‘Batman Returns’ returns

Mistletoe can be deadly if you eat it. A kiss can be even deadlier if you mean it.

Batman Returns (1992)

Elevator Pitch

Ruthless millionaire Max Shreck (Christopher Walken) has plans for Gotham City. He aims to oust the mayor with his own candidate: celebrity orphan Oswald Cobblepot (Danny DeVito), otherwise known as The Penguin. And when his secretary, Selina Kyle (Michelle Pfeiffer) finds out just what his plans are, he pushes her out of a window. But all is not plain sailing: The Penguin has plans of his own; the fall turns Selina into a vengeful Catwoman and there’s one more fly in the ointment. Well, a bat in the ointment really. A Batman to be precise (Michael Keaton).

After his Batman (1989) was a massive hit, director Tim Burton was able to get far more creative control for the sequel. One thing he insisted on, was filming in the States instead of Pinewood in England. He felt that filming the original there meant that it “suffered from a British subtext”.

This is ironic, to say the least. There is a lot of ‘British subtext’ in Batman Returns. The title of the film suggests the influence of American Frank Miller’s 1986 smash hit graphic novel The Dark Knight Returns, in which an aged Batman comes out of retirement to hit kids, sneer at Superman and blow up the Joker. Miller’s book was one of first mainstream, ‘adult’ graphic novels and had a huge influence not just on Batman or superheroes but on comics as a medium.

It certainly had a huge influence on Burton and informed the first Batman (1989) film, giving it that ‘grim n’ gritty’ tone that so shocked viewers who only knew Batman from the ‘60s Adam West TV show and the toy aisle.

But not that grim n’ gritty, let's be honest. Certainly not compared to Miller’s comic, which while being an absolute tour-de-force of visual storytelling, is extraordinarily hard-boiled and po-faced. Burton’s movie is none of those things, embracing the fundamental silliness of Batman and his world as much as it does its fundamental coolness.

What Batman Returns is more like is British writer Alan Moore’s 1988 Batman story Killing Joke. Moore had been the first up the beach in the great British invasion of American comics of the ‘80s. Writers like Moore, Neil Gaiman, Warren Ellis, Garth Ennis and Grant Morrison, along with artists like Brian Bolland, Dave Gibbons, Kevin O’Neill and Alan Davis had a massive impact on mainstream American superhero comics, infusing them with the punk sensibility of British anthology comic 2000AD and a more self-aware, archly literary, European approach to making comics.

Alan Moore is a talented and intelligent writer, so much so that he now regrets Killing Joke: “I think it put far too much melodramatic weight upon a character that was never designed to carry it. It was too nasty.” Nevertheless, it still does an excellent job of balancing the four-colour gothic of Batman with some genuine characterisation and psychological insight.

Plus it has an abandoned funfair and evil clowns, as every Batman story should have.

Batman Returns certainly does. The Penguin’s base is in a deserted zoo and his sidekicks are The Circus Gang, all machine-gunning acrobats and evil monkeys. It also occupies precisely the same space as Killing Joke, taking something silly seriously enough to pull at its hidden themes, while still delighting in its silliness.

There’s still a ‘British subtext’ to this Batman, an approach that undercuts the usual overwhelming, primary colour exuberance of the American superhero.

---

---

Delights

Like many superhero films that followed it, there are a lot of characters in Batman Returns, but the excellent performances mean that there are never too many. It's hardly a surprise to have Christopher Walken go big and weird, but both Danny DeVito and Michelle Pfeiffer know exactly what kind of film they’re in, taking precisely judged little bites of the scenery even as they temper their performances with subtle touches.

Keaton, on the other hand, is reined back: Batman is the still, enigmatic centre of the film, but he justifies Burton’s casting, of which so many were sceptical. His mobile and expressive face is put to great use behind Batman’s rubber mask.

Then there’s Danny Elfman’s music, featuring his Batman theme, which is up there with the best of John Williams as a leitmotif which becomes a starring character in its own right.

The real star, though, is designer Bo Welch’s Gotham City, an absolute masterpiece of quasi-gothic, fascist-inflected art deco. Welch took Anton Furst’s magnificent Gotham from the first film and developed it further, making it even more looming, dilapidated and monstrous.

The weird design approach that Burton adopted for his Batman films, an mutation of Gilliam’s ‘80s update of post-WWII Britain in Brazil (1985) (more ‘British subtext’), a world in which everyone dresses like it's the ‘40s but behaves like it's the ‘90s, allows a huge amount of leeway in production design, a gleeful mixing and matching of trends and signifiers that captures the exuberant inventiveness of the best comics artists.

Discomforts

Of course, what all this means is that Batman Returns is not like most superhero movies, certainly not like the twenty-first century Marvel Cinematic Universe. Burton hired Daniel Waters, the writer of Heathers (1988), a sardonic parody of teen movies, to write the script because Waters knew nothing about superheroes, and it shows. Instead of getting caught up in all the ludicrous lore, he simply tries to write them as characters. Silly characters doing silly things, naturally, but characters rather than plot tokens nonetheless. This gives the movie a distinct tone among superhero films.

And then there’s Burton’s own distinct tone. That little explosion of superhero films of the ‘90s, which followed the success of Burton’s Batman, Dick Tracy (1990), The Rocketeer (1991), The Shadow (1994), The Phantom (1996), for instance, are all highly camp, guiltily aware of their status as overblown kid’s films. None of them are taking their subject matter quite as seriously as Iron Man (2008) or Captain America: The Winter Soldier (2014), say.

Moreover, Burton’s camp is of a very specific kind. It is goth, and a specific kind of goth, to boot. The surprising thing about Siouxsie and the Banshees appearing on the soundtrack in the climatic party scene is that it's not The Cure. This is a self-aware, self-indulgent stripey goth, cosily dark and archly grim. A subculture of a subculture.

It is perhaps not surprising, then, that Batman Returns did not do as well as its predecessor. This was too dark and too weird for most people’s comfort.

Can we show the kids?

It was also too sexy for most people’s comfort.

As R S Benedict has pointed out, the aesthetic of the Marvel Universe is that ‘Everyone is beautiful and no one is horny’. It is all impossible plastic bodies with molded underwear being fruitlessly smashed against each other like action figures. There is chaste, awkward schoolyard romance but no sex.

In Batman Returns a woman dressed in skin-tight latex licks the face of a man trapped in a rubber corset and then stabs him with her metal fingernails. Batman and Catwoman cannot leave each other alone, while The Penguin stews in a sweaty welter of double entendres and inappropriate behaviour. The film is very aware indeed what all this dressing up and going out at night to grapple with strangers is about.

This made the movie too adult to be a kids film, while being too childish to be an adult film. It also made it tricky to sell toys.

---

---

Is it as good as you remember?

Yes. But that’s only because I remember it pretty well, as I watch it more or less once a year.

Here’s where I have to admit that I’m a Batman fan. I may have political problems with the conservative assumption that all cities are dystopian wastelands, full of freaks and ne’er-do-wells, and that the best thing that a billionaire can do to solve urban problems is put on a rubber suit and beat up the mentally ill, but come on. Let’s face it. Batman is cool.

He’s got a big cape and big cave. He’s got all the marvellous toys and the best rogue’s gallery in comics. He’s the World’s Greatest Detective and he can also go BIFF and POW. He is the night. He is the Batman. He is cool.

Part of what makes Batman cool is that he doesn’t belong. Like the plot of a Batman comic, he is lost in time. He was created by Bob Kane and Jerry Robinson in the late ‘30s to capitalise on the popularity of Superman. Superman was a new kind of character, a superhero, but they made Batman out of bits of older, existing heroes, out of two fisted adventurers and puzzle-solving detectives. He is a creation of ‘30s pulp, a companion to The Shadow or Dick Tracy, a character from the world of wartime noir, of gangsters and corrupt political bosses and mad professors, of goons and flatfeet, of shadows and darkness.

These origins give Batman a deeply weird affect and Burton picks up on it. The movie has all the lurid horror of Jerry Robinson’s 40s strips and its Gotham is the vertiginous playground of Dick Sprang, the artist who drew a lot of Batman and Robin comics in the ‘50s, full of giant typewriters and jungle-gym roof-scapes. Most Batman movies since take place at street level, are full of car chases, but this movie understands that the city is to Batman what the jungle is to Tarzan. It takes place in a parallel, hidden world of sewers and rooftops, of gargoyles and balconies and crenellations.

It is, in my opinion, the best Batman movie ever made (the best Batman adaptation is, of course, Batman: The Animated Series (1992), as everyone knows). Burton perfectly captures the hallucinatory, fevered quality of the best superhero comics, the running wild of the imagination, the roiling of the unconscious. The movie both embraces the high camp and pulls to the fore the themes that run underneath it, the sex and politics and psychology.

For example, both villains in the movie are alternate, warped Batmen. They are also both versions of Donald Trump, to some degree, but that’s another story. Walken’s angrily greedy millionaire Max Shreck is what trust fund baby Bruce Wayne would be if he was just an ordinary rich guy, while The Penguin, tortured by other people’s perception of him, is what Batman would be if he was an ordinary monster.

What the film champions is how Batman and Catwoman embrace their inner monstrousness. They are weirdos, and by being weirdos, they are able to find a peace that, unexpressed, would make them into monsters like Shreck or The Penguin. It’s a film almost purposefully made to help goths feel good about themselves. No wonder I love it.

That, and the reason I watch it every year: it's a Christmas movie, an unashamed one, full of Christmas trees and presents and log fires and snow. Like Burton’s other seasonal movies of the period Edward Scissorhands (1990) and Nightmare Before Christmas (1993), it is the perfect goth Christmas.

As Bruce Wayne says at the end:

Merry Christmas, Alfred, and goodwill toward men. And women.

---

For more Christmas movies, there’s our piece on how they’re all about Dad: