The Fight
This style is not felt in the titular fight between Batman and Superman, which plays against both generic expectation and the director’s previous efforts. Environments in his previous films offered open spaces with plenty of maneuverability for the camera, the mall from Dawn of the Dead or the pass at Thermopylae in 300. This is not the case in Batman v Superman, which quickly transitions from an abandoned street to, a dingy, dark, abandoned apartment building. The environment is claustrophobic. Confined by space the frame hardly remains in a sustained long shot, denying audiences a full frame view of the action. The frame is often limited to medium and close shots, reducing the characters down to iconography and spectacularizing the male form. These conditions result in a fragmentary style akin to call and response as each combatant batters the other as if they were an action figure. There is no grandeur to this fight. The dramatic context and overall presentation makes everything appear very juvenile.
Weakened by another dose of kryptonite gas and dropped several stories, Superman has been consistently out maneuvered and now Batman can go in for the kill. In these moments, Batman is simultaneously shown to be at his highest and lowest points. He walks strong and up right, dragging his prey behind him like a hunter. He even begins to monologue, though, as if he were a Bond villain. His monologue reaffirms his vigilante ethos and self-righteousness, these efforts to murder Superman are built upon the first lessons he learned from his deceased parents, that “the world only makes sense if you force it to.” By forcing this new masculine Other out of this world, he will regain his own masculinity, and with it coherence and sanity. At the same time as he projects strength, his appearance contradicts. The Bat-armor is mostly destroyed. His helmet bifurcates his face, exposing weak, soft, flesh underneath. His vocal modulator is damaged, giving his monologue a second crazed voice. The physical appearance matches his fraying mental state.
Batman unsheathes his final weapon, a kryptonite tipped spear. The spear is both a traditional weapon and phallic symbol, fitting for the character representing the old outdated brand of masculinity. His quest to kill Superman has been a search for a means to regain the symbolic phallus he lost at the Battle of Metropolis. Now he is rearmed with a more potent one, one that can permanently vanquish his foe, and is undone by it. More confident than ever, Batman marches forward triggering a mechanism within the spear to extend it, making it erect.
In his work, Jacques Lacan expanded on Freud’s concept of the phallus and sought to separate it from direct linkage and equivalence to physical biology, which he expanded on in ‘The Signification of the Phallus’. For Lacan, the phallus was a symbolic construct, a “privileged signifier … chosen because it is the most tangible element in the real of sexual copulation, and also the most symbolic in the literal (typographical) sense of the term”[2]. As a symbol, the phallus is intangible; a shadow on the wall. It, like the masculinity Batman believes his new weapon grants him, can never be fully realized. It is why films like The Right Stuff, operate as quests, for an idealized masculinity but ultimately fall short of the finish line. For the phallus “can play its role only when veiled”[3], only when it is hidden away or unattained does it possess power. By bringing it into the realm of tangibility, Batman has ironically removed this power by bringing up comparisons between his physical self and the artificial-self created by not just the Batman persona but this new armor and spear. Armor and weapons that show him to be vulnerable to attack.
Before going for the kill stroke, Batman erotically cuts Superman’s face. Superman manages gargle out the broken phrase “You're letting them kill Martha...” Batman is shocked; why would he say that name? Superman continues “Find him... Save Martha...”
Batman is psychically unmoored by this phrasing. In action films and film in general, there is the expectations of men being the “strong silent type”, men are supposed to speak with actions not words. This lack of introspection and expression in the actor is carried out, instead, by the film itself through mise en scene. From the staging, set designs, and costuming of classic melodramas to more contemporary usage of reflexive elements in film, such as fractured montages meant to represent the damaged psyche of Jason Bourne in his series of films. Snyder goes the more contemporary route, revisiting the death of the Waynes and the present in a fractured montage representing Bruce Wayne’s realizations about what he has nearly done. Unlike the smooth, sleek, idyllic depiction of murders at the start of the film, this visitation is fractured and with new areas of emphasis. The ill thought out swing Thomas Wayne takes at the gunman is prominently shown. The gun tangled in Martha’s pearls and the shot that shattered them. The montage as introspection identifies with the folly of the Father and cold despicable action of the villain. Bruce Wayne has not just lived long enough to see himself become the villain, but nearly the monster in the night that killed his innocent mother.
But he has not fully fallen into that deep abyss yet, there is still a chance at redemption and regeneration. Starting with saving Martha.
