Back in that golden time before everyone found out that Batman v Superman was actually not very good, I was one of the many who were looking forward to it—not for the giant fights, or to see if Ben Affleck would do a better job with Batman than he did with Daredevil, or even for Henry Cavill’s muscles. I was looking forward to something else entirely.
I was looking forward to Holly Hunter.
The trailers for the film promised so much. They had Hunter’s Senator June Finch summoning Superman to come before a committee and account for his actions, and while committees are often the enemy of anyone who wants to make any kind of decision or progress, here there was the hint of a proper showdown.
There were all sorts of moral quandaries and questions to be addressed. Should Superman be out there, wielding the kind of power he does, without any kind of checks on what he gets up to? Who did he answer to, if anyone? What was he up to? Should he be able to decide on his own what he got involved in and not check it with anyone? Where was the chain of command, for God’s sake?
Most interestingly of all, it was a woman who was trying to find the answers—a Junior Senator up against the most powerful and masculine man in the world. There was no pissing contest here (probably for the best, because let’s face it, Superman would win that one.) Amidst all the manly showdowns, there was the potential for a smarter debate, rather than a testosterone storm.
But the film entirely failed to deliver.
There’s no excuse for it. In Holly Hunter, they had an actress more than capable of delivering the kind of intelligent performance that could get across all the nuances and complexities of the issues. She could easily have been the best thing in a film full of muscly, frowning, angry men (and Lex Luthor on a sugar high), but instead, the film apparently couldn’t be bothered to deal with the character of Senator Finch properly. She wasn’t a force to be reckoned with. She was a heavy-handed mouthpiece for the importance of democracy.
It shouldn’t come as a total surprise. The franchise, after all, does have a prior record of neutralizing its women. In this version of the universe, Lois Lane is an annoyance who makes daft choices and appears in the bath for no discernible reason. After Man of Steel, we already knew that she wasn’t going to do much more than need saving, which she manages within minutes of this film opening, but Senator Finch was an opportunity to show that women asking inconvenient questions can be more than a narrative annoyance … until she was strangled by the script.
Sure, there were glimpses of what could’ve been; her standoff with Lex Luthor looked like the start of a complex debate. Do we want to go back to macho, MAD-era Cold War antics in how we deal with Superman? Or is there a smarter way than all-out aggression? Stuck between corporate overlord Lex and alpha-male Superman, it seemed briefly like Senator Finch was going to choose her own way.
Except she didn’t. That’d be far too interesting a development for a film that’s largely concerned with complaining about how individuals shouldn’t be able to trash things while celebrating individuals trashing things. After all, this is a film where if anything is in doubt, you hit it, and if that doesn’t work, you blow it up, and if you want to try and work through the complex angles of the moral arguments you kind of regret raising, you do it through a questionable and half-arsed dream sequence.
And so, Finch doesn’t develop, and Hunter gets stuck trying to bring a woman who’s basically a narrative device to life without her seeming like a better-haired Senator McCarthy. We’re given no background to her hearings and no insight into what she actually believes. She doesn’t even get a dream sequence of her own and instead just pops up now and then to mutter things about democracy.
We’re left hoping that it will all unveil itself at that confrontation with Superman—that the script will stop gesturing at things and actually get involved with its own arguments for once—but clearly, that was far too much to ask. Even this film wasn’t going to be down with hitting a woman (unless, of course, she’s Wonder Woman), so instead they blew Finch up—and the entire Capitol building with her.
Given that she’s a one-dimensional representation of the greatness of democracy, it’s a pretty undemocratic way to deal with her.
So nevermind the frown-acting, or the plot holes, or the clunky script. The real tragedy of Batman v Superman is that it gave itself a chance to do something genuinely interesting—and with a woman, no less—and then entirely copped out.
Jacki is a freelance writer based in the suburbs of London. She’s recently escaped the corporate world to write about mental health, pop culture, TV, feminism, and whatever else takes her fancy. You can Twitter stalk her @jackibadger.
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