(1/19/09)
One thing about action cartoon cliches is that they are not necessarily as demeaning as similar conventions and gross simplifications found in glossy Hollywood artworks, despite the general consensus that seems to believe otherwise. The cloying narrative ploys I am soon to critique are no more patronizing than similar banal appeals to pathos found in just about every incarnation of Oscar bait films. It is impossible to seriously fault a cartoon made under the strain of censors and format restrictions to strive for an elusive status of artistic prestige. But Nothing to Fear remains the worst kind of formulaic tripe, catering not only to easily excitable children, but to an older audience foolish enough to buy into its pretensions. The worst of Hollywood's overinflated productions are worthy filmic equivalents, with the exception that Nothing to Fear trades in production values for an even greater and more incompetent narrative grandiosity.
It has always been my belief that the least obvious references to Batman’s past are the most effective. Those that are blatant create an almost insulting abstraction out of a very real and personal happening in the life of this series' protagonist. The reference that touched me the most was a single line of dialogue uttered at the end of Harley’s Holiday, as it did not tug on the heartstrings, but rather subtly and briefly humanized Batman, who is in turn often viewed as a cold, unbending caricature of himself. This entire episode serves as one big nominal and theatrical drama about Bruce’s fear of his father’s judgment, just as pathetic as Forrest Gump but with none of the aesthetic glitz. It takes the easily marketable emotion of fear, and filters it through a Batman who's every thought is consumed with parental judgment.
Naturally Batman should be haunted by his parents. Their deaths have not only made an indelible imprint on his mind, but have also sparked his entire array of life goals and pursuits. But we must never think of these two people as Freudian curiosities who exist solely as psychological ghosts. When Thomas Wayne, backlit by blatantly metaphorical fire, says, “you failed me son,” he is reduced to a cliche, and all of his subsequent phrasings are mere platitudes. Even more grating are the lapses in logic. Bruce Wayne is a mere persona, a socialite shell that houses a heroic figure. Why would he fear his father's wrath, especially when that wrath is directed toward a false image that Batman himself is equally critical of?
Scarecrow's scheme is similarly insipid, though not nearly as pretentious. His motivation is simpleminded revenge fare, but the hope remains that a villain who has taken the name and ostensible image of fear's traditional graphic symbol will generate some eerie sense of terror, perhaps some form of visual disfigurement in the vein of an expressionistic horror film, or a general atmosphere of dread, achieved perhaps by thickly rendered portraits of psychological panic, claustrophobia, or broad social chaos. But his design is disappointingly inoffensive, and his methodology more so.
This methodology is rooted in a magical fear toxin that causes all exposed to it to undergo a hallucinatory anxiety attack that has them experience their greatest fear. This assumes that fear can be quantified, that any given person might rank his fears from least to greatest; they are fixed constants that don't seem susceptible to the changes, developments, or fluctuations that frequently ravish the human mind. Furthermore, due to the general tepidity of the narrative, all fears take the form of textbook examples of things that tend to frighten people, like spiders or skeletons. Because the common person doesn't count for much in Batman, the fears of the security guard or of the professor carry no personal weight or value. It is also humorous that the Scarecrow is implied to have a psychic knowledge of his victims' presumably personal terror experiences and that when Batman appears on the scene, the cowering variety of fear these people have thus far been subjected to suddenly becomes that of mass mob hysteria.
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