BATMAN RETURNS

Directed by: Tim Burton

Written by: Daniel Waters, Sam Hamm

Starring: Michael Keaton, Danny Devito, Michelle Pfeiffer, Christopher Walken, Michael Gough, Michael Murphy, Pat Hingle, Andrew Bryniarski, Cristi Conaway, Vincent Schiavelli

Distributed by Warner Bros.

Film was released June 19th, 1992.

Review by Michael Kaminski

After leaving Disney’s animation department due to the incompatibility of his eccentric drawings with the cutesy, family-friendly content of the corporation, Tim Burton’s bizarre short film Frankenweenie found its way to Paul Reubins, who chose the young visionary to direct a big-screen adaptation of his equally bizarre television series. Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure was a huge success when it came out in 1985, and Tim Burton was now not only a director but a bankable one. He followed the film up with the ghoulishly weird Beetlejuice, one of his best and most imaginative films. Though Beetlejuice carried the bizarre fantasy with a strangely human center, Burton was itching to do something more personal. However, he just couldn’t resist the big-budget rejuvenation of one of comics darkest hero’s: Batman. Burton’s bleak vision of the dark knight took heavy inspiration from Frank Miller’s violent and psychologically challenging portrait of the character, turning what was then best known for Adam West’s campy comedy from the 60’s into a captivatingly adult adventure that was more gothic than it was heroic. The film became the smash hit of 1989 and represented a total re-birth in the franchise. Sequels, naturally, were proposed right away.

But Tim Burton was not interested in repeating himself, and had other projects in mind. Notably, Edward Scissorhands, a gothic fairy-tale that was equal parts Frankenstein and E.T., a gloomy yet touching fable about a misunderstood freak with knives for fingers assembled in a lab who struggles to live in a whimsical vision of suburban America. However, even for one of the industry’s hottest directors, a film as original and unconventional as Edward Scissorhands was not an easy sell. Warner Brother turned down the film, but Fox eagerly gave it a home. Scissorhands came out in 1990 and while it was not the Batman-sized hit Fox was hoping for it nonetheless was a success, and to this day is considered one of Burton’s best and most personal films.

But now Warners was hounding him to do another Batman film. “Tim was very averse,” screenwriter Sam Hamm says. “He was very reluctant to get involved. And finally the way [the studio] got to him was to say, ‘what if the second movie is really just a Tim Burton movie?’ And that kind of got his attention.” Hamm’s script was tossed aside, and Burton began anew, this time with total creative control of the project. Burton had no interest in making another Batman film—instead, he created a sort of follow-up to Edward Scissorhands, placing the story in the setting of Gotham city and wrapping it in the logo of the Batman franchise. What he would create is a tragic fairy-tale, a gothic fable that took the same point of reference as Edward Scissorhands but re-interpreted it through the dark lens of his previous Batman film; gone was the sunny suburbs of Scissorhands, with its bright green lawns and gleaming blue sky, instead replaced with permanent night, towering skyscrapers sculpted out of iron and watery sewers filled with violent misfits. A modern version of Quasimodo or the Phantom of the Opera set in the Batman universe, Burton’s story was about a tragic freak of nature, betrayed by the world, cast away into the sewer and whom grows up to exact his revenge.

As a child, Oswald Cobblepot is born with flippers for hands and eats the family cat; his parents, horrified, throw the baby into a river, but instead Oswald is transported to the sewer, where he grows up amongst escaped penguins from a nearby zoo. For years, reports of a “penguin man” living in Gotham’s sewers persist, but many write them off as urban legend. Finally, however, when a local gang of criminals kidnap the baby of the mayor, Oswald Cobblepot finally rises to the surface with the child in his arms, gimply waddling over to the mayor and returning his child. Horrified but touched by the heroic act, the public becomes fascinated with the twisted creature as they learn his heartbreaking story. Oswald pleads to be re-united with his parents, forgiving them for their heinous crime, but discovers they have long since passed away. Building on his public popularity, he soon becomes an unlikely politician, even though he eats raw fish and spews bile. Unbeknownst to all, however, is that this is all a scheme for him to strike out in vengeance and destroy the society that rejected him as a child.

Paralleled with this was a more domestic interpretation of this theme as a demure assistant to an evil corporate executive is murdered by him after accidentally uncovering a money-laundering scheme. Resurrected by the blood of alley cats, she is transformed into a leather-clad villain that acts out the repressed desires of her alter ego, eventually partnering with the Penguin in his scheme to destroy Gotham. Oh yes, and there’s Batman in there somewhere. While Edward Scissorhands had learned the value of love and finally found acceptance by his family, the Penguin’s story is a tragic reflection. The mob discovers the true blackness of his heart and turns against him; the Penguin, enraged, sheds what adoptions of the civilized world he carried, tearing off his three-piece suit and crying, “My name is not Oswald—I am the Penguin!” Here the fate of sympathetic Edward is re-told with an end fit for the pathos-laden villain of the Penguin, bringing him full circle into Phantom of the Opera territory. Lashing out in anger at the society that created him, Penguin moves to destroy Gotham but is ultimately killed. As his body bubbles up black bile from the hate inside him, he collapses dead into the water of the sewer, and his penguins envelope his corpse and float him down to the dark recesses of the sewer that birthed him.

Batman Returns may have been obligated to fit the title character in somewhere, but at best the film uses the popular franchise as a marketing springboard for an original Burton creation, filled with his signature touches, from the Christmas-time setting to the circus motifs. The story of the Penguin, in some ways, antedates the revived Batman series itself, with its social misfit with childhood wounds that tries to fit in but is misunderstood as a monster; it is typically Burton, reaching back to his early short work like Vincent and Frankenweenie. Visually, the Penguin follows in tandem; he easily fits in with the Edward Gorey-inspired look Burton would later showcase in work like Nightmare Before Christmas, with designs by Burton himself, carrying all of his trademark stylization.

The character can be seen in Burton’s later work, a Gorey-like collection of macabre poems revolving around misfit children born with various deformities who are outcast and often meet unpleasant ends: 1997’s The Melancholy Death of Oyster Boy and Other Stories. The centerpiece story which the books derives its title from describes a baby born deformed in the shape of oyster, whose parents, horrified, later eat him and bury his remains by the sea. Finally, one of the book’s strangest entries is most telling: a single-page story called “Jimmy, the Hideous Penguin Boy.” With a lonesome illustration of a baby penguin-boy dressed in a tuxedo backed against red circus stripes, it is accompanied by the words:

“My name is Jimmy,
but my friends just call me
‘the hideous penguin boy.’ ”

Appropriately, Burton sent Danny DeVito a framed copy. “The Penguin” may have technically been a Batman villain created in 1941, but this was not it—this was a character that was thoroughly a Burton invention.

When the film was released, many noted the conspicuous incongruity it held with the original. Not only that, while the original film was infamous for being dark and un-child-friendly, it nonetheless revolved around the trials and struggles its hero endured—but this film was even darker and had a much more unsettling storyline due to its focus on the gruesome Penguin.

With Batman’s origins told in the first film, audiences entered theaters expecting to find a rip-roaring adventure that would develop the hero further, but were completely baffled to find a grim fantasy film that hardly paid any attention to the character.

If Batman Returns ever feels a bit off-kilter, it may be observed that the film could never quite achieve its true potential because it was still operating under the guise of a Batman sequel, and thus had to include and touch upon the hero somewhere. While integrated into the Penguin’s plot through the secondary story of Selina Kyle and her Catwoman transformation, the film would arguably be better served by cutting him out of the story altogether and reconfiguring the tale as the standalone tragic fable it was meant to be. Nonetheless, Batman Returns is a fascinating story, told with boldness and a personal touch. Not only do I consider it the best entry in the Batman series, but I count it among Burton’s crown achievements.

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