Batman is Screaming

This brief piece is burst open with macabre absurdity and psychotropic imagery--but of special interest is how Porpentine upends Batman's voice, with disturbing implications both for his identity in particular and for the notion of 'humanity' in general.

(Spoiler - click to show)We must hear the unthinkable. Batman can growl, grunt, groan, even howl with grief, but scream? To scream is antithetical to his axiomatic masculinity: is a Batman who is screaming still Batman? All the surrender that a scream contains, a woman's joy and her terror, has been displaced onto the screeching bats--to re-place the scream in Batman's throat is a threat to his integrity, his intelligibility.

Porpentine underscores how this screaming distorts Batman almost beyond recognition by how she depicts and refers to him--refers to it, rather. Batman's body is "gelatinously attentuated," stretched impossibly throughout the Joker's "giant ant farm prison." I can't think of a more delightful vision of a male dysmorphic nightmare: his hard, solid contours are made pliable, responsive, oozing perpetually and purposelessly, without direction. Batman has been stripped of manhood, of humanity, and reduced to 'itness.' The indomitable hero has become a bizarre creature, agonized and alone.

This awful transmogrification both precedes and proceeds from the screaming. The Joker's ingenious torment causes the screaming, true, but for the reader, (identified with the Joker by the second-person perspective,) the screaming comes first. In fact the screaming arrives before the game has begun, because of its titularity. And since the Sugarcane format pins the header to the left of the body text, the screaming echoes through the story, inescapable even after we've clicked away on our "two-tone shoes," leaving Bat-thing locked up behind us.

Batman's scream is not, indeed cannot, be described, only asserted. The scream's prison of inscrutability is in direct contrast to the Joker's animated vocalizations. We are treated to a "quaking, helpless laugh" which, ostensibly silent, is far easier to hear than Batman's screaming. The Joker's voice is perfectly legible, overdetermined by being so true to type. Xe weaves and swerves, hir quips going "up and down and whirling around" like the rickety rollercoaster that xe rides above the death swamps of hir lair.

This verbal dexterity stays firmly in the Joker's lane, however: gleeful evil, the quintessence of camp. Assuming hir gaudy mantle, we play the role of trickster demon to the hilt--how reassuring! Still, it can't quite ease the queasiness that Batman's plight summons up. Why so skittish? I've longed to revenge myself on this masculine paragon, to bring him low. Yet my victory tastes like bile.

The nausea that Batman is Screaming evokes is not simply a symptom of dependence on an Adversary for our grounding, such that its withdrawal injects us with vertigo. More upsetting is that Porpentine has 'filled our guts with possibilities.' What endless night of horrors, what gorgeous mischief might we accomplish, if only we can unman Batman? What are we if not subhuman, if the construct of 'humanity' as such is a massive, perverse fraud? It's enough to turn one's stomach.

This game was created in 2012, and uploaded recently by someone besides Porpentine. It was created at least as early as March of that year, since it's mentioned in an AdventureCow forum.

It is the shortest of the early experiments (which include Myriad and a few others). However, it contains a lot of Porpentine's signature style, including body transformation and horror, protagonists which evoke multiple emotions simultaneously, and surrealism.

This is not the kind of game I imagine Porpentine would release today, but it's interesting as a historical insight.

Batman is Screaming is a short Batman fanfiction from the Joker's point of view, where (Spoiler - click to show)the Joker finally wins.

It is utterly linear and slight in size, without much of a story, but the writing and characters' voices are top notch (I'm admittedly not a huge Batman fan, but the Joker's actions and props feel true to form). Unsurprisingly for Porpentine, there is some unsettling (not graphic, but unsettling) horror content as well.

Not one of Porpentine's more memorable games, but worth a playthrough for the quality of the prose alone.

As noted in the other reviews, Batman is Screaming is an early Twine game by Porpentine, interesting now in how it hints at some of the themes, tone, and imagery that Porpentine would develop in her later, more fully-formed games.

But this work is more than just an historical curiosity -- it's a really fun, gleefully grotesque, piece of interactive fan fiction. Porpentine totally captures the voice of the Joker but, like the best fanfic, introduces a scenario that would (likely) never make it past the DC editors or Warner Bros execs: (Spoiler - click to show)Batman has been trapped inside of some sort of bizarre ant farm; pieces of him have been slowly pulled apart while he still maintains consciousness and a sense of self that, I imagine, is deteriorating along with his bodily integrity.

This is a brief work that almost reads like a prose poem, given Porpentine's typical flare for evocative language and poetic images. Alternatively, as this is a work told from the perspective of the Joker after all, we could read this as an extended joke -- in which Joker gets the last laugh, of course. In either case, Porpentine uses Twine to parcel out the scenario in brief passages, both haunting and hilarious. This is a nearly linear story (with a couple tangents that circle back to the main thread), but the affordances of Twine are still well deployed. Plus, the purple and green color scheme is too good.