Bizarro appears to be the ambassador of mental disability in the DC Animated Universe, a drawling, well-meaning half-wit who inadvertently causes harm to a great many people. In Bizarro’s World, he almost obliterates Metropolis with the fuzzy aim of retelling the story of Krypton’s destruction on Earth; conceivably the same decimation made possible by a duplicitous supercomputer is now enacted through the bumbling confusion of a freak scientific accident with a brain disorder. The most ethically conflicting question raised in conjunction with Bizarro’s handicap is whether Superman is conveniently refusing to help him assimilate by placing him within a figurative playpen, patronizingly relocating him under the guise of granting him a reward.
Of course these musings are an over-ambitious exercise short-circuited by the obvious position taken by the episode and its screenwriter Robert Goodman, that Bizarro is a suitable target for our derision and that Superman is never ambiguous in his upstanding actions. Goodman is a master at fun, naïve celebrations of undiluted heroism, but his screenplay for Bizarro’s World has a slightly mean-spirited edge in the way Bizarro is treated as a fragile distraction that must be disquieted by white lies and patronization, but only after Superman himself attempts incapacitation by way of Kryptonite. If Identity Crisis was a celebration of stupidity as heroism incarnate, then Bizarro’s World treats it with an air of condescension.
The instance that comes closest to doubling as evidence for a rereading of Superman’s supposedly spotless ethics is when Bizarro finds the last survivors of the Preserver’s ship caged behind glass walls in the Fortress of Solitude. Superman’s taming and encaging potentially harmful organisms seems thematically tied to the way he comes to treat Bizarro and remove him from human civilization, and Bizarro’s instinct to free the creatures seems hardly disagreeable. Indeed, his gut morals may come across as more reasonable than Superman’s top-down compartmentalization and classification of the various species. Goodman never comes close to any explicit suggestion that Superman is in any way acting contrary to virtue, but I believe it is possible to find fault in his methods, a position supported by the morally gray prism of Justice League Unlimited. When viewed under that prism, Superman’s ideological faults extend back to S:TAS, whether Superman or the audience was aware or not.
An aspect I find more worth reading into than a deep-rooted ambivalence towards Superman’s moral actions is Lois’s maternal relationship with Bizarro, who in his infantilism seeks out a look-alike for Jor-El but not for Laura, settling on Lois instead. Bizarro’s fascination with Lois is preconfigured not by the information of the Brainiac orb, but by his previous conditioning as a clone of Superman. Even though Bizarro now knows himself to not be Superman, he still harbors an odd, Oedipal affection for her. Naturally his drive-in movie antics in the abandoned cultural center stem from Superman’s own attraction toward Lois, but with Bizarro’s mental defects, his idealization and compulsory protectiveness of her couple with her self-aware placation yield several possible psychological implications from which Lois could perceptibly draw intriguing inferences about the original model.
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