Welcome to the thirteenth installment of “10 @ a Time: Batman v Superman.” Last week we got right down to fighting, without losing sight of the film’s ongoing interrogation of what it means to be human. Today, we’ll visit the hill on which I’ve chosen to die.
[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 2:10:56 to 2:13:06.]
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| "Why did you say that name?!" |
To borrow a phrase from Rod Serling, “Tonight’s story is somewhat unique and calls for a different kind of introduction.” This, as you may recognize, is the undisputed most controversial moment of the film, and it’s a moment that infuriates me – not because the sequence is anything but expertly crafted, but because it is so blindingly obvious what Zack Snyder was trying to say that I cannot believe I am still fighting this battle nearly two years later. Even without the benefit of the Ultimate Edition cut, the theatrical release made this moment’s purpose explicitly clear (indeed, this scene is identical in both versions). “They stop fighting because their moms have the same name” is as reductive an approach to this sequence as “He just really liked sleds” is to Citizen Kane. It’s not about the name; it’s not about the sled. It’s about what those things represent. We’ve seen over the past dozen “10 @ a Time” installments that Snyder is not a director who does his work on a literal level. The film is loaded with symbolism, much of it multilayered, and the film is structurally unified by those symbols, which work together to create an integrated whole.
Rather than pick this scene apart in sequence, shot by shot, I’m going to take it as a kind of cinematic casserole and show you all the things that are in it, all the ingredients that add up to this moment. Put another way, what’s really going on with the “Martha” scene, and on what levels are we meant to understand it?
1. Batman has not prepared for this.
There’s a long-standing stereotype that Batman could win any fight, given sufficient time to prepare, and we’ve already seen Batman prepare for this fight in an extended montage that showed him at the peak of his abilities as a detective and an athlete, as a chemist and a smith. He’s been working on reinforcing his suit since the film began (cf. “funnel fairy butter bar”), and he’s spent nearly two years staging his kill box to take out Superman. He’s seemingly covered every possible base, closed every route of escape, armed himself with every weapon he might need to kill a god. But this is one of those “best laid plans” moments, and there was no way for Batman to gird himself against his own personal kryptonite. He had no way of expecting the possibility that “Martha” might happen.
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| "I made a promise on the graves of my parents that I would rid this city of the evil that took their lives." |
We’ve seen the way this film deals with trauma and memory. Bruce is haunted by the memory of what happened in that alley all those years ago – a memory which haunts us, too, because we’ve seen it at the top of the film, and so it looms over all the story’s proceedings. He’s tortured by the memory of the Battle of Metropolis, and it’s taught him the lesson that Superman needs to be stopped. Snyder has cut back to previous moments in the film to show us the impact of memory, teaching us how to read his visual style so that we’re ready for this moment. Here the memory is staged as a kind of tone poem: flowers, mausoleum, gun; alley, pearls, falling; Bruce, Martha, Thomas; “Martha...” These shots trigger that memory for Bruce and for us, but they’re deprived of narrative; they exist as moments, as feelings, as reminders of the trauma stripped of its meaning. All that remains is the pain, the death.
3. Bruce is instantly eight years old again, watching his father die.
The comics have always been a little vague (in that “sliding timeline” sort of way) about precisely how old Bruce Wayne was when his parents were murdered, but I’ve usually pegged it around eight to ten. Point being, he’s young enough for this to be one of his earliest solid memories, and it’s before he’s old enough to be able to make sense of it. When he hears Superman utter the word “Martha,” he’s instantly transported back to his father’s dying words, the last breath on his lips. The word “Martha” is the tether to that moment, the only thing that made any sense that night – his father speaking his mother’s name while the life poured out of them. All at once, Bruce returns to that original moment of powerlessness, from which Alfred theorized all his cruelty had begun.
4. Therefore, this is a cognitive reboot for Bruce Wayne.
Ben Affleck does an outstanding job of selling the cognitive collapse Bruce Wayne undergoes at this moment. He wears a dazed expression, casting his eyes around the room to say that he’s not fully sure where he is or how he got there. He’s been blindsided; nothing makes sense any more. All his righteousness of purpose is thrown to the side when his grand plot is derailed by his mother’s name. Thankfully, it’s an opportunity for him to reevaluate everything he thought he understood up to this point, and the world’s greatest detective finally realizes he might have missed one or two things.
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| "Some worthless Van Derm heirloom..." |
I’ve always embraced the version of the Batman myth where he never apprehends the man who murdered his parents, that “Joe Chill” is a ghost in the wind and that Batman’s never-ending quest for justice is in part inspired by this sense of unfinished business. That seems to be the version endorsed by this film, since we never get a clear look at the mugger in any of the frames, nearly all of which are not coincidentally shot from young Bruce’s point of view. For Bruce, then, the man who killed his parents could have been anyone. But now Batman is the one standing over a dying man, who’s taking his last moments to cry out for “Martha.” When he throws the spear aside at the end of this moment, he’s rejecting the very idea of the weapon because he realizes that now he is the one taking a life. Now he’s the killer. He’s the boogeyman in the alley. There is a difference between gradually crossing a line (“New rules?” “...Nothing’s changed.”) and recognizing yourself as your own worst nightmare.
6. It forces Bruce to see that, on at least one level, he and Superman have something in common.
“You were never a god... you were never even a man,” Batman snarls as he pins Superman to the ground with a mighty boot. Like Luthor’s, Batman’s hatred of Superman is predicated on difference, on whether or not Superman can bleed. He had thought that slicing open the Man of Steel’s face would teach Superman a lesson and bring him down to Batman’s level, but instead it ends up forcing Batman to see that he and Superman are closer than he was willing to predict.
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| "It's his mother's name." |
When Lois Lane reveals that Martha is “his mother’s name,” the definition of humanity changes for Bruce. Superman is human by dint of being proven vulnerable in this moment, the thing Batman and Lex had sought to prove. But Superman is also, finally, human because he has people who love him and who are loved by him. He has a family. Batman sees a dying man and a woman defending him, and he learns that Superman has parents about whom he cares very deeply. Batman had heretofore seen Superman only as a threat, an enemy, a force of danger, but he’d missed the compassion (was he not watching the Charlie Rose montage?). He’d perhaps thought Superman incapable of love. Sure, on a rhetorical level, he acknowledged that Superman must have parents (“I bet your parents taught you that you mean something, that you’re here for a reason.”), but again it’s a question of missing something, of being so bogged down in his own view of the world that he missed the obvious.
8. Perhaps most importantly, this is not exclusively a rational process. There is a gut-level emotional reaction; he comes to this epiphany on his own.
You might look at this moment and think, “Well, duh, Batman.” We’d put this together ages ago; maybe some of us realized way back when that Martha Kent and Martha Wayne had the same first name. But we’ve established that Batman clearly hasn’t done his homework here, and furthermore he’s unwilling to grant conscious attention to certain realities; Superman called him “Bruce” during the fight, but Batman never acknowledges the word “Clark” (it’s Lois Lane who brings that information to the table and presumably tells Batman before the funeral). But while we’re putting it all together rationally, parsing it out over the course of pages and pages of analysis, Batman doesn’t have that luxury. He’s got seconds to react as all this information washes over him, and he doesn’t need a lengthy monologue to explain his change of heart. In a sense, none of this is new information because Alfred has tried to convince him of all this over the course of the movie, but Bruce Wayne has stubbornly refused to listen to reason. Indeed, I think on some level Alfred knew that Master Wayne would need to come to these understandings on his own. “A man like that, words don’t stop him,” Clark Kent had heard about Batman; he’s not a man who listens to reason, but it turns out there is one word that will stop him.
One understated beauty of this moment, too, is the way that it’s an emotive moment for the audience. We can rationalize it as we have just done, but Hans Zimmer’s elegiac score reprises the “Beautiful Lie” theme from the film’s opener, the piano notes that have effectively haunted this entire film, and we too are transported back to that night in the alley even before we see it replayed for us. I’ve pointed out throughout the film Snyder’s remarkable ability to re-present and recontextualize visuals from earlier in the film almost like comic book panels, but the inclusion of music works on a level comics can never attain. To those of us who wondered why we were seeing yet another filmed adaptation of the death of the Waynes, this moment pays it off elegantly. The film doesn’t rely on our knowledge of the backstory. We see it, we hear it – we feel it.
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| "Save... Martha!" |
Next time, we’ll find out if the kitchen is serving Gotham roast for Fight Night.
Observations and Annotations
- Earlier in the film, Alfred had expressed hope that “Some young lady from Metropolis will make you honest.” And in the film’s third act, it’s a young lady from Metropolis – Lois Lane – who does precisely that, finally righting Batman’s ship and steering him back toward integrity with himself.
- This might be a bit of a stretch, but given the blatant crucifixion imagery coming up, perhaps not: The Gospels tell of the Roman centurion (apocryphally Longinus) who pierced the side of Christ with a spear before realizing “Truly this man was the Son of God.” Some versions of the story have Longinus as a blind man whose sight was restored when the blood of Christ splashed on his face. Here we’ve got an armored Batman drawing blood from a god and casting away his weapon when he realizes how far he’s fallen. Is Batman the centurion? (Sidebar: the spear of Longinus is itself an artifact within the DC comics universe, where it’s known as the Spear of Destiny.)
- Batman drawing Superman’s blood is also reminiscent of his early declaration that the Wayne legacy consisted in being a hunter.
- This is such a superficial remark, but it bears mentioning that this entire scene plays out under the green light of the kryptonite. Green is a secondary color, as distinct from the three primary colors of red, yellow, and blue – all of which appear on Superman’s costume. This scene is bathed in the thing that makes Superman weak, the thing that hurts him, and it’s striking that the color seems to live on Batman more than on Superman, as if the Dark Knight has himself become a weapon.
- I mentioned last time that Batman’s cowl breaks at the moment that he becomes vulnerable to seeing Superman’s humanity, and it’s worth noting that his “intimidation mode” voice is also faltering, exposing the humanity beneath the armor.
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