B:TAS reviews: I Am the Night

(9/08/09)

I Am the Night is the fanboy's wet dream. It plumbs the depths of Batman's torturous angst, features grand soliloquizing and even transgresses the almighty edicts of Broadcast Standards and Practices. Near the end of the first act, Commissioner Gordon is found wounded in the aftermath of a sting operation gone wrong. Less striking than the hospitalization of one of the series' most beloved characters is the censorship circumvention the writers pull off. Bullet wounds are such a rarity in Batman that you can almost hear the writers in a mode of self-applause, having pulled off something so forbidden under the pretense of melancholic gravitas.

I Am the Night makes no effort to mask its aim, and that is not to present us with a substantive look at Batman's psyche; it is to achieve the status of the penultimate Batman episode, one ripe with tormented posturing and grave subject matter and phony philosophizing. This melodramatic showiness is in part a sad aftereffect of the pop psychology of the forties and fifties; Batman is such a scarred creature that he becomes a vessel for all sorts of Freudian readings and psychiatric introspection. Usually, Batman's buried anxiety is rendered with provocative subtlety, but in I Am the Night it is relentlessly talked about. Batman broods, surmises, name-drops, ponders and implores, all with a scripted, laborious self-importance that slows down narrative for the purpose of 'drama' and 'intellectualism.' Screenwriter Michael Reeves pursues an abstraction, a glossy high-art quality that seems to wow all but the most critical fans.

The episode begins with Batman seated on a throne in the dark recesses of the Bat-Cave, already despairing before the onset of any palpable conflict. With a newspaper in hand, he reads of Penguin's release from Black Gate Penitentiary, and proceeds to wonder aloud at the worth of his vigilantism. Slumped in his seat but still acting out his woes with thespian bravura, he wonders if he has really done any permanent good, a basic philosophical conundrum one would expect him to have grappled with at the onset of his crime-fighting escapade. That this inquiry is made at all is supposedly enough for the vast majority of viewers, but it proceeds illogically from the serious and thoughtful figure with whom we are presented, especially when no reasonable challenge has arrived to upset the status quo.

After wallowing in Shakespearian theatrics, Reeves goes even further to trump up the episode’s melodramatic self-importance. At yet another appointment at Crime Alley, Batman and Leslie Thompkins dole out Santayana quotes, while the writers exploit the iconography of the roses laid at the site of Thomas and Martha Wayne’s deaths. This oft-cited event, the supposed birthplace of Batman, continues to become more archetypal and less personal, so that the subtle strength behind the producers’ decision to avoid depicting that fatal night gradually diminishes in lieu of so many unnecessary references. The meeting serves some purpose as a temporal marker, denotative of Batman’s weariness after so many years as Gotham’s vigilante savior, but its mythic dimensions are amplified to symbolic abstraction. When Batman scuffles with some thugs, one of his opponents haphazardly crushes his carefully placed roses. A lengthily held shot of Batman’s anguished face telegraphs his agony, in the process exaggerating the roses from the stuff of ritual lamentation to all-meaning emblems of his parents’ memory.

After so much vague despairing over lofty ideas, borrowed philosophy quotes, and the most banal visual symbolism, all of which, in their broadness, drive the existential specifics of Batman’s lifelong quest into oblivion, a concrete motivator for Batman’s despondency finally arrives in the form of Gordon’s gunshot wound. The show-stopping image of a supine Gordon on the verge of death is too calculatedly coincidental in directing the trajectory of Batman’s angst and self-doubt that it loses all genuineness as an occasion for pathos. Gordon is reduced to a catalyst for the plot, looming over the story as an object to be manipulated depending on where the writers want to go with Batman's depression.

Batman, with Nietzschean fury, throws away his cape and cowl into the black abyss of the Bat Cave, here serving as a spatial metaphor for our hero's cavernous psyche. His decision is wholly irrational. If anything the fact that Gordon was shot in his absence is proof that he is needed to help people; Gordon would not be incapacitated if he had made it to the stakeout on time. When the logical next step is to do his job better, Batman chooses instead not to do his job at all. Irrationality is a side-effect of emotional torment, but the cogency with which Batman invokes philosophical reason seems to point toward a pretense of logic that simply does not exist. Similar lapses in thought occur when Bullock, a strident advocate of Batman's absence in police affairs, blames Batman for—what else?—being absent from the stakeout.

And then there are all the theatrical poses. Batman arrives on the roof of the warehouse just to pause as if someone was photographing him. He flails his fists in anguished turmoil, and hunches over atop his cavern throne. Even the storyboard artists exerted plenty of effort to make I Am the Night look like a masterpiece.

The pacing is abysmal. My guess is that if Batman didn’t waste so much time at Crime Alley spouting off quotations, the first act could have been condensed and we might have actually seen development. The way it is structured there is no time to get at the heart of Batman’s rage. After but one temper tantrum we are to assume that he has isolated himself for three days. All the wile the Jazzman plans the fastest breakout in criminal history, yet another invention on the part of the writers that comes off as a forced development.

Genius does not happen when a writer tries so desperately to cram as much heavy-handed dialogue and iconic imagery into a story. Michael Reeves has achieved genius on many an occasion because his other episodes are fluid and natural. I Am the Night has an elegant surface with nothing underneath.