"Zack Snyder's Justice League" and the Dark Side of the Epic
The new iteration of the DCEU film forces audiences to confront the darkest contradictions of the present moment
When I was finishing my dissertation a few years ago, I noted that, in many ways, the contemporary superhero film is the descendant of the midcentury biblical epic, a genre that, I had argued, provided spectators a deeply conflicted and troubling encounter with the terror of history, the awareness of living in a moment in which time itself might come to an end through an atomic explosion. While many biblical epics seemed to espouse a pro-American and pro-Christian triumphalism, they could never quite shake the sense of unease roiling under the surface and, in fact, forced their audiences to experience the irresolvable contradictions of 20th century America, often through the sufferings of epic heroes like Moses, Samson, and Judah Ben-Hur. Like their predecessors, the films of the Marvel Cinematic Universe (the MCU, for short)--and, even more spectacularly, the DC Extended Universe (the DCEU)--subject their heroes to extraordinary agonies, even while suggesting that their actions, heroic as they are, remain futile. The titanic superheroes of the (post)modern era, I suggested in 2018, remain enmeshed in a current state of crisis: “The epic remains with us,” I wrote, “offering both an escape from and an encounter with our deepest desires and, inevitably, our darkest terrors as well.”
I had that analytical frame in mind when I sat down to watch Zack Snyder’s Justice League (also known among fans as The Snyder Cut). Though I’d seen Batman v. Superman: Dawn of Justice, I was a relative neophyte when it came to the DCEU, and I’d steered away from Joss Whedon’s iteration of Justice League (I always thought Whedon was overrated, even before the recent allegations of abuse). From the first moment to the last, I was struck by how much this film, like any good epic, captured both the pleasure and the pain of contemporary historical existence. Through its bleak aesthetic (a hallmark of much of Zack Snyder’s work), archetypal characters, and messy narrative, The Snyder Cut emerges as the perfect distillation of both its moment of initial creation (the tumult leading up to and including 2016) and its eventual release (the moment of COVID-19 and QAnon). Like the biblical epics of yore, it forces us to inhabit an inherently unstable and uncomfortable position, cheering for the heroes while recognizing the ultimate futility of heroism in our weary age.
Bleakness saturates everything about Justice League, from its color palette to its general symbolic ethos. With Snyder’s “signature desaturated look,” one can’t help but wonder whether the sun ever actually shines on either Gotham City or Metropolis. More to the point, the film also seems curiously ambivalent about the ability of its heroes to effect any lasting victory or, even if they do, whether there can ever be a return to a prior period of collective innocence. As Alyssa Rosenberg put it in The Washington Post, “Any peace the characters win is fragile: Superman’s existence made Earth aware of a wider universe that’s too big and dangerous for humans to master, or even understand, all at once.” In the fractured mythology of the DCEU, there are seemingly infinite universes, any one of which may contain a new apocalyptic threat like Darkseid, the being that is the big bad of Justice League.
Then there are the characters. Unlike the MCU, which goes out of its way to create characters with a light touch--Tony Stark, Peter Parker, Peter Quill, Ant-Man, etc.--the beings of the DCEU are a sober punch. It’s hard to imagine Ben Affleck’s Batman, Henry Cavill’s Superman, Ray Fisher’s Cyborg, or Gal Gadot’s Wonder Woman cracking wise. The closest we get are Jason Mamoa’s Aquaman and Ezra Miller’s Flash, but neither of those characters can quite lift the mood, serving as light grace notes to the darker, more operatic tone of the film as a whole. Taken as a group, the Justice League are much more like demigods (as The Atlantic’s Shirley Li calls them) than anything produced in the MCU, and this makes them both grander and less accessible. They become archetypes rather than characters with whom we can genuinely identify. The emotional impact of the film stems more from the exhilaration of its battle sequences--which are truly epic in scope and impact--and from its general world-weary ethos.
And, of course, there’s the narrative. The film is a sprawling four hours which, of course, is suitable territory for an epic (as Vivian Sobchack noted some time ago, the temporal experience of the epic depends on its long running time), even if 4 hours might seem excessive to some (for context, neither Ben-Hur nor The Ten Commandments were quite that long, and Gone with the Wind is slightly shorter). However, it also has to be said that it’s a very fragmented sort of story; it’s as if Snyder was trying to cram approximately 10 MCU films worth of storytelling and character development into one movie. However, it seems to me that its messy narrative is, yet again, a fitting expression of the times in which we live, in which the metanarratives of the past, including the very idea of truth itself, have come under increasing strain. Not to put too fine a point on it, but the messy narrative structure of Justice League seems to be, in part, the natural outgrowth of a world that has produced such ridiculous and disorganized, yet strikingly powerful, conspiracy theories as QAnon.
Through its numerous tensions, between heroic victory and never ending struggle, between demigod splendor and human limitations, between vast narrative and scattered storytelling, Justice League becomes the perfect vehicle for us to collectively experience the omnipresent angst of the last five years. Rather than resolving all of these threads into a cohesive whole, the film leaves us struggling to make sense of it all, as haunted and confused as Batman after his vision of a future in which Superman has been turned against his former allies and in which Earth seems to have become a blasted and desert wasteland. Unlike the films of the MCU which, as Rosenberg suggests, offer “a world in which order is always neatly restored after catastrophe,” Justice League instead forces an encounter with the irresolvable tensions, the disturbing conflicts, of our present moment.