On having your vichyssoise and eating it

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22nd July 2025

I rewatched Tim Burton’s Batman Returns (1992) again the other day, and it’s a film that just get richer and richer (not to mention darker, dirtier, pervier and more political) each time you see it.

There’s Christopher Walken’s chilling, thrilling impression of a young Donald Trump in the role of corporate monster Max Schreck. There’s Danny DeVito’s outrageous Penguin, biting smug stylists’ noses until they bleed, pushing Ice Princesses off rooftops, or lingering far too long on the bosom of a groupie as he presses a campaign badge onto her lapel. And OF COURSE there’s Michelle Pfeiffer’s incendiary turn as Selina Kyle and Catwoman, a performance whose snubbing by the Oscars is one of the greatest cultural crimes of the twentieth century. She is just BRILLIANT. I could write about her at length, and should, but I’m not here for that today.

In amongst all this louche villainy, Michael Keaton’s Batman gets a bit sidelined. I don’t think Keaton even says a word for the first thirty minutes. But he also gets one of the loveliest, randomest dialogue scenes in the whole film, an interchange so seemingly pointless that it skates close to perfection, something that serves no narrative purpose whatsoever, and yet I guarantee it’s one of the bits of the film you’ll remember long after you’ve seen it. (And I do urge you to rewatch it when you can; it’s a definitive Christmas film, an ideal antidote to all the icky sweetness of the usual seasonal offerings, like biting into a truffle and finding a shard of glass encased inside.)

Bruce Wayne is hard at work on the computer late one night in the BatCave when Alfred, his devoted butler, brings him a bowl of pale green soup sprinkled with a few chives.

It’s a wonderful episode. It shows real courage on screenwriter Daniel Waters’ part to include it. It shows real courage on Chris Lebenzon’s part to leave it in the edit. It shows real courage on Tim Burton’s part to have left the scene in the script and to have shot the scene and to have kept it in the final cut. I’m amazed every time I see it that it ever saw the light of day.

As throwaway a moment as it is, I’m writing about it here because I think it does have something to say — about taste. Or, more accurately, it might have several things to say about taste. (Interestingly, it complements a lot of what I was thinking about in my post from last week, On liking.)

When I watch it, I see Bruce encountering something that conflicts with his sense of taste — in a very literal way, because he doesn’t enjoy anything about this experience of eating cold soup. Its cues and signals are all wrong for him. He just doesn’t like it. He just doesn’t get it.

But then Alfred explains that it tastes exactly how it’s meant to, that the soup tastes precisely how it’s supposed to taste — and from that moment on, Bruce starts shovelling it down again, all concern seemingly vanished, all objection seemingly overcome.

Why is Bruce so quick to change his mind, so quick to move past his own instinctive sense of the wrongness of a cold soup? Is it because Alfred is telling him that the soup’s coldness is correct according to social convention (or high social convention, even), and so he simply accepts it? Does the fact that other people are okay with it make Bruce okay with it? Does it even make Bruce like it, all of a sudden?

Has Bruce’s taste now been enlarged by what other people think, or been completely overridden by it?

Was Bruce right not to like cold vichyssoise, or was he wrong? We’re properly into Schrödinger’s soup territory now.

Bruce must, presumably, on some level, now like the cold soup he previously disliked. Or perhaps he still dislikes it, but not strongly enough to stop him eating the rest of the bowl. Apathetic “liking” — perhaps one of the cornerstones of our contemporary culture… It’s not as though he couldn’t get Alfred to bring him something else instead. He could even get Alfred to heat the soup up, which Alfred would do, despite some tutting and a lot of side-eye.

Here’s an interesting possibility: is Bruce, like so many of us, just plain lazy when it comes to matters of taste? When it comes down to it, is he just not quite bothered enough to stick with his own instincts about what he likes and what he doesn’t, and is he indifferent enough simply to go along with the crowd? Is he just eating this cold soup — which he found abhorrent seconds before — purely because it’s easier to conform to what he’s supposed to like and to subscribe to how things are supposed to taste?

Each of the four main characters has a food or drink with which they are symbolically identified, now I come to think about it. Max Schreck presides over a meeting in his rooftop boardroom and, cup in his leather-gloved hand, patronises Selina for her ability to make “one hell of a cup of coffee”. The Penguin will seemingly do anything in return for a nice shiny raw fish, and gnaws on a side of salmon with feral snuffling delight. Selina returns home from the office and pours milk out for her cat, Miss Kitty; when she comes back a second time, just before transforming herself into Catwoman, she drinks from the carton herself, letting it pour out down her chin and down her front. Bruce, by contrast, gets… a bowl of cold soup.

Schreck’s imperiousness; Penguin’s lack of human civility; Selina’s discovery of her dark animal side. And Bruce’s blandness. All summed up for us without us ever quite noticing. Just goes to show: the devil is always in the detail.

PS — here’s Delia Smith’s recipe for leek, onion and potato soup which, she says, can be chilled down to give you a classic vichyssoise.

PPS — you can watch the Batman Returns vichyssoise scene at 38:10 into the film. Don’t tell anyone, but it might also be watchable here, if you were so minded…