Release the Snyder Cult! — It Turns Out the Naming Rights! Membership Option Was For Real and Someone Is Now Five Hundred Bucks Poorer Presents Nat

#Squeal! #ItsHappening #Q # DraintheSwamp

I am a Juggalo and a Phish fan who can think of nothing more fun or enjoyable than a four hour Phish show. But when I started encountering a curious breed of online fanatic obsessed with the idea that a Director’s Cut of the more or less universally reviled superhero team-up movie Justice League exists that, if it were released, would upgrade the film’s critical and popular reputation from “laughably inept disaster” to “contemporary masterpiece that single-handedly elevates the superhero movie in ways Black Panther and The Dark Knight could not have envisioned” I was legitimately flummoxed.

Justice League was just a movie, and a famously shitty one at that. Who, other than Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice/Justice League director Zack Snyder could possibly be that emotionally invested in it? Why had these weirdoes taken on the release of a director’s cut of a shitty comic book movie seemingly everyone hated as their own personal crusade, adopting “#ReleasetheSnydercut” as their eminently mockable slogan?

The answer has a lot to do with gender, politics, gender politics and the unusually heated and histrionic nature of what passes for discourse online, which is mostly a bunch of lunatics screaming at each other through their computers.

Me and my friends fighting for what is right. Does that make us superheroes? It does.

To the #ReleasetheSnyderCut brigade, Marvel is synonymous with everything that’s wrong in the world in general but with superhero movies in particular. They’re diversity-obsessed SJWs who don’t have the stoic gravity to understand the fundamental seriousness, even solemnity of comic book superheroes, and consequently degraded this holy territory with their infernal, womanly jokes, levity and emotion.

So when Joss Whedon, the arch-villain behind Marvel’s The Avengers stepped in to finish the movie after Snyder had to drop out following a family tragedy it was seen by conspiracy-minded, paranoid D.C super-fans as the ugliest and most personal kind of betrayal.

In this line of thinking, Mr. Wacky PC Marvel was inexplicably and wrongly being given the green-light to sabotage and ruin a rival’s masterpiece. He was the wolf in the henhouse re-creating Snyder’s timeless, towering masterpiece of mythology and melodrama in his own hopelessly jokey, inferior image, destroying it in the process.

Call me a “nerd” but I have set aside three and a half hours for this sure to be transcendent experience! Bring it on!

To me, there’s something incredibly poignant, even Great Pumpkin-like about the extraordinary faith his fanboys have in the vision and talent of Zack Snyder. They seem to see him the same way Trumps’ cultists see him, as an uncompromising, solitary badass forever being dragged down by smaller minds obsessed with compromise and political correctness and prioritizing diversity and multiculturalism over the rugged individualism and manly myths that, along with genocide and slavery, made our country what it is today.

It has consequently been exceedingly easy to write off the demands of the “Release the Snyder Cut” brigade, to lump them in with the apoplectic man-babies perpetually throwing temper tantrums because Star Wars has girls and black people in it and that makes them confused and angry for some reason.

Over the past few days, however, the “Release the Snyder Cut!” banner has been held aloft by non-pathetic people motivated by reasons other than misogyny, a deeply political fear of diversity and a wildly inflated over-estimation of the talent and storytelling skills of Zack Snyder.

I’m as shocked as anyone, if not more shocked, to see #ReleasetheSnyderCut being used non-ironically by Ben Affleck and Gal Gadot. Now, Affleck and Gadot are anything but disinterested observers. They are, instead the stars of Justice League who, on a purely selfish level, have a financial and possibly even creative reason to want the work they did on Justice League, all of it, to be seen by the general public.

But they also have an emotional reason to want to support their former boss, co-worker and possible friend. He endured a tragedy almost beyond imagination while working on one of the biggest, most scrutinized productions in the history of film. I can envision no worse fate for a parent than to bury a child who took their own life.

To suffer that kind of heartbreaking personal loss and then be blamed for the awfulness of a massive movie that no longer reflects your vision or your personality has to be excruciatingly painful. I can totally understand how people who worked with Snyder, and were ostensibly attracted to his vision of the film and the story, and not just the millions of dollars they were being paid for their acting services, would want a happy, redemptive ending for Snyder’s Justice League ordeal rather than one that posits him as the monster who egregiously fucked up some of the biggest superhero movies of all time.

That is why I non-ironically join the call to #ReleasetheSnyderCut, if only to release the Snyder cult of their existential despair and grant them their fondest, fiercest, and also only wish. Who knows? Maybe it WILL be the best movie ever made. It could happen! There were only six or seven thousand things keeping Justice League from being any damn good in its theatrical version. Maybe the Snyder cut fixed all that shit and reveal Snyder to be a Kubrick-like visionary!

Maybe there’s an edit where Aquaman yelling “My man!” to the cyborg-man has the power and poetry of great opera and Whedon, that rascally SJW scoundrel, undid Snyder’s great work out of Salieri-like jealousy.