Injustice League

I don’t mind telling you I spent this past weekend re-learning the art of defense on Madden, inhaling the cumbersome delight that is Lauren Oyler’s ‘Fake Accounts’, and coming to terms with the idea that West Ham United, Arsenal and Chelsea all have brighter short-term futures than Tottenham Hotspur — but only after sitting through four ungodly hours of Zack Snyder’s Justice League, and then (oy vey) the pilot episode of The Falcon & The Winter Soldier. 

I could have taken psychedelic drugs and undressed in public (but nevertheless kept my mask on). I could’ve drunk a whole bottle of Absolut and passed out on the neighbour’s grass (outdoors, and of course socially-distanced). But I did this, and I don’t know why, for in recent weeks I have made important declarations. I am approaching my mid-30s as the world approaches the pandemic’s finish line, and in addition to living in a world with less affliction, less disease, and fewer instances of blatant financial chicanery, I would like to live in a world without superhero movies. I suppose this is the sort of thing a sophisticated supervillain might say before abandoning his idea for a novel, his day-job and I suppose a steady life partner, if anyone in Hollywood could actually concoct a sophisticated supervillain. I’m done with these wars to end all wars, or as one critic so eloquently put it, Oh, dear, the apocalypse again. 

It’s far more fascinating to discuss the cultural implications of Marvel on your television, making another run at another cinematic portfolio, and what it means that they have a market rival (of sorts) in DC. Like a proper oldie I’ve been lamenting what a cinematic universe does to a generation of hero-lovers who are essentially experiencing these characters through continuously recycled lenses. 

When I was your (ahem) age, I drifted between issues of X-Men, Captain America, Daredevil and even separate strands of Spider-Man (Amazing, Spectacular, and Sensational) knowing that each one promised a different world. Some of Peter David’s run on the Hulk books was a military drama depicting Bruce Banner as an enemy of the state; but it was also a suburban comedy about him and his wife trivialising both his criminal status and the possibility of hostile alien life. Peter Parker eventually married Mary Jane, but still remembered mid-combat that he had library books and/or assignments due. The only two issues of Captain America I ever owned were about Steve Rodgers confronting his status as a symbol of American hegemony. The books had different colour palettes, wildly different art styles, and were each populated by unique individuals. When they did crossover, when you had Wolverine and Hawkeye sharing pages, it was freaking Christmas.

Now this happens at will and everyone’s fate is intertwined, because the laws of a cinematic universe dictate that everybody has to occupy the same spectral code for maximum commercial value. It all makes abundantly clear why Christopher Nolan would commit to a tightly-controlled trilogy of Batman movies. How noble was his cause, to reject the dogma of canon that doesn’t work as well on film frames as it does across comic book panels, and also the false allure of all-star cameos. 

Both Disney’s Falcon/Winter Soldier series (even one episode in) and Snyder’s Justice League suffer the same deficiencies of storytelling. Both depend on the death of an iconic figure for the emotional depth of characters whose screen-time is disproportionately devoted to bad-assery. Both catalog (and thus mail-in) shoddy romances to portray at least one of their main characters as capable of feeling and overcoming loneliness. Both offer their heroes snowflake foils, evil so-and-so’s with flimsy reasons for wanting to take over or destroy the world: snarling, supposedly ferocious gentlemen (in the case of Justice League) who don’t even possess tangible limbs.

We spend so much time watching heroes rendered in pixellated dogfights, or seeing them fight pixellated dogs, that there’s no humanity left for us to make a real connection with. If I can see Anthony Mackie’s summer bod’ suddenly become a slide of a computer program, mid-flight, I have every reassurance that I can simply restart proceedings — the way I would if the Falcon happened to die in a video game. If you can bring Superman back to life within (Gawd) four hours, or distinguish one hero’s personality from another’s with a different flavour of one-liner, then perhaps maybe, possibly, none of this actually means anything?

But there we sit, strung along by cliff-hangers and awesomeness and more awesomeness and carefully incepted nods to the kitsch of a long bygone era, in the wild hope that somebody somewhere will actually try something different. Maybe Deadpool will do more than just crack a bunch of dick-jokes. Maybe Marvel will actually cede to the pattern of a television beat before stuffing the whole damn goose in the oven. Maybe there’s a reason Zack Snyder wants four hours of my Madden time, and maybe there’s a reason Warner Brothers would let him pitch for it. 

Good directors, good writers, and mostly good actors sign up for these things because they get to cash a cheque that then lets them make the things they want to … a fate that sounds, oddly, eerily, a lot like my far less glamorous job at an advertising agency. Barely anyone sees those little flicks, however, those passion projects, and so the public at large continues to operate and live within a world defined by awesomeness; on toxic Twitter threads, in ugly YouTube comments, on (sigh) Tik-Tok. Nobody sees Nomadland or Promising Young Woman instead, and thinks, Shit, that movie makes me want to take a long hard look at myself.

Good writers, good directors, and good actors deserve more. In fact, they deserve the same things audiences do: fleshed-out plots, villains we can at least try to empathise with, and the not-that-costly wall-fence offered by the novelty of genre. But to work within genre, you’d have to quit all this multiverse bollocks and let people tell singular, three-act stories that don’t spill over into lifelong content dumps. 

Surely there’s more than enough money now, to insure such a preposterous notion?