A disconcerting aspect of “Batman Returns,” Tim Burton’s 1992 follow-up to the 1989 blockbuster “Batman” is that Batman is not the main character. He spends most of the run time off on the sidelines, directly affecting very little of the action. In fact, Batman’s role in the movie is that of the love interest for Catwoman (played by Michelle Pfeiffer).
A strong candidate for the label of the main character of “Batman Returns” is the aforementioned Catwoman. The movie’s spine is built around the transformation of meek secretary Selina Kyle into the leather-clad femme fatale Catwoman. The script charts her descent into villainy and madness and gifts her one of the movie’s few fully fleshed-out character arcs.
Pfeiffer’s performance is of utmost importance to the movie, helping to manage and control its extremely particular, singular voice. No Burton movie has ever Burtoned as hard as “Batman Returns,” and with its macabre and ghoulish tone, it is esoteric and, to put it bluntly, weird. Pfeiffer’s performance holds the movie together, her sensitivity giving it the heart and humanity amongst the Grand Guignol imagery that it wouldn’t have otherwise but so desperately needed.
It’s Christmas in Gotham City, and Selina Kyle is the secretary to the Donald Trump-like business tycoon Max Schreck (Christopher Walken). She’s a clumsy, stammering mouse in glasses, fly-away hair, and a clearance aisle dress suit. Pfeiffer makes the intelligent choice not to try and convince the audience that she’s unprepossessing a laughably impossible feat but instead beaten down. Selina is a woman who has been damaged by life, struggling to make it on her own in the big city, living in a crappy, cramped apartment with only a cat for company, mercilessly abused by her boss in a low-paying job, unlucky in love, and inundated with constant reminders in the form of commercials of all the ways she falls short of the ideal.
Though surrounded by comic book absurdity, Selina leads a life that’s perhaps recognizable and emotionally understandable. Selina is a woman who has spent all her life being told all the ways she doesn’t measure up and hates herself for these perceived failures. Ian Nathan observed in the book Tim Burton: The Iconic Filmmaker and his works that “Pfeiffer spends much of the film’s first act talking to herself because within the world she inhabits, she’s not just powerless, but invisible. She captures the existential despair of someone who is so used to being ignored that she all but disappears.“ Ashamed after attempting to share an opinion at work, Selina abuses herself in a nastily mocking voice, “You stupid corndog.”
One night, Selina returns to the office after hours, forgetting important papers. While going through the filing cabinet, she uncovers Shreck’s scheme to take over Gotham’s energy plants. At the most inopportune time, Shreck also returns to the office and discovers that Selina knows about his dastardly plan. Despite her protests that she won’t tell, he pushes her out of the window to her death. “How can you be so mean to someone so meaningless?” Selina wonders to Schreck as she stands in front of the window. She is murdered precisely because she is a poor, single, childless woman living alone in the big city. No one would miss her.
As Selina’s broken body lies in the snow outside of Schreck’s office, alley cats appear as if summoned by an unheard beacon. The swarm of cats surrounds her, meowing loudly and licking at her face and hands. Something magical is happening. With a gasp, Selina’s eyes shoot open. She’s alive. In the daze of a recently reanimated corpse that she is, Selina returns to her apartment, where she fashions herself a costume out of leather. Trying on the dominatrix-like ensemble, Selina stands in front of a hot pink neon sign that reads “Hell Here” and speaks to her cat in a husky, drawling voice, “I don’t know about you, Miss Kitty, but I feel so much yummier.”
Selina is gone, and Catwoman is here, armed with a whip and nine lives. The feline femme fatale sets out into the snowy Gotham night with a plan for revenge on Max Schreck, one that will hopefully lead to his death. Her schemes lead her to come into conflict with Batman (Michael Keaton) and make shaky allies with the Penguin (Danny DeVito). Her determination to carry out the revenge is only tentatively shaken by a romance with the mysterious billionaire Bruce Wayne, which gives her a glimpse into another way of life.
Amid the superhero capes, “Batman Returns” is a horror movie, and Catwoman is its Frankenstein’s Monster, brought back from the dead and clad in a costume covered in thick stitching. And like Mary Shelley’s creature, the audience understands and even identifies with the rage and trauma that twisted Catwoman into the monster that she is. Pfeiffer’s throbbing, distraught performance never loses sight of Catwoman’s emotional journey. Underneath the aggression and sexuality, Pfeiffer, with her heron eyes and quivering chin, never lets the audience lose sight of Selina’s trauma and pain. This is a tragic character.
Catwoman is a woman on the verge of a nervous breakdown, a porcelain doll being held together by glue, and Pfeiffer gives her an exciting sense of unpredictability. You cannot predict what she will say or do whenever she enters a scene. The wild, uninhibited feeling gives the viewer a sense that Selina is discovering her identity as Catwoman in real-time. Pfeiffer plays Catwoman in a purposeful performance, with a husky Lauren Bacall-like drawl and a theatrically lascivious saunter.
For Selina, Catwoman is a role and one that she becomes less and less comfortable wearing over the course of the movie. The thoughtfulness with which Pfeiffer approached the role is evident in the deliberateness with which the two roles are demarcated and the sly ways in which Selina and Catwoman bleed into one another. Notice that while dressed as Catwoman, Selina will not raise her voice to its natural timbre but will allow her eyes to dart quickly back and forth and her mouth to fall open in a surprised expression when she falls out of her depth.
Early in the movie, as Selina crosses the street, she is startled by a passing car and comedically scampers to the sidewalk. The almost cat-like quality of the movement builds the bridge between Selina and the Catwoman she will become. It’s a full-bodied performance, the work of an athlete on the part of Pfeiffer. She uses the body – the posture and the gesturing of limbs – to tell the audience about the characters of Selina Kyle and Catwoman.
As Catwoman, she moves with fluidity and purpose, prowling the streets as a menace. Yes, she’s sexy, but more importantly, this woman is truly dangerous. Many people of a certain age speak of Catwoman as a sexual activation point, and I would wager that it is the physicality, the way that Pfeiffer uses her body to give a performance, that lodged in people’s minds, just as much as the skin-tight suit. The camera never leers at Catwoman and treats her as just a sex object, but her body is always front and center.
This aspect carries over to the way that Pfeiffer uses her voice. As Selina, she stammers and gulps on her words in a frazzled Diane Keaton sort of way, as though she was apologizing for even existing at all, while as Catwoman, she purrs, bites, and snarls, languidly feeling each syllable in her mouth. The script, from Daniel Waters, who also gave us “Heathers,” is arch and ghoulish, with a campy comedic bite to the dialogue.
Few actors could pull off lines such as the aforementioned “I feel so much yummier” or the moment when Catwoman begins to lick herself during a meeting with Penguin without becoming, in a word, cringe-worthy. But due to Pfeiffer’s wry sense of humor, immense commitment to the role, and masterful control over tone, they fit in with a sort of weird logic.
Michelle Pfeiffer’s Catwoman may have entered popular culture as a fetish object in a dominatrix object, but it is not a performance made up entirely out of sexual charisma. The lasting power of “Batman Returns” and its iteration of Catwoman comes from Pfeiffer’s carefully modulated, multilayered performance. Filmmaker Tim Burton has built a great many of his movies around the plight and humanity of the outcast, the freak, and the monster, from “Edward Scissorhands” to “Dumbo.”
Here, in “Batman Returns,” the monster is Catwoman. She is a woman who has been abused and mistreated in ways not unfamiliar to many other women, pushed to the edge until all she has is rage and anguish. And even while strutting around Burton’s gothic nightmare version of Gotham at Christmas, swallowing birds and licking Batman’s face, Michelle Pfeiffer never loses sight of Selina Kyle’s inherent tragedy.
