Batman V Übermensch: Zack Snyder’s Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy
Batman V Superman: Dawn of Justice was bleak, deeply fetishistic and intermittently preposterous. But it wasn’t terrible. It was, however, terror-filled. And even fascistic.
I’d even go so far as to say that Batman V Superman is a fascinating if flawed film. Ben Affleck wasn’t nearly as bad as Batman a people feared. Gal Godot makes for a great Wonder Woman. And Jeremy Irons holds his own elegantly alongside previous generations of Alfreds. Yes, Jesse Eisenberg’s Lex Luthor was absolutely awful. He played Luthor with the same manic quirks he brings to every role, sometimes suitably. This time not. But much of the film was absolutely gorgeous. But that’s what I mean by “fetishistic” above, too. Snyder everything shoots that way. See 300. See Watchmen. Christopher Nolan certainly brought a dark, gorgeous aesthetic to the Batman movies. But if Nolan often shoots beauty in a way that’s very clinical and chilly, Snyder’s take on it is borderline fascistic, which is odd in a film, which appears to be warning about the dangers of fascism. Or is it?
“Fascism.” I was surprised I didn’t see the word used in many of the more prominent reviews of the film, though a Google search on “zack snyder superman batman fascism” certainly does render quite a few results. It’s pretty clear that Snyder is wrestling —in a somewhat muddled fashion — with the idea of fascism, not just in Batman V Superman, but in many (even most) of his films.
I think the main problem with Batman V Superman — aside from it’s being so bombastic — is that Zack Snyder really overloads the film with the dark Nietzschean themes, which have arguably always been a subtext of the Superman story. Nietzsche’s concept of the Übermensch, of course, translates roughly into English as “Superman” and posits a sort of penultimate human being for us regular, everyday Lumpenvolk to aspire to. And although it maybe unfair to describe Nietzsche as the Godfather of fascism, he and the Übermesnch ideal have long been associated with it.
Now, as far back as the 1940s, some complained about this association of Superman with fascism, too. Writing in his infamous 1954 anti-comic book screed The Seduction of the Innocent (speaking of bombastic!), Fredric Wertham complained that Superman was a “symbol of violent race superiority.” After interviewing juveniles delinquents (which seems like a rather biased sample), Wertham said readers displayed “an exact parallel to the blunting of sensibilities of cruelty that has characterized a whole generation of central European youth fed the Nietzsche-Nazi myth of the exceptional man who is beyond good and evil.” Even Marshall McLuan refers to Superman’s “strong-arm totalitarian methods of the immature and barbaric mind.” And many others have explored the subject since.
Many scenes in Snyder’s film hammer these themes home. The most vivid would be Batman’s dream sequence in which he sees an even darker, deeply fascistic future where the planet lays in ruins and is governed by Superman’s militarized henchmen — clearly patterned after Nazi stormtroopers, down to the “S” badges on their arms. This is portrayed as a horror. A magnificent horror, to be sure, but a horror.
But it’s not just Superman who stoops to fascism. Batman succumbs, too. He’s depicted branding a criminal he apprehends with the bat symbol, knowing (we discover later) it will mean his certain death in prison. Whether this criminal, a human trafficker, deserves that death or not is irrelevant: This isn’t the Batman we’re accustomed to seeing on the big screen. No, rather than eschewing guns, this Batman embraces them.
In The Dark Knight, Nolan positions Lucius Fox to critique Batman’s utilization of surveillance. Similarly, Snyder also deploys Jeremy Irons to explicitly critique Bruce Wayne’s fascist tendencies.
Bruce Wayne: We’re criminals, Alfred. We’ve always been criminals. Nothing’s changed.
Alfred: Oh, yes it has, sir. Everything’s changed. Men fall from the sky, the gods hurl thunderbolts, innocents die. That’s how it starts, sir. The fever, the rage, the feeling of powerlessness that turns good men… cruel.
On the other hand, is that really a critique or is it a justification? Is Alfred expressing that — despite his disapproval — he regretfully understands why men turn to fascism. Is this Snyder winking at us: Yes, torture is terrible, but these are terrifying times? Is he suggesting that in a post-9/11 world, what’s occasionally needed is a little bit of the old ultraviolence?
I don’t really think Snyder expects us to admire Batman for these actions. So I’m not insinuating that Snyder is a fascist, but he does vacillate between explicitly criticizing fascism — or at least giving a nod to criticism — and blatantly glorifying it or fetishizing it. Maybe Snyder’s films are really about his love/hate relationship with fascism. I don’t know.
This dalliance with fascism plays out elsewhere in Snyder’s work, too. Consider his long-term relationship with Frank Miller. They first teamed up for 300 — a film I haven’t seen to be honest, though every screencap I have seen from it betrays a fetish for fascist imagery. I’m not making a huge leap, though, as others have highlighted 300’s fascist themes. Here’s Rick Moody in the Guardian:
The film 300, directed by Zack Snyder, based on a Frank Miller graphic novel of the same name, is just what you would expect from the heavily freighted right-wing filmic propaganda of the post-9/11 period: the Greeks, from which our own putative democracies are descended, must fight to the death against a vast but incompetent army of Persians (those hordes of the Middle East), who are considered here unworthy of characterisation — in fact, every character in the film is unworthy of characterisation — and the noble Spartans (the Greeks in question) achieve heroism despite their glorious deaths on the field at Thermopylae, by virtue of the moral superiority of their belief system and their unmatched courage. [etc]
You may not know, however, that Frank Miller doesn’t just toy with fascist themes. He is, well, a fascist. And he basically turned Batman into a thug. He’s responsible for the Dark Knight that critics began to describe as fascistic in Nolan’s films. Much has been written about Miller’s increasingly outspoken political views in the wake of 9/11, but let’s just quote him verbatim.
Here’s Miller on Occupy Wall Street:
This is no popular uprising. This is garbage. And goodness knows they’re spewing their garbage — both politically and physically — every which way they can find.
Wake up, pond scum. America is at war against a ruthless enemy.
Maybe, between bouts of self-pity and all the other tasty tidbits of narcissism you’ve been served up in your sheltered, comfy little worlds, you’ve heard terms like al-Qaida and Islamicism.
In Holy Terror, Miller also devoted an entire storyline — initially intended to be a Batman story — to a new character called The Fixer and his fight against terrorism, which leaves Islam apparently indistinguishable from terrorism. In Wired, Spencer Ackerman called Holy Terror “a screed against Islam, completely uninterested in any nuance or empathy toward 1.2 billion people he conflates with a few murderous conspiracy theorists.”
So these fascist themes exist throughout Miller’s work. The question is whether Snyder thinks he’s tempering these themes or whether he’s enamored with them.
But Batman V Superman isn’t just about fascism, it’s about God. (Arguably, the two topics are inextricably intertwined.) All those mentions of God in Snyder’s film and the Christ-like appearances by Superman — descending through the clouds, stoic among the clamoring crowds — aren’t accidental. (They started in Man of Steel, really, when Jor-El says of his son, “He’ll be a god to them.”) Nietzsche explicitly devised the Übermensch concept as a replacement for the Christ figure. And Nietzsche practically cornered the market on “God is dead.” So, yes, this is a demonstrably atheistic movie, too. And, specifically, it’s about the death of God. So this isn’t a Carl Sagan’s ain’t-the-universe-grand breed of atheism: This is Nietzschean atheism neat. Lest you doubt it, Lex Luthor hammers the point home with his dialogue. Repeatedly.
Lex Luthor: See, what we call God depends upon our tribe, Clark Joe, ’cause God is tribal; God takes sides! No man in the sky intervened when I was a boy to deliver me from daddy’s fist and abominations. I figured out way back if God is all-powerful, He cannot be all good. And if He is all good, then He cannot be all-powerful. And neither can you be.
Luthor then refers to the battle between Superman and Batman as a battle between “God versus man; day versus night; Son of Krypton versus Bat of Gotham!” And “If man won’t kill God, the Devil will do it!” Then “God bends to my will.” Then, “Now God is good as dead.” And finally? Well [spoiler alert], “Ding-dong, the god is dead.”
I mean, all these mentions aren’t incidental. Snyder’s Superman is both Übermensch and God. And given great power, Superman’s temptation is to resolve the world’s problems with might. And might makes right, right?
Part of me appreciates Snyder for striving to bring some depth of meaning into his comic book storyline, however muddled and heavy handed. Sure, his take on the DC universe may not be an improvement on the lighter, more comical Marvel one, which skates quickly and smartly across post-9/11 anxiety and its resulting politics, but there’s more to his films than simple glowering and gloom, too.
Still, Snyder’s fascination with fascism seems unresolved. To say the least. And he’s certainly not done with exploring the topic yet: Apparently, his next movie is Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead.
