Another day, another movie for me. And another spoiler filled review. I just saw Clayface and as is usual for me I can’t just sit back and just enjoy things 100% without thinking of things based on the lens of my personal experience.
So getting the plot points out of the way. It’s an origin story of a Batman villain. I’m familiar with the character from the animated Batman series. Like Supergirl it’s an introduction, and unlike Supergirl it’s a full origin story. You don’t even need to be familiar with Batman, he’s not mentioned in the entire run time. The closest you get is it’s set in Gotham City which is referenced frequently providing name recognition- that’s the city that everyone knows that Batman resides in.
Matt Hagen is an up and coming actor and seems like a pretty decent guy. While partying at an expensive night club he hooks up with a girl he doesn’t know. Animal attraction and the drugs she slips him at the club take over and they end up sleeping together. Despite warnings from his friend she’s “the property” of a notorious crime boss.
Waking up there’s more than just the girl in the room. The crime boss and some flunkies are there and they’re gonna teach him a lesson. Killing isn’t good enough, it’s far more brutal to take switchblades and ruin his pretty face so he can live with the consequences of messing with the wrong guy. This leads Matt to lose his money, social status and pretty much everything - the face is scarred too much for being seen as an abomination regardless of how his past might have shown signs he had any good qualities.
Except there is a chance. An experimental nanobot procedure that can rebuild his face. And naturally as events play out things go wrong. A temporary burst of rage disturbs the nanobots, he revisits the doctor and you get the sense she can fix it, but instead of waiting for the painkillers the doctor trots off to get for him his pain and desperation drive him to overdose on the nanobot serum.
Which works. Temporarily. The rage problem still makes him change into an ugly clay faced abomination, but he gradually learns to control it. And he really starts to like the feeling of power. And it’s time for revenge which he successfully metes out on the crime syndicate. But the rage doesn’t go away and he only has one person remaining that cares about him. The attractive female doctor that treated his scarred face he’s now obsessed with. So obsessed he murders her husband and tries to convince her that she should be devoted to him. He’s the cool guy with these superpowers she gave him. Never mind the dead fiancé thing.
Great movie. Much better than the new Supergirl at portraying damaged mental state and motivation.
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A great companion for the philosophy and discussion we can have from Now You See Everything which I whined about yesterday. Indeed, it’s quite an interesting time where content about the Epstein class is openly being offered. The Social Reckoning, Musk, Now You See Everything. The contradiction of being forced to admire the most terrible people who continue to verify that things aren’t working out yet we are magically supposed to assume that they’re “just misunderstood good guys.” The relentless psychological projection that they are strong when their open overconfidence is a sign they are terribly insecure and fearful. We’ve seen this movie before, it’s just playing out on a global scale now. Complex problems require complex solutions, not decoding gematria as black and white only. Not unilaterally assigning tariffs because you had a bad day and never learned that historically it’s kind of dumb. Serious flaws that are masked as strength and increasingly butting heads with reality and losing.
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And now it’s personal. Because in many ways I am Clayface. Nothing really left to lose. Society decided I wasn’t worthy not because I don’t care but because I care too much. And it’s terrifying to me how petty and vindictive I can be when I’m pushed too far. How counterproductive it can be in the long term. Selfishly, I don’t like the idea that I’m bound to be judged as a greedy white man just because I’m superficially a Boomer age white man. Thanks oligarchs. Appreciate that.
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