Supergods

by Grant Morrison

  The taut muscles that stretched the fabric of superhero costumes in the comics pages to such unfeasibly unwrinkled extremes that it looked as if the costume had been painted on were never possible with cloth or spandex. But the costume designers solved that problem by creating fake muscles, sculpted into a durable breastplate reminiscent of a Roman centurion. Whatever his build or athletic ability, Batman could now sport impressive pecs and a washboard stomach. Screen Batman was at last the Dark Knight, and knight meant armor.

  The chest shield was now a sculpted medallion. Infantino’s oval frame remained, but here it contained a black bat bas relief, redesigned especially for the movie, that pushed and stretched the wings out to the curved edge, so that black negative space dominated and prepared to eclipse the last of the cheerful yellow. Reversing figure and ground had the effect of turning the sign into a gaping mouth, a maw hungry for consumer dollars, which gave the logo a new and more subliminally threatening appeal. His belt was once again wholly decorative, but now vaguely futuristic, with solid pods instead of pouches.

  The second Burton film, Batman Returns, was even better than the first, although seen now, the Burton films have a claustrophobic, airless quality that is the result of the director’s penchant for enclosed sets rather than location work. All the action occurred on small street corner sets, making Gotham City feel like a compact, sealed interior space rather than a sprawling, living city. Having said that, designer Anton Furst took inspiration from the etchings of the eighteenth-century Italian painter and engraver Giambattista Piranesi, so perhaps the stifling sense of an enclosed space, an “imaginary prison,” was exactly what the filmmakers intended us to experience.

  The standout character in the sequel was Michelle Pfeiffer’s alluring and definitive Catwoman, who like Burton’s Batman took her inspiration from punk and bondage clothing, with a shiny vinyl catsuit and spiked heels that in no way hindered her rooftop kung fu workouts and somersaults. As the mousy secretary Selina Kyle, who transformed into a seductive villainess after an attempt on her life, this version owed more to Rose and the Thorn than it did to any of Catwoman’s previous origin stories. (Originally a daring cat burglar, she’d been recast as a wily prostitute with a taste for robbery in Batman: Year One.)

  When Burton left Gotham to pursue his personal visions, the Batman franchise was handed to Joel Schumacher, who talked of creating a comic on-screen but who had not, one was forced to assume, bothered to consult any comic published since his own childhood. His additions to the Bat franchise owed nothing to the adult look and feel of the Batman stories that were being published or attracting media attention in 1995.

  Moviemakers soon learned not to imitate comics or to try to reproduce specifically comic book–style storytelling and formal techniques onscreen. Comics are what they are, and a good comic page can do things that even great movies can’t, just as a movie can achieve effects even the best comics are incapable of equaling. Trying to make comics more like movies is a dead end; trying to make movies that look like comics is generally box office disaster.

  Val Kilmer, not long after his eerily accurate turn as Jim Morrison, made for a handsome and inward-turning Bruce Wayne, in a performance no less an authority than Bob Kane himself decreed the closest to his original vision for the character. Tommy Lee Jones’s Two-Face turned up with a shrieking, cackling caricature that took Nicholson’s Joker as its starting point before carefully removing any nuance or subtlety and screamed the result out through a megaphone. Comedian du jour Jim Carrey’s take on the Riddler was slightly better, channeling Frank Gorshin and his movie The Cable Guy, but it was clear that Burton’s wisely considered revamp was giving way to the “living cartoon” approach once again. As the failure of 1990’s Dick Tracy (Warren Beatty’s primary-colored big-budget folly and love letter to his main squeeze at the time, Madonna) had proven without doubt, moviegoers had no appetite for such artifice.

  Val Kilmer’s Bat suit retained the molded torso look but added a new detail in the form of nipples. His costume took on a display aspect that would be foregrounded in the next Batman film.

  When Michael Gough’s Alfred produced Robin’s new costume from his sewing box with the words “I took the liberty, sir …” he spoke for a nation of perverts. The elderly butler had, in fact, taken the liberty of adding molded nipple cups to Robin’s breastplate. Rubber tailoring is, of course, a highly specialized art kept alive by the tastes of the fetish underground, pop stars, and the fringes of catwalk fashion, but dear old Alfred appeared to have mastered it in his spare time, along with everything else. Accompanied by a fruity raised eyebrow, the moment skated around an abyss that Schumacher would jump into feetfirst with his next Batman picture.

  The final Batman film of the nineties, and the one that transformed a money-spinning film franchise into a radioactive turkey cat dinner, was 1997’s Batman and Robin, widely regarded as the worst Batman film ever made and indeed reviled by some commentators as the most indefensible artifact ever created by a so-called civilization.

  Batman actors changed more often than the guard at Buckingham Palace, and now it was George Clooney’s turn to star. His prematurely graying Hollywood-handsome face made for a different kind of Bruce Wayne, one that was more paternal and at the same time more vulnerable, a grieving son to Alfred’s expiring surrogate father. “I love you, old man,” he all but wept.

  The homosexual subtext that Dr. Fredric Wertham discerned in the blueprint for the Batman story was thrust aboveground. Batman and Robin was as gay as it got.

  Clooney’s Batman proudly embraced the disco aesthetic as no other before him had dared to do. This was Batman as peacock. The chest symbol had broken out of its confining oval to become huge, stretching its wings from shoulder to shoulder and cast in silver. There were inexplicable argent flashes and decorative panels that cried out for attention. It made little sense for Batman to look like this. He belonged not in the shadows but under the strobe lights dancing the Batusi with the Village People. It was pure design; nineties aesthetic with no substance.

  Alicia Silverstone’s baby-fattish Batgirl was an utterly unconvincing addition to the cast. The skills that had made Silverstone the perfect lead in Clueless, the comedy of Bel Air manners, were lost in this overcrowded, underwritten movie, which appeared to have been concocted principally to serve as the dictionary definition of farrago.

  Arnold Schwarzenegger lumbered through the film, delivering his charmless turn as Mr. Freeze with all the enthusiasm of a postman dispensing dull circulars. His entire role was constructed around a two-page concordance of predictable one-liners—“Freeze!” “Chill out!” and so on—that even the mighty Arnold failed to sell with any authority. To make matters worse, he’d been recently outclassed by a cartoon. The Mr. Freeze episode “Heart of Ice,” from Batman the Animated Series by Paul Dini and Bruce Timm (which Batman and Robin had the audacity to quote in the form of Mr. Freeze’s sentimental snow globe memento of his dead wife), had broken new ground for a show allegedly aimed at kids, with its layered and emotive study of loss and madness. It spoke volumes about Schumacher’s approach that the animated Mr. Freeze was a tragic creature of depth and pathos, while the real man on-screen was a cipher in plastic and tinfoil, a lumbering, sleepwalking cliché emitter, the seeming result of some drunken pool party bet that the future governor of California could be persuaded to spray paint his bollocks silver for enough cash.

  It was left to girl of the moment Uma Thurman, fresh from her career-defining appearance as Mia Wallace in Pulp Fiction, to save the day. She looked great but hammed it up as a ridiculously over-the-top villainess, like Mae West as the evil fairy queen in a school play, hollering every line to the back row.

  The idea of a psychedelic Batman was not entirely objectionable, and the colors and costumes were eye-catching, but the performances were simply too arch, or the lines were tired and hackneyed, delivered with a weary detachment that suggested the onset of coma.

  At the end of act 2,
Alicia Silverstone let slip the single line that seemed to sum up Schumacher’s entire message:

  “Suit me up, Uncle Alfred!”

  Her chirpy call to arms was followed by fast-cut, hard-core dungeon-club close-ups of the teenager’s hard thighs and toned ass sleeking into spray-on black leather. High heels, dominatrix corset, and molded plastic nipple cups that turned her breasts into advertisements came next. It was hard to escape the conclusion that dear old Uncle Alfred may have been choosing to die deliberately in order to avoid inevitable arrest and conviction.

  The popular brooding Batman had lasted all of two movies. The emphasis was back on camp and color with a complete disregard for the kind of Batman audiences wanted. Batman Forever and Batman and Robin played out like Broadway musicals without the tunes and effectively eradicated mainstream interest in Batman by ignoring Frank Miller and Tim Burton’s restorative work and dumping the character straight back into a desperately dated Mardi Gras milieu that refused to take changing tastes into account.

  The set design was the best thing about the movie: The vivid ultraviolets and neons that were the result of Schumacher’s attempts to re-create a comic-book palette deserved to be in a much better film, and one day they will be. There was an overreliance on computer-generated imagery, the decade’s new special-effects toy, but at least Gotham seemed bigger in the establishing shots, as though it had finally broken out of Burton’s airless spaces and grown into a sprawling dream city built around soaring, improbable verticals and monumental statuary. And by this time, the fights had taken on a new gymnastic, acrobatic dimension as the result of softer and more yielding Bat fabrics.

  Clooney, unfortunately, looked smug and self-satisfied, as if he knew only his career would survive this debacle. Michael Gough’s Alfred, on the other hand, had to be replaced by a computer program following one mawkish deathbed scene after another in which the monstrous old pervert cheated the Grim Reaper yet again. Obviously, almost touchingly, these filmmakers imagined they’d be brought on for future sequels in the Batman series, and the frightening new Max Headroom–influenced CGI butler “Uncle Alfred” was nothing less than a death warrant for the frail Gough; his matte-complexioned, pre-embalmed digital counterpart had been designed to outlive the actor in the unlikely event of a follow-up.

  George Clooney’s jazzy metal Batman stands as the high-water mark of an approach that had reached its conclusion. The camp crusader was well past his sell-by date, as Schumacher might have realized had he paid any attention to what was going on in the comics and the popular animated show, where Batman was being played straight to great effect by Kevin Conroy. The voice actor perfected the self-assured, trustworthy cadence of a sane, truly adult Batman that didn’t give kids the creeps or adults the excuse to go see another movie.

  It took another eight years before Batman could be rehabilitated sufficiently for a return to the big screen, as a troubled hero for anxious times.

  My own movie agent at Creative Artists Agency submitted a treatment I’d entitled Batman: Year Zero, which had a young Batman traveling around the world, slowly assembling the familiar components of his outfit and disguise in the year before returning to Gotham as its protector. As a change from the Joker or the Penguin, the villains were Ra’s al-Ghul and Man-Bat from the Denny O’Neil seventies stories. Screenwriter David Goyer and director Christopher Nolan, who were assigned to the restoration of the bat franchise, obviously felt the same way I did, electing to return to Batman’s roots as part of their reconstruction effort.

  Goyer and Nolan’s new Batman had learned its lessons from the Alan Moore years and the “Ultimization” of Marvel characters, which had refreshed tired Cold War franchises with a new post-9/11 immediacy and opened up the possibility that every stale trademark could be similarly enlivened. Everything about Batman Begins was as carefully worked out as Batman’s crusade to be “believable.” Every item of the new Batman’s costume had to justify its place there.

  With Begins, Christopher Nolan created a Batman more in tune with the nervous tenor of the times. His Batman, re-creating many scenes and themes from Miller and Mazzucchelli’s Batman: Year One, was a soldier, pure and simple, adapting military equipment and tactics to suit a vigilante terror war on crime. For the first time on-screen, Batman’s uniform was functional, and every single piece of it told the story, like a set of tattoos, of who he was, where he’d been, and what he’d done. His costume was armor, no doubt about it. It was for protection, not display, not for fun, and definitely not because that’s how a drawing would look.

  Batman Begins was simply, tightly wound around the concept of fear: facing fear, overcoming fear, and succumbing to fear. It tried to ground Bruce Wayne by showing, step by step, the journey that a rich, bereaved, otherwise ordinary boy would have to take to become Batman. The script held to its missile-like course and had in Christian Bale an actor who not only had the piercing eyes, high cheekbones, and brooding Romantic quotient of a Neal Adams drawing but also a personal intensity that matched the role. This was the Batman fans had waited to see, the one that most closely approximated the character we all knew in our heads.

  The success of this believable Batman, and his willingness to engage in symbolic form with the hardcore issues of the day, allowed Nolan and his collaborators to aim higher with their second Batman feature. The Dark Knight would set a new standard for superhero films by talking directly to a mainstream global audience about the way the shadows had seemed to creep in while we were all watching TV.

  Box office records proved that Batman was back doing the business. This time he appealed to the same aspirational dream culture that made Iron Man’s Tony Stark such a popular character, but where Tony was ebullient and cocky, Bruce was a brooding Gothic hero of the old school. That made Batman ultimately a more potent figure. Iron Man pounded his evil doubles into the concrete to resolve the plot and restore the status quo, but Batman was twisted through the moral wringer only to wind up a fugitive in a world grown appreciably darker and more familiar.

  At the heart of The Dark Knight was a reputation-assuring performance that seemed to burn and fizz off the screen; it was hard to recognize the face of handsome young Heath Ledger under the scars and smeared makeup of the Joker, but he owned the screen from the moment he first appeared and slammed a pencil through a man’s head until his final dangling turn as the hanged man of the tarot, condemning Batman to an upside-down world of darkness and madness. The Bondi Beach hunk had transformed himself into a twitching, tongue-chewing agent of chaos. Where Cesar Romero’s Joker had been a gibbering, essentially harmless mental patient and Nicholson’s a twisted Pop Artist, Ledger’s Joker was a force of dark nature, a personification of chaos and anarchy, or so he wanted us all to believe. In fact, Ledger’s Joker lied constantly, insisting he had no plan when the whole movie bore witness to his grand and awful designs.

  And it was hard not to compare Aaron Eckhart’s sensitive, heartbreaking performance as the doomed district attorney Harvey Dent with the cackling over-the-top circus turn of Tommy Lee Jones in Batman Forever. Jones’s Two-Face had no real name, no backstory, nothing but schizo shtick in the form of his divided HQ (one side clean, one side shabby) and his devil and angel girl assistants, Sugar and Spice. The Dark Knight’s Harvey Dent offered instead a complex portrayal of the same character as a man maneuvered into hell by the Joker to prove his point. Dent was the White Knight destined to fall—so that even the title was a double, an echo applying to two men, not one.

  To match its theme, the movie’s structure was divided in two clear halves that overshadowed the traditional Hollywood three-act structure embedded within. This dominating diptych effect gave the odd sensation of watching two movies, and it neatly echoed the turn of the decision-making silver dollar Two-Face used: bright on one side, scarred and blackened on the other, like the story itself and especially the arc of the Dent character.

  The sprawling, expansive opening section took Batman from Gotham City to Hong Kong.
With crime in Gotham City on the run, he could afford to extend his influence internationally. Then at the midpoint, where the Joker was captured and it all seemed to be over, everything changed. Where a conventional superhero movie would have ended with the apprehension of the villain, The Dark Knight had another game to play. Would the silver dollar fall on its “good,” unmarked face or on its “bad,” scarred face, compelling Dent to do evil? The coin flipped, and the dark side landed uppermost. The second half of The Dark Knight undid the expectations of the first, as the story narrowed focus from the international to the painfully intimate and stifling. It ended with both the crusading DA and the film’s heroine dead, the Joker still alive, and the Dark Knight on his steed, accused of all the crimes in this darkest night of all. Nolan’s Batman roared into the end credits hunted by policemen and dogs for crimes he did not commit. An outcast hero in a corrupt nighttime city.

  A hero for a world in darkness.

  CHAPTER 22

  IN TRADITIONAL WESTERN occult symbolism, the gateway to the lunar realm of imagination is flanked by twin pylons, or towers. If you look at most versions of the tarot trump number 18, the Moon, you will see these towers. They represent the door that separates the world of fantasy from material reality.

  The descent of the kabbalistic thirty-second path of the tree of life describes an apocalyptic event involving the merging of two distinct spheres: the earthly and the lunar. The lunar sphere is the imagination, the world of thoughts and dreams. The earthly sphere is of the mundane, solid and heavy. In short, not only does real life become more like a story, stories must pay the price of this exchange by becoming more real and allowing the rules of the material world to impinge upon their insubstantial territories.