Sometimes as we get older, memories of childhood become tinged with grief. Since becoming a parent myself, I've found myself drawn back to the pop culture of my own childhood. Revisiting this stuff can be unsettling, like opening a box of toys stored in an attic for a long time and experiencing an uncanny feeling when they are not quite as you remembered them. And of course, your positioning with regards to these items, these memories, has changed completely. Then, they gave you comfort, taught you something about the world. Now that use has expired, and all they offer is a route back to the past.
When I was growing up, I spent a lot of time watching the films of Tim Burton, which were kind of ubiquitous in the early 1990s. A friend’s mother who was otherwise very conservative had been tricked by an older daughter into thinking that Beetlejuice was a children’s movie (she had never seen it), so she would often put it on for us when we were around six or seven years of age. Around the same time, Batman Returns was released, and although it was rated 15, I went to see it with my parents in the now-demolished Classic Cinema in Dublin's Harold’s Cross.
Batman Returns is not a children’s movie, but like much of Burton’s oeuvre it plays with fairytale. The mixture of this naïve aesthetic with the darkness and violence of the movie was confusing to me as a child. I doubt it will ever be feted as a great piece of cinema, but I loved it. Images from it have troubled their way into my imagination; Selina Kyle’s broken body surrounded by cats in a snowy alley. The Ice Princess, pushed from a building, hitting a Christmas tree and releasing a cloud of bats, the final image of Catwoman electrocuting herself while kissing the villainous Max Shreck. All of these images involve violence directed towards women. And even Catwoman, who empowers herself to seek revenge, has to die to do so. There’s no way out. This is what I learned, if anything, from Tim Burton movies.
In 2022, a close friend from my teenage years died by suicide. She was someone with whom I forged a sense of self that shored me up against the loneliness of adolescence. We had lost touch over the course of our thirties, but before she died she had moved house and was living close to me. We had planned a play date for our children. I had imagined us creating a new blueprint for our friendship as we entered a different phase of our lives. Like me, she had been obsessed with the goth pop culture aesthetics of the 1980s and 1990s. When she had lived with me for a short time in our late teens, after an earlier suicide attempt, we spent a lot of time watching movies together. Starting to write about her opened a window on my memories of these films. I found myself having to let go of imagined nostalgic movie nights that would now never happen. Tim Burton movies would have featured heavily in the rotation, and so in the Batman Returns-themed sequence of poems that follow here, from my next collection New Arcana, I’ve called her Lydia, after Lydia Deetz in Beetlejuice.
Movie Night with Lydia
I - Becoming Catwoman
.
My mother was a secretary like Selina Kyle,
before Christopher Walken pushed her out a window –
(Selina, not my mother). My seven-year-old self
watched her body slam through awnings
(not my mother’s body, but Selina’s),
splatting onto Tim Burton’s snowy alleyway.
Then the cats enveloped her like the fur coat
that hung in the wardrobe at home, the one
she always said was suspiciously tabby-striped
(my mother, not Selina) and they lick and lick her
and somehow this reknits her shattered spine,
her arms and legs swivel into place, but her glasses,
her large owl-eye glasses (my mother’s and Selina’s)
are smashed and this is the worst, just the worst day –
pushed out the window! By a man with
a bad wig no one mentions because bosses
can look stupid while pushing women out of sky scrapers
and it’s like, ugh, bad day at the office.
And up she gets and makes her way home
to her little girl apartment so we can see
she’s just been playing at being a woman –
she’s built herself a toyshop to get lost in,
(Selina, not my mother) and she splatters the walls
with black paint, smashing toys, and as a little girl
(me, not my mother, not Selina) this is just devastating,
because it feels like we aren’t allowed
to have anything soft –
no knitted kittens or kit-cat klocks –
because it makes us weak and the only way to stop
men with Struwwelpeter hair
from pushing us out of skyscrapers
(me, my mother, Selina) is by killing
everything dear to us so that no one else can.
II - The Ice Princess Falls
Cristi Conway who plays the Ice Princess
in Batman Returns says of her 'She’s the type
to push an old lady down and try to fix her nail
at the same time.’ On first read I’m confused –
so she’d want to fix the old lady’s nail? –
but that’s not what she means.
My memory of her is all fox-fur corset
and obscene curls. All open mouth and eyes and tits.
She seems to be getting what she wants –
until she’s kidnapped and then she’s all throat,
birthing this colt-scream,
body stretched like one of Bacon’s popes
as she crashes through the Christmas tree
and bats swarm out, deranging the crowd.
Everyone is unhappy that this beautiful body is broken on the ground,
but things keep happening to pull the camera away.
There is a cautionary tale here, about the dangers
of being pretty and not very nice.
I rewind her fall from the base
of the Christmas tree so she hurtles upwards
into Batman’s outstretched arms, but she won’t stay put,
and the bats won’t go back in the tree.
III - The Circus Performers’ Desertion
Pity the Penguin, poor Oswald Cobblepot,
emerging from sewers to a mansion
filled with ghosts of Waspish parents
who didn’t want the mirror of their greed.
Who chooses to be a fable? A fable
who slurps fish heads at fundraisers,
leaking ink like a pen with no page to soak its excess,
until the surface-dwellers flush him once again.
Underneath the zoo, emperor penguins glide,
back-lit, through an element
forgiving of bulk and ugliness.
But as Batman cruises closer in the Batsub,
the Red Triangle Gang start to melt away,
the blonde who announces, deadpan,
that something is coming closer –
Very large. And very fast –
recedes into the gloom behind set walls,
leaving us to ask if these tattered acrobats
were real at all? And maybe Oswald
never survived his infant fall into the sewers,
but ended a dark dream of his parents?
Maybe men like this do not emerge
into the light after such damage
to run for Mayor, to hold our gaze
as they dribble chewed fish brains
from their lips?
IV – Things That Have Made Me Cry Today
Michelle Pfeiffer
bullwhipping the heads
off four mannequins
in a single take
then using her whip
as a skipping rope
while the whole crew (wow!)
cheers.
V – Kissing Max Shreck
I would like to tell you how it feels,
after all this waiting, to cup his face and kiss him.
These elver lips, this shock of hair,
the judder of his jawbone on my palm.
It’s snowing sparks, they’re dancing on the water.
A day comes when we all have
to give ourselves up to the current,
let the pain that lives bone-deep
spill into every cell. It’s a flame in the brain,
along the tongue, from my mouth into his.
Can’t you be happy for me?
It’s snowing grease, his hair’s on fire.
Don’t look away until I’m finished.
New Arcana by Jessica Traynor will be published by Bloodaxe in September 2025
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