In order to appreciate the state of commercial adolescence to which Generation X has been disproportionately consigned, one needs to consider Tim Burton’s Batman in its sociocultural context: how it inadvertently provided a blueprint to reconceptualize superheroes from innocent entertainment meant to inspire the imagination of children to hyperviolent wish-fulfillment fantasies for commercially infantilized adults.
The weekly theatrical debut of a new franchise tentpole, voraciously bulling aside the $200 million–budgeted blockbuster released a mere seven days prior, is par for the course nowadays, but back in 1989—thirty summers ago per the calendar, though seemingly as recently as yesterday by the nebulous barometer of memory—we’d never before experienced anything like that.
That was the year that gave us new entries in such ongoing adventures as Indiana Jones, Star Trek, Ghostbusters, The Karate Kid, Lethal Weapon, James Bond, and Back to the Future, lowbrow comedies Police Academy, Fletch, and Vacation, as well as slasher staples Friday the 13th, A Nightmare on Elm Street, and Halloween—to say nothing of launching all-new franchises with Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure, Major League, Pet Sematary, Honey, I Shrunk the Kids, Weekend at Bernie’s, and Look Who’s Talking. To anyone who’d grown up in the nascent home-video era—that period in which all the aforementioned series (save 007) were born and could thusly be re-watched and obsessed-over ad infinitum—1989 was the Christmas of summer-movie seasons.
But none of those films, huge as many of them were, dominated the cultural spotlight that year as pervasively as Tim Burton’s Batman, released on this date in 1989.
Out of the Shadows
I can hear my thirteen-year-old nephew now: “One superhero movie? Wow—how’d you handle the excitement?”
Yeah, I know. But it was exciting. I was thirteen myself in 1989, spending most of my free time with my grade-school gang at the neighborhood comic shop down on Broadway, steeped in a subculture that hadn’t yet attained popular acceptance. Richard Donner’s Superman (1978) had been the only previous attempt at a reverent comic-book adaptation, and, creatively and financially successful though it was, most of that goodwill had been squandered in the intervening decade by a succession of increasingly subpar sequels (through no fault of the marvelous Christopher Reeve, who makes even the worst of them watchable).
As for Batman: It’s crucial to remember, and easy enough now to overlook, that in the late eighties, the prevailing public perception of the character was not Frank Miller’s Dark Knight, but rather Adam West’s “Bright Knight” from the self-consciously campy acid-trip of a TV series that had aired twenty years earlier. In the wake of that show’s cancelation, a concerted effort was made by the character’s creative custodians at DC Comics—first Dennis O’Neil and Neal Adams, then Steve Englehart and Marshall Rogers, and most effectively Miller with his aptly titled The Dark Knight Returns—to reestablish Batman as the “nocturnal avenger” he was originally conceived to be.
But if you weren’t following the comics—and, in those days, few over thirteen years old were—the predominant impression the name “Batman” conjured wasn’t the ferocious Miller rendering above so much as this:
Outside the funny pages, Batman’s media appearances throughout the seventies and eighties were mostly limited to Saturday-morning cartoons, where he and Robin joined Superman and Wonder Woman at the Hall of Justice on Super Friends, and would even occasionally team up with those pesky kids from Scooby-Doo:
In those years, Batman hid in the shadowy recesses of cartoons, comics, and syndicated daytime reruns of Adam West, out of sight from the authorities (meaning not cops but parents), and manifest only to those whom his presence was intended to affect—not criminals but children.
Then came the Burton film, and—overnight—Batman was everywhere: The Bat-emblem was splashed across billboards. Prince had us all doing the “Batdance.” An entire 20/20 segment was devoted to what Barbara Walters herself described as “Batmania.” Hell, hardcore rockers—actual cool dudes like Slash!—unapologetically appeared in public garbed in Bat-merch:
It wasn’t merely that Batman—and, by extension, the geek subculture—was getting his first taste of mainstream legitimacy, it’s that he was being taken seriously by parents, celebrities, journalists. The pulp-paper, four-color fantasies that fueled our dipshit schoolyard adventures had now asserted a position of prominence on the cultural stage. Burton’s film noir–cum–freak show aesthetic gave us, in one movie, both a new type of cinematic language and an interpretation of Batman no one saw coming: It was dark and Expressionistic; it was serious and psychologically complex. It recontextualized Adam West’s tongue-in-cheek take as merely a creatively misguided aberration, and stood as undeniable testament to the theretofore unacknowledged artistic merit of comic books graphic novels.
And more than merely giving us a Saturday-morning cartoon writ large—though it certainly provided that in spades—Tim Burton’s Batman validated the esoteric interests of every thirteen-year-old boy in 1989; it reframed our pop-cultural preoccupations as something capital-I Important, something worthy of journalistic analysis, no less. That summer, the adult world was finally savvy to what we’d known all along.
Where Does He Get Those Wonderful Toys?
Perhaps it’s my anti-nostalgist proclivities, but I’ve grown to hate the endless blog retrospectives of 1980s cinematic ephemera, to say nothing of the embarrassingly earnest social-media observations of pop-cultural anniversaries: #Ghostbusters35; #Alien40th; noting every November 5 how many goddamn years it’s been since Doc Brown invented time travel. You know, infantile shit like this:
For that reason, I’m loathe to indulge a belated who-cares-less reappraisal of Tim Burton’s Batman, but for whatever it may be worth, here’s what I think of the film thirty years on:
It’s mostly a triumph of directorial style over substantive storytelling, and in many respects now seems equally as campy—in its own ways—as Adam West’s pop-art incarnation. Little of it makes much sense, which sometimes works to the movie’s advantage—take the dazzling-if-impractical designs of the Batmobile and Batsuit, for example—but often doesn’t: The entire third act—from the utter lack of police presence at the parade (this despite the Joker announcing his diabolical plans in advance on TV), to the comically easy destruction of the Batwing, to the Joker ascending to the sky-high belfry of the cathedral to meet his airlift when the sensible course of action would’ve been to have it set down right there in the wide-open plaza—strains even the most generous predisposition toward credulity.
The production design is gloriously Gothic, though the city itself—which seems to be populated by all of two characters, Michael Keaton’s Batman and Jack Nicholson’s Joker—is curiously confined, even claustrophobic, with the hero and villain circling the same three streets on the Pinewood backlot. (And the unconvincing attempts to “scale up” Gotham through models and matte paintings haven’t aged well, alas.)
Eminently watchable performances compensate for undercooked characterizations: Keaton is compellingly edgy, though his Batman remains an emotional cypher; Jack is effectively droll and sinister in equal measure even if his Joker is reduced to Evil Incarnate; audience surrogate Kim Basinger grounds the whole thing in a measure of reality, this despite being saddled with portraying Lois Lane Lite. These characters may be somber, certainly in comparison with their 1960s counterparts, but that should in no way be mistaken—as it was in ’89—for psychological complexity. Dark don’t necessarily mean deep.
Danny Elfman’s score is aces, possibly the last great superhero theme music. I mean, can anyone hum on command the cues that identify Iron Man? Or Wolverine? Or Christian Bale’s Batman? When—why?—did old-school “hero’s marches,” like the kind John Williams scored for Indiana Jones and Superman, become outmoded?
Prince’s soundtrack is fun, but because his is the only pop music to appear in the film, it contributes to that sense of underpopulation that characterizes the production: that the world of Gotham is a microcosm, not a metropolis—a meticulously art-directed exhibition rather than a sprawling urban environment that continues past the edge of the frame.
Overall, I’d say, Tim Burton’s Batman fits into that strange cinematic category, along with Spielberg’s Jurassic Park, of being groundbreaking if not particularly great. It’s unprecedented success certainly changed the movie business for the worse (though, to be fair, the ensuing paradigm shift was inevitable): Whereas previously, a film might have a theatrical run of months—sometimes even years—building an audience by word of mouth, after that summer, opening weekend grosses became the name of the game, at which point a given movie, be it bomb or blockbuster, was hustled to the home-video market as quickly as possible. (Batman was available on VHS by Thanksgiving of that year, a mere six months after its theatrical debut, which was also an industry first.)
Batman arguably changed superheroes for the worse, too (though comics like The Dark Knight Returns and The Killing Joke, which influenced the production, share some of the blame): It invited adults into a private club that had previously been reserved exclusively for children—and really should’ve stayed that way. After that, we expected superheroes to mature as we matured, to get darker and more psychologically complex commensurate with our own life experiences—the disillusionments of adolescence and disappointments of adulthood. That is a bastardization of what superheroes were intended to do at their mid-twentieth-century inception—to “actively expand the imagination of their nine- to 13-year-old audience” (Stuart Kelly, “Alan Moore: ‘Why shouldn’t you have a bit of fun while dealing with the deepest issues of the mind?’,” The Guardian, November 22, 2013).
In short: Superheroes were stolen from children—and Batman was an unwitting accomplice to the theft.
Crime of the Century!
Esteemed contemporaries vehemently and all but unanimously disagree with my assertion—that superheroes have been coopted and perverted by a generation of middle-aged men—insisting instead these characters have simply “evolved” with the times. This “evolution” they cite, however, begins only thirty years ago; for the half century prior to Tim Burton’s Batman, superheroes functioned reliably and unambiguously as strictly prepubescent entertainment. In 1989, though, they mutated—a more felicitous verb than “evolved”—catering to a target demographic that continues to skew older and older and older. But in order to meet the demands of an ever-aging fan base, the simplistic storytelling that made them so appealing to and appropriate for kids in the first place—the very reason why adults had more or less ignored superheroes before ’89—had to be revamped.
The challenge in doing so was that what works so dynamically in a cartoon or comic doesn’t always readily translate to live-action cinema (particularly in the pre-CGI era): A flesh-and-blood actor in spandex—as anyone who’s ever been to Hollywood Boulevard can attest—just looks inherently, objectively ridiculous; Adam West embraced the silliness of it with a stoically straight face, whereas Christopher Reeve’s superhuman dignity somehow transcended it. Burton, however, used every cinematic artifice at his disposal to make the preposterous plausible: Michael Keaton was outfitted not in gray tights but black body armor—and mysteriously obscured in most shots by the production’s adumbral mise-en-scène and chiaroscuro cinematography.
Three decades on, Tim Burton’s Batman, in retrospect, can now be identified as the transitional juncture at which superheroes were expropriated from their juvenile audience; the movie offered a prototypal blueprint on how a path forward might be forged: go darker, more violent, more “realistic.” And that’s how this—
—“evolved” a generation later into this:
In order for superheroes to seem credible and stay relevant to an adult audience (with its disposable income, no less, for all the tie-in merchandising and endless home-video rereleases with bonus-content bait), the storytelling had to be incrementally refined to be less, well, illogical. Tim Burton’s Batman, relatively dark though it was at the time, nonetheless reflects some of the whimsical narrativity (read: nonsensical plotting) of its source material. When Burton successor Joel Schumacher took the franchise in the “wrong” direction—brighter, more kid-friendly and “comic-booky” (imagine that!)—in came Christopher Nolan with a grounded take on the mythos in which Batman was reconfigured as “a soldier, and it echoes the whole War on Terror” (Grant Morrison, “Celluloid Hero,” Rolling Stone, August 2, 2012, 43).
If Nolan’s Dark Knight trilogy was, as its title implies, dark, at least it was commensurably deep, considerably more than can be said for the grimdark slugfest of Zack Snyder’s subsequent interpretation, which supplants the ingenuous moralizing of old-school superhero stories with a brazenly nihilistic spirit more in sync with, shall we say, a seasoned worldview: The title Super Friends implies heroic cooperation; Batman v Superman, by contrast, explicitly promises violent confrontation. The latter is not an evolution of the former; it’s a corruption of it—a way for adults to make sense of stories and characters that were never intended for them:
A child knows that real crabs on the beach do not sing or talk like the cartoon crabs in The Little Mermaid. A child can accept all kinds of weird-looking creatures and bizarre occurrences in a story because the child understands that stories have different rules that allow for pretty much anything to happen.
Adults, on the other hand, struggle desperately with fiction, demanding constantly that it conform to the rules of everyday life. Adults foolishly demand to know how Superman can possibly fly, or how Batman can possibly run a multimillion-dollar business empire during the day and fight crime at night, when the answer is obvious to even the smallest child: because it’s not real.
Grant Morrison, Supergods: What Masked Vigilantes, Miraculous Mutants, and a Sun God from Smallville Can Teach Us about Being Human, (New York: Spiegel & Grau, 2011), 56
There is indeed a reason why those aforementioned heroic fanfares that John Williams and Danny Elfman composed so brilliantly eventually fell out of fashion: They were the musical equivalent of “Once upon a time…” They celebrated the fantastical nature of the material, which was completely at odds with the post-Batman ambition of making this innately absurd shit more believable.
Batman and Me
The year after Tim Burton’s Batman came out, I entered high school, where I found myself deeply homesick for the familiarity of my old junior high. So, I started hanging out there, socializing with whomever I could find on the basketball court, in the auditorium—wherever. For months this went on, until a security guard, under the erroneous though not illogical assumption that the ubiquitous campus presence of an older non-student could only mean drug dealer, told me—with no room for subjective interpretation—to never come back.
So, when I think about Batman now—or catch a few minutes of it on cable once and again—I am directly reminded of those prelapsarian days of childhood, before the hormonal complexities of adolescence changed everything. I recall my friends and I studying the character dossiers in the DC Heroes role-playing reference books (the only time we studied), quizzing each other on Batman’s weight or the top speed achievable by the Batplane. Or the time we sat atop Vault Hill in Van Cordlandt Park, reading in this-can’t-be-happening disbelief the issue in which Robin was murdered:
And, of course, I remember standing on a line stretched around the block to see Tim Burton’s Batman—thirty years ago this very day.
But to me, the notion of still going to see Batman movies—or even reading the comics—is like lingering at your own junior high long after graduation: I find it uncomfortable, even embarrassing. We know in our hearts we were meant to turn those things over to those coming up behind us, and move along to the next phase, not cling to the comforts of youth like a security blanket.
You can take it from me: For those of us who came of age on Batman and Robin solving mysteries alongside Shaggy and Scooby, the Burton film was nothing short of a dream-come-true apotheosis. But, man, if it didn’t come at a cost. I didn’t realize it at the time, but in 1989, both Batman and I experienced our last season of innocence together. I guess if you gotta go… go with a smile.
I just turned to Ken and said, “I TOLD you it was Superfriends and not Justice League–Sean said so!”. Also, in 1989, I was 24 and finishing up my English/Film degree. Batman wasn’t even on our radar, but I imagine it would be a whole course now. The thing about the first Batman that always stuck with me the most was Alicia Hunt, played by Jerry Hall. The acid, the mask–every about that was extremely unsettling and way beyond the camp of the original Batman certainly, and really pushed Burton’s film beyond anything I’d expected from a “superhero” movie. Now of course, that kind of violence is de riguer, even cliche, but back then, it was more along the lines of Le Chien Andalou–at least for me:-)
And I trust Ken’s reply was, “Who the f**k is Sean…?”
It isn’t actually an either/or kind of thing: Justice League of America was a superhero team-up book DC Comics launched in the early 1960s (itself a conceptual refurbishing of the old Justice Society of America from the 1940s). A decade later, Hanna-Barbera produced a long-running animated series based on the Justice League called Super Friends (even though the characters still occasionally identified as members of the Justice League on the show). I suppose the title was changed to perhaps attract preliterate young viewers (as I myself was when I first started watching it in the late ’70s) who weren’t yet familiar with the comics; whereas “Justice League” could be the name of a cop show, “Super Friends” leaves little room for ambiguity.
But it just goes to show that the intended audience was juvenile. Nowadays, of course, live-action movies (like the Batman v Superman “Ultimate Edition”) and animated features (like Batman: The Killing Joke) are proudly R-rated — meaning no kids allowed. This is part of a troubling trend that includes Logan and Deadpool, as well, and I personally find it unconscionable. If 45-year-old women were producing/consuming endless R-rated movies based on Barbie, Strawberry Shortcake, and My Little Pony, we’d be having a national conversation about their willing self-infantilization; panels of psychologists would be convened on cable news to explain what was happening and how to stop it. But 45-year-old men get to coopt and corrupt Superman and Batman and Wolverine (and Transformers, too), and we cede the cultural stage to them. How more people aren’t alarmed by grown adults “delighting in concepts and characters meant to entertain the 12-year-old boys of the 1950s” I swear I will never understand.
As for Burton’s Batman: Yes, I remember having many conversations with the adults in my life in 1989 for whom Batman was a revelation; the somber atmospherics and gleefully grotesque violence — that singular film noir–cum–freak show aesthetic of his — were not at all what they were expecting, what with visions of Adam West and Cesar Romero still in their heads! At the time, my friends and I delighted in watching our parents learn that Batman was capital-S Serious; Burton convinced them in a grand-scale way we simply never could’ve. (And yes: They do offer college courses on this stuff now.)
Though as you note, Suzanne, the violence now not only seems tame, but almost comical. Whereas Superman: The Movie attempted to take the classic comic-book aesthetic and put it on film without descending into parody or mockery — they had an ambitious two-movie script, an adequate budget to realize their ambitions, and world-class acting talent (Brando, Hackman, Reeve) — Batman represents the first attempt, I think, to take superheroes out of the flat, bright, four-color composition of the source material and instead express them in a self-consciously cinematic language: the three-dimensionality of shadow and light, verses the two-dimensionality of pen and ink. In doing so, Burton accomplished something no other comic-book adaptation had ever achieved: Batman felt like movie rather than a cartoon writ large.
And what becomes apparent when you watch it with thirty years of perspective is that Burton’s approach (which certainly had its own fantastical flourishes) opened the door for filmmakers to further develop the cinematic potential of superheroes, by giving what had once been cartoon worlds — with their flat composition and limited color palettes — depth and dynamism, chromatic complexity and kinetic energy. But in the process, superhero fiction ceased to serve its intended function — teaching kids basic lessons in morality by appealing to their receptive imaginations — and became exercises in analog-age nostalgia and/or demigod-worshipping for a generation of middle-aged men. And I’m sure that wasn’t Burton’s intention… but that’s what happened nonetheless. As we learned from Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight, sometimes actions taken with the best of intentions nevertheless produce unintended and undesired consequences.
But, then, I’m the only one who thinks adults consuming superhero fiction is a problem… so maybe it’s a crisis that exists only in my own head! (Wouldn’t be the first time!)
Anyway, thanks for weighing in, Suzanne! And on the matter of Justice League versus Super Friends, you can tell Ken — after you explain to him who the hell I am — you were both right! And when does that ever happen in a marriage?!
lolol now I’m not going to be able to go to sleep thinking of sliced eyeballs…
That is precisely, da-AL, why Suzanne’s voice is such a welcome contribution to this blog: Who else could reference a needless–yet–(literally) comical argument with Ken, a 1970s model–turned–actress–turned Mrs. Jagger–turned Mrs. Murdoch, and a silent foreign film from the 1920s in the span of a single comment… and actually still make a coherent point?!
Your voice is welcome, to, da-AL. Thank you for stopping by my little laboratory! Please come again…
I was fifteen in 1989 when Batman was released to cinemas. I think it was Uncle Jim who took me to see it, or maybe it was Dad. No, it was Uncle Jim, because we went to Dairy Queen afterward. Ah, 1989…the year I got to see Uncle Buck, Parenthood, and Star Trek V (which got a much worse rap than I feel it deserved).
I don’t think Batman can really take any blame for what came after. Tim Burton was making a dark, whimsical, art house take on the original material, incorporating some of the camp of the 1960s television show (Jack Nicholson’s Joker was simply Caesar Romero’s iteration sans the restraints imposed by T.V. at the time), but also taking German expressionism of cinema’s early days to mainstream American theaters, as George Lucas had done with only a comparatively few references in the design of C-3PO. It was actually Warner Bros. that ultimately balked at Burton’s more adult-oriented version in favor of an attempt to return to something more kid-friendly.
Then Christopher Nolan came along with his Dark Knight trilogy, which sought to do for Batman what Richard Donner did for Superman. That point, I think, is where the corporatization and bastardization of comics really took off. Kevin Feige also did his part with the Disney-backed M.C.U.
Prior to the Nolan trilogy and M.C.U., the most adult adaptation of Batman and comics in media following Burton’s films were the DC Animated Universe cartoons of the 1990s through 2000s. Batman: The Animated Series went a lot deeper with more adult-level storytelling than Tim Burton ever managed, but it was designed to be that way, whereas Burton simply wanted to do an art house adaptation that, contained within its own universe, was probably never intended to be anything more. I think adapting Batman for a more adult audience that had grown up reading the comics and watching the T.V. shows really began in 1992 under Bruce Timm and Eric Radomski.
If Tim Burton’s adaptation has any role in the present mess of comic book movies, it’s only in following the lead of Richard Donner in showing what could be done with a comic book if it was adapted to the cinema in a way general audiences would find appealing. The groundwork had been laid really in 1975 with Steven Spielberg’s JAWS, when b-movies were catapulted to money-making prominence. The success of Star Wars in 1977 and of Superman in 1978 cemented in the minds of studio execs that blockbuster movies were the future of Hollywood.
The dawn of the 1980s saw many changes we didn’t appreciate when we were teenagers in 1989. Films such as Alien, E.T., The Terminator, Ghostbusters, and others proved that special effects-driven vehicles were profitable, and if execs in Hollywood are anything, it’s profit-driven. I argue that Batman was merely one film that came along at a time of transition, when home video technology was advancing at an exponential rate and mass marketing was taking off in ways we couldn’t fathom.
Much of what you write about is on the money, but I think it maybe (unintentionally) ignores or downplays the rapid changes in technology and marketing that have driven cinema and television over the last forty-five years. I think it also might place undue blame on symptoms of Hollywood’s profit-obsessed thinking, like Batman, instead of the disease, which is that while the purpose of cinema is to make money for those who invest money in projects, there is such a thing as taking that motivation too far, to the point that corporatization leads to sanitation and homogenization, cynical pandering to target demographics, and so on.
Just some of my thoughts, for what they’re worth.
Michael!
I am so grateful to have your insights, because they fill in a lot of the (admittedly important) cultural, technological, and industrial context my post didn’t have room for. (More on this in a moment.)
1989 was a magical summer, though, wasn’t it? It’s hard to explain why it was so special to anyone who A) wasn’t there for it, and B) wasn’t at that very precise impressionable age we were. But whenever I talk to anyone around our age, their eyes light up when discussion turns to the summer of 1989. I have no doubt that is why It was set in that specific year — because the guys that made it are our age, and are members of our “secret club” of eighty-niners!
Back to the matter at hand: It’s hard to argue with any of the points you raise — about Star Wars and Jaws and Donner and Nolan — and I absolutely believe everything that’s happened to the movie business would’ve happened with or without Batman. It was inevitable; events were already in motion that would’ve transformed the movie biz into what it became.
Therefore, I wouldn’t say I blame Tim Burton or Batman for anything, but I do think that particular film represents the point at which the fanboy subculture got its first taste of mainstream legitimacy, and that’s an important cultural development to take into account when we consider the grander context of what we’re discussing. Think of what happened with Batman like a wild animal that gets its first taste of blood: There’s no going back after that. The desire for more becomes overpowering. And after Batman, fanboys wanted more of that popular acceptance that had previously eluded them; they wanted to emerge from the cocoon of comic shops, and for the first time, that was a safe and viable prospect.
Thusly, geeks eventually became rock stars in their own right! Joss Whedon was arguably our culture’s first celebrity geek — certainly the first television showrunner audiences regarded as an “auteur,” a guiding creative hand they knew by name, no different from Coppola and Scorsese and Lucas and Spielberg. Post-Batman filmmakers like Kevin Smith and Peter Jackson proudly brandished their geek/fanboy credentials — and were celebrated for it! A show like Game of Thrones — which was basically an R-rated dramatic realization of a Dungeons & Dragons campaign — couldn’t have become a cultural behemoth if such high fantasy hadn’t achieved mainstream acceptance in the intervening two decades after Batman. You remember what it was like to be kid in the 1980s: You didn’t advertise your love of superheroes and D&D. Nowadays, though? The geek has inherited the earth.
But as I addressed in “All That You Can’t Leave Behind,” fanboys were too busy reveling in their cultural acceptance to realize they weren’t legitimized so much as commodified: “geek” shifted from a stigmatized social category to a lucrative economic one. And in the years since Batman, corporations have gotten more efficient at commodifying the geek subculture — extracting value from it — by endlessly recycling old movie franchises, and leveraging FOMO to make sure you don’t dare miss the newest Star Wars movie even if you didn’t like the last four of them! (To say nothing of the way they’ve conditioned us to buy all the goddamn tie-in merchandising and endless rereleases on VHS… then DVD… then Blu-ray… and now in 4K HD with bonus content! And don’t think there won’t be a new-and-improved version to buy after that…)
So even though Batman isn’t single-handedly responsible for any of that — it was a complex confluence of cultural, technological, and economic circumstances that brought us to this culturally catastrophic marriage between corporations and fanboys — Batman (unintentionally) brought geeks and their esoteric interests out of the shadows, and turned that arcane subculture into the economic engine we now know as the “mega-franchise.” Batman didn’t create that, no… but it opened the door for it.
And until fanboys realize their interests aren’t being catered to so much as capitalized on — that shit like the MCU is exploiting them, not entertaining them — that’s going to be the model we’re stuck with for the foreseeable future. Yes, profit-driven thinking has led to the corporatization and homogenization of our popular culture… but Hollywood is only extracting profit from an audience all-too-willing to part with their cash for this stuff. So, we need to look in the mirror, too. And that’s why I use this platform to implore my demographic cohorts to let go of Star Wars and superheroes, and “to allow this surely unprecedented era to develop a culture of its own, relevant and sufficient to its times.”
Thanks for the thoughts, Michael — which are worth a great deal to me! I always intend my posts to be a starting point for conversation, not a conclusive declaration, and they only serve as the former if readers willingly engage me. So, much obliged to you, my friend!
Sean
P.S. As for Star Trek V (which I did see in theaters back in the day!)… we’ve discussed this in the comments of my post about the thirteen Trek feature films, but it’s worth recapitulating here: I don’t think The Final Frontier is a good movie, and I blame neither the concept or the budgetary restrictions imposed on Shatner. It was the screenplay; it’s a structurally unsound piece of storytelling. But… at least it tried to be about something, which is more than can be said for the three Abrams entries. And the scenes between the core triumvirate are charming and still watchable; Abrams learned the hard way (or in all likelihood didn’t learn) that you can’t put lookalike actors in those roles and expect to replicate the chemistry of the performers who originated them. For me, Star Trek V fits in the same cinematic category as the Star Wars prequels: It is an honorable failure.
I’m always happy to see someone that can deconstruct the Star Wars Megachurch-like nature of the Disney regime vis-a-vis fanboy minds. The MCU is fascinating as a marketing op, while it is horribly depressing — at least from my perspective — when considered as cinema.
The idea of the Marvel films as some sort of continuum that “respects” cosplay crazies is always worth a smirk. They wield that, largely in the form of a “cinematic universe” onscreen, into constant commercials for 5-10 other films being presented as, say, IRON MAN 3.
This continues past each film’s coda and into the credit sequences, which now are typically loaded with at least two sequences to advertise other properties, just in case all the cameos and references during the given movie’s runtime wasn’t enough (for the corporate IP interests and the fanboy desire, all the same).
Schumacher’s BATMAN FOREVER and its McDonald’s commercial-as-opening may be restrained by comparison. Yet the MCU sell is essentially camouflaged to the eyes of the average fanboy, by simply being a constant string of “in-universe” references that exist to tease future films in that universe…while often dramatically undermining the movie that they appear in.
I suppose the point remains within the frame of Warhol, paraphrased: ‘they will sell’.
Likewise, kid, I am always grateful to meet someone who shares my healthy skepticism of the “mega-franchise” business model — the keyword being business. As I’ve written about elsewhere on this blog, fanboys mistakenly thought they (and their esoteric interests) were legitimized when the geek subculture went mainstream — when superheroes and sci-fi went from niche hobby to pop-cultural monopoly — but they were really just commodified: “geek” shifted from a stigmatized social category to a lucrative economic one. Mega-franchises keep us watching (read: paying) by deploying a series of stratagems (camouflaged techniques, at that, as you astutely noted), including FOMO, “spoilers,” and “retconning” — meaning if you’ve grown weary of the Halloween and Terminator franchises, no need to worry: The last half dozen movies we produced no longer count! Sure, we admit we made shitty movies and sold them to you anyway, but trust us when we tell you that this one is worth opening up your wallet for again…
Indeed, kid, each movie in the MCU is merely an advertisement for the next one — an ad they have us now paying for the privilege of seeing! I completely agree with recent comments from Scorsese and Coppola: These movies not only aren’t cinema, they’re arguably “despicable.” They’re definitely not art — granted, not everything needs to be — but they’re not even its commercial permutation, popular entertainment; they’re marketing campaigns that have legions of grown adults “delighting in concepts and characters meant to entertain the 12-year-old boys of the 1950s” and filling shelf after shelf and room after room with
action figureslicensed merchandise.
Movies used to inspire meaningful conversation — Blade Runner; The Exorcist; Unforgiven; Taxi Driver; hell, even Back to the Future was thought-provoking — whereas now they’re all about Easter-egg hunting. What’s the “spoiler” in Blade Runner? If you’d never experienced that movie, I could talk you through the plot scene-for-scene, and it still wouldn’t diminish the pleasure of seeing it for yourself, figuring out what it all means. Mega-franchises, by contrast, are less concerned with saying something meaningful about the human condition than they are with challenging the viewer to catch all their internal cross-references; whereas movies once rewarded audiences with insight, now the reward is the esteemed privilege of calling oneself a superfan — a participatory designation earned by following all the breadcrumbs and connecting all the dots… an assignment only achievable if one never misses a new installment (FOMO). That’s the thing I wish all superfans understood: Marvel movies don’t seek our audience; they compel our fealty.
Thanks so much, kid, for your eloquent contributions to this post; I’m grateful to you, sir. You are most welcome to join any of the conversations on this blog, at any time.
Sean
I find it rather ironic that you’re quoting a piece that derides “clinging to childhood” — something, to be sure, that I agree with, particularly in this cosplay era of neoteny — yet also assert what so many people of a certain age bracket tend to: that BATMAN: THE ANIMATED SERIES is somehow a “deeper” study of the Batman and his psychology than what Burton provided. I think that portion of your post tends toward romanticized, nostalgic nonsense. And that the truth, so far as one can arrive at such a position (as opposed to understanding the Rorscharch-like nature of this material), is inverted on that point.
Both BATMAN and RETURNS are absurdist, expressionist films that present Batman/Wayne as an overtly disturbed man-child that borders on a true split psyche. The animated series, on the other hand, just by its very nature and target audience, could not and did not delve into these issues of mental disturbance — mental illness — the way Burton’s films did.
The structure of Burton’s BATMAN is backward — meaning that we only discover the cause of this schism in Wayne near the climax — making the title character the film’s key mystery. This structure places the film within the genre and structural typology of both noir and expressionist horror: the character is essentially a fractured mind that attempts to become a monster. This is also why both the Joker and Penguin taunt him as, essentially, a fake freak in both films: he has to wear a mask.
Similarly, he is overtly positioned as a fascist in Burton’s films. In the first film, we see Batman directly in front of the Axis Chemicals sign; a point that is not particularly friendly to the idea of Batman as a noble hero. This follows a scene where the character is positioned directly over Napier, gripping his arm, staring into his eyes and then…dropping him into a vat of chemicals. Or losing his grip on him. The point of the character’s power, and the ambiguity of his motive, are both played with in this sequencing.
This is bookended with Wayne in the cave, after discovering that Napier murdered his parents. He grips his glasses tightly, but he does not break them while watching Napier taunt him onscreen. The point is again control: how this constructed persona returns that to him relative to the childhood monster that haunts him.
There are many other examples of this rather interesting, and subversive, psychological deconstruction of Wayne and his motives throughout the film. And again, the film’s very outline from a plotting perspective is a subversion of the Campbellian Hero’s Journey, something that the rather pedestrian BATMAN BEGINS also finds itself following — in that way, Burton’s BATMAN has become more subversive with time. it instead is closer to something like THE THIRD MAN, in how it positions the title character as a shadowy figure that both is defined and defines the corrupted city he inhabits. Befitting the Expressionist, and even the Jungian opening title sequence of the film, the film’s world is Wayne’s mind.
I fail to see these elements in the animated series. It is essentially a very adept, yet sanitized, adaptation of the Burton aesthetic (and that of the old Fleischer SUPERMAN cartoons) — made a more mundane deco rather than the Nazi/Japanese WW2 fascism of Burton — that positions Batman as a somewhat stoic, yet inherently and overtly heroic presence. The version of Bruce Wayne in the animated series is pretty much the cliche of the fake playboy in public, with the Batman personality in all its stiffness taking over in private. There is no schism of the mind here, unlike Burton.
It was an impressive piece of animation in the wasteland of children’s programming of the early 90s, that was allowed to get away with as much as it did — and have such high production value — because of Burton’s films. But it remains a children’s show.
Its adherents tend to exaggerate its “depth”, particularly as far as Batman’s psychology. He’s an overtly serious presence in the series, yes. But unlike Keaton’s manic/compulsive take on the character, the Conroy/Timm version is not distinctly psychotic or disturbed.
And the Conroy version is much less interesting than Keaton’s because of those factors.
Further, as far as cinematic homage and overall sophistication, I find the Burton films to be rather fantastic pieces of modern expressionism; guided by films like THE CABINET OF DR. CALIGARI, METROPOLIS, THE THIRD MAN, CITIZEN KANE, FREAKS and THE BRIDE OF FRANKENSTEIN.
THE DARK KNIGHT centers itself on homages to HEAT but also — somewhat disappointingly — THE EMPIRE STRIKES BACK. And the Marvel/Disney movies, well…
The Burton films’ art house nature remains rather strange as far as blockbuster cinema. RETURNS may be Tim Burton’s darkest, most personal film…and it was the sequel to arguably the biggest merchandising juggernaut in modern cinematic history. A film that, when looked at structurally and psychologically, was and is rather strange as far as mainstream blockbuster filmmaking.
A pity that Burton couldn’t retain that fire past ED WOOD.
Wow, kid — you are my kind of blog reader! You read through the post, the comments, and had a thoughtful contribution to make to the conversation in your own right. Thank you. I certainly hope you keep your own film-criticism blog…? If not, I recommend you get on it! I’d read every post…
This is hands-down the most fascinating and scholarly analysis of the Burton Batman films I’ve ever encountered. The notion that the entire world of the ’89 film — beginning with its very open-credits sequence — is a Jungian expression of Bruce Wayne’s mind (his split psyche, no less), and that the structure of the story is an inversion of the hero’s journey, is a truly thought-provoking thesis that could serve as the foundation for a semester-long course devoted to studying the production. You’ve challenged some of my longstanding intellectual notions of this movie, which is always what I’ve wanted this blog to do: serve as a dialogue, not a monologue. Well done, my friend.
With newfound appreciation for Burton’s Expressionistic ambitions, I suppose it’s fair to suggest that his narrative agenda — such as the ambiguity of Batman’s motives from scene to scene, or that Wayne’s catalyzing psychic trauma is only made manifest at the story’s climax — is perhaps underserved by the fact that Burton was not presenting an original piece of material (like, say, Beetlejuice or Edward Scissorhands or The Nightmare Before Christmas) but rather playing in a “public sandbox”: We already knew Batman’s backstory, and that he is a noble hero — with full acknowledgement to the fact that folkloric figures like this are subject to artistic reinterpretation (a theme I explored in my two-part comparative analysis of the Nicholson and Ledger portrayals of the Joker) — so the psychological/motivational ambiguity Burton attempted to evoke was arguably (though by no means rightfully) undermined by the preexisting relationship the audience already had with the character.
Now, what you’ve done so admirably in your analysis above is extricate Burton’s Batman from the storied hagiography of Bob Kane’s Batman, and instead evaluated the film in a purer cultural and cinematic context, tracing its aesthetic influences to the film noir and Expressionist movements of the early twentieth century. But I don’t know that most fans — including my 13-year-old self — were able to divorce Batman ’89 from the fifty years’ worth of source materials that preceded it. That requires an academic/analytical discipline few possess. Even I have a hard time divorcing myself emotionally from Batman ’89 because, as I discuss in the above post, it is so inextricably entangled with my own developmental passage from the wide-eyed wonders of childhood to the crushing disillusionments of adolescence.
On that note, by the time Batman: The Animated Series premiered in the autumn of 1992, I was a sixteen-year-old junior in high school, and had moved on to darker fiction — particularly vampire stories like Rice’s Interview with the Vampire and Coppola’s Dracula — that spoke more directly to the loneliness of adolescence I was experiencing at the time. To that end, the Gothic fantasy of Batman Returns really resonated with me, especially its themes of alienation-induced madness. I suggested in another reply here that the film probably should’ve been called Burton Returns, because it ultimately bears so little resemblance to anything recognizably Batman (including its interpretations of Penguin and Catwoman, both of which — especially the latter — I adore), but as a Gothic fairytale–cum–urban fantasy, it’s a richly imagined piece of cinema. Again: I think the pushback Burton got here probably had more to do with the audience’s preestablished understanding of those characters from the previous comics, movies, and television shows in which they had appeared (to say nothing of the fact that his idiosyncratic vision was emphatically at odds with Warner’s corporate mandate to sell Big Macs, an agenda with which Joel Schumacher was more than happy to comply).
Given all the Bat-hype that year, though, I tuned in to TAS, but mostly found it to be, as you describe, a fairly psychologically simplistic take on the character whose chief selling point was terrific animation. But I just didn’t care about it. I’m aware there is a contingent of Millennials (a few years younger than me) for whom TAS is the definitive take on the Dark Knight, but I’m not in that club. I have nothing against TAS; I was simply not at the right stage of life to appreciate what it was trying to do.
It makes me wonder anew if perhaps superhero cartoons were better when they were crudely produced Saturday-morning cel animation like Super Friends and Spider-Man and His Amazing Friends? Perhaps the high production value of Batman: The Animated Series was also culpable, along with Batman ’89, of inviting adults into a world that had previously been reserved exclusively for children? TAS was something adults took seriously, and maybe that’s not a good thing. In addition to its high caliber of animation, it begat the whole “DC animated universe,” which was a kind of prototype for the live-action MCU, something I’ll discuss in further detail in my response to your other comment here, kid.
As for Tim Burton and the creative trajectory of his career, I could say a lot of things about that. Ed Wood probably was his last great film (and I think there’s a lot to recommend Sleepy Hollow, something I will be discussing in my November blog post). I think the problem Burton has encountered is that, like Guillermo del Toro, he’s a preternaturally gifted visualist without a particularly strong sense of narrative. Thusly, he’s very script-dependent. If he gets a good piece of material that’s in sync with his creative sensibilities, he’s capable of conjuring real cinematic magic. But if the script sucks, or if it isn’t a good aesthetic fit, that’s when he runs into trouble.
The other thing about Burton, of course, is that he for the most part only revisits a limited set of themes (misunderstood creativity being his key preoccupation), and he’s kind of said all he has to say about those subjects. His films don’t have a lot of social underpinnings; by contrast, Nolan’s Batman movies — regardless of how one may feel about them — speak to the sociopolitical preoccupations of their times. Most artists — especially those that eschew topical subject matter — only have so much to say about the world, and they tend to say it the most effectively and passionately when they are young. Few directors have enjoyed sustained creative relevance the way, say, Scorsese and Eastwood have. But, F. Scott Fitzgerald be damned, John Carpenter has recently enjoyed renewed artistic eminence, so perhaps Burton is due for a second act himself…? As a writer who shares his love of Gothic horror, I wouldn’t complain.
A thorough and interesting post, as ever, Sean. I considered, revisited and learned new things about this film that I, too, saw in theaters when it was released.
Of course, given my nature, the post seemed to come to clearest focus for me with your inclusion of the personal glimpse of your hanging onto junior high in such an atypical way. The awkwardness and desperation were palpable. And that, as it turned out, crystallized the main thrust of your post.
I’ll say it again: I always think deeply about your posts. And I’m glad you took to exploring these themes within the context of real moments lived. Everything feels balanced.
Side note: I always thought televangelist Robert Tilton would have made a good Joker.
Thanks, Erik! I knew you would appreciate the more personal angle.
To my mother’s surprise and delight, the very first word I could read or write was “Batman.” True story. She would set me down in front of the syndicated reruns of the Adam West show in the late seventies, and eventually my receptive mind drew a connection between the logo splashed on the screen — BATMAN — and the accompanying choral chanting of the word.
Anyway, there have been a number of retrospective pieces published this year — including in the New York Times — in observation of the character’s eightieth anniversary, and my mother has sent me the links as she comes across them, even maybe suggesting I could write one. And I felt that if I was going to do that, then I had to say something sufficiently different from 1) what everyone else was saying, and 2) what I’ve said about Batman in previous posts.
And what I struck upon was not so much the significance of the eightieth anniversary — which is a timeframe I have trouble getting my head around, given that I haven’t lived nearly that long — but instead the thirtieth anniversary of the movie. And I thought about how joyous that summer was, and how it was in many respects the last uncomplicated period of my life. And Batman kind of crystallizes that moment for me. And once I hit upon the notion that Batman experienced his last summer of innocence the same year I did, I felt I had a take that was sufficiently different and personal.
Prior to this post, I hadn’t shared that junior-high school story with very many people — I think perhaps just two? It’s not something that comes up a lot in conversation, and it isn’t particularly self-flattering, but I’ve long since given my then-me the gift of sympathetic understanding about the whole episode: I did what anyone who feels lost or displaced would do — I went “home.” And for a while, it felt good.
But it was illusory, of course, and was never going to last. And getting kicked out — getting told I was no longer welcome there? That was rough, because it meant the only place I had left to go was somewhere I in no way felt comfortable. And I basically spent the remainder of high school aching for the comforts of “home,” never feeling — or allowing myself to feel — at ease where I was. And I think that’s part of the reason I continued to relate to Batman’s loneliness throughout high school, and it was certainly the time I discovered the vampire fiction of Bram Stoker and Anne Rice, in which I very much found a kindred spirit in Claudia.
But as soon as I got to college, my whole world turned around, and I can honestly say I have not felt a moment’s loneliness in 25 years. I’m lucky. But I never forgot what it felt like, and I sometimes think it’s funny how closely Batman’s evolution over the past four decades has mirrored my own. So, that was the angle I selected for this piece. I somewhat hope it will be the last word I ever issue on Batman… though I somehow doubt that.
Sean
P.S. Tilton does have a Joker-esque look about him, doesn’t he? I understand much of the upcoming Joker movie with Joaquin Phoenix was shot in my old neighborhood in the Bronx — the exact same area, in fact, where Batman was created in 1939 — but for reasons I made clear in the closing section of this post, I have no desire left to “go there,” ya know?
I was super into Anne Rice for a while as well. I loved the first book of the Mayfair Witches series: The Witching Hour. I’d never before read a book where the plot took you through the distant history of a family rather than a character, and so I was enthralled. Once we got to “I was raped by a demon and then had a baby in two days—a baby who was the demon father itself, who then raped me again—I was suspecting that it might be too dark for me. By book two, it was definitely getting too squirmy for me, what with the graphic opening scene of a pre-teen girl seducing her uncle (who, of course, goes along with it). But I still enjoy a good realistic New Orleans witch story.
If it’s fun for you to see the new Joker movie for reason other than the commercialism (i.e., just to see your old stomping ground portrayed through a certain lens), do you feel that you could go for that reason and ignore the other in such a special case?
Interview was so eye-opening for me (I first discovered and read the book about two years before the movie came out), because having grown up on the slasher films of the 1980s (Halloween, Friday the 13th, A Nightmare on Elm Street, Child’s Play), I had a certain understanding of what horror entailed: It was about jump scares and sexy teenagers! Even The Lost Boys, which was probably the first R-rated vampire movie I ever saw (other than maybe Langella’s Dracula, which I surely saw edited for television), followed that tried-and-true 1980s formula of teens and screams.
Interview was a revelation, because what Rice essentially did was write a domestic drama… with vampires. It really changed my perception of what horror could be. And at the time, The Vampire Chronicles was only four books, and I was in high school so I had all the time in the world to read whatever I wanted. But once I got into college — taking a full course load, working retail jobs to pay my way through school, dating the young woman I would later marry — I had no time for recreational reading or television, so I lost track of The Vampire Chronicles. By the time I came back around to it, there were like half a dozen more books in the series, and she’d even crossed it over with the Mayfair Witches, and I was so intimidated by the sheer volume of content that I never really pursued the series past Tale of the Body Thief. I’m a slow reader, and I like to read a diverse variety of stuff, so trying to tackle an epic series like The Vampire Chronicles or A Song of Ice and Fire would be a commitment that would tie me up indefinitely! But I would like to revisit Rice, and I’m thinking I might just take it a book at a time, not necessarily one right after the other, and make it one of those things I finally get around to doing…
But you are not the first person I’ve spoken to about Rice who said the same thing: that there were only so many times they could indulge some of her more graphic prose before feeling like they’d had enough. I get that. I like the genre — hell, I trade in it! — but I’ve even had the same reaction to some of the work of, say, Thomas Harris (who writes the Hannibal Lecter books): At some point I’ve just had my fill of the grue and don’t wish to expose myself to any more of it.
Joker will depend heavily on the reviews (if they’re bad, I won’t bother) and — more to the point — my own personal mood! Truth is, I barely watch any movies anymore. I can’t tell you how many movies I’ve planned to see in theaters, only to say upon release: “Eh… I’ll catch it on home video.” Then it comes out on home video, and I’m like, “Yeah, I’ll wait for it to run on HBO.” And then it goes into rotation on HBO and I still don’t make time for it! Blade Runner 2049 is one of those movies: love the original; sequel got great reviews; expressed enthusiasm about seeing it… still haven’t bothered. Same with the last Halloween. For whatever reason, I can no longer find the motivation to see movies I think I want to see, and I’m just learning to listen to myself and trust that I’m feeling what I’m feeling for a reason, and even if I can’t explain it, that doesn’t mean there’s anything wrong with feeling that way. Sorta like we talked about in “Different Stages”: Sometimes outside your conscious awareness, you’ve moved on from something you once loved and have done so long it’s become an institutionalized practice of sorts, so you’ve never even considered giving it up! And one of the gifts we give ourselves as we age is saying, “You know what? That was fun… but I’ve had enough.”
With respect to my particlar apathy toward movies, I think it all goes back to something I said in “‘Almost’ Doesn’t Count”: that when you turn your passions into your profession, you often do so at the expense of the joy you once took in those pastimes. I just don’t think I find joy in movies anymore; certainly not the way I did as that 13-year-old in 1989. But I haven’t lost my sense of joy; I take joy in other things now — like baseball and blogging and my work with the local animal shelter — and if it’s a choice between a movie or any of those things, for me it’s no choice at all.
Thirty years! Wow. Time flies. It’s interesting to read your posts and look at film from a more evolutionary, societal, and artistic-choice perspective. I can completely relate to your descriptions of the Scooby-Doo Batman of my childhood and the Burton Batman of my adulthood. It does seem that superheroes have been forced to age with the generation that birthed them, thus darker, more “realistic,” and more emotionally/morally compromised. Says something about adulthood. Fascinating post.
Hey, thanks, Diana — not just for the comment, which I always appreciate, but for the fact that you briefly suspended your blogging moratorium to make a contribution here. Thank you. You’re in my thoughts.
Yes, I said to Erik directly above, if I was going to contribute yet another perspective on this “milestone” Bat-anniversary, it had to be from a vantage that hadn’t been covered elsewhere. And I thought I had a unique perspective — having been a 13-year-old boy afflicted with Batmania that summer — to discuss what it meant to be there, what it means in retrospect, and why my feelings on it thirty years later are so complicated.
Should superheroes have been allowed to mature emotionally and psychologically? My contemporaries certainly think so. But I insist to this day that anyone who goes back and looks at Super Friends and Scooby-Doo Meets Batman cannot rationally argue that superheroes were ever meant to be anything other than children’s entertainment. Whether you view what’s become of them as an evolution or corruption, I suppose, is a matter of personal perspective.
All I know is that it used to be that kids loved superheroes and Encyclopedia Brown until we “graduated” to increasingly more adult heroes like Rambo and RoboCop and Axel Foley and John McClane, before then moving on to Holden Caulfield and Philip Marlowe and Michael Corleone and Atticus Finch and Paul Muad’Dib. Superheroes didn’t need to evolve; we evolved — away from superheroes. We wanted to experience all the different worldviews fiction had to offer! But now we just drag our toybox of action figures with us into middle age. It’s a method of self-infantilization I just can’t abide by — one that bastardizes the very things that are the symbols of the lost innocence we so yearn for.
Thank you, Diana — for being such a reliably steadfast supporter of this blog’s esoteric preoccupations! Don’t think I don’t appreciate the special kind of friend it takes to indulge some of these topics!
Wow, Sean. Your posts are always so thoughtful.
At first, when you were rattling off all those old movie greats, you must have somehow nudged that latent nostalgia that lurks secretly in the heart of every Gen-Xer. All I could think was, “No wonder movies seem like they suck so much right now. They used to actually tell stories back then.” All that was missing from the picture was walking barefoot to the theater. Two miles uphill. : )
I liked the old Adam West versions, although I’ll take a pass on Scooby-Doo. Really don’t like the modern superhero stuff with the single exception of Wonder Woman, which I’m fond enough of to own–the single superhero flick in my collection. I think the only Batman movie I really liked was the one with Michelle Pfeiffer as Catwoman. Most of the others fell on the scale somewhere between “Time to go now” or “Okay if I’ve got nothing better to do, and the company is good.”
I like your take that this is something that should usually be left behind, or at least not continued at its preadolescence levels. Hey, I read Dr. Seuss and Shel Silverstein to my kids, and I enjoyed them as an adult. But it was different than the sort of enthusiasm they’re expecting from superhero movies today.
Cathleen! Thanks for popping by!
Gen X’s pathological predilection for analog-age nostalgia is of course something I have long sounded the alarm on — exhaustively so! And as for the subject of creative bankruptcy, my post “Artistic Originality” examines how the current custodians of pop culture have chosen imitation over inspiration as their preferred creative mode. The movies of today have us (by design) stuck in the past because we only wish to look backwards; the endless recapitulations of 1980s ephemera (Star Wars, Ghostbusters, et al.) are the arrested fantasies of filmmakers who dream not of a better future, but a better past. (For more on this subject, see my Goodreads review of Ready Player One, in which I censure it for being the epic poem of a generation of middle-aged men who’ve withdrawn from the infinite complexities of 21st-century reality in favor of the finite simplicities of 1980s sentimentality.)
I’d sworn off the superhero movies, but my wife was really interested in Wonder Woman, so I gave it a shot. Agreed: I was surprised by how much I enjoyed it. (We even bought it on iTunes, which makes it the sole superhero flick in my digital collection, too!) Michelle Pfeiffer’s performance as Catwoman in Batman Returns is remarkable; I’m sorry they were never able to get that proposed spin-off film with her off the ground. (Though it eventually morphed into that awful Halle Berry Catwoman movie, which ties into Batman Returns by featuring a still frame of Pfeiffer as a “previous Catwoman.”) I had hoped to maybe address Batman Returns in this post, but it seemed an unnecessary digression.
For what it’s worth, I’ll say a few words about it here: I think a more appropriate title would’ve been Burton Returns, because as a Batman story, it’s pretty unremarkable — it bears so little resemblance to the source material — but as a Gothic fairytale–cum–urban fantasy, it’s such a richly imagined piece of cinema. Tim Burton, not Batman, is the star of that movie. So, it is both better and worse than the first one, depending on how you wish to appraise it! But Pfeiffer is unquestionably one of its highlights; for completely different but equal reasons, she and Julie Newmar are my favorite Catwomen.
As for your closing comment about Dr. Seuss and Shel Silverstein: As I said to both Suzanne and Diana above, we accept that the time comes to stop watching Sesame Street and Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood, to stop reading The Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew, and to stop playing with Barbies and Cabbage Patch Kids. Right? Nobody would take an adult who still indulges in that stuff seriously. And yet middle-aged men are allowed to obsess over superhero movies and
buy toyscollect action figures, and this is totally socially acceptable! As esteemed comics scribe Alan Moore once said:I’m not saying there can’t be quality superhero movies that even parents can find entertaining — Superman: The Movie (1978) and Wonder Woman (2017) certainly fit the bill — but when we’ve got adults expressing indefatigable enthusiasm for this stuff, as you put it, and pouring their disposable income into the endless merchandising, it’s worth asking if that’s an emotionally and culturally healthy thing. It’s at least worth asking the question, methinks. If for other reason, exposing oneself to the same stories and characters for decades on end would seem to me like eating the same meal everyday, or taking the same vacation every year. I mean, don’t you wanna partake in the endless wonder of an infinite literary/cinematic landscape, and not hear the same bedtime story every night…?
Thank you, Cathleen, for engaging the post so thoughtfully. It was fun for me to write it — to remember what I loved about Batman, and why I’m glad to have moved on from him.
Enjoy your weekend — and have a safe and happy Fourth of July!
Loved this Batman tribute, well done Sean! 🙂
Gee, thanks, Sophie! So pleased you popped by!
Hey, Sean. I disagree with your main thesis – that comics were always strictly for children (remember, Batman’s earliest appearances had him snapping necks and wielding firearms, Superman expressed socialist values no kid could possibly understand and Captain America was a Jewish-American revenge fantasy against the rising forces of fascism in Europe) but I respect your opinion and found your article to be well-reasearched, concise and fascinating, and your life story as a screenwriter is something I admire and aspire to. In addition, I like how you respected the medium of comic books even while criticizing them and the modern film industry, finding value in their more fantastical, child-oriented side even if you disliked adult fans. I also would like to correct your assertion that Batman’s darker underpinnings began with Frank Miller and the movie; they had been built since at least the late 60s by writers such as Neal Adams and editor Julius Schwartz. I am glad however, that people are t are free to talk about this sorts of academic things on the internet and find so much information free everywhere.
Welcome to the blog, my young friend. Thank you for reading this post and taking the time to comment! And I appreciate your patience between then and now. If it’s all right by you, I will address you, respectfully, as Blank.
Since you’re new here — and I’m delighted you found this piece and made the choice to join the conversation! — permit me to establish a few quick facts about this blog with respect to its protocols and purpose. The reason the comments never close on any of my hundred-plus posts — even oldies like this one, as you acknowledge — is because the discussion each essay is meant to initiate is never closed!
For example: You mention that you disagree with this particular essay’s central thesis. To that point: If you were to comb through the eight years’ worth of posts here, you would find — repeatedly — that I often don’t agree with myself! My opinions on matters related to narrative craft, socially conscious storytelling, and commercial adolescence are always evolving. By writing about these issues, revisiting them when I have new insights, and engaging with thoughtful readers like yourself, I have developed a much more nuanced perspective on them.
You and I have much in common, it seems. I was once an aspiring screenwriter myself, and as a high-school student in the early ’90s, I practiced sequential illustration under the mentorship of legendary Batman artist and editor Carmine Infantino (he who put the yellow oval around the Bat-emblem in the 1960s). You’ve also clearly studied the history of cinema and comics. Good. Keep doing that. Be exposed to all the different genres and mediums and artists as possible. As the great prog-rock musician Neil Peart once said: “What is a master but a master student? And if that’s true, then there’s a responsibility on you to keep getting better and to explore avenues of your profession.”
With respect for your impressive command of the history of comics, permit me, as an Xer, to provide a bit of cultural context for you. You were born into a world whereby the mainstream legitimacy of superhero fiction was fully established and accepted, and in which it is in no way viewed as culturally strange or subnormal for grown adults to invest almost religious interest in the metanarrative intricacies of superhero “universes.” (Bear in mind: This is also a world where the faux noun “adulting” is not only lexiconic, but frequently used unironically.)
Now, I am sure you appreciate that fact intellectually, but it is more challenging to fully appreciate things that predate our birth from a sociocultural perspective. Case in point: I grew up in the shadow of Vietnam. Many adults I knew were vets of that war, and the war itself was referenced, directly or indirectly, in much of the media of the time (comics, TV, movies, videogames, etc.). But the war was over by the time I was born, so though I was aware of it intellectually, I did not — could not — appreciate it from a sociocultural perspective. I daresay I still didn’t really “get” it until I watched Ken Burns’ 10-part documentary The Vietnam War from 2017.
I say all that to suggest that people your age may not entirely understand that superheroes were never the stuff of mainstream entertainment, critical respect, or adult adulation before, say, the 1990s. The one-two punch of Miller and Burton unquestionably represented a turning point (and, more accurately, a no-turning-back point). Up until the 1970s, superhero comics (and cartoons) were very consciously and explicitly produced for a nine-to-thirteen-year-old readership. (Under the auspices of Stan Lee, Marvel may’ve arguably reached for a slightly older audience than DC — say, eleven-to-fourteen?) But the point is: Comics were ephemeral entertainment created to appeal to children, affordably priced for Depression-era boys like my late father.
Sure, they sometimes tackled issues or incorporated themes you might rightly identify as quote-unquote “darker,” either psychologically or sociopolitically, but that is just as true of the children’s stories of E.B. White or Maurice Sendak or any of the classic Disney animated features (like, say, Dumbo and Bambi, or even more recent fare like The Lion King and Up). However…
As Generation X — talkin’ ’bout my generation — came of age in the late ’80s and early ’90s, instead of leaving childish things behind, we dragged those characters with us into adulthood. The reasons for this sociocultural shift are complicated. Partly it has to do with the fact that we were the first American generation to not grow up under the specter of the draft. Having been relieved of that existential anxiety — wondering if our adolescence would abruptly end with involuntary deployment to some country on the other side of the world — we opted to remain in adolescence forever by obsessing over comic books (which we rebranded as “graphic novels”) and rewatching our favorite movies on VHS ad infinitum (a generational trait Wes Craven’s Scream commented on way back in 1996). All the 1980s reboots and revivals that you see — from Star Wars to Ghostbusters to Halloween to The Karate Kid to The Terminator to Transformers to Indiana Jones to Picard — are symptomatic of our idiopathic desire to be eternal 12-year-olds.
Another reason for our lifelong fixation with childhood ephemera has to do with the deregulation of children’s programming under President Reagan, a subject I explored in “In the Multiverse of Madness, Part 2.” We were, as I demonstrate in that post, systematically trained to be lifetime subscribers to all the comics and cartoons we consumed as young children.
And as we got older, superheroes got “grittier”: more violent, more sexualized, more nihilistic. In short: They became completely inappropriate for their originally intended audience! (Even poor Scooby-Doo, referenced in the essay above, hasn’t been spared from a cynical R-rated makeover.) And in order to justify the grimdarkening of these innocent characters — in order to rationalize making them utterly inappropriate for kids — we told ourselves that they were always dark stories, anyway.
I assure you, Blank: They weren’t. They were inherently silly stories that were very explicitly meant to expand the imagination of their 12-year-old readership. That’s all. At our most impressionable, we Xers were exposed to a bunch of very cynical sales campaigns masquerading as narrative entertainment — from The Transformers: The Movie (1986) to The Death of Superman (1992) — and somewhere along the way, we elevated that ephemeral crap to Essential American Literature.
But the commercial ethos baked into so many of Gen X’s childhood favorites notwithstanding, the problem with taking characters like Batman seriously — with relocating them from the kid world to the adult world — is that they become morally questionable in the process. As a children’s action hero, Batman is innocuous enough: When I was a boy, I loved his adventures and all his gadgets, from the Batmobile to the Batcave to his utility belt. I grew up on afternoon reruns of the Adam West series from the ’60s and adored it.
But as soon as you start to take that character seriously, something we’ve done with increasing escalation from Burton through Nolan through Snyder and now to Matt Reeves, the entire premise is exposed as morally dubious: In essence, Batman is an extrajudicial grievance collector, yet another of comicdom’s endless stable of “angry tough guys who break things and push other people around yet always see themselves as the victim” (Fred Van Lente, “Dark Knight Returns: A Storytelling Landmark — Whose Cracks Show 35 Years Later,” 13th Dimension, March 20, 2021).
And we must ask ourselves: Are these the kind of fictional heroes we need right now? Go-it-alone, hypercompetent badasses for whom the rules don’t apply? What sort of values does that inculcate?
So, Blank, I will give you a piece of screenwriting advice I wish someone had given me at your age: Don’t focus exclusively on developing your commercial imagination; put just as much care and consideration into exercising your moral imagination. To that end, the question isn’t whether or not superheroes should be kid-friendly entertainment. Rather, it’s whether we should even still be telling those stories at all. Or are the values embedded in those concepts and characters artifacts of 20th-century thinking, with no application here in this nascent millennium? Perhaps it’s time for new stories, with new types of heroes?
Don’t do what my generation did: Don’t put the heroes of a bygone era on a pedestal. Don’t consign yourself to a 20th-century time capsule like the brainwashed “hero” of Ernest Cline’s despicably evil novel Ready Player One. Question all of those culturally ingrained values and presumptions! Tell new stories, relevant and sufficient to this new era.
On the subject of superhero fiction, Blank, I am going to leave you with three resources:
The first is my essay “Superman IV at 35: How the ‘Worst Comic-Book Movie Ever’ Epitomizes What We Refuse to Admit about Superhero Fiction.” It serves as a sort-of sequel to “Tim Burton’s Batman at 30,” and supports my assertion that superheroes and comics were intended to be and should exclusively be for kids.
The second is Patrick (H) Willems’ excellent video essay “What’s the Point of R-Rated Superheroes?”
The third is Glen Weldon’s book The Caped Crusade: Batman and the Rise of Nerd Culture. Weldon devotes much page real estate to examining “the grim-and-gritty approach that has been the default narrative tone in superhero comics since the late 1980s.”
Blank, I thank you for engaging me so willingly and intelligently, and I hope you’ll grace the blog with your presence in the future.
Sean
I would also like to clarify: I am not some Gen-Xer, rabid superhero fanboy. For one thing, bills and food shortages prevent me from ever even thinking of buying action-figures or merchandise, and two: I am in my early 20s and studying to be a screenwriter, so I’m constantly exposed to art house cinema like Welles, Herzog, Jvankmajer, etc. But I am a superhero and animation fan, and I just wanted to share my opinion. I respect and value yours’ and look forward to your reply.
Exactly, Blank — study everything. All of it. Learn the difference between cathartic storytelling (Citizen Kane and The Godfather and essentially everything produced last century) and “storyless” worldbuilding (Game of Thrones and the MCU and all the intertextual transmedia “universes” so popular nowadays). I talk about the difference between those two types of fiction in “The End: Lessons for Storytellers from the Trump Saga.”
Less important than the rules of screenwriting are the rudimentals of storytelling. Learn them. I covered that subject in my first post, “The Case for Craft,” but you can get an overview of all my relevant posts on that subject under the Narrative Craft subheading on my Start Here page.
Learn mythic structure. For that, I recommend Christopher Vogler’s The Writer’s Journey, the most recent edition of which I reviewed here.
Learn genre, particularly as it was codified by Blake Snyder in his three Save the Cat! books, which I discuss here. When used artfully, STC! is an indispensable storytelling program.
Learn characterization. For that, I recommend David Freeman’s Beyond Structure workshop, though he has not offered it in quite some time, alas. Whether he ever will again, I do not know. But his tools and principles are one-of-a-kind.
For more about “postnarrativity” — what I earlier referred to as “storyless” fiction — read Douglas Rushkoff’s book Present Shock: When Everything Happens Now, which I first discussed here.
And most importantly, my young friend, write. Write all the time. As Robert Rodriguez wisely observed in Rebel without a Crew (also worth reading in its entirety):
Good luck to you, Blank. I wish you only joy and success on your creative journey!
SPC
Howdy,
I’m waaaaaaaay out of my league with the discussion; a fourth grader in a trigonometry class. However, I enjoyed the blog post. 1989 was a special year for multiple reasons, part of it due to movies, and Batman was a major part of that. I still enjoy watching the 1989 movie about once a year, and mama and I even went to see it in the theater a couple of years ago. I don’t watch any of the new comic book movies in the theater unless a friend wants me to go see it with him, and that’s more for the social aspect than because I’m interested in the film. In fact, I normally have to ask what the hell’s going on. I’m not 100% sure why, though I’m sure you can articulate it, but they always mess everything up now in the comic book movies, or Star Wars films, and really just about everything. I think it all comes down to the money. Nobody is interested in telling a story anymore, or rather the story is secondary. I will eat my hat if a lot of the dialog in these movies isn’t stated exactly the way it’s stated just so it can be used as a soundbite for a video game later, and so you end up with clunky dialog in the film. A lot of social issue messages that have no place in the story are inserted here and there just to keep certain groups happy. As a result the story suffers and so does the movie. Then there’s product placement which actually doesn’t bother me at all, but it seems to upset a lot of people.
I don’t think Batman 1989 did it that way. It made bookoo bucks, but it did so because it capitalized on itself, which is the right way to do it. Tim Burton set out to make a movie, and that’s what he did. (And after reading the novelization, I realize he didn’t even have a great story to work with; it’s the cinematography, production, actor performances, music, etc. which make it work.) There weren’t any high and mighty messages slipped in here and there. The movie was concerned with the movie and not trying to appease who might be in the audience… I guess… Now I’m starting to second guess myself, so I reckon I’ll shut up about all that. Like I said: fourth grader. Trigonometry class. Have barely learned my times tables and can’t even do long division yet.
I personally don’t see the harm in enjoying an old movie as long as it’s not detracting from my other responsibilities as a functioning member of society. (And really, enjoyment of something is ultimately a matter of opinion, and I learned years ago that the biggest mistake I can make is to discount my own.) I’m actually slowly (very slowly) rereading all my old Batman and Superman comics just for old times’ sake. (I have a decade’s worth from the 90s.) I haven’t touched them in a few months, and I go through spurts. (It depends on what else I’m reading or doing at that time.) Still, I don’t see the harm in that either. However, I can’t get on board with reading new ones; I just don’t like them all that much. As for the new comic book movies, I can’t get on board with them either. It’s too big. You have to watch 30 other movies just to follow everything, and I’m sorry, I have other things I’d rather be doing. I have some friends who will study everything there is to know about these movies before they even come out, and I just don’t get it. I like to be surprised when I watch a movie. I don’t want to know what’s going to happen. Then they want to get into conversations about every bit of minutia you can fathom, and I let them go on and I politely nod for a bit before excusing myself or trying to change the subject. But I still don’t hold it against them. It’s something they enjoy that isn’t hurting anybody, so they can rock on. Also, it’s a bit hypocritical of me to judge them too harshly. There are a few areas of interest about which I know waaaaaaay too much. Admittedly most of it is information I gathered when I was younger, but I certainly know a thing or two about obsessions.
Caveat about the comic book movies. I don’t include the Nolan Batman trilogy in all this. I feel like that was something different, probably because that’s its own trilogy and doesn’t try to link to everything else. (I think I saw you mention that in another blog post. Hell, it might’ve even been this one; my short term memory sucks, and I’ve looked at a lot of your stuff today.) It has a little bit of social messaging in it, but not to an obnoxious degree, and most of it seems to be a natural part of the story instead of shoehorned in.
I remember Batmania very well. I think you mentioned you were 13. I was 10. There’s a world of difference between a 10-year-old and 13-year-old, and that might be part of the reason I can still enjoy the movie as much as I do. As for the celebrities wearing all the merchandise and all, yeah Slash had the shirt, but I think Jordan Knight wore it better, but that’s only because I had a bit of a crush on him back in the day.
Last thing, I swear. Have you ever done a blog post about the 1990 Dick Tracy movie? I don’t know if it’s technically a comic book flick since it was based on a comic strip, but I always felt like that struck a perfect balance. It’s something kids and adults can both enjoy, and with the colors and costumes and everything, it looks like it came right off a comic book page. It’s over-the-top silly, but it has serious moments. I can’t really explain it; I just know that I like it. Do you have an opinion on what is a great comic book movie?
Hi, Pierce!
Welcome to the blog — and thank you for joining this conversation! My posts are never closed to comments, and I always reply to them — even if a bit belatedly in this particular instance. Thanks for your patience. I spent the entirety of July juggling three unrelated writing projects, and my blog, alas, got necessarily neglected in the whirlwind. Because you left such a wonderful, thoughtful comment, I wanted to respond in kind — when I had the time and bandwidth to provide the response it deserves. So, let’s go! Lots to dig into here…
First off: My posts, as you may’ve noticed, are both esoteric and inexcusably prolix, which can admittedly make them seem intimidating. I’m thankful to anyone who reads them — and that goes double for those who join the convo! These essays are never intended to be the Final Word on the subjects they explore, merely an opening conversational salvo. For instance, many of the themes explored in “Tim Burton’s Batman at 30″ were first workshopped in “The Great Escape,” and then subsequently developed in posts including “Superman IV at 35″ and “Into Each Generation a Slayer Is Born,” all of which are classified under the topic of Commercial Adolescence, one of three major categories on this blog, along with Narrative Craft and Socially Conscious Storytelling. Sometimes — usually — these categories overlap to some degree.
My point is, I write these posts to initiate an intelligent dialogue — not to soapbox or to proselytize — and those discussions invariably make me think more deeply about a given post’s thesis. So, no one is out of their depth here! Everyone who participates is welcome and appreciated! My wife once suggested I change the tagline of this blog from “Writer of Things That Go Bump in the Night” to “Highly Academic Discussions about Really Dumb Shit”! This is a forum, a safe and welcoming space, for fans of storytelling and pop culture to consider some of our favorite stories and characters in their wider sociocultural — and sometimes sociopolitical — context. We scrutinize the values embedded in the stories that have entertained and influenced us — e.g., I recently reexamined all the automobile-worshipping media on which I came of age in the ’80s — and we consider if those stories still speak to us and reflect the kind of world we want to inhabit:
So, with that out of the way, let’s talk Tim Burton’s Batman! I don’t know any Gen-Xer that doesn’t hold the year 1989 in special regard. Perhaps that is owed in part to the richness of the pop culture — it was an eventful summer at the cinema, to be sure, though certainly not by today’s IP-centric standards — and perhaps it’s just fondly remembered as the twilight of the Reagan era, that Day-Glo decade that existed between the scandal-plagued ’70s and the crime-obsessed ’90s. It was a fun time to be a kid, for certain; Xers ache for the ’80s the way boomers revere the ’50s, for reasons I explored in “In the Multiverse of Madness, Part 2.”
I was halfway through junior high that summer, and for reasons too personal (and too boring) to go into here, it was the last truly happy period of my young life. Things went downhill quickly after that. So, for me, the pop culture of 1989, which is emblemized by Burton’s Batman, is like a photo album of some truly joyous days. But I also don’t want to live in 1989 forever, hence the reason I did not see — and will never watch — The Flash (a.k.a. Keaton Returns) or Indiana Jones and the Fountain of Fiber Supplements. Let’s talk about why the movies today feel different, point by point.
The first reason is that storytelling itself has changed since we were kids. We now live in an era of “storyless” fiction, otherwise known as “postnarrativity.” Postnarrative fiction, epitomized by franchises like Lost and Game of Thrones and the Marvel Cinematic Universe, is not concerned with conclusion or catharsis, simply about keeping the adventure alive for as long as possible, and piling on more and more concurrent plotlines for as long as such a thing is sustainable. When Game of Thrones crashed into a heap in the final season, that was not a “bug” in the storytelling; rather, it was a feature — an inevitability — of its postnarrative structure. What we’re talking about is the difference between the 1992 Buffy the Vampire Slayer movie, which was a closed-ended empowerment story for 12-year-old girls, and the so-called “Slayerverse,” a multiversal mashup of the Buffy mythos that is all about catering to the differing tastes and nostalgic yearnings of adult-Millennial fans. (You can read my full thesis on that subject here.)
Corporate franchises have adopted the spirit of postnarrativity (the nonlinear structure of Pulp Fiction, the absence of any “moral to the story” à la Seinfeld, the aversion to conclusive resolutions of The X-Files), but use puzzle-boxing to keep fans engaged. (See more about these viewer-engagement strategies in “In the Multiverse of Madness, Part 1.”) The reason mega-franchises like Marvel don’t “make sense” to casual viewers is because they have been purposefully designed to reward superfans who obsess over each new puzzle piece in the intertextual metanarrative — at the expense of everyone else. Gone are the days when you could get a one-off, closed-ended superhero story like Burton’s Batman or the Kristy Swanson Buffy. Flawed though those movies may have been (more on this point in the next paragraph), each at least presented a story. Modern superhero movies are just movie-length coming attractions for the next offering in the franchise, which is part of the reason why the dialogue, as you noted, is often so clunky: So much of it either has to pay off a plot point established in an earlier movie, or set up one for a forthcoming movie. Superfans don’t want a story; they want storyworld omniscience. Because that’s what modern mega-franchises have systematically trained them to want. Today’s fans are less interested in prescriptive endings — i.e., what the story is trying to say — than they are with omniscient perspective — understanding how the fictive world works.
Indeed, Pierce: Burton’s Batman is a triumph of cinematic style over storytelling substance. You are also correct when you observe that Batman ’89 doesn’t aspire to any social messaging, though the same could be said of Burton’s entire repertoire: His movies are not underpinned by topical sociocultural or -political themes. In stark contrast with Christopher Nolan (and we’ll talk more about those movies in a minute), Burton is a visualist, not an intellectual. His films are rich with Gothic atmospherics and fairytale flourishes — which he uses to dramatize the plight of misunderstood outsiders (a theme that recurred in last year’s Netflix series Wednesday, which he exec-produced and directed the first four eps) — but don’t have much to say about the real world. Consequently, when he is working from a good script — Edward Scissorhands, Sleepy Hollow — you get a great story stylishly told; when he’s working with subpar material, however — Planet of the Apes, Dark Shadows — his visual flourishes seldom compensate for an inadequate screenplay. He’s a very script-dependent director, because he’s more of a visual artist than a skilled storyteller. When he’s working with the right material, he makes magic, but when he isn’t, he misfires.
(Side note: I thought the first four episodes of Wednesday were really wonderful — a perfect example of Burton at his best. Those episodes were all about exploring Wednesday’s character, her relationship with her family [particularly her mother], her social interactions, her peculiar worldview, and the Gothic setting of Nevermore Academy. But all of that deliciously idiosyncratic, character-driven storytelling was sidelined in the second half of the season, helmed by Gandja Monteiro and James Marshall, in favor of servicing a byzantine conspiracy plotline and who cares less?)
As far as storytelling goes, Nolan’s Dark Knight trilogy is an absolutely staggering cinematic achievement. Each of the three films is great in its own right, and when viewed in totality, they achieve something pretty close to genius. I admire the hell out of them, and I do get emotional when I watch them — particularly the dénouement of The Dark Knight Rises. It tells the full story of Batman’s crimefighting career, from its inception to his retirement, something no one else has ever really done in a superhero saga. However…
The trilogy is emblematic of the comics-are-not-for-kids mentality I now find so troubling, even somewhat reprehensible. Those movies certainly rise to the level of myth, but for reasons I explored in “Superman IV at 35,” superhero fiction was never meant to be “grounded or elevated” material. It was meant to expand the imagination of nine-year-olds. The Dark Knight movies, though far superior to any of their contemporaries in the superhero genre, are ultimately violent wish-fulfillment fantasies for middle-aged men. As no less than Grant Morrison observed, “Anyone who tried telling stories after 9/11 noticed that the real world became horribly fictional — so all of our fictions seemed to aspire toward realism. In Nolan’s films, Batman is a soldier, and it echoes the whole War on Terror” (Grant Morrison, “Celluloid Hero,” Rolling Stone, August 2, 2012, 43).
So, Nolan’s Bat-movies, in contrast with the Burton and Schumacher films, are in direct conversation with the sociopolitical climate of the era in which they were produced. And because Nolan appears, by all evidence, to be politically liberal, and most filmmakers and artists in Hollywood espouse liberal principles, I think many Americans assume the media they consume is, for the most part, embedded with liberal values. But speaking as someone who lived in Hollywood for 20 years, and who still makes a living from screenwriting, I can attest that despite the way filmmakers vote, their movies are often reflective of deep-seated conservative values:
Accordingly, the Dark Knight movies reflect, however inadvertently, a lot of the sociopolitical values baked into the conceptual premise of Batman from the moment he was conceived by Kane and Finger in the 1930s. These movies are very suspicious of public institutions and their efficacy, preferring instead to let what ills society be left in the hands of a silver-spoon billionaire who moonlights as an extrajudicial vigilante, motivated by personal vengeance, armed with military-grade hardware, and guided by surveillance-state technology. Nolan literally makes a heroic martyr out of a military-defense contractor. (As does Jon Favreau in Iron Man.) Not exactly the stuff of progressive wet dreams.
The Star Wars movies — all of them, from the classic trilogy to the prequels to the Disney-era entries — are no different, this despite George Lucas’ openly Democratic political affiliation. All of them demonstrate a deep distrust of public institutions, which are invariably portrayed as either corrupt (the Empire, the First Order) or inept (the Old Republic, the New Republic, the Jedi Order). The galaxy’s only hope in all of those trilogies is a chosen-one warrior-priest — a solitary hero who possesses the intuitive skill/savvy to do what our week-kneed public officials cannot. In Star Wars, representative democracy isn’t nearly as effective as tyrannical authoritarianism (the Empire) or a demigod-led shadow theocracy (the Jedi Order).
I say that not to make a political point, but rather to comment on your (rightful) observation that filmmakers/storytellers often shoehorn social messaging into their stories that feels like blatant pandering — “going woke,” as it is sometimes pejoratively labeled — like when all of a sudden Tim Drake was established as bisexual, or Lando Calrissian as pansexual. Part of the reason moves like that ring irritatingly false is because so often the progressive intent behind those character retcons is at odds with the more conservative ideological foundations of the narratives themselves.
I will say that I think that sort of thing is less about catering to certain members of the audience, however, than it is a desperate bid for contemporary cultural relevance on the part of a mid-20th-century multimedia franchise that runs primarily on the fuel of nostalgia. It’s an attempt to paper over the fact that the stories themselves were created to reflect the mores of a bygone era, without actually interrogating the values underpinning those stories.
I think it’s rather creatively pathetic to make Robin bisexual, but not because, as a cisgendered straight male, I am offended or disgusted or threatened by bisexuality. Not at all! But rather because Robin was created to inspire the imagination of the 12-year-old boys of the 1940s, and Lando Calrissian the 12-year-old boys of the 1980s. Robin was a 13-year-old boy — an audience surrogate — who looked up to Batman, figuratively and literally, and who assisted his larger-than-life adventures. Any sexual subtext to that relationship was imposed on it by fearmongering quacks like Fredric Wertham or jaded adults who’d long since lost the ability to see those stories with asexual eyes. Robin’s original writers understood that character and his readership, and those naïve adventures were written in that same spirit of wide-eyed innocence.
I find it equally pathetic to have Robin growling things like “Fuck Batman,” because it demonstrates either a lack of understanding as to the intended audience for that character, or — more likely — a complete disregard for that audience. And I’m honestly not sure which is worse. It’s immaturity masquerading as edginess. There’s nothing “woke” about it. Quite the opposite. It’s trying to impose adult complexity on two-dimensional cartoon characters. The blurring of the line between children’s stories and adult entertainment can, in my view, be traced to the 1980s, and there’s no question that Tim Burton’s Batman was, however inadvertently, the no-turning-back point for that seismic cultural shift.
On the matter of the Batmania of the summer of ’89, I recall reading this line somewhere years ago (I can’t remember where, else I would link to it): “There would be better Batman movies later, but none would ever be bigger.” Indeed. And I absolutely remember Jordan Knight wearing a Bat-shirt! LOL! My sister is two years my junior, so the music and imagery of New Kids on the Block were a fixture in our household at that time! I’m pretty sure the first concert I ever saw was NKOTB: I took my sister to a show at, I believe, Madison Square Garden. They weren’t my cup of tea, but the Bronx freestyle girl group Sweet Sensation was the opening act, so my eighth-grade self found something enjoyable to take from the experience! Nowadays when I hear the New Kids on the radio, I’ll usually listen to the song all the way through — just for old times’ sake. Just a few weeks ago, I heard Sweet Sensation’s “Hooked on You” on Sirius. That took me back! Wonder whatever happened to those ladies…?
On the matter of Dick Tracy: I must concede I have not seen that film since it was first released on VHS well over 30 years ago. I think it came out at the wrong time for me to truly appreciate it. At that point, as I was transitioning into adolescence and reveling in the hormonal angst of that stage of pubescence, I was taken with the somber tones of Burton’s Batman, and starting to get into R-rated movies that traded in darker themes and more explicit violence: action flicks like Lethal Weapon and Die Hard (and their first sequels), as well as mob dramas like Goodfellas and State of Grace. Dick Tracy and the first Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles were movies that were certainly on my radar, but that I probably would’ve enjoyed a bit more had I been about five years younger.
That said, I should check out Dick Tracy again and see how it holds up. The way you describe it — primary colors, over-the-top, appropriate for kids without alienating adults — is basically the way I remember it, and I am on record as having praised the much-maligned Batman Forever for the same virtues. (I’m less a fan of Batman & Robin, which I think is a very poorly made movie in every respect. It’s shamelessly toyetic, and its environmental themes — and I say this as an environmental activist — are deeply misguided, to put it generously.)
Anyway, Pierce, I’m grateful to you for engaging me here, and I will now respond to the comment you left on “Mirror/Mirror,” which is a post I thought at the time would encourage far more enthused engagement than it did. (That post kinda flamed out, alas.) Your contributions here are very much appreciated, my friend, and I hope you’ll come back again! I’m grateful you shared your passion and intelligence with me here. Thank you.
Sean