Hello, everyone. My name is Matthew Monagle and I enjoyed Batman v Superman.
(Hi, Matthew.)
It’s been three days since I saw the two titans of the DC Universe trade punches and I keep waiting to wake up with a change of heart. On paper, there are very few reasons to enjoy the newest incarnation of the Dark Knight; Batman’s moral code may be ambiguous at best, but shooting people in the head or setting them up to be murdered in prison is a, ah, somewhat looser interpretation of the character than even a cursory glance at the comic books should allow. And yet, despite this, I find myself with a grudging degree of respect for the sheer audacity of Zack Snyder and David Goyer’s take. What once seemed like a disconnect between filmmaker and subject now feels like something more deliberate. In giving audiences a version of Batman and Superman who are both as petty and narrow-minded as they are powerful, Snyder has resurrected the blockbuster B-movie for the comic book generation.
Given that B-movies typically involve more grandiose characterization than Snyder’s grimdark worldview allows, it may seem odd to throw Batman v Superman into this category. This has to do with the film’s bizarre internal logic. A film can have gaping plot holes as long as it possesses a sort of internal consistency; put another way, it doesn’t need to make sense to us as long as it seems to make sense to itself. Batman v Superman has tons of issues – outlined in reviews published by every major publication over the past three days – but it still manages to hold onto an authorial vision that sells out entirely on the moody and petulant versions of these characters. In Snyder’s world, Batman and Superman aren’t superheroes; they’re not even really good people. Here Batman and Superman are egotistical, portentous freaks, and Snyder finds a way to weave the precedence for this into each character’s childhood with a few subtle tweaks to their origin stories.
Batman and Superman are both characters born in the death of a loved one, but the characters of Batman v Superman learned the wrong lessons from those deaths. Let’s start with Superman. Jonathan Kent’s nominal sacrifice in Man of Steel may be one of the most-mocked moments in recent comic book movie history, but it does offer some insight into Snyder’s vision of the character. When Jonathan Kent dies in the 1978 version of Superman or the WB show Smallville, his death exposes the limits of Clark Kent’s blossoming powers. Sure, Superman may be more powerful than a locomotive and able to leap tall buildings in a single bound, but when his dad suddenly clutches his chest and falls to his knees on a dirt road, Clark is helpless to save him. This lesson – that we are defined not by our power but by our weaknesses – forms the basis for Superman as much as any of Jonathan’s Midwestern values.
The values passed along by Jonathan Kent in Man of Steel have been discussed at great length since the film’s release, but the actions of Clark Kent in Batman v Superman strongly reinforce Superman’s role as arbiter, not hero. A young Clark Kent was fully capable of saving his earthly father, but the fact that Snyder re-positions this as a choice – not as a representation of his weakness and humanity – offer a different lesson to the character. The biggest lesson Superman learned from his father was that he gets to choose who lives and who dies, subverting his heroism in the name of a global numbers game. Superman lacks a clear sense of morality because he’s never known what it means to be human; he is the god that others claim him to be, and no god from antiquity to the Old Testament operated independent of their own self-interest.
And then there’s the death of Batman’s parents, Thomas and Martha Wayne. The Waynes have been sacrificed on the altar of superhero origin stories more times than we care to count. In the two most recent version of the character – Christopher Nolan’s Batman Begins and the Fox television series Gotham – Thomas is seen to be cooperating with the thieves, doing his best to disarm a situation before it turns irreparably violent. Thomas Wayne’s legacy in these films is that of a humanitarian and a pacifist, a man wise enough – and selfless enough – to recognize the fair trade of a pearl necklace for the life of a loved one. That isn’t the case with Snyder’s Thomas Wayne. In Batman v Superman, we again watch the mugging of Thomas and Martha through the eyes of a young Bruce, but this time Thomas tries to intervene by attacking the mugger. He swings wildly; the gunman pulls the trigger.
Again, a different death leads to a different life lesson. Thomas Wayne does not die due to greed or chance, he dies because he was not able to put the gunman down before he had a chance to pull the trigger. The image that haunts Bruce’s dreams – that of his father moving too slow – teaches him to strike faster, harder, and first. Snyder’s Bruce Wayne is the sort of man who truly believes that the only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun; the idea that Wayne would never kill – a rule so firm in the Batman universe that not even Frank Miller would break it in The Dark Knight Returns – cannot take root in Snyder’s Gotham. Ben Affleck’s Batman is barely recognizable as the caped crusader, instead sharing more in common with the hyper-violent vigilantes of American and Italian cinema from the 1970s.
Herein lies your central conflict. I’ve read many reviews of Batman v Superman that suggests these two have no overt reason to fight, but consider the foundation of each superhero and the animosity makes more sense. In one corner, a Superman who learned that his judgment – his self-interest – is reason enough for some to die and others to live. In the other corner, a Batman who believes wholeheartedly in the need to shoot first and ask questions later. Both men are conditioned to believe that the other superhero represents the biggest threat to the safety of others; what’s more, both men lack the necessary moral safeguards needed to avoid a deadly conflict. It may not be the kind of superhero movie that most fans of the DC Universe were hoping for, but if you embrace these two characters as the semi-monsters they so clearly are, you might just find that Batman v Superman has something to offer.
With this in mind, it was not the conflict between Batman and Superman that gave me pause but their sudden – and inevitable – reconciliation. The comic books demand that the two characters fall somewhere between mutual respect and outright friendship. Snyder’s vision, however, could have allowed one to kill the other without losing any of its internal coherence. You can argue that this compromises the values of these two characters past the point of no return; in response, I might suggest that Snyder – through intent or incompetence – has created a version of the DC Universe that operates on the level of a John Woo Hollywood blockbuster (Broken Arrow, Face/Off) and goes all in on dourness rather than overreacting. It’s not objectively good – not in any sense of the word – but in an ocean of comic book adaptations all asking some version of the question, “What does it mean to be a hero?”, there’s no small satisfaction to be found in a film that answers with, “Who the fuck cares?”
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