 Starring: Michael Keaton, Jack Nicolson, Kim Basinger, Alfred Gough
Director: Tim Burton
Year Of Release: 1989
Plot: After seeing his parents shot as a child, billionaire Bruce Wayne has grown up and taken on the alter-ego of The Batman, who fights crime in Gotham City using his array of gadgets and technology. After Batman accidentally douses criminal Jack Napier in toxic chemicals, the villain re-emerges as the psychotic The Joker, who plans to bring a new level of terror to Gotham, in his own sadistic, joke filled style. |
Me and Tim Burton’s Batman have a history together. In documentaries, when they try and discover what made someone turn to a life of crime, they talk about poverty, falling in with the wrong crowd, or maybe even bad genes, but with me it was far simpler – it was Batman.
Well, I call it a life of crime, but to be honest my overdeveloped sense of guilt means I’d make the world’s crappest criminal. I can’t even just walk away if they give me too much change in a shop, so God knows what I’d be like if I ever tried a robbery. However Batman did cause me to commit my first knowingly illegal act.
You see the problem was that they gave Batman a 12 certificate at the cinema. In case you’re not from the UK, back then if a film was given a 12, 15 or 18, certificate, no one under that age was allowed in the cinema to watch it. Now we have 12A instead of 12, which means younger kids are allowed in with an adult, but that didn’t exist at the time.
In fact the 12 certificate was a brand new exciting thing when Batman arrived in the UK, as it was the very first movie given that rating when it was introduced by the BBFC in 1989. Well, okay it wasn’t that exciting unless you were aged 12, 13 or 14, because it didn’t make any difference to anyone else. However if you were around that age, it was pretty much the most thrilling that had happened since Michael Jackson brought out his Bad album, because it brought with it the possibility that you wouldn’t have to wait until the film came to video before you could badger your parents into letting you watch it.
I had a problem though, I was only 11. No greater injustice can ever have been served in the history of humanity than for a new cinema certificate to be introduced that allowed anybody 12 or over to go and see what at that time must have been the most hyped film in history, but for me to be 11. Surely there must be people who were locked up for crimes they didn’t commit who didn’t think they were getting as raw a deal as I did in the summer of 1989.
However every cloud has a silver lining, and in my case it was that my brother was going to see Batman, and said I could go with him, despite my age handicap. I’d never previously seen my brother as a rebel who stuck his middle finger up to authority and lived on the edge, but he must have been if he was going to take an 11-year-old to a 12 rated movie.
So off we went to the big Odeon cinema in Exeter. I must have been quite a sad, sheltered child, because I don’t think even Bonnie & Clyde during the height of their crime-spree felt as daring as I did on that August evening. Nowadays, a lot of 12-year-olds don’t feel daring until they’ve got their fifth girl pregnant and have happy slapped a pensioner, but being a rural 11-year-old in 1989 going to see Batman, I thought I was some sort of desperado. Shit, they should make coming-of-age movie about it, that’s how cool I thought I was.
The main problem though was that I wasn’t very cool. There were probably six-year-olds waltzing past the ticket booth with a swagger, passing for 12 and not even thinking about it, but I was pretty certain I was going to be busted any minute. After all, it would be eight whole months until I was 12, so surely anybody looking at me could see my eleven-ness written all over my face.
I didn’t know what would happen when they inevitably realised that some lowlife 11-year-old criminal scum was trying to sneak into a 12 film, but I was pretty sure it was going to be bad. Were there cinema police? Did you have to go to court if you were caught? Who knew?
The whole thing of going to films with age-restricted ratings was brand new to me at the time, so for all I knew they could have had a special scanner that beeped if anyone a day under 12 walked through it, or perhaps there’d be an entire bureaucracy set up to check birth certificates and government databases before you were allowed into the cinema. However I assumed this probably wasn’t the case, or else my brother wouldn’t have agreed to take me.
When we arrived at the cinema, I was absolutely certain my cover would be blown at any second. However I’d seen a few James Bond films, so knew that despite my lack of cool gadgets, acting the part would probably help. I did have a slight issue with that though – how do you act 12? Now I know that I should have pretended I knew everything there was to know about sex, while getting every single fact wrong, but at the time I’d never been 12, so wasn’t aware that this was their defining factor.
As it turns out though – and you’ll never believe this – but all my worrying was for nothing. Apparently an 11-year and four month year old boy looks pretty much like a 12-year-old one, and most people working behind a cinema ticket booth aren’t paying enough attention to notice if a foetus is trying to get in to watch The Texas Chainsaw Massacre.
I’m quite glad I didn’t know this at the time though. I think the thrill of doing something I knew that I wasn’t meant to, was probably more exciting than actually getting to watch the movie. It also briefly made me cool amongst my square, law-abiding 11-year-old friends, who weren’t allowed to go and see Batman. They obviously weren’t like me – a rebel who knew rules were only made to be broken. James Dean looked like the teacher’s pet next to me.
To be honest, my flirtation with crime was a bit sad and pathetic. On the scale of criminals, it puts me around the same level as someone who once recorded a song off the radio and then immediately taped over it because they couldn’t handle the guilt, but at the time I thought Jesse James had nothing on me. That’s the joy of being 11 though, even the little things in life are exciting. You can go and see the coolest movie in the world ever (which Batman must have been, because the adverts told me so) and you can feel like you’re one step from being a wanted outlaw while doing it.
Somehow I don't think I need to worry that I'll turn into a super-villain, but after this confession, I'd better watch out for the cinema police.
TIM ISAAC
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