In this case, what Dad was right about was the 1989 Batman with Michael Keaton and some weird music by Prince. "There was no 'pow' or 'bang' or 'sock,'" Dad noted, and his complaint was perfect. You see, for our family, and for a lot of people my age or a little older I suspect, Batman meant the TV show with Adam West and Burt Ward as Batman and Robin, and a slew of celebrities as guest villains--most notably, Burgess Meredith as the Penguin, Cesar Romaro as the Joker, and Frank Gorshin as the Riddler. The heroes intoned heroic platitudes with the straightest of faces, while the villains were free to indulge in the sort of hamminess usually reserved for Christmas pantomimes. As for the "pow," "bang," and "sock," you could count on those when the caped crusaders fought the villains' henchmen--each punch accompanied by a gloriously colorful comic book graphic. The show taught the world what "camp" meant, and it lasted a couple of seasons--as long as such giddy foolishness could last, I think--and even more importantly, it was meant to last some 26 minutes of TV time each week.
Now in 1989, Tim Burton had a novel idea, and it was enough to make a trailer that was really impressive. If you're of a certain age, you probably remember Michael Keaton in the bat suit grabbing a villain and saying, "I'm Batman" with about 50 layers of bad-ass cool. (Years later, I realized that was more a triumph of sound recording and editing, but it still rocked.) Burton's novel idea: what if you took Batman absolutely seriously? Unfortunately, the answer is, you can't. You can see it in Burton's first Batman, the one with Jack Nicholson's Joker, and in his sequel with Danny DeVito's Penguin and, most memorably, Michelle Pfeiffer's Catwoman. And that's who you remember, the villains with their weird deformities, wacky colors, and what-the-hell attitude toward their own evil. Burton's first Batman was something of a mess, with Keaton trying to be on the cool end of "real," and Nicholson multiplying the TV show by 10--but it's "real" and "serious," so the Joker dies at the end. In the sequel, Batman pretty much made an appearance--the villains had completely taken over.
Joel Shumacher gets a lot of flack for what he did to the Batman franchise, but what he really did was recognize that the camp had to be embraced. But Shumacher's films weren't perfect, either. Yes, there were George Clooney's bat-nipples, a masterstroke of ushering Batman out of the camp closet, and there was Arnold Schwarzenegger's Mr. Freeze making his henchmen sing along with the Snow Miser's song from "The Year Without a Santa Claus," but Shumacher didn't recognize the danger of overkill, and, frankly, too much money. If you go back to the TV show, part of the essential charm was its no-budget effects (Batman and Robin scaling the side of a building, with its "of course it's fake" sensibility, became a signature scene). The camp becomes too heavy with honest-to-goodness special effects, which I think illustrates a general rule of camp entertainment--it can't travel first class.
To return to The Dark Knight for a moment, this problem of taking the story and characters seriously is directly related to its overlength. (I won't even talk about the movie's twisted politics wherein George W. Bush is Batman.) The movie should have ended when Harvey what's-his-name turns into Two-Face, when exactly half his face gets burned by acid and he makes all his decisions by flipping a coin. I'm going to repeat that, because it illustrates the point I'm trying to make--he turns into Two-Face, when exactly half his face gets burned by acid and he makes all his decisions by flipping a coin. In other words, he's a comic book villain in a comic book world--you can't take him seriously. And you certainly don't want to close out his story arc by adding another half-hour to a movie that's already been banging on too long. What should have happened was, Harvey becomes Two-Face, giggles maniacally while flipping a coin, and we tune in text time. Or we buy the next issue.
And that's the fundamental problem with comic book movies in general--they're movies and not comic books. They're also not pitch-perfect TV camp classics. If the medium is indeed the message, then the message comic books send simply don't jibe with the message of movies. There are, however, a few exceptions. The first two Spiderman movies were pretty good (didn't see the third)--largely because you have a hero who already provides a running commentary on the world of superheroes. Peter Parker is essentially a dorky kid navigating a fundamentally ridiculous set of circumstances, the ridiculousness of which he completely recognizes. (That's why he can say things like, "I will be Spiderman no more"--he knows that sometimes, he has to talk like a comic book.)
You know which comic book movie really got it right? Superman, from 1978. What critics complained about initially--its unevenness of tone from "mythic" to "big city comedy" to "camp" to sincere heroism and back again--was its key strength. That's what you get in a comic book from page to page, sometimes panel to panel. It took not a "visionary" director like Burton or Christopher Nolan, but a fairly literal director like Richard Donner to realize that all those elements are part of comic book heroism, so he put them all in there, one after the other. It helps if you have an impossibly comic book style actor to play your hero, too, plus an impossibly legendary star to play the hero's dad. Christopher Reeve never really topped being Superman (could anybody?), and if Marlon Brando's legendarily overpriced turn as Superman's pop gave us the silliest part of the movie, that fits the picture even better. If only Marlon had taken a sock at one of his detractors, and we could see a big "sock!" on the screen. I'd like to think that scene exists somewhere, in a more perfect world.
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