B:TAS reviews: House and Garden

(11/3/09)

Most episodes of Batman evoke a 1940s atmosphere.  Gritty streets, detective stories, heavy shadows; all of this is reminiscent of the era’s succulent pulp thrillers.  House and Garden evokes the 1950s in its juxtaposition between a Norman Rockwell kind of domesticity and sci-fi horror surprises.  I have never seen Invasion of the Body Snatchers, which so many people often compare to this episode, but I have seen enough episodes of The Twilight Zone to understand the trend of making ideal middle class American life seem eerie and sinister under the surface.

But Dini’s primary objective is not to riff on old genres, but to revisit a character that has yet to be treated well by a script.  Poison Ivy has been the raving environmental terrorist whose only dignified major appearance has been in a Thelma and Louise comedy caper.  Now she is humanized, no longer a hollow shell reliant on a gimmick, but a psychologically fragile woman who cannot pursue her most deeply rooted emotional wants and needs without filtering them through her own psychosis.  The link between the jollily domestic and the covert grotesquerie lies in Poison Ivy’s twisted conjoining of basic human want and misguided obsessions.

See No Evil already presented us with an ominous Gotham suburb in its desolate neighborhood of rickety fences and condemned buildings.  It is worth noting that Gotham City in daylight rarely looks as natural as in the night.  Oftentimes the sky is oversaturated in its bright orange hues, casting uncomfortable shadows on and within buildings.  I find this true of Pamela Isely’s new house.  Its reveal is set to a jovial theme and yet it is externally drab with the sun blaring down on it.

There is a kidnapping plot mid-story that I could personally have done without.  It adds a reasonably well-staged fight scene on a smoky dock, but it slows down the propulsion of the narrative, which had already started to meander in its revelation of new information.  As soon as the ordeal on the wharf is over with, Robin immediately reveals the first handful of big shocks and suddenly the action speeds forth unhindered.  Though I am not usually so hesitant about giving spoilers in my reviews, as I assume anyone who reads one has already seen the episode in question, the third act of House and Garden simply cannot be written about casually.

I will say though, that Poison Ivy’s defense of her actions, in which she states that she meant everything she said about wanting a family, constitutes Diane Pershing’s greatest vocal performance in the show.  It’s so unplanned and forceful; I can feel her frustration in not wishing for her actions to be viewed as perverse for the sake of perversity.  She has done these things for innate human reasons, even if they have resulted in crimes against nature.  I feel that the thievery aspect might cheapen the effect, as it really is more selfish generic law breaking.  It does spark the investigation, and yet might not her genetic experiments speak for themselves?

Before descending into the realm of cold, pale inhumanity of her The New Batman Adventures redesign, Ivy had this tour-de-force of an emotional examination that forever made her one of Batman’s most sympathetic adversaries in the animated series.