TNBA reviews: Double Talk

Double Talk is the first formalist triumph of TNBA, not quite nearing the best of B:TAS’s many experiments, but surpassing the dryness of the new series’ previous efforts. It is the first episode to construct multiple psychological spaces and offer any semblance of psychological subjectivity, not essential qualities for an action cartoon but far preferable to the connect-the-dots linearity of the previous installments.

As the second spotlight for the Ventriloquist, it is difficult not to compare Double Talk to its precedent and superior, Read My Lips, an episode that excised the psychoanalytical dream sequences that Double Talk thrives on in favor of snazzy genre flourishes. Double Talk has more in common with the up-close character probing of Two-Face, and indeed, both episodes share many of the same formalist features that make each one such a compelling psychodrama—color tinted interiors that erupt from the mental anguish of their respective protagonists, opening dream sequences in which the suppressed identity terrorizes the nervous host in an abstract space, and bombastic set pieces that gradually recede into periphery as the protagonist’s psychological turmoil moves to the forefront.

In trying to emulate both Read My Lips and Two-Face, Double Talk fails to meet either one. Its stylization persists as long as the subjective set pieces do, making the more ‘objective’ or plot-oriented sequences just as stale as those in Cold Comfort or Sins of the Father. Keeping its stylistic strengths apparent for its entire duration, Read My Lips has a rhythmic edge, one that enables it to float back and forth between fairly personalized dramatizations of Wesker’s disorder and the surrounding rat-a-tat action that synchronizes to the palpitating jazz score with a dance-like finesse. As for its attempts to match the intimacy of Two-Face, it lacks the slow, methodical pace of that episode’s two-part format and the believable spatial evocations of its meticulously painted backdrops.

The most fascinating aspect of Double Talk is that it seems to split off from one of the core ideological foundations of B:TAS, that being that all villains are so possessed by their psychoses that there is no hope of reformation, a Calvinist, predeterminist underpinning that at its worst yielded moments of bitter, shoulder-shrugging defeatism. Wesker finally rids himself of Scar-Face, asserting his dominance as he riddles the dummy with machine-gun bullets. It is a moment that sadly lacks the visceral impact of Read My Lips’s similar climax, in which Boy Kirkland exercised canted perspectives and focal shifts while maintaining a hectic tempo to hammer home Wesker’s psychological devastation. In Double Talk, Geda doesn’t show any such feel for Kirkland’s psychologically acute framings, anticlimactically cutting from Wesker’s triumph to an optimistic affirmation of Wesker’s newly acquired happiness, a sudden and fleeting catharsis that clearly merited more time.

Double Talk is still a success, the first entry in the TNBA line-up that exhibits some regard for human troubles and doesn’t simply flatten its concerns into passionless artifice and that, besides Holiday Knights, achieves a visual style that has more dimension than cardboard.