‘Batman Returns’ is an Expressionistic, Psychosexual Gothic Masterpiece
Batman Returns is my favorite Batman movie. It is my favorite Tim Burton movie. In fact, it is one of my all-time favorite movies, in general. I can’t even remember the first time I saw it, I was so young. It came out when I was three. I had the toys, the pajamas, the comic book adaptation, the ride-in electronic Batmobile, the puzzle, the coloring book, you name it. Nobody questioned putting all of this in the hands of a child, marketing it so explicitly to kids, because it’s Batman. So I never, ever questioned the content of the film, whether it was something I “should” be seeing as a child. Not even once. It wasn’t until I was older and started reading about the controversy surrounding this movie that it even occurred to me to think about the boundaries it pushed. But that’s the way it was for myself and most of the kids I knew growing up in the early ’90s. In an age where things like Terminator, Aliens and Predator were heavily marketed to kids, with all kinds of toys and games. Those movies kind of became kids movies by default. Even though they absolutely were not made with that audience in mind.
Batman Returns was forced to navigate a much trickier situation. It wasn’t made with children in mind, either. It wasn’t even really made with the comics in mind. As a huge fan of the comics it’s interesting to call this my favorite Batman movie, because there’s not a lot of the source material to be recognized here. Only in vague terms of broad characterization. The themes of these characters largely resonate with the comics, but the stories really don’t. These are characters that have existed since the 1930s, though, and they are open to all manner of interpretation. The comics themselves had played fast, and loose, and had certainly gone to dark places by 1992. Instead of pulling too much inspiration from the source material, the influences of Batman Returns are almost entirely cinematic. I think that is one of its greatest strengths.
Visually, Tim Burton’s first Batman had drawn inspiration from film noir and pulp classics of the ’30s and ’40s, mixing the era that birthed Batman with the pop sensibility of the late ’80s, creating a Gotham City that is its own world out of time and space. Some of that does still leak into the sequel. Catwoman is a ’40s femme fatale with a distinctly ’90s edge, taking the assertive woman driven to murder into the modern day, transforming her into a wholly unapologetic free spirit. This was true of the era as a whole, which saw the triumphant return of the genre with films like Fatal Attraction, Single White Female, Basic Instinct, and The Last Seduction. Batman Returns came out right in the middle of this resurgence, but with the difference being that in this revenge plot, we are entirely meant to be on the woman’s side, even if she is technically a “villain.”
Burton shifted gears with Batman Returns, cinematically speaking. This movie’s influences are almost entirely found in silent era German Expressionism. It permeates every frame. This is a snowy, gloomy Gotham with long, heavy shadows. The buildings look different from the previous movie. I have to wonder if part of the Christmas, late winter setting was to allow for weather so overcast it makes Batman Returns look borderline black-and-white.
The most obvious reference to the classic era of German horror is in the name of the film’s true villain, Max Shreck. Played by Christopher Walken, Shreck is named after the titular star of F.W. Murnau’s legendary Nosferatu. Shreck is, essentially, a caricature of Donald Trump if he were drawn by Charles Addams. The overt references don’t stop there, though. Danny DeVito’s Penguin is a far cry from the tuxedo wearing crime boss of the comics. Instead, this villain’s outfit primarily evokes the mad doctor of The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, as well as Lon Chaney in the tragically lost to time London After Midnight.
Even outside the German aesthetics, the early horror film influences are all over this movie. Instead of being the proprietor of the Iceberg Lounge, this Penguin leads a band of malicious circus outcasts known as the Red Triangle Gang. Both the Penguin and his gang feel more like an homage to Tod Browning’s 1932 film Freaks than any comic book incarnation. Penguin is reimagined as a “bird man,” born with deformities giving him a nose that resembles a beak and hands that resemble flippers, who was the victim of an attempted infanticide by his wealthy parents. He was tossed into the water as a baby, but survived and grew to maturity in the sewers. Like the Phantom of the Opera, he is a man who lurks below a thriving aristocracy of which he is deeply resentful and simultaneously longs to be a part.
This is a Batman movie for the freaks and that’s the best thing about it. It is a deeply horny, weird, and fetishistic movie. This is the first movie to really suggest that full-body black rubber and vinyl are weird things to wear if you’re not extremely horny about wearing them, and that maybe that is clearly part of why they wear them. It does not tone any of those elements down for a younger audience. It is a Gothic, psychosexual horror film and none of that sexuality is subtext, not in the least. The movie presents a hero, a villain, and an antihero and they are all unified by being unhinged fetishistic weirdoes. I love that being the trait shared by Batman, Penguin, and Catwoman. I love that they all have an explicit relationship to sexuality and to kink, but each have a distinctly different one, and that they do this while each representing an entirely different spot on the spectrum of morality.
Penguin is sexuality in its grossest form, making explicit passes at every woman he sees, groping them, and even bragging about it. This makes for a fitting plot point in that he’s also running for public office. He’s a guy who most people find disgusting to look at, but wins the city’s sympathy by playing up his tragic past, but nothing can fix, spin, or cover up how disgusting he is on the inside. That’s where his problems ultimately lie and that’s also why his plots get increasingly more insane as the scam he’s playing on the city begins to crumble around him. He goes from wanting to be mayor to, when that fails, killing the firstborn infant sons of every successful family in Gotham, which is a psychotic leap. And when that fails, he decides to kill every child in the city.
Once he starts spiraling and his plans start failing, each new idea is more outrageously psychotic than the last. He also decides to carry out this plan via penguins with rockets strapped to their backs. That, to me, is the perfect marriage of this film’s cinematic influences and its source material. Penguin’s plot to murder children is horror in its purest and meanest form, a twisted take on the pied piper, and his method of executing that plan could have been pulled directly from the comic book page, or even the ’60s television show.
Batman, on the other hand, is the weirdo who thinks he’s passing for normal. He knows he’s not normal, which is crucial. His introduction is also so in keeping with the film’s cinematic influences. He’s sitting in complete darkness, immersed in the shadows of his decrepit old mansion, like Dracula, motionless until the moment the signal shines onto the wall and he is called to action. He’s bluntly attracted to Catwoman, and their fights with one another are deeply sexual in nature. Sometimes they move from one right into the other. With enough flirty banter interspersed in their combat, it becomes clear that the fight itself is a kind of flirtation, too. And if that wasn’t overt enough, she pins him down and licks his face.
This is a Batman movie where Catwoman traces her hand down his muscly rubber chest and fully slips it beneath his belt line. Keaton’s Bruce Wayne is a terrific expansion on his performance in the original, partly because the story plays so much into his weirder quirks. Just like the first film, Keaton’s Bruce seems entirely oblivious to the world around him. In Bruce Wayne mode, he never appears to be fully aware of who he is or what he’s doing, and I love that. It’s perfectly embodied in the moment when he meets Selina as Bruce after meeting her as Batman and says, “I mistook me for someone else.” It’s a fun little joke but also a crucial line that speaks so much to what both of those characters are going through.
Catwoman has no hidden self, not really. She plays at having a dual identity, like Batman, and it’s fascinating to watch them go about their respective roles in entirely different ways. Her personality is exactly the same in and out of costume. This is a woman who essentially died and was reborn completely uninhibited. Selina Kyle played the role of a meek, mousey secretary who followed the rules and did everything her boss asked her to do and the only thing it ever got her was thrown out of a window.
Her transformation is immediate after that, and it is fantastic to witness. She walks home in a daze, almost a zombie, and the thing that snaps her out of it and into a pure and primal expression of rage is an ad on her answering machine for “Gotham Lady Perfume.” Selina Kyle works in a department store owned by a megalomaniacal, murderous billionaire. Her apartment is a pink nightmare. It looks like an upscaled Barbie Dream House. It’s covered in stuffed animals and throw pillows probably also sold by Shreck. She lives in a world of product catered to women, designed and sold by men.
Selina destroys all of it, completely torching her old life, in an outright rejection of corporate femininity. While the logistics are questionable, it really puts an exclamation point on the whole scene to see her take a designer jacket, tear it to pieces, and reassemble it into a kinky costume for herself. It’s a binding expression of freedom, so skintight that instead of making herself a costume, it’s almost as though she’s made herself a new body. Outsider art crafted by her own claws.
Bruce’s attraction to her goes far beyond the physical. Even before he knows that Selina is Catwoman, he swoons over how deeply comfortable she is with who she is. She says whatever she thinks. She hides nothing about her personality from anyone. She got tossed out of a window by her boss and clocks in at work the next day to look him directly in the eye. Selina and Bruce’s separate relationships to their dual identities are hilarious and cause some of the best moments. I adore the scene in which we intercut a classic Batman suiting up montage with Selina haphazardly changing into her Catwoman costume in the car.
While her relationship with herself is very different, though, she sees Bruce in much the same way he sees her. She tells Bruce “You make me feel the way I hope I really am.” That’s the most important thing about their relationship in this film. Each of them, in some respect, wants to be the other.
Batman Returns is a miracle. I still can’t believe it happened. But it’s so easy to see how it wound up the way that it did. When the first movie was a monumental hit, they begged Tim Burton to make the sequel with the promise that he could do whatever he wanted. Burton and writer Daniel Waters were so right to lean into the psychosexual aspects of the character and that world, and yet, even if it wasn’t made with children in mind there is no universe in which it would not have been marketed to them.
Batman was one of the biggest movies of all time, so there were going to be Happy Meals even if it turned out to be a horny gothic nightmare. And it did. Because of that, Batman Returns is not only a gorgeous, expressionistic drama about isolated outsiders finding themselves and each other in the darkness, but is in general one of the most fascinating moments in time in pop culture history.
