Question about Scarecrow
Does anyone know what the whole deal with Jonathan Crane and the Scarecrow in Batman Begins was? I mean Crane seemed evil the entire movie but then after being gassed by Batman he started calling himself Scarecrow, so was that meant to be some sort of change? Was he supposed to be schizophrenic? Or just plain crazy?
Well there are many different versions of Scarecrow depending on which Bat-verse you are currently visiting... but in BB I don't think he was a schizo... just evilly troubled... and when he became crazy (gassed) he kinda made a new identity for himself, like he had during his experiments.
He was Scarecrow when he ruled over his patient's fears, it was his way of doing pretty much what Bruce had when he dubbed himself Batman, now Bruce wasn't a shizo, or was he? LOL!
I don't think he was all that crazy before being gassed in BB... just (as Rachel had put it) "corrupt" in his own mind. He was like Bruce only the evil version due to his past.
I think he got caught up in the moment. See how different he acted when he said the line "Would you like to see my mask?", he acted like a different guy. Crane post-gassing seems like the same thing, where his true colors come out. Starting all of this mayhem got him excited and he went into his true form as a nutbag, and then he was like a kid in a candy store and had some fun...until the taser happened...
There's no indication in Begins that Crane suffers from any particular mental illness: he doesn't seem to hear voices or suffer from delusions like people with schizophrenia often do (it seems to vary in comics: in The Long Halloween and Dark Victory he's constantly singing nursery rhymes... whatever you want to take from that). I would imagine dubbing himself "Scarecrow" can be explained by the pleasure he is uniformly seen to take in terrorizing his victims... and frankly no other name works with a mask like his.
Re: Question about Scarecrow
Originally posted by atharpina
Does anyone know what the whole deal with Jonathan Crane and the Scarecrow in Batman Begins was? I mean Crane seemed evil the entire movie but then after being gassed by Batman he started calling himself Scarecrow, so was that meant to be some sort of change? Was he supposed to be schizophrenic? Or just plain crazy?
The version of Scarecrow you saw in BB is completely different than the one in the comic books. Scarecrow was always a weak geeky teen that was always picked by bullies. And in one occasion was the victim of a cruel prank by a girl. Ever since then he develop a curiosity for fear. And if you remenber the Batman: The Animated series the Scarecrow was a colleage professor with a high interest in studies of Fear. His obsession of what a causes fear drove him nearly insane.
But here is the tricky part. He never become a schizo. Instead his obsession cause him to become evil. His childhood trauma with a scarecrow only increase his tormented state of mind.
If the version of the scarecrow in BB was similar to the one in the comics then the gas Batman used on Crane couldn't had work. Why? because similar to the Joker, the scarecrow is inmune to his own chemical gas. That is why they had to alter the character for BB. If not, that would have been a plot hole in the storyline.
Well since people have started responding to this a little more again I have one more question about Scarecrow in the movie.
Okay, so his voice was always really grungy and scary sounding when he had the mask on, especially when he yelled. Was that because of the gas or because of that inhalor thing to protect him from the gas inside his mask? I'm not sure because it seems like it'd be just an effect of the gas, making his voice a lot more menacing. But during the riot when Rachel's with the little kid and she had been inoculated his voice was still like that, then she tazored him and he sounded normal as he screamed, which could have been because the shock messed up the inhalor part. I'm just curious as to what everyone else thinks?