LamboMan
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So after much thinking and writing on these boards and on SHH and discussions with people, I've finally managed to clearly understand the character arcs of Batman and Superman in this movie and also how they were deconstructed and reconstructed. It seems a common complaint is that Snyder took the Watchmen route and 'deconstructed' these characters but did not do enough to build them back up again. I beg to differ and here's why:
Before the movie came out I was completely expecting the battle between Batman and Superman to be a battle of ideals. Their ideals are the things that guide their methods and classically, in the comics and animated media, they have always disagreed on their methods and that is what has divided them in the past.
This was definitely touched upon in the movie as a motivation for Superman to investigate Batman and want to stop him (also, there is a deleted scene showing Clark investigating Batman while in Gotham and we will see this in the Ultimate Cut).
But in the end the resolution wasn't one of their ideals or methods, it was a resolution of the very character motivations and life events that lead them to become what they are.
It wasn't a resolution of the 'effects' but of the 'cause' itself and that is something I have never seen happen in any Batman and Superman story. It went to the core of the characters and changed them and made them better, instead of just resolving surface conflicts or disagreements and leaving the characters intact.
The resolution I’m talking about revolves around the infamous ‘Martha’ moment. Everything in the movie leads up to that moment and the event changes both heroes for the better.
The Deconstruction of Batman
“They took me to the light. A beautiful lie.”
Batman was convinced that his life’s work was a lie since it amounted to nothing and was something he did to comfort himself from the fact that he could never go back and save his parents. Being Batman was his coping mechanism and it was all a “beautiful lie” in the end.
Throughout the movie, Bruce showed signs that he had stopped believing in the value of his mission in life (to ensure that no young child has to lose their parents again and to stop crime in Gotham) and had accepted that his entire life’s actions were worthless due to the appearance of Superman, a being who could destroy the entire world on a whim if he ever turned bad. He had also stopped believing he did any good in his twenty years since he lost a lot of people along the way like Robin and his employees (both of whom he saw as his family), some of whom were his personal friends (Jack) and he felt that he had failed in his mission to protect people. We see all of this from the following dialogues:
“Twenty years in Gotham Alfred, how many good guys are left? How many stayed that way?”
“We’re criminals Alfred, we’ve always been criminals.”
“So twenty years of fighting criminals amounts to nothing?” “Criminals are like weeds, you pull one up, another grows in its place. This is about the future of the world. This is my legacy.”
Now that times had changed, he had changed as well and since he had begun to go too far and was “fallen”, the only thing left for him to do was to save the world from Superman, a possible future threat. He had nothing else left. I’ll elaborate on this point:
When he said, “There was a time above, a time before, there were perfect things, diamond absolutes,” Bruce was referring to his past world and himself. He was referring to the time he was a perfect hero and not the cruel man he had become today. Then he said, “and what falls is fallen” believing that since he had crossed the line and become too ruthless, he was now irredeemable in life and could never be saved from the darkness. This was why he branded people and didn’t care about the consequences of doing that (sending people to the ICU, giving them a death sentence).
He was ready to give up everything, his morals, his principles, to defeat Superman and ensure a safe world, even if it meant he needed to kill every last vestige of his past self and kill Superman with his own hands. Since he is already fallen and irredeemable and has nothing left to lose, it doesn’t matter to him. He feels he is doing the right thing even if it ends up getting him killed (“this is suicide”).
The Reconstruction of Batman
When Batman hears Martha’s name he is snapped back to the moment of his parents’ death and realises that he wasn’t the hero who was going to save the world from a dangerous alien, he was the man who was about to take a boy away from his mother. He was about to become the very thing he had fought against all his life and what had caused him to become Batman in the first place. Even though he was ready to kill Superman before, he had never thought of himself in terms of his parents’ killer and instead saw Superman as the killer. He lost his parents to a shooter “for no reason at all”, he lost Robin to the Joker (chaos) and he lost his last family, his employees to the Kryptonians’ war (that emerged out of nowhere).
But now he realised that he had things the other way around and that Superman was the victim and the man with a family, a mother and people that he loved and whom he was trying to save and was helpless to save at that moment. He saw things for what they really were: Superman was the boy about to lose his mother to a madman and that boy was helpless to save her. That is why when he realises all of this he throws the spear away in anger at what he had let himself become.
When Batman is faced with this reality he doesn't just come back from the edge and become good again, he manages to FINALLY come to terms with the loss he suffered for 30 years. By getting a chance to save Martha, he can finally do something that allows him to cope with his loss, which 20 years of fighting criminals and stopping evil couldn't do. It also reinstills faith in him that what he did for 20 years WASN’T a waste and that "what falls" ISN'T "fallen" permanently and that his life as Batman WASN'T just "a beautiful lie". This is proven at the end of the movie when he says, “Men are still good, we fight, we kill, we betray one another, but we can rebuild, we can do better, we will, we have to.”
Batman was inspired by the fact that Superman, who could have killed him easily, didn’t, and that all he was trying to do was save his mother from a madman (Lex). He was also inspired by Superman’s sacrifice to save the world. Batman realised that he could still be the good guy, he could redeem himself if he decided to (“I failed him in life, I will not fail him in death.”) This is why Batman doesn’t brand Lex at the end of the movie since he is trying to change back to his old ways and reform himself to the Batman he used to be, from a “time before, a time above”.
He decides to do the right thing and form the Justice League to protect the world in Superman’s absence, he takes that responsibility on himself. This completes Batman’s character arc and in the Justice League movie we will see Batman as he was before all the rage and powerlessness turned him cruel.
Batman's arc was about his redemption from what has been classically represented as irredeemable and his rise from the depths of the cave to the light to become a better version of what he used to be. Batman had become militant (like in The Dark Knight Returns) and saw this period as a war ("You're going to go to war?" "That son of a ***** brought the war to us") and treated it as such with collateral casualties being acceptable to him, but at the end he rises above that and realises he is better than that and can rebuild himself and do better. He must, he will.
The Deconstruction of Superman
The character of Superman has always been one to see the world in terms of black and white and absolute good and bad. In the comics, Superman’s world has always been depicted as black and white, where Superman and his actions are absolute good and the villains and their actions are absolute bad. This is how the audience has seen Superman since his inception.
Even in the Christopher Reeve movies, this was pretty apparent. Superman is the perfect hero and his villains are absolute evil.
To understand this within the context of the latest movies, we need to go back a bit, to Man of Steel, to the part where Superman is battling Zod at the end of the movie.
When Zod declared his intentions to kill every human and to stop at nothing till the world is destroyed, Superman replied, “You’re a monster Zod and I’m gonna stop you.” This clearly shows us that Superman saw his and his actions as white and Zod’s as black. The catch here is that was not true and Zod was a very gray character who was motivated by the protection and survival of his own species and planet, just like Superman was.
In Batman v Superman he is a guy who uses his powers for good and feels that he is always in the right regardless of the negative consequences of his actions (“I didn’t kill those people if that’s what they’re saying.”) For him doing good with his powers was just that - doing the right thing - which is why he is disheartened when the world doesn't stop questioning his actions and even his very existence, even though he is just trying to be the good guy and help people. He sees his actions as white and is in denial about the negative consequences. He sees that as someone else’s fault and he is not entirely wrong about that since Zod caused all the destruction and death in Man of Steel, the African government killed the villagers and Lex’s men killed the terrorists).
In spite of this, he is ready to face accountability for the negative consequences and that is why he turns up at the senate hearings and feels bad when he sees Keefe deface the statue, because he is reminded of his failures.
In the party scene, he asks Bruce about his opinion on the Batman and his methods which people in Gotham should not be in support of, since to him, Batman is in the wrong and his methods are wrong. He feels he is right when he accuses Batman of instilling fear in people and taking away their civil liberties. Later on he also felt that Batman was bad because his branding apparently got a guy killed, regardless of the series of events that lead to that guy dying after the branding. Black and white.
That is why he confronts Batman later on and tells him to stop his activities or that he would make him stop (“Consider this mercy.”) He also kept fighting with Perry over the Batman story and wanted to expose him as the criminal he saw him as (black).
All of the above isn’t to say that his actions and what he stood for (truth and justice) were wrong, it just means that he always felt he was right in his actions and decisions even when he wasn’t. His intentions and what he was fighting for were right, but whom he was fighting and how he was thinking were wrong.
He kept seeing himself and his actions and his point of view as white and in the right, up until the event that began to change him - the senate bombing.
He had faith in the world and that the system would prevail, that people would see his actions for what they were and understand his intentions if he spoke to the world and just kept doing the right thing. That is why I feel he saw the world and his actions as white until then, having faith that humanity could accept him and begin to do good alongside him, joining forces with him (“They will join you in the Sun, Kal. You will help them accomplish wonders.”) But then after the bombing he saw the world as black, which is why I feel the dialogue of his, "My world doesn't exist anymore" works on two levels as he isn't just referring to Krypton, he is referring to the world as Superman saw it, in white. Even if he didn't mean it directly, it works thematically from the writer's and director's points of view.
I feel that was the artist's intention, to make you feel that Superman lost faith in fundamental capacity for good in the world and that his actions could effect change like he wanted to. He also lost faith in himself and the value of his actions since they courted death. The Zod battle, the African incident and now the bombing. It broke Superman and made him lose faith in himself, his role in the world and in humanity. It was his lowest point. He blames himself for seeing the world as white and not keeping an eye out for the danger at all times since he had too much faith in the system and the world ("I'm afraid I didn't see it because I wasn't looking") which now seemed completely black to him.
“All this time I’ve been living my life the way my father saw it, righting wrongs for a ghost, thinking I’m here to do good. Superman was never real, just the dream of a farmer from Kansas.”
Here he refers to both his fathers. First he refers to Jor-El, since he was the one to instill faith in Superman that he was sent here to do good and that his actions could change the world and humanity for the better (“You can save her Kal, you can save all of them”). Then he refers to Pa Kent, who also told Clark when he was young that, “Good character or bad, that man’s going to change the world” and, “I have to believe you were sent here for a reason and all these changes you’re going through, one day you’ll see them as a blessing and when that day comes you will have to make a choice: whether to stand proud in front of the human race or not.” Having Clark become something more than just a man, becoming Superman, was a dream that both his fathers shared, albeit in their own ways.
The Reconstruction of Superman
He lost faith in that dream, that belief his fathers held and he felt that humanity was better off without him. Everything seemed black and so he gave up and exiled himself, if only for a short time. It is there that he remembered the wise words of his father in the form of a story he once heard from him. The memory of Pa Kent’s story makes him realise that negative consequences of heroic actions and unintended ripple effects are inevitable and that doing good or being a hero isn't just black and white.
There are gray areas and not everything can be controlled or is within his control (no Phantom Zone or other deus ex machina like in older Superman stories) but atleast you can make sure that you did your part and saved something (the planet) instead of nothing, even if there are some losses along the way (referring to losses in the Zod battle).
So he realised that he cannot give up hope and stop doing good just because there are unintended consequences to his actions and because the world that he believed in (black and white) is gone. This is the first step in his metamorphosis. He accepted reality for what it is (gray) and realised that he always had Lois to remind him that there IS still good in this world, and that the world doesn't have to be white OR black and neither does he. He just needs to do what is right at that point in time and regardless of the consequences he can't just leave the world to defend itself. Lois is all the motivation he needs to continue doing what’s right and have faith in himself and the goodness and positive effects of his actions.
That is why he returns to the world after his self-imposed exile and continues to fight the good fight.
When his mother is kidnapped, Superman's character is metamorphosed completely when he realises that Bruce became the villain of the piece only because the world pushed him till he broke and he realises this when Superman himself was about to break and felt that, "No one stays good in this world." He understands that if he can even begin feeling like that, then another man can definitely go down that path but that doesn't mean he's evil (no more black and white beliefs).
He understands that Bruce was pushed to the edge by Lex’s machinations (“It didn’t take much to push him over actually, little red notes here, explosion there, ‘You let your family die!’”) and that he wasn’t entirely responsible for his actions. Bruce had felt powerless to save his ‘family’ just as Superman was feeling powerless to save his own and so Superman connected with Bruce and saw himself in his position and sympathised with his predicament.
Clark had seen earlier that Keefe, who was a casualty of his fight against the Kryptonians, was working under Bruce Wayne and hence he connected that Zod’s actions during the fight may have resulted in the deaths or injuries of Wayne’s employees (I'm sure information about who had died and which buildings were brought down during the Zod battle were also public information which Clark could have been aware of, so he could have even more knowledge about this from there). He connects the dots and realises that Bruce Wayne had been pushed to the edge of his rope by the losses and then even further by Lex fueling that rage and rubbing salt into the wound with his manipulation.
Superman also realised that Lex had manipulated both of them from the start (I'm sure he connected the photos of Martha to that of the sex trafficker which were also from Lex and were polaroids with similar writing on them) and that Bruce HADN'T gotten that guy in prison killed with the branding.
At this point he accepted that his actions against Batman without being completely informed or understanding him had been a big mistake, and so he apologises to Batman and asks for his help instead of using his power to subdue him outright in order to end the fight. (“Bruce please, I was wrong, you have to listen to me.”)
At the very end of the movie, when he says, “This is my world, you are my world” is when he has come to full acceptance of his place and role in the world and has regained all his lost faith in the goodness of the world. He declares to Lois what he realised earlier, that she is all he needs to have faith in himself, his actions and the world.
That’s why he gives it all up and after being faced with his mortality for the first time, he does the brave thing and puts himself in harm’s way (Doomsday and Kryptonite spear) to save the world and makes the ultimate sacrifice, completing his character arc and reconstruction. He is now the Superman he was always meant to be but in a more realistic world, with a more realistic character and when he returns in Justice League, he will be the best version of himself yet.
This was Superman's character arc, to show a character that has classically been depicted as living in a black and white world with black and white characters and who has always had deus ex machina at his disposal giving him flawless victories, brought to the 'real world' from the 'comics world' which challenges him and his notions and has him understand what that means and teaches him how to cope with and function in our gray reality.
TL;DR :
Batman is a character who is always held up to this standard of "diamond absolutes" and "perfect things" and so even the thought of him not being able to come up with a non-lethal solution to lethal aggressors is appalling to many people since it has been ingrained in the public consciousness that Batman can NEVER cross that line or else he will fall and never rise again. This has been said by the writers time and time again in the various comics and Batman animated media.
This perception is what is challenged by Snyder, he takes this golden and unchallenged principle and puts it in a real world context and analyses it. He shows us that it can exist only in a make believe, unrealistic and cartoonish 'comic book world' and not in the real world. Not that it's a bad thing, but it's not something that is relevant to the real world and to us as people in the real world.
That is what he does, he takes that concept and makes it something that is relevant in the real world - that if something falls or if you make grave mistakes or errors and do things that you or other people might deem unforgivable, that does NOT mean it's the end of everything and that you can never rise from there again. The message he is trying to get across is a very relevant one, that no matter how bad things are or what you have done, you can still fix things and rise again from the darkness and become a better version of yourself by doing better things and improving yourself in life since nothing is absolute and nothing is permanent. Change is the only constant and so people CAN change for the better if only they themselves and the world around them allows them to and accepts that change. What you do does define you, but what you do now defines you a lot more than what you did in the past.
Superman is a character who has always been depicted in a black and white world, one where there are perfect heroes and ultimate villains and absolute good and evil. He is always accepted and cheered for and held up to a high standard of being above all men, both morally and emotionally, and is never allowed to be human in those regards. In both MoS and BvS, we see a Clark Kent who actually acts like a human being since he grew up a human and displays a full range of emotions and reactions to his world and their reactions to him.
In MoS, he learns that sometimes you need to make the hard decisions in unwinnable situations when there are no other options left and you need to make them quickly if you're going to save innocent lives. He learns not that "it's bad to kill" but that you cannot always have perfect victories and flawless outcomes. There will be consequences and there will be death when the stakes are world-endingly high and when superpowered people stronger than him are in the mix. Not all battles can be won, but the wars can still be ended before there is even more loss of life.
Then in BvS we see a world which doesn't accept Superman as their saviour unanimously, a world where some worship him while some despise him and some hate him with all their guts and will do anything to see him dead or broken or both. A world that wants him to answer for his very existence. It's a world in which Superman is viewed as a hero by some and as the devil by others. This is not a black and white world, it is an extremely gray one just like ours. The world is cynical and dark and broken and cannot have faith in the value of just simple "good". Superman, even though he tries his best to win the world over by his good actions, ends up inadvertently doing more harm than good and himself loses faith in the validity of his actions and of his mission in life. He feels he is hurting the world more than helping it and so he decides to exile himself. It is here that he remembers that all good actions will come with unforeseen consequences and unexpected and inevitable backlash and negativity but that does not mean he just throws his hands up and gives up.
The message that Snyder wanted to get across was that even in a cynical and morally grey world like ours, the fight is truly lost when the really good people give up and so they can never give up. "It isn't right to fight, but you must fight for what is right" is something that I came up with a long time ago and it applies here as well. Superman cannot give up, because when he does, all is truly lost. Superman learns that he MUST do the right thing in the face of all adversity and always fight for what is right no matter how tough things get. It is this thoughtful message that Snyder is trying to get across. We must also, in our lives, apply this and never give up and never stop doing the right thing even in the hardest of times and against the worst of negativity.
To summarise the summary, the moral messages of BvS are:
1. No matter how bad things are or what you have done, you can still fix things and rise again from the darkness and become a better version of yourself by doing better things and improving yourself in life since nothing is absolute and nothing is permanent. Even a murder can be redeemed and no matter who you are, you can rebuild and be better. You have to, you will.
2. Always do the right thing in the face of all odds and adversity and never give up hope and faith in the power of good actions to change the world or even a single person.
Before the movie came out I was completely expecting the battle between Batman and Superman to be a battle of ideals. Their ideals are the things that guide their methods and classically, in the comics and animated media, they have always disagreed on their methods and that is what has divided them in the past.
This was definitely touched upon in the movie as a motivation for Superman to investigate Batman and want to stop him (also, there is a deleted scene showing Clark investigating Batman while in Gotham and we will see this in the Ultimate Cut).
But in the end the resolution wasn't one of their ideals or methods, it was a resolution of the very character motivations and life events that lead them to become what they are.
It wasn't a resolution of the 'effects' but of the 'cause' itself and that is something I have never seen happen in any Batman and Superman story. It went to the core of the characters and changed them and made them better, instead of just resolving surface conflicts or disagreements and leaving the characters intact.
The resolution I’m talking about revolves around the infamous ‘Martha’ moment. Everything in the movie leads up to that moment and the event changes both heroes for the better.
The Deconstruction of Batman
“They took me to the light. A beautiful lie.”
Batman was convinced that his life’s work was a lie since it amounted to nothing and was something he did to comfort himself from the fact that he could never go back and save his parents. Being Batman was his coping mechanism and it was all a “beautiful lie” in the end.
Throughout the movie, Bruce showed signs that he had stopped believing in the value of his mission in life (to ensure that no young child has to lose their parents again and to stop crime in Gotham) and had accepted that his entire life’s actions were worthless due to the appearance of Superman, a being who could destroy the entire world on a whim if he ever turned bad. He had also stopped believing he did any good in his twenty years since he lost a lot of people along the way like Robin and his employees (both of whom he saw as his family), some of whom were his personal friends (Jack) and he felt that he had failed in his mission to protect people. We see all of this from the following dialogues:
“Twenty years in Gotham Alfred, how many good guys are left? How many stayed that way?”
“We’re criminals Alfred, we’ve always been criminals.”
“So twenty years of fighting criminals amounts to nothing?” “Criminals are like weeds, you pull one up, another grows in its place. This is about the future of the world. This is my legacy.”
Now that times had changed, he had changed as well and since he had begun to go too far and was “fallen”, the only thing left for him to do was to save the world from Superman, a possible future threat. He had nothing else left. I’ll elaborate on this point:
When he said, “There was a time above, a time before, there were perfect things, diamond absolutes,” Bruce was referring to his past world and himself. He was referring to the time he was a perfect hero and not the cruel man he had become today. Then he said, “and what falls is fallen” believing that since he had crossed the line and become too ruthless, he was now irredeemable in life and could never be saved from the darkness. This was why he branded people and didn’t care about the consequences of doing that (sending people to the ICU, giving them a death sentence).
He was ready to give up everything, his morals, his principles, to defeat Superman and ensure a safe world, even if it meant he needed to kill every last vestige of his past self and kill Superman with his own hands. Since he is already fallen and irredeemable and has nothing left to lose, it doesn’t matter to him. He feels he is doing the right thing even if it ends up getting him killed (“this is suicide”).
The Reconstruction of Batman
When Batman hears Martha’s name he is snapped back to the moment of his parents’ death and realises that he wasn’t the hero who was going to save the world from a dangerous alien, he was the man who was about to take a boy away from his mother. He was about to become the very thing he had fought against all his life and what had caused him to become Batman in the first place. Even though he was ready to kill Superman before, he had never thought of himself in terms of his parents’ killer and instead saw Superman as the killer. He lost his parents to a shooter “for no reason at all”, he lost Robin to the Joker (chaos) and he lost his last family, his employees to the Kryptonians’ war (that emerged out of nowhere).
But now he realised that he had things the other way around and that Superman was the victim and the man with a family, a mother and people that he loved and whom he was trying to save and was helpless to save at that moment. He saw things for what they really were: Superman was the boy about to lose his mother to a madman and that boy was helpless to save her. That is why when he realises all of this he throws the spear away in anger at what he had let himself become.
When Batman is faced with this reality he doesn't just come back from the edge and become good again, he manages to FINALLY come to terms with the loss he suffered for 30 years. By getting a chance to save Martha, he can finally do something that allows him to cope with his loss, which 20 years of fighting criminals and stopping evil couldn't do. It also reinstills faith in him that what he did for 20 years WASN’T a waste and that "what falls" ISN'T "fallen" permanently and that his life as Batman WASN'T just "a beautiful lie". This is proven at the end of the movie when he says, “Men are still good, we fight, we kill, we betray one another, but we can rebuild, we can do better, we will, we have to.”
Batman was inspired by the fact that Superman, who could have killed him easily, didn’t, and that all he was trying to do was save his mother from a madman (Lex). He was also inspired by Superman’s sacrifice to save the world. Batman realised that he could still be the good guy, he could redeem himself if he decided to (“I failed him in life, I will not fail him in death.”) This is why Batman doesn’t brand Lex at the end of the movie since he is trying to change back to his old ways and reform himself to the Batman he used to be, from a “time before, a time above”.
He decides to do the right thing and form the Justice League to protect the world in Superman’s absence, he takes that responsibility on himself. This completes Batman’s character arc and in the Justice League movie we will see Batman as he was before all the rage and powerlessness turned him cruel.
Batman's arc was about his redemption from what has been classically represented as irredeemable and his rise from the depths of the cave to the light to become a better version of what he used to be. Batman had become militant (like in The Dark Knight Returns) and saw this period as a war ("You're going to go to war?" "That son of a ***** brought the war to us") and treated it as such with collateral casualties being acceptable to him, but at the end he rises above that and realises he is better than that and can rebuild himself and do better. He must, he will.
The Deconstruction of Superman
The character of Superman has always been one to see the world in terms of black and white and absolute good and bad. In the comics, Superman’s world has always been depicted as black and white, where Superman and his actions are absolute good and the villains and their actions are absolute bad. This is how the audience has seen Superman since his inception.
Even in the Christopher Reeve movies, this was pretty apparent. Superman is the perfect hero and his villains are absolute evil.
To understand this within the context of the latest movies, we need to go back a bit, to Man of Steel, to the part where Superman is battling Zod at the end of the movie.
When Zod declared his intentions to kill every human and to stop at nothing till the world is destroyed, Superman replied, “You’re a monster Zod and I’m gonna stop you.” This clearly shows us that Superman saw his and his actions as white and Zod’s as black. The catch here is that was not true and Zod was a very gray character who was motivated by the protection and survival of his own species and planet, just like Superman was.
In Batman v Superman he is a guy who uses his powers for good and feels that he is always in the right regardless of the negative consequences of his actions (“I didn’t kill those people if that’s what they’re saying.”) For him doing good with his powers was just that - doing the right thing - which is why he is disheartened when the world doesn't stop questioning his actions and even his very existence, even though he is just trying to be the good guy and help people. He sees his actions as white and is in denial about the negative consequences. He sees that as someone else’s fault and he is not entirely wrong about that since Zod caused all the destruction and death in Man of Steel, the African government killed the villagers and Lex’s men killed the terrorists).
In spite of this, he is ready to face accountability for the negative consequences and that is why he turns up at the senate hearings and feels bad when he sees Keefe deface the statue, because he is reminded of his failures.
In the party scene, he asks Bruce about his opinion on the Batman and his methods which people in Gotham should not be in support of, since to him, Batman is in the wrong and his methods are wrong. He feels he is right when he accuses Batman of instilling fear in people and taking away their civil liberties. Later on he also felt that Batman was bad because his branding apparently got a guy killed, regardless of the series of events that lead to that guy dying after the branding. Black and white.
That is why he confronts Batman later on and tells him to stop his activities or that he would make him stop (“Consider this mercy.”) He also kept fighting with Perry over the Batman story and wanted to expose him as the criminal he saw him as (black).
All of the above isn’t to say that his actions and what he stood for (truth and justice) were wrong, it just means that he always felt he was right in his actions and decisions even when he wasn’t. His intentions and what he was fighting for were right, but whom he was fighting and how he was thinking were wrong.
He kept seeing himself and his actions and his point of view as white and in the right, up until the event that began to change him - the senate bombing.
He had faith in the world and that the system would prevail, that people would see his actions for what they were and understand his intentions if he spoke to the world and just kept doing the right thing. That is why I feel he saw the world and his actions as white until then, having faith that humanity could accept him and begin to do good alongside him, joining forces with him (“They will join you in the Sun, Kal. You will help them accomplish wonders.”) But then after the bombing he saw the world as black, which is why I feel the dialogue of his, "My world doesn't exist anymore" works on two levels as he isn't just referring to Krypton, he is referring to the world as Superman saw it, in white. Even if he didn't mean it directly, it works thematically from the writer's and director's points of view.
I feel that was the artist's intention, to make you feel that Superman lost faith in fundamental capacity for good in the world and that his actions could effect change like he wanted to. He also lost faith in himself and the value of his actions since they courted death. The Zod battle, the African incident and now the bombing. It broke Superman and made him lose faith in himself, his role in the world and in humanity. It was his lowest point. He blames himself for seeing the world as white and not keeping an eye out for the danger at all times since he had too much faith in the system and the world ("I'm afraid I didn't see it because I wasn't looking") which now seemed completely black to him.
“All this time I’ve been living my life the way my father saw it, righting wrongs for a ghost, thinking I’m here to do good. Superman was never real, just the dream of a farmer from Kansas.”
Here he refers to both his fathers. First he refers to Jor-El, since he was the one to instill faith in Superman that he was sent here to do good and that his actions could change the world and humanity for the better (“You can save her Kal, you can save all of them”). Then he refers to Pa Kent, who also told Clark when he was young that, “Good character or bad, that man’s going to change the world” and, “I have to believe you were sent here for a reason and all these changes you’re going through, one day you’ll see them as a blessing and when that day comes you will have to make a choice: whether to stand proud in front of the human race or not.” Having Clark become something more than just a man, becoming Superman, was a dream that both his fathers shared, albeit in their own ways.
The Reconstruction of Superman
He lost faith in that dream, that belief his fathers held and he felt that humanity was better off without him. Everything seemed black and so he gave up and exiled himself, if only for a short time. It is there that he remembered the wise words of his father in the form of a story he once heard from him. The memory of Pa Kent’s story makes him realise that negative consequences of heroic actions and unintended ripple effects are inevitable and that doing good or being a hero isn't just black and white.
There are gray areas and not everything can be controlled or is within his control (no Phantom Zone or other deus ex machina like in older Superman stories) but atleast you can make sure that you did your part and saved something (the planet) instead of nothing, even if there are some losses along the way (referring to losses in the Zod battle).
So he realised that he cannot give up hope and stop doing good just because there are unintended consequences to his actions and because the world that he believed in (black and white) is gone. This is the first step in his metamorphosis. He accepted reality for what it is (gray) and realised that he always had Lois to remind him that there IS still good in this world, and that the world doesn't have to be white OR black and neither does he. He just needs to do what is right at that point in time and regardless of the consequences he can't just leave the world to defend itself. Lois is all the motivation he needs to continue doing what’s right and have faith in himself and the goodness and positive effects of his actions.
That is why he returns to the world after his self-imposed exile and continues to fight the good fight.
When his mother is kidnapped, Superman's character is metamorphosed completely when he realises that Bruce became the villain of the piece only because the world pushed him till he broke and he realises this when Superman himself was about to break and felt that, "No one stays good in this world." He understands that if he can even begin feeling like that, then another man can definitely go down that path but that doesn't mean he's evil (no more black and white beliefs).
He understands that Bruce was pushed to the edge by Lex’s machinations (“It didn’t take much to push him over actually, little red notes here, explosion there, ‘You let your family die!’”) and that he wasn’t entirely responsible for his actions. Bruce had felt powerless to save his ‘family’ just as Superman was feeling powerless to save his own and so Superman connected with Bruce and saw himself in his position and sympathised with his predicament.
Clark had seen earlier that Keefe, who was a casualty of his fight against the Kryptonians, was working under Bruce Wayne and hence he connected that Zod’s actions during the fight may have resulted in the deaths or injuries of Wayne’s employees (I'm sure information about who had died and which buildings were brought down during the Zod battle were also public information which Clark could have been aware of, so he could have even more knowledge about this from there). He connects the dots and realises that Bruce Wayne had been pushed to the edge of his rope by the losses and then even further by Lex fueling that rage and rubbing salt into the wound with his manipulation.
Superman also realised that Lex had manipulated both of them from the start (I'm sure he connected the photos of Martha to that of the sex trafficker which were also from Lex and were polaroids with similar writing on them) and that Bruce HADN'T gotten that guy in prison killed with the branding.
At this point he accepted that his actions against Batman without being completely informed or understanding him had been a big mistake, and so he apologises to Batman and asks for his help instead of using his power to subdue him outright in order to end the fight. (“Bruce please, I was wrong, you have to listen to me.”)
At the very end of the movie, when he says, “This is my world, you are my world” is when he has come to full acceptance of his place and role in the world and has regained all his lost faith in the goodness of the world. He declares to Lois what he realised earlier, that she is all he needs to have faith in himself, his actions and the world.
That’s why he gives it all up and after being faced with his mortality for the first time, he does the brave thing and puts himself in harm’s way (Doomsday and Kryptonite spear) to save the world and makes the ultimate sacrifice, completing his character arc and reconstruction. He is now the Superman he was always meant to be but in a more realistic world, with a more realistic character and when he returns in Justice League, he will be the best version of himself yet.
This was Superman's character arc, to show a character that has classically been depicted as living in a black and white world with black and white characters and who has always had deus ex machina at his disposal giving him flawless victories, brought to the 'real world' from the 'comics world' which challenges him and his notions and has him understand what that means and teaches him how to cope with and function in our gray reality.
TL;DR :
Batman is a character who is always held up to this standard of "diamond absolutes" and "perfect things" and so even the thought of him not being able to come up with a non-lethal solution to lethal aggressors is appalling to many people since it has been ingrained in the public consciousness that Batman can NEVER cross that line or else he will fall and never rise again. This has been said by the writers time and time again in the various comics and Batman animated media.
This perception is what is challenged by Snyder, he takes this golden and unchallenged principle and puts it in a real world context and analyses it. He shows us that it can exist only in a make believe, unrealistic and cartoonish 'comic book world' and not in the real world. Not that it's a bad thing, but it's not something that is relevant to the real world and to us as people in the real world.
That is what he does, he takes that concept and makes it something that is relevant in the real world - that if something falls or if you make grave mistakes or errors and do things that you or other people might deem unforgivable, that does NOT mean it's the end of everything and that you can never rise from there again. The message he is trying to get across is a very relevant one, that no matter how bad things are or what you have done, you can still fix things and rise again from the darkness and become a better version of yourself by doing better things and improving yourself in life since nothing is absolute and nothing is permanent. Change is the only constant and so people CAN change for the better if only they themselves and the world around them allows them to and accepts that change. What you do does define you, but what you do now defines you a lot more than what you did in the past.
Superman is a character who has always been depicted in a black and white world, one where there are perfect heroes and ultimate villains and absolute good and evil. He is always accepted and cheered for and held up to a high standard of being above all men, both morally and emotionally, and is never allowed to be human in those regards. In both MoS and BvS, we see a Clark Kent who actually acts like a human being since he grew up a human and displays a full range of emotions and reactions to his world and their reactions to him.
In MoS, he learns that sometimes you need to make the hard decisions in unwinnable situations when there are no other options left and you need to make them quickly if you're going to save innocent lives. He learns not that "it's bad to kill" but that you cannot always have perfect victories and flawless outcomes. There will be consequences and there will be death when the stakes are world-endingly high and when superpowered people stronger than him are in the mix. Not all battles can be won, but the wars can still be ended before there is even more loss of life.
Then in BvS we see a world which doesn't accept Superman as their saviour unanimously, a world where some worship him while some despise him and some hate him with all their guts and will do anything to see him dead or broken or both. A world that wants him to answer for his very existence. It's a world in which Superman is viewed as a hero by some and as the devil by others. This is not a black and white world, it is an extremely gray one just like ours. The world is cynical and dark and broken and cannot have faith in the value of just simple "good". Superman, even though he tries his best to win the world over by his good actions, ends up inadvertently doing more harm than good and himself loses faith in the validity of his actions and of his mission in life. He feels he is hurting the world more than helping it and so he decides to exile himself. It is here that he remembers that all good actions will come with unforeseen consequences and unexpected and inevitable backlash and negativity but that does not mean he just throws his hands up and gives up.
The message that Snyder wanted to get across was that even in a cynical and morally grey world like ours, the fight is truly lost when the really good people give up and so they can never give up. "It isn't right to fight, but you must fight for what is right" is something that I came up with a long time ago and it applies here as well. Superman cannot give up, because when he does, all is truly lost. Superman learns that he MUST do the right thing in the face of all adversity and always fight for what is right no matter how tough things get. It is this thoughtful message that Snyder is trying to get across. We must also, in our lives, apply this and never give up and never stop doing the right thing even in the hardest of times and against the worst of negativity.
To summarise the summary, the moral messages of BvS are:
1. No matter how bad things are or what you have done, you can still fix things and rise again from the darkness and become a better version of yourself by doing better things and improving yourself in life since nothing is absolute and nothing is permanent. Even a murder can be redeemed and no matter who you are, you can rebuild and be better. You have to, you will.
2. Always do the right thing in the face of all odds and adversity and never give up hope and faith in the power of good actions to change the world or even a single person.
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Glad you enjoyed it!
