A great piece on David Goyer and his disdain for comics

Good stuff. [Link]

Goyer’s remarks were recorded in front of a live audience and it seems clear that the writer made them to be playful, but nevertheless there’s a certain level of contempt in his language, something that’s been present in most of his film work but hasn’t really gotten unbearable until recently, and it just keeps coming as the conversation goes on.

To wit, when Goyer starts talking about the Martian Manhunter, he defies anyone who’s heard of the character to have also “been laid”.

“Well, he hasn’t been rebooted but he’s a mainstay in the Justice League. He can’t be f**king called the Martian Manhunter because that’s goofy. He can be called Manhunter… The whole deal with Martian Manhunter is he’s an alien living amongst us… So he comes down to Earth and decides, unlike Superman who already exists in the world now, that he’s just going to be a homicide detective… So instead of using super-powers and mind-reading and like, oh, I could figure out if the President’s lying or whatever, he just decides to disguise himself as a human homicide detective. Dare to dream!”

[...]

“I would set it up like The Day After Tomorrow. We discover one of those Earth-like planets… So maybe like… we get the DNA code from that planet and then grow him in a petri dish here… He’s like in Area 51 or something and we’re just basically… doing biopsies on him. Then he gets out and he’s really angry and he f**ks She-Hulk.”

Look. I’m not here to defend the Martian Manhunter. I just recorded a video for ComicsAlliance three days ago where I talked about the Martian Manhunter being a B-Lister who never really caught on as a solo hero, and I can understand if you’ve got some issues with the character.

But at the same time, there are a couple of things that really get me here, and the first one is Goyer’s snorting dismissing of how the Martian Manhunter can’t be the “Martian Manhunter” because that’s a silly name. This guy wrote three movies about a dude named “Batman.” If there is a planet where the words “Martian Manhunter” are inherently less silly than the word “Batman,” then it is not the one we are living on.

(Incidentally, DC already has a character named Manhunter who, in her latest incarnation, is a derivative of a pre-existing male superhero who is an attorney in her civilian identity. Presumably, Goyer thinks she was created so Deathstroke the Terminator would have someone to make out with.)

It’s also really telling that Goyer thinks Martian Manhunter is shooting low by becoming a homicide detective in his civilian identity — you know, literally fighting crime all the time on both large and small scales. This is the man who wrote a superhero movie where Superman had to be prompted into becoming a superhero at all by two dead fathers, and who could probably go listen to the President’s heartbeat just to be sure everything’s going all right in the time that it takes him to pretend to ride a bike to his job at a newspaper. Dare to dream!

Finally, there’s his line about all these virgins who have hunched over their basement long boxes for so many years that they’ve actually heard of the Martian Manhunter, the character who was on Justice League and Brave and the Bold and Smallville, DC’s most prominent television shows over the past decade. The ones with millions of viewers?

If I’m not in the business of defending the Martian Manhunter as a character, I’m certainly not in the business of defending comic book fans — everyone involved in comics has some sweeping generalizations about their fellow readers to gripe about, I assure you — so I’ll just say this. Goyer’s got a point. Martian Manhunter is a relatively obscure character. Despite being featured in almost every incarnation of the Justice League, despite multiple attempts to brand him as a solo hero, he’s never caught on. He’s always a supporting character in someone else’s book, taking a back seat to more iconic characters, and I have my doubts that there’s a way to do a movie that could really make him stand out in his own right.

You know, sort of like Blade.

But it’s not Martian Manhunter’s status as the D-lister of the Justice League that’s really the point here. The point, made abundantly clear by Goyer in his remarks, is that he doesn’t really understand why anyone would come to Earth from a dead planet and decide to devote their life to helping others, which is a pretty terrible quality for a person writing multiple films about Superman to have. A super-powered alien who helps people, you see, is silly. It should be a revenge-fueled rampage culminating in a sex joke at the expense of a female character, because that’s smart and mature. This is the thought process that leads to a movie where Superman’s response to a genocidal villain claiming the hero can only win by breaking his code against killing is to do just that, and then smile cheerfully while a woman stands in the background talking about how sexy he is.

Spoiler warning in case you haven’t seen it: That’s exactly how Man of Steel ends.

I don’t think that it’s necessary to be a die hard fan of something to write well about it, and I’m even of the mind that if you’re not a fan, you can see points that someone who is might miss. Regardless of the spirit in which his remarks may have been made, Goyer’s language goes beyond just not liking a couple of characters. There’s a palpable disdain there, one that’s not present in other live-action expressions of DC heroes on television and in animation, and one that’s mitigated by Nolan’s dominant influence on the later Dark Knight films, but one that comes through in every frame of Man of Steel. Goyer is embarrassed by the very idea of superheroes. They’re for “little kids who get the sh*t kicked out of them every day”. Goyer’s heroes are uncomfortable with the idea of altruism. Everyone’s out for revenge, everyone has to be pushed and prodded and dragged to do the right thing — that is, if they ever get around to doing it at all.

That’s not what superheroes — particularly DC’s heroes — are about, and yet, here’s the guy in charge of bringing them to the widest possible audience, in films soaked with shame and contempt, where a character like Superman can’t exist in a world with anything brighter than a medium grey. Goyer’s pushing against what the characters are about instead of embracing them for what they are, because he’s too afraid of making something that might be considered silly.

In other words, to use his own famous Blade catchphrase, David Goyer’s always trying to ice skate uphill.