Hell Here: ‘Batman Returns’ Looks More And More Like Sociopolitical Prophecy With Every Passing Day

In 1988, Tim Burton wrote a grim little poem called “The Melancholy Death of Oyster Boy.” (Officially, it was a collaboration with novelist Michael McDowell, with whom he also partnered with on the scripts for Beetlejuice and A Nightmare Before Christmas.) The poem detailed the unwanted birth, and subsequent death, of a chimaeric freak: half-man/half oyster. In tone and the basic outlines of its story, it hews closely to the origin story for archvillain The Penguin (Danny DeVito) in Burton’s masterpiece Batman Returns (1992). Divisive as part of Batman lore, it’s better-read as both portrait of isolation and sociopolitical prophecy. Everything in this Fritz Lang dream of Gotham is tangled and corrupt. Every person living there copes with multiple roles to play and identities with which to play them. As Batman (Michael Keaton) explains: everyone is, through traumatic misadventure, “split right down the middle.” It’s a world in bad trouble, just like ours is today, all these years later.

Selina Kyle (Michelle Pfeiffer) lives alone. She’s humiliated at work by her boss Shreck (Christopher Walken), a corporate vampire named after the mysterious actor who played Nosferatu. (Note how the tiled walls of his building resemble the padded squares lining coffin lids.) Shrek likes to put his name on buildings, a narcissist with an elevated self-regard fond of lying and giant oil paintings of himself. His hair is ridiculous. The Penguin uncovers some of Shreck’s manifold corruption to extort Shreck’s support in a mayoral run for him. “Somehow you’re a respected monster while I, to date, am not,” The Penguin says. Every word of Daniel Waters’ script is razor-sharp and multi-layered – small wonder as Waters is also the genius behind ageless teen satire Heathers. Yet, despite its acuity, Batman Returns fails to predict the extent to which the great, ignorant unwashed turn a blind eye to the obvious shortcomings, dementia, even confessions of their cheap gangster overlord. When Batman exposes The Penguin’s venality, his followers turn on him, you see. As we’ve learned over the last few years, this is pure fantasy — much to our collective horror.

When Selina uncovers Shreck’s corruption, he kills her. Selina’s subsequent transformation into Catwoman takes place over a single six-minute sequence and it’s the single best thing Burton has ever done. Pushed from a great height, she’s raised from the dead by a clowder of cats, destroys her apartment after getting a sexist robocall, creates a latex catsuit out of scraps (calling back to the Bride of Frankenstein), and luxuriates before transforming the neon “Hello there” sign in her bedroom into “Hell Here.” It’s only the first time Selina will be killed by a man only to somehow find the resources, though progressively traumatized, to move forward. She lists her murders off in madness at the end. Each of the three major male leads in the film have brutalized her and, during the extended, surreal climax, Catwoman lobbies for vengeance. She calls Batman naive for wanting to trust the courts to handle Shreck. “Men like him get away with everything,” Selina says. (Shreck, agrees. He tells a reporter to “give the Constitution a rest.”) Selina would love to live with Bruce in his castle “like in a fairytale, but I just couldn’t live… with myself.”

Pfeiffer’s performance is superlative; groundbreaking for a fan community still looking for its way in this regard. That she’s not mentioned more in conversations about representation suggests her ambivalent status as anti-hero. In her first appearance as Catwoman, Selina mutilates a would-be rapist in an alley. When the rescued woman (Joan Giammarco) thanks her, Catwoman dresses her down for “making it so easy for them.” Then she blows up a department store. She’s a terrorist of the status quo. She fulfills no agenda, save her own, and defies even our desire to pack her into a rallying cry. The traditional way her character would be handled would be through some sort of alliance or romantic domestication. Batman Returns handles it with her ultimate emancipation. She gets the last shot of the film and, in its iconographic power, it is one of the great, cathartic moments in film history.

Yet, even though Batman Returns undeniably belongs to Selina, my favorite moment comes when Bruce’s only friend, an employee, serves him a dinner of soup. Bruce recoils, “it’s cold,” and is told it’s vichyssoise and supposed to be cold. Without another objection, Bruce eats it. He’s a shut-in, a child of trauma with no skills to deal with ordinary situations and completely reliant on others for his experience of life. He can only ever exist in contrast to, or as a mirror of, derangement. Played for laughs, the scene is for me a snapshot of his injuries. He doesn’t get the girl in the end, he gets a stray he finds in an alley. These are our heroes and Gotham in winter is the city in the shadow of our collective unconscious. Batman Returns is the example to give when someone claims that superhero films can’t be art. It’s alive, and it has claws.

Walter Chaw is the Senior Film Critic for filmfreakcentral.net. His book on the films of Walter Hill, with introduction by James Ellroy, is due in 2020. His monograph for the 1988 film MIRACLE MILE is available now.

Where to stream Batman Returns