I have a very good friend who’s very into Tim Burton’s Batman. If he wasn’t currently living abroad he’d still have the film’s Joker and Batman trading cards affixed to his walls. A twee-Texas punk, somewhere in Istanbul he’s wearing a hand-drawn Batman in a rocketship labeled “Bat Happening,” a riff on an album cover of the late-80s indie band, Beat Happening.
Why should you care about my globe-trotting, guitar strumming, bat-crazed friend Joel? Particularly on the day that Batman was released 25 years ago? Well, until this weekend, Joel was my only reference point for the film. I’d seen every Batman film since (starting with Returns), but I’d never seen Batman.
How was this possible?
I was seven years old when Batman was released into theaters. Although it was the highest grossing film of 1989, it also had a very long and healthy life on home video. In fact Batman helped drop the price point of home video, selling for $14.99 or less. Most rental stores previously sold videos for $99 (i.e. movies were just rented). There had been other home video purchase pushes (Raiders of the Lost Ark, Crocodile Dundee) but Batman was the film that broke the idea that people might actually want to have a home video library. The VHS retail copy even had a Diet Coke ad of Alfred (Michael Gough) dutifully waiting for his bat master to arrive home, Coke and a glass on a platter: only one soda could quench a hero’s thirst. This was followed by a Daffy Duck/Bugs Bunny instructional animation telling you where you could buy a Warner Brother’s hat.
I didn’t have the VHS tape (Joel said he wore his out as a kid; and his family still gives him Batman swag). I’m just telling you this to start you down the road of your own nostalgia past. Because I just saw those ads for the same time, too.
I don’t have a good excuse for never seeing Batman. I was never in a coma. I’ve had access to electricity all my life. I’ve seen a lot of movies and was even known by name at my neighborhood video rental store. Really, it’s just something I missed and never caught up on. I met this Joel character while the new Christopher Nolan films were being released. Previously, I’d seen one of the Burton’s, both of the Schumacher ones (and purchased the Batman Forever soundtrack). When we saw The Dark Knight, Joel had already seen it twice.
As the Nolan films were so serious and my memory of the Schumacher ones were that they were goofy, I never sought out Batman. As I came to love Joel’s attachment to that film, I think I never watched it because deep down, I thought there’s no way it’d live up to his grin and cackle when he recited Jack Nicholson’s lines (“Tell me something, friend: you ever dance with the devil in the pale moonlight?”).
But now that there’s an ocean between us — and a YouTube blockage in Turkey — I decided to give it a shot. And I watched Batman for the first time. And halfway through I had to Skype Joel to gleefully cackle about my viewing experience (for those interested, it was around the “pen is truly mightier than the sword” line).
But let’s back up a little bit.
Batman is still beloved and the build up fervor prior to is release — and the box office after — proved that there was a wider audience for comic book movies than anticipated. But after Nolan’s trilogy and with the subsequent Marvel and DC universe building currently taking shape, this type of superhero movie has, unfortunately, moved from Smylex to Brand X (oh no!).
Seventeen years passed between Burton’s Batman and Nolan’s Batman Begins. In between we got Dick Tracy, The Mask, The Shadow, X-Men, Spider-Man and the Joel Schumachers. (Tonally, and historically, is it okay if I include Martin Campbell’s Zorro? Thanks.) This Batman set the table for all of those films. Batman Begins cleared the table for an all-new menu.
I’ll tell you what I miss in terms of comparing menus. First, in Batman, the score is not only great, but it’s front and center. I miss when big movies introduce you to the credits via an orchestral score. Get ready, Danny Elfman prepares us, you’re going to experience a movie! The credits also tell you that! In the 90s it used to be that the only films that eschewed the opening credits were the serious ones. Now almost every movie does, including most tentpoles. Similarly, the set design is close to a comic book (using blocks of color for a room is glorious to cast a shadow against). Even the Wayne estate is surprisingly barren for the living quarters of someone so posh. It’s just big. Everything in Batman feels like a made-up world and as self-contained as a snow globe. There’s just one newspaper, no neighboring towns and everyone gets caught because there’s no escape in Gotham (but the artwork is from the real world; spare the Francis Bacon painting, The Joker likes it).
And last, it’s goofy! There are one-liners galore (“never rub another man’s rhubarb.”). A tonal disconnect from criminal mastermind to his henchman (Tracey Walter). A rivaling actor (Jack Palance) who has such fun, it’s almost as if someone told him that he was actually playing The Joker. And disjointed fight scenes (cut to separate shot of Batman kicking a gun from someone’s hand) and building layouts (the restaurant is on the second floor of the art museum: bring your boombox!) that directly harken to comic book panels that, for spatial reasons, didn’t have the luxury to storyboard a full transition.
Now, the Nolan films are certainly better stories in a classical sense. But truthfully, these films don’t even need to be compared. So, let’s talk brands. What is unfortunate about both eras of the superhero film is that they’ve each had to have one specific expressway with no exits — the 90s were goofy, less bound to our real world, and the 00’s have been very serious, and more realistic in cityscape, carnage and villainry — and there’s no end in sight.
Hollywood is a copycat game. Formulas lead to success. If a tonally different film veers from the formula and isn’t successful then the likelihood of anything being allowed to step aside from that formula is greatly decreased. It’d be nice to have a mix of goofy superhero films and serious superhero films. But as both Marvel and DC continue to build their superhero universes, they’ve determined that they need to maintain the same aesthetics and tones throughout their universe.
Exhibit A: Edgar Wright leaving Ant-Man after working on developing the film for eight years. What changed in those eight years? Oh, just The Avengers connecting the Marvel Universe and Warner Brothers ramping up a Batman v Superman in order to starting to mount the road to a Justice League movie. Now superheroes are in the expensive mini-series tentpole business. Hiring directors similar to television: maintain what people have already filed in for and do not apply your personal stamp.
Exhibit B: The Green Hornet. Seth Rogen’s comic book adaptation came after The Dark Knight trilogy had completed and had set forth the template for the coming generation of superhero films: very serious. Rogen dared ask, why so serious? He hired a director, Michel Gondry (Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, The Science of Sleep), who has a similar aesthetic to the Burton of the 80s: an affectionate observer of the maligned daydreamer. Similar to Burton, Gondry was not a previous fan of the comic book. They were hired for their whimsical affectations.
Burton, however, got to set the standard. Gondry and Rogen were working against a sweeping superhero renaissance. The Green Hornet was goofy, full of story shortcuts, minimal set design (in a word: 90s). And Sony panicked from the movie they received. Audiences weren’t kind. And we’ll probably never get a movie like that again. Honestly, regardless of how you feel about that expensive vanity genre experiment (I actually kinda liked it) it’s too bad that it signaled a likely end to the non-universe aligned superhero film.
There was a great, unexpected moment in Seth Rogen’s current (and approved) summer blockbuster, Neighbors, where he and the young stud next door (Zac Efron) discuss Batman. To Rogen, Batman will always be Michael Keaton. To Efron it will be Bale. They both do a simple impression: “I’m Batman.” For Rogen’s Keaton, his line is uttered like he’d just looked over his shoulder and then grabbed a bread stick and leaned across and said, “Of course I’m Batman, but don’t tell anyone.” For Efron’s Bale, it’s growled from the bottom of his throat (or is it young Bruce Wayne growling from the gutter where he’d witnessed his father’s death?) with the full conviction that it will set everything right in the world and everyone needs to know it.
It’s kinda perfect for both films. And it’s kinda perfect for each generation of the stars of Neighbors. Not that Efron is inherently very serious and Rogen can’t be serious. But people were upset when Keaton was cast as Batman and when Rogen was cast as The Green Hornet. (Comedians can’t be superheroes!) Keaton’s Bruce Wayne bed Kim Basinger and then retreated to his bat cave and slept hanging upside down. Bale’s Bruce Wayne was highly trained, a former prisoner, had muscles upon muscles and he faked being careless to women to keep them at a safe distance from vigilantes, even though he had a big heart under all that muscle. After Burton-Keaton’s Batman, the 90s gave us elastic superheroes and goofy villains. After Nolan-Bale’s Batman, the 00s have given us, comparatively, grounded heroes and grounded villains.
And as you can see from the photo above: they’re both beautiful.
Now, if you’ll excuse me. I’ve got a little a little bromance of my own to catch up on after finally seeing Batman. (“It’s me, sugar bumps.”)
Brian Formo is a featured contributor on the CraveOnline Film Channel. You can follow him on Twitter at @BrianEmilFormo.
