>tfw you realize Batman’s job is so easy ‘cause Gotham, city of eternal night, is stuck in an eternal interwar so all the buildings have pre-electric light and ventilation skylights
I want a Batman ‘66 retro adventure where the Joker has sabotaged the Gotham City High School Marksman Tournament so the guns will backfire hilariously and it’s totally accepted that a man in a bat suit is running around earnestly seeking clues from a bunch of golly-gee teenagers toting rifles in the middle of basically Central Park
You could probably fully automate a McDonald’s and have it just be, like, a big vending machine if they didn’t care about ~friendly atmosphere~. Maybe there are problems with this I am not seeing?
Best I can think of is a) Most normies are extroverts, to the point that a robot McD’s would feel alienating to them, beyond just removing the ~friendly atmosphere~. and b) maybe the technology for some parts of the work is less mature than for others, and we’re waiting on a missing step?
Also, without human staff a place like that would be vandalism-bait; that doesn’t really explain why the big vending machine plus one or two security guys isn’t a thing though.
Reason A is what I meant when I said friendly atmosphere.
When you talk about “Rockefeller Republicans”, I don’t know how many people today even have an idea of who the Rockefeller family were, I’m not sure how much information that name carries.
So, uh, think of the Wayne family. Bruce and his late parents. “Wayne Republicans”. Basically the same thing - urban-based dreams of social uplift through monumental programs overseen by men born into more money than God. Vague social liberalism that disdains bourgeois morality from an aristocratic direction, anti-corruption, pro-Establishment to the extent the Police Commissioner always takes their calls.
That was a big part of the Republicans during the post-War period - the conservatives were just one faction, and often a losing one. Wasn’t just titanic heirs but small businessmen (maybe equivalent city fathers to their small towns, though) and professionals - the Republicans were the party of the postgraduate educated.
The Republicans were opposed to national health care all along, Ronald Reagan dropped a spoken word album about it in 1961. Part of that was green eyeshade deficit hawkery (that was a big part of their brand, the later pivot away from this to tax cutting was understood through the framework of “Two Santa Claus Theory”, which is an actual and very important thing in postwar American politics, “Two Santa Claus Theory”). And part of it was “grr, socialism boo”. But really, a lot of it wasn’t in resistance to what this would mean for taxpayers, or patients, or even the country, so much as doctors, who were a big Republican constituency.
Because doctors were professionals – by guild understandings that predated the United States, they owned their own practices, regulated and judged each other, were granted a degree of authority over those who came to them needing something important they were not qualified to provide themselves. They resisted the thought of themselves as merchants, and loathed the thought of themselves as employees or civil servants.
A lot of the “disappointingly moderate” Republican-appointed Supreme Court justices over the years actually fit fine with the Wayne Republican tradition. Sandra Day O’Connor, first woman on the court, put there as a payoff from Reagan to the moderate faction - the Republicans arguably the feminist party, albeit a “Lean In” type. After all, if you saw a woman in an executive role before the ‘70s, it was probably in the Daughters of the American Revolution or some society gala-type charity NGO. And those “first woman to go to X school”, well, the families that would think to send a daughter off to law or medical school were a subset of the families that would think to send a child at all.
Hell, for a while, the Republicans were even the more abortion-friendly party. The Democrats were the Catholic party after all. The Republicans were the Protestant-as-humanistic-heritage-charity ones, the ones who eugenically spaced their three children two years apart unlike those grubby Papists, the ones with mistresses, the ones with bourgeois life courses to even be diverted from. Not to mention the doctors who cleaned up after amateur abortions or offered black-market ones themselves.
(But not like legalization was priority one, c’mon, Bruce Wayne’s dad was a surgeon, you think he doesn’t know a guy?)
Anyway this was what Goldwater (with his base of ideologues and country & western extractive industry - for most of the 20th century the white military middle-class paradise of California was an anchor of conservative Republicanism) was fighting against, what Reagan (California Über Alles) eventually defeated. The Wayne Republican tradition still stumbled along until let’s say Dole/Kemp ’96, that was the last hurrah and the ticket’s total failure to generate any enthusiasm whatsoever (two years after Newt Gingrich’s Congressional “Republican Revolution” breakthrough with conservative southern and suburban whites) heralded its end.
Well, you could maybe see the administrations of the two Bushes as an intermediate form, an attempt to graft the old money social uplift tradition to the religious base the Republicans cultivated in the 1980s in search of a sort of Christian Democracy. “Thousand Points of Light”, “Compassionate Conservatism”, New World Order and nation-building abroad, the ADA, NCLB, environmental laws and Medicare Part D at home.
But the bipartisan abandonment of Bush the Younger and the coalitional realignments through Obama and Trump seem to have rendered even this a dead end. As things stand in 2017, “progressive social programs paid for by taxation, sensitive to the economic interests of professionals and capital-holders” is thoroughly Democratic territory.
I’ve developed a…’controversial opinion’ doesn’t feel as if it comes close to adequately covering it. ‘Heresy’ falls far short. ‘Blasphemy’ might be in the neighborhood.
I think - as an ongoing character template meant to sustain numerous stories - I prefer the potential of this Mr. Freeze…
…over this Mr. Freeze:
To be very super clear upfront, I’m not saying Batman & Robin is a better Freeze story than Heart of Ice. I actually ended up loving that movie, but “I’m afraid by condition has left me cold to your pleas of mercy” isn’t quite on the same tier as “Think of it, Batman. To never again walk on a summer’s day with the hot wind in your face and a warm hand to hold. Oh yes; I’d kill for that.” Though if we’re throwing stones, it’s worth noting that episode also includes the line “Rest well, my love. The monster who took you from me will soon learn that revenge is a dish… best served cold.”
The thing about classic Freeze is that he’s absolutely perfect…for maybe 3 stories. You know how people discuss “the Two-Face problem”, where the only stories of substance people can seem to think to tell with him are about how he became Two-Face, and him getting cured and it not taking (even All-Star Batman, with its very solid new twist on him, is still also banking on whether or not he can be rehabilitated)? Same problem with Victor: you can do 1. He tries to kill people to cure/avenge Nora (Heart of Ice, Deep Freeze), 2. He does something sentimental because of Nora (White Christmas), or 3. Nora is cured but his life still sucks because he’s Mr. Freeze (Sub-Zero, Cold Comfort, Meltdown). Unlike Harvey, there isn’t even the possibility of moving him outside that paradigm, because his entire deal as a character is that all he cares about is bringing her back, no frills or side gimmicks. While most of the time the changes are ill-advised, I don’t find it shocking in the least that the likes of Judd Winnick and Scott Snyder have tried to switch up his deal to put him in a place where you can do new stuff with him, because
while that makes for a spectacular one-shot or two it leads to some crushing diminishing returns for a recurring villain.
The guy in the movie on the other hand? I genuinely can’t believe I’m saying this, but there’s a little more on the bone to him. Yes, he makes silly ice puns and I’m not saying he should do that all the time in the comics,* but we also get this:
You can still do classic Sad Freeze stuff with him, and that he’s a character who can encompass both of those takes interests me. He seems less like a cartoon at points so much as prone to severe mood swings, moving on a dime from having his henchman sing along to The Snow Miser while puffing on a cigar and luxuriating in his criminality to sneaking off to watch his wedding video and mourn his wife in private. And it’s made equally clear this isn’t just a switch that was flipped: Nobel-prize-winning scientist and two-time Olympic decathlete Dr. Victor Fries is shown to be a goofy, awkward, giggling dope in his wedding video, and he mentions making his solid steel survival suit intentionally a size too small because he wants to look skinny. This is a guy who’s fundamentally insecure except when he’s belting out freeze puns, and that gives a deeper in than “he and Batman are both sad about their dead families”.
Obviously he’d have to be at least somewhat subdued, but picture it: Victor Fries is in the reverse position of Bruce Wayne, living a life without confidence or love and having finally gained it, seeing the death of his loved one coming and having every possible physical and mental advantage in order to save her, and he fails. So miserably in fact that he catastrophically injures himself in the process, and what’s worse she’s still hanging on by an impossible thread that won’t let him give up hope and move on. Batman has to tell himself that Thomas and Martha would have approved of what he’s done, but Fries actually has the fading chance of getting to receive that validation. And so like Batman before him he decides to embrace what’s happened to him and Show Them, Show Them All! that he’s a force to be reckoned with in control of his world.
Everything’s of course still in service of Nora at the end, but suddenly you can do other stuff with him. He can have weird themed crimes to decipher. He can pursue his own goals. He can have more than one emotional state. He can, yeah, have a room full of crooks sing The Snow Miser to him while he puffs on a cigar, because with the one source of meaningful positive reinforcement stripped away he craves validation until he can get it back, even if it means bending Gotham and the underworld to his whim, because that’s the life he’s been consigned to. And the odd attempt by Batman to rehabilitate him takes on a new light: clearly he’s of two minds about his situation, burying his feelings beneath his gimmicks and at least somewhat capable of being reached, but while Batman questions his own motivations on occasion, this Freeze literally surrounds himself with a chorus singing his praises and addresses even his most ridiculously petty concerns of self-image. This unselfaware, superhuman nerd belting puns and loving his new life of crime and throwing himself into everything about it that can distract him and fill the great gaping hole in his heart left by the tantalizing loss of the one person who ever cared, and his failure to save her, feels like a more interesting comparison to Batman than what we’ve traditionally had. Them both seeking validation through justice/crime to make up for the loss of a loved one, with Freeze trying to achieve the actual validation of Nora coming back and accepting and forgiving him for his non-sin of not saving her before, strikes me as richer than ‘they’re both sad because someone died but Victor took it worse’. And it’s a more open-ended story driver to boot.
* This is absolutely a lie, he does need to make ice puns all the time.
So the reason I was thinking about Batman and Catwoman was I’ve been playing the new Arkham Knight game. It’s good! After just going off on how the Arkham games have an edge up on GTA by not having any of the (out of style) driving genre in them, the third-to-last thing I expected was for the new one to have Burnout-style driving in it, the second-to-last thing was for it to have Japanese arcade-style tactical tank combat, and the absolute last thing I expected was for them both to work so well.
Also I’m really just appreciating how well the property works for open-world gaming because unlike other games it can easily make an in-universe explanation for all sorts of stuff that’s really a function of games-as-commercial-objects with “Because Batman”. Why is the same protagonist engaging in (and skilled at) melee combat, tool-based puzzles, car combat, aerial maneuvers, and mystery-solving? Because Batman. How do you expect us to buy a plot making all sorts of bounces and turnabouts to justify a bunch of different boss battles? Because Batman. Why are we still supposed to think of this guy as good when he spends the game taking out thousands of faceless mooks? Because Batman. Why are we taking time out to track down all sorts of hidden collectables? Because the Riddler, because Batman.
The one thing though, after 4 of these they’re scraping the bottom of the barrel as far as enemies goes. Consensus is that Batman has the best rogues’ gallery in comics, and further that that’s because so many of them work as twisted reflections of Batman.
To wit, Catwoman’s thing is dressing up in sexy black leather and going off on outside-the-law missions on the rooftops of Gotham; Penguin’s an orphan with a taste for high society; Joker (and to an extent Anarky) is as obsessive about creating chaos as Batman is with order; (Joker and Penguin are also hella fond of themed gadgets;) Scarecrow uses fear as a tool and a weapon; Two-Face has a split personality; Riddler is constantly showing off his supergenius; Mr. Freeze is driven by the memory of personal loss; Man-Bat is, uh.
(Harley Quinn is really a Robin - a sidekick who maintains absolute personal and professional loyalty in the face of how much suffering the role brings. That’s a big theme of this game and I’m surprised they didn’t use her more in it.)
Even the ones that don’t have such thematic resilience make a particular kind of sense for Batman - his “no guns” thing contrasts with Deadshot’s “only guns”; his combination of fighting skill and resilience are matched by Ra’s al Ghul, Bane, and Solomon Grundy. Poison Ivy is odd - plants and poison aren’t really meaningful to Batman, and actual superpowers are kind of peripheral to the Batverse, but what she is really, deadly kiss and all, is a distillation of the femme fatale figure. Recall that Batman is heir to the pulp tradition from which that archetype comes, and that poison is a traditionally female weapon.
But when you’re getting down to Deacon Blackfire and Firefly… well, I guess bats are the natural predators of insects, but “a pyromaniac with a jetpack” is kind of a stretch. I suppose the series has used Killer Croc and Calendar Man (and Mad Hatter, who I give a pass though on what principles I can’t tell) before. At least it’s not Condiment King, I suppose.
Except “an orphaned preteen, brought up as successor to the tradition of vulnerability-masking aggression” (the atom of the Batmanverse) is especially pulpy for the Catwoman, thus female, thus sexual variant
Maybe more pulpy than the contemporary Batman could bear? Wow wow that’s a wow.
Solution instead it was a (cat) lady grown to her late 30s in escapist obesity never had to live up to her self-conception (that’s why she wrote fanfic) who gets hit on the head, hard, in one of those timeless Gotham muggings.
She comes out of the coma years later, 100 pounds lighter, her inhibition completely gone (from the hit or one of those iffy psycho-professionals Gotham attracts like flies, that will vary by writer)
Sets out to live out her dreams, eventually attracts the attention of Selina Kyle who sees enough of a kindred spirit to want to protect and teach her
So Batman doesn’t show up to give testimony at trials, right? It’d be a hell of a cross-examination, anyway.
Now for the supervillains in Arkham, that works - it is a mental asylum, I’m guessing they’re in on some sort of involuntary hold, or maybe you could get a probation violation. But the small-time crooks he rounds up occasionally Commissioner Gordon just has to let go, right?
