The DC Cinematic Universe vs. the World – Joker

Written by Tom

Even though the DCEU mainline films were becoming more optimistic and joyous, they had still made DC and Warner Bros. hesitant about keeping their eggs in one basket. As such, they started to diversify, greenlighting a range of movies which would foreground idiosyncratic takes on the superhero genre while limiting those takes to one film each. The first film of this type (beyond TV spin-offs like Teen Titans GO! to the Movies) was Todd Philips’ Joker – a more grounded take on the genre providing a downbeat origin story for its eponymous character.

Ironically, the concept of Joker fits in well with the Snyder era of the DCEU. The early DCEU was very interested in blurring the lines between heroes and villains as a (perhaps overly literal) way of defining itself as the anti-Marvel cinematic universe. This was the era which treated Superman and Batman as deranged anti-heroes and had previously used the “villains as main characters” set-up in the first Suicide Squad movie. Given this, the obvious thing to do with “A DCEU Joker movie” would’ve been to make a film which had him be villainous while unambiguously siding with him. Of course, you’d then have the issue that the Joker is canonically one of the worst people in the entire DC canon – making a movie that sided with him would be making a movie justifying a complete monster. As such, Joker went with the least morally repugnant spin open for it: it presented itself as a social satire, telling a story about how the stresses of modern capitalism slowly push a basically sympathetic man into becoming an utter psychopath.

This aspect immediately made Joker one of the more controversial films of the DCEU, an impressive feat given that this is a series containing Batman vs. Superman. It’s a story about a white man who goes on a killing spree because he feels that modern society has failed him. It was released at the same time that white men who disliked modern society were shooting up schools, driving cars into protestors, sending death threats to women on the internet, invading the capitol, and all sorts of stupid shit. The critical line against the film formed almost immediately: this was a film about and for the alt-right. Then Todd Philips started spending his promotional interviews complaining about cancel culture and how political correctness has ruined comedy, worsening the film’s reputation. You can see how the “it’s slightly fascist” readings took root: if it looks like a duck and quacks like a duck, it might be a duck. I know several people who straight up refuse to watch this movie, having completely rejected the idea that it could possibly have social worth. This is a film that people won’t watch on principal.

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.

“It’s Just a Costume! It’s Just a Costume!!”

Written by Daniel – In 2017, I wrote two dissertations for my undergraduate, one on cosplays of Harley Quinn and the other on interventionism and internationalism in Scooby-Doo! So this post is really just an ego trip, as I treat myself to combing my two interests in costume and Scooby-Doo! I’m curious about how costumes, fancy-dress, and cosplay posses narratives, and in taking on these narratives through our clothing we change ourselves into someone else, our identity transforms, and we encourage others to see us differently. It’s the narratives that these costumes posses which are used by their wearers to adapt how they’d conventionally like to be perceived. Such dress changes not only their appearance but how we ought to interact with them, and how they interact with everyone else. Scooby-Doo 2: Monsters Unleashed (2004) is a great jumping board for this discussion, because the costumes in this film have no wearers. In this film, it’s not just a costume, but the costumes are actually monsters!

Since 1969 Scooby-Doo and the Mystery Inc. gang have been traveling the world unmasking monsters for who they really are: bitter business men and women trying to scare away competition, investors, locals, or members of the public. Now in its 50th year, the show continues to depict the Mystery Inc. Gang unmask those behaving as monsters. However, in Scooby-Doo 2 written by James Gunn who has gone on to write and direct The Guardians of the Galaxy films, this film sees in its opening minuets an exhibition of costumes from some of Scooby-Doo’s most iconic mysteries. But the exhibition launch is cut short as the costumes are stolen from the gang, only to be brought back to life by an evil masked figure, who wants to see Mystery Inc. come to an end. In this film the monsters are no longer frail bitter humans to be unmasked but they embody the supernatural and the otherworldly, the codes and signs sewn in to fabric are brought into the real material world.  

‘I Feel Twenty Years Younger’: Age-Bending cosplay.

Written by Daniel Skentelbery – This post is adapted from my short talk at FSN2019, the Fan Studies Network Conference at Portsmouth University. Whilst subjects including gender and race are commonly discussed among cosplayers, the performance of age is relatively un-discussed, despite it being an all to common activity. This talk introduces the notion of Age-Bending in cosplay, a practice which I define as the act of dressing as a character from popular media who is significantly older or younger than the player.

[Screenshot] Astruc. T. 2016. ‘Reflecta’. Astruc, T. 2015- . Miraculous: Tales of Ladybug and Cat Noir. S.1Ep.23. France: ZAGtoon.

@86thFloor. 2018. ‘#MiraculousLadybug’. via Twitter. . [Accessed: 14.06.2019].

My studies are focused upon cosplay practices, at conventions and online, in North America and the UK. Cosplay is the dressing up and performance of a character from popular media, usually located within the fan convention space, or through the sharing of images and videos on social media. It is such distribution of cosplay which see the practice entering into the everyday, becoming valuable forms of expression for the cosplayer’s identity. Elizabeth G. Nicholas writes that “in the world of cosplay, one need not be constrained by the lottery of biological sex, the limitations of age and size, nor the canonical image of a figure from a game, television programme or film” (Nichols 2018). This bodily transformation through performance means it is hardly surprising that existing literature on cosplay has placed a distinctive focus on cosplayer’s ability to mold their identity through a cosplayers chosen characters. My AHRC NWCDTP funded research is primarily focused on gender and queer identities in cosplay. Particularly looking at performances of identity through gender-bending cosplay (which is the process of adapting a characters gender to fit your own) and cross-play cosplay (which is when you cosplay a character of a different gender as accurately as possible). Though here, I will be taking a detour to address the notion of age-bending cosplay in relation to performing and/or discovering one’s own ability to present and perform one’s own body.

The DC Cinematic Universe vs the World: Suicide Squad

My “In Defense of Doctor Who Series 11” posts on “Thin Ice” and “Knock Knock” are proving way longer and more complicated than I thought they’d be. To give me more time to work on them, let’s instead resurrect my “Zac Synder vs. the World” series (in which I argued that Zac Synder’s films in the DC Cinematic Universe were brilliant movies which weren’t aimed at any of the audiences most likely to watch them) and apply the same approach I developed for that series to the rest of the DCEU. We start with a doozy:

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Written by Tom

Much like Justice League, the fact that Suicide Squad‘s production was an incompetent dumpster fire was well known even before it hit cinemas. Indeed, the main thing the film is known for is being terribly made. It’s become a warning for film students first, an actual movie second.

Nevertheless, let’s recap the basics. Zack Snyder had finished Man of Steel and was hard at work on Batman vs Superman, both of which were over-the-top deconstructionist grimdark movies which took the narratives they promised and actively refused to do any of them right. Given that this was how the DCEU apparently worked now, the idea of making a Suicide Squad film became the obvious way to continue the series. The idea of “a superhero film where the heroes are villains” was the DC modus operandi of “superhero films done wrong” made literal. The Suicide Squad comics featured a lot of iconic characters mixing with characters the film could hopefully make iconic, making the film high on marketing potential and an easy thing to spin-off from. And all of these concepts had recently been used by Marvel in the highly successful film Guardians of the Galaxy. In short, Suicide Squad was DC’s most obvious way of taking the series aesthetic created by Zack Snyder and turning it into a film which would become a sure-fire hit. Give the project to David Ayer, a well-versed director used to over-the-top action flicks, and what could possibly go wrong?

Well, for starters the DC Cinematic Universe was already years behind the Marvel Cinematic Universe before DC had started even thinking about retroactively making Man of Steel it’s origin point. As such, the producers’ main desire was to start paying catch up with Marvel, and they wanted to catch up fast. The result was that David Ayer was given an inhumanly small amount of time to get Suicide Squad together. Trying to find ways of streamlining the process, he decided that he would only write one draft of the script and would purposely overload it with every single scene he might even consider using, planning to spend his time in the editing booth doing the types of structural decisions you’d usually do on the page.

While he was filming it though, the rest of the DCEU hit something of a snag: Batman vs. Superman had been released and was proving divisive. The film had its good reviews and its defenders (why hello there) but it was also getting severe criticism from people who thought it was overly-serious, needlessly baggy and narratively unsatisfying. Given that these were meant to be some of selling points of the series overall, things were not looking good.