Batman Returns Is the Definitive Religious Christmas Movie

This Holiday Season, Settle Down with a Cup of Hot Chocolate, a Christmas Sweater, and... The Bible (??) to Enjoy the Feel-Bad Movie of the Season.

Superhero films lend themselves to religious allegories.

After all, stories about god-like beings walking (and flying) among us are catnip for allegories about God’s relationship with mankind, and the famous “Jesus pose” is ubiquitous across superhero films that span directors and cinematic universes.

But the most interesting superhero-cum-religious-parable isn’t one of the Superman films with their clear invocation of Jesus’s story.

It’s another DC comics mainstay: Tim Burton’s 1992 gloriously twisted follow-up to his 1989 smash hit, Batman Returns.

It’s one of the strangest mainstream blockbuster entries in the superhero genre and the type of film that could not be made today.  

What sets Batman Returns apart from most superhero religious allegories is that the villain of the film is heavily influenced by biblical stories.

The opening of the film, in creating a model for so many sequels to come, focuses on the creation of Danny DeVito’s antagonist, the Penguin.

From the first scene, the biblical allusions are clear.

The Christmas setting of the film is impressed upon the viewer from the first scene of the Penguin’s birth framed against the backdrop of an imposing Christmas tree.

Positioning the Christmas tree as looming over the proceedings more than mere set dressing: It establishes that what is to follow is a dark subversion of traditional religious themes, the warm iconography of Christmas serving as the setting for something twisted.

That opening scene, the Penguin’s birth, turns the Moses story on its head.

The Penguin is cast out of his home by his parents, not for his safety, but for the purpose of his destruction because he’s such a monstrous creation that his parents can’t bear to raise him. There’s also the inexplicable nature of the Penguin’s birth, a miraculous, if also monstrous, creation. And the film also undercuts any audience sympathy for the Penguin by having the first thing he does on-screen is trap and kill (and potentially eat) a cat.

To heighten the effect, Danny Elfman’s Penguin theme starts as mournful by making use of a choir to encapsulate the childlike helplessness of the Penguin, victimized by his parent’s rejection of his monstrousness.

Then it transitions into sinister and foreboding as the Penguin is carried by the stream into the sewer towards complete villainy. 

The film then picks off a very conspicuous 33 years later. The Gotham City square tree once again establishes the holiday cheer that gets quickly undercut by the arrival of the Penguin’s circus gang, causing the lighting ceremony to devolve into violence. 

The Penguin’s return to Gotham then plays on the story of the return of the Prodigal Son by having his search for his parents be cover for his plan to murder all the first-born sons of Gotham – a clear invocation of one of the plagues of Egypt. His character bounces back and forth between a devilish Christ figure and a devilish Moses figure, a hugely enjoyable subversion of the standard heroic archetypes viewers are familiar with in most superhero stories. 

As if to properly drive home the upside-down nature of the religious allegory, the Penguin is as revolting a character as can be put in a PG-13 superhero film. He’s physically grotesque, a lecherous sexual deviant, a completely irredeemable monster whose master plan involves a run for mayor, the attempted kidnapping of all of Gotham’s first born sons, and then the destruction of the entire city at the hands of his army of penguins (it’s worth noting that the climax strains plausibility in all the best ways). If a great villain can be defined as the inverse of the hero, then the Penguin’s bombast and psychosexual desires make for a dark mirror of Bruce Wayne’s understated trauma and attempts at a connection with Michelle Pfeiffer’s Selina Kyle.

Audiences did not receive Returns well upon its release, and it’s clear why upon rewatch. The film is too dark for children, too silly for parents, and it feels overstuffed given its trio of antagonists, which isn’t to forget Pfeiffer’s iconic turn as Selina Kyle/Catwoman, nor is it to overlook Christopher Walken’s business tycoon Max Shreck. Given that the story’s length is a relatively lean-feeling two hours and ten minutes, it’s a feat of screenwriting and storytelling that the film is able to cram all of these elements in and produce a semi-coherent film.

But coherence is not what Batman Returns is interested in.

It’s a bizarre film, but one that rewards rewatching with a careful eye to the religious layers.

During an age of cookie-cutter superhero movies that prioritize visual conformity and are allergic to taking genuine risks, revisiting Returns is like a breath of fresh air.  

So this holiday season, in between the rewatches of comedies or retellings of timeless old stories, make some room for a superhero story soaked in religious symbolism that was ahead of its time.

There’s so much to enjoy: the score, the “demented” set design, the performances, the cheesy but immensely quotable dialogue.

And you may just be able to find some significance or meaning in the film’s retelling of familiar Bible stories.