Zack Snyder Continues To Defend His DC “Fantasy World”

I’d ask why won’t Zach Snyder shut up, but this time Joe Rogan got him to talk about it.

Snyder recently appeared on Joe Rogan Experience talking about his various works. Apparently Rogan is a fan of Snyder’s work and the Snyderverse. That means when Snyder said something stupid, Rogan got in on saying equally stupid things. As you can guess from my article title, they BOTH think superheroes should kill, that it makes no sense for them not to kill. Thankfully, these two will never be superheroes. In most comic worlds, superheroes are vigilantes the police work with because supervillains exist and the laws make them harder to fight. Plus the superpowers and one of a kind gadgets don’t help. You won’t want supercops, but that’s sort of the role superheroes fill in classic superhero stories. That’s not how it started but it’s how those universes evolved.

There are reasons these heroes don’t kill, and there are those of us who gravitate towards those heroes. Sometimes we want to watch Arnold shoot up a bunch of baddies, sometimes we don’t. There’s a reason Chuck Norris has been both a lethal and non-lethal hero depending on the project. Some of us don’t want Batman to be the Punisher even if we enjoy both. (I’ve never really gotten into the Punisher outside of his original miniseries myself.) In fact, in JLA/Avengers, Batman tells everyone not to interfere with this universe because they don’t know how the Marvel Universe rules operate…and then jumps right in to stop the Punisher minutes after saying that. Plastic Man rightly called him out on the hypocrisy but that’s who Batman is, someone who doesn’t kill, even the villains. However, Snyder has two comics he really loves: The Dark Knight Returns and Watchmen. I don’t have a problem with that, but what gets on my nerves is the believe that every superhero story should follow those books.

So if Snyder’s not going to stop defending his universe, I’m not going to stop telling him why I think he’s wrong. These are characters I grew up with. They meant something to me at a time I really needed them, and the version that Snyder made and Rogan defends in the following video are not those characters. Do I hate Zack Snyder? No. All I know about him is that he made terrible stories with characters who got me through a bad point in my life. I do hate what he did, and I have problems with his point of view on characters when he clearly doesn’t understand our issue beyond “they’re fans and passionate about their take”, but he’s still wrong. In the video he refers to “character canon” as “god”, and that’s something I can go after him for as a critic.

I’m coming in at about 1:07:31, which I think the video will start near but I couldn’t get the embed to start for me exactly where I wanted it. The relevant part, or at least where I had enough and stopped, ends at 1:18:57, when they start talking Watchmen. You can watch the whole thing if you want. That’s pretty much my limit.

I already shudder a bit at the use of “religion” to describe fandom. It could be possible that he’s using it the same way we use “mythology” and “pantheon”, terms we already have available. However, I don’t worship Superman. I even balked once when an issue of Superman Adventures had a page where it came off as a kid praying to Superman. A cultural mythology is not the same as a spiritual mythology. It’s shared experiences or experiences we can empathise with even if we can’t personally relate to it. I never lost a dog, the reason the kid was hoping Superman could hear him, but I can show empathy by seeing how much the dog means to him. Pantheon may be inaccurate since there are differences between, say, the Justice League versus the gods of Mount Olympus. They aren’t gods, no matter how many people try to tell you they are because of the power guys like Superman have. The Greek gods were examples of the worst aspects of humanity while until DiDio came along the DC heroes were examples of the best parts of humanity, which we should emulate as real people.

The idea that canon isn’t “god” goes against my writer’s nature as much as it does my fan’s nature. Canon, or in this case what I refer to as “multiversal continuity” is what separates Batman from pulp hero The Black Bat to any character inspired by Batman as Batman was inspired by The Shadow. The core essence of what and who Bruce Wayne is, his abilities and ethics, are what set him apart from any schmuck in a dark costume beating up bad guys. Take that away and you’re not writing Batman any more than if I wrote a story about Zack Snyder but made him a rodeo clown who moonlights as a director…and no, I’m not going to take a shot at him because that would mess with my point. We’re writing the stories of fake people, but we should treat them as if they’re quite real, not simply a template for whatever type of character we want to do. If I can tell you everything about an alternate take on a famous character except their name and you can’t tell it’s that character, then the character was written wrong.

I agree with Plastic Man, but we all want to see that fight, right? It was the Punisher, by the way, the hero we expect to see killing bad guys.

I have not fully read The Dark Knight Returns, because I don’t even like the Frank Miller stories everyone praises, but I do want to challenge Snyder’s notion that the scene with the mutant holding the kid is his “Kobayashi Maru” test, which he could just as easily used to describe what Snyder himself did to Superman in Man Of Steel. This is Batman. Even coming out of retirement Batman should already have a plan for this. Originally DC didn’t want Batman killing because it wasn’t a good showing for the younger readers that became the target audience because they enjoyed superheroes more than adults. (How times have changed.) It was later established that seeing his parents gunned down turned him against guns, so Batman using a gun is antithetical to his character. Batman would have a non-lethal way of taking the mutant out and saving the child. It’s why, contrary to what Christopher Nolan had convinced everyone, Batman’s batarangs are smaller boomerangs, which you should already be able to tell from how Bruce names his stuff. They curve so you don’t see them coming when they knock you out. He has gas grenades, a grappling hook, maybe rubber bullets if any bullets at all.

Batman doesn’t kill because he doesn’t see himself as judge, jury, and executioner, something Rogan apparently believes he should be. Batman is supposed to be better than us and given his above genius IQ and some of the more hyper Bat-fans insisting he could beat anyone with “prep time” he should have an answer. If anything Batman should have hacked a real life Kobayashi Maru situation in the same vein that Kirk did with the simulated one. Watching Batman wasting dudes takes away from times like how he dealt with Darkseid, and even then what Snyder was missing with Zod’s death was impact. Superman screams, cut to a gag involving a spy satellite Superman just trashed to keep from being followed around. When Superman was forced to kill Zod in the pocket dimension, the stories that followed was about him coming to terms with having to make that choice when there was no other way because for whatever reason the Phantom Zone wasn’t an option. When Alan Moore had him kill Mxyzptlk (after Moore rewrote the imp’s character to also force these events because Moore is as cynical as Snyder and Rogan but considers superheroes a bad thing), Superman decided he couldn’t be Superman anymore and removed his own powers, lest killing become so easy we get…well, the Injustice version of Superman.

At least Snyder admits he’s here to deconstruct, to break the toys. He wants to make his heroes kill, and will gladly set up the situation where they have to, but that wasn’t the story going that way, that was his intent from the start. I could create a scenario where Bugs Bunny is forced to kill Elmer Fudd. Would that be the story you want to see? Would it even make sense given how many times Fudd has been shot, blown up, and dropped from a cliff? If anyone planned for the scene Snyder uses as his example it would be Batman. The problem with deconstruction, especially today, is that there is no reconstruction, no building the character back up as a better hero who learned from the experience. We’re told, not even in the movie but in interviews, that this is how Superman learned not to kill, which he did by NOT showing his Earth parents teach him respect for life and why his powers shouldn’t be used to force his will on others. Going by the movie alone, there is no such payoff for snapping Zod’s neck outside of a scream, which could just as easily be interpreted as the START of Superman becoming Injustice Superman just as much as killing the Joker.

The next scene does not feature Superman and Batman at the Super-Cafe having cheesecake and coffee.

Then again, you can tell how much they “respect” Batman when they start going off on how he’s just a rich dude in a costume who doesn’t have powers, or how lame the name “Superman” is. He wants Miller’s out of shape Batman, a “big #$%^in dude”, when Batman is a stealth fighter who attacks from the shadows, inspiring fear in his adversaries because at first they don’t see him coming, and then they’re not ready for whatever trick he has. Batman has a lot of ninja qualities, as Gaijin Goombah once went over, when it comes to how he deals with opponents. Even his cape is a weapon not only in stunning his foes (a tool used well in the Arkham games) but in giving him this scary silhouette that puts the bad guys off guard, which is why he uses the bat look in the first place, to scare the “superstitious, cowardly lot” into a disadvantage. Of course they also ignore the charity work, the attempts to rebuilt Gotham City, and even gives jobs to ex-cons he may have beat up in the past in hopes that a second chance will lead them away from going back to crime, a reason often given by repeat offenders in the real world why they went back to their criminal ways because nobody would hire a former jailbird.

Zack Snyder has a style, and it lent itself well to Watchmen, but it’s clear he doesn’t understand why Batman was popular enough to be so popular all these decades, long before Snyder was even born. I would not want to write the Watchmen characters into my kind of character because I already had them in the heroes they were based on and I’m glad Moore was forced to create his own. If Snyder created his own original Snyderverse, with his own original superheroes, he’d be better off and fans would not only let him be but might find his take different because it’s Shadowrunner doing these things, not Batman. There are people who like Watchmen primarily because until recently they weren’t part of the DC Universe, and when they were the story was about Superman showing Doctor Manhattan he was wrong for forcing their darker reality on the DC universe (I like to think that’s Geoff Johns telling DiDio he was wrong for darkening the DC characters, but he is the guy who rewrote Flash’s backstory to make it darker). The DC universe isn’t Watchmen and Dark Knight Returns was an exception rather than the rule. Miller is also the guy who made All-Star Batman & Robin, and I’d wager some of his own fans would push back if Snyder started praising that take.

Zack Snyder does not understand the DC universe or it’s longtime fanbase. Create his own superhero universe and he might have something, though reviews I’ve seen of Rebel Moon say otherwise. He’s off them now and I’m happy with that. I just don’t want him being the sole voice of how DC should be interpreted. His “@$#%$in fantasy world” is not the one I want to see. Heroes lift us up, and us tearing them down is the opposite of why I love superhero stories, whether he likes it or not.