Page - 90 - in JRFM - Journal Religion Film Media, Volume 03/01

90 | Simon Philipp Born www.jrfm.eu 2017, 3/1, 75–104 character who relentlessly pursues those he holds responsible for his disable- ment, is rendered as a misunderstood monster and applied to villains and heroes alike. As in most of Burton’s work, in a Burton movie you fear not the Other but the “ordinary”. in the end, Batman Returns (1992) is sheer gothic, modeled after the cinematic re-imaginings of classic gothic tales. Burton eagerly draws on the vast symbolic-image stock of the horror movie, influenced by German expressionism (see fig. 11–16). In the tradition of films like Das Cabinet des Dr. Caligari (The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, robert Wiene, De 1920), he uses stylized settings to illustrate the dark and twisted world of his film. Burton externalizes the protagonist’s ambivalent psychic states in an opulent pictorial design. the repressed subconscious of the characters turns outward in the bizarre exaggera- tions and expressive color contrasts of the set design, the gloomy lighting, the costumes, the make-up and the sinister score by composer Danny elfman. the characters’ environments are framed as psychological dioramas that strung to- gether would evoke the image of a multi-faceted theme park. Burton’s Gotham is a world of décors in which no neutral space exists, no outside, no escape. A postmodern no man’s land in which the signs of light and darkness, reason and madness, reality and fiction are perverted into their eerie opposites. A tAste Of theAtriCALity: the DArK KNiGht Burton’s Batman vision is dark, fatalistic, oppressive. the Dark Knight loves his shadowy existence so much that he refuses to stand in the light of attention. the proactive villains take over and marginalize the hero in his own movie. By contrast, in Batman Begins (2005) Christopher Nolan resets the Caped Crusader as the main protagonist of the story and explores the beginnings of the char- Fig. 17: Ground zero: Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight (2008) constantly evokes images from the traumatic terror attacks of 11 September 2001. Film still, The Dark Knight (Christopher Nolan, US 2008), 01:33:06.