Batman’s Fear State Shows Gotham Deserves A Better Class of Criminal

As the Bat-Titles crossover Fear State bears down upon Gotham in DC Comics, it’s beginning to look like Batman’s rogues’ gallery is getting stale.

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Warning: Spoilers ahead for Fear State, including Batman #113, Detective Comics #1034, and Harley Quinn #7

As the newest crossover story to hit Gotham reaches fever pitch in Fear State, Batman’s villains are once again convening to take over the city, and, tried and true though it is, something in the old formula just doesn’t feel the same anymore. As longtime B-tier villain Scarecrow prepares to unleash his usual fear-based plan upon the beleaguered denizens of the crime capital of the world, it’s difficult to not feel a twinge of déjà vu at the spectacle, an unexplainable sensation that all of this has happened before. That’s because it has, and Gotham deserves better.

Masterminded by James Tynion IV, Fear State is the Bat-titles’ 2021 follow-up crossover to 2020’s Joker War, which saw the people of Gotham turn away from Batman following an extended period of chaos, electing an anti-vigilante mayor, Christopher Nakano. The story has deep ties to the Gotham City seen in DC’s Future State event. In that possible future, Gotham becomes a police state where vigilantes are killed on sight and Batman is believed to be dead, leading a new Dark Knight to rise and take up his crusade.

The Fear State storyline pits Batman and allies against a variety of confederated enemies who have various competing schemes to take over Gotham, most notably Scarecrow, who is using Gotham’s citizens as a test in his strange, large-scale science experiment known as the “fear state,” and billionaire industrialist Simon Saint, who is trying to slide his way into power in Gotham with his Magistrate security program. And both of these villains, while superficially imposing threats, are really just kind of the same old thing, along with the rest of Gotham’s current nuisances.

A Series of Vague, Unrealistic Plans

In order to understand the current problems with Batman’s villain stable, it’s important to recognize the chief inspiration behind the current story-arc: the 2015 video game Batman: Arkham Knight. In that game, the main storyline involves Scarecrow teaming up with the Arkham Knight, revealed to be a version of Jason Todd, who together seize near-complete control of Gotham using Arkham Knight’s rogue paramilitary operation. Batman, over the course of a single night, must end their reign of terror, all the while struggling to stave off mental possession by The Joker (played by the inimitable Mark Hamill), who, having died in the previous game, appears as a hallucination throughout the narrative.

Fear State sets up a similar premise, with Saint, a thinly veiled Steve Jobs analogue, standing in for Jason Todd. Unlike Todd and Scarecrow in the Arkhamverse, however, their partnership does not last long. While the two are originally allies, with Saint breaking Scarecrow out of Arkham and secretly financing his “fear state” experiment, Scarecrow turns on Saint in Batman #111 following a typically megalomaniacal declaration that he will push the people of Gotham “into a true fear state.”

Saint’s original idea is to use the specter of Scarecrow’s terroristic activities to induce Mayor Nakano to implement the Magistrate program, where Saint will provide cybernetically-enhanced private soldiers to act as police against both supervillains and masked vigilantes like Batman, a circumstance illustrated in the Future State alternate timeline. By eventually gaining complete dominion over the city, Saint hopes he will be able to implement Scarecrow’s fear state hypothesis in order to test his own schemes of Orwellian control, likely in preparation for an even larger-scale program. His plans have already begun breaking down, though, as his first vigilante, Peacekeeper-01 is currently wandering the streets of Gotham in a fear toxin-induced self-aggrandizing delusion, killing anyone he comes across. Mayor Nakano, whose approval Saint needs to continue operating the Magistrate program, is considering shutting down the program as of Detective Comics #1043.

An Overreliance on Fear

The Scarecrow, also known as Dr. Jonathan Crane, is one of Batman’s oldest villains, having debuted in World’s Finest Comics #3 in 1941, and is well-known for using his “fear toxin” to psychologically destroy anyone who stands in his way. In fact, most of, if not all of his previous nefarious schemes also rely upon this gimmick. Tynion introduces a possible origin to Scarecrow’s obsession with terror and the “fear state” experiment through a flashback to Crane’s postgraduate education in Batman #113. The younger Crane explains his theory that, by pushing a population into a state of absolute terror, known as the “fear state,” it is possible to enact real social change, in that, the act of forcing a group of people to confront a collective fear they otherwise would not face allows a population to then collectively conquer said previously insurmountable fear and be better for it. It is a plan that takes a rather impersonal perspective on human psychology, quite fitting for a pitiless madman.

In his diatribe, Scarecrow reveals a key part of his plan involves the use of narrative manipulation in the media to further generate an atmosphere of paranoia and uncertainty, and Tynion does conspicuously focus quite heavily on the media’s presence throughout the story-arc. Simon Saint is completely preoccupied with his media appearance to the point where he will change his incredibly complicated plots in order to fit a more suitable media narrative. One germane plot thread involves his scapegoating of a band of vagrant nomads known as the Unsanity Collective, about whom Saint plants stories in the media accusing them of working with Scarecrow so he can label them as terrorists and set the Magistrate upon them (after he himself hires them to commit crimes.)

However, generating an environment of distrust using the media and imbuing fear in the populace with draconian law enforcement measures in an effort to enact control are not new or particularly novel ideas, as both were written about extensively by academics such as George Orwell and Michel Foucault. These tactics were on full display in fascist societies of the early 20th Century such as Nazi Germany, with decidedly less than healthy results when implemented. Scarecrow’s plan is fundamentally flawed because fear on a large scale doesn’t influence people to conquer their inner demons together: it by and large just causes people to lash out in anger and mistrust. While this might be Scarecrow’s ultimate goal, it is a hackneyed one, as he’s attempted this dozens of times across the 80-year history of the character.

A Chain of Fools

What Saint and Scarecrow are relying on for their plans to succeed are multiple factors that are well beyond their control: Saint needs the support of municipal government, the continued public success of his Magistrate initiative and the cooperation of the media, while Scarecrow needs to push a certain threshold of the citizenry past a nebulous limit of “fear” where he might properly begin his experiments. Neither one has a solid hold on all the variables to their schemes, and, compounded by the presence of a massively powered-up Poison Ivy underneath the city, it’s possible this crossover isn’t even going to end up with them as the main villains, given how much they’ve struggled already.

Perhaps the most emblematic villain of the failure of Batman’s rogues’ gallery in Fear State is Hugo Strange, an evil psychiatrist who was also sprung from jail by Saint to assist his efforts. While previously Strange had been working on the city’s behalf to “clean up” the streets (while secretly injecting former Joker thugs with a mysterious serum), thanks to Harley Quinn’s successful strike on his laboratory/prison, Strange is reduced to literally running around Gotham in a Batman costume, scaring random criminals by punching them. While certainly a frightening prospect, this is objectively a far cry from the more serious threats Gotham has faced.

Batman’s Fear State is a story about how trauma can push people to the brink of sanity, but so far, all it’s demonstrating is that Batman’s villains are the ones who probably need the therapy. Which makes sense, after all, because they are insane.

Link Source : https://screenrant.com/batman-fear-state-scarecrow-simon-saint-villain-flaws/