For Clark, Lana had always meant normal. The living embodiment of it. And Clark had always wanted normal, chased after it, craved it and lusted after it with everything in his not normal body. So Clark pined for Lana in the same willfully blind way he longed for normal. Lana, who meant high school and girlfriend and small town and lovely couple and young love and making his parents proud.
But being who he was, Clark’s relations with normal were invariably inconsistent and unsatisfactory. Clark and normal never really seemed to get together, never really had more than an intermittent flirtation.
Until Clark lost his powers after graduation, lost everything (not quite) that separated him from normal.
With no special abilities, Clark felt free to embrace normal for the first time since his parents had taught a very small boy to lie. Clark became seriously involved with normal. And sex with Lana was the concretization of the metaphor, turning everything literal. Clark was fucking normal, and his inner-reporter loved the ambiguity of the phrase and the way the verb his parents would never let him say could also be an adjective. In spite of radioactive pieces of his home world and talking spaceships and crystals he never really understood, Clark was able at last to cross the threshold of normality, thrust his way into it, finally entering that narrow, cramped, dark space that was normal.
Which was when everything began to go wrong, sliding and twisting, turning and turning in a widening gyre.
People got hurt, and Clark realized normal meant sacrifices he hadn’t intended to make, didn’t know how to handle. If Clark and normal were together, he couldn’t help people the way he was compelled to do. So when he got his powers back again—and they always seemed to come back—a part of Clark he refused to acknowledge was very relieved when the obstacles between him and normal reasserted themselves. Even if he wished he hadn’t had to die first.
But Clark wasn’t over his fascination with normal, yet. He decided, through some form of twisted Kryptonian logic, that it would be possible to have normal and still not be normal; he decided to tell Lana everything. Clark wanted to have his normal and eat it, too.
When Clark told Lana, of course it all went wrong—it wasn’t right. Clark was not meant to have normal, couldn’t have normal, and so she died. And when Clark refused to accept that normal was dead to him, he turned back time to try to change things. But all that did was kill his father, because no matter what he did, Clark was never going to get to keep normal. He could never be happy with normal. It took him a long time, but eventually, even Clark realized he had to let normal go, and he pushed Lana as hard as he could away from him, and he took his first voluntary step away from normal.
Clark should have realized that his destiny was never caught up in normal; his life was always going to be something special.
* * *
When Clark learned that Lex had asked Lana to marry him, his first thought was that Lex wouldn’t have to change the monograms on anything. Then he excused himself to go throw up in the bathroom.
Looking at himself in the mirror over the sink, Clark came to a rather stunning realization: despite his dogged pursuit of her, he was not in love with Lana. He had never actually loved normal. No, Clark was in love with something different, something special, something very much not normal, and that was why the knowledge of Lex marrying Lana made him want to evict the entire contents of his stomach again.
In fact, Clark had always flirted with not normal, from the moment he realized how truly not normal he was.
Lex had never been normal.
Clark no longer wanted normal.
But Clark still couldn’t have what he wanted.
* * *
Everyone expected Clark to be miserable about the wedding, and he was. Everyone expected him to want to stop it, to fear its coming, and he did. Everyone expected him to stalk over to the mansion and demand that Lex not marry Lana, and he wanted to. Everyone expected him to tell Lana that she couldn’t marry Lex, and he did. Everyone expected him to cry over Lana when the wedding car pulled away from the church, and he did . . . but not for the reason people expected.
Lex had wanted him at the wedding so that Clark would see what he had lost, and Clark saw. He had never really had normal, never really loved normal, so he couldn’t lose normal. But Clark had still lost something, and he knew what it was. He had lost Lex.
As Clark watched Lana and Lex drive away together, normal and not normal married together in a way that could never last, he wondered what was left for him. He couldn’t have special even though he wanted it, and he couldn’t have normal even though he didn’t want it, and that didn’t exactly leave Clark with a lot of options.
No, it left Clark—again—the only one of his kind. The odd man out. The alien living in a Fortress of Solitude.
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lady_bug_kay) wrote2007-06-17 06:10 am
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Great work here, Kay. Bravo.
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You wrote about this episode exactly the way I was talking to my TV and saying, "He's not crying over Lana, damnit! It's Lex! It's Lex!" ;)
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They're trying so hard to make Clark heterosexual by giving him more and more love interests. There's still Chloe and now Lois, who is supposed to be his ultimate girlfriend. But while the other girls are there, they still have Clark pining over Lana. It's been six years! The total amount of actual dating tim between the two was like three months in all that time. Clearly, it's not Lana he's obsessed with. Bring back Oliver, I say, at least until Bruce Wayne appears. They should change the show's name to Metropolis and jump ahead a couple of years and forget their 'no tights, no flights' policy and just go for Superman, already.
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i read ur above reply and wish granted! www.justinhartley.net says that he will be back next season. CW was too stupid to pick up his pilot and smallville brought him back.
so ollie will be there next season! ;)
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