(10/05/09)
I made two discoveries during my fourth or so viewing of His Silicon Soul today, discoveries I should have made during my revisit of Heart of Steel. The robot duplicates are actually referred to as ‘duplicants,’ a clear reference to the replicants of Blade Runner lore. My second finding was that the actor who voiced Karl Rossum, William Sanderson, also played Dr. J. F. Sebastian in Blade Runner. And what is this episode about? It is about humanity. What makes someone human or not human? Blade Runner tackles that same question.
Blade Runner has never been all that for me. I think its visual fusion of sci-fi and film noir is phenomenal. Cluttered neon signs light dark alleyways and city streets, with incessant rain completing the atmosphere. But then there is the human story that frankly does not interest me. It is artfully told, but I feel the idea of human duplicates coming to possess human traits could not sustain two hours of such superb atmospheric construction. I don’t feel that there is much insight to be gained from the film, regardless of its influence.
Heart of Steel has no pretenses about its human story. There are no extraneous story elements. It is directly about whether a Batman duplicate made by HARDAC has come to possess some degree of morality. This is no more ‘deep’ than Blade Runner, but it is more suitable for Batman’s twenty-two minute runtime. And while I always find that essential leap of logic we have to accept in such stories, that specifically designed machines somehow come to acquire emotions, somewhat vague, unexplained, and more or less contrived, I feel that Heart of Steel succeeds. This particular Batman duplicate was designed to act like Batman, to blend in with his surroundings and to presumably abduct further subjects for the replacement process. If his mechanical function was to act the role of a human person, perhaps he can acquire a ‘soul,’ something Blade Runner, oddly enough, never alluded to.
I also find a surprising degree of thematic elements I could not pinpoint the first few times around. Karl Rossum casually states that he grows life instead of builds it. He tends a greenhouse garden. Is this not highly suggestive or the organic, life at its most natural? Where more haunting for the duplicate Batman to confront his artificiality than in a place where life is sprouting all around him? And if the episode argues that there is such thing as a fusion between the human soul and a mechanical body, then perhaps the fact that Rossum harvests his garden with robotic machines means something as well.
There is too much over-dramatic theatrical dialogue and posing in the third act, and yet I can easily overlook it because it’s a perfectly staged confrontation. Two Batmen fighting it out in the recesses of the Bat Cave? It almost seems like Batman wrestling with himself, the Bat Cave representing the depths of his being. Maybe I’m stretching a little, but the producers clearly felt that this larger-than-life battle was intriguing enough to stage it again for A Better World in Justice League.
Though Batman poses the philosophical notion we have been thinking all along, how can that final image of the duplicate’s lifeless, tattered body not evoke some feeling of disturbance?
The episode begins with a few thugs who raid some storage building to find some locked away HARDAC equipment. Upon opening the crate, a robotic Batman comes to life, and we learn that the machine had built another duplicate at the last minute that had survived the building’s collapse. Believing himself to be the true Batman, he quickly apprehends the thugs and goes to Wayne Manor, which in its artificial mind it believes is its home. Alfred is shocked to find Batman’s torso ripped apart with wires and circuitry flailing about. It is when Alfred defends himself from what he obviously believes to be some sort of monster that I always end up feeling a slight sympathy for the robot Batman. We can tell at this point that he believes himself to be the real thing, and I always end up feeling sad for him when Alfred reacts so hostile. It’s a testament to the power of the episode that the robot’s journey he ends up taking makes me feel even worse for it.
While the real Batman is finding out what exactly has happened at the warehouse, our duplicate protagonist has been doing research on the Bat Computer, which naturally leads him to Karl Rossum, the creator of HARDAC. This is one of my favorite scenes in the episode. The setting of the greenhouse is excellent. Simultaneously, it shows the peaceful life to which Rossum has secluded himself and also an appropriately isolated and dreary location for this robotic Batman to reflect on the fact that he’s not human. Rossum gives one of the best-written pieces of dialogue in the series, as he demonstrates for the duplicate the difference between implanted objectified memories and true sensual experience. And the fact that I’m such a huge fan of Rossum’s voice makes me love this scene even more. Right when we begin feeling more sympathy for the creature, the real Batman shows up and a fight breaks out that ultimately demolishes Rossum’s greenhouse. And in a moment of surprising moral fortitude, the duplicate Batman ends up saving Rossum’s life.
Obviously, at this point in the episode, there are hints that this robot has truly taken on Batman’s sense of morality. But since every good story needs a proper conflict, our protagonist doesn’t maintain his sense of morality for long as he returns to the place where he first emerge to find that he was missing some of his original program that HARDAC had manufactured for him. The lovable misunderstood duplicate Batman we knew has now become HARDAC’s last chance to destroy humanity. He heads to the Bat Cave, where he begins to enact his creator’s final plan by means of the Bat Computer. Naturally, the real Batman shows up to stop him and what proceeds is a marvelous showdown between the two that takes them all over the Bat Cave, even into places we’ve never seen before.
When it seems that the real Batman has been killed, his robotic doppelganger feels terrible and stricken with immeasurable guilt that he has taken a life. In a fit of despair, he shuts down the sequence building to the reactivation of HARDAC and in the process destroys himself. He showed signs of morality before, but now, even as he has been infused with his original program meant for the destruction of humanity, he shows more humanity than he had before. As the real Batman looks at his mangled lifeless robotic body, he raises the notion that perhaps it had a soul. Now this whole ordeal might have seemed clichéd had it been tackled like your typical science fiction drama, but it feels believable here. If HARDAC truly intended for his duplicates to mirror the traits of their targets, then is it possible that this artificial intelligence could have adopted Batman’s innate sense of right and wrong? It’s an interesting and almost philosophical idea and it is what makes this episode truly great.
I have struggled over time whether this belongs with ‘Heart of Ice’ and ‘Beware the Gray Ghost’ in the league of truly excellent episodes of ‘Batman: the Animated Series’. I have finally decided, after much thought, that ‘His Silicon Soul’, with its insight and look at the potential consequences of a mechanized Batman, is truly one of the greats of the series.
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