Picture a Pre-Pubescent Mattie (PPM), acne sprouting up like weeds across the oily plain of his face, visiting his local comic book shop.

PPM’s eyes dart across the racks. His heart starts to race. His hand adjusts the Bat-signal trucker cap perched awkwardly atop his enormous head, back when those were worn only by actual truckers and the hopelessly unfashionable.

PPM picks up every Batman comic he can find; later that day he devours them voraciously, laying on his bed beneath his Batsignal poster, his Bartman poster, and the poster he took from an old comic book magazine of Adam West and Burt Ward in their Dynamic Duo garb from the sixties.

Yes, little Pre-Pubescent Mattie had Bat-fever.

I was OBSESSED with Batman in 1989. Totally out of my head. I still remember the exact date that Batman premiered in theaters: June 23, 1989. I remember it because throughout the last half of my seventh grade year, I lived for that date.

I. Absolutely. Could. Not. Wait. For. This. Movie.

And so the Tuesday after the film came out, my dad took an afternoon off from work and we went to see Batman at the once-beautiful River Oaks Theaters in Calumet City, IL.

My Trapper Keeper the next school year was covered in stickers from the “Batman” trading cards. My sister and I obsessively collected each and every one of the cards to form a complete set. In art class, I devised ways to incorporate the classic oval Bat-symbol into my projects. I took to decorating my Batsignal trucker hat with buttons from the comic book and sci-fi conventions I started to attend in high school. (My favorite? The “Kirk/Spock in ’92” button.)

Batman was not the first pop culture phenomenon to knock me over the head and take me captive. But it was the first time I fully chose of my own volition to embrace a big pop moment, to stand alongside the seething masses in our Bat-signal T-shirts jamming to “Batdance” on our Walkmen headphones. It was everywhere, and so was I, slurping it all up without hesitation and loving every second of it.

As a movie, it’s a simple story, and that’s one of the big reasons it works. Director Tim Burton and screenwriters Sam Hamm and Warren Skaaren don’t clutter their film with extraneous villains who are more a lampoon than a serious threat; there’s no Ahnold muttering idiotic quips with his face painted blue, or Danny DeVito limping around with fins over his arms. (Though I do think Batman Returns is largely underrated…) It’s lean storytelling that focuses on what’s important, which is the duality of Bruce Wayne and the viciousness of the Joker.

The story isn’t what makes it so damn watchable; it’s more about a mood, a feeling, atmosphere. It’s a triumph of style over substance, which is something that can be said about many of Tim Burton’s films…and frankly, about many Batman stories over the years. The movie teeters at the edge of being aware of its own heightened artifice, tiptoeing just to the edge of showing off the wires that help Batman swing and the grotesque facial appliances that give the Joker his rictus grin.

Burton’s Gotham is a city on its last legs where only evil exists in primary colors. His Joker is a horrifying lampoon of a circus clown who gets off on combining pure naked bloodlust with his playful exterior. And his Batman is an unrelenting force of justice, consumed by revenge against an enemy he can never defeat. Production designer Anton Furst creates a twisted nightmare version of New York where every corner seems to end in a dark alley and criminals rule the streets.

There’s a distance to it all, a theatricality that seems rooted in the halting rhythms of comics, not as they were in 1989 but as they were at their birth in the 1930s. Images stand out beyond story…Michael Keaton stretching his batwings out over a couple of thugs, the Batmobile snaking its way down a leaf-covered forest road…they linger in the mind like or the iconic cover of Detective Comics 27, Bat-Man swinging down onto hapless criminals, justice raining down from on high.

This staged feeling, almost as though the characters themselves are performing and not just the actors, fits with the whole identity-as-mask theme that’s central to the film, and that’s always been a core part of Batman’s appeal. As his character has developed, so also has a simple question with no easy answer: Is Batman Bruce Wayne, or is Bruce Wayne Batman? Which is the reality, and which is the disguise? Burton dives more directly into these issues with his second Batman film but it’s there in the first film too, in the overall unreality Burton and his crew create–the heightened, yet darkened, sense of drama and action.

Looking back, there was something formative in my embrace of Batman. In the duality of Bruce Wayne and his alter-ego, I found a reflection of my own emerging personality complex—a rift torn inside myself, one side presenting a relatively happy and uncomplicated side to the world, and the other side suffering under crippling self-hatred. (Okay, so maybe that’s more Harvey Dent and Two-Face than Bruce Wayne and Batman, but work with me.)

In this story, just as in others I would soon discover, I found a sweeping and romantic expression of a character divided against himself, in an outright conflict with the world around him that only he really understood.

I was a Bat-fan before Tim Burton’s film…but in a way, my whole lifelong desperate romance with the minutiae and ephemera of pop culture started with the 1989 incarnation of Bat-mania, and the film that inspired it. Although it may not have cracked open my insides, it gave my self-loathing a mirror in which to peer.