Our new column The Morning After entails our intrepid commentator, Lars Pearson, waking up, making the coffee and looking at matters of High Geekery in the harsh light of day. Often after use of a Spider-Man toothbrush…

Zack Snyder wants you to know that you’re living in a [bleep] dreamworld.

The movie director who had Superman kill General Zod in Man of Steel – a mere hors d’oeuvre to the sumptuous buffet of criminals that Batman massacres in Batman vs. Superman – wants you to wake the [bleep] up, accept that superheroes kill, and not be so naive after you’ve “lost your virginity to this [bleep] movie.”

The blend of on-stage vehemence and F-bombs from Snyder – who was pushing back against critics who frowned upon Batman and Superman killing their opponents – was eye-opening, but not in the least bit surprising. This is, after all, someone who’s toiling away to adapt Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead for screen. And, someone who’s on record that he (honestly, seriously, not joking) based his Superman and Batman films on Watchmen.

That would be Watchmen, the seminal Alan Moore-Dave Gibbons tale about what happens when superheroes go too far, and cross the line beyond which they’re indistinguishable from the villains. Even the title offers a cautionary tone (inspired by Quis custodiet ipsos custodes, “Who will watch the watchers?”, or more literally “Who will guard the guards themselves?”), but Snyder treats it like a manifesto of how to approach life. If anything, you worry that he thinks that Rorschach was too timid and namby-pamby.

Don’t get me wrong, I love me some Watchmen too – but from Day One, it was lunacy of the highest order to apply that model to Batman and especially bright and shiny properties like Superman and Justice League. To be clear, Batman or Superman killing someone somewhere, somehow, isn’t such a problem – although you damn well better have the proper context and justification (as John Byrne did with Supes in 1988). But Batman vs. Superman, in case you’ve forgotten – and I’ve tried, believe me I’ve tried – entails Bats going on an absolute murder spree, killing at least a dozen opponents. He stabs criminals, he brands them, he flattens them with his car. Most jolting of all, he saves Ma Kent by setting her abductor on fire and burning him to death.

Well, it’s not as if Batman could just disable a thug without killing them, could he? Why thwack a baddie with a Batarang, when flames are so much easier?

The crux of Snyder’s screed is that it’s [bleep] unrealistic to think Superman and Batman would refrain from murdering their opponents. Questionable morality aside, is that a justification unto itself? Art isn’t like life. Art can invoke the real-world, or not, but ultimately it’s not the same thing. So even if we accept Snyder’s worldview (which as it happens, I don’t) on the legitimacy of “heroes” killing with wild abandon, he’s overlooking – or simply doesn’t care – about whether the masses actually want to watch that sort of thing.

The showing of Batman vs. Superman that I went to, there was a child to the left of me, and another child to the right of me – both of them repeatedly bawling their eyeballs out. And not in a “I am sad because Bambi’s mother has died” sort of way, but in a “I, a small child, am traumatized by the horror I’m witnessing” sort of way. Perhaps Snyder should double-down on his candour, and go to conventions with a T-shirt that says, “My movies literally make children cry.”

Batman has, we can all agree, gotten more hard-hitting in recent decades (especially with the Christopher Nolan films), but I’m reminded of the now-forgotten one-shot The Joker: Devil’s Advocate (1995) by Chuck Dixon and Graham Nolan. The gist is that a number of people die from stamps laced with Joker venom, the Joker’s insanity defence finally fails him, and he’s slated for the electric chair. The problem being: Batman knows the Joker didn’t commit the crime for which he’s been convicted. A lunatic runaround follows, the Joker milking his final hours while Batman tries to prove his innocence.

Some of my colleagues at Wizard – and, hand on heart, I respect where they were coming from – thought Batman would just let the Joker fry, as he’s earned a death sentence plenty of other times. Within the story, Batman’s friends argue that very same point. I was never convinced, though… if Batman, in possession of exonerating evidence, kept quiet and let the state execute the Joker, he’s as good as strapped the Joker in and thrown the switch himself.

Batman wouldn’t do that, to my mind, because he doesn’t want the responsibility of deciding who lives and who dies. Call it cowardice if you must, but the man whose parents died from gunfire wouldn’t want anyone else to experience death, unless it’s within the bounds of the law. It’s hard to escape that framework for the character, whatever his occasional lapses (such as his rashly trying to kill the Riddler in the Tom King comics – but there, at least, Bruce is disturbed by his actions).

Either way, Snyder’s verbal takedown was – in all probability – a strange epilogue for a misguided phase of DC movies that’s run its course. Batman vs. Superman grossed $873 million, but would probably have reaped $200 million more, had the uber-violence and trashing of beloved icons not alienated a healthy slice of mainstream viewers. Snyder’s Justice League grossed $675 million, but that amounted to – and there’s no way of sugarcoating this – an unmitigated disaster, as it was intended as a flagship property. Warner Brothers has surely noticed that Aquaman starring Jason Momoa was a brighter, happier film that (pardon the phrasing) netted $1.1 billion, so is the way forward.

Not that the commercial rejection of his vision has ruffled Snyder’s feathers in the slightest. He’s down the [bleeping] road compared to you [bleeping] Neanderthals.

[To check out what Snyder said, click here]

In a different lifetime, Lars Pearson was a department head at Wizard: The Guide to Comics. He is currently the co-author of Ahistory: An Unauthorized History of the Doctor Who Universe(now, aiiieeeeeee, more than a million words!).