EPISODE 607: I THINK IT WAS THE DUMBREAKA

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Mar 22, 2021

POP CULTURE SPIRIT WOW

So I watched Justice League, the Snyder Cut.

Actually I watched the entire Snyderverse Trilogy—Man of Steel, aka Tornado Dog; Batman vs. Superman, aka Tornado Dog II: Wait, Your Mom’s Name is Martha?; and Justice League, aka—

Well, actually that’s the thing isn’t it? If you asked me what the aka should be on the original I would have said Tornado Dog III: Because Why Just Blow Up Cities When You Can Destroy the Planet? I remember it being funnier than the other two films, but only more violent.

But the thing is…I actually kind of think Justice League, the Snyder Cut is a good movie.

Let me now walk away from this statement so I can momentarily feel justified in how much I dismissed the whole idea of it and its fans for so long, before crying tears of real shame in a sec:

Justice League is long. It’s very very long. 4 hours long. You cannot sit down and watch it straight through and enjoy it, it’s just too much standing around and doing character development and also so many many things explained, BUT NOT WHY WE DON’T HAVE COLONIES ON THE MOON YET WHEN 2001 WAS 20 YEARS AGO.

Exposition – aka Characters Stop To Tell You Stuff that the Writer (get serious, Some Studio Exec) Feels You Need to Know – is death. Imagine being on a rollercoaster and they stop halfway through to explain I don’t know, rain. That is not a rollercoaster you’re going to go on again, even if it is the largest wooden rollercoaster in the world and the first time you were supposed to ride on it in your grade school graduation trip you got so scared halfway through the line you turned around and walked back through a crowd of your classmates who already had come to see making your life miserable as an important experience in community building, so you were definitely not turning back this time under any circumstances.

But because the movie was so long I decided to take it in smaller chunks, usually around 30 minutes. And watched like that, it’s actually pretty good. Like really, pretty good. Almost every character gets a satisfying story, and newbies Cyborg and Flash more than the others. In a way the whole film ends up being Cyborg’s story, and it’s better for it.

Also, the film’s presentation of the Flash is so good I am surprised the internet is still up and running because there is no doubt “When is the Flash coming out” was the most googled thing on them this weekend.

If you get to his opening scene with the dogs, you will watch this film to the end no matter what. (And wait, because he gets an equally amazing scene later.)

In every way the DC Universe has scorned the lessons I thought they should have learned from Marvel. They didn’t build to a shared universe. They didn’t draw on the great comic stories (not really). Their characters kind of hate each other, in a real hatey hate kind of way. And they don’t offer much in the way of hope.

Seriously, these films are not made to build audience, but to shed audience.

But get to the end of Justice League and you wonder if maybe there’s some kind of crazy genius in this plan after all. Because where the Marvel Universe has always been about community, a shared experience that is at times shaken or challenged, the DC Universe is all about the struggle to overcome distrust and form community, which is by nature a much bleaker and harder story to tell, but also much more emotional if you can make it to the end. It’s a story that begins in loneliness and isolation and comes to a place of hope and friendship.

The story of this film is so insane, and probably if it weren’t for the pandemic and Hollywood’s consequent desire to do nice stuff that would generate an audience and revenue, this movie would never had been made. (Which is another sign of just how crazy brave Snyder was; he literally created a series that wouldn’t really pay off until the end.) But now maybe it was all providence because this is actually the perfect pandemic super hero film.

It also has an ending that is so bonkers that I can’t even believe I’m saying this, but I really want to see that movie.

On a different topic…

I didn’t really have a gay friend until late in my training to a priest. I mean, no, I had lots of gay friends in the other priests and seminarians that I lived with or knew, and still others that left. But people outside the cloister wall, as it were, that was a whole other thing.

I wasn’t conscious of myself as avoiding “those people” but in retrospect I so clearly was. And why? What was I afraid of? Falling in love, maybe? Or being judged – that’s the thought that immediately rushes to mind – being seen as I was, still afraid and in a kind of closet and just not being really authentic yet, and being scorned for that.

But I think the truth is not so much about judgment as challenge. To be around people who were openly gay was to expose myself to ideas or ways of living that would make me look at my own. Specifically their lives would force me to confront the self-hatred and fear that was still so present in my own, even as I was feeling so much better because within the Society I felt able to be myself.

So yeah, I kept my distance.

But then when I was in theology there was an administrator at our school who was gay and married. And even as part of me on the inside was always skittish and looking for an exit strategy lest I see myself, he was just so unassuming and funny and brilliant that I didn’t run away—or not as far as to leave the room, anyway. In fact, on a couple occasions I went to dinner at his place and had a wonderful time with him and his partner.

Last week the Vatican announced that queer people can’t be married in the church because God does not bless sin. And as I’ve sat with that, I keep thinking about the queer married couples I know, like John and Steven or Juliana and Kait, and how they have been such a source of welcome and liberation for me. Just by allowing me into their lives without judgment of my semi-anxious self, they have made me (and others) more able to find home in ourselves as we are.

If that’s not a sign of a commitment and life that is blessed I just don’t know what is.

A lot of the best stuff I find for this newsletter comes from other newsletters.

Here’s two that I really loved this week:

Ryan Broderick’s Garbage Day, a newsletter about the crazy stuff you can find on the internets.

Such as:

Ben Marshall @notbenmarshall

I GOT VACCINATED!!! 🙏🙏

No, I don’t get the references in this either, but it is pretty hilarious, no?

Ryan’s always got stuff like this. So good.

An excerpt from Dan Hon’s newsletter:

Wear a mask. It’ll change your life.
Last week, my wife and I were in counseling with our therapist. Both of them have given me consent to write about our conversation.
Our therapist, K, mentioned that, in terms of “everything getting back to normal”, in the sense that we’re not in this COVID-19 particular state of crisis and emotional assault, she’d read that it would take about five years.
Ha ha, I joked: the next pandemic will have already started by then.
It has been difficult, right? If you’re reading this, odds are you probably score highly on the conscientious index. You understand the reasons behind wearing a face mask and that you have decided to put collective wellbeing above personal inconvenience.
Like last year, we're in transition: this time to the prospect of mass vaccination. This period brings a new flavor to the stress we've been experiencing, a different one from March of last year. The coming months are just as unknown, just as unprecedented. It’s entirely reasonable to feel worried or anxious about what’s coming next, what it will be like, how we will behave or choose to behave, both individually and collectively.
We talked about March last year as part of processing this latest change. I had taken my last flight on February 29, coming back from a workshop at Berkeley. For some of us, we were about to enter a constant state of alert. Going out, we would be scanning, continually, for threats: at the supermarket, is that man too close to me? Should I be sanitizing everything? Have I sanitized enough? Do I have the right kind of mask?
We never stopped, but as summer ended, what we were scanning for changed. Is opening back up safe? Should we be sending children back? Should we be going back to work? In America, it got worse as we got closer to Thanksgiving and December holidays.
We've lived with this for over a year now. You can feel it, right? It's exhausting. All that cortisol, all of that adrenaline.
In the last few weeks, during this new in-between state of the vaccine coming, but not, as the saying goes, evenly distributed, K had gone on a family trip to a town in central Oregon. It was an expedition from the blue Democrat-voting region marking the Portland metropolitan area into a sea of purple turning to red to red.
K is in a high risk category. She told us about her group diligently wearing masks and keeping distant. Together, they were being responsible. Even if it looks like hope is on the way, we’re still in the midst of a pandemic. We can’t afford to let our guard down now, when we’re so close.
But when her group went about town, they were surrounded by people who weren’t wearing masks, outside or inside.
It made them anxious. Why weren’t these people taking precautions? Hadn’t they seen the science? Didn’t they want to keep other people safe?
K knew the answer. Here, in this community, not wearing a mask was a point of pride. This wasn’t really a surprise. K had family here.
This was the first time she’d been in such a situation, among so many people like this. She had taken the trip thinking that perhaps things would be safer now that the end was in sight.
But the community she was in was behaving as if there wasn't a pandemic going on at all.
As if everything were back to normal.
Only there was one difference.
Everywhere she looked, it felt like there were people staring at her. Judging her.
Some people were actively angry at her, derisive: oh, you’re one of those mask wearers.
Everywhere, contempt for her and her group.
It was worst indoors, she said.
The trip had turned into something else. On top of the persistent scanning for threat of the last year, of looking around worried whether people are wearing their masks correctly, making sure you're keeping appropriate distance, and so on, now she and her family were in a situation with a new stress: pervasive and persistent scorn, judgment, hatred and contempt.
We sympathized. That sounds horrible.
And then I thought a little about what my life has been like.
I said: this is like racism.
How do you mean, asked my wife and K.
I said: because people were judging you because of how you looked. They didn’t know anything about you, but for the fact that you were wearing a mask. You were in constant fear at any interaction.
People were calling you names. You were made fun of. And while you weren’t physically assaulted, but suddenly you were in an environment where you were on high alert because you were worried you could be. You'd seen videos of people being spat on, coughed at. Anyone could’ve been a threat to you. You were outnumbered. You were sticking out. You were marked.
I said: Imagine growing up like that.
Imagine the world being like that from the moment you’re born, for every single day. Imagine only feeling safer when you’re around other people like you. Imagine never knowing when or if someone’s going to explode at you.
But the difference is, you could leave.
The difference is, when this is over, you can take your mask off.