Control Nathan Rabin 4.0 #117 Batman Beyond: "Meltdown" and "Heroes"

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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 and am now in the process of writing about every episode of Batman Beyond for the same insanely generous patron. 

I also ecently began an even more screamingly essential deep dive into the complete filmography of troubled video vixen Tawny Kitaen.  

I am perpetually amazed at how dramatically the same comic book characters can differ across mediums and eras. Take Bane, for example. He received the worst possible cinematic introduction as a more or less silent bit player in a Hot Topic version of a Lucha Libre get-up in the worst and most embarrassing Batman movie, Batman & Robin. 

If you knew Bane only as a goon in Joel Schumacher’s widely reviled superhero debacle you’d have absolutely no reason to think he was anything more than a dim-witted flunky, unworthy of being anything more than a brutish henchmen. 

Then Tom Hardy made Bane a bona fide superhero movie icon in Christopher Nolan’s hopelessly overstuffed and over-extended but often riveting The Dark Knight Rises, a charismatic, enigmatic figure at once brilliant and brutal. 

Batman & Robin made Bane a dumb brute and Mister Freeze a fucking joke, a shameless dispenser of unforgettably terrible cold-themed puns. 

Arnold Schwarzenegger’s lusty exercise in unhinged self-parody made the versions of Mister Freeze Eli Wallach and Otto Preminger played in the 1960s Batman (separately, as it would be very confusing if these ever so slightly dissimilar actors both played the role at the same time in the same episodes) seem as restrained and understated as actors in a Robert Bresson film by comparison. 

The toxic reception Batman & Robin received could easily have killed Mister Freeze outside the world of comics. Indeed, twenty-three years after Joel Schumacher’s audacious, candy-colored superhero romp became the laughingstock of the film and comic book world the character has still not appeared in any subsequent live-action Batman movies.

But that does not mean the cold-loving bad guy has been in the deep freeze in all mediums. Sorry. Where Batman & Robin made Mister Freeze a super-sized corn-ball dishing out puns and punishment in equal measure, Batman Beyond lends the character an almost Shakespearean depth. 

As sensitively voiced by Michael Ansara, this Mister Freeze’s defining feature might just be stoic dignity, followed closely by a deep melancholy. Needless to say, that does not describe Schwarzenegger’s take on the role. Or Eli Wallach’s. Or Otto Preminger’s. 

In “Meltdown” an aggressive new scientist for evil businessman/super-villain Derek Powers/Blight proposes building a new body for her boss but suggests they refine the process by testing it on someone else with “systemically damaged DNA.” 

That someone turns out to be Victor Fries/Mister Freezer, who has been in cold storage for a half-century until things cooled down a little. 

The super-villain with the chilly demeanor cuts a decidedly tragic figure as a disembodied head whose every molecule cries out for the sweet release of death, for the kindness and warmth of the grave. 

“I’ve been like this for nearly fifty years and I haven’t aged one day. I have become what many men have dreamed of..an immortal. And yet, there hasn’t been a day, an hour, a minute that I haven’t thought about death. It obsesses me, even now” Freeze monologues, each word vibrating with unbearable pain and unendurable loneliness.

Freeze is colder than a Harold Pinter play. When Powers tries to assure him the process of giving him a new body will be safe, he hisses “I am neither afraid nor comforted by your banal words” in an icy monotone. 

Freeze’s new body gives him a new lease on life. He vows to do better this time around, to be better, to battle and defeat his demons. He gets off to a promising start, saving a kitten from getting hit by a train and visiting his own grave to symbolize the end of his old life as a tormented super-villain and the beginning of his new life as a gentle man of peace eager to make the most of the second chance life has afforded him. 

Bruce Wayne does not trust him, of course, but then he has reason to be deeply skeptical of everyone and everything. 

Fries wants to do good. He might have succeeded if the universe had only played ball. Instead, the sinister forces behind his new body push him to the point where he has to turn back into Mr. Freeze just to survive a cold world and evil scientists with ice water in their veins. 

In the end Fries gets what he ultimately wants more than a new body or a new life: to die. He chooses to end his own miserable existence rather live in a world with nothing to offer him but pain. 

If that sounds intense and bleak, it is! “Meltdown” takes us on quite a journey in just twenty minutes as it explores the complexities of a very complicated man battling the monster inside and sometimes even winning. 

“Heroes”, the sixth episode of Batman Beyond offers a similarly nuanced exploration of the fascinating overlap between good and evil as well as the extensive commonalities between heroes and villains. 

We open with Terry McGiniss’ trainee Batman attempting to foil a robbery without much success when the Terrific Trio enter the picture and upstage the teen superhero. 

The Terrific Trio is a parody of its distinguished competition’s Fantastic Four. Slinky disappearing bombshell Freon is its answer to Invisible Woman/Sue Storm, 2-D Man is Batman Beyond’s take on Reed Richards/Mr. Fantastic while Magma combines the fiery magnetism of The Human Torch with the rock-like frame and existential angst of Thing. 

The Terrific Trio is introduced glibly dispensing one-liners while saving the day but this is Batman Beyond so there is voluminous darkness behind the comic book shenanigans. 

The accident that transforms the trio into superheroes is an exercise in Cronenbergian body horror that captures how disorienting and scary it would be to watch helplessly while your body transforms into something you do not understand. 

Magma in particular has a hard time coming to terms with the monstrous nature of a body that only vaguely resembles that of a human being. After once again saving the day, only to have a little girl recoil from him in horror, Magma smashes a police car in frustration, a gesture the show subversively depicts as casual and no big deal, the meta-human equivalent of kicking a can when you don’t get your way. 

The Terrific Trio are marketed and merchandised as wholesome, All-American heroes, the sunny flip side to the Dark Knight’s moody intensity but when they go looking for answers in the wrong places they become a target. 

It turns out that the accident that resulted in the creation of the Terrific Trio was not an accident at all. “We are what you made us” Freon seethes at the colleague turned betrayer responsible for their bleak existential plight as angry freaks pushed uncomfortably into the role of heroes. 

There’s a wonderfully meta moment here where newscasters warn that footage of the Terrific Trio’s transformation is too intense and violent for children, words that of course only encourage kids to crank up the volume.

Batman Beyond was similarly way too violent, intense and brooding for children. It’s uncompromising in its bleak depiction of a dystopian hellscape sourly overseen by a bitter, exhausted, rage-filled old man version of Bruce Wayne, one who seemingly just wants to die in peace instead of remaining attached to a world he feels nothing but contempt towards. . 

The complicated, contradictory villains dominate both of these episodes so thoroughly that they reduce Bruce Wayne and his agile young protege to supporting players.

Batman Beyond gets its title from its Batman having extraordinary powers earlier incarnations did not possess, and the role of Batman being handed off to an eager young apprentice but it could also refer to the way this fascinating cult show moved beyond the need to have Batman/Bruce Wayne at its center when that role can be filled by even more complicated, even darker supporting characters and villains who are fascinating in no small part because of their extraordinary capacity for good. 

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