B:TAS reviews: Dreams in Darkness

(7/24/09)

With a cartoon show as blatantly psychological as Batman: the Animated Series, there must exist the temptation for the producers to craft superficially psychoanalytical stories that mean little to the observant viewer. Dreams in Darkness is like that. There are hallucinations and first-person monologues of the sort that can be seen everywhere in the modern Hollywood psychological thriller. Yet despite the shallowness of the ostensibly meaningful visions Batman undergoes and the occasional logical flaw, it remains a work of visual ambition that draws its strength from the nonexistence of an orthodox way to do strange dream sequences.

The first act is told in a cliché-ridden 1940s monologue clearly for the purpose of kicking things off with the endlessly intriguing image of Batman locked up in Arkham Asylum, which is where he remains come the lowering of the proverbial curtains at the end of the first act. It is at once effective and a tremendous error, inserting the most insurmountable of cliffhangers into the first half. There is a lack of direction as Batman suddenly has time to blow in Arkham before the final showdown. Even as the writers flounder at trying to offer some character insight, there emerges an improvisational non-sequitur approach to the whole thing that either causes the storyboard artists to do as they please or sends the story into the realm of hideous exposition and verbal exchanges.

The exchanges yield a Batman so grossly out of character that he succumbs against all odds to the cliché of the wrongfully diagnosed man attempting to convince the stubborn doctor of his sanity. No one who watches this show really dreads Scarecrow’s sinister plot, so Batman’s confinement instills impatience rather than Rear Window style suspense.

The rest, however, is pure fun in the vein of New Hollywood drug films. Studio Junio, which the show’s producers have deemed a very Japanese studio, handles the animation and injects a bubbly free-flowing movement into the scattered dream sequences. One of the visions has Batman witnessing his villains melting, expanding, and exploding into one another. It means nothing in the context of Batman’s current predicament, but it is the tendency of pop psycho thrillers to veer away from cohesion into strange surrealism, and the apparent symbolism is too obnoxious to take seriously. The other vision of note has Thomas and Martha Wayne walk down a slanted Gotham alleyway with all the dark otherworldliness of a Murnau film. Batman follows but doesn’t go anywhere, as they enter a tunnel that becomes the barrel of a gun.

The climax is expectedly underwhelming and returns the Dali-esque middle portion to coloring book scope. Batman fights the Scarecrow, whose bland fear obsession drives him to poison the Gotham reservoir with his toxin, only to find himself terrified by snakes and green men. It is here especially that I miss the grisly terrors of Fear of Victory, all of which are far more competent and meaningful than any of the shallow, though admittedly enjoyable, hallucinatory distractions of Dreams in Darkness.