Merchandising. Merchandising. Merchandising. Merchandising!!!!
Confession time: I loved Batman Forever when it came out. I remember seeing it at Mann's Grandview Theatre with my best friend, James Pinkett, on opening night. The place was packed. This was to be the first Batman movie of our time - being a little too young to appreciate the import of Batman Returns. Jim Carrey was exploding on the scene, at the height of his powers,and we were enamored of his slapstick gesticulations and gyrations. The hype was everywhere, the anticipation was palpable: this was a summer movie blockbuster at its finest.
It is a certainty that I saw the film more than once. I probably could have relayed the general plot to you, even these 16 years later (assuming I probably saw it sometime after 1995). But, watching it again, what struck me most was the merchandising. Even my memory has become commercialized. Most commonly I thought: "I remember that (toy, card, McDonald's promotion)." The Batmobile and the Bat-Wing (had the latter, friend had the former). The soundtrack. The Riddler's cane (check) and at least two or three of those crappy McDonald's glasses. Visions of trading cards, action figures, video games and movie posters dance in my head. THIS was a summer movie blockbuster at its finest.
I suppose it had to be all those things, for the film begs to be forgotten. Tommy Lee Jones as the over-the-top Two-Face. Val Kilmer's smell-the-fart acting. Nicole Kidman's undergraduate psychology - that fucking ink blot looks like a bat, I don't care what she says. Alfred's two-penny humor. And Chris O'Donnell... I am glad he is no longer a part of my life.
Yet everything is largely window-dressing for Mr. Carrey. He excels given the strictures placed on the story, the abrupt transitions and the total lack of contextualization for his mania and rise. Adjustment issues, lonely, mad scientist, hero-worship gone awry; you know the drill. But he does more with a cartoon than anyone else could. Manically prancing across the bat-cave, he is the proverbial insane super-villain in the candy-shop. When he and Two-Face set-out on an old fashion crime spree - sticking up banks and knocking over jewelry stores - his childlike sense of fun is pitch-perfect. He remains a bright spot, even if it bears little relation to the rest of the effort.
And, at its heart, Batman Forever is supposed to be fun. Clearly the product of studio group-think and pitched at a younger audience, like my ten-year-old self, we can only judge a piece of art based upon the premises under which it was conceived. In the balance this is where the third Batman installment fails the most spectacularly. Mr. Carrey aside, its a bore. Kidman's will-I or won't-I love machinations, Dick Grayson's attempts at rage and vengeance, too much glow-in-the-dark thuggish face-paint, all make Gotham and the people who inhabit it part dystopian comic fantasy, part shoddy thesis on power and madness. Everything and everybody is (at best) a two-dimensional piece in a puzzle that doesn't fit together. It's not that the film is incoherent. Rather, it is many different kinds of nothing.
Except a commercial. After all these years, it is still a commercial.
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