Zack Snyder's Justice Lube Part 10: I'm on a Plane
/
Scene 9: A Close Shave (38:42-40:10)
The shot of cheese-grater Steppenwolf cuts to a shot of a razor being rinsed under a tap, in what may be the only visually witty edit in the entire movie. And what a razor (and tap) it is. A Google image search ignores the razor altogether but correctly identifies the other object as a tap. The “visually similar images” are downright queasy. Instead of razors and taps, we get near-monochrome photos of flowing smoke, steel hammers shattering glass, vapers slipping clouds from their mouths. It looks like a sequence of shots from an ad for some mysterious but very masculine product. This Is What Vaping 5 Gum Feels Like, maybe.
The razor belongs to Bruce Wayne, and the fancy tap belongs to his private plane. Bruce and Alfred are regrouping after his failure to recruit Aquaman and looking at other potential recruits. Functionally, this scene renders the earlier tarmac scene pointless, which is probably why Whedon adapted this scene and cut the other one.
This scene makes it clear that the stakes for Bruce Wayne are not global but personal. He feels that he must take up the mantle of saviordom to fulfill the promise that he made “him” aka. Superman. Alfred points out that there are no “barbarians at the gate,” which prompts Bruce to muse that “maybe the barbarians are already here”. Dun-dun-dun.
The phrase “barbarians at the gate” is, as they say, a tell. Although the classical Barbarians were Germanic tribes bearing down on the crumbling Roman Empire, it’s no great stretch to apply the term to the subhuman pagan monsters of 300 who sought to subjugate and feminize the manly Spartans of Frank Miller and Zack Snyder’s conjoined imaginations.
Compare and contrast: the Whedon scene, previously covered in this series, covers the same basic material but is startlingly different in its particulars. There’s the horrible colour grade, a visibly heavier and soul-drained Ben Affleck who could have benefited from the CGI budget that went to Cavill’s moustache, and more quippy Whedonisms than the scene can bear.
That said, it’s not ineffective in packing in some needed exposition (we first hear the names Barry Allen and Victor Stone here) and while the stakes are not as specific as they are in Snyder’s scene, we get the sense of a Bruce Wayne who is still possessed by obsessive impulses but has channeled them into saving the world instead of beating up criminals or murdering Superman. Same Batman, different day. Insofar as that goes, it’s a subtle and understated bit of insight into the character, reaching into his psychological roots instead of a conversion narrative based in honour and faith. Freud over Jesus, if you will: New Gods over Old.
