Taken away like a common (Dead Man’s Hand)

Posted on by froborr

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It’s March 20, 1999. The top song is still Cher’s “Believe,” and most of the same people are charting. At the box office, something called Forces of Nature opens at number one; also opening in the top ten are True Crime and an animated version of The King and I. In the news since last week, um… not much, really? A new Serbian offensive in Kosovo today, and tomorrow a couple guys will complete the first circumnavigation of the world via hot air balloon. That’s about it.

Unfortunately, that kind of fits this week’s episode, which introduces the Beyond version of the Royal Flush Gang, a couple of earlier incarnations of which will later be seen in Justice League and Justice League Unlimited. They’re not particularly interesting as villains here: thieving aristocrats, which I know is redundant, but at least they’re honest about their thievery.

The most interesting part of the episode, by far, is the visual storytelling in the scene where Melanie seduces Terry. In some ways, this plays out much like scenes of Poison Ivy or Catwoman being seductive in Batman: The Animated Series would–she slinks about, strikes some cheesecake-y poses, drops in the occasional innuendo or purr–but it’s also notable that she doesn’t touch Terry until the very end, and her poses are subtly different from Catwoman’s or especially Poison Ivy’s. Specifically, where they tend to put themselves above their target’s eyeline, she spends much of her time below Terry’s. She holds her limbs closer to her body, even wrapping them around herself, where they spread out more. The results make her seem smaller, more vulnerable; still essentially a child, she is playing at an adult game but not as good at it as she thinks.

She also spends quite a bit of time rubbing or pressing herself against things like light posts and a low wall. Combined with the frequency with which she puts her arms around herself, it implies someone who craves the sensation of touch–and yet, again, she doesn’t touch Terry until the very end of the scene. She shies away from the touch she wants; her body language suggests that she may be touch-starved. This isn’t just a child; she’s a neglected child! Gentle nonsexual touch is a basic human need; touch-starvation in adults is associated with increased stress, reduced immune system function, and increased risk of heart disease, while in children it is also associated with developmental issues.

Which, of course she is: her family keeps her outside social contact limited, and they’re not exactly the hugging types. There’s a quiet misery to her that Terry seems to recognize on some level as akin to his own: after all, he too is leading a second life of questionable legality that interferes with his ability to bond with his girlfriend, resulting in their apparent temporary breakup in this episode. Wayne is a demanding, stern figure much like King and Queen, who appear to be Melanie’s parents, though the total lack of affection makes it hard to tell what familial roles the different members of the gang fill. True, Terry has his mother and brother providing affection Melanie doesn’t get, but she hasn’t had to deal with a parent being murdered as far as we know; her trauma is the continuous trauma of living in an ongoing abusive situation and his is the discrete trauma of a singular moment of loss and violence, but they both are dealing with trauma.

Two hurting kids in need of someone to talk to, both isolated by their secret double lives of dressing up in costumes to do illegal things. Is it any wonder they cleave to each other rapidly? Melanie is by far the most sympathetic villain in Batman Beyond so far, and it’s down pretty much entirely to the visual storytelling in that one scene, as contextualized by the dialogue elsewhere. That’s not something the DCAU does that often, so kudos to whoever out of director Dan Riba, story board artists Dave Bullock, Darwyn Cook, Steve Jones, Pat McEown, and James T. Walker, and the animators at Koko and Dong Yang studios contributed to it.

But we also see an important difference between the two of them, a reason to hope Terry will come out okay while we despair with the handcuffed, police-escorted Melanie, headed as she no doubt is to just another environment for her to accumulate continuous trauma, that being what prison does. Wayne and King were paralleled throughout the episode as stern elder father figures who insisted their respective teenagers focus on work rather than relationships and connection, but King has nothing to say as the Royal Flush Gang is led away. As the Batman Gang departs the scene, however, Terry asks if Bruce has ever had to deal with feelings for one of his enemies.

With a wistful smile, Bruce answers, “Let me tell you about a woman named Selina Kyle…”

It’s not touch, but it’s a form of connection. He’s opening up to Terry, letting him in, letting him see Bruce at his most vulnerable. Remember the elements of BDSM in Batman and Catwoman’s early encounters, carried into BTAS from the then-current Batman Returns, albeit becoming a bit less explicit in the process; in those moments Batman was filling the roles of sub and bottom, positions of vulnerability and relinquishing control. Even if he doesn’t describe their encounters in that detail, he is still sharing an old struggle and an old pain with Terry, still opening up emotionally, and in its own way that is also relinquishing control and making himself vulnerable. It is a different kind of intimacy from touch, but it is intimacy nonetheless, and that is something both Terry and Bruce have clearly been lacking.

Bruce sees that need in Terry, and in filling it, fills his own need as well. Isn’t that what love is all about?

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I keep hearing squeaks in my chimney (Shriek)

Posted on by froborr

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It’s March 13, 1999. The top song is Cher with “Believe”; Whitney Houston, Mariah Carey, and TLC also chart. Top at the box office is Analyze This; The Rage: Carrie 2, Cruel Intentions, Wing Commander, and October Sky hang out lower in the top ten. In the news since last episode, white supremacist John William King was convicted for the kidnapping and brutal murder of James Byrd Jr on February 23; the Convention on the Prohibition of Anti-Personnel Mines took effect on March 1; and former Soviet-bloc states Hungary, Poland, and the Czech Republic joined NATO yesterday.

On TV we have “Shriek,” an episode we have had reason to reference before, specifically its final reveal that Wayne knew the voices he was hearing couldn’t be from his own head because they called him “Bruce,” and he thinks of himself as “Batman.” As we have discussed, however, he really is both the frightened child and the dark protector that child called into being, both Man and Bat; more interesting for us now is Terry’s response: “That’s my name now.”

And it is. Shriek recognizes Terry as Batman when he rescues Bruce from the ruins of the old Gotham PD headquarters, and says as much to Powers afterward. Terry is Batman, but in a very different way than Bruce ever was. Much as with Batgirl before him, Batman is a suit Terry puts on and little else; he remains fundamentally the same person in the suit and out of it. We see that in his confrontation with Powers in Bruce’s hospital room: if Terry had been wearing the suit in that scene, the only difference in how it played out would be that the orderlies wouldn’t be able to hold him back. Terry can take on other personae if he needs to–the pizza delivery guy he plays to get into Shreeve’s lab, for instance–but that need is dictated by external circumstances, not an internal division or a fracturing of his self.

Bruce, meanwhile, seems to have allowed one side of himself to take over completely, though this is complicated by the fact that he’s always had a “Bruce Wayne, dilettante billionaire playboy” persona that acts as a costume over the Bat when he’s not wearing the batsuit, and is distinct from the real Bruce Wayne persona, the scared child. But we can see now roughly where the shift happened. He definitely still at least partially thought of himself as more than just the Bat in the flashback portions of Mask of the Phantasm and the dream sequences of “Perchance to Dream,” but the way he closes himself off and shuts himself down emotionally by The New Batman Adventures suggests the process had at least begun by then. Regardless, it seems to be nearly complete by Batman Beyond: as a curmudgeonly, isolated old man he can shove the hurting child down so far even he can’t hear him anymore.

The reason is simple: Bruce is vulnerable and the Bat is not, and as fear is Bruce Wayne’s defining trait, he hides behind his emotionally invulnerable persona, shying away from the family ties he’d been forming over the course of Batman: The Animated Series. Powers advises Shreeve to do much the same, abandon his old life as a researcher–now the subject of a police manhunt–and embrace the power of the Shriek suit and persona. The result, however, is that Shreeve ends up getting captured anyway, and deaf to boot. He lost the very sense he was trying to elevate at the beginning, which of course is irony so classic it almost ceases to be irony and becomes cliche–but it’s also what Wayne did.

After all, behind everything else, the loss and the pain and the rage and the fear, is a little boy who loved his parents and lost them. It was always family that drove Bruce, the desire for it and the fear of losing it. That was what led him to adopt the Robins, to train Batgirl, to form the relationships he did with older authority figures like Commissioner Gordon and Leslie Thompkins. By embracing the Bat completely, for the protection of Bruce, he cut himself off from what Bruce valued most.

But with Terry he’s beginning, bit by bit, to get it back. Someone else is Batman now, and Wayne’s noncommittal grunt in response to him claiming the name is not quite a rejection of that fact. Here, at the end of his life, Bruce is slowly starting to come back to life.

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But a soul nonetheless (Heroes)

Posted on by froborr

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It’s still February 20, 1999.

“Heroes” is another of those difficult to write about episodes that will be done again–and better–elsewhere in the DCAU. In this case, we have essentially a first draft of Justice League Unlimited‘s “Ultimatum,” which has the distinctly unfair advantage of also introducing the woman who is easily JLU’s most interesting, entertaining, and complex villain, Amanda Waller.

Here, instead we get some one-off Fantastic Four knockoffs, their murderously jealous “friend,” and a one-off general with a Hitler mustache. Also Batman just straight-up murders four people onscreen, three of them named characters with lines and backstories, so that trend is continuing. Terry is not the kind of Batman whose robot duplicate would break down at the idea of killing someone.

But then, that’s part of the question this episode is exploring. Normally, this kind of episode–in which a “new hero” appears, potentially replacing the main character, occurs much later in a show’s run. The reason is fairly simple: this kind of episode presents, as a threat if not in actuality, the possibility of narrative collapse. It’s been a while since we worked with that concept, so, very briefly: most fiction is driven by some form of conflict, usually a threat to the protagonist’s well-being or obstacle to their goals. Serialized works, however, add an additional possible dimension to conflict, namely the possibility of a threat to the premise of the serial or an obstacle to its continued ability to tell stories. To put it more concretely, where more typical forms of conflict encourage the audience to ask “How can this situation be resolved,” narrative collapses provoke the question “How can there be episodes after this?” Typically speaking, that answer can be found only through some form of sacrifice.

In the case of “new hero in town” episodes like this, that threat to the continuation of the serial is the possibility that the hero the show is built around will quit or be replaced. We of course know that won’t happen, just as we know in episodes where they fight a villain that the hero will win, if not right away then eventually. The question is how it will play out, and what kind of spectacle we will witness in the process–and what they may have to sacrifice.

In this case, the possibility of Terry quitting or scaling back his superheroics is prevented by the very rapid deterioration of the Trio situation–namely, while Terry is investigating them, their government employer tries to kill them, and then they try to kill the scientist responsible for their development of powers. This is hardly the only reminder that the authorities of this world are deeply corrupt; this episode drips with corruption. Even Barbara Gordon, whom we still remember primarily as Batgirl, indicates that protecting a particular pair of hostages is a higher than normal priority because they are the family of a councilman.

All of which ties into what gets sacrificed so that Terry can continue his superheroics, because he straight-up murders them. Which, as we’ve observed, he’s killed before and will kill again, and so have other DCAU heroes–Superman in particular is quite happy to murder thinking, feeling beings as long as they’re aliens or robots. Terry, meanwhile, has killed background characters, in a “safe,” deniable way, as he does at the beginning of this episode: he guides an unnamed thief in a jetpack and (partially face-obscuring) helmet into colliding with a billboard. Up until now, he hasn’t killed characters, and there’s always been some possibility that they survived or some deniability that it’s an intentional act by Terry. But 2D Man is sucked into a ventilation fan Terry activates at a strategic moment, Freon screams horribly as the same fan dissipates her, and Magma collapses into rubble onscreen after Terry sprays him with water and then beats him. There’s no denying this.

Which makes it, ironically, a denial in itself, or at least a disavowal of how the DCAU has treated its characters killing in the past, dividing between Real Characters (who are human, and have names, faces, backstories, and lines) and Fodder (who lack these traits). It will not treat the world as cops like Commissioner Barbara Gordon do, as neatly divisible into the people to be protected and the monsters to be fought. From now on, this Batman isn’t just a killer, he’s an intentional depiction of a killer.

But what of the deepest divide between Us and Other in the DCAU, the one superheroes exist to defend, between people to be protected and criminals to be fought? Is this possibly, finally, the secret we’ve been looking for to achieving a superhero who doesn’t require any such divide?

No, as we will see, it isn’t. But maybe in seeing how Terry and Batman Beyond never achieve that, we will gather more clues as to how it can be achieved.

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Retroactive Continuity: The Ballad of Black Tom

Posted on by froborr

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Commissioned essay for Shane deNota-Hoffman

A piece of advice sometimes given to fiction writers–a good one, I think!–is that if you belong to a hegemonic identity, include characters who are marginalized along that axis, but don’t try to tell the story of being marginalized on that access. I discussed why in my discussion of Lovecraft Country: part of the experience of marginalization is being stripped of the power to tell your own story, such that it is replaced by the story told about you by the hegemonic identity. Telling marginalized people’s stories for them perpetuates that injustice whether the story so told accurately reflects the other injustices inflicted upon them or not.

And, frankly, you’re never going to tell someone else’s story entirely accurately. That’s fine when you’re telling a part of their story en route to telling your own, but to put it bluntly, if you’re not black, you can’t tell a story that is simultaneously your story and the story of being black in America. It’s one or the other. (This is why making Jordan Peele showrunner of the Lovecraft Country adaption is a seriously good move.)

That becomes very apparent very quickly in The Ballad of Black Tom, which is another attempt to do cosmic horror while grappling with Lovecraft’s racism, this time by someone who is actually subject to racism, Victor LaValle. Right from the premise, it is less abstract than Lovecraft Country, more focused on direct, individual experience: this isn’t Racism In America depicted as a cosmic horror, this is a cosmic horror story told largely from the perspective of a specific person, Tester, acting in the margins of a specific Lovecraft story, “The Horror at Red Hook.” Tester is a black man, but racism isn’t a cosmic horror to him; it isn’t an indifferent force of nature, but active malice perpetuated by individuals acting within a cultural milieu that encourages. Racism is systemic injustice, and the novel never ignores that, but the components of the system are individual white people, making an ongoing choice to accept the lies of their culture rather than the humanity of the people in front of them.

At the same time, the book evades a mistake that I (in my whiteness) did not catch in Lovecraft Country until I saw The Ballad of Black Tom choosing not to do it: it does not treat racism as an alien intrusion into an otherwise good world. The entire second half of the book is from the perspective of a virulently racist cop who had been a major antagonist in the first half. In doing so, it calls back to a concept we discussed long ago, W.E.B. duBois’ “dual consciousness”: marginalized people have to remain conscious of how they are viewed by the hegemonic culture in order to stay safe, maintaining a dual awareness both of how they understand themselves as a human being, and how the rest of the world understands them as a grotesque Other. A white man who doesn’t think of himself as racist, like Lovecraft Country‘s author Matt Ruff, will naturally shy away from thinking like a racist; for a black man, doing so is a vital survival skill, so of course it is only LaValle’s book that does.

And as I write, I’m aware of further injustice I’m perpetrating: I allowed Ruff’s book to stand on its own, but I’m discussing LaValle’s in terms of Ruff’s. So let’s let that rest here, and instead focus on why having that racist perspective is important: because it’s so distressingly normal. Malone is a Lovecraft protagonist–literally, he is the protagonist of “The Horror at Red Hook,” one of Lovecraft’s most overtly racist stories–and he fits neatly in that familiar role. He is a figure of authority–a police detective–who has dabbled a bit in the occult and is therefore somewhat secluded among figures of authority. Malone fights an evil plot by a (wealthy, highly educated, aristocratic, white) sorcerer who recruits a small army of (poor, lacking in formal education, immigrant, black and Middle Eastern) followers in pursuit of a dramatic change to the world that will give him power. He faces horrible experiences that don’t end up remaking reality, but imply that such a remaking will happen soon. (In a touch of dark comedy, the description of the now-inevitable, decades-long transformation of the world into something more habitable to the Great Old Ones sounds a lot like global warming.) And in the end, he is too traumatized physically and mentally to remain in his life, so he retreats to the country before mysteriously vanishing.

But because of the first half of the book, we understand far better than he what’s happening. Tester is everything a Lovecraft protagonist isn’t: a poor black man who works as a messenger, con artist, and occasional street musician, is aware of but tries to keep himself out of the occult, and seems to actively enjoy the variety brought to life by the multicultural community of 1920s Harlem–he is noticeably disdainful of his father’s reluctance to try unfamiliar foods, for example. He recognizes cosmic horror for what it is: “What was indifference compared to malice? ‘Indifference would be such a relief,’ Tommy said.”

This is ultimately what he decides: to embrace the “horror” of smashing the human world as he knows it, because handing the world over to the forces of cosmic indifference is preferable to the societal malice he experiences every day. That’s the key: racism isn’t indifferent or cosmic or alien; it’s an active malice, rooted deep in our culture, that manifests itself through institutional and individual action. It’s a world in which Malone can murder Tommy’s father and then tell Tommy about it bluntly, safe in the knowledge that if Tommy reacts in any way other than calm acceptance, Malone would be seen by the law and society as justified in beating, arresting, or murdering Tommy–and then, when Tommy reacts with calm acceptance, Malone can comment on it as proof that black people don’t form familial connections or feel feelings like white people do.

Why shouldn’t Tommy help destroy that world? Who wouldn’t prefer chaos to that kind of vicious order, indifference to that kind of sneering malice? He embraces becoming a monster and waking Cthulhu because he is already seen as a monster, and it’s impossible to blame him.

And that right there is the greatest challenge to the hero, the monster-slayer, the protector fantasy: the monsters are better than this. Our cages must be destroyed, our fences torn down, our walls collapsed; only in the ruins can we be free.

If we’re lucky, then we’ll be able to build. If not? It’s still better than that which the protector fantasy protects.

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But not to my friend (Superman’s Pal)

Posted on by froborr

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It’s February 20, 1999. Monica, Britney Spears, and Cher top the charts. Payback opens at number one in the box office, bumping Message in a Bottle to two; She’s All That and Office Space opens as well, at six and seven respectively. In the news, a woman will shoot and kill three men and wound a fourth at a shooting range in Finland tomorrow, apparently without motive; on the 16th there was an attempt to assassinate the president of Uzbekistan and on the 22nd a moderate Iraqi Shi’ite cleric will be assassinated.

On Superman: The Animated Series, a long-needed Jimmy Olson focus episode. Jimmy is, historically speaking, a significant character in comics. The classic comic book Superman’s Pal Jimmy Olson was a major Jack Kirby vehicle–which he took when DC hired him precisely because nobody else wanted it–and introduced the New Gods, Darkseid, and the Cadmus Project; more importantly, it put Jimmy through an absurd number of gloriously late Golden/early Silver Age transformations into everything from a werewolf to a “Turtle Boy.”

There’s really none of that in this episode. We’ve already had Jimmy as a vehicle by which to introduce Darkseid, but the closest we get to his transformations in this episode is the one from Clark Kent’s coworker to Superman’s pal. The path he gets there is, unfortunately, rather cliche and boring, a pretty standard arc in which he slightly exaggerates his importance to Superman, the media exaggerates (and outright falsifies) that importance still further, and then he finds himself being hounded by people who want Superman’s attention, until finally he ends up in the clutches of a villain.

Honestly, I’d rather have an episode about Tina trying to be Lois Lane’s intern; she’s cute, smart, and knows what she wants, none of which are particularly true of Jimmy. (Notably, her entry in the DCAU Wikia is notably longer than Jimmy; I’m clearly not the only one who finds her more interesting.) What she wants, inexplicably, is Metallo. What he wants, other than murdering Superman, is unclear: he seems to not object to kissing her, but he can’t possibly be feeling it, his lack of physical sensation being a huge part of his character. As for her, I guess she really likes metal, because half the mouth she’s kissing is exposed robot chassis.

Bruce Timm, in the commentaries to the DVD release, called this one of the worst episodes of not just STAS, but the entire DCAU. That makes me really want to find the reason it’s secretly brilliant, but there really isn’t one; it’s characters acting in ways that make no sense (Andrea is ruthless but has never come across as an outright liar before, Superman rewards Jimmy for exploiting their friendship, Tina and Metallo make out) for 20 minutes until the time runs out and Superman and Jimmy decide to just straight up murder Metallo in a hydraulic press. He survives, of course, but there really isn’t any sign here of the Superman who’s “always taking care not to break something, to break someone.” (There’s a lot of attempted murder in this episode, what with the guy who threatens to send Jimmy “to the morgue.” Between this and the outright onscreen murder in Batman Beyond a week ago, the Kids’ WB censors are clearly asleep.)

But then, largely unmotivated, senseless transformation is the order of the day for Superman’s Pal Jimmy Olsen. It’s just a lot more fun when it involves swapping brains with a gorilla or getting stretchy powers. However, there is ultimately a good outcome here. Batman has several supporting characters outside of his villains, such as Commissioner Gordon, Batgirl, the two Robins, and Alfred. Superman has… pretty much just Lois and occasionally Supergirl. His character is, paradoxically, more of a loner than Batman! He really does need a pal, to give him someone recurring to interact with, someone who can have arcs and develop as a character, which Superman pretty much hasn’t since day one. Bringing Jimmy closer into Superman’s life is a great idea in that regard, significantly expanding what the show can do with him in the future.

Too bad it only has five episodes left and he only has lines in one of them.

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That suit you wear (Meltdown)

Posted on by froborr

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It’s February 13, 1999.* Monica tops the charts with “Angel of Mine”; Britney Spears, Deborah Cox, Cher, and Brandy also chart. The top movie is Message in a Bottle, with My Favorite Martian opening at number two. In the news, on the 11th Pluto got further from the Sun than Neptune for the first time since 1979, where it will remain until 2231; the US Senate ends the impeachment of Bill Clinton with his acquittal on the 12th; on the 16th, Kurdish rebels will take over multiple embassies across the world in protest of the arrest by Turkey of their leader Abdullah Öcalan.

If it is a function of superheroes to be the near-apocalypse–that which separates non-apocalypse from apocalypse, which is to say that which prevents apocalypse–then it makes sense for a function of supervillains to be the apocalypse heroes prevent. “Meltdown” gives us two supervillains who fill that role unusually straightforwardly: the return of walking nuclear winter Mr. Freeze and the full emergence of walking irradiated wasteland Blight.

We’re back where we started, in more ways than one: Mr. Freeze’s first episode, “Heart of Ice,” was the one that put Batman: The Animated Series, and therefore the DCAU, on the map, as well BTAS’ first true sympathetic villain episode (as we’ve been using the term); and we are back in the realm of villains who signify nuclear apocalypse, meaning that despite its futuristic setting, Batman Beyond is still very rooted in the early-nineties post-Cold War averted apocalypse from which BTAS emerged most of a decade prior.

We’re back to a volume 1 theme, as well, namely that Batman is defined by hope, and specifically the hope that redemption is possible. That’s a major reason Wayne can no longer be Batman: he no longer believes it is. He has, after all, reached old age without ever finishing the job–he failed, as he inevitably would eventually, and therefore remains unredeemed and irredeemable.

Or, more accurately, he missed his chance. What, after all, actually is redemption? Let’s set some parameters: first, it is not the same thing as forgiveness. Forgiveness is something the victims of wrongdoing have the option to give; it cannot be obligatory or it becomes meaningless, which in turn means it cannot be created through the actions of the wrongdoer. Redemption, by contrast, results entirely from and through the wrongdoer’s actions. On the other hand, redemption cannot be deserved or earned: if it is created through the wrongdoer’s actions, then the moment their actions are such that they could deserve redemption, they already have it and therefore no longer need it.

Mere effort, then, is not enough. Redemption isn’t about what you do, but who is doing it: it’s making yourself into the kind of person who doesn’t do what you did. Which takes a bit of unpacking, because we’ve already been pretty clear that we don’t do totalizing morality in these parts: it’s about right and wrong actions, not good or bad people. But nonetheless, people have personalities and patterns of behavior, and some actions are so wrong that they suggest the person who did it needs not just to choose to do differently, but to work to do differently, to grow and evolve into a person different enough that they can be sure they will choose differently. That growth is redemption.

And Bruce Wayne rejected it before he started. He had the chance to grow into someone else, someone who didn’t shroud themselves in a Bat and punch Crime until it stopped. Remember, the thing he is seeking redemption for is survivor’s guilt. He was a child, and helpless; he didn’t actually do anything wrong. But he can’t admit that, so he put himself in a position where only the end of Crime would redeem him, and that was always impossible. He had the option to go a different way, to stop refusing to live and start moving on, in the flashback segments of Mask of the Phantasm, but he went the Batman route instead.

This question of redemption is core to Batman Beyond, set as it is in the post-near-apocalypse: in the aftermath of not-the-final-battle-after-all, we are all survivors and must all find a way to live with that guilt. And judging by this episode, it doesn’t look promising: Fries returns incredibly quickly to vengeance and murder–he outright kills Dr. Lake, a rare onscreen murder of a named human character in a DCAU show, and would have killed Blight more than once if his radioactive flesh hadn’t saved him–and Blight has given no sign of any desire for redemption and isn’t depicted remotely sympathetically.

Yet, as Wayne reluctantly admits at the end of the episode, Terry wasn’t wrong either. Fries really was changing, but the return of old suffering triggered–as it so often does–a return to old behaviors. Had he only survived, only been able to live free, he might have truly grown and escaped his old patterns.

And Wayne is alive. He is being forced out of his familiar patterns of solitude and isolation, and out of his older pattern of being Batman, to being someone who guides and cares for another–the role in which he always came closest to redemption, as witness the good times in his relationships with Dick Grayson, Barbara Gordon, and Tim Drake. Terry, meanwhile, is refusing to be the same kind of Batman–he’s still got his girlfriend, still has his mother and brother, still has his life. Batman is a job for him, not an expression of guilt.

Maybe there’s still a chance.

*A number of sources say February 14, but that was a Sunday, and the one contemporary TV listing I’ve been able to find has it at 9:30 am on the 13th.

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Retroactive Continuity: She-Ra and Monsters

Posted on by froborr

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Commissioned entry for Susan Smith Webb. This doesn’t fit the normal rules for Retroactive Continuity entries, but (1) I like the topic and (2) she gets special treatment for Reasons.

We’ve talked a lot about monsters and what they represent. To recap the main points briefly, monsters are primarily defined by their association with the grotesque: they are distortions of the “normal” human form or other familiar creatures and objects, most commonly either by proportional distortion (such as the small body and large head, hands, and feet of a goblin), chimerization (such as the animalistic features of a werewolf), or death and decay (either literally as in the case of a vampire or zombie, or figuratively as in the extremely aged appearance of a classic witch). The grotesque, in turn, has two major functions: first, it is the aesthetic of carnival, which is to say representative of the transgression of boundaries and therefore the violation or inversion of social norms–a chimera implies a forbidden union of different species, for example. Second, it is the visual representation of the abject, that which is neither subject nor object, the rejected elements of the self. The grotesque is a reminder that you are a body, that you are filled with blood, guts, and shit, that you will age and are mortal.

These two aspects combine to make the figure of the monster a powerful representation of the Other, members of the extended self, the community, who are rejected and expelled for violating social norms or not conforming to the idealized “normal” human body and behavior–the marginalized, in other words. This, in turn, often leads to a reclamation of monsters and the grotesque by the unjustly marginalized–indeed, this analysis of abjection and the grotesque comes entirely from feminist scholarship, especially Kristeva’s Powers of Horror.

She-Ra contains numerous characters who are arguably monstrous in the sense of deviating from the “normal” human body plan. In particular, characters are frequently chimerized: deer-people populate the village of Thaymor and the area around Bright Moon in early episodes, Mermista and her people are mer-folk, lizard-people, goat-people, and more populate the Crimson Waste, and Angella has wings, among many other examples. It is in the Horde, however, that we see the figure of the monster most used to represent the Other.

Consider Scorpia. She is unquestionably chimerized, with her scorpion claws and tail. But she is also “distorted” in the sense of being unusually tall, stocky, and immensely muscular, which deviates from the “norm” of what women are “supposed to” look like. (The supposer being, as it always is with our culture’s beauty standards, white supremacist cisheteronormative patriarchy.) Her relationship with Catra is also heavily queer-coded: while she talks about wanting a friendship with Catra, their trip to Princess Prom is in many ways framed as a date, she bonds with Sea Hawk over their mutual pining for someone who doesn’t seem to want or respect them, and she suggests essentially running away together to Catra near the end of Season 3. She is, in short, physically gender-nonconforming and sapphic.

It is no accident that her character is defined by exclusion. Her family, according to her, joined the Horde voluntarily and gave Hordak the Black Garnet runestone, because they were rejected and excluded by the other peoples of Etheria. (There is some reason to doubt this story, but it has not actually been contradicted by anything we’ve seen in the show, and that the rest of the world calls their home “the Fright Zone” suggests at least an element of truth.) She mentions being rejected and excluded by the other princesses at past Princess Proms, and most importantly, her overtures of friendship are repeatedly and consistently rejected by Catra. Scorpia is a warm, friendly person who wants badly to be loved; she is an aggressive fighter her derives satisfaction from defeating her enemies, but so is Glimmer. It’s pretty clear that her rejection by the princesses, and by extension the rejection of her people, isn’t about behavior; it’s about her monstrous appearance.

Catra is likewise defined by rejection, but in a different way. Where Scorpia’s rejection defines her circumstances, Catra’s rejection by her foster mother Shadow Weaver and best friend/primary love interest Adora has shaped her personality. Her chimerization is also more subtle: she has fur, cat eyes, ears, and tail, sharp nails, but in this art style most of her fur is indistinguishable from light brown skin, and most of the rest of her features are familiar by way of catgirls, who have been sanitized and defanged by pop culture in much the same way as fairies. And, too, cats are a familiar creature that is often found in human homes, treated as part of a human family; generally speaking, that’s not true of humans.

But underneath, Catra is far more monstrous than Scorpia. She has internalized her monstrosity, her rejection, and so unlike Scorpia she plays out that monstrous role, deliberately embracing being “the bad guy” because she feels unworthy of being good. This comes to a head in the Season 3 finale, when she first opens the portal knowing the havoc it will wreak on Etheria, and then becomes an avatar of sorts of the portal, becoming even more monstrous as she chimerizes with it.

In this choice to embrace and internalize being defined as a monster, she is a microcosm of the Horde itself. Hordak is a “defective” clone–someone who fails to meet the arbitrary standards of a “correct” body in his society–and a literal outsider, having come to Etheria from another world, and he embraces this role of invading Other, which is to say monster. In the Horde, we see lizard people, bear people, octopus people–chimeras of human with animals seen as scary or particularly alien, not the deer and bird people that seem to make the bulk of the Alliance. Entrapta, possessor of monstrous hair and mad scientist, permanent Other because of her struggles with basic socialization, ends up joining the Horde. Double Trouble, a nonbinary lizard person–like Scorpia, queer and a chimera–joins the Horde.

But again, we see fish-people and deer-people and bird-people in the Alliance. We see varied body types in the Alliance. The difference isn’t just that the “ugly” monsters are in the Horde; scary-animal-chimeras are more prominent in the Horde and friendly-animal-chimeras are more prominent in the Alliance, but we see both in both, and the diversity of real-world body types is comparable in both. The real difference is that the Horde internalizes their monstrosity. They have learned that there are acceptable things to do be and unacceptable things to be, Us and Other, but rather than try to end that extinction, they make a new Us and start Othering everyone else, rejecting all difference from their own new norm.

And in that respect, Catra is the Horde. It makes more sense than ever that she has refused to leave it, and instead sought dominance within it.

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A soulless little doll (Golem)

Posted on by froborr

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We’ve discussed golems before, but it’s been a long time, so let’s recap the basics: the golem is a figure from Ashkenazi Jewish folklore. The typical golem legend runs that a rabbi in an embattled Jewish community–most commonly Rabbi Loew of 16th-century Prague–created a golem, a giant made of clay who served the community by performing menial tasks and fighting back against pogroms. However, the people abused the golem–in the version I know best, by making it keep sweeping the streets even on the Sabbath–and it went berserk. Its creator thus had to destroy it, or in some versions render it dormant. In the latter, the golem still exists somewhere, but the secret of how to bring it to life has been forgotten.

Golems are one of the major sources of both robot and superhero lore. Multiple lines of descent can be traced, but the short version is that a lot of Golden Age science fiction and comics were written by Ashkenazi Jews, and our folklore is represented therein.

In today’s Batman Beyond, meanwhile, the titular Golem is a piece of construction equipment, stolen and controlled by picked-on nerd Willie Watts. He is not, however, a sympathetic villain. None of the main characters of the episode come off as sympathetic: Nelson bullies Willie and is aggressive and pushy with Blade, including what I believe is the first instance of a character outright sexually propositioning another in the DCAU, when he asks if she wants a ride and clarifies he’s not talking about his car. Blade is manipulative and condescending, taking advantage of Willie’s crush to make Nelson jealous. And Willie himself is vengeful toward Nelson and possessive of Blade, with some justification for the former and none at all for the latter.

In that, he rather resembles the depiction of the Mad Hatter in “Mad as a Hatter,” which was similarly structured like a sympathetic villain story, but remained unsympathetic toward and critical of its villain protagonist. His character design has some common elements, too, with an enlarged, pointed chin and nose that appear to be how the DCAU signifies “ugly male.” His ability to use his mind to control technology is even an inversion of the Mad Hatter’s use of technology to control minds.

But unsympathetic though he may be, he still has the protection of the Golem, the defender of the marginalized from abuse by the powerful. And Willie is abused. By Nelson, who insults, threatens, and hits him, but also by his father, who passes on a nugget of truth–that sometimes you have to stand your ground and assert your boundaries–but drowns it in toxic masculinity with comments like “hit him where it hurts” or calling his son a “wuss.” The thing is, abuse doesn’t make people better. It breeds fear and anger, and frightened, angry people don’t always focus on the right targets when they strike back. The abused–and the marginalized, who are the same dynamic scaled up to an entire population–can easily internalize negative attitudes about themselves that serve as justifications for their abuse, and these can in turn be made into justifications for abusing others. In Willie’s case, he internalizes the subtext of his father’s statements–the he deserved to be bullied because he’s a wuss, and can only stop being a wuss by enacting violent revenge–and then uses that to justify attacking Nelson and numerous bystanders. They don’t succeed in hitting him back where it hurts, after all, and therefore must be wusses.

This is the problem with golems; they get abused. It’s so important for marginalized communities to have boundaries and safe spaces, to find ways to protect themselves from the abuse they face in the larger society. But it is so tempting, and so easy, to progress from “we deserve safe spaces and to be protected from the harm society perpetrates against the marginalized” to “we are to be protected, they are to be policed.” Which, you may recognize, is another way of stating the in-group/out-group, Us/Other binary from which marginalization itself derives. It’s the core problem of the protector fantasy: who gets protected, and from whom?

And that goes back to how Willie sees the world. He is a picked-on, abused outcast in his own eyes, which isn’t untrue. But we also see from his interactions with Blade what he thinks he should be, what he aspires to be: able to command her attention and affection, which he sees as rightfully his and resents when she directs it elsewhere. He thinks, in other words, that he should have hegemonic power over her; he doesn’t want to end abuse but to escape it by becoming the abuser. He’s internalized his father’s “hit them where it hurts” long before we first hear it in the episode. And again, it scales up neatly: he doesn’t want to end marginalization, which necessarily means ending hegemony, but to become hegemonic himself. He wants what he sees as the rightful power of masculinity, with which to force Blade to perform according to his desires.

And this is, unfortunately, often the case in marginalized communities. We’ve talked about it before in regards to lesbian cop Maggie Sawyer. Which is where we all too often end up with golems: they go berserk and start hurting people they should be protecting. It’s easy to tell that they’re doing that when they go around hunting high-schoolers and smashing through buildings; it’s less obvious, but no less damaging, when they do it by becoming cops, Terry–both of you.

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