You know what? I would have waited another year or two for the finished version of Snyder’s Justice League than the crappy version of Joss Whedon WB gave us
Exactly. The film couldn’t have been more explicit about the fact that we’re not supposed to see him as being in the right and people still try to paint it as a glorification of his actions and accuse the film of endorsing toxic masculinity which is just olympic-level hypocrisy after all the shit They’ve given Clark for not being a perpetually smiling goon and daring to have complicated emotions.
It is a remarkable dichotomy. In many ways, Clark is the most human of us all. Then… He shoots fire from the skies and it is difficult not to think of him as a god. And how fortunate we all are that it does not occur to him.
it’s just bizarre to me that what draws me to bruce wayne as a character is how broken he is psychologically, how easy it is for him to want to ignore his own code, how much time he spends in ISSUE after ISSUE dreaming of killing criminals, of killing himself, of the deaths he has caused by accident and trying to bury them so far back he never has to deal with them.
and then we got that version of bruce wayne on screen, and people said it wasn’t really batman, batman would never act like that. it’s all i’ve EVER read batman as, and people who have never picked up a comic want to take away what makes him intensely precious to me? they don’t want to see him struggle with weighty moral problems and his own mental labyrinth? they don’t want that?
that’s why bvs criticism really, really bugs me, like on a deep level. it’s really crazy that people didn’t want to see ONE version of batman that’s as broken on the outside as how he always feels, when there are a million other versions of batman that are calmer, saner, more confident. like why are you so afraid of letting bruce wayne be afraid?
It’s the same reason they can’t stand a Superman that has doubts and existential dilemmas. They can’t stand the idea that these characters, who are ideals to them of what we can be, the perfect, strong, powerful hero, they can’t stand that they are still human, with human struggles and slave to their emotions.
You can’t have a power fantasy with emotional weaknesses, because we’re trained to think that the perfect person is a flawless person. But that’s not true. To be a perfect human is to be flawed. If you’re not flawed you’re essentially a god, and that separates you from humanity.
Arguably what makes Superman perfect is that he has all of the emotional strain that we do and still manages to save the world. He has godlike powers, but he isn’t a god, he doesn’t want to be a god either, he just wants to help people.
And what makes Batman such a compelling character is that he is so broken, and could be the most powerful villain ever, but he is still compelled to do good. Even when he loses his way, it’s still for the greater good, in his mind. And of course, that’s why he really was the main villain of BvS. Because villains always think what they’re doing is right, and can always justify their wrongs. What the audience struggled with is reconciling the ideas that a hero can be wrong. And he was wrong. People complaining that his actions aren’t true to the character are missing what his character is. Because this was Batman finally going off the edge that he’s balanced so precariously on. The edge that he looks down from and knows how easy and comforting the fall could be. But when he hits the ground, he realises that it’s ugly, painful and messy down there. So he has a choice, stay down there, a broken, ugly creature, or climb back up and get a clear perspective again.
Being shown this in a superhero movie is unprecedented. And to be shown it with arguably the most well known and well loved characters in superhero history is unfathomably brave and bold.
And people struggled to understand that if they had a problem with the way the character was behaving, it’s because they were supposed to.
But it damaged their perfect ideal, it punctured the puffed out chest of their power fantasy. There was no understanding that in saying that these characters could fail and still overcome, that they were even more powerful than ever shown. And to be shown them overcoming such obstacles is in fact an inspiration to people with personal struggles. They don’t want to accept that, because to put an element of effort into the power fantasy takes away their “fun”, but it adds so much more meaning. They want perfection and they want zero effort to achieve it. They don’t want human personalities and enotions, because those are seen as weak and distracting. They want cheat codes and convenience, and watching Batman struggle with the very mental illness that makes him the hero he is wasn’t convenient for them. It was difficult, it was real, it was human… it was perfect.
By insisting on an adult rating, Tarantino confirms that his Star Trek will be a gritty reboot. This already sounds like a bad idea, because Tarantino’s brand of sex and violence is fundamentally unsuited to Star Trek. It’s also a textbook example of a depressing Hollywood trend:
J.J. Abrams already did this to Star Trek in 2009. While Abrams’ Star Trek is a fun blockbuster, it misunderstands the Original Series cast and what they stood for. His version of Kirk is an arrogant frat boy who treats women like crap and forms an antagonistic rivalry with Spock. He’s also motivated by daddy issues, an overused theme among male filmmakers.
If you watch the 1960s show, you’ll understand the difference. William Shatner‘s Kirk is a charming romantic lead, a thoughtful leader, and kind of a bookworm.
Toxic masculinity is a formative theme in gritty reboots. Zack Snyder did something similar with Batman v Superman, and Guy Ritchie is the king of this phenomenon. He rebooted King Arthur (a romance!) as a macho gangster story, and Sherlock Holmes as an action movie peppered with no-homo humor.
But what about non-gritty reboots? What would they look like?
Except that Batman v Superman was all about deconstructing Toxic masculinity as evidenced by the fact that we are very clearly not supposed to side with Bruce or see him as being in the right.
Frankly that accusation pisses me off as one of the dominant criticisms against Zack Snyder’s Superman films has been his portrayal of Superman which is so often dismissed as being ‘’grimdark’’ and people have gone out of Their way to paint DCEU Superman is as negative a light as possible simply because he struggles with fear, loneliness and being met with hatred. Fanboys expect him to shrug all this off and keep smiling and to not be overwhelmed or fall into any kind of despair even though those are two things that pretty much anyone else would do. These posts go into more detail about it
I was rewatching BvS last night and honestly my favorite thing (or one of my favorite things) about it was all the God/Superman parallels and how Clark dealt with it. Like, throughout the movie people either worshipped him as a god, a savior or they condemned him out of fear of the unknown. I really loved how the movie explored the concept of: here’s this alien we know nothing about that’s flying around trying to save the world and we have no clue what to do with him. It showed the fickleness of humanity. How one minute we’ll be in total awe of something only to turn on it when something happens that we don’t like/approve of/understand. I haven’t read the comics so I’m not sure if this can be found there as well, but I feel like the parallels are especially relevant to today and I’m so happy it was in the movie. The world seems to be searching for a hero but if one came along how would we treat them?
I just need everyone at WB to know that the Superman presented in Justice League did not fill me with hope or optimism because that wasn’t Superman, that was the flanderization of his character not only from the two movies with him but from the comics as well.
Miss me with the whole “he’s full of optimism now” because no, he was not, we saw literally nothing of the sort, all of those scenes were cut. He saved an empty building and quipped, which part of that makes him more hopeful than he’s been in MoS or BvS? So again, miss me with the Lies, because telling me that instead of showing me that is tiring.
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