Word: batmanic
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...redress all grievances, we have a new Batman movie. Director Tim Burton has chosen to make a deadly solemn film about a superhero whose mental state is just this side of psychotic. This Batman does not battle crime out of any sense of moral righteousness. He does it because he is obsessed. He likes to scare the hell out of crooks by dangling them off the edge of skyscrapers. He enjoys slinking around in the dark, vanishing and reappearing without warning in the thick mist that envelops Gotham...
...designer Anton Furst, it seems to be part Transylvania castle, part Star Wars fantasy, part comic book, but mostly a decaying caricature of Manhattan island. The city is covered in shadow and smog. Any superhero who hung out there long enough would inevitably become a bit deranged, but fortunately Batman (Michael Keaton) has a head start...
...almost expressionless. His voice, somewhere between a rasp and a whisper, reveals almost no emotion. It is easy to understand why the people of Gotham are afraid of him--early sightings of the superhero describe a six-foot bat who drinks human blood. Keaton does his best to make Batman a creature of the supernatural...
...Where Batman appears dark and impenetrable, his nemesis the Joker (Jack Nicholson) is just the opposite. Nicholson wears a bright orange and purple suit that stands out from the Gotham cityscape. Dressed like that, the Joker is not about to disappear into the fog. And Nicholson's face, wrenched into a permanent parody of a grin (the result of being dropped, by Batman, into a vat of toxic chemicals), is a perfect complement to Keaton's expressionless mask...
...especially in killing people. ("I am the world's first fully functioning homicidal artist," he tells Vale.) For the Joker, killing is a release of the pain and boredom of his pretoxic-waste life as a big-time gangster. In his own way, he is as driven as Batman...