Current mood:

dorky

Burnt Offerings: Thinking About Lex and Lionel

*Note: This post contains a discussion of the metaphoric connections between Smallville characters and figures in Christian mythology, written from an analytical perspective and not a devout one.

The post-crash reunion between Lex and his father opens when the son speaks these words: Abraham threw Isaac on the pyre to prove his faith to God. What was your excuse? Part of Lex's frustration with his father lies in the difficulty of understanding Lionel's motives in general. Does Lionel behave from love, from the desire to make his son the strongest man in the world, operating on the principle that what doesn't kill you only makes you stronger? Or does Lionel ultimately want to destroy Lex to prove finally his own superiority, creating a worthy opponent for the ego-boosting satisfaction of destroying him?

mecurtin pointed out that the notorious hug scene in Phoenix occurs with an aria from Gounod's Faust playing in the background, implying that Lex is making a deal with the devil. But I'd like to adjust the meaning of this scene: I think it's Lex who is the metaphorical Lucifer, not Lionel. There's only one niche in Western culture grand enough for Lionel, complicated, arbitrary, mysterious, all-power, and that's God himself.

First, Lionel as God. Consider the story of Abraham and Isaac. While Lex clearly sees overtones of this Biblical story in his relationship with his father, but also feels that it fails as a metaphor because Abraham's motive for the sacrifice are clear: to prove his faith in God. The more appropriate role for Lionel in this role is God's, with his strange, obscure motives, behavior much more akin to the devil's than God's, one reason this passage often confounds scholars: And it came to pass after these things that God did tempt Abraham ,and said unto him, "Abraham," and he said, "Behold, here I am. And he said, "Take now thy son, thine only son Isaac, whom thou lovest, and get thee into the land of Moriah; and offer him here for a burnt offering upon one of the mountains which I will tell thee of (Gen. 22:1-2).

When the angel of God appears to stop Abraham's knife he says, Lay not thine hand upon the lad, neither do thou any thing unto him: for now I know that thou fearest God, seeing thou hast not withheld thy son, thine only son from me (Gen. 22:12). The double whammy of temptation and fear, not to mention the sheer selfishness of demanding such a sacrifice from a man so righteous that he never pauses, never delays in acting out God's wishes, offers a problematic vision of God the Father, one not above obscurely-rooted, torturous demands on his followers. It's not hard to believe in this God as the creator of Lucifer -- an idea so disturbing to some in the Middle Ages, this idea that evil could come from pure good, that various heresies, including the Cathar (Albigensian), developed the notion of an alternate universe ruled by an evil God, with Satan as his servant. (See Malcom Lambert's Medieval Heresy for more.)

The Book of Job adds to this image of God as less than perfect figure, since the trials of Job spring from a conversation between God and Satan. In her book The Origin of Satan, the well-known scholar Elaine Pagels says that God "boasts" of Job to Satan when he says, Have you considered my servant Job, that here is no one like him on earth, a blessed and upright man, who fears God and turns away from evil? (Job 1:8). She adds, The Lord agrees to test Job, authorizing the satan to afflict Job with devastating loss, but defining precisely how far he may go (42).

It is this version of God that suits Lionel, the one who likes relationships predicated on fear, and who amuses himself with cruel challenges, who boasts and plays with mortals with the callous blindness of the three Greek sisters. He's unpredictable, untrustworthy, arbitrary, selfish, dangerous, powerful and not a little scary, the kind of guy who'd call an assembly of hundreds of workers then fire them all, blaming his son. He's also the type who'd invent for himself an adversary, a fellow gameplayer to keep him amused through eternity; humans, after all, are so malleable, so easily breakable if you know where to hurt them. And who knows better than God?

God and Lucifer is the second defining father/son relationship in Western culture, and Lex, who will fall, is clearly not Christ, although perhaps he wants to be. Isaiah 14:12-15 contains the most famous and influential Biblical (as opposed to apocryphal or literary) account of Lucifer's story: How art thou fallen from heaven, O Lucifer, son of the morning! how art thou cut down to the ground ,which didst weaken the nations! For thou has said in thine heart, I will ascend into heaven, I will exalt my throne above the stars of God: I will sit also upon the mount of the congregation, in the sides of the north: I will ascend above the heights of the clouds; I will be like the most High. Yet thou shalt be brought down to hell, to the sides of the pit.

In the most famous literary version of the story, Milton, aiming to "justify the ways of God to men" (1.26), explains Lucifer's evil as something inherent to him, so that it's his own "pride," and not God himself that "had him cast out from heaven" (1.36-37). God's hands remain clean, at least in theory, but of course this ignores the sticky questions, so troubling to future Cathars, of how evil can burst into spontaneous being if God is the creator of all; since God is the source of all, God ergo must contain evil.

Even with the introduction of free will, God doesn't come off well, still bears the taint of his own responsibility, like a parent who didn't raise his son right, who bound him so tightly to his son that the son began to strangle, begin to desire power of his own, to break away from the old man's bonds and found his own dynasty. Isaiah and Milton call this impulse "pride," but isn't it equally a desire for freedom, for individuality? And surely a guy with the balls to start a poem that claims to explain the ways of God to man can get behind the idea of pride. Pride is destructive, divisive, but it works like birth in the Christian story, the cutting of the cord, separation as the start of subjectivity. Start me off in Heaven with a Dad who keeps telling me what to do, whose rules are the only ones ("Why, Dad?" "Because I'm God." "Oh."), and I'd be leading my own rebel army against him, like Lex does, or threatens to.

Right now he's pretending, or perhaps even genuinely trying to be a good son, to shut off his own identity in order to satisfy his father. During the hug scene in Phoenix, that hideous awkward hug, like Judas with Christ in Renaissance art, or Satan and God if any of the painters had dared to represent that, what does Lex say to his father? He offers submission, perfect submission, the erasure of self, promising to give up the one trait always ascribed as the start of the Fall, the worst of the seven deadly sins: If I keep my pride in check, I know there's a lot more to learn from you.

It's a losing battle, as we all know, and the irony is that in breaking with his father, Lex, just like his namesake, has nowhere else to go, no other system that will bring him happiness. Or perhaps the truth is this: the fatal flaw shared by Lex and Lucifer isn't pride. Pride will save you, free you, strengthen you. No, these two remain perpetual exiles because they lose their pride; they live always engaged in battle with their fathers, not realizing that in the act of fighting, in the act of competing, they forever remain locked in the role of son.

Surely it's no accident that Lucifer never procreates; he's the perpetual son, never the Father, because he never finds enough confidence to establish a world not governed by God's rules, a world where he's different, not evil. Both of them, the two sons, will always see themselves as failures, beings who couldn't satisfy their dad, not realizing that these fathers can never be satisfied without the sons attached to them like limbs, without the sons dying to prove their love. And even then...
___

The Face of Sirius Black
Last night I dreamt of Sirius Black. And can I pause here to complain that when teaching me scansion, the rhythm of poetic lines, my professors never told me that I could make my dirty dreams sound better, that porn would flow if only I listened to the beats. To this day my hearing's more intuitive, and I never cover meter in class, just hope that their student ears will catch the waves. Chaucer makes a very nice splash, oysters and cloisters, yeah.

So Sirius Black was in my dreams, a series of them, his face changing for each, always hurtfully beautiful, all cheekbones and hollows, hair a little too long but still thick and shiny, finger-rumpled. I remember his mouth, too, sharply cut, the kind that turns even straight boys sodomitic. Remus wasn't there, but he would've pictured his cock between Sirius' pink lips. suzycat asked not long ago about the blank faces of fictional boys, what we see, and now it seems like the best thing ever, the clouds in the text where Sirius' face would go, perfect-sized for my ideal man. (Or men -- why have one perfect man when you can have three or four? Perfection in plurals, erotic legion. It's why I've always found the Devil kind of cool -- multiples instead of a limiting One. Not the actual devil, of course; I'm not worshipping Satan in my spare time, no altars to the dark lord here. Bwhahaha. There's a thought. I find it hard enough to hide all the gay porn when my parents come to visit...)
___