Thirty years ago, audiences flocked to see a supernatural political satire about the mayoral campaign of a disgusting sewer mutant, a film that also doubled as a bizarre romantic comedy about two eccentrics with masked fetishes exchanging blows and spitting in a snowball metropolis. Hindsight has a way to turn every boxing sensation into a curious time capsule, which allows us to stare at the strange attractions that used to put assholes in the seats. But through the lens of the modern blockbuster machine and the ruling superhero-industrial complex that powers it, Batman Returns seems like a real anomaly, strange, exciting, and personal to the mega-budget Hollywood spectacles.
Surely this is a more special film than its predecessor, Tim Burton’s record-breaking popcorn sensation Batman, released in front of crowded, applauding crowds in the summer of 1989. To lure Burton back into the world of the cloaked crusader, Warner Bros. had to offer more creative control over the sequel. The director practiced it from top to bottom. In place of the original art deco noir aesthetics, Batman Returns becomes a complete baroque tale. When the camera rushes like a creature of the night through the distorted architecture of the Gotham Zoo, it is clear that we are completely in Burtonville, the former home of witty jokers and lonely hairdressing androids.
With Batman Returns, Burton made Gotham the greatest of the great peaks, terrorized by a gang of criminal criminals and inhabited by freaks on both sides of the hero / villain division. This includes billionaire vigilant Bruce Wayne (Michael Keaton, returning in a clumsy cloak and hood), a ghostly character in the film who at one point resembles Norman Bates or Ted Bundy, serial killers with split personalities or secret entertainment.
Bruce’s problems double, his screen time is halved. Almost everyone agrees that Jack Nicholson’s Joker stole the first Batman. The second immediately gives the spotlight to the gallery of crooks, depriving Keaton of any dialogue for the first half hour. The film belongs more to the deformed, tortured Oswald Cobblepot, also known as the Penguin, and to Selina Kyle by Michelle Pfeiffer, reborn as the vengeful, vampire Catwoman.
The other thing that drew Burton back was the participation of Heathers screenwriter Daniel Waters, who gave the material an arch, a black-comic spice. The absurd political angle of the plot was his idea. This is an inspired hoax, imagining that such a vulgar creature as a penguin could steal the heart of the electorate. In the film’s funniest revelation, DeVito’s supervillain is interrupted in the middle of a meal, chewing a mess of raw fish, by the new staff of brilliant operatives and volunteers applauding his candidacy. What seemed cynical in 1992 now seems rather touchingly naive. Imagine a politician who drops out of the race just because he is caught in a tape that ignores his base.
Waters’ plot is irresistible, imposing illogical fidelity between the villains. It doesn’t matter – for Burton it’s just an excuse to run into these huge cartoon characters to build a vaudeville scene for three tortured animal-themed robbers. The director distorts this classic Batman theme of bad boys who are distorted reflections of the good to fit his own enduring love affair with the inappropriate. DeVito, playing superbly under mounds and hours of daily prosthetic work, makes the Penguin a sympathetic monster: terrifying in appearance, rude and corrupt in nature, but still a tragic figure. Burton loves him as only a father can. And he recognizes him as a soul mate of his archmesis. Who is Cobblepot, other than Privileged Wayne, abandoned instead of an orphan? “You’re just jealous because I’m a real freak and you have to wear a mask,” he told Batman. This is a point that the dark knight gives way to.
Meanwhile, Pfeiffer, who landed the role after Annette Benning became pregnant and left her, presents one of the big turns of movie stars in all comic book movies: a gliding incarnation of hell-free rage, hissing poison … aplomb lilies and warlords against the mighty, sexist exploiters of Gotham. Both in a stylized design and in an instantly iconic tight-fitting patchwork outfit, she could come straight from the source material panels. Yet Pfeiffer evokes the stern despair of a real identity crisis that erupts during a great alter ego, a ball tango with the enemy in the silence of the film before the climax.
If the political contest suggests a classic Preston Sturgess comedy in a superhero drag, there is a note from Ernst Lubich to the damn romance between Keaton and Pfeiffer, circling each other in various forms of evening wear, concealing their double lives, secret identities and scars from battles. time of a candle by the hearth. Batman Returns is easily the strangest game on the big screen of these characters: the one that dares to see a little S&M fantasy in people burying their slender physique under rubber and leather. This is one of the reasons why parents are so angry about the unknown sequel and why McDonald’s rejected the Happy Meals line. The dialogue is full of hints. The penguin, a squeaking pervert, eagerly sniffs the Catwoman’s boot and longs for his interns.
Danny DeVito plays the deformed and tormented Oswald Cobblepot, also known as the Penguin in Batman, returns. Photo: Warner Bros./Allstar
It is noteworthy that the film also has a class conscience. His real villain is neither the Penguin nor the Catwoman, but the shocking bastard robber Christopher Walken Max Shrek, named after the actor who played Nosferatu, but is clearly a model of the younger Donald Trump. He is, of course, another distorted mirror image of Batman – Bruce Wayne, who wants to rob people instead of protecting them. “The law doesn’t apply to men like him,” Pfeiffer’s Catwoman says shrewdly about her boss, the man who pushed her out the window to end her story about the origins of the supervillain. Years before Christopher Nolan sent Bane to occupy Wall Street, Burton was more careless in sending a strike of class war through Gotham.
As an adaptation, Batman Returns plays as fast and free as the first Batman. Burton was quick to admit, in Burton’s memoirs of Burton, that he was not much of a comic book reader, a confession that underscored his disregard for canonical prehistory and elements such as the hero’s traditional aversion to murder. For some fans, his Batman films are heresy. Of course, they come from a less true or enjoyable era of comic book blockbusters. Yet their exaggerated visual pleasures and spray-sized performances on the panel have their own fidelity to the original environment, a kinship of cellulose. They reject realism, which may be a more appropriate approach to the story of a man who dresses like a bat to shatter those with a similar sense of drama.
What really marks Batman Returns as the product of a very different era of superhero spectacles is the decisive victory of the authorship that Burton claims over his intellectual property. Joel Schumacher, Nolan, Zack Snyder, Todd Phillips – all these directors have found ways to put their own mark on the myths of Batman. But none of them has so completely, successfully shaped it in the form of their own worries and obsessions. Batman Returns is a first film by Tim Burton and second by a film about Batman. And watching it today, at a time when discovering the directorial soul of a superhero film often requires real detective work, means enjoying the eccentricity of his achievement. The bat’s signal just can’t compete with the freak’s flag that Burton flies over Gotham’s silhouette.
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