Why did my parents let us watch Batman Returns at my 8th birthday party?
As both a film obsessive and the father of young child, I spend a decent amount of time wondering what to screen and when to screen it. Since my kid has been bit by the movie bug relatively early, I do a lot of guess-work about what’s appropriate for him, often using what I assume I watched at or around his age as a guidepost.
As a liminal Millennial, I grew up during both the Disney Renaissance and the era of Don Bluth movies like An American Tail and The Land Before Time, so those are a given, as are films from the subsequent two decades of Disney-Pixar hegemony.
But as I prepare for the next few years, I look back to what I watched during elementary school and I’m often shocked at what my brain was basted in, like the cops-and-robbers comic book adaptation Dick Tracy or Tim Burton fare like Batman and Beetlejuice. And while those movies have their fare share of sex, violence and darkness, none delivers all three quite like something I saw before I was 8-years-old.
Batman Returns was released in June 1992, the summer before I began second grade. I’m sure I saw it that summer, as I’d continue a nascent tradition that I had begun as a pre-schooler — dressing as the year’s blockbuster villain (The Joker, Beetlejuice, The Shredder, etc) for Halloween — by being The Penguin that fall.
And just a week after Halloween, a bunch of second graders and I headed to a second-run drafthouse-style theater to see Batman Returns, again or for the first time, for my 8th birthday party.
Why did my parents think this was a good idea?
Cards on the table: of the live action, full-color Batman movies, I regard Returns as the best, both as a coherent film and as one that captures the full-range of the Batman experience. Returns balances Batman’s inherent broodiness and campiness; the others oscillate pretty wildly in one direction or the other. It’s also one of the best superhero movies ever, its rank inflated with every successive exploitation of comic IP. And in the parlance of today’s media, it’s a trauma story that — unlike most of the genre — shows what happens when characters lean into the skids of their pain instead of growing from it. (It’s also one of the finest Christmas movies.*)
With that said, it’s not a movie for children! This is a movie where a character played by Paul “Pee-wee Herman” Reubens — less than a year after his adult playhouse adventure — attempts infanticide before the title card is shown. And it only gets more disturbing and kinkier from there.
After the game-changing Batman, Burton and company were emboldened to fly their freak flags even higher. The Gotham City of Returns is the true Metropolis, with the hard shadows and harder angles of German Expressionism; naming Christopher Walken’s character Max Shreck after the actor that played the lead in Nosferatu is just a bonus.
Despite featuring two members of Batman’s rogue’s gallery, it is Walken’s Shreck that provides the film’s pure, unadulterated villain. For my generation, this was our first glimpse of Walken — before True Romance, Wayne’s World 2 and Pulp Fiction — and his look was as iconic as his cadence. Shreck’s introduction is a naked appeal to endless growth capitalism and dirty politics, and that’s in polite company. He’s eventually revealed to be a toxic waste-dumping murderer who invokes the Reichstag fire as a political inspiration.
Setting aside his attempted murder of Selina Kyle (to paraphrase, they don’t give the Nobel prize for attempted chemistry), Shreck’s evil is rooted in the reality of boardrooms and backrooms. The film leaves the real nasty stuff to the costumed freaks. Batman might not kill, but he blows up a guy with a bomb, lights others on fire and throws acid at Catwoman. The film also features a disembodied hand, a grizzly electocution and, most memorably, a nose gushing blood.
The latter scene expertly mixes menace with camp, of which the film has plenty. It’s mostly doled out by Catwoman, whether she’s getting dumped in a truck of kitty litter or purring lines like, “Seems like every woman you try to save ends up dead… or deeply resentful.” Meow!
But Catwoman’s main mode is serving up sexual innuendo, which Michelle Pfeiffer does whether she’s Selina Kyle (first adorkable, then fuckable) or as a dominatrix femme fatale poured into a vinyl suit. A scene where she gives herself a tongue bath after Penguin comments on their “naked sexual charisma” isn’t exactly subtle, but I’m assuming much of this went over our heads and hit the intended, parental targets. Locked in an awkward embrace after a failed date, Bruce Wayne says, “No hard feelings,” to which Kyle retorts, “Actually… semi-hard, I’d say.”
I haven’t focused much on Bruce Wayne, who doesn’t speak in Returns for nearly a quarter of the film’s runtime. When he does, it’s after being intrigued by the Penguin, in whom he finds a kindred spirit also traumatized by his parents. But as always, Wayne’s adoption of the cape and cowl is A Choice; he wasn’t deformed and dumped in a sewer like the Penguin. Alfred calls out his bullshit (“Must you be the only lonely man-beast in town?”) and even before Shreck knows his identity, he recognizes that Wayne and Cobblepot might have been prep-school bunkies, if not for fate. And as much as Wayne and Kyle tire of wearing their masks of sanity, she is the only one who can reconcile things honestly: forget man-beast, why does Batman get to be the only vigilante in town? Why does Shreck get to live when the rich and powerful never face consequences?
Shreck finally pays the piper when Kyle makes him kiss her deadly — an electrocution that tries to outdo Joker’s traumatizing hand-buzzer killing in the first film. Returns ends on a somber note: Penguin gets a touching Viking funeral; Batman/Wayne returns to his dual life, never to embrace therapy; and Catwoman appears in a post-film stinger when that still felt exciting (even if it didn’t pan out).
I’m sure the kids in the audience ate it all up. And while the list of offenses would make Brent Bozell blush, I’m starting to think Returns wasn’t that crazy to show to eight year-olds. Violent? Of course, but rarely at the end of a gun. Sexualized? Sure, but we didn’t clock it. Dark? Yes, but not for the generation weened on The NeverEnding Story. On the positive side of the ledger: lessons about not trusting greenwashing capitalists, evaluating situations with an eye toward class, and embracing your true self.
“It’s the so-called normal guys who always let you down,” Kyle admits. “Sickos never scare me. At least they’re committed.”
* Even for those pedants that don’t think Die Hard or Home Alone are Christmas movies, this is a film set on and around Christmas, where Gotham has been turned into a winter wonderland, a tree-lighting is the sight of a major turning point and a 33-year-old Penguin makes a list of children. There’s also a bit of Moses (baby down the river) and Easter (resurrection) that only help the cause. Plus, all great Christmas movies feature a masquerade ball.
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