editor is under no obligation to use that footage. But they do.

The Dialogue of Love

Last but not least, the dialogue of other characters on Smallville is written as if Clark and Lex are in a romantic relationship. In Zero, when Lex seems an increasingly dangerous man to know, Martha suggests that Clark "cool it," i.e. his relationship with Lex. That's not how Americans refer to friendships, that's a construction usually associated with dating.

Both Chloe and Pete place Clark's relationship with Lex in a parallel position to his relationship with Lana. Clark has a crush on Lana of long duration, although this is the first year in which they've established a personal relationship.

Also, in an instance where it seems as if Lex will be leaving Smallville, Chloe offers herself as a replacement for Lex. She can't logically be offering herself as Clark's new best friend, because she's already his very close friend. We do know, however, that Chloe has romantic designs on Clark. It seems likely then, that she is attempting to advance her romantic plans, by substituting herself for a romantic figure already in Clark's life.

The Reality Check of Chlana

Just to point out how pervasive and unusual the Clex is, I'm going to contrast it with a relationship that is slashy in a far more traditional fashion, the relationship between Chloe and Lana.

Allison Mack and Kristin Kreuk act nicely together with a quiet but steady chemistry. The episodes Rogue, Nicodemus, and Obscura show the girls attempting to help one another and each attempting to improve her status in the other's eyes.

None of the other characters talk about Chloe and Lana's relationship. The amount of time they spend together is not abnormal for two students who attend the same high school but are part of overlapping, rather than concentric, social circles.

They are, however, pretty cute together, and their strengths and faults seem complimentary. Chloe is loud, outgoing, strongly and public opiniated. Lana is quiet, a passive manipulator of events, and somewhat lacking in common sense. The sort of tension these differing styles would create are very slashy. At the same time, the fact that Chloe's behavior could make her a natural protector of Lana would strike a chord with those slashers who enjoy unequal relationships.

Chloe and Lana's slashiness is very much in the background of this season's story arc and their relationship has not yet been a major plot point in any episode, although it does form a subplot in Rogue and a slashy explanation makes Chloe's action in the beginning of Obscura (delaying a trip to Metropolis for an interview at the Daily Planet, her dream intership, in order to make sure Lana is okay) make more sense than is provided for in the episode. The feelings of the two girls for one another is very much a subtext, and it seems likely that the writers had not, by the end of first season, clearly decided what that relationship was. (Their rivalry over Clark may push them towards enmity, but that's not a foregone conclusion considering Lana is attempting to sublimate her attraction to Clark, believing him already Chloe's.)

This sort of slashy relationship is much more the usual case than Clark and Lex', and it differs in the following ways: it is organic to the setting, it is background to the action of both episode plots and story arc plots, it is not remarked on by other characters₁, it is not pervasive in way their scenes are edited and directed.

An Ending of Uncertainty

Whether or not this homoerotic text is deliberate on the part of cast and crew is ambiguous. It's quite clear that the Clark and Lex relationship is a central issue of the show Smallville, but its reading as gay by such a large swathe of the audience is not necessarily intentional. It is clearly, however, a reasonable extrapolation from the television show, and not just the wishful thinking slashers have demonstrated in search of other pairings. (e.g. Lex/Whitney or Lionel/Clark, pairings where the characters have never had an on-screen conversation, nor has there been anything to seriously imply that they might have done so.)

¹The Endnote of Pretentiousness

It is not unusual for characters to remark on primary buddy relationships in two situations: breakup of the relationship, whether from internal conflict or outside agency; prospective death of one member of the buddy pairing. Martha's admonition to Clark in Zero might be seen as along those lines; Lex is clearly the focus of some malevolent agenda, and Martha wants to induce an estrangement to protect her son. It is not quite the usual case, however, because generally what observers of the relationship are remarking on is the passionate defense of the man threatened by death by his buddy. Classic examples of this are the final episode of Starsky & Hutch and Sarek approaching Kirk for Spock's katra in Star Trek III: The Search for Spock. return to text