Here's the brief back story: My parents were going to a dinner party or... something. I'm not really sure, but it was the kind of social function that a 13 year old and his 11-going-on-12 year old brother would stick out at. They decided it was best to take us to Waverly Place, home of a multiplex that's not a gym, buy tickets for two movies playing in close proximity to each other, and let us walk from one screen to the other between them.
Why Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Batman Returns? Well, there's a good chance we'd already seen Batman Returns when it opened, so they figured we'd be okay watching it again. We both liked Batman, after all, so that one made sense. Buffy the Vampire Slayer? Okay, I don't really know. Maybe the PG13 didn't worry them too much, maybe the comedy looked fairly innocent - I mean, it's a Valley Girl who learns she's the next in a long line of vampire killers. It had Luke Perry and Donald Sutherland and Paul Reubens. And Rutger Hauer - I mean, we'd already seen Blade Runner, even if we didn't understand it, so we knew most of these actors. It was a comedy about vampires, and the other options at the time were Universal Soldier, Mom and Dad Save the World, Boomerang, A League of Their Own, and Cool World*. Maybe the times just lined up right.
This is going to sound odd, but I don't blame my reticence on watching the series Buffy the Vampire Slayer on the movie of the same name. I actually like the movie, or at least with the last time I saw it all the way through, which was probably ten years ago. Maybe it doesn't hold up, and maybe (okay, almost certainly) the series aged better than the film, considering it's Joss Whedon's unfiltered version of the Buffy mythos. Still, I have a fond place in my heart for the goofy charm of Kristy Swanson fighting Rutger Hauer at the prom, or of Paul Reubens losing his arm and his prolonged death scene (which extends beyond the credits).
Whedon fans are well aware that Fran Rabel Kuzui and Donald Sutherland did some serious tinkering with his original screenplay, taking the story less seriously (or at least, overplaying the "tongue in cheek" aspects). The series was designed to reset perceptions about Joss Whedon's character, and it seems like the movie now has a bum rap (it has a 32% rating on Rotten Tomatoes and a 5.3 rating on IMDB). I enjoyed it enough in the theatres that there's a copy of Buffy the Vampire Slayer around here somewhere on VHS, and now I want to watch the film again...
At the end of Buffy, we walked across the lobby and waited for Batman Returns to start. Since it came out almost a month before, we must have seen the film before, but I honestly can't remember what the reaction to seeing it a second time was. Instead, I frequently drift instead to The Nightmare Before Christmas, a movie we was in the same auditorium a year and change later**.
I really had to think carefully about Batman Returns, because while I know that was the movie we walked across the lobby to go see, it just didn't make sense. My lingering sensation of Batman Returns is that it's a Christmas movie - that's when the film is set, Burton adopts his muted visual palette to include snow caked Gotham City and transitions the visuals to match the frigid tone of the film. Yes, Catwoman (Michelle Pfeiffer) is sexually charged, and the Penguin (Danny DeVito) is appropriately animalistic, but after Batman Returns begins on a Charles Addams inspired pre-credits sequence with the Cobblepot family (Paul Reubens and Diane Salinger), the film takes a persistent, emotionally frozen turn that bothered audiences.
This is all the more surprising because Batman Returns was released in June of 1992, in the middle of the "Summer Season," where it seems the least appropriate. I genuinely had difficulty reconciling my memories of Batman Returns as a movie (tonally, at least) with when I saw it on the big screen. It didn't seem possible that Warner Brothers would want to release a "winter" movie in the summer, but they did. Batman Begins makes sense, as does The Dark Knight, which are movies piping with steam or basked in sunlight. Even the cartoonish Batman & Robin, with Mr. Freeze as the villain, feels more appropriate to release in June than Batman Returns.
Speaking of appropriate, I mentioned in my Army of Darkness Retro Review that there was a semi-stringent policy about what the young Cap'n could and could not see during my teenage years (Army of Darkness and The Crow: "no", Pulp Fiction: "yes"), but having seen both films now over the years, Batman Returns is thematically more "adult" in tone than the exaggerated Army of Darkness. It's a continuation of themes of disfigurement, abandonment, and psychosis from Batman, and one could argue as "dark" as the ending of Edward Scissorhands, which I also saw at a young age. One might argue that in the late 80s and early 90s, what was considered "family friendly" was a little more lenient in terms of violence and disturbing content, which might explain the eccentricities of people around my age.
Either way, I still watch Batman Returns, still enjoy it more than any of the other cinematic iterations until The Dark Knight, and also plan on watching it again soon. In fact, I might stage a "double feature" event for both films so that everyone can enjoy the "related by Paul Reubens, mostly" pair. Let's pencil that in sometime soon, shall we?
* By the way, I'd say by 1993 we'd seen all of those movies, save for Boomerang and probably Cool World. We saw A League of Their Own at Mission Valley. I'm pretty sure I didn't see Cool World until high school, and to be honest I sort of wish I had never seen it.
** Which is, by the way, how that the film was much more kid-friendly and less frightening than I hoped it would be. Once I moved past that initial disappointment, I was and remain a huge fan of Tim Burton and Henry Selick's stop motion masterpiece.
1 comment:
As to Buffy, I'd already seen in (in Boston, filling an empty afternoon) and I knew you guys wouldn't see anything that'd scar you for life. It wasn't "Lady in White"...
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