Summer Event Movies, Part 1: Batman, Transformers, and Line Hopes

I’d meant to write last weekend about the 20th anniversary of Tim Burton’s Batman, which hit theaters on June 23, 1989.

Sure, there’s a lot to be said comparing Burton’s Batman with Christopher Nolan’s Batman Begins (and each director’s follow-up), and about how Burton’s blockbuster has weathered the decades, especially now that Heath Ledger’s Joker has pretty clearly blown the screws off the doors of Jack Nicholson’s.

For the record, no, Burton’s Batman doesn’t hold up all that well—it has for the most part become a cultural artifact, a giddy, uneven, somewhat incoherent pop snapshot of that moment in cinema. And that’s more what I’d intended to write about: How Batman ushered in the Event-Movie Era.

It seemed apropos last week, as we were in the midst of this year’s Huge Event Movie, Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen. (I’m so worn out on the subject of Transformers, I can’t even bother to come up with "clever" mock subtitles anymore… that’s how far I’ve fallen... but if I had, it would have been Return of the Fallacy.) I’d intended to talk about the idea of the Event Movie, how it has its roots in a fun, personal bit of excitement (looking forward to a film, getting more and more excited for it, standing in long lines the first day, that rush when the lights go down), but has, like so much else in our society, been hijacked and co-opted and turned into a crass, calculated, clockwork marketing strategy.

Certainly Warner Brothers knew what they were doing back in the fall of ’88 when that gold and black Batman logo began popping up on signs and billboards. But part of the reason we all got so jacked up for Batman the following summer was that this was a whole new ride—to get that swept up in what (I know it sounds corny) felt like a national movement. Everyone wanted to see Batman—the film itself became almost incidental, we were riding the hype and loving it. "I'm Batman," became the mantra of not just the fanboy film geeks, but seemingly the whole damn country.

Sure, I’d stood in lines for Return of the Jedi, but that was the final (ha!) chapter of an already beloved (ha!) trilogy. And movies like Ghostbusters and Aliens were massive summer box-office hits, but they had to prove themselves first as films, then they became must-sees. Batman was different: it wasn’t the movie, it was the anticipation.

That Friday night of June 23rd, we lined up (outside on the sidewalk—yes, children, back in those days not every theater was inside a mall), formed a supply chain back to a nearby record store my friends worked in so that our big plastic cups of vodka lemonade never ran dry, and had a ball. And all that was before we got in the theater. My college roommates and I even had a Batman party right after the screening, one of the biggest in our storied college-party career.

We had a term back in those days: “chasing the experience.” It described that very human inclination to try to repeat good times, usually to a lesser result than the first time. You go out to a certain bar or party one night, it all just clicks, everyone has the time of their lives, so the next week you try to do it again and… eh… it just doesn’t work a second time.

Well three years later we chased the Batman premiere experience by trying to ratchet up the excitement and social trappings for Batman Returns, and well, eh…the post-party was a flop. Of course, the ironic thing is, Batman Returns is a much better film than Batman, but that just hammers home the point, doesn’t it?

Hollywood doesn’t let these lessons slide by. It learned quickly and well from the Batman hype and marketing push, and so studios went on, each summer, trying to replicate the results. Sometimes it worked, as with Terminator 2 and Independence Day. Sometimes it didn’t. (Oh, Waterworld…) The rise of Super Bowl movie teasers made sure we knew exactly which films were supposed to be Our Must Sees five or six months into the future.

I used to love this effect, I really did. It was addictive—all winter long I looked forward to that First Movie Line of May, hanging out with everyone, friends and strangers alike, everyone excited to share in the same communal experience. The line itself, as Harry Knowles at AICN likes to point out, often is the point.

Which brings us to Transformers 2. You see, when we gorge on all this hype, when we start getting ourselves worked up to love a film months or even a year in advance, naturally we don’t want to be disappointed. It’s kind of like planning a huge wedding (uh, I would assume): you emotionally invest so much in the idea of the thing, the thought that it might not be perfect or—gasp!—even bad simply cannot be entertained.

We humans have some pretty heavy survival instincts coded into our lizard brains. We like to be happy. We don’t like to be sad.  At one time this instinct translated into daily life as “try to avoid getting eaten by larger animals.” Today, in our High-Def, High-Speed Connection world, it translates as “Look, I’ve invested a lot of emotional energy into wanting to like this movie, so by god I’m going to like it.”

There’s also more than a little peer pressure at work, especially for film goers under 30. You and your friends get psyched up, pumped up on months and months of a massive marketing onslaught (and more than a little "I must see it because everyone is seeing it"), get maybe a bit lit up, you stand in line for a hour or two, you hoot and holler at the screen, and then… when you come back out into the light of the mall, high-fiving and grinning, you certainly don’t want to be the one in the group to say, “Um, that was pretty disappointing.” Nobody wants to ride home with Debbie Downer.

Here at redblog, Erika was very VERY psyched up for Transformers 2, having loved the first one. I was more “eh” about TF1, but while I didn’t have high expectations for TF2 (even before the negative reviews started pouring in), I certainly did hope that it would be as exciting and fun as those King Hell Bastard trailers made it look. Everyone wants to have fun at that kind of movie. Even today, seeing the non-stop ads on TV for TF2, I’m still gape-jawed at the images, and some small part of my lizard brain says, “dang, that looks like an amazing kick-ass movie! I want to see that sucker!… oh, wait… I have…”

So yes, we both disliked Transformers ROTF, but you can’t accuse Erika of not wanting to like it, and even as I watched it I thought, at least during the first hour, “wow, these are some fantastic giant robot battles!” I won’t go into, yet again, why I had soured so heavily on TF2 by the end of its two and a half hours, but the point is, no, I didn’t expect it to be deep or “Oscar material”—I wanted to see really cool robot battles, but I wanted to see them in a movie that could hold my interest and not continually insult my taste and intelligence and eventually bore me over two and a half hours. I wanted to get caught up, to enjoy not just the movie but the event.

Those line hopes are a hard habit to break.

Read more here in Summer Event Movies, Part 2: Popularity vs. Quality, Criticism and Playing Nice.

Comments

[zak]

hay batman uyr movis ar kol