No movie intended for the widest of possible wide audiences, produced on such a large budget, will ever be allowed to be so gleefully misanthropic ever again, let alone a superhero movie.
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Imagine variations on that awkward incident being repeated with millions of small children all over America and you’ll begin to conceive how Batman Returns, remembered today in passing as a quirky 90s footnote was really quite infamous in its day.
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There’s an incineration of innocence earlier as well, when during the inexplicable evil circus attack on Christmas revelers a teddy bear is immolated by a Satanic fire-breather. Specifically, it was the shot of Michelle Pfeiffer stabbing her stuffed animals that broke me, I think because at that age I still anthropomorphized stuffed animals as living things. It was at that point I had to ask to be let off the carnival ride, and my mom hit the STOP button. We continued to the next scene, when an innocent woman is shoved out a window and survives only to suffer a nervous breakdown, and wreck her apartment in a psychotic rage. But we continued onward, my parents and I – sensitive people, my parents – I think they’d still be as disturbed by the film now as they were twenty-five years ago. Then a monstrously deformed man pulls severed body parts from a bag, and that’s just the first 20 minutes. Then an army of killer clowns attack a crowd of Christmas revelers. What happens in the first half hour of Batman Returns? Well, a mom and dad heartlessly attempt infanticide on their freak baby by throwing it into a river. The story had a twisted tone, but was ultimately reassuring. Batman was good, The Joker was evil and as with the rest of my children’s entertainment, I could count on the former eventually vanquishing the latter.
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I had already seen Batman and though The Joker was sometimes intense and the violence occasionally a bit much, I was too entranced by the richness of the imagery to feel any lasting discomfort. I was six years old when my mom and dad sat down with me to watch the film on video. He and Burton were friends of course, but it was kind of a warning: On the surface this is light entertainment for kids, but… If you don’t believe me that Batman Returns is entirely about sexual frustration consider that the first person we see onscreen is Paul Reubens, in what was his first public role since being arrested for public masturbation in a porno theater. Movie trilogies are an overrated idea anyway Return of the Jedi, Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome and Alien 3 all failed to outdo their first two chapters. Even more so than Batman ’89, which was about how different types of creative people (Bruce Wayne, Jack Napier) express their will to power, Returns is about how misfits try to define their identities to the world in a way that still gets them laid.įor probing even further into the most emotionally traumatic corners of Gotham City, Burton was not asked back to make a third Batman film. The triangle of neuroses between Batman, The Joker and Vicki shifted in the sequel to a more blatantly orgiastic triangle of sexual hostility between The Bat, The Cat and The Penguin: social Darwinism played out amongst a trio of animal-people. In Daniel Waters, fresh from his previous film Heathers, about teenagers with psychotic egos, sexual dysfunctions and social hierarchies, he found the perfect writer to continue the first film’s subtext of adolescent angst disguised as superhero hijinks. It always strikes me how Burton correctly understood that comic book adventure is an outlet for the power trips and sexual frustrations of young egos, Batman in particular being their apotheosis with his goth-romantic aesthetic and oedipal origin story. They say it was too much of a “Tim Burton movie.” But when did Tim Burton ever make another film this unsettling ever again? Even for a guy whose stock in trade is the macabre, Batman Returns brought out his most extreme bag of tricks. They roll their eyes and spout talking points about how it “wasn’t true to the comics,” how it was too weird or campy, how it was mean that Batman set a guy on fire. When given total freedom for the sequel he turned what could’ve simply been Batman II: The Adventure Continues into a whirlwind tragicomedy of feminism, class struggle and kinky fetishism.Ī generation was scarred. Batman Returns is the bleakest meditation on sexual dysfunction in arrested adolescence ever to be licensed for a McDonald’s Happy Meal.Īgainst all odds, Tim Burton had turned the first Batman into a character study about artistic ego and sexual competition, in the guise of an action film.