Cafe Society

The film ends on a shot of the back of hero Bobby’s head, framed by a black proscenium arch, as he pauses in the New Year’s Eve celebration at his Manhattan nightclub. The arch reminds us life is theatre. 

The shot evokes its antithesis at the end of Manhattan: Allen’s Alvy Singer’s open face as he contemplates his young lover’s (Mariel Hemingway as Tracy) departure for study in London and its threat to their romantic future. Of course, the latter shot was itself a replication of/homage to Chaplin’s close to City Lights. There the close-up on the tramp’s face projects his roiling mix of pride that his beloved blind flower girl can now see and resignation that her vision has dispelled her romantic delusions about him. “Yes, I can see,” she admits, dashed. Similarly, Allen ends The Purple Rose of Cairo on a close-up of Mia Farrow's face as she returns to the refuge of romantic cinema, her hopes for a fuller life dashed by her loss of both her fictional ideal man ("Nobody's perfect") and his betraying portrayer.

The parallel suggests Cafe Society is an older artist’s return to his imaginative past, especially to the romanticism and moral tensions of that 1979 classic. There are other echoes: the golden dusk skyline, the Manhattan-philiac score, the romantic carriage ride in Central Park. The December-June romance here is displaced onto Phil Stern’s relationship with his secretary Vonnie, though the nebbish (Isaac there, Bobby here) still finds himself caught unawares in a romantic triangle. The new film is less judgmental: there is no betrayal in the Phil-Vonnie-Bobby triangle, just a collision of genuine loves. (Phil’s wife suffers the betrayal Yale committed upon his wife and friend Isaac).

The back of the head is explicitly inexpressive. What can hair say in the dark? The climactic face shot may be played as inexpressive — as Rouben Mamoulian instructed Garbo to play her Queen Christina —  but it trusts the audience to read into it the complex of emotions the context provides. The back does that as well. 

We read into our rear view of Bobby’s head the elements we found in Vonnie’s face in the preceding scene: a detachment from the hilarity around them, a loving memory of each other and both a regret and a resignation that their choices turned them so dramatically apart. Of course the characters and the bicoastal settings are bridged by the song on the soundtrack, “I’ll Take Manhattan,” which Bobby did and which Vonnie might now prefer to have done. 

The soundtrack is studded with Rogers and Hart songs. The composers are cited here as having based their careers on the sadness of unrequited love. They “got it right.” Here as in Annie Hall art provides a satisfaction and completeness that real life doesn’t. 

The film itself seems a film about film. In the opening lines the Beverly Hills poolside life is described as a supersaturated Technicolor experience. Hence the burnished gold in which 1930’s Hollywood is imaged and in the glorious aura of the Hollywood stars, who are constantly named in the dialogue — without anyone appearing in the story (some do on film). Their names transcend corporeality. 

Allen’s third-person narration of the film confirms this detachment. We’re watching a narrative of supposed life but it’s packaged and presented as a story. Allen sounds like an 80-year-old man now, even as Jesse Eisenberg’s speech rhythms recall the young Woody. It’s an old man’s story, an old man’s retrospection, in which experience has softened the young man’s moral absolutism, softening our judgment of the romantic mistakes and even of the gangsters’ murderous criminality, whose victims may sometimes almost deserve their fate. 

As the erstwhile idealist Bobby points out, “In matters of the heart people do foolish things.” And sometimes they prove right — one way or another — as the later careers and maturity of Vonnie and Bobby appear to prove. As Vonnie explains, she had good reasons for preferring Phil. Arguably all three found fuller lives as a result. “Alternatives exclude”: We can’t  have everything. We make our choices as the heart and head determine and we live with the consequences. 

Here life doesn’t allow for rigid purity. Bobby’s early scene with the aspiring prostitute is a knot of impulses and conscientious restraints. The gangster murder scenes seem incongruous in a Woody Allen film but are absorbed into the period and film genre contexts of the plot. In Allen’s rewrite of Macbeth’s “tale told by an idiot,” life here is a comedy — written by a sadistic scriptwriter. 

In this land of romantic fiction, the Ali Baba Motel is at the intersection of Grace and Yucca. The sacred ever collides with the profane in the land of Hollywood gods and goddesses. In the most pragmatic choice gangster brother Ben converts to Catholicism on the eve of his execution because Jews don’t believe in an afterlife. Ben chooses to believe what the situation encourages him to believe.  And if Aristotle contended that the unexamined life is not worth living, “the examined life is no bargain either.” These are the ruminations of an older man. The old story teller's play with 1930s film conventions and genres prepares us for the suspension at the end: There is no happy ending, only choices, consequences and acceptance. As the Stern matriarch advises, “Live every day as if it’s the last and some day you’ll be right.”
      There's another implication of that closing back-head view. The character is leaving, walking away from us. Perhaps he's about to pursue his attraction to Vonny in Hollywood. Or perhaps he's turning his back finally on her and the lost alternative life she embodies. But by closing on the back rather than on the face Allen is deliberately obscuring his point, removing us and himself from the face.
     He may very well continue to make a film a year. Or this may prove his valedictory film, his final image. That may be him walking away from us. 

Essentially this film shows a master artist exulting in the practice of his art. It is masterfully made, rich in nuance and complexity. “The Lady is a Tramp” bridges Phil’s dumping of Vonnie and her developing love for Bobby. Vonnie is validated by the song’s respect for the irregularities and integrity of its heroine. When the two Exes meet in Bobby’s club later, her glib Hollywood chatter and his club-running slick are equally signs of their new lives, new experiences, but only overlays on their essential innocence when they first met and their bond and attraction that survives. 
Veronica asks Bobby if he was ever unfaithful to her. His pragmatic answer is no. But it may also be true, because a kiss is just a kiss, a treasured lost love is just a treasured lost love, as time and life and art go by. 

Love and Friendship

We don’t really have to wait for the novelization promised in the end credits for Lady Susan Vernon to be “thoroughly vindicated.” It’s in the film. 

Whit Stillman’s reading of Jane Austen’s novella anatomizes the constrictions the male-cantered social structure places on women and the manipulations and wiles women need to survive them. However dishonest, cunning, manipulative, cynical and both amoral and immoral she may be, Lady Susan does what she has to do to survive in an antipathetic social order. Her survival and her daughter’s marriage validate her schemes.

The narrative arc moves from the widow Lady Susan’s banishment from the Manwaring estate, where she has been seducing the master, to her daughter’s wedding. There Lady Susan is titularly married to a wealthy fool but is carrying Manwaring’s child. The plot is Lady Susan’s triumph despite a series of exposures and failed plans.   

There is a clear discrepancy between the genders’ power and worth in this battle of the sexes. Only Susan and Manwaring have any sexual spark; everyone else reads vapid. More importantly, Manwaring apart all the men are hapless tools, fools and gulls. The intelligence, sensitivity, awareness and the capacity to plan and to act rest solely in the women. 

Yet the men have all the power, all the authority. The women can effect their desires only by manipulating the foolish men. As a penniless widow with a young daughter Lady Susan can be forgiven her manipulations of the silly men who don’t deserve their authority and power. As Lady Susan observes, in this social order "Facts are such horrid things."

Susan’s sister-in-law Catherine is a positive contrast. She has Susan’s insight into male vanity and helplessness along with her ability to manipulate her husband. But she is direct and forthright about it. She deploys her cunning to protect her gullible brother and to preserve her family’s honour. Unlike Susan, though, Catherine can afford to be thus open because she is secure.

The three other women reflect their gender’s powerlessness. The American Alicia Johnson must sneak forbidden meetings with her close friend Susan under her husband’s threat of exile back to the dread Connecticut. Manwaring’s abandoned wife, despite her wealth and her protection by said Mr Johnson, is reduced to mad wailing by her humiliation. Susan reduces her supposed friend Mrs Cross to unpaid attendant until necessity finds her a job — until which she is at her “friend’s” mercy for sustenance. Susan’s assertiveness gains validation from these examples of women’s helplessness in a patriarchal society. 

The tension between a placid formal social surface and the tensions of gender warfare plays out in Manwaring’s name. As spelled, the name suggests the external face of manliness, the man that is worn whether for shelter, warmth or protection in a society biased against women. But the name is pronounced Mannering, as if the manners and social conventions are part of the patriarchal ordering that ensures the men’s advantage over women, however foolish and redundant the men — and needy and worthy the women. As the title suggests, both love and friendship are the arenas in which the social conventions oppress women — and where the outlaw widow must scheme to survive. Hence her "I had a feeling that the great word 'respectable' would some day divide us."

The young and handsome Reginald, for all his character and virtue, proves Susan’s most gullible prey. He is the film’s most articulate man, in contrast to the verbally silliest, Owen, whom Susan initially plots to marry her daughter then weds herself to cover for her pregnancy by Manwaring. 
    The other men speak in the short bursts of period foppery — except for Manwaring, who speaks not a word. As the sexual and motive force in the film, his wordless power contrasts to his partner Susan’s chatter and trickery and the other men’s vacuity. Manwaring’s expression is strictly in his stone face and steely eye. That he is Susan’s object and objective reminds us of the imbalance of power between the sexes. It is for his cold protection and hot embrace that Lady Susan so chillingly conducts herself. Not entirely to her discredit, when we gauge her need and the helplessness of the recessive women.   

Disorder

This tense roller-coaster of suspense encapsulates the current international corruption in politics. In the pre-title sequence two lines of charging, hooting soldiers converge on a tufted plain. The ensuing narrative will trace the central soldier’s disintegration — an emblem of the disintegration of our global politics. A broken time breaks its defenders — and requires broken men to save it.  

Hero Vincent is initially shot in intense close-up, which with the throbbing soundtrack suggests the wounded man’s heightened sensitivity. His visit to a crippled veterans’ rehab centre provides physical equivalents to his mental damage. There he buys blackmarket drugs, a dangerous alternative to the psychological help he refuses 

The political backdrop coheres with Vincent’s presentation as — from his tattoo — a figure of Chaos and the global disorder evoked by the title. The Lebanese mogul is an international arms dealer, himself a figure of chaos and political disorder, feeding the violence which ultimately creeps from the Middle East into his luxurious French estate. The posh party Vincent is hired to guard ripples with sinister disorder, from the belligerent unlisted visitor to the suspicious negotiations in the back rooms and rolling lawns. The ominous scheming undercuts the bucolic atmosphere of the estate’s name, Maryland.

Vincent’s eagerness to return to the war in Afghanistan shows him crippled not just by the violence of war but by his addiction to it. While friend Dennis explains that Vincent’s head is still in the battlefield, his anxiety makes him a questionable but effective “security guard.” The term is paradoxical for a man of such violence, paranoia and danger. When he appears to have over-reacted to the car possibly following Vincent and his charges to the seashore, his paranoia is justified by the violent attack upon them later. 

The arms-dealer’s family are a telling extension. Little Ali is the privileged son whose parents refrain from denying anything or disciplining him. The German Jessie begins as  the standard issue blonde trophy wife, but softens when she leaves the party to feed the dog. Though Vincent is initially hired to secure them for the arms dealer’s two days away, ultimately the arms-dealer abandons them, as the police will too. They are left to the shaky Vincent to protect. 

The polished serene Jessie and the damaged Vincent may seem antithetical but ultimately both prove isolated, enclosed in their respective psychological bubbles, unable to make any meaningful connection beyond themselves — except for the family dog, Ghost, an emblem of commitments now dead.

As Vincent grows increasingly enchanted by Jessie, he remains more removed and sombre than his friend Dennis’s later play with her. Vincent reads a romantic invitation into her fantasy of him killing bears in Canada. His delusion that they might have a relationship is harshly ended when he sees her look of fear and revulsion at his repeatedly smashing an invader’s face into the glass coffee table. The willfully uninformed Jessie is appalled at what her protection requires. 

Yet the last shot has Jessie returning to embrace Vincent. Whether she actually does that or he imagines her doing it we can’t firmly say. The film tacitly allows both readings. 

If she does it, she has realized her escape to Canada was impossible and she needs this powerful man to provide the security for which she initially married the arms dealer. If she doesn’t, then Vincent has taken another pathetic step into madness, bolstering his illegal painkillers with an implausible romantic fantasy. Either reading confirms the antithetical characters’ essential similarity as isolates awakened to a brutish disorder.  

     That theme grows out of writer/director Alice Winocour’s earlier Mustang, where three sisters leave their constrictive Innocence for Experience.  The woman’s hand is also evident in the film’s concern for how men are weakened by their strength. Her beefcake shots of Matthias Schoenaerts parody the familiar male fetishizing of the female lead. 

Money Monster

Like Spotlight, Money Monster  revives the lost ideal of responsible, investigative journalism. Lee Gates (George Clooney) is a TV showman who does vaudeville acts to flog his financial coverage. “We don’t even do journalism,” his sharp producer (Julia Roberts) admits. Gates initially embodies the modern media’s — like the government’s — sellout to corporate America. Then his cocooned complacency is upset by the invasion by a threatening bomber outraged that Gates’s glib recommendation caused the man’s — and many other helpless schnooks’ —  financial ruin.

As the world watches Kyle Budwell’s siege their stunned sympathy catches the frustration and rage that fuel the Sanders and Trump revolutions. The corrupt business executive Walt Camby steals north of $80,000,000 to finance an African adventure while his trusting shareholders are left broke an broken.  In a comic replay of the citizens’ impotence, a staffer tests a new erectile cream — but is prematurely rushed away on assignment. For the showman, of course, courage in investing is imaged as impressive balls.

As his name suggests Gates proves to be a pathway. He develops some sympathy for his attacker, especially after the boy’s pregnant girlfriend rages at him instead of pleading for his survival. The showbiz team turns serious when a friendly network of hackers exposes Camby’s lies and fraud. Gates is determined to get Kyle some answers, to justify his campaign. In the end he does, but he can’t save the lad’s life. 

The film operates on several levels of reversal. As the financial “journalist” plays showbiz the usual array of real newsmen, like the ubiquitous Wolf Blitzer, show up as themselves. Apparently no one has told them that if they play fictional versions of themselves in Hollywood fictions they squander whatever credibility they may have had on their own news shows. The very casting proves the film’s starting thesis: Americans are merely entertained where they need to be informed.  

The reversal of the pregnant girl’s usually sentimental appeal to her man parallels the film’s overall sense of an America in which normal loyalties have been lost to rabid self-interest. The casting plays a romantic twist on this. Clooney and Roberts in a movie, that promises scenes of electric romance. But no, in the bulk of their scenes they aren’t even together, just shot and framed separately as she communicates from the production booth to his earpiece. They connect but are separated, an emblem of a fractured union, a fractured country. Only at the end do they meet. She abandons her new job after he admitted his need for her. That adds a romantic tinge to the illusion of justice restored.

  And it is just an illusion. Villain Camby will be investigated but as he says, he didn’t break any law when he exploited the corrupt system. Remembering how all the real-life villains behind the mortgage calamity went scot-free, we have little hope he will suffer proper punishment here. And after a montage of saddened faces, the representative citizens shaken by the boy’s needless killing, the normal life of games and anodynes resumes: a guy resumes his bar game of fusball. Emotions give way to an automaton.
The film delights in reversals. When Gates twigs to the fact that the FBI are trying to shoot him, he uses the terrorist as his shield to get from the studio to the Camby interview. In that irony we’re reminded you can’t tell the good guys from the bad any more. Trump is counting on that. 

A Hologram for the King

This might have been titled Rebirth of a Salesman. The new Willy Low-man is Alan Clay, i.e. the quintessential man. Tom Hanks as the current representative American doesn’t just have feet of clay; he is entirely vulnerable and crumbling. 

Alan was reduced back to sales after his management ruined his old bike-making company. When he shifted his manufacturing to cheaper China they stole his models and began making their own bikes — but better and cheaper — and stole the industry. 

He still flashes back to having to announce his US factory’s closure, for which his father has still not forgiven him. A camping story recalls the father’s lesson in self-reliance. By outsourcing its manufacturing Alan/America lost that essential value. No longer independent the once-powerful Alan/America suffers indignities and frustrations by having to go cap in hand to try to salvage a future by submission to an alien and antipathetic culture, i.e. Saudi Arabia.

The failed businessman also failed domestically, of course. His wife divorced him (for “not seeing the big picture”). He still has a tenuous relationship with his 20ish daughter — but he feels guilty for not being able to support her, to pay for her college, to provide for her future.

As befits a psychological analysis of America, the opening scene is Alan’s dream. While he glibly offers a hearty pitch (product indeterminate so irrelevant), the key elements of his life explode in puffs of pink smoke behind him: his house, his wife, etc. He’s flying to the Saudis where his new company depends on his selling the king on their new IT program for their plan to urbanize a desert. 

The ensuing comedy derives from the fumblings of a stranger in a strange land. He can’t adjust to the culture any more than to the time-lag. So he sleeps through his appointment times, only to find it doesn’t matter. He was stood up anyway. He stumbles into meeting his elusive contact only to be dumped by him again. The guy lets him drive his flashy Audi but only because the American is no longer in the global driver’s seat. The privilege is a taunt.

Obviously the key metaphor is the hologram of the title. Alan finally manages to show the king his company’s impressive holography, where a “real” character interacts with a virtual figure. He creates the continuum between reality and illusion, substance and image, power and pretence. Despite the perfect presentation the Chinese beat Alan out again.

Though holography is the new, ultimate force of image-making, America has always defined itself by fabricated images. That’s how Arthur Miller characterized his Loman, who taught his son the false importance of being “well-liked” and soared into failure with his suitcase and a smile. Falling for the image is the real failure to see the big picture.

Here the past image, the lost glory, is the Schwann bike, Alan’s old company. The bike evokes America’s lost station in the world, its mythic past of innocence, optimism, when it was a world power with clean hands and an unlimited future. Of course that was as illusory as the hologram. 

The Danish Embassy party is an orgiastic release from the Saudi restrictions. Yet Alan is as out of his element there as in the Saudi culture. Its noise, fever and license seem like another dream. He declines the woman’s offer of sex out of an uncertain mix of his purity and impotence. Similarly, when he declines to shoot the wolf the scene evokes the hunting scene in an earlier classic of American Innocent Abroad, Michael Cimino's The Deer Hunter.  

Alan tries to negotiate the mysteries of the foreign culture. He’s thrown by his driver’s command of US pop music. He misses the banned booze — and suffers even more when he gets some. He’s especially at sea with the differences in gender issues. In a climactic paradox the woman doctor swims topless with him — in order to divert suspicion! From behind, a topless woman and a man look the same, you see. The underwater frolic seems another dream, the positive replacement of the first. 

In a side episode Alan has to deal with a growth on his back. It’s an image of a burden, a threat that proves benign. In a drunken initiative he tries to cut it out himself, another failed self-reliance. He finally has it removed by his woman doctor, who returns to lance his malignant love-life as well. 

If the romantic happy ending seems a bit forced and implausible — that’s because it is. This cross-cultural relationship is our anodyne, our relief from reality, another version of the false image of domestic bliss Alan will be offering his clients when he sells them the new apartments yet to be built on the Saudi sands.  

In that respect the entire film is a carefully selected image of Saudi Arabia. It’s defined by its massive population, its alien dress and manners, its fervid and ubiquitous religiosity, and its striking power. When someone decides to help Alan all his problems are immediately addressed. The huge and opulent buildings flash the new Muslim power, which dwarfs the American and leaves him helplessly dependent. 

The film frames out any suggestion of the Saudis’ support of terrorism, especially 9/11, and its current political play as a counterforce to the even more disruptive Iran. But that’s fine. The connotations remain, especially as we see how the Saudi businessman plays his American partner. Spelling out that political reality would probably have been too big a boil for the back of this satiric and pointed comedy to bear. 
     In any case, the world the Saudis are developing there is as false an image as the idealized America fabricated for Alan's opening dream commercial. Like any illusion, reality will eventually blow it up too.

The Brand New Testament

Even more explicitly than Howard Hawks’s Red River, The Brand New Testament replays the transition from the harsh vengeful god of the Old Testament to the loving forgiving deity of the New. Where the John Wayne authority gives way to the sensitive Montgomery Clift in that Western, here the father/God’s cruelty and arbitrariness are rejected by the young daughter who revolts against him. 

Of course that’s how a genre can accommodate an archetypal myth. Here the genre is the family sit-com. JC, the father/God’s son, has escaped the family but hasn’t been able to improve the world sufficiently. Hence the contemporary setting, where God has preferred a murderous absurd world for his own amusement. 

The son having failed, now the feminine has to intervene. The young daughter Ea is the main heroine but she is abetted when her long suppressed mother — amid her domestic (i.e., cleaning) role — enables a reset that saves everyone and fills the heavens with flower wallpaper. Her projection of Interior Design is better than his ostensibly Intelligent.

In playing this theology against the context of a family sit-com (where the omniscient Father hardly knows best), the film’s essential assumption is that the first wave of Christianity has failed us. Jehovah’s wars and frustrations have thwarted the Son’s lessons of peace and harmony.  

Ea’s initial revolt is to release to the world everyone’s date of death. With that new and most forbidden knowledge, people lose their dependency upon God. No longer having to please him, they are prompted to redefine their lives and themselves. Each of Ea’s six new apostles represents a different form of self-discovery and humanizing. The last apostle actually converts from boy to girl.

The most evocative is the matured beauty Catherine Deneuve who escapes her cold tyrant husband first with a rent boy and then, more rewardingly, with a loving gorilla. In Ea’s new regime the most savage is turned into loving and the cold Christian “civility” is overthrown. Similarly another woman’s insentient prosthetic arm becomes her bond with her new lover, whom her love converts from killer. In a reversal of the Eden myth, another man is led out of his self-restriction in a city park to the antithetic freedom of the Arctic. No longer at two with nature, he’s led there by a flock of birds he can choreograph into visual patterns.  

The film’s first and essential joke is that in this theology Creation happened in modern Brussels. But far from a radical idea, that revives an essential tenet of Christianity: the eternal and pervasive presence of our divinity and our eternal battle with temptation and evil. 
     Further, as man made God in his own image (though he arrogantly pretends the reverse), there’s a certain logic in this God being a short-fused murderous and malicious abuser of women and children. That’s the force we see dominating our globe.    

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?