Roger Ebert said that Tim Burton’s Batman was mean spirited and fascist.
It's an understandable mistake since it deals with cosmically loaded archetypes.
Batman, for instance, could be read as a character who doesn't overcome his demons, but totally gives into them and becomes one with them. A sort of black magic initiate.
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This film is as much of a Joker origin story as Todd Phillips’ Joker.
Heath Ledger’s Joker from Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight was a cultural staple and stole the movie - the irony being that the Joker in that film has dialogue written for the express purpose of telling the audience that he only serves as a plot device for the cultivation of the true inner tension of the movie between Bruce Wayne and Harvey Dent.
‘I’m like a dog chasing a wheel,’ he tells Dent.
He's an indifferent force of nature. Even his origin story is uncertain. The story of how he got his scars is different every time he tells it. He has no identity and believes nothing.
It's also of note that, despite the fact that Ledger’s joker has the clipped and stifled vocal cadence of a chronic masturbator, he comes off largely asexual.
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Though Heath Ledger’s Joker bares the more literal physical resemblance to Lautréamont’s Maldoror - cutting a smile into his own face - Jack Nicholson’s Joker bares the more confluent personality to Maldoror.
Tim Burton’s Joker is far from asexual. This Joker is horny.
Double crossed for fucking his boss’s girl, he scuffles with batman during a police ambush and falls into acid.
An Eastern European plastic surgeon couldn't fully repair the nerves and the best he could do was make him look like a clown. Go figure.
This Joker is not an indifferent force of nature. Now villianously transformed gangster, Jack Napier, carries his psychosexual drives and shadowy ambitions into his new life in a war against nature.
Everything he does is set to a Prince soundtrack (literally on a boom box in one case).
It's not clear how the Joker maintains such a loyal following of purple-wearing thugs but it's not important. What is important is that the Joker now considers himself a sort of criminal artist. A satanic surrealist. Maldoror and Marinetti in one. As he informs to a detective, the detective taunts him that he has no future. He gets revenge on the past by destroying art in the Gotham museum - a true futurist.
It is at this museum that he meets up with Vicki Vale, an award winning no-booty photographer known, apparently, for capturing the grisly aftermath of some kind of third world genocide - work for which the Joker teases her, suggesting that it's all sensational exploitation but also implying that the ghastliness of her work is a sexual turn on for him.
A pornotragicomic figure, we learn over the course of the movie that the Joker has developed a fetish - artistic practice? - for disfiguring women's faces, which he attempts on Vicki Vale by, uh, squirting acid in her face. She ducks.
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Bruce Wayne is Horny too. Michael Keaton, basically a comedian at the time he was cast, is my favorite Batman because he genuinely carries himself like he has post traumatic stress and possibly BPD.
Joker negs him and emasculates him, to add insult to injury. ‘Never rub another man’s rhubarb!’
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The Joker poisons Gotham with all kinds of nerve damaging agents in beauty products, and this is the 80s so that's basically 9/11.
This part is more of a vibe but not the meat of the film.
What's important is we learn that just as Batman created The Joker by accidentally dropping him in acid, The Joker created Batman years earlier by killing his parents.
Tarot symbolism abounds. We have the Magician and the Fool who face off, finally, in The Tower. Joker dances with Vicki Vale who seems to be drugged by some soporific scent on Joker’s clothing.
He's defeated ultimately when Vicki sees Batman in the distance and stalls Joker by pretending she's actually into him, and it's at that moment Joker can barely sustain his medically permanent smile any longer and, what comes over his face? For the first time he realizes he's never really loved anyone? Or maybe he just thinks it's fishy because he ultimately doesn't love these hoes.
Anyway, Batman and him then engage in a slapstick fight full of Spencer's prank items being produced like chattering teeth and big glasses, before Joker ultimately falls to his death from The Tower.
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I don't know if I can make a good case that this is the best Batman film. However it is one of my favorite films, period. I think it holds up. I like the claustrophobia of the very fake looking Art Deco Gotham, the horny hero and villian, the gay-coded tweakers, the Prince album as a soundtrack, the larger than life crime caper Danny Elfman score, the loony tunes antics of Jack Nicholson, and the overall pure libidinal and primordial thrust of the movie which is completely lacking in amy kind of moral pandering or preaching. Pure hatred and revenge.
As a child we had a copy of the VHS and it had a merch promo for Warner Brothers hosted by Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck. It was such a light hearted little intro to the sinister mean spiritedness that followed.
I also love that I'm old enough, not only to have seen previews for the theatrical release on television, but I remember some adults in my family putting on MTV or something and a then current music video for ‘Batdance’ by Prince playing and being blown away by it.
Overall this film was an early multi-media experience that was ahead of its time and unmatched by superhero movies that followed.