The DC Cinematic Universe vs. the World: The Story So Far

Written by Tom

‘The DC Cinematic Universe vs. the World’ is my series of posts looking at the DC Cinematic Universe, how it’s developed itself over time, and what its aesthetics are trying to do. We’re about to start looking at our third block of films (running from ‘Shazam!’ to ‘Zack Snyder’s Justice League’). Given that the series is a bit long now and was last seen about two years ago, maybe a quick recap is in order…

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Zack Snyder made a one-off deconstruction of Superman called Man of Steel. At the same time as this, DC were looking to fast track the creation of a cinematic universe to rival Marvel’s. Man of Steel, being the financially successful reboot of their most iconic character, seemed like the perfect place to start and so retroactively became the DCEU’s first film with Snyder becoming the mastermind of the universe going forwards. This gave Synder a massive problem though: his first film was about deconstructing heroism, something that would be unsustainable in a continuous superhero franchise. How do you create something which would move the franchise away from deconstruction while maintaining stylistic consistency with a film dedicated to it?

His answer was to deconstruct his deconstruction in Batman vs. Superman, setting up his usual grimdark aesthetic but using it to house a story that’s fundamentally about how grimdark aesthetics can be dull. Once filtered through Synder’s bombastic directorial style (a style which can’t do anything quietly), the result was a film that basically screamed at the audience about how non-functional it was. This set the DCEU up as a cracked mirror of the Marvel Cinematic Universe – it wasn’t interested in doing standard superhero movies as much as it was interested in exploring “superhero movies gone wrong”. As an artistic statement, this is fascinating and has been able to maintain a strong cult fanbase to this day. Many mainstream viewers and critics found Batman vs. Superman to be too messy and weird though, many of the film’s more contentious moments becoming widely parodied memes. The DCEU was already beginning to show cracks.

Cue Suicide Squad and Justice League, the films that would bust those cracks wide open. Both of them tried to capitalise on the DCEU’s “superheroes gone wrong” aesthetic – Suicide Squad by literally putting villains in the superhero role and Justice League by wrapping up Synder’s deconstructionist aesthetic with a story about the DC superheroes finally becoming the icons they should’ve been two movies ago. The issue is that they were both production disasters.

Joker (Review)

Written by Tom

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Joker is superb. Best film of the year by far.

The major critique of the film – that the Joker is a consciously alt-right character – is entirely correct. Hell, one of it’s climatic moments is him making the joke “What does get when you cross an isolated loner with a sociopathic society? Exactly what you deserve” which little more than confirms it. He is 100% meant to be an extrapolation of the type of person who becomes a school shooter, an incel or a male-rights fascist. He’s an isolated, disaffected straight white guy with all the stereotypical issues this entails.

The thing is, these types of groups have very specific justifications for their outlooks. “Identity politics is ruining their ability to be a masculine archetype”; “virtue signalling media is part of a socialist plot to stop women having sex with men”; etc. But this film doesn’t entertain their justifications for one second. They’re not even invoked purely to be got rid off; it’s just not what’s happening here.

Instead the film lays the Joker’s life bare and finds that the things which caused him to be who he is are all economic and sociological. To put it another way, they’re all capitalist. Joker lives in a city where all the shops are closing down and the streets have been left to rot by the local government so much that a new form of rat has evolved. His family has historically been condemned to poverty because of the way they’ve been cast aside and ignored by the rich people that their paychecks used to rely on. A significant part of his fall into madness happens when his state-funded psychiatrists gets closed down, meaning that he can no longer take the medicine keeping him on the straight and narrow. He has no job security, constantly on the verge of being fired because of things which are rarely his fault, which has left him with a feeling of powerlessness which has left him with anger issues. And the fact that society has made everyone else as disaffected as him has led to everyone around him being an asshole, making him isolated and lonely. This is all part of a cocktail that keeps on getting worse and worse until the Joker is born.

Ever After High (Way Too Wonderland): Jester’s Wild

Written by Daniel – Episode 2 of series 3 ‘Way Too Wonderland’ of Ever After High unfolds like a strange dream of being back at school, and having to endure the schedule and rules of school once again, only nothing makes sense. Classes are just strange elaborate series of events with apparently no rules or respect for reality – and no one around you is ever going to help. When will we wake up from this nightmare!

We’ve got a few new characters into the mix, namely: The White Rabbit, the handsome Chase Redford (The Red Knight); and Courtly Jester (daughter of the Jester playing card). Courtney as far as I can tell is Ever After High‘s equivalent of DC’s Harley Quinn. The character has a classic jester appearance merged with stereotypical punk iconography, and for what it’s worth, I really like the design and find the character an intriguing one, as I shall go into further detail later in the post (the one flaw with the character is the voice work – she has this awful English accent, which I think they chose to fit in with the punk aesthetics, unfortunately it’s just not good). The episode shows Apple, Raven, Madeline, Kitty, Briar and Liz having to go through Wonderland’s annual school day, and if they are going to warn Liz’s mother The Queen of Hearts of a plot to kill her in time for tea, they need to graduate form school (keeping track? good). 

Zack Snyder vs. the World – Justice League

Written by Tom
The third 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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At this point, talking about the issues with Justice League feels like kicking a dog while it’s down. It had a tortured production and wears the scars of it quite blatantly. The producers seemed to finally lose faith in Snyder’s direction after the response to Batman vs. Superman and started requesting changes to make the film into something it wasn’t (the same methodology that gave us the beloved smash hit Suicide Squad). Personal problems meant that Snyder couldn’t finish the edits, leaving the film in the hands of Joss Whedon who would’ve had even less control over the edit and was being asked to do too much stuff with too little time. The result is exactly the type of mess you would expect: scenes feel compromised, everything’s too rushed, nothing is focused on providing any one single effect, and, as a result, everything falls flat. What else did we think we’d get?

But then again, the question of these Snyder blogs has never been whether Zack Snyder’s DC films are good or not; instead we’ve been interested in if they work internally as singlular texts. I contend that both Man of Steel and Batman vs. Superman do work as texts because both give themselves a job and largely succeed at doing it. Man of Steel tasked itself with deconstructing Superman and does it. Batman vs. Superman tasked itself with turning the DC cinematic universe into one which could house the Justice League and does that. Whether you like the films, or whether you think those tasks are ones which should’ve been done in the first place, are ultimately different concerns and you can find other people’s opinions about them everywhere else on the internet. Here, for just three posts, we’re interested in the texts themselves.

So let’s turn our lens to the internet’s current punching bag: what is Justice League doing as a film and how does it relate to the previous Snyder films on a thematic/narrative level? 

Zack Snyder vs. the World – Batman vs. Superman

Written by Tom
The second 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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After Man of Steel came out, it was decided that DC would try to out-Marvel Marvel and create their own cinematic universe. Rather than begin all of their movies again, something which would’ve taken time and left them flagging further behind Marvel than they already were, they decided to make Man of Steel the starting point of their new universe and add more heroes to the world already established by Snyder.

This was never going to be an easy task though, if only because Snyder’s world had already set itself up to be ambivalent about superheroes at best. This ambivalence could sustain a single superhero movie and could probably be stretched to sustain a superhero trilogy, but it was never going to work as a central part of an on-going superhero franchise. Which left Batman vs. Superman in a really difficult position: it had to take the entire universe that Man of Steel created and remake it into something that could house a sustainable alternative to the Marvel cinematic universe. More than this, it had to do it in a way that naturally led from the highly deconstructionist style that Man of Steel used. As a result, Batman vs. Superman went for pretty much the only option open to it: it turned it’s deconstructionist lens onto Man of Steel itself, providing a film that looked at what Man of Steel did, found it to be lacking and started championing it’s replacement. So let’s see how the film did it.