Life Moves Pretty Fast: The lessons we learned from eighties movies (and why we don't learn them from movies any more) (27 page)

When Alfred (Michael Caine), the loyal voice of caution, asks Bruce Wayne in
Batman Begins
whether he needs to cause quite so much destruction while trying to save Gotham, Bruce smirks, ‘Damn good television … Didn’t have time to observe the rules of the road, Alfred.’ The year this film came out, 2005, was also the year when US public opinion about President Bush really began to tank. Nearly half of Americans in 2005, according to a survey by Pew Research, believed the war in Iraq ultimately caused more damage than good. Did we need to cause so much destruction? Bush scoffed at this, saying in a speech on 7 October that such concerns were ridiculous because he was dealing with a terrorist movement that wanted to ‘intimidate the whole world’. Who has time to observe the rules of the road when dealing with ‘the enemy’? Certainly America’s right-wing media had been echoing this sentiment for years. David Brooks wrote approvingly in 2001: ‘We will destroy innocent villages by accident, shrug our shoulders, and continue fighting.’

The parallels between Batman and Bush post 9/11 are even more obvious with
The Dark Knight
: there’s the bad guy who sends his minions out on suicide missions and blows up random buildings just to prove he can; a villain who is so unlike any others that the good guys need to break their own rules to get him, such as Batman’s use of sonar to tap civilians’ cell phones to fight crime (v Patriot Act, that); the fact that most people wrongly see Bruce Wayne as a screw-up blessed with a wealthy daddy, and Batman as a terrorist. Indeed, even the previously road safety-aware Alfred has come round to Bush’s razed-earth point of view in this film, and he counsels Bruce that the way to destroy a villain who ‘just wants to watch the world burn’ is to ‘burn the forest down’. In an article in the
Wall Street Journal
entitled ‘What Batman and Bush Have in Common’, Andrew Klavan describes
The Dark Knight
as ‘a conservative movie about the war on terror, making a fortune depicting the values and necessities that the Bush administration cannot seem to articulate for beans’. The
Washington Independent
went further, suggesting that
The Dark Knight
was, in fact, a specific endorsement of Dick Cheney, particularly in regard to its attitudes towards security, justified law-breaking and references to ‘the dark side’ (a favourite Cheney coinage).

At the end of the film, Batman tells the police commissioner that their acts must be hidden in a massive cover-up because the general public can’t deal with the truth. The Bush administration also hid plenty of things from the American public, from the cost of the war to the use of torture. It was only in 1992’s
A Few Good Men
Colonel Jessup’s (Jack Nicholson) claim that people ‘can’t handle the truth!’ was taken as proof of his dangerous megalomania; in
The Dark Knight
hiding the truth is seen as part of Batman’s wise and self-sacrificing nature. As one journalist wrote in
Mother Jones
, ‘[The Dark Knight says] we need dark knights to do the dirty work to keep us safe while we can sit back and self-righteously dismiss them as going too far … This film seems to laud rule-exempt leaders as the only effective weapons against our evil enemies, a message I thought Americans had finally decided to reject.’

Unsurprisingly, the film’s cast tried to distance themselves from such political readings of the film. Aaron Eckhart, who plays district attorney Harvey Dent, insisted ‘certainly that wasn’t the intention’ and that it ‘is simply good drama for good movies’. But he admitted, ‘I agree [with the analogy] in a way. Of course [it has analogies]. When I read
The Dark Knight
for the first time, I saw a lot of political issues. You know, obviously today’s culture seeped in. It’s a mirror of our times.’

Whether or, more likely, not Nolan meant his Batman to represent Bush and Cheney, the American media and government had been paving the way for this analogy to be made for years in their desperate search for heroes after 9/11, the more cartoonish the better. A month after the attacks, Marvel published
Heroes
, an oversize comic book featuring drawings of firemen rescuing women from the rubble, and it sold out in one day. Susan Faludi writes in
The Terror Dream
, her study of how 9/11 affected the American psyche: ‘The president’s vows to get the “evildoers” won him media praise BECAUSE it sounded cartoonish.’ One especially ridiculous American columnist compared Bush giving the 2003 State of the Union address to the moment when Clark Kent moves ‘to tear open his shirt and reveal the big “S” on his chest’. Another commentator, Peter Roff, wrote: ‘Bush punctuates his rhetoric with verbal “Whams,” “Pows,” “Biffs,” and “Whaps” to make clear who are the good guys and who are the bad guys.’ Roff also compared the President to the superhero the Shadow, ‘a man of mystery who strikes terror into the very souls of evildoers everywhere’. ‘That,’ Roff writes, ‘is just the kind of hero America needs right now.’ These columns, remember, were written – not for comic book-consuming teenagers – but broadsheet-reading adults.

Nolan’s
Batman
movies are aimed far more at adults than Burton’s ever were. They are far more violent with huge body counts, because who has time to observe the rules of the road nowadays, Alfred? But perhaps the most obvious difference between the two franchises is the tone. Despite Burton’s reputation as a messy-haired gloom-meister, his films are funny, and
Batman
is no exception. From Jack Nicholson’s larkishness (‘Where DOES he get those wonderful toys?’ ‘This town needs an enema!’) to Michael Keaton’s dry irony (‘You know, I don’t think I’ve ever been in this room before …’),
Batman
is definitely a funny movie. Even when Keaton seems at his most lonely in
Batman
he’s amusing, such as when he sneaks up behind people in his house making fun of his possessions. But he’s still
alone: Keaton’s Bruce Wayne wanders around unseen at his parties, unrecognised by his own guests and therefore always alone. Bale, by contrast, plays Bruce Wayne as a rich asshole who turns up late to his own parties with a girl on each arm and immediately dominates proceedings by making snarky speeches.

All superhero films take themselves ridiculously seriously nowadays, and this is especially true of Nolan’s
Batman
films, which are portentous and pretentious and po-faced. Superhero movies now affect to provide some kind of socially and politically relevant narrative, and the political narrative in America these days is pretty demoralising (I discussed the bizarre anti-Occupy message of the final part of Nolan’s trilogy,
The Dark Knight Rises
, in the chapter ‘
Ferris Bueller’s Day Off
: The Impact of Social Class’). Also, studios themselves take these films so seriously because they are the tentpoles to a studio’s financial year. But as Burton’s
Batman
proves, you don’t need to keep telling the audience how SERIOUS and IMPORTANT a movie is for it to feel like a big deal, and you don’t have to act like the film is as significant as the cure for cancer for it to become a worldwide smash. Because at a certain point, someone is going to stand up and say, ‘Do we really want to spend our adult lives the way we spent our teenage years – looking to superheroes to make sense of our world for us? And if we do, couldn’t we make these movies a bit more, I don’t know, FUN?’

After
Batman
, Tim Burton made his masterpiece in 1990 –
Edward Scissorhands
, the most beautiful and most explicitly autobiographical of all his feature films (Burton wrote it as well as directing it), and when I saw it, it left me so breathless I couldn’t even get out of the cinema seat at the end of the film. So I stayed and watched the next screening. It combined everything I loved about his eighties films – the surreal suburbia of
Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure
, the desire for escape from this world of
Beetlejuice
and the loneliness of Batman – but more so in this story of a miserable loner with blades for hands. I was only twelve when I went to see it and I don’t know if I subconsciously recognised in it the deeply depressed teenager I would become – one who felt so alone and longed to be hugged but hurt anyone who tried – or if I just fancied Johnny Depp. But I probably watched that film more than any other as a teenager. Today, though, I can hardly bear to look at it. To watch
Edward Scissorhands
now is like pushing on a scar that covers some still sparking nerve endings.

But just as I grew up with Tim Burton, for a while I grew out of him. Along with other childish things, I put his films away in my twenties, and it embarrassed me that I once thought of all that Hollywood gothicism as art. God, what a dork. And look! Burton was right! His films all DID look the same, mainly because they all starred the same damn actors. Was Burton perhaps unaware there are other actors in the world besides Johnny Depp? Should I track him down and whisper when he steps out of his house, ‘Psst! Hey, Tim! Two words: James Spader.’

But thankfully, I grew out of the childish self-loathing that I mistook in my twenties for mature self-awareness, and I came back to Burton in my thirties when I went to see
Frankenweenie
(2012). It was like coming back home after a long and difficult trip away: everything felt familiar but a little different and it was comfortable but also exciting to be back in a place that, still, spoke to a small and dark corner inside me. (It also helped that
Frankenweenie
marked the beginning of Burton heaving himself out of the creative rut in which he’d laboured for the past decade. Neither of us had the greatest starts to this century.) I no longer queue up to see the first performance whenever a new Burton film opens – to be honest, I don’t even see every film Burton makes at the cinema these days (I still haven’t ever made it through the whole of
Planet of the Apes
, and I reckon we’re both fine about that). But I’ll always feel extreme fondness for him for waking me up to the excitement of movies in the 1980s, and for holding my hand through the 1990s. Burton’s
Batman
doesn’t try to make a comment about socio-political power-playing – it’s about loneliness, but done in Burton’s sweet, stylish and surprisingly subtle way. I, personally, find that a lot more moving than a two-and-a-half-hour defence of the Bush presidency. We Burton fans are weird like that.

PS For the record here is the official order of the
Batman
films from the past thirty years, from best to worst.

1.
Batman
(1989, Burton):

‘Simply the best! Two thumbs up!’ Tina Turner.
^fn12
The best cast of any
Batman
film of all time. Jack Palance, for God’s sake! Jack freaking Palance!

2.
Batman Returns
(1992, Burton):

So much better than you remember. Christopher Walken is completely wasted but Danny DeVito as the Penguin is brilliant. His penguin funeral haunts my dreams.

3.
The Dark Knight
(2008, Nolan):

There are too many climaxes, too many characters, and too much Bush-ness, but unquestionably this is a good film. Aaron Eckhart and Gary Oldman are good, Heath Ledger is great.

4.
The Dark Knight Rises
(2012, Nolan):

I can make out about 25 per cent of the dialogue in this film, and the anti-Occupy Wall Street plot is insane. Still, it’s better than Nolan’s first one. Which is …

5.
Batman Begins
(2005, Nolan):

The film that reminded us all that Katie Holmes cannot act and Liam Neeson and Morgan Freeman stopped even bothering to try long ago.

6.
Batman Forever
(1995, Schumacher):

Sort of how I imagine a gay club on cocaine in the 1980s would look. But not in a good way.

7.
Batman and Robin
(1997, Schumacher):

The movie that proved George Clooney is actually a superhero because he alone among the entire cast was able to rise like a phoenix out of the ashes of this unspeakable dreck.

THE TEN BEST ROCK SONGS ON AN EIGHTIES MOVIE SOUNDTRACK

10 ‘When the Going Gets Tough, the Tough Get Going’, by Billy Ocean, from
The Jewel of the Nile

Not, strictly speaking, a rock song. But if you have never seen the video for this song, starring Michael Douglas, Kathleen Turner and Danny DeVito as backing singers, well, your life is just about to get a whole lot better.

9 ‘Eye of the Tiger’, by Survivor, from
Rocky III

The only acceptable song to play when you’re beating up Mr T.

8 ‘Stir It Up’, by Patti LaBelle, from
Beverly Hills Cop

I love Patti LaBelle, I love this song and, most of all, I love the moment Eddie Murphy gurns to this song at the end of
Beverly Hills Cop
.

7 ‘You’re the Best’, by Joe Esposito, from
The Karate Kid

Play this song before leaving the house and you will win every karate tournament that day, and that’s a fact.

6 ‘Footloose’, by Kenny Loggins, from
Footloose

Seriously, how awesome must it be to be Kenny Loggins? The man’s an eighties movie soundtrack legend.

5 ‘The Heat is On’, by Glenn Frey, from
Beverly Hills Cop

Like the Big Lebowski, I cannot stand the Eagles. But such is the power of
Beverly Hills Cop
that I cannot resist this song by head Eagle Glenn Frey.

4 ‘Power of Love’, by Huey Lewis and the News, from
Back to the Future

MARTYMCFLY4EVA.

3 ‘Into the Groove’, by Madonna, from
Desperately Seeking Susan

I totally agree with you – there is not enough Madonna in this book. For the moment in
Desperately Seeking Susan
when she dances to herself on a jukebox, she deserves her own chapter.

2 ‘Danger Zone’, by Kenny Loggins, from
Top Gun