Dia: Okay, so shall we, show on the road.
Duck: Let's, I realized, sorry, I realized we should do that because I realized that last time we totally didn't do introductions again.
Dia: No. Okay, we should do those,
Duck: We should do that
Dia: We know what we're doing. It's fine.
Duck: We're professionals.
Dia: We're very capable. Do you want to start?
Duck: Sure. Hello, everyone, our dear listener in the singular, who I assume we have by now because this is episode three. So we must be famous by now. My name is Duck, I am the science and not knowing things half of this podcast.
Dia: And hello listener. My name is Dia and I am the literary analysis nerd and this week also, comic book obsessive of this podcast.
Duck: Yes, this is the week where you know things about comics and superheroes. And I am the naive innocent, who does not know things about these things.
Dia: This was a very exciting week for me because I got to force someone to get into Shazam slash Captain Marvel, which I've never gotten to do before in my entire life.
Duck: Your life has been building towards this moment,
Dia: Except through the medium of like, throwing Tumblr posts out like their bread crumbs for the birds. Just like, someone, someone come to me please.
Duck: Has that ever worked?
Dia: Uhhh…
Duck: I mean, it must work for someone.
Dia: Yeah, I mean, I've gotten emotional validation from strangers on the internet. But that's not the same thing as someone who will be forced to receive my messages at two o'clock in the morning about Black Adam.
Duck: Right? Not only have you forced me to to consume this media product, but I also have to talk about it with you, which is something that usually the internet does not allow you to guarantee.
Dia: The internet is not a good place to acquire a captive audience unless you're much more talented or popular than I am.
Duck: I was gonna say I've done it with a couple of things. But in those cases, I'm gonna to blame the things, which, I’m trying to be very diplomatic about this but what I'm saying is you need better material.
Dia: To be fair there are quite a few people who have a real solid foothold on captaining the Shazam ship. I’m simply not one of them.
Duck: Oh, that's fair. Forcibly, I dragged one of my friends into The Goblin Emperor and they've been writing fanfic about it non stop for two years.
Dia: I mean I do have a fandom, which I consider my personal property because I've run so many fan exchanges, but.
Duck: It's on the list. We'll get to it eventually.
Dia: It’s not Actually, my property, which is the sad thing.
Duck: That is the thing. Yeah.
Dia: But with any fan exchanges at a certain point, you start to believe all these fan works belong to me in some ephemeral way.
Duck: You're right. You're the godparent of this work,
Dia: I am doing the administrative work, therefore I should be able to tax the rewards.
Duck: I think what you've invented there is capitalism.
Dia: Might be feudalism actually?
Duck: Yeah, yeah, I think it's feudalism. When you say you run exchanges you mean that for a certain number of days of the year they have to plow your fannish field?
Dia: Yes.
Duck: And they get all of these holy days which are misinterpreted as days off are actually the only time they get to write their own fanfic.
Dia: Yeah. In my defense, I do so much pinch hitting for fics that I think are unbelievably boring. So you know I’ve earnt my keep.
Duck: You contribute to the, to the commune,
Dia: I have not forgiven whoever prompted that Road Trip AU. These are the trials of the pinch hitter. Anyway. Welcome to Analysis Roulette, this, this year? This week, we're doing a---
Duck: It’s been a long week.
Dia: It's been a very long week. This week, we are doing a abuser-innocent paradigm analysis of Shazam and/or Captain Marvel, depending on what period you're discussing. Duck, do you want to walk us through what we're calling the abuser innocent paradigm? Because that is not to my knowledge an academic term?
Duck: Yeah, absolutely. And, and to my knowledge, it is also… I am unaware of any formalized academic school of analysis that is this. What I am aware of is the internet. And the internet--
Dia: I have heard of the internet.
Duck: The internet loves this one, just loves it, this is the go-to to to discuss all kinds of media, including on its weirdest level, the RPF, sorry, real person fic, dear listener, type stuff where you, you know, which is functionally just gossiping about celebrities, but with a narrative veneer. And then sometimes people get into the gossiping a bit too hard and they start analyzing things through this paradigm. And it's like, I'm a little uncomfortable with the amount of assumptions you're making about the relationships between the people in this band in order to make this school of thought apply to it. The school of thought being that in essentially all personal relationships if they are not perfect, defined as you're perfectly happy, perfectly, sort of formally equal in terms of the age of the people involved, the wealth of the people involved, the histories of the people involved... If there is any conflict within the relationship, which of course there always is, then it's because someone is the bad guy. And not only are they the bad guy, but they are irredeemably the bad guy. And they are bad all the way through. It's very Calvinist actually… I wasn't, I was trying to avoid… Never mind, it's Calvinist. There's a bad guy who is bad all the way through and--
Dia: Do we have a little whiteboard for “days since our last Calvinism”?
Duck: Days since we last blamed Calvinism. I blame basically two things for all the ills of the world and that is Calvinism and the Norman Conquest.
Dia: Astonishingly correct.
Duck: I’m reductive but I'm not wrong. The point is, in any relationship, any human relationship, particularly romantic, but really any human relationship where there is any conflict, someone is the bad guy, and they know they're the bad guy, and they are being the bad guy on purpose. And the other person is completely powerless. And never to blame for anything that happens. And usually, in this analysis, like, doesn't realize they're being abused. So you have the abuser who knows they're the bad guy. And you have the person who is so innocent, it doesn't occur to them that anyone could be hurting them on purpose. And who has never done anything wrong. Because power is all completely one sided. It is this approach that says if you have any power differential in any aspect, then that is insurmountable. And it means that there is a sort of a black and white, this one has all the power, this one has none of the power and the one with all the power is abusing the one with none of the power and all relationships work this way. So when you look at a relationship, and when you look at a story in terms of its relationships, the only thing to consider is who's the bad guy.
Dia: I'm taking this reductivist but characterful approach and transitioning into more of a ‘okay. All conflict within narrative can be viewed as interpersonal conflict. And within that interpersonal conflict, there are the bad guys and the good guys. And once you understand that, you can understand the whole story, regardless of how much of it is actually based on interpersonal drama’.
Duck: Yeah, I think that's a crucial step is that it is that interpretation of anything that happens is essentially just people having a domestic argument,
Dia: Not a school of thought that lends itself particularly well to stories where the bad guy is a meteor hitting the planet Earth, which is why those stories tend not to have big Tumblr fandoms.
Duck: Harsh, but probably true.
Dia: I'm not wrong. I feel like I should specify. We are not positioning ourselves as above this school of analysis. Well, you might be, I'm not. I have equally trash tastes. I'm just into different trash.
Duck: I’m not above this school of analysis, I’m on an equally bad level but like round the corner somewhere.
Dia: Exactly. Case in point this week, I made Duck watch Shazam.
Duck: You super did. Well, you also got me to read the first several pages of a very funny comic from 1973.
Dia: It's incredible. So yeah, so this week, we're doing an innocent abuser paradigm reading of Shazam slash Captain Marvel, and anyone who isn't already relatively familiar with DC Comics is going to be wondering why I keep saying Shazam slash Captain Marvel since to I think the majority of modern audiences those are two different people. So potted history of all of comic books.
Duck: Please, take it away.
Dia: In the 1940s, Fawcett Comics’ Whizz Comics line, introduced a character called Captain Marvel, which is the superhero alter ego of Billy Batson, a young boy, in varting dire straits of life, usually homeless, occasionally a foster child, sometimes an abuse victim. I do specify victim, it is cartoon, comic book abuse, over the top. It is not aimed at realism. But he has been given by the wizard Shazam the ability to transform into Captain Marvel when he invokes the wizard’s name. And wizard’s name stands for the wisdom of Solomon, the strength of Hercules, the stamina of Atlas, the power of Zeus, the courage of Achilles and the speed of Mercury. So it's a sort of divine demigodly figure, who is known as the Champion of Magic. This is all great, except that there are already some big players on the comic books market, namely DC and Marvel, neither of whom are huge fans of people infringing on their intellectual property.
Duck: A preference they’ve really grown out of since.
Dia: Yeah, they're fine with it now, they're good. So I'm not gonna get into the weeds of how it happened. But in the 60s, 70s ownership of Captain Marvel was transferred to DC Comics, who started running it as Shazam. And at that point, the character was still called Captain Marvel. But the comic books were called Shazam, because Marvel Comics had a series called Captain Marvel, where the main character was called Captain Marvel, and it belonged to Marvel. So it was sort of judged that they had a better claim on that name.
Duck: That's probably fair.
Dia: Yeah, I mean, far be it from me to defend Marvel. But yeah, you see where they're coming from on that one?
Duck: Well, I think in this case they had a point.
Dia: I'm not sure when exactly at some point relatively recently, DC started pivoting to the character just also being called Shazam. I want to say in the like, late 2010s. This is very funny to many people, because he transforms into his superhero self and back by saying Shazam. In the comics, it has been specified that he has to mean it. This was not specified in the movie, which led to--
Duck: In the movie he clearly did not mean it at least once of the times he said it.
Dia: Yeah, so in the movie, it's entirely possible he just cannot introduce himself. I haven't seen the sequel yet. It is currently out as we record, I have not seen it for a) podcasting reasons and b) being broke reasons.
Duck: Both super valid. I choose to believe the sequel is entirely about finding ways to get his siblings to introduce him because he can't do it himself.
Dia: They also can’t say his name.
Duck: Or he gives up and it's like, I'm Captain Marvel.
Dia: That would be incredible.
Duck: I just, I just need a, I need a superhero name, because I can't say my superhero name.
Dia: Yeah, I mean, they should have gone with that as the explanation in the 70s comics. Honestly, it wouldn’t have been the stupidest thing in 70s comics. It wouldn't even have been the stupidest thing in that 70s comic.
Duck: The 70s comic just in the first two episodes has got a really strong lineup of stupid things.
Dia: Yeah, I'm a huge fan, I think it’s my favorite thing about it. And so I made Duck read the first issue of the Shazam line, which, amongst other things, has Superman standing like disapprovingly on the side of the cover to show you that it's all fine now and he's DC, which I personally find very funny. Which explains that he's-- he and his superhero family and his villains have all been in kind of time suspension for the last 30-40 years, which explains how a homeless newsboy from ye oldie times is running around in the 70s. being confused by people with afros and other 70s things.
Duck: Yeah. They spent the intervening time suspended in a giant ball of suspendium.
Dia: Yes. So that's the potted history of the comics.
Duck: I assume they get better from there by better I mean, just continue.
Dia: To be honest, there are zero good DC origin stories in my opinion, not in the sense that they aren't good ideas but in I've never read one and said, this is well written and engaging material.
Duck: That's fair.
Dia: They are a lot more fun in flashback. I just feel like launch issues are not DC's strongest suit.
Duck: Yeah.
Dia: Like if you look at the first ever Spider Man, it was like punchy. You see why they picked it up. Whereas I read the first DC Shazam comic and I'm just like, What are you doing DC? Oh, who's idea was this? But yes, so this brings us into the 2000s. We haven't even got to the movie yet. And the 2010s which is when we start getting the version of Shazam that the movie is based on which is Billy Batson is a foster kid who for whatever reason has been chosen by the wizard Shazam to become Captain Marvel, the Champion of Magic, and he and his foster siblings become the Shazamily, that's what they called, it's adorable, don’t fight me.
Duck: That’s… certainly a word.
Dia: All DC heroes are categorized into little families. It's one of the things I like best about DC as opposed to Marvel. I'm a big fan of both, but I just like the family superhero structure. I think it's adorable. So you've got the Superfam, the Batfam, the Arrowfam, and the Shazamily, things like that.
Duck: Of course, I'd heard of Batfam to be fair, but I assumed it was a fan thing.
Dia: I assumed you had heard that mostly from me.
Duck: Yes.
Dia: That tracks, that. Yes. The modern day Shazamily are foster siblings. They all have the same powers as Shazam, but he is the Champion of Magic. And he joins the Justice League. He's involved in a lot of big storylines. I'm a huge fan of his role in Injustice Gods Among Us. You know, he's a pretty established part of the Justice League in general. And so the movie gets made in 2019. Before I launch to a summary of the movie, any comments?
Duck: No.
Dia: No, I've heard some comments already.
Duck: I have comments on the movie.
Dia: Yeah, I meant more preliminary ones that are going to be relevant before I explain it. I'm going to try and do this real quickly because--
Duck: I don't think I need to pre-contextualize this.
Dia: Okay, so the movie tells us a story of 14 year old Billy Batson, no longer 10 years old, possibly for quality of child acting reasons, possibly for quality of child endangerment reasons, who knows. He is a troubled foster kid who was lost by his mother at a Christmas carnival when he was quite young, and has spent all of his time since then as far as we can help running away from home in order to try and find her. He's reached some pretty desperate stage by the time the movie begins. Specifically, he is breaking into cop cars to steal their records, which…
Duck: Yep.
Dia: Icon behavior. When the movie begins, he's being caught doing this and is being sent to a new foster home the Vasquez’s is where he meets his foster siblings, Freddy, Mary, Eugene, Pedro and Darla. He gets into an altercation at school with two boys who are bullying Freddy, he doesn't really want to get involved with them. He isn't close with them, doesn't want to become siblings with the others, despite the best efforts of Freddy and Darla in particular. But when the bullies who are picking on Freddy have stolen, have stolen Freddy's crutches, hit him with a car, and insulted the fact that he's got no mother, which feels like overkill, Billy does grab one of Freddy's crutches and whacks them over the head with it. When he runs away from the bullies. He gets on the subway. And the subway takes him to the Rock of Eternity,
Duck: Which is not named in the film, but it's a great name.
Dia: It is a great name, right? The Rock of Eternity is the home of all magic. And that's where he meets the wizard. This is where I'm going to diverge and tell you about the other storyline we've been following. So,
Duck: Yes, please.
Dia: In the old days, by which I mean like the eighties probably.
Duck: I think they specify, it's like late 70s. Possibly. He’s wearing a seatbelt. That's the time we’re in.
Dia: I'm real bad at numbers. So we're just going to have to accept my fudging of dates. So we go forwards.
Duck: I don't think that date is important.
Dia: If you told me it was the 1820s that would take me a minute to be sure you were wrong.
Duck: It's not, it's not the 1820s. But beyond that it is in the oldie times of like, the mid to late 20th century.
Dia: Sure. A kid is in a car being driven by his apparently relatively shitty dad and father to someplace when the car door opens and it drops him off at the Rock of Eternity. He has seen all these sorts of scary looking statues that are whispering to him in a mystical way he approaches the wizard. The wizard declares him to be not pure of heart, unsuitable to become champion, kicks him back to the car. He's a bit alarmed by this, tries to open the door, causes an accident, his dad turns around to verbally abuses him, to verbally abuse him and he gets T-Boned by another car, which is… bad day for everyone involved, but is weirdly funny as a viewer.
Duck: Yeah.
Dia: So we're gonna fast forward back to now, now Billy is in the same situation, except the wizard has in this time been attacked by this guy, Dr. Sivana. So Dr. Sivana, all grown up has been researching dream experiences, people who've seen the same weird wizard vision as him. Except unbeknownst to his researchers, he knows it's all true. And he's going there to give over to the evil statues, take them into himself, and attack the wizard, presumably for no reason other than to prove to the wizard that he was right.
Duck: It's-- right. It doesn't read like vindication so much as you told me I would never be good enough. I agree. But I really want the magic it powers.
Dia: Big Bugsy Malone energy, you know, like, Oh, I am not good enough to be the Champion of Magic? Well, I'm going to be a super villain.
Duck: Yes
Dia: I am the best at being evil. So he's done all this and attacked the wizard. Which is why when Billy gets there, the wizard is in something of a state. He has a look at Billy, shows him the same vision and basically goes, You're not pure of heart, but I'm desperate, do you want superpowers?
Duck: Right, he goes, to be honest. I don't think I'm getting another go, you will have to do, you are not allowed to say no to this?
Dia: Yeah. Billy does try to say no.
Duck: Three or four times.
Dia: Several times. He's clearly confused and uncomfortable. And one of the things I really like about this movie is that it does a sort of troubled teenager without making him unbearable, but he's quite polite to the wizard given everything.
Duck: Yes. Yeah, I think that's that's, that's a fair point.
Dia: But the wizard gives him powers whether he wants them or not and transforms him into He-Man looking Zachary Levi. Levi? I'm not 100% sure on how to pronounce his name.
Duck: It transforms him into a fully adult man with uh, with the kind of musculature you could only get by wearing a skin tight suit that has substantial padding.
Dia: Yes. To be fair, the actor did refuse to buff up for this and requested that the padding which I approve--
Duck: Oh no, I approve of the suit being done by padding because you actually can't get superhuman musculature without half killing yourself because you’re human
Dia: I think it is excellent that this happened.
Duck: You just pad the suit, that's what you should do. But it does put us immediately into the cartoonish no real human being. has those proportions--
Dia: It doesn’t help how the actor in question does look like an action figure in a way I can't really explain.
Duck: He has a remarkably plastic face.
Dia: It's like how Margot Robbie was perfectly cast as Barbie. And I don't mean that as a dunk on Margot Robbie, but somehow she does look like a Barbie doll in every promo for that movie.
Duck: Yeah, adult Shazam’s face does look like it came out of a die mold.
Dia: Yeah. So fortunately for Billy, his new roommate and foster brother Freddy is really into superheroes because this is in the DC universe where kids are really into--
Duck: Superheroes are real.
Dia: Yeah, this is in the DC universe. These kids grew up watching Superman and Batman and Wonder Woman, um, and presumably, the socio political connotations explored in previous DC movies.
Duck: Right.
Dia: Which sure whatever you do you, I guess. I wasn't that into senate hearings when I was 14. But I guess if anyone involved was bulletproof I might have been.
Duck: Right it's, is it senate hearings, or is it just everyday you open TikTok, and you get superheroes, you get Superman's latest stunts?
Dia: True. But anyway, so this means he goes straight home to Freddy, and pretty much says I have superpowers and I have no idea what to do about it. And they engage in some whimsical hijinks, let's go with? Buying beer, trying out superpowers, you know, things 14 year old boys do when they can transform into the Champion of Magic. Meanwhile, Dr. Sivana is committing gruesome murder.
Duck: Yes. And he is doing it with glee and malice aforethought.
Dia: Stylish, it's bloodless, and I feel like that actually makes it worse. I understand it’s required for ratings reasons, but I actually find it more disturbing?
Duck: No, it is because this is like biting off of heads. But then somehow the heads are… there's no blood.
Dia: It’s simultaneously demon attacks and uncanny valley. I can only handle one or the other of those.
Duck: Yeah, it's… it is totally very, very sharply contrasted to the Queen montage where we figure out all the things we can get away with now I look like a grown up. And whether I can shoot fire from my hands, like there's that level of I have some unknown superpowers, let's figure out what they are with a Queen montage. And then on the other hand, I'm gonna literally throw this board member out of the plate glass window out of the skyscraper.
Dia: Skimming over quite a bit of content to get to the stuff that I think is relevant to our analysis. So we're going to skip straight to the first confrontation between our hero and villain. Sivana has found out that the wizard shazam did manage to find a champion after being whatever-it-is-Sivana-dided to death. Yeah, so he decides he's going to go do some supervillain shit as one does.
Duck: Yep.
Dia: You get the impression he could have just sodded off and, like, been evil somewhere. Like, he doesn’t--
Duck: Oh, sure, there’s no implication that he needs to do this for any reason other than he wants to.
Dia: Yeah
Duck: He doesn't want there to be a champion running around. He wants that power as well.
Dia: Yeah. So he goes and attacks Billy slash Shazam. When he is running around doing his Marvel thing. They get into a fight. It's quite a funny fight. Billy gets away unscathed. And then Sivana spots Freddy, who was looking for Billy after they'd had a fight and corners him. It cuts to black here, in the novelization, it actually shows him torturing this 14 year old child, which is a choice. Apparently that was cut from the movie.
Duck: I think it's probably a creative decision for the movie to not show us that, although one they will not make later.
Dia: No. So in the normalization, this is only the first of several times a child gets tortured, in the movie, they got rid of it. Apparently, it was in an earlier draft of the script. But I got that information from an anonymous person on Tumblr. So who knows? Following this confrontation, Billy, who now has access to his mother's whereabouts, goes to her apartment. And he basically meets his mother who he's been building up this whole time, looking for his whole life, and finds out that she did lose him by accident at that carnival, but she found him and saw him talking to a policeman and decided to leave him there on the basis that he would have a better life in the foster system than with her, a single mom who had some issues with her parents.
Duck: It's a genuinely touching conversation, which is not true of most of the trying to be touching conversations in this movie.
Dia: I think it's conversation that benefits a lot from having an adult in it. And I don't mean that as a dunk on the talents of the child actors. I think just. There are different expectations of children and grownups.
Duck: Yes, and when you're having both parties in the conversation be 14, in scripting terms, you're writing characters that have less--
Dia: Yeah
Duck: Life experience and awareness of what's going on in their own emotions.
Dia: It's a scene which implies that she is in not necessarily an abusive, but definitely an unhealthy relationship with a current boyfriend.
Duck: Yeah, it's clearly not good.
Dia: Yeah,he is yelling at her to tell them who she's talking to, she lies, which to be fair, even if he wasn't, I feel like that would be a hard one to yell over your shoulder.
Duck: It would.
Dia: And Billy pretty much to-- it’s implied to spare her feelings-- says, oh, no, foster care’s great. Everything's good. I just wanted you to know that it all worked out. And,
Duck: And he walks off saying something about I have to go back to my real family, which in context, he clearly means as a combination of reassurance and dig at her. Yeah, like it's something he's saying. Because simultaneously, she wants to know that he's alright. So he's saying, Well, I go into my real family, because I am alright. And you're not my real mom.
Dia: Yeah. And he has been resistant the whole film, he has just had a blow up row, attempted abscondence. It is not implied that this is necessarily something he believes.
Duck: No, I don't think we're meant to interpret it in the moment of him saying that. It's a dig.
Dia: Yeah. He gives her back the compass, which I'm going to get to later but which had been his memento from her. He goes up to the roof. He gets a call, apparently, from his foster siblings, actually from the evil Dr. Sivana, who is holding them hostage.
Duck: Dun dun dun.
Dia: At this point, genuinely one of my favorite cinematic scenes of 2019, he jumps off the roof, yells Shazam, and flies away. With learning to fly having been something that was like a major sticking point earlier, he got the hang of it in the confrontation. It's a very satisfying moment.
Duck: Right. He's very, mostly I know exactly how to do this. I have learned my lesson with letting lightning pass through objects on the way to me. There's been scenarios with that. It's fine. It is a good thing. He's like jumping into responsibility, and also at the same time has learned not to blow up the building.
Dia: Yeah, it's both practically and emotionally a moment of growth. On the one hand, he has matured as a person. On the other hand, he has literally learned not to blow up buildings,
Duck: He has mastered his sick-ass powers. And also matured.
Dia: Exactly. It's great. I genuinely love that scene. I think the shot specifically of him jumping is gorgeous. Like the lightning isn't really emphasized in this film, despite it being actually a very cool superhero transition. And it's only from this point onwards, the lightning is cool. Before that the lightning that was just kind of there. From this scene onwards, no one turns into a Shazam without looking awesome. Because he's come to terms with it.
Duck: Yes, it’s no longer goofy, now it's epic.
Dia: Yeah. And I got the impression this was before you started to not be bored.
Duck: I started to like-- I went back and checked the timing so as to give you an accurate estimate. And I counted the point where I started enjoying this movie as the start of the conversation with his mum. From then on, I was having a good time.
Dia: It's a movie I'm fond of. But I would say it is a movie where I skip a lot of scenes, which is fair, I don't think I am the target demographic for this movie.
Duck: Yes, I think we're both too old for this movie in certain crucial ways.
Dia: Yeah, I'm very fond of it. I find it charming, but the scenes I actively rewatch are in the last 40 minutes.
Duck: Yeah.
Dia: Because I am a filthy skipping heathen. And I don't really watch entire films if I know which scenes I find boring.
Duck: Just watch the good bits. I support this.
Dia: What’s the point? I have rewatched specific battle scenes from every Avengers movie, I have not rewatched a single Avengers movie since the first time I saw them. I know which bits are fun now, I don't have to sit through the rest. So Billy zooms back to his foster home and finds that the foster parents are out looking at him because he had gone missing and his siblings are being held hostage. He offers to turn himself in for their wellbeing. Well, he resists this slightly but you know, not when actual harm is threatened. I'm not gonna get into the weeds of the conversation, but they escape from Dr Sivana and the sins and they go to the Rock of Eternity together. They discover that Sivana can be harmed when the sins are not in his body so, when they are otherwise occupied, because he's put the sins eye in his head. It's super gross.
Duck: It’s a super cool prosthetic that the film really wants you to believe is terrifying and gross.
Dia: It wants you to find it terrifying and gross, the part I find gross is the visual of them going in and out.
Duck: That's fair. That's pretty gross.
Dia: It gives me the absolute ick to a degree that I don't think was intentional.
Duck: Yeah, it's this sort of very dense black dust particle effect.
Dia: Yeah. We have--
Duck: That you would not usually have associated with, with heads? So yeah, I can see that being…
Dia: I mean, this may be me personally and specifically because I didn't find it as distressing the first time I watched it and between the two incidents between those two viewings I have had a traumatic incident of being blind in a situation where I was, like, relatively exposed. And I found it very traumatic to watch the sins going in and out of the eye.
Duck: I mean, it is upsetting. It's not meant to be nice, so I think that's fine.
Dia: But yes, so they escaped to the Rock of Eternity. They work out that Sivana can be harmed when the sins aren't in his eye. They don't really discuss that they're gonna stop Sivana, it's kind of just assumed because he's trying to kill them and also doing supervillain shit.
Duck: I think that's fair. I don't feel that's a plot hole.
Dia: No, it's not a plot hole. It's just interesting because it feels like the sort of thing that these movies usually feel the need to beat into your skull.
Duck: Yes, I think to be fair, I think the movie is kind of already done the--
Dia: It’s beaten different things into your skull.
Duck: Right. I think it's already committed to a plotline in which we are not refusing the call to adventure. We're just a bit of a dumbass about it.
Dia: Yeah. They escaped via a strip bar, which is to be honest, the only one of the children/grown up jokes that worked for me, because I found Darla’s excitement over glitter, genuinely charming.
Duck: That was very cute.
Dia: It’s adorable
Duck: I also liked Freddy's response, which was, Darla says can I have glitter and Freddy’s response is “not from them”. Very good answer towards your little sister, which is basically, you could have other glitter.
Dia: Yeah. I also love that this is the moment where Mary, who to be fair it’s not like she has been slouching as an older sibling, but I do love how overprotective she is in the strip club in a situation where a supervillain is trying to kill them all.
Duck: Yes,
Dia: She's great.
Duck: I also enjoy that because this is a family movie we never see inside the strip club.
Dia: No, I mean, I reckon if I had watched this at an age where I did not know what strip clubs were I would have been with Darla. I would have been like there was glitter.
Duck: There was glitter. Glitter and hot wings.
Dia: Sounds ideal. But anyway, um, so they make their way back to the carnival where Dr. Sivana is doing supervillain shit.
Duck: He's just terrorizing the populace for the fun of it, I think.
Dia: He's vibing. I don't know what he's doing. But he's having a good day. It's the same Carnival, I think is sort of implied, where Billy lost his mother slash was abandoned.
Duck: I think it definitely is because it's definitely-- it has at least one identical attraction. It is the same place.
Dia: Yeah. It's either the same or similar enough that you're meant to pick up on it being the same.
Duck: Yeah.
Dia: There's, there's some various bits of slapstick in the background, which make it quite tonally confusing. When Sivana pretty much says, Hey, Billy, come out, or I'm going to keep being a supervillain, which is a very hard point to counterpoint.
Duck: Yeah.
Dia: Billy does indeed come out. He's Shazams mid-step, it looks great. And he gets waterboarded on screen in front of his entire family, which is fun.
Duck: He fully does.
Dia: It’s very dark.
Duck: He goes from superhero to 14 year old kid, tries to run away down what we think is like an icy decoration turns out to be literally a frozen stream, not the public safety choice I would have made but okay, carnival designers you do you, And then there's a hole in the ice and there’s water underneath and the supervillain is fully holding his head down.
Dia: Which it does stop him from Shazaming, but it also seems like it violates the Geneva Convention maybe.
Duck: it's a choice to just put that on screen and never address it. Like it's not even here is the really traumatic thing that happened during this fight to Billy. It's just that the next set piece in this superhero supervillain fight is when he waterboards the 14 year old and then yeah, moving on, next scene.
Dia: Yeah. And the next scene, Mary, who to be fair, is awesome, grabs a shooting gun off one of the stalls and tries to shoot out Sivana’s eye, like it's implied she would have done it which is very impressive given that those guns are garbage. But he catches the bullet, this forces him to let go of Billy, who manages to get some air after being tortured and Shazams and breaks free. The sins are causing havoc they're attacking his siblings so he gets them all together does a little all hands on deck thing that they do at home so you know that they’re family, and tells them to say his name and they all yell Billy and then he says no the name I used to transform into this guy and he Shazams them all the full Shazamily are out in force.
Duck: Everyone has got a sick ass new padded jumpsuits and they're all very tall.
Dia: They're all grown up shaped. They are all super powered. And they're gonna go do battle with the sins while Billy takes on Sivana. And at that point, it is actually pretty standard superhero showdown.
Duck: After that it is a superhero movie and a movie set piece.
Dia: It has a couple of unique moments both on the positive and negative end of the word unique, most of which are jokes. I think it actually does integrate the jokes really well into the fight scene, but it is reminiscent of how much tonal whiplash you've been experiencing thus far.
Duck: Yes.
Dia: To be fair, the monologuing where Shazam can't-- there's monologuing where Shazam can't hear what Sivana’s saying because they're, you know, superhero villain distances from one another. That works pretty well. Santa's being rescued by Darla who is adult shaped but actually like six is genuinely funny.
Duck: She’s like, I’ve been a very good girl. That's very cute.
Dia: Adorable, whereas the bullies being rescued by wedgie feels a bit much for me.
Duck: Yeah, it's very because all through the fight we're cutting back to these two bullies who are stuck on the thingy. Not the Merry-go-round. The one that goes up and not around.
Dia: I just do not care. I don't care if they get punished. I also don't care that they get rescued. I'm just not invested.
Duck: They get, they get, they get stuck on the Ferris wheel for a while and they're in some mild peril and then they get rescued by a wedgie. And it's very coming back to them feels like it's what it's trying to anchor is the we’re still in a kids movie. Don't worry. This is still on kid stakes. It's clearly not on kid stakes.
Dia: You can’t go back to the kid's movie after the waterboarding.
Duck: The stakes are not at Ferris wheel wedgie level.
Dia: But Billy does manage to get the last sin which is envy out of Sivana.
Duck: With some very childish taunting.
DL It's-- I'm not sure it really seems like they’re going like, he finally used the wisdom of Solomon, his Final Superpower. And it's like, did he? Was that the wisdom of Solomon? Being kind of a dick. It sort of seemed like he had the be kind of a dick move mastered by the beginning of the movie.
Duck: That was a skill he did already have.
Dia: Yeah, like being annoying was not something he needed the help of Solomon to achieve.
Duck: But it's fine because what happens is that bereft of all his sinful powers Sivana just drops like, like a person with no superpowers in midair. It's great.
Dia: Yeah.
Duck: They catch him before he hits the floor because they have to get them get the gang back together to like, finish the bit.
Dia: Billy does a little bit where he pretends he's going to get hypnotized by the eye and become just like Sivana, he doesn't. His exact reasoning is this is a demon eye, that's gross.
Duck: Good reasoning
Dia: But causes his foster siblings to panic thinking that they now have to, they’re going to have to take on evil Billy. Sivana gets picked up by whatever authorities the DC Universe has. I think it's the Wall? Who knows.
Duck: There are people whose job is to put supervillains in small but crucially not quite inescapable cells.
Dia: Yeah. And the Vasquezes and their foster kids have a family dinner and we're sort of given a general everything is good now, we're all superheroes. We're all loving siblings. All things are good. There is a stinger but it is a stinger nobody has about because it's Mr. Mind who I think is a great character. But I don't think anyone was like, “Oh my God, there's an evil worm!” watching this credit
Duck: I mean, he is, he is the worm from Labyrinth wearing an evil cape.
Dia: I mean, I love him. I love all of Captain Marvel's villains just because--
Duck: No, please do not take that as, as a disparaging description. Oh, no. It's the worm from Labyrinth with an evil cape. It's great.
Dia: Yes. Captain Marvel/Shazam villains are interesting because their pathos and depth are pretty much in direct inverse proportion to their actual threat levels. With the exception of Captain Nazi who gets a zero on both counts. They did not put Captain Nazi in the movie for some reason.
Duck: I think that's a good choice.
Dia: Can't think why they wouldn't.
Duck: I think that’s a good person to not put in the movie.
Dia: And we get a final scene where Freddy is sitting alone at lunch. He's kind of embarrassed. He'd previously said he was friends with Shazam and then been humiliated when Billy didn't show up to back up this fact. And then his foster siblings all come and sit with him grinning suspiciously, sans Billy. Billy shows up as Shazam. And then Superman also shows up.
Duck: Headless. Not literally headless. I mean he’s shot so his head's not in the shot because
Dia: Yeah, Henry Cavill was not available for this cameo.
Duck: So they didn't do a who’s playing Superman reveal. Instead they did a we're not showing you who's playing Superman. But look, he's also here carrying a school lunch tray.
Dia: It's actually quite a nice little scene, but it is very weird how wholesome and cutesy the last five minutes of this movie are after all of the preceding movie.
Duck: Right? It's very much we are now tying a wholesome tiny little bow on the end of this movie, and pretending that the whole way along it has been lunch room bully levels of stakes,
Dia: Whereas the stake had been vacillating wildly.
Duck: There has been a variety of stake. Yeah.
Dia: Also in the end-- in the end credits, you get little little doodles. I think they're implied to be Freddy's? of the Shazams really taking on various threats and being cooler than Batman and Superman and also also dating Wonder Woman, which just.
Duck: That sounds like something Freddy would fantasize about.
Dia: I've never been a 14 year old boy. But I just feel like if my sibling had been tortured in front of me, and I had been tortured, and all of my family had nearly died, my last thought would be on and maybe Wonder Woman will date me.
Duck: I mean, that's fair. But I also would not put it past him. I mean, as a way of processing your trauma, “I’m not going to think about the traumatic bits, I’m going to imagine Wonder Woman”, doesn't suck.
Dia: Yeah, is Freddy not all of us writing fanfiction alone in our bedrooms, age 14.
Duck: We do not have any fanfiction from when I was 14, and that is for the best.
Dia: Oh, I was still hardcore pretending to ship Destiel to impress cute girls. It did not work.
Duck: That's a sad period of life to have been in.
Dia: And I will never be able to forget. That was actually about the age I was getting into DC. So you know, I also had cooler interests like this film.
Duck: I'm gonna say yes, this is cooler than Supernatural. But I'm saying it's cooler than Supernatural. So the bar here is low.
Dia: Yeah, I see where you're coming from. That's fair. However, that is our potted summary of this movie. It only took us 45 minutes to get there.
Duck: It was a lot more coherent than my one.
Dia: That’s probably because I skipped a huge chunk of movie.
Duck: To be honest, all that happens in that movie is Billy failing to learn about the power of family.
Dia: To be fair, I respect I-- when I was 14, I really hated power friendship stories. I think when I was 14, I would have gotten so much story from someone who's even just a little bit resistant to the idea in ways that didn't seem terminally stupid. Because whenever you watch those movies as a kid, the people who aren't all in on the power of friendship, it's always for, like, very dumb reasons.
Duck: They’re always villains.
Dia: Rather than just, I'm just having a bad day.
Duck: Yeah, no, it is unusual for the hero to at any point in the narrative be like, I don't want your power of family to cure me. Just leave me alone.
Dia: Yeah, or at least for more than five consecutive minutes.
Duck: Right? I am willing to tolerate your presence in the house. But do not ask me to be hugs.
Dia: Yeah. And this is one of the things I actually really like about their portrayal of Billy, is that he just feels very realistic in a way that troubled teens in movies usually don't to me.
Duck: Right? I think it's probably because he isn’t the villain. So he's not written over the top. Because if you look at the two bullies in this film, they are drawn in crayon.
Dia: Yeah.
Duck: Take literally any pair of well off bullies in an American high school setting, and distill them down to primary colors. And that's the pair we get on on screen.
Dia: They hit a disabled child with a car and taunt him about having no parents and no one even questions whether they will face consequences.
Duck: Right? Because they just have the run of the place and they do whatever they like, because we're the school bullies. And everyone knows school bullies do whatever they like. It’s that very unreal dynamic, where there's like, most of the school is normal. And then there's the bullies.
Dia: Yeah.
Duck: And I've like I've not been in many social situations where there's Everyone is fine, apart from the really identifiable bad guys.
Dia: Yeah.
Duck: Which is not how any human society works in my experience, but it is how American high schools work in every show I've ever seen.
Dia: Yeah. Whereas Billy, as a character feels much more like a kid who is going through some stuff. Like he's not great at interpersonal because he's 14. He's, he's 14.
Duck: And he's not great at power of family because he's lived most of his life in a succession of foster homes, desperately looking for his mum, so he can tell her that he didn't mean to run away.
Dia: Yeah. He does feel very believable in a way that I think most teenagers in coming of age power of family and friendship dramas don't to me and didn't when I was one.
Duck: Yeah, I think in particular, it's nice to have a power of friendship thing, where it's not just he's got to accept that it's the power of family and friendship, but like there's some actual proof required.
Dia: He isn’t portrayed as necessarily being in the wrong for being skeptical and disinterested in this family, he is portrayed as being a dick about it, but not necessarily wrong to feel that
way.
Duck: Right. And there are little moments of, you know, Freddy, calling him on some shit. It's not the best monologue ever in the world. But I think we're, I think it is reasonably, a reasonable interpretation that part of what gets to Billy about it is that anyone cared enough to call him out on his shit.
Dia: The others you don't really-- while you do see Billy having moral lines, he defends Freddy when he feels the bullies to have crossed a line that he relates to, he's not like, disinterested in these people to an unrealistic extent. But he's only really showing up for them once they have shown up for him.
Duck: Yeah.
Dia: He has a average level of nice.
Duck: It's Freddy caring enough to call him on his shit that I think touches him in a certain way, there's-- I can't remember which one of the siblings, like throwing a batarang at the villain. And it's not just oh, we can hurt him, it's also, they came to rescue me, armed with a vacuum cleaner and the batarang.
Dia: I love them
Duck: Like they showed up to rescue me and also I am six foot six and built and have LIGHTNING POWERS. So it's clearly my job to rescue them now that they've come to rescue me but it's nice that they tried.
Dia: Yeah. By contrast, Dr. Sivana is not a realistic character.
Duck: Dr Sivana’s family relationships. You could write several theses.
Dia: I've definitely had days where I felt like I could have released demons on my parents, but all of them were when I was eight.
Duck: Mm hmm.
Dia: You know, I don't think I'd have gone through with it.
Duck: Yeah, I think that most of us as adults with our own research labs, and access to nearly infinite wealth and power and never actually having to see them because we don't sit on the board. Therefore we don't have to go to the board meetings with them. I think most of us could be sufficiently the big enough people to not throw them out of skyscraper windows.
Dia: I mean, it's notable that there are enough people who have experienced this exact same trauma of the wizard rejection, not necessarily the subsequent car crash, which I agree is an additional trauma, but it's still a very similar inciting incident. There are enough of them to form a studiable group. And none of them are supervillains now.
Duck: None of them are supervillains.
Dia: And that may be lack of resources, but none of them are supervillains. And this is the DC universe, there are things you can use to turn you into a supervillain on every single street corner.
Duck: Supervillains are a known technology that you can pursue if you want to. Yes.
Dia: Yeah. So yeah, there's Billy. There's Sivana. And there's Billy's mum. And kind of these are the three characters that are forming my thesis on how this film relates to the abuser innocent paradigm that we explained many years ago, when we started recording,
Duck: The one with which we are all familiar with, do not need to recap. Please continue.
Dia: Yes. The thing that I find very interesting about this movie is one actually pretty singular choice it made, which is to have Sivana be a rejected champion. And to have all of the champions be, the potential champions be children. So in the comics, I sent you a couple of variations of the DC version of Billy's origin story.
Duck: You did.
Dia: I ran briefly through them at the top of the podcast. But in terms of origin story, and specific. The wizard has chosen adults in the past. One of the villains, who now has his own movie, was a past champion. In the DCEU, which is the film's universe, the potential champions, all children.
Duck: Yeah.
Dia: This is interesting.
Duck: The children have this interesting dream slash alien abduction experience.
Dia: Yeah. And since the fall of this previous champion, which is in like, ye oldie times, there's pyramids and stuff. You know, those times, it's in made-up DC geography, so let's not get into the weeds of it.
Duck: Probably for the best.
Dia: There have been an untold number of children rejected for not being pure or innocent enough and none is ever found.
Duck: The wizard is trying real hard to find a single pure of heart, truly good, innocent child. And every single one, he's like, Nah, it's possible to tempt you. You're not good enough, and you'll never be good enough.
Dia: In defense of Sivana, the temptation he witnesses seems to just be interest, like, interest in the magical thing that is talking to him.
Duck: Yeah, it's somewhere between he's interested on the basis of having no way to tell apart the various like, spooky wizard spooky stuff too, whatever. They're both like, look at the cool shit we’ve got. It’s somewhere between that and certainly from what the wizard says, like, actually supernatural levels of temptation. I assume it is because the actual like out loud, tempting they're doing is not very good.
Dia: Yeah.
Duck: It's kind of on the other hand, like this, is this parallel, we will probably not bother to come back to because he probably doesn't mean anything and is just how the thing was written. The temptations that the the sin statues do in the beginning of Thaddeus Sivani is at a very similar level to the taunting that Billy does of envy. And I'm like, is that because that again, is like actually a superpower or are they just like that? Is it because they are just very stupid? I don't know. But their temptation and his temptation are at very similar levels of convincing. I think if a 14 year old off the cuff can tempt, as well as you can temprafter your 1000s of years of practice, you're not very good at it.
Dia: Maybe this is the wisdom of Solomon and we are both missing out on something obvious. Who knows.
Duck: We are not wise enough to be tempted by this.
Dia: Though the wisdom of Solomon was not that great biblically speaking. This was the baby guy, that guy.
Duck: Right, Solomon was the baby guy.
Dia: That’s how we all know him
Duck: He was also famous for other work, but that was one of them.
Dia: Including summoning demons, which you'd really think was more relevant to Billy's work as the Champion of Magic. Regardless, that's not the point I was getting to, I'm just easily distracted. The change there from the comics is very, very interesting to me. Partly because in the comics, choosing the child as the champion is something that the wizard like is not popular for. There's actually, I want to say in the late 2000s, might be early 2010s? A comic where Superman finds out for the first time that Shazam is a 10 year old homeless child. And the first thing he does with this information is go to the Rock of Eternity to yell at the wizard. And I love that for him.
Duck: A correct response.
Dia: I mean, what else are you going to do with that information? Your co worker is actually a homeless child who has been press ganged into this job,
Duck: We’re gonna go and find the press-ganger and tell him off.
Dia: Yeah. But in light of that the fact that it is now a child only gig is interesting. And the fact that this rejection is what turns Sivana from like, I guess, maybe a somewhat temptable kid, it's not really implied that he's particularly evil.
Duck: He's being portrayed as just like a normal kid, who was simply-- who didn't live up to a very high bar. And we know it's a very high bar because no one has ever lived up to it.
Dia: Yeah, it's a high bar, no one has ever lived up to it. And he seems, at the very least, to be having a rough time of it in a not dissimilar way to Billy. It is very dissimilar way to Binny--Binny? Billy, in ways I will get to later. But crucially,
Duck: Having a rough day is part of what we know about him as a kid.
Dia: Yeah, we don't really know much else to be honest. We have these two very similar origin stories. And to be honest, my dream would be to come back to this movie at some point to do some class analysis, because there is class coming out the wazoo in this.
Duck: Oh, yes, there is a lot to be said on that level.
Dia: However, we're not going to do that. Today, we're talking about the innocent abuser paradigm. And the thing that's interesting about this is, I believe that the film is pitching to us the innocence of children. And I don't think that's a controversial topic. That's just my premise.
Duck: No no, I'm happy to accept this as the premise. That seems like a reasonable interpretation of what the film is trying to say.
Dia: I don't think it's saying children are like, sparkly, pure unicorns, but just that children are relatively okay. You know,
Duck: Children have a fundamental goodness, that we all must learn to return to kind of deal.
Dia: Like, the pitch on kids from this movie is that they are still learning to be people in a way that feels very true to my experiences working with young people and teenagers. Which is, it's not their fault if they are problematic sometimes. They're still learning how to be people.
Duck: Yeah.
Dia: And
Duck: It's they’re good, but sometimes they're going through it.
Dia: Yeah. But the wizard is seeking purity of soul in children. And that is an unreasonable expectation.
Duck: Yeah.
Dia: It's fairly reasonable to say that that's the baseline premise we're working from.
Duck: Yeah, I think so. I think you could, you could make some interesting points about how sort of one of the things that movie is saying is, innocence isn't enough. If you want goodness, you have to choose it. And to do that, you have to know what you're choosing.
Dia: Yeah. The thing that's interesting here, is that the contrast is not actually only between Billy and his mom and Thaddeus and his dad, but in several ways between the adults in the film. We have the Vasquezes who are pretty much incorruptible, pure, perfect foster parents.
Duck: They are. They are drawn in vanilla on a cinnamon bun.
Dia: I don't think that's a problem. I think it is good to have for once a good presentation of the foster system.
Duck: I don’t have a problem, they’re just as characters… they’re not a cipher but they're also not who the film's about, so.
Dia: Yeah, I have no issue with the foster parents just being incredibly blandly portrayed good people. That's the reason that I am shelving them from this conversation.
Duck: They’re not interesting. There's nothing to say.
Dia: I mean, exactly. It's like they are not relevant to this paradigm because they are the good ones. The difference that's interesting to me is between someone like Thaddeus and someone like Billy's Mum, I want to say Marilyn.
Duck: I could only hear it briefly and I do not remember.
Dia: I think it's Marilyn, I'm pretty sure it's Marilyn in the comics. I can't remember if they changed it for the film. Let's call her Marilyn. And if she's not, I'm sorry, fictional woman.
Duck: We apologise for the confusion.
Dia: Look, man, everyone in DC movies has the same four names. Just as well she's not another Martha, okay. It's already close. We've already got a Mary, we've already got a Marilyn, there's a lot happening. And they've all got alliterative names, which really doesn't help. I know it's supposed to help them remember, but it does the opposite for me.
Duck: Yeah. And they end up being bad names.
Dia: Yeah. I do think Pedro Pena is a great name.
Duck: Freddy Freeman.
Dia: Freddy Freeman is great. Hilariously, quite a lot of the stupid names are actually people who worked on the first comic. So there's Billy's dad is called CC Batson. And he's named after CC Beck who was one of the first writers or artists on them. I just wish we could go back to a time when there were guys called CC. I think I want that society. Anyway. The interesting thing is, so Billy has relationships with the adults in his life. There's the mum, there's the foster parents, and there's Sivana. And it's actually very hard to categorize Sivana or the mother within a sort of normal moral context.
Duck: Sure.
Dia: If you're looking at this, because this is a movie that is very much about interpersonal drama, the superhero stuff is mostly used for stakes-raising and gags.
Duck: Yes.
Dia: The drama is Billy's acceptance of his family, Billy coming to terms with his abandonment, Billy’s is coming of age narrative.
Duck: Billy has a really action-packed three or four days.
Dia: The secondary narratives are about Sivana choosing to be evil, and his foster siblings dealing with their teenagerhoods.
Duck: Yeah,
Dia: Even in very minor ways. But that is where the crux of the antics come from. And that's interesting, because it's this very interpersonal drama, and one where we don't have very clear cut lines. We don't get a real answer on was, Marilyn… you sort of expect more from her in a way not not more as a mother but more detail and you just don't get it? That's something that you as the viewer are denied.
Duck: Yeah.
Dia: You get Billy's memory of the scene where he was lost at the carnival, Marilyn’s memory of the time she abandoned her son at the carnival, and the conversation between Billy and Marilyn. And that's all you got.
Duck: Yeah.
Dia: And it's clear that this is a woman who Billy feels real sympathy and almost pity and empathy for and also is horribly hurt by.
Duck: Yeah. And sort of one of his mature decisions in the film is to give her some bland reassurance and walk away from that, rather than sort of explode.
Dia: And yeah, it's not just a moment of maturity, it's also a moment of this is the right thing for him to do to give her that space, and to give her that false reassurance, even if it is also a dig, also the reassurance that she did the right thing. And that's interesting to me, because it's not something that I think we as humans would reasonably expect of a 14 year old.
Duck: I don't know whether that’s expected of most adults, to be honest with you.
Dia: Yeah, it's a very emotionally mature choice and a very difficult choice. And it's interesting, that that is where we see Billy's first real moment of maturity and adulthood. And it's then that he goes to save his siblings having found out they're in danger, et cetera, et cetera.
Duck: Yeah.
Dia: Because we've had this setup for the whole movie of Billy and Sivana as foils, which they've really not in the comics, they brought that in specifically for this movie for a reason, I presume. And that feels like where that set up of good guy bad guy, foils, one of them was arrogant and assumed he had the right to the power and was upset when it was taken away, one of them tried to turn down the power and had it forced on him. It feels very standard, like, there's a reason that this is like classic 40s comic book stuff. And I feel like the confrontation with the mum is where that actually gets split open a little bit. Despite the film kind of following through on it, it also feels like that moment makes it more engaging and more interesting to me. Because it complicates things. He doesn't have a very simple-- Well, it's not as though the trauma and difficulty and abandonment Billy's experienced has disappeared. It's been made more complicated in a way that feels very real to me, because most difficult childhoods and childhood traumas aren't that cut and dry.
Duck: Yeah.
Dia: You genuinely believe--
Duck: One of the most difficult things is that everyone else in the situation is also an entire round person with a whole lot of stuff going on.
Dia: Exactly. And you genuinely believe that Marilyn, thought she was doing the right thing in the moment and maybe regretted it maybe is trying to convince herself of that now. But in the moment, she was thinking, I can't handle this responsibility.
Duck: Yes.
Dia: Someone else can. And it's really hard not to empathize with that feeling.
Duck: Yeah, and I think so what the what the end of that scene feels like to me when Billy is giving that false reassurance, like, yes, there is a degree to which he's, you know, there's a little bit of a dig about, you know, my real family as contrast to you. But I think what he's doing for the most part is he's having this horrible conversation where all of his illusions, like all of his fond imaginings, of what his, how things are gonna go and how things really went, which he knows our fondimaginings, have been crushed. And he's, he is aware that that's what's happening. It's not like he didn't know that this was dreams he was, daydreams he was telling himself as to how this was gonna go. And it hasn't gone that way at all. And he can kind of feel all of that illusion being crushed. And what he chooses to do is to not crush hers in turn, because he is also fully aware that she is just imagining, she has got the same kind of “this is how it's going to go for and, for that person, whom I don't actually have any contact with or know anything about. But I'm gonna tell myself a story about their life, that's gonna make me feel better”.
Dia: Yeah.
Duck: And his has just gotten broken. And what he chooses to do with that is not break hers.
Dia: Yeah,
Duck: It’s a sort of, well, one of us might think, might as well think this is worked out. Someone might as well come away reassured from this conversation.
Dia: Yeah, and that's why that's the moment of growth for him. Before any of the climax of the movie happens, that's the moment he gets. And it's interesting, because superhero movies when they tried to do complexity, usually either bring in what if bad guy, but good? Or what if good guy, but bad?
Duck: Right, not what if what you needed to do in order to act super heroically was to go and have a really painful conversation with your birth mother about how she actually did give you up on purpose. That's not something you usually have as the purpose of and then after that, having had that necessary conversation, you can go and like, save your siblings.
Dia: And it’s a quiet, very emotional scene. And the kind of quiet emotional scene that I feel like has a very hit or miss history in superhero movies.
Duck: Yes. And like even in how they shoot it, it is in this barely dressed like, beige painted, cheap flats corridor, outside of Marilyn’s front door, we don't even see the inside of her flat, you've just got these two people in their very ordinary clothes, in a drab hallway having a face to face conversation. And the rest of this film is drawn in marker pen.
Dia: It’s very brightly colored. It's a Christmas time movie. So there's bright lights and colors and shiny things everywhere.
Duck: There’s lights everywhere.
Dia: But not in this scene.
Duck: The costumes are very over the top.
Dia: Even the day to day life costumes are very brightly colored, because it's winter, and they're all wearing their fluffy hats and warm coats.
Duck: Yeah.
Dia: But still very bright and dynamic.
Duck: And then there’s this scene, where it's drab, and Marilyn’s just very tired and not made up, and there's just two people having a conversation in the corridor. And it's it is in very sharp contrast to…
Dia: it's a definite-- it's an intrusion of soap opera, it doesn't feel out of place with the rest of the movie,
Duck: Exactly
Dia: It feels out of aesthetic.
Duck: It's doing a fascinating of like, changing the focus both ways at once. This is both a reduction of the stakes and intensification of the stakes.
Dia: Yeah.
Duck: Because this is, this is a point where the emotional stakes are real instead of being comic book and it doesn't matter if you get punched in the face through a wall, you'll get up again, like this is the point where words really can actually hurt you.
Dia: Yeah.
Duck: But also, this is just a conversation you're having.
Dia: Exactly.
Duck: No one's getting punched through a wall. There is no supervillain.
Dia: And it's really pretty hard hitting and this is where I want to get to the pin we put in earlier, small round objects.
Duck: Small round objects.
Dia: There are three of them.
Duck: Tell me of small round objects.
Dia: There are three small round objects in this movie. Number one--
Duck: I can count them off, I think, if you would like me to.
Dia: Yes, by all means please do. It will be so funny if you get one just completely wrong.
Duck: If I get one of them wrong it will be the best. So small round objects the first: a magic eight ball.
Dia: Correct.
Duck: Small round the second: a gross demon eye.
Dia: Also correct.
Duck: And small red object the third: a cheap plastic compass being given out as a booby prize at a carnival.
Dia: So correct. So do you want to run me through the chronology of these three small round objects?
Duck: Um, we see the magic eight ball first because it's what child Sivani is playing with in the back of a car, which his dad tells him off for playing with and that his brother snatches out of his hands and his mean about it and then gives it back. And then it is the first glimpse of like, his portal to the Rock of Ages where he gets rejected.
Dia: Yeah.
Duck: The second I think is…
Dia: I think we sort of see Sivana still having it as an adult but it's not given much weight after that point. It's just, oh yeah, that's the same dude, it reassures you that this is the same person.
Duck: I believe so yes, we see it briefly in his lab where he's just a he's still got the toy because supervillains must have their identifying features. Much like saints that way.
Dia: Yeah. Also just because like, I don't remember people's names or faces. If you want me to know people by faces I’m going to be lost.
Duck: It would be very helpful for me personally, if people came along with like the trinket you can recognize them by
Dia: That would help so much.
Duck: Yeah. Just always wear the same hat and we will be fine.
Dia: Yeah. Okay. Second object small and round.
Duck: Second object, the demon eye. I think we see, we see it, I think we saw-- we technically see it immediately after the eight ball, but we see it in its encased state, on a plinth. We do not see actually being got until later in the film, after we have seen the little compass being first won as a booby prize at the carnival, by Marilyn. And she gives it to Billy. And he's like, but I wanted the tiger. And she says one of those sort of semi meaningless parental things about oh, this is better than the tiger because with this, you can always find your way home and gives it to him that he is reassured by this and proceeds to fixate on the little compass as four year olds do, and drops it. And it's following that between the feet of the crowd that separates him from Marilyn, and he can't find her and is sort of taken to the-- it's the front gate but there is also a lost and found sign behind him. Which is…
Dia: It is a bit sad
Duck: A bit sad and he’s sat on…
Dia: To be fair it is true that that is where you take lost children.
Duck: Yes, that is where you take lost children.
Dia: But it is also a little bit on the nose.
Duck: A little bit on the nose. And he’s sat on the front bonnet of a cop car being talked to by a policeman and he’s just sort of hanging on to this compass. It's, it's sort of in that moment it has become the talisman because it's how he's gonna find his mom.
Dia: Yeah.
Duck: And then we see the demon eye again as adult Sivana breaks in and fights the wizard and just like, shoves the eye into his eye.
Dia: Yeah. Which-- that-- I think that's the bit we were meant to find gross. But for me, it's the cloud of dust penetrating his skull that I find unbelievably icky.
Duck: Oh, I found that gross. And then I found pulling it back out again gross. But then we see him in the stinger and he's got both of his eyes and it was just like the demon the bit that got pulled out and I was like, Oh, well now I'm unbothered. It recast the previous scenes into like, mystic instead of body horror, and I'm fine.
Dia: Yeah, that's fair. So those are our three small round objects and also brings me into my non small non round object, which is going to be a bonus round.
Duck: That’s a wide field, I don’t want to guess that.
Dia: It is the tiger
Duck: Oh, the tiger!
Dia: When Billy's mum is trying to shoot this carnival game. It was one of those ones with guns. I don't think we have them as much in the UK.
Duck: It’s darts.
Dia: I understand they're very difficult-- yeah, the gun shows up later. That's my bad.
Duck: Yeah.
Dia: It’s the dart stand. She's trying to win prizes. He wants the tiger. In the comics. He actually has a friend who's a talking tiger called Tawky Tawny. But that's not the point I'm making. It's just very cute.
Duck: It's alliterative!
Dia: In the final carnival scene where there's people running away from the supervillain stuff, adult Shazam ends up in the same slash very, very similar booth, where there's a little girl she's terrified and he grabs the same tiger down off the racks and offers it to her with look, he's gonna protect you, you're gonna be okay.
Duck: It's another, like, it's the second genuinely touching very adult moment.
Dia: It's actually one of the scenes where I most believed adult Shazam as Billy.
Duck: Yes. I agree.
Dia: Which, I don’t mean that as a dunk on performance. It's an incredibly hard job that he did very well.
Duck: Right, it's very hard to convincingly be 14 even when you are 14. Yes, I felt that was a point where their performances most closely approached each other.
Dia: Yeah.
Duck: Because it has much of the same emotional feel as when he was being very, very strong and grown up and solemn talking to Marilyn. And he has this same kind of, I'm trying very hard not to freak out. Because you need me not to freak out.
Dia: Yeah.
Duck: I'm going to give you this tiger, I'm going to tell you to close your eyes and hold on to the tiger and everything's going to be okay. And I'm not going to give you any further details because you are tiny and do not need details. Because this is very bad. And I don't want to tell you that.
Dia: Yeah.
Duck: Hold that, you're gonna be fine. I'm gonna go find that guy.
Dia: And I think having that moment of synchronicity, that very similar approach from teen and adult Shazam and Billy is actually really important because for most of the movie, Shazam has been very goofy and childish in a way that teenage Billy isn't which is actually really interesting to me. It's mostly played for comedy, but I just find it very interesting on dramatic level that when he's in this adult invulnerable form, when nothing can hurt him, he is a lot more childish and silly. Duck: What he has, partly--
Dia: I think that’s actually very engaging.
Duck: Partly because of the costume but mostly because of the behavior when in the costume, he comes across a children's TV presenter.
Dia: Yeah. it--
Duck: It's that oversize gesture. It's that performative goofiness.
Dia: Yeah.
Duck: And then you get that very quiet moment of, I've been sort of, I've ended up in here in the middle of my having big punchy fight with supervillain a context which I living in this world, have for the how fights with super villains go because Super Heroes and Super Villains having fights is a thing I see in the news. And then instead of the idea of that performance is just let's have a human interaction.
Dia: And it's the kind of moment that isn't--
Duck: Before we get back to being performance--
Dia: It’s the kind of moment that isn’t unusual in superhero movies these days, it's actually pretty common to have this little touch in with reality lull in the drama moment. But I actually feel like this is one of the best performed ones. It definitely beats Hawkeye in Age of Ultron. Sorry.
Duck: I think the difference is, that there's very much a drop of a very, there's a very performative performance that even the character is doing a performance.
Dia: Yeah.
Duck: That gets dropped for this moment, and then put back on again.
Dia: So--
Duck: And it does stitch the two performances of the character together.
Dia: Yeah.
Duck: More closely than any other point, I think.
Dia: However, it does bring me on to my objects, small round ones, and also tigers.
Duck: Small round tigers. Let us assume a spherical tiger of uniform density.
Dia: The thing is Sivana holding on to the magic eight ball feels to me like it's not necessarily a direct correlation. But it's a very good visual cue to the foil-ness of Billy and Sivana, which I don't think is really disputable. It's very clear they are opposites.
Duck: Oh yea, they are in the film to be opposites who fight.
Dia: Yeah, and the magic eight ball kind of just sits there in a way that to me feels like Billy is actively stuck in the past, he is actively trying to seek out this fantasy world. Sivana is almost passively, he's just left his past on a desk, but also he is becoming a supervillain about it. Which is why it's very, very interesting to me that-- well, not interesting, I mean, it's very textbook cinema. But it's textbook cinema in a way that engages me, that Billy gives Marilyn the compass. And she clearly does not recognize this thing. Just like she has no idea why this child she abandoned as an toddler is giving her a keychain compass.
Duck: Yes.
Dia: But it's very clearly meaningful to him. Because he knows that she needs that hope that he has had for his whole life.
Duck: Yes.
Dia: And he needs to give it to her, even if it's in a way that she doesn't necessarily recognize or understand.
Duck: Yeah, which I think it, you know, doubles on what I was saying about, Well, you've just crushed all of my hopes and dreams, and I shall choose not to crush yours. Here is the talisman of having hopes and dreams.
Dia: And that's how Billy sheds his child-- child fixation on somebody making something better. Whereas Thaddeus keeps the eight ball and gets the eye. He kind of adds to it, he leans all the way into this sense of himself as victim, that he was done wrong by the wizard.
Duck: Right, I'm gonna keep this talisman of the night I was betrayed. And also I'm going to come back and get the thing you wouldn't give me on the night you betrayed me.
Dia: And I don't think it's irrelevant that the eye that he gets is similar in shape and size to these two talismans. Whereas for Billy, he has actively chosen to move past that. And he hasn't necessarily succeeded because you know, trauma and growth is a process but he--
Duck: Plus, it was was three hours ago.
Dia: Yeah, he's hasn't gotten over it the minute she closes the door, but he is seeking to move on emotionally in a way that Thaddeus is simply not interested in.
Duck: Yes.
Dia: What with being a supervillain. And crucially, he moves on to the thing he wanted in the first place, the tiger. He takes that role for someone else, he gives that tiger to a little kid, it's very cinema, it's very textbook. And it really works. I like I feel like a lot of people when they say something's very textbook or very obvious mean that as a criticism. I really don't, I think the neatness and obviousness of it is really in its favor. Because it’s an obvious hint at something very complicated.
Duck: Yes, it-- you kind of have to condense that down into symbols because otherwise this is a five arthouse film in which we still don't say everything we tried to say.
Dia: I mean, I would watch that.
Duck: Okay, fair, but what we're actually watching is Shazam.
Dia: I’ll go on the record saying I would watch the five hour arthouse Shazam. I would go broke if you could watch it in cinema. I would be at the Odeon every single day of my life going one more ticket for Shazam, please.
Duck: Like no, I can't stay late at work. I have to go to my 20th viewing of Shazam.
Dia: I would, I would be the only person in the audience and I would be keeping that cinema afloat. My friends would be worrying.
Duck: So if anyone is out there who's considering funding this, you have an audience.
Dia: It's me, I'm the audience for five-hour art house Shazam. That's what Watchmen should have been.
Duck: I will allow myself to be forced to see it once but I'm not coming every night.
Dia: That's what you think. It's adorable you think you have a choice.
Duck: So when are we doing a podcast that is just a minute by minute close reading of arthouse Shazam.
Dia: And you will like it. However.
Duck: With the Shazam that we actually have,
Dia: And looping us back to the innocent abuser paradigm. What's interesting to me is that this film, you can solve it very easily into that paradigm. You can go either Billy good, and mum bad. And Sivana, obviously bad. Or Billy bad, and treatment of found family bad and found family innocent. We can even kind of go with Freddy’s kind of a dick. But you know, he's 14. He's a--
Duck: He has a certain amount of excuse.
Dia: Yeah, it's like, it's, I think you would be wrong to do so. And I don't think anyone has to be fair, I spent a lot of time going through Tumblr tags I usually avoid in preparation for this episode.
Duck: We salute your courage.
Dia: Oh, god, there’s some stuff. But like most people, in terms of audience reception, and not just on Tumblr, I also read reviews. It's just Tumblr’s where I found the most weird stuff as is usually the way.
Duck: That’s what it’s for.
Dia: But in terms of reviews, and audience reception, and AO3 content production. What I found most people to be saying was either eh, everyone's got kind of fucked up, but they're all doing their best. And it's a found family. Or no, they're all good kids doing their best, which are actually pretty similar positions just with different degrees of interest in the bad behavior of teenagers.
Duck: Yes. It's really just a question of how well you think they're doing, you agree that they are good people who are attempting good.
Dia: Yeah, pretty much. I think the most diversity of opinions in terms of the paradigm I saw was regarding Sivana, and how justified his behavior is, I saw a lot of the take that Billy and Sivana are fundamentally the same, but one of them was given a chance to be a hero and one of them wasn't, my beef with that take is that Billy did not want the chance to be a hero. At all.
Duck: I don't, I don't buy that take at all. Because also that's not fundamentally what's wrong with Sivani.
Dia: Yeah, like, one of them is a foster kid with nothing. And one of them is a millionaire who doesn't like his dad.
Duck: Right.
Dia: They’re from very different positions in society. Sivana was given the chance to be a hero when he was given unlimited amounts of money.
Duck: Right. And a thing about Sivani is partly-- because the dialogue for this film is also written in crayon most of the time he waltzes into the boardroom and is like, let me lay out my childhood resentments and why I am going to murder you about them because I have never let go of these childhood resentments, does display extremely good insights into all of the things that therapy could show him. It-- he has already been to therapy, he has simply decided that he is not going to move on or let go he is going to become a supervillain about it.
Dia: I don’t mean to dunk on other people's traumas. But his childhood trauma that made him evil is pretty thin on the ground compared to like, okay, DCEU villains kind of suck, but like compared to most DC characters.
Duck: And yeah, and especially in this film, where it's okay, you had a rough relationship with your dad and your older brother’s a bully. This, this is not great. Also you were in that car crash that one time and that was pretty sucky.
Dia: Yeah.
Duck: And that wasn’t cool.
Dia: Also a wizard said you were a prick.
Duck: And you know, your dad blames you for the car crash and this is all not great. But also you are a billionaire.
Dia: I mean, like at least Lex Luthor’s dad was like, over the top comedically abusive instead of just like, shitty.
Duck: Right. And what you have done about that, and in this film, we have a number of homeless children.
Dia: The thing is we don't get backstories for the rest of the foster kids-- very deliberately, like Billy asks, and Freddy kinda just goes lol, I have terminal cancer, actually no, I don't, none of your business.
Duck: Yeah, Freddy gives him like two lies about why he's disabled and then is-- as a way of telling him that he's not going to get that.
Dia: Yeah. It does to me read very much like somebody who has been asked many, many times and people haven't let it go. And so he's resorted to messing with them.
Duck: Right.
Dia: Which feels very real.
Duck: Because he's not interested in having that conversation. We don't know why any of the other kids are in foster care. All we know is that the current place they are in foster care in is a good place and they have, they really want to stay with their current foster parents and their siblings. That's all we know. We don't know why.
Dia: I know you haven't seen the CW Flash. Um, don't, it's fine. There's a scene in it where Captain Cold who I love--
Duck: Great name.
Dia: Is asked by Iris West why he's like this as a person. And he goes I had a rough childhood and she just goes everyone in this room had a rough childhood and that is how I feel about Sivana in this movie
Duck: Right!
Dia: It’s like, read the room.
Duck: Right and Sivana has good insight into why his childhood was rough and, and why he's messed up by it. But his reaction to this insight is not to, like heal in any way, his reaction to understanding why he's messed up is to go, it is good to have clarity about why exactly I'm going to murder you.
Dia: It’s very interesting. It really reminds me of--I have forgotten her sodding name, very famous woman, worked with abusive men in prisons as a therapist, has a section in one of her books about the existence of therapised abusers, which is basically people who are awful to their partners or families, and also have been in a lot of therapy, and have found that that therapy helped them to understand themselves in many ways, but it made no progress in curing them of their violent or abusive behaviors.
Duck: Right.
Dia: This is not true of--
Duck: It hasn’t actually changed what they wanted to do with their time and the outcomes they wanted.
Dia: Yeah.
Duck: And the you know, the relationship styles they found appealing, which are the ones where they get to abuse people.
Dia: Yeah. And just, just disclaimer, I am not stating anything about any individual human people who actually exist.
Duck: Oh, no, we're talking about these extremely fictional characters.
Dia: Yes. Please do not take me as any kind of qualified opinion on the subject of real abuse, but fictional abuse in the DC universe I do feel qualified to comment on. And he reminds me of that. This feels like somebody who has accepted the fact that he had damage, worked on it to improve himself for his own ends, not for the purposes of being a better person, just a more functional one.
Duck: Yes. He is somebody who has learned about the things that will upset him, because when he gets distressed by things that remind him of bad things in his past, it really interrupts his plans for doing evil today.
Dia: Exactly. And that's interesting in the light of-- if we're talking about a school of reading conflict that relies on Okay, who is good, who is bad? Who is doing the bad? Who is receiving the bad?
Duck: Yeah.
Dia: This becomes a actually complicated movie because you have these very clearly set up foils. And the crucial thing is they both get confrontations with their parents, they both get rid of their little tokens of small round innocent-ness, and they end up in this very obvious diametric superhero supervillain. I have chosen to be the good guy, I have chosen to be the bad guy place. And you don't get a much clearer image of this, then when Shazam pretends to fall for the eye, and doesn't. And we have not seen anyone else fall for the eye. But we have seen that the wizard has refused every child he's encountered, presumably for similar reasons of being tempted by the eye. You have to assume that pre Shazam, Billy would also have been tempted by the eye.
Duck: Yes.
Dia: It is some way the experience of having I mean, partly, you know, being surrounded by supervillains and traumatized by this eye probably helped. But it is interesting that you get that possible growth, recognition of growth. I don't really know what to call it. But you know what I mean, that moment of clear difference comes after everything else.
Duck: Yeah, it precedes like, only the final confrontation.
Dia: Because the actual nature of victimhood and abuse and trauma within this film is, it's not just that it's not clear cut, but it's not clear cut in a way that is different to how most films do it.
Duck: Yes, it's actually quite difficult even, even taking like straightforward pairs of people, even not considering how they interact with the other people in their lives. It is hard to point to an individual relationship and go Oh, there's the bad guy. Straightforwardly there’s the bad guy.
Dia: All of the characters in this movie are going through their own things, and are forced into a very diametric good or bad position by Sivana choosing bad,
Duck: By Sivana leaping gleefully into the arms of bad.
Dia: Like Sivana’s character arc in this movie is fantastic. A wizard told him he was fucked up. So he killed the wizard and became a supervillain. He could have done anything.
Duck: He had so many choices in life, but what he decided to do was to kill the wizard who told him as a like eight year old that he wasn't good enough.
Dia: Yeah,
Duck: Thus proving that he wasn't good enough.
Dia: I've never been entirely clear in this movie if he knew that he would be able to get the powers. Do you know what I mean?
Duck: It’s not clear.
Dia: It's not clear he knew it was possible, but he was gonna go fuck up that wizard regardless, you know?
Duck: Right, he was just gonna go get revenge.
Dia: Like, it does feel to me like it would-- I-- This isn't necessarily how I read it, but I think it would be an entirely valid interpretation to think he went there to pick a fight with the wizard, and everything else only happened because he found out he could have superpowers now. And when he got superpowers, he went well, I guess I'm going to be a supervillain because I'm sure as hell not going to be a good guy.
Duck: Right.
Dia: Like what else are you going to do?
Duck: The logical, the logical way to proceed with my superpowers is gruesome murder. Okay, what’s step two?
Dia: Right. Okay, number one kill dad. Number two torture children. Number three carnage.
Duck: I'm gonna ruin everyone's Christmas.
Dia: Usually grey films, films that aim to be morally gray, apply that pretty unilaterally. And this really doesn't, Like No, no, he's evil and he's decided to be evil. It's just that it's also kind of more complicated than that in unrelated ways.
Duck: I'm not I'm not sure Sivana is more complicated than that.
Dia: More complicated than that in the sense that it's not, if that makes sense. Like the fact that there is this foilhood set up, there is this yeah, he had a rough childhood set up. And it's just not engaged with because it's not interested in engaging with it, rather than because it's not there.
Duck: Yeah, it's odd because it is there, you've got you've got sort of, you've got a complicated character in Billy, who kind of gets flipped, like he's in a, he's in a superposed state, between potential superhero, and potential, just takes selfies for tips, non superhero, with powers.
Dia: Just some guy.
Duck: But he's in this sort of quantum superposition of states, between TikTok guy and superhero.
Dia: The two genders.
Duck: And he gets to resolved into superhero by Sivana deciding to be evil.
Dia: Yeah. But it’s only through that--
Duck: But without that happening, it's not clear that he resolves to superhero.
Dia: And that's the thing is like he does emotionally mature in the conflict with his mother, but it's really-- you don't know how that would have translated to Shazamness, without Sivana choosing to attack his siblings.
Duck: Right, the, you know, because that's such a human level conversation. It could very well have the human level response of I'm going to stop running away from this particular foster home, because actually, it's okay, because I have nowhere to run to anymore. And it's fine. And I'll just like try to get along in a way I have not previously been trying to get along.
Dia: It’s definitely…
Duck: And that could be the resolution for that if this was the arthouse version of Shazam, whether he somehow doesn't get the superpowers.
Dia: And I think in the DC universe, superheroes-- I'm going to constrain this to DC, it's not necessarily only true of DC, but I'm talking DC as a place. Superheroes are very damaged people in a way that I think-- I just said I wasn't going to talk about other ones, I'm gonna say Marvel, it's not that that isn't true of Marvel, but in Marvel, it kind of, I always get the impression that everyone is having an equally bad day. Like the Marvel Universe is just full of people having the worst day of their lives every single morning. Whereas DC, the superheroes are very kind and very friendly and very decent, and also very, very hurt people. And the thing that's interesting to me here as a contrast to that if you look at previous DCEU films, I actually should have asked you which ones you had see,n I did not, I'm not going to do it now because it would take a while to walk you through the plots of the ones that are relevant to what I'm saying.
Duck: Uhuh.
Dia: But in most of the DC movies, they've hemmed in on the darker elements they've gone-- and I don't think it's a route I dislike, it's a route a lot of people dislike which is why they aren't very popular movies, but I actually like it which is very much a “all that pain and loneliness and it just made him kind” gifset vibe. It's people who have been through a lot choosing to do good with what they have.
Duck: Yeah. Of course what they have is superpowers which most of us do not have access to.
Dia: Or money, be fair.
Duck: Money is a superpower
Dia: This is true, but like it's, it's interesting that to me it's actually not really the Peter Parker approach. It's not with my power, I have these powers, therefore I must do good. It's well, good needs doing, just as well I have these powers.
Duck: Yes, the logic runs in a different direction. I think that's very true of this movie, like, the logic is not I am now Shazam I have superpowers--
Dia: Oh, no.
Duck: I must find good to do with them. The logic is absolutely: my brand new siblings are being threatened by a supervillain, I guess the powers are going to be how I'm going to solve this one.
Dia: That's why I find this so interesting in terms of like the moral reading, the reading of this film that seeks for there to be moral good and moral bad and everything to fit into those categories. It's interesting because he’s kind of just doing what's in front of him at the moment. And he's doing his best. He's just a kid. But so is everyone else. Everyone else is doing their best except for the guy who is doing his best to be evil.
Duck: Right. So where does that leave us in terms of putting a bow on the moral paradigm of this movie?
Dia: I think for me. The reading of this in the victim abuser paradigm is pretty obvious, which is we should all go and write fanfiction where Billy got adopted by Sivana.
Duck: I'm sold. That sounds great, actually, yes.
Dia: No, but in all seriousness--
Duck: And then we have a clear, clear, bad guy and a good guy, and they don't have any complicated external relationships to complicate it, it's all straightforward.
Dia: They should have adapted that version of the comics. However, in seriousness, where we’re in the universe where they did not adapt the version of the comics where he gets adopted by Dr. Sivana, if we look at the victim-abuser, the innocent-abuser paradigm, as a categorizing of people into victimhood or evil.
Duck: Yes,
Dia: That's the paradigm that says, Well, you don't have agency, which is interesting, because you read it into real people. That's something you mentioned at the top, but it is true of characters, right? I mean, they don't they're not real
Duck: Characters are not people.
Dia: Sorry to anyone reality shifting on TikTok at this exact moment.
Duck: Yeah, you talk about a character having agency within their narrative, but it means something very different to when we talk about a person having agency.
Dia: Yeah,
Duck: It's more as a character trait. Do they, do they affect the plot?
Dia: Exactly. But like, as a paradigm, it's essentially saying, people are in one of these two categories. They don't shift, they just are. It is once again, very Calvinist. And this is a movie about people who are on the cusp of making a decision. He could have been a pretty garbage person. Like he's 14, he's still figuring out who he is and how to be that person. But there's a lot of signs in this movie that he could have sucked.
Duck: Yeah, just in his own right, as a human being, you know,
Dia: There are signs in this movie that Sivana, like, could have been okay. He didn't choose to. But he could have.
Duck: He walked open-eyed into not choosing that, yes,
Dia: Yeah. But at some point, the first time we see him, here's a kid who's going through it, he could have chosen. And we see Marilyn, who is kind of trapped in this life, because she had this moment of paralyzed decision making.
Duck: Yeah.
Dia: And through that lens, I think this is a movie that is about deciding what kind of person you want to be. And that sounds so deep like, it's not an incredibly basic, obvious statement about this movie. But that is my response to the reading of this movie through an innocent abuser lens is, it is a movie about deciding what kind of human being you want to be, and what the consequences are of those actions.
Duck: Yes, I think it doesn't fit very well into that paradigm. And I think you're right about the reasons why it doesn't, is because it's a movie that says, Well, you're not put by nature into one of these boxes. And the kind of person you decide to be is probably going to be more complicated than one of those boxes, unless you decide to be a Dr Sivana.
Dia: Absolutely.
Duck: Who is here to demonstrate that evil is an option.
Dia: Oh, yeah, you can choose evil, especially if you have money.
Duck: Right. He’s just, he's just here to display that going full evil is an option, and then we have a spectrum of other options for you.
Dia: Exactly. I think that is our conclusion. But I do have a footnote.
Duck: Okay.
Dia: Which didn’t fit into my analysis, but was important for me to say in most of the comics Billy is then. In most of the cartoons, Billy is ten. Billy here is 14. And a lot of people had real doubts about him being 14 and kind of assumed it was just because quality of child actors and need to endanger child actors. You will notice Darla is not doing stuff.
Duck: Yeah.
Dia: One of the things that really stands out to me about this movie is the contrast to my first encounter with Captain Marvel slash Shazam, which was the animated series Young Justice, was the first time I encountered him. And in that series, there's an episode where all the universe has been split into a universe with all the children in it and all the adults in it.
Duck: A classic childhood fantasy.
Dia: As, as we all know, and this is portrayed as a disaster. There's like planes falling out of the air and stuff. And at one point, child Billy Batson is in the child universe. He woke up in the child universe with all the adults gone and has no idea what will happen to him if he transforms because they don't know the universe has been split. As far as they're concerned. All the adults in the world just disappeared, possibly dead.
Duck: Certainly.
Dia: Until the person who was flying the plane he's in, turns 18 and disappears. He can't fly a plane. He's 10. He's homeless child. He has no idea what's happened to her. He's very worried. And the line he gives it's very superhero cartoon aimed at children, but the line he gives is, Captain Marvel may have the courage of Achilles, but Billy Batson has the courage of Billy Batson.
Duck: Oh, I love it.
Dia: It’s so cute. And he transforms and he saves her and everything's fine. And he's, he's the only one who can switch between the grownup universe and the child universe. It's all very shenanigans from that point onwards. But that moment really, really stuck with me like, that's what got me to go and read the Shazam comic books.
Duck: Yeah, that's a really good line.
Dia: It's such a good line. And he's so baby. Like, this is a cartoon where most of the characters are like in their early to mid teens at that point. So like, 10 is baby in the way that 10 year olds are babies when you're 14.
Duck: To be fair they remain babies from then on.
Dia: Oh, yeah. But as in this is not aimed at 10 year olds, you're not supposed to think he's protagonist-aged.
Duck: This is not the young adult, ah, they just, they're just like me, and fighting in a war becomes, oh, they’re child soldiers only we are out of them being just like you. Yes.
Dia: You as the viewer are expected to read him as baby. And it's a very soft moment. It's a very sweet moment. It's a moment that made me fall in love with this character. It's a moment I thought about a lot when I was going through the film making notes for this episode, because that version of Billy Batson is so different a person to this version of Billy Batson. And in the light of this paradigm, it's very interesting to me how much innocence they chose to take away from him to make him a more rounded character. Because this Billy would never say that.
Duck: No, and not just because he's operating in a slightly different, you know, vocal register where that sounds goofy. He just--
Dia: He doesn’t think much of Billy Batson.
Duck: He doesn’t think of himself as a-- yeah, he's definitely still at a point where Shazam is everything that's worthwhile about him.
Dia: Yeah. And I don't know, it's, there is a reason I picked this as a footnote, which is it's not very enlightening in terms of the paradigm. But it is something that really stuck in my mind while I was thinking about it.
Duck: It's very inspiring, I'm going to use it.
Dia: It's such a good line, I think about it every day of my life. Comic Billy Batson’s motto is do good and good will follow because he is the sweetest and softest and most innocent bean, even in the versions of the comics, where he is a little shit, which is the ones this is based off. He's a little shit who's an innocent good bean and deserves the world. And Billy in this movie really isn't. He's just 14.
Duck: He's just 14. He's a 14 year old foster kid who keeps running away.
Dia: Yeah, like, it’s that-- my little footnote here is just like, it's interesting to me how deliberate all of this feels. If I think about other versions of Captain Marvel, like this is very very--
Duck: They had other options, other versions of Billy available to them when they wrote this one.
Dia: Yeah, and this is very, very true to a specific comic. But that specific comic doesn't give Dr Sivana this backstory. And it makes all of the people in the foster care system apart from the Vasquezes a lot more obviously awful. Like, this feels very deliberate. And I love it when creative works do things on purpose.
Duck: That's a good button.
Dia: That is a great button. That's, that's my final line. We've got some drawing to do.
Duck: This is the best part of every episode, is where we get to find out what we're letting ourselves in for next. I believe this time it is my turn to roll.
Dia: it is but you're gonna have to give me a second because I forgot to call the GoogleDocs up. Duck: That’s okay, I need to load a dice roller. So we will both load some pages. Because I don't actually have a D100. Or indeed a D101. Because we have of course, we have a secret 101st option.
Dia: We do and we are not telling.
Duck: We're not telling.
Dia: Because you will judge us.
Duck: You will judge us, you will be right.
Dia: I completely forgot that I had proofread a poem called My Will for someone, and when I opened Google Docs, the first thing that came up was My Will, I was like, I don't remember writing one? I’m gonna get murdered.
Duck: Just your future self making sure to have your affairs in order.
Dia: Oh, my God that gave me a heart attack. I was, I genuinely thought for a second that I had been. I was like, going to be murdered for my complete lack of money.
Duck: For all your worldly goods, and some…
Dia: Sorry, the only time someone writes a will for you in TV world where all of my knowledge--
Duck: In TV world it would mean you're about to come into an inheritance and then be murdered for it.
Dia: This is true.
Duck: On like a Thursday afternoon.
Dia: Like, that is what happens in TV world when someone writes your will who is not you?
Duck: Yeah, even in this world and I don’t think it's usually a good sign.
Dia: No, which is why I was concerned. Okay, I have the correct Google Doc, which is not my last will and testament open in front of me.
Duck: Okay, am I rolling the paradigm first?
Dia: Yeah, let's have the paradigm first.
Duck: Did we say we actually had 24 schools, and we're now down to what 22?
Dia: No, we're not taking them out of the hat are we?
Duck: I thought we're gonna reset at the end of the season.
Dia: We are, I just mean I literally haven't taken them out of the hat in my document.
Duck: No that’s fair. I can roll the dice if--
Dia: It’s cool, I’ve taken it out now.
Duck: How many is that? 22?
Dia: 23.
Duck: 23 rolling a 23 sided dice.
Dia: Which exists and you have.
Duck: I got a nine.
Dia: You're doing an ideological reading.
Duck: Interesting, interesting.
Dia: This could go horribly wrong.
Duck: Number 93.
Dia: Oh, hello, spicy.
Duck: That’s a high number.
Dia: Oh, the concept of flat earth.
Duck: Okay, that's gonna be very funny
Dia: And eminently doable.
Duck: Right. I can think of at least three ideologies.
Dia: Yeah.
Duck: Oh, I'm looking forward to this.
Dia: Look on the bright side, you didn't get mustard.
Duck: Join us, dear listeners, in a fortnight for the ideological reading of the concept of a flat earth, which may or may not include references to mustard.
Dia: Okay. Okay. Badada, I remembered that that was something I was gonna scroll up on last time. So I was going to check what I said was put back in the hat, where to put things back in the hat. What's your vote? My one concern is I really, really wanted to do a couple-- there is a couple of other schools that I really hoped I'd get. But I don't think it's worth making us do this film again.
Duck: Yeah.
Dia: The thing is like there are other, there are other kinds of analysis I would really like to apply to Shazam. And specifically I would like to apply to the comics, because I picked the movie for point of access reasons, but also because it just fit the theme better. But also, I do not want to inflict further unnecessary Shazam.
Duck: Can we-- can we take it out of the hat and reconsider it for season two, whether to put it back in?
Dia: Works for me, okay, which means I need to replace it with something. What section was it in? Was it in my personal obsessions? Or was it in random nerd stuff?
Duck: It was--
Dia: It was in my person.obsessions, yeah. Okay. Well, in that case, I will…
Duck: You'll figure something out.
Dia: Figure something out, yep, it's not one that requires consensus.
Duck: No, that's the whole point of having those sections, that you get to inflict things on me and I get to inflict things on you.
Dia: Yes. I'm sure it will happen.
Duck: We just have to roll in the whatever section it was.
Dia: Yes. I believe the 50s.
Duck: Yeah. So everyone out there fingers crossed your fingers for a 50?
Dia: Yes. In which case, I believe you are going to be assigning me some homework at some point in the next fortnight. And you, dear listener, get to just tune in and find out what we learned.
Duck: We will certainly have some thoughts to share.
Dia: Speak for yourself. I have no thoughts. I have devoted my brain entirely to full time DC stanning.
Duck: Well, that's regrettable because I'm going to replace it with conspiracies.
Dia: Oh dear.
Duck: See you next week.
Dia: Bye-bye!