Batman vs Superman

Full disclosure here: My cultural frame of reference begins with the 1950s Western Canadian pro wrestling circuit. That’s where I learned about archetypes, Manichaean duality, moral relativism, theatrical conventions, ethnic stereotypy, and all like that. 

Certain insights from that education have remained steadfast, to wit:

i) Usually a match was between good guy and bad guy. The villain often won, always by chicanery.

ii) The referees were always incompetent and blind. When they refereed women’s matches or the midgets they were in addition comic buffoons. With the women that saved them from intruding upon the male spectator’s wishfulness. With the midgets they made the small seem more adroit. Thus the referees represented The Law in the outside (aka Real World), where justice is blind and scarce and its enforcers hapless.

iii) On rare occasions two good guys would be matched, like Stu Hart vs George Gordienko. (That was in Calgary. In India Gordienko was a famous villain.) This was wrestling at its purest, the Greco-Roman ideal, so it was bloodless, unimpassioned and boring as batshit. But — both parties always seemed on the bring of erupting into the forbidden, like a punch, but in their virtue they held back. The match usually ended in a draw, with gentlemanly handshakes all around. Yawn.

iv) When two bad guys were matched the fans’ sympathy immediately went to the more local villain, like Al “Mr Murder” Mills from Cranston, AB, when he took on a Kowalski, a Zybysko or Kinji Shibuya. 

v) Masked wrestlers were always villains and very rarely went unmasked (i.e., defeated). 

  Of course that brings us directly to Batman vs Superman. 

***

For all its spectacular effects the film is a rich mine of mythology. Tucked into its urban cataclysms are a few brief scenes in bucolic Kansas. In addition to the central figures, its allusions cover the range of america’s favourite mythical creatures: Wonder Woman, Dorothy, Alice, the Frankensteinian creature from outer space named Doomsday (cp Kong), The Flash, and of course Anderson Cooper.

The film can be read as a modern allegory on several dimensions. In the feminist spirit Lois Lane saves Superman’s life twice (which in this film evens the score). In the final post-nuclear battle our two stud heroes need the two women — Lois to recover the kryptonite spear and Wonder Woman to lasso the invincible monster and render him vincible. Both heroes remain devoted to their respective mothers, both named Martha, a name associated with Christian service. 

The most obvious reading is the current paranoia about massive urban destruction, the 9-11 nightmare rewrit large to cover the swelling global threat from radical Islam. Though no specific religious reference is made, the arch villain Lex Luthor is a modern technocrat who purports superiority to the tribal culture that he has supplanted and which is the source of our various theories of godhood. The villain draws on the techie nerd persona of Jesse Eisenberg.

Luthor represents a world of inverted values. To him devils now come from the sky, like our air bound heroes, not from the deep, eruptions from the Id. “God is tribal. God takes sides,” Luthor contends. His activity, from world conquest to creating a monster, is a Satanic aspiration toward godhead: “If man won’t kill God the Devil will do it.”

In a suggestive bit of casting, a striking Israeli, Gal Gadot, launches a Wonder Woman franchise here. In contrast, African American Laurence Fishburne plays Perry White.

For his part, Batman is condemned for making his attacks personal, branding his baddies with his bat emblem. The hero is called a vigilante. The impugning of both heroes’ virtue expresses our supposedly worldlier view, i.e., cynicism. As Luthor justifies his evil, our biggest political lie is that power can be innocent. As the two American comic book heroes face widespread public attack, the film catches the pervasive anti-Americanism in the world.

When the weaponized kryptonite completely saps Superman of his power, he’s tossed about like a sandbag first by Batman and then by Doomsday. There we have the tragic image of an old power helpless and humiliated. This is the once powerful America humbled, especially as in the fumbling impotence of Obama’s foreign policy. 

But it’s also the obsolete idea of a protective divinity. Batman is a civilian Bruce Wayne with mechanical and technological amplification of his human resources. But Superman is a superhuman from another planet, thus godlike, who hides behind the civilian/mortal front of Clark Kent. Here Lois knows and is having a passionate affair with … them. As the film brings the old mythology into our modern time, the god must die — but here he wins the saving grace of sacrificing himself for his love. “You’re not brave,” Batman notes, “Only men are brave.” Gods are too powerful to be brave. “Do you bleed?” Batman asks him. He doesn’t, but he can love so he can die. As Wayne predicted, Superman will learn what it is to be human when he feels pain and mortality.

Amid the final ruins the mortal crusader is given the film’s heartening coda: “Men are still good. We fight, we kill, we betray one another, but we can rebuild. We can do better. We will. We have to.” Hence this earlier exchange between the star-crossed lovers:

Superman: Superman was never real. Just the dream of a farmer from Kansas.

Lois: That farmer's dream is all some people have. It's all that gives them hope.

Myths die but our need for their models and encouragement survives.

Maybe that’s why this apocalyptic vision is subtitled The Dawn of Justice. The gods are gone; it’s up to us.

Anyway, who’s rassling these days?