Tag: Supergods

In order to appreciate the state of commercial adolescence to which Generation X has been disproportionately consigned, one needs to consider Tim Burton’s Batman in its sociocultural context:  how it inadvertently provided a blueprint to reconceptualize superheroes from innocent entertainment meant to inspire the imagination of children to hyperviolent wish-fulfillment fantasies for commercially infantilized adults.

The weekly theatrical debut of a new franchise tentpole, voraciously bulling aside the $200 million–budgeted blockbuster released a mere seven days prior, is par for the course nowadays, but back in 1989—thirty summers ago per the calendar, though seemingly as recently as yesterday by the nebulous barometer of memory—we’d never before experienced anything like that.

That was the year that gave us new entries in such ongoing adventures as Indiana Jones, Star Trek, Ghostbusters, The Karate Kid, Lethal Weapon, James Bond, and Back to the Future, lowbrow comedies Police Academy, Fletch, and Vacation, as well as slasher staples Friday the 13^th, A Nightmare on Elm Street, and Halloween—to say nothing of launching all-new franchises with Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure, Major League, Pet Sematary, Honey, I Shrunk the Kids, Weekend at Bernie’s, and Look Who’s Talking.  To anyone who’d grown up in the nascent home-video era—that period in which all the aforementioned series (save 007) were born and could thusly be re-watched and obsessed-over ad infinitum—1989 was the Christmas of summer-movie seasons.

But none of those films, huge as many of them were, dominated the cultural spotlight that year as pervasively as Tim Burton’s Batman, released on this date in 1989.

Out of the Shadows

I can hear my thirteen-year-old nephew now:  “One superhero movie?  Wow—how’d you handle the excitement?”

Yeah, I know.  But it was exciting.  I was thirteen myself in 1989, spending most of my free time with my grade-school gang at the neighborhood comic shop down on Broadway, steeped in a subculture that hadn’t yet attained popular acceptance.  Richard Donner’s Superman (1978) had been the only previous attempt at a reverent comic-book adaptation, and, creatively and financially successful though it was, most of that goodwill had been squandered in the intervening decade by a succession of increasingly subpar sequels (through no fault of the marvelous Christopher Reeve, who makes even the worst of them watchable).

As for Batman:  It’s crucial to remember, and easy enough now to overlook, that in the late eighties, the prevailing public perception of the character was not Frank Miller’s Dark Knight, but rather Adam West’s “Bright Knight” from the self-consciously campy acid-trip of a TV series that had aired twenty years earlier.  In the wake of that show’s cancelation, a concerted effort was made by the character’s creative custodians at DC Comics—first Dennis O’Neil and Neal Adams, then Steve Englehart and Marshall Rogers, and most effectively Miller with his aptly titled The Dark Knight Returns—to reestablish Batman as the “nocturnal avenger” he was originally conceived to be.

But if you weren’t following the comics—and, in those days, few over thirteen years old were—the predominant impression the name “Batman” conjured wasn’t the ferocious Miller rendering above so much as this: