Zack Snyder's Justice Lube 3: A Sweater Sniffing Good Time
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Scene 1: 09:30-14:25
At last we have left the credits behind. Here, at last, is some Justice League. But first, we get the intertitle “Part 1 - Don’t Count On It, Batman”. With this, Zack Snyder joins the pantheon of filmmakers who have divided up their films into explicit chapters - Quentin Tarantino and Wes Anderson come to mind. It’s a bit affected, but it’s not unwelcome when you’re dealing with a four-hour runtime.
But really: why the hell not. Zack Snyder, you’ve been given carte blanche to do whatever you want here, and your die-hard fans are going to eat up whatever you throw on the screen. This movie could have been ten hours of you lifting weights and there would still be three hour YouTube videos screaming about your artistic triumph.
This first scene seems straightforward on first viewing but baffling on second thought. Bruce Wayne has come to an icebound Icelandic hamlet to locate Arthur Curry (“the Aquaman”) and persuade him to join his band of heroes. Bruce believes that “invaders are coming from far away” and that Curry can help.
If only the scene unfolded in a way that made any sense at all.
As the credits close, Wayne is heading towards a building, surrounded by a crowd of hearty fisherfolk. In the first scene, he is in the building along with everyone else in the village. A man in a watchman’s cap fiddles contemptuously with Wayne’s business card. What business do business cards have in this pure embodiment expression of the volk?
Wayne explains that he is looking for a man - a stranger - who comes on the king tide when the people are hungry. “He brings them fish,” Ben Affleck somehow says with a straight face. Have these villagers never heard of hákarl, or even harðfiskur?
Serving as interpreter for the villager in the watchman’s cap is a man who can only be described as a barely human titan. He is a towering Polynesian man with milk-white pupils, an easy command of English and an American accent. It is glaringly obvious that he is the person Bruce Wayne is tracking down. There is absolutely no reason to drag out the pretense, unless Bruce Wayne wants to look like an absolute idiot. At one point he offers the villagers $25,000 American to speak to Curry, which draws derisive laughter from the room. Ha ha, Mr. Wayne, these chthonic specimens of pure humanity do not need your money! They take it anyway.
Here is how the scene could have gone.
WAYNE: I’m looking for Arthur Curry, the Aquaman.
CURRY: There’s no one here by that name.
WAYNE: It’s obviously you.
CURRY: No it isn’t.
WAYNE: You have an American accent. You look nothing like anyone else here. Plus I literally have footage of you poking things with a trident under the sea.
CURRY: Uh… deepfake.
WAYNE: Oh fuck off.
CURRY: Ya got me.
Cut to an exterior shot. Curry, who has admitted his true identity, has immediately moved on to making fun of Wayne for his Batman identity. He shucks his coat and peels off his magnificent sweater to show off his more magnificent upper body. “A strong man is strongest alone,” he tells Wayne before sinking into the water.
Here’s where things get weird. As the ripples of his disappearance spread outward (kind of like Superman’s death cry?) the villagers begin to sing. It’s a mournful dirge that seems to mark their sorrow at Aquaman’s departure. The song is a traditional Icelandic tune called Vísur Vatnsenda-Rósu, an 18th-century poem written by a young woman mourning her unrequited love. It’s a piercing and beautiful tune. In the context of the movie, it’s a moment of batshit insanity.
A young blond-haired woman steps forward, still singing. She picks the sweater up from the beach where Aquaman left it, fondles its knots and sniffs it deeply. It would almost be an erotic moment if it weren’t so subordinated to ritual worship.
The sweater raises so many questions - did he swim there in that sweater and just dump it on the ground? Seems a bit rude. Did he show up shirtless and borrow some clothing? If so, it seems even ruder to toss it on the ground. Then again, these villagers don’t even know how to preserve fish, so they’re probably not up on etiquette either.
Compare and Contrast: This scene pops up in sharply truncated form (as most of these scenes do) in JWJL. The trajectory is largely the same, but Whedon inserts footage here and there that mostly consists of Bruce Wayne cracking extra jokes. At some points it feels like he’s actively making fun of Chris Terrio’s original screenplay by having Wayne point out the ridiculousness of Aquaman’s lines. At the end, after several extremely obvious soundstage-set inserts (Aquaman’s eye colour and Bruce Wayne’s hair visibly shift from shot to shot), Aquaman makes an awkward backwards leap and rockets off, leaving a CGI disturbance in the water. The villagers do not break into spontaneous song. No one sniffs the sweater.
