When I called for Debrief recommendations at the beginning of the month, I got such a tremendous group of films that I’ve had to bank the suggestions because I fully intend to return to a good deal of them. For more than a few weeks, I have been considering how I could tackle a two film Debrief. Mostly, I considered writing about two films from the same director – especially an early then late film from a director’s career. So when @JonNeutron hit me up on BBM about looking at Tim Burton’s Batman and the most recent interpretation of that storyline, Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight, I knew he had a brilliant idea that I could run with.

Prior to the Tim Burton picture, which came out during the summer blockbuster season in June of 1989, most people’s exposure to Batman was either through the comic book that originated the story or through the campy television version starring Adam West, Burt Ward and Cesar Romero. I remember running home from elementary school to watch the re-runs of that series. Don’t you dare tell me you don’t know about KAPOW and BAP! But from this, we have to understand that the public did not think of Batman as a serious piece of entertainment and social commentary. When Jon first mentioned the Batman idea, my very first thought was that this Debrief would be some kind of blasphemy. I admit to never having read a Batman comic. In fact, I could probably count the number of comics I’ve read all told on two hands. It’s just not my medium of preference. Could I possibly know Batman without knowing the history of the comics? I’m going to go out on a limb and say that the comics mostly don’t matter to the films. It’s a different medium with different audiences. Perhaps by the late 1980s, some of the comics were in fact a serious commentary rather than a playful adventure. But I will defer that discussion to a comic aficionado. But if most people held impressions of Batman through the Adam West television series, Tim Burton was about to take a step in the direction of solidifying Batman as an American legend.

On a pure numbers comparison, Burton’s production wound up costing $48 million and grossed over $411 million in worldwide receipts. 19 years later, Christopher Nolan directed The Dark Knight. TDK was a follow up to Nolan’s prequel to Burton’s story, Batman Begins. In 2008, Nolan’s production cost $185 million, grossed over $1 billion in worldwide receipts. I saw The Dark Knight the Thursday night before its North American release at a midnight screening. I remember being wowed. I also remember being a young kid in the early 90s and being unable to escape the toys and marketing associated with Burton’s Batman. From early on, the series has been more than a movie, it’s been an entire product. I’m interested in your reactions to and memories of both of the films. Post your caped crusader love or hate below.

1989 – Tim Burton

2008 – Christopher Nolan

For this Debrief, I’m going to forego a plot synopsis of either films. If you haven’t seen one or either of these films, shame on you. I’m willing to wager that the Batman story as a whole has now been covered so thoroughly that you’re at least familiar with the general story. So my request for this Debrief is that you re-watch both in order.

In grade 9 drama class, I had a very eccentric, rather unconventional teacher. She sat us down one class to watch Burton’s Batman. But instead of putting on that film, she put in a 1920 silent film directed by Robert Weine, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari. Her mistake was intentional. She did end up showing us selected clips from Batman, but she was trying to infer influence and, perhaps, homage.  I’ve since seen Caligari a handful of times in different contexts. It is considered a prime example of German Expressionist films. To simplify an understanding of German Expressionism, the art is highly stylized , sacrificing realism. Camera angles, high contrast, shadows and angular set design are used to create a mood and atmosphere that mirrors a troubled human psyche. This period of art came into fashion just prior to the eruption of World War I. The human mind hangs on the brink of madness and the city and its architecture had come to mimic that oblivion.

To bring in a discussion from a previous Debrief, we have a contrast of Burton’s make-believe Gotham City and Nolan’s use of Chicago as Gotham City. It may seem minor, but it changes one of our fundamental interpretations of the story. With Burton, the city and its inhabitants are mere caricatures of the metropolis and its residents. With Nolan, we carry all our preconceived notions of Chicago and “America” into the film with us. I’d go as far as to say every fabric of Nolan’s story seems more real to us. There’s more on the line. Those buildings and those citizens all carry real memories with them, perhaps that you have  personally experienced.

I had hoped to find some stills of the architecture of Gotham City in Burton’s Batman, but what I could find weren’t the exact stills I hope you’ll notice when you watch the film. What I see in the set design of the completely fabricated city of Gotham are menacing buildings and streets that symbolize apathy and hopelessness. Instead, I can take a still from another film, The Man Who Laughs, to illustrate a blatantly obvious influence. The Man Who Laughs, though made in America well past the prime of German Expressionism, was still directed by a Paul Leni, a German born man known as a German Expressionist filmmaker.

Conrad Veidt in The Man Who Laughs – 1928

“Jack Napier” before he becomes the Joker – Burton, 1989

Jack Nicholson as the Joker – Burton, 1989

Heath Ledger as the Joker – Nolan, 2008

Both films feature the Joker as the main villain. And I’d wager a lot of people who haven’t revisited Burton’s Batman since seeing the most recent film in the series will be quick to dismiss Jack Nicholson’s interpretation as cartoonish. To be fair, the point of the Burton and Schumacher Batman films were to be cartoonish, albeit sometimes to an embarrassing extent. But, I am particularly fond of one scene of Nicholson’s Joker. Joker and his thugs infiltrate the Gotham art museum and proceed to playfully deface the high-brow art with their own version of graffiti and paint slop. We are told that Joker is a highly proficient artist and studied art (as well as biology and chemistry) in school. Later in the film, Joker professes to being a part of the avant-garde. That term originates from French military use. To be a part of the avant-garde meant to be on a small team of highly skilled soldiers that advanced the terrain and tackled the enemy ahead of the slower moving main army. In the art sense, it is to be experimental and push the boundaries of the cultural world. Joker’s labelling of himself paints Batman as the “mainstream”, and the Joker in search of radical social reforms.

I think Nolan’s interpretation of both Batman and the Joker shows a loosening of mental stability. There was a lot of adoration for Heath Ledger’s Joker because of his frightening portrayal of a wild, sociopathic terrorist, and rightfully so. The conflict of Batman’s order versus Joker’s anarchy dominated that story and eventually tore apart one of the “normal” men of Gotham, in Harvey Dent, to join those two characters on the extremes of society. Such is my point; in Nolan’s film, Batman no longer embodies the mainstream of Gotham, now an unpredictable and untrustworthy vigilante, and Joker abandons the avant-garde for outright chaos.

I think Nolan’s film even moreso than Burton’s has us question what right Batman has to assert his will like he does. Early on in The Dark Knight, upon rescuing the Batman-impersonators, one of the impersonators asks, “what makes you different from us?” To which Christian Bale responds in that uber-gruff voice “I’m not the one wearing hockey pants.” And everybody knows that the Batman myth is not about having super powers. The man is so just extravagantly wealthy that his “power” is derived from those unlimited financial resources. Again, Burton’s Batman’s technology was largely cartoonish, but Nolan brought legitimate 21st-century, military-grade technology to Batman’s arsenal, largely through the addition of the character of Lucius Fox (Morgan Freeman). There’s even a little documentary in the bonus features of the The Dark Knight blu-ray disc about the technology Nolan integrated into his films to bring a realism to Batman’s arsenal.

Burton consistently used editing to contrast the opulence of Wayne Manor and the Commissioner’s Office with the desperation of the streets of Gotham. This contrast isn’t as played up in The Dark Knight, not because Wayne Manor isn’t absurdly large and extravagant, but because the streets of Chicago aren’t nearly as grim as the German Expressionist inspired set design. Inevitably, in both films, the audience could even find themselves somewhat sympathetic with the Joker because he may be off-the-chain crazy, but Bruce Wayne is not a man of the people and his wealth is the only reason he gets to assert his special brand of morality on the city. There is no hint that Batman concerns himself with what drives people to a life of crime, just that they’re evil and justice must be served.

That thought brings me to a young professor I had for a 300-level class on American film history. We came to class and he told us that he had just seen The Dark Knight for the first time, this being April of 2010. He proceeded to go on a semi-coherent rant about how he couldn’t believe that no one else had interpreted the film as Batman being a symbol for George W. Bush. In the rambling, I caught that he insisted the comparisons were blatant; the Hong Kong sequence being a critique on American interference in foreign nations; his dealings with Joker as tackling terrorism; the journalism/media portions of the film being about Bush’s public favour, crafted through the media, rise and deteriorate; and finally the cell-phone sonar being about the unlimited power Bush formulated for himself through unconstitutional levels of surveillance. To him, this warranted the audience falling out of favour with Batman and, in fact, made him like the film less. Sometime later, I had a detailed discussion with @djmddsc about this professor’s take on the film. In the end, we decided that whether or not the Batman/Bush comparison was accurate, it was no reason to dislike such a film. “All the more reason to see it as a film for the times”, said Dan. While I think all films are documents on “their times”, I think Dan was on to something here. The Dark Knight is going to go down as an artifact on American society in the late ’00s.

And because I love these trivia-type role-that-wasn’t little bits of info, Tim Burton consider a handful of actors for the role of Batman before Michael Keaton was eventually cast: Kevin Costner, Tom Selleck, Pierce Brosnan, Bill Murray, Mel Gibson and Charlie Sheen. Oh, the possibilities!