Batman.

BATMAN seems destined to be the blockbuster of this decade of blockbusters. It recouped its $50-million production costs in its very first week and set records for biggest opening day, biggest first weekend, biggest seven days, and biggest second weekend. We are clearly looking at a phenomenon that will outstrip the Star Wars saga, Jaws, Ghostbusters, the Indiana Jones movies, and even the biggest of them all, ET It is fair to ask, then, why thc fifty-year-old vigilante of Gotham City is so extraordinarily popular with the American people, and so unpopular with liberal intellectuals.

Well, the public loves the movie for all the same reasons liberals hate it. [For a dissenting view from our side, see John Simon's review in the August 18 issue.] This Batman is a criminologist in the Pat Buchanan mode. He does not attempt to "understand" evildoers-he throws them off skyscraper roofs. This is a Batman who believes in the death penalty and practices it. We are left in no doubt as to what he would have done to Willie Horton.

Although rightly compared to the great German impressionist cinema of the 1920s for its mood, music, and lighting, and for Anton Furst's astonishing sets, this Batman, directed by Tim Burton, actually harks back to an even earlier and more fabled tradition. He has made a mid-nineteenth-century opera, a Batman according to Wagner. The splendid, swelling theme by Danny Elfman captures this mood from the opening credits, and Michael Keaton's remarkable, underrated performance fills it out.

Keaton's Batman is filled with rage, but a rage that is tightly focused and morally directed. This is the Count of Monte Cristo brought up to date, a betrayed and brutalized little boy come home, unrecognizable in cape and mask, with wealth enough to wreak havoc in the name of justice. Alexandre Dumas would have approved.

It is also a Judaeo-Christian Batman, a complex character indeed, mired deep in guilt, hatred, and sublimated passion. He is the orphaned son of a multi-millionaire, dependent upon his butler, raised in a vast mansion, and owning an awesome collection of medieval weaponry. One senses that Bruce Wayne was never a hippie, wants no part of the New Age, and, like Captain Kirk in Star Trek V, does not want to "lose his pain," because his pain makes him what he is.

By contrast, his archenemy is truly a man of the 1980s. If Batman prowls the rooftops to the rhythms of romantic opera, Jack Nicholson's Joker jives to a very different beat. He is perfectly in tune with his feelings, and lets them all hang out. "I've been dead, and found it liberating," he tells his first victim. "I'm much happier now." Shirley MacLaine could not have put it better.

The Joker is the ultimate Nicholson role, the performance he has bcen groping toward for two decades. With his nihilist views of what constitutes art, with his mastery of televisual terror, Nicholson's Joker is a cross between Andy Warhol and Yasir Arafat. In a remarkable display of cultural wit, he sets up his artistic scenarios of terror to the music of Prince. The point is never stressed. It does not have to be. Rock is the handmaiden of nihilism and chaos. Liberal platitudes are powerless to defeat it. Only grand opera and a man dressed up as a giant bat can do tbe job.

This cinematic Joker is light-years above his comic-book incarnation. As written for DC Comics by Alan Moore, probably the most brilliant writer in popular graphic literature over the past decade, the Joker is a good man gone bad. But in the movie, according to the wonderful script by Sam Hamm and Warren Skaaren, Jack Napier is a monster before he goes wacko. In the universe of this movie, morality is a living force and aimlessness does not rule. A psychotic monster is formed not by chance, but as the sum of, indeed in retribution for, all his previous wicked acts.

And in an age when cinematic notions of heaven are typically limited to such things as baseball diamonds in Iowa, Tim Burton has returned to the imagery of Dante and Milton. Hero and villain have their climactic showdown at the dizzying summit of Gotham Cathedral. It is war in the heavens, and it comes as no surprise when it is the weight of a ghastly stone gargoyle tied to his feet that foils the Joker's escape by helicopter ("I shall ascend into heaven") and drags him to his doom ("Thou shalt be brought down to the sides of the pit").

Such a vision of ultimate conflict stands in stark contrast to the appallingly mechanical moralism of Christopher Reeve's Man of Steel in Superman IV. With its hamhanded, agitprop message of unilateral nuclear disarmament, Superman IV died at the box office. That Batman is booming suggests that the Great American Public has reserves of moral sensibility it is hardly aware of itself.

Superman, the immigrant from Krypton who grew up in rural Middle America and made good in Metropolis, is definitely a Dukakis liberal, a Green. Batman, however, has a less rosy-eyed view of life. "It isn't a perfect world," Bruce Wayne tells Vicki Vale, the lustrous Kim Basinger, as the memory of his parents' murder replays behind his eyes. He does not trust the government to improve things. After all, the mob has run Gotham City for a century. Like that other Wayne, John, Bruce knows that "a man's gotta do what a man's gotta do." Here is an unreconstructed Reagan Republican if ever there was one.

This must be bad enough for Batman's liberal critics, but if we ask what religion Bruce Wayne professes, the answer must horrify them even more. Although he would be outraged by the current state of the Church in America, Batman has to be an unrepentant, unashamed, pre-Vatican 11 Roman Catholic-and if Pope John Paul II really wants to reach the American people, he should screen Batman and ponder its message.