Granddad, Did You Fight In The Zack Snyder Culture War?
It was insufferable nerd versus insufferable nerd…
Did you fight in the culture wars, they’ll ask. And I’ll show them my emotional scars. Because the culture wars didn’t leave any permanent physical damage. We attacked each other with our thumbs while sitting on couches hundreds of miles away from each other. The culture wars of the early 2000s were what the plump men of a dying empire did to entertain themselves. Namely, they tormented each other over their personal entertainment preferences.
I want to tell my grandchildren that I stood for what I believed in. I want to be able to look them in the eyes and say: “I never liked Zack Snyder.” He was a movie director too besotted with stories about frowning übermenschen, I’d quip from my rocking chair. His movies were melancholy love letters to the beauty of violence and pent-up macho fury. I, mean, maybe 300 was good — if you think of it as a flamboyant comedy.
But who knows if they will even care. Who knows if they’ll ask? My side may have lost the culture war by then. I once defended the all-female reboot of Ghostbusters. In retrospect, it was not a good movie. I was wrong. What if I’ve been wrong all along?
The future could belong to Snyder. He could be the only film director remembered…
