Look, we’re all dealing with 2020’s global pandemic and the economic collapse and the chaos in the streets and the grim future and the disintegration of everything that was once normal in our own ways.
Some turn to social media to share with the world their cute quarantine projects. Their home-baked bread. Their living room workout routines. Their macaroni art. Or some shit like that. I don’t know. I don’t pay attention to those people.
Still others become more politically active. Or maybe they turn to religion or escape into video games or Netflix or alcohol abuse. I personally know one suicide.
Me, I’ve been hiding out as best I can in a nostalgic bubble. When the curtains are drawn and the pants come off, I live in the 1980s. Movies bring the best high, particularly when I haven’t seen them in some decades. I also dig into vintage TV here and there, too. Some music. Some comics. Junk that I grew up with .
I ordered Cobra on Blu-ray this week. That’s how nutty I’ve gotten.
And in my travels down Nostalgia River, I reached a point when I needed to rewatch the 1989 Batman movie. THIS stupid old thing was somehow going to help save me–and, in a way, it did.
Friday, June 23, 1989.
I remember that date too many years later because I was 12 years old and a comic book fanatic and I NEEDED to see this movie. It had been hyped and argued about for months.
Michael Keaton was a super-controversial casting choice. People fought in the streets over it back then. I got jumped once at Cici’s Pizza in Garland, Texas by anti-Keaton fanatics and one of them stomped on my Weird Al cassette. I shoved a slice of pepperoni-and-olives in the guy’s face and punched him in the throat. In the summer of ’89, I learned that life is hard and violent.
Okay, I’m fucking with you, but I’m not kidding about the controversy.
We didn’t have the internet back then, so if you wanted to vent yer spleen, you had to write a goddamn letter and address it to Starlog or Comics Scene or Amazing Heroes, put it in a stupid envelope, lick a fucking stamp, throw it in a mailbox and maybe get published six weeks later. Their letter columns were full of hate over Keaton. He was known for comedies and the geeks of ’89 were afraid that this meant that Batman would not get the “serious” treatment that he–and their comics hobby–deserved. Jack Nicholson as The Joker was a step in the right direction, but the nerds weren’t so sure about Mr. Mom.
They also weren’t so sure about director Tim Burton, a young fella who only had two feature films to his credit at the time, both comedies.
Then the images came out and the trailer came out and the TV commercials started running and they looked cool and the dorks began to warm up on the matter.
I still think that the vintage trailer is great. It’s all whiz-bang. It does what a trailer should, which is ballyhoo the movie as the most action-packed thing you’ll ever see in your whole miserable life. It’s constant movement that never takes time to even suggest a plot. They don’t make trailers like this anymore.
On June 24, 1989, I finally got what was mine at the Saturday matinee at the long-gone AMC Towne Crossing 8 in Mesquite, Texas. My mom drove me and my sixth grade buddy Ed Dean (hope you’re doing okay, Ed, wherever you are) to the theater, gave us enough money for popcorn and Coke ($10 maybe back then) and then took off while I sat in a packed room and slipped into the dream.
At the time, I LOVED this movie. I got caught up in its big Gothic grandeur. The 12-year-old me was way into the shadow world setting and that great Danny Elfman score that boomed across the room.
5 stars. A+.
Four months later, it came out on VHS, priced to sell for the 1989 holiday season, which was unusual. Back then popular movies played on the big screen for a lot longer than they do today. It was normal for summer blockbusters to still be in theaters on Christmas Day. VHS took about a year to come out most of the time.
But Warner Bros. shirked the rules with Batman and theater owners weren’t happy about that…
At our house we were among the throngs who bought the tape on release day and we watched it and… the movie put me to sleep.
Without the loud, operatic presentation, this thing was a snooze. Even a pubescent dumbass like me knew that, though I was in denial about it. Batman was a good movie, I insisted, even as I was nodding off during Bruce Wayne and Vicki Vale’s romance scenes.
When it streamed on Netflix in 2014, I watched it on a laptop–for the first time in decades–and wrote a negative review. Watching it like that, the film was stilted and nonsensical. All shrunk up and quiet, you think less about the bombast of it all and more about the hole-ridden plot.
Today though, I have a 65″ 4K nuclear-powered TV and while I don’t have the most state-of-the-art sound set-up (my speakers are a pair of tall, heavy 1970s-era monsters meant to pump out Kiss and Aerosmith vinyl), I can still shake the walls pretty good and now Batman is cool again. With current technology, I can get something that almost sorta gropes at a hint of what I saw at the AMC as a pre-teen twat. It’s a film that needs to be as big and loud as you can manage. Its presentation should steamroll over its many logical stumbles and carry you into its goofball spectacle.
It’s a summer blockbuster. It’s idiotic. That’s all but a given. The question is how WELL does it make up for the idiocy?
Let us count the ways.
#1. THE MUSIC
Danny Elfman’s music is a good start. It’s the first real sensation that you get here as it charges over the opening credits. It’s one of the last of the classic 1980s theater-shaking orchestral film scores with a grand march for the main theme. It’s a menacing track. It almost sounds like a villain’s theme, which is perfect for this film’s take on a moody, troubled hero. It was the first film score that I ever bought (on cassette way back when) and I can tell you from experience that it sets you up pretty good for another day in the 7th grade as you listen to it through a $10 Walkman on the bus. It gives you a strut that can get you through the first two classes, at least.
It also made Elfman the new Big Deal in film music. After this, he became one of the go-to guys for comics adaptations and action movies. Even a low-budget film like Darkman found the money to get Elfman.
I’ve got no bad words to say about it. I still listen to it. It’s in my phone because every now and then a tedious car trip needs to sound like this.
Yes, there is another soundtrack album by Prince and it’s essential, too, in its own way.
Prince embraces the CAMP of a Batman movie. He probably never read The Dark Knight Returns or The Killing Joke. He probably didn’t even read the script. He just knows that this film is a world of weirdos in masks and that they’re probably horny underneath their costumes and he started doing his thing from there.
And he’s not wrong. Prince freaks argue over the Batman album, but I like it. My favorite song, “Electric Chair”, a mega-80s funk-rocker with lots of guitar, isn’t even in the movie (or I haven’t noticed it, at least).
We also must mention the totally loony “Batdance” and how it was all over the radio in the summer of ’89. Every FM format played it except for country and Christian, natch. You might have heard it after Peabo Bryson, you might have heard it after Skid Row.
#2. THE EYE CANDY
Production designer Anton Furst committed suicide in 1991 at age 47, cutting short a brilliant career. Before he’d had enough of us and/or himself, he’d worked with the likes of Stanley Kubrick and Neil Jordan and then had a hand in one of the most impressive alternate worlds on film in the 80s. Furst’s work on Batman is up there with Lawrence G. Paull and David Snyder’s work in Blade Runner and Norman Garwood’s design work in Brazil (which was also shot by this film’s cinematographer, Roger Pratt) .
His Gotham City exists a few miles outside of reality. It looks like 1940 jumped straight to the 1980s with nothing in between. Every building appears to be at least seventy years old. Even the people dress in old-fashioned style (fedoras and top coats everywhere; also, gangsters prefer pinstripes and even the uniformed beat cops are decked out in super stylish leather coats). It’s not New York City in disguise, nor is it Philadelphia or Chicago. Gotham here is its own grimy, art deco thing. It’s a sprawl of buildings, jagged as stalagmites. Steam and mist rise from every pipe and every crack in the concrete, like something’s cooking beneath the pavement. Rust crawls the walls. The streets are full of garbage. Gotham is a city defined by decay.
The original script by Sam Hamm famously described Gotham as looking “as if Hell had erupted through the sidewalks and kept on growing”. Burton, Furst and Pratt give us that urban hellhole vision, but with a cartoon heart.
And it works. When director Joel Schumacher took over the Batman movies in 1995, he imposed a day-glo, neon look on Gotham that made the city look like a giant night club. Later Christopher Nolan would reboot everything and pursue a realistic vision of the city with real streets, real buildings and skies that weren’t matte paintings. In Joker, Gotham IS the sleazy old New York City of the early 80s.
Those depictions are all interesting in their own ways, but nothing yet has topped or even tried to compete with the 1989 movie’s shadows and gargoyle sculptures for sheer presence.
#3 . THE CAST
Okay, I don’t buy Michael Keaton as the kind of physical specimen who can comfortably hoist a guy aloft at the very edge of a tall building like he does in Batman’s intro scene here–but he’s still good. Before he became an actor, Keaton was a stand-up comedian on the New York City circuit and maybe the result of that is an inherent dry sarcasm in his performance.
Keaton’s Bruce Wayne is probably the biggest dick of all of the movie Bruce Waynes. He fucks with people for no reason (see his first meeting with Vicki Vale). And apparently he’s so aloof that not even local news reporters know who he is on sight, even though he’s one of the richest men in Gotham and hosts gala events at his home.
He’s also one of the few movie Batmen who gets laid. Christian Bale’s Bruce Wayne spends two movies pursuing a woman who doesn’t want him. Meanwhile, Keaton’s Bruce Wayne not only beds Vicki Vale on their first date, but he doesn’t even leave his mansion for it. She comes to him. Whatta playa.
Keaton’s Bruce Wayne walks with confidence, but it’s not a jock’s confidence or a pretty boy’s confidence. It’s partly a rich man’s confidence, sure, but it’s also that of a guy who can’t be phased. He’s not afraid to be an asshole. Nobody’s breaking his heart. If the series had continued for many more years, you get the sense that Keaton would have gone through women like James Bond (in the next movie, Batman Returns, Vicki Vale is out of the picture).
As for Jack Nicholson, sure, maybe his Joker doesn’t have the big ideas behind it that Heath Ledger and Joaquin Phoenix’s Jokers had. He has the campy origin story from the old comics (he’s a crook who plunges into a vat of mystery chemicals and emerges as a white-faced, green-haired mutant with a permanent smile).
Also, the script drops the ball when it TELLS us that Nicholson’s Jack Napier is a psycho early in the film, but doesn’t do enough to SHOW us. We know that he’s sleeping with crime boss Jack Palance’s woman (Jerry Hall). We know that he regards her with condescending contempt (and she is kind of ditz). We know that he likes purple suits and we know that he totes around a deck of cards with a bullet hole through them.
We also know that Jack Napier is Jack Nicholson and that’s enough to keep us watching.
We’ve seen Nicholson play surly outsiders and unhinged psychopaths. The Joker is well within his powers. He eats up the scenery, irons over those wrinkles in the storytelling and makes us buy every little thing. He laughs like a maniac, sells his crazy costumes and makes every line sound like it could be either a joke or a threat.
And he does it so naturally. He’s great, even if I wish that the script did more to make us scared of him before his transformation.
As for the supporting cast, I get a kick out of Hammer horror veteran Michael Gough as Alfred the butler. He, along with Pat Hingle as Commissioner Gordon, are the only actors to carry on with their roles under both Burton and Schumacher like nothing ever changed. Then there’s Billy Dee Williams, reliably magnetic as Harvey Dent (too bad that we never got to see his Two-Face). Robert Wuhl as the only reporter who believes that the “Bat” sightings aren’t a myth provides sturdy comic relief. Kim Basinger does her best as The Love Interest and The Woman Who Needs to Be Rescued.
Special mention goes to character-actor stalwart Tracey Walter as Bob the Goon, Nicholson’s right hand man in crime. Bob works with Jack Napier and Bob also works with The Joker. Bob is cool with whatever. Bob don’t give a fuck.
#4. TIM BURTON
I am not a fan of Tim Burton, but I can’t deny that he has a vision. My favorite Tim Burton is the monster matinee lover who grew up in California in the 60s and eventually became a cartoonist-turned-director who makes movies about freaks. That guy made one of my all-time favorites, Ed Wood.
My least favorite Burton is the Hollywood guy who makes bloated effects extravaganzas with hollow insides. The guy stuck in a cycle of re-adapting old fairy tales and legends at fifty times the budget of previous film versions, but without even half of the heart. The guy who can fill a screen with color and absurdity, but can’t tell a story to save his life.
Batman sort of gives us both Burtons.
This is not a great movie. It reeks of a film that was written and re-written right up until the last day in the editing room. Some scenes that should be important have no impact because they’re forced into the film with zero narrative set-up (see the famous head-scratcher moment when Alfred takes it upon himself to bring Vicki Vale into the Batcave and reveal Bruce Wayne’s secret). Then there’s the 1000% unnecessary twist when we learn that the young Jack Napier was the guy who shot Bruce Wayne’s parents on that fateful night way back.
Even when I was 12, I thought that was horseshit, but somebody on the creative team got into the idea that it would be interesting if Batman and The Joker both created each other. DEEP, MAN.
As for the good stuff in the story, Burton’s two Batman movies are unique in superhero cinema because they’re sideways monster movies. Burton was never a comic book fan. He claims to have never read them at all. He was a horror kid. Loved Vincent Price and Hammer films and Roger Corman’s old Edgar Allan Poe flicks (Jack Nicholson got his start with Corman and was in a few of those old Gothic drive-in movies)–and THAT’S how he approaches Batman.
Batman fights for justice, but he costumes himself to look like a monster. His tactic is to scare the shit out of the bad guys first before he starts busting faces. No one in this movie looks up to him as a hero at first. He’s a demon in the night and no one know what’s going on behind that mask.
The Joker’s monstrous qualities are obvious. (Let’s also mention the terrific, horror-style scene when the newly deformed Joker removes his bandages for the first time in a grimy underworld makeshift “doctor’s office”.)
It’s Frankenstein meets Dracula here. Also, it climaxes in a dusty old cathedral setting, shades of The Hunchback of Notre Dame, another story about a freak.
And when I tune into that signal and hear that music and watch those shadows and remember a few sunny days long past, the flawed and sometimes clumsy Batman is pretty alright despite everything.
I don’t know if there will be more Nostalgia Shit Fuck installments. I haven’t been a comic book freak in decades, but that stuff was my whole world at a very formative age (about 1986 to 1992, a long time when you’re a kid) and that might be why I usually put numbers on the articles here. It’s a comic book thing.
I like the idea of continuing this series with pieces about 80s music videos and tattered old comics and sitcom episodes and whatever other life rafts I turn to in a year that doesn’t look like it’s going to get much better. We’ll see.
Nostalgia isn’t a bad thing. I used to think that it was something to avoid–and it can be a bad thing, I guess, if the “glory days” are all that you have.
It can also be a bad thing if you take on the role of the bitter elder who needs to preach to the kids about how they’ll never be as cool as you because they didn’t grow up with the same shit that you did.
Fuck all a’ ‘dat.
Nostalgia shouldn’t fuel your anger and bitterness. It shouldn’t bring out the negative side of you.
It should make you happy. It should also still surprise you as you find new meanings in familiar old things and see your opinions change over time.
There should still be an element of discovery in it.
And when you talk about it, you don’t have things to prove.
No, you have things to share.