San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Time to give respect to the 1980s and ’90s ‘Batman’ movies.
When you’re a kid — or at least when I was a kid — you spend a lot of time watching TV. I remember being 5 or 6 years old, watching an “I Love Lucy” rerun and being struck by the ridiculousness of Desi Arnaz’s clothes: the baggy pants, the wide lapels, the structured shoulders.
I was seeing his clothes through the eyes of the mid1960s, a time of thin lapels, thin ties and tight pants. Then years went by. It was 1983, and one day, for some reason, while spinning around the dial, I stopped at an “I Love Lucy” episode. Desi Arnaz was onscreen again, only now he didn’t look ridiculous at all. I wanted that jacket. I wanted those pants. “Check it out,” I thought. “Ricky Ricardo is wearing Armani.”
Though there will always be people who gravitate toward the classic, most people will naturally respond to the new and assume it’s better. The new, after all, is geared to please us now. The new is a response, on levels conscious and unconscious, to what people are currently thinking and feeling, not only about specific things like fashion, music or movies, but also about life.
We can’t begin to decode it in our own time, but from a distance every era is of a piece. The cars Detroit made in the 1950s were somehow like the America of their day: big, confident, prosperous. In this way, we end up liking art that’s somehow in harmony with the present psychological moment. Then the moment passes, and we’re on to something new.
But good art, whether it’s Buster Keaton, Herman Melville or a pair of Ralph Lauren boxer shorts, has a way of coming back.
This is a long and admittedly convoluted way of saying that this stayathome time is a chance to take a second look at the Batman movies of the 1980s and ’90s. It’s time to understand that those earlier Batman movies are actually better than the second wave of Batman movies, directed by Christopher Nolan, that we all thought were so great 10 and 15 years ago.
Those earlier movies were, to be sure, a mixed bag: Tim Burton’s “Batman” (1989) was a classic and his “Batman Returns” (1992) a flashy disappointment, while “Batman Forever” (1995) and “Batman & Robin” (1997) were just pure fun from director Joel Schumacher, who died of cancer Monday, June 22. They had revolving actors in the title role, and revolving villains. But at their best, they hit the right balance between camp and seriousness.
The Nolan Batman trilogy, by contrast, has only one flatout success, “Batman Begins” (2005). The other two are labored and overdone. “The Dark Knight” (2008) was saved by the performance by Heath Ledger as the Joker, made all the more affecting, at the time, by Ledger’s death just a few months before the film’s release. “The Dark Knight Rises” (2012) was a bloated, grotesque disaster, steeped in a selfseriousness that has had a pernicious influence on the superhero genre ever since. It signaled the moment when superhero movies became decadent, thick with special effects and unearned importance.
But in 1989, Burton’s “Batman” was the joyful beginning. The buildup in the weeks leading up to it, followed by the revelation that it was every bit as good as promised, announced the birth of an exciting new form.
Always a much better actor than the Jack Nicholson caricature he often plays in public, Nicholson as the Joker was a study in rage and malice behind a clowning facade. And Michael Keaton’s Batman has never been surpassed.
Also, remember how psychologically unsettling and eerie Jim Carrey’s Riddler was in “Batman Forever” (1995) and what fun Arnold Schwarzenegger was as Mr. Freeze (“Batman & Robin”)?
These movies balanced a sardonic attitude toward their comic book origins with a sophisticated sense of how awful it would be to live inside a comic book world. They were postmodern in their approach, not sending up the blockbuster form, but winking at it and commenting on it.
They were the real art, while most of what’s followed has been earnest and obvious.