Those two books are the worst thing to happen to comics since the advent of the comics code specifically for that reason. “Establishing deconstruction of the genre…”for people who are less talented, less intelligent, and who would just continue to push the envelope ad nauseam for 20+ years. Snyder’s among that lot and you need only look at his Watchmen to see why.
I cut Alan Moore a lot of slack for the same reason I cut a lot of people more slack: he’s funny. He wrote the definitive pisstake on comic books and a generation of people was too dumb to tell they were the butt of a joke. Snyder doesn’t give me the vibe of an avid comic book reader. He gives me more “I was the frat bro who shared a dorm with a nerd and picked up his copy of Watchmen one day and it blew my mind because it was edgy.” That’s the vibe I get from his movie, anyway. He somehow manages to copy and paste panel after panel while completely and utterly missing the point.
The slow motion fight scenes, the elaborate $100K a pop Hollywood quality superhero suits; the very way he frames Rorschach as the sort of righteous crusader against an increasingly evil world with his own Randian sensibilities on full display (this is a dude whose dream project is to adapt The Fountainhead, after all)…and don’t even get me started on Hallelujah. Snyder views the entire thing as a celebration of these heroes when it’s fundamentally an indictment. Miller and Moore may very well have had genius imaginations, but, make no mistake, they were still beholden to the same things in their twenties as the rest of us are: being dumb, uncertain, and angry that they didn’t have it figured out or that the world they got wasn’t the one they were promised.
These were a couple of long haired art kids trying to tell stories of heroism at a time in history that was, frankly, debilitating for people like them. The New York they lived in was still the seedy, dangerous cesspool that nobody could figure out what to do with, the nuclear threat of the Cold War was looming overhead, and good old’ Ronnie the populist was selling out the country piece by piece in the name of Capitalism, the free market, and fiscal conservativism. I like The Dark Knight Returns and Watchmen, despite my disdain for what they wrought, but because they were important books that had something unique to say at a time in history when it needed to be said; when America’s heroes needed to be scrutinized.
And that’s where my issue with Snyder comes in: not everything needs to be a deconstruction and, like Wez said, we already got shades of old man Batman in Nolan’s films barely 5 years prior. Not just “Old man Batman” we got everything Snyder tried to do (but, again, smarter and more nuanced) with the post-9/11 angst and the question of freedom vs. security in The Dark Knight. Everything Snyder does, he props up like it’s the second coming of Christ and it’s not. I got to watch real people jumping out of ****ing buildings on TV as a 6-year old. My idea of escapism isn’t some guy (who would become a suicide bomber for Lex Luthor) getting his legs crushed by debris while some orphan child wanders helplessly through a dust cloud.
I get it, too. You catch me off-line and talk to me about something other than comic books and I’d be the first to tell you that the world sucks and it’s going to hell in a hand basket, but that doesn’t mean Superman does, too. In a world this hopeless, who in their right mind would want Superman, of all things, to be dour, self-doubting, and gloomily looming overhead in his dark blue suit? Batman’s superpower, for instance, is his overwhelming resilience. It’s not prep time and it’s not that he’s a human being. It’s that he can be faced with the absolute worst of the worst that humanity has to offer, regularly, and still find a reason to keep fighting.
Snyder took away all of that. He made a hopeless Superman and a broken Batman and then didn’t understand when most people didn’t respond to it. I know what his angle was: “break the toys so I can put them back together again.” It’s a cool thought experiment and, if it were an elseworlds comic, I’d probably even pick it up and read it, but to paraphrase “The Dark Knight,” it’s not the one we needed right now.
