Batman Returns is a mean bastard of a movie. Tim Burton’s Gotham City is inhabited exclusively by monsters: monsters whose insidious natures seep out in discernible deformities, monsters whose evil lurks behind crooked smiles and double-breasted suits. Burton’s Batman is a brooding loner, not a playboy: all stoic glares and placid threats, eerily tranquil as he uses the thrusters on the Batmobile to immolate people. And Burton’s Penguin is purged of his bird-themed gimmicks, adorned instead with flippers, a cigarillo, and a host of sociopathic tendencies. (He tries to kill all the firstborn children in the city because his parents threw him and his baby stroller into an icy river.) In the movie’s third act, a zoo explodes, a chase involving a bird boat with wheels ensues, and everyone but Batman ostensibly dies a very violent death.

This Gotham is a cartoonish, aphotic nightmare world rendered in plastic props, obviously built on vast soundstages; it can exist only as a fictitious place, an overt fantasy. Nothing in it is plausible—even the Bat signal defies logic, its luminescent silhouette cast upon absolutely nothing in the sky. From the demon circus kidnapping children with freak-show trains to the climactic showdown with Batman cruising through cavernous sewers in a speedboat and penguins with rockets strapped to their backs, Batman Returns is Guignol of the Grandest caliber.

Is it also, as so many critics were quick to proclaim upon the film’s 1992 release, really a perversion of Bob Kane’s beloved detective? Hardly: contra Christian Bale’s gravel-throated monologues in the more recent Dark Knight trilogy, Kane’s Batman was always a cartoon character capable of violence. It was the family-friendly Adam West television show that betrayed Kane’s vision, lacing the image of Batman with quirky catchphrases and synthesized onomatopoeia—pow!—in a way that ensured that most people would associate Batman with drawn-on eyebrows and delusional flow-chart detective work for the next thirty years.

It was DC Comics editor Whitney Ellsworth, not Kane, who decreed that Batman would no longer kill; this was a business decision, not a moral one, in that readers couldn’t sympathize with a guy who killed without remorse, and readers wouldn’t pay to read about someone with whom they couldn’t sympathize. But to speak of heritage, look back to 1940, when Batman impaled a Chinese swordsman, threw an American disguised as a Chinese swordsman out of a window, and crushed...