Following Joel Schumacher’s death earlier this week, there was the inevitable return of one of nerddom’s longest-living arguments, namely the quality of the two Batman films he directed. Granted, the man directed all sorts of other movies, including at least two undeniably great ones (The Lost Boys and Tigerland), and one fascinating and questionable one (Falling Down) and of course a whole lot of trash as well, but nerds be nerds and if we’re not talking about Batman somehow we’re just not happy.
The arguments boil down to two sides. The first, much more mainstream argument is that they are the bad sort of trash, because Batman’s costume has nipples and because of all the butt shots and because they’re campy and queer-coded. This argument, most of the time, boils down to not much more than thinly veiled homophobia. (And this was so mainstream that MadTV – hey, remember MadTV? Yeah, me neither – literally aired a sketch where “Joel Schumacher” explained that his first choice for Batman was Tommy Tune.) The second argument, the contrarian one, is that they are good precisely because of these things – the argument advanced first by Chris Sims and elaborated upon this past week by Anthony Oliveira. And, because the internet is the internet and polarization is the natural endpoint of any argument on the internet, there is no middle ground in this mostly-one-sided opinion war.
Well, call me Nuance Bob, because that is what I seek to introduce right now. I don’t think the Schumacher Batman films are good Batman films, and I don’t even think they’re particularly good films in and of themselves. That said, my dislike for them has nothing directly to do with their campiness, queerness or the butt shots, and when people complain about these things I think they’re mostly calling themselves out as narrow-minded dorks and/or prudes (and nerddom has both in great amounts, although the prudishness is of course mostly from a straight white male permissive perspective). Honestly, a lot of the time the queerness is the best part of these films for me. I have other reasons to dislike them.
That said, I do think the Schumacher Batman films achieve what Schumacher set out to do with them, and in that sense they are definitely successes. If you want what Schumacher is selling, then his Batman films – and especially Batman and Robin, which is simply better than Batman Forever on all counts – give you exactly what you desire. This is, of course, a concession to the idea that the audience’s subjective choice matters in determining the quality of a work of art, which is a minefield of debate all on its own (“is Thomas Kinkade good now?”) but I don’t think it’s something we can dismiss. Schumacher was a queer man who injected queerness into his films whenever he could, and if you look at his ouevre he mostly did a lot of buttoned-down stuff across his career. Getting to direct two Batman movies was a rare opportunity for him to go as wild as he could under Hollywood circumstances and justify it with “it’s superheroes!” Who can fault him for that? Who can fault people who find pleasure in that? I certainly can’t. But I do think the campiness of Schumacher’s films is the core of why they don’t work for me – and, by extension, a lot of other people.
By this, I don’t mean that they are too out there or too gloriously weird: I mean, my favorite Batman movie and the one I think is objectively the best of them all is Batman Returns, a movie that features rocket-equipped penguins, an evil circus troupe where the most dangerous member is a trained poodle, and Michelle Pfeiffer trying to eat an entire canary just to make a point, plus a pretty kinkily-sexualized relationship between Batman and Catwoman to boot. That said, Batman Returns is mostly not a camp film, for all its fantastical and weird elements. It is, like a lot of Tim Burton’s work, somewhere between goth and emo in terms of its aesthetic, and the reason it works (and Burton’s earlier Batman, although it is less successful than Returns) is because, whatever you might consider the flaws of these films, they are sincere.
The Burton films, and especially Returns, are achingly, almost embarrassingly sincere in their emotional cores, in a way that the “more realistic” Christopher Nolan Batman films often cannot manage with the same depth, because the Nolan films are desperate to make the ludicrous thing that is the entire idea of Batman “work” in an ostensibly real-world setting, and as such their emotional arcs are shortchanged because if you’ve got a guy dressing up like a bat, you either roll with it or find excuses. (I like the Nolan Bat-films, don’t get me wrong – but as time progresses, they’re aging with less and less grace simply because of this fact.) And, indeed, Adam West’s Batman – in both TV and movie form – is sincere as well, despite being also goofy and silly, because it’s sincere about being goofy and silly.
Sincerity is not something that is necessarily at odds with the camp aesthetic – John Waters, for example, has spent an entire career bridging that gap. But camp by definition is grounded in irony, and a sincere work that is also ironic has to find sincerity within its irony, and I don’t think the Schumacher films manage that. Batman Forever certainly doesn’t; it’s a messy hodgepodge of a flick, with no central emotional core whatsoever in a movie that is about Batman and Robin coming together as a partnership. I have to consider that a stunning failure. No amount of entertainment derived from Jim Carrey’s wonderful, queer-as-hell Riddler really changes how lifeless most of the rest of the movie is. (Tommy Lee Jones’ Two-Face is, for me, too frenetic to really be entertaining at all, but I know opinions vary sharply about this and I don’t want to get into that right now.) Really, when I think of Batman Forever as a whole, for me the entire film is encapsulated by the “holey rusted metal” gag from Forever – a wink and a nod to previous Bat-camp that isn’t as funny as the original and doesn’t serve as much more than a reference to it. It’s the queer Batman equivalent of “cake is a lie” T-shirts: hey, kids, remember this thing you liked on TV? We remember it too! But: they didn’t like it so much that they weren’t willing to wink at us and snicker about how dorky it was, and that’s how Forever truly fails.
Batman and Robin at least has a sincere emotional core, but it isn’t a narrative emotional core at all: it’s simply a film about the eroticism of Batman as a concept. It sincerely loves getting off about Batman. (I mean, Uma Thurman’s super-great Poison Ivy performance only really makes sense in that context, right?) Which: fine, it’s not a traditional superheroic arc or anything but at least the film is about something – except for when the movie is taking extended sequences to handle the story arcs of Alicia Silverstone’s Batgirl or Arnold Schwarzenegger’s Mr. Freeze, when the film is about nothing beyond bright, colourful visuals and actors who are terribly, terribly miscast in their very important roles. I don’t remember which queen on RuPaul’s Drag Race said it, but I do remember one of them saying it: camp that isn’t funny is bad camp. The problem with big chunks of Batman Returns is that Silverstone and Schwarzenegger are just not funny at all. (Chris O’Donnell, bless his heart, is at least trying to run with it in the most whitebread way possible, but really, only Uma Thurman in this movie is actually suited to what the movie wants to do.) When someone tells me to just shut my brain off and try to enjoy the seemingly endless series of grade-school-level ice-themed puns Schwarzenegger spouts off in the most perfunctory way, my response is always to think “but why couldn’t they have just written funny lines instead?” I mean, it’s not like Arnold doesn’t know how to toss off a decent one-liner. Or, and here is an idea, maybe don’t play the single most tragic Bat-villain for laughs – particularly when you’ve adopted the Nora Fries backstory from Batman: The Animated Series entirely for your movie, which makes all of the puns land that much more awkwardly – just because you’ve decided to embrace a camp aesthetic for the film in toto. Schumacher could have, instead, chosen to play Freeze straight and keep the camp visual aesthetic intact, which would have made for a more impactful movie. Or he could have made funny jokes instead of once again indulging in the holey rusted metal aesthetic of doing dumb jokes and asking us to celebrate their stupidity.
I get that Schumacher obviously didn’t want to make that sort of movie! That’s fine, that’s a choice – but at that point, why even use Mr. Freeze when he’s going to work against what you want to do? Granted, at this point we’re almost certainly running Schumacher’s desires up against studio demands to use visible, marketable characters in the movies so they can sell toys, but movies like this are always going to be about improvising your way towards what you want to do with what you’re given, and I don’t think Schumacher succeeded in that respect. This is why I have to consider Batman and Robin a failure – not because it’s queer, not because of its fetishization aspects. Those are the good parts, and they don’t outweigh all of the bad.
