Superman and ‘Maybe…’

Ever since the new Superman trailer dropped a while back, I’ve seen a lot of people griping about Pa Kent’s “Maybe…” line.  The context, as much as is apparent from the trailer: kid Clark has just saved some kids in his schoolbus from drowning by lifting the bus out of the water by himself.  This seems to have triggered a low-key Smallville witch hunt (voiceover by shocked mother: “I saw what Clark did,” with that sort of nasal overtone that implies “and he will suffer for it”), which leads to the following conversation.

Pa: You have to keep this side of yourself a secret.

Clark: What was I supposed to do?  Let them die?

Pa: Maybe…

I get the anxiety about whether we really need a darker Superman, even though I would read the hell out of a Superman comic that had the Man of Steel hitchhiking across Steinbeck’s America, and I sort of hope this film (which seems to have some industrial fishing sequences) will linger with Clark on Cannery Row.  But man, Kevin Costner as Pa Kent is selling me on that line.  He sounds like a man who understands that he lives in, well, Smallville.  That the people he’s grown up with are good, and kind, and might be scared by something they don’t understand.  That small town life may be wonderful, and / but it’s also built on secrets known and never acknowledged.  On silence and studied avoidance of confrontation.  On learning rules and lines and staying within them.

Based on delivery, I don’t think that’s the end of the conversation between Pa and Clark, either.  Beats me whether the movie will do anything interesting with that line, but, you know, someone’s going to raise a hand and say “I actually like that line and what it implies,” and it might as well be me.