I would agree that in Snyder's project of placing superhero characters (and their myths and archetypes) into our modern real world, there are (to me)--at least with Superman and Batman thus far--clear references to the collective American psyche and identity
from 911 and our current
post-911 world. MoS's destruction of a portion of a city that is intended to resemble New York (complete with images of collapsing skyscrapers--with Wayne
Financial Tower (!) being pivotal to BvS's story) by an 'alien' threat seems pretty clearly symbolic. I think it is intended to mirror how our sense of the world as a dangerous place and how to protect ourselves in it (we're way more vulnerable than we ever realized) has changed by virtue of 911.
I'm older than most of you guys, but the types of anxieties our current post-911 generation faces seem a lot grayer the than the one my dad's (WWII vet) generation faced--and in which superheroes were originally defined. The enemy was crystal clear when my dad fought in WWII. The Nazi Third Reich was straight-up evil. No ifs, ands, or buts. They had to be destroyed.
It became a bit tougher as I was growing up, with Viet Nam, though. Viet Nam was all about the Cold War. The U.S. and the the Soviet Union had missiles poised at each other in a tense chess game. And the USSR's combination of totalitarianism and communism was utterly antagonistic and antithetical to life as we enjoy it in western capitalist democratic society. Given the U.S.S.R's vision it could not really ever have peacefully co-existed with us for long. So in the generation that succeeded the Viet Nam era, Ronald Reagan was able to use that effectively (and not lacking a reality base, as I said) to help American society feel a clearer sense of moral values about our cultural identity.
Still, the solution of Mutually Assured Destruction required putting the entire world on the brink of annihilation. So there was also a lot uneasiness there. And to make matters worse, in order to combat the spread of communism during the Cold War the U.S. had to hold it's nose and support a bevy of Third World thug dictators that we felt we could not afford to let side with the Soviets in the larger global framework. We sacrificed our dearest morals to hold onto those Third World chess pieces. The alternative (i.e., letting those dictators getting bankrolled by the Soviets) probably was a worse outcome for the geopolitical chessboard. But this gave us a black eye in the court of world opinion that still shows to this day. And understanding Viet Nam within this entire backdrop resulted in a generation that grew up "questioning authority" (i.e., our own government) as never before. So the sense of certitude about the U.S. cultural identity went from black and white in my dad's generation to gray in mine.
Anyway, in this post-911 world how do you fight a shadowy enemy such as jihadist terrorists? They unequivocally hate the Western way of life and have set out to brutally annihilate it without mercy or remorse. So it's not hard to define the enemy. That part is easy, at least. But tactically it's a tougher nut to crack. In the case of the invasion of Iraq, for example take the Cheney doctrine:
In the immediate wake of 911 and the vulnerabilities the U.S. felt afterward, was it a clear choice to just go ahead and take out a foreign leader who
1) clearly hated he U.S. after we humiliated him (appropriately, from our perspective) on the world stage in the Gulf War by crushing his invasion of Kuwait,
2) therefore had every reason to ally with entities that hated us even more than he did (jihadist terrorists),
3) was
swimming in 'oil for food' voucher money (a U.N. scam as it turned out) with which to bankroll third party terrorist agents (whether Al Queda or many others--many were/are ultimately mercenaries),
4) was vigorously building underground facilities in no less than thirteen of his so-called 'royal palaces' that were off limits to U.N. weapons inspectors (which Hans Blix went on record in his book to agree were extremely worrisome, and he felt most likely
were harboring secret weapons development programs), and
5) had even made an assassination attempt against G.H.W. Bush ("Senior")?
Many who view Republican neo-cons negatively will of course say no, chanting the mantra "Ha! We knew it! No weapons of mass destruction were ever found!" Followed by various narratives about what motivates the neo-cons. But imo it should not be ignored that the U.S. and its allies stood assembled on Iraq's doorstep for damn near a
year, trying to leverage Sadam to step down and avoid an invasion. That went on for almost a year. And in my view, during that time Sadam could have secreted whatever tech he might have been trying to develop in his royal places to Syria. Iraq was expert at that sort of thing. Anyway, that scenario is not the slightest bit implausible to me. In pointing these things out I'm not apologizing for the bad things the U.S. has done and does. I'm just saying that they actually make sense to me. A bad thing (i.e., invading a country on less than clear evidence)
may have prevented something far worse had we not. We'll never know. But I'm not sure either how smart it would have been to have faith in the 'containment' argument about Iraq following 911. I.e., don't invade, we'll just keep an eye on him and use economic sanctions. Sadam was a Frankenstein monster that the U.S. created, and I'm sure we had plenty of reason to legitimately fear what harm he could do to us via a third party agent with all that hatred and money. (Note: hmm... will we see a Frankenstein monster that is ultimately created by the U.S. government (via Lex as their contractor) appear in BvS? Yep, sure looks like it!)
Now getting back to MoS and BvS, and 911 parallels, and how different the American psyche is now from when Superman was first created through to the Silver Age of comics... maybe the picture is actually a bit grayer than we would like it to be in terms of finding strategies to accurately assess threats to our American way of life and how to respond to them. Maybe sometimes in this world we're forced to choose a lesser evil among choices with all relatively bad outcomes. That is imo perhaps what Jonathan Kent's "I don't know... maybe" line to Clark is meant to reflect in MoS re: the moral dilemma of saving a bus of school children versus the revealing to the world who Clark is
clearly before he is ready to handle that.
I think the U.S.'s cultural sense of moral identity of Superman as an archetype of "truth, justice, and the American Way" has been dragged kicking and screaming into this gray real world that we face both in MoS and BvS. That is why the film is so divisive. We want America to be like the Golden and Silver Age Superman
in principle. But when it comes down to the nitty gritty in a world of difficult choices
in practice, most people are actually relieved that we have Frank Miller's Batman operating in the shadows behind the scenes.
BvS first contrasts (via conflict) then unites those two archetypes. And it certainly fits that the film is partly titled "Dawn of Justice." As
A Thesis on Man of Steel argues (convincingly for the most part), in MoS the archetype and myth of Superman undergoes a
rebirth into our modern world of moral grays and anxieties. That is what MoS is about conceptually. And it shows that Snyder is truly an auteur (and a very skillful and important one, at that.)
Now I do also think that the modern post-911 anxieties we have in the U.S. about terrorist threats clearly result in scapegoating of immigrants, many of whom from the south are "illegal aliens." Many Americans are worried about how easy it is for jihadists to infiltrate and set up cells in this country given how porous our borders are. (With the Kryptonian invasion symbolizing this in MoS and BvS.) But I think it also speaks to a deeper worry about the changing fabric of our society, that the terrorist concerns belie. The reality is that unless one is a full blooded Native American, American citizens are all the sons and daughters of immigrants. We're a nation of immigrants and always have been. And yet!.. to see the kind of Wonder Bread world of "apple pie and Chevrolet, weird sort of American Dream" (as Snyder has put it) slowly give way to a different sort of cultural tapestry has been very disconcerting to many. Many folks who immigrate to the the U.S. now do not assimilate, at least during the first generation. I'm simply pointing out that it isn't actually that hard to understand how unsettling that could be to many white and black Americans whose ancestors came to the U.S. early on. From a psychological standpoint it is arguably actually more gray than black and white. We don't want to feel anxious about it for the wrong reasons intellectually. But I think many of us do, at least at a kind of primal gut level.
Sorry for the tl;dr long discourse here. I didn't intend to go this deep into it. But I do think that the thesis above illustrates that MoS and BvS are probably using some very sophisticated symbolism, and playing creatively with Jungian myth and archetypes, to weave a fictional world that is not only incredibly rich and engaging story-wise, but perhaps also even socially relevant. Am I reading too much in? Yeah, that certainly could be. Perhaps Snyder did not intend to tell such a deep allegory. But amazingly, even if so, I do expect that the two films (MoS and BvS taken together) will lend themselves to such a coherent interpretation.
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