Seeing Things Super-Clearly
Up in the sky! It's a bird! It's a plane! Just a sec, let me get my glasses on so I can look. . . .
After more than three years of peering through increasingly scratched and scummy lenses, of pushing my ever-looser frames back into place, Clark Kent-style, I finally broke down and got new eyeglasses. After shelling out for not one but two pairs—they're only my window on the whole world, after all, so maybe a backup would be smart—I remembered why it had been so long between eyeglasses. When the lens makers get my prescription, they run to book Caribbean vacations before settling down to grinding or whatever it is they do. ("Honey!" goes the excited call home from Glasses R Us. "We've hit the jackpot!") Let's just say that if a normal person were to try on my specs, I'm pretty sure he could see through walls.
My genetic inheritance of screwy vision—I think my dad's eyes were something like 20/1,200—didn't kick in until about the fifth grade. I breezed through my early childhood like a regular kid—actually seeing the dodgeballs hurtling towards me, for instance. I could play outside in the rain without worrying about smeary puddles forming in front of my eyes. Nobody called me "four-eyes."
As I got older, though, I saw the handwriting on the wall—or, rather, didn't: The lessons on the blackboard got harder to read. If I wasn't sitting near the front of the class, I had a problem. So my parents took me on the first of many trips to the eye doctor, and soon I was fitted with thick, dark-rimmed glasses of the sort that recently have become stylish in a retro sort of way but decidedly weren't back in the 1960s. If there'd been any chance I might not have descended into total nerd-dom just in time for the tender mercies of junior high, the arrival of eyeglasses on my face pretty much blew it. The optometrist should have fitted me for a "Kick Me" sign at the same time.
Contact lenses weren't as omnipresent then as today, and nobody had yet dreamed up zapping away poor vision with laser surgery. It wouldn't have mattered: The thought of sticking anything in my eyes makes me even woozier than the sight of blood (and I once fainted during a Red Cross film about accident victims). I'm doomed to wear glasses to the grave, at least if I want a clear view of the afterlife.
At about the same time, I discovered superhero comic books (thanks to my new friend Bill, who was wise in the ways of "all in color for a dime"—pretty soon, 15 cents and then a quarter—and who had a stash of these pulp-paper battles between good and evil). Is it any wonder that I immediately identified with heroes who also wore glasses? I'm talking about in their alter ego secret identities, of course—otherwise, the Green Goblin or Lex Luthor would simply smash the hero's spectacles and the fight would be over.
I loved Daredevil, but he doesn't really count; his alter ego, Matt Murdock, was actually blind, so his need for glasses was a bit different than mine—OK, only a little bit. Enhanced super-senses, naturally, enabled Matt to fight crime even without his sight. This did give me hope for the future if my eyes kept getting worse. But where could I find a barrel of radioactive waste to hit me in the head and give me radar sense and superhearing?
Spider-Man was probably my favorite, since not only did his alter ego, Peter Parker, wear glasses, but he was a science nerd. (Hence his presence in the lab where a radioactive spider—again with the radioactivity, obviously a 1960s obsession—bit him and gave him super powers. Do you know how hard it is to find a radioactive spider in Sioux Falls, SD? Or to tell a radioactive spider from the regular kind, at least without a Geiger counter or other gizmo it would be hard for an 11-year-old to get his hands on in the days before online shopping?) Despite having the proportionate strength of a spider and other cool powers, Spider-Man lived a life pretty much like yours or mine. He didn't always get the girl. Flash Thompson, the star quarterback and school bully, picked on him. Peter Parker was even saddled with an ailing aunt who made my parents look like Annette Funicello and Frankie Avalon on the hipness scale.
Best of all, Spider-Man wore a mask that covered his whole face. He wasn't wearing glasses under there—after the spider bite, he no longer really needed them—but he could have been. Nobody would have known.
Superman was different. Although I was an on-again, off-again reader of Superman comic books and played wearing a towel as a cape just like most kids, I never had quite the affinity for the Man of Steel that you might expect—given that in his secret identity as Clark Kent, he famously wore glasses. Sure, I tried taking off my glasses the way Clark did to begin the transformation to Superman—"This looks like a job for. . ."—but it never worked for me. Without my glasses, I couldn't leap tall buildings in a single bound or run faster than a speeding bullet. Nor did bullets bounce off my chest, though I confess I never actually put that to the test. No, without my glasses the world was merely blurry.
It was harder to identify with Clark Kent, too, because in a way Superman was really just pretending to be Clark. Even in high school, he never had to be a nerdy kid wearing glasses. He was already Superboy. Clark Kent was only a pose to protect his secret. In the current TV series "Smallville," teenage Clark doesn't even bother with the glasses; he just does super stuff behind the scenes, without donning a costume. Where's the angst in that?
As I've grown older, though, I've become fonder of the iconic Superman—and with him, the glasses-wearing Clark Kent. In the new movie Superman Returns, star Brandon Routh does a perfect riff on the late Christopher Reeve's portrayal of Clark as an aw-shucks farm boy who's forever—yes—pushing up his glasses with a nervous index finger. Never mind that Clark Kent is all play-acting, that Superman could be spending his time instead in the Fortress of Solitude, spinning Kryptonian top-40 tunes or jawing with his digitized dad, Marlon Brando. Clark Kent becomes an expression of Superman's longing for normalcy, for the mundane, un-super life he'd maybe really rather be leading with Lois Lane.
Maybe it's not so surprising for Superman to have days when being only plain Clark Kent seems pretty appealing. Braniac attacking Metropolis with a giant death ray? Call somebody else. Maybe the Flash can take this one—or Batman, if he's really so danged smart. Let's see what that stupid utility belt of his can do against an orbiting death ray! Good luck to ya, bat-guy.
"With great power comes great responsibility"—that was Spider-Man's Uncle Ben, not Superman's dad Jor-El. But, as the new movie hints, sometimes even Superman would give up all that super power to shed the responsibility with it, to just take a walk in the park with Lois like a regular guy. And if gigantic green brain-sucking mutants suddenly popped out of the park's bandstand and started eating picnickers, well, gosh, that would be somebody else's problem for a change. Anybody got Wonder Woman's cell-phone number?
Superman dreams of being Clark Kent, just as all the Clark Kents of the world dream of becoming super. Spider-Man, too, probably has days when he wishes that damned spider had bitten somebody else.
Put on the glasses and let the weight of the world be on somebody else's shoulders. Why not? Let the super guys envy us glasses-wearing guys for a change.
Let me warn you, though, Superman: New eyeglasses cost an arm and a leg these days. Does the Daily Planet have eyecare insurance? Because on a journalist's salary. . . .
David A. Fryxell disguises himself as the mild-mannered editor of Desert
Exposure.