(electronic music)
Hey there Internet People, Jared here.
It’s been years since the DC unveiled their expanded cinematic universe, but unfortunately,
these days, we can’t think of Batman or Superman without getting a little bit sad.
Or, very, very sad.
(Hello Darkness my old friend)
- So today we’re gonna face that sadness, together, and take a look at the big question
to end all big questions: what the hell went wrong with the DCEU?
Sure, you can point to standalone successes.
People seem to like Aquaman.
Wonder Woman was pretty good.
But unlike Marvel, which managed to make over 20 movies with only a few stinkers,
(Sad Horn Sound)
- DC’s grand ambitions seem to have crashed and burned.
How could a sure-thing turn out so disappointing?
The way we see it, the problems can be traced back to two comics from 1986, and the mismanaged
influence they have had on superhero culture at large.
Allow us to explain.
Welcome to this Wisecrack Edition on The DCEU: What Went Wrong?
And of course, spoilers ahead for all of the films in the DCEU as well as slight spoilers
for some excellent comics.
Let’s dive in.
Now, of course, the DCEU isn’t “over” per se.
Parts of it are even getting rebooted with definite articles, such as THE Suicide Squad
and a highly anticipated THE Batman.
Still, at a time when superhero franchises are the biggest movies in the world, characters
like Cyborg, Flash, and, most egregiously, Superman have seemingly disappeared.
To be fair, it’s not for lack of trying, but there were fundamental issues with their
plans from the very beginning.
To make sense of those issues, we first need to understand Superman and Batman, and what
they represent: Two different versions of pure wish-fulfillment.
Not only in terms of putting on a cape and fighting crime, which would be awesome, but
in terms of the way they make us think about human potential.
Superman, in all his godlike power, reflects what we wish we could be.
He’s, by definition, more than human.
He is the fantasy of being freed from our physical limitations.
Batman, on the other hand, made himself who he is.
Through drive, will, persistence and a sizable inheritance, he pushed himself to the absolute
extremes of human capability.
In other words, he’s what we know we could be if we applied ourselves and maybe had a
butler.
The two heroes also differ greatly in their psychology.
Batman is irrevocably flawed; no matter how hard he tries, or how many villains he punches,
he’ll never get over the tragic death of his parents, and that’s led him on a personal
crusade against crime.
He is constantly engaged in the struggle to do the right thing because, essentially, there’s
not much separating him from the villains he faces.
The key way that he does distinguish himself is in one clear, unbreakable rule; he will
not kill, lest he become like the mugger who murdered his parents.
Superman, for all his un-Earthly power, is a rural farmboy at heart.
He isn’t driven by trauma, he simply believes that he has a moral and ethical duty to use
his power to help.
He was raised to know that lying is wrong, that you shouldn’t harm other people, and
that honest work is more than good enough.
He doesn’t generally involve himself in geo-politics or governmental policy because
he doesn’t see it as his place.
He never uses more force than is necessary.
At his core, he embodies everything good and noble about the human spirit.
Through this, he reinforces faith in our values and provides hope.
At least, these are your standard Batman and Superman.
Different artists have imagined Superman as a communist or Batman as a vampire.
But the way our two favorite superheroes manifested in the DCEU, as helmed by Zach Snyder, can
directly trace their influence back to two specific works that take a unique approach
to heroics: Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’ “Watchmen”, and Frank Miller’s “The
Dark Knight Returns”.
Both of these comics were revolutionary when they debuted in 1986 because they subverted
and deconstructed so many superhero tropes, by placing them within a “real world”
context.
Both Watchmen and The Dark Knight Returns pick apart the kind of society that would
necessitate superheroes and the kind of people that would be drawn towards the superhero
life.
They critique the very concepts of superheroics and vigilantism, as well as the effects that
they would have on the world.
Watchmen took a wide view of the genre as a whole, using newly created characters to
represent the archetypes present in superhero fiction.
The Comedian, a stand in for flag wearing patriotic heroes like Captain America, gleefully
quells social unrest and commits atrocities in Vietnam, content to be a tool for the government.
The all powerful Dr. Manhattan mirrors all of the unimaginably powerful heroes like Superman,
Captain Atom, or Silver Surfer.
But Manhattan’s ultimate power leads to an increasing disconnect from the human condition
thereby questioning the fundamental humanity of this type of superbeing, which tacitly
leads us to consider what connects characters like Superman to people like us.
And the kind of cold-logic and “greater good” mentality that characters like Batman
so often fall in to also comes into question, with Ozymandias’ Squid-based master plan
to unite the world under a common enemy by killing millions.
This brings the very notion of heroism itself into question, pushing us to examine our own
moral concepts of justice and good.
Gadget loving detectives, obsessive crusaders, the legacy hero: all these archetypes and
more are expertly folded into a handful of characters . However, as we’ve seen, Moore
still treats them as real people with complex psychology.
None of them are truly good, or truly bad.
Whereas Watchmen looks at the entire genre, The Dark Knight Returns hones in on a single
figure: Batman.
It imagines a much-older Caped Crusader who has aged in real-time, eschewing the then
unchallenged convention of un-aging comic book heroes.
We see the Batman/Robin dynamic in a new light too with Batman characterizing the series
of Robin’s that have served with him as “soldiers”.
In this telling, the death of the second Robin, Jason Todd, was the biggest factor in Batman’s
decision to retire.
But when he fails to quell his crime-fighting urges and dons the cape and cowl again, he
is more than willing to take another impressionable child under his wing.
This directly addresses the inherent irresponsibility of Batman in regards to enlisting children
and teenagers into his hyper-violent war on crime.
Miller also re-appraises the mythic, perpetual struggle between Batman and The Joker.
Here, The Joker has been pretty much comatose since Batman retired, confined to Arkham and
seemingly compliant.
But after Batman returns to Gotham, The Joker too resurfaces to continue their feud. Miller
paints their conflict as an effect of Batman’s presence, suggesting that maybe it was Batman
himself who caused crime to evolve into super-crime and the stakes to be irreversibly raised in
Gotham City.
Miller also features Superman as a naive, ignorant yes-man for the government, who wages
a climactic battle against Batman essentially “because the President said so”.
Overall, Watchmen and The Dark Knight Returns broke new ground in the development of superheroes,
and were heralded for their self-aware critiques of the genre.
But as revolutionary as they were, both books come to somewhat pessimistic conclusions about
superheroes.
Put simply, they’re grim, grimy, and hella cynical.
They both feature the governmental regulation and prohibition of superheroes, for example,
suggesting that the natural response to superbeings would be military application and they both
paint superheroes as psychologically compromised, driven by neuroses and disorders.
Unfortunately, the comics industry didn’t really get this.
After the massive critical and commercial success of Watchmen and The Dark Knight Returns,
everyone tripped over themselves to mimic the grim, dark aesthetic of these two revolutionary
works.
But their imitation was only surface level - , and led to what is known as The Dark Age
of Comics.
Suddenly everything had to be dark and gritty, and superheroes turned into a**holes who killed
villains indiscriminately.
Optimism was seen to be cheesy, replaced with baseless angst.
Blood, gore and rampant oversexualization were everywhere, but seemingly just for the
aesthetic.
Without the nuance and complexity of Watchmen and The Dark Knight Returns, the stories were
ultimately hollow.
Enter Zack Snyder.
Before the DCEU, Snyder was becoming known as the “comic book guy” in Hollywood,
mostly due to his faithful adaptation of Watchmen.
And during press for Watchmen, Snyder lauded two comics over all others; Watchmen (duh),
and The Dark Knight Returns, even mentioning his desire to adapt the latter for film.
And here’s where we get into the real meat as to why the DCEU fell flat on its face.
The same cynical deconstruction that worked for Watchmen and The Dark Knight Returns seem
to inform every decision Synder made when building the DCEU.
He could only see superheroes and the world they inhabit through a grimy, pessimistic
lens.
But just like the Dark Age of Comics, Snyder seemed preoccupied with the dark surface,
rather than the intellectual core.
Furthering this, his overriding worship of those fabled deconstructivist comics caused
big problems when he drew from other, less gritty, source material.
To highlight this, let’s look at Man of Steel, the origin story for the granddaddy
of all superheroes.
Snyder actually draws from a lot of influences here, predominantly the classic, optimistic
Superman comics Birthright by Mark Waid, and All-Star Superman by Grant Morrison.
The movie wears these influences on its sleeve; things like Clark flying alongside a herd
of zebra and the S Crest on his costume standing for hope
- That’s what this symbol means.
The symbol of the House of El means hope.
- Are pulled straight from Birthright.
He even lifts this speech almost word for word from All-Star Superman.
- You will give the people of Earth an ideal to strive towards.
They’ll race behind you.
They will stumble they will fall.
But in time… they will join you in the sun Kal.
- But Snyder’s nods to these inspirations are, essentially, lipservice.
- It’s not an S. On my world it means hope.
- We get acknowledgements by way of shared designs, imagery and dialogue, but Snyder
seemingly can’t reconcile their hopeful, uplifting themes with his own cynicism.
We know this because, whenever possible, Man of Steel takes the dark and gritty option.
We covered this in our What Went Wrong for Man of Steel, but between the rampant collateral
damage, and Superman actively murdering Zod at the climax, Man of Steel doesn’t look
kindly upon The Big Blue Boy Scout.
The creative team has explained that the intention was to have him eventually grow into the morally-grounded
Superman we know and love.
But here’s the problem: Snyder introduces the character already subverted, his angst
and general hand-wringing placing him closer to a reluctant hero instead of the paragon
of truth, justice and hope.
But Superman is arguably the archetypical superhero.
You can’t introduce a definitive archetype and deconstruct that archetype simultaneously.
Otherwise you’re not introducing Superman, you’re introducing Big Flying Dude.
The proto-Superman that we see in Man of Steel is, ultimately, so far from the Superman that
we recognize that he’s a different character entirely.
Snyder gave us even more insight into this choice in an interview, in which the journalist
stated that “the so-called No-Win scenario is the only way to test a hero’s rules and
ethics”.
Snyder agreed, adding that “...it’s the only way to move forward with a hero, because
otherwise the hero drowns in the mire of his own morality”.
According to this, you can view the climax of Man of Steel as the ultimate moral and
ethical test.
Except Superman fails.
In every conceivable way.
Literally the first meta-human Superman has to deal with causes him to lose all focus,
allowing Metropolis to be leveled, countless people to die, and Superman becomes a murderer.
Snyder’s Superman doesn’t even seem to register that he could do anything else other
than snap some necks.
This is a textbook example of “dark and gritty” disguised as supposed clever subversion
It’s worth stating that, at this point, Snyder’s plan to essentially build up to
a “true” Superman was still viable.
We had only seen one movie, after all.
Which brings us to Batman v Superman, and where the cracks really begin to show.
See, Batman v Superman was supposed to be another Superman film, a direct sequel to
Man of Steel, but then Snyder decided to add Batman in there and make Miller’s The Dark
Knight Returns the central influence.
Batman v Superman is notorious for being a dumpster fire of a movie, and again, we’ve
covered it in its own What Went Wrong.
But for this video, let’s look at Snyder’s two main inspirations: The Dark Knight Returns,
as mentioned, and The Death of Superman.
What Snyder chooses to take from them, and what he chooses to omit, once again demonstrate
his fascination with surface level, gritty subversion.
The first time we see them together on the big-screen, we get a frankly psychotic Batman
killing goons, branding people, and straight-up pre-meditating the cold blooded murder of
Superman.
And Superman?
Well he’s just sort of there, perhaps, presumably, internally struggling.
In taking the surface level angst and violence from The Dark Knight Returns, but ignoring
the deeper themes, Snyder creates a contradiction in character.
Whereas The Dark Knight Returns asks us to consider the archetypal Batman’s relationship
to violence or Robin, Snyder simply wants us to consider how cool it is that Batman
brands people.
Or put another way, The Dark Knight Returns is in conversation with, and criticizes, the
established Batman mythos.
Batman v Superman, on the other hand, is talking to itself.
And it’s mostly saying: “grit is good”
The same issues apply to Snyder’s use of The Death of Superman - which ironically could
have helped Snyder build up his wholesome version of the man of steel.
Released in the midst of the Dark Age of Comics, The Death of Superman, sees Superman die at
the hands of Doomsday.
Four separate heroes, Superboy, Steel, Eradicator and Cyborg Superman, try to fill the hole
that his death has left in Metropolis, to varying degrees of success.
But when a bigger threat in the form of Mongul, aided by none other than Cyborg Superman,
appears to wreak havoc, Superman returns from the “dead”, proving to be the only one
who can stop them, and be worthy of the title of Superman.
Thematically, the whole story revolves around the notion that a dark and gritty Superman
isn’t Superman at all-- the methods of the 4 replacement “Supermen” actually reflect
the edgy, grim heroes of the ‘90s.
However, the only thing Snyder takes away from this is: Superman + death.
Rather than seeing how Superman’s death could fulfill his arc of redeeming him, Snyder
ignores everything else to, once again, hyper-focus on the surface fact that Superman done died.
By the time Justice League rolled around, the damage had already been done.
We pick up where Synder left off: Superman’s dead, Batman’s guilt-ridden and struggling
with his violent tendencies and Wonder Woman’s oddly detached from everything.
While we may never know the entirety of Snyder’s plans, what we do know paints a somewhat conflicted
picture.
On the one hand, Snyder’s vision would have revealed Martian Manhunter and Green Lantern
completing the iconic Justice League lineup facing off against Darkseid, which makes it
hard to not pine for what could have been.
But on the other hand, even more time would have been spent in the Knightmare future,
with a decimated Justice League fighting back against a brain-washed fascist Superman.
That part would have been inspired by Tom Taylor and Brian Buccellato’s Injustice
comics, a grim, gritty, and cynical deconstructive tale that asks: “What if Superman broke
bad?”.
Based on Synder’s previous adaptations, it’s not hard to extrapolate: We suspect
the same kind of surface level, cynical interpretation would have come into effect here too.
But ultimately, we can’t know for sure, because Snyder didn’t get to complete his
vision and we’ll never really know if his controversial choices would have paid off.
Still, the fact remains that we did get most of the story, and most of us hated it.
So much so, that it killed the idea of an interconnected cinematic universe dead
It’s not all doom and gloom though! DC and Warner Bros have stepped back from their sprawling
plans of connectivity, handing the reins over to a creative teams that are willing to embrace
the bright, playful, and hopeful nature of the genre.
Wonder Woman, Aquaman, and Shazam have generated warmer reception from fans and critics alike,
and indicate a less depressing future for DC films.
But what do you think, Wisecrack?
Did Synder miss the point?
Or are we being too hard on the guy?
Let us know what you think in the comments.
Thanks to our dope patrons for supporting the channel and our podcasts.
Slam that subscribe button.
Thanks for watching and, as always, peace.