Books, Arts & Manners: Batman and Girls at Bat

THERE IS something disturbingly infantile about a society in which the summer’s most touted, opulent, breathlessly awaited movie is Batman Returns. This piece of goods has just about everything against it a movie can have. Not only is it based on comic books, but also it is a sequel: two queasy genres in one. It was directed by a loutish director, Tim Burton, who specializes in films for children. (Backward ones, at that.) And even as comic strips go, Bob Kane’s Batman was particularly primitive. But what is especially shaming for our culture is the critical acclaim this trash has garnered.

In this sequel, which I consider visually undernourished and inferior even to the original, there is neither a well-defined plot line nor an antagonist as funny and formidable as Jack Nicholson’s Joker. The protagonist, Batman, in private life the befuddled billionaire Bruce Wayne, lacked much personality in either guise in the first film; in the sequel, he seems more pallid yet, both in and out of costume, which makes him a quadruple loser. In Batman Returns, he is no longer pitted against one solid villain, but against a flimsier and confusing two and a half: the Trumpishly greedy entrepreneur Max Shreck; the malformed ornithoid mobster from the literal underground (the sewers), the Penguin; and Catwoman, of whom he and we cannot even be certain whether she is an opponent.

JS

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John Simon

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THERE IS something disturbingly infantile about a society in which the summer’s most touted, opulent, breathlessly awaited movie is Batman Returns. This piece of goods has just about everything against it a movie can have. Not only is it based on comic books, but also it is a sequel: two queasy genres in one. It was directed by a loutish director, Tim Burton, who specializes in films for children. (Backward ones, at that.) And even as comic strips go, Bob Kane’s Batman was particularly primitive. But what is especially shaming for our culture is the critical acclaim this trash has garnered.

In this sequel, which I consider visually undernourished and inferior even to the original, there is neither a well-defined plot line nor an antagonist as funny and formidable as Jack Nicholson’s Joker. The protagonist, Batman, in private life the befuddled billionaire Bruce Wayne, lacked much personality in either guise in the first film; in the sequel, he seems more pallid yet, both in and out of costume, which makes him a quadruple loser. In Batman Returns, he is no longer pitted against one solid villain, but against a flimsier and confusing two and a half: the Trumpishly greedy entrepreneur Max Shreck; the malformed ornithoid mobster from the literal underground (the sewers), the Penguin; and Catwoman, of whom he and we cannot even be certain whether she is an opponent.