Media

...Two significant things about the title (besides, of course, the terrific fifth-grade pun on the seekers of the Northwest Passage): Lois (Lane, if you're a visiting Martian) comes first...

...In fact, a running gag in the series is that "Superman" appears remarkably infrequently: in most episodes, whatever the problem du jour happens to be, Lois and Clark (that's Clark as Clark) will have mainly sorted things out to the point that Supe's requisite appearance is almost inessential...

...The classic Superman scenario—and the classic American foreign policy scenario—is that of the last-minute rescue: Into the phone booth...

...Never mind that as Superman he was about as goyische as you could get: when he put on those horn-rims and became insecure, fidgety Clark Kent he was—the name notwithstanding—pure Yeshiva-bucher...

...Even the name, after all these years, sounds camp...

...Be careful what you call: it may come...

...And the nation would come to find its omnipotence quite as difficult to live with as did its secret self-image, the man in the red cape...

...It's the assertion that Clark—the Clark in all of us—matters more than the Superman in all of us: that it's less important for us to be the strongest than it is for us to be the most human: that the quotidian—the cities, the hungry, the ordinary—is not just the husk of the divine, but its heart...

...FRANK McCONNELL 23...

...This Superman wants to make it without the red cape and the blue body-stocking...

...The comic began in 1939, so it's a safe bet that a lot of the kids—and they were kids—who went off to fight on other planets like Anzio and Bastogne and Guadalcanal had stored, somewhere in their imaginations, the myth of the just-ordinary guy who, when danger threatened, emerged from the cocoon of the quotidian as the invincible defender of the right...

...But here Clark often does quite as well as Clark as he does as you-know-who...

...Change] Cap the volcano...

...For almost a half-century, I suggest, America has suffered from the cold-war disease, which can also be called "Supermanism": the overwrought anxiety to use great power for a 22 MEDIA great good, and the unending frustration of never finding a clear great good...

...This Lois and this Clark really like one another, and are constantly fencing, with equal wit on both sides, about the fact that sooner or later they are going to tumble into the sack, and not because she's going to find out that he's really Superman...

...But it's also, as we surf into the next century, the demythologization of a myth...

...Watch any of the numerous propaganda movies made during the war and notice how the plot, though "Superman" is never mentioned, follows the rhythm of the myth: every G.I...

...But like all really good jokes, it does not diminish its object as much as it humanizes it...

...is a Clark Kent, with a Kal-El inside him screaming to get out...

...This is a piece about the ABC series, "Lois and Clark: The New Adventures of Superman," which has just wound up its first season and which is, no kidding, one of the best things—smart and poignant—you can watch on the Tube...

...It's a comic book, for crying out loud, and a comic book read by kids, not by the law-school-bound collegiate recovering nerds who follow the baroque intricacies of serious comic-book stuff like Peter Milligan's Shade: The Changing Man or Garth Ennis's Hellblazer or—a true and emerging work of high art—Neil Gaiman's Sandman...

...Great Shades of Elvis...

...The country that had invented the strongest man on earth was now the strongest country on earth...

...Just as the battalions of the Nazi Ubermenschen, "splendid blonde beasts" in the classic and nauseating phrase, arose from Berlin to Munich, on the other side of the Atlantic emerged an absurd, crudelydrawn, quite embarrassingly adolescent fantasy of omnipotence disguised as wimpiness which, to Dr...

...Lois is Teri Hatcher—about whom, in the immortal words of Roy Orbison, "rrrrowwrrr...

...I don't really think that the writers and producers sat down to create a "Superman" for the worldrhythms of the nineties...

...Lane Smith is Perry White, who refreshingly swears, instead of "Great Caesar's Ghost...

...There may be better series on TV...

...We had the Bomb...

...Which is why "Lois and Clark: The New Adventures of Superman" is such a joy...

...Of course, by 1946 we were Superman...

...But Names, as any real adept will tell you, are delicate, dangerous things to play around with...

...But Superman...

...Siegel and Shuster, the scrawny teens from Cleveland who invented the Superman mythos in 1938, probably had no idea that they were conjuring with a Name that played a central role in the visionary system of the great Nietzsche, and that, defaced and perverted, was playing an even greater role in the formation of the Third Reich...

...For fifty years we haven't taken off the red cape: no wonder our room is a mess and our nerves arc frazzled...

...In fact, the best movie ever made about World War II, William Wyler' s 1946 The Best Years of Our Lives, becomes even more plangent when you think of its story of three returning veterans as the plight of KalEl forced to hang up the cape and for the rest of his life be just— well—good old Clark...

...Well, being only Superman: for sure...

...The timing could not have been more perfect...

...Global Policeman, Guardian of the New World Order (George Bush's witless phrase), or Defender of Truth, Justice, and the American Way: the formulas, geopolitical and comicbook, have an uncanny internal resonance one with the other...

...Chesterton, who I think knew nearly everything about nearly everything, once said that the test of a really good religion was that you could make jokes about it...

...Maybe what I find so inspiriting about "Lois and Clark" is that it is a joke, and a gentle and affectionate one, about the megalomania of the Superman ethos...

...but I do believe that sometimes the right stories get themselves told for the right age: and "Lois and Clark" is that...

...By the way...

...Clark/Superman is played by Dean Cain, who has none of the granite-statuary handsomeness of Christopher Reeve, but an irrepressible smartass grin, in or out of the supersuit: he's already, in other words, more Clark than Clark's other, and capable of smiling wryly at both incarnations...

...Stroll back on the set with your hornrims on...

...and, maybe more significant, it's Clark, not Clark's demideity alter-ego, who's featured—not just in the main title, but in the unfolding of the episodes themselves...

...In its small but shining way, "Lois and Clark" plays with one of our central determining myths, and tells us that, in this age and the world, it's time to stop worrying about our superpowers, hang the red cape for a while, and start cleaning our room...

...We don't really like to use it without an ironic cock of the eyebrow, now do we...

...The funny thing is—and I'm quite serious about this—I think Superman may have been an essential part of the war effort (at least our part of it—let's not forget that Russia had at least a 60-percent share of the agony of defeat and the thrill of victory...

...I doubt very much if there is one more quirkily relevant to the state of the nation...

...Goebbels, say, would have been just one more proof of the essential sickliness of permissive, Jew-infested America...

...What's worse than being only Clark, you ask...

...It's wonderful ensemble acting, and even when the individual episodes are dumb—we're not talking Anna Karenina here—there's a sense of high fun that, even on the Tube, can't be faked...

...The boys from Cleveland just wanted to sell their idea for a comic book: and so they did...

...And thereby, I suggest, hangs a large part of the psychic history of America in the fifty years since the Big Guy in the Blue Suit with the Red Skivvies first made his appearance...

...and who, for the first time in any version of the tale, is at least as smart as the mild-mannered reporter who is her partner...

...And Superman's archenemy, Lex Luthor, is played with perfect Donald Trump-reptilian arrogance by the veteran John Shea...