Zack Snyder vs. the World – Man of Steel

Written by Tom
The first of a trilogy of posts, arguing that Zac Snyder’s DC films are genuinely interesting pieces of work which are in no way designed for their primary audiences.

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Zac Snyder’s three DC Universe movies – Man of Steel, Batman vs. Superman and Justice League – are, to put it politely, polarising. I quite like them myself, despite their large flaws. The flaws and virtues I see in the films seem to be quite different to those seen by others though, so I thought I’d take the gap between Mr Robot seasons and use it to ramble about these flicks and how I read them overall. We’ll start at the start with the 2013 Superman film Man of Steel.

Man of Steel is, of course, DC trying to recapture lightening by making a film that’s to Superman what The Dark Knight was to Batman. As such, it’s a Superman movie grounded in the real world featuring a very serious Superman brooding over important themes which have to do with the very concept of heroism itself, all directed by an auteur with a distinct artistic vision. Unlike The Dark Knight though, Man of Steel proved an intensely polarising film, and a lot of it has to do with the nature of each film’s heroes themselves.

Batman, more than any other, is a superhero who has been remade over and over again in as many different formats and styles as you can think of. All versions are different and most of them completely redesign most of the characters and rewrite their backstories. More than that, aspects and characters from particularly popular adaptations get frequently written into the comics themselves, so Mr Freeze’s origin story from Batman: The Animated Series will become his de-facto canon origin story while someone like Harley Quinn will progress from being a background TV character to someone with her own spin-off comic series. The result is that the Batman canon is actually a surprisingly complicated assemblage of multiple different canons which all feed into and bounce of each other. Which in turn allows something like The Dark Knight to take the Batman mythos and turn it into a straight-faced mediation of heroism without anyone thinking it a defilement of any particular version of the Batman character: Batman doesn’t really have a single centralised character, and so we can read The Dark Knight as Christopher Nolan’s idiosyncratic version of Batman, separate from all the others.

Superman doesn’t really have this. Yes, there are multiple adaptions of Superman but they all go for basically the same aesthetic: Superman as the colourful ur-hero, fighting villains in vibrant cityscapes. Whereas you can get multiple flavours of Batman TV shows, multiple flavours of Batman comics, and multiple flavours of Batman films, the main differentiation between versions of Superman are their mediums. The 70’s Superman films are Superman done as a movie; Superman: The Animated Series is Superman done as an animated series; Louis & Clarke is Superman done as a romantic comedy; etc. While there’s tons of Batmans, there’s pretty much one archetypal image of Superman who gets slightly adjusted depending on what medium he’s in.

Which isn’t what you get in Man of Steel. By being tasked to be the innovative director who’s going take Superman and produce a The Dark Knight for him, Zack Snyder’s being asked to make an one-off alternative Superman. More than that, he’s being asked to make a one-off Superman who draws from a film which would be highly suspicious of such a character. Because the big theme of The Dark Knight is an investigation of what heroism is, so this becomes the main theme of Man of Steel. But Superman is very much our ur-version of a hero: he’s the faultless all-American man with a square jaw in a red-and-blue costume. As such, you can’t really question heroism in a Superman movie without fundamentally questioning the worth of Superman himself as an icon. And so that’s what Zack Snyder does, turning the entire movie into a deconstruction of Superman as a heroic character.

Snyder has good form in producing this type of film, having previously directed Sucker Punch which is almost entirely based on providing beautifully stylised images of violence within narratives which directly critique violent, sexualised images. The result is meant to be a problematisation of pleasure within the film: it invites you to take pleasure in its images, calls you an asshole for it, and then continues to show you the images in order to make you feel awkward and uneasy for liking them in the first place. And you get the same technique in Man of Steel with a lot of the movie being dedicated to providing the main images associated with Superman in a way that’s just wrong enough to make you feel uneasy about them. So Superman’s powerful and gets into fights with other powerful beings? Fine; then the Superman in this movie will literally be a god whose fights destroy entire cities, presumably killing thousands. Superman’s an alien? Well, we’ll make him entirely inhuman with the main narrative thrust being “Can this Superman learn enough about how he relates to the world to be able to save it?” The result is that this version of Superman becomes a source of tension in his own movie: for there to exist a figure like Superman to protect us, he’d also have to be an inhuman figure capable of turning around and killing us on a dime, and if our hero has to be someone like that, do we want him in the first place?

This all comes to a head in the infamous scene where [SPOILER] Superman chooses to break General Zod’s neck. Many people complained that it was out of character for Superman to do that, missing the fact that that’s the entire point. More than anything else, this is the defining moment of Zack Snyder’s DC Cinematic Universe: the moment where his films definitively stop being adaptations of the comic books and become Zack Snyder’s particular version of the Superman mythos, that mythos being one where Superman is genuinely capable of killing people and there’s always a significant question mark over whether he will or not.

Of course, a lot of people sitting down to watch Man of Steel would be expecting the adaption of the comic books, the idea of “__________’s version of Superman” not really being a thing that exists in the popular consciousness. And an audience of people sitting down for an adaption of the Superman comics can probably be expected to already know their answer to the question “Is Superman thrilling or terrifying”, their answer being “thrilling, now give us more flying scenes”.

Which is going to be the running theme of this mini-series on Zack Snyder’s DC movies: the way that they’re actually pretty interesting when taken on their own merits but are in no way designed for the audience who’s most likely to watch them. Snyder has decided that Superman is actually a terrifying object who’s morally objectionable at best, and he communicates this by taking the iconography and shape of Superman stories and constantly pushing them just past their comfort zone. The result is a film that in many ways attacks its audience for wanting a superhero film by giving them what they want but never how they want it. Which in turn is a sure-fire way of alienating a substantial proportion of your audience, as Man of Steel did.

This isn’t necessarily a bad thing for the film to do though. The original idea of Man of Steel was to explore a certain vision of who Superman was; if it was popular enough then it’d get a few sequels and if it was unpopular then they’d just do another film a few years later. The issue is that the Marvel universe had just started to gather steam at the time and the requirement to make an equivalent DC universe – and to make it quick – was being increasingly felt by all. So Man of Steel ultimately wasn’t allowed to stand as a singular expression of one man’s concept of superheroes but instead became the foundation of an entire universe of movies, even though that universe was based on artistic principals which purposely alienated large sections of its audience. And it furthermore led to Batman vs. Superman, a film that is possibly one of the greatest superhero movies ever made and is exactly the film you shouldn’t make if you’re trying to kickstart a beloved series of mainstream flicks.