The Sounds of Batman Then and Now

Before the year 2000, the comic book fan had relatively little to be excited about at the box office, Most superhero movies simply were not possible on a reasonable budget without some serious imagination. Back in 1988, Tim Burton certainly had that to offer, and his take on Batman generated quite a bit of excitement in certain circles. The dedicated comic fan will doubtlessly argue the strengths and weaknesses of the movie, but its influence on the character’s ongoing evolution has been undeniable.

The score to Batman was composed by Danny Elfman, who at the time was better known, at least to me, as the lead singer of Oingo Boingo. Elfman has gone on to have quite a bit of success as a movie composer, but Batman was probably his breakout moment - his Star Wars, so to speak. As a much younger musician, and one who judged orchestral music mainly by what it would sound like on the marching field, I thought it was brilliant. Certainly, Elfman’s playful, imaginative style clearly brings back imagery from the film and in small doses, it’s electrifying.



I revisited this soundtrack recently and was initially quite exhilarated. The opening theme is now, in retrospect, iconic. Burton’s dark imagination may have changed Batman visually, but Danny Elfman’s attendant soundtrack shaped the way Batman sounded for the next decade. The Batman Animated Series, which was arguably one of the finest renderings of the Batman mythos, featured a variant theme by Elfman. This tied the series into the same world as the movie, and as the DC animated universe grew, the shadow of Elfman’s themes stretched further and further.



Despite its influence, over the course of the Batman OST, as a more mature listener I began to feel less and less engaged. It’s pervasively nervous, anxious energy soon becomes exhausting, and the themes that were so compelling at the outset are repeated and reinvented endlessly with relatively little harmonic or rhythmic variation. By the album’s end, it starts to feel like the whole thing has been nothing more than that one theme over and over again, dressed up in Elfman’s characteristic flurry of strings.

These days the cinema is a much different place for those of us that grew up reading comics. There are many amazing movie adaptations, not the least of which was the genre-defining Dark Knight trilogy from Christopher Nolan. His gritty, real-world take on Batman appealed to both comic fans and non-fans alike. Like its concomitant movie, Hans Zimmer and James Newton Howard’s soundtrack to the second of these films, The Dark Knight, is a much different rendering of Batman’s soundscape.



The Dark Knight OST often has more in common with the moody, minimalistic ripples of Phillip Glass than the thematic bombast of John Williams. This impression is doubtlessly due to its use of repetition as a compositional tool. At no time, however, does it sink to redundancy (which, taken as a whole, Elfman’s score does). The Dark Knight uses melody sparingly, instead conjuring a sinister, cerebral mood through a staggeringly broad spectrum of timbres and sounds. Perhaps because it is relatively sparse, it is still possible to hear vague outlines of Elfman’s thematic material if you are imaginative. Mostly, however, The Dark Knight is a defiantly original tightrope walk between contemplative focus and terrifying, explosive fury.

Because melody is not at the forefront of The Dark Knight, Zimmer and Howard’s score is not as immediately memorable as Elfman’s, but it is in some ways more engaging. Its strengths are far more subtle, and are not overused to the point of exhaustion. Unlike the Batman OST, which fatigues the focused listener, The Dark Knight gives the listener enough room for their own place in the soundscape. It feels as if it is over too soon, which infuses it with an aesthetic value outside of its status as the accompaniment to an amazing movie.

EDIT: This review became an episodic project that formally started HERE.

"Dead Man's Party:" A Halloween Tradition

Perhaps over the years, I've just become a stick-in-the-mud.  Unless I have a really clever costume, I don’t usually dress up for Halloween, and, at least in recent times, I make a concerted effort to avoid refined sugar. To most, it would seem that the holiday is a bust for me, but I do have a few very specialized traditions that I keep every year. During my more bachelorish times, I would invite over some unsuspecting victims and watch Peter Jackson’s voodoo zombie splatterfest Dead Alive. That ritual has fallen by the wayside in recent years, but another that still remains is to put Oingo Boingo’s 1985 classic Dead Man’s Party in rotation for a few days.



This tradition has its roots in high school, when my old friend Snoopy and I decided the piercing Jokeresque stare of Danny Elfman, who was then lead singer and songwriter for Oingo Boingo, harbored a macabre genius. Before his scoring career took off with the soundtrack from the first Batman movie and the now ubiquitous Simpsons theme, several songs from Dead Man’s Party were featured in television and films, not the least of which was the song Weird Science.



Dead Man’s Party is as a particularly well-evolved example of the post-punk/new wave/ska movement and overall, I think that it truly is a classic 80s album. Its distinctively wild-eyed menace is creepy in that enjoyable, wax-museum sense, where an immobile Frankenstein in the shadows with bolts in his neck is cause for simultaneous unease and glee. Although Snoopy and I pegged it as having a somewhat pleasantly morbid undercurrent, Dead Man’s Party did not become an official “Halloween Album” until a couple of years later.

In 1989, after being in college for just a few months, I went to a Halloween drumline party in the country with some people I knew from marching band. It turned out to be a somewhat bizarre scene. Freshman members of the drumline were being subjected to a knuckle-busting round of “rat trap roulette” while others were being recruited to throw an old piano onto the bonfire. This latter activity was particularly cathartic to those of us enrolled in the brutal piano classes that UNT used to weed out the weaklings.  The piano crashed into the flames with a thunderous clap and, as its frame began to warm and its strings began to break, it conjured an incredible death knell that lasted for almost an hour.  John Cage himself could not have come up with a better performance.

As the din began to die down, I remember standing on a hill and looking out on the scene with a mixture of admiration and disbelief.  Then, from behind me, I heard the distinctive synth-marimba intro of Just Another Day, the opening track from Dead Man’s Party, rolling out from the stereo in the house.



The hosts played the entire album at length to its end, and I was pleased see people I didn’t know singing along with even its deeper cuts. Since then, I have played Dead Man’s Party every year almost without fail for the Halloween season and strangely, the album has transcended nostalgia. I still find it to be a pleasurable way to acknowledge the holiday, even if I am not doing anything particularly festive.

These days, Dead Alive is pretty much off the table. I don't think its wife-appropriate, much less kid-appropriate. Perhaps in a few years, when the Little One is a bit older, The Nightmare Before Christmas can replace it as the official Halloween movie, and Elfman’s distinctive croon can make another appearance as the singing voice of Jack Skellington. For now, though, I think that Dead Man’s Party would be great to have on as we get on our costumes and get ready to go trick-or-treating for the first time.