Why Michael Keaton Wears the Cowl Best: The Hidden Details of Tim Burton's Batman (1989)

Why does it seem like Michael Keaton wears the cowl best? Some say it's the lips, but if you ask me, it's the brows. Keaton and Jack Nicholson are perfectly paired in Tim Burton's 1989 Batman because they both have sharply angled eyebrows. The cowl was designed so that its brows exaggerate Keaton's natural angles. It serves the purpose all theatrical masks should: not to hide what's underneath, but to unveil it.

Batman, directed by Burton and starring Jack Nicholson first and Michael Keaton, redefined Hollywood to be driven by bankable superheroes. Its visuals, music and production design gave it a legacy powerful enough to bring Keaton back into the cowl 34 years later. I think that return is deserved, because Keaton, more than any other Batman in my opinion, understood that Bruce Wayne isn't cool. He's an aloof oddball with undiagnosed dissociative identity disorder who moonlights as a bat in order to cope. Masks, acid washed skin, toxic makeup: Burton's Batman is all about the faces we wear, and those faces unveil the freak show Burton truly envisioned for this franchise.

Jack Nicholson's casting made Batman 1989 a hit before release, and it led to the MCU

The opening credits bill Jack Nicholson first. That was a contract stipulation by Nicholson, applying to the film and all marketing materials, because his casting gave the project real heat. This is where we have to talk about the Batmania of summer 1989. Unlike Star Wars, which George Lucas worried would be a flop and which wasn't really commercialized until after its release, Warner Bros. knew from the moment it cast Nicholson that Batman would be a hit, so it went in with a bold plan.

The poster was simply the Batman emblem. That's it. Then came the summer of 1989: Batman toys, Batman cereals, people shaving the logo into their hair, and Prince doing the soundtrack. Batman was everywhere, and it worked. The film made 40 million dollars in its opening weekend, breaking the record at the time, and became the then fastest movie to reach 100 million dollars. That changed the industry to focus more on opening weekend sales.

Even more important were the toys. Exclusive toy making rights went to a company called Toy Biz, which was bought by Ike Perlmutter. He used the huge profits from this movie to buy merchandise rights from a nearly bankrupt Marvel in 1993, which led to X-Men films, Spider-Man films and, yes, the Marvel Cinematic Universe. So without Batman 1989, and without Nicholson being such a heavyweight that he gave Warner Bros. so much confidence, we would not have an MCU.

Anton Furst designed Gotham City as "an essay in ugliness"

The film opens like a play, with a painting on a scrim showing us Gotham City. This version was conceived by production designer Anton Furst, who won an Oscar for it. He mixed clashing architectural styles to, in his words, "make Gotham the ugliest and bleakest Metropolis imaginable." He imagined what New York City might have become without a planning commission: "a city run by crime with a riot of architectural style an essay in ugliness as if hell erupted through the pavement and kept on going."

Furst crafted Gotham from 1930s Art Deco architecture, a look that would go on to inspire the look of Gotham in Batman: The Animated Series and several other titles. The whole city feels like one sprawling, ugly, steaming machine.

I love the fake out in the opening. A mother, father and son leave a movie theater into a street full of crime, the exact setup of Batman's origin story. But this isn't the Waynes. Only when we see Batman's silhouette leering down from overhead do we realize we're not seeing young Bruce; we're seeing adult Bruce, angry at criminals who turned a gun on a wife and her kid. The criminal Nick wears the same I heart Gotham City shirt the kid was wearing, showing a Gotham suffering from a cycle of violence. No one really loves Gotham City.

Burton blankets the rooftop with steam and smoke from pipes, chimneys and Eddie's own cigarette, as if all of it contributes to a haze Batman uses as cover, looming like a shadow puppet to elicit fear. Notice too that Batman's chest emblem has a three pronged tail, unlike the more famous design on the titles, bat signal and poster. It's believed there was a rights issue with the logo when the costume was designed and the film was shot, which was cleared up during post production and marketing.

The "I'm Batman" cowl makes Michael Keaton look more like Michael Keaton

Then comes the famous line: "I'm Batman." I love it. The cowl is lit to match the shape of his angled eyebrows, which again match the shape of Keaton's own face. Future cowls would furrow the brow or just make it bulky, fitting whoever the handsome actor was into it. Here it's more of a theatrical mask, designed to make Michael Keaton look more like Michael Keaton.

Harvey Dent is played by Billy Dee Williams, a big name from Star Wars in the 80s, because Burton wanted him to be the Two-Face of this franchise. Dent later argues with the mayor over the 250 thousand dollar cost of the festival, and the line about not having seen one balloon sets up the parade balloons as the instrument of the Joker's poison gas in the final act. Alicia's model photos on Jack Napier's wall include one with bright red lips, foreshadowing the white face and red lips mask the Joker will make her wear. Everyone in this movie is wearing masks.

Napier bribes Lieutenant Eckhardt, played by William Hootkins, who played the rebel pilot Porkins in Star Wars: A New Hope and the government man in Raiders of the Lost Ark. Seriously, everyone in this movie shows up everywhere else. Eckhardt says he answers to the crime boss Grissom, not to psychos like Jack.

Nicholson's Joker is performative insanity; Keaton's Bruce is genuinely haunted

The film diverges from the comics' Joker mythology in several ways, including showing his origin as a gangster. He's certainly a sadistic sociopath, but he's not clinically insane. For him, it's all ego. Beneath the faces and masks is a battle between ego driven, performative insanity, the craziness Nicholson's Joker boasts about and has fun with, and the less fun, authentic, sad, haunted mental illness Bruce actually suffers from.

Future film Jokers take a more empathetic approach to mental illness. Heath Ledger's Joker takes it personally when people call him a freak or crazy. Joaquin Phoenix's Joker was a more direct product of the defunding of mental health services in the 1980s. But Nicholson, after playing mentally ill roles in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest and The Shining, described his Joker as pop art: a performance artist, a showman, a narcissist. Those behaviors were all present before Napier fell into the vat of acid. As a gangster he already wore a bright purple suit, the one splash of color in a film where the other major players wear black, white and gray. The Joker loves having a clown mask stained on his face because it gives him an excuse to be the psycho killer he always was.

Bruce is more understated. When Burton approached Keaton after the two worked together on Beetlejuice, Keaton said it was a terrible idea, since he was known as a more comedic actor. But reading the script, he had one take on Bruce: this man is truly mentally ill, and suiting up as a bat is all he can do to prevent a full psychotic breakdown. Burton agreed that's how he wanted the role played. Notice how shy and aloof Keaton's Bruce is, and how much less comfortable he is in the tux than in the bat suit.

In my opinion, Keaton is the only Batman to be more handsome in the cowl than out of it. That's not a knock on his appearance; the man is attractive. It's a compliment to his acting. When he puts on the suit, a new confidence overtakes him, and to me it's the most transformative transition between Bruce and Batman.

DC Easter eggs, Axis Chemicals and the Joker's laugh

The reporter Knox gets mocked by a staffer with a bat man in a suit signed by Bob Kane, who co-created Batman with Bill Finger. Knox meets Vicki Vale, who just took photos in Corto Maltese, the fictional DC Comics country that was the setting of 2021's The Suicide Squad. Grissom, played by Jack Palance, orders Napier to oversee the Axis Chemicals job personally, and Napier flips up a Joker card with eyebrows looking a lot like Nicholson's, plus a hole in the cheek where Napier later gets shot by a ricocheting bullet.

At the fundraiser, Vicki asks Bruce which of the guys is Bruce Wayne, and he says he's not sure. Again, the faces we wear. Unlike the Bruce Waynes of future Batman movies, who are all tabloid party boys, Keaton's Bruce is a faceless recluse, like a Boo Radley. He's not even certain of his own identity unless he's wearing the cowl.

Axis Chemicals is based on Ace Chemicals in the comics, and as Batman slings the first gangster over the railing, Burton gives us our first look at the open vat in the background: Chekhov's vat. The stunt combat is limited, but there's a great moment when Batman jabs a goon and the guy stays up a half beat longer just to sell his hat falling off. Sometimes great action is just about making it pop. When Napier falls into the acid, his hand reaches up from the runoff as his lucky deck floats past, Joker card in front.

Nicholson's genius is how much delight he puts into his monstrosity: the way he demands a mirror, the way he doubles over in grief and transitions into his iconic cackle. He's hiding his face, but he wins us over with the laugh alone, setting an important rule for every Joker after: you have to nail the laugh and make it your own.

The makeup tricks behind the Joker's most unsettling moments

On their date, Vicki says the mansion doesn't feel like Bruce, and he says some of it is very much him. Since he's never even been in the dining room, the part that's him is, of course, the Batcave. Vicki takes off her shoes climbing the staircase, something she does again climbing the cathedral stairs with the Joker in the final act.

When the Joker reveals himself to Grissom, the makeup is its own story. Nicholson was allergic to spirit gum, so the team used a silicone adhesive and an acrylic based makeup paint called Pax, in a specific shade of white that wouldn't blow out the brightness. I love how Burton lights the Joker's approach so you can just start to make out his ghostly face in the shadows, which looks really cool on a big screen. After the Joker shoots Grissom, what really activates him is the newspaper saying Batman terrorizes Gotham's gangland. He's like an actor reading a casting list and realizing a rival got the role he wanted. It's all ego.

He takes over the other bosses, frying Tony with a joy buzzer. The line "a hot time in the old town" is from an old minstrel song from 1896 commonly associated with the Great Chicago Fire. In that scene he wipes away flesh colored makeup to reveal the white underneath. The team applied the white acrylic first, coated it in silicone oil, then painstakingly covered that with flesh colored grease paint, airbrushing and fading it. The handkerchief was soaked in isopropyl alcohol so it would remove only the grease paint, not the white acrylic. The result is a really unsettling magic trick.

Burton weaponizes everything unnerving about clowns

The Joker's "you are my number one guy" is a weird impersonation of Jack Palance, and I love actors impersonating other actors. He kills Vinnie with a quill pen, a move echoed in The Dark Knight when the Joker kills a man with a pencil. A lot of Christopher Nolan's playbook for The Dark Knight started right here. Burton mines everything unnerving about clowns: mimes, freakish smiles, oozing paint, the hand buzzer, the squirting flower, garish balloons, a bang flag pistol. Everything clown like is weaponized.

When Harvey Dent appears on the news, the Joker uses an extendable boxing glove to punch the TV right on the side of Dent's face, hinting at half of Two-Face's face getting burned. We see a CIA folder about a nerve gas that leaves victims smiling, and cut up photographs on his floor, a literal cutting room floor as he edits his Smilex commercial. The female anchor's last minute touch up causes her death by laughter.

This sequence is one of the scariest parts of the movie for me, especially the way the commercial interrupts the broadcast as if the Joker has access to the airwaves. The creepiest aspect is the moving mouths of the dead models. He must have filmed another mouth in close up and posed it on the dead model's face, but whose mouth is it? It's never explained. I've introduced the concept of unexplained arbitrary horror before, and Burton loves it: shots with no basis in reality, a living cartoon. Burton was an animator; he knows what the uncanny valley is and loves to drag us into it.

The museum scene, and why Batman 1989 is really Citizen Kane

The Joker brings Vicki to the museum and forces her to wear a mask to play her part in his game, while his goons deface the art to Prince's Partyman, with a boombox goon following him everywhere because this is performative insanity. He wants the only fine art in Gotham to be his own iconography. The artwork includes a Rembrandt self portrait and The Blue Boy by Thomas Gainsborough, a print of which shows up in Arthur Fleck's apartment in 2019's Joker. The one painting he spares is Francis Bacon's Figure with Meat, and Bacon's work would later inspire Nolan for The Dark Knight.

He points at an unfinished George Washington portrait and says dollar bill, echoing his line to Vicki. The original idea for the parade was for his money to be counterfeit, with his face on the bills. When Alicia removes her mask, it covers Vicki's face in the frame; his real threat is that he'll do to Vicki what he did to Alicia. She throws water at him and he cries "I'm melting," like the Wicked Witch in The Wizard of Oz.

In my running theory that every American film is trying to be either The Wizard of Oz or Citizen Kane, Batman 1989 is actually Citizen Kane. It opens with a Xanadu style hazy shot of Gotham, and at its heart is a mysterious Charles Foster Kane figure, with journalists trying to decode who this eccentric billionaire really is. Vicki stalks this orphan who lays roses where his parents were killed: the mystery of Bruce's Rosebud.

The Batmobile, the bottomless Batcave and a Gotham removed from time

Batman ziplines them out to our first shot of the Batmobile, which used parts of a Chevy Impala, with an engine styled after a Harrier jump jet that also inspired the sliding cockpit. Each punch in the alley is lit by Vicki's camera flash. At that height a flash would only light the foreground, but it creates the effect of each hit flashing like lightning.

I've always loved how vertical the Batcave is in the Burton films. Gotham goes up and up, blocking out the sky, while the cave goes down and down. Real caves are claustrophobic; this is a full mirrored underworld. The front page carrying his decoded formula includes a sub headline about President Truman speaking at Princeton, which with the date Friday November 7th would make it 1947. But with the cars and color TV, this Gotham is deliberately set in an elsewhere removed from time.

"You ever dance with the devil in the pale moonlight" exposes the Joker's ritual

When the Joker barges into Vicki's apartment, he paraphrases Edgar Allan Poe's The Raven. Again, it's performative: he's quoting a poem about someone going mad rather than knowing what that feels like. Bruce hides a tray under his shirt and mirrors the Joker's performance back at him, telling the story of a bad seed who got sloppy. Bruce fuels it with raw anger because the Joker is making a mockery of mental illness, laying claim to what it actually means to be mentally ill.

Then the Joker asks, "you ever dance with the devil in the pale moonlight," the line Bruce remembers from his parents' killer. This might be the most actually psychotic thing the Joker does: a ritual with no benefit, creepy poetry for an audience with no time to appreciate it, self aggrandizing himself into the devil, something he did before the acid. Structurally, the scene exists so an unmasked Bruce can confront him. The mirroring is that important.

The parade, the Batwing moon shot and the cathedral climax

The Joker warps Gotham into a grotesque cartoon, even making Mayor Borg turn to talk to a screen beside him. Challenging Batman, he says "I have taken off my makeup let's see if you can take off yours," but the irony is his skin is actually white; he put more on. Bruce's flashback reveals the Joker killed the Waynes, a major retcon from Joe Chill in the comics that Burton made to personalize the conflict. I like how the scattered pearls mix with spilled popcorn, mirroring the popcorn Vicki spilled when the Joker said that line and shot Bruce.

At the parade, the Joker wears the same mask he gave Vicki, this time a face of cowardice, protecting himself from his gas after goading Batman to unmask. Batman snags the balloons with the Batwing and rises into the light of the moon to form the perfect bat signal. It's one of the most iconic shots in any movie, and here Batman is literally dancing with the devil in the pale moonlight. The Joker faces down the Batwing in the street, just as Ledger's Joker later would.

The cathedral climax was part of reshoots, an attempt to work Vicki in. Batman's finishing move, lifting his legs to pull a goon down the shaft, pays off Bruce hanging upside down earlier. Both accuse each other of making them, but while Napier caused Bruce's illness, Jack was sadistic before the fall; Batman only gave him an excuse, a face to match the monster within. The gargoyle the Joker snaps at is the one Batman uses to anchor him as he flees, sending him to his death. His smile, I think, pays homage to Nicholson's ghostly smile in the final shot of The Shining. The mechanized laughter comes from a small green silk bag the film never explains. A later official comic calls it a laugh box, but on its own I think the film wants the Joker to have the last laugh.

A Two-Face ending we never saw

The film ends with Harvey Dent reading Batman's letter as he and Gordon unveil the bat signal, but there's more we never got to see. Williams got that final speech because Burton wanted him as Two-Face. In Batman Returns, Christopher Walken's Max Shreck was originally written to be Harvey Dent, with the explosion at the end meant to scar him. In certain drafts of the 1989 film, the Joker would have survived, faced prosecution from Dent and thrown a bomb in the courtroom that scarred Harvey's face.

So that green silk bag, perhaps only in my imagination, I think was going to be a dead man's switch, a bomb now carried by Commissioner Gordon, who stands directly to Harvey's left during that speech. Whether or not you buy that interpretation, the movie leaves us with two faces: Bruce Wayne, the man loved by Vicki Vale who now bails on dates with her, and the face this patient chooses, the loner on the rooftops, friend to the gargoyles. Batman.

Do you buy my theory that the Joker's green silk bag was meant to be a bomb setting up Two-Face?