both.

so I remember re-watching Batman 89 recently and being really baffled by how there's basically no plots it's just two horny dudes winning the attention of a hot lady reporter the structure of the movie is instead shaped by the increasing privileges we gain as the audience first we see Batman and Bruce from the point of view of a total Outsider oh sorry Bruce Wayne and then as someone invited in and then finally truly with him as we learned that the Joker actually killed his parents a revelation that literally doesn't change anything when Joker dies Batman doesn't reconsider his mission he's just like cool fact bro Joker also has like no motivations which I know sounds like a weird thing to point out he's Joker but he's not an abstract force of Anarchy here he actually has a concrete unambiguous backstory Jack Napier was a serious mob guy who fell into some chemicals and all of a sudden he's goofy has a clown theme going on and starts messing with the city with face products in ruining an art museum in fact he murders are gone in Broad Daylights and has a money parade with no one trying to arrest him Joker's usual one bad day ideology weighs off to prove everyone can go mad if they're just pushed is replaced by Jax equally complex motive to have his face on the one dollar bill dollar bill the whys don't matter in Burton's Batman because it's made back in a time when people just assumed no one would take the genre seriously enough to ask is that the film is preoccupied with playing around with a Vibe the creation of a mythology out of a feeling of rejection what the twist did was create symmetry Batman and Joker are split down the middle I was a kid when I killed your parents I mean nicely I made you you gotta say you made me and how child is you yeah they are outsiders with no place in the society they're trying to be a part of Bruce hides not just Batman but even himself in the very beginning could you tell me which of these guys is Bruce Wayne well I'm not sure but ends up gifting the bat signal to the city so it can be a part of it Joker also hits but then he ends up openly rejecting the society around him he wants to remake the World In His Image both out of anger and also so it won't be weird anymore are about appearance parents attractive that hind me I now do now do dream I make art and until someone dies see I am the world's first fully functioning homicidal artist as a result their motives for trying to win Vicky over can be interpreted as them trying to answer a once in being accepted with Norms all right listen you know how a normal person gets up and goes downstairs and it's breakfast and kisses somebody goodbye and goes to a job and you know no she's conventionally attractive it's literally a reporter someone who notices things and somehow has a massive apartment all to herself from a journalist salary [Music] the Quest for acceptance is then more explicitly explored in Batman Returns it opens with the sound of a baby being born then two Rich douchebags decide to abandon it in the river this baby then grows into a tragic being whose hands hold the bars of a storm drain like prison bars it's now Christmas where traditional ideas of family and happiness is all on display but then there's this little Penguin man who can't be a part of it neither does poor Selena Kyle when she comes home she has no one she calls herself pathetic her mom is disappointed that she's not coming home for Christmas the guy she's dating goes on holiday alone and says I'll be going alone Dr Shaw says I need to be my own person and not an appendage and all the time she feels judged by Society for failing to be its idea of an ideal woman while the bad guys Christopher Walken trying to scam Gotham with a power actually sucks power as opposed to produce it while he's building himself a Santa claus-like Legacy for him and his son as penguin points out Shrek is a respected monster unlike him who's just considered a monster but memory returns is a lot more angrier than Batman 89 it's Infamous for its Darkness but we're watching it now it's a pretty goofy film it's violence and adult content is more obscene and childishly juvenile than anything because images are so surreal when the tone is so exaggerated that there's no sense of weight what is disturbing is the overwhelming sense of bleakness it's not about finding your place like last time but it's about a total rejection of it thanks so easy don't you always waiting for some bad man to save you there's no happy ending this time where equilibrium is found Bruce and Vicky broke up in between films because she couldn't reconcile with Duality she had trouble reconciling them because I had trouble um reconciling them penguin does in fact receive basic humanity and literally almost becomes mayor Selena becomes Catwoman and even gets her handsome prince who's as much of a weirdo with her in fact he makes me feel the way I hope I really am he even offers her the chance to be with him forever but all the characters destroy themselves before they can fit into the very things that they wanted to be because I'm a genuine freak and you have to wear a mask whoever you think you are I would love to live with you in your Castle I don't know anymore I just couldn't live with myself the only Solace you get is where the bad guy gets her comeuppance but that doesn't change anything for Bruce who then wanders off alone that continuity that feeling of unchanging loneliness that's the note that we're left with in Batman 89 in returns of every entertaining films but there's no overarching story or character work with them instead what's escalated between them was the style and its symbols of Duality as a result when Schumacher came in those were the only things left to push Batman Forever is a very weird movie as a film about Duality ironically it feels like three movies awkwardly shifting back and forth one moment it's a slow character study about a dude dealing with regret and falling in love with his therapist in a three-sided love triangle then it's a slapstick comedy about Jim Carrey and Tommy Lee Jones robbing banks and starting a company that in a matter of few days rival Wayne Enterprises that is Bruce Wayne and Dick Grayson arguing about the destiny of his anger and these really intimate scenes the resulting Cinema experience is absolute fear of your ears being blown out because all of a sudden very very quiet it's just subtle acting and that's where people speak very quietly I think does anybody else feel like a Friday it just raises too many questions Gotham is less goth now and more like a nightclub and Bruce is less of an awkward Outsider but more like a really really solemn man match however Batman Forever is also the first to give him a full Arc I had to save them both both Bruce Wayne and Batman not because I have to be now because I choose to be there's a cut subplot to the film where Bruce discovers his father's diary where it's revealed his dad wanted to stay in on the night of their deaths but Bruce's eagerness to go out changed his mind [Music] as a result as an adult Bruce must now reconcile with being Batman leading to a really Gothic moment where he makes peace with a giant bat your nightmares are there and until you face them I fear you will spend your life fleeing them this alongside around 50 minutes worth of scenes were cut so a more bare expression of this existential crisis comes in the form of the movie's two simple forces pulling in opposite directions inside Bruce dick the boy Bruce was angry but also youthful and committed the boy needs Batman and you'd be alone like me chase the woman who seems to love Batman however when she actually wants Bruce Wayne he finally quits and doesn't a dick he knows the loneliness ahead of his journey and now he has a way out but Bruce eventually learns is that this Duality inside him is not guilt or a trap it's a choice a choice to save both sides of him to keep and make room for both sides of him [Music] we all know the story of Batman and Robin it was considered not only the death of the series but the entire superhero genre for about two years before blade it abandons the goth and established tone so thoroughly for Camp that it becomes pretty much pure nonsense and you know what it's also the greatest movie of all time I don't think it's physically possible to not have a good time if you're watching this with someone I remember watching this with my partner late in the evening and we're about to go to sleep but God damn few seconds in we're completely re-energized we get our shots Batman driving a Batmobile with no windshield or roof minutes later George Clooney gives the most casual I'm Batman ever I freeze I'm Batman event slides down a dinosaur like The Flintstones there's a hockey battle for a diamond Mr Freeze throws a police officer to retrieve his gun there's a rocket ship that suddenly comes out of his van you're mad this capsule explodes it'll slaughter a thousands and there's bat bombs surfing in outer space a Chase through a factory where Mr Freeze gives his little wave this is only the first 15 minutes of the movie and it never slows down it's just pure Insanity of big choices big acting big scale and somehow 90 of the dialogue is just pure puns enough Monkey Business it's like watching a drunk man jump off a side of a building and actually somehow fly Batman also has a pretty solid Arc here and I'm not even joking as Alfred said he's been trying to control death as a means of coping with the death of his parents death and charms stole your parents but rather than become a victim you have done everything in your power to control the Fates but what is Batman if not an effort to master the chaos that sweeps our world but it's a futile task his need for control has now as a result alienated and limited Dick's life in agency thus pushing him away like telling dick he's got to spend more time in the simulator after they just saved each other's asses from Mr Freeze and Bruce stopping his motorcycle mid Chase Batman has to instead accept death in order to live which is provoked here through him accepting Alfred dying no defeat in death [Music] Victory comes in defending what we know is right now we still live he's been able to connect with Dick and give him what he wants what he also wants himself to to be a family you weren't talking about being Partners you were talking about being a family I'm asking you friend partner brother will you trust me now this act of trust is what leads to them defeating Ivy and expanding the cave to now include Barbara this is gonna sound totally insane but out of all the films of this era it's the only one with a cohesive comprehensible and complete Arc for Batman where content isn't clearly cut out and we don't see him as an abstract third party did you have a hard time finding the house these films as a complete media entity in hindsights was Ed's core a stylistic arms race Batman is a fundamentally ridiculous concept if you apply any level of realistic pressure onto him it's a man dressed as a bat in order to scare criminals he doesn't work if you take him out of exaggerated conditions the solution Burton had was to create distance Keaton's Batman is a byronic prince who is awkward and socially clumsy but also romantic in a way that he's abstracted and also through the way we constantly see him through the eyes of others Schumacher tried to close the distance we have with Batman's view we see him not as a prince but as a little boy in a man's body trying to find a family trying to find a way forward and out but that intimacy is also often lost by the new level of theatricality which doesn't enhance the emotions but often distracts and undermined them but that inherent theatricality is what makes Batman a reasonable Concept in a way he's a heightened man in a height and world where the conversation of the story must be in sync between the two this conversation is something which the later Batman films were able to navigate way more wisely through Batman Begins was able to make it work through a combined study where on one hand we followed Bruce on a biographical level from a young boy to a lost Angry Young Man to Batman but it's a transformation that's completed 40 minutes into a 2 hour and 10 minute film the rest of it and the trilogy were studying his effects Legend Mr Wayne without initiating a stylistic arms race the act of studying Batman as a social and philosophical project was Nolan's alternative briefs film in contrast deliberately avoids the abstract it touches on the topic of what does Batman mean for Gotham but this time Bruce's character his POV his feelings that's king of everything and it's in that vulnerability and also deeply unflattering side Batman makes sense the two moments which stands out it was the police station if this was the other films we probably would have switched to the police's point of view and it would have had this oh you don't chase Batman kind of satisfaction when he disappears but instead we follow him all the way to the end sharing his anxiety the other was the final shots in 89 Batman Begins in Batman 2022 they all end with Batman reacting to the bat signal but where 89 and begins ends on a painting like Larger than Life shot of Batman Matt Reeves ends on a close-up of Batman accepting that he's left the woman he loved to rebuild his home unlike the others you can look into his eyes and see him not as a symbol but as a man it's seeing that human effort to create something more with no theatrical shortcuts like frantic editing or heightened exaggerated Gotham that makes the Batman in the Batman theatrically sensical a lesson learned from Decades of experimentation [Music] media with me [Music] I cannot see what God knows so this was the Batman retrospective this was originally supposed to be a series called comparing Batman like the old comparing Spider-Man series but I didn't want to drag it out into like four or five videos so instead it's a super condensed singular video with the idea that it would basically just throw you into it and it just throws you back out in a really sudden way with hopes that you can come out with your own ideas and think about stuff hopefully it was interesting I had a lot of stuff left for the Nolan bit from about 12 pages so I might make a dedicated video on darkness rises to use them but hey ho hopefully this was mildly interesting and I'll see you all later [Music] thank you [Music] liar waste recycling initiated whoops

Channel: Implicitly Pretentious

Views: 86,917

Keywords: batman, batman 89, batman returns, tim burton, batman forever, batman and robin, catwoman, joker, riddler, two-face, batgirl, robin, dick grayson, george clooney, val kilmer, joel schumacher, michael keaton, dc, video essay

Id: u8EzlOcqSe0

Length: 17min 5sec (1025 seconds)

Published: Sat Jun 17 2023