Last time-
This was a bigger elephant in the room, and it's 11 years old, but it was hidden behind plausible deniability until fairly recently, but I still didn't address it.
I think I talked about it in comments with Billdude, but not ever in a post.
Here it finally is.
Zack Snyder is totally a Randroid.
An Ayn Rander.
He's at least a fanboy, if not a strict adherent to Objectivism.
Comic books and Ayn Rand have had a complicated relationship going all the way back to Steve Ditko.
Do we throw away Spider-Man and Doctor Strange? Of course not.
Frank Miller's got fascistic leanings, and Snyder's Justice League trilogy is totally informed by Frank Miller mixed with "Injustice: Gods Among Us".
But...superheroes (taken uncritically) are a power fantasy of being authoritarian vigilantes, and fascists take to that like a fly to shit.
We shouldn't be surprised when artists and writers with those leanings are drawn to the genre.
Snyder could always hide behind "I'm just doing Miller's take" and he also did "Watchmen" which was left-leaning, but had Rorschach, which was a snarky comment on Ditko, but actually attracted fashy fans. The waters were a bit muddied for quite a while.
But, Snyder's production company is called Atlas, and he's making a remake of "The Fountainhead" so yeah. Mask's off now.
But, does that necessarily make him a shitty person?
Ditko spouted some crap in his Question and Mr. A stuff, but by all accounts, especially from Stan Lee, he was a kind guy.
Well, there are reports of Snyder being a manipulative jerk with how he both hung onto power at Warners for as long as he did, and rammed through the Snyder Cut of JL.
BUT! Like I said here, and don't take back, someone had to be the Kevin Feige, or try to be, and no one else was stepping up to the plate at the time.
Snyder was a flawed boss, but he was a boss.
All of that is moot, cuz he's gone now, and James Gunn is finally boss.
So, we have to look back on the legacy, which is the DCEU itself.
Aside from a murdering Superman, and a bloodthirsty Batman, does Snyder's pocket of the multiverse (particularly his JL trilogy) stump for anything creepy?
Is it any more violent and authoritarian than say...James Bond, or Star Wars?
Nah. Maybe if you're academic, and go through it with a fine toothed comb, but I don't think it's gonna subliminally turn a gentle kid into Kyle Rittenhouse.
And "the Snyderverse" also contains chaos agents like Harley Quinn, and gentle goofballs like Shazam.
Other creators got to play in that world, and it's as diverse as our real world.
So, no matter what your opinion is on Snyder, or his politics, you can't exactly just chuck those 11 years of DC away.
Anymore than you can puck Ditko or Miller from comics history.
And now, with Gunn's impending reboot, Snyderverse is yet another Elseworld, like "Red Son" or "Gotham by Gaslight". We can step back from it, and look at it as a "what if?" and not THE DC universe.
But, there hasn't been a THE DC since multiverse got created in the comics in the 70's.
If you don't like the direction DC goes, wait a few years, they'll reboot.
Ditto Marvel.
Given that, let the creators play.
So long as they're not out and out calling for the lynching of people, I think we're good.
But, all that being said, is Snyder a jerk? Yeah, probably.
4 comments:
"Actresses don't bounce back" - I guess Sydney Sweeney and Miami Vice Daughter are going to survive this "Madame Web" debacle...and hey, if it's about flop superhero flicks, didn't Ryan Reynolds bounce back really fast from "Green Lantern"? I don't know anything about "Madame Web" at all except that it's a superhero film and that people were joking about what a turd bomb it was before it was even out.
I've never seen "Euphoria," is Sydney Sweeney actually a talented actress or is she just the 2024 version of one of those "American Pie" girls?
It isn't interesting anymore when some zillion dollar film bombs. It's usually a poorly hyped superhero film or some old IP that someone dug up to make into a movie (like "John Carter" or "Land Of The Lost") and everyone just stays away, or some sequel like "Independence Day: Resurgence" that everyone knows is going to be terrible from the beginning.
You won't see people writing essays or having books published about these flops, not like "Ishtar" (and yes, people HAVE written deep essays about that one, because the director was a woman who had been hailed as a hero in the 1960s) or "Heaven's Gate" which gets people to talk about how it was the end of the New Hollywood 70s auteur era, nor will people ever dig up the flop and try to be revisionist and pretend it was actually a really good film, like how many essays I've read recently about how the David Lynch "Dune" is actually really good. (And "Heaven's Gate" is in the Criterion Collection, too!)
Nor is it fun to sit around and hate these failed blockbuster films for very long, I remember "The Bonfire Of The Vanities" film from 1990 inspiring late night talk show hosts to make jokes about it for years after (and a book was written about why that film bombed, too.)
It also isn't fun to notice how much money a movie cost anymore, or how much money it makes--I can remember when there were only five or six movies that had made more than $300 million dollars anymore, and that's a drop in the bucket now.
As for controversies...
...what's odd about Snyder being in love with Ayn Rand is that he's in his mid-50s now. Ayn Rand is for pissy-ass basement dwelling teenagers (or insanely rich teenagers, or grownups who never stopped being insanely rich teenagers) and always fucking has been.
Then again, Penn Jillette and Alan Greenspan aren't exactly young either, and they're fans of it. (Greenspan will be 100 if he lives two more years.)
Yeah, yeah, "conservative who still likes to get high," but Ayn Rand hated drugs and hippies, so.
I'll cop that at least he's doing "The Fountainhead," which, in spite of Rand's bitchy harpy philosophy, did manage to tell sort of a decent story, unlike "Atlas Shrugged" which was 1100 pages of straw men and hate.
It's POSSIBLE that it could be saved enough to be at least watchable!
But don't look at me, I only ever *really* liked his "Dawn Of The Dead."
As for cancelling artists...
....well, the main reason I don't want to do it is that my OCD-ridden, perfectionist, somewhat autistic mind would tell me to be "consistent" about it, and I'd drive myself nuts trying to do be consistent about it.
It probably can't NOT be done on an inconsistent, "case by case" basis.
You aren't consistent about it and neither am I and neither is probably anybody else, because of how bad your OCD would have to be to do so...you'd disappear up your own aperture, like the pop culture equivalent of some monk who decides to REALLY be "pure" he has to gouge his eyes out or go live in the desert or something like that.
Hey, maybe we should get some Randroid Objectivists on this, they're navel gazers and miserly, they'd eat this shit up!!!
Some of my examples?
John Landis directed my all time favorite movie, "National Lampoon's Animal House." He also is probably the one most directly responsible for decapitating Vic Morrow and two little Vietnamese kids on the set of "Twilight Zone: The Movie," because he was being careless AND trying to get around child labor laws, and has never lived it down or seriously apologized and walks out of any interview if it's brought up.
So yeah, he really fucked up there.
But...I still like his one movie, eh?
Led Zeppelin are the band that got me into rock music and I'll never forget them or stop loving them.
Jimmy Page was infamous for years for being into occult crap and buying Aleister Crowley's home and people liked to start dumb rumours about there being backwards messages in "Stairway To Heaven," and there's probably little to no reason to care about that, but a lot of that has been used to mask something he probably really did do, which might have been grooming a 14 year old girl named Lori Mattix back in the 1970s and keeping it really secret. This same girl also said she lost her virginity to David Bowie around this same time.
I wouldn't put it past either of them to have done it, really.
I just enjoyed the X-Files episodes "Tooms" and "Squeeze," but Doug Hutchison probably really is an ickie icky ick ick.
Morrissey is a racist navel gazing idiot who moved to Los Angeles (where he'll probably die) even though he was a British nationalist. I still like all those songs by The Smiths.
Tom Wolfe was a tiresome anti-intellectual asshole but I still think a number of his books are really good.
He's also the forefather of South Park Republicanism (trashing liberals and intellectuals and elites just to watch them cry when their sacred-cow bubbles get popped, and assuming that making them cry and look bad is sufficient enough to bury them, rather than making a better argument).
"South Park" itself is of course responsible for "Manbearpig," the most godawful, reprehensible episode of television to ever air, but the "tourette's" episode is still really funny.
Sam Peckinpah was a near worthless human being, but "The Wild Bunch" is still a great movie.
Frank Zappa and John Lennon weren't so good to their families. Still like the Beatles and the Mothers.
Captain Beefheart and Lou Reed were absolutely godawful to work with but I still like some of their stuff.
Well said.
Nothing to add.
I did want to add, but felt it was too late after I'd posted, that in spite of Snyder's politics, he got along really well with all the actors during his tenure as director.
You can't say that about Joss Whedon.
Whedon was a nasty vindictive little piece of shit.
Multiple actors had horror stories.
Where Snyder rubbed people the wrong way was as a producer, and it was suits he pissed off.
Warner's suits are notorious scum, so good on them.
Christ, I dunno, who else?
My favorite example is the Chevy Chase vs. Bill Murray "fist fight" that almost happened back at SNL in the 70s that got broken up before anything could really happen, which was used for years as an example of what a dickweed Chevy Chase was...but even if he was, it's Bill Murray that everyone hates now, and that's after years of people thinking Chevy was a prick and Bill Murray was an American treasure. (Remember, the "Charlie's Angels" debacle where he told Lucy Liu she wasn't any good or whatever the fuck it was didn't really put a dent in him, but this time he's really in trouble. Changing eras and all.)
Joss Whedon used to be made of Teflon too...I can't find it anymore, but in an AV Club comments section someone said "Ever notice how nothing is ever Whedon's fault? He wrote the retarded toad lightning line, but Halle Berry said it wrong. He wrote 'Alien: Resurrection,' but the movie studio and the director ruined it." I can't remember what else was in it.
I guess we're really in a different era now because I haven't heard from him in awhile.
I'm not really into him. I like "Cabin In The Woods," but thought "Buffy" took four seasons to even get good.
Sondra Locke had so many horror stories about Clint Eastwood (the worst one is that he made her get an abortion...isn't Clint popular with conservatives?) that I lost track of them. I guess talking to a chair didn't ruin Clint but who knows if that will.
We've all had our laughs at GG Allin's songs and stories about him being disgusting at his concerts, but now that I'm older and realize that he actually really did hate every other human being on Earth every single second of every single day without end makes it a little hard to laugh any longer.
Hard to laugh at Wesley Willis now too knowing he was really schizophrenic.
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