Life Moves Pretty Fast: The lessons we learned from eighties movies (and why we don't learn them from movies any more) (26 page)

As the subtitle of this book might have suggested, I’m interested in why so many movies made in the eighties could not be made today, and that is true of Burton’s films – but not necessarily because of changes in the studio system and what have you (although that, too: it’s hard to imagine a director with such relatively little experience getting to work on
Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure
, to say nothing of
Batman
). Rather, it’s because Burton himself changed. He grew up, and watching the films of his I loved from the eighties onwards is a little like watching the progress of my own inner life from childhood to adulthood, noting the changes but also the consistencies: ‘Certain images and feelings stay inside of you all your life,’ he said. ‘You think you’ve worked through them, but you don’t, really. You just keep drawing something for a long time and it becomes part of you. Just when you’ve reached a new plateau in your life, it mysteriously comes again.’

Burton has said that the repetition of imagery in his films merely reflects his own ‘limitations’. But to ten-year-old me, who had never before encountered a modern-day American director with such a strongly recognisable vision, this coherence was something else: it was art. With his films of the eighties and, later, the nineties, Burton taught me about visual style, and how the way something looks can be exciting in itself. He also taught me that a movie can capture the spiralling unhappiness I often felt inside, but still be funny about it, and the eighties film that taught me these lessons most clearly was Burton’s blockbuster, 1989’s
Batman
.

Like me, Burton was not a comic book fan (another personal affinity that pleased me), but we both learned to love comic book movies with
Batman
. Burton snobs (who are very distinct from Burton fans, which is what I am) sometimes dismiss
Batman
, saying it is the least Burton-esque of his films due to studio control over the film. But I’ve never understood that, and have often suspected that what these snobs actually dislike is that the film was so ridiculously successful in the mainstream. Burton’s supporters generally come from the same demographic as the director: that is, current or former school misfits, and it’s hard when one nerd sees their fellow nerd friend suddenly elevated to being the coolest kid in the playground. What a sell-out, right? And I got that, I really did. I refused to buy any of the
Batman
memorabilia that flooded the world the way
Star Wars
toys did ten years earlier, because I knew Burton would never have been involved in such bland, corporate, identikit junk. But the movie itself was different.

No one, really, can argue that
Batman
doesn’t feel like a Tim Burton film. All the familiar Burton motifs are there, bigger and – therefore to my eleven-year-old mind – more exciting than ever. Gotham City – always a stand-in for New York City – thrilled me, with its mix of looming architecture and rickety buildings, the worst of art deco mixed with a circus from hell. Gotham is chaotic, jumbled and un-navigable, and everything is absolutely HUGE, from the buildings to the crime waves. It’s a far cry from the idealised and sparkling New York of, say,
Breakfast at Tiffany’s
, and it looked, to be honest, a lot like how New York looked to me as a kid: big and scary and confusing and exciting.

Burton’s Gotham encapsulates not just Burton’s style but also an attitude towards modern-day cities that runs through eighties movies. For an era that was ostensibly so upbeat about capitalism and all the possibilities it offered, eighties movies were remarkably negative about modern-day cities. Even besides the obvious examples, like
Blade Runner
and
Escape from New York
, think of the poverty and the squalor in Hill Valley 1985 in
Back to the Future
and the filth and crime in eighties New York in
Ghostbusters
. With Gotham, Burton took that trend to its climactic extreme at the end of the decade and, in doing so, established the template for how cities would be depicted in superhero films for the next thirty years.

It is a real testament to comic book artist and writer Bob Kane and Bill Finger that two of the most influential movies of the 1980s and the twenty-first century feature the same protagonist, one they created back in 1939. But it’s also quite something to look back now at the early coverage of Burton’s
Batman
and see how fretful critics and fans were that it would be ‘too dark’ and ‘too scary’ for kids. Instead, he changed the way Hollywood depicted superheroes for ever, rescuing them from the bright and cheerful campness of the
Superman
movies (and Adam West’s kitschy TV show) and turning them into phenomenally lucrative brooding men of mystery. Burton’s influence has only deepened over the past few decades, now that superhero films are so ubiquitous and form the spine of the US film industry, and compared to superhero films made in the twenty-first century, the 1989
Batman
looks like
Sesame Street
: there are colours, there is relatively little violence and the characters don’t all look absolutely miserable. There were huge protests at the time against Burton’s casting of Michael Keaton as Batman, with fans suggesting he was too weird and too weedy to play an all-American superhero. But next to creepily intense (and Welsh! Scandal!) Christian Bale, Keaton, with his crazy eyes, looks perfectly bat-like.

Christopher Nolan picked up this baton again in 2005 with
Batman Begins
, saving the franchise from the camp mess Joel Schumacher made of it in the 1990s,
^fn7
and he restored the dark look of the movie franchise to something more in line with its comic book origins. The impact of this shift has been enormous in Hollywood, arguably even more so than it was when Burton did it in 1989, simply because there are so many more superhero films being made now than there were two decades ago, thanks in part to the nigh-on superhero-like rise of Marvel Studios. All superhero films after 2005 became much darker as a result of
Batman Begins
’s success, from the
X-Men
to the
Avengers
to
Spiderman
.

But I’m going to lay it on the line here and just say it: I don’t like the Christopher Nolan
Batman
films. Not out of loyalty to Burton – although I admit I did think that would be why when I first went to see
Batman Begins
with a sceptically cocked eyebrow – but because they’re boring. God, they’re so boring, full of endless speechifying from the characters about how good and evil are two sides of the same coin, and we all wear masks, and true power is a terrible burden, and it’s always darkest before dawn
^fn8
and the rain in Spain stays mainly on the plain and blah blah di freaking blah. I suspect Nolan knows this, which is why he sticks in about seventeen action sequences per minute in his films. But the scene in the museum in
Batman
, in which Jack Nicholson serenades Kim Basinger to Prince while poison-gassing everyone else sticks in my mind far more than any of the 10,781 action scenes from Nolan’s series, because contrary to what superhero filmmakers think today, the more action scenes you include, the more diluted they become.

The only interesting thing about Bruce Wayne – a rich playboy whose power resides in his access to jazzy toys invented by others – is how he became Batman, and Burton knew this, which is why he focused on it in
Batman
and it’s why his sequel,
Batman Returns
(1992), stumbles a little, because he no longer had that storyline to mine. Nolan knows it, too, and so the first part of his trilogy,
Batman Begins
, takes that as its main plotline – and stretches it out to an insomnia-curing length of two hours and twenty minutes, padded out with seemingly endless scenes involving Christian Bale training to be a ninja in the snow. Hey, Nolan, I came here to see
Batman
– not
Kung Fu Panda
.

Burton is a much punchier storyteller, conveying what needs to be said (Bruce Wayne’s a rich loner! He was really messed up over the murder of his parents!) with a single scene. His action scenes are also far, far easier to follow than Nolan’s, which are a jumbled mess because too much is going on in them with too many characters. After
Batman Returns
(starring Keaton, Christopher Walken, Danny DeVito and Michelle Pfeiffer), all superhero films became overstuffed with famous actors in the belief that audiences would be so distracted by the celebrities they wouldn’t notice that the plots don’t make a jot of sense. The problem with this is that it then increases the chances of the heroes themselves – always the dullest characters in a superhero film – being overshadowed by all the villains. This is not a problem in Burton’s film, because Burton revels in the weirdness of Batman,
^fn9
and Keaton’s eyes are always fascinating to watch, even when they’re near hidden beneath a mask.

But Bale, while a brilliant actor, doesn’t have Keaton’s deranged magnetism – if anything, the mask makes him look weirdly pouchy – and giving him a stupid vocoder voice when he’s Batman simply obscures Bale’s charisma even more. Thus,
Batman
becomes a boring, opaque drag and it often feels like the heart of Nolan’s
Batman
films is not with Batman, but with Jim Gordon (Gary Oldman), the good police officer, and this is especially true in the second part of Nolan’s trilogy,
The Dark Knight
. This is by some measure the best of the modern
Batman
series because it features
Batman
’s best villain – the Joker – who is played by Heath Ledger, giving the most mesmerising performance in the whole trilogy. But even here, I have to admit that I still think of Burton: with his cracked white face-paint, skew-whiff hair, brightly coloured suit and self-description as an ‘agent of chaos’, Ledger’s take on the Joker looks an awful lot like Beetlejuice.

There is no point in debating who did the Joker better, Ledger or Nicholson, because they’re both, clearly magnificent: Nicholson’s feels iconic from the moment he steps on the screen whereas Ledger’s performance snarls and burrows its way beneath your skin with its creepiness. But Nicholson’s Joker is ultimately more satisfying because he gets a backstory (the snappy tale of Jack the lad ending up in a vat of acid because he slept with his boss’s girlfriend, played respectively by Jack Palance and Jerry Hall
^fn10
) and he gets a death, when Batman’s trickery makes him plummet hundreds of feet down to the pavement, landing with a smile on his face and a mechanical toy laughing in his coat pocket.

In truth, it’s fortunate that Nolan doesn’t bother with his Joker’s backstory because he’d probably have taken four hours to establish it. But the lack of a death, well … Nolan is oddly averse to showy dramatics, as if slightly embarrassed that he’s making a film about, you know, SUPERHEROES. Compare, for example, the thrilling opening scene in which Batman is introduced in Burton’s film (‘I want you to tell all your friends about me.’ ‘What are you?!?!?!’ ‘I’M BATMAN.’) with Nolan’s decidedly less exciting version in which he makes banter with a homeless man (‘Nice coat’). So it is perhaps not surprising that in
The Dark Knight
he doesn’t even kill the Joker – he just leaves him hanging upside down somewhere. But it is also less satisfying.

Nolan fans say they prefer the ‘realism’ of Nolan’s films compared to Burton’s, and critics frequently cite the ‘gritty reality’ of the movies admiringly; but, if these films were ‘realistic’, they would consist of crowds of people standing around and pointing at Batman and saying, ‘Oh look! It’s one of those Fathers4Justice morons! What a DICK.’ Also, take it from a reformed fashion writer: no man can wear a full-length cape in the real world without sparking serious mockery. But the real point is, who comes looking for realism when they watch a movie about some dude who flies through the air dressed as a freaking bat? I’ll tell you who: people who are trying to pretend that they’re not watching a superhero film, and they’re trying to convince themselves that this film is Saying Something Important.

Many of the differences between Burton’s and Nolan’s
Batman
films can be ascribed to the different style of the directors. But that’s not the full story and many of the reasons I find Nolan’s
Batman
films often next to unendurable has to do with the time in which they were made.

All disaster films set in New York now look like responses to 9/11, even if they were made years before (I find 1996’s
Independence Day
almost unwatchable now for that reason, not that I try to watch it too often). But it is pretty obvious that the wild rise of superhero films in Hollywood since the beginning of the twenty-first century is as much a response to 9/11 as it is to the growing importance of international audiences. Superhero films provide escapism, and they also create a self-validating narrative for an America that feels under attack by an enemy it doesn’t understand.

People have been writing about how superheroes reflect American self-identity pretty much since the day after Superman first appeared in 1938. Whole Ph.D.s are written on this subject today, with titles such as ‘Rethinking the American Man: Clark Kent, Superman and Consumer Masculinity’ and ‘Nationalism and Power: Captain America, Governmental Policy and the Problem of American Nationalism’.
^fn11
You can easily widen this argument out to movie heroes in general: from the 1920s to the 1960s, American film heroes were masculine, dominant, even swashbuckling, reflecting America’s self-pride after the two World Wars. This attitude crumbled during the Vietnam War, and so enter stage left – the flawed hero! This pretty much started with Arthur Penn’s 1967 film,
Bonnie and Clyde
, and today, in the twenty-first century, even the superheroes are riddled with self-doubt and inner conflict. You don’t need to have written an essay with a colon-laden title about Clark Kent and heteronormative masculinity to see the glut of superhero movies post 9/11, featuring tortured superheroes who are tasked with saving the world but are often misunderstood by the dull-witted masses as destructive vigilantes, as a reflection of how America sees its position in the world today.