By Titus Techera
Tim Burton’s Batman and Batman Returns might be the perfect Halloween movies. They were big successes back in 1989 and 1992, grossing together more than a billion dollars (adjusted for inflation). They are fun popcorn movies, but also weird artistic experimentsthat embrace the juvenile character of American pop culture while revisiting cinema history.
Batman and Burton deserve credit or blame for turning cinema toward superhero stories, which have since become the dominant film genre. But they were funnier than comic book stories have been since, better able to mix various elements of pop culture, and more at home with Hollywood glamour. To the extent that our entertainment has the character of childish playing with expensive toys, there’s a lot to be said for knowing all the aspects of the business without taking any of them too seriously.
Batman mixed New Hollywood stars like Jack Nicholson (The Joker) with the hottest pop musician of its time—Prince, who scored a multiplatinum album with the soundtrack. Cool cats like Billy Dee Williams (Harvey Dent) were placed onscreen next to old heavies like Jack Palance (the gangster Grissom). Then there’s Burton’s own favored composer Danny Elfman, whose score has proved quite influential on subsequent Batman productions. Balancing Prince’s American funk, Elfman’s Romanticism recalled the Euro-classical influence on on film music.
Visually, Burton juxtaposes the squalor of ‘80s New York, then about to sink to its lowest, with 1930s luxury. It’s not as incongruous as it sounds: Burton remembers, even if the audience doesn’t, that the old days of wood-paneled offices and black-tie night clubs were also an era of mounting poverty, violent gangsters, and police corruption.
Burton adds to this vision of American history his love of contemporary artistic styles.. The set design returns us to a time when modernism meant mixing the technologies and wealth of the 20th century with the memories and fantasies of the ancient past—think of Art Deco. Batman is the cinematic correlative of an art deco skyscraper in a way Fritz Lang’s humorless Metropolis, for example, was not. And, of course, Burton knows his film history: Batman in costume looks a bit like F.W. Murnau’s Nosferatu and is explicitly compared to vampires.
This is not just pastiche, though perhaps it is not quite as highbrow as Jean-Luc Godard’s notion of cinema taking responsibility for history even as it explores the psyche. Burton really does think we could learn about moral character if we remembered the splendor and cruelty of the past. So also with comic books and fantasy, which adapted classical techniques and themes for a democratic public. Burton is convinced that the submerged love of beauty in pop culture shows a suffering, a longing simply left out of most of our public life, and he has dedicated his career to revealing what’s breaking America’s heart. Despite its dark theme and mood, Burton’s Batman looks and sounds gorgeous in a way that completely eludes subsequent mask-and-cape movies.
Now, what does all this have to do with Halloween? Once you see Nicholson dressed as a purple clown running a circus menagerie of mimes with machine guns in the middle of Manhattan, grinning for the cameras, I think you’ll feel it is pumpkin season after all. So also in the sequel, when Danny De Vito as the Penguin sends his harlequins to attack industrialist Max Shreck (Christopher Walken, in another Nosferatu reference) in Central Park. Burton’s typical idea—let’s have our dreams and nightmares walk the streets, film it all, compare that with cinema and see what America is really all about—well, that only makes sense come Halloween.
Burton uses these fantasies to criticize the wrong kind of beautification. As The Joker, Nicholson calls himself the first functional homicidal artist. In a scene that reveals liberal radical chic for what it is, Burton shows us the Joker engage in gangster terror and graffiti vandalism.The setting is the Guggenheim museum. One could call that an avant-garde attitude to our cultural heritage. The Joker also makes deadly cosmetics, causing America’s most trusted TV figures to look terrible on camera since they fear the chemicals might kill them. These are all ways of attacking America’s pretentious elites and one cannot help suspecting that Burton shares that criticism, if not the murderous intent. The ugly truth is important, because without that it’s hard to take any more beautiful truth seriously.
There’s also a lot of humor to the stories, indeed childish humor, as befits comic books. I broadly find this silliness, preferable to the 1960s notion of camp, which is too smug or knowing—a fantasy for adults rather than actual children. In the exorbitant and preposterous atmosphere Burton creates, it becomes possible to see what’s wrong with the kind of entertainment and public life we’ve become used to and instead look for something more more authentic. In a cultural sense, Burton really is trying to save America, and the plots of the movies are dedicated to that task earnestly.
In Batman, the plot turns around the celebration of the 200th anniversary of Gotham City. That suggests the founding moment is 1789, which points as much to the French Revolution as to the American Constitution and the inauguration of Washington. The movie’s Gothic cathedral finale, as well as Bruce Wayne’s aristocratic life, all suggest the ancien regime. The atmosphere indeed is revolutionary—Gotham is rife with crime, going bankrupt, all semblance of morality has perishedIn the midst of all this the mad figure of the Joker ascends from mere gangster to attempting genocide by deadly gas. Out of the post-modern mix of things new and old, without rhyme or reason, which characterizes our times, evil smiles at us and, in Nicholson’s threatening accents, says, “Have you ever danced with the devil by the pale moon light?”
Politically, this is a kind of populism. The Joker playacts fireside chats on TV and takes lead of the celebratory parade. He’s a caricature of an American president, and thus reveals the triviality and corruption of our real politics. In his demand for justice, Batman stands for the moral convictions that have been replaced by the modern state. For Batman, politics is a serious matter—not just show biz.
Batman Returns is even more directly political. A kind of caricature of Trump, industrialist Max Shreck wants to control Gotham and figures on using the Penguin as a sympathy candidate in the mayoral race, a freak who appeals to our love of victims and our desire to see the underdog win. Like my friend, the late critic Paul Cantor told me, Batman Returns is as much a reflection on the identity politics of the ‘80s as Batman was of the New Deal and the Great Depression. With the ambiguous villain Catwoman (Michelle Pfeiffer), feminism (“I am Catwoman, hear me roar!”) is also dragged in. This time, Gotham turns away from Batman and toward tyranny. . By the end of the film, Batman seems morally a lot more reactionary than he had ever seemed, aesthetically, in his elegant mansion.
Far from being an accident of commerce or of Burton’s artistic idiosyncrasy, these visions of Batman are very earnest. They get under our skin by being preposterous, but they appeal thereby to a deeper moral concern we cannot afford to admit to share publicly. They’re intended discreetly to strengthen our passions and our resolve. The dream-like atmosphere of Halloween itself helps realism, because it allows us to deny even to ourselves why we feel the way we do and what it is about our way of life that scares or paralyzes us.
So have a Happy Burton Halloween, enjoy the Batman movies and let the thought of counterrevolution play in the back of your mind!
Titus Techera is the Executive Director of the American Cinema Foundation and a culture critic for think tanks including Liberty Fund and the Acton Institute. He teaches in the Manhattan Institute Logos Fellowship and is a Visiting Fellow at the Mattias Corvinus Collegium in Budapest.