Headache in a Suitcase
A Close Read of Batman Forever, The Doors, and South Pacific (with some Fox News, just for fun…)
Christmas Day, 1995. I am 15 years old. I sit on a patch of blue carpet and unwrap a VHS cassette-shaped gift. I already know that it is the movie Batman Forever. I slide the cassette from the box, the sound of plastic and the smell of cardboard, observe the mass of tape on the right side of the cassette, and I say to Uncle Bob, “It looks like they already watched it.”
April 4th, 2025. My son’s 10th birthday. We pack five fourth-graders and two second-graders into the car and head off to see A Minecraft Movie. Jack Black and Jason Momoa fully commit to their roles. Every kid gets their own popcorn and box of candy.
Some of us remember that sweet spot of years when owning a film on physical media was both easy and a luxury. What will today’s fourth-graders recall with smooth fondness?
Batman Forever opens with a supercut of Val Kilmer donning the Batsuit and choosing weapons. Quick zooms, tight shots; the cape looks like it’s made of leather and must be altogether too heavy. We’re almost convinced that this could be a serious film, but then Batman poses for the camera under perfect lighting, the faux tension broken by Michael Gough’s Alfred, quipping, “can I persuade you to take a sandwich with you, sir?”
April, 1994. I have a very small role in the high school drama club production of South Pacific. I play a Navy man in a white suit, white cap that I’ve learned how to fold and stuff in my back pocket, black shoes that I’ve learned to spit shine. I’m on stage for maybe eighteen minutes, notably in the chorus for the show-stopping number “There Is Nothin’ Like a Dame,” a song in which conscripted WWII sailors sing about how ridiculously horny they are, stuck on an island with no (white) women.
We feel restless, we feel blue,
We feel lonely, and in brief,
We feel every kind of feelin’—
But the feelin’ of relief.
We feel hungry as the wolf felt
When he met Red Riding Hood—
What don’t we feel?
We don’t feel good!
—Oscar Hammerstein II
Tommy Lee Jones’s Two-Face is over-the-top and down the block, giggling non-stop and surrounded by and army of henchpeople all cosplaying the Gimp from Pulp Fiction. Kilmer, perhaps in deliberate contrast to Jones, couldn’t be more dull. WOW he is boring. It’s well documented that the 90s Batsuits were terribly restrictive, and we can see in Batman and Batman Returns how Michael Keaton and his stunt doubles compensated by creating stylized whole-body movements that gave Batman an eerie otherworldly slightly-out-of-sync kind of feel. But Kilmer doesn’t employ the stylized movements, and he remains stiff and awkward outside the Batsuit as Bruce Wayne. He barely moves his face.
I fail to notice the sexual content of South Pacific, focused on not bungling my part. I’m to mime the outline of an hourglass physique, as if caressing her from top to bottom, while singing the line, “has a soft and wavy frame like the silhouette of a dame.” I sing adequately, but the miming is terribly exaggerated. Because I’ve never caressed anyone, the imaginary woman I pretend to caress has measurements of like 45-10-70. I don’t think to analyze the lyric, the word “like;” what exactly am I caressing that has a soft and wavy frame like the silhouette of a dame, but isn’t one…?
When we’re not on stage, we wait in the music room down the hall. Someone has turned on the 55-inch TV and popped in Oliver Stone’s The Doors. I’m fresh off stage, buzzing from the sheer volume of singing “Nothin Like a Dame,” with a chorus of fearless boys, and I walk in on Val Kilmer’s Jim Morrison, first talking to Crispin Glover’s Andy Warhol about a phone call to God, and then getting a blowjob from a topless Russian blonde in an elevator, laughing with acid-laced cruelty when the elevator doors open to reveal his wife (Meg Ryan).
In Batman Forever, Nicole Kidman’s blonde hair shines as if airbrushed. She wears a distinct dark lipstick that throws back to old Hollywood. Dr. Chase Meridian: sounds like the name of a Bond Girl, but the pun feels esoteric at best.
December, 1994. My best friend Sam’s dad Fred takes us to see Dumb and Dumber. It’s a half-hour ride in a cigar-fumed GMC Jimmy. This is the third Jim Carey movie this year, behind Ace Ventura and The Mask. I can’t stand Dumb and Dumber, but Fred laughs all the way through, enjoying the “three Stooges slap-sticky stuff.”
April 5th, 2025, the day after my son turns 10. We’re in the First Presbyterian Church of Stamford, NY, for Fred’s memorial service. The church is packed, standing room only. At least a dozen people offer memories. I’ve prepared a few of my own to share, beginning with Dumb and Dumber, mentioning also how many movies I saw for the first time with Sam at Fred’s house (including but not limited to Jacob’s Ladder, In the Mouth of Madness, Halloween, Friday the 13ths Parts 1-5, The Godfather, and The Exorcist III[1]), the point being that Fred, as a caretaker of children, offered us space to explore movies on our own terms. Then my mother offers a memory, and I decide to stay silent, because two Sharicks talking is one too many. After the service I visit the church basement, the room where I learned to write my name.
Two-Face’s goons have some kind of taser weapon, and Batman turns it on one of them. The goon is dressed in black vinyl, including a zippered facemask, looking like The Gimp from Pulp Fiction. The gimp-goon, stunned by the taser, runs in every direction, writhing in electricity, babbling gobbledygook that sounds like “bah-gah-da-blog-gah-da-bog-bog-blah-gah-duh.”
When my children were small, two or so, we started a game based on this babble. We start at opposite ends of the hallway. This kid runs toward me. They jump and I catch them in the air. I hold them at arm’s length, gently vibrating my hands. I run, zooming the kid left and right, careening through the air, chanting, “bah-gah-da-blog-gah-da-bog-bog-blah-gah-duh.” We reach the bed and I let them plop down. Then they get a bellybutton raz.
It's the kind of game that becomes incrementally more difficult by the day, because children grow heavier. At age eight, I can still hold my daughter at arm’s length. My son hasn’t asked for “Bahgata Bahgata” in I-don’t-know-how-long, but if he does, I’ll attempt it, because one day he’ll ask for the last time, if he hasn’t already, and I won’t know it.
One evening you’ll read a bedtime story for the last time and you won’t know it.
One day you’ll hug them through a bout of crying.
One day you’ll fix a little breakfast.
“What’s on all our minds?” —Jim Carey as Edward Nigma, aka the Riddler
Bruce Wayne visits the R&D department at Wayne Enterprises. Jim Carey is here as Edward Nigma, but really as Jim Carey, and he’s ridiculous from his first frame. Here we see how the movie hinges on impatience. Carey shows Bruce his brain-manipulation doohickey and asks for funding. Bruce, because he’s smart and clearly concerned about what would be an obviously world-changing device, withholds funding, but agrees to continue the conversation. Carey is so impatient that he demands an immediate answer: yes or no. He wants instant gratification, instant recognition of his worth as an inventor. Bruce says no, because manipulating brainwaves (whatever that means) “raises too many questions.”
In the face of world-changing knowledge, the establishment, the power structure, feels threatened by questions.
Speaking of too many questions, Bruce has a personal one-man bullet train that transports him from Wayne Tower to the Batcave. Are we not supposed to ask who built this? Are we supposed to believe that Bruce and Alfred built this themselves? Whoever built this, Bruce had them killed.
Kilmer’s Batman races to the Batsignal like a fireman responding to an alarm. He finds Chase on the roof, girls out, the same perfect/awful lipstick, Thirst Trap ’95. In this scene we’re supposed to notice the Batsuit, that it has nipples. The Kilmer Batsuit is carved to look like a perfect specimen of masculinity. No man—not even a world-champion body builder, could look like this suit.
(The Batsuit is a clue as to how we’re supposed to read Batman: as a symbol of masculinity or as a weapon, an agent of violence. Sometimes the suit is mimicking a chiseled physique (89, Forever, Batman and Robin, parts of Batman V. Superman) showing us that what’s important is the man—what the character feels. When we get a look that resembles body armor, (Returns, the Nolan series, the V part of BVS) the design underscores what Batman can do, which is, often, break things. In Forever, we need to see him as a man.)
This rooftop scene is anything but erotic. What did Chase think was going to happen? And then Batman escapes to his car to quip an exasperated “women,” leaving the second half of his thought unspoken but loud and clear: “are so stupid, amirite?”
(Bruce’s assistant Margaret wears the exact same shade of lipstick as Chase. Did the makeup department only have one tube for the whole production? Or was this movie was made by men for boys who can’t wait for Christmas.)
“Why be brutalized by an uncaring world?” —Jim Carey as Edward Nigma
Bruce takes Chase to a charity circus, where the ringmaster wears, again, that same shade of lipstick. I used to work at a media circus. Occasionally someone who knows my employment history asks if I witnessed any of the infamous sexual harassment at Fox News. I did, but I didn’t know it at the time. I did once meet Andrea Mackris, who sued former FNC anchor Bill O’Reilly. I did work with Gretchen Carlson, who sued FNC chair and CEO Roger Ailes, resulting in his resignation.
“Is it hot in here?” —Nicole Kidman as Gretchen Carlson in Bombshell
“What’s the point of doing anything worthwhile if nobody’s watching?” —Nicole Kidman as fictional TV news reporter Suzanne Stone in To Die For.
The only harassment I witnessed first-hand was my own, by a man you’ve never heard of. It lasted all of twelve seconds. “I don’t like that,” I said, and he apologized and stopped.
To Die For hit theaters on October 6th, 1995, four months after Batman Forever, and exactly one year prior to the launch of Fox News. Ailes must have seen it, especially this scene.
Riddler’s whole plan is to install what he calls “the box” (which looks nothing like a box and everything like a blender) in every home. The box is a mind control device that keeps people watching TV while their thoughts and spending preferences are beamed to Riddler’s data center. He has invented TikTok in 1995.
At the circus, where more movie happens, muscles are on display. In fact muscles are on display all over this movie—in the Batsuit, as we’ve seen, in the Robin suit, in the statues that decorate the Gotham skyline, in the circus performers, in Two-Face’s faceless henchmen.
Meanwhile, Riddler and Two-Face themselves are a physically puny couple dressed in tights, tiaras, tiger-print suits. Riddler’s soft and wavy frame is powerless without his mind. Two-Face is powerless without his shiny guns.
Batman Forever is about how straight culture reacts with violence at the slightest hint that gay culture might want to have some access to media.
“After Forever’s success, I wanted to do The Dark Knight. It was going to be very dark. I remember going to the set of Face/Off and asking Nic Cage to play the Scarecrow. The studio, and I’m not sure the audience, was in a frame of mind to go too dark with Batman at that time. It’s interesting how our culture has changed. How the socioeconomic, political culture makes it absolutely palatable to see Chris [Nolan]’s Batman—for instance The Dark Knight Rises—which is such a comment on exactly what’s happening. You might be able to track that on all the movies. Maybe Batman is one of those things like pi. It’s the center of the universe.” –– Joel Schumacher, director of Batman Forever.
Schumacher is right. No Batman movie is a Batman movie. Every entry in the series is either a giant metaphor for exploring a social taboo, or a sketch pad for the filmmaker to practice techniques for his next “real” movie. Burton used Batman as a sketchpad for Edward Scissorhands. Schumacher used Forever as metaphor. Nolan used Begins as sketchpad for The Prestige, The Dark Knight for Inception, and The Dark Knight Rises for Interstellar. The Batman is a three-hour comment on generational trauma and cyclical corruption. Batman Returns is the Christmas special.[2]
Likewise, The Doors isn’t about Jim Morrison. It’s about Oliver Stone.
A funeral isn’t about the person who died.
There is nothing like a dame.
The closest we have is to a true Batman movie is Mask of the Phantasm.
In Act 2 of South Pacific, the sailors dress in drag, complete with grass skirts and coconut bras. Maybe there’s something like a dame after all?
The truth is, I did kind of like it, and also I very much did not. What I meant was, “this frightens me and I feel unsafe.” The fear is what excites but exploring it raises “too many questions.”
Watching the The Doors in between South Pacific chorus numbers, it isn’t the sex that 8th-grade me finds so appealing. Rather, it’s the freedom of Kilmer’s Morrison, the recklessness, the apparent indifference to convention or what anyone else thinks.
“We’re all two people. One in daylight, and the one we keep in shadow.” —Val Kilmer as Bruce Wayne
“This is the strangest life I’ve ever known.” —Val Kilmer as Jim Morrison
“You’re a headache in a suitcase. You’re a star.” —Bono, “Hold Me, Thrill Me, Kiss Me, Kill Me.” (Batman Forever’s end-credits song)
[1] A criminally misunderstood and underrated film containing the best jump scare of all time.
[2] Returns (the one with Danny DeVito’s Penguin and Michelle Pfieiffer’s Catwoman) is a near-perfect standalone Batman adventure. Drop it into your Christmas movie list next to Gremlins, Die Hard, Ghostbusters II, Elf; maybe swap out How the Grinch Stole Christmas.
Returns is criminally underrated. And Kilmer in the Doors should've won the Oscar. :)