My Batman Confession

I have a secret I’ve been harboring for more than 30 years. This will come as a shock to people who know me. But I think it’s time I come clean:

Despite what I said at the time, I did not enjoy Tim Burton’s Batman movie.

I blame it on spoilers. Massive, massive spoilers. In a time before the internet, I went into this movie more spoiled than I had ever been before or since. And it ruined it for me.

A 2011 study found that for most people, spoilers don’t really spoil anything and claimed that spoilers can actually increase your enjoyment of a story. But I know the truth. Come with me back to 1989 and I’ll tell you my tale of woe.

I was 14 years old, and at the height of my comic book reading and collecting days. Each week, my local comic shop set aside dozens of titles for my “pull list,” and I kept them all categorized and sealed in mylar bags with acid-free backing boards. I attended comic book conventions before they were cool (that’s not a humblebrag) and went to signing events where I met the people behind my favorite books. I had dogeared copies of the Overstreet Comic Book Price Guide. And I subscribed to the Comic Shop News, a weekly industry publication that let me know what to keep an eye on from the major and independent publishers. I was deep into comic book nerdery.

So you can imagine how excited I was when I heard that Tim Burton would be directing a new Batman movie. I loved Beetlejuice and Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure and I was game to see what he would do with Batman. So I followed the production as closely as I could back in pre-internet days. That mostly meant reading printed publications like the Comic Shop News, Starlog, Comics Scene, and Premiere, and even watching Entertainment Tonight for any bit of news I could find.

Like many others, I paused at hearing that Michael Keaton would be Batman. He wasn’t what I pictured for the caped crusader. I had seen him in Gung Ho, Mr. Mom, Johnny Dangerously, and of course Beetlejuice and I liked him generally, but was he Batman material? I wasn’t sure.

Then I read that Batman co-creator Bob Kane got over his Keaton reluctance by drawing a cowl on Keaton’s headshot, and that helped him visualize Keaton as Batman. I didn’t have a Michael Keaton headshot. But my local video store used to give away movie posters when they took them down from the walls, so I managed to get a poster for Clean and Sober featuring Keaton’s larger-than-life-size head, and I drew a Batman cowl on him as best I could. I did a terrible job, but if it worked for Bob Kane, it would work for me. I was on board. And even if Keaton wasn’t the right fit, Jack Nicholson as the Joker was a no-brainer, so I was excited for that.

The rest of the cast seemed fine to me. I knew Kim Basinger from Blind Date and My Stepmother is an Alien and thought she would be fine as Vicki Vale. Jack Palance was a legend. And all I knew about Jerry Hall was that she was Mick Jagger’s girlfriend. (You forgot she was even in Batman, didn’t you?)

I eagerly waited for the trailer to drop. Back then, that meant finding out when it would make its premiere on Entertainment Tonight and having the VCR ready to record it. And I watched that trailer over and over. I memorized every beat. Every cut. Every sound effect.

(I’m pretty sure it was this version, but I don’t recall it having no music. If that was the case, I didn’t find that notable at the time, but I find it fascinating now.)

The anticipation for this movie was huge, and Batman merchandise was everywhere. T-shirts, buttons, posters, toys, comics. It was a phenomenon:

At my local comic book shop, they sold packs of Topps Batman movie trading cards. I bought as many as I could afford, and here is where the spoilage began.

Each card had a still from the movie on the front, and a description of the scene on the back. Putting them together, I began to get a sense of the plot of the film. It got me even more excited to see it, but little did I know it would also begin to take the luster off the movie.

I put the cards in chronological order and I could make out the major beats of the story. But the cards didn’t go into that much detail.

Still, it was fun to put together whatever I could from those cards.

I counted down the weeks until the movie came out. Prince was doing the soundtrack, and of course I recorded the premiere of the video for his single Batdance. It was a bit silly, with the dancing Batmen and Jokers and Vicki Vales, but full of little soundbites from the movie, cut up and mixed with the music. I didn’t have context for movie lines like “Vicki Vale. I like —” (her line was cut off by Prince singing “Batman!”) and “I try to avoid all this but I can’t” but I could replay them over and over and hear those soundbites, a tease of what was to come.

One day at the supermarket I saw the mass market novelization in the magazine aisle. The movie was still a couple weeks away. Was this a mistake? Should the book be out already? I didn’t know then that novelizations are part of the marketing and are deliberately released before the movie. So I bought it before they could catch their error.

I brought it home. And I read the whole thing. I could see the movie play out in my head as I read. Suddenly the Topps trading cards all made sense. The book filled in the blanks. I felt like I had a secret. I knew what was going to happen in the movie, and it wasn’t even out yet.

The movie was just over a week away. My local radio station held a contest where lucky callers could win a copy of Prince’s Batman soundtrack and tickets to the local premiere of the movie. I spent all my free time glued to the station waiting for them to announce it was time to call in.

Each time they announced the contest, I tried to be the lucky caller. And finally I succeeded. I couldn’t believe it. I was going to get to see the movie before it even officially came out!

I received my free copy of the soundtrack on cassette and played it repeatedly while I waited for the big day.

Finally, the day arrived. My ticket to the screening did not guarantee entry, so I arrived at the theater several hours ahead of time to make sure I would get in. There were already people in line when I showed up in my Batman t-shirt, but not many. I got in line behind them.

As the line got longer, excitement filled the air. A local news station walked the line looking for people to interview, and I guess a 14-year-old in a Batman shirt who obviously got there hours early was a good subject.

Eventually, we were let into the theater! It was Cine Capri, the last giant single-screen theater in Phoenix. I sat towards the back to make sure I had a good view of the entire screen. The lights dimmed. I was ready.

Danny Elfman’s score played over the opening titles as a camera travelled through some interesting and confusing terrain. What were we looking at? The camera finally revealed that we’ve been seeing close-up details of the Batman logo. Clever! That wasn’t in the book. I loved it!

But then, everything else unfolded before me like some sort of strange dream. It was all new in that I had never seen the movie before, but I knew everything that would happen before it happened. I felt like my spirit was sent back in time and trapped inside my own body to watch the events of my life happen for the first time, but with the knowledge from the future of how it would all turn out.

The experience was so strange. There was a scene where Vicki Vale says “I like bats” and I recognized the first half of the sentence — “I like” — from the Batdance song, but then my brain expected to hear Prince singing as I had heard it a hundred times before. Instead, I heard the rest of the sentence. “…bats.”

This kind of dissonance happened over and over. I knew what to expect. I had experienced some of it before. Images I knew from the trading cards flashed by every couple of minutes. But nothing was happening the way I’d already experienced it. It wasn’t quite like the book. It wasn’t quite like the song. It wasn’t quite like the trailer.

It was dizzying. I was not enjoying it. How could this be? What had I done?

As the movie continued, I became more and more annoyed. Why was I having such a bad time? Was the movie bad? I realized that it wasn’t the movie. It was me. I had ruined it for myself. Too much of the movie was in my head, but in pieces rather than the whole that the filmmaker intended. It was completely spoiled.

After the movie, when people asked how it was, I answered that it was great. I explained how Keaton was ultimately the perfect choice, how Nicholson was at his best, how Danny Elfman had outdone himself, and how incredible the set design and the Batmobile looked. But as for whether or not I enjoyed it, that was a different answer.

Somehow over time, that feeling wore off. I saw the movie again and was able to appreciate it for its own merits.

But ever since then, when I have been tempted to learn too much about an upcoming movie or TV show, or when someone flippantly gives away a plot point or story twist, I always think back to how I ruined Batman for myself by learning too much. I can’t let that happen again. When I say “no spoilers,” I really mean it.

I have danced with the devil in the pale moonlight. And it ruined the movie.

Well, I’m glad I got that off my chest. It was also fun thinking back to a time when you didn’t get a new Batman movie every two years. What’s everyone thinking about the new one? Have you seen the trailer? It looks fine, but I might be having a bit of Batfatigue. Do we need another Batman and Catwoman story? And is Cillian Murphy playing the Scarecrow again or was he recast as some other character?

What do you mean Cillian Murphy’s not in this one? I saw him in the trailer. That’s Paul Dano? Those are two different people? Are you sure? Huh.

Thanks for reading. See you next time!

David