Control Nathan Rabin 4.0 #143 Batman Beyond: "Disappearing Inque" and "Curare"

Welcome, friends, to the latest entry in Control Nathan Rabin 4.0. It’s the career and site-sustaining column that gives YOU, the kindly, Christ-like, unbelievably sexy Nathan Rabin’s Happy Place patron, an opportunity to choose a movie that I must watch, and then write about, in exchange for a one-time, one hundred dollar pledge to the site’s Patreon account. The price goes down to seventy-five dollars for all subsequent choices.

Or you can be like three kind patrons and use this column to commission a series of pieces about a filmmaker or actor. I’m deep into a project on the films of the late, great, fervently mourned David Bowie and I have now watched and written about every movie Sam Peckinpah made over the course of his tumultuous, wildly melodramatic psychodrama of a life and career. 

This generous patron is now paying for me to watch and write about the cult animated show Batman Beyond and I also recently began even more screamingly essential deep dives into the complete filmographies of troubled video vixen Tawny Kitaen and troubled former Noxzema pitch-woman Rebecca Gayheart.

I’ve been writing almost nothing but Control Nathan Rabin 4.0 pieces for the main feature of this site for the past two months. It looks like they’ll continue to be the focus for at least the next month or two because I need to get through my backlog of former choices and I still have a few to get to but also because I desperately need for people to read this column and be inspired to request Control Nathan Rabin 4.0 movies of their own. 

As of this morning, this site’s monthly Patreon haul is pretty much the lowest it has been for the past few years. I rely upon the Patreon income for this site to support me and my family. I need at least about three thousand dollars just to stay broke and struggling but I have fallen below twenty five hundred dollars a month for the first time in a while. 

I tell myself that this rather pronounced decline in patrons and income is attributable to the Great Recession and the pandemic and that lots of folks are struggling and having a hard time getting by month to month. I take some comfort in knowing that I am not alone and that this awful plague has affected us all, but it still feels awful to see the income from the labor of love that consumes so much of my time and energy and passion hit new lows during a time of great uncertainty and despair. 

That’s why I want to continue to remind readers and potential patrons of this column’s existence and its importance to the site’s survival. I also want to remind people who might understandably be sheepish or skeptical about Patreon that you can also choose a movie for this column outside of Patreon by Paypalling me seventy-five to one hundred dollars at nathanrabin@sbcglobal.net and that way you do not need to worry about joining Patreon or editing a pledge or eliminating it altogether or any of that potentially confusing nonsense and get the same reward, now faster and more efficiently than ever before. 

So you can only imagine how much I appreciate ongoing Control Nathan Rabin 4.0 projects like my epic exploration of the entirety of Batman Beyond. I went into the deep dive completely blind. All I knew about Batman Beyond was that it was a continuation of Batman: The Animated Series that took place in the future. 

I did not realize just how lonely and sad that dystopian future would prove but Batman Beyond does justice to its source material so perhaps I should not be surprised that it is achingly, agonizingly melancholy and grim in its world-building, one of the most gorgeously and fully realized visions of Bruce Wayne’s howling depression and Batman in all of pop culture. 

"Disappearing Inque” is all about loneliness and longing, but the broken-hearted man feeling all the feels is not elderly Bruce Wayne but rather Aaron Herbst, a resentful, pushed-around grunt  who works for a cryogenics company where he develops an unhealthy attraction to Inque, a sexy, shape-shifting inkblot of a femme fatale who is kept in a state of frozen animation after tussling with Bruce Wayne and Terry McGinnis in a previous episode. 

Batman Beyond is a children’s animated cartoon so it merely hints rather than explicitly demarcates that Aaron Herbst desperately wants to fuck this cryogenically frozen super-villain. Aaron lusts for this inhuman monster who cannot talk or express feelings or opinions, who is stuck forever in a state of total helplessness. 

We see this sad, pathetic, lost soul “kiss” Inque through the glass. It seems safe to assume that when no one else is around he whips out his dick and goes to town. For Aaron has decided that Inque is his girlfriend, so he talks to her and confides in her and lives for the day when she might become a real force for evil in the universe, and not just his make-pretend girlfriend. 

Aaron isn’t just unusually nuanced and emotionally complex for a secondary villain in a cartoon: he’s a figure out of early Todd Solondz. He belongs in a Neil LaBute play as much as he does something with its own line of Happy Meal toys. That’s what makes him such a fascinating and weirdly unforgettable bad guy, at once tragic and darkly comic. 

When Aaron gets fired from his job for sexually harassing the cryogenically frozen and being an all-around creep he enacts revenge by liberating Inque from her frozen prison. Inque treats Aaron the way everyone else does: with sneering, unbridled contempt. 

Aaron may have saved Inque from an eternity in the deep freeze, but she nevertheless does nothing to hide her visceral revulsion towards a sad little man who is hopelessly in love with her, to the point that he wants to become whatever she is. 

Inque uses Aaron to get the chemicals she needs to re-gain her human form and to help her get revenge on both trainee Batman, who we learn here has been on the job for six months, so hopefully his probationary period is over, and “the old one”, AKA Bruce Wayne, AKA AARP Batman. 

Speaking of AARP Batman, rumors are swirling online about Michael Keaton returning to the role of Batman/Bruce Wayne in an upcoming Flash multiverse project but also a live-action adaptation of Batman Beyond and while the dystopian cult cartoon’s version of Bruce Wayne looks like Boris Karloff crossed with Clint Eastwood, Keaton undoubtedly has the gloomy, haunted gravitas to pull off the role. 

Inque’s VERY dangerous curves make her nearly as sexy and slinky as Michelle Pfeiffer’s Catwoman. She’s a great super-villain, all heartless calculation, and Aaron makes for a great victim  of her casual and complete cruelty. 

The poor boy never stood a chance. He tells Inque that he wants her powers but instead he becomes a gloppy pile of goo, barely recognizable as human but clearly in a universe of pain he can never express, because he has no mouth and yet he must scream. 

In a gloriously warped final scene, Aaron is being kept just barely alive in a lab by a lonely technician who treats him the way he treated Inque: as a silent companion and steadfast friend she can pour all of her thoughts and secrets and dreams and fantasies into. 

What I’m trying to say, dear reader, is that for a children’s superhero cartoon, Batman Beyond is actually pretty fucked up. 

It actually made me think that maybe, just maybe, superheroes aren’t just for kids anymore.

In Batman Beyond’s next episode, “Curare”, the twelfth episode of the season, Bruce Wayne and his teenaged protege face off against another deadly female villain—the titular Curare, a card-carrying, dues-paying member of the Society of Assassins who is tasked with killing Barbara Gordon’s D.A husband, Sam Young. 

Unfortunately if you fail to effectively carry out a hit, Society of Assassins rules dictate that the other members of the Society of Assassins have to assassinate you as punishment. Also, if you fall behind on your dues the punishment is death. The Society of Assassins does not play around. 

Curare looks cool and moves with superhuman agility even if her vibe is unmistakably “sexy mummy ninja.” “Curare” reminded a lot of the first Kill Bill in that it’s a stylish, dialogue-light series of clashes between a badass female assassin and the people who get in the way of her objectives. 

The drama and emotion here come from Barbara Gordon strolling into the Bat-Cave and blowing Terry’s mind with the news that she used to be Bat-Girl, Bruce’s partner in the sheets and the streets. 

That’s right: according to Batman Beyond, Bruce Wayne and Barbara Gordon used to visit a magical place known as the Bone Zone, AKA Pound Town. But then Barbara would be all, “Hey, let’s go to a dinner party at my friend’s house this Saturday” and Bruce would be all, “No, I need to fight the Joker” and then she’d reply, “You ALWAYS need to fight the Joker” and he’d explain, “Yeah, well I AM Batman. It’s kind of my deal.” 

Stockard Channing is great as Barbara Gordon. She brings so much weight and personality to the role. She is every bit Bruce’s equal, if not his superior, in that she’s able to have a life and maintain relationships and isn’t a weird ghost of a man forever battling his demons. 

We’ve only got one more episode left in Batman Beyond’s first season but thankfully there are thirty-nine episodes in the second and third season. So just like Frank Stallone’s one hit, we are far from over when it comes to our epic exploration of a unique and endlessly fascinating little corner of the Batman universe. 

Help ensure a future for the Happy Place during an uncertain era AND get sweet merch by pledging to the site’s Patreon account at https://www.patreon.com/nathanrabinshappyplace

Also, BUY the RIDICULOUSLY SELF-INDULGENT, ILL-ADVISED VANITY EDITION of  THE WEIRD ACCORDION TO AL, the Happy Place’s first book. This 500 page extended edition features an introduction from Al himself (who I co-wrote 2012’s Weird Al: The Book with), who also copy-edited and fact-checked, as well as over 80 illustrations from Felipe Sobreiro on entries covering every facet of Al’s career, including his complete discography, The Compleat Al, UHF, the 2018 tour that gives the book its subtitle and EVERY episode of The Weird Al Show and Al’s season as the band-leader on Comedy Bang! Bang! 

Only 23 dollars signed, tax and shipping included, at the https://www.nathanrabin.com/shop or for more, unsigned, from Amazon here