Batman Returns (1992)

Considering I'd never seen this movie, I grew up with an alarming amount of memorabilia for it. Cards, official comic adaptation, magazine etc. Watching it for the first time was like a reunion with an old friend.

Re-watching Batman in the first part of this batathon was a puzzling experience: it was enjoyable, but really quite bad. It has little in the way of a coherent plot, the final fight sequence is anticlimactic, the bat-themed technology as ridiculous as ever, and so on. The flat characterization of minor characters is especially problematic: corrupt cop Eckhardt is hard-boiled private eye and Dirty Harry all in one fat package; "Bob the Goon" is loyal and sycophantic, but an idiot; wise-cracking journalist Knox no more than annoying garnish; Alicia an empty-headed bimbo.

But Batman Returns forced a re-evaluation. If you consider both films as as attempts to put the Batman comics on film -- and not merely a loose adaptation of the Batman story -- then they are remarkable successes. Flat and unsatisfying those minor characters might have been as characters, but as examples of their type they were perfect. Which is to say: as representations of minor comic-book characters, the kind of characters providing background colour and no more, the kind of characters who appear for three panels and vanish, they were perfect.

The villains come from a similar tradition of bad writing: in Batman Returns they are, frankly, ridiculous. Catwoman's Pygmalion-esque transformation from dowdy Selina Kyle into slinky, vinyl-clad hotness is irritating; but her attempts at playing "cat" are intolerably bad. Particularly cringe-worthy is when, during a visit to the Penguin, she begins to clean herself in the manner of a cat -- i.e., by licking her arm and rubbing it over her head.

If Catwoman is insane, the Penguin a deformed, deranged monster. It's hard to pinpoint his low: when he submits to Max Shreck's kipper like a trained seal, perhaps, and then bites a man's nose? Or when he orchestrates a plot to have penguins with rockets tied to their backs destroy Gotham City? (It's only one step from there to sharks with frickin' laser beams attached to their heads...)

Their awful dialogue -- and it was awful -- could well be blamed on screenwriter Daniel Waters: he was also responsible for Hudson Hawk, so some hate is definitely due in that direction. But I'll be more charitable than that: the dialogue was awful because it was perfectly in-character. It was exactly what one would expect from the abhorrent, unrealistic creations that spoke it.

The project was to put comic book villains on screen. Not the way they've become in recent years, with reasonable (my God!) explanations of their abnormal psychology, "he's just misunderstood" etc. -- no, they're outrageously mad. Batman Returns works if you consider it in the same tradition as holy-shark-repellant-bat-spray Adam West, the tradition of inspired supervillainy that saw heroes fighting the most insane of enemies and the most inane of plots. Consider the giant gift-box filled with evil circus performers, or the rocket-equipped penguins, or Max Shreck's bizarre plan to siphon Gotham's power into a giant capacitor. These things are very much comic-book evil.

What does a comic-book villain look like, in real life? We see what it would look like if a psychotic woman began to act like a cat, and it's pathetic and awful and sad. The Penguin is even worse: a child-man, out of control, playing with his toys. (In that context, even rocket-powered penguins don't seem strange...)

Oh, and: the sexual deviancy thing. I don't know what Burton was getting it, but there's a real obsession with sex there. The Penguin's constant (and disgusting) innuendo, Catwoman... well, Catwoman. Even Shreck's death was sexual. Hmm.