Welcome to the third installment of “10 @ a Time: Batman v Superman.” Last week we talked about Lois’s relationship to Superman and how that foreshadows much of the rest of the world’s inability to understand him. Maybe he’s just a guy... having said that, let’s check in with the other guy.
[For those playing the home game, we’re looking at the “Ultimate Edition” home video release; for today’s 10@T installment, we’re looking from 0:19:55 to 0:29:17.]
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| "I am vengeance, I am the night..." |
While I’m not going to pretend that this is deliberate – at least, I won’t argue that it is (it very well might be) – there’s an interesting structure that reveals itself by taking BvS ten minutes at a time. In short, thus far: Bruce, Superman, Batman, Clark, Bruce. If we extend our gaze, the last thing we saw in Man of Steel was Clark Kent, and the pattern’s going to broken in the next ten-minute chunk by (appropriately enough) Lex Luthor.
What I see in this pattern is an explication of the differences between these two men – first, the difference in their motivation (Bruce’s loss v Superman’s love for Lois), then a difference in their methods (Superman’s quickness v Batman’s shadowplay), then a distinction in public perception (Batman as fearsome but necessary, Superman as a figure of some controversy), and finally the difference between each man’s domestic life. Clark Kent has apparently moved into Lois Lane’s walk-up apartment in the eighteen months since Man of Steel, bearing flowers and offering to cook before joining Lois in the bathtub (compare to Bruce’s solitary shower later in the film). Bruce Wayne, meanwhile, appears to live in a subterranean techno-bunker of a Batcave with Alfred. We’ll see later that Wayne Manor is moldering, while the fogbound boathouse-style studio hardly seems homey.
Snyder stages the two heroic entrances very differently. Superman’s had something of an international adventure flair reminiscent, for this reviewer, of Sommers’s The Mummy, but he stages Batman’s entrance as a horror film, which works out exceptionally well. Christopher Nolan dipped a toe into the horror pond with The Scarecrow, but Snyder goes full-on, with one of the women saved by Batman describing him as “the devil.” In this movie, that’s a very loaded term to throw around casually. Lex Luthor recognizes that Superman is seen "as something of a god, and so he pits the human equivalent of the devil against him in order to demonstrate that demons come from the sky, not from beneath our feet. And yet, of course, we know that Superman is neither god nor demon – he’s just a guy – and what is truly demonic, truly devilish, is that (sinful) human nature which leads us to mistrust and deceive. Lois has seen that and chosen to trust, and it will be up to Bruce and Lex (and, to an extent, Wonder Woman, who has walked away from mankind itself) whether to embrace their better angels or to regard their cohort as inherently untrustworthy.
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| "If it's suicide you're after, I have an old family recipe. It's slow and painful. You'd like it." |
With Batman’s arrival straight out of a horror movie – a Bat out of hell, if you will – replete with Hans Zimmer’s thrumming bass strings, we’re also introduced to one of the more controversial aspects of the film: the Bat-brand. And to those who cry foul, who tweet #NotMyBatman, this is exactly the point. Batman branding criminals is supposed to be seen as wrong, a casualty of moral bankruptcy, and Alfred recognizes it. (Sidebar: Jeremy Irons is inspired as Alfred. He’s got that dry, droll sarcasm down pat.) Snyder hides this in some playful banter between Bruce and Alfred – “You’re getting slow in your old age, Alfred.” “...Even you got too old to die young, and not for lack of trying.” – but Alfred has always been the character to speak the truth to Bruce Wayne, even when he doesn’t want to hear it. Bruce claims, “We’ve always been criminals; nothing’s changed,” but Alfred wisely points out that “Everything’s changed” and that Bruce has fallen victim to “the fever, the rage, the feeling of powerlessness that turns good men cruel.”
To wit, while Batman and Lex Luthor spend their time worrying about what might happen if Superman will fall – obsessing over that “1% chance” Batman will cite later – they have not noticed the fallen state of their own souls. But remember – what falls is fallen, but what has fallen may rise. For now, though, Alfred remains by his employer/ward’s side, equal parts chiding and guiding, continuing to work on Bruce’s armory despite fundamentally disagreeing with his mission. That was one note that always struck falsely for me in The Dark Knight Rises – that Alfred would ever walk away from Wayne Manor voluntarily. The two ought to be tirelessly inseparable, in spite of the grave misgivings they have about the other’s behavior. Bruce describes them as criminals, but they’re soldiers in the same war on crime. This Bat-soldier, though, has lost his way.
On the subject of lost and found, Lois gets to be a journalist big-time in this movie, finding the stray bullet fired, it would seem, from Chekhov’s gun. This iteration of Lois Lane has always been quite sharp, even deducing Superman’s identity in record time back in Man of Steel, and it’s refreshing to see a movie that doesn’t treat her like a damsel in distress. Indeed, quite the opposite is true – Lois actively hides the bullet from Clark because she doesn’t want to be that. She’s bristling ever so slightly against the idea of being his damsel. She also recognizes the intense pressure under which he labors, wondering if it’s possible “for you to love me and be you.” But that’s the point of Superman, right? He’s the ultimate ideal of good. He can do anything.
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| "I've got to find a job where I can keep my ear to the ground, where people won't look twice if I want to go somewhere dangerous and start asking questions." |
Next time, the zigzag continues as we nip over to Metropolis and shoot some hoops with our antagonist.
Observations and Annotations
- The score of the football game is Metropolis 58, Gotham 0. It certainly doesn’t prefigure the way that “Fight Night” turns out for Batman and Superman, and I’m more than a little disappointed the score wasn’t at 52, a number so central to DC Comics.
- Speaking of annotations, the Russian Bruce has been tracking
is Anatoli Knyazev, known to comics fans as KGBeast, a late Cold War-era
villain who’s persisted beyond the fall of the Soviet Union. He’s also been
turning up on Arrow as a Russian
mobster, though I doubt we’ll see him suit up in the films or on television.
Incidentally, KGBeast’s creator Jim Starlin has spoken about drawing residuals
checks for KGBeast and not, surprisingly, for Starlin’s most famous creation,
Thanos.
- Clark Kent’s glasses fall on the bathroom floor, suggesting
perhaps that that identity is a performance and that the real man, Superman, is
in the tub with Lois. For me, though, that shot always reminds me of the cover
of “The Death of Clark Kent,” in which Clark’s high school friend Kenny Braverman
becomes the supervillain Conduit after deducing the hero’s true identity.
Probably just a visual wink if not straight up apophenia on my part, though
perhaps the ending of the film begs to differ.
- Alfred inquires whether the White Russian exists, “if he is indeed a him.” Alfred intimates that Bruce might be chasing a “phantasm,” and while on the surface it could just be a synonym for “ghost,” there’s no way this isn’t a reference to Batman: Mask ofthe Phantasm, in which Batman’s latest villain (SPOILERS) turns out to be a woman from his past. It’s exactly the kind of thing about which Alfred might rib Bruce, to boot.
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