2018: A Batshit Odyssey continues!
Batman (dir. Tim Burton)
What might be considered the first major cinematic outing for the caped crusader finds Michael Keaton behind the mask, and Tim Burton at the helm, both of whom had worked together the previous year on Beetlejuice. Tim Burton has made some weird movies, and most of them have not been weird in a good way, but there was a period in which he directed a solid stream of good films, and this is one of them. But going in, it's worth accepting that you are going to get more Burton than Batman. Say what you will about Burton, like Christopher Nolan and Zack Snyder after him, he has a particular vision and—whether you think it's absolute pants or not—the sense of “auteurism” is strong in his take on Batman.
The film opens with the wonderful Danny Elfman theme, which I would characterise as “neo-Wagnerian”. Just listen to those opening harmonies and that orchestration, they could have been lifted straight out of Der Ring des Nibelungen. As they play on, dark textures and shadows unfurl across the screen to slowly reveal the Batman symbol. If there's a better opening sequence to a Batman film, well buddy, I ain't seen it. It perfectly prefaces the look, style, and mood of the film, highlighting the Gothic and expressionist sensibilities of Burton's early work. Gotham City is presented as a rich amalgamation of Gothic and art deco architecture shot through with preternatural spiderwork of industrial pipes and catwalks—New York City as a cartoon labyrinth.
The story is fairly straightforward. Jack Napier is an unhinged gangster who is having a secret affair with his boss Carl Grissom's daughter. It turns out to be not so secret, and for a multitude of obvious reasons Grissom plots to have Napier's next job, clearing incriminating documents out of the Axis chemical plant, go horribly wrong, using Lieutenant Eckhardt, his inside man on the police force, to coordinate a raid on the plant with orders to shoot to kill. Commissioner Gordon is tipped-off about this at a party at Bruce Wayne's mansion, and Bruce uses his surveillance system to eavesdrop on the conversation. As Batman, he takes off to face down Napier, who, during a shoot-out sequence—with hints of The Third Man—at the chemical plant, falls into a vat of chemicals, apparently dying. In fact, he survived the submersion but has been permanently disfigured and driven insane. With his faced fixed permanently into a grin by severe facial nerve damage, he becomes the Joker. When he kills Grissom and takes over his criminal empire, Joker positions himself to take on Batman, who has attained a status of myth both in the criminal underworld and in the mainstream media. Meanwhile, Bruce Wayne becomes romantically involved with Vicki Vale, a photographer who has come to Gotham City to try and catch Batman on film, and must wrestle with keeping his dual identities separate, especially when Joker himself begins to develop a perverse interest in Vale.
Michael Keaton is not a square-jawed, buff dude, so his casting might seem a little odd in comparison both to the typical depiction of Bruce Wayne in the comics and what we've come to except from Hollywood action movie stars. Keaton plays Wayne as an unassuming, charming, and witty eccentric, his lack of imposing stature and physique makes it that much easier to believe his secret identity is secure, because Batman's sculpted body armour makes him look much bigger. Even so, when as Batman he must rescue Vicki Vale from the Joker he is careful not to have her see him too close in good lighting. The identity issue is one he goes back and forth on as he gets closer to Vale, and while he thinks hard over the question of whether or not to tell her it is actually revealed to her quite unceremoniously, as Alfred allows her into the Batcave. It can be assumed that Bruce wanted this, or gave up and realised that it would be better to show her than tell her who he was, since his reaction is completely without surprise or worry when she arrives.
The film features an extremely theatrical Batman. He does a lot of impractical things for dramatic effect, for image's sake, to lend himself a kind of supernatural mystique. Compared with later more “realistic” interpretations, it is pretty far out there in terms of how he acts and how people react to him. It's very stage-y, and your willingness and ability to accept that realism is not what Burton is interested in will probably impact heavily on your overall feelings about the film. This is not super-genius ninja Batman who takes out a whole room full of thugs without them even seeing him. In some ways he's more like Marvel's “anti-Batman” Moon Knight, who makes sure the bad guys see him coming and who will gladly withstand being beaten half to death if it gets the job done. In a time before superhero films and TV shows started to get gritty, the hits Batman takes are fairly soft, and there isn't much blood in the film, but he does find himself on a couple of occasions in real struggles with Joker's henchmen. I think this works here mainly because Keaton is not a big beefy dude, he's an average-sized dude, and he uses his gadgets and his wits to get the upper hand on opponents who are often physically stronger than he is. This Batman, to the consternation of a good many comic book fans, also appears to kill several people, although many times he ties people up or knocks them out. For me this is not an issue, but Batman is the quintessential hero in the comic books in that he never kills anyone, he believes in crime and punishment, and in redemption and rehabilitation. This Batman is less moral, it could be said, which might reflect on the darker portrayals of the character in comic books around the time the film was produced.
Opposite Keaton, Jack Nicholson is cast as the Joker. I almost don't want to talk about it, because it is such a classic, ubiquitous performance, and the one to which I gravitated the most as a child. I was a '90s kid, and I loved Batman. Batman: The Animated Series, the two Burton films, the '60s Batman show, all were among my favourite things to watch. For me, the Joker is best in motion when played by two people: Jack Nicholson in live action and Mark Hamill in animation. Nicholson's Joker is a mobster, sociopathic, highly intelligent, and completely off-the-rails following his emergence from a vat of deadly chemicals. He delights in theatrics, pranks that result in death and disfigurement, and symbolic displays of power. He revels in the grotesque, and has a perverse aesthetic sensibility in which mutilation and murder are artistic acts. It is an amusing touch, when Joker and his henchmen tear up an art gallery, for him to restrain his right-hand man from defacing a work by Francis Bacon. Nicholson had previously starred in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest and The Shining, both of which saw him play at insanity. For the Joker, we see him combine the two, the pretend craziness of R.P. McMurphy, and the deep-seated homicidal psychopathy of Jack Torrance. Joker likes to play up to his audience whether he is intimidating a single person or luring thousands of people into a nerve gas attack, and he turns on a dime from clown to maniac and back again to terrorise them emotionally as he terrorises them physically. Like the figure of Batman itself, there is something mythic, almost fairytale-like in the way Nicholson carries himself in the film.
While Burton is often quoted as saying that he was never big into comic books, much is made of his endorsement of The Killing Joke, an Alan Moore one-shot that came out the previous year, and whose depiction of Batman and Joker has coloured pretty much everything since. Alan Moore himself, noted curmudgeon who enjoys shitting on mainstream comics whenever he gets the chance, said that it was “far too violent and sexualised a treatment for a simplistic comic book character like Batman and a regrettable misstep on my part”. But Moore's insistence that Batman just doesn't have the complexity as a character to handle that kind of material has fallen on deaf ears, generally speaking. In any case, for all that Burton apparently makes of Moore's disowned work, it doesn't actually seem to have imprinted on the film at all. The film has its moments of violence, but sex is pretty much out of the picture entirely, we know that Bruce Wayne and Vicki Vale sleep together at some point, but it isn't the point of their relationship, and there is no sex scene. The closest we get to on-screen sex is when, for a few seconds, Vale feigns being won over by the Joker's warped affections in order to distract him while Batman moves in for an attack.
Burton's love of classic horror cinema makes itself felt in several key scenes. When Joker's plastic surgery treatment is concluded and he impatiently tears the bandages from his face to see himself in the mirror, we do not see his face, only his reaction, smashing the mirror and laughing hysterically. This recalls Georges Franju's Eyes Without a Face, but it is also tonally steeped in the dramatic expressionist style of the classic Universal monster movies of the 1930s. And as he leaves cast in shadow up a staircase he briefly reminds the viewer of Nosferatu. Eyes Without a Face is more literally referenced when Joker reveals the face of Grissom's daughter from behind a mask, who has been disfigured with some kind of acid, something that may sit more uncomfortably than ever with today's audiences. Oftentimes Gotham City seems to point in its outsized architecture to the warped cityscapes of The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari. The final confrontation with Joker atop a huge church tower that seems to stretch and shrink as the drama demands lends the impression of a “living city” that twists itself in response to the grandiose characters and their conflict. This again compounds the sense that Burton wants to deliver a mythic Batman, a Gotham where everything is not quite real, but real enough, an exaggerated artist's impression that provides a stage broad and yielding enough to accommodate flights of fantasy.
Batman is my favourite superhero film. It is by no means perfect as a film, and certainly not as an attempt to bring Batman to life, but even now, shorn of nostalgia, it mostly holds up. There are one or two goofy effects, like the CGI parade balloon, or the weird animated composite shots looking down over the city, which neither look real nor appropriate to the somewhat unreal tone of the film, but these complaints don't count for much against the fantastic visual design of Gotham City, and the excellent make-up, costumes, and practical effects. The score by Danny Elfman reinforces the distinctive look and pace of the film with its Wagnerian grandeur and brooding harmonic ambiguities. Keaton and Nicholson are brilliant and I could watch them all day. I'm not crazy about Kim Basinger as an actor, but Vale is a fun and likeable character, one notable issue with the portrayal—and this is not necessarily Basinger's fault—being that she screams and faints and all that stereotypically womanly stuff despite supposedly being a hardened war photographer. It's something that feels a little dated now since women have become more prominent and active in action movies, and especially superhero movies, in recent years, but even without all that taken into consideration it's just not great writing. Warts and all, I love this film, and while I understand the many criticisms levelled against it, I just don't give a damn.