We’ve been reminded this week of how Tim Burton’s Batman,
the Jack Nicholson/Michael Keaton box office smash that altered how a
generation of moviegoers responded to hype and marketing, just turned
25. Discussing the Burton Batman has been quelled in recent
years, thanks in part to Christopher Nolan’s trilogy with Christian Bale
as the caped crusader, to say nothing of the campy and dreadful Joel
Schumacher sequels (the first of which credited Burton as a producer)
from the decade before that. Suddenly, this Batman is news
again, and very much appreciated. In 1989 it inaugurated a renewed
interest in comic books, the silly old Adam West TV series from the ’60s
was suddenly back in syndication, and Hollywood studios had a fresh
orchard of published ideas and characters from which to pluck and plant
new franchises (the Superman series with Christopher Reeve had by this time died; and we don’t have time to discuss Howard the Duck).
Of course when we compare
Batman‘s impact to how novelty
characters have worked in the last 10 years, it’s a fairly limp
resurgence. The first comic book movie, as I recall, to follow up was a
straight-to-video
Captain America. There was also a tedious television series of
The Flash which could never get its pace in order and was soon canceled. Burton’s hotly anticipated all-star sequel,
Batman Returns, had the indelible mark of its director, but the Wagnerian
noir of
the first film was replaced by fetishistic Gothic indulgences
(personified by Burton’s grotesque–and doubtlessly personal–rendering of
Danny DeVito’s Penguin) that could not excite the movie fanboys as
much–in fact, it repelled some of them. Then you had
The Shadow,
The Phantom,
Batman Forever, and finally
Batman and Robin, which kind of crapped on everything, with a cherry on top.
Batman did change hype and blockbusting (even in a summer when it was one of the few big releases that wasn’t a sequel–
Ghostbusters II, Lethal Weapon 2, and
Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade were all released around this time), and Burton’s touch broke out of the MTV music video style that became trendy with
Rocky III and
Flashdance. But its impact is not as powerful as
Jurassic Park would be four years later, Steven Spielberg once again (as he had with
Jaws in 1975 and
E.T. in 1982) setting summer movies on a whole new trajectory. Whereas
Batman‘s
environs are somewhat retro, an artful futurism groomed with the fabric
of German Expressionism, with two loudly dressed men at its center,
Jurassic Park
heralds the future with new creations that quite literally gobble up
the human caretakers, the filmmakers, to quote Richard Attenborough’s
John Hammond, “sparing no expense” in the spectacle, or as 1993′s other
Spielbergian hero, Oskar Schindler (Liam Neeson), says, it’s less about
the work than “the presentation.” The tumult within Gotham City is
rather intimate when set against the non-stop propulsion of
Speed, tornado touchdowns in
Twister,
Independence Day‘s alien invasion, and
Armageddon‘s catastrophic asteroid. The popular notion of the journeying hero–like Rocky, Luke Skywalker, Tom Cruise in
Top Gun or
Days of Thunder,
Indiana Jones, or Batman–was, for a time (Harry Potter and Frodo
arrived in 2001), replaced by extreme sound and fury (which is still
here, yes, though at a kind of Ludicrous Speed kind of sound and fury).
