Michael Keaton’s Batman
Bat Dreams
Let us begin with Bruce Wayne, because in bat matters, he is the bat who matters most. Bruce Wayne lives a recurring nightmare. He sleeps in daylight — if he sleeps at all. He dreams of bats. He dreams of death. He dreams of the night he saw his parents murdered in front of him. Then he awakens, full of vengeance, puts on a cape, clambers across rooftops and confronts the darkness of his soul by chasing criminals. He becomes a bat to make sense of his life. This is what works for him.
Michael Keaton, who is not Bruce Wayne but will soon play him onscreen, also has a recurring nightmare. It too involves bats and despair. Unlike Bruce Wayne, who is haunted by his past, Michael Keaton, a heretofore beloved comic actor, is spooked by his future. Becoming a bat has brought no sense whatsoever to his life. Especially becoming a particularly legendary bat. Keaton is, it turns out, a most reluctant bat. He explains his terror:
“This is what will happen. I’m gonna do four or five of these movies, and it’s gonna become my career. I’ll have to keep expanding the bat suit, because I get fatter every year. I’ll be bankrupt. I’ll have a couple lawsuits going. I’ll be out opening shopping malls, going from appearance to appearance in a cheesy van. I’ll kind of turn into the King, into this bloated Elvis, smoking and drinking a lot. I’ll invent a little metal attachment, like a stool, for my hip, where kids can sit, because my back can’t take their weight. I can hear myself already — ‘Just climb right up there, li’l pardner. Is that yer mom over there? Heh-heh-heh. Go tell her ol’ Batman would like to have a drink with her a little bit later…'”
Bat Sex
Those drips, those drops. It’s bat pee! Bat pee is dripping from a pair of fruit bats that hang, batlike, from the stalactites of the Batcave. Well, the set of the Batcave, constructed for the $30 million movie Batman, a summer release starring Michael Keaton and Jack Nicholson and directed by Tim Burton. But wait! This is not the only kind of bodily bat fluid in evidence here. The bats flutter, they stir, they screech, they begin to engage in … bat fornication! Hot, raw, fierce, inverted bat heat. Bat love has blossomed in the Batcave.
“Hey, you two!” says Michael Keaton between takes, addressing the bats from where he sits below, at a bank of Bat-computers. “Don’t make me have to come up there and separate you!”
Keaton, being Keaton, is incapable of letting bat sex on a movie set pass without comment. This is his charm, his antic appeal. At the moment he is in the guise of Bruce Wayne. As opposed to that of Bruce Wayne’s alter ego, the biggest bat of them all. This relaxes the dress code a bit: Keaton has ostensibly descended to his bat lair from Wayne Manor wearing jeans and a black turleneck. He now occupies what looks to be a large barber’s chair facing several video monitors. There, on the monitors in freeze frame, is Jack Nicholson, a hideous rictus carved onto his leering countenance. Nicholson, of course, is the Joker, and he has just issued an electronic challenge for an apocalyptic confrontation: “Can you hear me, Batman? Just you and me. Mano a mano.”
Gauntlet heaved, there comes another distraction: Alfred the Butler (cheekily played by British thespian Michael Gough) shambles in with a visitor in tow. A visitor in the Batcave? The sanctity of the sanctum is at once shattered. Alfred has blown the bat cover by letting in an outsider! A girl! Kim Basinger! She plays photojournalist Vicki Vale (the press yet!), Bruce Wayne’s new love interest. They’ve slept together only once, Vicki and Bruce, but Alfred somehow feels that this entitles her to knowledge of his employer’s secret identity. Keaton glowers.
“Thanks, Alfred,” he sputters, hoisting one of his epic eyebrows. “Thanks a lot!”
He then grabs Basinger, and they begin to waltz.
Bat Attack
At this moment batheads everywhere are mortified. The preceding scene — the bat fluids, the acerbic japes, the waltzing — is what they most feared from a Hollywood rendering of their DC Comics idol. This is tampering, they are thinking, this is fey heresy. But alas, other than Alfred’s indiscretion, none of the aforementioned whimsy (which punchily transpired in rehearsal) will be seen in Batman, a decided bleakbuster. The film by Burton (Pee-wee’s Big Adventure and Beetlejuice) cleaves fancifully, even exuberantly, to the hallowed and somber bat mythos of the comics. The movie’s original script, by screenwriter Sam Hamm, was a work of dark art, reverentially circulated throughout Hollywood for months before filming began. It was reworked considerably by various hands during last year’s writers’ strike, when Hamm refused to do so himself. Still, it remains a gloomy folly that will generally please skeptical batheads, who are for the most part lifetime comic-book subscribers with dour dispositions.
But then, Batman himself is one glum customer. True, he is a good man, a noble man, a man unafraid to dress differently. But he has acute personality disorders, not the least of which is his compulsion to expunge all evil from Gotham City, preferably before sunrise tomorrow. What Batman is not is the tongue-in-cheek straight arrow essayed by the legendary Adam West on the ABC-TV series two decades ago. Batman does not wink at us when he cuffs criminals. He is no quipster, no hambone hero. Since his 1939 debut in Detective Comics, he has been mostly just plain grim.
Michael Keaton’s Batman, Page 1 of 5