I never was much a fan of Tim Burton’s BATMAN.

There was something about it – a lack of primal energy, even with the pumping beats of Prince backgrounding whatever wasn’t touched on by Danny Elfman. It felt safe and secure in a way that I didn’t put together along things like STAR WARS or INDIANA JONES, pictures that had these sloppy, bursting-at-the-seams, fly-by-the-seat-of-your-pants sensations running through them.

What I’m saying is it really felt like there was a lack of electricity there.

However, BATMAN RETURNS, now that was something I could sink my six-year-old mind into. There’s almost too much going on in RETURNS at times. It plays with myths and realities, satirizes corporate culture and government responsibility, plays out the battle of the sexes, and is able to create a tone that is closer to an R rating without ever taking itself, content-wise, anywhere close to it. It’s almost Billy Wilder’s Batman. It’s maybe the most biting Tim Burton ever got as a filmmaker, the closest he got to a political picture.

“You’re just jealous, because I’m a genuine freak and you have to wear a mask!”

“You might be right.”

It’s all about dehumanization and family. Consider Max Shreck, who in the end is more the true villain of the picture than anyone on the poster. He doesn’t see people as human beings – he sees them as walking bank accounts and credit lines. He pollutes as much as the bad guys in Captain Planet episodes. He can’t be arsed to remember his administrative assistant’s name. He sees nothing but potential ways to further his own agenda. He is – quite literally – intending to suck Gotham dry. And why wouldn’t he? After all, he shares a surname with the man who played Count Orlock in NOSFERATU. He is a man of privilege. He is the corporation as a person, over a decade before reality declared this was a legal thing.

That he is able to weave a plan to save his own skin from the machinations of a madman who himself is a victim of dehumanization is simply an adherence to the agility of a corporation to get what it wants. Penguin’s dehumanization is less political in nature – here is a man who was abandoned as a baby by his parents because he was born not with hands, but flippers, and with a vicious streak a mile wide – but in the hands of Max Shreck, The Penguin is able to retrieve his name, Oswald Cobblepot, a surface level suggestion of some regained humanity. But it’s all surface: because he has been abandoned to the animals, he has become like them, feral in his lust for sex and violence, and barely able to keep a psychological lid on it.

Contrast this to Selina Kyle – a woman who is all lid, pushed into this position by Shreck, and who bursts out of her jar existence (one simply has to look at the confines of her apartment to understand how small she keeps her world) after Shreck waves his power a little too much and outright attempts murder on her. She, a human mistreated, turns herself into something symbolic and animalistic. It is through this that Selina finds a way to avenge her dehumanization. She takes the symbol of her oppressor, and turns it on him – and by virtue of association, the city itself that has allowed him to get away with that oppression.

She is the bridge between The Bird and The Bat. Bruce Wayne’s first appearance in RETURNS is of him in a study, brooding. Waiting. He is in his own jar. He awaits the chance to become his animal avatar. Unlike Selina, he took the mantle on not for singular revenge, but for a greater retribution of society. Unlike The Penguin, he was not born into this animalism. The self-made man, the oppressed woman, and the abandoned child – all put into opposition with each other by a corporate figure who only wants to profit.

Here’s where I remind you this came out in 1992. As a massive blockbuster. So shortly after the Reagan years, heading into the fake idealism and bloat of the Clinton era in America, BATMAN RETURNS wages a war against the upper class and corporate machinations.

And it does this through operatic gestures, and with as heavy a debt to German Expressionism as Tim Burton ever carried. Look at the scene in which The Penguin visits the grave of his parents. His gestures are not that of a man truly torn up about the fate of those who gave birth to him, but of someone who is putting on a performance. He does not speak until he wanders back to the waiting press corps back at the gate to this private cemetery, who give him the stage to announce his “transformation” from man-beast into human being. The scene is very clearly on a soundstage, but Burton plays it out like a sad moment in an opera – complete with The Penguin at what would be classically defined as his lowest point appearing as a speck of a man, “downstage” from us, and moving “upstage” to complete the transformation.

Much has been made of Burton’s influences including F.W. Murnau and Fritz Lang. But they too had influences, reaching back to 19^th-century composer/conductor/”music dramatist” Richard Wagner – and here Burton strives to strike at the same level. There is no small movement in BATMAN RETURNS, no tiny emotional change. Everything is on as big a scale as humanly possible.

(How obvious is the German influence on this? Shreck suggests that there should be an event like the Reichstag Fire of 1933 to inspire a recall on the mayor. The Reichstag fire, if one remembers their 20^th century history, is one of the instrumental events that led to the rise of the National Socialist Party, and the beginning of the Third Reich. This is interesting, as the superhero is, by virtue of the idea behind them, something of a fascist fantasy. Here, writer Daniel Waters and Burton manage to put maybe the most fascist character of them all and turn him into something that seems like a man of the people.)

The movie is grandiose to the point it tries to encapsulate society and gender. Michelle Pfeiffer’s Catwoman is deeply, darkly sexual – not in the way of original character influence Hedy Lamarr, but more in the style of Barbara Stanwyck, up front, almost threatening in how she handles wearing a vacuum-sealed leather suit. Pfeiffer does not walk anywhere in this movie, once she goes through the primal change from Selina to Catwoman; she slinks, stretches, and curls her body around, embracing the felinity inside the character. She’s also distinctly feminist: her first appearance is literally her punching out a potential rapist and telling the woman to stand up for herself, instead of waiting for a man – as she puts it, Batman – to save her. To be succinct, Catwoman doesn’t take anyone’s shit. She turns her sex into a rose, and doesn’t care if you prick yourself by rubbing up against it. One of the main theses of the movie is that none of us – from the abandoned to the insane, male or female – is too different from another. Post-Catwoman Selina is much more aggressive a sexual being than pre-Catwoman Selina; when she and Bruce hunker down to watch the second tree lighting ceremony in the middle of the movie, it is her who pounces on a supine Bruce. She has become the predator.

Contrast this moment against her some thirty to forty minutes before, where she is rejected not in person, not even over a phone, but through the doubled-up disembodiment of an answering machine – by a man at the behest of his therapist, at that.

It’s a longer play on the repetition that occurs just prior to and immediately following her fall. Her performance changes wholly on each return to the apartment, the first time as the bottled-up Selina, passive and quiet, almost mousy, with her messages being a constant knock on her spirit, and the second time as the lid she keeps herself under is loosened, allowing the Catwoman to blow out. There is a key moment that repeats: a pair of messages from a Gotham beautician’s company, whose sales pitch is designed to entice women to objectify themselves for some powerful man. The first time, Selina simply shuts the machine off. The second time, a new message singles out the idea of “your boss asking you to stay late”, which is the final twist that pops Selina’s lid off.

“I don’t know about you, Miss Kitty… but I feel so much… yummier.”

There is something to be said for how, out of the masks, the traditional cinematic gender roles are reversed; Bruce is passive, Selina is active. When Bruce must sneak out of the mansion to perform some Caped Crusader duties, he leaves Alfred with a message that is almost akin to a teenage girl’s attempt to tell a mutual friend that she wants to spend time with her crush, but not to outright say that because oh god I will be mortified. Selina, who needs to be going to the same spot Bruce is heading, also runs into Alfred, and after some collection of her thoughts, asks Alfred to think of a “dirty limerick or something” in order to express her interest in Bruce. This feels more in tune a teenage boy’s idea of how to think of their attraction to someone. There are suggestions here – both of Selina and Bruce suffering from a case of arrested development, and of how experiences have flipped their perceptions of themselves – that make a nice contrast to when the two are masked. More traditional societal rules come into play when they are playing dress-up. These are not the true versions, but for the sake of what they want or need to do, both the Batman and the Catwoman are willing to play up their battle as something more traditionally sexual. Wayne, under the cowl, becomes stoic; Kyle, slipped into her catsuit, is willing to play cards she had no interest in playing when she – to put it one way – let her hair down.

And at the heart of their relationship, taken as a whole, and thoroughly underlined at Shreck’s costume ball where both Bruce Wayne and Selina Kyle show up, sans masks, is the question of which version of themselves is the true one. That their alter egos are exposed in a moment of intimate connection that only exists because of those alter egos is a subtle ironic nudge to their own identity confusion.

The Penguin does not suffer from this problem. He is a straight-ahead pervert, and makes no intentions to hide it. Claims of “French flipper tricks” and the chance to grope the electorate are filled with a false bravado. Here is a man who has stewed in his own sexuality, adrift for most of his life with a certain loneliness that cannot be simply filled. There is an id factor to the performance, and there’s not too many people more suited for this sort of thing than Danny DeVito, he who would later link another circus back to sexuality and unrestrained id in Burton’s BIG FISH*. He, however, assumes his own mask for nefarious purposes, pumped full of ego by Shreck with every move he makes.

“I was their number one son… and they treated me like number two.”

The mask he assumes is of the charitable/pitiable Son of Gotham. The moment he slides on the mask is the moment he publically assumes the name Oswald Cobblepot, and he does not remove it himself (as, we will later discuss, Batman and Catwoman do). It is instead forced off by some cleverness by a man he intended to destroy. The Penguin becomes so bloated with ego that his hubris gives Batman a pin to pop him with. The story Oswald, The Penguin is a very simple one: he was a monster, he was given a chance to redeem himself, but the rotten core of his own ego and the lack of morals of those around him gave way to his own destruction, and so he returns to being a monster. Along the way, his story manages to poke at the looming corporate oversight of government – as a businessman nearly succeeds in removing an elected head of government for the story of the week – and the shallow ways in which an electorate can be swayed by emotional appeals.

Cobblepot, who denies his birth name upon the destruction of his mask – “I am not a human being!” he proclaims, in an inversion of the plaintive cries of the Elephant Man – enacts a plan that he had placed on the back burner while he was groomed to be Max Shreck’s key to ultimate power; to kidnap the first born son of every Gothamite who was a part of the class who abandoned him. This includes Shreck’s only son, only for Max to have one moment to be a genuine human being and go in his son’s place. The movie roars to its climax; Wayne races back to the mansion, Kyle to — actually, I have no idea where she goes off to, but of course this doesn’t really matter – and the Penguin, upon failure of plan A, goes to a plan B straight out of the Adam West series: blow up Gotham!

How does he plan on doing this?

He’s going to use his penguins.

This should have been mentioned earlier, but not only was Oswald born with the deformity that made his hands have flippers instead of fingers, he at some point – after a period working as a freak at the Red Triangle Circus, where he evidently murdered some children – made his way to underneath the abandoned Gotham Zoo, where most of the penguins had apparently been left. And he became their king, as well as turning the remnants of the Red Triangle Circus’s people into a criminal gang. The movie never bothers to bring attention to the fact that a baby tossed into a river grew up to be the deformed master of a few hundred penguins and a crime boss. It’s obviously for the best, because to bring attention to this makes it seem really, really dumb.

But, then again, the movie’s intent is not to give us a serious drama – it very plainly stakes its claim in dark comedy. Bringing Daniel Waters onto the movie was essentially the nail in the coffin of it not veering into such a direction. But this is beside the point.

“Seems like every woman you try to save ends up dead… or deeply resentful. Maybe you should retire.”

So the Penguin’s penguins march on Gotham square, following their master delivering a Patton-esque speech in which he tells them that it will be a genocide – boys, girls, adults, children, it doesn’t matter – and warns them that by the nature of what they’re doing, not all of them will be coming back.

Burton knows the rule of suspense, though: right here, he’s announcing that a bomb will go off in several minutes through the transmission of the penguins’ coordinates. As they find their way through the streets of Gotham, which are quiet as can be, not a creature stirring; we have Batman, who has evidently planned for such a possibility by already having a Bat ski-boat available to him, roaring through the tunnels of Gotham’s water system, racing towards the location of the radio transmission of The Penguin’s detonator.

Before long, the remaining members of the Red Triangle Gang realize that the jig is up. One last family abandons Oswald. He is now truly alone – and so he races from his home, taking his amphibious duck vehicle (this movie sounded so normal for the first 2,000 words, didn’t it?) to the surface, only to have it crushed under the Bat ski-boat.

Surviving the wreck, The Penguin gets the drop on Batman. Only for, in classic Batman fashion, for a larger plan to have already been set in place. The penguins, who had made it to Gotham Square – the planned launching point – have been reassembled around the Zoo thanks to Alfred intercepting the radio signal and turning them around. It’s the ultimate betrayal – The Penguin has been abandoned by humanity completely. And now, the only things he had left – his penguins – have been turned against him too. He strikes out. He gets a hold of the detonator. If he goes, they all go down with him. He pushes the detonator.

The zoo itself is blown to smithereens, but all the penguins are unharmed. The Penguin himself, though, finds himself surrounded by bats, and in his haste to get away, falls back into his subterranean home, into the water far below.

Bad guy dead, movie over, right?

Not so fast. Max Shreck, who had quite literally been locked in a cage, has finagled the keys to his prison from a monkey, and is going to get away – only for his past to catch up with him. That which he wronged comes back in the form of a she-devil with a whip, who literally catches him and pulls him into the water. There is still one last case of psychodrama to study, as sex, power, and justice all become inexorably intertwined. Shreck is able to pull himself to land, ending up on a far end of the gargantuan room in which The Penguin lived, plotted, and went to ruin. Leaning himself against the power generator for this entire complex, armed with a revolver that had been laying on the floor of the pool, he finds himself face to face with the oppressed.

Catwoman stands in front of her prey. But behind her is Batman. She is, in wholly visual terms, balanced between the promise of justice and the promise of vengeance. And she states her case. We go back to the difference between the classes – Selina, Catwoman, knows that Shreck will never see the inside of a prison cell. He’s too rich, too connected, too powerful. Batman promises that they have the evidence. He’ll be put away.

Batman suggests that they could have a normal life. That this could be the end of them lying to themselves. The happy ending is just around the corner, he suggests. “We’re the same, you and I – split down the middle,” he tells her, removing his cowl, exposing himself – combining both the Bat and the Man for the first time in his life, accepting that he is both at the same time (BATMAN FOREVER, covered tomorrow, states this outright, in dialogue, in unambiguous terms, as well as in an observation from Rachel Dawes at the end of BATMAN BEGINS, 13 years later. It feels much stronger a statement here, a visual key to Bruce’s soul, rather than exposition).

Rather than accept her divided psyche, though – rather than accept some sort of compromise, and rather than become some happy housewife locked away like a hermit – Selina gives in to the Catwoman completely, cementing her feminist self as what she wants to be, who she really thinks she is inside. This gives her the inner strength to survive four shots, and she disappears in a blaze of glory – bringing down the electricity with a kiss to her “Anti Claus”. Catwoman becomes a true feminist icon, and like most icons, martyrs herself for her cause.

“You killed me… The Penguin killed me… Batman killed me… that’s… three lives down. You got enough in there to finish me off?”

The only person who understood her is left alone. Bruce pulls aside debris to only find the charred corpse of Shreck buried underneath. And so Bruce Wayne returns to his life of solitude, finding a black cat on Christmas Eve, retiring back to his empty castle, to do whatever small thing he can do to help fix the world.

His greater calling makes a plea to him, lighting up the night sky.

But, as we find out in the closing moments, he is not the only one prowling the night.

There’s something astounding about RETURNS as a film, even separated from the mythos – an admittedly difficult task, as the movie is so indebted to so much of the legacy of The Dark Knight as a character in different forms. The entire style of the movie is a collision of crafts, where gargantuan soundstages can be home to intricate wordplay and peppery dialogue not found in any other superhero movie this side of – well, no movie has ever quite gone this openly satirical. The emotion and psychology of the movie is purely operatic, Wagnerian in scope, keyed with visuals outright taken from the pioneers of German Expressionism, while it plays with interactions and tone in a way that is closer to DOUBLE INDEMNITY and ACE IN THE HOLE. Between Waters and Burton, a sort of alchemic magic formed, giving us the only superhero movie that has felt sharply satirical yet not self-effacing. There is no ironic distance in BATMAN RETURNS – just reminders that we, as a culture, are too easy to entice, to separate, to crack into pieces. It may in fact be the best movie Tim Burton’s ever made. It certainly rests high on the list. This would be the last Batman movie Burton would have directorial involvement in.

But man, what a way to go out.

*Remember that Ewan McGregor’s character first sees Alison Lohman’s character there, and later has to calm DeVito, who has turned into a wolf. Sex and an unrestrained id! Also, Burton has a weird thing for putting Danny DeVito in circus/carnival settings…