“The Bat, The Cat, The Penguin,” the movie posters snarled in the summer of 1992, and Batman Returns did not disappoint; here was a Gotham bestiary par excellence. If the task of sequelizing Batman was an inherently thankless one – Tim Burton almost didn’t take the job, and audiences did not take to Returns as they did its predecessor – then the advantages of ultimately convincing the director of your major, major, major hit Batman movie to create a follow-up to his own work can be seen in every frame of Batman Returns. Batman hinted at Burton’s now-unmistakable “Burtonness” only in drips and fragments, but Batman Returns is the Original Unexpurgated Bat-Burton: the movie you make when you have absolutely nothing standing in your way. I greatly prefer it to the original; in fact, I greatly prefer it to every other film Tim Burton has ever made. Hot off the conceptual triumph of Edward Scissorhands, and emboldened by the powerhouse success of Batman, Batman Returns sees the director fusing the two aesthetics perfectly, making a comic book adaptation that is as wholesale unique and piercingly visionary as any yet made, which also happens to be the Most Tim Burton Movie Ever.
Batman Returns doesn’t bear an enormous visual or storytelling debt to the Batman comic books (and certainly not, oddly enough, to its filmic predecessor), and that might make it a poor adaptation in some minds, but I am thrilled by how completely Returns springboards off the basic iconography of the Batman rogues’ gallery to arrive at its comprehensive wordbuilding. Gone are the late Anton Furst’s neo-Fascist Gotham exteriors; in their place, the production designs of Bo Welch conjure a Gotham that feels somehow smaller– a kind of post-industrial Atomic Age nightmare where the buildings lean over the squabbling populace, the marketing icons leer unapologetically at their spoon-fed prey (the Shreck cat is as godawfully simple an excoriation of consumerist bullshit as you could hope to find), and everything is covered with a filthy layer of sooty, occluding snow.
The engine of the story is not any of the three principals, but rather Christopher Walken’s odious Max Shreck, whose name means exactly what you think it means, and whose giant white fright wig presages Burton’s Sweeney Todd by about two decades. This is the Demon Barber of Gotham, all right. His brutalist mega-capacitor, a Pharoah’s pyramid for the end of the 20th century, is designed to shear electrical power off the somnambulant Gothamites, if only Shreck can get the pesky legal requirements out of the way. What seemed like cartoonish bad-guy thuggery in 1992 has turned out disappointingly prescient: Shreck essentially spends Batman Returns in a protracted war for de-regulation, first with the mayor, then Bruce Wayne, and finally, by installing a mayor of his own. This used to read as cynicism or even paranoia; now, it’s just the way these fuckers do business. I suspect The Dark Knight Rises is going to play as an intriguing counterpoint to Batman Returns, for reasons beyond their surface conceptual parallels.
As Max Shreck’s opposite number, Michael Keaton returns to the Batsuit (for, unfortunately, the final time) with casual, effortless skill. Keaton was a wonderful performer, at the peak of his prime in ’92, and if we’ve lost track of him since then, it’s to our deficit. As Bruce, he has no Vicki Vale to chase him around this time and is decidedly less emo as a result, a personality redesign that extends as far as the batsuit, which has less human features than its predecessor (the Adonis muscle suit in the top half has been replaced by reptilian scales) and seems to ride, creature-like, on wings of leather rather than rubber. Bruce has dozens of the suits in his closet; his vast Batcave/metaphor for the psyche is wired for digital sound (no, “scratching” the CD doesn’t make sense, but hey, it was 1992); and his Charles Foster Kane fireplace is the perfect spot for snuggling. If Batman Returns has a failing, it’s that there’s really nothing at stake for Bruce this time around; he’s doing just fine. Another maniac is trying to blow up his city, and he has to deal with that, but however many years this is after the Joker, Batman has arrived at an equilibrium of personality that only rarely emerges for air in the Batman movies. The script makes a playful hedge game of Batman’s inherent duality (“Sorry! I mistook me for someone else”) but saves the tortured-soul antics for next time.
Which is just as well, because his enemies this time are so screwed up that if Batman was also going through some massive personality crisis, we’d likely end up with a movie that was 4 hours long and/or completely unwatchable. It’s important to reiterate that in Batman Returns, neither the Penguin nor Catwoman bears much resemblance to their comic-book iterations (or the goofy non-adaptations of the 60s TV show, which is probably about as much familiarity as most of the audience had with them anyway). It was Burton’s rethink of the Penguin, actually, which is said to have gotten the director started on the project; his doodle of a Penguin-ish child with the caption “My name is Jimmy, but my friends just call me the Hideous Penguin Boy” not only served as Burton’s inspiration for the character, but brought Danny DeVito onside as well. Reconfigured as a birth defect freak child of two horrible rich people (charmingly, Paul Reubens plays the dad, a year or two after the masturbation scandal) who was tossed Moses-like into the sewers, the Penguin would elicit sympathy if he weren’t just so fundamentally, inextricably skeezy. Jack Nicholson might have played the Joker like a walking purple penis, but DeVito overdrives the sexual predation of the Penguin to such a degree that the character could easily be, and quite likely is, a serial rapist. That the Penguin visits his final vengeance by trying to lure the children of Gotham into his basement lair – “A little Pied Penguin action!”, he coos – only ratchets up the disturbance factor even more. No wonder people went apeshit on McDonalds for their Batman Returns campaign: every Happy Meal had a child molester inside!
If the Penguin’s black humour was lost on audiences in 1992, I’m not surprised. These are dark one-liners. (The character introduces himself with one of my favourites, upon coming face to face with Max Shreck: “I believe the word you’re looking for is ‘AAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHH!’”) But to dismiss the Penguin (as my father once memorably did) as “just not funny like the Joker” is both accurate and incomplete. Daniel Waters writes the shit out of the character, and DeVito gives himself over so completely to the full-body performance (he ate raw fish – repeatedly) that the results remain definitive, even today, and even for a stylization that bears so little resemblance to its source. Burton, Waters and DeVito brilliantly psychologize a character who, previously, was little more than a visual gag, and do a marvelous job of working the character’s traditional trappings (umbrellas, tuxedoes, the cigarette holder, and – oh yeah – penguins) into his Batman Returns misadventures organically.
But anything Batman Returns achieves with the Penguin will forever pale next to its defining contribution to the genre, which is of course Michelle Pfeiffer’s Catwoman. Fifteen years before Heath Ledger flashed his keloid scars, Pfeiffer gives so complete a reinvention of the standing tropes of the character that she essentially rewrote Selina Kyle forever after, permanently cementing Catwoman’s post-feminist punk subtext, and cracking open a wellspring of self-aware, glass-ceiling discontent which remains vivid and visceral today. In 1992, Catwoman was a stunningly holistic reaction to the 80s’ entire cinematic offering of shitty female leads and disposable “girlfriend” bimbos. A whip-cracking, kick-boxing, back-flipping, sub-vigilante (Catwoman never intercedes heroically, only self-interestedly), Returns’ heroine is also a total (and, one assumes, intentional) inversion of the general uselessness of Vicki Vale. The dual romantic storyline (between Batman and Catwoman, and unrelatedly, between Bruce Wayne and Selina Kyle) is grounded in needs from both characters, and when Batman Returns palms-ups and admits that both Bruce and Selina are too inherently screwed up to manage a working relationship of any stripe, the film eradicates the notion of Batman as romantic hero forever after. (Not that Batman Forever noticed, of course. But I like to think that some of the seeds of Rachel Dawes, and her ultimate fate, were sewn here.)
To the film’s great credit, Catwoman visually disassembles throughout the picture, subtly underscoring the fragmentation of Selina’s psyche and the slow rundown of her “nine lives” – once she’s out, she’s out. Selina cobbles her costume together out of spare vinyl in her closet after being chucked out a window, single-handedly inventing steampunk with her sewing needle claws and broken-dollie white stitching over what looks like poured black glass. Her rubber catsuit glistens obscenely as she snaps the heads off fashion mannequins, and brutally chastises rapists and their prey, all while her bone-white face makeup suggests more zombie than flesh. The white stitches pop and fray through the rest of the film, while Danny Elfman’s quintessential score mewls and screams with Catwoman’s howling inner rage. The Selina who appears in the Penguin’s lair at the conclusion looks little like a cat, and a hell of a lot more like a demon; but hell’s where she’s going anyway, at least for now. (The inclusion of Catwoman’s silhouette in the final shot was not, of course, in the script – but boy, was it a pleasure, nonetheless.)
And this is ultimately what endears me to the character, and lets her endure. She was a great costume, and a great romantic pairing for our “hero” (and yes, as a piece of cinematic subversion, that lick can scarcely be equaled); but where most movies like this would be more than content to stop there, this Catwoman was also a fully dimensional character who followed her own purposes all the way to the end, rather than subordinating her interests to the men in the film or to the story of the film, as most woman-props in action movies tend to do. The moment at Shreck’s Christmas ball, when Bruce and Selina recognize each other – the only two people at a costume party not wearing costumes – is shattering, because it is also the moment that we realize that Selina cannot, and will not, behave as the requirements of this kind of movie would have her do. If she must be damned for it, so be it; she changed the game, regardless.
The film concludes with a needless effort to respond to the Joker parade / Batwing sequence of Batman, here transformed into an army of missile-bearing penguins (!) attacking Gotham while Batman heads to the control center via the sewers in his batskiboat (!!). The finale is well staged, but unnecessary, and robs the Penguin of the most perfunctory catharsis, even as comic book movie villains go. Catwoman, though, gets a beauty of a send-off, expending her last “lives” turning away bullet after bullet from Max Shreck’s gun before administering an electrifying kiss of death to the true villain of the piece. What remains for Bruce Wayne – to prowl Gotham’s streets on Christmas Eve, looking for any sign that Selina might have survived – remains touching, and is the reason I still name Batman Returns as my favourite Christmas movie when asked. Batman Returns is a film of three impressive and imaginative characters grasping for some basic human connection that none of them can ultimately achieve… and if that’s not Christmas, I don’t know what is.
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