What follows was originally meant as a rebuttal to the Den of Geek article written by David Crow comparing Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice to the Joel Schumacher film Batman & Robin. I will not be addressing the actual comparisons themselves; rather my focus is on addressing specific remarks that Crow makes about the actual content of Batman v Superman, and through careful analysis of the content of the film, to illustrate that his points are largely assumptions based on misrememberings at best, if not misunderstandings or full-on intentional misrepresentations of said content.
My own assertions regarding the film will be drawn mainly by reading the events shown in the film itself and how those events relate to each other; in other words doing an explication of the film. I will occasionally address Crow’s points of out of order for the sake of clarity, for instance I handle Batman’s entire arc at once, so any comments from Crow relating specifically to Batman’s arc will be addressed in that section of this piece. Where applicable I will also draw on interviews, scholarly sources regarding dramatic structure, crisiscenter.org, and even Wikipedia and Merriam-Webster’s dictionary.
To begin with, before we get into David Crow at all, I’m going to open with this quote from Henry Cavill talking to JOE.ie at one of the press junkets (you can find the video at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zEo…):
“It’s not just the characters pulled straight from the comic books and then there they are on screen; we’re looking into the minds, the psychologies, and the why of the characters.”
“Like, the way we expect movies to be now is to have some kind of […] psychological accuracy. That the person is coming from a place probably diagnosable in some way.”
That’s exactly what I see when I watch this movie; it may not be precisely the versions of the characters that we know, but I’m more interested in whether the motivations make sense in the film itself, and to me, psychologically, they do. But I’ll get into specifics about why as we explore Crow’s words about the film, and how those words do or do not reflect the film itself.
The first several paragraphs of Crow’s article are full of nothing but generalizations with no evidence from the film or anywhere else to back them up. It takes Crow until the eighth paragraph to say anything specific about the movie that is even worth challenging. Up until that point it’s all conveniently glib, carefully crafted sentences containing only rhetorical statements.
Finally, in the eighth paragraph, Crow begins to break down the film as he sees it:
“Ben Affleck is introduced as Bruce Wayne, the only First Responder in Metropolis during the climactic bout between Superman and General Zod in Man of Steel. He saves a little girl from the debris of a collapsed building, and in the midst of so much devastation, the Man Who Would Be Batman stares up to the skies as two gods fight to the death, and he plans to ensure there will be no victor.”
This is problematic on a couple of levels. I’m assuming that his assertion about Wayne being the “only First Responder” is a bit of snark. We know from the end of MoS that all hell had broken loose, and we see a bit of it here. We know the military was helping fight Zod. We see a police horse with no rider walking in the dust clouds as Wayne explores the rubble that used to be the Wayne Financial building.
The second issue is the statement that “he plans to ensure there will be no victor.” How did Crow arrive at that conclusion? What we saw was Bruce look up with a pissed-off expression while holding a little girl who just lost her mother. Let’s put that in context.
The opening of the film, the “Beautiful Lie” sequence, was a dream where Bruce relives his parents’ deaths, funeral, and his discovery of the Batcave. In this telling, Thomas Wayne’s final word is “Martha.” These events are sequenced so that the falling pearls, the falling parents, and Bruce falling into the shaft, are all intercut to heighten the impact of the falling imagery. As Bruce falls into the shaft, a single pearl falls beside him. Traditionally, pearls symbolize purity and innocence, so the broken strand of pearls used in nearly every telling of this sequence symbolizes the end of Bruce’s innocence. Adult Bruce’s narration says something like:
“There was a time above, a time before. There were perfect things. Diamond absolutes. But things fall; things on Earth. And what falls... is fallen.”
“In the dream, they took me to the light: a beautiful lie.”
As fans we know that Bruce became Batman in order to prevent what happened to his family from happening to anyone else. The bats are his totem. We know all of this from every version of the character we’ve ever seen, and we have effectively just received a Cliff’s Notes version of it, but we’re also being told here that becoming Batman was “a beautiful lie.” What redemption it may have granted him, didn’t last. Because the sequence is presented as a dream, this should imply that it’s not just about when he was a kid, it’s also about what the character is currently facing. That’s why he’s dreaming it. He had fallen, the bats metaphorically lifted him up, but now he’s fallen again. So Batman’s journey is to be one of redemption in this movie. That’s the set-up for his entire arc.
So when we see him save that little girl in Metropolis, the imagery is clear. Her mother is gone (note that it’s the mother!), and Bruce has failed to prevent this from happening. He was unable to help. And then he sees Superman and Zod. Now we know from the opening that he thought that by becoming Batman, he had taken control back, had assumed power over his destiny, but Superman’s existence shows him that he’s really powerless after all. This is his second fall. It’s not just the buildings falling around him (falling, again!): the order in Bruce’s world has fallen apart. The illusion of control is shattered. All a beautiful lie. So when he looks up at Superman, he’s seeing the cause of this catastrophe, and thus the target of his rage. He ends up taking that rage out on others, branding human traffickers, marking them for death. Assuming absolute power over them, falling into a kind of depravity. Alfred lets you know this is a recent develpoment when he holds up the headline “BAT BRAND OF JUSTICE” and says, “new rules?”
Alfred also highlights the change with his trailer line:
“That’s how it starts: the fever, the rage. The feeling of powerlessness that turns good men cruel.”
Incidentally, this theme recurs throughout the movie, as with the dream where the bat monster busts out of Martha’s tomb. It begins with blood (what bleeds? Open wounds) because Bruce has been feeling the same sense of helplessness he felt in Crime Alley; perhaps also he is troubled by the blood on his hands. Then the bat busts out: his totem is no longer a symbol of rising out of the darkness, but rather embracing the darkness. An image of horror, the monster he has become.
The idea of making sense out of his world again is spoken aloud by Batman himself when he has Superman all but beaten during the big fight later on:
“I bet your parents taught you that you mean something, that you're here for a reason. My parents taught me a different lesson; dying in the gutter for no reason at all. They taught me the world only makes sense if you force it to.”
“Criminals are like weeds, Alfred; pull one up, another grows in its place. This is about the future of the world. This is my legacy.”
Now, I understand that this isn’t necessarily the version of Batman that everyone wants to see. The Millerbat has taken precedence in popular culture in the last few decades over many other, more nuanced portrayals, but the movie has already demonstrated to us from the very first scene, that this Batman has fallen. That he isn’t what he used to be. All through the film we see things, like the Robin suit with the Joker graffiti, or hear references to good guys being gone, or not staying good, etc. As the opening line, “there was a time above,” these other moments tell us that he hasn’t always been this way. Bruce is looking for a way back up, looking for redemption. He thinks he has to kill Superman in order to do it. When you seek redemptive power in killing, that’s called revenge, and the phrase “redemptive power in killing” makes it pretty clear how misguided that is.
Meanwhile, at Den of Geek, Crow goes on to say:
“However, like everything else wrong with this film, the intriguing idea is left unresolved in a movie that is too busy juggling its commercial duties.”
Left unresolved? Batman spends most of the film gearing up to take Superman down, and as detailed above it’s shown repeatedly that Batman has indeed lost his way, so that’s one way we know that we’re meant to understand he’s in the wrong. Another way being that Superman is Superman, whom we’ve met previously in Man of Steel, and know to be a good guy. Zack Snyder, who seems not to be a good interview at all, did at least pay this some service by telling Stefan Pape of HeyUGuys that the story deals with “the difference between revenge and justice,” which is significant, albeit not specific.
Some may feel that the film is taking too long to get anywhere with this revenge business, but it’s structured as a revenge tragedy, like Hamlet, where there’s a lot of planning and second-guessing to get to the climax. Chris Terrio specifically referenced this when he told Empire Magazine:
"For Batman V Superman I wanted to really dig into everything from ideas about American power to the structure of revenge tragedies…”
“The revenge tragedy, or revenge play, is a dramatic genre in which the protagonist seeks revenge for an imagined or actual injury. The term, revenge tragedy, was first introduced in 1900 by A.H. Thorndike to label a class of plays written in the late Elizabethan and early Jacobean eras.”
That’s exactly what Batman is doing. He’s seeking revenge for, a.) the actual injury of losing so many of his employees in the Black Zero Event, including the little girl’s mother, and b.) the imagined injury, breaking Batman’s purpose of making sense out of Bruce’s world, turning him back into a helpless child in a dark alley. Later on in this piece, I will discuss in more detail the structure of revenge tragedies, and how that relates to this film.
And of course Batman nearly does kill Superman, culminating in the infamous “Martha” scene. I’m going to bring Crow’s comments about this scene in now, instead of later, because it makes sense to me to do it here while we’re talking about Batman’s arc. David Crow:
“Apparently, shocked that Superman’s seeming last words were the same as his father’s—as the Wayne parents’ murder (reenacted for the 900th time in BvS) culminated in Thomas whispering “Martha” before his death—Batman is shaken out of his desire to kill his foe. “Why do you say that name?!” he repeatedly demands. “This moment, in which Batman pivots from desiring Superman’s head on a plate to wishing to team up with him because of a potentially supernatural intervention by providence, is as ludicrous now as when M. Night Shyamalan used the exact same ending in Signs with the magical meaning for “swing away, Merrill” reinstating religious faith into Mel Gibson’s lapsed minister.”
Here’s the stuff Crow’s not talking about with regard to that scene, which I have to assume means he didn’t get it. First of all, during this fight Batman has repeatedly treated Superman as something other than a person. As with the line, “you’re not brave. Men are brave.” Also, what is the last line Batman speaks before Superman says Martha? “You were never a god. You were never even a man!”
Now, taking the rest of what I’ve just laid out, about Batman in this movie, and his journey toward redemption, consider Superman’s exact line. “You’re letting them kill Martha.”
So we see the dream again, about the murders, from the Beautiful Lie sequence. And in context in the opening, it was a dream, not just the event itself. What was the dream about? His loss of innocence, and his fall from grace. Why did young Bruce feel powerless in the dream? He saw his parents die, he couldn’t stop it. Why did he get mad at Superman during the Black Zero Event? The little girl’s mom died, he blames Superman, and he probably blames himself because he couldn’t stop it. Why is he trying to kill Superman now? To reclaim control, by removing that which offends him; to undo the failure, the fall from grace.
“You’re letting them kill Martha.”
And indeed he is. Not just Martha Kent, for if Batman kills Superman, he won’t have saved himself, he won’t have undone the fall, he won’t have avenged his mother. He will have completely undone everything he’s supposed to stand for, which already at this point hangs by a thread. It will be a defeat, not a victory.
Hearing the name of his mother, after the dreams he’s been having about her death, and the powerlessness he felt… it jars him. It’s not just that their moms are both named Martha, or that his dad’s last word was “Martha.” It’s at least three other things as well. First, he sees Superman as a man now, to know that he has a human mom and not just a Kryptonian one. Secondly, it’s the fact that Superman was begging for his mother’s life, not his own. That’s something Batman understands. Lastly, and probably most importantly, it also means that Batman has a chance to do what young Bruce couldn’t do in Crime Alley. He can save Martha. It’s the completion of the hero. THIS will carry him back into the light. He abandons revenge in favor of saving an innocent. That’s why the best Batman action scene is the rescue. Like Boromir at the end of Fellowship of the Ring, he’s fighting to reclaim his soul. Hence the layers of meaning in his line to Superman, and Terrio’s exact choice of phrasing:
“I’ll make you a promise. Martha won’t die tonight.”
“Men are still good. We fight. We kill. We betray one another. But we can rebuild. We can do better. We will. We have to.”
“Twenty years in Gotham, we’ve seen what promises are worth, Alfred. How many good guys are left? How many stayed that way?”
Bruce’s point of view has just been demonstrated to have changed. He has risen above. Then in that final scene, Batman visits Lex Luthor in prison. He’s got his bat-brand ready to go, but instead of branding Lex, he punches the wall. He didn’t brand him. He’s changed. He’s redeemed himself. He’s finally undone the fall.
Batman has a clear character arc, which has just been laid out. Setups and payoffs.
Back to David Crow:
“A few scenes later, Henry Cavill’s Superman is given a proper introduction when he straight up murders a terrorist threatening the life of Lois Lane in the deserts of Africa, but it has no more artistic value than when he later fails to stop Lex Luthor from blowing up Capitol Hill. These acts of terror do not inform the film’s story (or lack thereof) but merely serve as an excuse to have Superman again refuse to smile for a whole movie while he broods in listless, existential exile.”
“Similarly, whereas the ideological war between Batman and the Joker could be one of words in The Dark Knight, Snyder and Affleck’s Batman flies through the film like a computer-generated wrecking ball, murdering seemingly dozens of enemy combatants with machine guns mounted on his Batmobile and Batwing. Any sort of philosophical distinction between Batman and Superman in this form is nearly impossible to articulate since their methods are identical. Jesse Eisenberg espouses, they are “day vs. night,” but they both soar through dark clouds and slaughter their enemies without feeling, compunction, or any sense of awareness; Superman can just get to his meat sack target faster when he isn’t sulking.”
“I didn’t kill those people if that’s what they think!”
Not, “I didn’t kill those people, well, except for that one guy…it looked like I’d been Jell-O wrestling, hee hee hee.” Even if he did kill that one man; the guy was holding Lois as a human shield and threatening to kill her. Whatever happened to him, he deserved. There’s still a big difference between taking one terrorist leader through a wall in a life-or-death situation, and branding guys so they can get shanked in prison. A glaringly huge difference. A stark difference between taking an armed hostage-taker though a wall and blazing a trail of destruction across the waterfront in Gotham. It shows that Clark values innocent life over bad guys if it comes to having to choose. One can make the case that Superman should be above that, and I don’t necessarily disagree, but the statement in question is that there’s no difference between Superman and Batman’s methods, and that is simply untrue.
If you are opposed to any form of killing under any circumstances, I suppose this would be a distinction without a difference, but the fact is that the law of this country, and most if not all other countries, DOES distinguish between different forms of killing and different circumstances. Self-defense, for instance, is an excusable circumstance for killing. Police officers are allowed to kill people who are threatening the life of citizens, the officers themselves, or other officers. Even when someone is convicted of killing, there’s a distinction between murder and manslaughter, and several levels for each, with different sentences attached. In other words, in the real world, killing a guy who has a gun to the head of a reporter is generally not frowned upon by society, while killing people who are not an immediate threat, is certainly wrong.
As for the claim that the incident in the desert and the Capitol bombing don’t serve the story, well, they do, for a couple of reasons. Getting Superman to the desert was orchestrated by Lex in order to be able to blame him for the deaths of all those people (Lex’s private security guys, led by KGBeast, did the actual killings). We soon see why Lex would want this, as he tries to convince Senator Finch to give him an import license for the kryptonite his people got out of the Indian Ocean. If the government believes Superman is dangerous, they’ll want Lex’s deterrent. This will give Lex more success, and more power, as well as giving him the means to destroy Superman. As we will see later, Lex has reasons for wanting Superman gone.
Finch, however, denies the import license, telling Lex:
“Take a bucket of piss and call it Granny’s peach tea. Take a weapon of assassination and call it deterrence. You won’t fool a fly or me. I’m not gonna drink it.”
So Lex kills her. He does it via Scoot McNairy, which has a few benefits for him. The first is to make sure he isn’t directly implicated; but it also winds up Bruce Wayne, and makes Superman look bad publicly. People would blame Superman either for the explosion, or for not saving anybody. Either would have the effect of helping to turn public opinion against Superman so that Lex can work up his “deterrent” without opposition. At any rate, both moments clearly serve the plot, as I have just described.
While we’re on the subject, let’s talk Lex’s motivations. Why would Lex want Superman gone? The answer to that is stated by Lex on the helipad talking to Superman:
“The problem of you on top of everything else. You above all. Ah — 'cause that's what God is. Horus. Apollo. Jehovah. Kal-El... Clark. Joseph. Kent. See, what we call God depends upon our tribe, Clark Joe. Because God is tribal. God takes sides. No man in the sky intervened when I was a boy to deliver me from Daddy's fists and abominations! I figured it out way back: if God is all-powerful, he cannot be all good. And if he's all good, then he cannot be all-powerful. And neither can you be. They need to see the fraud you are. With their eyes. The blood on your hands.”
This shows that Lex not only has daddy issues, but that he has transferred them onto God, and has further transferred his God issues, onto Superman. Incidentally in this particular instance it doesn’t matter if the viewer wants to see Superman as a God / Jesus-figure, or not; it only matters that Lex sees him that way, and that this is the source of his hatred for Superman.
This fixation on power that overshadows his own genius is also spoken to when Lex says, during the library benefit:
“Books are knowledge and knowledge is power, and I am... no. Um, no. What am I? What was I saying? The bittersweet pain among men is having knowledge with no power because... because that is *paradoxical* and, um... thank you for coming.”
On one level this may refer to his need to get his hands on the Indian kryptonite, because without it he has the knowledge and not the power. But on another level it speaks to Lex on the whole. He has always been a genius, but his dad had violent, abusive power over him; he was a victim, helpless, so he distrusts power. At the Capitol he tells Senator Finch that power can’t be innocent. He is repeatedly shown to have a pathological need to be in control, again probably due to what his father did to him as a child. It is common knowledge that abuse is something that is passed on (you can read all about that at http://www.crisiscenter.org/pdfs/ge… ).
Jesse Eisenberg sums up the character’s core fairly succinctly in discussing his performance with The Daily Beast:
“Even playing a villain in a superhero movie I’m trying to use my own feelings of powerlessness, of injustice, righteousness, dogmatism—all these feelings I have, I impose them on this character who obviously looks very different and behaves very different but is in some way connected to my personal experience.”
Incidentally this is also why the bit with the Jolly Rancher. Lex was purposefully disrespecting someone he needed something from. It’s a way of dominating the guy, of showing him who the “real” boss is. An old rule in screenwriting is that you show who has power by having people to come to see the person in power, rather than the person in power going to see them. That’s why people come into Don Corleone’s office in “The Godfather,” rather than him coming to see them. It’s also why, when the film takes Vito out of his house, it’s so he can get shot. Likewise here, people are constantly coming to see Lex, either at his home or his office. The one time he comes to see Senator Finch, he never formally enters her domain, both a sign that he will not concede power to her and, of course, because he’s about to have her blown up. Lex leaves his own turf a second time, when he goes into the crashed Kryptonian ship. Presumably this is because he expects to find knowledge there that he can use. We later learn (given his talk about Darkseid and finally the released deleted scene) he also finds that even if he causes Superman to be destroyed, there is someone terrifyingly powerful who is on his way.
What else does Lex do in the Kryptonian ship? Creates Doomsday. I’m going to transplant one of Crow’s points again, so that I can handle all of the Lex stuff together.
“Like all the other characters without capes in BvS, Wonder Woman and Doomsday are so busily shoehorned into the movie that Spider-Man 3 is a naturalist indie drama by comparison.”
It’s a funny turn of phrase, but here’s the thing about Doomsday: Yes, his appearance seems rather sudden, which I admit I am hoping is at least partially an artifact of the half-hour cut from the film. Doomsday himself, though, fits the themes of Lex’s part of the story. Remember Lex’s pile of issues, daddy issues to God issues, God issues to Superman. Lex creating Doomsday looks like a ritual, doesn’t it? He’s got a sacrifice, he uses blood. And he says the line, “if man won’t kill God, the devil will do it.” We can therefore infer that Luthor has, symbolically, sold his soul. He’s made a metaphorical deal with the devil. And what happens when you make a deal with the devil? You lose.
The thing we tend to forget in this conversation is that Lex was interested in the other “meta-humans” as well. He asked specifically for access to the crashed ship. Assuming, as is logical, that he had no idea at that point about Doomsday, or Darkseid, why did Lex want access to the ship? My guess is that he was hoping he would find some knowledge or technology that he could exploit, perhaps in his further war on the meta-humans. What he found instead was the knowledge that there is power out there in the universe that is beyond comprehension, and given what we know of his issues, it’s not hard to imagine that such a realization would break him.
But to Crow’s point, yes, for sure we don’t know why Lex would want to create Doomsday. Doomsday in the comics has his origins on Krypton, and what little explanation there is in the movie pays tribute to that (The Ultimate, anyone?). Which indicates clearly that this Doomsday isn’t the first of his kind. Doomsday also has a connection to Darkseid in the comics, having wrought havoc on Apokolips for a time. In one of the animated films, Darkseid deploys an army of Doomsday clones that Batman, Superman, and Wonder Woman end up fighting. In more recent comics, the Kryptonians are said to have fought a war against Doomsday. In some stories even Lex has been connected to Doomsday, as when he brought him back to life in the comics using Superman’s DNA. In other words, Doomsday’s appearance in this film is sudden, but the way he is used isn’t really as off-model as it may seem. Which really only begs the question why did Lex do this?
Was Doomsday in this film a ploy to bring the other meta-humans out to play? Was it something Lex did to set the stage for Darkseid’s arrival? Or was he just a scorched-earth policy? Without knowing what happened on that ship, we don’t really know the answer. I do hope that either the extended cut, or the Justice League movies, get into this more. For the purposes of this film, though, it doesn’t really matter if Luthor has no plan to stop Doomsday once Superman is dead. Luthor made a deal with the devil. He finally gave away his power, out of spite for God (and Superman the god-figure). A desperate move, and a dangerous one. Like the ancient proverb, “the enemy of my enemy is my friend.” The idea that it’s all gotten away from Lex is made clear enough in the final confrontation between him and Batman, where Batman shows that he is once again in control of himself, while Lex is in no way in control at all. He is both a prisoner, and a crazy person, ranting about the coming of Darkseid. He has succeeded only in breaking himself.
Crow again, on Batman and Superman’s methods:
“They are essentially fascists inflicting their viewpoint onto the world. But any such pseudo-intellectual underpinnings are as buried in sound and fury as Batman’s supposed arc about trusting Chris O’Donnell to drive his car in Batman & Robin. It’s just rhetorical lip-service for a half-baked plot that strings together a series of mindless set-pieces, whether they be of dancing gorillas or Batman sounding like an ape as he wails on Superman’s face.”
This is the full definition of Fascism, from Merriam-Webster:
- often capitalized : a political philosophy, movement, or regime (as that of the Fascisti) that exalts nation and often race above the individual and that stands for a centralized autocratic government headed by a dictatorial leader, severe economic and social regimentation, and forcible suppression of opposition
- a tendency toward or actual exercise of strong autocratic or dictatorial control <early instances of army fascism and brutality — J. W. Aldridge>
In other words, David Crow has no idea what a fascist is, and that entire paragraph is nonsense. Evidently he thinks that vigilantism equals fascism, when it’s really closer to the opposite extreme. Fascism is absolute rule of government, all power taken away from the people, and no opposition allowed. Vigilantism is almost anarchical, it’s a rejection of the justice of the State, the notion that the government won’t see justice done so private individuals will, without the government’s consent or support. In the real world we tend to frown on vigilantism because it is dangerous to let people do whatever they want to.
On paper, though, superheroes are almost exclusively vigilantes, so we know that in certain contexts, we would allow it… as when a private citizen sees a crime happening and intervenes on behalf of the victim, something that The Dark Knight talked about a little. That film also talked about the fact that the Balebat’s motivations couldn’t be personal, that he had to rise above his own desires and be truly altruistic in order to be more than a vigilante. It’s a questionable distinction, though, and BvS doesn’t put as fine a point upon it. In this film, Bruce reminds Alfred that they have always been criminals, as they are operating outside the law. Clark says as much about him on a few occasions, including at Lex’s fundraiser. Bruce immediately rebuts that point by saying the same is true of Superman, which is also strictly true.
“In the first climax of Batman v Superman—a film so bloated that it needs two finales to justify its destruction porn—Batman and Superman finally commence the war promised in the title. Granted, it makes both of them look like rubes since they were easily manipulated by an outside force. (Seriously, why does Batman never investigate who sent him those letters, and why does Superman not use his super-hearing to find his kidnapped mother, instead of doing the bidding of Lex Luthor?) But when the eponymous donnybrook is finally commenced, Batman becomes the more damnable monster since he won’t stop to listen to Superman or have a conversation about someone being kidnapped. He instead clobbers the hell out of the other guy in a cape.”
It’s only two climaxes if you try to force this film to fit into a three-act dramatic structure, but that isn’t its intent. As I mentioned earlier, Chris Terrio specifically referenced the revenge tragedy, which in Elizabethan terms is generally a five-act play. It doesn’t make sense to fault the film for not having a three-act structure, as there is more than one dramatic structure that a story can have. It’s basically a straw man argument since you first have to take it as a given that all films are meant to have a three-act structure before you can bitch that this one doesn’t. Again, I’ll get into the five-act structure towards the end of this piece.
Moving on, why would Batman investigate who sent the letters to him? They’re written on the checks he sent to Wallace Keefe, why wouldn’t he assume it was Keefe who sent them back? And then Keefe blows himself up pretty much immediately after that, which would seem a clear indicator that there’s nothing left to investigate. Keefe may have willingly gone to his death, but whether he did or not, he is Lex’s patsy. Lex is responsible but nobody will connect him to it since Keefe’s checks came to Bruce with insane scrawling on them, and Keefe smuggled an explosive into the hearing and blew everybody up. It’s a neat little package. What impetus would there be for Batman to investigate any further? When one investigates, it’s typically because one has reason to suspect that there’s anything to discover.
Further, as evidenced by the film, and by what I described in the Batman section of this writing…Batman was probably going to end up fighting Superman no matter what. That was written all over his face when he watched Clark and Zod streaming across the sky at the beginning. Crow even acknowledged that, remember? All Lex did was dictate the timetable.
Regarding Superman, I’ll agree that he could probably have found another solution other than fighting Batman, but what was it Lex said?
“If you kill me, Martha dies. And if you fly away — Martha also dies. But if you kill the Bat... Martha lives.”
I suppose there’s room there for interpretation, but I think “if you fly away” means basically what it sounds like, if Clark doesn’t go to fight Batman, if they think he’s looking for her…they’ll kill her. I admit it’s thin; we think of Superman as being able to do anything. We’ve explored Bruce, we’ve explored Lex; let’s look at Superman’s arc in the film.
In the beginning, Superman acts unilaterally, saving Lois, and walking into a frameup. Senator Finch and her committee are questioning if he did the right thing. This reminds me of Batman in “Batman Begins” saving Rachel Dawes when, as Michael Caine’s Alfred reminded him, “what you’re doing has to be beyond that.” Like Batman in the Dark Knight trilogy, Superman wants to inspire people to his dramatic example. He has to be more than the guy who saves his girlfriend.
That would be what Lois meant by, “I don’t know if it’s possible for you to love me, and be you.” We then see Clark starting his crusade to stop the Batman’s “one man reign of terror.” When he shows up to congress to face the accusations against him and speak up for himself, Wallace Keefe’s chair blows up and everybody dies in an instant, leaving Clark suddenly surrounded by death and destruction. Failure. He’s been purely reactive, attentive to the person he loves, and has failed to live up to the symbol he’s supposed to be. He’s caught between his nature as a man with desires and dreams, and his responsibility as a man who can be so much more, a hero, a savior, the embodiment of hope.
He speaks at various times to his mother, Martha, and, by way of a memory, to his father Jonathan as well. His mom tells him:
“Be their hero, Clark. Be their angel, be their monument, be whatever they need you to be. Or be none of it. You don’t owe this world a thing. You never did.”
A loving mother telling her son that he’s got the freedom to choose his destiny – incidentally the freedom that Lara and Jor-El always wanted him to have. For Jonathan’s part:
“I remember one season the water came bad. I couldn't have been twelve. Dad had out the shovels and we went at it all night. We worked 'til I think I fainted, but we managed to stop the water. We saved the farm. Your grandma baked me a cake, said I was a hero. Later that day we found out we blocked the water alright - we sent it upstream. The whole Lang farm washed away. While I ate my hero cake, their horses were drowning. I used to hear them wailing in my sleep.” “Did the nightmares ever stop?” “Yeah. When I met your mother. She gave me faith that there's good in this world. She was my world.”
That seems to amount to the idea that doing good is always an uphill battle; that bad things will always happen somewhere. That you do the good you can, because there is good in the world, and people need to see it. And therefore you have to find the thing that gives you a reason to keep going, and hold on to it. In other words, Clark shouldn’t have to choose between the two sides of his nature. He is who he is. If Lois shows him the good in the world, if she inspires him, and if he inspires others, then she’s worth protecting. Maybe there is no distinction at all.
Then Lex calls him by throwing Lois off the roof and when Clark confronts him, his willingness to believe that there is good out there is immediately shaken by Luthor having taken Martha. He hits Superman with the puzzle of having to choose between being all-powerful and being all-good.
Clark tells Lois:
“I have to go to Gotham to convince him to help me. Or he has to die. No one stays good in this world.”
This is another thing I hope the extended cut clarifies for us all just a little, but the thing I take away from this is that Superman is still struggling to reconcile the two sides of his nature. If he tries to save his mom and she dies, Luthor wins. If he has to kill Batman to save his mom, Luthor wins. But if he can get Batman to help him…if he can find one single ally in this world who can stand beside him…then he doesn’t have to BE all-powerful. He can settle for all-good. That’s how you break the trap. So despite being shaken, Superman acts in good faith: he tries to talk to Batman instead of pummeling him, believing that he’s more than just a monster.
“Bruce, you have to listen to me. I was wrong. It’s Lex, he wants to – “
But Bruce only wants to fight. Crow goes on a rant at this point, one that is as unfocused and muddy as he accuses Snyder’s film of being.
“With all the self-righteous nastiness of a 2016 presidential frontrunner, Batman rants, “My parents taught me a different lesson dying in the gutter. This world doesn’t make sense unless you force it to!” All but exclaiming he thinks we need to build a wall, Batman in essence announces that “might makes right,” and his strongman authority allows him the ability to judge other men (and superheroes) worthy of being executed with extreme prejudice.”
It seems to me that Crow is ranting about some other stuff that pisses him off, and not the movie at all. Crow is imputing his own baggage into the film. It seems like he continues to miss the fact that Batman is intended to be the bad guy here, that he has “fallen,” and is on a misguided quest for vengeance.
At last, though, Superman does break through. Because he chose to believe that there’s good in people, even somebody as messed up as Batman was at that point. They don’t instantly become best friends as some suggest, but they understand each other at last, and that’s the important thing. Clark continues with his “faith that there’s good in the world” trajectory and decides to trust Batman with his mother’s life. That’s a big move, but Superman knows it’s the only choice he’s got, he’s got to get to the scout ship. Now he doesn’t have to be all-powerful. And yes I know Bruce tells Martha, “I’m a friend of your son’s.” That’s the best way to calm her, isn’t it? He didn’t say they were brothers or besties or anything. They’re on the same side now. Allies. Another word for that is “friends.”
A little later, Superman leaves the Doomsday fight to save Lois’s life yet again, and here he recovers Batman’s spear. Before he flies off, kryptonite spear in hand, to end Doomsday’s rampage, Superman tells Lois:
“This is my world. You are my world.”
This is obviously a callback to his conversation with Jonathan on the mountain, but what does that mean? Throughout the film, he’s been forced to choose between saving one person, and saving the world. One could argue that the biggest failure in the Capitol bombing is that he didn’t do either one. That condundrum, in fact, mirrors his choice at the end of “Man of Steel,” killing Zod to save the world, accepting a partial defeat for the sake of the greater victory. A world without Lois isn’t worth fighting for. A world with her in it, is worth dying for. His faith in goodness is fully restored. There is good in the world, and it’s worth fighting for, even if there are consequences. Even if that consequence is his own death. He doesn’t have to be all-powerful to be a symbol. He just has to be all good. In effect, where Lex gave up his power to bring destruction, Superman gives up his power, so to speak, to end that destruction.
The rant continues:
“Personally, I suspect that Snyder is trying to achieve the accolades he saw Christopher Nolan receive for making his superhero an allegory about the use of American power in the 21st century by now retreading in 2016 the points that Alan Moore’s Watchmen graphic novel made also about superheroes 30 years ago. However, in The Dark Knight films, Batman’s philosophy is constantly challenged by the likes of both villains and his allies, and he is perpetually grappling with his own ethical self-doubts. Snyder, on the other hand, does not seem to understand that Watchmen is diametrically opposed to such positive nuance about centralized authority since that book views superheroes (and American myths about rugged individualism in general) to be naïve, dangerous, and potentially dictatorial.”
Superman’s arc in this film mirrors several aspects of Batman’s from The Dark Knight, suggesting that one man can indeed have too much power, but what do you do when he’s literally born with that power and can’t turn it off? What I don’t understand is how Crow keeps getting on the subject of Watchmen. This film has nothing to do with that one. The argument seems to say, “this film makes the same points as Watchmen, but also doesn’t make those points at all.”
I can’t tell you what Crow’s point is, but I would remind him that Zack Snyder did not write this movie. Chris Terrio did. I also would say that this isn’t another adaptation of Watchmen or a remake of The Dark Knight, and I see no reason to assume it wanted to be. I think it’s clear by now that this film has its own point of view. In Chris Terrio’s own words this was a revenge tragedy. He also referenced “ideas about American power,” so, okay, Crow uses that exact phrase. Let’s ask ourselves, then, what does this film say about power?
It says that people like Lex who seek power are often driven by dark, personal purposes and not altruistic ones. It says that fear is a terrible reason to act out, because it is irrational and destructive, as is the case with Batman. It contrasts all of that with a Superman who has all sorts of power and hesitates to use it because he worries that it may do more harm than good. An insanely powerful being who wants to inspire hope, not fear, surrounded by power-hungry players who make him out a bogeyman to justify their bad behavior. While I wouldn’t call that a particularly deep line of thinking on Terrio’s part, I also wouldn’t call it wrong as it relates to the real world.
It looks to me like Superman is the one representing the purest idea of American power. He’s an idea, perhaps an ideal; he wants to make the world better, he wants to help people. But people worry that when he acts, he’s overstepping his authority. When you take sides, you make enemies as well as friends. Look at the US’s history in foreign relations. How many times in the 20th century have we gotten into fights that didn’t really involve us? Korea? Vietnam? Those were driven by fear – the fear of the spread of communism. People used to worry about stuff like that. The war in Iraq? The fear of terrorist attacks, the fear of a repeat of September 11th. Acting out of fear is tempting, because fear is powerful. Politicians control us through fear all the time, whether it’s used as an excuse to build a stupid wall along a border, or to control what kind of lightbulbs you use. We know that fear should never dictate our lifestyle in any way, and it should never be used as an excuse to treat a single human being like trash.
Lex’s distrust for power drove him, essentially, to destruction. Bruce let his fear and anger be an excuse for him to dehumanize Superman, and only when Superman became human in his eyes did he feel compassion for the Man of Steel. Clark just wants to apply his power in a meaningful and inspirational way. If people, such as Lex, and Bruce, are afraid of him, and if that fear makes them do awful things (and boy did it ever) then how is he a force for good? That’s part of the puzzle. How do you inspire hope and not fear when you can melt the world by looking at it a little too intently? And though you care deeply about someone, can you be a force for good if you’re playing favorites? Or is that just being “tribal,” as Lex would say?
“All of the heroes for next year’s Justice League movie are also bizarrely introduced from security videos kept by Lex Luthor, which are no more satisfying or less hilarious than when Clooney and O’Donnell watched Arnold Schwarzenegger falling into an “icy” swimming pool in Batman & Robin’s CCTV origin for its main villain.”
This was actually my main complaint about the film after my first viewing. The security videos of Flash, Aquaman, Cyborg, and Wonder Woman did feel awkward to me, but I think the bigger sin isn’t the clips themselves, but the baffling placement of them in the edit. I think if they were placed somewhere where they didn’t interrupt the run-up to the big fight, it would have made more sense. I am not sure, though, what the right place would be. I am only sure that the place where they are in the film, isn’t it.
The Knightmare sequence was also weird. Snyder evidently talked in an interview about having created that himself, it wasn’t part of Terrio’s script, and you can feel that because it’s not like the other dream sequences, and doesn’t follow their vibe. It breaks the pattern of the other dreams. Although, yes, the first was a vision of the past, the second a vision of the present, and the third, maybe a vision of the future. It also was about him trying to steal Lex’s kryptonite and getting killed by an evil Superman, so it’s a parallel to what he was working on. I would also note that it is certainly a look at what could happen if Superman chose being all-powerful, over being all-good. Perhaps that’s the point.
The problem with this sequence is that it’s unclear how Bruce could dream about Darkseid, whom he does not know exists, or if it really is at dream at all; and then the Flash’s appearance on top of that, creates a lot of confusion. That makes it seem like it should be a vision, but Bruce is shown waking up. Twice. Was it a dream or a vision? Or was one a dream and the other a vision? Will we ever find out? Do we really want to? Snyder implied during that junket interview with Stefan Pape of HeyUGuys, that we will find out. Regardless, to me this is the film’s most serious misstep, and the only one that I think does real harm to the story, especially because for anyone who hasn’t read a bunch of comics, it’s even more confusing than it is for us, and it’s confusing enough already.
I have to skip Crow’s next two paragraphs, as they are again full of nothing but blustering rhetoric that makes no particular meaningful observations except that angry man is angry and not as smart as he thinks he is.
“Just as Batman & Robin was the nadir of everything wrong with superhero movies of its era, Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice is a Doomsday-shaped monster that represents all the worst tendencies of modern superhero movies. It has the “darkness” and violence of Christopher Nolan’s Batman films with none of their cleverness, and it is a hapless, formless, and hideous mess that gropes after the shared universe formula of Marvel Studios—but with the opposite effect since it makes us not desire to see more of these characters.”
I should think that everything I’ve just written above shows that the film is not so devoid of cleverness, and that with the exceptions of the ill-conceived Knightmare sequence, and the strange Justice League setup scenes, it’s certainly not hapless. There are a few definite weak points, most of which could prove to be a result of the studio-mandated runtime than either the script or the material that was shot. Only time will answer that.
To address the “formless” accusations, I’m going to have to finally get into the five act structure. Revenge tragedies, as a form, were invented by the ancient Greeks, but were adapted into new forms over time, most famously in the Elizabethan era, for example many of the plays of William Shakespeare. Elizabethan plays take place across five acts, which seems to be the structure Terrio went for. The five-act structure, as laid out by Gustav Freytag in his book “Technique of the Drama,” published in 1895, is as follows:
ACT I: EXPOSITION ACT II: RISING ACTION ACT III: CLIMAX ACT IV: FALLING ACTION ACT V: DENOUEMENT (In tragedies the denouement is always a catastrophe)
A friend of mine linked me to a great write-up of this movie with regard to its five-act Shakespearean-style structure, and that author re-stated these into Shakesperean terms as follows:
ACT I: Exposition – the Call for Vengeance ACT II: Anticipation – Detailed Planning of RevengeACT III: Confrontation Between Hero and Intended Victim ACT IV: Delay Because Hero Decides to Perform the Killing ACT V: Completion of the Hero
In either case, the breakdown is clear. From the Beautiful Lie, through the Black Zero event, through Lois in Nairomi and the hearings about the Nairomi incident, are all part of act one. This is the setup for the conflict.
Act two is where Bruce is looking for the White Portuguese, trying to get his hands on the Kryptonite, while Lex is trying to get it into the country himself and Clark decides to investigate Batman. The fundraiser. Everyone is at odds.
Act three is the kryptonite chase and the confrontation between Batman and Superman, Bruce getting the kryptonite after all.
Act four has the Capitol bombing, the letters, the training, the kidnap, the helipad and the fight, culminating in the infamous Martha scene.
Act Five, then – the catastrophe – would be the Doomsday fight and the death of Superman, his funeral, etc.
In any case, the film has a very specific structure and Chris Terrio did exactly what he said he was doing, he wrote a revenge tragedy. Formless, then, it is not. For a whole metric ton more information on Revenge Tragedies, and how they are structured, including the different character archetypes used and how this film definitely uses them, you can check out the extremely detailed writeup at: http://pulpklatura.tumblr.com/post/…
That author explained it with far more aplomb than I could hope to here. And now to Crow, one last time:
“It is a movie that thinks having Batman battling a giant CGI bat in his dreams is artful, and seeing him later throw a grenade at an unconscious man is heroic.”
Neither of those things happened in this movie. He did not battle the giant bat, and he did not throw that grenade. That kind of drastic misunderstanding or misrepresentation of events, which runs rampant through the article, is a perfect indicator that David Crow did not, and does not, understand Batman v Superman, or is misrepresenting it for some reason. In either case, if his opinion on the film is based on that sort of disingenuous thought, then that opinion has no evaluative usefulness.
All of this may not change anyone’s mind, but I hope some of you at least now understand why I and so many others do like the film, having read here a detailed account of what we see in it.
Thank you very much for this! I saw that there were no comments posted on here (possibly leading you to believe there were no readers). I will tell you now I have read this entire analysis and it mirrors my reading of the film to a T. I also want to acknowledge that your efforts to properly adjudicate BvS have not gone unnoticed and is much appreciated. While your analysis on the film is mostly regarding the text, the visual storytelling is also master class (Admittedly I referring the the Ultimate Cut that was released after your time of your writing this)! Also, while the handling of future movie set-up may be problematic, it’s only a small price to pay for what I truly consider to be a masterpiece of collaborative art.
Oh, man, I’m so glad to have received a comment on this piece… I love the Ultimate Edition, and I felt vindicated by certain aspects of it since the stuff that was put back in, made the African frame job clearer, gave Clark a more fully-realized story arc, and even clarified the bat-brand subplot in a way I did not anticipate, but that helped make the point.
It’s true I did not get into the visual storytelling aspect, but as someone who collaborates with an indie director on some (extremely) small projects, I heard from him all about how the visual storytelling language was flawless. I majored in art, back in my college days, and I understand that Zack Snyder’s background is in art history. I think it shows. Any freeze-frame from one of his movies looks like a work of art, and he makes some interesting decisions that support the narrative.
It is, for instance, not lost on me that Bruce Wayne was living in an ACTUAL glass house.
And throwing metaphorical stones.