Batman Returns (1992)
Dir. Tim Burton
Written by Sam Hamm, Daniel Waters, Wesley Stick
Starring Michael Keaton, Michelle Pfeiffer, Danny DeVito, Christopher Walken, Michael Gough
Originally published on Letterboxd, where the majority of my reviews now go. Included here for posterity.
In a way, it's kind of comforting to see that the Achilles’ heel
of modern huge-budget franchise IP movies --too many overbearing egos
pulling them in too many directions and winding up with scripts
rewritten into chaotic incoherence-- was vividly present even here, at
the very inception of the concept of a big-budget comic book movie
franchise.* BATMAN RETURNS (to cinemas, presumably, since there's no
suggestion the character has been anything but a continuous presence in Gotham City)
isn't just haphazardly plotted, it barely has anything which could even
be called a plot, and its few absent-minded gestures in that
direction (most of which materialize only well past the halfway point,
and still peter out before the arbitrary "climax") certainly have
nothing whatsoever to with each other --or any character named "Batman,"
for that matter. This makes for a movie which is fundamentally
and unavoidably broken, a movie which we can parse for any meaning only
in the manner of archaeology, by interpreting and extrapolating from
tantalizing artifacts which survived the presumed dozens of re-writes,
and offer hints at what actual intent might have once flourished before
being buried in a mountain of arbitrary wheel-spinning. And of course, because it's me, that's exactly what we're going to do. What, you have better ways to spend your time?
In this case, we don't have to dig very deep before we find that others have pondered the film before us, and come to a pretty consistent conclusion. The consensus as to what was being attempted here --which emerged concurrently with the movie and has only solidified since-- is that director Tim Burton believed himself to be making a movie about the experience of social misfits, or at least decided that whatever the suits eventually decided about the script, he would make a movie about freaks and misfits and just sort of ignore anything --plot, for example-- which might get in the way of that goal.
There's some evidence for this interpretation which survives even in the script; the famous exchange where Penguin contemptuously tells Batman ”You're just jealous because I'm a genuine freak and you have to wear a mask!” to which Batman sadly assents; Alfred pointedly asking Bruce "Must you be the only lonely man-beast in town?”; Selina Kyle's lament that "It's the so-called 'normal' guys who always let you down. Sickos never scare me. Least they're committed." But that's honestly about it for textual evidence; most of the rest of the dialogue is devoted to weirdly sexual quipping or "plot" mechanics. It’s weird, in a way, that a movie could get a point across so strongly despite the fact that it occurs almost nowhere in the script or story. But the sentiment comes through loud and clear in the direction, particularly its almost fetishis --did I say "almost"?-- its blatantly fetishistic interest in its deviant, not-all-there protagonists, namely Penguin and Catwoman. And lest you wonder if I mistakenly left somebody out, I want to point out that in the original Daniel Waters script, the word "Penguin" appears 465 times, as opposed to a mere 342 for "Batman," including the title.**
So it is our villains, then, who will be the focus of the movie, to the point that it's dubious to even call them villains at all. Despite how overwhelmingly repellent he is, the movie is weirdly sympathetic towards Penguin, an outcast from his very birth --where the movie begins, as perhaps the only film in history to begin with the birth of its apparent antagonist-- who longs, it seems, in equal measure, for both acceptance by a society which shunned him and for violent revenge against them. And it's even more sympathetic to Catwoman, a put-upon wallflower*** who finally just snaps and starts lashing out at the world, which the movie clearly posits as an empowerment fantasy. Whether or not the movie validates their behavior, it at least understands, and is much more interested in understanding than judging. Whatever the script may say about them (and it’s too all-over-the-place to really say anything specific), Burton as director hones in on their pain and their feelings of persecution and rejection in a way that feels deeply personal. The 90's was the decade for wallowing in self-pity and feeling like an unfairly ignored misfit, and certainly no director seems to have more fully embraced that zeitgeist than Burton, who was at the time--and it's hard to remember this now that he’s spent the better part of the last two decades becoming a garish parody of himself—considered a genuinely subversive and eccentric auteur, the cinematic patron saint of macabre weirdos. EDWARD SCISSOR-HANDS is more concentrated in its fixation on outsider-dom at the hands of suffocating bourgeois normalcy, and ED WOOD is a better parable of a misunderstood artist, but BATMAN RETURNS is, without question, the pinnacle of Burton's fixation on --and, of course, fetishization of-- social deviance as empowerment.
Burton is even less interested in punching than he is in Batman, so that empowerment is not manifested in grandiose action, but in sexual capital. The movie is overtly, startlingly sexual; not just surprising for a PG-13 movie about a comic book character, but for a Burton movie in general. Burton is almost categorically an unsexy director. I don’t think I can even name another director anywhere near his level of success and ubiquity who has left behind such a thoroughly sexless body of work; even the fetish-y Ed Wood or the heaving bosoms in SLEEPY HOLLOW or PLANET OF THE APES**** play out with an almost naïve, childlike lack of kink. But here, the movie's erotic fixation on Catwoman is almost uncomfortable in its intensity. I'm not sure Penguin says a single thing to her that isn't overtly sexual, and while Batman/Bruce Wayne's interest in her is (a little) more refined, the entirety of their relationship is about their desire for each other. Curiously, the costumed thing comes between them, rather than bringing them together, and I think I know why: Catwoman is, like Penguin, a "genuine freak" (she may, in fact, be some kind of zombie?), uninhibited both in and out of costume. But Batman is still in the closet; he's not ready to give up on being respectable, dorky Bruce Wayne and admit that he's a full-fledged freak. For all his money and cool cars and stuff, his hesitation to commit to either lifestyle is isolating him; his relationship with last movie’s love interest, we are told, couldn't survive his being Batman, and now his relationship with kooky dominatrix Catwoman can't survive his being tethered to Bruce Wayne. He's not a normie, but he's not quite a fully committed freak, either. He lacks the courage to embrace who he really is, and consequently is never 100% present in his own story. No wonder Burton so openly doesn't care about him.
Of course, this sort of defeats the purpose of making a movie ostensibly about, you know, Batman. Batman is fundamentally a juvenile macho power fantasy –just look at the fevered testosterone-driven nightmare by Frank Miller from which BATMAN RETURNS almost certainly derives its name--, and if you don’t find Batman’s butch fascism appealing, or find Bruce Wayne very interesting, there’s simply just not much for the character to do. I hear this has more action than the 1989 BATMAN, which is frankly kind of mind-boggling; there are maybe a handful of halfhearted action beats in here, but Batman barely has anything to do because there isn’t really much to do. Penguin is sort of the villain, but his evil plan is barely hinted at until the last 20 minutes of the movie, and Batman foils it with some weird abstract anti-cinematic computer program that mostly happens off-screen. Catwoman doesn’t have any kind of arc at all, and in fact her storyline barely even involves Batman and gets resolved without even a glancing intervention on his part. There’s barely any conflict here, and most of the movie finds its characters idling around (in one case, literally; it’s pretty funny to see the Batmobile just cruising around the city under the speed limit) without any clear long-term objective or any reason to get involved in each others’ lives. In fact, a huge chunk of the movie, probably pound for pound the most screentime of any of its six or seven plots, is spent on the political machinations of Penguin and greedy capitalist Max Shreck (Christopher Walken), a very, very weird and self-defeating decision for a movie which claims to be about an action hero, but an equally self-defeating one for a movie which stubbornly insists on itself as a fairy tale (more on that later).
This weird diversion into politics, and really the character of Shreck himself, is the apotheosis of the film’s wildly divergent, contradictory impulses. Shreck’s role here is obvious; he’s the one character who’s not a freak, and consequently the one Burton feels most comfortable identifying as a clear villain. He is venal and debased in strictly normal, aggressively mundane ways (his evil plan, barely even mentioned, is, I guess, to secure city permission to build some kind of energy-stealing power plant?). He represents the oppressive, stagnant forces of straight society, comfortably asserting himself around mayors and rich, well-connected socialites in a way that Penguin and Catwoman could never dream of, and Bruce Wayne has little interest in. Unfortunately, this means that he must serve as antagonist for all three of our freaks, making him the only person in the movie who seems in any way active or meaningfully consequential to conflict of any kind. He’s the character who’s designed to be a dull foil for our colorful heroes, and yet he’s the one who motivates virtually every single bit of action.
And this is made even worse because he’s played by Christopher Walken, by far the most “genuine freak” anywhere around, who undermines the character’s bourgeois venality by playing him as a total fucking weirdo (kudos to Andrew Bryniarski, who plays his son Chip with a committed and pretty hilarious Walken impersonation). As with most of the movie, including its inexplicable political interlude, there are good ideas here; framing the movie as outcasts vs establishment is a solid idea, and putting Christopher Walken in there is always a good bet to make things more entertaining. Unfortunately, these are two ideas which not only don’t work together, they actively cancel each other out. Either Shreck is a despicable stuffed shirt or an entertaining weirdo; he cannot be both, and the movie posits that he must be for it to work. It does not work.
Much of the movie, then, cancels itself out; it's an action premise without almost any significant action, it’s a movie about fetishy outcasts which never actually gets around to examining what that might mean, it’s a Batman movie which is mostly uninterested in Batman, it’s unbearably plotty without ever actually establishing a plot. That leaves the content almost a complete wash.
Fortunately, in swoops the style to save the day! While Burton was neglecting the plot, it seems, he was not idle; instead, he was constructing gigantic art deco dreamscapes full of towering statuary, neon kitsch, and gothic menace, a world so potently evocative that, especially when draped in Danny Elfman’s iconic, career-defining score, it actually manages to conjure meaning and purpose to a movie which otherwise has none. It’s pure alchemy, but it’s there. The script may disagree, the title might disagree, but the style informs us decisively and with a focused confidence otherwise completely absent from the movie: this is a macabre fairy tale, a tragedy in the original sense of the word, about people The Fates have plucked from obscurity for an arbitrary, cruel odyssey through life. From the film’s mythic opening to its melancholy final shot, Burton tells us through pure cinema what he cannot through narrative cinema: it’s lonely out there for a freak. That is the pervading sense one gets from BATMAN RETURNS; one of timeless, lugubrious hopelessness, of disconnection and desperation and frustration, about sad people groping out –or lashing out—to find each other, and failing. Even if Batman foils the Penguin’s evil plot, this is a movie about failure, about not getting the girl, about not getting the job, about being too broken to transcend your pain, about searching for a place that doesn’t exist in a society that doesn’t want you, only to find yourself right back where you started after the dust settles.
It is a strange thing to find at the heart of a movie with BATMAN in its title, but it’s equally indisputable and unmissable; it is the movie; everything else is just window dressing. I cannot in good conscience call BATMAN RETURNS a good movie, but I also can’t deny that if all that window dressing is messy and incoherent, the movie’s heart and soul are as vivid and affecting as any movie ever made. It’s a masterpiece hidden inside a corporate junkheap, its greatness nearly always obscured, but always palpably near, a diffuse warm glow behind a frost-covered window pane. I’ve never been sure how much of a “genuine freak” Burton actually is, but there’s a howl of lonesome despair in BATMAN RETURNS which is as genuine as anything as you’ll find in mainstream cinema. It’s an inarticulate howl, but it echos back to us throughout the entire film, giving definition to the dark spaces in-between the silly plot where our eyes can’t quite reach. It allows us to plunge on into that darkness with this reverberating echo as a guide.
Like a bat.
Speaking
of which, what’s up with casting Michael Keaton as Batman, it really
doesn’t make any you know what, this review is running kinda long
actually let’s just end it there.
*Strictly
speaking, The 1978 SUPERMAN and its three sequels and one spinoff
probably ought to be considered the genesis of the modern comic book
franchise, but for reasons we could reasonably debate, the consensus
seems to be against that reading.
** Including "Bruce Wayne" pushes the character to a narrow lead, but still.
*** Read: "That unbelievably gorgeous supermodel has glasses"
**** Estella Warren, not the Apes.
