Frostbite - Victor Fries' Eternal Conflict
by Alex Weitzman
There
are few who'd deny that one of the finest single spans of a human life
that Bruce Timm has ever put on screen is that of Victor Fries. We do
not get any sort of detailed documentary about his past, nor do we ever
get to fill in the large gaps in time between his scant and special
appearances, and yet despite that, it is incredibly easy to feel like
you know Victor Fries. Even with the outlandishness of his situation and
activities, Victor is a common man in the workings of society, and
thusly a very uncommon member of the Rogues' Gallery.
Our first glimpse of the prototypical good-man-gone-bad: Mr.
Freeze. Heart of Ice. |
What is it that makes Victor so astoundingly different from the other
foes of the Bat-family? Well, for one, it helps that he has never fully
pinpointed Batman as the cause of his troubles. Fries is never entirely
an enemy of Batman's, but Batman sees to it that he is an enemy (or at
least a roadblock) of Fries' - at least, when Batman sees Fries acting
poorly. As embarrassing as Trial was for many of the villains involved,
it would have been five times as inappropriate to see Fries there. Every
member of the Rogues' Gallery, after all, suffers from a
practically-permanent form of delusion about either reality or legality.
Fries suffers his delusion the least; there is no doubt that he knows
his actions are illegal and sometimes immoral, but he has stopped
caring. It's not quite so much delusion as it is moral fatigue; Victor
has been strung out past his breaking point, and now the consequences of
his vengeances no longer matter.
Indeed, moral fatigue is a good way of putting it, because it sounds
infinitely accessible to any common audience member. And Victor is very
much a common man. The various struggles of Victor Fries can be summed
up as various permutations of interaction with the wrong kind of people.
In almost every appearance of Mr. Freeze in the Timmiverse, something is
askew in the man or woman just beside Victor. You can practically bounce
from bad seed to bad seed. You start with Heart of Ice, in which the
real interaction has occurred pre-episode, but is blatant throughout the
entire story: Victor Fries regrets ever getting involved with Ferris
Boyle. Boyle sets Victor up with a lab and funding, then comes to pull
the plug at the most important moment. And THEN he leaves Victor for
dead in an accident that he caused. Jerk. In fact, not to sound too
conspiracy-theorist, but I'm even skeptical about Boyle's claim that he
pulled funding weeks ago. Nothing else in the dialogue confirms that;
Boyle seems very insistent on proving that he can do anything he wants,
whenever he wants; and how the hell would Victor be getting anything he
had at all if the funding was actually pulled? Who wants to bet that
Boyle was blowing cheap hot air for his excuse as to why he was shutting
Victor down? Again, jerk.
"You want to be like this? Abandoned and alone? A prisoner in a world
you can see but never touch? Old and infirm as you are, I'd trade a
thousand of my frozen years for your worst day." - Deep Freeze |
It is, of course, not this author's intent to try and justify vengeance
like Freeze's. That is naturally the most compelling ideological
conflict of Heart of Ice - Freeze's vengeance versus Batman's justice.
But it also starts us on Victor's track record of dealing with and/or
trusting poorly-chosen people. Victor trusted that Boyle would not do
anything so monstrous as to kill his cryogenic experiment
mid-saving-his-wife; Boyle did. Next, in Deep Freeze, Victor doesn't
much hide his contempt for Grant Walker, as nutty an old fruitcake as it
gets. Consider that Victor, when Walker describes how he wants to be
like Freeze, does not merely refuse, but he even gives (in his own blunt
way) Walker invaluable advice coming from his experienced perspective.
(See picture at left.) But once Nora is brought out as a trump card, Fries
refuses to fight back. It takes Batman's perspective on the situation -
reminding him how much Nora would despise Victor to see the world
destroyed as Walker intends - to break Victor out of his repeated
pattern and turn him towards practically the side of good.
In SubZero, Victor again turns the wrong way to seek the right goal.
Nora needs medical attention, but Victor, beginning to get more and more
distrustful of the system, drafts his old colleague Gregory Belson for
the cause. It is Belson that drives Victor to new lows of morality.
Belson is a creep of a dickhead who finds lying casually as easy as
lusting after gold. Perhaps you'd think that, by now, Freeze would know
not to trust such people; after all, he proves he's learned something in
Deep Freeze with his initial refusal of Walker's request. However, the
spoiling element remains Nora. Victor Fries is driven by the same motive
that has made him so desperately human in his previous appearances - the
care for a loved one's welfare - but the stakes are simply being
ratcheted higher and higher with each successive appearance. It is in
SubZero when we first see Freeze outright lie, telling Koonak that he
won't be harming Barbara Gordon. He's more vicious in SubZero, and less
patient. SubZero is half-disliked by the main DCAU fandom (although not
nearly as much as the next entry), because Freeze is beginning to lose
our sympathy. He fails to target his poor influence, the way he
targetted Boyle and Walker. He acts against someone whose sympathy with
us is already established (Barbara Gordon, although admittedly, she sure
does lose it in later stories). But again, this is because Nora's
situation has been so multiplied in danger, and Victor is proving what
depths he will sink to for her. It is a problem we see all the time in
reality: when the chips are down, what lines will people cross?
While SubZero does take some flak, it's Cold Comfort that invokes the
ire and hatred of the fanbase. In some respects, it's pretty easy to see
why. It's a very drastic change from the Mr. Freeze modus operandi that
we're used to; after all, Nora got cured in SubZero. No matter how it
gussies it up, it does culminate in a dropping-a-bomb-on-the-city
plotline, which might be the screenwriting equivalent of bringing up
Hitler in an argument. Despite that, Cold Comfort does not come from a
false premise, which in the span of the DCAU, is more important. The
development at work is almost brilliant in its obviousness: due to
Victor obsessing so much over the health of his wife Nora, he managed to
completely miss the fact that he himself was suffering under a terrible
physiological condition that could cause him serious harm - and that
said harm (and his embarrassment at it) would result in him losing his
wife after she gets better. It's traditionalism at its most intransigent
and unhelpful to say that this concept is somehow "bad", because it's
completely logical. Would Victor indeed react to this conclusion by
partaking a crusade against that which we love? This one is harder to
determine, as Freeze plays it as being the result of a emotional
breakdown. When a soul is consumed by loss, especially a loss of
something so coveted as Nora was to Victor, desperate actions are quite
possible. The problem, ultimately with the episode, is that the writers
had him engage in desperation that led to more boring consequences. This
makes the episode less than worthy of the acclaim of the other sections
of the Fries saga. However, fan complaints about the direction taken
with Freeze itself is foolhardy, because this was a sadly inevitable
direction for Victor Fries. You can only toe the darkness for so long,
and obsession will result in terror at some point. The Batman world has
shown us how normal people can become monsters, like Jervis Tetch and
Harvey Dent. Victor Fries is in that group as well, but it took him a
lot longer to get there. That he held it off for so long is admirable;
that he fell was unfortunate but to be expected.
New Gotham, new rules, same ol' ability of certain people to be
incredible bastards. Meltdown. |
Of course, few people have any complaints for Meltdown, Victor's trip
into the future via the old-fashioned way (as Vandal Savage might put
it). Obviously, this one is beloved because it restores Victor Fries to
the audience's sympathies. His fascination with his own death is another
interesting and inevitable development in his character. One constant in
Victor has been how much he despises the condition that has been
inflicted upon him, which is a half-step away from being suicidal. It's
the result, as well, of what would be left of the man after having lived
so long after (we can only assume) Nora's death. Having spent his life
living for her for so long, her passing would cause him to want to die
as soon as possible, perhaps to join her on the other plane. Meltdown
finally addresses Freeze's relationship with Batman, with only a few
brief but very telling lines. Despite the fact that Batman is clearly
someone new, Victor addresses him like it's the same man he met back
when he was gunning for Boyle. And he confirms that, upon his
transformation into the man known as Freeze, Batman was ultimately the
only man Freeze knew that cared enough to keep Freeze from doing
terrible things while also righting the injustices he encountered. It's
a sign that Victor has always recognized that Batman is not an "enemy",
and that the Bat is indeed a force for good. Only Cold Comfort resulted
in Freeze trying to harm Batman without provocation, and we've discussed
the flaw in that one.
Victor, as a fan favorite, is preferred when we can like him, and even
root for him. SubZero and Cold Comfort, therefore, are disliked because
they make us uncomfortable. Since we can picture ourselves in Victor
Fries' shoes in the really beloved episodes like Heart of Ice or
Meltdown, those other ones reveal to us that we also have the capability
to be on the other side of justice, to be improper in our actions. It's
hard to tell an audience this. They don't like being told that they're
evil, or even that they could be when the context calls for it. Still,
in a certain way, that makes those two less-liked episodes actually more
important than the other ones. Victor Fries is a common man with common
needs, albeit at intense levels. It's the intensity that holds the
potential for crossing the line, though, and it's dangerous to plug into
Victor Fries' revenge fantasies for too long. This is why Batman is a
necessary character. He keeps the story of Victor Fries from becoming a
nihilistic matter of vengeance. Batman is there to curb Mr. Freeze when
he goes too far, and will help him for the things he does that have no
baser problems. Most of Batman's rogues need Batman to foil them. Mr.
Freeze merely needs Batman to guide him.
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