Batman Always Wins: Stop The Press! Who's That?

Picture a Pre-Pubescent Mattie (PPM), acne sprouting up like weeds across the oily plain of his face, visiting his local comic book shop.

PPM's eyes dart across the racks. His heart starts to race. His hand adjusts the trucker cap perched awkwardly atop his enormous head, back when those were worn only by actual truckers and the hopelessly unfashionable.

PPM picks up every Batman comic he can find; later that day he devours them voraciously, laying on his bed beneath his Batsignal poster, his Bartman poster, and the poster he took from an old comic book magazine of Adam West and Burt Ward in their Dynamic Duo garb from the sixties.

Yes, little Pre-Pubescent Mattie had Bat-fever.

Considering my sentimental attachment to the Caped Crusader, and of course the fact that this is a BATMAN THEMED COLUMN IN CASE YOU HAVEN'T NOTICED YOU FACELESS RANDOM CLUELESS PERSON I AM JUST NOW MAKING UP TO JUSTIFY USING ALL CAPS AT THIS POINT OKAY ENOUGH OF THAT, I hope you’ll forgive my waxing poetical on the first Batman film.

To describe this film as “seminal” in my development as a geek, a movie fan, and even a HUMAN BEING is to understate its importance. I was absolutely fucking OBSESSED with Batman in 1989. Totally out of my goddamned head. I still remember the exact date that Batman premiered in theaters: June 23, 1989. I remember it because throughout the last half of my seventh grade year, I lived for that date. I. Absolutely. Could. Not. Wait. For. This. Movie. And so the Tuesday after the film came out, my dad took an afternoon off from work and we went to see Batman at the once-beautiful River Oaks Theaters in Calumet City, IL.

My Trapper Keeper the next school year was covered in stickers from the Batman trading cards. My sister and I obsessively collected each and every one of the cards to form a complete set. In art class, I devised ways to incorporate the classic oval Bat-symbol into my projects. That aforementioned trucker-style hat had a Bat-symbol stitched in fluorescent yellow on the front, and I took to decorating it in buttons from the comic book and sci-fi conventions I started to attend in high school. (My favorite? The “Kirk/Spock in ’92” button.)

As a phenomenon, Batman in 1989 was the first time I was aware of a massive pop culture event and decided of my own volition to fully join in, to stand alongside the seething masses in our Bat-signal T-shirts jamming to “Batdance” on our Walkmen headphones. It was everywhere, and so was I, slurping it all up without hesitation and loving every second of it. It was my awakening to the power and potential in films, music, television, stories; it guided me into comics. It kinda made me a geek. (Okay, a BIGGER geek. Happy, grade school playground tormentors?)

As a movie, it’s a simple story, and that’s one of the big reasons it works. Director Tim Burton and screenwriters Sam Hamm and Warren Skaaren don’t clutter their film with extraneous villains who are more a lampoon than a serious threat; there’s no Ahnold muttering idiotic quips with his face painted blue, or Danny DeVito limping around with fins over his arms. (Though I do think Batman Returns is largely underrated...more on that in a future column, for sure.) It’s lean storytelling that focuses on what’s important, which is the duality of Bruce Wayne and the viciousness of the Joker.

But it's not watchable because of its awesome story; it's more about a mood, a feeling, all atmosphere. It's really a triumph of style over substance, which is something that can be said about many of Tim Burton's films...and frankly, about many Batman stories over the years. Burton's Gotham is a city on its last legs where nothing but evil seems to exist in primary colors. His Joker is a horrifying lampoon of a circus clown who gets off on combining pure naked bloodlust with his playful exterior. And his Batman is an unrelenting force of justice, consumed by revenge against an enemy he can never defeat. Production designer Anton Furst creates a twisted nightmare version of New York where every corner seems to end in a dark alley and criminals rule the streets.

And yet...there's a distance to it all, a theatricality and artifice that seems rooted in the halting rhythms of comics, not as they had evolved in 1989 but as they were in their birth in the thirties. Burton's Batman emerges from a spiritual connection with the early, primal Batman tales. Plot is largely meaningless; atmosphere trumps all. Images stand out beyond story...Michael Keaton stretching his batwings out over a couple of thugs, the Batmobile snaking its way down a leaf-covered forest road...they live in the mind like that ghostly, silent image of The Bat-Man sneaking into a palatial estate, or the iconic cover of Detective Comics 27, Bat-Man swinging down onto hapless criminals, justice raining down from on high.

This staged feeling, almost as though the characters themselves are performing and not just the actors, fits with the whole identity-as-mask theme that's central to the film, and that's always been a core part of Batman's appeal. As his character has developed, so also has a simple question with no easy answer: Is Batman Bruce Wayne, or is Bruce Wayne Batman? Which is the reality, and which is the disguise? Burton dives more directly into these issues with his second Batman film but it's there in the first film too, in the overall unreality Burton and his crew create--the heightened, yet darkened, sense of drama and action.

My love affair with the Bat didn’t start with Tim Burton’s film...but in a way, my whole lifelong desperate romance with the minutiae and ephemera of pop culture started with the 1989 incarnation of Bat-mania, and the film that inspired it.

So thanks, Jon Peters, for snorting blow and fucking hookers with Jack Nicholson back in the late eighties. If not for that, I might not be the nerd I am today.