On a podcast somewhere, Quentin Tarantino has remarked that if podcasts had been around when he was a kid, he never would have gone into actually making movies – all that energy would have gone into criticism and he’d have felt no burning urge to film. Conversely, I think that if I’d been handed millions of dollars and a film crew instead of stumbling across some cop show and a rag-tag bunch of misfits who took my ideas seriously enough to beat the shit out of them – people who I liked and respected enough to argue with rather than ignore – I would have churned out movies not too different from what Zack Snyder makes. In fact, I made (though never finished) a short film in 2016 – not a few months before I began posting here – that I think in retrospect contains many of the same story problems attributed to Snyder and none of his virtues. I believe I can provide some unique insight into the movies of a man who I see as a kindred spirit.

I think Snyder likes the idea of ideas more than he does the meaning of any particular idea. This is probably why his work tends to resemble fascism (I suspect Rebel Moon, with its very diverse cast and WOC lead, was a rare case of him actually responding to criticism – he seemed very surprised and hurt to discover he has a white supremacist following); fascism plays off the simplest and easiest interpretations, and Snyder expends a lot of effort trying to generate the simplest and easiest myths. He wants to feel (and make others feel) the way that Watchmen made him feel – a sense of a massive world beyond our control, rich myths of individuals, and an awe at the power of action.

Like a lot of weak writers, he tries to get there by talking his way to it. The fascinating thing about his original and original-ish movies is how many of them are built around one specific choice; Rebel Moon: Part One builds to that guy killing the guy played by Charlie Hunnam, Batman V Superman opens with the tremendous image of Bruce Wayne sans Batsuit running into a cloud of dust and climaxes with him deciding not to kill Superman. One way of looking at his characters is that they’re building up the nerve to do the thing they really want to do – rationalising, theorising, occasionally temporarily talking themselves out of it (consider Abigail Nussbaum’s take on the infamous vision Supes has of his father in BvS).

This is why so many of his movies feel inconsequential, because they almost literally are. I find myself thinking of Hideo Kojima at his most depressed – circling the same thought over and over, trying to get 2 + 2 to equal 5 and despairing when he can’t. The difference is that Snyder is indulging in this purposefully, gleefully demonstrating melancholia for two or three or (ugh) four hours. Dark as the thought is, I find myself wondering if the suicide of his daughter didn’t shake him out of some of this the way my father’s slide into dementia has caused me to lighten the fuck up a bit; Rebel Moon is considerably more about straightforward heroism and the connections between people than, say, Man Of Steel. 

I see resonance between my critical writing and Snyder’s approach, such as it is, to storytelling, and I think it reveals the fundamental difference between storytelling and criticism as disciplines. I don’t really think of criticism as creativity – it does involve the creation of something that did not exist before, but it’s more like I’m extending the original work in some way. As a critic, I’m dependent upon us all knowing the objective data of the original work; the criticism I’m least proud of is the the stuff that got too theoretical and too disconnected from the objective imagery we share – stuff that got embarrassingly creative. My goal is to take the obvious (to me) implications behind the shared objective reality and then my contribution is to square them.

Snyder has similar instincts, but he applies them in the wrong place. The downside of criticism is that you cannot make shit up – you get access to the mystical space underpinning reality, but you can’t lie about what you see. I can’t describe Vic Mackey as an Accountant Cop because that does not reflect the objective reality we’re given (works pretty well for Ronnie though). The downside of storytelling is that you can’t pick and choose the mystical space that underpins your story; your job is to flagrantly make up images and behaviours, and by definition the creation of something new will make a new mystical space, and you don’t get to pick what that is.

There’s also the fact that Snyder’s career path has gotten in his own way. His fifth movie, Sucker Punch, was the first of his works that wasn’t an adaptation, and in the twenty years he’s been working, he’s made six that weren’t direct adaptations. If each of his original works is answering a single question to which a single action is the answer, he’s answered a grand total of six questions on his own. I, on the other hand, have asked and answered over three hundred questions in six years – sometimes imperfectly, sometimes doing variations on a single question, sometimes taking a while to believe the answers I get, but with a seemingly inevitable forward movement building on the past.

Some artists do their best work when they put questions in their characters mouths – this was a major thing I learned from TNG that never ended up in the essay and which was confirmed for me when I started The X-Files. It’s like that line from Oscar Wilde – some people have to put in a mask to show their true face, and being able to attribute an uncomfortable and embarrassing question (or worse, answer) to a character can liberate some people. I believe Synder and I are a different – not superior, but definitely different – class of people, where the things we think just don’t feel true unless we say them (and also unless we say them).

This is where I have gradually come to the actual appeal of making fiction – on top of the appeal of creating entirely fictional data and a self-contained history of events that I think are way cool, I get to use characters to say things that are half-true, rationalisations, completely out of context, bad faith, or even outright fabrications. It’s nice not having to go back over data making sure what I say is 100% true and logical and that I haven’t misinterpreted it. I don’t think Snyder is there, and let’s face it, the man is a fifty-eight year old millionaire. The fact that he made his work less blindingly white and male is a miracle in itself, I hardly expect him to discover the joys of dramatic structure. I’m happy enough just seeing him as a road not taken.