This post is about Justice League, and I promise that I will get around to talking about the film in a few moments. Before I can do so, however, I feel compelled to contextualize my thoughts about the film by telling you about my favorite radio play Christmas song (I won't bore you with the five categories of Christmas songs in which I keep an ever evolving ranking). The song is called "We Need a Little Christmas," and though it originally came from the Broadway musical Mame where it was performed by Angela Lansbury, my preferred version is the Johnny Mathis cover. I don't particularly care for the music, or even for many of the lyrics, but there are eight lines in the song that so captivate my attention that they echo through my head for hours any time I happen to catch the song on the radio during the holiday season. The first four set up a definite problem of human nature related to time and entropy and age:
For I've grown a little leaner,
Grown a little colder,
Grown a little sadder,
Grown a little older,
A problem which is redeemed, a handful of lines later, by the celebrations of the holiday season, a remedy for the ague that is part and parcel of being a human being embedded in time:
For we need a little music,
Need a little laughter,
Need a little singing,
Ringing through the rafters,
Because, of course, in some vital sense these are the things that give life meaning. They are also some of the qualities associated with an all but forgotten virtue that faded from conscious awareness, for many of us, with the loss of divine right monarchy and the courtesies of the [literary] chivalric orders: joviality. For most of us, the notion of joviality is hidden behind that falling curtain of lost meanings. The term in modern parlance denotes a friendliness or cheerfulness, a social niceness that makes one easy to get along with. And here, as so often happens, the greater bulk of the concept sinks into the liminal space outside of conscious thought. I've not heard a better description of the fullness of joviality than the one offered by C.S. Lewis in That Hideous Strength. Lewis writes:
Before the other [gods] a man might sink: before this he might die, but if he lived at all he would laugh. If you had caught one breath of the air that came from him, you would have felt yourself taller than before. Though you were a cripple [sic], your walk would have become stately: though a beggar, you would have worn your rags magnanimously. Kingship and power and festal pomp and courtesy shot from him as sparks fly from an anvil. The ringing of bells, the blowing of trumpets, the spreading out of banners, are means used on earth to make a faint symbol of his quality. It was like a long sunlit wave, creamy-crested and arched with emerald, that comes on nine feet tall, with roaring and with terror and unquenchable laughter. It was like the first beginning of music in the halls of some King so high and at some festival so solemn that a tremor akin to fear runs through young hearts when they hear it. For this was [the] King of Kings, through whom the joy of creation principally blows across these fields of [the Sun]...
Nowhere in contemporary popular culture is this notion more fully encapsulated than it is in the figure of Superman, and it is in this mythic sense that Justice League resonates most powerfully.
Much has been written about the representation of Superman as a Christ figure in the recent run of DCEU films. This is not quite accurate, in each of the three films in which Superman has appeared he is drawn in relation to different mythic figures. In Man of Steel, Superman is represented as Christ; in Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice, the comparison is explicitly made to the Arthur of Nigel Terry's Excalibur; and in Justice League he is Balder the Bright, the son of Odin murdered by Loki (Lex Luthor), whose resurrection recreates the world in the aftermath of Ragnarok (sadly, making Thor: Ragnarok only the second best Ragnarok themed superhero film of November 2017). Which brings us back to Justice League.
The film opens in a decidedly un-jovial place. Superman has died, and been laid to rest. Without him the world has, as several clunky moments of exposition will remind us, lost its sense of hope. Superman was a living myth, the incarnation of joviality (his dour demeanor in the two previous films notwithstanding), and like Balder he has been slain. So, naturally, we've got to get him back. Also there is a villain, who has an agenda, and whatever (it is becoming ever more the case that the value of superhero movies is divorced from the specifics of their plots). Also it is funny/fun/charming/winning, and a good time at the movies, and goes a long way towards retroactively redeeming Dawn of Justice, which I didn't think was possible.
Ultimately though, at least for me, it is the mythic power of the thing that stands out. I love Superman, not the jingoistic Superman of (among others) the John Byrne Man of Steel run (from which the first Snyder film gets its title), but the Superman of Final Crisis, who sings in the last moments of the universe to drive away the spirituous evil Darkseid, and who offers up the light stored in his cells to power the Miracle Machine that allows him to wish all reality back into existence. I love the Superman of All-Star Superman, of Richard Donner's films, of Alan Moore's Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow: "the imaginary story (which may never happen, but then again may) of the perfect man who came from the sky and did only good." And because Justice League offered me a glimpse of that Superman, it has earned my love. The second time I went to see it, I wept openly in the theater, overwhelmed by a sense of relief that even in a fictional world it was possible that this Superman could exist.
And that, if for no one else, made this film a triumph for me.
