Originally published in May 2016.
Zack Snyder’s Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice is as bleak a movie as everyone expected it to be, and I went to see it pretty immediately after it came out, on the command of some vestigial Batman-is-cool part of my brain. More than any character or aspect of the plot, the movie was defined, to me, by an overriding sense of brutality and grimness, and by an exaggerated masculine surety in its presentation and in the characters themselves.
This grimness, meant to be seen as believability, is not a new thing in superhero comics, and that’s exactly where Snyder picks it up and stretches it, ill-fitting, over every inch of the enormous movie.
A small number of mainstream American comics in the mid-80s are usually understood as being the first to clearly articulate this aesthetic in the genre, and setting it free to take over every other superhero book in the following years. Watchmen by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons and The Dark Knight Returns by Frank Miller et al. are maybe the central books: both offer precisely the maximum amount of insight and self-criticism allowed by the stilted medium of monthly pamphlet comics about vigilantes in circus tights. Both use as a means of achieving that insight an unprecedented brutality and physicalism in their action, and a new and naturalistic approach to and critique of the basic premises of the genre: what does it mean to have a secret identity, what does it mean to be more powerful than a nuclear weapon, what does it mean to have the desire for revenge motivate your entire life?
Watchmen (which Snyder adapted, or at least riffed on at great length) meaningfully explored the fascism and inhumanity inherent in the Batman and Superman myths, and what it means to see those characters as in any way admirable. The Dark Knight Returns (which Snyder wrapped into BvS at several points) worked with the implications of power both untethered from and in service of Truth, Justice, and the American Way, and emphasized how broken and inhuman a person Bruce Wayne must be (this is central to Batman: Year One, which came out the next year, by Miller and David Mazzucchelli).
What superhero comics as a genre took away from these books wasn’t, on the whole, their critical edge, but merely a violent and gritty aesthetic of superhero-realism. [ FOOTNOTE: James Harvey recently posted a bunch of recolors of Miller’s newer work, highlighting a related tension in mainstream comics right now: between slick visual literalism and medium-conscious abstraction. Harvey’s position that Miller’s new work is good is extremely controversial, but the post makes an important point about the paradigms implicit in this sort of art. ] And a good thing, too, because if the critique at the heart of Watchmen was meaningfully internalized by the readers and creators of the genre, it seems like it would have rendered it obsolete. Both books have a real “last word” feel about them, which seems a little ridiculous in the light of the decades of aimless, “realistically” gritty-violent superhero comics that followed. Miller’s own later work with superheroes seems to have abandoned Dark Knight’s sense of self-critique, emphasizing instead iconoclasm and violence for their own sake, or for the sake of Miller’s increasingly regressive politics.
We see this aesthetic and attendant lack of critical engagement play out in superhero movies on an ever-grander and more expensive scale. The appearance of realism is paramount: bright colors are muted and textured into plausibility. Characters bleed and suffer to suggest the reality of what’s happening. More narrative energy is expended on helping to suspend the disbelief of the audience than telling a story. Superhero movies must elaborately buffer their outlandish premises in superficial believability, to the point of becoming apologetics for their own genre. This grasping at believability has become more and more desperate as superhero movies have become more and more central to global pop culture. [FOOTNOTE- In Snyder’s own career, as in Miller’s, we see the transition from a use of superhero-realism to some conscious self-critical end to its use just because it’s Cool — or just because it’s now assumed a necessary premise for the genre.]
In the characters of Batman and Superman as they appear in BvS, this aesthetic of blunt violence and assumed realism and rationality emerges as something firmly in line with the modern mainstream vision of masculinity: an ideology of authoritative correctness and total emotional muteness, underwritten by violence. This masculinity doesn’t make stoic, self-possessed people as much as it makes time bombs: the threat of violence is what gives power to it. Superman and Batman are avatars of this extremist masculinity: they embody it with an almost self-parodying intensity. “It’s time you learned what it means to be a man” and “Do you bleed?” are two sparkling pieces of dialogue in the movie that got a huge amount of play in the promotion leading up to its release.
David Bowie and Prince, two of the most famous and successful men to visibly deviate from uptight masculinity, have both recently died, and it’s as if we’re left with a more clamped-down and regressive image of masculinity than ever. Does masculinity (even that of non-heterosexual men) feel the need to more rigidly and violently articulate its boundaries in the presence of greater visibility of alternative sexualities and presentations? BvS feels at points like a work of intentional propaganda, delineating these new ideals of masculine behavior.
It’s inevitable that the threat of violence is what motivates the movie, starting with its very title. And when the two characters do start working together (with, parenthetically, Wonder Woman), it’s inevitable that their shared enemy is itself a blunt extrapolation of that theme: the most imposing, muscular and physically powerful thing that can be written into the story [FOOTNOTE- This enemy is based on the character Doomsday, who is best known for having killed Superman in the Death of Superman, another of Snyder’s sources in BvS. Superman dies in the movie, too, by the way: what’s the use of threats if Superman can’t die?]. Fighting it only makes it stronger, but of course fighting is the only solution to the problem it presents.
The core extremist assumption of the superhero idea is that rightness can be known, and can be enacted by an individual (usually a white, male, physically powerful individual). This assumption has been cursorily questioned throughout the genre’s history, but it can only be questioned in BvS in such a way that creates a violent conflict. This is the only permissible endpoint of such a total sense of rightness and its articulation solely in the language of violence.
The movie and its genre’s feverish preoccupation with believability is in parallel with the fascistic sense of right and wrong that animate these characters. The genre of superhero movies as a whole, in parallel with the rest of mass media, has put itself in a position of absolute ideological authority. The big-budget action movie implicitly puts forth an ultimate vision of reality: slick, expensive, realistic, and unassailable. Any work putting forth another vision is understood only as failing to put forth that ultimate vision (one can imagine similar critiques of, say, Bowie and Prince, that assume in their carefully-managed images a simple failure to appear masculine).
The few memorable knods in superhero movies to the comics’ rich tradition of campy garbage — namely Joel Schumacher’s Batman Forever and Batman & Robin — are universally maligned, and more for their campiness than for their quality as narratives. These critiques are firmly situated in the status-quo context that assumes utter rationality, literalism in storytelling, and stoic, masculine restraint.
The narrative voice of BvS implies its own total definitiveness. There is no ambiguity to speak of. Snyder’s “style” has always been so overblown as to never call into question or meaningfully editorialize on what is actually, literally “happening” in the scene [FOOTNOTE- I really got my hopes up in an early scene, when BvS’s iteration of Batman’s origin story veered into something hallucinatory — but within seconds, Ben Affleck’s Bruce Wayne came in with an authoritative voiceover to reassure us that this was a dream, and should therefore be removed from consideration]. The implication is that this story is being told “realistically,” and in so doing on such an enormous platform, it helps to set up a conceptual space for what “realism” looks like for every subsequent work. This is the great work of mainstream movies being made all over the world: defining what narrative and reality look like, and doing so ignorant of the fact that they’re even making such a statement. Like any ideology with an exclusive claim to truth (religious fundamentalism, scientism, capitalism), it can see nothing but by its own light.
It’s fitting that so much noise was made — both by Snyder and the cast in promoting the movie, and by characters in the movie — about BvS telling a transcendent mythological story, and about Batman and Superman being themselves modern mythic archetypes. Their characters and their story, and this particular movie, are meant to transcend the merely artistic.
It’s fitting that BvS is the first DC Comics film made with a “cinematic universe” in mind. Loose narrative threads are so intolerable to the new aesthetic, and the writing and interpretation of these movies are so impoverished by total literalism, that the multi-movie shared universe is the new ideal. Snyder’s Batman and Superman will fight on, embalmed forever in an internally-consistent closed universe with all questions answered and all morality absolute.
