Big Love, Smallville, and Messianic Fiction
The spring of 2011 marks the finale of two television series that have been keeping me company for several years, each of which I feel a little misty at the thought of letting go of. Beware, traveler: herein lie spoilers for Big Love and Smallville.
The protagonists of the two programs hardly seem similar, at a passing glance. Big Love's Bill Henrickson is a fundamentalist Mormon polygamist, a family man, and an entrepreneur. Smallville's favorite son, Clark Kent, is a monogamist of undetermined Protestant stock, single, and searching for the right career.
But scratch the surface a little (with Kryptonite, if you must), and it's easy to see how the two characters have more than a passing resemblance to one another. Even beyond generalities one could draw regarding each program's implicit statements about the American Dream, for example, each continuity's set of thematic elements mirrors the other so well, in fact, you'd think the writing teams were each cribbing from the Aarne-Thompson Tale Type Index. (And heck, if one subscribes to the Campbellian monomyth theory, as does your humble host, the popular wisdom is that we're all cribbing from it, all the time, simply by being part of our own culture.)
The Secret Identity
Both Bill Henrickson and Clark Kent protect double lives, secret identities. The lies and deception that these two men, each of whom purports to rely on values such as honesty and forthrightness, are born of their iconoclastic and idiosyncratic natures. Bill is forced to hide his family life away from the American and mainstream Mormon publics that will castigate him for his lifestyle choices, while Clark must obfuscate not only his abilities, but his very species, in order to lead a normal life and to facilitate helping others.
Generational Villainy
Opposing the hero on each program is a villainous father-son team, Roman and Albert Grant plaguing Utah as Lionel and Lex Luthor plague Kansas. The generational aspect of the characters' villainy suggests in each case that the hero stands for something immovable, unfickle, true in every age: a heroism that stands the test of time.
The Good Woman
Both Bill and Clark are aided in their quests by the love of a Good Woman, a female character and romantic interest who provides the love-force necessary to keep the male hero grounded, to serve as a sort of "lightning rod" through adventures, no matter whether those adventures span the deserts of Beehive Country, Outer Darkness, or the Phantom Zone. And while the utlization of female characters as this sort of set dressing is nothing new, it is disheartening that Smallville never quite evolved past it in the way Big Love did. Smallville's Lois Lane, of course, differs from Big Love's Barbara Henrickson in one other important way; because the Henricksons don't practice monogamy, Barb has to work all the more to foster the special sort of connection to her husband that monogamists like Lois and Clark (or like my wife and myself, for that matter), can take for granted.
Guided by Voices
Finally, and perhaps most importantly within the schema of each program, both Bill and Clark try to be moral actors for order within television worlds that naturally favor immorality and chaos...just like our own real world. And each character is guided by the voice of a disembodied, invisible Father Figure. Bill's moral center derives form his belief that Heavenly Father provides him with a testimony to split from the Juniper Creek (an FLDS Church proxy) compound and found his own, "true" religion. Clark's spirit guide, meanwhile, is literal: the artificial intelligence of his alien father Jor-El, frozen in the ice and crystal of the Fortress of Solitude. (A bonus for Clark: he can quite literally switch off his god when he grows tiresome, as in last week's penultimate episode.)
What I'm Driving At
Neither of these semi-messianic characters is always entirely successful in operating in a moral manner, of course. Bill Henrickson, as a "realistic" character, could never hope to truly emulate the example set by proto-Superman (as none of us could), but even Clark is frequently tempted to use his birthright super-powers in a selfish or venial manner.
Clark always comes around, of course! Like Christ, Superman serves as an impossibly perfect ideal, not as a literal role model: both Superman and Christ are inspirational, not aspirational. And an argument could certainly be made (hey, the First Lady of Inkville makes it all the time), that Bill is himself one of the greatest villains of Big Love. It is Bill's hubris, his fall from grace (a fall Clark can never truly experience, assuming the character retains any sort of fiction-world integrity), that makes Bill such a complex and moving character. Sussing out whether Bill Henrickson is an example of what to do or what not to do is a more confusing proposition.
The characters are also dissimilar in one other telling way: Big Love attempts to explore the issues and concerns of a real-world public admission of polygamy (not to mention moral clarity), while Smallville, for all its gritty (and perhaps over-protested) "no tights, no flights" mise-en-scène, still essentially cleaves to the logic, moral and physical, of a comic book universe.
Thus, the characters have correspondingly different endings. Bill Henrickson, like Christ, like all misunderstood prophets, must eventually forfeit his life once his Good Works are done, a necessary sacrifice to cleave to his ideals and rescue his people from the wilderness. Clark, in his own messianic feat, is fated to be reborn with an entirely new and upgraded identity, as a Superman come to save not only his Chosen People, but all of us. Big Love's realism (and attendant bleakness) is necessarily countered by Smallville's science-fictional pop-hope.
But each man still redeems our sins...
"I am the voice of one calling in the desert, 'Make straight the way for the Lord.'"
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