Bat-Dance
Here’s something that I wrote for a comics journal two years ago that didn’t get picked up. Read it and comment, if you would. I appreciate it. (Please note The Dark Knight hadn’t come out yet).
Society as Reflected in the Batman Movies
Tim Burton’s Batman is set in a fantasy world made deliberately ambiguous by the filmmakers. It is a place that Burton wants to exist for both everyone and no one at the same time. The modern clothing and computer technology used by characters in the film stand in contrast to the old fashioned automobiles and architecture that populate the city. All of the mobsters dress like archetypal gangsters in a film noir and wield dated revolvers or, in the case of Bob the goon, a .45. Burton is trying to create a timeless story for his audience, one that could have taken place in 1949 or 1989. The indeterminable setting adds to the fairy tale qualities of the movie. It is pure escapism into a fantasy world, something that films of the 1980s represented more than any other decade in the history of cinema. The Cold War loomed above with the ever present threat of nuclear war and communist invasion. The lower class was the poorest it had ever been. The gas shortage provided the sobering notion that the country could find itself at the mercy of a world community that seemed to grow more terrifying every day. The 1980s was the decade when people went to the movies to see E.T., Luke Skywalker, Indiana Jones, Marty McFly and Rambo to forget about the world the way it really was. They wanted something pure, where the villains wore black hats and the heroes wore white ones. Burton wove those elements into Batman. He presented larger-than-life characters in a time and place disconnected from the real world yet still relevant to it. This film, like many of Burton’s other works, is a story book being read aloud to us by the actors.
Batman Returns was released in 1992, three years after Batman, but still shares the majority of the themes present in the first film. Again, the movie plays out like a story book, with near-mythical characters interacting in a time period that is impossible to determine. However, the film is much darker and more violent, so much so that it caused a public backlash that lost Warner Brothers some advertising tie-ins and cost Burton the chance to make any more Batman sequels. The film’s prologue, wherein the infant Penguin is thrown into the sewer by his parents, was enough to make many audiences leave before the opening credits had even rolled. However, this scene is critical to the movie not simply from a storyline standpoint, but from a thematic standpoint as well. Batman Returns is a revenge movie, an indictment of the decadence enjoyed by the richest few throughout the 1980s, a population of Americans who became the wealthiest they had ever been in the history of the nation due to Reaganomics. The Penguin’s mother and father are clearly portrayed as being part of this elite percentage of people in the short time they are onscreen, and their defining action in the film is to throw their infant son into a river because he is deformed. This is a family that conceivably could have paid for any treatments or surgeries their son would need, but instead decided they would rather drown their child than live with his deformity. Later in the film, it is revealed that the Penguin’s ultimate plan is to kidnap and murder all the first born children of Gotham, left home alone and unguarded while their parents attend a socialite costume party. This suggests that the city’s elite are more concerned with a trivial display of their status than the safety and well-being of their children. The Penguin himself is a manifestation of his parent’s evil, and thus a manifestation of the evils of all the wealthy. His physical deformities are their moral aberrations. Tim Burton is attacking the class of Americans that dominated the 1980s, and in doing so he is expressing the frustration and resentment felt by the lower classes.
Batman Forever was released in 1995, with an entirely new cast and a new director, Joel Schumacher. Schumacher’s version of Batman was a rehashing of the 1960s television show. The film has a frenetic energy and irreverence that stands in stark contrast to the fables Tim Burton had created in the two previous films. Batman Forever came out in an America six years removed from the Cold War and four years from a massive victory in the Persian Gulf. The nation was the most confident it had been in decades, and as such audiences were less interested in the fairy tale escape the previous two films offered and were much more responsive to the bulging hedonism and neon flair of Schumacher’s vision. As opposed to the economic situation of the average late eighties ticket buyers, the average mid-nineties ticket buyers had money to spend, and they wanted to see movies that celebrated that success. Batman Forever is a product of an America interrupted, a nation running free after a decade of fear and financial strife. Schumacher’s film is a slot machine on all 7’s, so full of flashing lights and instant gratification that it leaves no room for the subtlety and nuance seen in Burton’s films. While it certainly is escapism (superhero movies have difficulty avoiding that label), the film was produced at a time when audiences didn’t have anything to escape from. The mid-nineties saw no great enemy and no great crisis. Batman Forever is escapism for its own sake, like a trip to the cookie jar on a full stomach. Schumacher’s next Batman film, 1997’s Batman and Robin, is very much the same.
2005 saw the release of Christopher Nolan’s Batman Begins, nearly a full decade after Batman and Robin. The American landscape had changed completely following the 9-11 tragedy, and Nolan’s film was a complete byproduct of that change despite himself being British. America had been suddenly and bodily pulled from a state of contented apathy into one of fear and panic. Terrorism was an enemy that could arrive at any time or place but couldn’t be identified or directly confronted. This enemy’s goal was the downfall of Western society, more specifically the punishment of Western capitalism. The enemy in Batman Begins was the League of Shadows, an insurgent group of anarchists from the East who believe it is their duty to punish society by destroying cities they feel have reached the height of corruption. They are terrorists, and by including them in the film Nolan was acknowledging the current condition in America. Audiences needed to see terrorism be defeated, and Nolan delivers this defeat at the hands of a distinctly American icon.
