The Misplaced Rage of a Broken Mythos

Or, Scott Snyder Didn't Do What You Think He Did

Part One- Left Turn at Alba-koy-key

In 1992, I was just ten years old. I’d already started taking an interest in fantasy, science fiction and horror genre fiction, mostly through books, Dungeons and Dragons, films and video games. I also, thanks to my older brother Newton, started getting lightly into comic books at around the same time, when I was about eight or nine. My early favorites tended to be the characters whose serialized tales he was purchasing, or those who seemed similar to the ones he introduced me to, including Darkhawk, Ghost Rider (Danny Ketch run), The Punisher, Lobo, Doctor Strange, The Darkhold Redeemers, Werewolf by Night, and a limited run character named Slapstick, Marvel Comics’ attempt at introducing the concept of ‘The Toon Force’, if I remember correctly. I was aware of Batman, yes, but I hadn’t started picking up his books, and thanks to the introduction of “Batman: The Animated Series” (henceforth abbreviated to BTAS) to television, I didn’t really need to. I had my ‘in’ to the character and his stories!

The principle writers credited with the creation of most of the episodes, Paul Dini and Bruce Timm, had been granted fairly wide latitude by the folks at DC Comics when it came to adapting the character and the world in which his stories were to be set. The general television-viewing public weren’t aware of it at the time, but behind the scenes, Warner Brothers Studios (who had secured the rights to animated adaptations of several DC properties, not just the Caped Crusader) had a great deal riding on the success of this program. If it caught on with audiences, it would give them the confidence to green light other DC animated projects, including Superman and, eventually, The Justice League.

Dini in particular was not the sort of writer who would balk at such a golden opportunity to work with the property. The man had cut his teeth working on the He-Man cartoons in the 1980’s and Tiny Toons Adventures in the years just prior to working on BTAS. If you’re anything like me, you surely recall that program periodically and lovingly lampooning comic book characters on the regular. One might think of the Tiny Toons short about the ‘Just-Us League’, wherein they cast Buster and Babs Bunny (“No relation”) in the roles of Superman and Wonder Woman, respectively, and used Plucky and Hampton to stand in as Batman and Robin as they foiled the plans of Maxamillion Moneybags, standing in for Lex Luthor. The specifics of this send-up elude me right this second, but it was an homage to DC characters, and Paul Dini was the man involved in scripting that short, a sure sign that he already possessed a grasp on and adoration of the source material. After all, to best satirize something, it helps if you actually appreciate the original.

BTAS gave the world a look at comic book adaptation done well, something that hadn’t really been done previously. Folks might point to the 1967 Spider-Man animated series, but that program didn’t really move the needle for the average television viewer, and the Super Friends didn’t do much good either in that regard. Prior to BTAS, every attempt at bringing the characters and worlds of comic books to life had resulted in an overly campy, kitsch presentation that just floundered for solid purchase outside of a very childish framework. Animation was viewed primarily as the purview of kids’ programming, and when the entire field is directed that way, it can be right next to impossible to steer away from such a presentation.

But Dini and company did exactly that, and they did it in spades. Their version of Batman introduced the world to Harley Quinn, who would go on to become one of modern comics and comic films’ fan favorite characters. The show also gave the world the best work ever done by an actor who had to go to the polar opposite extreme from what he was previously known for, when the guy who played Luke Skywalker, hero of the galaxy far, far away, turned around and provided the voice of The Joker, the epitome of criminal madness and mayhem! That is quite the range, and love him or hate him for his real-world political views and sentiments, you cannot deny the man’s skill in going from one end to the other in terms of heroism vs villainy.

BTAS helped define Batman’s rogues gallery for a whole new era, and some few of them benefitted immensely from their new frameworks. Of his long-running villains, however, perhaps none got a more thorough re-write than the Emperor of Ice, Mr. Freeze.

Part Two- Mr. Zero

In the 1960’s era of Detective Comics, Victor Fries was a cold-obsessed mad scientist who develop dand deployed a freeze ray gun to commit petty crimes in and around the city of Gotham. While tinkering with the weapon to fix it after a run-in with The Batman, there was an accident, and he basically became genetically mutated, becoming the suit-dependent villain, Mr. Zero (as in ‘absolute zero’, the scientific principle of the total absence of all heat).

Paul Dini and Bruce Timm took the basic ‘cold-obsessed super scientist’ skeletal framework for this gimmick villain, and layered on a much different, sympathetic and tragic origin story/motivational matrix for him. For long-time Batman fans prior to 1992’s animated series, I imagine this might have been rather jarring. Prior to BTAS, Freeze was just a low-level gimmick villain, after all, one who would pop in every year or two in the comics, invariably pulling some heist or caper centered on the themes of ice or winter/snow, maybe a Christmas story now and then, get foiled, and then fuck off to prison or whatever until the writers on any given stretch decided they needed a short and easy gimmick appearance while they focused on one of the bigger villains or more meaningful story arcs in the background.

But in the hands of Dini and company at BTAS, Mr. Freeze was crafted into a tragic antagonist, one whose adoration for his wife Nora was so profound that he ended up turning himself into a monster in his efforts to try and save her. He will not give up on her, which requires he take steps beyond legal and ethical boundaries of society. We as viewers can at least empathize with him a little, thanks to this motivation. Hell, one is even left to question if he would even remain a villain if he managed to unfreeze and save his beloved wife from her medical condition.

Despite winning an Emmy for the episode in which Freeze’s tragic origins were established for the mythological foundations of BTAS, however, not all would remain wondrous forever. There would eventually be other writers who would get a chance to work with the franchise, and it is now to one of them that we turn, in the form of Scott Snyder, and DC Comics’ ‘New 52’ universal reset framework.

Part Three- The Snyder Betrayal

‘Wow, Josh, tell us how you really feel’, right? Bear with me. I’ll admit that I am way late to the party on reading DC’s ‘New 52’ Batman series, and I’ve nobody but myself to blame for not being prepared for what I initially thought of as a betrayal of the character of Mr. Freeze, committed by Scott Snyder. In his New 52 reset, Freeze never actually personally met or knew Nora; he was just obsessed with her, a manifestation of his neurotic devotion to all things frozen and wintery, as revealed by Batman in the latter portions of the story. Effectively, Victor Fries was reduced to being just another psychotic in Batman’s rogues’ gallery, one revealed as having a psychological horror premise.

Or, so I initially thought. So, too, did plenty of folks in online comic book discussion threads (all of them, actually, that I could find). I generally hold Reddit in utter disdain in most areas, but because they host tons of archived fandom discussion threads and boards on pop culture generally speaking and in comics and animation specifically, and because my time to dive into searching out these discussions is limited, I used the quickly tracked and categorized conversation threads around the New 52/Snyder Freeze as a primary reference point for examination. The folks archived in those conversations all seemed to be split along a kind of 75/25 line, with 75% of folks hating the Snyder re-write of Freeze from the Paul Dini/BTAS framework, and 25% not exactly loving it, but being far more accepting of it.

Among that 25%, the most common refrain given for being okay with the “Snyder Betrayal”, as I dubbed it to start this section, came along the lines of, “It’s a new writer, he’s allowed to alter things in the lore and canon to suit his style of narrative. We shouldn’t stifle new talent given the reins of an old/legacy IP.” There’s a degree to which I can appreciate that rationale, despite my initial gut reaction. But I also understand and empathize with the 75% Paul Dini crowd who hated the Snyder Betrayal. After all, I grew into adolescence and familiarity with the mythos as a whole with the Dini version of Freeze.

Anyway, I had found myself, in the days after reading that Mr. Freeze story, second-guessing my gut reaction. I found myself looking at the story again, and scouring the internet for some sort of clarification from Scott Snyder himself regarding this New 52 retcon of the character. Given that he isn’t even one of my favorite villains from the Batman property (the title of favorite belongs squarely to Johnathan Crane for me, thank you), one might wonder why I care this much about the retconning of an ancillary antagonist in a reboot of a decades-old intellectual property, right?

I care because this reaction in me to this material was notable. I experienced an intense sense of betrayal, of corruption of the lore/mythos that I had found originally tragically empathetic. Bear in mind, all of that stuff about Freeze being a gimmick villain prior to BTAS? I didn’t know any of that when I was watching BTAS as a 10-year-old kid. But I did learn about it later, in my early 20’s, when I was last invested in reading comic books as a hobby, before giving it up for about two decades. But I do care about the Art of Narrative, the beauty of the written word as its own kind of magic in our lives. Part of the passion I have for storytelling revolves around respecting mythos and legendarium, so the Snyder Betrayal felt like an insult to the lore that I had become attached to.

Snyder did eventually clarify that, yes, he made the change to Freeze in order to make him out to be a dangerous obsessive, a, quote, “force of nature trapped in a delusion”, as Snyder put it. Under the paradigm that I have primarily operated on for a long time, the Hierarchy of Narrative Analysis, which places clarification above inference above interpretation (an intentionalist basis as it is referred to in literary theory and academic settings), I should have unleashed a sigh of disappointed defeat and walked away from all of this. Lord knows, after all, that literal hours spent sperging out in my head and scouring the Internet for some other reading or reaction to this story would result in nothing less than me feeling like an absolute idiot tool for not recognizing both the wisdom of the crowd and the writer’s own words on the matter, in addition to being over a decade late to the party.

Except, I couldn’t shake the suspicion that something was off here, something had been missed, overlooked. I am in staunch opposition to Barthes’ “Death of the Author”, as those of you familiar with my work will know, but you would also know that I accept that some few of the analytical tools of the anti-intentionalist crowd have merit. I am not an absolutist like Grice.

There’s something else to calculate in all of this, too. I am, like Snyder, a writer, a storyteller. I don’t just read works of fiction, or analyze them; I create them, too. And in all of my years as an author, working with small publishers and editors, one piece of advice that has landed hardest with me because of its proven salience on several occasions, resulting in some of my greatest adjustments and fixes in the editing process, came from Ms. K.D. Lang; “Beware the narrative Freudian Slip”.

Part Four- What Did Freud Call It?

There is a phenomenon in psychology/psychiatry which is colloquially referred to as a “Freudian Slip”. It’s an error of speech or action which arises out of the sudden surfacing to one’s spoken words or taken actions that are, in truth, elsewise unconscious or repressed wishes, thoughts or desires. For a long time now, the Freudian Slip has served as the basis for some clever dry humor, and it comes to mind for me because of such a witticism in the show ‘Frasier’, which I have referenced before in my non-fiction writings. I’m a fan of the show still thanks to my interest in and moderate-depth readings into the field, largely in the works of Freud and Jung. In an episode from one of the early seasons (for reference, Season 4, episode 3, “The Impossible Dream”), Niles relates to Frasier something said to him by a client during a session. “One of my patients had a rather amusing Freudian Slip: he was having dinner with his wife, and he meant to say, ‘pass the salt’, but instead he said, ‘You’ve ruined my life, you blood-sucking shrew.” If you’re familiar at all with the overall character arc of Niles in that show, you might be forgiven for thinking that the younger Crane brother should have seen how closely that slip approximated his own tensions with his wife at the time, Maris, but that’s a whole other discussion for another time…

In case you’re still wondering and haven’t looked it up already, the term Freud used for the phenomenon was ‘parapraxis’.

If you’re still hanging in there with me, first let me say, God bless you and keep you, you’re an absolute trooper. Most folks would have already dismissed me as a blathering nerd who’s going off on far too long a ramble about things that don’t really matter, that comic books and cartoons are kids’ stuff, or the domain of sexless basement dwellers and losers. They would also likely ask, ‘What the hell does Freud have to do with the whole Scott Snyder/New 52 Mr. Freeze thing?’ Well, I would say to them, “Not just Freud, friend, but Jung too. And they have everything to do with it.”

Part Five- “Subvert Fans’ Expectations”

There’s a meme in modern Star Wars discourse, one wherein the general aim is to point out that Rian ‘Ruin’ Johnson’s endeavors to, quote, “-subvert fan expectations” (source: Blu-ray commentary track on The Last Jedi) only resulted in subverting box office and fan critical expectations for a Star Wars property. In other words, trying to put his own stamp on the overall mythos to sate his own ego resulted in a poor final product in “The Last Jedi”. Believe it or not, friends and neighbors, he is far from the first writer of stage, screen or books to have that desire.

Scott Snyder clarified that he had been aiming to present his own take on the Mr. Freeze character and backstory, to make him more psychological horror than tragic figure. He was, in other words, making a conscious effort to subvert Paul Dini’s version of the character, which had, for many years, stood as the broadly understood and accepted canon version of the character.

But elements of Fries’s dialogue with Oswald Cobblepot in Snyder’s ‘Batman Annual #1’ prior to the “Snyder Betrayal” reveal, as well as other moments leading up to that reveal, didn’t seem to line up quite right for me as a veteran storyteller and someone familiar with basic psychology. Victor’s background as a scientist and researcher, well, also fed into this sense of things not lining up quite right with Snyder’s later clarification. Freeze’s character motivation and behavior matrix didn’t line up. Re-reading the Snyder version a third time, I finally realized what was nagging me most about the Snyder clarification:

Victor’s mother.

In Snyder’s version of Fries, he witnessed his mother fall through a crack in a frozen body of water, vanishing into the frozen, deathly depths when he was just a boy. This is a brutal trauma, one which clearly left its mark upon little Victor. One might understand how he might become attached to or even obsessive with ice and all things frozen, leading him to ultimately study cryogenics as a student of science.

Now, here’s where Snyder’s implementation of his conscious endeavors to subvert Dini’s version of Fries begins, as revealed in the panels wherein Batman reveals that the woman in the cryo tube, Nora, isn’t actually Victor’s wife. He wrote his doctoral thesis on the frozen woman, and this is intended to be Snyder’s gut punch to readers of his offering.

But Snyder, I posit, had already subconsciously established Victor Fries as a tragic personality, not an obsessive psychotic one, when he wrote the scene involving Victor’s mother falling through the ice in his childhood. As a college student, Victor fixated on Nora not as an object of attraction and desire, but as a surrogate for the mother he couldn’t save from the power of nature’s chilling embrace. Why would Snyder subconsciously do this? Because, I hypothesize, being about five or six years older than myself, Snyder would have been about 15 or 16 when he, like I at the age of 10 in 1992, was exposed to the Paul Dini tragic version of the Mr. Freeze character.

Developmental and behavioral psychologists have posited in numerous papers, studies and journals that most people, particularly males, between the ages of 12 to 17, form the foundational basis for their aesthetic tastes and preferences during this time frame of their lives. It’s why we listen to the same music we loved as teenagers, why our favorite books and films generally tend to come from those times in our lives.

Ergo, despite his conscious desire to present Fries as a deranged obsessive, Snyder’s narrative hand was pulled toward the tragic, because of Dini’s influence hitting at around that period in his own life. Moreover, this is narratively sound construction, psychoanalytically, because it satisfies theories of trauma response put forth by both Freud and Jung, and contributes to the notion of Snyder having engaged in a form of narrative parapraxis.

In Freud’s writings, one finds the notion of transference, wherein a subject maps their emotional framework for a person in their live upon someone else, in this case, Victor mapping his adoration for his mother onto Nora (think scholarly ‘rebirth’, Nora ‘gave life’ to his academic success and career in science). Freud also wrote about subjects who engage in repetition compulsions, similar to the notion of the ‘Redemption Arc’ in fiction and mythology, which also fits when considering the story’s denouement. Victor’s mother, we are shown survived her first fall through the ice, but it left her broken physically and mentally, a figure whom Victor could not fix or save as a child. Already traumatized and perhaps not fully grasping the severity of what he was doing, again, as a child, he brought her back and ‘mercy killed’ his mother, sending her once more into the frozen waters. But here, he once more in Nora has a woman trapped in ice, but one whom he can try to save (tying into the redemption script of the character as established by the Paul Dini mythos).

As for Jung, Snyder’s Fries touches upon the anima complex in both his mother and Nora, an inner feminine or guidestone of the nurturing and emotional who are frozen, both literally and figuratively. This is best portrayed by Victor’s calculated actions and lack of emotional range.

I meander into Freud and Jung primarily to showcase that Snyder, in my estimation, ended up with a final product that showed his own parapraxis: a character he outwardly wanted to express as ‘new’, to put his own stamp on and make horrific, still ended up being a tragic figure when one reads carefully and with an eye to the psychological and mythological. What was the tragedy? The tragedy of failed redemption.

As a side-bar, I found myself wondering, briefly, why Victor would imprint on Nora as his wife in his fixation delusion. But that’s actually easy enough to parse out. Surely you know the old axiom: “Women marry men who remind them of their fathers, and men marry women who remind them of their mothers.”

In that instance, who else but Nora would be more able to remind Victor Fries of his mother?

Wrapping Up

Looking around online after putting together the basic handwritten draft of this piece, I tried to find some outlet or blog or article that had already put together these musings of mine, because it strikes me that I am no genius by any stretch of the imagination, and if any of this theorizing had a snowball’s chance in hell of being something to lean into, somebody else would likely have already made all of these connections.

But, no. Sure, a few outlets back at the time of the New 52 run expressed shock and made note of things like Fries losing his mother as a child, but they didn’t make the connection to the Emperor of Ice foisting surrogacy for his mother figure then onto Nora later in the story and life. Likewise, nobody seemed to recognize that Snyder, being the age that he is, likely had an overwhelmingly powerful subconscious attachment to Dini’s portrayal of Freeze as a character of tragic design, nor horrific. Again, Snyder’s clarification of his intentions with the character still matter, and I would even hold that they matter more than any interpretation I’m foisting on his efforts. However, I have myself been victim to the narrative Freudian Slip, as K.D. warned me against, and I cannot imagine that Snyder is immune to such a phenomenon in his works.

Maybe I just had a sharper editor in her than Mr. Snyder was working with at the time….

Cheers!