502 PART 4 | SINCE WORLD WAR II
orchestrated, and shifting restlessly between a wide range of styles.
One of Elfman’s most familiar pieces in that idiom, a sort of comic-
book counterpart to John Adams’s postminimalism, is his theme music
for the animated television series The Simpsons, which premiered in- The dark, brooding score for Batman thus represents a depar-
ture for Elfman. Like fi lm composers of the golden age such as Steiner
and Korngold, Elfman wrote the Batman score in a largely romantic
harmonic and melodic language, using the resources of a symphony
orchestra, and like those composers he relied on leitmotif technique.
But whereas a golden-age fi lm score would contain several leitmotifs,
the Batman score has only one, associated with the title character. The
only other distinctive melody is a love theme for Bruce Wayne and his
love interest, and it is simply a variation on the “Bat-theme.”
In contrast, the music accompanying the fi lm’s villain, the Joker, is
a postmodernist stew of Prince’s pop songs, a grotesque waltz, and a
syrupy arrangement of Stephen Foster’s “Beautiful Dreamer.” More-
over, the Joker is aware of his music, both when it is diegetic (as when
he enters a room carrying a boom box) and when it is not (as when he
dances to and seems to conduct the waltz). As an anarchic trickster fi g-
ure, the Joker refuses to abide by a basic rule of nondiegetic music: the
convention that the audience hears it but the characters do not. The
Joker allows Elfman to turn the commercial necessity of incorporating
Prince’s songs into a virtue. The clash of musical styles that results is
used to intensify the confl ict between hero and villain.
Elfman’s treatment of Batman/Bruce Wayne’s music, though more in
the golden-age tradition, runs counter to 1980s expectations. An audi-
ence familiar with John Williams’s fi lm scores would expect the open-
ing title music for an adventure movie to be loud, brassy, marchlike, in
a major key, and emphasizing “heroic” upward melodic leaps—an apt
description of Williams’s title music for Star Wars, Superman, and Raid-
ers of the Lost Ark. Instead, Batman’s title music (LG 20.1) begins softly,
in the lowest registers of the orchestra, in a minor key, with an uncer-
tain meter, and with a melody that rises mostly by step and empha-
sizes a falling “sigh” fi gure—music one might expect at the start of a
horror movie. Even when a more energetic march rhythm takes over,
the music repeatedly modulates downward through a series of minor
keys. Rather than set the optimistic tone of a typical adventure movie,
Elfman’s title music prepares the audience for a hero who is socially alienated,
troubled, and unstable. Unexpected things about this character are suggested
before he even appears onscreen.
CDS, MTV, AND POP SPECTACLE
The late 1970s saw a sharp decline in record sales, with the LP market shrink-
ing by 10 percent or more throughout the industrialized nations. Some observ-
ers blamed the downturn on the worldwide recession following the mid-1970s
oil crisis, and others on the public’s widespread use of blank audiocassettes to
copy music in violation of copyright laws. Still others argued that the marketK Danny Elfman’s soundtrack
for Tim Burton’s Batman (19 8 9)
contrasts golden age–style
leitmotif for Batman (Michael
Keaton) and self-consciously
postmodern pastiche for the Joker
( Jack Nicholson).172028_20_495-513_r3_sd.indd 502 23/01/13 11:15 AM