The Celluloid Heroes book I have been writing for the last several years has been an all-encompassing, all-engrossing project. The first draft of it clocked in at roughly 180,000 words. The current iteration sits comfortably at 140,000.
But during the winnowing down part of the rewrites, a great deal had to go. Turning these 40-odd films into a narrative non-fiction biography, essentially, of my entire life to date meant chapters I was (and remain) very fond of had to go.
Which brings us to this month’s episode about Battlestar Galactica.
Now you look at the above trailer and go “wait a minute, I thought Celluloid Heroes was about the cinema going experience”. Battlestar Galactica being a TV series would seem to be outside that purview on first glance, being a short-lived yet fondly remembered ABC TV series that aired between 1978 and 1979.
And you’d be right … save for the fact I was one of a relative few who first got to see Battlestar Galactica in a movie theater two months before its television debut.
And months before the toys began to show up:
How is this possible?
Well … the answers are, as always here:
Celluloid Heroes Episode Three is the kickoff to a mini-series-slash-trilogy of episodes I like to call Attack of the Killer B’s in which my focus shifts to three lesser-known, lesser-celebrated sci-fi epics I saw in theaters while living in Vancouver British Columbia between 1978 and 1980. All of them could be considered “B” pictures. All of them also began with the letter B. Sound off in the comments below which have been enabled, unlike last episodes’ posting (sorry about that) about which films you think those other B’s are, and make your predictions as to the remaining films I’ll be covering over this first 12-episode Season (hint: we end the narrative in late 1983 calendar-wise).
And so without further ado here’s a fun selection of images from this month’s episode. Listen on Spotify, Apple, Youtube, and on the Longbox Crusade Podcast Network.
My fourth and final year of film school was quite the different beast from the three years preceding. Whereas before our schedules were loaded with classes on film theory, film history, art history, business, design, film technology, storyboarding and more, the final year we had one class – film production. To earn our final grade and graduate we either had to make a thesis film, or work on at least three other films for other directors in a consistent supporting capacity; cinematographer, editor, sound recordist … or screenwriter.
Me being me I did both. I co-wrote two films for other classmates, story-edited a third, and co-wrote and co-directed my own film with roommate Marcus; an action thriller heavily influenced by Frank Miller’s “Sin City” comic book series titled Vigilante. It was slick and competent, it featured probably the first photo-real computer-generated images of any Ryerson student film, and was loaded chock-a-block with as much swearing and guys-sticking-guns-in-each-other’s-faces as one would expect from a mid-90s crime caper film. Our production teacher thought we were wasting our time, talent, and money on a “dumb action film” in his words, but there was a definite method to our madness.
Unlike me, Marcus still wanted to direct at that point though he was becoming more interested in animation. I wanted to burnish my action movie credentials because my plan post-graduation was to go gunning after the various low-budget genre outfits dotting Toronto at the time churning out low budget direct-to-video movies starring low-budget actors like Jeff Wincott, Jeff Fahey, Michael Dudikoff, and Sven Ole-Thorson. I wanted to be the low-budget schlock John Sayles before I moved on to make my Matewan, my Lone Star, and my Eight Men Out. I reckoned that armed with Vigilante and the various action and genre scripts I’d been shopping around I was bound to get some traction somewhere, right?
Well, yes and no. Breaking in as a screenwriter was neither easy nor was it quick. Not that I didn’t have success or the promise of it; getting read was easy and my work showed some potential on my imagined road to following the Sayles method of cutting my teeth in low-budget exploitation then graduating to more personal work; I just wasn’t there yet. But just writing a screenplay the right sort of people liked wasn’t enough; it had to be something they could sell, and selling took a long time, with a lot of false starts and false promise and having some genuine close calls with stardom on projects that nearly got made only to fall apart in the eleventh hour.
The prime example of this was Hell For Breakfast, a criminals vs. cannibals caper comedy Joe O’Brien and I had been writing on and off over the previous year. By then Joe had landed a job in the offices of low-budget film producer Damian Lee, best known then for the Jesse “The Body” Ventura-starring Abraxas: Guardian of the Universe, and the Corey Haim-starring adaptation of Dean Koontz’ Watchers. So it came to pass one day as Damian was flying to Los Angeles that Joe, in a fit of what was either confidence or stupidity, slipped a copy of Hell For Breakfast into Damian’s satchel without telling him. Damian, intrigued, read it on the plane and when he landed, called Joe to tell him how much he liked it and wanted to talk to him and me about it when he returned. One hastily signed option agreement and small fee later we were in business.
By early 1997 Hell For Breakfast was looking increasingly to become my big break. It was tailor-made to be filmed in one primary location on a budget low enough to almost guarantee a return on the investment, and was actually written to accommodate the geography of Filmshack even though by that point we’d all moved out. But Damian saw greater potential in Hell For Breakfast and for a time it seemed he was right. The screenplay made the rounds and all of a sudden became a hot property, attracting at one point a cast that included Judge Reinhold (Beverly Hills Cop), Sheila McCarthy (Die Hard 2), Michael Madsen and Chris Penn (Reservoir Dogs), James Russo (Once Upon A Time In America), William Forsythe (The Rock), Balthazar Getty (Young Guns II) and Corey Haim (The Lost Boys) himself. This led to a very surreal January 1997 weekend of screenplay work-shopping and revisions with Judge, Sheila, Corey, and Damian at the latter’s condo in Yorkville, right above where the University Theater used to be where I’d seen The Right Stuff just thirteen years earlier.
Sitting across from actual successful Hollywood actors it felt like my moment in the sun had come, but as rapid was its rise so too was Hell For Breakfast’s fall. Clashes of personality, clashes of vision, some bad blood between people I never even met, and most importantly a lack of interest from the international film markets killed the project later that year. It would eventually be resurrected, but that would be until much later in a story I will get to. Yet that was the story of my career in 1997; a series of false starts and early promise before it all came tumbling down.
Hell For Breakfast’s implosion wasn’t all terrible though. Now on Damian’s radar he commissioned me and Joe to write a Dirty Dozen-styled heist thriller set in the dying days of the Vietnam War, and a brief stint in a hastily assembled writer’s room developing a television series with the very-90s title Team Xtreme. Neither took flight, but they were all valuable in they taught me a lot more about the ins and outs of the entertainment biz, namely “have a contract in writing before you put pen to paper” followed closely by “know when to keep your mouth shut”.
Just staying alive and keeping a roof over my head was a challenge. Working long hours for low pay at my various minimum wage jobs was soul-crushing, but the worst part of it was working so much for so long for so little meant so many closely-knit friendships I’d made in film school were quickly fraying. Not deliberately but because we were all so damn busy and we were all struggling. Some gave up the quest. Some moved back home. Some found they didn’t much like the film industry and pivoted to different fields. We were all of us in that critical juncture between youth and adulthood where the question “what do you want to do with your life?” became much more frequent and much louder. I felt at times as if I was on a highway at night driving through an obsidian void, the only illumination being the headlights reflecting the lane divider line back at me. Small wonder David Lynch’s Lost Highway hit me in the right place and at the right time. But then David Lynch and I had a lot of mileage together already.
Beginning in 1989 my interests in movies had moved beyond the juvenile to the adult. Through my consumption of movie books and magazines I was hearing the names of groundbreaking maverick filmmakers like the Coens, Gus Van Sant, and Mike Leigh before I ever got to see any of their films. But the most mysterious, most intriguing of all of them was David Lynch. I’d heard about Eraserhead and of course had seen the notorious flop Dune because in the 80s bad sci-fi wasn’t as bad as a boring drama (and for the record I like that version of Dune, messy as it is). I was well-aware of The Elephant Man, having first seen its gloomy black and white movie trailer numerous times when we lived in Vancouver. But it was my buddy Elliott who mentioned he’d rented Blue Velvet and asked if I wanted to watch it, so armed with a VHS from the Video Place we settled into the basement rec room of our house on Chipman Road – the one my parents had build just in time for it to help blow their marriage apart – and settled in to Lumberton, North Carolina and a mystery revolving around the discovery of a severed human ear.
Blue Velvet was an experience. The closest thing I think I’d watched to that point that so perfectly captured the feeling of being in a waking nightmare. It was surreal, dream-like, and punctuated by shocking sex and brutal violence and topped off with an unhinged performance from Dennis Hopper in a movie teeming with eccentric (what we would later call “Lynchian”) characters. Both Elliott and I were in awe-struck silence the whole way through and when it was over, both added a silent “masterpiece” comment in our brains anytime anyone ever brought up Blue Velvet. The movie was a stunner, but I don’t think I quite realized just how much of an impression it made on me until after giving Elliott a lift home. Driving back to my place along Brockville’s quiet streets everything around me felt just vaguely “off” from the way the pavement felt beneath the car’s tires to the architecture of the houses I passed. I stopped at a red light and waited for the green. I waited, and waited, and waited a seemingly impossible amount of time as that red light just bathed everything in crimson, then started flashing on and off before finally switching to yellow, and then green. It was a moment heightened by my post-Velvet mood. To put it simply: it was very Lynchian.
But you say what is Lynchian? To me it is a world-view out of step with the normalcy we see on the surface. It is the teeming masses of ravenous insects that lay beneath your nice green suburban lawn. It is a confession that the world we inhabited was a chaotic place where one false step can pitch you over the edge into a twilight realm where the nightmares dwell. Lynchian is a visual and sonic assault on your senses; a mood more than a concrete idea or structure with an ominous, surrealist tone only a very select few people can hear and immediately recognize. It is, as Velvet’s protagonist Jeffrey Beaumont (Kyle MacLachlan) would say, “a strange world”.
I picked up a used copy of Blue Velvet on VHS later that year at one of the Brockville Public Library’s annual sales. Clearly it had been decided they had enough copies of Blue Velvet or one copy too many for comfort. I would practically wear that tape down to nothing over the next several years through multiple re-watches. The visual noise and terrible tracking issues that resulted just added to the ambiance of Lynch’s vision. In the degradation of that tape I felt like I was adding my own layer of reality to Lynch’s, distorting further what was pretty distorted already. My parents thought the movie was weird but they pointedly didn’t forbid me from watching or owning that copy. Like even they knew I was going to have to learn how strange the world we lived in really was.
The world – or at least North America and only for a short time – caught up with Lynch’s vision in February 1990 when his and Mark Frost’s TV series Twin Peaks went to air. Peaks was a phenomenon in those early months of a new decade, but even that understates what a lightning bolt to the TV landscape it was considering the top-rated shows of the time remained Cheers, Roseanne, 60 Minutes, The Cosby Show, and A Different World. Lynch’s and Frost’s stab at the small screen was unlike anything else on it and pretty soon everybody was talking about cherry pie, donuts and damn fine coffee. Here was a soapy murder mystery complete with bodies wrapped in plastic, dancing backwards-talking dwarves and an oppressively nightmarish mood that intensified as day became night and those traffic lights blinked red. In the more than thirty years since Peaks first aired it, along with Rod Serling’s The Twilight Zone, remains my favorite television program.
My obsession with Lynch would remain over the years, though it would wane with Wild At Heart which while bolstered by some nutso performances, brutal violence and graphic sex, felt like the Pabst Blue Ribbon version of Blue Velvet. Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me I would see that first autumn of film school and leave me mostly mystified. I wasn’t alone either; by 1993 Lynch and Peaks were mostly forgotten by a fickle public who had moved on to the much safer weirdness of The X-Files. Lynch still occupied a special corner of my memory though; when presented the opportunity to see Blue Velvet for the first time on the big screen at the Bloor Cinema I jumped at the chance and was just as transfixed by its widescreen images previously cropped by video.
I don’t quite remember how I first learned about Lost Highway, though I suspect it may have been the Nine Inch Nails song “The Perfect Drug” which would appear on the film’s soundtrack that first announced Lynch was back. And so it was on my birthday weekend of 1997 I opted for Lost Highway and not the other big movie released that day, George Lucas’ special edition of The Empire Strikes Back. I don’t think anything else shows how far removed I now was from that four year-old Star Wars fan I had been. I and the assorted friends who had joined me for the celebration settled into our seats at … I want to say the Carleton as it was the most centrally located art-house friendly cinema, but like much about my odyssey through Lynch’s nightmare landscape, there’s the truth and there’s my interpretation of it.
Lost Highway was a surreal odyssey that quite possibly never leaves the prison cell its protagonist Fred Madison (Bill Pullman) finds himself in jail after being convicted for the brutal murder of his wife Renee (Patricia Arquette). Fred is a jazz musician – a saxophonist – somehow able to afford a gorgeous home somewhere in the Hollywood hills. Or is it Renee’s house and is he leeching off her? Or is it her house at all, we can ask as through the course of the film we learn more about her mysterious past. We don’t know but despite seemingly being the happy couple there is strife. There is sexual tension, there is jealousy, and there is the most noir of clichés of wondering if your wife is really who she says she is.
What sparks our voyage into this Lynchian reality begins with somebody buzzing the intercom of their home and delivering the message “Dick Laurent is dead”. Fred doesn’t know a Dick Laurent; Alice claims to be just as in the dark. They chalk it up to a mistaken stranger; this is L.A. after all where weirdness comes with the territory. But that weirdness will not let them go not, and what follows are a series of mysterious videotapes that begin showing up on the Madison doorstep. Each contains grainy handicam footage of the Madison house. Then inside the house. Then inside the bedroom as Fred and Renee sleep. The final videotape is of Fred, standing over Renee’s mutilated body; an act that catapults him into a cell on death row, awaiting execution for a murder he claims to have no memory of. Or is the man in the prison cell actually Pete Dayton (Balthazar Getty) a young man with no memory of how he got in there with a now vanished Fred nowhere to be seen? Pete is who he says he is though, and the baffled police release him to the custody of his parents (Gary Busey and Lucy Butler) to resume his daily grind, vigorously screwing girlfriend Sheila (Natasha Gregson-Wagner), and being the auto mechanic of choice for ferocious mob figure Mr. Eddie (Robert Loggia).
And then there’s the very Lynchian Mystery Man (Robert Blake); a pale, Kabuki-painted figure who may be a figment of Fred’s imagination, or who may be an actual corporeal being. The final piece of this very Lynchian puzzle arrives in the form of Mr. Eddy’s moll with the evocative name Alice Wakefield, played again by Arquette this time as a buxom blonde. And if you can believe it, things from get a lot stranger from there, culminating with Fred, on the run from police, stopping outside his home and ringing the buzzer to announce to the occupants that “Dick Laurent is dead” bringing the journey back to where it started, then well beyond it.
I didn’t know what the hell to think of Lost Highway when it was over. So too did many of the people in the audience. It ended to some clapping, some scattered boos but mostly, to reference a different Lynch film, total silencio. It wasn’t even one of those movies we could say was “good” or “bad” because in those immediate moments following its conclusion we just didn’t know what the hell it was. Not that there weren’t some noble attempts over coffee and birthday pie afterwards. The most popular interpretation was that the Pete portions of the movie were all a construct of Fred’s tormented mind at his moment of execution; the violent jump-cuts, his face contorted, his skull bulging as he transforms into the much younger Pete. Like in Ambrose Bierce’s “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge” the rest of the movie playing out in a nanosecond where Fred imagines a different life, a daytime contrast to his nighttime world where he’s young and virile, where he jackhammers Renee/Alice to orgasm, where he kills the bad guys and saves the day. Another interpretation was the film’s narrative actually began in reverse, with Pete meeting Alice, murdering Mr. Eddie, and the two of them changing their names and growing to become Fred and Renee. But even then in the theater and in the post-movie discussion that followed those solutions seemed too convenient, too linear, too predictable for a Lynch film.
Written by Lynch with his Wild At Heart collaborator, novelist Barry Gifford, Lost Highway did not set the box office on fire. The film was largely reviled in critical circles and what audience Lynch had won with the quirky, TV-friendly Twin Peaks hit eject after it. A shame too, because Lynch’s next two follow-ups, the wonderful The Straight Story and the nightmarish Mulholland Drive are among his best work. In fact Drive (which I would see at the 2001 edition of the Toronto International Film Festival before the general public) shares so many similarities with Highway even their titles suggest a duality present in both films. In Drive it’s bright-eyed and chipper protagonist Betty Elms (Naomi Watts) who shares many traits with Fred Madison as she too navigates a nightmarish version of L.A. to help amnesiac friend Rita (Laura Elena Harring) discover who she is. Or is Betty actually Diane Selwyn; a struggling actress in deep depression following a disastrous affair with Harring’s Camilla Rhodes? Viewed as a companion piece to one another, both Drive and Highway communicate to each other with Drive’s mysterious Cowboy and terrifying vagrant seeming to be of the same universe as Blake’s Mystery Man in Highway. In a Lynchian world, both interpretations are probably one and the same. The acclaim both The Straight Story and Mulholland Drive received (the latter is frequently named the best movie of the 21st Century) plants Lost Highway almost as an outlier; a strangely forgotten Lynch film few mention, as though it never existed at all. But in the years since its reputation has grown as audiences have rediscovered Lynch’s film and placed it within the context of his entire body of work.
Lynch passed away just yesterday, and the news hit me quite hard. Lynch and his work were such a part of my formative, early years of becoming an artist I quite honestly shudder to comprehend the life I might have lived had I not seen Blue Velvet with Elliott when I did. More than any other filmmaking living or otherwise, I think it is Lynch who set me on this path I’ve been following all of my adult life and some of my teenage years as well.
David Lynch. 1946-2025.
Silencio.
*The preceding is an excerpt from my non-fiction book “Celluloid Heroes: A GenX Journey Through Fifty years of Cinema”. Still a work-in-progress, hopefully some news on that soon.
This is an old paperback. It’s been with me for what seems forever, accompanying me through ten different moves between cities, provinces, states, and countries. It’s an essential relic of my teenage years; specifically that moment when I began the first steps to seriously consider becoming a writer. Every time I open it for a re-read it always reveals something new about its contents, about the time it was purchased, and about myself.
It was spring 1987. I had been first bitten by the Stephen King bug the previous August when I saw Stand By Me, based on his novella The Body (already detailed in Celluloid Heroes Part III). I purchased this particular paperback at Leeds County Books, then one of only two bookstores in Brockville. The other, a Smithbooks, was situated in the Thousands Island Mall in the city’s north end, and a second-hand store, Seekers Books, was, like Leeds County, situated on the main downtown thoroughfare of (ironically) King Street. Of those three bookstores as far as I know only Seekers remains, having stopped there on a swing through Brockville back in 2022.
I don’t remember what prompted me to go shop for my first Stephen King that day though I suspect my Grandmother, herself a big horror fan, had something to do with it because she’d liked his books (I recall being morbidly curious of the garish paperback cover for Cujo on a visit a few years previous). While I had read The Body in the Different Seasons collection I borrowed from the Brockville Public Library (the basis for “Stand By Me”) I hadn’t yet spent my own money on a King book. In 1987 there were plentiful options: that day alone I scoped everything from Carrie, ‘Salem’s Lot, and The Shining, to then recent offerings like Pet Sematary, Christine, and Misery. But my eyes gravitated to The Bachman Books: Four Early Novels by Stephen King. I gave the back cover a read. These were four short novels written by King and published post-The Shining by King under the pseudonym Richard Bachman drawing its nomenclature from author Richard Stark – itself a pseudonym of Donald Westlake, one of King’s favorite writers – and Randy Bachman of Bachman Turner Overdrive, a song from which was playing on the radio when King was brainstorming surnames.
The idea, as King outlined in his introduction “Why I Was Bachman”, was simple; he was worried about oversaturating the market with his books so he and his agent devised Bachman, to publish small runs of some early novels written by King while still in High School and later College. To King these for short novels were “pretty good” but clearly not horror. Two of them, The Long Walk and The Running Man were Dystopian sci-fi, both centering around nightmarish gameshows in a futuristic fascist America (indeed they could have been set in the same universe). The other two were suspense/character studies; Rage, which centered on a high school student who shoots his math teacher and takes his class hostage, and Roadwork, a bleak tale of a man who’s lost everything – his wife, his son – but his house and soon find himself embroiled in a fight to keep that as well.
I decided to take the plunge, figuring four novellas for the price of one book (with taxes, around $7 and change Canadian) a deal too good to pass up. I paid, dropped it into my backpack, and biked home. I cleared the homework deck, stretched out on my bed, opened the book and began to read.
Of the tales in Bachman, Rageleft the strongest impression on me as its protagonist, troubled teenager Charlie Decker, was only a few years older than I. Because it was the oldest of the books – written by King while he himself was a high school senior – its voice felt closest to authenticity in all of King’s work especially in its capturing of the teenager’s voice (contrast that with the teenaged protagonist of his more recent Fairy Tale who feels like a 75 year-old man writing a teenager which, frankly, it was). Rage is all anger and self-righteousness; Decker, already facing suspension if not expulsion and possible jail time for attacking a teacher with an adjustable wrench, decides one day to “get it on”, brings a gun to school and shoots his math teacher in the head. Another teacher is shot trying to stop Decker. Then the door is locked, the school evacuated save for the other occupants of his math class. Over the next several hours Charlie will hold court, airing grievances, the whys and wherefores of who he is and what he’s done, and the other students will do the same with their own messed up, miserable lives.
Rage also left an impression I think because of my age. We’d moved to Brockville the previous August after a horrible year and a bit in Greensboro North Carolina (detailed elsewhere on this website; click the “Greensboro” tag for all the gory details). While I’d been friend-less in Greensboro, Brockville was almost the flip-side. Within the first few weeks of eighth grade I’d been invited to the cool kids’ parties, I landed my first (lame eighth grade) girlfriend (she wasn’t lame; just the idea of having a girlfriend in eight grade) shortly after, and was pretty much welcomed. By springtime things had settled, I was no longer the mysterious new kid, and while still abundant with friends and well-liked overall, could sense storm clouds on the horizon.
Those storm clouds? High School. You see, in Greensboro I’d been in a more typical middle school environment, where in Brockville eighth grade was pretty much like kindergarten through seventh; the same class of kids, the same classroom, the same teacher, the same school. These were kids who largely had been with each other since kindergarten; these were friendships and relationships going on nearly a decade in some cases. But with high school, a new building, new faces, teachers, classes, and classmates that was all about to change and change dramatically. I knew from the Greensboro experience what high school was; an alienating world of cliques, popularity contests and conflicts. I knew it was going to be rough and expressed as much to the friends I did have. They scoffed; things wouldn’t change that much, right? Well, I won’t go into all the details but it was once of those instances where the new guy was right on the money.
Rage was notorious for many reasons; perhaps the biggest was King’s decision to pull the book from publication following a string of school shootings that the perpetrators had either owned copies of the book or spoken glowing of it. Even today it’s a tough one to track down unless you head to eBay where a paperback identical to the one I own will set you back thirty dollars at least (some listings go up to fifteen hundred dollars, with a rare paperback of Rage in its original release asking an astounding eight thousand dollars). I would wager the inclusion of the hard-to-find Rage the main reason for such prices. As for King’s explanation for Rage (initially titled “Getting It On”) being pulled from print, well, the debate is ongoing, but any book involving a school shooting was inevitably bound to hurtle into the unyielding brick wall that is Life in America, one nation under gun, at some point. [1]
But if Rage was the primer then The Long Walk was the detonator. It was the characters; the interplay between all of them. With nearly a hundred named and numbered participants on the Walk naturally some fade into the background but King manages to juggle well over thirty speaking parts and have them all register on the reader. It’s also the world-building; the half-track, its stone-faced soldiers, the numbered participants, the three warnings, and the “ticket” delivered from the barrel of a carbine rifle. The premise is simple: the hundred participants of The Long Walk do just that, beginning at a marker on the Maine-new Brunswick border, traverse Maine, and enter New Hampshire before it all comes down to two finalists outside of Danvers Massachusetts. Set in an alternate version of 1970s America, John Travolta references and all, the history woven through the tale – oblique references to an East Coast blitz during the dying days of a World War II that continued into the 1950s indicate a much different outcome – remains part of the scenery familiar enough to us in the here and now (or in Walk’s case, there and then) while just skewing slightly off-kilter. The second longest tale in the collection after Roadwork, of all the Bachman Books it remains my favorite, as well as a top ten-top tier King for me.[2]
So I was all-in on King but after finishing The Long Walk I needed a break myself. School was winding down, I had assignments to finish, tests to pass. I shelved The Bachman Books with the intention of getting back to them when summer arrived. And that indeed happened, though the circumstances of that revisiting felt, in the moment, like something out of a King story.
Because the summer of 1987 would go down in my memory as the summer my face fell off.
We’d visited my cousins that July, and I had plans to be dropped off at my buddy Mark’s home to accompany him to their timeshare up in Muskoka. The visit went well but the night before leaving I started feeling under the weather. Like, really under the weather. I sparked a fever, I went to bed early, and when I awoke my face was covered in pockmarks.
Yes, friends, at the ripe old age of fourteen I had my first case of the Chicken Pox; late for most kids but right on time to fuck up my summer vacation handily. My four year-old cousin had just gotten over a case and was highly communicable and so I got it. Bad. Obviously there’d be no visit to Muskoka. There’d be no summer vacation at all. Instead I got to go home and get used to both the itchiness, and the smell of calamine lotion.
I was miserable. Trying to avoid any scratches or breaks that would leave me scarred. I was semi-successful – one pox formed under a pimple already formed on the bridge of my nose leaving a scar that’s still there to this day – but the worst part of it was the monotony. Being hit with the pox left me highly contagious so I couldn’t go anywhere or see anyone. Our house wasn’t air-conditioned either so that just added to the uncomfortable misery. I took to hiding out in our basement where it was cool and comfortable, like some hideous monster from, well, from a Stephen King story (or a Richard Matheson or Charles Beaumont one; two writers whose work I would discover through King and his non-fiction book Danse Macabre).
In the basement there was distraction aplenty. There was the TV and all that a wonderous 13 channels could afford me which in the daytime pretty much meant game shows in the morning, soaps in the afternoon, and nothing else until roughly 4pm when Video Hits on CBC would begin its daily run.
To be fair Samantha Taylor was 50% of why I watched Video Hits and I’m not alone there either.
My parents’ old record player and stereo was down there also, so I got acquainted with their music collection; Gordon Lightfoot, Simon and Garfunkel, Neil Diamond, The Guess Who, and Creedence Clearwater Revival were in constant rotation along with a freshly acquired copy of U2’s The Joshua Tree . Seeing as the basement was the most comfortable place in the house that summer I asked if I could sleep down there on the fold-out couch. For July into August I pretty much never left except to go to the bathroom and meals. To keep myself distracted as I slowly recovered, I exercised and I read. The exercise was to keep moving, and keep active. That combined with the sheer amount of weight shed while fighting off the pox meant I really slimmed down. The reading thing; well, since bitten by the King bug I had found increasing interest in the strange, the unusual, and the unexplained. My birthday gift earlier that year had been a subscription to the Time Life Enchanted World series of books; a must have after seeing the iconic TV commercials featuring Vincent Price.
Those Enchanted World books remained with me in the basement, but having read through Wizards and Witches, Ghosts, Night Creatures, and The Fall of Camelot enough times over my brain craved more stimulation and with not much else to do I once again picked up The Bachman Books and read the second half of the stories.[3]
Of the remainder Roadworkwas probably my least favorite, not because it’s a bad story (technically speaking it’s the best of the bunch being the then most recently written of the pack), but because its story of middle-aged Barton Dawes fighting back against a world that seems determined to grind him to dust were the most remote from myself and my life at age fourteen. Identification with the protagonists of Rage and The Long Walk was easy when you were within three years spitting distance of them, and The Running Man’s schlocky enjoyment was bolstered in large part by just how different it was from the Arnold Schwarzenegger movie “adaptation” released that same summer.
But Dawes’ dilemma in Roadwork was too distant for me to really appreciate; a father grieving the death of his child, estranged from his wife, unable to function outside of his own self-destruction and finding himself increasingly out of touch with a world racing to profit at all costs was too remote. Reading it in 2024 though I was shocked to find how prescient King/Bachman was in our modern age of late-stage capitalism, “enshitification”, the loss of our third places, homes, bars and nightclubs, movie theaters and bookstores bulldozed to erect more stacked shipping-container luxury condominium boxes. The interstate about to be rammed through Dawes’ home is itself a big con; relentlessly constructed without actual need so the unnamed state can continue receiving federal funding. Even knowing the outcome on my later reread I almost wanted the resolution of Roadwork to find Dawes triumph at the end, but it was not to be. While in the present day one empathizes with Dawes’ situation, the guy remains an unrepentant, unlikeable asshole. Not even the revelation all of this has transpired in part because of the death of Dawes’ young son from cancer humanizes him.
All the Bachman stories share one common thread in how bleak they are.[4] Two end in the deaths of their protagonists (I won’t say which ones), two end with their protagonists alive but quite possibly driven insane from their separate ordeals (again, I won’t say who). In point of fact Roadwork hews closer to King’s run of crime stories like Billy Summers, and the Finders Keepers series; taut suspense thrillers with vivid characters and pages that self-turn. Roadwork’s biggest problem though remains in its protagonist himself; while his story is a compelling narrative Dawes is just too miserable to enjoy spending time with. It was reassuring in a way to see that even in the early 80s King was still learning his craft as well.
Thanks to the pox I couldn’t see The Running Man in the theater and had to wait for video before I could. The movie and the story it’s based on are night and day. The latter is a glum, grim, very serious dystopian nightmare whose protagonist Richards must compete in a grueling game-show that sees him pursued across the northeastern US in a fight to the death, all to be able to afford the life-saving medical treatments his sick daughter needs. Contrast that with the garish Arnold flick where he squares off with just as garish gladiators in a hellish Los Angeles while Family Feud’s Richard Dawson plays a nightmare version of his genial real-life game-show host. Corny, campy, and contrasted with that same summer’s far superior Predator, The Running Man, with its cameos from musicians Mick Fleetwood and Dweezil Zappa, and wrestler Jesse “The Body” Ventura as a retired gladiator turned color commentator seems to be having more fun than I did watching it. As for the Bachman book, the relentlessness of the tale culminated in a fiery climax that while spectacular – and inevitable – left a sour taste in my mouth. In it I can easily see why Bachman never really took flight. What “Bachman” never learned, having died of “cancer of the pseudonym” when he was finally outed by an enterprising journalist, is what King did; that even the darkest of stories need some glimmer of hope in the end. Yes, even Pet Sematary.
The most interesting thing about these Bachman books is they all feel of the very same world. The Long Walk and The Running Man could share the exact same (“what if the Nazis won WW2”) universe, and it’s easy to see a kinship between Charlie Decker of Rage and Barton George Dawes of Roadwork: two unyielding objects who refuse to bend and end up broken as a result. I think though what makes these grim, gloomy Bachman protagonists fascinating is how believable they are. Who hasn’t driven past their own childhood home and found it re-painted and landscaped beyond recognition or torn down and rebuilt into a multi-unit modernist monstrosity? Who, in their teenage years, hasn’t felt like a misfit unable to fit in anywhere? Where the characters in these two more grounded in reality Bachman Books leap off the page is in the violent means in which they resist the roles thrust upon them; Decker kills two teachers and takes a classroom hostage. Dawes undermines his place of employment, shatters his marriage, and uses violent means to disrupt the eminent domain about demolish his home for a freeway extension that was unnecessary to begin with.
When finished with Bachman that first read in 1987, and still dealing with the pox (which was just beginning to fade), I asked my mother if she could go to Seekers and see if any Stephen King books were available I didn’t have any specific titles in mind so when she came home later that day with lightly used paperbacks just dropped off paperbacks of Cujo and Carrie I was set. Later that summer came Different Seasons – the book I’d already read from the library – but now a copy I could call my own and still own to this day. Cujo was lost when lent to someone who I legitimately can’t recall, but this copy of Carrie – a rare first edition paperback as it happens – is the one I still possess.
This copy, as it happens …
While I probably would have become a die-hard horror fan eventually, it was that summer my face fell off that really sparked my interest and my fandom of King; being stranded and temporarily disfigured at home was certainly an identifiable catalyst for that fandom. Neither horror nor King have really left my life either. There was a period in the 90s I drifted away from him, until 1997 – a decade on from that fateful summer of 1987 – when, working a dull as dishwater summer job I found myself hitting up the local used bookstore where I purchased and finally read the doorstops that are The Stand and It respectively. That return to Castle Rock, and Derry, soon led me to Jerusalem’s Lot, Dark Score Lake, and Little Tall Island; fictional locations very familiar to King’s constant readers and Greek to everyone else. After 1997 I never stopped gorging on King and while my interest has waxed and waned now and again every new King book is a must-read for yours truly. He’s in his 70s now and I hope he’s still writing when I’m in mine.
Sitting poolside this past summer I dove back into The Bachman Books for a month-long re-read and found those familiar names and characters waiting for me, ready to perform in my theater of the mind yet again. I held court with Charlie Decker in Rage, took The Long Walk with Garraty, McVries, Stebbins, Olson, and mad, mad Barkovich. I holed up in my house with Dawes in Roadwork, and followed The Running Man on his nightmarish journey through a New England landscape familiar to me now after six years as a transplanted Yankee. I’m nearly forty years removed from that teenager who picked The Bachman Books off the Leeds County bookstore shelf and decided to take the plunge, but reading those stories again made me feel fourteen all over again.
There remains a particular alchemy in re-reading some old favorites; treading familiar ground yet discovering something new every time. That’s why stories are important. That’s why they resonate, echo and ripple through our lives.
That’s why they matter and why they always will.
ADDENDUM: a reader asked if I was familiar with The Stephen King Book Club on YouTube. The answer is yes, and it was their step-by-step “broadcast” reporting on The Long Walk that inspired me to pick up the Bachman Books again for a summer reread. I recommend the channel and the first episode of their Long Walk Recap, linked right here:
[As an addendum, this will be the final website update of 2024. I’m busy on a couple of other projects, one of which I hope to formally announce here in January. Until then …]
[1] I have one myself – a thriller titled Underneath – that begins with an act of gun violence in a high school and gets even bleaker from there. Small wonder agents have given it a hard pass without even reading the thing. A pity too, as it’s one of my better efforts.
[2] The remaining ten (in no particular order) are ‘Salem’s Lot, Pet Sematary, Bag of Bones, The Stand, The Body, Apt Pupil, 1963, The Mist and, of course, On Writing. Honorable mention to his non-fiction book Danse Macabre; a big inspiration for my Celluloid Heroes book and web series.
[3] I still own that complete set of 21 books by the way and they remain one of my most prized collections.
[4] The Bachman books not included in this collection – Thinner, Blaze, and The Regulators – are all similarly downbeat. Small wonder Bachman wasn’t a blockbuster of an author …
Everybody has that one magical, occasionally momentous summer: the one that lingers in your memories decades later. For me that was the summer of 1994: the first summer I spent the totality of in Toronto. I was living in a house on Ossington Avenue with a bunch of other Film School nerds – Alex Boothby, Marcus Moore, Warren P. Sonoda, and a theater student named Jason Jones (later of The Daily Show With Jon Stewart among other impressive credits). I served as production coordinator and unit manager on two music videos Warren directed that summer for a Nova Scotia band named Fire Rooster:
Summer 1994 was also the last great summer of the Lollapalooza line-up, which I attended at Molson park in Barrie Ontario just north of Toronto.
And I did …
Owing to the fact I had money in the bank and a loose schedule with work it was in July post Lollapalooza that my buddy Mark, whose family was away on an Alaskan cruise, to come stay at his place in my old Scarborough stomping grounds, to grill burgers on the barbecue, to partake of the in-ground swimming pool, and to just enjoy being twenty-one years old. To this day exactly thirty years later the summer of 1994 remains the best summer of my life. Possibly because – and I have reflected on this before – it was probably the last truly care-free summer of my life which would become more complicated as the decade wore on. In my mind and memory the years of 1989-1994 reflect a certain moment in time and in my life almost diametrically opposed to the 1995-2000 stretch that was a lot less fun by comparison (though it had its moments as well).
In a strange way the summer of 1994 was a reflection of Generation X as well; we’d enjoyed a pretty good run the preceding decade or so as we moved to the forefront of the cultural focus. Our music, our movies, our media was dominating the marketplace with no signs of slowing. But as always on those clear summer days and warm summer nights you often miss the storm clouds gathered in the distance. But at the time t hey did feel distant to me. I was having the time of my life. Hanging out, hitting the bars, and watching movies. lots and lots of movies.
If there was jewel in the crown that was the Toronto movie theater scene back in the 1990s the Uptown Theater on Yonge Street just south of Bloor had claim to the prize. The Uptown, specifically “Uptown One” was the largest, most cavernous space with the largest screen short of the IMAX one at Ontario Place, and accompanied by earth-shaking THX-certified sound. For years it was the theater for the Toronto International Film Festival, hosting premieres, and the entirety of the Midnight Madness Film Series where my film school pals and I gorged ourselves on horror, sci-fi-suspense-action films during the glorious ten days of TIFF that kicked off that first week or so of school. It also hosted regular Midnight Movie screenings every Saturday; big-screen movies you needed to see on the big screen to fully appreciate them. Here was an opportunity to catch those movies we missed in theaters the first time around like Jaws, Die Hard, and The Shining.[1] And we availed ourselves of that opportunity every chance we got.
Front row, center, resting your feet on the apron were the best seats in all of Toronto by the way …
The great thing about these midnight screenings was they were almost always packed. Not just a few weirdo movie random types; these were large, diverse movie going crowds willfully denying themselves a good night of sleep to spend two hours beginning between 11:30 pm and 12:00 am to watch a movie they could have easily rented on video because they loved film. I will never forget the bloodcurdling shrieks of one woman sitting a few rows down from me during a screening of Aliens, as a face hugger was slowly picking its way towards an unawares Newt during the Med lab sequence. Same as I’ll never forget that moment in The Shining where I knew (through repeated viewings on video) which column Jack Torrance was hiding behind with his axe as hapless Dick Halloran approached and just had to wait for the audience to jump in their seats and scream.
The Uptown felt like a movie theater; a Movie Palace to be exact, for the main auditorium was enormous, dwarfing everyone who sat inside. The people who ran the Uptown seemed to genuinely enjoy their work too; so much so that on occasion they would surprise audiences with performances from local busker/fringe mayoral candidate Ben Kerr, who once serenaded a packed crowd of filmgoers with a song written for and about the Michael Bay film we were all there to see; Armageddon. The Uptown casts such a long shadow over the collective memories of all who went there that even today there are those in Toronto who mark its closing and eventual demolition (for a condo tower, natch)[2] as the beginning of the decline of Toronto’s movie going scene. All of the great – and to be fair not-so-great – theaters began to fall like dominoes in the early 2000s. The Uptown. The York. The Eglinton. The Hyland. The Hollywood. All replaced by glossy and garish multiplexes that promised Big Screens, Big Sounds, Big Experiences but always felt less special than a movie at the Uptown. Sure they had stadium seats, and state-of-the-art sound. But their lobbies were noisy, garish places with video games and attractions that cheapened the theatrical experience.
Put simply: The Uptown was the theater you went to when you wanted the best possible movie-going experience. When a highly anticipated movie was scheduled to play there, the line to get in routinely stretched around the block, which is where I, along with elementary school friend Mark and high-school/college friend Nathalie and hundreds of others found ourselves on Saturday August 29, 1994 as we queued near the front of that line to see a new Oliver Stone film called Natural Born Killers.
Outside of John Carpenter has any filmmaker has had as impressive a consecutive run of movies as Stone? Beginning in 1985 and ending just ten years later he directed Salvador, Platoon, Wall Street, Talk Radio, Born on the Fourth of July, The Doors, JFK, Heaven and Earth, Natural Born Killers, and Nixon. Stone was very much a filmmaker of his time; that mid-80s to mid-90s run. In that decade he had his finger as firmly on the pulse of the movie-going public as Spielberg and Lucas had from 1975-1985; not as a box-office juggernaut but for sheer gallons of ink spilled in discussing the controversial filmmaker’s body of work.
Controversy has been Stone’s thing pretty much from the start of his mainstream career. He had a spotty, unremarkable run as a low-budget schlock director in the 1970s before breaking out with his screenplay for Midnight Express, followed by ones for Conan the Barbarian and Scarface sparking that now perennial conversation of whether movies have become too violent. But his landmark Platoon put him on the map and again courted controversy with its depiction of soldiers doing less than honorable things in the jungle, most notably in the film’s central My Lai-inspired village massacre. But it was also a powerful metaphoric tale of seduction, of the embodiments of good (Willem Dafoe’s Christ-like Sgt. Elias) and evil (Tom Berringer’s brutal Sgt. Barnes) vying for the soul of wide-eyed youth Taylor (Charlie Sheen). Platoon, which I saw in the theater in Lake Placid NY while on a ski trip with my parents, knocked me on my ass. I wasn’t the only one: as the credits rolled my dad and I stood up to leave and realized we were the only ones in the packed cinema who were standing.
Stone seemed to dial back on that aspect of his work, and what’s remarkable about his subsequent films is in how tame they are. The heroes and villains of Wall Street (greed), Talk Radio (racists), Born on the Fourth of July (an indifferent government) and even The Doors (excess) are both conventional and easily identifiable. Nobody in a Stone film is an innocent though; all of them are tainted by their original sins, even Born’s paralyzed vet turned anti-war activist Ron Kovic, who joins the army to fight the commies in Viet Nam and is “enlightened” by a single VC bullet to the chest.
Stone dealt in broad strokes drama; subtlety was never his strong suit nor was it his intent. His messaging was graffiti sprayed over the steps of the US Capitol; a message best communicated by being shouted to the masses. How well that worked for you was all a matter of opinion. Some hated his proselytizing; others embraced it because it was so clear-cut obvious. It was blunt, straight-forward, lacking in nuance. It was an internet-era filmmaking before the internet really took hold.
But audiences were unprepared for 1991’s JFK; his propulsive, occasionally convincing, always thrilling deep dive into conspiracies revolving around the assassination of the president on November 22, 1963; a date that loomed as large in the Boomer psyche as September 11, 2001 would in the memories of subsequent generations. JFK was unforgettable both for the subject matter but also for the way the film was presented, in a dizzying montage of varied film formats, aggressive narration, flashbacks, and newsreel footage including the famous Zapruder film showing the back of the president’s head blown out over and over and over (“Back and to the left … back and to the left … back and to the left”) again.[3]
Had JFK been a sluggish historical drama it might not have garnered much notice; to that point Stone’s films had earned respectable dollars at the box office but never blockbusters. JFK changed that with its top-flight cast a virtual murderer’s row of talent; Kevin Costner, Sissy Spacek, Tommy Lee Jones, Gary Oldman, Walter Matthau, Ed Asner, Jack Lemmon, Kevin Bacon, Laurie Metcalf, John Candy, Michael Rooker, Jay O Sanders, Sally Kirkland, Wayne Knight, Tony Plana, Vincent D’Onofrio, Bob Gunton, Donald Sutherland (in one of the greatest single-scene performances in film history), and Joe Pesci. The $40 million dollar JFK earned $200 million worldwide, making the three-hour plus film a genuine success. In late 1991 it was the movie you had to see; I recall attempting on two separate occasions to see it in Kingston, and the film being sold out by the time we got to the box office window.[4]
But even to my impressionable teenaged mind Stone’s JFK was hokum, albeit entertaining hokum; a mix of narration, fast cuts, mixed media, all of it creating a propulsive story that’s convincing because it moves so fast. And had I seen JFK in the theater in 1991 (it wouldn’t be until 1994 that I, along with Warren, went to see it at the Paradise Cinema not far from the rental we were sharing) I would be writing about it and not Natural Born Killers, which came along barely than three years later and proved to be an even more controversial film. As though Stone himself was saying: “You want controversy!? I’ll give you controversy!”
Natural Born Killers feels born from the response JFK received in the mainstream press and the often vicious, vitriolic attacks Stone himself received from politicians and pundits, not to mention what I am sure were many angry letters sent to his production office. Stone was personally affronted by the JFK backlash and identified the news media as the main culprit, accusing them of whipping up negative reviews and creating controversy all at the behest of their corporate masters. The news media who, in Stone’s mind, had for three decades perpetuated the “myth” of Kennedy’s assassination, toeing the Warren Commission’s line about Oswald being the lone gunman.
And yet Stone himself even identified that while the old guard hated JFK, it tested and played very well to the filmgoers born after the assassination: Generation X. The ones much more willing to cast a wary, distrustful eye to their governments, their leaders, even their parents. Like he too saw this next generation as more willing to ask tough questions of what the news deigned to show them.
If only there were a project he could make to draw from that audience …
It took a little while to figure out what that project would be. Stone followed JFK with Heaven & Earth, the “third part” of his loosely connected Vietnam trilogy, this time focusing on the experiences of a Vietnamese woman caught up in the war. The film’s mixed critical response and box office failure seemed an additional rebuke. Here was Stone addressing his critics and attempting to tell a woman-centered story about the horrors of war, only to have it be soundly rejected, presumably as an additional punishment for stirring the conspiracy pot. The failure of Heaven& Earth seemed to light a fire in Stone. All he needed was the right project.
Then producers Don Murphy and Jane Hamsher passed Stone a screenplay they’d optioned by a young writer on the up-and-up named Quentin Tarantino. Natural Born Killers was an incendiary black comedy about two thrill-killers, married couple Mickey and Mallory Knox, and how they become media superstars, aided and abetted by the same tabloid news media that depends ratings-wise on their exploits. The 90s saw the rise of tabloid and “Reality TV” which was another “only in the 90s” innovation that would rise to dominance beginning in the early 2000s beginning with MTV’s The Real World – a “documentary” about a group of 20-something GenX-ers cohabitating in a NYC loft – that made minor celebrities out of “normal” people (until the next season’s cast came along, and the next, and the next …)
“Reality TV” extended to the actual real world, and incendiary criminal acts became daytime news fodder as well. Court cases like Eric and Lyle Menendez, Lorena Bobbitt and – in a bit of real-life-to-showbiz synergy nobody saw coming, OJ Simpson, captured the public’s attention whether we wanted it or not. You couldn’t avoid knowing who Tonya Harding and Nancy Kerrigan were because the nightly news blasted you with every bit of information about them. The Goldman-Simpson Murders occurred earlier the summer of Natural Born Killers’ release, prompting Stone to add in a shot of OJ – still a year away from his trial – at his arraignment to the film’s closing montage weeks before release. With the first Gulf War resolving itself too quickly for the news media to really make bank it was looking for something – anything – to draw in viewers and keep them there as 24-hour news network CNN made its bid for dominance and Rupert Murdoch’s Fox News was waiting in the wings, lunching its 24-hour channel in 1996.
Stone loved the script. It represented his chance to take some retaliatory shots at the media who had eviscerated him and make them, not the killer couple, the true villains of the story. In Stone’s mind (and in his massive rewrite, aided by Richard Rutowski and David Veloz, of Tarantino’s screenplay – the budding auteur only got a story credit), Mickey and Mallory are victims of the same trash media and insidious reach of television that made Stone himself Public Enemy #1. Mickey’s fleetingly glimpsed childhood is one of abuse and murder and suicide. Mallory lives in a home under constant physical and sexual abuse at the hands of her domineering father (Rodney Dangerfield) and doormat of a mother (Edie McClurg); that flashback plays out as a deranged sitcom with laugh track called “I Love Mallory”, filmed on a soundstage with big bulky TV cameras. Mickey’s entrance is to audience applause, and tasteless jokes get the laugh-track treatment.
Mickey and Mallory were young punks (and killers, let’s be clear) but are simultaneously the only three-dimensional characters in the film. The rest of the main cast – Tom Sizemore’s media-savvy super-cop Jack Scagnetti, Tommy Lee Jones’ prison warden Dwight McClusky, and Robert Downey Jr.’s trash tabloid reporter Wayne Gayle – are all cartoon characters played to an even more cartoonish hilt. The only actor who comes close to projecting any sense of gravitas is activist turned actor Russell Means, who cuts a sympathetic, short-lived figure in his brief role as a Native American who takes Mickey and Mallory in during their desert wanderings.[5]
Natural Born Killers is a surreal road-trip through the American psyche, or at least that’s how I imagine Stone described it. Everything in it is played to the nth degree, from teenage serial killer groupies proclaiming Mickey and Mallory “the biggest thing in murder since Manson” to the Superbowl Sunday prison post-game broadcast interview an incarcerated Mickey gives to Gayle that ends up stirring the prisoners to riot by speaking some hard, harsh truths about America, about human nature, about life and how all of ours are exploited by wealthy parasites who get rich off others’ miseries. It’s a crude film in violence, in action, in dialogue, but it is never boring. Viewed in the present it sometimes feels and looks like the pre-internet-pre-cell phone-pre-social media outrage cycle world that it definitely is. Yet it also reads as a warning about where America was heading with its obsession with fame and fortune and celebrity. Gazing about the current hell-scape of influencers and social media stars and provocateurs stirring up outrage in an attempt to go viral and boost their own SEOs, the world Natural Born Killers prophesized has become our reality.
But in one particular area Natural Born Killers genuinely stuck the landing and one must give credit to producer Jane Hamsher, who assembled a series of mixtapes for Stone to listen to while driving around scouting locations through the US southwest. Tapes loaded with the crème of the crop of angry, aggressive GenX-centric music. The idea being this was the music and these were the bands people like Mickey and Mallory would have grown up with, who expressed the rage of a generation crying to be heard. Stone responded with genuine enthusiasm; despite being nearly fifty years old, the film he produced was squarely dropped into GenX territory. Its soundtrack, produced by Nine Inch Nails’ Trent Reznor, was an exercise in audio overload featuring L7, Jane’s Addiction, Cowboy Junkies, Dr. Dre, Leonard Cohen, Rage Against The Machine, Diamanda Galas, Marilyn Manson, The Specials, The Melvins, and Duane Eddy that played out in the film and on its accompanying soundtrack album as one long uninterrupted fever dream of music, like an Adderall-addicted teen scanning through the radio station settings. And it was that soundtrack that led to Natural Born Killers becoming one of those “of the moment” movies that captured the imaginations of its intended audience; GenX.
As to why it hit so hard, one has to look at Natural Born Killers in the context of the year in which it was released for 1994 was a volatile year for GenX beginning with the suicide of Nirvana front-man Kurt Cobain. Alternative Nation had been shattered to pieces and it was looking for something to grasp onto with the same spirit Nevermind had brought to the mainstream. Bands like Oasis, Blur, and Green Day tried to fill the void and while soon to become megastars in their own right, they all lacked that rage Cobain delivered in his guttural howl so well; unlike Cobain, these artists wanted to be superstars.
TV was no help either, at the time preoccupied with the ongoing OJ Simpson saga. The movies of that summer had also been a bit of a letdown. Yes, there were megahits like The Lion King and Forrest Gump and Speed, but for young adults culturally immersed in nose-rings, tattoos, dyed hair, and loud aggressive music they were all pretty safely mainstream. While Tarantino’s next film, Pulp Fiction, astounded everyone by winning the Palm D’Or at that summer’s Cannes Film Festival it wasn’t due to be released until that October. That was the environment Natural Born Killers was about to cannonball itself into.
Seeing Natural Born Killers on opening weekend truly felt like participating in an act of generational rebellion. The film was already being called “dangerous” and “incendiary” and “irresponsible”; naturally we had to see it in the best theater possible. As already stated the line to get into Uptown 1 stretched around the block but Mark, Nathalie, and I were near the front. We had tickets, but what we didn’t have were the best seats in the house. That was my job to secure and I knew, from numerous screenings at the Uptown that they were in the first row. Normally the first row is where you don’t want to sit as it’s right up against the screen, but the Uptown’s design was as such that the first row put you up against a lengthy apron leading to the screen further back, and you could put your feet up on the edge of it and stretch out (if there was one failing in the Uptown’s design it was the lack of leg-room).
So I was ready to do my part, and once they tore our tickets and let us inside the building I was off like a shot, racing up the long staircase while the rest crowded onto the escalator. I was in the theater, bounding for the front row, and managed to secure the three seats in dead center before either Mark or Nathalie knew what had happened to me. On locating me right where I said I would be, they were amused, but appreciative for having the best seats that night for what would be an epic experience.
And to be fair, if the experience of seeing Natural Born Killers was better than the actual movie, you couldn’t fault it or us for feeling that way. We did enjoy the movie because we were all the right age – in our early 20s – for its blend of satire, violence, humor, and anger. The audience was fully on-board, laughing at the blood and gore, cheering when the villains got their just desserts, and just tripping out on the truly wild visuals; even compared to JFK, Natural Born Killers looks and feels like no film Stone – indeed anyone – had made before or since.
There was a definite split in reactions to it as well and the split happened right along generational lines: in short GenX loved Killers and Boomers loathed it. In hindsight it’s not difficult to see why in both cases. What the movie and Stone seemed to be saying was this is the world we’ve created for ourselves. A world where ratings, where profit, drives all, and as long as Mickey and Mallory promise Big Ratings and Ad Revenue they’re not only safe but dare we say necessary to keep that spice flowing even if it means a few people get killed along the way.
Stone’s film ends with a roll-call of then sensational media figures Erik and Lyle Menendez, Lorena Bobbit, Tonya Harding, and the Big Kahuna himself OJ Simpson – at the time just arrested and charged with the murder of his estranged wife and her friend – everybody in that audience at the Uptown recognized them because we’d been inundated with news stories courtesy of the tabloid culture that came to infest mass media discourse in the 1990s and never really went away. Every week a new outrage, every year another Trial of the Century and on and on and on. Fiction became fact by sheer repetition. TV gurus like Oprah elevated shills like Drs. Phil, Oz, and for all I know Frankenstein as well.
In short, the world Natural Born Killers depicted was a Boomer Creation, and a world GenX had no choice but to live in. What Stone and company were pointing to was something we all had come to realize; that the media was not our friend. That the days of Edward R. Murrow, Walter Cronkite, and Dan Rather were coming to an end. Truth was less important than ratings, allowing the Rupert Murdoch’s and Clear Channels and Sinclair Broadcastings of the world to buy up the competition was a genuinely bad thing that was just the first salvo in a decades-long decline in independent voice and independent everything.
Natural Born Killers marked the end of the Stone Decade. Never again would the filmmaker capture the public’s imagination and ire in quite the same way. His post-Killers output of Nixon, U-Turn, Any Given Sunday, (multiple cuts of) Alexander, W., World Trade Center, Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps, Savages, and Snowden, while all possessed of their own merits just didn’t have the same zing as Platoon, Born on the Fourth of July, JFK, and Natural Born Killers. Those movies put him on the map, and simultaneously made him the punchline to many lesser types’ jokes.
Viewed through the passage of time though he was a filmmaker unlike any other working at the time with the possible exception of Martin Scorsese. But whereas Scorsese’s obsessions were of the rot in the human soul, Stone’s was the rot at the heart of American Identity, extending to his early 2000s documentary series “The Untold History of the United States” which blames American interventionism for every ill and evil of the twentieth century (while simultaneously hand-waving away the crimes of Stalin, Mao, and Pol Pot as aberrations of rather than features of totalitarian communist ideology).
In a similar way Natural Born Killers ended up marking the end of the GenX era as well – the angry, volatile brand of it anyway that had dominated the discourse and culture for that first half of this tumultuous decade — which was always a minority, albeit a vocal one. That rage of being a rat in its cage which began in 1989 had lost its way by the end of 1994. Kurt Cobain was dead, the economy was improving, things were looking better than they had at the beginning of the decade. Britpop took the wheel and promised happier, bouncier times. Grunge would soon become a footnote; an outsized one in GenX memory to be fair, but still a footnote. Music was becoming lighter, brighter, peppier, and spicier.
Yes, GenY was making its voice heard and they had the internet as their megaphone. The next five years would look very different from the previous five. Grungy black and white was becoming Gen Ys boy bands and pop princesses. It all made NBK feel like the last hurrah for Alternative Nation as well. I would go back to see the movie in the theater two more times, and I’ve since seen it numerous times more on DVD. Somehow we (my roommates and I) acquired a big bus-shelter sized NBK poster for the living room wall where it hung pretty much until we all moved out at the end of 1996. I’ve revisited in times since but I’m a much older man now and it doesn’t posses that lightning in a bottle it did in 1994. Life looks a lot different in your fifties than it did in your twenties and while I’m still angry at the state of the world I work hard on my side to improve it in whatever ways I can. Certainly not through the barrel of a gun. Definitely not by staring at a screen.
And despite 1994’s summer weighing outsized in my mind there have been great summers to follow, not coincidentally all of which have occurred since my son was born. Nothing makes you appreciate summers more than your child to share them with you. His experiences become your re-experiences, from summers on Cape Cod (1982 and 2024 respectively) to relaxing poolside (1994 and 2024), movies, museums, activities and adventure. Life is what you make it and that applies too to summer.
Looking back today, as dangerous, incendiary and irresponsible as Natural Born Killers may have seemed one cannot deny that it was onto something. What seemed an exaggerated cartoon portrayal of American life in 1994 has sadly become more prescient now as we’ve hurtled into the third decade of the 21st Century. There’s a full laundry list of atrocities – Columbine, Newtown, Uvalde, Tr**p – that have come to pass since Natural Born Killers’ release to be met with a largely benumbed gaze as “just another day in America ending with Y”. Mass media has given way to social media and its amplification of everyone’s voices to little benefit. Because of algorithms always seeming to hand a bullhorn to the very worst aspects and voices in society it keeps people watching and sharing and scrolling. It makes celebrities of stupidity and ignorance, it platforms cruelty and delivers hatred to an audience addicted to its flavor. If Killers was made today Mickey and Mallory would have been social media stars, broadcasting their crimes on TikTok to millions of adoring fans and spurred countless of copycat murderous couples killing for Internet clout.
In one of life’s many ironies the then-present day critics of Stone’s film would likely admit now that as offensive to their sensibilities the film was then, in the cold hard light of today it looks positively quaint compared to the daily outrage and insanities we carry around in our pockets everywhere we go. It’s a shame Stone is more or less retired from filmmaking; he could make a hell of a movie about our present day nightmare.
[1] The Uptown staff were also big movie fans, so much so that the tickets for that screening of The Shining were deliberately misspell to read “The Shinning” in reference to a popular spoof from The Simpsons TV show.
[2] The reason the always profitable Uptown closed? It was sued for not being wheelchair accessible. When the court ordered them to make it compliant, the prohibitive cost of a retrofit led the Famous Players chain to shutter the building and sell the property to a developer. In a tragic twist to the story, during the demolition of the building a wall collapsed onto an ESL school housed next door, killing one.
[3] So mainstream was JFK that it was parodied in an infamous episode of Seinfeld.
[4] Think of that: a three-hour plus film about the investigation into the Kennedy assassination selling out multiple times. We’ve come a long way, baby. Or not. It wouldn’t be until sometime in the mid-90s I finally saw JFK on the big screen, at a rep screening at Toronto’s Paradise Theater with my roommate (now president of the Director’s Guild of Canada) Warren Sonoda.
[5] In this post-The Doors film Stone hadn’t quite let go of his obsessions with Native American mysticism.
ADDENDUM:
A reader asked about the significance of this entry’s title. It comes from a great song by the great 90s hip-hop group Disposable Heroes of Hiphoprisy “Television, The Drug of a Nation”, the message of which might just as well apply to the internet culture of today.
Summer always seems endless when you are younger and the first week of summer vacation was always my favorite. School was wrapped up for another year, and the memory of those hallways, those lockers, those desks lingered fresh in the mind as we embarked on what was two full months of freedom from pencils, books, and teachers’ dirty looks. Living in Brockville Ontario at that time was a definite advantage; being a river town swimming and boating on the St. Lawrence were the norm and I recall many afternoons spent piloting the small outboard boat we owned around the bays and inlets lining the Canadian side of the river (and occasionally the American side as well – you could do that pre-9/11).[1] Before July and the official start of the summer season began, that last week to handful of days remaining in June were an oasis of calm before summer “really” started, with its jobs, its family trips, its obligations, and with its hopeful leisure time.
Summers for me back then was also extra-special because that was when the best movies were released. Not “best” as in critically because they frequently were pretty mediocre or downright bad, but “best” as in “this is a movie where you munch popcorn and allow yourself to be transported”. Unlike now where a “summer movie” can be released in the dead of winter) back then Hollywood made us wait until the warm months to unleash a horde of summer-friendly cinematic fun upon us. They didn’t have to be all-time greats; they just had to be good enough to be a good time[2] and I, like so many others of my generation, were fortunate to have lived through the Golden Age of the Summer Movie: Jaws, Star Wars, Grease, The Empire Strikes Back, The Shining, Raiders of the Lost Ark, Dragonslayer, Superman 2, Conan the Barbarian, Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, Poltergeist, The Thing, E.T. The Extra Terrestrial, Tron, Blade Runner … and that carries us up to only 1982.
By 1989 movies were very much at the forefront of my mind as well as I was very much focused on pursuing a career in the entertainment biz. But doing so back then was difficult verging on impossible when you were a kid in a small-town far from the bright lights big cities of New York, L.A. and Toronto. There wasn’t much in the way of opportunity for a Brockville teenager like there was one who hung his or her hat in Studio City, Van Nuys, or Santa Monica. There also wasn’t much opportunity to learn the ins and outs of moviemaking, in this pre-DVD behind the scenes and audio commentary world of 1989. Learning the ins and outs of the movies themselves meant going to the cinema, renting the VHS, or watching every movie-related program TV had to offer.
Thankfully I had two great lifelines courtesy of TVO – TV Ontario to those of you not from Ontario Canada. If you are from Ontario though, those three letters will signify something. TVO was and remains the province’s public broadcaster, airing special interest programming, news, multilingual documentaries, children’s programming, all of it funded from the public purse. It is, like PBS in the states, one of the finest examples of our tax dollars at work we can genuinely see and access. TVO was also producer of two informational TV shows I watched pretty religiously.
The first was Prisoners of Gravity, created and produced by Mark Askwith; a well-known comics luminary (who I would come to know quite well as my career took off) who later went on to become a segment producer at Canada’s Space: The Imagination Station – Canada’s answer to the Sci-Fi, later SyFy Channel. Along with host Rick Green (of the famous Canadian comedy troupe The Frantics), Prisoners of Gravity chronicled the happenings in the sci-fi community with an emphasis on literature and comic books. Interviews with luminaries like George Clayton Johnston, Robert F. Sawyer, Neil Gaiman, Alan Moore, Frank Miller, Julie Czerneda, Tanya Huff, William Gibson, Harlan Ellison and Spider Robinson. Prisoners of Gravity (or “PoG” as fans referred to it) aired weekly on TVO between 1989 and 1994 on Friday nights and I watched it any chance I got. PoG dug deep into the art of writing, of ideas, of crafting stories that genuinely provoked thought rather than just passive distraction. Outside of Ray Bradbury and Richard Matheson I wasn’t a huge sci-fi and fantasy literature fan when I started down the PoG road, but by the end I was a full convert.
The second TVO show was actually a block of films that aired Saturday nights titled, appropriately, Saturday Night at the Movies, hosted by a kindly looking elderly bald man with glasses and a broad grin named Elwy Yost.
Elwy was what we would call one of the great ones; a man clearly in love with films, and whose love of them was infectious. The program for Saturday Night was simple; two films aired back to back, with an intermission comprised of interviews with the actors, filmmakers, and behind the scenes personalities behind those films. Hitchcock and Ford, Hawks and Curtiz, Donen and Wise were favorites of Elwy’s, but he also introduced me to the films of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, Billy Wilder, and Francois Truffaut among others. Saturday Night excelled in introducing you to the movies that in some cases you couldn’t see elsewhere. While home video was certainly well-entrenched in the late 80s I would never had a chance to see 1968’s The Swimmer or 1964’s The Americanization of Emily without Saturday Nightat the Movies.
This is all to say I spent many a Saturday night at home, watching Elwy and TVO when other teenagers were out cruising the strip, getting drunk, and getting laid. It wasn’t uncommon to make up some excuse to friends as to why I couldn’t go out on a particular Saturday, just so I could stay home and watch Matewan with an accompanying interview with its director John Sayles, or Jason and the Argonauts because Elwy’s guest that night in conversation was none other than fellow Canadian James Cameron, who himself looked as delighted to be talking with Elwy as Elwy was with him.
The films aired without commercials and uncut, and my home library of video tapes back then included many episodes of Saturday Night at the Movies. I could have just set the VCR to record and gone out but for me watching them in the moment was a lot more satisfying, in the same way see in a film in the theater always is. It was the immediacy, the “blink and you’ll miss it” element that to this day has me leave my phone locked in the car or left on the dresser at home when going to a show.
My interest and education in film was largely self-taught, through Starlog and Premiere magazines, through video rentals and newspaper reviews but also by going to the movies. Summer movies were a big deal back then and had been since Jaws devoured the box office in 1975. Up until Jaws movies were generally slowly rolled out across the country, opening first in the larger markets like New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, San Francisco and Toronto. You would frequently hear about a movie like The Godfather or The Exorcist for months before you got to actually see it. But with Jaws and then Star Wars the movies began to open bigger, and wider. Throughout the 80s the summer movie season became Hollywood’s Christmas, Thanksgiving, Easter, and Birthday rolled into one two-month stretch where you could more or less make your year. And if one of the many movies released became an all-time classic of its genre like Dirty Dancing, Ghostbusters, or Beverly Hills Cop, you would continue to rake in the dollars on home video. Over the intervening fifteen or so years since Jaws the summer season became bigger and longer, with the first “summer” movies debuting in mid-May and running more or less through August.
In the list all-time Legendary Summers of my lifetime, three from the 1980s stand out. 1982 gave us Star Trek II, The Thing, E.T., Poltergeist, Blade Runner, Conan the Barbarian, and Tron. 1984 had Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, Ghostbusters, The Last Starfighter, Gremlins, The Karate Kid, Purple Rain, and The Terminator.[4] 1985, with Back to the Future, The Goonies, and Cocoon seems almost quaint by comparison. The trajectory by then was well-established, and movie critics would groan collectively as Hollywood dumped its biggest releases into the summer months, and pine for the relatively calmer, saner, “better” films of autumn.
But the Summer of 1989 was different and everyone recognized those differences in the moment. Dubbed “The Summer of the Sequel” we had Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, Star Trek V: TheFinalFrontier, Ghostbusters II, The Karate Kid Part III, License to Kill and Lethal Weapon 2 among the pickings, along with Honey I Shrunk The Kids, The Abyss, When Harry Met Sally and Uncle Buck.[5]
But to look at 1989 and the Summer Film in general, we have to look at the third film from a quirky filmmaker who, after Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure (1985) and Beetlejuice (1988) was handed the reigns of a comic book character best known to audiences as the star of his very campy 1960s TV show. And while Tim Burton’s Batman, released to theaters 35 years ago this day of publication, is campy in numerous ways, it ably demonstrated especially to me the role a director played in turning the everyday into the extraordinary, in those rare cases when the right director meets the material best suited for him. Simply put: Batman 1989 would have been a very different film if it had been directed by anyone other than Burton.
Now let me add a quick little 2024 aside: I love Batman. I love the character, I love Gotham City and its Rogue Gallery of Villains. Heck, the wallpaper of my iPad is, you guessed it …
But in 1988-1989 Batman was kind of hokey to me. My prevailing memory of watching the old 60s Batman TV show likely dominated this belief, as did the old Superfriends cartoon series. And while friends in Brockville had talked up The Dark Knight Returns, Batman: Year One, and Batman: The Killing Joke as being dark, adult stories, I had yet to be converted.
Burton’s film would change all this.
Like many of us, Burton was the weird kid. Growing up in sunny suburban Burbank California, he was obsessed with Universal horror, Vincent Price, Edmund Gorey, German Expressionism, and monster movies on TV. Graduating from Cal Arts he became an animator at Disney before branching out into directing. His unique visual style was his calling-card, and crossing paths with comedian Paul Reubens, Burton’s star would climb when Reubens picked him to direct Pee Wee’s Big Adventure. He followed that with Beetlejuice; a truly odd film that proved to be a big hit, and introducing Gen X to one of its seminal poster girls (and personal movie crush); Winona Ryder. I saw Beetlejuice with a group of kids from school, and could hear the girls we were with unimpressed by Winona’s Goth Lydia Deetz, calling her gross and weird and creepy but those preppy teenage girls just didn’t understand the appeal of being strange and unusual.
It was shortly after seeing Beetlejuice in the theater in 1988 that a friend mentioned that Burton was directing the upcoming Batman movie. That Michael “Beetlejuice” Keaton would be playing Bruce Wayne, with Jack Nicholson taking on the role of the Joker. At first I thought this friend was having me on, but an issue of Starlog confirmed it all later that month. In that pre-internet age news traveled slowly; movie news particularly so. It wasn’t uncommon to learn a movie even existed until you plopped down in a theater seat and saw the trailer pop up on the big screen. This was the case when in early 1989 when going to see a movie whose title escapes me now, seeing the trailer for Batman. You can still find it on YouTube and it’s quite a stark difference from the slickly produced trailers of today (and to be fair even back then). There was no music, basic production sound, no narrative. Just clips from the film which looked like nothing any of us had seen before. It looked dark, gothic, expressionistic, seeming to straddle multiple eras all at once, with the duster coats and fedoras of the criminal gangs contrasted with the Batman’s hi-tech gadgets and car:
Bat-mania developed slowly over the first months of 1989. We all knew the Batman movie was coming, but so too were the returns of the Enterprise Crew hot off the smash success of Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home, and the Ghostbusters were back as well. Even Indiana Jones had his Last Crusade, indicating this third film would be the final entry in the Indiana Jones series.[6] So yes, Batman; but would it be a hit? Would audiences who grew up on Adam West and Burt Ward and the notion that comic books were kid’s stuff respond?
In that sense, the decision to have Prince record songs for the movie, and be so enamored with the Batman mythos the Purple One recorded a whole damn album of songs was a masterstroke. Prince’s Batman album is widely derided now and even was so on its release, but you cannot deny it helped usher people – particularly the teens who made MTV, Much Music, and CBC’s Video Hits a staple of afterschool viewing. The “Batdance” video in particular was a real banger in that regard, with Prince appearing as himself, as a character calling himself “Gemini”, with dancing Batmen and Jokers and Vicki Vale’s cavorting about an obvious soundstage while music punctuated by audio clips from the movie. It’s one of those “only in the 80s would this work” moments in pop culture that burned itself into the memories of every GenX kid who watched it. It also made every school-age kid who saw it want to see Batman.[7]
I was looking forward to Batman like most summer filmgoers, but more so because by 1989 I was a big comic book fan. I had been one since 1984 when I discovered the G.I. Joe: A Real American Hero comic series but my tastes had matured though by 1987 as I discovered books like Hellblazer, The Shadow, and Sandman. Brockville’s first comic book shop, The Comic Cave, opened in 1988 and I spent many hours there browsing the racks discovering a new favorite book almost every week. A friend finally convinced me Batman was cool when lending me his paperback editions of Batman: Year One, The Dark Knight Returns, and most particularly The Killing Joke. That book was what made me most interested to see Batman, especially when in an interview in Starlog Burton made mention of it being an influence. It’s no surprise the version of Batman occupying my brain was a much different beast from the one we got.
I actually didn’t see Batman opening day despite it actually arriving at the Parkedale Cinema in Brockville on day of release, because opening day and night were spent at my friend Casey’s lakeside cottage outside the city. Being teenage boys being boys the “sleep-over” became a “let’s stay up all night and play poker and burn shit in the camp-fire” so by the Saturday afternoon when I and my buddy Mark visiting from Toronto staggered back to my house to crash, we somehow decided seeing Batman that night was the much more prudent course of action than, you know, sleeping. But movies were important back then. They were cool back then. And back then you had to see it on opening weekend so you could say you had seen it. And so, after a hasty dinner of pizza the two very bleary-eyed of us staggered to the Parkedale to stand in line for tickets and crowd into the sold-out theater to take our seats and try to get through Batman without nodding off.
Doing anything while sleep-deprived is a challenge. Seeing a movie while sleep-deprived makes for a wholly different experience. And I noticed it from the beginning as the Warner Brothers logo transitioned to a gloomy landscape as the credits rolled and Danny Elfman’s now legendary score played over what would eventually be revealed to be the Bat-symbol. The movie was dark, and it was dim, and while I was attentive to it, in its most gothic moments – the opening in Crime Alley, the raid on Axis Chemicals and the (re)birth of the Joker, all the way to the operatic showdown atop Gotham City Cathedral, I couldn’t be sure I was in the theater watching Batman, or having a dream about being in a theater watching Batman. As I recall afterward Mark felt the same way, and on the way home we quizzed each other (“Did the Joker really pull a massive gun from his pants and shoot down the BatWing?”) to confirm that yes we had actually seen Batman and hadn’t been dreaming the entire thing.
So I’d seen Batman. But did I like it? To be honest I couldn’t be sure, so I saw it again a second time in a state of full waking to make sure what I’d seen the first time was what I’d seen. And at the time I was kind of mixed. It certainly had atmosphere to spare, but the story was thin, the action clunky (Burton is many things but a director of action is not one of them). That’s not to say it wasn’t good because deep down it did what every film should do which is to transport you to a time and a place where you do not exist. Where you are just some silent presence observing the trials and tribulations of these characters and their world.
In Batman’s case the world is Gotham City, and what a dingy, dreary world it is; possibly the best representation of the city outside of Matt Reeves’ The Batman in 2022. Bolstered by Anton Furst’s gothic production design, the Gotham of Batman is very much that “third main character” after Nicholson’s Joker and Keaton’s Dark Knight.
As for the plot, well, there really is none. It’s an origin story. For the Joker. For Batman. And for the dominant form of blockbuster moviemaking that would really kick into gear in the late 1990s with Blade, the X-Men series, and Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man trilogy, all of which paved the way for 2008’s Iron Man; a modest hit that ended up kicking off a cinematic universe to spread across screens big and small over the following fifteen years.
It’s surprising looking back even now to consider just why Burton’s Batman hit so hard because it’s so damn weird. Not weird like Batman Returns would be in 1992, not weird as in the “what the hell were they thinking” weird of Batman and Robin of 1997. Batman is a loose, almost plot-less film carried along by its stunning production design, moody cinematography by Brazil‘s Roger Pratt, loopy score by Oingo Boingo’s Danny Elfman, snazzy costumes by Bob Ringwood, and diametrically opposed performances by Keaton’s brooding, slightly off-kilter Bruce Wayne/Batman and Jack Nicholson’s very off-kilter Jack Napier/Joker. The premise of Batman – Batman must stop the Joker from poisoning the citizens of Gotham City – is pretty much the plot. The vibes are funhouse mirror though, with Nicholson chewing scenery and camping it up to the hilt while the normally just as loopy Keaton in the straight role of “man who dresses as bat”
Batman is an exercise in style and in mood. It is a brooding, shadowy nightmare of dark alleys, Lovecraftian architecture, and gothic styling. More than any movie I’d seen up until that point, Batman made me truly understand and appreciate what a director brought to the table. A Batman film by Tim Burton is diametrically opposed to one from Joel Schumacher, Christopher Nolan, Zach Snyder, or Matt Reeves. And while all of the latter films are very much their own things all of them owe some of their vision to Burton’s first film. We certainly see shades of it in Batman Begins’ expressionist jumble of tenement slums and in The Batman’s nightmare version of Gotham. We even see it in 2023’s box-office bomb The Flash, which resurrected Keaton’s Caped Crusader for an extended cameo and did absolutely nothing interesting with him.
Batman 1989 was also quite campy, becoming more so as the Joker begins his campaign of terror. Like he’s hijacking the narrative, tearing away the brooding noirish atmosphere of the film’s first act and giving it a dose of his Smylex gas. Street mimes become Tommy-gun-blasting maniacs. Trenchoat-and-fedora goons get makeovers with snazzy leather jackets bearing a Joker logo. Gotham’s mayor, police chief, and District Attorney Harvey Dent (Billy Dee Williams) break the fourth wall and look to the Joker on his TV screen as he interrupts their TV-screened press conference. The criticism of Batman from its fans; the heavy use of Bat-machine guns, Bat-bombs, Bat-missiles would seem to fly in the face of the legacy of a character who never used a gun, but this isn’t the comic book Batman; this is Tim Burton’s Batman and Batman is a Tim Burton movie.
In the wake of Batman’s extraordinary success, what was truly surprising though was the lack of any films Batman inspired. We really didn’t get any other “comic book movies”; no new Superman, Flash or Wonder Woman, no Spider-Man, Captain America, or X-Men either (Marvel’s finances were in a general shambles throughout much of the 1990s). Instead what we got were movies starring characters whose origins were pulled from the same Great Depression era as Batman and Superman. 1990 saw Dick Tracy, 1991 gave us the retro throwback The Rocketeer, 1994 gave us The Shadow, 1996 The Phantom. It was as though Batman’s enormous success somehow convinced studio execs that the movies the kids of the 1990s were desperate to see were the characters their grandparents grew up with back in the 1930s while listening to their exploits on the radio. None of these Batman-inspired follow-ups hit in the way Burton’s film did (and most of them bombed outright). What was even more surprising was that Batman didn’t inspire that wave of comic book movies; all the 90s brought us outside of modest hits like 1994’s The Mask and outright flops like Barb Wire were three more Batman movies.[8]
As to why it was such a hit though, I wouldn’t point to comic book fans, which even then were not a major force in a box office success. I would suggest instead that because so many of that summer’s movies were sequels audiences were just looking for something new even when “new” in this case meant a character first created in 1939 who’d been a recognizable piece of pop culture for the intervening fifty years. The Bat-Logo was hip. It was cool. Using it as the principal marketing hook was a master-stroke, and one that you can credit producer Jon Peters with; he alone may be the one most responsible for changing how movies were marketed and you can see the simplicity of Batman’s logo poster throughout the next thirty-five years of film. All throughout that summer and well into fall a Batman logo t-shirt was considered to be a “cool” fashion choice, even among the girls. Batman may not have been a great film, but it was a fun one, and one that just happened to be the right film at the right time for it to take flight.
I remain a Bat-Fan to this day. I have a massive Lego Bat-Wing mounted on my office wall. I have a collection of Lego Batmobiles spanning the Adam West-Burt Ward TV series through Robert Pattinson’s incarnation. I even grabbed a Michael Keaton as Batman circa 1989 from McFarlane toys just to have him on my shelf of 70s-80s movie-inspired action figures. To me Batman is the most malleable of the superhero figures comic books gave us. He can be dark and brooding, he can feature in a horror or action or romantic storyline, he can do “the Batusi” and appear in Lego form but always, always be that same character. His rogues gallery of villains are the best rotating cast of n’er do wells in fiction bar none, from The Joker and Penguin and Catwoman to The Riddler, Two-Face, Clayface, Mr. Freeze, R’as Al Guhl, Scarecrow, Mad Hatter, and Bane. The Gotham of Batman, like the Metropolis of Superman, is a fictional city everybody knows about and has probably visited at one time or another. There is quite literally a Batman for every occasion and inclination.
My Lego Batwing, hanging on the Bat-wall
I also remain a Burton fan, though when looking at the overall scope of his work, his most essential years to me remain his early ones, from 1985 and Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure through 1994 and his biopic Ed Wood. Many believe he lost his touch after Ed Wood’s box office failure but I feel Burton has always been Burton; it was just in that decade or so stretch comprising Pee-Wee, Beetlejuice, Batman, Edward Scissorhands, Batman Returns, The Nightmare Before Christmas, and Wood found his eccentricities in sync with the movie going public and the cultural shift as GenX took the wheel. It’s no big stretch to see a similarity between Beetlejuice and Scissorhands with David Lynch briefly entering the mainstream with Twin Peaks, and the Alternative Rock generation moving to the forefront. Strange and unusual was “in” for a time and then it wasn’t, and while there is a lot in Burton’s subsequent work to admire, notably Sleepy Hollow, Big Fish, and Sweeney Todd which feel more fully realized than his Planet of the Apes, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Alice In Wonderland, and Dumbo. Tim Burton just became what all successful filmmakers do at some point; he became Tim Burton, Incorporated; a filmmaker with a certain style and language and outlook that becomes the selling point over what he’s actually selling.[9]
Lego Batmobile and minifig collection. Thank the pandemic for my Lego obsessions
1989 was the Summer of the Bat. It announced that the 1990s would be a much different decade than the 80s. A decade where the formerly weird suburban kids like Tim Burton would be handed the keys to the kingdom and both shape and be shaped by a cultural shift that would change everything that came before. As for me it was the summer my movie obsession and career path resultant really kicked itself into high gear. The next three years would be some of my most stressful but also my most happy even as my home life would take a turn for the worse. But, like Bruce Wayne, I would find reason to fly.
Just a portion of my 80s movie and TV figure shelf. You have to grow up but you don’t have to grow old.
[1] And occasionally the American one as well; the border was a lot more open back then compared to now.
[2] And if not? It was still two hours in an air-conditioned theater when the temperature outside hit 90 degrees.
[3] Contrast that with 2023, where we seem to ge a “summer” movie every month.
[4] 1981, with Raiders of the Lost Ark, The Road Warrior, and Escape From New York was no slouch either.
[5] None of these were as anticipated by me as Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing but owing to its R rating and not making it to theaters in Eastern Ontario I had to wait for it to hit video before watching it multiple times.
[6] Unfortunately, and your mileage with Kingdom of the Crystal Skull and The Dial of Destiny may vary, it was not.
[7] And became a great punchline in Edgar Wright’s 2004 film Shaun of the Dead in the process. The “gag” which I won’t spoil wouldn’t work nearly as well if it had been any album but Prince’s Batman one.
[8] 1990’s Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles was a hit but one still in production when Batman was released.
[9] He shares that similarity with Michael Bay of all people, whose more interesting films like Pain and Gain, 13 Hours, and the terrific Ambulance are lost in the shuffle of five (!) Transformers films.
