Michael Verhoeven's The Nasty Girl (1990)

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Leslie Martinson's Batman (1966)

Tonight we're showing Batman, the movie. But it's probably not what you think. When we think about Batman movies these days, we make a variety of assumptions without knowing it -- what kind of costume he wears, the reality of the world he exists in and the darkness of that world, a certain bleak aesthetic that goes hand in hand with the mythology. This current impression exists because the popular culture vision of Batman changed, drastically, in 1986. That was the year that Frank Miller’s “The Dark Knight Returns” (originally published in three volumes) came out. Prior to that, Batman was firmly in comic book mode – he fought outlandish costumed villains or two-bit criminals, worked in a absolutely moral, though slightly ironic, universe (good, evil, little in between), and faced the frequent simplicity and looniness of comic narrative with a persistent straight face. It was the stuff of juvenile fantasy. Yes, the 1970s saw the rise of more realistic art in comic books. Neal Adams, and a handful of other illustrators, located DC and Marvel heroes in a much more detailed, recognizable world and added powerful detail to their illustrations. But the two-dimensional simplicity of the stories for the most part stayed intact.

Then Frank Miller gave us the “Dark Knight.” If you haven’t read that story, it’s set in the near future. Batman is 55, battle-scarred, thought by many to be dead. Punks, disorder, corruption rule the city (and make you wonder if Batman ever had any effect on Gotham’s crime rate). The comic’s real villain is moral decay, and Batman’s role is decidedly ambiguous. He even fights Superman, who comes off as a government stooge. The villains are not just evil, but dangerous. So Miller shifted the emphasis from fantasy (superheroes fight and beat the metaphorical representatives of social disorder) to post-modernist social commentary (superhero fights monsters in stories that reveal our own cultural id).

To completely understand the effect of DKR, you only have to look at the Batman stories of the next few years. In 1988, DC released two comics, “The Killing Joke” in which the Joker shoots and paralyzes Commissioner Gordon’s daughter, and “A Death in the Family,” in which the Joker beats the second Robin, Jason Todd, to death with a crowbar. The Dark Knight effect, then, was to move Batman into a darker universe, an ugly world, both in atmosphere and in antagonist, that is not easily conquered.

And in 1989, Tim Burton released the first of his Batman movies, starring Michael Keaton as Bruce Wayne/Batman and Jack Nicholson as the Joker. Burton fully embraced the dark and gothic aspect of the character lurking within the more recent, malevolent, storylines. Making effective use of the ominous, looming architecture of production designer Anton Furst, Burton created a cast of grotesques, who got even more grotesque in Batman Returns (1992), sinking the viewer into a disturbing slough of psychosis and the dark, seamy side of life. Think: Burton’s Catwoman (Michelle Pfeiffer) whose vinyl outfit screams dominatrix, while the outfit’s ever-present stitching suggests metaphorically the scars on her soul.

Burton was followed by Schumacher (Batman Forever with Val Kilmer and Batman and Robin with George Clooney) and then Nolan (the current Batman trilogy with Christian Bale). But whether gothic grotesque or Freudian chic or pessimistic realism, all these Batmen are dark, violent, oppressive, and tortured.

And all of them are 180 degrees and worlds away from Leslie Martinson’s 1966 offering, a movie made using the cast and concepts of the concurrent Batman TV show. What you’re seeing tonight is not only not recognizable in the current Batman scheme, it’s hard to figure out where it came from; it’s that alien. But the word we attach to it is “camp.” First of all, it treats the comic book origins of Batman as just that – comic. Second, it presents Batman in an ironic mode of deadpan self-mockery. It’s like the movie is one giant in-joke. Nobody actually acts like this, the movie suggests, but we’re going to pretend that it’s all perfectly normal. The more outrageous the character, situation, language, the more normal we’re going to pretend it is. Doesn’t everyone scale the sides of buildings with a thin rope when they could take an elevator? Doesn’t everyone have a spray can of Shark Repellent Bat Spray in the bathroom cupboard? Doesn’t every country have a navy surplus submarine fitted with duck-foot-like stabilizers and a periscope in a penguin head? Of course these things exist! And Batman (Adam West) and Robin (Burt Ward) think nothing of their oddity, even as they speak in sentences that end exclusively in exclamation points.

One thing I really like about this movie is how the production designers (Serge Krizman and Jack Martin Smith) went back to the original comic books’ 4-color printing process: yellow, magenta, cyan (blue), and black. Batman’s costume is gray. This cape is blue, as is Bruce Wayne’s hair. All the colors in a comic book are based on what variations, with tinting and combinations of tints, can be made with those four colors, a palette of 64 colors to be exact. And the movie stays pretty true to that palette in invoking the original comic look.

Look also for the cinematographer’s (Howard Schwartz) frequent use of the “dutch angle,” where the camera is tilted so that world on screen looks tilted too. Batman uses this technique when depicting the villains, whose world is, metaphorically, crooked.

So there’s a ton of fun to be had watching this very comic-book version of the movie. And it’s a perfect antidote to the more recent seven dark and depressing versions of the character we’ve had since 1989. In fact, you might think a bit about how these different versions of Batman reflect, a lot, the cultures in which they’re created. And then ask yourself: in which “world” do you most want to live?

R. Findlay
Film Club Adviser