B:TAS reviews: Catwalk

(11/16/09)

Selina Kyle has always been a troubling character due to her close relations with former story editor Sean Catherine Derek’s social agenda.  Never mind the unintentionally parodic feminism, her role as a shrill mouthpiece for animal rights is cloying enough in its political commentary.  Paul Dini does not take a revisionist approach in his explorative piece, Catwalk, but he does take these familiar traits and transforms them from soapbox ploys to representations of Catwoman’s existential crisis.  Her stance on animal rights is now an extension of how she feels about herself; her captivity as it emerges from social conformity mirrors the captivity of her animal brethren.

Her femininity is exploited to greater effect as well.  This is not the insulting female empowerment message of The Cat and the Claw, which did a terrible disservice to that very idea by raising the women to predetermined masculine standards of power and by hammering home that message with a patronizing repetition.  In Catwalk, Dini shoots for an almost transcendent dance between Catwoman’s feminine allure and Batman’s masculine hardness in a luminous dream sequence.  She performs her part with energy and grace; he stands motionless but intimidating and controlling.  The relationship between Batman and Catwoman is so defined according to sexual friction between the two, that both in terms of romance and in terms of their adversarial dynamic, that such opposition becomes a gender battle of sorts; one can read a few things into Batman’s position of control and Catwoman’s social captivity at his hands.

Every episode about the couple needs a third party to generate conflict and stir up trouble.  Dini chooses Scarface, a character whose villainy stems more from psychosis than from the oblique tyranny of Roland Daggett or the archetypal mad scientist traits of Tyger, Tyger’s Emile Dorian.  Perhaps his obvious grotesquerie is meant to foil Catwoman’s moral and psychological grayness.  Though not associated with the inmates of Arkham, she remains plagued by disorder, that of kleptomania, a far less extravagant form of mental instability than dissociative identity disorder.  Because she only skirts the line of moral and existential chaos, she remains the adversary with the greatest chance of being converted to a healthy existence.  But in that Batman is himself far from normal in his quixotic crime fighting quests, it is quite possible that Catwoman’s attraction to this inherently romantic figure is every bit as responsible for her perpetual thievery as her identification with liberated wildlife.

When superhero cartoons, which already have so much to do with the concepts of identity and role-playing, churn out character-charged installments like Catwalk, the potential for critical character evaluation becomes significantly great.  So it is easy to sidestep the frenetic rhythm and springboard plotting that makes this particular episode such a great outing.  The story constantly doubles back on itself and all physical encounters between Batman and Catwoman are infused with an agile gracefulness.  Animation direction matches the real-time story progression for speed and flashbulb brevity.

Over the span of the narrative, each of the three major players opens his or herself up for betrayal, Scarface intentionally for making the first move, Catwoman for risking a shady partnership for her freedom, and Batman for ever holding onto the belief that Catwoman can change, even though the cards that comprise the ideological framework of Batman: the Animated Series always seem stacked against him.