10 @ a Time - Batman v Superman, Part 11

Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice – Part Eleven: Transfigurations, Part II

Welcome to the eleventh installment of “10 @ a Time: Batman v Superman.” Last week we talked about how the major players are readying their positions for the final act. Today, fathers take the floor before the sons duke it out.

[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 1:44:51 to 1:57:46. We’re running a little long because some really fascinating symmetry shows up if we think of this batch all together.]

The blood on whose hands, Lex?

If last week’s ten-ish minutes were the cinematic equivalent of Zack Snyder gathering all his clubs into a bag and loading them into the golf cart, this chunk represents the backswing as the golf ball rests on the tee. It’s stuff like these thirteen minutes that makes me perpetually amazed that this movie didn’t strike a chord with viewers, and I understand that much of what I love is clarified in the Ultimate Edition, but the skeleton and the three-point comparison I’m going to draw out was indeed present theatrically. There is more thought in this baker’s dozen than in all of something like Mad Max: Fury Road, and if there’s one thing you’ve learned about me from these eleven weeks together, it’s that I would rather a film be overladen with substance than with style.

In short, we have three conversations about fathers, the legacies they leave, and the paths their sons forge in their absence. Two of these conversations are configured as transfigurations, ascending to the skies to hold court and touch something of the divine; the third is a gothic collapse like something straight out of Poe. And amid all of this paternal transfiguration, there’s a mother whose quiet labor has heretofore drawn no attention and a woman who’s gotten in over her head by putting it all together. Because good things come in threes, there’s a third woman, but we’ll get to her in a bit – and boy, is she a wonder.

"You just have to decide what kind of a man you want to grow up to be, Clark."

We begin at the top of the world, where Clark Kent climbs a mountain to talk to his father. I hinted last week that this was a kind of transfiguration sequence, mirroring the moment in the Gospels when Christ was touched by his divine Father, illuminating his godhood. (And recall that the Biblical transfiguration happened in the days leading up to the Passion. Given Superman’s impending demise, I can’t believe that’s an accident.) If we understand this as a transfiguration, the divinity of Clark comes not from a theological conversation with his celestial father Jor-El, but from a dialogue with his earthly father about heroism and love. It’s Kevin Costner making a surprise cameo as Pa Kent, having died (some would say needlessly) in Man of Steel’s Kansas flashbacks. (I say “surprise” because I didn’t know Costner was in the film until I saw it, a remarkable feat in today’s first-to-the-post journalism and spoiler culture.) Pa Kent begins with an ominous bit of foreshadowing when he says of the mountainous topography, “All downhill from here.” The mountains may be a natural recourse for Kansans who “grew up on a pancake,” but they’re also an indication of the high point of narrative action; with the climax of the film awaiting the clash of fists, all that’s left is a denouement.

But before Superman can go mano a mano with Batman, Pa Kent reminds his son what it means to be a good man with a tale of small personal heroism – saving his family farm from floodwaters – yet it’s heroism at a cost. The Kent farm was saved, but the Lang farm washed away, an exacting cost which took its toll on Pa and haunted him every night until he met Martha Kent. You see, the nightmares stopped when Pa found love, the love of a strong woman who helped him find hope, “faith that there’s good in this world. She was my world.” Like his son, albeit on a much smaller scale, Pa Kent understood that there was a right thing to do, even if it cost him an awareness of the price of heroism; he couldn’t look at the world with innocence anymore because he knew that as much as he tried to do good, there would always be pain just out of reach. Yet it took love to remind him that the good doesn’t stop because of the bad. The good must carry on. It’s a lesson Batman will learn by the film’s end, and Superman will live out his father’s epiphany when he too finds “his world” in the love of Lois Lane.

Bruce exits one (k)nightmare and enters another.

“Things fall, things on earth... and what falls is fallen.” We started at the top of the world, and now we tumble to the bottom for a scene of Bruce Wayne with his adoptive father. Clark met Pa Kent on a mountain top; Bruce is met by Alfred Pennyworth in the moldering Wayne Manor. The conversations could not be more different, a case study in contrast. Where Pa reassured Clark that the world could still be good, Alfred fails to convince Bruce to abandon his course of action, even likening it to “suicide.” And where Clark embraced his earthly father as such, Bruce clings to the memory of his dead father Thomas Wayne, in so many ways still imprisoned by the memory which opened the film. “I’m older now than my father ever was,” he intones gravely; “this may be the only thing I do that matters.” Alfred tries to get Bruce to see the value of his life’s work, tries to pull his son back into the light, but Bruce dismisses twenty years of work by noting, “Criminals are like weeds, Alfred.” And while there was always a sense in the comics that the only thing separating Gotham from its criminals was a revolving door at Arkham Asylum, Batman never fell this far into doubt. He never embraced the idea that killing The Joker would save the city; he knew that it was only begin a spiral into darkness. Yet this Bruce Wayne sees the death of Superman as his legacy – indeed, his destiny, since he traces his lineage back to the hunters who built Wayne Manor.

And where Pa Kent left his son spiritually ready to rejoin the world, Bruce abandons Alfred to the ruins of Wayne Manor, where Alfred closes the scene with the eerily poetic line, “So falls the house of Wayne.” Bruce had thought this was the apotheosis of the Wayne family tree, but Alfred rightly observes that his son has fallen from grace, far from what his mission as Batman was ever designed to be – a point driven home by the shot, from inside, of Bruce exiting Wayne Manor. It’s a shot that’s framed identically to the Knightmare opening and the crypt nightmare, the cinematic rule of three indicating the pattern that Bruce is finally in his own (k)nightmare.

To drive that point home, Batman dons a suit of armor like an even darker night, glowing eyes straight out of Frank Miller’s Dark Knight Returns, to which the film’s third act owes a not inconsiderable debt. Batman lights the Bat-signal, calling Superman to do battle, throwing down a gauntlet like a medieval knight. Superman had told him not to answer his “light in the sky,” so Batman lighting the Bat-signal is a promethean act of man defying god. “Come and get me,” he dares; “fall into my baited trap.”

"The problem of you on top of everything else..."

“The (k)night is here,” Lex Luthor calls into his phone upon seeing the illuminated Bat-signal, and I’m legitimately not sure which version of the homophone he means. (The subtitles omit the ‘k,’ though I’m not sure I agree.) This segment of the film with Lex’s big monologues is among my favorite scenes in the film because of how smug Jesse Eisenberg plays Lex Luthor, how unable he is to repress even an iota of his self-satisfaction at how well his plan has come together. And while some have rejected this Lex as a cheap Riddler knockoff, the truth is that this scene is classic Lex Luthor. Lex has always been a schemer, a man desperate to be recognized as the smartest man in the room, the true super-man. The only thing not classically Luthor is his stuttering, but even that makes sense if we think of Luthor as a man whose mind is operating so fast that it makes him nervous, a man so desperate to be taken seriously that he fears being misunderstood.

This is a Lex who not only wants to be a god but wants to be seen as a god among men by those same mortals. He’s proud of his skyscraper and its careful, precise construction. Indeed, his whole plan is a matter of meticulous geometry; drawing out Superman is first a story of circles, then of triangles – human mathematical concepts developed by the ancient Greeks, and as we know this Lex thinks of himself as kin to the philosophers of Greece and the ‘philanthropists’ in the classical sense of the word. And if we understand this too as a transfiguration scene, it’s Luthor who puts himself in the place of God, imparting knowledge to Superman.

Where the first two moments of transfiguration were marked by conversations with surrogate fathers, this one is notable for the absence of fathers but nevertheless inflected by a father’s presence. “No man in the sky intervened when I was a boy to deliver me from Daddy’s fists and abominations,” Lex tells Superman, and while we’ve known that Lex’s relationship with his father was something other than functional, this is the first time the specter of abuse has been raised. (Perhaps this is the source of Lex’s insecurities.) Superman had a supportive and loving father around, and Batman was so consumed by his father’s death that he lost sight of Alfred’s paternal influence, but Lex had such a powerfully negative father in his life that his outlook was shaped by this experience. In part, Lex resents the godlike way Superman was viewed because he psychologically rejects father figures in general.

What happens when an unstoppable force meets an immovable object?

More interestingly, Lex rejects Superman on the grounds of the ideas he represents. “Boy, do we have problems up here!” and the first problem is the idea of “absolute virtue,” which Lex regards as “evil.” Lex’s childhood prevents him from accepting the idea that anyone can be inherently virtuous, and he’s willing to commit murder to prove that point. Lex rejects the idea of Superman as a god because he believes gods can be all-good or all-powerful, but not both, and he needs mankind to see the world as he sees it. “They need to see the fraud you are, with their eyes,” he exclaims. Superman’s presence is an existential threat to Lex’s very worldview, and Lex cannot stomach the thought of being wrong. But of course he misses his own hypocrisy; when he castigates Superman for “the problem of you on top of everything else,” he does so from atop his own skyscraper, which he built over Metropolis and on which he attempts to bend God to his will. Moreover, Lex calls Superman a “flying demon,” but tellingly it’s Lex who flies away at the end of the scene, in his own private helicopter. There’s nothing like the smell of expensive blind hypocrisy.

A lot of people lamented that Batman v Superman was overfull of plotlines, but in the snappy “problems up here” monologue we learn that nearly all of those plotlines served one major plot – Lex’s attempt to prove that Superman is an existential paradox, and his concurrent effort to use Batman to resolve that paradox (either by one’s death, or the other’s). The Ultimate Edition has clarified that to some degree, making it for my money the definitive version of the film. And if we recall a line from The Dark Knight, “The night is always darkest before the dawn,” and we’re about to go through a pretty dark (k)night.

Next time, check your email now, because it’s time for the greatest gladiator match in the history of the world.

Observations and Annotations

• Pa Kent tells Clark how he saved his family farm from a flood when he was a boy. Recall that earlier in the film we saw Superman rescue a family from a flood, following in his father’s footsteps. Yet lest we forget that Superman has two fathers, he also saved a rocket from destruction, something Jor-El also accomplished in his last living moments on Krypton.
• The Lang farm is owned by the family of Lana Lang (likely her father, to be a contemporary of Pa Kent). We met Lana briefly on the school bus saved by young Clark in Man of Steel, and she’ll turn up again at the funeral in the Ultimate Edition.
• Maybe it’s the Shakespeare buff in me, but I can’t help wondering if Clark speaking to the ghost of his father is a nod to Hamlet; in Act One, Scene Five, at the height of his self-doubt, Hamlet speaks to his father’s ghost and is spurred on to his revenge.
• Then again, is Pa a ghost or a vision? There’s an exchange between the two – “I miss you, son.”/“I miss you too, Dad.” – which makes me think that this might not be the first time Clark’s seen his late father.
• The touching piano chords of Clark’s Kansas theme disappear as we cut to Wayne Manor.
• In a note-perfect blend of audio and visual, Ma Kent’s abduction mirrors Lois Lane’s, the latter of which is scored to Lex’s theme (“The Red Capes Are Coming”). Even before Lex admits what he’s done, then, we’ve gotten a hint that it was Lex’s guys who kidnapped Martha from Smallville, and it must have been some time ago given that they need to be at the port between Metropolis and Gotham during Fight Night.
• As Batman readies his kill box, there’s a ? graffiti – a nod to The Riddler?
• Batman pulls a tarp away to illuminate the Bat-signal: protection from the elements, or is this a sign that the Bat-signal has fallen into disuse? That is, has Commissioner Gordon turned his back on Batman after the Dark Knight got darker? (Doubtless a question for Justice League.)
• In his monologue to Lois Lane, Luthor quotes (“Lane Lo in the morning, Lola in slacks”) Nabokov’s Lolita, the story of a madman justifying his crimes to anyone who will listen. Sound familiar?
• Superman catches Lois by slowing her fall, avoiding the Gwen Stacy problem. There’s also a lovely soft piano version of “Flight” as he does so.
• Lex mentions “Daddy’s abominations,” but he’s about to create one of his own in the wreckage of the Kryptonian ship.
• “The holes in the holy” – see, it’s wordplay like that which makes me love this movie. It’s a small frisson at the back of the mind, but I’m a sucker for it.