To the surprise of absolutely no one – after all, this is the same man who thought Ezra Miller-playing-a-dollar-store-Peter-Parker was a perfect representation of Barry Allen – former DCEU architect Zack Snyder has admitted that he has no love for the concept of ‘character canon’.
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The Man of Steel, Batman v. Superman – Dawn of Justice, and original Justice League director offered his thoughts on the topic while making a headline appearance on the 2114th episode of the Joe Rogan Experience.
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Pressed by the show’s eponymous host for his reaction to the more heavy levels of scrutiny his DC films have received from comic book fans, Snyder opined, “That’s a lifestyle choice for a lot of people. It’s not a movie.”
“If I made a romantic comedy, you’d be like ‘Okay, that was fun’,” explained the director. “The people who love – and by the way I love that they feel this passionately, in no way would I criticize that because I live the same life, because for me it’s morning, noon, and night – but for those guys, it’s not just a movie, and so you have to, on some level, acknowledge that this is their religion and they feel strongly about it. And the truth is it’s my religion too.”
Turning to the grievances fans have had with his darker, more brutalistic take on DC’s roster of superheroes, Snyder then admitted, “I tend to get in trouble because I do take a deconstructionist view – because of The Dark Knight Returns, because of Watchmen, if you’ve read those two comics it’s hard to go back – and it’s because I care that I want to take them apart.”
“People are always like ‘Batman can’t kill. Batman can’t kill is canon,'” he explained of his creative philosophy, “And I’m like, ‘Okay, the first thing I want to do when you say that is I want to see what happens.’
“And they go ‘Well don’t put him in a situation where he has to kill someone,’ Snyder continued, “and I’m like ‘You’re just protecting your god in a weird way. You’re making your god irrelevant if he can’t be in that situation. He has to now deal with that, if he does to that, what does it mean? Does he stand up to it? Can he survive that, as a god? As your god?'”
Following a brief detour in which he took a moment to offer praise to Frank Miller’s deconstruction of The Dark Knight in the aforementioned The Dark Knight Returns comic book series, Snyder then affirmed, “That’s where like, Frank Miller takes Batman and just tears him in half, and you’ve got to now come out the other side of that and Batman is still the hero.”
“Batman still does the right thing,” the director noted. “He mains his code, his ethics. He doesn’t change, but like, our perception of him changes.”
To this end, drawing his thoughts on canon to a close, Snyder then argued, “But a lot of the fandom, who I feel like have gotten to the same place I have with the characters where they need to test them.”
“And I feel like the character – It’s been my experience, that the characters have not let us down,” said the Rebel Moon creator. “These myths have not let us down. You put them to the ragged edge, into that scenario, and they come out the other side and you’re like “Yeah, there’s a reason why Superman is Superman!” He can handle it, he can f—ing take it because he’s so iconic.”
