Batman Forever and Batman and Robin

It’s kind of funny when you think about it, but the conceptual development of the modern Batman movies has followed a nearly identical track to the original comics. Batman was first introduced back in 1939 as a sort of middle ground between the wild fantasy of the Superman style of comics that was just getting started and the more established pulp noir formula. As such, he wasn’t exactly “good, clean, All-American fun,” but rather a fairly dark vigilante character who was initially sought by police as much as he was feared by criminals, who fostered a disconnect between himself and his audience and, yes, who killed people. A lot.

Skip ahead fifty years to 1989 and Tim Burton introduces us to Batman, a movie devoted to recreating that dark, unpredictable quasi antihero who was hunted by the police (in both this movie and its sequel) and who would kill his foes. Hell, the Burton Batman movies even looked like they took place in the thirties.

For the comics, everything changed quickly in 1940 when Robin was introduced as a means of lightening the stories (bringing them further from noir and closer to Superman) and generating a more kid-friendly aesthetic. Similarly, after Batman Returns Tim Burton was booted from the director’s seat by studios that wanted to appeal more to younger audiences (or, more precisely, to their over-protective, busybody parents) and so Joel Schumacher was hired to replace him for Batman Forever, which – among other things – softened the tone considerably, focused much more on humor and action and, of course, introduced the character of Robin.

The comics would later go on to darken the character again in the seventies and eighties; and likewise the movies would eventually reboot themselves under Christopher Nolan (who clearly draws a lot of his inspiration from certain seminal “dark” texts from that era).

But returning to Schumacher, his movies are generally considered the worst of the lot, the anti-Burtons (at least to those who know there were two directors for the nineties movies) and frankly an embarrassment to the franchise, the character and to humanity in general. And this isn’t an unfair assessment; after all, Schumacher did essentially unwrite everything Burton inscribed into the public consciousness.

Before 1989 most people thought of Batman as Adam West, as a guy from a show so cheap and so bad that its title character once got away with dressing up as a dinosaur to convince his enemies that he was an actual dinosaur revived from a giant egg. Burton’s success was in not only undoing all that, but in re-appropriating its inherent wackiness (and certain visuals) into something altogether more dangerous. And Schumacher’s great failure is in regressing everything back to the days when things weren’t weird, but dopey; where they weren’t clever, just loud and obnoxious; where the humor lacked wit and everything was safe and predictable and the heroes always triumphed in the end because the villains were so comically useless. Batman was a surprisingly macabre take on the character that paved the way for the gloomy (and brilliant) animated series and even the more recent movies, while Batman and Robin is Adam West all over again, just with a higher budget.

So, yeah, Schumacher didn’t exactly do a great job, but calling him the worst of the three may be a bit of a stretch, as he and Nolan both make the same basic mistake. They each muck up the balance that Burton brought to his movies, that balance between real character drama (to give everything weight) and complete, unabashed comic book absurdity (to keep it dynamic and unique) and between humor and horror. Nolan ultimately made things too drab, too po-faced, too obsessed with pedantic realism; while Schumacher fell to the other extreme and made things too zany, too over-the-top, he made everything so light and fluffy that his stories ultimately lack any sense of gravity.

Everybody knows about this and how bad it would get and everybody has their favorite worst joke: whether it be bat credit cards, the fetishized suiting-up sequences, the petty bitchings of the dynamic duo resulting in dips in giant vats of yogurt, the ice puns, Bane, whatever. It gets pretty bad, and there are times where I consider Batman and Robin completely unwatchable.

But – to be fair – that’s somewhat less true of Batman Forever, which is actually fairly adequate and, believe it or not, has the tightest plot of all six movies to date (excepting some stuff near the end); it’s a stupid plot (Riddler stealing brainwaves and all), but it’s tight. Beyond that, Batman Forever acts as a sort of transitional period between the Burton pinnacle (as represented by Batman Returns) and the Schumacher nadir (Batman and Robin). You can see numerous elements of both approaches. It keeps Burton’s titling scheme, his bulletproof batsuit, his random girlfriend who is treated as all-important for this one movie and then forgotten by the next and his willingness to have Batman kill.

It also tries its damnedest to have Val Kilmer emulate the awkwardness of Michael Keaton’s Bruce Wayne. Take the scene at Chase’s office, where he knocks in her door and then clumsily tries to brace it back up, I could possibly see Keaton doing that. It’s still not great though, is it? And there are a lot of moments where Kilmer just doesn’t seem to get the complexities of his role. Later on in that same scene, we have Bruce declaring to Chase that “I need to get you out of those clothes… and into a black dress,” the sort of line Keaton’s Wayne would have stumbled over, really selling that he just didn’t know how to do this sort of thing; but with Kilmer I can’t tell if he’s just spacing or if he’s actually shooting for smooth.

There is some other evidence to suggest that Schumacher is trying more to return to the ditzy playboy approach to Bruce Wayne (his later seduction of Sugar for example), but the meekness of Kilmer’s portrayal (when compared to, say, Christian Bale’s over-the-top oafishness) leaves him kind of stranded between traditional Bruce and Keaton’s more nuanced interpretation.

His Batman is also a dull, uninteresting plank, like Bale’s but without the one scene or so per film that makes him briefly okay.

Ultimately, Val Kilmer is like his movie: inoffensive, but not as distinctive as those that surround him.

And of course, Batman Forever sets us up for the coming disaster in Batman and Robin in several exciting ways: from the increased use of humor, to a more toned-down Dark Knight who doesn’t run afoul of the police, to Robin’s “Holy rusted metal” line that – while ironic – echoes things to come, and to the glitzy, acid trip visuals that look like Schumacher just discovered blacklights and had to tack them on to everything: the walls, the cars, Christ even the guns and batarangs light up.

But, I think, most of these are pretty well balanced in Forever. The humor in most cases isn’t as intrusive as it would be later – and a lot of times is actually funny. There is a thematic value to the restrained Batman (we’ll get to this) and for all the wackiness, having the two villains discover Batman’s identity and act on it ramps up the scale and urgency like never before (in theory). And in a nice touch, this also requires him to turn to two previously one-off vehicle: the Bat Wing (from the ’89 movie) and the Bat Boat (from Returns).

No, these things aren’t yet problematic; the big issue this time, the thing that really sinks Batman Forever and the thing that set the tone for the sequel and ingrained some of our worst Batman memories is its treatment of the villain characters.

If I had to sum up how each of the three directors characterized their villain casts, I would say Burton’s were absurd, yet complex; Nolan’s were – barring one – dull and lifeless; and Schumacher’s were obnoxious. Nothing more than that, really, they’re all just annoying. I know I just said Forever’s climax had a dire sense of urgency, but imagine how much better it would have been if Riddler and Two-Face weren’t such gibbering ninnies. Imagine if the animated series Two-Face had stormed the Bat Cave. How sweet would that have been?

It’s weird, really, and a tragic testament to what happened to the franchise that Burton could take villains like Joker and Penguin – two characters who have traditionally been nothing but unrepentant assholes – and infuse them with enough humanity that we actually care when they die, while Schumacher can take villains like Two-Face and Mr. Freeze – two characters who by this point had been firmly established as tragic figures – and completely deprive them of the depth inherently built into their origin stories.

Batman and Robin actually uses the Nora Fries history created by the cartoon series, the one that makes Freeze more an avenging crusader than nutbag with an ice gun and yet did anyone at any point care one iota about him? And Two-Face doesn’t even get that, he’s basically just a clown with a bad rash. The result is that we ultimately don’t care when Two-Face dies and we kind of wish Mr. Freeze would join him.

And then there’s Bane and Poison Ivy, both of whom are just plain tedious. Ivy sadly falls into the unfulfilling role of seductress, which always leads to obnoxious storylines. It’s sad too because the animated series had recently revamped Poison Ivy into a more respectable villain, downplaying her seductive side and focusing more on her kicking ass with killer plants.

And as for Bane… yeah… he never really survives translation well, does he? Even the animated and Arkham City versions are crap. To be fair though, he always was just Batman’s own particular nineties apocalypse gimmick. You know how various comic lines introduced dull, overpowered beasts (like Doomsday and Onslaught) just to wipe out a bunch of heroes and call it epic? Well, that’s what Knightfall was to Batman and it faired better than other such stories because Batman’s rogues gallery has always been a cult of personality, so it wasn’t enough that Bane was tough; he had to be clever too. You’d never know that of course from seeing Batman and Robin because the most you get out of Bane here is grunting, essentially reducing him to the level of the contrived comicbook peers he once so easily surpassed.

So of the five villains used by Joel Schumacher, the best is probably Riddler; granted, he’s just Jim Carrey playing him like a homoerotic Ace Ventura, but at least he’s funny. Sometimes.

Part of the reason I think this happens is due to the story structure of Schumacher’s movies (the other part being due to the mandate to kiddy things up a bit). Burton always introduced his villains organically through the narrative, with Joker starting as crime boss Jack Napier, Catwoman beginning as mousy secretary Selina Kyle and Penguin’s birth opening Returns. But Schumacher begins each time with an action scene against an already established villain (Two-Face/Mr. Freeze). Riddler ultimately works the best because we see Edward Nygma’s transition from dude to freak, whereas the scene where Harvey Dent becomes Two-Face is a very blink-and-you-miss-it court room snap.

Batman and Robin skews this a bit. Freeze is actually developed better than Ivy because – even though he’s already running around icing things in the first five minutes – the movie does spend more time on revisiting his origin. And while we do see how Pamela Isley becomes Poison Ivy, Uma Thurman’s forced, scenery-chewing performance and Ivy’s limited role in her movie compared to Riddler’s (I honestly think she was just thrown in so Batgirl could beat somebody up) makes it hard to care about what she’s doing.

Speaking of Batgirl…

The Schumacher era is also unique in that it is the only one of the three modern eras to include Robin or Batgirl (although I have this suspicion Dark Knight Rises might end with Batman beginning to train a young Dick Grayson), which is nice because the sidekicks don’t often get that much attention and Robin in particular receives a lot of undeserved hate for his symbolic role in creating the Adam West era. But however much I like that Robin has finally made a live action film appearance, he really doesn’t get the best treatment here.

There are some good ideas at play: like how rather than commit to one of the three official Robins at the time, Batman Forever combines them, taking Dick Grayson’s name and circus origin, Jason Todd’s grudge against Two-Face and Tim Drake’s updated, non-elven costume. But for all that and for all the time spent on Dick and his desire to join Batman’s crusade (and Batman’s trying to show him a happier way), Robin just becomes a damsel in distress right alongside the official damsel in distress. When it comes to the final battle, it’s Batman who beats Two-Face, Batman who defeats Riddler, Batman who destroys the evil super gizmo, Batman who saves Chase and Batman who saves Robin TWICE.

Even Robin’s symbolic maturation, where he chooses not to kill Two-Face when he has the chance is undermined significantly when Batman kills him not ten minutes later.

The poor Boy Wonder doesn’t even fare much better in the movie with his friggin’ name in the title either, mainly because Batgirl’s there now and this is the nineties, which was a big sci-fi women’s empowerment decade; this is the decade that brought us Buffy and Janeway and Xena and Lara Croft and Aeryn Sun and any number of other strong, tough, independent female characters who could do more than scream while the guys sorted everything out. And so it’s Batgirl who defeats Poison Ivy and Batgirl who gets to thaw Gotham, while Batman defeats Mr. Freeze and Robin… helps Batgirl defeat Bane.

There’s even this one scene right around the Bane fight where Robin and Batgirl are falling from the telescope. This is later touted by Robin as a big moment for him, because it’s where he realized Batman was finally learning to trust him, as he didn’t swoop down to save him but let Robin sort himself out. And that’s great and all, except that Robin’s grapnel didn’t catch, and it was actually Batgirl who saved the day then. And their exchange, where Robin says: “I got you,” but Batgirl counters “No, I got you” is one of the biggest, most force-fed girl power moments of the decade.

Which is fine. It is. You know, whoo women. And I actually like Batgirl in this movie, I do. Alicia Silverstone offers something of a bland, ordinary interpretation (and she really isn’t given much to work with), but she has a certain likable quality that sustains her; and she has some of the most quotable lines.

But that scene was designed as Robin’s big independence moment, so for Christsake, let him have it. Batgirl already gets the computers thing at the end, which is more or less fitting because it’s in line with her previously established hacking ability (although one imagines correctly guessing the password to your uncle’s laptop is a far cry from configuring a series of satellites to spread daylight from one side of the globe to the other). She gets a better girl power moment when she chastises Poison Ivy’s tired old seductress shtick in favor of her up-to-date kick-ass modern woman mentality (in a speech that would make animated series Poison Ivy stand up and applaud). So let Robin have one damn moment. His name’s in the flippin’ title!

Anyway, calming down, deep breath. Okay. You know, though, for all the faults and oddities of Schumacher’s movies, there actually is a solid narrative bedrock to both of them. It’s hard to see because the superficial layer is a mishmash of hokey aesthetics and bad jokes and beneath that is a plot of lame B-movie sci-fi clichés (you know, like stealing brainwaves), but beneath that there is real thematic polish that actually unites these movies with Burton’s (as they do exist in the same continuity) and extrapolates on what Batman and Batman Returns started.

No, really, it’s there.

Take Batman Forever, it has this underlying theme where most of the characters are compelled toward murder and vengeance. Two-Face is pathologically driven to kill Batman for reasons we’ll pretend make sense and Riddler is pathologically driven to kill Bruce Wayne for rebuffing his homoerotic advances (watch that scene again). Each of them is fixated on these goals: to cleanse the wound, to “purge the fixation” as the convenient psychiatrist girlfriend says. And on the other side, you have Dick Grayson, who is driven to kill Two-Face. His drive isn’t pathological though, as Bruce knows, it could be.

There are actually two great scenes that sort of mirror each other. The first is Riddler’s “seduction” of Two-Face, where he suggests simply killing Batman would be anticlimactic, that when it’s over he’ll be left with only “wet hands, post-homicidal depression.” And the other is when Bruce tells Dick what happens after he kills Two-Face: that his “pain doesn’t die with Harvey, it grows, so you run out into the night to find another face and another and another, until one terrible morning you wake up and realize revenge has become your whole life and you won’t know why.”

Both scenes reflect the same sentiment, that the simple act of purging the fixation will never be enough. The key distinction here between heroes and villains is that Riddler is suggesting Two-Face draw it out, take his time, savor every second; while Bruce is suggesting that Dick deny this impulse altogether and save himself from a lifetime of regret.

Because out of all these characters, Bruce is the only one who knows exactly what he’s talking about, who knows where this can all lead, because he’s been there before. In this continuity Bruce Wayne’s parents were murdered by a young Joker and Batman successfully kills his old foe at the end of the first movie. I’ve suggested in my Tim Burton Review (which has been mysteriously removed) that this left him in something of a haze in the second movie; he was lost and without purpose, essentially going out into the night finding another face and another, realizing that revenge had become his whole life.

Bruce’s speech to Dick is not only about himself, but about himself in Batman Returns, which ended with Bruce waking up to the reality of what he has become when confronted with Catwoman (who acted as his reflection). His failure to redeem her in the end signified a failure to redeem or save himself, perpetuating him on the Batman path.

Now, in Forever¸ Bruce gets a new mirror in Dick, a young man whose past is identical to his own. He acknowledges this directly, talking to Alfred about a “maniac crying out in the night [and] two shots.” He sees himself in Dick and so in Dick’s desire to become a vigilante in his own right, Bruce is forced to confront his own reasons for fighting and forced to decide whether he should be fighting at all.

His discussions with Chase help us revisit the moment of his origin and when the impulse toward Batman began; and in the end when he and and Robin join forces to save Chase and defeat the new villains, two key things happen: Batman for the first time isn’t fighting alone, but with a partner, giving him an emotional connection that strengthens him. And, also, Robin doesn’t kill Two-Face. He could, he clearly wants to and he’s not exactly disappointed when the man dies anyway, but Bruce’s message sinks in and he relents; and in this act, Bruce finds his own vicarious redemption.

Naturally, Riddler tries to disrupt this by making Batman choose whether to save Robin or Chase, forcing a wedge between his recovering dualities and sort of revisiting the end of Returns where he was tasked with stopping Catwoman (as Batman should do) or saving Selina (as Bruce needs to do), ultimately failing to do either. But this time he saves them both, catching Robin (the symbol of Batman’s redemption) and Chase (the cause and focus of Bruce’s emotional catharsis). He has his cake and eats it too as the saying goes. He gets to be a superhero and avenge his parents’ deaths while not losing hold on his basic humanity, and for once creates a real distinction between himself and his enemies.

And this leads us to our much more relaxed and approachable Dark Knight in Batman and Robin, a Batman who gets along with people, who’s touted by reporters as Gotham’s great protector, who holds charity auctions for crying out loud! I know everybody hates George Clooney here (and I’ll admit he isn’t great), but it could have been so much worse. His even keel and straight-faced performance really help balance out the wackiness and lend stability to an out-of-control setting.

See, in a world where Robin is a bitchy smart-ass, Batgirl is a cartoon heroine and the villains are all goons, Batman has become the stabilizing element, the one thing we can now predict and depend on, exactly the opposite of what Keaton was. This is significant because it shows how at peace with himself Bruce Wayne has become, which makes him more dependable, much more simplistic and straightforward as a superhero and, of course, infinitely less interesting. Still, it makes Clooney doing his whole Clooney thing appropriate to the role. This warm and fuzzy Batman isn’t suited to the grim complexity of Keaton or the gruff aggressiveness of Bale.

It’s telling really that this is to date the only of the six movies where none of the villains die; he’s not that kind of Batman anymore. It’s also notable that Batman doesn’t just defeat Mr. Freeze, but redeems him in very much the way he once failed to redeem Catwoman. In convincing Freeze to give him the cure for Alfred (which is conveniently stored in the Freeze suit) he allows the man to return to the days before he became a supervillain, back when he was a scientist, looking for hope.

There is also an underlying motif of family in this movie. Alfred makes mention of this frequently, suggesting that Bruce needs to trust Dick because “that is the nature of family,” remarking how “fate and chance stole [Bruce’s] parents” and how he’s been fighting back ever since. Well, that he has, going so far as to create a surrogate family in place of his old one (the introduction of Batgirl now gives us the core Bat Family), one specifically dedicated to the thwarting of the criminal element that took his parents in the first place. The sins of the past are rectified and Batman is at peace.

And this is why I think it’s actually good the series ended after Batman and Robin. It’s in much the same way Spider-Man 3 could only be followed by a reboot. In each case, you have superheroes defined by a past tragedy coming to terms with that tragedy and learning to move on. Spider-Man forgave the man who killed Uncle Ben and Batman was able to move on from the death of his family by finding comfort in a new one. He was able to stop seeing the man who killed his parents in each of his foes, which is why he stopped killing them.

So, yes, the movies had to end there, because after that where else do you really go? But, of course, that’s not why the franchise ended. And after it’s release, there were all sorts of plans for a fifth installment, promising us Scarecrow and Harley Quinn, but it was never to be.

And this says it all. Because, despite the criticisms, despite the systematic undermining of everything that got this series kicking in the first place, Batman and Robin was a financial success and thus the studios had every reason in the world to keep milking it. But they decided not to, because they looked at this campy, garish, hideous little movie and they were too embarrassed to continue it. That’s right, the same entertainment industry that gave us this, this and especially this decided a sequel to Batman and Robin would perhaps be in poor taste.

So they let it rest, catch a breath, relax and recuperate for a decade so that when a new Batman movie invariably came out, the Dark Knight could reclaim a sense of dignity.

It was a nice idea. Shame about the result.