Let’s Get Nuts: The Vulnerability of Michael Keaton’s Batman, 30 Years Later

The hype for Tim Burton’s 1989 Batman was extremely real. I remember talk of people going to movies in the preceding months just to see the trailer. I don’t remember if it was this specific trailer, but I do remember that it was like this–no narration, just atmosphere, just footage, 90 seconds or two minutes you could just get lost in. It tantalized us with Burton’s steamy, shadowy, fully realized Gotham, the raw power of the Batmobile, the star power of Jack Nicholson, and, in a casting choice I found thrillingly off-kilter, Michael Keaton as Batman.

I was 12 that summer. I remember the thrill that ran through me once riding past a billboard on Sunset, just the shiny metallic logo on a black background and the film’s release date. It seemed to herald the arrival of a particular kind of cool that simply hadn’t existed before, at least not in my young life. 

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It’s interesting, isn’t it, what falls away as the years go by, and what remains? Now, when I think of that film, it isn’t the (admittedly outstanding) environmental design that I remember most, or the silhouette of the Batwing against the moon, or anything that seemed to make the movie so tremendously important and exciting in the summer of ‘89. Even walking out of the theater after my first viewing, I remember that I’d been blindsided by the peculiar vulnerability of Bruce Wayne, and it’s this that I still love about the film. 

Sixteen years later, Batman Begins would give us a version of the character who’s tremendously capable in or out of the Batsuit, a martial artist who cracks a ton of skulls in a prison camp before being dragged away by guards to solitary. “Why?” Wayne asks.

“For protection.” 

“I don’t need protection!” 

“Protection for them,” the guard quips, nodding back toward the numerous men Wayne has left writhing in pain. 

I can’t imagine Keaton’s Wayne ever being in a situation like this, and if he did get himself into one, I don’t see him being so dominant. As Batman, he’s a capable enough fighter, sure, but one gets the sense that the theatrics of his costume and all his accoutrements do a lot of the heavy lifting, as he uses the shadows of the city to his advantage, instilling fear into the hearts of his opponents. In an early scene, we see a criminal being dragged off by police after an encounter with Batman, raving deliriously. “I’m tellin’ ya, man! A giant bat!” 

When he lacks the suit and has to do what he can in broad daylight, it all feels very different. He pays Vicki Vale a visit at her apartment with the intention of telling her that he’s Batman, but their conversation is interrupted by the Joker, and pitted against him, Bruce feels completely outmatched. Smashing a vase with a poker, Wayne goes all in, doing everything he can to operate on the Joker’s level. “You wanna get nuts?!” he shouts. “Come on! Let’s get nuts!” But the Joker isn’t even fazed. He just pulls out a pistol, asks Wayne if he’s ever danced with the devil in the pale moonlight, and shoots him, without missing a beat. 

Bruce’s attempt to confront the Joker doesn’t feel like one formidable force against another. Compared to his incredibly threatening nemesis, in this moment Bruce comes across like a wounded child, trying very much to make himself seem big and scary in an effort to fend off danger and keep safe someone he cares about, but only succeeding in revealing how small and vulnerable he really is. It’s my favorite moment in the film. It seems to me that the power dynamic is not entirely unlike those moments when I’d try to make myself seem bigger than I was to protect my mom when my father went on drunken rampages, but I actually only felt very small and very scared. It’s in this scene that we most clearly see that Keaton’s Bruce Wayne is still very much the person he was in the moment his parents were killed, that the Batsuit and everything that goes with it are tools he’s created not just to frighten criminals but also to protect himself. I guess this is what’s stayed with me most from the film because as I’ve gotten older, it’s only felt more true to me that those of us who are made to feel lost and scared when we’re young, we can carry on, we can grow, we can heal, but that wound will always be a part of us.

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