Crooked Marquee's New Christmas Canon: Batman Returns

This week, we’ll be focusing our posts on holiday movies, including several that we feel are worth putting into your holiday viewing rotation this year. Follow along here.

Seemingly out of nowhere, fetish wear had a serious moment in mainstream cinema in the early ’90s. Thanks to “The Man” in Wes Craven’s The People Under the Stairs and “The Gimp” in Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction, men in leather bondage suits got more exposure than they ever had before. And smack dab in between them came the unabashedly kinky Batman Returns, which pitted a rubber-suited hero against a female vigilante in a homemade vinyl catsuit. Despite being set at Christmastime, few would forecast peace in Gotham City or goodwill toward Batmen and Catwomen (or Penguins, for that matter).

Coming off the mega-success of 1989’s Batman, director Tim Burton was given carte blanche by Warner Bros. to shape its sequel how he saw fit, without the input of cautious studio execs or pushy producers who had curbed his darker tendencies. (In the interim, he also made the deeply personal Edward Scissorhands, whose misfit protagonist shares some of the same sartorial tendencies as Craven’s and Tarantino’s creations.) In retrospect, this all but guaranteed Returns would be less commercial than its heavily hyped predecessor, but it would unquestionably be “A Tim Burton Film,” a distinction that meant more to discerning cinephiles three decades ago than it perhaps does today.

The omnipresence of Christmas in Gotham is established in the film’s prologue, which depicts the macabre birth and cruel abandonment of Oswald Cobblepot, whose upper-crust parents are moved to dispose of the deformed scion they have no intention of raising to adulthood. As they’re wheeling his carriage through the park in the dead of night, they’re greeted with a cheerful “Merry Christmas” from two passersby – a sentiment they decline to return. They just wish to send their freakish son to a watery grave from which they hope he’ll never return.

It’s still Christmas when the action skips forward 33 years to a tree-lighting ceremony in Gotham Square observed by a sewer-dwelling creature with rubber-gloved flippers. This is, of course, the grown-up Penguin, but Burton and screenwriter Daniel Waters delay his full reveal until after they’ve introduced the rest of the major players, starting with megalomaniacal industrialist Max Shreck, who’s pushing to build a new power plant because, as he later tells Bruce Wayne, “One can never have too much power.” At the other end of that dynamic is his mousy executive assistant, Selina Kyle, who undergoes a radical change in personality after he pushes her out a window for learning too much about his nefarious plans and she miraculously survives. That’s just one of the benefits of having nine lives, most of which she burns through after fashioning a skin-tight costume out of a vinyl jacket and going out on the prowl for men to take out her anger on (much like Zoë Lund’s mute protagonist in Abel Ferrara’s Ms. 45).

Compared with Catwoman’s decidedly DIY dominatrix, Batman is more buttoned down, with a chamber full of matching Batsuits, cowls, and boots. While Michael Keaton and Michelle Pfeiffer emphasize the awkwardness of their tentative romance when their characters are out of costume, when they’re suited up, their mutual attraction is most manifest. “No, that’s not you,” Catwoman purrs while feeling him up, something that clearly turns Batman on, particularly when she penetrates his armor and declares, “Ahh, there you are.” Their first encounter ends with them withdrawing to lick their wounds, however, when she draws blood and he retaliates in kind.

Meanwhile, Shreck – “Gotham’s own Santa Claus,” as he’s called by the beleaguered mayor during a photo op – hatches a scheme to hold a recall election and get Oswald to run for mayor as his proxy, a subplot that allows Christopher Walken and Danny DeVito to play off each other in a different way. When Oswald’s bid for respectability goes down in flames, he reverts to his Penguin persona and crashes Shreck’s festive masquerade ball, announcing to the gathered swells that his gang is even then abducting their firstborn sons so they can get a taste of how he was ill-treated by his parents (who, it’s heavily implied, he murdered when he came of age). Just as Batman foils this plan and prevents Penguin from launching a missile attack on Gotham, Selina takes her revenge on Shreck (“A die for a die,” she calls it), whose shocking demise can be considered poetic justice.

Just or not, when the heavily promoted and cross-marketed Batman Returns reached US theaters in the summer of 1992, it racked up the then-biggest opening weekend in history ($45.7 million), a record about as short-lived as its box-office supremacy once word of mouth spread about just how dark and disturbing (and family-unfriendly) it was. The film has had a long afterlife, though, and is more fondly regarded in some quarters than its higher-grossing predecessor. It is also the only Batman film that ends with Bruce’s butler Alfred saying, “Well, come what may, Merry Christmas, Mr. Wayne.”