Thirty years ago, audiences came out in droves to see an over-the-top political satire about the mayoral campaign of a disgusting sewer mutant – a movie that also doubled as an oddball romantic comedy about two weirdos with mask fetishes, trading blows and spit in a snowglobe metropolis. Hindsight has a way of turning every box-office sensation into a curious time capsule, letting us gawk at the strange attractions that used to put butts in seats. But through the lens of the modern blockbuster machine, and the reigning superhero-industrial complex that powers it, Batman Returns looks like a true anomaly, as weird and horny and maybe personal as mega-budget Hollywood spectacles get.
It’s certainly a more idiosyncratic movie than its predecessor, Tim Burton’s record-breaking popcorn sensation Batman, released to teeming, cheering crowds in the summer of 1989. To lure Burton back to the world of the caped crusader, Warner Bros had to offer him greater creative control over the sequel. The director exercised it from top to bottom. In place of the original’s art deco noir aesthetic, Batman Returns goes full baroque fairytale. When the camera swoops like a creature of the night through the twisted architecture of the Gotham Zoo, it’s clear we’re fully in Burtonville, previous home to wisecracking prankster apparitions and lonely hairdressing androids.
With Batman Returns, Burton turned Gotham into the biggest of big tops, terrorized by a gang of criminal carnies and populated by freaks on both sides of the hero/villain divide. That includes billionaire vigilante Bruce Wayne (Michael Keaton, slipping back into the cumbersome cape and cowl), ostensible hero of the movie, who at one point likens himself to Norman Bates or Ted Bundy, serial killers with split personalities or secret pastimes.
Bruce’s problems are doubled, his screen-time halved. Just about everyone agrees that Jack Nicholson’s Joker stole the first Batman. The second surrenders the spotlight to the rogues’ gallery immediately, depriving Keaton of any dialogue for the opening half-hour. The movie belongs more to Danny DeVito’s deformed, anguished Oswald Cobblepot, AKA the Penguin, and to Michelle Pfeiffer’s Selina Kyle, reborn into the vengeful, vamping Catwoman.
The other thing that drew Burton back was the involvement of the Heathers screenwriter Daniel Waters, who gave the material an arch, black-comic zinginess. The absurdist political angle of the plot was his idea. It’s an inspired gag, imagining that a creature as vulgar as the Penguin could steal the electorate’s heart. In the film’s funniest reveal, DeVito’s supervillain is interrupted mid-meal, chowing down messily on a raw fish, by the new staff of beaming operatives and volunteers applauding his candidacy. What seemed cynical in 1992 now looks rather touchingly naive. Imagine a politician dropping out of a race just because he got caught on tape disparaging his base.
Waters’ plot is lumpy, forcing an illogical allegiance between the villains. No matter – for Burton, it’s just an excuse to collide these outsized cartoon personalities, to build a vaudeville stage for three tortured, animal-themed outlaws. The director twists that classic Batman theme of the bad guys being warped reflections of the good guy to suit his own enduring love affair with misfits. DeVito, deliciously overacting under mounds and hours of daily prosthetic labor, makes the Penguin a sympathetic monster: horrifying in appearance, crass and corrupt in nature, but still a tragic figure. Burton loves him as only a father could. And he recognizes him as a kindred spirit to his archnemesis. Who is Cobblepot but Wayne without privilege, abandoned instead of orphaned? “You’re just jealous because I’m a genuine freak and you have to wear a mask,” he tells Batman. It’s a point the dark knight concedes.
Pfeiffer, meanwhile, who nabbed the role after Annette Bening got pregnant and vacated it,…
Read More: Batman Returns at 30: still as weird as big-budget blockbusters get | Tim Burton