B:TAS reviews: The Underdwellers

(8/16/09)

Pieces like The Underdwellers almost singlehandedly awaken the cynic in me, in that they have a veneer of moral didacticism that coats little more than platitudinous pedagogy and makes quick fixes out of serious social problems. This drab piece on forced child labor is abominable in its insistence on the tragic plight of the overworked orphans at its center while still concluding on an optimism that is pure fantasy. It tunnels into the suffering of abused children, but then makes the outrageous proposal that this suffering is quickly mollified and its cause easily eradicated.

Oddly, the episode begins with a disjointed bit of safety lecturing. Two boys are playing ‘chicken’ on two Gotham subway trains, their stupidity immediately thrust upon us without care for buildup or subtlety, and Batman arrives in time to save them. The only way this self-enclosed narrative block connects to the main story is in the notion of Batman as the savior of troubled youth, though given this episode's penchant for reductivism, it would not be surprising if there is an intended association between two foolish adolescents and oppressed children.

Even stranger: before The Underdwellers becomes grueling in its tepid appeals to comedy and abhorrent conclusion, it boasts some degree of directorial expertise. The plight of the children is rendered visually in an extended sequence that seems to borrow from the opening of Lang's Metropolis, playing with distorted space, light and dark contrasts, and oppressively stylized compositions. This interlude practically collapses diegetic temporality, creating an appropriately numbing monotony and repetition that treats its subjects with a deserved tragic seriousness. Given the general talkiness of the episodes overseen by script supervisor Sean Catherine Derek, it is a wonder this virtuosic stretch of cinema made its way into the episode at all.

But all illusions of serious exploration of a societal ill, which exist only so long as lyricism trumps narrative, are shattered upon the reveal of the Sewer King. Sporting a kingly robe and flaunting a shrill cartoon voice, he seems to exist on another plane of fictional reality than that of the poor overworked children, the suffering of whom is now transmuted into fairy-tale torment from a realistic, if stylistically depicted, physical torture. The weariness on their faces, their soiled clothes, the aloof shots of toe-stubbing and hunched-over poses all fade away as the irascible Sewer King, two alligators at his beck and call, introduces the concept of 'the light,' a room of pure white fluorescent light to which the children are condemned if they displease their master. What were just moments before real human specimens now seem more akin to gremlins.

Furthermore, in positing the Sewer King as the sole overlord of this underground slave society, the writers present a tangible image of the evil that underpins such widespread abuse. His cruelty is viewed as a clear perversion of human decency, an anomaly as opposed to a real human tendency that strikes more often in social collectives and corrupt legal systems than in freakish individuals. As but one lone sociopath at the helm of this operation, there presents itself a simple solution: to defeat him. And so Batman, palpable as a vigilante who can prevent isolated street crime or dismantle small mob operations, becomes the cure for social epidemics, and it is after he defeats the children's oppressor that this diversionary sweetening of reality becomes most offensive.

The Sewer King, cornered, bears the brunt of Batman's wrath, channeled in such a way to please the fans who immediately look to 'that fateful night' as the answer to every accentuated emotion or semblance of human vulnerability that emanates from the character's usual stolidity. But the real implication is that children are pity objects, and by the end they are whisked away by loving adoptive parents who just happen to be present at their exodus from the sewers into the 'promised land' of Gotham City. If we are to place this in any kind of real-world context, we would garner that the actual problems of society are buried and remote anomalies that only reside in the garish territory of unhinged lunatics. The 'real world' is a place of perpetual brightness and sunshine, embodied by the automatic philanthropy of the children's smiling benefactors.

In refusing to embrace either reality or fantasy in full, instead conjoining select elements of both for a sociological fairy tale, The Underdwellers is the most repulsive form of didactic fiction that is of no discernible use to anyone.