The Talking Picture, Ep. 23: Whatever Happened to DC Movies?

Small Thoughts On The Collateral Damage of Superheroism

Returning to the subject of the conflicts examined in superhero flicks, there has been a fair amount of attention given to the insane levels of collateral damage inflicted by these battles. In The Avengers, for example, there’s a shot where we see a skyscraper begin to collapse and we never see nor hear of it again. That building collapse alone must have killed hundreds; the battle as a whole may have killed millions. Compare this to, say, Spider-Man 2 or even The Dark Knight, where there are definitely casualties, but each one is given agonizing attention and are relevant to the emotional or thematic drive of the film.

I realize this is largely just due to the inevitable scaling-up of the action sequences. A big climax requires big stakes, and establishing big stakes requires one hell of a lot of destruction. Nevertheless, what all of this serves to underline is that the concept of superheroes is inherently fascistic. That is, the idea of a breed of people who have extraordinary abilities thanks to an accident of birth is fascistic. Quite possibly unavoidable, since we already have some people born smarter or better-looking than others, but then parlaying those powers into unrestrained authority over those not fortunate enough to have been born with superpowers doesn’t really help the case for superheroes.

On Superheroes

I have heard a variety of arguments to the effect that this new crop of superhero movies are all the same. Obviously there are similarities in tone between, say, Spider-man and the X-men, or between Spider-man and Iron man, or between X-men and the Avengers, or between Thor and Green Lantern. There is undeniably some truth to this, and your toleration for those common elements is going to vary depending on how much you just like the genre. But it’s also dangerous to generalize - after all, there’s very little connecting “The Dark Knight” and “The Avengers” aside from some superficial similarities between Bruce Wayne and Tony Stark.

But a closer examination of even those two characters reveal that sure, they’re both billionaires, but their relationship with their respective moonlight roles reveals that equating the two is like saying the lead characters of Lincoln and There Will Be Blood are the same because they both have prominent facial hair and are played by Daniel Day-Lewis. Iron Man doesn’t have a dual identity - he is just Tony Stark, all the suit does is make him harder to punch when he annoys you.

Batman, on the other hand, is more complicated. I’ve already written a bit about this, but Bruce Wayne really no longer exists - he is an act designed to draw attention away from his vigilante activities by night. All that’s left of him is the specter called the Batman.

As for the tone of the Marvel movies, yeah...they do get a little samey after a while, but while the combination of spectacle, snark, and strong characterization isn’t exactly original anymore, it’s a formula that works and that produces pretty entertaining movies. Certainly I prefer it to, say, the MIchael Bay formula of massive spectacle with bugger all else going for it, or the Fantastic Four movie’s approach of awkwardly trying to be a more whimsical X-men without really understanding what makes the characters special in their own right. So yes, you have Iron Man 2 desperately trying to be Iron Man 1 and failing, but then you have Iron Man 3 trying to be Lethal Weapon and mostly succeeding.

That segues awkwardly but not illogically into something else I wanted to organize my thoughts on: super-hero methods. I think the preferences in any given time period in superhero storytelling as regards this feature will tend to reflect the dominant fears of the time. During periods of high street crime, I imagine you’ll be more likely to see heroes like Spider-Man and Batman taking down muggers and convenience store robbers. In times of war, you’ll be more likely to see heroes like Iron Man and Captain America taking on conflicts that threaten the globe. In times where we fear things like terrorism, like now, we’ll be more likely to see stories about heroes taking on large, cosmic, and largely unknowable evils, favoring heroes like Green Lantern and Thor. The Avengers movie managed to combine the second two.

However, there is one somewhat encouraging trend in these stories - increasingly, it’s less about a war on crime than it is about the hero taking on his or her own demons in the form of a specific enemy. That is, it’s more about examining the character than it is about about an uncomfortably fascistic power fantasy for paranoid shut-ins.

On the Ending of Inception

A few quick words on Inception, particularly its ending. Even today, I hear confusion from some people as to what the ending meant, or even frustration as to Christopher Nolan’s alleged failure to provide us with a hard-and-fast answer to the question of whether Leo ever did manage to reach the real world or if the entire end of the movie is just another dream.

First off, I’d like to say that the ending is perfectly timed. When the spinning top wobbles, the image cuts out before we get to see if it will continue wobbling and eventually fall or just right itself and carry on forever. This is reality vs. the dream world in a nutshell, and withholding the final verdict from us creates ambiguity.

But that’s precisely what those confused by the ending or particularly expressing frustration at it are missing: the ambiguity is the point. Leo doesn’t care anymore whether he’s in the real world. This level of reality is where he gets to be with his children. This level of reality is where he has a life. So even if it’s not entirely real (and who’s to say?), it’s the reality he will choose to live out.

This is the choice that all of us face to one extent or another. True, we could all be living in the Matrix, we could all be living out a lie and really just be brains in vats. But as far as I’m concerned, it doesn’t matter. As long as I can make a good life for myself here, it doesn’t matter whether it’s real or not. It’s where I live, and I will make the most of it.

Nolan really knows how to end a film, though. I think part of the reason he’s so universally acclaimed is because, psychologically, we as humans tend to remember the first and last items in a sequence better than anything in the middle. I imagine Nolan understands this and thus understands also the value of a good ending. He certainly puts a lot of effort into them. Sure, the ending of “TDKR” was lacklustre, but the ending of The Dark Knight is perfect. The endings of Batman Begins and Memento are terrific. The ending of “The Prestige,” well, your mileage may vary depending on how thoroughly you’ve thought out the mechanics of Hugh Jackman’s magic act. By the end of the film, I had thought about it and had already realized that the Hugh Jackman character had basically been drowning a replica of himself every night for the length of his entire performance run in a wonderfully grotesque metaphor for how he’d been tearing himself apart piece by piece after the death of his wife, so the final shot where we realize that the long rows of tanks each contain a dead Hugh Jackman didn’t have much revelatory value for me. Sure, it’s still a cool ending and the sudden cut to black, plunging the audience into darkness at the precise moment of maximum horror, is an effective technique (and consequently one that the ending leans on heavily). 

On this spectrum, the ending of Inception falls toward the upper end. It makes an unavoidable misstep in teasing us, provoking an automatic and involuntary reaction just when it needs us to step back and look at the situation more analytically. At the same time, if you’re basically a sociopath like me, you’ll have no problem looking at it analytically. So for me, it works in a way that the ending of The Prestige doesn’t, but for someone who didn’t get Inception that would probably go the other way around.