Control Nathan Rabin #105: Batman Beyond "Rebirth"
#NotSoDarkandGritty
Welcome, friends, to the latest entry in Control Nathan Rabin 4.0. It’s the career and site-sustaining column that gives YOU, the kindly, Christ-like, unbelievably sexy Nathan Rabin’s Happy Place patron, an opportunity to choose a movie that I must watch, and then write about, in exchange for a one-time, one hundred dollar pledge to the site’s Patreon account. The price goes down to seventy-five dollars for all subsequent choices.
Or you can be like three kind patrons and use this column to commission a series of pieces about a filmmaker or actor or early aughts animated television program. I’m deep into a project on the films of the late, great, fervently mourned David Bowie and I have now watched and written about every movie Sam Peckinpah made over the course of his tumultuous, wildly melodramatic psychodrama of a life and career.
I also recently began an even more screamingly essential deep dive into the complete filmography of troubled video vixen Tawny Kitaen.
With this piece we begin the next big Control Nathan Rabin 4.0 journey: an exploration of the acclaimed animated series Beyond Batman for the gent who commissioned the Peckinpah project.
I have never covered a television series for this column before but I very much appreciate the steady income the Peckinpah series provided and I want to make it as easy and appealing as possible for y’all to give me the money I need to keep this site going and feed the family.
Looking good!
Besides, I like challenges and I was intrigued by what little I had seen of Batman Beyond when I watched some when my son was going through a big Batman phase a few years back. It did not take me long, however, to figure out that Batman Beyond is way too dark and way too weird to be appropriate viewing for a nightmare-prone four year old boy.
Batman Beyond is, in fact, dark and gritty. Even Batman’s dog is a fucking asshole in this incarnation and while I’ve learned through experience to be inherently skeptical of dark and gritty re-imaginings of pop culture icons, particularly where superheroes and comic books are concerned, Batman Beyond, which ran from 1999 to 2001, was dark and gritty before dark and gritty became one of the most hackneyed, overwrought cliches in pop culture.
Furthermore, Batman Beyond is not dark and gritty for the sake of being dark and gritty. The darkness and the grit serve a thematic purpose. The creators had a vision for Batman that they’d realized over a series of critically acclaimed series, beginning with the legendary Batman: The Animated Series, which gave birth to previous Control Nathan Rabin 4.0 entry Batman: Mask of the Phantasm and then The New Batman Adventures.
With realistic old man action!
Batman Beyond opens in 2019 with Bruce Wayne rescuing a kidnapped debutante in a sleek, futuristic new costume that gives him the power of flight. The design of the Batman costume gives him the appearance of a permanent scowl and perpetual angry glare. The costume makes its wearer look not angry but filled with rage, which is appropriate, since this long in the tooth Bruce Wayne is an ornery bastard, a mean old man on the verge of giving up.
Rescuing a hostage is the kind of routine job Batman has pulled off thousands of times in myriad mediums but things play out very differently this time around. Bruce doesn’t just endure a blow or two from anonymous henchmen: he gets walloped with a giant wrench and then gets his old ass kicked in a decidedly non-Batman-like fashion.
The beating Batman endures is fucking brutal. He’s so overwhelmed and so defeated that he scares away his attacker by doing the unthinkable: pointing a gun at him, in violation of his moral code.
In this moment he’s not Bruce Wayne or Batman: he’s just a scared old man hiding behind a trigger. He takes off his mask to reveal a handsome grey-haired old man, a cross between Clint Eastwood and George Clooney.
He throws down the gun in shame and retreats to the Batcave, which he has transformed into a sort of secret Batman museum filled with trophies from past cases and his suits and the suits of friends and sidekicks. Like seemingly all of the buildings in Batman Beyond, it is vast and empty in a way that can’t help but underline the loneliness of both Bruce Wayne’s melancholy existence and a futuristic Gotham whose design is influenced both by art deco and the floating, technology-crazy Japanese-American future world of Blade Runner.
Putting his costume away for what he intends to be the final time, Bruce broodingly promises, “never again” before shutting off the lights and closing the door of the Batcave. His old life is over. He is now a superhero in retirement.
We then fast-forward twenty years, to the extremely futuristic year of 2039, where Gotham City is being terrorized by sinister corporate raider and Bruce Wayne rival/nemesis Derek Powers, whose company has merged with Wayne industries to form the unholy abomination Wayne-Powers after years of aggressive takeover attempts and Jokerz, a violent street gang that dresses like wicked clowns and look up to The Joker as an inspiration as to what kind of destruction one man can wreak when he has enough hatred in his soul. It’s a little like the Joker’s cult of personality in 2019’s Joker only not insultingly cheesy and terrible.
With the very old Bruce Wayne out of action for a period of decades, it has fallen upon everyday heroes like angry teenager Terry McGinnis to protect the people of Gotham from the likes of the Jokerz.
Terry’s life changes forever when he crashes on Bruce Wayne’s estate while fleeing the Jokerz and the ancient retired crime fighter emerges out of the shadows and engages in a little inter-generational violence, taking care of the gang using little more than a cane of fury.
What Wayne lacks in youth and vigor he makes up for in guile and instincts. There’s a wonderful moment when J-Man, the leader of the gang and a Joker lookalike, attempts to sneak up on Bruce Wayne after he’s demolished much of his crew and Wayne takes him out with a forceful backwards thrust of his cane without even looking.
Bruce Wayne may be able to beat up bad guys like a man half his age but he’s also an exhausted, even frail figure who leans on Terry to get back to Wayne Manor after the skirmish. Terry makes himself at home after the weary old man nods off and discovers that the sad husk asleep in a chair used to Batman, and has the suits, Batcave, Batmobile and technology to prove it.
The former Batman is less than amused to find Terry snooping around his old digs and kicks him out. Terry has access to the tech necessary to become Batman. Now all he needs is the violent murder of one or both of his parents as motivation to get into the crime-fighting business professionally.
That arrives almost immediately when Terry’s dad is murdered by Derek Powers’ malevolent minions in a deadly corporate cover-up. Terry senses malfeasance and goes back to Wayne manor looking for someone to aid him in his super heroic quest.
The grumpy man of the house is at first reluctant, but when Terry taunts, “You’re no Batman, you whacked out old fraud!” he opens the gates and his heart to the possibility of having a successor, someone to use all those wonderful toys he spent so many decades inventing and perfecting.
Terry derives an almost sexual charge from seeing Bruce’s superhero suits up close for the first time. Like seemingly everyone in Batman Beyond, Bruce Wayne is built like a linebacker. The men in this world all have impossibly broad shoulders and huge torsos: they’re either all seriously beefy men or in the future wearing shoulder pads has caught on again big-time, this time for dudes.
Bruce reluctantly agrees to help but he does nothing to hide his distrust and anger towards Terry, who eloquently captures the old man’s haunted brokenness when he observes of his rage-filled, clenched demeanor, “Something happened to you, didn’t it? And it wasn’t just that you got old.”
In his youthful petulance, Terry decides to take the old Batman suit out for a joyride without the owner’s knowledge or consent. In this world Batman’s powers include flying so unlike previous incarnations of the character, we get a glorious sequence where this ordinary teenager gets to experience something extraordinary and superhuman: flight.
Terry uses the suit to discover that Powers is selling a powerful, deadly mutagen and also that his main henchmen killed his dad but when Bruce discovers that his suit has been stolen he is understandably not pleased.
Bruce Wayne is able to control his suits remotely so when Terry tells him he can’t give it back on account of he’s being attacked by bad guys at the moment the billionaire shuts off the suit almost long enough for Terry to get killed but has a last moment change of heart.
Terry is a sly one, so he plays the old, “I need to kill the man who murdered my father” card, knowing that it’ll resonate with a famous orphan like Wayne. Terry proves a natural at crime-fighting. Without anything in the way of training, he manages to dispatch bad guys with great dexterity and efficiency.
The aspiring Batman throws a canister of the mutagen at Powers and it breaks. Doctors try to save his life by pumping him full of radiation, transforming him into a glow in the dark skeleton looking motherfucker in the process. Though it is not established through dialogue, this is the introduction of a super villain known as Blight.
Bruce Wayne, meanwhile, decides to pay a visit to the McGinnis home, where he is welcomed with open arms by Terry’s mom despite being a weird old stranger with a mysterious interest in her hunky teenaged son because he is very famous and very rich, and consequently a boon to humanity.
The second episode ends with a beginning: Bruce Wayne offers Terry a job as a gofer running various errands for him. Terry’s youthful passion has worn down the old man’s defenses, paving the way for him to become Batman under the billionaire’s harsh tutelage.
Like the first episode, this concludes with Bruce beckoning Terry into a world he shut off long ago to protect himself, telling the much younger man, "Very good, Mr. McGinniss. Welcome to my world.”
I quite enjoyed the first two episodes of Batman Beyond. The idea of a dark and gritty Batman has lost all of its novelty and freshness over the past two decades but that’s not all Batman Beyond brings to the table.
Batman Beyond further differentiates itself from every Batman cartoon or movie I’ve seen in taking place in the future and also featuring a Batman who is not Bruce Wayne but rather a teenager.
Batman Beyond is very sad and very lonely. In his giant, empty house, without even a freakishly accomplished butler to do his bidding, Bruce Wayne cuts a Charles Foster Kane-like figure. This is not a Batman I have seen before and let you tell you something, brother, as a dude who has written professionally about pop culture for twenty-three years, I’ve seen a lot of different Batmans.
But this one is genuinely different.
I’m excited to re-visit two episodes of Batman Beyond a month for the indefinite future for this column and something tells me that I will only get better at writing about Batman Beyond once I actually understand what the hell is going on.
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