You Love to See It: Batman Returns (Patreon)

Batman Returns, Tim Burton’s odd and piquant superhero film, is about the pieces that compose a person. Outside of this film I’ve never much cared for Batman or his beloved rogues gallery, or for superheroes in general, but something about Burton’s movie just feels right to me. It breaks the character of Batman into its component parts which reveal as separate entities his nature and place in the world far more effectively than they could in synthesis. The first of these fragmented mirrors is Michelle Pfeiffer’s hypersexualized and Id-driven Catwoman, a psyche unleashed by trauma and embodying Batman’s vigilantism. She does what she wants because she’s been powerless and didn’t enjoy it, because it allows her to recapitulate her trauma as the figure in power rather than the victim. Because she can. She is the unspoken psychosexual allure of Batman’s life as an unaccountable, untraceable enforcer of his own private code.

Then there’s Oswald Cobblepot, the Penguin, who can be read as a representation of Batman’s status as a freak and an outsider. Born deformed and soon abandoned by his wealthy parents, the Penguin was raised by a colony of his flightless namesakes. He is a genuine aberration beside Batman’s half-baked and self-imposed exile from society, a creature of the underworld who can’t take off his mask. He exposes Batman’s dalliance with the life of an outsider as the affectation it is. Like Batman, though, he uses his status to reinforce and justify his actions. He is treated with disgust and so responds in kind, rampaging like Frankenstein’s monster, playing on the simpering pity of his physical “betters” in order to get one over on them. Batman, in essence, is the same, his secret identity a joke he’s always playing on everyone he knows and loves. He may tell himself that’s to protect them, but that it involves an element of fetishistic control and secrecy is undeniable.

Lastly, billionaire tycoon Max Shreck, played with amoral pragmatism by Christopher Walken and his dandelion bloom of white hair. Shreck is a venal capitalist mogul, his early life and driving motivations an utter blank beside the comparatively fleshed out identities of his co-antagonists. He wants more money, he wants more power, but for their own sake, not in service to some grander ideal. He is the bottomless well of money from which Bruce Wayne emerges as Batman, bending his entire fortune into service to his own delusions of grandeur rather than attempting even once to better the lives of the many through any method but street-level violence. He is the void at the character’s heart. Burton doesn’t delve particularly deep into any of this, but in laying the pieces out and leaving the rest to the audience he manages to turn a fundamentally boring fictional world into one I’ve gone back to again and again over the years.