Batman (1989)
Dir. Tim Burton
Written by Sam Hamm and Warren
Skaaren
Starring Jack Nicholson, Kim
Basinger, Michael Keaton
A lot of guys I know associate
action movies with their dads, have fond memories of paternal male bonding through
the storied medium of tough guy movies from the 1980s and early 90s. There are
men who have a sentimental fondness for Steven Seagal or Bruce Willis to this
very day, because they associate them so strongly with their own fathers, many
of whom are now gone. Well, my old man was (and remains!) a great guy, but he wasn’t really
into movies; the only thing I ever distinctly remember him showing me was
RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK, and that only because he tried it when I was way too
young, completely traumatizing me pretty much from the get-go. I have only
myself to blame for the cinephilia which has so thoroughly crippled me socially
and emotionally during my adult life. Nobody pushed me. I just fell into it.
And yet, I do have one other
youthful memory of an adult showing me a movie: Sometime around 1990 or 1991,
my Uncle Richard showed me BATMAN.
I was, in fact, meeting
Richard for the first time. He was a recent addition to my family, having
married my Aunt Anne a few years earlier, and my immediate impression upon
meeting him –the same impression he made on nearly everyone, I later
learned—was one of tremendous energy and intense focus. He was a smallish man
in statue, with a thick, dark beard and lively dark eyes that felt like they
could melt steel when they alighted on something. The only child of Jewish
parents, he was used to being the center of attention, and seemed to revel in
holding court with a genial grace that sprang not from ego, but from a love of
life so confident and overwhelming that it simply had to be shared. He juggled
–what little kid could resist such a man?--, and vigorously attempted, without
success, to teach me the skill; he waxed philosophic on politics. And he asked
me if I had seen BATMAN.
I had not. I had something of a solitary childhood, with few friends and even
fewer sources of access to pop culture; the TV in our house only got a few
channels, and was seldom on. The Batmania that had swept America upon the
film’s theatrical released had entirely passed me by, unnoticed. I knew who
Batman was, of course, but in the same way that I knew who Shakespeare or
Robinson Crusoe was, as a mythic culture figure with whom I personally had
almost no direct experience. So that stark gold-on-black logo on the VHS box
(it was the first-ever Hollywood movie to premiere “priced-to-own” on VHS a
mere six months after the film’s release!) was as mysterious and portentous to
me as the Sphinx. Richard was incensed; “it’s really cool!” he said, casting a
reproachful look at my parents for neglecting his nephew in this shockingly
negligent manner, and I believed him utterly and without reservation. Richard
was into technology; his television seemed huge and futuristic, and he
approached setting it up properly for this showing the same way he approached
everything in his life: with a direct, all-consuming gusto that said louder
than any words ever could that if we’re going to do this, we’re going
to do it right.
Revisiting
the movie now, many years later –my sister wasn’t born when I first saw
it, and she’s a married adult with a doctorate today—I was impressed by how
much I remembered, which is all the evidence I could ever require that there’s
something special here. But it’s a much stranger artistic object to experience
with several more decades of American culture under my belt, a curious time
capsule from a distant history where it was by no means clear that
audiences would accept, or perhaps even understand, a superhero film.
It is a movie which more or less takes for granted that audiences recognize the
character of Batman and know what his deal is –and if even I knew
in 1990, I think that was a reasonably safe assumption—but doesn’t preoccupy
itself by trying to anticipate what the audience is expecting from a
Batman film. Because, after all, people weren’t really expecting anything
specific. Other than the 1978 SUPERMAN a decade earlier, nobody had ever tried
making a serious comic book film; even SUPERMAN’s sequels had quickly devolved
into campy, kiddie matinees, ending with the ignominy of SUPERMAN IV: THE QUEST
FOR PEACE just two years before a young, unusual filmmaker (boasting just two
finished films on his resume, one a TV adaptation and the other a weird,
grotesque comedy) showed up with a very different approach to comic-book cinema
in mind. If there was any template to work from, it was only the even-campier
1966 Batman TV series starring Adam West (or, I guess, the Batman serials from
the 1940s, if you want to get real technical about it) and everyone seemed to
be in agreement up front that it should definitely be not-that.
This was to be a serious movie,
then; not exactly a movie for adults, but certainly not a kid’s film. Something
dignified, something crafted with a certain amount of ambition and maturity,
though also not with so much dignity, ambition and maturity
that there couldn’t be a Burger King merchandising tie-in. A movie for the
masses, something with board demographic appeal, real bread and circuses stuff.
Crucially, a movie for the people, not for the fans; nobody
involved in the production seems to have fretted too much over appeasing
diehard devotees of the character. Comic books nerds were still considered a
fringe demographic of stunted adolescents, barely worthy of attention and
certainly not in their wildest dreams worth pandering to. The inmates were not
yet in charge of the asylum; the internet had not yet allowed them to organize
and form a powerful economic block, although it must be said, they themselves
were still as virulently invested in controlling the process as they have
subsequently shown themselves – even without the internet to assist in
organizing, over 50,000 letters from Batman fans poured into the studio to
protest the casting of Michal Keaton (MR. MOM), who was generally considered
too much of a comic actor for the role. The difference between then and now,
however, was that the studio felt perfectly comfortable ignoring them and not
pandering to their outraged fury, despite the fact that it was the shifting
preferences of these very fans which in some ways made a Tim Burton BATMAN film
possible.
After all, comic books had
abandoned their campy origins for more self-conscious grown-up fare fairly
recently; Frank Miller’s over-the-top THE DARK KNIGHT RETURNS had pushed Batman to
edgier new places in 1986, and Alan Moore’s nihilistic THE KILLING JOKE had hit
stands just a month before Burton’s film was officially greenlit. Combine that
atmosphere with a then-edgy young director with a reputation for the macabre,
and it’s tempting --particularly when viewed in retrospect through the lens of
Nolan’s ultra-serious trilogy-- to consider BATMAN a film defined by its
boundary-pushing darkness. And it would indeed be foolhardy to ignore it,
because that’s definitely what struck people at the time (sensitive ol’ Roger
Ebert, even while praising the movie’s design, called it a “hostile,
mean-spirited movie about ugly, evil people”). Still, watching it today, the
thing that stands out is not so much the gothic darkness (which is expected,
and perhaps even a bit of a bore after almost 30 years of increasingly insipid
“adult” posturing in comic books) but how little removed from the camp of 1966
it actually is. The “darkness” is primarily the effect of the portentously
gloomy production design and the ominous, magnificent score by Danny Elfman
(which, to be fair, are probably the two most impactful and defining factors of
the whole film), but when you get down to the plot and structure, we find
something not really so very different from its pulpy roots.
Indeed, if we look at the
script in the abstract, it’s not like we find some kind of moody psychological
exploration of Nietzschean modes of identity. We find quintessential comic book
stuff: colorful villains, silly convoluted plots, stock characters, and
childish fantasies about fast cars and caped crusaders. You could have used
this script, almost completely unaltered, for an episode of the Batman serial
from 1943 and nobody would have batted (ha!) an eye. There’s really very little
“adult” material in here. Bruce Wayne is definitely DTF, but it’s not a horny
movie (like virtually every Burton film, with the very notable exception of
BATMAN’s immediate sequel, sex is something abstract, a genre trope more than a
compulsion of flesh). Likewise, there’s certainly some deaths, but it’s not a
violent movie; death, like sex, happens bloodlessly and safely off-screen, obliquely implied but tastefully glossed over. When Batman
murders what must be dozens of henchmen by blowing up the building they’re in,
the movie does not encourage us to consider the subject of their charred
remains or, even worse, wonder about possible mutilated survivors dragging
their mangled bodies from the wreckage. Batman vanquishes his opponents and
they simply vanish from his mind and ours. The hero has prevailed, the villains
have been routed, good has triumphed over evil, and the movie sees absolutely
no reason to consider the matter even a little bit further. There is little
evidence that Bruce Wayne is traumatized or mentally unwell, or that his
behavior is aberrant or antisocial; there is little evidence he considers his
dual identity to be a burden or a turn-on or anything else. Indeed, there is
little Bruce Wayne of any kind. The movie is almost aggressively uninterested
in who he is. He is simply Batman. Who would ever bother asking what that
means? Batman is Batman is Batman. You know what his deal is. It’s being
Batman. Batman is nothing so vulgar as a character. Batman is an icon.
Of course, narrative film
tends to be about characters, not icons, and the result of Burton’s obvious
disinterest in the former is something rather weird: a movie called BATMAN
which is only intermittently and reluctantly about Batman, and then only to the
extent it functionally has to be. Burton loves the image of Batman; loves to
see him in contour, to have him drop down from above with his wings cutting a
gorgeous geometric silhouette against the backlit street, loves to watch his
eyes gleam out of the darkness of his exaggerated tombstone profile. But beyond that he
has manifestly little interest in the macho, repressed power fantasy which is
arguably at the heart of what Batman is. In his own words: “I was never a giant
comic book fan, but I've always loved the image of Batman and the Joker. The
reason I've never been a comic book fan … is because I could never tell which
box I was supposed to read. I don't know if it was dyslexia or whatever, but
that's why I loved The Killing Joke, because for the first time I could tell
which one to read” (Tim Burton, Burton on Burton: Revised Edition (London:
Faber and Faber, 2006) 71.) In other words, the first Batman comic Burton ever
loved came out literally one month before he was greenlit to start shooting
this movie… and the thing he liked about it was the intuitive layout. Not a
word about the content, even with that books’ shocking, provocative storyline.
He loved the “image of Batman and the Joker,” but their story is clearly not
something that resonated with him. Burton was never a kid who fantasized about
punching gangsters or driving fast cars; if he had any connection to the
characters at all, it’s in their shared love of an eccentric black aesthetic
and swishing around dramatically in capes. But that leaves the inevitability of
Batman being an action hero something which openly bores the director, and
something he engages with only when he’s given absolutely no choice (and even
when he’s forced to, he does a pretty middling job of it… the big climax is
mainly defined by Batman furtively running up a seemingly endless flight of
stairs. Probably didn’t even need a stuntman).
Instead, he refocuses the
movie by skirting around Batman, centering the narrative on two other
characters. One is The Joker (Jack Nicholson, THE TERROR) whose theatrical
style and delight in anarchic rule-breaking is clearly more fun and appealing
to Burton, and who dominates the movie to a far greater extent than Batman. The
other is Vicky Vale (--you know, from the Prince song!—Kim Basinger, COOL WORLD)
a plucky photographer whose determination to photograph Batman allows Burton to
frame the movie in a way that bests suits his interests: with its ostensible
central character as a figure of mystery, compelling and unknowable. It puts us
outside Batman, looking in, all the better to perceive him as a larger-than-life
figure. An image, not a character.
Putting it in black and white
like that, it sounds like an insane approach to a movie like this. A comic book
movie with almost no action, that tries as hard as it can to keep its title
character removed from the audience? Lunacy! And yet, watching it all those
years ago as a little kid with his cool new uncle, that never occurred to me. Maybe
it’s because, like Burton, I wasn’t a fan of the comics, didn’t have any
attachment to the formula. Maybe it’s because unlike many comics fans, the basic
premise of Batman as a fascist power fantasy doesn’t have a tremendous amount
of appeal to me, and I don’t miss it when it’s shifted to the deep background.
But I’m most inclined to think that Burton is just essentially correct: none of
that stuff is really important. Comic books are only superficially an action
genre, and their staying power and broad appeal suggest there’s something more
powerful here than just macho wish-fulfillment. The content itself is barely
even important; it’s the aesthetic that matters. The medium is the message. Batman
is bigger than content. It’s about a vibe. As my reviewing hero Vern put it, “Tim
Burton’s BATMAN is a movie about a feeling – a feeling called Batman.” Not
about acting like Batman, not about being Batman, or watching him, or learning
about him. About feeling Batman.
That feeling isn’t about a
person, it’s not about a specific goal, it’s not about politics or even spirit-crushing,
overcompensating male insecurity. It’s about the towering, tombstone art deco
skyscrapers with their severe, unearthly statuary. It’s about the lurking, low
rumble of the score, which feels like it scrambles up from some unfathomable
depth and claws its way to the sky with just enough strength left to resolve
into that lonesome, mournful theme. Like Burton’s evocation of Gotham city
itself –with its ragged modernity squatting atop the sepulchral ruins of an alien
vision of savagely inhuman modernist majesty—it feels not just ancient, but out
of time, a half-remembered vision from a dream of the elder gods. That
is the Batman feeling, that is the elusive core that has allowed a very stupid
concept for children to somehow twist and evolve itself over the course of what
is now 82 years. That is what could make someone’s cool uncle confidently
assert that BATMAN is really cool, an appraisement that to this day I certainly
couldn’t dispute. And it’s the thing that stuck with me all these years. It is
not, truth be told, a movie with a tremendous amount of incident, especially by
modern comic book standards. But that cool sticks with you.
Batman has stuck around too,
of course; Burton would push even further into aestheticized dreamland with
BATMAN RETURNS, and Joel Schumacher would exaggerate it into feverish camp with
a soft underbelly of crass corporate commercialism with his two sequels, finally
crushing the series under its own weight and allowing Christopher Nolan to
start fresh with his gritty, self-serious trilogy in the ‘aughts. And then of
course there was the steroid-sweaty, abortive Synderverse run, with Affleck
playing the character, and now there’s a new reboot on the horizon as well. But
while all of those have their merits, there’s something to be said for Burton’s
ability to –or maybe just inability to do anything else but—strip the character
down to the pure mythical core and let that Batman Feeling speak for itself.
Other directors have had varying success doing other things with him, but in
some ways, there’s a pureness of vision right here, at the very beginning of
things, which has somehow been lost along the way. The Nolan films, for
instance, are fun, but almost in spite of starring Batman; you get the
sense that the director might have been just as happy making films about a rich
playboy detective who didn’t have the embarrassingly pulpy habit of
dressing like a bat. BATMAN (1989) could never be about anything but a
caped crusader – it wouldn’t be anything, would have no reason to exist
at all without that distinct silhouette with the bat ears, without the sleek
lines of the rocket car, the grotesque Conrad-Veidt-inspired Joker’s visage.
It’s not always a real exciting watch, but there’s always something
magnetically compelling about it. I felt it back then as a kid, full of wonder
and amazement at this strange thing unlike anything else I’d ever seen before.
And I feel it even now, all these years later, though maybe with an adult’s
sense of amused distance from it.
That’s no small feat, because
those two viewings are separated by a lot of years. I’m an adult now – not even
a young adult, but sinking ever closer to middle age. Uncle Richard is gone,
died a year ago of complications from a stroke. When I was briefly in his house
after the funeral, I made a point to look for a BATMAN Blu-Ray by the TV, but I
didn’t see one. I never got to watch another Batman movie with him, never even
got to ask him what he thought of RETURNS, or the Schumacher movies, or
anything that came after. I wondered what he would have thought if I had
told him what an impression that night made on me. Would he even remember? I
wish I had asked, but it never came up, and now it’s too late. Here’s some
advice, kid: when people mean something to you, tell them so. Don’t wait. If
you miss your chance, you’ll never get another one.
Sometimes people are gone
before you’re ready. Life can seem so static sometimes, as one day drifts into
another and everything seems the same. But nothing is permanent, and suddenly
your youth is gone, your loved ones are gone, and you find yourself grasping to
try to hold onto something. Even memories fade, quietly rearrange
themselves. I ask myself – wait, did Richard show us the juggling tricks the same
night that we watched BATMAN? Or am I confusing two different visits? I
can’t be sure. The past recedes like a heavy fog, shaping the world we imagine
but retreating as we try to approach it. But life moves on. There’s always a
new Batman on the horizon. Maybe that’s why we can’t bring ourselves to let him
go – maybe by holding onto Batman, we’re trying to hold onto our cool uncle, or
our older brother, or long-gone childhood friend, or just our childhood selves,
back when we were earnest enough to simply bask in that Batman Feeling without
all the emotional clutter of complicated adulthood dulling its potency. As always,
we take the wrong message from things, end up thinking it’s Batman himself that we care about, let some goofball like Christopher Nolan try and tell us it’s a
psychologically rich concept, let some stunted fascist like Frank Miller tell
us it’s gritty and dangerous. But Burton knows –or at least, knew then—that’s
it’s both simpler and deeper than that. Batman is about being a kid, swooshing
around in a cape and feeling mysterious and elemental, about allowing yourself
to be swept up in that feeling, and maybe even sharing it with someone else who
really needs it. In that sense, although Burton would best capture the Batman
Feeling on the screen, it would be Schumacher who had the final word: Batman
is, indeed, forever.
For Uncle Richard and Uncle David, my cool uncles.
APPENDIX A: Various Batmans or Batmen
BATMAN BEGINS (2005)
THE DARK KNIGHT (2008)
BATMAN VS SUPERMAN (2016)
JUSTICE LEAGUE (2017 / 2021)
THE BATMAN (2022)
