Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice (2016)

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djross
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Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice (2016)

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Big-time Hollywood superhero movies began forty years ago, with Superman: The Movie (1978), part of the great shift to a new cinematic economy based around blockbuster spectacles, which began with Jaws (1975), Star Wars (1976) and Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977). Superman was at that time the most expensive movie ever made, taking as its dramatic tension the possibility of nuclear devastation, in a world where the chance of ‘mutually assured destruction’ remained the most probable ‘existential’ threat. Richard Lester’s role in the Superman movies perhaps indicated a last surviving remnant of a counter-cultural spirit of ‘freedom’ and ‘anarchism’, but Reeve's all-American-boy can-do-ism in the face of planetary-scale problems, even if tempered with irony and a certain amount of demythologization, perhaps already foreshadowed the coming conservative revolution of Reaganism, which represented an anti-political economic anxiety at the domestic level, but a renewed will to escape the frozen gridlock of détente at the international level (or at least the simulacrum of such a renewal).

In the four decades since, superhero movies have continued to rise in status within the system of Hollywood generic categorizations, and they have continued to invite analyses of their significance as both ideological and anthropological artefacts. They are ideological artefacts in the sense that they are mechanisms for negotiating the relationship of mass collectives (in the first place, the American people) to the circumstances of their own changing technical, economic and political existence. They are anthropological artefacts in the sense that they are ritualized enactments of mythologies that serve to negotiate the relationship between the individual and the collective.

This inexorable rise of the superhero movie entered a new phase, however, in 2008, the year in which the so-called ‘Marvel Cinematic Universe’ was launched with the May release of Iron Man. The MCU should be understood firstly as the most successful example of yet another economic model for Hollywood, whose major innovation was the notion not just that audiences could be lured back to the theatre for sequels to hit movies, but that a pre-programmed set of interconnected films could be planned and executed on a previously unseen scale involving billions of investor dollars, each instance of which would function as a cross-promotional advertisement for all of the others. But the economic significance of this new idea was at the time somewhat overshadowed by the billion-dollar success of the release, two months after Iron Man, of The Dark Knight.

Compared with Iron Man, the huge critical and commercial popularity of Nolan’s second Batman film gave the impression that these kinds of movies could reflect contemporary life in new ways that were, if not more realistic, at least less anchored in optimistic fantasy. The film’s timing (premiering one week after the collapse of IndyMac, for example, and a couple of months before Lehman Brothers) seemed to fit with changing economic circumstances, and into a universe where dark forces were operating on all sides, questioning the idea of heroism itself and functioning as commentary on the problem of the legitimation of authority in a world that had come to lack any clear moral compass. Even Iron Man itself, though painted with a lighter brush, had something of the same sense about it. Here is my review (written June 2012) of that initial MCU effort:

    A carefree arms industrialist is brought to the realisation that his products often wind up in the hands of those of whom he disapproves. Shunned by military associates and his own corporation, the systemic flaws and immorality of military-industrial capitalism are exposed. The protagonist's response is thus to create a new, unstoppable weapon in order to destroy other weapons, culminating in a battle with its own prototype, thereby regaining military approval. Patriotic fantasy for our times.

This author is not in any position to offer authoritative commentary on the history of superhero movies as they have evolved over the last ten years: firstly, because, of the more than forty major superhero films released since 2008, only a dozen have been viewed (not one X-Men movie, or Spider-Man movie from that period, let alone anything featuring a turtle as protagonist, unless one counts Sion Sono's Love and Peace); and, secondly, because not one word can be said about the relationship between these films and the comic books that were their initial inspiration, having never read one. Hence there are undoubtedly many aspects of this history that completely elude the author, who, in any case, has only, shall we say, limited, semiotic interest in this particular set of cultural artefacts (to paraphrase Robert Sheckley). Nevertheless, having in the last few weeks seen the two main entries released by MCU’s competitor, the so-called DC Extended Universe, one or two things seem to suggest themselves as calling for comment.

The year 2008 wasn’t just that of the first billion-dollar superhero movie and the commencement of what would become the most successful film series in history. In addition to being the period in which the scale of the global financial crisis would fully reveal itself, it was also the year that would end with the surprise election of a president whose rhetoric was focused around the idea of hope and the supposed potential for achieving lasting change. In a year in which all the ills of the world seemed to be released from the Pandora’s jar of financialized capitalism, the last to be released would thus be, as per the Greek myth, ‘hope’ itself, proving that this would be a moment of immense contradiction — if not a systemic contradiction in the Marxist sense.

This ambiguity and duplicity seem to relate to the somewhat divergent paths (or marketing strategies) pursued by the major studios in the quest for the superhero dollar. While The Dark Knight Rises (2012) would explicitly explore (in highly confused fashion) the themes of economic crisis, inequality and protest, Marvel would continue with their lighter, fluffier approach, even if, for example, Iron Man 3 (2013) would formulate a somewhat reflexive thesis about the possibility that nations might suffer collective PTSD and then inflate the symptoms of this disorder via mass-media spectacles. But with empty spectacles like Avengers: Age of Ultron (2015), Marvel showed that their multi-billion dollar investment was above all premised on the appeal of pure escapism and the charisma of Robert Downey Jr., with wisecracking heroes battling fearsome foes in adventures of pure CGI destruction asking next to nothing from its willing audience beyond the price of admission.

The other side of this coin was pursued by DC in Man of Steel (2013) and Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice (2016): going beyond the topical, but confused and superficial sociopolitical explorations of Nolan’s Batman trilogy, Snyder attempts to take these comic-book icons as mythical figures in a truer sense, and invests his two Superman films with pseudo-philosophical speculations concerning the existential crisis lying at the root of the nihilistic turn that everyone feels contemporary society has taken. The result is in many ways even more confused (aside from other problems that need not be discussed here: the premise of Batman v Superman, in particular, proves to be, unsurprisingly, an unworkable gimmick), but with Man of Steel’s exploration of the timeliness or otherwise of the idea of a Platonic philosopher-king, and Batman v Superman’s dramatization of the struggle between dikē and hubris and the question of the fate of that struggle today, the representation of the hero becomes a kind of battleground for asking what individual or collective response is possible in a society afflicted not just with crisis, but with the decomposition of its very basis. This was, of course, a species of bombastic seriousness always destined to induce critical punishment from a group of ‘professional’ opinion-givers suffering perpetual anxiety about their role as functionaries of the culture industry.

Beyond this more apparent dichotomy between an escapism that studiously avoids challenging its audience and some kind of attempt to force some kind of encounter with rampant nihilism (both poles of this dichotomy being, however, always subject to revision and curtailment due to commercial imperatives), what more is involved in this ongoing spectacle founded on heroes and the destruction they respond to and that they perpetrate? One question overhanging the last decade of superhero movies is, perhaps, whether they are really stories about heroes at all, whether they respond to a need to identify with or project oneself onto heroic figures, or whether, instead, it might be the case that nobody today believes in heroes, and that all those dollars spent at the superhero box office represent not the wish and the need for a new positive force, or a new figure of identification, but for something else. But in that case, what?

One more thing all these movies respond to, in one way or another, directly or indirectly, is, indubitably, the events referred to collectively as 9/11: like many other movies conceived since 2001, what the superhero movies of the last decade supply is imagery that more or less explicitly evokes the unprecedented scale of urban destruction globally televised on September 11. Perhaps the clearest example of all, of what seems almost a kind of collective and industrial repetition compulsion, are the scenes early in Batman v Superman that show the collapse of buildings, the billowing clouds of smoke and dust that result, and the confused wanderings of those who find themselves caught in this new, surreal, disorienting and disoriented world of massive, deliberate malice. Unsurprisingly, perhaps, superhero movies can be thought of as attempts at wrestling with the trauma of that moment, which placed an entire nation in the same position as those confused wanderers, feeling as though they have entered into a reality that seems more like a movie, and where there is a feeling that the apocalypse really is unfolding unimaginably, and cinematically, before their very eyes.

Contemporary cinema, we might then say, is somehow a response to a feeling of this coming apocalypse, in all its various manifestations, and despite the fact that commercial imperatives virtually exclude the phrase ‘climate change’ from ever escaping any character’s lips. Other examples could be cited, such as Fury Road (2015). But, more than a response, is it not that cinema itself somehow generates this feeling that doomsday is nigh, or, even more than that, that it wants it? After all, imagery and themes highly ‘reminiscent’ of 9/11 can in fact be found in a number of films that predated the catastrophe: Zwick’s The Siege (1998), for example. And were not those who conceived and executed 9/11 themselves directing a kind of television event on an unprecedented scale, and, in so doing, were they not, in some way, themselves caught up in, and responding to, this cinematic will?

If it is true that today nobody can believe in heroes, let alone magical fantasy ones, if they have come to believe, for good reasons and bad, that all those hitherto considered to be acting as representatives of their interests have all inevitably and invariably been corrupted by a decadent system in irreversible decline, yet these very same audiences feel inescapably drawn to witness these generic spectacles ostensibly premised on our love of ‘heroes’ and our need to see represented what they do for ‘us’, what, if not heroism, is it that they are actually hoping for and hoping to see revealed before them? Is it, now, simply a matter of the need to feed an appetite for (or, rather, addiction to) destruction, and to see how far it can go? And, when it becomes the case that all access to the world is conducted through ubiquitous screens to which we are all perpetually attached, how does this will, this appetite and this addiction, cinematically exploited but also cinematically fostered, traverse the space between ‘representation’ and ‘reality’, ‘fiction’ and ‘nonfiction’, ‘truth’ and ‘post-truth’? Something in cinema wants apocalypse, even if it ends up coming at the cost of cinema itself, or worse. What might that have to do with the world we find ourselves in today, in which the American people have willed themselves a leader whose explicit claim consists, to a large extent, in the declaration that all previous declarations of hope were never anything more than lies and deceits, and that what befalls all of us today is no more than to adapt to what seems a post-hope, brutal, geopolitical ‘reality’ that would be the only ‘truth’ still worthy of the name?
Last edited by djross on Thu Jan 24, 2019 4:35 pm, edited 1 time in total.

Ag0stoMesmer
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Re: Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice (2016)

Post by Ag0stoMesmer »

Seems the questions you asked here were all rhetorical, it's been a long time in politi-cultural terms since you posed them, any progress?

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