The Weirdest Part of Tim Burton’s ‘Batman’
Tim Burton is known for making odd movies but the central plot of Batman is on another level. The movie has the last type of plot you would expect from a film about the Caped Crusader. What’s even more unusual is that nobody seems to talk about this artistic choice.
Tim Burton’s ‘Batman’ is a twisted love triangle
We expect superhero stories to revolve around clashes of personality and attempts to save the world. Burton’s Batman is, in essence, a love triangle. Bruce Wayne loves a reporter named Vicki Vale who becomes the object of the Joker’s affections. Vicki is apparently fine with guys who wear bat costumes but not guys in clown costumes, so she goes for the Caped Crusader. Of course, the Joker has a habit of taking everything too far, so the film’s climax revolves around him kidnapping Vicki and Batman trying to save her.
Why? Batman comics usually don’t revolve around love stories. Nobody would have gone into the theater expecting the film to revolve around a love triangle. It’s such an odd choice, but fans don’t talk about it, much less deconstruct it. The Vicki/Joker half of the triangle is part of a beauty and the beast motif that runs through several Burton films, including Edward Scissorhands, Beetlejuice and its sequel, and, arguably, Corpse Bride. Unlike other versions of the story, the beauty and the beast do not make an appealing couple in any way.
Tim Burton’s ‘Batman’ is not his best work
On some level, the fact that nobody talks about the love triangle in the film proves that it failed to make much of an impact on people. When fans discuss the movie, they bring up its visuals, the performances of Michael Keaton and Jack Nicholson, and Danny Elfman’s score. No one cared all that much about the movie’s storyline in the 1980s and that has not changed.
Is that such a bad thing? Not really. Popcorn movies don’t have to be plot-driven. All it proves is that Batman is not one of the Nightmare Before Christmas visionary’s best movies.
What the screenwriter was thinking
During a 2014 interview with Comics Alliance, screenwriter Sam Hamm discussed the writing of Batman. “Tim and I got along extremely well from day one,” he recalled. “The question that intrigued us both was, ‘Why would an incredibly rich guy want to put on a weird suit and beat up petty crooks?’ I mean, he’d have to be crazy, right? We hashed out a loose storyline built around the notion that we would start with the Joker’s origin and treat Batman’s origin as a mystery to be solved (by Vicki) in the course of the story. What would happen to Batman if he met a girl and started to go … sane?”
Hamm discussed the film’s legacy. “I’m actually pleased that the character continues to inspire new interpretations,” he revealed. “The scale of the [Christopher] Nolan movies makes our humble effort seem small, personal, almost intimate in retrospect. And although I do secretly kinda wish you could occasionally see a big-budget studio picture that wasn’t based on a comic book, I cannot deny that Batman has been very, very good to me.”
