Control Nathan Rabin 4.0 #203 Batman Beyond: "Mind Games" and "Revenant"
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 also recently began a series chronicling the films of bad boy auteur Oliver Stone.
The more I see of Batman Beyond, the more impressed I am with it and the ways in which it deviates boldly and unapologetically from formula in pursuit of an audacious and original new vision for what a superhero cartoon can look and feel like.
Batman Beyond eschews the Noir present for a dazzlingly realized future that owes more to Blade Runner than Tim Burton’s gloomy, art deco take on Batman. It brings back Bruce Wayne but as an old man at the end of a sad, eventful and heroic life and mentor rather than as Batman.
The animated cult classic offers a high school-centric take on Bob Kane and Bill Finger’s icon crime-fighter courtesy of a teenage trainee Batman named Terry McGiniss who has moves as well as attitude.
It’s been two decades since Batman Beyond went off the air after a mere fifty-two episodes but in many ways superhero cartoons and superhero entertainment still hasn’t caught up with it and its innovations.
Batman Beyond combines Terry’s teen angst with his mentor’s existential brooding for a crime-fighting duo defined as much by deep psychological trauma and daddy issues as their cool gadgets and crime-fighting vehicles.
In "Mind Games” Terry is visited by the spooky, spectral image of a little girl with an unmistakable young Christina Ricci/Winona Ryder Goth vibe named Tamara who implores him to save her from a sinister telepathic cult known as “The Brain Trust” that kidnaps children with special powers.
The spooky little girl’s words lead Terry to confront the man posing as her father, a hulking blonde brute built like refrigerator who can laugh off a seemingly fatal fall from a large building as easily as he can one of Terry’s punches.
Then again, seemingly all the male teenagers and adults in Batman Beyond are built like college wrestlers with the exception of characters who are supposed to be strikingly thin or dramatically overweight.
That describes another member of the Brain Trust who looks like a gelatinous, snow-white cross between Danny DeVito’s Penguin in Batman Returns and Marlon Brando in The Island of Dr. Moreau.
The blob-like fellow doesn’t look capable of walking short distances without wheezing or needing to rest but through the magic of telekinesis he’s able to beat the holy living shit out of Terry using only his mind while levitating serenely in a Buddha pose.
It’s an audacious fight scene in that one party isn’t moving and the other is responding to a furious onslaught with no apparent source. The Brain Trust are a secret society devoted to pushing forward human evolution, by force if necessary, by training unusual brains to go further than human minds are supposed to go.
Tamara is a memorably creepy little girl, a lost soul ripped away from her working class parents because she is different and in Batman Beyond being different separates you from your family and friends but also society as a whole. It’s a curse as well as a blessing, one that some aren’t able to survive.
Terry brings the pain to the mind freaks of the Brain Trust before Tamara lends a crucial assist in the form of lasers straight from her eyes. As a sinister child with frightening powers, Tamara has a tough road ahead of her, but being able to shoot lasers from her eyes should help get her through the hard times.
The next episode, “Revenant”, also revolves around a sad, lonely kid with terrifying telepathic powers. Only this time the misfit in question is an old foe in Willie Watt. The last time we saw Wille he was the proverbial 98 pound weakling getting kicked around by his abusive dad, bully Nelson and life in general.
Such is the sorry lot of the high school nerd. Then the angry young man hooked up with a powerful construction robot known as GoLeM and used it to act out his free-floating rage against a world that seemingly has nothing to offer but pain, loneliness and rejection.
Willie’s crimes of the mind land him in juvenile hall, where he uses his infinite alone time to make a remarkable physical transformation from skinny Poindexter to muscular bully.
The angry young man hasn’t just been working on his body; he’s been working on his mental powers as well. He’s been using his ability to control things with his mind to wreak havoc at the high school where he used to matriculate with Terry.
The denizens of Hamilton Hill High don’t realize that Willie is behind the mysterious goings-on. Instead a quartet of lovestruck popular girls think that the mischief is the work of a hunky high school student who excelled at sports and electric guitar before dying young and beautiful.
These love-struck teens want to go on a kissing date with the dead jock so they hold seances to try to resurrect his spirit, only to be faced with the unwanted advances of creepy Willie Watt.
In a neat detail, the students of Hamilton Hill High create a cult around the dead boy, with boys dressing up like him and girls lusting after his ghost. Willie can’t compete with the living or the dead.
Deep into “Revenant” the subject of ghosts is being discussed around the McGinniss dinner table and Terry’s big-eyed little brother, who I am on record as finding more than a little annoying, asks why the family can’t be visited by the ghost of their dead patriarch.
It’s a bracingly emotional, quietly revelatory scene where Terry’s mom patiently, lovingly explains that the father is dead and ghosts aren’t real, so he’s consequently not coming back, in any form beyond bittersweet memories.
When Terry’s precocious little brother says he’s starting to forget about his father, that his memory is fading a little more each day it’s a shockingly powerful and poignant confession.
In between all the angst and telekinesis there are some great character moments, like Bruce Wayne reflecting that he’s seen plenty of supernatural stuff in his eventful lifetime but that what was happening at Hamilton Hill was “so high school.”
As the elderly Bruce Wayne, Kevin Conroy fits vast universes of contempt and condescension into the words “high school.”
In real life and in Batman Beyond, hell is other people and also high school but unlike real life, the futuristic cult classic is fun rather than traumatic to revisit and think about.
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