Let's face it, you're not exactly "normal," are you?

BATMAN

1989

Directed by Tim Burton

Written by Sam Hamm and Warren Skaaren

Spoilers: severe

By the late 1970s, Batman had become a figure of ridicule in the wider culture; this would not have been the case for comic book fans by the late 1970s, for the shenanigans that characterize Silver Age DC Comics were already well in the past, but as comic readership was declining by then, too, what "Batman" meant to most people, even as the subsequent decade produced works such as The Dark Knight Returns and The Killing Joke, was just the popular and widely-syndicated Batman TV show from the mid-1960s headlined by Adam West (or the 1966 feature film that used this iteration of the character), and if you know anything about the 60s Batman then you know the word almost invariably used to describe it is "camp."  Perhaps you know it from the famous meme from the 1966 feature film, regarding West's forlorn aside to the audience about the difficulties sometimes inherent to the disposal of an explosive.  Perhaps you know it from Robin's catchphrase template ("Holy [pun], Batman!"), or from the Batusi, or from the colorful title cards with cartoonish sound effects used to join up the edits during its rambunctious action scenes.  "Camp," then, was accurate.  It was not by any means high camp, for the show is intentionally silly comedy; yet with the occasional exception notable for its rarity, it was the last time that the Dark Knight's screen adaptations were going to be intentionally silly.

The long-suffering production's polestar was a disdain for silliness, and a desire to honor a character that by his very name suggests a monster haunting the night, a hero only by virtue of the even worse monsters he fights—you know, all that good stuff, plus Superman had been a hit, and it seemed correct that DC's then-second-most-important character should shortly follow their first, which wound up not happening for eleven years, at which point the Superman franchise had already been dead for two, leaving it to Batman to resurrect their moribund genre.  Partly, the long development reflected Batman's devaluation, with no studio willing to bite until finally Warners—which, mind you, didn't own DC until shortly before Batman's release—was nudged into backstopping it when at the turn of the 80s the independent rightsholders announced, no doubt over-optimistically, that they were going to make a movie whether they had a studio partner or not.  Partly, it reflected the very challenge of redeeming Batman, perhaps with some backsliding towards a more comedic interpretation: at one point Ivan Reitman was attached—Bill Murray potentially coming with him—which wasn't what anybody really wanted, but then, infamously enough, the actor ultimately cast as Batman caused about as much consternation amongst geeks as Murray would've.  Eventually, Batman's producers, Jon Peters and Peter Guber, found the man to realize their grave vision, and I can hear you asking, "Who better to execute a campless Batman than Tim Burton?", I assume with some amount of sarcasm (a movie with writing credits going to a couple of guys named "Sam Hamm" and "Warren Skaaren" couldn't possibly be silly).  But it worked: thrown into a veritable snakepit that was the summer of '89, Batman rose to become its year's domestic box office king, not least on the strength of its reputation as a dark and serious superhero film, and for, like, a really long time, that reputation stuck.

Batman remains well-regarded, and don't imagine I'm going to claim otherwise—its legacy has surely only grown, indeed, arguably tumorously*—but I don't think it is any longer generally regarded as a very serious film, or at least not a self-serious one.  One of the very first things to happen in Batman is a gesture towards "degenerate urban blight," represented by an eight year-old boy being propositioned by a prostitute, in front of his parents, because that is just how degraded Gotham City's become and why it needs a Batman; I feel like a movie containing this gesture could, potentially, have some measure of camp to it.  And, looking back from almost four decades later, this could suggest something about the whole matter of Batman: even taking the utmost pains to avoid it, there's no real escaping it, because maybe there's just something inherently camp about a guy dressing up like a bat to punch gimmicky weirdos who threaten to destabilize a vision of society based predominantly on the crime movies released 30-40 years prior to whichever Batman movie it is we're talking about.  But nevertheless, it's led to a downward spiral of decampification in Bat-cinema that's mostly amounted to slathering the movies with a combination of pompousness and grime that is itself, totally fucking camp, except I'm pretty sure Bat-filmmakers think it isn't, which only makes, say, The Batman, the 2022 film concerning the Batman fighting the Riddler in a city-sized version of the bathroom from Saw, all the harder to take seriously.

Tim Burton, anyway, seems to have been pretty aware of it and, despite the brief of his assignment, completely embraced it, finding his entree into Batman not through "grimness" and "grittiness," except as the accessories to the kind of dark fantasy that spoke to his strengths as a filmmaker, and oddly enough—considering that Batman was only the third feature film of Burton's young career and was intended as a trust exercise with tens of millions of dollars at stake; indeed, considering that Burton has made it clear he barely even likes his Batman—it was also, to date, the movie he had the earliest and most critical hand in shaping, working on it for a few years.  (Previously, even if he imposed substantial changes on Beetlejuice, given its messy collage of screenplay drafts, I'm pretty sure he only worked on implementing those changes for about a week.  Though its maker being Bat-brained would explain why Beetlejuice concerns the horny villainy of a chalk-faced, greenish-haired man who laughs—played by Batman, to boot.)  Burton has also been forthcoming about his lack of any particular preexisting affection for Batman, or comic books in general—which I've always found inconceivable (this fucking nerd?), but it must be true given there's not much profit in him admitting it—whereas Hamm, at least, was given the opportunity to build his cred by writing some comics of his own during the run-up to Batman '89; yet if you have any familiarity with Batman, you will probably recognize how fucked-up and wrong this iteration of the character is.  Hamm has blamed Burton on the egregiously "IP film adaptation" decision to tie the Joker to the murder of Bruce Wayne's parents, which is like having Lex Luthor blow up Krypton, and I've always misremembered this as a representation of Bruce's psychological obsession with fighting crime—that he perceives in every villain he fights the brutal man who orphaned him—but this is blatantly not the case, and yes, it sucks.  Even so, you can, at least, see how filmmakers could've convinced themselves it was a good idea; what's much more deliberately fucked-up and wrong is how over the film Burton slowly and meticulously ramps up the consequentiality of Batman's violence, and it's actually a little sick the way that, bit-by-bit, Burton drops the plausible deniability of "but maybe they escaped the explosion" in favor of "Batman is murdering people left and right," which means he knew how wrong this was and did it anyway, despite having been entrusted with a superhero so pathologically-scrupulous about the sanctity of life that—even in non-continuity stories!—writers as tough as Frank Miller and Alan Moore still wouldn't write him as a killer.**

And, somehow, I've never found this very damaging, because whether anyone wanted him to or not, whether he himself even meant to or not, Tim Burton made himself a Tim Burton film, which makes itself clear in a number of self-reinforcing ways, though just as much in its fundamentals as the musical and visual accoutrements that are maybe more obvious, by which I mean Burton's instinct to turn this towards a manichaean struggle between midnight freaks inhabiting mythic identities in order to realize their true selves, each one half of a whole, one black and good and the other colorful and demonic; which isn't actually "bad Batman," nor is, ultimately, Burton's principal interest in that struggle clearly gravitating towards the bad guy.  It inaugurates a film franchise that, like the comics, is often more fascinated by its manifestations of evil than its manifestation of justice, and it's why to the extent the movie even has a plot (not much), it's the story of how the betrayal of a mobster turned him into a theatrical lunatic and sent him on a death-ride against the whole world, and also why it doesn't feel terribly egotistical that Jack Nicholson, playing the Joker, outbills Michael Keaton, playing the titular superhero.  It's also perhaps part of the reason why Batman has no great urge to serve as an origin story for Batman, cf. almost every other superhero's first cinematic appearance, even ones with multiple series-starters—and it correctly ascertains that even in 1989 you know who Bruce Wayne is (Bruce first appearing cowl-free eighteen minutes in, Keaton not clarifying that this is Bruce till several minutes after that, while the movie itself feels free to do nothing more besides implying that Bruce is Batman in its scene transitions for almost its entire runtime, and it likewise introduces the Batmobile and Batplane and Batcave, not without panache, but as if you know what they are, too).  So, besides references to his formational tragedy and an eventual flashback to it, the closest it gets to an origin is the opening minutes of the movie which threw this particular little kid for a loop back in 1989, when the first scene of this Batman has that family with the little boy leave a movie theater, getting accosted by thugs, only to be saved by Batman.

From there, it really is the story of the Joker, or at least this Jack Napier guy (perhaps it's a good sign when Nicholson doesn't have to pretend to be anybody but a "Jack," given this has resulted in arguably his two most celebrated performances), and how his arrogance has alienated everybody in the Gotham underworld so they contrive to retire him from their organization at the gangland-owned Axis Chemical Corporation, and, with Batman's help, he obligingly falls directly into a roiling vat of Nickelodeon slime.  But Jack does not die.  He is reborn as the Joker, with so many grudges to settle that once his old boss is dead, he has to do it at industrial scale, commandeering the chemical works to orchestrate a whimsical campaign of mass poisonings against all Gotham such as you'd think somebody—not just Batman, anybody—would've traced to their source immediately if they thought about it for two seconds, but Gotham is, after all, the kind of fallen city whose police only show up for a few early scenes to evidence their corruption, and then entirely vanish until the very end of the movie.

If it's the Joker's story, then it's Nicholson's movie and that may even be mathematically true (I haven't timed it, but I would be kind of surprised if Keaton is onscreen more than Nicholson, and I don't see how he could possibly have more lines), but it was understood, as a matter of instinct, that this was what they were paying him a lot of money and front-end points for, for precisely this unrestrained and undisciplined performance that's a lot of wacky vocal affectations and, frequently, just eating runtime in addition to scenery, as Nicholson provides percolative pauses between just a downright shocking number of his lines.  For all this and more, you could still call Nicholson the aptest live-action Joker, even if in the long shadow of The Dark Knight there are very, very few people who would argue that Heath Ledger's Joker is not the far more overwhelming force, and, accordingly, the "better" Joker.  (Ledger didn't have Bob, though, and friend-of-Nicholson Tracey Walter's performance as the Joker's slack-faced sidekick always occasions some weird, welcome texture.)

But being "worse" than one of cinema's greatest villain performances, period, still leaves plenty of room for greatness below that level, and Nicholson's wall-to-wall evil self-amusement as "the world's first fully-functioning homicidal artist" is certainly our pleasure too, constantly angrily laughing at his own jokes because nobody else has a sense of humor, and even when he's unavoidably pitted directly against That Legendary Joker To Come, Nicholson still does much to invoke chaos, and expose the pitifulness of human systems, and show the world their rules won't save them, and so forth.  But he might be having more fun with it.  He certainly seems to be, thanks to the estimable Joker makeup that's mining the grotesque out of what is, kind of, just a caricature of Jack Nicholson's already-existing face.  (Hence he can sometimes look more upsetting when he's "disguised" as Napier; though the creepiest thing isn't even Nicholson, but the implication that the Joker wasn't even human anymore, but a sentient laugh persisting for long seconds even after the body had died.)  The Joker, anyhow, untethered to puny logic, gives any movie leave to be camp and severe at the same time—notably so in one of the few places Burton found to wedge in some of the unwanted Prince original pop soundtrack that Peters had imposed upon him,*** but which doesn't seem to bother Nicholson's already prance-heavy performance, and the only reason "Joker versus the art museum," literally a scenario from the TV show, except now our archfiend is also dancing to "Partyman," might not read as silly is that to prepare for his grand entrance, he's murdered forty people with gas, whose corpses are still lying there—which is pretty much what Christopher Nolan figured out nineteen years hence, though somehow the avowedly-fantastic Batman '89 maintains more plot credibility and doesn't have to expend ungodly amounts of energy distracting you from it, like The Dark Knight does.  (About the only thing that's genuine bullshit is the Joker's henchmen somehow respawning at the top of the tower in the finale.)

Nicholson makes it easier than it should be, maybe, to forget Keaton, but I tend to rank his Batman highly, too.  Along with Ben Affleck, he's one of only two modern live-action Batmen I affirmatively like, and it's a more complicated challenge, at least, than Nicholson has, with Keaton's primary mode being to stand there in the bulky Batman armor emanating darkness and competence without moving too much and therefore risking falling over—and, to the detractors' surprise, the seemingly-unassuming Keaton turned out to be aces at this fearsome stillness—but then to also do something with Bruce Wayne.  And what he's done is create this sort of auxiliary personality out of Bruce, this perfectly-likeable but highly-incomplete human, who always seems like it's his first day trying out "being a person," and this is, for one, superficially funny and enjoyable to watch (Keaton's Bruce scenes are never a drag on the film's momentum, a significant achievement all by itself), but also feels like it's legitimately getting at Batman, psychologically, as the creation of that little boy whose life stopped decades ago, and, having been consumed by making his vengeful fantasy a reality, has never absorbed much of anything else—a backstory that doesn't make perfect sense logically, but does emotionally.  (Maybe especially in a Burton context.)  Then there's Kim Basinger, or rather girl photojournalist Vicky Vale, and I would feel pretty confident declaring that you would not find a more purely-instrumental damsel in American cinema going back a quarter-century (maybe a half-century), even starting from 1989, existing as "a character" (and you cannot take those scarequotes off) only to prod at Bruce's hollow shell and, more to the point, existing in the movie at all only to get captured by the Joker a whole lot in scenes out of an early 20th century melodrammer so that she can be saved by Batman.

And I don't know: I think Basinger is doing more work than is usually recognized—if nothing else, she has some terrific reactions to Nicholson's rampage, including a hilarious terror-inflected shrug when he asks her if he looks like he's joking—and if there's little indication why Vicky would be all that special to either deuteragonist, she's so incredibly useful as a conduit for the audience to behold these larger-than-life figures striding across this titan city from her regular-life-sized perspective, and never moreso than in the first time Batman unties her from the metaphorical railroad tracks and renders her back off to his subterranean lair in a night drive through haunted woods inside a roaring Batmobile, in what is probably the most sustained dialogue-free and score-driven passage of the entire film, the sequence that gives us the longest roar of Danny Elfman's title theme while Basinger, reasonably enough, shrieks when Batman drives into a Goddamn wall that somehow isn't there anymore when she looks back up.  (The appropriate mythological reference, I'm sure, occurs to you, and it's a pretty dangerous-feeling one, playing with "The Rape of Perspephone" as consciously as it does.****)

And that's useful indeed, when so much of Batman is driven by its imagery and its score, the former being provided in substantial part by production designer Anton Furst, who, when Burton asked him, "can you do Metropolis?" did not answer, "isn't that Superman?", but "can I ever."  The mythically crime-ridden Gotham he built is the tangled collision between that German Expressionist reference and the Art Deco everything else, this veritable nightmare of the 20s, 30s, and 40s (one of the few clues that it's not literally the 30s being the existence of broadcast television).  That's obviously embodied by the Joker, that malevolent Gwynplaine, but very nearly as much by all these sleek ornamented spaces festooned with hideous murals, public art in the form of statuary that feels like a declining Soviet republic, a chemical works corroded with its own pollution, and maybe especially the sinister perfection of what remains, to this day, the most recognizable and perfect of all Batmobiles, a cruel and implacable version of a Tex Avery dick-shaped cartoon supercar—not to mention Bob Ringwood's great costumes, mutating gaudy gangster flick elegance into the Joker's florid decay—all of it centered around this metropolis's apparent tallest structure, an empty ruin of a Gothic cathedral as high as a skyscraper with bells as big as a house, the only way up being its stairs.  It is very total work, accomplished on some big soundstages at Pinewood (and with miniatures that, I should be frank, vary considerably in their quality and persuasiveness, sometimes to Batman's detriment), grimly oppressive even in daylight and ready to be swathed in blacks and careful ribbons of light by DP Roger Pratt at night.

Burton is exploiting that mood to the hilt, and even with Batman's reputation as an action movie having fallen in subsequent years (I haven't helped), I was pleasantly surprised to discover that it's acquitting itself awfully well for a movie where its hero often necessarily has a hard time moving.  It's my favorite movie Batsuit, at least in its visual simplicity (and the trademarkable splash of yellow), but the movie can even benefit from its stiffness.  There's something legitimately graphic art about the action in this movie, and the big shootout at the chemical works that's the first real action sequence is astoundingly static, built out of coverage and even moreso out of editing—if it's not literally true that the camera never moves this entire sequence, then it still only moves when it's positively necessary (notably a dolly-out to keep Batman out of the frame till he backhands one of Napier's ne'er-do-wells)—and the upshot is that, whether Burton or his second unit meant to or not, Batman maintains the rhythms of a comic book, snapping from "panel" to "panel" with disaggregated shots encompassing only one single action, and in turn, because this is a movie, it comes with the strange feeling of every one of those actions being maximally emphasized.  It's stagey (while the "normal" scenes do have more externally dynamic camera direction), but it feels in consonance with the "mythic" that's such a pervasive element of this Batman, and it also means that when it loosens up (possibly just the crew figuring out, late, how to introduce mobility into their action), in the finale in the cathedral, it becomes extra-intense because opponents are now throwing two or three punches apiece in one shot, or now we're staging the Joker leading Vicky in a perverse wedding dance whilst Batman takes a beating over there.  (Though the former mode does still pertain to such extremely memorable beats as the henchman who leaps at Batman from behind, only to fall through the rotted floor.)  And, not forgetting this is at heart a toy commercial, of course only the Batplane can save Gotham from the Joker's evil parade, and it's a fine ripoff of the Star Wars trench scene (with one of the stupidest "Batman prepares for all contingencies" moments in that character's overprepared history, when it turns out the Batplane has mechanisms to neutralize evil balloons), up until it becomes something transcendently original and the Joker whips out his four foot-long anti-aircraft pistol, a scene so good that Nolan ripped it off—and, even with Ledger, it was not as cool.

But for all that, and it's so much "that," it's Elfman who's indispensable, with perhaps the most beloved work of film music from the 1980s that isn't John Williams, especially with his superb, bleakly-triumphal motif for Batman (and, showcasing its surprising flexibility, also for Bruce Wayne).  It's the dominant force of this ever-operatic movie; at its fullest extent, it delivers in full upon the promise of an underworld god rising from the depths while a chorus wails from below the ground.  Batman can be taken for granted in these latterdays, and I've been guilty myself; I'm still resistant to calling it a true masterpiece, as it gets its source material wrong on really fundamental points; but even preferring its own immediate sequel, its combination of the outre—the camp—with its atmosphere of decadent grandeur makes for a visual symphony of "the Batman" that's better as a Batman than anything to follow.  Except of course for Mask of the Phantasm, but guess what we owe that to?

Score: 9/10

*If The Empire Strikes Back is probably the best candidate for the first "modern" film, then Batman is the winner of the first year where the world The Empire Strikes Back created had reached its full maturity.  Then again, can we even still call those films "modern" in 2026?  Despite the similarities (the manufacture of a phenomenon based on preexisting IP with built-in mindshare with first-weekend box office and merchandisability being its financiers' principal goal), even as something as crassly, even absurdly commercialized as Batman '89 feels like it came from a more genteel era than our own (at around $48 million, it cost a great deal of money but not a sickeningly great deal of money; it was a preexisting IP entrusted to an auteur filmmaker given considerable latitude to make his own movie, rather than to a contractor tasked with remaking a movie over and over until an executive committee was satisfied that their product furthered their company's overarching strategy; it of course predates pervasive digital work; and a huge portion of its profitably came from fans actually owning it on home video).

**"He killed people in the 40s."  Yeah, fine.

***The credits promise there are five Prince tracks in the movie, and I sure don't know where they are besides the other prominent one, "Trust."  Burton obviously had only his own pop star in mind for this movie.  (It's also startling how precious little connection it feels like any of Prince's songs, which ain't top-tier Prince, have to Batman, including the ones that explicitly reference Batman characters.)

****The "pointless (?) attention to detail" award goes to whoever remembered to that Vicky's feet, unshod during the chase, should still be encrusted with city grime when she wakes back up in her apartment.