First up is Tim Burton's 1989 summer sizzler: Batman. An unsung hero of this particular production is screenwriter Sam Hamm. A great deal of what's up there on screen that you'd retroactively assume to be Burtonisms are straight out his pop-nightmare screenplay. Hamm's opening gambit description of Gotham City reads like a particularly evocative tell on Burton cityscape's:
"The place is Gotham City. The time, 1987 -- once removed.
The city of Tomorrow: stark angles, creeping shadows, dense, crowded, airless, a random tangle of steel and concrete, self-generating, almost subterranean in its aspect... as if hell had erupted through the sidewalks and kept on growing. A dangling fat moon shines overhead, ready to burst."
Burton and his team of re-writers Warren Skaaren and Charles McKeown are responsible for Joker's capering and the ouroborus ring "you fucked me first" origin strand. Burton has gone on record several times to state that he's no great fan of the comic medium. In Faber and Faber's excellent Burton on Burton he puts it:
"I was never a giant comic book fan, but I've always loved the image of Batman and The Joker. The reason I've never been a comic book fan - and I think it started when I was a child - is because I could never tell which box I was supposed to read. I don't know if it was dyslexia or whatever, but that's why I loved The Killing Joke, because for the first time I could tell which one to read. It's my favorite. It's the first comic I've ever loved. And the success of those graphic novels made our ideas more acceptable."
Hamm also advocated jumping straight into the piece in motion rather than have a first act dedicated to the whys and wherefores of Superheroing. Advice that most superhero movies would be wise to follow. The origin formula is developing into an inelegant albatross around many tights film's necks. Interestingly, it is Sam Hamm who is responsible for the creation of the Batman mentor character Henri Ducard that went someway to propping up an origins act in Christopher Nolan's Batman Begins. Hamm's Ducard is more of a Parisian master-detective in the amoral pulp mode, rather than a cypher ninja terrorist.
None of this Hamming up is intended to suggest that Burton is a creeping idea cribber, merely to illustrate film is a collaborative medium. Other than a brief stint on Masters Of Horror, it's been all quiet on the Hamm front. No doubt he's seen as having a spectre of failure about after box-office mega flop Monkeybone. It's a real shame. He's tremendously talented. Quentin Tarantino is widely quoted as saying in it's pre-rewrites Hamm form, Batman's screenplay is one of the very finest there is. Google it, and see for yourself. Anyway, without further ado...
Batman
A hysterical, nightmarish fairy tale version of the Dark Knight. Burton's film is an astonishingly - even perversely - violent and macabre comedy, blessed with an enormous, insistent, thundering score by Danny Elfman. Keaton plays Batman very much in the Burton hero mold - isolated, childish but with an inkling of sweetness. Kim Basinger plays Vale as a overbearing stalker of a woman one minute, a pedestal blonde the next. Nicholson is portly but terrifying as the clown prince of crime. His violence manifesting as an avant garde experiment.
Batman is an aggressive, slightly awkward, phantom monster, with little of the moral underpinning of the finer comic book iterations. Indeed the end clash plays as the meeting of two rather nasty bullies rather than a heroic triumph. Batman physically and vocally pounding his adversary and obviously quite enjoying it. Keaton plays Wayne as distant and possibly even mentally unhinged. A leaf through Napier / Joker's crime file by Wayne is capped with a dreamy flashback to his parents murder. The whole sequence plays like self manipulation / justification rather than deadly accurate memory.
Pacey, action packed and not afraid to examine the superhero psyche as damaged and aggressive rather than heroic. Burton's film is supremely nasty, even subversive, for a Warner's summer money machine picture. Miraculously, Burton even out-does himself with the frankly sexually perverse sequel - Batman Returns.
And for the collection:
Batman Returns
Second time round, Burton succeeds in simply trying not to please anyone but himself. Returns has the same deeply personal emotional drive as Edward Scissorhands. It's Burton's pox Japanese kitsch Christmas aesthetic amped up into infinity. Everything is overbearing, enormous and expressionist. Returns' locations have nothing in common with reality, the universe existing within a giant German snow globe.
Burton's film is again perfectly complimented by a fantastic ethereal choir accompanied, brooding, Danny Elfman score.
Michael Keaton barely shows his face for much of the first hour of Returns, he's a background spectre, out of the way whilst we are treated to the canon diverging origins of the various super-villains. Rather than undermine the character it gives him a mythic, supernatural quality - we first see him alone, bathed in blue Batsignal twilight; slumbering in his Gothic castle-mansion. Wayne becomes a vampire justice-god figure. He sleeps deep in his fortress till he is needed. It's a significant and welcome step up from the confused bully-thug of the first film. His tenuous, last-gambit relationship with Gotham PD and his flippant use of deadly force lend him an air of absolute danger.
Danny DeVito excels as Burton's take on the dapper little gangster of Kane and Finger's universe. He is transformed into a vile, deformed, sleazy waddling bird-man, backed up with muscle in the shape of a deranged circus act. He's very much Bruce's loss taken hideous, violent shape - indeed Wayne initially feels pity for him.
Phieffer is a believably damaged romantic counterpart for Batman. Catwoman when played correctly is the female reflection of Batman. Equally skilled, intelligent and driven by a need for vengeance. She's the only female in the whole of the Batman canon that makes any sense as a love interest.
Walken appears as the scheming genuine evil that is Max Schrek. His primary motivating factor is greed, rather than an emotional equalizer. Walken plays him with faux-charming, dead inside panache. He also looks like a psychotic Aryan hairdresser.
A beautiful, romantic take on the Dark Knight Detective. Absolutely criminal that the Warner's bean counters managed to block Burton's Superman film after this failed to score with the Happy Meal crowd.
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