The Gramophone Film Music Guide (a publication for which Elfman wrote a forward¹⁰) describes the score for Batman Returns as "quintessentially 'Elfmanesque'", a remark which may now appear outdated, but for the time this score represented, if anything, a superficial stylistic step back from the thick "gothic" textured soundworld of Batman, towards Beetlejuice. First impressions are so rarely accurate for Elfman scores, and Batman Returns is by no means an exception: even for us today the essence of Christmas crossed with Halloween is an identifiable trait which resurges periodically in works such as Scrooged and The Nightmare Before Christmas, but this is no more than a patchy trademark, perhaps a "Burtonism". In fact the trade-off between experiment and self-convention¹¹ is a reward in itself for this score. Elfman works well with clichés, turning them to his own mischievous ends: Batman is reformed, darker but less war-like, descending further into psychological and visual fantasy. The almost passé leitmotif method of Hollywood film music is brilliantly re-worked with a skill that sometimes makes Star Wars sound heavy-handed. This carefully constructed poly-thematicism (in opposition to an almost mono-thematic Batman) permeates the whole score, and such is the execution that both CD and film scream quality and inventiveness.

Surely this was a convincing, positively directed evolution from the former score. The fallout from the movie may be seen, in context, as influential in the composer's career (Elfman's range of genres, directors and styles took on a distinct experimentalism in succeeding years) but from an equally distanced viewpoint we may see this score for what it really is: perhaps not a masterpiece, but certainly a pivotal point in Elfman's compositional approach. No score since has ever been entirely what the Elfman fan has expected, and in my opinion both film score and CD deserve prominent status in his oeuvre.

For further comments on the first three Batman films, please also see Mr Perrine's feature
"Music for a Darkened Knight" at http://www.msu.edu/user/perrinet/elfman/dark_knight/index.html

10 Gramophone Film Music Good CD Guide ed. Mark Walker (3rd Edition - Harrow, Middlesex: Gramophone Publications Ltd., 1998)
11 Elfman rarely comes close enough to self-plagiarism to be criticised at length.