Batman

A hysterical, nightmarish take on the Dark Knight. Tim Burton's film is a macabre comedy, blessed with an insistent, thundering score by Danny Elfman. Michael Keaton plays Batman as the typical Burton hero - isolated and childish, but with an inkling of strange sweetness. Kim Basinger's Vicki Vale is portrayed as an overbearing stalker one minute, a blonde bombshell the next. Bruce Wayne and Vale are a dreadfully mismatched couple, Wayne seeking her out simply because she is desirable. She is a trophy to him, to be coveted and fought over. In terms of brain space, Wayne seems far more interested in the enemies he creates. 

Jack Nicholson's Joker is terrifying, a cruel mobster transformed, by a toxic waste dip, into a flippant libertine. His violence manifests throughout the film as an on-going Avant-garde experiment. This Batman is an aggressive but awkward phantom with zero moral underpinning. Indeed, the third-act clash between Batman and Joker is more like the meeting of two rather nasty bullies than a finale that naturally tracks into your standard heroic triumph. Batman physically and verbally pounds his adversary, obviously quite enjoying the momentary power he holds over this criminal. Burton's Wayne is distant and possibly even mentally unhinged. 

A leaf through Jack Napier's crime file is capped by a dreamy flashback in which Wayne recalls a version of his parents' murder. The sequence feels needling - a feeling mostly derived from where the nightmare is physically placed in the film. There's a sense that this is an unconscious manipulation, as if Wayne is constructing the kind of massive justification he needs to access the deeper, scarier, parts of his own psyche. This may not even be Bruce's actual memory then, just the live ammunition required to get the job done. Not afraid to examine the superhero as hopelessly damaged rather than courageous, Burton's film is pretty subversive for a summertime money machine. Miraculously, Burton even out-does himself with his kinky sequel Batman Returns.

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