Batman: The Movie
Seeking some undemanding entertainment the other night, I put on my DVD of 1966’s Batman.
As bad as it is, it seems silly to attack this movie too strongly. It is, after all, a comedy. More than that, it’s not even a movie. It was not meant to compete with, say, Torn Curtain. It’s merely product, a brand extension, designed to increase the value of a television show.
The plot, such as it is, makes no sense and wanders all over the place. This shouldn’t be a problem for a comedy (Horsefeathers has no plot whatsoever but is still pretty damn funny) but still it tests the patience of an intelligent viewer. The characterizations are loud, silly, grating, contradictory and unfaithful to the source material.
For those unaware of this unique cultural artifact, the plot goes like this: Catwoman, The Joker, The Penguin and The Riddler have conspired to kidnap Commodore Schmidlapp, who, in addition to running a distillery, is the the inventor of a gizmo that can instantly dehydrate people. The bad guys use the device to turn the UN United World Security Council into piles of colored dust. Before they do that, they spend an entire act screwing around with an attempt to kill Batman by kidnapping Bruce Wayne. Catwoman, who is normally a cat-burglar (hence her name), is here turned into a master of disguise, pretending to be a Russian journalist. The Penguin, normally concerned with bird-related crimes, here pilots a penguin-painted submarine and also briefly becomes a master of disguise. The Riddler, being The Riddler, is compelled to give away all their plans with his clues. The Joker is given nothing to do; in retaliation, Cesar Romero has refused to shave his mustache, clearly visible under his clown-white makeup.
The tone veers from genial camp to bizarre, psychedelic comedy. Adam West, looking like the young Harrison Ford (or maybe Dennis Quaid) plays Batman with a keen edge of ironic seriousness. The villains suffer from the same problem as the heroes in Superfriends; they have no characters to play, only a clutch of symptoms. The Batman of Batman: The Movie is not one to brood in a cave between illegal bursts of vigilante activities; this Batman takes place entirely in broad daylight. Batman holds press conferences at police headquarters, trots down the street in crowded lunch-hour traffic and punches a shark while dangling from a ladder. Far from being the world’s greatest detective, this Batman is an easily-fooled dolt who blunders from clue to clue, solving crimes almost by accident.
The climax of the movie, which involves Batman intoning a solemn prayer for peace and the future while holding a garden hose, is almost worth sitting through the rest of the movie.
This evening, my son Sam (5) found the DVD sitting out and asked to watch it. I warned him that it was not the Batman he’s used to, that there would be no swell animation, that this Batman would not be grumpy and sullen, that he walks around in public in broad daylight, that the whole movie was kind of silly, but he was still game.
Enthralled.
I remember when I was a kid taking Batman seriously, but that was a long time ago (I was exactly the same age as Sam is when it first came on TV). Sam has never shown interest in live-action versions of his favorite cartoon stars; the George Reeves Superman got a thumbs-down, and while he’s curious about Superman Returns, he hasn’t pushed to see it.
Tonight he was so caught up in Batman: The Movie that he needed company while watching it. Not to make sense of the plot (which is impossible anyway) but to verify the fact that it was actually happening. He was transported, stunned, horrified, confused (unsurprisingly), intrigued, and held in the grip of suffocating suspense.
While the tone of blithe camp escaped him (the dehydrated pirates were a source of genuine anxiety), he got the broader jokes, such as when Batman can’t get rid of a large, round bomb on a crowded pier and pines "Some days you just can’t get rid of a bomb!" or the Bat-copter crashing, fortuitously, atop a mountain of foam rubber. He asked if there were more Batman movies like this one. I said "Sam, there are, literally, dozens of Batman movies like this one," which delivered to his cerebral cortex a vision of heaven. (Why are those episodes not available on DVD? I assume a rights issue, as the characters are owned by WB and the series was produced by Fox.)
Sam disagrees with my assertion that the Joker does nothing ("No! He zaps those guys with the dehydrating gun!") but he does not approve of Cesar Romero at all. He totally bought the obviously-rubber exploding shark, and its cousin the non-exploding exploding octopus. He liked the penguin submarine and all the bat-machines. When asked what his favorite things in the movie were, he correctly answered "Catwoman and the Batmobile."
Mouths of babes.
Clayface vs. Grey Ghost
Clayface vs. Grey Ghost. Clayface is pictured on the right.
After many months of watching Justice League, Sam (5) abruptly asked to watch “some Batman” today. I got out our old DVD sets of Batman: The Animated Series and asked him which episode he’d like to see. Sam decided the way he usually does, by looking at the pictures on the DVD box, and chose “the one with Clayface.” That would be “Feat of Clay,” the two-part episode introducing the new villain.
I think what he was expecting after a not having seen the show since he was 3 years old was a plot where Clayface wants to do something bad and Batman has to stop him. Instead, this is what he got:
Lucius Fox, an employee of Wayne Enterprises, goes to meet Bruce Wayne in the middle of the night in an abandoned tramway station. Lucius, it seems, has some information on a crooked industrialist named Daggett that he’s turning over to Bruce so that Bruce can give it to the district attorney (which would be Harvey Dent, but that’s another story). Bruce Wayne, however, turns out not to be Bruce Wayne but rather an actor impersonating Bruce Wayne, on the behalf of some gangsters working for this Daggett fellow, who want Lucius dead. This actor turns out to be a Lon-Chaney-style “Man of 1000 Faces” named Matt Hagen. Hagen was in an accident years earlier and sold his soul to this Daggett creep in exchange for a miraculous makeup compound that gives Hagen the ability to fix his scarred face enough to keep working in movies. Trouble is, the makeup is addictive and makes your skin fall apart if you stop using it (a plot that WB would use again, to little effect, in their movie Catwoman, which might as well not have been based on a comic book at all for all it resembled the DC character). Meanwhile, Daggett has gotten tired of Hagen’s unpredictability and puts a hit on him. Daggett’s hit men could easily shoot Hagen, but they decide at the last minute to, instead, dump a beaker full of this magic makeup gunk on his face. The gunk soaks into his skin and affects him on a cellular level, turning Hagen into the hideous Clayface, a monster with the ability to mold his features into any form.
And that’s just Part One.
Setting aside thedarkness of tone and the ugly, brutal quality of the violence, Sam was utterly baffled as to what was going on. As well he might be. He kept turning to me and saying “What’s going on? Where’s Clayface?” (Clayface, indeed, does not even put in an appearance until well into Part Two.) Once Clayface appeared and Batman started pursuing him, he was still confused. “Wait, why is Batman after Clayface? What did Clayface do to Batman?” (Imagine: he’s five years old, yet he already grasps the notion of “probable cause.” A costumed vigilante can’t just pursue a shape-shifting monster merely on a hunch, there are rules!) I tried to explain as simply as I could what was going on, how Batman (that is, Bruce Wayne) isn’t after Clayface per se, he’s after whoever tried to kill Lucius Fox, and that leads him to Hagen (but not before a couple of dead-ends and having to spend the night in jail), and Hagen, after a great deal of angst, embraces his new-found powers as Clayface and uses them, not to commit crimes, but to get even with Daggett, the corrupt industrialist who made him this way. So Batman, by the end of the show, isn’t even fighting Clayface, but trying to help him reintegrate his fractured personality, an issue close to the heart of the 1992 Batman.
It’s impressive how much these early episodes of Batman TAS were real detective shows; there are gangsters and murderers and briefcases full of incriminating evidence and surprising amount of innuendo, references to things unsaid and shady, mysterious moral zones. Characters sometimes have complex, perverse or contridictory motives; you have to really pay attention to follow the plot, even as an adult. Also impressive, after watching so much Justice League, is how dark and painterly the animation is (that is to say, it looks like the Fleischer Superman shorts). Justice League looks like a kids’ show in comparison.
But the darkness and complexity of the plot was a little too much for my little guy to soak in and he needed a pallette-cleanser. He chose “Beware the Grey Ghost,” an episode where Batman teams up with the actor who used to play Bruce Wayne’s favorite costumed crime-fighter, the Grey Ghost, to solve a series of mysterious Grey-Ghost-inspired bombings taking place in Gotham.
This, especially after the scary, sophisticated Clayface two-parter, was right up Sam’s alley. Bruce Wayne watched superhero shows with his dad when he was a kid! Sam was right there. He completely understood who the Grey Ghost was and what he meant to Batman, and it was revealed that Batman has a secret cache of Grey Ghost toys and action figures, you could see the Batman universe snap into sharp focus for him. And when Batman teams up with his childhood hero in order to solve a crime, it was wish-fulfillment on a meta-level.
For Sam’s 45-year-old dad, there was great humor in the episode as well, since Adam West voiced the part of the Grey Ghost and the mad bomber turned out to be a demented toy-collecting manchild played, both in looks and voice, by series producer Bruce W. Timm.
For a bedtime story, it was the new issue of Justice League Unlimited, where B’wana Beast saves the day by punching a giant bee. That was one he could easily wrap his mind around.
For my readers who wonder if I’m ever going to write about a movie made for grownups again, go see the hugely entertaining, compulsively watchable Notes on a Scandal. It features a deft, accomplished script by Patrick Marber, a thunderous, tumultuous score by Philip Glass and a couple of stunning, detailed, utterly lived-in performances from Judi Dench and Cate Blanchett.