[Pride 2020] Sickos Never Scare Me

Is it any wonder we queers are drawn to psychopaths and weirdos? They present an alternative to the ‘normal’ heroes who dominate our screens. Maybe we’d been better off looking to the villains for reassurance that it’s OK to be different. We just have to hope they don’t die at the end...

As a teenager I went through a distinct phase: I kept falling in love with murderers.

First it was Dr. Hannibal Lecter in The Silence of the Lambs. Then it was Patrick Bateman in American Psycho. I rounded out the 1990s besotted with Matt Damon’s sociopath in The Talented Mr Ripley. They all had in common a certain sophistication. They were urbane, witty, eloquent. They liked art and food and fine wines. That they also thought nothing of killing people with knives, axes, oars or whatever they had to hand.

I realise now, of course, that it was the ‘otherness’ of these characters I was attracted to…but the fact that some were played by attractive men also didn’t hurt.

Being gay is, obviously, not a phase. And claiming that watching films featuring strange characters like these ‘turns’ people in any way (sexually, criminally) is not only plain wrong but also just plain lazy. Which is fortunate really, because I had lots of opportunities to get to know cinematic ‘sickos’ even before my teenage years.

I knew I was ‘different’ from the age of around six and I learned the term to describe my difference from the playground not much later than this. Growing up gay in the ‘80s and ‘90s was made more bearable by my parents’ no-holds-barred attitude to books and movies. I could read and watch anything, which is very fortunate in hindsight. There was nothing made for queer kids and teenagers back then, and there’s still far too little in the way of books and movies today. If I hadn’t been allowed to watch some of the ‘age-inappropriate’ things my parents allowed me to watch I might have gone truly insane.

It didn’t take much persuading to get my dad to buy me the ‘15’ certificate Batman Returns VHS (“Dad, it’s fine...it’s Batman, so it’s for kids).

Okay, you might be thinking: Batman Returns isn’t a horror movie. And that’s probably what Warner Bros. kept telling themselves as well when they tried to market this weird, subversive and deeply queer film. No wonder they took the series in a garish day-glo direction with Batman Forever - a film which is not quite as queer as Batman Returns, but significantly more camp (thanks to the influence of gay director Joel Schumacher).

I was ten years old when I first saw Batman Returns and it blew my mind. More importantly, it made me feel connected to something, at a time when I was feeling increasingly cut off from my friends and classmates. I was depressed for most of my early twenties and, when things got really bad one Christmas Eve, re-watching Batman Returns was the only thing that could bring me up from the depths. It’s still one of my favourite films to this day.

I’ve always loved the Batman character (the whole dual identity thing right?), but it was Batman Returns that opened my mind to the wonder of the villains. Catwoman and The Penguin gave me that first thrill of queer recognition. I’m sure we’ve all had those moments, where we feel like we’re seeing ourselves on screen, even if the self on the screen is grotesque. I saw straight through Danny DeVito’s hideous makeup to The Penguin’s outsider nature. Such pathos! His death is presented as something truly lamentable. We definitely know whose side Tim Burton is on: the villains’. With the exception of one villain that is: Christopher Walken’s character Max Shreck was invented for this film, his name taken from the star who played the titular vampire in 1922’s German Expressionist classic horror Nosferatu (by queer director F. W. Murnau).

Batman Returns’s Max Shreck is a psychopath who is impossible to like, the irony being the true monster of the film is the most ‘human’ (certainly compared with a penguin, a cat and, arguably, a bat). Shreck truly earns our enmity when he pushes Catwoman out of a window, to her presumed death. Fortunately, in a metaphor I’m sure is appreciated by queer audiences used to having to pick themselves up after traumatic experiences, she has nine lives. That she is brought back to life by starving cats chewing at her fingers is just the icing on the cake for those of who thought we might never find a loving, stable relationship outside of the feline variety. How many of us pictured ourselves as Crazy Cat People, our pets turning into our devourers once we shuffled off the mortal coil and they ran out of cat food?

Anyway, I digress.

More than the Penguin, it was Catwoman who I really fell for - just not in the obvious way. Whereas straight men were drawn to Michelle Pfeiffer’s skin-tight PVC-ed curves, I was drawn to the way she swerved conventionality.

Every second of Catwoman is a queer delight, even when she’s not Catwoman but her alter ego Selina Kyle. There’s a delicious scene where Bruce Wayne is talking about his own “difficulty with duality” and hoping she won’t think of him as a “Norman Bates or a Ted Bundy type”. Selina replies: “It's the so-called ‘normal’ guys that always let you down. Sickos never scare me. At least they're committed.”

In this scene, Selina / Catwoman presents hope for us all: no matter how ‘sick’ we might be, we stand a chance of someone who will commit to us - and, hopefully, not just commit us. Let’s not forget that homosexuality was stigmatised as a ‘mental disorder’ until as late as May 1990 by the World Health Organisation. Some forms of queerness are still labelled as such in some communities.

Catwoman would have no truck with such communities. She’s definitely one of us. The scene where she transforms from mild-mannered Selina Kyle to full-bore Catwoman is an operatic ode to queerness. At one point in the sequence she destroys an intricately-detailed doll’s house, the camera tricking us into thinking for just a second that this might be a real property before it pans out to show that it’s just a model. By playing with scale it has the effect of presenting Catwoman as a 50 Foot Woman-like monster, demolishing a symbol of heteronormative normality. There will be no settling down in a big house with a husband and kids for her.

I’d be lying if I said young me didn’t repeatedly vamp around my bedroom to the music cue that plays in this scene, pretending I was Catwoman shattering the heteronormative patriarchy. In the years before coming out, when everyone else was listening to Bon Jovi and The Spice Girls, Danny Elfman’s Batman Returns soundtrack was my ‘jam’. I don’t care in the slightest how ‘uncool’ that makes me. I gave up caring what people thought about me in 2009 when I finally came out.

What makes the scene so transcendent is its almost wordlessness; Danny Elfman’s scissoring strings carry us through, a bit like another ‘transformation scene’, the shower scene in Psycho.

Most of the popular films throughout cinema history have been transformation stories, variations of the classic triumph narrative: a hero (usually male) has to overcome some inadequacy to defeat a villain and his reward (usually in the form of the girl, who probably needs rescuing at some point). Like most of the best horror films, Batman Returns subverts this. Catwoman does a fair amount of the rescuing herself, but remains on the side of villainy. She is true to herself. Batman doesn’t even get the girl - or Catwoman doesn’t get Batman (whichever way you prefer).

While it’s made clear in the final scene that she’s still alive - one of the few times in the Batman canon that things get truly supernatural - she stays on the rooftops out of sight, closing out the film by occupying the same cinematic space usually taken up by the title character. All Batman gets is a black cat to take home to lonely Wayne Manor. Which, to be fair, is not a bad consolation prize.

In many narratives, the queer character dies. It’s the only way to put everything safely back in the box. And it’s not just in the movies: in real-life, too many queer people have died, often by their own hands. The narrative which tells us the only happy ending is a cisgendered man and woman living together is not confined to our screens - it’s the narrative in the collective unconscious, telling everyone how to behave. When a supposedly mainstream film, like Batman Returns, comes along which challenges this narrative we have to cherish it.

The horror genre, more than most, has a tendency to leave queerness at large. The psychopath lives, to wreak havoc another day. He, she or it is, out there, somewhere. Just as, for queer people who want commitment, there is someone out there. Sometimes we just have to look a little bit harder to find them.

Please Consider Donating