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Electronic Theses, Treatises and Dissertations
The Graduate School
2012
A Spectacle Worth Attending to: The Ironic
Use of Preexisting Art Music in Film
Matthew J. McAllister
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THE FLORIDA STATE UNIVERSITY
COLLEGE OF MUSIC
A SPECTACLE WORTH ATTENDING TO: THE IRONIC USE OF
PREEXISTING ART MUSIC IN FILM
By
MATTHEW J. MCALLISTER
A Dissertation submitted to the
College of Music
in partial fulfillment of the
requirements for the degree of
Doctor of Philosophy
Degree Awarded:
Summer Semester, 2012
Copyright © 2012
Matthew J. McAllister
All Rights Reserved
Matthew McAllister defended this dissertation on May 22, 2012.
The members of the supervisory committee were:
Michael Broyles
Professor Directing Dissertation
Evan Jones
University Representative
Frank Gunderson
Committee Member
Douglass Seaton
Committee Member
The Graduate School has verified and approved the above-named committee members, and
certifies that the dissertation has been approved in accordance with university requirements.
ii
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
First and foremost, I would like to thank my dissertation director, Michael Broyles, for
his constant encouragement, enthusiasm, and professionalism that he showed throughout the life
of this project. Michael’s careful and consistent guidance, along with his endless positivity,
made this project less of a chore and much more like a fun, playful investigation. Additionally, I
must thank the entire faculty of musicology at The Florida State University. They have built a
truly remarkable program that keeps its students positive, curious, and engaged. Among the
many outstanding faculty members at FSU, Douglass Seaton deserves special accolades for his
tireless efforts to instill a rigorous work ethic and a strong culture of scholarship among the
students in the program. I am especially grateful for his keen insights and though-provoking
questions while preparing the final stages of this document, but most of all for the models of
teacher and scholar that he has provided.
I would also like to acknowledge my family, and would like to thank my mother, Linda
Hendershot, and my father, Michael McAllister, for their support. Moreover, this project could
not have been completed without the help of my friends Carlos Velez, Jason Quattro, Paul
Luongo, and Joshua Corum, and I wish to thank them, deeply, for extending to me their time and
talents. Finally, I must thank my former professor and mentor, Sterling E. Murray, who has
become something closer to a father to me than simply a teacher. Without his support and belief
in my abilities, I would never thought to pursue my education and career to this end, and for this
I am profoundly grateful.
iii
TABLE OF CONTENTS
List of Figures ................................................................................................................................. vi
List of Musical Examples ..............................................................................................................viii
Abstract ........................................................................................................................................... ix
PART I
1. WHY IRONY? ............................................................................................................................1
Elements of Irony.................................................................................................................7
Confident Unawareness ...........................................................................................9
Contrast of Appearance and Reality ........................................................................9
Comic Element.......................................................................................................10
Detachment ............................................................................................................12
Aesthetic Element ..................................................................................................12
Irony as Stimulus or “Stable” Irony ...................................................................................13
How Stable Irony Works........................................................................................14
Types of Stable Irony .........................................................................................................17
Irony as Terminus or “Unstable” Irony..............................................................................19
2. MUSICAL PRACTICES IN THE “SILENT” FILM ERA .......................................................22
The Rise of the Theater Orchestra and the Blockbuster Film............................................24
The Expansion of the Art Music Repertory and its Dissemination ...................................27
The End of an Era ..............................................................................................................30
The Transition to Sound.....................................................................................................32
3. HOLLYWOOD’S “GOLDEN AGE” AND THE CLASSICAL-STYLE FILM ......................35
The Development of the Early Classical-Style Film Score ...............................................36
Influences on the Classical Hollywood Film Score ...........................................................37
The Wagner Debate ...........................................................................................................38
Principles of the Classical Hollywood Film Score ............................................................40
Invisibility ..............................................................................................................41
Inaudibility .............................................................................................................42
Signifier of Emotion...............................................................................................43
Narrative Cueing ....................................................................................................43
Continuity and Unity..............................................................................................44
Breaking the Rules .................................................................................................45
4. ART MUSIC IN FILM DURING THE SOUND ERA .............................................................46
iv
PART II
5. A BRIEF OVERVIEW OF IRONICALLY DEPLOYED ART MUSIC IN FILMS ................55
Introduction ........................................................................................................................55
Analysis of Preexisting Art Music in Films .......................................................................57
6. PREEXISTING ART MUSIC IN THE FILM ADAPTATION OF
STEPHEN KING’S MISERY.........................................................................................................84
Music in Misery .................................................................................................................85
Liberace Motif in Misery ...................................................................................................85
Why Liberace? ..................................................................................................................88
7. WAGNER, EROTICISM, AND EVIL IN APT PUPIL ..........................................................105
The Music of Apt Pupil ....................................................................................................106
8. DIEGETIC, NONDIEGETIC, AND NARRATIVE POSITIONING IN
HE GOT GAME ...........................................................................................................................123
Reappropriation, Irony, and the Reformation of Cultural Identities ................................123
9. MUSIC, IRONY, AND THE FORMATION OF PRACTICAL IDENTITIES IN
ELEPHANT..................................................................................................................................136
Introduction ......................................................................................................................136
Elephant (2003) ...............................................................................................................140
10. CONCLUSION ......................................................................................................................149
11. BIBLIOGRAPHY ..................................................................................................................154
12. FILMOGRAPHY...................................................................................................................163
13. BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH .................................................................................................164
v
LIST OF FIGURES
Figure 5.1. Screenshot from Cashback. Screaming girl accompanied by “Casta Diva.” ............56
Figure 5.2. Screenshot from Casino. Ace’s body silhouetted against flames and
the lights of the Las Vegas casinos ................................................................................................58
Figure 5.3a. Screenshot from Casino. The members of the Midwest Mafia shown
during Ace’s opening monologue ..................................................................................................59
Figure 5.3b. Carravagio: The Calling of St. Matthew (1600) .......................................................59
Figure 5.4. Screenshot from Casino. The new Las Vegas casinos (MGM Grand)
and the allusion to Christian iconography while Ace speaks of a paradise lost ............................61
Figure 5.5. Screenshot from Casino. The new, “Disneyland” crop of Vegas tourists..................61
Figure 5.6. Screenshot from Junebug. Workers’ inane chatter with scenes of
quotidian labor accompanied by an orchestral arrangement of Shubert’s “Gratzer Galop.” ........65
Figure 5.7. Screenshot from The Madness of King George. King George is
gagged at the moment the choir sings in the dramatic opening of “Zadok the Priest.” .................69
Figure 5.8. Screenshot from The Madness of King George. The inverted “Coronation.” ............71
Figure 5.9. Screenshot from 28 Days Later. Jim looks out the car window at piles
of corpses (reflected in the window) as Ave Maria sounds nondiegetically..................................72
Figure 5.10. Screenshot from 28 Days Later. The survivors approach a completely
ablaze Manchester as Fauré’s “In Paradisum” from his Requiem sounds .....................................74
Figure 5.11. Screenshot from Needful Things. Nettie and Wilma lie dead below
Wilma’s husband as the final bars to Ellens dritter Gesang sound ...............................................78
Figure 5.12. Screenshot from The Killing Fields. Cambodian civilian casualties as the
triumphant finale of “Nessun dorma” declares “Vinceró! .............................................................80
Figure 6.1. Screenshot from Misery. Empty phone with Liberace photo .....................................86
Figure 6.2a and b. Screenshots from Misery. Annie’s two “shrines.” ..........................................87
Figure 6.3. Screenshot from Misery. Page in Annie’s scrapbook identifying her
as a Republican ..............................................................................................................................89
vi
Figure 6.4. Screenshot from Misery. Sheldon becomes aware of his dires situation
just as Liberace’s version of the “Moonlight” Sonata begins to play ............................................98
Figure 7.1. Screenshot from Apt Pupil. Todd doodling on his test as Wagner’s
“Love Duet” from Tristan und Isolde enters ..............................................................................107
Figure 7.2. Screenshot from Apt Pupil. Dussander (Sir Ian McKellan) above Archie
(Elias Kotas) as the “Liebestod” gains intensity ..........................................................................113
Figure 8.1. Screenshot from He Got Game. Opening credits. The game played in
rural America accompanied by Copland’s John Henry ...............................................................127
Figure 8.2. Screenshot from He Got Game. Opening credits. Copland’s John Henry
continues to accompany scenes of the game, this time in urban, inner-city spaces ....................128
vii
LIST OF MUSICAL EXAMPLES
Example 5.1. Handel, Zadok the Priest (HWV 258), mm. 20-21. Vocal score with
piano reduction...............................................................................................................................70
Example 7.1. Wagner, Tristan und Isolde, Act II, “Love Duet,” mm. 9-12 ...............................107
Example 7.2a. Wagner, Tristan und Isolde, Prelude, mm. 1-2 ...................................................111
Example 7.2b. Wagner, Tristan und Isolde, Act III, “Liebestod,” mm.1-2.................................111
Example 7.3. Wagner, Tristan und Isolde, Act II, “Love Duet,” mm. 9-12 ...............................112
Example 7.4. Wagner, Tristan und Isolde, Act III, “Liebestod,” mm. 38-42.............................114
Example 7.5. Wagner, Tristan und Isolde, Act III, “Liebestod,” mm. 44-47.............................115
viii
ABSTRACT
Irony is an important discursive mode and literary trope. It invites a debate about
meaning and significance, creates a feeling of community among perceivers (even if, on the
surface, it excludes), and draws them into morally active engagement. Irony can allow for
conceptual points to be perceived more quickly and to be remembered longer than do literal
statements.
Art music has remained relevant to the wider popular culture partly through its use in
films, and ironic deployments of this music constitute one of its most sophisticated uses. It
makes perceivers aware of the surface features of a film, its multiple, deeper contextual layers,
and the complex interplay that takes place among them, which helps directors to make
conceptual and narrative points that transcend their immediate filmic narratives.
In the so-called “Golden Age” of Hollywood film, circa 1933-60, the narrative elements,
including and especially music, were standardized in order to create a product with the clearest
possible narrative. Composers during this period employed the stylistic elements of the
Romantic orchestral idiom as the lingua franca of cinema due to its cultural currency and in
particular its well-established emotional connotations. Throughout the 1960s however, the major
Hollywood studios began to experiment with different filmic products, especially those modeled
on European auteurism, which placed the control of the film in the hands of a single filmmaker
and not, as was Hollywood practice, in the hands of a committee.
With the success of such non-traditional films and their even less- traditional scores, the
Hollywood establishment became more willing to take chances by placing the various
components of films under the control of individual directors. With the music choices now in
the hands of the auteur, the rules and conventions for music in films changed, and preexisting art
music has had a noticeable presence in films from the late 1960s until the present. Moreover,
ironically deployed art music became, if not a staple, a regularly used device by some of
Hollywood’s more sophisticated directors. The recognition of this irony can unmask deeper
contextual layers that reveal or enhance major themes in the films and, in some cases, the
ideology of the filmmaker. Moreover, music, through its association and interaction with film,
can reinscribe itself and its perceived meaning within the wider culture. This means that art
ix
music continues to be relevant to our culture; music acquires renewed meaning through its
significant and sophisticated participation in the Western world’s most popular artistic medium.
x
CHAPTER 1:
WHY IRONY?
The phenomenon of irony is of considerable cultural and literary importance, and it draws
one’s attention in a way that no other literary trope or discursive mode seems to match. It is at
once admired and suspect, prized and despised, but once perceived it can never be ignored. Art
music has remained relevant to the wider popular culture thanks in no small part to its use in
modern American films, and ironic deployments of this music invite the audience to contemplate
both its importance within culture and its continuing power to comment upon situations,
personalities, art, and society at large. Ironically deployed preexisting art music makes the
perceiver aware of the surface features of the film, its multiple, deeper conceptual layers, and the
complex interplay and dialectic that takes place between and among them, as well as allowing
films and the music in them to make historical, narrative, and ideological points that transcend
their immediate narrative. The processes that allow for such transcendence are the topic of this
investigation.1
Irony forces the perceiver to explore any number of issues that lie beyond the surface of a
work. It invites debate about meaning and significance, at the same time it offers a glimpse into
the personal attitudes of the ironist.2 By prompting an audience to engage in this debate, irony
draws together a community of spectators who each, individually, contemplate and assess the
efficacy and cogency of the ironic performance. Irony functions to join perceivers together in a
bonded community instead of dividing them. As Wayne C. Booth argues:
Every irony inevitably builds a community of believers even as it
excludes … it often builds a larger community, with fewer
outsiders, than would have been built by non-ironic statements.3
Moreover, irony achieves this communion with astonishing efficiency. Booth also notes
that the process of perceiving irony occurs very quickly, and that this is necessary due to “the
1
Dougles C. Muecke, Irony: The Critical Idiom (London: Meithen, 1970), 51.
Wayne C. Booth. A Rhetoric of Irony (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1974), 21.
3
Booth, 28-29.
2
1
complex mental operations irony demands of us” and “make[s] possible a density and economy
impossible in any literal mode.”4 Additionally, this rapidity accounts for the fun of “getting it”:
Perhaps no other form of human communication does so much
with such speed and economy … when it succeeds, [it] reveals in
both participants a kind of meeting with other minds that
contradicts a great deal that gets said about who we are and
whether we can know each other.5
Booth claims that social bonding via irony is achieved through the identification of, and
with, likeminded individuals who also “get it.” And while he notes that there certainly are
victims of irony (either real or imagined), for the individual perceiving irony the “predominant
emotion … is that of joining, of finding and communing with kindred spirits.”6
In addition to drawing together a community of spectators, irony compels communities
and the individuals within them to consider important and at times profound issues, no matter
how pedestrian or frivolous its context. “Wresting with irony … [is not] only about ‘verbal’
matters … but a debate about how a man should live.”7
For example, a segment titled “Dreaded Bliss” which aired on the January 12 th , 2010,
edition of the television program The Daily Show with Jon Stewart covered the debate and
protests concerning a bill to legalize gay marriage in New Jersey. The satirical “fake-news”
program sent out one of its correspondents to interview citizens outside the statehouse, where
protesters both for and against the issue had gathered in order to express their opinions publicly.
In the segment correspondent Wyatt Cenac interviews two African Americans, one male and one
female, who are protesting against gay marriage. The first interview has the male AfricanAmerican answering Cenac’s question, “How are you like [George] Washington?” The man
responds, “You had a group, a minority … and they believed and they fought for the cause …
and as it was, centuries ago, so it is today.”8 Anther protestor then remarks:
4
Ibid., 104.
Ibid., 13.
6
Ibid., 28.
7
Ibid., 38.
8
The Daily Show with Jon Stewart. First broadcast 12 January, 2010 by Comedy Central.
(http://www.thedailyshow.com/watch/tue-january-12-2010/dreaded-bliss), accessed January 21, 2010. “Dreaded
Bliss,” produced by Timothy Greenberg and edited by Daniel Schlesselman.
5
2
In this land of America, where we live as Americans, as I, myself,
being a female, and being an African-American woman, I once
upon a time –my forefathers … I didn’t have a right to vote, I
didn’t have a right to a say in life, but now, I have a right, we have
the voice, and I’m so thankful today that the same-sex issue was
rejected.9
The cause, centuries ago, was freedom from oppression and not, as it is today, the relegation of a
minority to second-class status.
After a cutaway from the interview, which showed a clip from Fox News announcing that
the measure had been defeated, Cenac’s voiceover of the slow-motion images of these religious
and minority groups summarizes:
It was just as our forefather had envisioned: that one day, people
who had been discriminated against for their religion, or the color
of their skin, could come together to discriminate against people
for their sexual orientation … without the slightest sense of
irony.10
The closing scene in the segment is of the famous Emanuel Leutz painting Washington
Crossing the Delaware, with superimposed images of the New Jersey protesters inside
Washington’s small rowboat and a final voiceover by Cenac intoning, “Let Freedom Ring!”
Cenac, by playing the role of detached observer, takes on the role of the Greek Eiron. In
Greek comedy the Eiron was a stock character who defeated or brought low his braggart
opponent (the Alazon) by pretending to be less than he was or not as smart as he was. In
actuality, the Alazon brought himself low, while attempting to educate the Eiron on the
supremacy of his position but instead merely revealing himself as the ignorant party. The Alazon
would be exposed to the audience as being ignorant of an issue and foolishly unaware of the
truth of situation. By allowing the protestors to pontificate, Cenac establishes the situation as
being ironic through the obvious incongruity of minority groups who have suffered
discrimination protesting the full inclusion of other minority groups.
While the segment is clearly comedic, the issues that are brought up by this ironic
exposition are both universal and profound. We laugh at the hypocrisy and ignorance of the
9
The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, January 12, 2010.
The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, January 12, 2010.
10
3
protesters (in the same segment we laugh as well at some of the protesters campaigning for gay
marriage), but we also meditate upon the ideas of democracy, majority-allotted civil rights, and
the lack of logical thought of those fellow citizens who could grant or deny those rights. As
Booth suggests, irony is especially suited to draw the perceiver into “morally active
engagement.”11
The ideological points in the segment are made directly, quickly, and in a more
memorable fashion than they would have been by means of a literal statement. Research by
Raymond W. Gibbs has shown empirically that “ironic utterances do not take longer to
comprehend than do literal ones.”12 Additional research by Kreuz, Long, and Church has shown
that sarcastic statements –a basic form of irony13 –“are also better remembered than are literal
statements.”14
The television show is well known for its scathing parodies and satire, modes of
discourse that “use similar aspects” to irony, “but it [irony] is not necessarily of feature of
them.”15 The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, a parody of modern cable news, which often uses
satirical means to make its points, allows, in this instance, the protesters to satirize themselves
unwittingly, thereby drawing attention to the inherent irony. A straightforward parody or literal
statement would have been less effective and memorable than the approach taken in this
particular segment; this episode is thus a testament to the power and efficacy of irony.
Irony is a particularly powerful discursive tool; it implicitly yet effectively conveys the
thoughts and values of the ironist, while slyly convincing perceivers to adopt these as their own.
While a literal statement would easily express the same sentiment, it would be far less effective
at persuading the perceiver to identify with the ironist’s view.
Booth points out that in irony, “the author invites the reader [viewer] to reconstruct the
meaning of an irony himself, the reader finds the position more plausible than an overt statement,
since it is, in a real way, his own.”16 Those viewers of “Dreaded Bliss” who perceive the irony
11
12
525.
Booth, 66.
Raymond W. Gibbs, “Psychological Aspects of Irony Understanding,” Journal of Pragmatics, 16 (1991):
13
Douglass C. Muecke, Irony: The Critical Idiom, 52.
Roger Kreuz, Debra L. Long, and Mary B. Church. “On Being Ironic: Pragmatic and
Mnemonic Implications,” Metaphor and Symbolic Activity, 6 (1991): 149.
15
Roger Kreuz and Richard Roberts. “On Satire and Parody: The Importance of Being Ironic,” Metaphor
and Symbolic Activity, 8/2 (1992): 106.
16
Booth, 41.
14
4
reconstruct an unspoken “true intention” of the ironist (either Cenac, the editor, or the producer,
although the specific ironist in this case is insignificant), and, due to the complex mental
processes involved with that reconstruction, arrive at a conclusion similar to the ironist’s, which
they feel is at least partially their own. Booth reinforces his idea when he claims that “irony
dramatizes this choice, forces us into hierarchical participation, and hence makes the results
more actively our own.”17 By the processes of this mental engagement “[i]rony thus produces a
much higher degree of confidence than does a literal statement.”18
On the one hand, dealing in irony clearly has its advantages when positing specific and/or
ideological points of view. On the other hand, the risks of communicative failure are greater
than would be the use of literal statements, metaphors, or even sarcasm and parody. For an
audience who can-not, will not, or does not perceive the irony, the results can be
communicatively catastrophic. As Booth flatly states, “[i]rony risks disaster more than any other
device.”19 In dealing with irony, there is a high-risk/high-reward relationship. Douglass C.
Muecke supports this conclusion when he says that “… irony runs the same risks of failure
through being too laboured or too subtle, too brief or too long drawn out, mistimed in the telling
or ill-adapted to audience or occasion.”20
For example, The Colbert Report, a satirical send-up of conservative media, has
comedian Stephen Colbert playing the part of an angry, know-it-all conservative blowhard who
furiously takes on all things “liberal.” For most, the satire is clear cut; Colbert pretends to be an
irate conservative, and through this guise he pokes fun at the conservative entertainment
industry. But a recent study by Heather L. LaMarre, Kristen D. Landreville, and Michael A.
Beam shows that political ideology greatly colored the perception of the satire:
there was no significant difference between the groups [selfidentified liberals and conservatives] in thinking Colbert was
funny, but conservatives were more likely to report that Colbert
only pretends to be joking and genuinely meant what he said while
17
Ibid.
Ibid., 51.
19
Ibid., 41.
20
Muecke, The Compass of Irony, 15.
18
5
liberals were more likely to report that Colbert used satire and was
not serious when offering political statements.21
In short, a significant portion of the viewing audience is not likely to perceive the ironic intent
lurking behind the surface. In the particular case of “Dreaded Bliss,” this risk is largely offset by
Cenac’s blatant mentioning of the irony (“without the slightest sense of irony”), but this obvious
exposition actually serves to lessen the effect of irony for the perceptive audience members.
Muecke states that “the very presence of the inquirer would tend to destroy the rather intimate
social rapport upon which … irony depend[s].”22 In other words, by laying bare the presence of
irony Cenac actually diminishes its impact by thwarting the mental process Muecke calls “ironic
dissembling.”
Ironic dissembling is the process of seeing through the surface features of a situation or
statement to arrive at the true meaning behind it, one that agrees with the ideology of the
perceived ironist. This is an important element of irony, as it shifts the balance of responsibility
from the poietic maker to the aesthetic receiver. It relies upon an observer or an audience to
recognize the ironic elements of a situation.
It is important, for the irony to be successful, that ironic dissembling is possible for most
but not for all. Those who are unable to see through the irony are some of its victims. Irony is
meant to be seen through by the audience but not by the victim(s) of the ironical statement. 23 For
our purposes, the victim necessary for irony to exist can be virtually anyone, real, imagined,
created, or evoked. In the example from The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, the victims include
both the protesters being interviewed and any audience members who do not perceive the
hypocrisy.
Irony allows and even forces perceivers to look beyond the surface of a presented or
observed situation and to engage with the meaning and significance of a given issue. By this
means, irony creates a tighter community among those who perceive the irony and thus identify
with an implied but very real ideology. It achieves this rapidly, and this rapidity of complex
mental processes is both pleasurable and effective. By appearing to leave open the interpretation
Heather L. LaMarre, Kristen D. Landreville, and Michael A. Beam, “The Irony of Satire: Political
Ideology and the Motivation to See What You Want to See in The Colbert Report,” The International Journal of
Press/Politics, 14/2 (2009): 212.
22
Muecke, Irony: The Critical Idiom, 2.
23
Muecke, Irony: The Critical Idiom, 2.
21
6
of a given situation, ironists lead the perceivers to engage in mental processes that make the
conclusions about an issue their own. This high level of mental engagement makes irony more
convincing, effective, and better remembered than are literal statements.
It has been empirically demonstrated that those with a particular ideological stance
concerning a specific issue are more at risk of failing to perceive irony.24 Finally, it is the fact
that some perceivers do not perceive irony that, in part, makes irony possible at all. Irony must
have a perceived victim in order to be recognized, and thus a victim, whether real or imagined, is
an essential component of irony.
Elements of Irony
The concept of irony (eironeia) as used in Greek drama and rhetoric would have been
almost unrecognizable to Cicero or Shakespeare. 25 By the sixteenth century in England the
concept appears to have been similar to the modern concept of sarcasm or a “Drie Mock.”26 Only
by the end of the eighteenth century was the term applied to the ironic elements in the works of
dramatists such as Aeschylus, Shakespeare, and Racine, among others. 27 The waters surrounding
the concept of irony today are similarly muddy, as Muecke points out when he claims that
“[t]oday irony will mean different things to different people” and that the concept of irony in our
culture “is still developing.”28
Muecke’s landmark study, The Compass of Irony, concedes that the task of concretely
defining irony may be impossible when he says, ironically, that “Since … Erich Heller, in his
Ironic German, has already quite adequately not defined irony, there would be little point in not
defining it all over again.”29 More to the point, he posits that there is
no brief and simple definition that will include all kinds of irony
while excluding all this is not irony, that distinctions from one
angle may not be distinctions from another, and that kinds of irony
24
LaMarre, Landerville, and Beam, 212.
Muecke, Irony: The Critical Idiom, 15.
26
Ibid., 16. Quoting Puttenham’s Arte of English Poesie (ed. G. D. Willcock and A. Walker, London,
25
1936).
27
Muecke, The Compass of Irony, 47.
Muscke, Irony: The Critical Idiom, 10.
29
Muecke, The Compass of Irony, 14.
28
7
theoretically distinguishable will in practice be found merging into
one another.30
All of this slipperiness leads to a fundamental problem: How should irony be identified in
a study of irony? The Merriam Webster Dictionary defines irony as “the use of words to express
something other than and especially the opposite of the literal meaning,” or as an “incongruity
between the actual result of a sequence of events and the normal or expected result.”31 Muecke
takes the position that
irony, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder…we talk of irony,
as we do of beauty, as if it were an objective quality or
phenomenon, and generally we may have to rely upon having
enough in common, a sufficient intersubjectivity, to be able to talk
meaningfully of heavy or subtle, tragic or comic, bitter or playful
or striking irony.32
The best we can do, according to Muecke, is to agree that irony has both the qualities of
subjectivity and “certain aesthetic qualities, lacking which, it fails to affect us as irony.”33 With
the above caution in mind, we may progress toward outlining the essential qualities and elements
of irony, since it is clear that no single definition will suffice to cover either the concept or all
instances of irony. For the purposes of this study I will use Muecke’s rather open and inclusive
definition of irony as “the art of saying something without really saying it … an art closely
related to wit … nearer to the mind than to the senses, reflective and self-conscious rather than
lyrical and self-absorbed.”34 And while a strict definition of irony may elude us, Muecke posits
that there are five basic elements common to all irony:
1) confident unawareness on the part of a “victim” (Muecke’s term)
2) a contrast of appearance and reality
3) a comic element
4) an element of detachment
5) an esthetic element.35
30
Muecke, The Compass of Irony, 14.
http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/irony (accessed January 26, 2010)
32
Muecke, The Compass of Irony, 14.
33
Ibid., 15.
34
Ibid., 5-6.
35
Muecke, The Compass of Irony, 15.
31
8
Confident Unawareness
Confident unawareness refers mainly to a victim of irony, someone who “need only
reveal by word or by actions that he doesn’t suspect that things are not even remotely like what
he ingenuously supposes them to be.”36 For Muecke, those who exhibit hubris and obliviousness
make the best ironical victims.
But simply having a victim does not suffice to create irony, for irony is always in the eye
of the beholder. The ironic victim needs an audience, someone to perceive both the unawareness
as well as the reality of the situation in order for the irony to be properly identified and
experienced, even if that audience is the ironist. Irony is, after all, meant to be seen through, and
a perceiver must take part in the ironic dissembling to see through the surface situation or
presentation in order to access the underlying, the actual.
The obvious case of an ironic victim in a film would be a character who is confident of
the outcome of a particular situation. As is usual in drama, the audience viewing the film is
naturally more aware of the character’s true situation than is the character himself. Less
conventionally, the victim could be fellow audience members themselves. There may be a
portion of the audience, real or imagined, who do not “get” the irony. This creates a feeling of
inclusiveness, a kind of “in-crowd,” who may perceive an irony which excludes others. In this
way, there may also be victims within the audience.
Contrast of Appearance and Reality
Muecke’s second basic element, the contrast of appearance and reality, is perhaps the one
most basic to irony. It arises, very simply, when an ironist says or presents one thing but means
something quite different. The ironist, unlike the liar or hoaxer, is not trying to deceive an
audience but instead presents an alternate reality in order to make his implicit point more
effectively than would be the case with a literal statement. In short, the ironist “pretends, not in
order to be believed but … in order to be understood.”37 Muecke ties this element with the first
(confident unawareness) when describing a situation in which “the ironist presents an appearance
and pretends to be unaware of a reality while the victim is deceived by an appearance and is
36
37
Ibid., 28.
Muecke, Irony and the Ironic, 34.
9
unaware of the reality.”38 It is important here not to ascribe absolute value to the words
“appearance” and “reality.” As Muecke describes, “what is ‘appearance’ and what is ‘reality’ in
irony are no more than what the ironist or ironic observer takes them to be, from which it follows
that irony is not invulnerable to further irony for a new vantage-ground.”39
We see in the above statements the subjective nature of irony. And while it would be
easy to extrapolate this argument into a reductio ad absurdum, it is important to understand that
this study will be examining ironies that are meant to be perceived by large and diverse
audiences. As such, the contrast of appearance and reality filmmakers must present in order for
irony to be detected by a large portion of the audience (if that is their intent) must be fairly
conspicuous.
Comic Element
Muecke’s third basic feature of irony, the comic element, is perhaps the most
questionable. He speculates that the comic element is “inherent in the formal properties of irony:
the basic contradiction or incongruity coupled with a real or a pretended confident unawareness.
No man wittingly contradicts himself … consequently, the appearance of an intentional
contradiction sets up a psychic tension which can only find a resolution in laughter.”40 However,
Muecke takes issue with the argument posed by A. R. Thompson that irony must contain both a
comic and a painful element.41 Muecke instead suggests that any painful elements stem “from
the sympathy we may feel towards the victim.”42 But while Muecke discounts the necessity of a
painful element, he does concede that “other things being equal, irony is more effective or more
striking if it has a painful as well as comic effect.”43 A good example of this feature can be seen
in a headline from the satirical website The Onion. Three weeks after a devastating earthquake
rocked the destitute nation of Haiti, The Onion published an article accompanied by a headline
reading: “Massive Earthquake Reveals Entire Island Civilization Called ‘Haiti.’” The article
reads as if it were published in National Geographic, which both lends it an element of parody
38
Muecke, Irony: The Critical Idiom, 30.
Ibid., 31.
40
Muecke, Irony: The Critical Idiom, 34.
41
A. R. Thompson, The Dry Mock , 15. In this he argues that irony must “rouse conflicted feelings.”
42
Muecke, Irony: The Critical Idiom, 34.
43
Ibid., 35.
39
10
and establishes the discursive mode that will aid the purveyance of the ironic content. The faux
anthropological study is peppered with sentences that make the reader both laugh and wince at
the same time:
reports now indicate that these people have likely inhabited the
impoverished, destitute region—unnoticed by the rest of the
world—for more than 300 years … “That an entire civilization has
been somehow existing right under our noses for all this time
comes as a complete shock,” said University of Florida
anthropology professor Dr. Ben Oliver … Researchers also came
to the “startling” conclusion that Haiti's inhabitants must have at
some point in their history been exposed to the English language,
as many seemed capable of uttering such phrases as “Help us,” and
“Please don't abandon us again.”44
Doubtless, there is a painful element in this article, which stems from the sympathy we
feel for the inhabitants of the beleaguered nation. But there is also a certain comic element that
stems from the realization that the article is truly an indictment of the attitude of those in the
industrialized world who have largely ignored the plight of this poorest of nations. We largely
ignored them until the quake struck and then pounced upon the island when its difficult situation
became a profitable news story and as a way to demonstrate our people’s sudden charity.
One does experience a pleasant emotion when confronted with irony, even when one is
the victim. This pleasantness may be due to a sense of intellectual achievement through
recognition of the irony rather than from its being inherently comical. Recognition comes not
only from an identification of the irony itself but also from an awareness of one’s being a part of
the intended (or unintended) audience, that certain in-crowd identification. It is not an inherent
comic element that aids to render these pleasant emotions, but instead recognition, the selfcongratulation one feels in perceiving even the most disturbing ironies.
In the above example from The Onion, our pleasure is derived from the recognition of the
true state of affairs about our national consciousness of the poor as well as the true motivation
behind some of the sudden attention to a disaster. Additionally, there is a sense of superiority
when we laugh at those who were culpable of such ignorance (even though these people very
well could be ourselves).
“Massive Earthquake Reveals Entire Island Nation Called ‘Haiti.’” The Onion, 25 January, 2010,
(http://www.theonion.com/articles/massive-earthquake-reveals-entire-island-civilizat,2896/). Accessed April 3,
2012.
44
11
Detachment
While the third of Meucke’s basic elements may be the most tenuous, the fourth –
detachment –is more important to the present inquiry. Theater and film are inherently ironic.
The viewers are detached, literally seated on high and apart from the diegesis, and they often
know more about the situation and people populating the drama than do the characters
themselves. “The very theatre itself ... is a sort of ironic convention whereby a spectator
occupying a good seat, as it were, in the real world is enabled to look into the world of illusion
and so get ‘a view of life from on high.’”45 This distance, a very literal detachment, produces a
special potential for the realization of ironical situations.46
The filmgoer is, in his very essence,
detached.
Muecke, in his Irony and the Ironic concedes that the elements of detachment and the
comic are closely linked when he says “[t]he word ‘comic’ suggests a certain ‘distance,’
psychologically speaking, between the amused observer and the comic object ….”47 He
concludes that “[t]he ironic observer’s awareness of himself as observer tends to enhance his
feeling of freedom and induce a mood of satisfaction, serenity, joyfulness, or even exultation.”48
Aesthetic Element
The final basic element to irony, the esthetic element, is concerned with stylistic
considerations. Irony, whether intentional or otherwise, must be perceived in order for it to be
considered as such (again, even if the only perceiver is the ironist). It must be shaped so that it
achieves, as Max Beerbohm notes “the production of supreme effect through means the least
extravagant.”49 Beerbohm’s statement suggests that the esthetic element is closely linked with
economy, but this is not necessarily the case. The point here is that “[j]ust as a funny story with
all the proper ingredients will not amuse us if badly told, so irony, if it is not to be ineffective,
has to be ‘shaped.’”50
45
Muecke, Irony: The Critical Idiom, 41. Quoting Sedgewick, Of Irony, Especially in Drama, 32.
Ibid., 42.
47
Muecke, Irony and the Ironic, 47.
48
Ibid., 48.
49
Muecke, Irony: The Critical Idiom, 45.
50
Ibid.
46
12
The aesthetic element is not, however, solely the responsibility of the ironist. It takes an
ironically-developed perceiver to fashion the surface elements of a situation into the ironical
contrast of appearance and reality. In dealing with ironies that have no author, so-called
“situational ironies,” it is left to the mind and wit of the perceiver to create the aesthetic
conditions of a situation.
Finally, it is important to think about the elements of recognition or the comic,
detachment, and esthetic as not being mutually exclusive. Any of irony’s elements, whenever
altered, will have some effect upon all of the others, and the final three seem especially
interconnected. As Muecke sates, “… it seems possible that further consideration might find
some way of grouping together the element of detachment, and the comic and aesthetic. It is at
any rate clear that they overlap.”51
Irony as Stimulus or “Stable Irony”
Widely credited with the first systematic examination of the concept of irony, Søren
Kierkegaard, in his The Concept of Irony with Continual Reference to Socrates, delineates that
irony functions in two basic ways: as a means to an end, and as an end in itself.52 Kierkegaard
refers to the kind of irony that stimulates thinking and which aids in a recognition of the true
meaning behind a surface as irony as stimulus. According to Kierkegaard, “[t]here is a kind of
irony that is only a stimulus for thought, that quickens it when it becomes drowsy, disciplines it
when it becomes dissolute.”53 Esti Sheinberg, in her Irony, Satire, Parody, and Grotesque in the
Music of Shostakovich, claims that this type of irony is finite and as such allows for positive
solutions or a synthesis between the surface and underling features of an ironic statement. Irony
as stimulus
aims at a ‘true’ meaning that lies somewhere behind the ostensible
message of an utterance. Its presupposition is that both the
recipient of the message and its sender share the same value
systems and communication codes, thus providing a means for the
51
Muecke, Irony: The Critical Idiom , 48.
Søren Kierkegaard, The Concept of Irony with Constant Reference to Socrates (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, [1841] 1989), 121.
53
Ibid.
52
13
reconstruction of the covert, ‘real’ message that is to be
preferred.54
According to Sheinberg, the theories that have been presented by various rhetoricians and
philosophers over the course of centuries are remarkably similar. From Quintilian’s Institutio
Oratoria circa 95 C.E. to Douglass Muecke’s Irony and the Ironic of 1980, she notes that “[t]hey
all speak about ‘saying one thing while meaning another,’ and all stress the aesthetic importance
of a correct interpretation by discovering the ‘true’ meaning behind the ostensible one.”55
Precisely the ability for the perceiver to find a true or real meaning behind the surface
allows irony as stimulus to function so effectively in satire. In seeking these truths, irony as
stimulus, or stable irony, assumes a value system, an ethical hierarchy upon which it operates,
while at the same time assuming that the perceiver and ironist share these values. As Sheinberg
states, “irony as stimulus dissimulates one meaning by openly stating another in order to ridicule
and debase. It is a rhetorical device that strives to reach a goal that by definition will include a
value-judgment – either ethical or aesthetic.”56
How Stable Irony Works
According to Wayne C. Booth, stable ironies require a complex mental reconstruction,
that he calls “ironic dissembling,” in four steps:
1) Rejection of the literal meaning
2) Substitution of alternative interpretations
3) Decision about author’s intent/beliefs or the intention of the work within context
4) Decisions upon newer meaning(s) we think correspond to the
unspoken belief(s) we attribute to the author. 57
A brief analysis of the article from The Onion reveals how each of these steps works and
how readers settle on entirely different meanings from that posed by the surface elements.
54
Esti Sheinberg, Irony, Satire, Parody, and the Grotesque in the Music of Shostakovich: A Theory of
Musical Incongruities (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2000), 34.
55
Ibid.
56
Ibid., 35.
57
Booth, A Rhetoric of Irony, 10-12.
14
Step 1 requires that readers reject the literal statements, and only the most naïve readers
would be incapable of this portion of the reconstruction. Surely, any mildly- informed reader
would know that this article contains obvious incongruities, which then set the reader in search
of alternative meanings. As Booth delineates, “[i]f he is reading properly, he is unable to escape
recognizing either some incongruity among the words or between the words and something else
that he knows.”58 Here the glaring incongruity is the so-called “discovery” by anthropologists of
Haitian civilization brought about by the earthquake. Knowledge of the nation’s name –to say
nothing of its geography, economic situation, or political history –immediately invalidates the
surface statement, setting the reader onto step 2 in the reconstruction process.
Step 2 requires the reader to substitute alternative interpretations. These alternatives will
themselves be incongruous with, if not contrary to, the literal statements. While this step does
not produce a single alternative, it invites many possible substitutions which must now be tested
against the knowledge of the author(s) and/or his or her assumed beliefs. A possible alternative
occurs if the reader concludes that the author is somehow terribly misinformed, mentally
unstable, or is purposely engaging in deceit. If any of these would be the case, what we would
have is not irony but instead a lie, a fabrication, or nonsensical rambling. This would be a rare
conclusion for the perceptive reader, as Booth points out when he says that “[w]e accept this
alternative only when other more plausible ones fail to emerge and satisfy us.”59
In the case of the headline, we assume that the author is not crazy and that he is not trying
to intentionally mislead us. But now the reader is left with many possible alternatives, which he
must whittle down in steps 3 and 4 in order to arrive at one that is most plausible.
Step 3 requires us to think about the author’s knowledge and/or intent as well as the
intention/context of the work. This is perhaps the most crucial step among the four in order to
arrive at a plausible or accurate reconstruction. In the case of the headline, we must dismiss the
idea that the author believes that Haiti is a newly discovered civilization and that he or she also
rejects this statement. We are able to do this by examining the context of the work. The Onion
is a satirical, fake-news website. It comprises ridiculous, nonsensical, and offbeat stories that
usually critique the real news of the day. Anyone writing for The Onion would be likely to
employ satire or irony, and would be expected to write sometimes shocking, seemingly- heartless
58
59
Booth, 10.
Booth, A Rhetoric of Irony, 11.
15
articles.60 The authors are generally highly intelligent and have a keen understanding of national
and world events, as well as a highly attuned sense of social criticism. Therefore, it is highly
likely that the author has as much, if not more, knowledge about Haiti as would most readers.
We may therefore posit that the author expects the reader to reject the literal statements. Booth
reinforces this point when he claims that “[n]o matter how firmly I [the reader] am convinced
that a statement is absurd or illogical or just plain false, I must somehow determine whether what
I reject is also rejected by the author, and whether he has any reason to expect my
concurrence.”61
The notion of authorial intent is very important to the perception and reconstruction of
stable ironies, and Booth states that:
… dealing with irony shows us the sense in which our court of
final appeal is still a conception of the author: when we are pushed
about any “obvious interpretation” we finally want to be able to
say, “It is inconceivable that the author could have put these words
together in this order without having intended this precise ironic
stoke.”62
The fourth and final step of ironical reconstruction involves making a decision upon a
newer and final meaning of the literal statement based upon our conception of the author’s
unspoken beliefs. The reader must choose between the possible alternative meanings from step 2
and reconcile these with what he thinks he knows about the author and his or her values. In this
case concerning the article from The Onion, the reader must decide whether the author is actually
sympathetic with the plight of the Haitians or else, as the surface statement would portend,
coldly indifferent to or even malevolently reveling in the devastation. In rejecting the surface
statements, the reader then rejects the latter of these two stances and settles on the former.
Once the reader has some fairly stable conceptual ground to stand upon, he or she may
then insert the alternative meanings for the literal ones. In this case, the article draws attention to
the fact that wealthy, industrialized nations both had a hand in causing and then ignored the
glaring problems of Haiti’s poverty and its effect upon infrastructure and its ability to deal with
60
Another example of this type of strategy is seen in an article dated March 26, 2007, just a few weeks
after the death of reality-show star and dietary supplement spokesperson Anna Nicole Smith , which, placed next to a
photograph of a gravesite, reads “Anna Nicole Smith Finally Reaches Target Weight.”
61
Booth, A Rhetoric of Irony, 11.
62
Ibid., 11-12.
16
severe crisis. The sudden attention and international response to Haiti’s ordeal is suspiciously
devoid of any discussion as to what could have been done by other nations prior to the disaster
that may have averted at least some of the devastating effects of the quake. While the media and
political figures alike express shock at the severity of the situation, the article pokes fun –albeit
very serious, moralizing fun –at the seemingly sudden interest in a nation which was long known
to be in desperate need of international aid. By shocking the reader, the article focuses our
attention on the fact that we, as a community of wealthy nations, should have been helping Haiti
deal with its crushing poverty well before this disaster occurred, and that our sudden interest in
helping is somewhat tainted by hypocrisy.
The message is at once comical and moralizing, and the irony reaches the readers in a
way that is more effective and efficient than would a literal statement. Moreover, by forcing the
reader to undertake the process of ironical reconstruction, the reader is more apt to agree with the
goal or intimated point lurking behind the ironical statements.
Types of Stable Irony
According to Meucke, irony falls into two basic categories, Verbal Irony and Situational
Irony. Verbal irony (or “behavioral irony,” since the ironist may use other media such as film) is
irony in action. It refers to a kind of irony where there is a present and perceivable ironist, one
who is “consciously and intentionally employing a technique” in order to “present … a situation,
a sequence of events, a character, a belief, etc. … that exists or is to be thought of as existing
independently of presentation.”63 Situational irony, on the other hand, is the “irony of events,”
“irony without an ironist,” or “the irony of a state of affairs or an event.”64 An important
subcategory of situational irony is cosmic irony, a form of irony in which fate, destiny, or the
gods toy with man and his expectations. Muecke postulates that irony always needs a perceived
ironist, and that the personification of Fate, or the notion of God-as-novelist, may have opened
the door for the perception of this type of unscripted irony.65 Moreover, and seemingly
63
Muecke, Irony and the Ironic, 56; Irony: The Critical Idiom, 28.
Muecke, Irony: The Critical Idiom, 28, 49-51.
65
Ibid., 38.
64
17
oxymoronically, Muecke say that dramatic irony or what is “pre-eminently the irony of the
theater,” is a subcategory of situational irony. 66
On the surface this may seem odd, since it is verbal irony that requires an author, a
potential ironist, and dramas (and films) clearly have authors. However, dramatic irony plays
upon the suspension of disbelief in which we engage when viewing a film or play. We
experience these works as if they were entities unto themselves, presumptively unaware of the
writer’s and/or director’s omnipresence. We therefore read a given ironic situation as just that
and not, as our knowledge of the real world might suggest, as something created, presented, or
contrived by an outside being. Take, for instance, the episode “Time Enough at Last” (1959)
from the popular television series The Twilight Zone. In this episode we view a nearly blind,
ludicrously-bespectacled bookish misanthrope, played by Burgess Meredith, who survives a
nuclear holocaust and eventually emerges from the rubble to find himself the sole survivor. The
devastation and loss nearly push the man to suicide, but he reconsiders this act at the last minute
when he spots the remains of the library and its intact piles of books. For once, this man has
enough time to read and there is, presumably, no one left in the world to disturb or torment him.
But just as he situates himself among enormous stacks of books meant for his reading pleasure,
he stumbles and breaks his glasses. We assume the man must spend the rest of his days alone and
virtually sightless, deprived of his greatest and only remaining pleasure.
We initially view this as situational or, more specifically, cosmic irony, and not as the
work of Lyn Venable (the author of the original short story) or Rod Serling (the author of the
teleplay). Perhaps after the immediate viewing we then contemplate the medium of the story and
realize that it is, in fact, an irony of the verbal kind, but this is not the instantaneous impression.
We suspend our belief or sense of credulity and view plays, television programs, and films as if
we were watching life itself.
What this example points out is that the author(s) in this case
presented, or scripted, a situational irony. Perhaps dramatic irony is best described for the
purposes of this study as “verbalized” or “scripted” situational irony. This type of irony is
distinctive in that it can be perceived as both verbal and situational irony.
66
Muecke, The Compass of Irony, 105.
18
Irony as Terminus or “Unstable” Irony
Where stable ironies seek a finite goal informed by values (either esthetic or moral),
unstable ironies, or a deployment of irony as terminus, seeks to point out the fundamental
incongruities of life, those to which we are all victims. Stable irony functions upon shared
values, mores, norms, and knowledge, and as such is often employed at the service of satire and
parody. Unstable irony, on the other hand, seeks to call into question the very existence of
values, mores, norms, and knowledge. It seeks to question the very foundations upon which we
live our lives and structure our behaviors.
Booth argues that in unstable irony “no stable reconstruction can be made out of the ruins
revealed through the irony,” and that “the only sure affirmatio n is that negation that begins all
ironic play.”67 Where stable ironies involve a four-step reconstruction that allows for an arrival
upon new meanings, unstable ironies essentially create a “feedback loop,” where all that exists is
infinite negation.
With unstable ironies, the goal is not to arrive upon solid agreement between author and
reader via interpretation, but instead to highlight the interpretive experience itself. There are no
right answers in unstable irony, no correct or normative positions upon which to perch; it is the
interpretive equivalent of going down the rabbit hole. Muecke points out that unstable irony, or
what he terms “general irony”:
… lies in the contradictions, apparently fundamental and
irremediable, that confront men when they speculate upon such
topics as the origin and purpose of the universe, free will and
determinism, reason and instinct, the scientific and the
imaginative, ends and means, society and the individual, art and
life, knowing and being, self-consciousness (what is conscious of
what?), the meaning of meaning, and the value of value. 68
For Muecke, these contradictions are not simply those that we encounter in our day to
day lives, but are instead the fundamental “predicaments many of which have forced men into a
realization of their essential and terrifying loneliness in relation to others or to the universe at
67
68
Booth, A Rhetoric of Irony, 240.
Muecke, The Compass of Irony, 121.
19
large.”69 This is “the raw material … of Romantic irony.”70 He points out that this type of irony
has become increasingly common over the past 250 years as a response to the jettisoning of the
closed ideology of pre-enlightenment Christian worldview in favor of an open ideology where
God is no longer the sole authority.71 Historically speaking, the open ideology of the
enlightenment left two fundamentally different principles to fill the void of the closed ideology,
namely objectivity and subjectivity.72 Muecke claims that the polarity that exists between
objectivity and subjectivity is a manifestation of an open ideology in that each stance is
accepting of revision. For the objective scientist Muecke claims that there is a need for “endless
revision and self-correction, for questioning and suspending judgment, and…keeping alive a
sense of an infinity of possibilities.”73
He also points out that objectivity is necessarily less
inclined to unstable irony than is subjectivity, because the objective scientist “would be in a bad
way if his sense of irony persuaded him of the essential futility of an endless series of thesis and
antithesis.”74 The unstable ironist sees no way of confirming nor rejecting either the objective of
subjective, while at the same time being aware that they are fundamentally irreconcilable. For
Muecke, the unstable ironist
dwells, historically, in the densely populated no-man’s land
between the old and the new differing from his fellow countrymen
in that he knows where he is, knows, that is to say, that there are
two sides and that he cannot take either side or bring them into
accord.75
Esit Sheinberg similarly discusses the destabilizing effects of unstable irony when she
says that “Irony as terminus … deal[s] with the endless process of nullification that brings the
ironist (and the ironized) to the edge of an infinite void of consciousness, often resulting in
existential dizziness and feelings of vertigo.”76
This chapter has established that irony is a particularly important, memorable, and
effective rhetorical trope and has highlighted empirical studies that support these claims.
69
Muecke, The Compass of Irony, 122.
Ibid., 159.
71
Ibid.,, 128.
72
Ibid.
73
Ibid., 129.
74
Muecke, The Compass of Irony, 129.
75
Muecke, The Compass of Irony, 130.
76
Sheinberg, Irony, Parody, Satire, and the Grotesque in the Music of Shostakovich, 40.
70
20
Additionally, it has outlined the basic elements of stable irony (irony as stimulus) and described
the mental processes that occur when someone engages with it.
Finally, it has identified a
second kind of irony, unstable irony (irony as terminus), and described its processes of infinite
negation and its destabilizing effects it achieves by its highlighting of the fundamental ironies of
the existence and the human condition.
The following three chapters will outline the history and circumstances that surrounded
the use of preexisting art music in films, and will show how ironical deployments eventually
became a useful aesthetic tool when wielded by sophisticated directors. Part II will show, in
detail, how preexisting art music in films is deployed and read ironically, and how that situation
unearths deeper contextual layers that enrich the filmic narratives and, in some cases, helps to
make the filmmakers’ ideological points.
21
CHAPTER 2:
MUSICAL PRACTICES IN THE “SILENT” FILM ERA
Music has been closely, almost inseparably, linked with motion pictures since the dawn
of the medium in the 1890s. Examining the role of art music within this earliest period reveals
much about the formation of a standard musical vocabulary for narrative films. Art music as film
accompaniment formed a basis for the so-called classical Hollywood film score that would come
to dominate sound films of the next generation and beyond.
The rule rather than the exception, the use of preexisting music – both popular and art
music –formed the primary bases for filmic accompaniments during the early stages of film. 77
Decisions as to what music was deemed appropriate for film were largely left to individual
theater conductors, pianists, and organists. As a consequence, musical accompaniments for film
were widely divergent, an aesthetic Wild-West where the whims, fancies, knowledge, and
abilities of the in-house musicians determined what music was most appropriate for a scene.
By the early 1910s there was a movement afoot within the industry to standardize
musical accompaniment practices.78 Industry trade journals such as Moving Picture World,
Moving Picture News, Nickelodeon, and Film Index began to include regularly columns aimed at
house pianists and theater orchestra conductors on how to choose and sync music for particular
scenes tastefully and effectively.79 These “cue sheets” were at first rather general. Descriptions
of tempo and/or mood, with terms such as “March,” “Andante,” “Lively,” “Pizzicato,” “Adagio,”
“Waltz,” etc., constituted a significant portion of the suggestions in early cue sheets. 80 These cue
sheets became increasingly detailed over the course of the silent film era, with specific titles and
sections of preexisting music being prescribed for filmic accompaniment. From both these trade
journals and the publication of cue sheets the earliest standardized film- music repertory can be
surmised.
77
James Wierzbicki, Film Music:A History (New York: Routledge, 2009). 32.
Rick Altman, Silent Film Sound (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004), 240. Altman’s book
is a very detailed study of the standardization of sound in film. He takes great pains to examine closely the
earliest experiments with sound in films and carefully traces the musical history of the silent film idiom.
79
Altman, 240.
80
Wierzbicki, 36-40.
78
22
Rick Altman, in his Silent Film Sound, notes that film music during the early and mid
1910s displayed a balance between well-known popular tunes and preexisting art music. But the
repertory of art music was quite limited during this time, as Altman concludes:
… the same titles [were] encountered repeatedly: Gounod’s “Ave
Maria,” Mendelssohn’s “Spring Song,” Rubenstein’s “Melody in
F,” Schumann’s “Träumerei,” Tosti’s “Goodbye,” Weber’s “The
Storm,” and several opera selections, including [the] “Sextette”
from Donizetti’s Lucia di Lammermoor, the “Berceuse” from
Godard’s Jocelyn, the “Barcarole” from Offenbach’s Tales of
Hoffmann, the “Overture” and “Waltz” from Supp ’s The Poet and
the Peasant, the “Triumphal March” from Verdi’s Aida, and the
“Pilgrim’s Chorus” from Wagner’s Tannhäuser. Outside of
traditional wedding and funeral marches by Mendelssohn, Wagner,
and Chopin, this is very nearly the totality of the common
repertory on which trade press columnists and other musical
suggestion compilers felt they could depend.81
Altman notes that these works were chosen because of audiences’ familiarity with them.
He writes: “the classical pieces most often used by early-twentieth-century piano teachers were
pressed into service early in the teens theaters. Rubenstein’s ‘Melody in F,’ Schumann’s
‘Träumerei,’ and Massenet’s ‘Elegy’ were chosen not just because the musicians knew them
well, but because they were well known to audiences[.]”82 There is a curious parallel between
the practices of cue-sheet compilers of the 1910s and Theodore Thomas’s touring orchestra of
the 1880s. Thomas, like the cue-sheet compilers, used the same well-known works to draw
audiences into the concert halls. A significant difference is that Thomas used these familiar
works hoping to pack the houses and then to elevate the musical tastes of the audience by
exposing them to larger, more serious musical works. 83
As the film industry expanded throughout the teens, there was a marked increase in the
number of films, and each of them required some kind of musical accompaniment. Cue-sheet
compilers, increasingly from a classical background, began seeking out a wider variety of art
81
Altman, 267.
Altman, 377.
83
Paul Luongo, “An Unlikely Cornerstone: The Role of Orchestral Transcriptions in the Success of the
Thomas Orchestra” (PhD diss., The Florida State University, 2010), 36.
82
23
music to accompany the growing spate of films. 84 By the end of the teens there was a
significantly larger body of preexisting art music regularly used for filmic accompaniment.
But there was more to art music’s filmic rise than simply a desire for culturally
significant music. Altman points out that exhibitors and musicians (among many others) made
conscious decisions to promote the use of instrumental art music in order to train audiences into
being quiet consumers.85 For them, instrumental art music was unlikely to tempt the audience
into singing along with the music (as was common practice during the nickelodeon period), and
its use also had the desirable effect of appealing to a more upscale demographic while increasing
the prestige of the theater.86 Once again, a variation on Thomas’ scheme is shown to be at work.
But whereas Thomas was trying to educate audiences by exposing them to serious instrumental
works after luring them into the houses with orchestrations of well-known amateur music, the
theater orchestra conductors worked to attract cultured, wealthy audiences to the movies through
music. Thomas was trying to elevate musical tastes of his audiences through music. The theater
conductors were trying to elevate the status of their theater, and the medium of film, by attracting
cultured, wealthy audiences with serious instrumental music.
By the middle of the teens there was greater homogeneity among film industry practices.
Standardized equipment, distribution, and exhibition and musical practices allowed the motion
picture industry to achieve a level of stability and profitability that until then had been sorely
lacking.
With greater stability came greater confidence among investors, and soon the first
large-scale picture houses began to open.
The Rise of the Theater Orchestra and the Blockbuster Film
The opening of the 3,000+ seat Strand Theater in New York City in 1914 marked a major
turning point in the film industry and in film music practices in particular. The size and opulence
of the theater signaled an obvious change in the desired motion picture demographic, but it was
the practices of the theater’s music director, Samuel L. “Roxy” Rothapfel (1882-1936), that had
the largest impact on film music in the age of silent film.
84
Altman, 269.
Altman., 276.
86
Ibid., 246.
85
24
Rothapfel’s groundbreaking idea was to employ a large orchestra, both to accompany
motion pictures and to perform a variety of musical entertainments throughout the course of an
evening. “Large orchestra” was a relative term, however; the Strand’s initial orchestra numbered
between sixteen and twenty musicians. But soon Rothapfel’s model would be adopted, and
exponentially expanded, by movie palaces across the nation. 87
At first considered a daring and
possibly financially ruinous experiment, Rothapfel’s practice proved successful and eventually
became the gold standard for the movie places. As May Johnson reported in 1920,
[Rothapfel] was the first to present motion pictures in conjunction
with high class musical program. When the Strand management
announced that it contemplated showing motion pictures to the
musical accompaniment of a large orchestra with vocal and
instrumental soloists between films, it was predicted that the
project would be a dismal failure by theatrical experts who claimed
to be in a position to know. The news of the Strand’s success
quickly spread throughout the country, however, and in less than
two years almost every city of any consequence had a large theater
orchestra offering entertainments after the pattern created at the
Strand in New York.88
It is difficult to imagine that Rothapfel’s grand musical experiment would have achieved
such success and longevity had it not been for the major blockbuster films released that
coincided with his musical innovations. The confluence of movie-palace construction, larger
orchestral accompaniments, and an unprecedented spate of blockbuster films during 1915-1916
helped to cement the practice of art music within the silent film tradition. And of all the major
films of the 1910s, none had as much influence upon filmic culture and practice as did D. W.
Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation (1915).
Griffith’s epic was shown nationwide to over three million people during its first year.89
To complement the grandeur and sheer length of the film (an astonishing twelve reels), an
equally mammoth orchestral accompaniment was deemed necessary by Griffith. The film’s Los
87
Altman, 300. Altman notes that by 1916 the Rialto theater in New York employed an orchestra
double the size of the Strand’s, and by 1920 the Capitol theater fielded an orchestra with over seventy
concert-level musicians. Rothapfel was hired by each of these theaters to oversee their musical operations
at the time of their openings.
88
May Johnson, “Light Opera, Musical Comedy, Picture Houses,” Musical Courier (April 8, 1920).
89
Altman, 294.
25
Angeles premiere in February of 1915 under the original title The Clansmen included a fortypiece orchestra, twelve-member chorus, and vocal soloists.90 The compiled score by Carli Elinor
for the twenty-two-week Los Angeles run employed music by Mozart, Rossini, Suppé, Wagner,
Bizet, Massenet, and Offenbach, in addition to Beethoven’s First Symphony and Schubert’s
“Unfinished” Symphony.91
The film’s score by Joseph Carl Breil for the New York production comprised original
music (“special music”), popular and folk tunes, and a significant quantity of preexisting art
music. Breil’s score became attached to the film throughout its New York run (nearly a full
year), as well as its numerous road-show exhibitions. So successful was Breil’s lavishly
orchestrated score for The Birth of a Nation that advertisements took pains to assure the public
that the local showings of the film would retain the unusually large orchestral forces. 92
Moreover, the score proved to be so popular that conductors of local theater orchestras were
being asked, years later, to perform it with other films.93
Largely heralded as a monument in film history, The Birth of a Nation must also be
considered as having helped to create a template for standardized musical accompaniment. It is
unlikely that any other film of the period reached as many spectators in so many parts of the
nation. Moreover, the film’s score was clearly part of its commercial appeal and as such would
likely have been reproduced more often and more faithfully than would the scores for other films
of the period. As a result, the music Breil chose as accompaniment for The Birth of a Nation left
an indelible mark on audiences of the time and was a model for other film composers/compilers
of the period.
Breil’s score made use of several works that were already common currency within film
accompaniment practice: Grieg’s Peer Gynt Suite, Supp ’s Light Calvary Overture,
Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture, Wagner’s Rienzi Overture, and Weber’s Freischütz overture. His
additions to this repertory include Bellini’s Norma Overture, Beethoven’s Sixth Symphony
(fourth movement), H rold’s Zampa Overture, Wagner’s “Ride of the Valkyries,” and the
“Gloria” from a Mass previously attributed to Mozart as his Twelfth Mass in G Major. 94
90
Ibid., 292.
Ibid., 293.
92
Altman., 294.
93
Ibid.
94
Martin Miller Marks, Music in the Silent Film: Contexts and Case Studies, 1895 -1924 (New York:
Oxford University Press, 1997), 199-207.
91
26
The deployments of both art and popular music throughout The Birth of a Nation were
carefully crafted. Art music was reserved for “relatively impersonal scenes,” whereas popular
songs underscored “sentimental, touching, or introspective moments that develop or reveal the
characters’ personality.”95 These prescribed roles for popular and art music would become
standard industry practice throughout the remainder of silent film era.
The Expansion of the Art Music Repertory and its Dissemination
By the end of the teens a number of theaters both in and outside of major population
centers began to employ Rothapfel’s musical practices that had proved such a financial success.
By 1922 roughly thirty percent of theaters nationwide employed orchestras (although very few
were of a size to rival the New York palaces).96 Indeed, movie palaces were significant
employers of concert musicians in metropolitan areas throughout the mid 1910s and early 1920s.
In some cases the lure of the consistent work had a negative impact on local symphony
orchestras. The San Francisco symphony orchestra was forced to “indefinitely postpone” its
1920 season because so many musicians were hired away by movie theaters. 97 Some theater
orchestras in major cities began to rival the size and talent of the established symphony
orchestras. With rosters as large as 110 instrumentalists and now-luminary conductors such as
Eugene Ormandy, the largest movie palace orchestras achieved a kind of cultural equivalence
with the major orchestras.98
By the 1920s there had developed a standard program among the larger theaters, often
mimicked by smaller venues, that provided ample opportunity for a wide variety of music. This
standard program consisted of an overture, followed by a newsreel, a musical novelty,
educational film or “scenic,” a live vocal solo, and a short, two-reel comedy.99 All this occurred
before the feature presentation.
Movie palaces with orchestras were apt to show off their resources by playing first-rate,
“serious” music, and the practice of beginning an evening’s entertainment with an overture
provided a ready-made vehicle for such displays. Of all the music contained in an evening’s
95
Altman, 315.
Ibid., 303.
97
Ibid., 302.
98
Ibid., 310.
99
Altman, 380.
96
27
entertainment, the overtures would be the best advertised.
100
Obviously an important audience
draw, the overtures also played a key role in the expansion of the standard film- music repertory.
Generally chosen for their variety and brevity, many of these works were drawn from the opera
repertory. The additional repertory included orchestral works by Rossini, Suppé, Verdi, Puccini,
Mendelssohn, Dvorák, Grieg, Liszt, Rimsky-Korsakov, Saint-Saens, and Tchaikovsky.101
Overtures eventually transferred from solely concert-style performances and became part
of feature films’ accompaniment.102 By 1920 there is evidence that this was already standard
practice. Edith Lang and George West’s Musical Accompaniment of Moving Pictures (1920), a
manual for theater organist and pianists, lists twenty “standard” overtures. 103 Tellingly, the
authors indicate that “[m]ost of these overtures contain brilliant and lively passages which will fit
scenes in the Wild West, hurries, chases, fights, and mob scenes, etc.; many of them also contain
slow movements which will prove useful as love themes, etc.”104
The onset of the 1920s also saw an increase in foreign imports. Films from Germany and
France were making their way into American theaters, and music directors and conductors
responded by casting a wider stylistic net for their choice of accompaniments. Along with the
overtures that were being co-opted as film accompaniment, these foreign and avant-garde films
represent another significant expansion of cinematic art-music repertory.
Two striking examples of this are the accompaniments chosen for German films by Ernst
Lubitsch (1892-1947): The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920) and Deception, originally titled Anna
Boleyn (1920). For The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari “Roxy” Rothapfel and Erno Rape chose
decidedly modernist compositions. Included in the suggestions for the film were Richard
Strauss’s Till Eulenspiegel, Debussy’s Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun, and works by
Mussorgsky and Prokofiev. Additionally, avant-garde composers Leo Ornstein, Arnold
Schoenberg, and Igor Stravinsky, whose music had never before been considered for film
accompaniment, found their way into the film. 105
100
101
Ibid.
Ibid., 310-11. Altman provides a fairly detailed list of the works by each composer that were commonly
employed.
102
Ibid., 313.
Edith Lang and George West, Musical Accompaniment of Moving Pictures; A Practical Manual for
Pianists and Organists and an Exposition of the Principles Underlying the Musical Interpretation of Moving
Pictures (Boston: The Boston Music Co., 1920), 29.
104
Edith Lang and George West, 29.
105
Altman, 315.
103
28
Hugo Riesenfeld’s orchestra for Deception, a film set in sixteenth-century England,
added a harpsichord, oboe di caccia, and viola d’amore in a novel bid for musical authenticity. 106
Moreover, his compiled score drew upon music early music by composers such as Handel, Bach,
Rameau, Vivaldi, Corelli, Purcell, Mattheson, Couperin, Scarlatti, Lully, and even Anne Boleyn
herself via the use of her composition “O Death, Rock Me to Sleep.”107 None of the works in
Deception (with the exception of Boleyn’s) existed during Boleyn’s lifetime. But here we can
see the beginnings of Hollywood’s use of pre-Romantic styles as an indicator of the generically
antiquarian. Under these circumstances, the evocation of “old,” the practice of employing music
from outside the Romantic period was soon adopted for some American films. 108
The resulting proliferation of art music performed regularly throughout America for
middle-class audiences was impressive. And performances of art music by theater orchestras
were by no means limited to urban areas. Altman notes that “[d]uring a single week in 1915 …
Torpey’s Lorenz Orchestra in Bethlehem (Pa.) played compositions by Bizet, Godard, Grieg,
Herbert, Jansen, Lehar, MacDowell, Mascagni, Mozart, Offenbach, Puccini, Rossini, Schubert,
Schumann, Smetana, Supp , Thomas, and Tobani.”109 Theater directors were quick to tout the
positive impact of their industry on the general public. In the introduction to his 1925
Encyclopedia of Music for Pictures Erno Rapeé, an influential arranger/conductor during the
silent film era, credits the film industry with spreading orchestral, professional music making
throughout the Unites States. “If you consider,” he writes,
that only ten years ago there were not more than a half-dozen
symphony orchestras in this great country of over hundred million
inhabitants and that it is just exactly ten years since the first
Cinema palace DeLuxe opened its doors to the public it will not be
hard to see the connection between the two. 110
Moreover, Rapeé noted that, along with the spread of “quality” music, properly trained
theater musicians were running out of town “fake music teachers who have ruined untold
106
Ibid.
Altman, 315.
108
Ibid., 317.
109
Ibid., 313.
110
Erno Rapeé, Encyclopedia of Music for Pictures (New York: Belwin, 1925), 24.
107
29
promising talent.”111 It is clear that by the middle of the 1920s theater orchestras were
responsible for bringing live art music to vast swaths of the general public. Indeed, attendance
figures at the largest city theaters could each exceed 80,000 per week. 112 Either as direct filmic
accompaniment or as cinematic preamble, art music was forging an indissoluble association with
cinema.
The End of an Era
By the end of the 1920s the body of art music used for film accompaniment would begin
to wear out its welcome with the film-going public. Carli Elinor, describing his score for D. W.
Griffith’s 1918 epic Hearts of the World, humorously attested to the common use (and perhaps
overuse) of particular composers’ music when he wrote that “compositions by the illustrious
Rossinitchaikovskysuppegriegchopinwagner supplied the proper atmosphere for the remainder of
my score.”113
Preexisting, autonomous art music is, by its very nature, resistant to thematic
transformations. Unlike originally composed film music, where musicians were expected to vary
themes blatantly to fit the mood or setting, the modification of art music was discouraged.114
This lack of flexibility, along with the common practice of repeating music several times per
film, led to what Altman terms “thematic abuse.”115 George M. Beynon, as early as 1918,
pointed out not so subtly the drawbacks of such a practice, when he wrote, “As the music
continues, the poor little number is dragged in by the heels whenever Mary appears in the
foreground, until your soul rebels and you hate that music forever. This innocent little musical
piece that has caused you so much irritation is called the THEME.”116
As early as 1921 “Roxy” Rothapfel brought back The Birth of a Nation but now with new
music chosen by Roxy and his assistants. Rothapfel defended his decision to remove not only
the majority of Breil’s original score but also the entirety of its preexisting art music by claiming
that since “[t]he movie going public has since then become familiar through the medium of the
111
Rapeé, 24.
Ibid., 25.
113
Altman, 315.
114
Ibid., 376.
115
Altman, 315.
116
Ibid.
112
30
motion picture theater and popular opera with these operas and the stories of these works ... it
was thought in better taste to utilize the airs which are contemporaneous with the period of
history ….”117 Rothapfel, ever ahead of the industry curve, anticipated the general turn away
from the orchestral warhorses in the late 1920s.
Detractors applied the same criticism to art music in the 1920s that was leveled against
popular tunes in the 1910s: the audience’s knowledge of the works’ original context would
interfere with their film experience.118 Art music was not altogether expelled from the movie
palaces in the late 1920s, but instead the repertory was expanded to include lesser-known
accompaniments, a means of renewing the film music repertory. 119 One stark example of how
expansive this renewal could be is Erno Rape ’s Encyclopedia of Music for Pictures. Published
in 1925, Rape ’s encyclopedia lists hundreds upon hundreds of pieces of art music for use in the
cinema.
By the end of the 1920s a gradual shift away from silent films toward “talkies” and sound
films abbreviated any attempt to widen further the film repertory of art music. With the advent
of standardized sound, movie studios exerted greater control over their products, reassigning the
task of creating musical accompaniments from individual theaters to hired hands inside the
studio walls. Studio orchestras eventually replaced the theater orchestras. And while a greater
homogeneity among film music practices in the sound era served to entrench the narrative
musical practices of silent films, there was a distinct turn away from the use of preexisting art
music.
That said, the footprint of the industry’s silent film era practices was nevertheless quite
large. Preexisting art music had found a home outside the elite concert halls in the more
egalitarian movie palaces, where a consistent, canonical repertory of art music had developed by
the end of the silent film era. As a result, a much wider audience was exposed to a large but
prescribed body of art music. Moreover, this art music was now laden with filmic, dramatic, and
emotional associations that would prove essential to the development of a musical vocabulary for
the original film scores that would become the industry standard for generations.
117
Ibid., 318-319.
Ibid., 318.
119
Altman, 319.
118
31
The Transition to Sound
Early attempts at sound films were met with a mixture of amusement at the novelty and
business skepticism by the major film studios. While there had been sound films that predated
1926’s Don Juan, generally considered a major breakthrough in sound films, these were one-ofa-kind novelties exhibited and promoted by independent inventors with widely divergent
technologies. For the established film industry to make the enormous technological investment
to retrofit hundreds (if not thousands) of theaters to exhibit an untested product, this was simply
too great a risk. This industry-wide resistance to sounds films began to change after Warner
Bros. contracted with AT&T’s Western Electric subsidiary Vitaphone in 1925. 120
Oxymoronically, it was not actors’ recorded speech that first drew the interests of Max
and Harry Warner to the “talkies,” but instead Vitaphone’s ability to synchronize music with
images. According to Ron Hutchinson, Harry Warner, upon viewing a Vitaphone exhibition of a
jazz band in 1925 exclaimed, “I myself would not go across the street to see or hear a talking
picture. But music! That’s another story.”121
Initially, the incorporation of art music, firmly established during the silent film era, held
strong within Vitaphone’s productions. The first exhibition of this technology, on April 6, 1926,
in New York City, included films of musical performances: Wagner’s Tannhäuser Overture
performed by the New York Philharmonic, Dvořák’s Humoresque by violinist Mischa Elman,
the aria “Caro nome” from Verdi’s Rigoletto by soprano Marion Talley, a set of variations on a
theme from Beethoven’s “Kreutzer Sonata” by Efrem Zimbalist, and “Vesti la giubba” from
Leoncavallo’s Il Pagliacci by tenor Giovanni Martinelli.122 Only after this rather long musical
introduction, one that maintained the established tradition of performing overtures prior to the
feature film, was Don Juan shown to the public. The fact of the matter is, the first-ever “talkie”
didn’t actually utter a single word. Only pre-recorded sound effects and an orchestral
accompaniment sounded alongside Don Juan’s imagetrack.123
Less than two years after the premiere of Don Juan, the film industry had effectively and
en masse made the switch from silent to sound films. On May 15, 1928, three of the leading
120
Wierzbicki, 91.
Ron Hutchinson, “The Vitaphone Project: Answering Harry Warner’s Questions: ‘Who the Hell Wants
to Hear Actors Talk.’” Film History 14: 1 (2002), 40.
122
Weirzbicki, 91.
123
Ibid.
121
32
Hollywood studios contracted with AT&T’s subsidiaries for cameras, sound recording devices,
and theatrical amplification systems that were already employed by Warner Bros. and Fox. 124
The early sound period, roughly between 1928 and1933, was one of instability regarding
film music practices. Ironically, the coming of sound films all but eliminated film music
accompaniment in the traditional sense. Filmmakers instead focused upon the insertion of
diegetic musical “numbers,” which provided a reason for music’s inclusion. Many of these
works took the form of backstage musicals, where multiple musical numbers could be logically
inserted into the narrative. Between 1929 and 1930 alone over 175 films were musicals. 125
Where nondiegetic music did exist, it was generally relegated to the margins of the film, during
the opening and closing credits.126 But by the close of this transitional period, the practice of
supplying nondiegetic, or “background” music, began to reappear in a number of important
films. It seems that at this critical period in film music practices there was a debate about
whether originally composed or preexisting art music would be best suited to the task.
Both sides made arguments advocating for what they saw to be most appropriate for
nondiegetic music. A Los Angeles Times reporter in 1933 noted that,
Mountains of music, rivers of melody, massive tone effects, huge
blocks of vibration dissolving into single-voiced melody which
lingers in the memory and increases the sentiment and power of
emotion, are used in the modern films. Masters of orchestral and
vocal sounds, such as Wagner and Tchaikowsky, are now called
upon to lend their aid from a bygone generation to clever musical
directors of the Hollywood studios. The film scores blend these
masters so cleverly and add such good composing of their own that
the connecting links are never noticed.127
But not all were convinced that the mine of Romantic orchestral music would yield sound
film gold. One of RHO’s executive producers, David O. Selznick, actively lobbied for originally
composed music for films. According to legendary film composer Max Steiner, “... Selznick
came to the conclusion that any music, whether classical or popular, that is known … is
distracting.” More to the point, Steiner reported that “Selznick, who is extremely sensitive
124
Ibid., 105.
Ibid., 120.
126
Ibid., 119.
127
Weirzbicki, 129.
125
33
musically, also said he thought music should fit the precise action, mood and even words in a
screen play, and obviously should be especially composed.”128
Composers Max Steiner, Alfred Newman, Erich Korngold, and Dimitri Tiomkin would
for decades tilt the balance of power between original scores and preexisting art music as film
accompaniments in favor of the former. At a time when any profitable innovation was quickly
copied by the whole of the industry, Steiner and his contemporaries provided a successful model
that would be emulated by other major Hollywood studios. 129
Throughout the transition to sound films, film music practices underwent radical and
frequent changes.130 The introduction of widely-adopted sound technologies was initially met
with a flurry of experimental sound films.131 In what could be described as an industry
overreaction, a second phase, when virtually no nondiegetic music at all was employed (but
when musicals and “numbers” films ruled), immediately followed. Finally, as the practice
became more common, originally composed, romantically- inspired symphonic music would
reign supreme just as the film industry was on the cusp of its most influential and profitable
periods in its history.
By 1930 the silent film and its in-house musicians were quickly becoming things of the
past. In an already dire economic atmosphere for theater musicians the loss of thousands of jobs
could not have come at a worse time. But with theater overheads being drastically streamlined
and with the tight studio control of production that sound films allowed, the film industry would
be one of the rare economic success stories of the Great Depression. During a time of global
financial disaster, the Hollywood film industry enjoyed its “Golden Age.”
128
Ibid.
Weirzbicki, 114.
130
Ibid.
131
Ibid.,128.
129
34
CHAPTER 3:
HOLLYWOOD’S “GOLDEN AGE” AND THE CLASSICAL-STYLE FILM
The term “Golden Age” denotes a period in Hollywood film production, circa 1933-1960,
when the primacy of the narrative elements of film was established and standardized. Building
upon the cinematic/narrative conventions practiced during the silent and early sound eras,
filmmakers soon settled upon a standardized mode of cinematic storytelling. According to
André Bazin, “by 1938 or 1939, the talking film … had reached a level of classical
perfection.”132 “Classical-style” is a term that was applied retroactively by film scholars active
in the 1970s to describe cinematic storytelling where the technical devices primarily served to
lay out a narrative in the clearest possible fashion. 133 The goal of the classical-style film was for
audiences to focus on the story and not, as was the case with early silent films, marvel at the
technical achievement of cinematic technology. 134
Every element of the classical-style film serves the narrative: scripts, screenplays, editing,
cinematography, lighting, direction, and, of course, music. It is useful to understand that
classical-style films are a class of texts produced by mainstream Hollywood during the Golden
Age, the conventions of which, by and large, still govern narrative filmmaking and reception.
Film music in the Golden Age is a specific type that functions to buttress and clarify the
narrative within these films.135 An understanding of classical-style narrative film music is
crucial to any analysis of music in modern film, since film music is largely perceived through the
lens of classical-style film and is informed by its legacy. To surprise and affect an audience,
directors knowingly violate film music’s conventions, and these violations are in and of
themselves meaningful; they expand the power the medium. The principles of modern narrative
film music are outlined and examined later in this chapter, but first an understanding of the
development of classical-style narrative film music will contribute to a better understanding of
this body of music.
132
Wierzbicki, 136.
David Bordwell, Janet Staiger, and Kristin Thompson, The Classical Hollywood Cinema: Film Style &
Mode of Production to 1960 (New York: Routledge, 1985), 145.
134
Peter Larson, Film Music, trans. by John Irons (Reaktion: London, 2007), 86.
135
Larson, 86.
133
35
The Development of the Early Classical-Style Film Score
During the early 1930s advances in audio-mixing technology made possible the practice
of “underscoring.” Different from but often confused with the catch-all term “nondiegetic,”
underscoring refers specifically to music that accompanies speech.136 Before 1931 the
simultaneity of dialogue and music was nearly impossible and resulted in an overall poor audio
quality, but by the following year sound technology advanced sufficiently to allow for
underscoring.
137
This technological advancement also allowed for a vastly expanded placement
of nondiegetic music, as well, which was until that time generally reserved for opening and end
credits. As a result, both underscoring and nondiegetic music, that is music that emanated from
outside the diegesis, soon became a staple of standard filmic practice.
Music in the earliest sound films more or less mirrored the movie-palace model of
accompaniment, featuring both standard concert-hall music as well the ubiquitous cue-sheet
repertory.
138
But soon industry-wide economic consolidation produced a pronounced shift away
from concert-hall- and cue-sheet music in favor of original film scores.
Under the burgeoning studio-system mode of production, musical aspects of films were
becoming centralized under (literally) one roof. Mervyn Cooke notes that by the mid 1930s
“each of the major studios housed a permanent music department, with contracted composers,
arrangers, orchestrators, copyists, librarians and music editors, plus a resident orchestra, all
working under a senior music director.”139 This assembly-line style of musical production proved
to be cost effective and allowed studios to avoid royalty payments for more recent, existing
music by creating wholly owned music that was similar. As a result, studios were willing to
experiment with original film scores as an economically sound and commercially viable
alternative.
Often not the individuated vision of a single composer but instead a collaborative effort
among several composers, the early classical-style film score was a reflection of the industry’s
assembly-line ideology. The pervasiveness of this mode of production is highlighted by the fact
that the industry’s official prestige vehicle, the Academy of Motion Picture Art and Sciences,
136
Mervyn Cooke, A History of Film Music (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 76.
Wierzbicki, 137-8.
138
Wierzbicki, 140.
139
Cooke, 70.
137
36
awarded its annual Music Award for Scoring (the Oscar) to music departments instead of
individual composers from 1934 until 1937.140
With the studios aiming for obvious, formulaic narratives, the age-old criticism that
preexisting music was inherently distracting found a renewed voice among the denizens of the
studios’ music departments. But while a jettisoning of preexisting music might eliminate
distractions, either real or imagined, studio executives worried that audiences faced with wildly
new or avant-garde music would find themselves at sea, struggling to interpret these new musical
offerings within the context of film. In short, the music of contemporary art-music composers of
the day might be an even greater distraction than preexisting music. Studios and their music
departments therefore opted for original music that was like the well-worn Romantic repertoire
instead of radically new art music.
But before original films scores became de riguer, the market needed to weigh in as to
what constituted successful film music. By the mid 1930s a few influential, commercially
successful films paved the way for the full-scale adoption of the original film score. The
successes of Max Steiner’s King Kong (1933), Of Human Bondage (1934), and The Informer
(1935), Rudolph Kopp’s Cleopatra (1934), Alfred Newman and Hugo Friedhofer’s The Call of
the Wild (1935), Franz Waxman’s The Bride of Frankenstein (1935), and Dimitri Tiomkin’s Lost
Horizon (1937) signaled that the era of the film composer was underway in earnest by the mid
1930s.141 These mid-1930s successes proved that audiences accepted newly composed film
music. By the late 1930s original film scores were commercially successful, aesthetically
acceptable, and, perhaps most importantly, economically sensible.
Influences on the Classical Hollywood Film Score
The Romantic orchestral idiom, specifically modeled on the music of Wagner and
Strauss, has been the lingua franca of the cinema since the silent era. Primarily because it is
tonal and familiar, with distinct and intelligible connotative values, it creates “a pool of
conventions, of options, whose combination and recombination constitutes an easily recognized
140
141
Cooke, 72.
Wierzbicki, 146.
37
discursive field.”142 These conventions are more than stylistic accoutrements decorating
narrative films; they are essential signifiers that help to drive the narrative. For Hollywood
composers during the sound age, Romanticism’s orchestrations, harmonic vocabulary, and
especially its established emotional connotations, continued to serve the classical-style narrative
film.143 The musical language that accompanied films would have a significant effect upon the
systemization of the narrative film.
144
By virtue of its familiarity and connotative accessibility, Romantic music was a perfect fit
for character-centered narrative film.145 It aids the spectator’s identification with the character(s)
while simultaneously elevating the character’s struggle to the realm of the universal. As Claudia
Gorbman, in her influential book Unheard Melodies, puts it most succinctly, “[t]he appropriate
music will elevate the story of a man to the story of Man.”146 One of Romanticism’s most
influential figures had prefigured this lofty promise. His music and, more importantly, his
ideology concerning music and drama would have a profound effect upon the development of the
classical Hollywood film score.
The Wagner Debate
If there is one name that dominates the discussions surrounding the influences on the
classical Hollywood film score, it is that of Richard Wagner. Claims concerning film music’s
indebtedness to Wagner were already appearing in trade journals at the advent of the medium.
The Moving Picture World predicted in 1910 that “just as Wagner fitted his music to the
emotions, expressed by words in his operas, so in the course of time, no doubt, the same thing
will be done with regard to the moving pictures.”147 The following year the same journal
142
Gorbman, Unheard Melodies, 71.
Caryl Flinn, Strains of Utopia (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992), 33. Caryl Flinn suggests
that far more than just music was drawn from the Romantics. She argues that Romantic ideology was so engrained
within film-music composers that it prohibited their ability to profit from their works. By viewing themselves
through the lens of Romanticism as transcendent figures who were above or otherwise uninvo lved with contracts,
copyright control, and performance rights, she notes that film composers greatly undermined their financial,
authorial, and employment standings in relation to that of the studios.
144
Gorbman, 70.
145
Flinn, 26.
146
Gorbman, Unheard Melodies, 81.
147
Stephen Bush, “The Music and the Picture,”The Moving Picture World, 16 April, 1910, p. 59.
143
38
proclaimed that “every man or woman in charge of the motion picture … is a disciple or follower
of Richard Wagner.”148
When analyzing statements made by film critics during the 1930s, when they noted
increased sophistication of narrative film music, Caryl Flinn argues that “it reveals … the
growing impact of Wagnerian aesthetics on film.”149 Flinn considers Wagner’s foundational
concepts of Gesamtkunstwerk (Total Art Work), unendliche Melodie (Unending Melody), and
Leitmotiv as central to the style and function of the classical Hollywood film score.150 The
Gesamtkunstwerk concept is almost self-evident in sound film; the uniting of dialogue, drama,
dance, emotion, and mood form the basis of filmic narrative. Unendliche Melodie, as it relates to
film, has roots in the era of the silent picture, when music was played from beginning to end in
order to drown out the noise of the projector, the audience, and/or the environment. But this
practice continued to be implemented during the early days of the sound film, even when the
need for masking, aural wallpaper, no longer existed. Max Steiner’s so-called saturation, where
music is played throughout the entirety of the film, is an example of Hollywood’s appropriation
of that particular Wagnerian aesthetic.151
Perhaps the most contentious debate surrounds the use of the term “leitmotiv” as
employed in film music. Claudia Gorbman, while crediting film music’s liberal use of themes as
belonging to the intellectual tradition of the leitmotiv, is more cautious with her assessment of
fidelity to the practice. She notes that “in many cases, the theme’s designation is so diffused that
to call it leitmotif contradicts Wagner’s intention.”152 In fact, Gorbman is careful not to use the
term leitmotiv in the way that Flinn and other film- music scholars have; if one seeks “leitmotiv”
in her the index, readers are directed to “See Themes.”153
James Wierzbicki carefully differentiates the purely Wagnerian application of leitmotiv
from cinema’s themes, and laments what he feels has become a sloppy interchangeablity. He
writes that Bordwell, et al., Gorbman, Flinn, and Kathryn Kalinak “do not question what was
clearly a misuse of the German term …” and that “they write as though ‘film-score theme’ and
Stephen Bush, “Giving Musical Expression to the Drama,” The Moving Picture World, 12
August, 1911, p. 354.
149
Flinn, 17.
150
Flinn., 17-18.
151
Ibid., 16.
152
Gorbman, 29.
153
Ibid., 188.
148
39
‘leitmotiv’ were synonyms.”154 He spells out his differentiation by noting that “Wagner’s
technique (which involved fragmentary motifs capable of being not just developed but also
intermixed) differs substantially from the basic Hollywood approach (which involved tune-like
musical ideas that were for the most part simply reiterated whenever their associated filmic
entities entered the narrative).”155
The dust up over terminology is best settled by indentifying it for what it really is:
reminiscence motive. In fact, the description of filmic leitmotiv is conspicuously similar, and
Bordwell, et al., note that
The Hollywood score, like the classical visual style, seldom
includes overt recollections or far-flung anticipations of the action.
The music confines itself to a moment-by- moment heightening of
the story. Slight anticipations are permitted, but recollections of
previous musical material must be motivated by a repetition of
situation or character memory.156
The above scholarly debate shows the degree to which devotees of film music give
credence to the notion of its indebtedness to Wagner. Whether or not film composers achieved
Wagner’s grand synthesis of music and drama is a topic for an altogether different project. What
is ultimately more significant is that composers of narrative film music found in Wagner’s work
both a stylistic and, perhaps more importantly, a theoretical model.157
Principles of the Classical Hollywood Film Score
Around the same time that narrative films’ duration, editing, cinematography, and
narrative structure (among other aspects) settled into predictable schemes, musical practices also
began to adhere to certain conventions. The most often cited list of these musical conventions is
found in Claudia Gorbman’s Unheard Melodies (1987), an influential book concerning narrative
film music and is as follows:
154
Wierzbicki, 144.
Ibid.
156
Bordwell, et al., 35.
157
Flinn, 17.
155
40
I.
II.
III.
IV.
V.
VI.
VII.
Invisibility: the technical apparatus of nondiegetic music
must not be visible.
“Inaudibility”: Music in not meant to be heard consciously.
As such it should subordinate itself to dialogue, to visuals –
i.e., to the primary vehicles of the narrative.
Signifier of Emotion: Soundtrack music may set specific
moods and emphasize particular emotions suggested in the
narrative (cf. #IV), but first and foremost, it is a signifier of
emotion.
Narrative Cueing:
-referential/narrative: music gives referential and narrative
cues, e.g., indicating point of view, supplying formal
demarcations, and establishing setting and character.
-connotative: music “interprets” and “illustrates” narrative
events.
Continuity: music provides formal and rhythmic continuity
–between shots, in transitions between scenes, by filling
“gaps.”
Unity: via repetition and variation of musical material and
instrumentation, music aids in the construction of formal
and narrative unity.
A given film score may violate any of the principles above,
providing the violation is at the service of the other
principles.158
Invisibility
The first of Gorbman’s seven principles seems almost too obvious to be worth
mentioning, but it points to a convention mirrored in the technical aspects of narrative
filmmaking. The narrative film must seem natural, as if there is no technical apparatus
whatsoever. This technique is used, paradoxically perhaps, to achieve a certain verisimilitude
audiences have come to expect from their filmic fantasies. One must not see the camera, lighting
equipment, microphones, or any of the myriad technical apparatuses that make film possible, in
order to achieve that perfect illusion central to classical-style narrative film. It is important to
note that this principle refers mainly to nondiegetic music, as diegetic instances of music are
governed quite differently than narrative, nondiegetic music.
The invisibility of technical apparatus that Gorbman delineates is so taken for granted
that violations of this principle occasionally make for memorable gags in slapstick comedies.
158
Gorbman, 73.
41
For instance, in Mel Brooks’s High Anxiety (1978), a cliché dramatic orchestral stinger
punctuates a point of pseudo-drama within the movie. An instant later, the audience sees the Los
Angeles Symphony Orchestra, stuffed into a bus that crosses the background of the framing shot,
diegetically performing the stinger. The gag, repeated throughout the film, clearly plays upon
audiences’ notions of this cinematic convention.
Inaudibility
Gorbman’s principle of “inaudibility” is key to understanding the psychological role of
nondiegetic narrative film music. While film music is never inaudible, this principle points to
the convention that film music’s presence must never compete with or supersede the dramatic
elements of the film narrative.
159
This principle was already well established by the early sound
era. As the Soviet composer and musicologist Leonid Sabaneev wrote in his 1935 publication
Music for the Films: A Handbook for Composers and Conductors,
In general, music should understand that in cinema it should nearly
always remain in the background: it is, so to speak, a tonal
figuration, the “left hand” of the melody on the screen, and it is a
bad business when this left hand begins to creep into the
foreground and obscure the melody.160
Sabaneev’s prescription for musical subordination, and what Gorbman calls inaudibility,
is generally achieved by adherence to a three basic strategies: 1) musical form should be
determined by narrative form, 2) music should not interfere with speech, and 3) the mood of the
music should match the mood of the scene. 161
The principle of inaudibility, specifically the violation of it, is essential to the perception
of music as ironic within a cinematic context. For music to be read ironically it must in some
way be conspicuous; it must draw the attention of the perceiver in a way that is unlike the
subordinated classical-style film score.
Preexisting music holds special potential to violate the inaudibility principle. First, the
musical form is clearly not determined by the narrative form. Secondly, it may indeed “drown
159
Gorbman, 76.
Gorbman, Unheard Melodies, 76; Wierzbicki, Film Music: A History, 141.
161
Gorbman, 76-78.
160
42
out the voice,” by conflicting with the pitch range of the voices on the soundtrack.162 Arguably,
violations of these first two strategies may be a bit too subtle to draw the attention of the viewer.
But flagrant transgressions of the classical-style convention that music should match the mood of
the narrative can elicit a strong sense of the ironic.
Signifier of Emotion
Music’s role in eliciting emotion in cinema is largely taken for granted. Anyone who has
ever left the television room and hears the swelling sound of an orchestra knows from afar that
something important must be occurring. It is a vital part of how we connect with the characters in
the story and it reinforces the emotional content of the narrative. Music does not simply mirror
the characters’ emotions but instead signifies the true situation or emotional state behind the
surface of the narrative. Music brings a subjective truth that makes human the objective, onscreen image track.163
Film music may generate a sense of irony when it is conspicuously detached from the
mood of filmic narrative. Gorbman calls these kinds of instances “[c]ounterexamples –music
inappropriate to the mood or pace – [that] are usually comedic or self-reflexively modernist.”164
This type of music, termed “anempathetic,” refers specifically to music that differs strongly from
the typical narrative film music in that it does not reflect the emotional state of the characters or
their actions. According to French film theorist and composer Michel Chion, anempathetic
music shows “an ostensible indifference [to the mood of the narrative] by following its own
dauntless and mechanical course.” 165 By violating audience expectations, music can evoke a
strong sense of irony when paired with an image track indifferent to, or in opposition with,
commonly accepted emotional connotations.
Narrative Cueing
Gorbman’s fourth principle divides into two distinct categories: “referential/narrative”
and “connotative.” The first of these identifies basic contextual elements within a narrative such
Gorbman, 78. Gorbman cites Laurence Rosenthal’s advice to other composers and soundmen to “[keep]
the orchestra well away from the pitch-range of the speaker – low instruments against high voices, and
vice versa.”
163
Ibid., 79.
164
Ibid., 78.
165
Gorbman, 78.
162
43
as location, time, and character archetypes.
166
The second is of greater interest to this
investigation, and will factor into nearly all of the analyses of individual instances of ironically
deployed preexisting music.
Connotative cuing infuses the image and the narrative with meaning; it aids the spectator
in deciphering the true nature of the characters’ values.167 Music has been permeated by social
meanings since long before sound film. Instruments (tone colors), rhythms, harmonies, melodies,
textures, dynamics, and forms have formed an understandable connotative language within
Western culture for centuries.168 Film music composers and directors have been exploiting this
fact since the inception of the medium.
For instance, a polished, expensively-attired man
walking through the halls of an elaborately decorated office suite would likely lead an audience
to believe this character was raised near the seats of money, influence, and power. But if the
music that accompanies such a scene is that of southern blues played on a steel guitar, it might
tell us something vastly different about this man’s personality, geographic background, or his
values than could the image track alone.
Continuity and Unity
With the fifth and sixth principles, Gorbman delineates film music’s ability to smooth
otherwise jarring transitions within the narrative as well as to create unity by use of thematic
repetition. The timing of entrances, volume control, and exits of music in film are coded
signifiers of transitions, and we as audiences generally accept this despite whatever visual editing
techniques are employed. Montage sequences are almost inevitably accompanied by music, and
music’s continuity serves to smooth out any harsh cutting of the visual track.169 Conversely, if
music is cut too precisely with the scene it may emphasize the inherent disjointedness of the
editing process.170
166
Ibid., 83.
Ibid., 84.
168
Ibid., 85.
169
Gorbman, 89.
170
Ibid., 90.
167
44
Breaking the Rules
Gorbman’s final principle notes that film music may “break the rules” in the service of
any of the other principles. This very “breaking of the rules” is essential to a perception of
ironically deployed music, preexisting or otherwise. Ironically deployed music does not function
to serve one of the other six principles outlined by Gorbman. Instead, this music deliberately
steps outside the classical narrative strictures and invites the audience to engage at perceptual
levels that are outside the reach of the typical classical-style Hollywood film. But that is not to
say that this music ignores these principles; quite the contrary. These conventions are so wellrooted within the film-going culture, that an explicit violation of any of these will be enough to
indicate to the perceptive audience member that there is more here than meets the eye.
Violations invite the viewer to engage in the process outlined in Chapter 1 whereby they must
make a decision as to whether the author (director) is somehow woefully incompetent or is
aiming, through irony, at a deeper level of engagement with his or her audience.
45
CHATPER 4:
ART MUSIC IN FILM DURING THE SOUND ERA
The practice of using preexisting art music in films did not end with the coming of sound
technology. In fact, this repertory continued to be employed in much the same way as it had
been during the silent film era, with the same well-worn pieces being pressed into service again
and again. What did begin to change, however, was the perception among film makers and
composers that the classics were artistically, or even morally, acceptable filmic accompaniments.
The first wave of criticism concerning the use of preexisting art music in films came, not
surprisingly, from film composers themselves. In Composing for the Films (1947) Hanns Eisler
(with Theodore Adorno) argued that, in the world of film music, “[o]ne of the worst practices is
the incessant use of a limited number of worn-out musical pieces that are associated with the
given screen situations by reason of their actual or traditional titles.”171 They were pointing to a
perceived overuse of orchestral war-horses that had become pervasive film accompaniments:
Rossini’s William Tell Overture, Wagner’s “Bridal Chorus” from Lohengrin, Schubert’s
“Unfinished” Symphony, and the like.172 But Eisler and Adorno leave some room for specific
uses of preexisting art music, when they concede that it “can have a certain charm when, as in
animated cartoons, it serves to stress the absurdity of something impossible, for instance, Pluto
galloping over the ice to the ride of the Walkyries.”173 By noting specifically the use of art
music to accompany absurdities, they were condoning ironic deployments of art music.
They also swiped at film composers (likely those in direct competition with Eisler) when
they condescendingly stated that “it must be acknowledged that childlike faith in the eternal
symbolic force of certain classical wedding or funeral marches occasionally has a redeeming
aspect, when these are compared with original scores manufactured to order.”174
There is a clear, two-fold reasoning behind Eisler’s and Adorno’s criticisms. First, it
would be advantageous for any film composer to discredit the use of music that was not
originally composed for the screen. More preexisting music means less work, and this trajectory
eventually leads a film composer to unemployment and oblivion. Eisler was clearly writing with
171
Hanns Eisler and Theodore Adorno, Composing for the Films, (Books for Library Press: Freeport, NY:
1947), 15.
172
Ibid.
Ibid., 17.
174
Eisler and Adorno, 16.
173
46
an agenda, but that is not to say that his criticisms are disingenuous. Their view concerning art
music in film had, by the late 1940s, become common currency among filmmakers and,
especially, composers.
The familiar complaint that art music distracted from the drama was trotted out again by
the new generation of composers. Composer Ernest Gold took the more traditional view that
classical music “… interferes. If you know the music, it draws more attention to itself than it
should …”175 British film historian and preservationist John Huntley, writing in a book
published the same year as Eisler and Adorno’s critique, echoed Gold’s caution concerning
unwanted associations, when he wrote that:
The associations which individual members of the audience may
have in relation to a certain piece of well-known music are quite
beyond the control of the director of a film in which it is used;
indeed it may produce an effect on the individual entirely different
to the one he wants, or it will almost certainly produce a distraction
(which may occur at a vital moment in the plot and spoil the whole
effect of the film), because of these private reminiscences which
are evoked by the music.176
Max Steiner, on the other hand, claimed that art music’s unfamiliarity would in some way
inhibit the full force of the dramatic narrative, and noted that “while the American people are
more musically minded than any other nation in the world, they are still not entirely familiar with
all the old and new masters’ works and would thereby be prone to ‘guessing’ and distraction.”177
It seems that art music, whether familiar or not, was bound to interfere and was therefore
undesirable. The notion that audiences had forged associations with music and that these would
somehow obstruct the narrative was as old as the medium itself. But the criticisms of the 1940s
and 1950s went beyond suspicions about narrative interference and unwanted association. They
also came replete with moral overtones.
Max Winkler, who made his fortune compiling cue sheets containing suggestions for
preexisting music to accompany silent films, was one of the first to recant publicly his own
actions concerning the use of art music for films. Writing about his efforts to fulfill the
175
Flinn, Strains of Utopia, 37.
Dean Duncan, Charms that Soothe: Classical Music and the Narrative Film (New York: Fordham
University Press, 2003), 17.
177
Flinn, Strains of Utopia, 36-37.
176
47
staggering demand for cue sheet music, he used conspicuously moralistic prose to describe his
work. The following oft-cited quote from his 1951 article “The Origins of Film Music”
illustrates that Winkler, by this time at least, was well aware that the industry had undergone a
paradigm shift concerning the use of art music:
In desperation we turned to crime. We began to dismember the
great masters. We began to murder the works of Beethoven,
Mozart, Grieg, J.S. Bach, Verdi, Bizet, Tchaikovsky, and Wagner
– everything that wasn’t protected by copyright from our pilfering.
The immortal chorales of J. S. Bach became an “Adagio
Lamentoso for sad scenes.” Extracts from great symphonies and
operas were hacked down to emerge again as “Sinister Misterioso”
by Beethoven, or “Weird Moderato” by Tchaikovsky. Wagner’s
and Mendelssohn’s wedding marches were used for marriages,
fights between husbands and wives, and divorce scenes: we just
had them played out of tune, a treatment known in the professions
as “souring up the aisles.” ... I took shame and awe at the printed
copies of these mutilated masterpieces. I hope this belated
confession will grant me forgiveness for what I have done. 178
This hyperbolic prose (note the words crime, dismember, murder, mutilate) points to both
Winkler’s flair for the dramatic and a pronounced ideological shift among those involved with
the creation and implementation of film music during the 1940s and 1950s. This type of
criticism was more in line with that being espoused from the “elite” worlds of classical music
and the Academy. For instance, the 1954 edition of Grove’s Dictionary of Music and Musicians
praises film music’s role within society on the one hand, while landing a hard slap in the face
with the other when it says that “[t]he silent film thus made millions of people acquainted with
classical music, even if in a diluted and degraded form.”179 The point is clear: musical
performances in the service of films – even great, canonical music – are of lesser value than are
traditional concert performances or recordings of the same music.
The conditions that surrounded this marked increase in film- music criticism likely had to
do with a general crisis consuming the film industry in post-World War II America. During the
178
Max Winkler, The Origins of Film Music, http://www.tagg.org/teaching/mmi/stumfilmarts1.pdf.
Accessed July 9, 2010. See also A Penny from Heaven, (New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1951), 175.
179
Ernest Irving, “History.” In “Film Music,” Grove’s Dictionary of Music and Musicians, 3: 93-8
(London: Macmillan, 1954).
48
period of the First World War and throughout even the Great Depression, Hollywood enjoyed
massive box office returns. But the economic and social landscape underwent a significant
realignment following World War II.
Perhaps the most potent blow to the economic dominance of the studio system was the
1948 Supreme Court decision, known as “The Paramount Case,” that broke the major studios’
longstanding monopoly over distribution and exhibition. 180 Additionally, the realities of
television (7.3 million sets were sold in 1950), the baby boom (which kept potential filmgoers
closer to their children and, by extension, their homes), a weak overseas market, and the stifling,
moralistic atmosphere of the Red Scare that greatly impeded Hollywood’s creativity.181 The
confluence of these realities conspired to limit significantly Hollywood’s financial stability,
cultural import, and its reign as the uncontested international entertainment.
Throughout the 1950s and 1960s Hollywood insiders had noticed that low-budget but
psychologically rich European films were garnering a growing and loyal American audience. 182
With box office receipts significantly lower in the post-war years, some major studios sought to
recoup audience share through emulating these low-cost, innovative products. As a result, some
filmmakers were freed from the excessively obvious, classical-style products to create films
informed by alternative aesthetics. The aesthetic value system that informed these European
films pointed the way for American filmmakers.
Throughout the 1950s in France, a distinct school of criticism took shape that emphasized
the role of the director as the driving artistic force behind the film. Auteurism and auteur theory
were imported to America in the early 1960s and were quickly (and forcefully) subscribed to by
some influential film journalists and academics. 183 The conception of film as the work of an
individual (instead of a collaborative effort by technicians) made it possible for critics and the
public to view auteur films as different in kind from classical-style filmic products. Different
kinds of films naturally called for different conventions, and those within Hollywood who chose
to embark on new musical paths co-opted the European aesthetic of using music which, instead
of conforming with the on-screen action, actively played against it.184
180
United States v. Paramount Pictures, Inc., 334 U.S. 131 (1948)
Wierzbicki, 160-2.
182
Ibid., 170.
183
Shyon Baumann, Hollywood Highbrow: From Entertainment to Art (Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press, 2007), 82.
184
Wierzbicki, 169.
181
49
Some influential European directors, to whom their American counterparts turned to for
inspiration, had already begun to use preexisting music in enigmatic and iconoclastic ways.
Federico Fellini, Luchino Visconti, and Michelangelo Antonioni were just a few important
Italian directors whose work during the 1960s paved the way for interesting and ironic uses of
preexisting music in films.185 Before long, American films would be employing similar musical
approaches.
The watershed moment relating to the use of preexisting art music came, rather
unexpectedly, in 1968 with the release of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. Not since
the silent era had a big-budget, blockbuster film been produced where the entirety of the score
was drawn from preexisting art music. Moreover, this was entirely unplanned. Prior to the
film’s release, Kubrick discarded a nearly-complete original score by famed composer Alex
North. In place of the composed score, Kubrick decided to keep many of the classical “temp
tracks,” musical stand-ins used during the film’s production.
The borrowed music in 2001 would become one of the film’s defining features, largely
due to a number of novel narrative and presentational aspects. First, a good deal of the film (or
even the entirety of it, depending on one’s exposure to twentieth-century music) laid bare an
obvious anachronism. The music is drawn entirely from the late- nineteenth century through the
mid-twentieth century, while the narrative is set either in the prehistoric past or the distant future.
Additionally, the music is conspicuously present or, as industry insiders call it, “in the open.” At
no point in the film is the music employed as underscore, where it would have to compete with
dialogue for the audience’s attention. Instead the music occupies its own exclusive auditory
space, where it is elevated to the conceptual level of the image track, if not superseding it.
The combination of “in the open,” eminently familiar, Victorian Richard Strauss and
Johann Strauss, Jr. (Thus Spoke Zarathustra and On the Beautiful Blue Danube) presented
alongside scenes of the primordial past or the space-age future cause the perceiver to notice the
music consciously. Instead of passively accepting the musical accompaniment, the perceiver
must actively deal with its presence and resolve the obvious chronological, archetypal, and
stylistic incongruities with the image track.
By foregrounding these obvious incongruities, Kubrick allowed for an ironic reading of
the music. Here preexisting music moves beyond the soundtrack, as traditionally delineated, and
185
Ibid., 197.
50
into the realm of active participant within the filmic narrative. The music’s cultural associations,
in particular those attached to the better-known works, are toyed with. They are reinforced,
opposed, juxtaposed, altered, and at times forever transformed by their participation within the
film. Perhaps the best-known example of this kind of alteration via irony comes from Kubrick’s
use of Johann Strauss’ On the Beautiful Blue Danube in 2001.
Unimpressed by Alex North’s score for the space station docking sequence, Kubrick
spent hours with a portable projector, turntable, and his sizable personal record collection in an
attempt to find just the right piece for the scene. After an all-night dubbing experiment, Kubrick
played the Strauss waltz with the scene for a few trusted friends and, according to anecdotal
evidence, all were remarkably pleased with how well the Strauss worked.186 Kubrick, well
aware that the work was one of the most famous pieces in the entire Western cannon, remarked
that he would be thought of as either “a genius or an idiot” for incorporating it into his futuristic,
sci-fi blockbuster.187
The gamble eventually paid off, although neither immediately nor universally.
Hollywood film composer Jerry Goldsmith went so far as to complain that “2001:[A Space
Odyssey] was ruined by Kubrick’s choice of music.”188 Irwin Bazelon mentioned specifically
the Strauss waltz as a kind of Muzak and that he felt that 2001’s “nineteenth-century splashes of
musical sentiment … reduce[d] its emotional impact to that of romantic drama.”189
But while the proscription against the use of art music was echoed by many within the
film-criticism community, for some forward-thinking insiders found that the film overcame any
distracting connotations.190 As film composer John Williams noted,
It’s largely cultural association. But what I think Kubrick has
shown so wonderfully well is that the associations can be
dispelled. Take a thing like the Strauss waltz in 2001. The whole
thing about a waltz is grace, and you can see that the orchestra can
achieve this. Kubrick takes what is the essence of courtly grace,
the waltz, and uses it to accompany these lumbering but weightless
giants out in space during their kind of sexual coupling. And even
Paul A. Merkley, FRSC. “‘Stanley Hates This But I Like It!’:North vs. Kubrick on the Music for 2001:
A Space Odyssey,” The Journal of Film Music (2:1, Fall 2007), 25.
187
Ibid.
188
Ibid.
189
Irwin Bazelon. Knowing the Score: Notes on Film Music (New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold Co.,
1975), 111.
190
Merkley, 25.
186
51
though the Strauss waltz [is] in my mind … it’s the Danube, it’s
Viennese awful chocolate cakes and ghastly Viennese coffee…
But Kubrick says to us, “Watch the film for five seconds and
forget those associations, and it will stop being nineteenth-century
Vienna,” and in the hands of Von Karajan the music becomes a
work of art that says “look,” that says “air,” that says “float,” in
beautiful orchestral terms, and if you go with this film, the film
helps dispel all of these associations, and we’re into a new audiovisual world.191
The critical tide would turn and eventually rest in favor of Kubrick’s musical choices for
2001, but not before rekindling the heated debate concerning the role of art music in films.
Bazelon referred to art music in films as “offensive,” as nothing more than emotional
saccharine.192 Roy Prendergast said that art music’s use in film represents “the antithesis of film
music”193 while Ernst Lindgren asserted more generally that “the use of classical music for sound
films is entirely to be deplored.”194
Much of this criticism is charged with the same moralistic and emotional prose as Max
Winkler’s mea culpa concerning his “criminal” activity. But there is a notable difference
between Winkler’s confession and the criticism coming from those writing in the 1970s.
Winkler was “ashamed” of his actions because of what his publishing company did to music,
whereas Bazelon, Prendergast, Lindgren, and Goldsmith take issue with art music’s
diminishment of films.195
But things had changed with respect to the composer’s place in the creation of filmic
products. Auteur theory and practice demanded that musical choices rest largely in the hands of
directors and not composers. As a result, composers had far less influence over what kinds of
music would be included in films and how it would be deployed. The box-office success of 2001
191
Bazelon, Knowing the Score (Van Nortrand Reinhold Company: New York, 1975), 2000. Transcript of
Bazelon interview with Williams.
192
Duncan, 18.
193
Duncan, 17.
194
Ibid.
195
This rhetorical shift speaks to sea change in the public’s conception of the medium. In Hollywood
Highbrow (2007) Shyon Baumann makes the case that during the 1960s there was a fundamental shift in the
understanding of film as an art form rather than a mere entertainment. According to Baumann, there were three
main factors that precipitated this change in perception: 1) changes in American society, 2) changes from within
Hollywood that mimicked other art worlds, and 3) a creation of a common discourse of film that allowed for
discussion of film as art. Baumann’s book provides a detailed examination of the causes and trajectory of this
cultural paradigm shift concerning film as art.
52
(it was the top grossing film of 1968) did little to affect a change in this new creative hierarchy
between composer and director. Kubrick’s effort and aesthetic philosophy were ripe to be
copied by directors working for other major studios in Hollywood. And with this, gone were the
sweeping proscriptions against preexisting art music as filmic accompaniment. This was
especially so after Kubrick’s (in)famously ironic use of Beethoven, Rossini, and Purcell in A
Clockwork Orange in 1971, only three years after his 2001 broke down the barriers surrounding
preexisting art music in films.
Kubrick’s masterpiece about human nature, choice, and morality, famously transferred to
the screen author Anthony Burgess’s characterization of a guiltless, violent misanthrope who
was also a devotee of Beethoven’s music, particularly his Ninth Symphony. The conspicuous
indifference between scenes of “the old ultraviolence” and Beethoven’s sacralized symphony
extolling the virtues of the brotherhood of man forced viewers to contend with irony in a way
that perhaps no other film until that time had. In the film’s most famous scene, the anti-hero,
Alex, is strapped to a chair and forced to watch scenes of horrible violence as part of an
experimental aversion therapy that will make him physically ill when he sees or contemplates
violence. The soundtrack to the therapy, called the Ludovico treatment (an obvious allusion to
the composer’s name), is the final movement of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. The result is
Alex’s revulsion to the Ninth Symphony as a kind of collateral damage from his treatment.
The use of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony in such starkly ironic fashion opens many
possible contextual layers that have been the subject of debate since the film’s debut in 1971.
Most prominent is the irony of Beethoven’s Ode to Joy as the exaltation the unity of mankind,
set against the scenes of violence. A deeper reading questions whether the unity of mankind is at
all possible, given the nature of man. Alex is forced to be nonviolent, which is not the same as
his becoming moral, since morality demands choice. This raises the question of whether a world
where we are not free to choose evil is really a world where the utopian ideal of the brotherhood
of man is achieved. Would the elimination of our ability to be violent also eliminate our ability
to perceive transcendent beauty, in the same way that Alex is robbed of both of these abilities?
Kubrick, following Burgess, offers no easy answers, but the ironic deployment of Beethoven’s
music in the film raised questions that were, and still are, impossible to ignore. Perhaps the most
effective use of ironically deployed art music in film, Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange remains a
monument to the possibilities of music’s role within film narrative.
53
By the time A Clockwork Orange was released, film historians had already begun to
notice a change in film music that began in the late 1950s. Gerald Mast, in his A Short History of
the Movies (1971) noted, “[g]one is the old principle of studio scoring – to underscore a scene
with music that increases the action’s emotional impact without making the viewer aware of the
music’s existence. In new films there is little of this kind of background music.”196 In short, by
the early 1970s the rules and conventions for music in films had changed radically.
196
Wierzbicki, 194.
54
CHAPTER 5:
A BRIEF OVERVIEW OF IRONICALLY DEPLOYED ART MUSIC IN FILMS
Introduction
The screen has gone dark, the trailers having ended just a short time ago followed by the
full dimming of the theater lights. A few viewers in the hall get in their last whispers or place
their crunching bags of popcorn in the most strategic, soundlessly accessible locations near their
chairs. Soon after, there is total silence.
In that silence, the first image of the feature appears: “Magnolia Pictures.” The plain
image fades away and the blackness returns. A sudden explosion of grey slices the black
rectangle in half and then slowly opens to engulf the screen and reads, “Left Turn Productions.”
This, too, gradually fades to black; silent still.
Finally, in the darkness, there is sound. Muted strings performing arpeggios over a
pizzicato bass establish a thoroughly Romantic chord progression, and a lithe flute beautifully
sounds a bel-canto style melody. The dark screen, now accompanied by music, shows the usual
pre-narrative information – director, producer, production company, and finally the title of the
film – intermittently fading to black. As the music arrives at a half cadence, a disembodied
narrator speaks in the darkness: “It takes approximately five hundred pounds to crush a human
skull, but the human emotion is a much more delicate thing.”
When the music begins anew on the tonic, the first images of the diegesis slowly appear
on the screen: in slow motion, a young woman is screaming violently, directly at the camera.
When the image fully illuminates, a mellifluous soprano begins to sing. Bellini’s “Casta Diva”
from Norma elegantly sings out over the image of the furious, emotionally untethered woman.
After the aria’s gorgeous opening phrase, the narrator fills us in on the situation: this is Susie, the
narrator’s first real girlfriend, and he’s ending the relationship.
As the opening scene of Cashback (2006; dir. Sean Ellis) unfolds, the audio track is
limited to Bellini’s music and the narrator, both calm and unaffected, beautiful in their own way.
But the image track is markedly different. The slow motion captures every twisted snarl, every
droplet of flying spittle, and exaggerates the features of Susie’s distorted countenance (See
Figure 5.1).
55
Figure 5.1: Screenshot from Cashback (2005; dir., Sean Ellis). Screaming girl accompanied by
“Casta Diva.”
As audience members, we are immediately struck by the incongruity between the imageand soundtracks. This incongruity occasions an internal dialectic, whereby we must wrestle with
the possible meanings of such obvious and staged inappropriateness. We contemplate the
conventions of filmic narrative and specifically music’s role within them, and we expect that this
film will stray from them. This ironic use of “Casta Diva” sets the hermeneutic tone for the film:
It will be different from most; it will challenge the viewer in some ways, and, most importantly,
it will require that the viewer is active in interpreting the diegesis instead of passively accepting
what is presented. This call to active engagement allows filmmakers to communicate subtle but
important contextual layers within filmic narratives.
This chapter will present examples of ironically deployed preexisting art music in a
number of films. Each illustration will demonstrate how music instantiates the four-part process
of ironic dissembling – 1) rejection of literal meaning, 2) consideration of alternatives, 3)
decision upon new, “true” meaning and, 4) decision upon filmmakers’ unspoken points – and
then posit interpretations for each instance. These deeper contextual layers – the new, “true”
meanings and the filmmakers’ points –in each of these examples are generally limited to the
world of the film itself, the topic of the film, and/or the characters in the film. This chapter will
show how ironically deployed music affects our psychical conceptions of the topics and/or
characters in these films and how this affects our identification with them, thus affecting the
overall impact of the film.
56
Analysis of Preexisting Art Music in Films
“When you love someone, you’ve gotta trust them. There’s no other way. You’ve gotta
give them the key to everything that’s yours. Otherwise, what’s the point? And for a while,
that’s the kind of love I thought I had.” So says Sam Rothstein’s (Robert De Niro) disembodied
voice as we view him exit a posh restaurant and walk toward his early-1980s Cadillac. Sam
opens the door, sits down in the driver’s seat, and turns the ignition. The car explodes,
ferociously. Suddenly and completely, the screen is filled with flames, as J. S. Bach’s “Wie
setzen uns mit Tränen nieder,” the final chorus from his St. Matthew Passion (BWV 244), erupts
from the previously nonexistent soundtrack. Casino (1995; dir. Martin Scorsese), an epic tale of
greed, betrayal, pride, and trust, set against the backdrop of the mafia-controlled Las Vegas
casino industry of the 1970s, has begun.
The above, pre-title sequence gives way to the lavish opening credits populated by closeups of dancing neon lights of the Las Vegas strip, engulfing hellfire, and the silhouette of Sam’s
falling body. The entirety of the credits is accompanied by this majestically tragic chorus from
one of Bach’s crowning achievements in sacred music. The chorus immediately draws the
attention of the viewer, mostly due to an incongruity between the music and the film’s generic
expectations.
While it is not unusual for mafia films to use preexisting art music (as in The
Godfather, The Godfather: Part II, Goodfellas), in general that music is in some way connected
with the Italian-American community and often consists of Italian songs and operatic arias.
Bach’s music, due to its cultural provenance and severe compositional style, is a marked
departure from the norm. But it is Bach’s music that lays the groundwork for the underlying
narrative that is about to unfold.
When the title sequence ends, the narrative begins in 1973, a decade before the pre-title
sequence. Sam’s voice still guides us, leaving us wondering if his narration is coming from the
Great Beyond. We are told of the grandeur that was Las Vegas in the 1970s, of how it was
“paradise on earth,” and how, in the end, he “fucked it all up.”
As the chorus sounds over the title sequence, we see the silhouette of Sam’s body
twisting and turning after the attempt on his life. This will mark the end of his reign in Vegas as
a street-kid-turned-power-broker. He is, literally, expelled. This imagery is not a happy
coincidence, as the screenplay describes this recurring image as “His body twists and turns
57
throughout the frame like a soul about to tumble into the flames of damnation” 197 (see Figure
5.2).
This opening title sequence is rife with allusions to religious imagery, and this theme will
recur in the closing segment of the film (as will Bach’s music) and will tie the narrative together
both chronologically and thematically.
Figure 5.2: Screenshot from Casino (1995; dir., Martin Scorsese). Ace’s body silhouetted against
flames and the lights of the Las Vegas casinos.
When Sam’s narration describes a $62-million loan that was procured in order to
purchase the casino, he speaks of the benefactors as “the only kind of guys that could actually get
you that kind of money.” During this description we are shown a table of older men in a hazy,
smoke-filled room. We will eventually learn that these men are the upper echelon of the
Midwest mafia. This image is an allusion to the Last Supper and that event’s many artistic
incarnations. In particular, this Last Supper alludes to Caravaggio’s celebrated chiaroscuro
technique with its striking use of light (see Figures 5.3a and 5.3b). 198
197
Annette Wernblad, The Passion of Martin Scorsese: A Critical Study of the Films (Jefferson, North
Carloina: McFarland, 2011), 50.
198
Ibid. (Wernblad also notes the similarity to Caravaggio.)
58
Figure 5.3a: Screenshot from Casino. The members of the Midwest Mafia shown during Ace’s
opening monologue.
Figure 5.3b: Carravagio’s The Calling of St. Matthew (1600)
59
This opening sequence, accompanied by Bach’s music, forces the viewer into an internal
dialogue about the nature of the film. As in Cashback, the placement of this music at the very
beginning of the film sets ups a series of expectations – or, more accurately, violations –
concerning filmic conventions, particularly those within the subset of mafia films. But what,
exactly, might those expectations and violations signal? The answer lies in the subject of Bach’s
grand Passion setting. Director Martin Scorsese says as much when, speaking about his choice of
music:
I guess for me the Bach is essential to the sense of something
grand having been lost … there was a sense of an empire being
lost, and it needed music worthy of that. It needed music which
would be provocative. The destruction of that city has to have the
grandeur of Lucifer being expelled from Heaven for being too
proud.199
This grand fall from grace is most evident in the film’s final sequence, which reiterates
Bach’s magisterial chorus. Tying together the chronology of the film’s narrative, we once again
see Ace leaving the posh restaurant, exactly as in the opening, pre-title sequence. He gets in the
car, turns the ignition, and the car catches fire. But the initial blast doesn’t harm him, thanks to a
steel plate beneath the driver’s seat. He barely escapes the car before it explodes and is torn to
pieces. When this second explosion occurs, Bach’s “Wie setzen uns mit Tränen nieder” reenters,
followed immediately by scenes of huge Las Vegas casinos undergoing demolition. As in the
beginning, Ace’s voiceover guides us through the d nouement, explaining how the mafia-run
casinos were pushed out by the big corporations. What was once, in the eyes of Ace and his
kind, a paradise has been lost.
Ace’s narration is accompanied again by quasi-religious images. When Ace speaks of
the new casinos that have taken the place of the old ones, we see a lingering image of the main
entrance to the MGM Grand (as it looked in the mid-1990s) and its giant lion-head entrance; the
lion, in Christian iconography, has been a symbol for Christ since the Renaissance 200 (see Figure
5.4). We are also shown the new Las Vegas tourists. Not gangsters, hustlers, or seasoned
gamblers, they are instead frumpy old tourists. They represent a sea of banality and they walk
199
Martin Scorsese, in Scorsese on Scorsese, eds. David Thompson and Ian Christie (London: Faber and
Faber, 1996), 206-7.
200
George Ferguson, Signs & Symbols in Christian Art (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1961), 21.
60
through the doors, shrouded in light from the outside is if they are “crossing over.” They are a
manifestation of the walking dead (see Figure 5.5).
Figure 5.4: Screenshot from Casino. The new Las Vegas casinos (MGM Grand) and the allusion
to Christian iconography while Ace speaks of a paradise lost.
Figure 5.5: Screenshot from Casino. The new, “Disneyland” crop of Vegas tourists.
61
The mixing of religiosity with the mafia is not as incongruous as it may appear on the
surface. It is a narrative strategy that Scorsese used in his other mafia films. In both Mean
Streets (1973) and Goodfellas (1990), the films that complete his so-called “mob trilogy,”
Scorsese establishes a Mafia-as-Church structure.201 This earthly ecclesiastic system in Casino
functions as follows:
Its sacraments include skims to the mob bosses and payoffs to the
right politicians in Nevada. Keeping church stable requires the
right gave-and-take among the bosses, the workers, the police, and
the politicians. Paradise or heaven on earth, as defined by getting
unlimited amounts of money from the suckers who come to the
casino to gamble, is lost as the demigods –[Ace] Rothstein and
Santoro –become hungrier and hungrier for the forbidden fruit,
greedier and greedier for unrestrained power and megalomaniacal
control. Inevitably, the greed breeds violence, which once
unleashed, spins out of control. In the narrative, Nicky relates that
they “fucked it up,” and, ultimately, destroyed their paradise on
earth.202
Scorsese’s equating of mafia-controlled casinos with the church and with Christian
symbols is aided by Bach’s music. The juxtaposition of these competing, counterintuitive social
structures creates a kind of irony in and of itself. And while most of the population might cheer
at the idea of the mafia’s being banished from operating with impunity, Scorsese, through this
ironic deployment of Bach’s music, openly challenges this notion.
Near the end of the destruction montage, Ace laments that the town will never be the
same, and that today it “looks like Disneyland.” And then our narrator cautions us about what
might be even more sinister than a mob-run casino: one that appeals to the American family.
Ace notes: “And while the kids play cardboard pirates, mommy and daddy drop the house
payments and Junior’s college money on the poker slots.” With the aid of Bach’s music, we see
Scorsese’s theme brought to light. Scorsese noted that the new Vegas is more dangerous than
the old one “[b]ecause the old Vegas is being replaced by something that looks seductive, kiddiefriendly, but it’s there to work on the very core of America, the family.”203
201
Maria Miloria. The Scorsese Psyche on Screen (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2004), 63.
Ibid.
203
Martin Scorsese, in Scorsese on Scorsese, eds. David Thompson and Ian Christie (London: Faber and
Faber, 1996), 207.
202
62
Bach’s music laments the loss of innocence for the American family, one that might
otherwise steer clear of the potentially devastating gambling industry. As corporations moved in
and eliminated all the violent people, they made the destructive habit of gambling all the more
acceptable, accessible, and seductive. The music warns of this American tragedy. The fall from
grace here is expanded to encompass America herself, and not just Ace and his kind. Bach’s
music laments the exposure of the American family to truly terrifying organizations, not the
mafia but the legally and politically protected gaming corporations.
In stark contrast to the flashy, hyper-violent mob film, Junebug (2005; dir. Phil Morrison)
is a quiet and atmospheric film, filled with long, silent shots of empty rooms and rural scenery.
While avoiding nearly all instances of traditional underscoring, director Morrison nevertheless
assigns music an important role in articulating this narrative theme.
When the sophisticated, cosmopolitan, art impresario Madeleine (Elizabeth Davidtz)
hurriedly marries the perfect southern beau George (Alessandro Nivola) in Chicago, the pair
travel to the new groom’s hometown nestled in rural North Carolina. Madeleine’s objective is to
secure the work of an eccentric, bigoted, “primitive,” local artist for her chic gallery, while
George uses the trip to reconnect with his family and to introduce them to his new wife. On the
surface, the film is a fish-out-of-water tale: the sleek, polished Madeleine, with her worldly
upbringing and her European affectations, is confronted by her husband’s stoic, dysfunctional,
chain-smoking, Southern family, who resist nearly all of her professional charms. But the film’s
deeper narrative questions easy dismissals of bumpkin life.
The film uses three kinds of music: original, popular, and preexisting, both folk and art.
Each of these serves a particular role within the narrative. The film opens with the sounds and
sights of ancient, Southern men yodeling, and this prologue visually emphasizes the film’s rustic
setting via the use of grainy 8mm film. Immediately following, the narrative begins in earnest
when it cuts to an auction inside a stylish Chicago art gallery, where the film’s two main
characters meet. In the aftermath of the auction Madeleine and George are seen passionately
kissing in the now-empty gallery. A love-struck Madeleine gazes into George’s eyes and asks,
perhaps rhetorically, “Where did you come from?” George then takes a moment and responds,
cheekily, “Pfafftown, North Carolina.” At this moment the calypso-esque popular song
“Harmour Love” (1977), written by Stevie Wonder and performed by Syreeta Wright,
accompanies the opening credits, falsely signaling to the audience that the film is a light-hearted
63
love story. This catchy tune will return during the closing credits, lifting the audience from the
weightier, emotionally charged narrative of the film.
Junebug uses popular music as a kind of transport, moving the audience into and out of
the fantasy world of the diegesis. In this way, “Harmour Love” functions like the classical
Hollywood film overture. But aside from this familiar usage of an unfamiliar song, the
remainder of the film’s soundtrack invites careful consideration and helps to establish the
director’s points.
Throughout the film, but particularly in the first half, Morrison accompanies his visual
narrative depicting life in deep-red, rural America with chamber music by Haydn, Vivaldi,
Shostakovich, Schubert, and Alois Strohmayer. The very plain people, scenery, and occupations
of rustic America are distinctly at odds with this genre that is generally associated with the most
discriminating connoisseurs of art music. A scene that illustrates Morrison’s use of art music
shows George’s ever-sullen brother, Johnny, interacting with his coworkers while processing
orders at Replacements, Ltd., a bulk-order warehouse filled from floor to ceiling with dinnerware
and other accessories. This is perhaps the only scene in the film where Johnny is even remotely
cheerful, surrounded not by his successful brother or the keenly intellectual Madeleine, but
instead by those more of his kind –the real inhabitants of Pfafftown.
The scene juxtaposes warehouse drudgery, an elegant orchestral transcription of
Schubert’s “Grazer Galop,” and a chatty workers’ expletive- laced monologue concerning the
local professional football team, quarreling neighbors, and a story about a friend’s mistaking a
tick lodged in his anus for a hemorrhoid. This obvious discrepancy between the visual/dialogic
track and the soundtrack invites the audience to interpret possible meanings created by this
conspicuously odd combination (see Figure 5.6).
64
Figure 5.6: Screenshot from Junebug. Workers’ inane chatter with scenes of quotidian labor
accompanied by an orchestral arrangement of Schubert’s “Grazer Galop.”
Throughout the first half of the film, audience members may interpret this as a kind of
urban, elite snobbery. Here the filmmaker and spectators, in particular those identifying with
Madeleine, have a little fun at the expense of the parochial characters. One cannot help but
chuckle just a bit at the sight of inarticulate warehouse workers manipulating packing peanuts
and describing how they replay last year’s Superbowl on tape, hoping the outcome will somehow
miraculously change, while Schubert’s “Galop” works as underscore. The music engenders a
sense of cultural superiority in viewers witnessing this quotidian work and sophomoric chatter.
But viewers will soon discover that they are also, in part, victims.
When Johnny’s high-school-sweetheart-turned-wife, Ashley, goes into labor, Madeleine
is forced to choose between an important meeting with the artist and going to the hospital with
the family. Madeleine asks George to drop her off at the artist’s isolated home while George
meets the family at the hospital. George briefly protests, telling Madeleine that “it means
something, you know … family.” Madeleine tries to explain the urgency of her meeting,
suggesting that if she doesn’t meet this artist she will “lose him” to a rival art dealer. George
acquiesces.
While Madeleine is off securing her contract with the local artist, Ashley’s baby is
stillborn. When Madeleine reaches George via cell phone late into the night, she immediately
65
begins relaying her story about how she “got him back.” But before she can launch into the
details of the “get,” George interrupts to let her know that “we lost him.” Madeleine is
dumbstruck upon hearing this news and is rendered speechless. While George begins to tell her
the details of the tragedy, Madeleine says, “I have to come to the hospital.” To which George
replies, “well, you could have.” George advises Madeleine to find her own way back to the
house and elects to stay the night in the hospital with Ashley.
The final scene between George and Ashley reveals much about the latter’s true nature.
Ashley shows herself to be not a simple country bumpkin but instead the moral center of the
family. She is thoughtful, has emotional depth, and sees people and situations with a clarity that
evades the other members of the family, who have until this point in the narrative, been
presented as her intellectual and emotional superiors. The contrast between Madeleine’s rather
selfish actions and Ashley’s struggle allows us to apprehend the underlying theme informing the
film and how the art music has supported this.
Throughout the early portion of the film art music is frequently deployed accompanying
the scenes and people of the rural South. The discrepancy between the cultural connotations of
this music and the visual narrative works to create a kind of dissonance with which the audience
must contend. Before the film has fleshed out the characters, the audience is likely to consider
this juxtaposition as a tongue-in-cheek, snide commentary about the hidebound, insular South
and its inhabitants. But as the film completes its narrative course, we see that the joke, really, is
on us.
As Madeleine’s abandonment of Ashley unfolds toward the end of the film, we discover
that the music was not at all a sarcastic accompaniment, but that it was a genuinely appropriate
complement. The use of art music, first to create in the audience a sense of superiority and then
ultimately to undermine this conception, mimics Madeleine’s emotional journey in the film.
When Madeleine leaves Ashley and the rest of the family in order to secure the contract with the
local artist, we see that her cultured background, while good at cocktail parties and appropriate
for making money, lacks real value. It is commitment to family, embodied in Ashley and not
Madeleine, that deserves our respect and admiration.
By inviting us, via ironically situated (or so we thought) art music, to assume a superior
stance in relation to the parochial characters, Morrison has set a kind of trap, which helps to
ensure that the audience identifies with Madeleine. The goal of this identification is that we, like
66
her, experience the same kind of humbling that Madeleine does at the end of the film. Morrison
hints at this strategy when he says that
The idea was to accept they’re types, and Madeleine—also known
as “us”—discovers them as such. And let’s explore what that
means. To us. Any effort to make them not types would actually be
imposing my idea of what people ought to be like as much as if we
were exploiting the fact that they were types. Instead, I thought
let’s accept what they are and then try to explore what that means
to us.204
Irony is a slippery discourse that risks failure and misinterpretation more than any other
discursive trope, and it also requires the existence of a victim, someone who doesn’t “get it.”
Morrison seems to have understood the inherent risks of such a strategy, when he notes that “… I
knew that what that meant was that some people would just see the caricature. I had to accept the
possibility of people seeing this movie and just seeing ‘quirk’ and that was terrifying. But I had
no other choice.”205
Finally, we see his strategy for setting his audience up for a paradigm shift
laid bare when he tells us that the film “was about creating a modest vehicle for reminding us
that what we assume going in to a situation is an illusion, a product of a self-protective
outlook.”206
The ironic art music serves a two-fold process in Junebug. First, it creates a sense of
superiority in the audience, falsely pointing to the denizens of the rural, American South as
victims. Second, it makes the actively engaged audience reflect upon its prejudices, ones that the
music helped to point out at the onset of the film. And in this way the music, along with the
other narrative elements, provokes a cathartic event within the viewers that is similar to
Madeleine’s.
While art music highlights the elevation of rural characters in Junebug, it plays an
inverted role in The Madness of King George (1994; dir., Nicholas Hytner). Detailing the years
1788-1790, the film surveys the life of King George III during his slide into dementia. Adapted
from Alan Bennett’s stage play The Madness of George III (1991), the film incarnation closely
Jeannette Catsoulis, “The Insider Outsider: An interview with Phil Morrison, about his new film
Junebug.” Reverse Shot Online. http://www.reverseshot.com/legacy/dogdays05/morrison.html (accessed November
9, 2011).
205
Ibid.
206
Ibid.
204
67
follows the dialogue and even the musical architecture of its West- End predecessor. The music,
adapted by George Fenton, borrows heavily from G. F. Handel and includes diegetic and
nondiegetic instances of Music for the Royal Fireworks, Water Music, and, most notably, the
coronation anthem Zadok the Priest.
As the film begins, we are shown glimpses inside the life of the monarch (played by
Nigel Hawthorne), his family, and the political machinations that swirl amongst them and the
parliament. As the King’s behavior becomes increasingly erratic and unpredictable, those within
parliament and the royal family aligned with the King are forced to take extreme action. In an
attempt to alleviate the King’s afflictions, they turn to a country physician, Dr. Willis (Ian
Holm), whose life work it is to treat the mentally handicapped in a most puritanical and stern
manner. In a dramatic and powerful scene where George III is confronted about his mental
illness, Handel’s Zadok the Priest serves in an impressively ironic role.
Led into a kind of medical ambush, George III is made aware that his participation at Dr.
Willis’s treatment farm is not optional. When the King scoffs at the idea of being in the care of a
commoner, Dr. Willis intimates that it would be in the King’s best interest to come willingly.
Willis then opens a door to an antechamber revealing a restraint- laden chair that will be used to
confine the monarch. When George sees the device, he is visibly shaken by the sight. “When
felons were induced to talk,” George says, almost to himself, “they were shown first the
instruments of their torture. The King is shown the instrument of His, to induce Him not to
talk.” Tears begin to stream from George’s eyes. “Well, I won’t,” he says as he begins to back
away from the horrific furniture. At this moment, the introduction to Handel’s Zadok the Priest
begins to play.
George’s backpedalling becomes an all-out sprint for safety as Dr. Willis’s eighteenthcentury orderlies pursue and eventually capture him. As Willis’ orderlies carry the King back to
the restraining chair, the King’s guards attempt, half-heartedly, to free him; they are clearly
confused by the order to capture the man they have been tasked with defending with their lives.
When George is placed, struggling, in the chair, his mouth is covered by an orderly’s hand as the
leather restraints are applied. Dr. Willis stands beside the King and addresses the slack-jawed
guards, lecture-style, all the while accompanied by the dignified orchestral introduction to
Handel’s majestic anthem:
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If the King refuses food, He will be restrained. If He claims to
have no appetite, He will be restrained. If He swears and indulges
in MEANINGLESS DISCOURSE... He will be restrained. If He
throws off his bed-clothes, tears away His bandages, scratches at
His sores, and if He does not strive EVERY day and ALWAYS
towards His OWN RECOVERY... then He must be restrained.
When Willis finishes his proclamation, the King shouts at him: “I AM THE KING OF
ENGLAND!” To which, Willis replies: “NO, Sir. You are the PATIENT!” At this moment, the
King’s mouth is covered with a stretched-leather gag that is then tied behind the headrest of the
chair, completely immobilizing and muting the monarch. The gag is employed at precisely the
moment when the choir makes its startling, fortissimo entrance (see Figure 5.7 and Example 5.1).
Figure 5.7: Screenshot from The Madness of King George (1994; dir., Nicholas Hytner). King
George is gagged at the moment the choir sings in the dramatic opening of “Zadok the Priest.”
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Example 5.1: Handel, Zadok the Priest (HWV 258), mm. 20-21. Vocal score with piano
reduction.
As the anthem’s magisterial choral section continues, the camera begins a slow,
prolonged pull-back that eventually reveals a surreal “coronation” scene. The King is strapped
and gagged to a monstrous throne that is more medieval torture device than medical tool. The
orderlies have taken the place of the royal guards, who have themselves become the spectators in
the inverted ceremony. Dr. Willis stands before the defeated, humiliated King, his presence
ironically akin to that of the Archbishop anointing the monarch (see Figure 5.8). Zadok the
Priest in this context emphasizes the humanity and frailty of King George. It provides a means
of identification with the King while, at the same time, elevating the very human struggle against
mental illness. In short, it is the King’s battle with his illness that is worthy of someone of his
station.
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Figure 5.8: Screenshot from The Madness of King George. The inverted “Coronation.”
Music of the Anglican tradition, used in The Madness of King George to provide ironic
commentary and to add a touch of historical verisimilitude, is also used in the post-apocalyptic
film 28 Days Later (2002; dir., Danny Boyle). The film’s soundtrack alternates among original
classical-Hollywood film scoring, popular and pop-style original music, and preexisting, choral
art music. Set in England in the near future, the film depicts a largely emptied nation that has
sustained an outbreak of “rage,” a highly contagious, rapidly afflicting virus that results in
murderous zombies that lay waste to the population.
The story begins when Jim (Cillian Murphy) wakes to find himself in a completely
deserted hospital; his surroundings suggest that the population of the building left in quite a
hurry and without regard for what, or who, was left behind. Wandering the totally deserted
streets of the City of London, Jim is able to piece together from discarded newspapers that
Britain has been evacuated. After drifting through the city, he enters a church, where he
discovers the pews piled high with corpses. Among the corpses is, to Jim’s surprise, one still
animated. When the zombie chases Jim (these zombies don’t stagger and stammer, they move
quickly) from the church, he is saved by a small group of survivors who fill him in on what has
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happened in the last twenty eight days: no army, no government, no police, no radio, no
television, and very few survivors.
When Jim learns the magnitude of the situation, he insists upon finding his parents.
The survivors trek, on foot, to Jim’s parents’ house in a nearby suburb. Throughout the scenes of
the journey through deserted London and beyond, a solo, a cappella rendering of the Anglican
hymn Abide with Me sounds nondiegetically. The hymn, sounding during scenes of empty
cityscapes, functions as an elegy for London, Great Britain, and all of civilization.
In a later scene the group of survivors is able to obtain a radio transmission from a group
of left-behind armed forces that instructs anyone remaining to travel to their compound in the
countryside.
The group decides to make their way by car, but first they must escape the clogged
and dangerous city streets. They hotwire a taxi and begin their journey during a scene that is
accompanied by a nondiegetic performance of the Bach/Gounod Ave Maria. The music largely
dominates the soundtrack, while the image track shows piles of corpses, stacked like logs on the
sidewalks, during scenes that are intentionally reminiscent of holocaust images (see Figure 5.9)
Figure 5.9: Screenshot from 28 Days Later (2002; dir., Danny Boyle). Jim looks out the car
window at piles of corpses (reflected in the window) as Ave Maria sounds nondiegetically.
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The group must decide whether to try their luck through a tunnel clogged with abandoned
cars, corpses, and who- knows- what else. Boyle’s setting of this scene is not tense and
suspenseful, as one might expect, but is instead a kind of joyride or roller coaster scene; the car
bounces and swerves through the maze of carnage to the delight of everyone inside. The
grotesque scenery and the relatively buoyant atmosphere of the characters during the tunnel ride
both offer a stark contrast to the musical accompaniment. This draws the viewer into a
contemplation of the meaning and usefulness of religion to civilization, even going so far as to
mock religion’s musically eloquent assurances of eternal peace.
The final use of art music occurs when Jim and the survivors decide to travel afar toward
a rumored armed-forces safe zone. As with both of the previous instances of preexisting music,
this one accompanies a journey. As the now tight-knit group begins to travel through the idyllic
English countryside, Faur ’s “In Paradisum,” from his Requiem, accompanies the drive.
The scene is essentially a montage, with the journey passing in less than a minute.
During the sequence we see vast, open spaces and witness the serene countenances of the
travelers. Of the three journey-scenes in the film, this is the only one that is not fraught with an
underlying sense of fear. Instead of being exposed on foot or trapped in a closed space, this
journey feels safe. In fact, the only sound we hear during the first half of the journey montage,
other than the Fauré, is of a radio broadcast from the safe zone announcing its location and that
“Salvation is here! The answer to infection is here!” The music, in this case, fits perfectly well
with the notion of safety and protection and, ultimately, a solution to the nightmare scenario.
But eventually the bucolic countryside gives way to the large, industrial city of
Manchester, which the survivors view from afar on a desolate mega-motorway.
In the distance
ahead they view the entire city emitting smoke and the occasional explosion. The promise of
Paradise has instead become the reality of Hades (see Figure 5.10). The music here offers a
commentary on modern, industrial society. Our modern paradise is an illusion, and it will very
likely bring about our end.
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Figure 5.10: Screenshot from 28 Days Later. The survivors approach a completely ablaze
Manchester as Faur ’s “In Paradisum” from his Requiem sounds.
Needful Things (1993; dir., Frasier Clark Heston) deals in the small-town version of
Hades and details the machinations of the Devil in the person of Leland Gaunt and his
exploitation of greed and grievances. When Leland Gaunt (Max von Sydow) opens an antiques
and curiosities shop in sleepy Castle Rock, Maine, he sets in motion a plan to destroy the town
and the lives of its inhabitants. Gaunt’s innocuous store-front shop, Needful Things, is a
hodgepodge of lamentably used furniture and shoddy second-hand clothing. But, as each of the
townspeople finds out individually, the inventory also consists of one item each of them
painfully desires. Gaunt’s payment plans are deceptively agreeable: a nominal monetary
payment plus the carrying out of a prank to be played, anonymously, on one of the other
residents. But Gaunt has carefully arranged that each trick stoke suspicion against a specific
individual, especially among those who have a longstanding history of enmity. Before long
Gaunt stokes the fires of small-town rivalries, which erupt into large-scale violence that threatens
the very existence of the town.
One subplot in the film involves two local women, Nettie Cobb (Amanda Plummer) and
Wilma Jerzyck (Valri Bromfield), who carry a long-standing grudge. When Gaunt has different
townsfolk carry out acts against each of the women, they instinctively blame each other.
74
Coincidentally, these acts are committed at the same time that Nettie and Wilma are out fulfilling
their bargains with Gaunt, carrying out acts against other townsfolk.
When Nettie returns home from her mischievous errand, she finds her beloved Rottweiler
has been killed and horrifically skinned, the dog left hanging in her hallway like a grotesque
piñata. At the same time, Wilma returns from her errand to find the windows of her house have
been broken out by apples having been thrown through them. Nettie makes her way to Wilma’s
farmhouse to confront her, and all hell breaks loose.
Nettie and Wilma settle their differences by way of a drawn-out fight with a meat cleaver
and a large kitchen knife. The scene is a full-blown fight sequence, complete with hand-to-hand
combat and physical stunts. A scene such as this suggests a particular kind of music, one that
has been established by decades of classical Hollywood film scores. But Heston and composer
Patrick Doyle instead chose to set this scene to Schubert’s Ellens dritter Gesang, also known as
his Ave Maria.207
The music functions on several levels within the sequence. First, it acts to define the
timeline of events that occurs leading up to the confrontation. When the music begins, we see
Gaunt sitting alone in his store, in front of a fireplace, listening, presumably, to a diegetic
recording of the Ave Maria. There is an immediate surface irony here, in that we know that
Gaunt is the devil incarnate and that his indulgence in sacred music forms a kind of sacrilege.
During the orchestral introduction there is an intensifying close-up of Gaunt physically wrestling
with his hands and softly groaning, as if he is mentally using his powers (and perhaps the
music?) to ensure that his plans are carried out. The scene then gradually fades to show Nettie
doting over her dog while, at the same time being captivated by her purchase from Needful
Things, a small curio figure that she has been seeking to collect for years. This scene then
slowly fades, revealing a young boy riding his bicycle to Wilma’s farmhouse to fulfill his
bargain with Gaunt, which will be to throw apples through Wilma’s windows. With the
appearance of the boy, the music changes to nondiegetic film score. Ave Maria will return in
order to condense the timeline of the events that are about to unfold and to offer ironic
commentary.
In the scene that follows the boy’s destruction of Wilma’s windows, we see Nettie
carrying out her task; pasting obscenity-laden papers inside the house of a local businessman.
207
The film’s official soundtrack lists this as “Ave Maria [Schubert’s Serenade].”
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Interestingly, the music that accompanies this is another instance of preexisting art music,
Grieg’s “In the Hall of the Mountain King” from Peer Gynt. But this music is conspicuously
appropriate for the scene, and does not contain an occasion for irony. In fact, “In the Hall of the
Mountain King” is one of Hollywood’s most enduring musical accompaniments, one that
specifically denotes mischief (see Chapters 2 and 3). The setting of these two pieces of
preexisting art music back to back strengthens the ironic impact of Ave Maria in the following
scene. Here we most clearly see that not all deployments of preexisting art music are created
equal.
When Nettie arrives back home from her rascally errand, she briefly visits her curio
figurine before she’s unsettled by the noticeable absence of her beloved dog. After a short and
tension-filled examination of her living area, she’s brought to a closed door. When she opens the
door, she discovers the skinned body of her dog hoisted in the air and attached to a swing, its
legs tied above it as if processed by an industrial butchery. An orchestral stinger exaggerates the
audience’s shock and undergirds the visual grotesqueness. As Nettie falls to the floor, screaming,
the scene and the music gradually fades back to Gaunt, still wrestling with his hands but now
giggling to himself, listening to end of the first verse of Ave Maria.
The use of music here ties together the various events that have taken place in the last
few minutes of the film. Using Ave Maria as a kind of stopwatch, we can deduce that the
preceding events that have been sandwiched between the two scenes of Gaunt in his armchair
have all occurred simultaneously. What took nearly ten minutes to view has all taken place
within the time it takes for the first verse of Ave Maria to sound in Gaunt’s drawing room.
As Gaunt finally relaxes his hands, he begins to smile and then to laugh, giving the
impression that his will has been done and that his plan is now unalterably in motion. As the
image track fades from Gaunt to Wilma and her broken windows, we know that we are about to
witness the fruits of this unholy labor. But as the image track shifts to the scene of the
impending battle, the soundtrack conspicuously lingers on Ave Maria.
As Wilma enters her vandalized farmhouse, she takes a moment to survey the damage
before cursing Nettie under her breath and then heading straight to retrieve a large meat cleaver
hanging from her wall. When Wilma turns around, Nettie is standing directly in front of her,
armed with a large kitchen knife. The women verbally accuse each other of the crimes, and
Wilma then swipes at Nettie’s head with the meat cleaver. The swat is wide, though, and the
76
cleaver buries itself in the door frame, leaving Wilma exposed. Nettie takes advantage of her
opportunity and drives her knife deep into Wilma’s belly. Wilma responds by using her free
hand to grab Nettie, and the protracted fight sequence begins. The women, accompanied by
Schubert’s mellifluous music, engage in larger-than-life film violence punctuated by exaggerated
diegetic sound design that emphasizes each weapon’s blow.
Wilma is able to kick Nettie down the stairs and escape to the upper floor. When Nettie
begins her search in the upstairs area, the scene effectively changes from a fight sequence to a
taut search. Billowing curtains, plentiful doors and doorways, and tight close-ups provide ample
opportunity for the audience to anticipate Wilma’s reemergence at any moment, thus heightening
the suspense. When Wilma finally does make herself known, the women stand face to face in
front of an upstairs window, ironically unbroken. Nettie charges at Wilma and drives her
weapon into the side of Wilma’s neck, but Nettie’s inertia carries them both through the window.
The pair tumble, intertwined, across a lower-level roof and then to the ground, where Nettie
impales herself with the knife. As the last of the life bleeds out of the two women, in front of
Wilma’s husband, who has come running toward the commotion, the final bars of Ave Maria
bring this gruesome scene to a close (see Figure 5.11). But before the final chord evaporates, the
visual narrative returns to Gaunt’s shop, where we see him checking off the women’s names
from a list of townspeople, and rounding off the series of scenes.
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Figure 5.11: Screenshot from Needful Things (1993; dir., Frasier Clark Heston). Nettie and
Wilma lie dead below Wilma’s husband as the final bars to Ave Maria sound.
Ave Maria functions in a number of ways. First, it allows us to understand the events as
being controlled by Gaunt, who initiated both the music and the series of pranks. Second, it
serves to establish a chronological framework for the events. But beyond these narrative
functions lies the ironical reading, whereby we begin to question issues of religiosity and
femininity which the performance, text, and cultural context of the work bring to the fore.
The underlying points brought to the surface through the pairing of a bloody, violent
knife fight between two women and Ave Maria are rather bluntly exposed. Accompanying the
two women is a piece that expresses the power of the sacred feminine to enact peace. The text,
sung here by a female soprano, speaks of the protection offered by the Blessed Virgin. Feminine
peace and protection are not only absent within the context of the scene, but also openly mocked
by the grisly images of the fight, easily the most violent in the film. Any appeal to religiosity is
denied here. In this context, religion is literally usurped by evil; a point that plays an important
role in the film.
When the crime scene at Wilma’s is being combed over by the police, a Catholic priest
kneels over the still- intertwined bodies of the two women and begins to pray for what we assume
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to be the repose of both their souls. But soon, we notice that the priest is praying, specifically,
for Wilma, and makes no mention for the corpse lying right on top of hers. Soon, a Protestant
pastor kneels beside the priest and begins to pray for Nettie, his prayer clashing with the priest’s
as they both increase the volume and intensity of their supplications. In the finale of the film, the
Protestant and Catholic communities of the town will be pitted against one another with violent
and deadly consequences. The ironic deployment of Schubert’s music makes the narrative point
concerning religion as sectarianism, a point that is foregrounded during the film’s finale when
the Catholic and Protestant communities are pitted against one another in an all-out war. The
religious and sectarian violence is both mocked and foreshadowed in microcosm during Wilma
and Nettie’s deadly confrontation.
In the end, neither woman –nor sect, nor any other artificial
tribalistic affiliation – is victorious.
The notion of “victory” and the questions about the definition and consequences of the
term lie at the heart of two films that make use of the same ironically deployed opera aria to
make opposite commentaries. As reporter Sydney Schanberg (Sam Waterston) helplessly
languishes in his New York apartment, he plays a recording of “Nessun dorma” from the opera
Turandot by Puccini. The experiences of the recent past have been, to put it mildly, harrowing
for Schanberg. He has spent the past few years as a correspondent in Cambodia, covering the
fall of the U.S.-backed government and the subsequent rise of the Khmer Rouge. After narrowly
escaping the oppressive and violent communist regime, Schanberg was forced to leave behind
his translator and close friend Dith Pran (Haign S. Ngor), a situation that haunts the reporter as
he listens to the elegant, triumphant aria in his comfortable apartment thousands of miles away
from the unimaginable misery unfolding in Cambodia.
The Killing Fields (1984; dir., Roland Joffé) is based on the true account of the
relationship between The New York Times Magazine reporter Schanberg and his translator and
friend Dith Pran. Set primarily in Cambodia during the fall of the Lon Nol government and the
rise of the Khmer Rouge, the film depicts Pran’s struggle to survive the regime’s forced-labor
camps and arbitrary mass murder. Once Pran has been captured and imprisoned by the Khmer
Rouge, the film also follows Schanberg’s attempts from New York to find any information
concerning the whereabouts of his companion.
While taking a brief respite from his search for Pran, Schanberg plays “Nessun dorma”
and retires to his couch, where he views video tape that outlines the beginning and consequences
79
of America’s covert involving of Cambodia in the Vietnam conflict beginning in the early 1970s.
The video tape informs us about the United States’s military policy of invading and bombing
Cambodia in order to engage the North Vietnamese, decisions that were purposefully withheld
from the Cambodian people. Soon Schanberg’s videotape cuts to a press conference, where
President Nixon baldly tells reporters, “There are no American combat advisors in Cambodia;
there will be no American combat troops or advisors in Cambodia. We will aid Cambodia.
Cambodia is the Nixon doctrine in its purest form.” This statement was a lie.
As the aria closes in on its heroic conclusion, the video shows scenes of the results of
the actual, as opposed to the stated, military policy in Cambodia: giant bombers unleashing their
deadly payload and the bloody, dismembered bodies of Cambodian civilians. As the most
gruesome scenes of the wounded and dead appear on Schanberg’s screen, the famous ending of
“Nessun dorma” rings out from his stereo: “Vinceró! Vinceró!” (I shall win! I shall win!). A
two-fold discrepancy occurs between the image and the music, but also, and more tellingly,
between the text of the aria and the reality of the war in Southeast Asia (see Figure 5.12).
Figure 5.12: Screenshot from The Killing Fields (1984; dir., Roland Joffé). Schanberg watches
video footage Cambodian civilian casualties as the triumphant finale of “Nessun dorma” declares
“Vinceró!”
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The final words of the famous aria assure victory, but what we see on Schanberg’s screen
reminds us that victory is actually horrific. The ironic commentary opens us to the director’s
point concerning the entire regional conflict: massive military force and carpet bombing innocent
civilians is not a path to peace, the ultimate result of victory if our political leaders are to be
believed. The entire American doctrine of “peace through strength” is called into question by the
ironical juxtaposition of “Vinceró!” against the scenes of horrid and sickening mutilation in the
name of, and at the hands of, our nation.
In the post-9/11, fictional war film The Sum of All Fears (2002; dir., Phil Alden
Robinson) the same aria is used ironically, but for an entirely opposite point. When a low-grade
atomic bomb explodes at a football game where the President is in attendance, the CIA
immediately suspects that the new Russian leadership is responsible. However, young CIA
analyst Jack Ryan (Ben Affleck) suspects otherwise, and he must find out the truth before a fullscale nuclear war erupts between the two atomic powers. By the film’s end Ryan successfully
unravels a complex plot that implicates a network of rogue Russian operatives and German neofascists who coordinated the bomb attack.
The penultimate scene in the film is a revenge montage, where each of the three major
ringleaders of the plot are executed one by one, while, at the same time, the Presidents of the
United States and the Russian Federation are shown signing peace treaties. The scene begins
with the first of the ring-leaders alone in his foreign villa, enjoying a diegetic CD recording of
“Nessun dorma.” He thinks his plan has worked, and that the United States and Russia are
careening unstoppably toward war. His manner is relaxed and pleased as he sits, eyes closed,
gracefully conducting along with the aria. He does not see nor hear the American paramilitary
assassin who enters his home to cut his throat with a large bowie knife.
As the montage continues, we see one of the two rogue Russian operatives running
through a deeply snowed wood. When he finally falls, two Russian officials who have been
chasing him assassinate the man by shooting him repeatedly. Finally, the head of the operation
is shown leaving his elegant Moscow townhouse. Being cautious of car-bombs, he sends his
lackey to start his car. The assistant takes a deep breath before starting the car and is visibly
relieved when nothing happens. As the ring-leader enters the car, he places a cigarette in his
mouth, just as “Nessun dorma” reaches is climax. When he presses the car’s cigarette lighter,
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the car explodes, and the final target is killed. The day is won, and America and her people are
safe.
These two uses of “Nessun dorma” are useful illustrations concerning the difference
between the underlying, narrative points that are made by each director. In the case of The
Killing Fields, aggressive military action and policies, and the people who endorse them, are
shown to be not a solution to violence, but as an equal part in the evil that is perpetrated upon
innocents. America, via her geopolitical actions and policies, is shown to be no better than the
enemy. The obvious discrepancy between image and music, in this case, allows an introspection
that leads audiences to come to the side of the director without the aid of his literally stated
position. The same process, with the same music, leads audiences to an entirely different
conclusion in The Sum of All Fears.
American military might and her policy of targeted assassination are lauded, not
criticized, in the later, post-9-11 film. The irony here is more of a surface feature; it extends to
the characters in the film as we witness their participation in the creation and execution of the
ironic situation. The villains have initiated the aria, and they are foolishly complacent in
thinking that they have succeeded. When the American intelligence community exacts its
revenge, we see that the shouts of “Vinceró!” were misplaced: they belong to the Americans and
not to the terrorists who instantiated the aria. In this case, the audience is treated to a
reaffirmation of American military capacity and policy.
These two examples demonstrate how the juxtaposition of images and music open
audiences to deeper contextual layers and narratives that help to develop the film’s themes. The
thematic stances in both films may challenge or reaffirm the opinion of the culture at large. In
the case of The Killing Fields, the argument that the conflict in Vietnam and Southeast Asia was
a terrible military, diplomatic, and moral mistake is espoused.
The Sum of All Fears, particularly its assassination finale, provides a satisfying, chestthumping affirmation of American military force. This was especially resonant in the months
following 9-11, when the film was released. But just as in The Killing Fields, the point is made
emotionally, the (barely) unsaid cajoling the audience into agreement with the director’s point.
The aria’s use in The Killing Fields constitutes a more complex ironic commentary,
which asks us as viewers to reassess our position on our nation’s policies. The irony reaches
beyond the diegesis and into our real world. We are left without the firm, stable ground of our
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assumptions and are forced into a dialogue about the role of our nation and its powerful military
in the affairs of other nations and peoples. The irony in The Sum of All Fears is more of a
surface feature. It plays in the space between the images and sound, causing us to take notice. It
does not, however, move much beyond the story space and unsettle our notions about right and
wrong within the geopolitical sphere. That said, viewers of today, with the aid of hindsight, may
find a particular kind of irony –cosmic irony, or irony without an ironist – as a residual feature of
such a naïve ideology as was popular in the early 2000s. Such is the power of ironically
deployed music in film. Its legacy is not set in stone but is flexible and changeable according to
the times and audience that perceives it. This powerful, effective, efficient, and highly
memorable mode of discourse maintains its ability to affect viewers well beyond the time of its
creation.
Each following chapter will examine, in considerable depth and detail, the underlying and
deeper contextual layers that are exposed by the use of ironically deployed preexisting art music
in a single film. In each of the examined films are found significant, substantial, and, at times,
profound subtexts that help to convey the filmmakers’ points. In these cases, the issues raised
via irony transcend their filmic narratives and force the perceiver to contemplate and sometimes
openly question long-held assumptions about the nature of life and how it should be lived.
In the above instances of ironically deployed preexisting art music, the irony provides an
opportunity for an interesting and affecting paradigm shift on the part of the viewer relating to a
situation or character within a film. In the following investigations, we will see that entire
conceptual ground being shifted beneath the perceivers’ feet, demonstrating that irony is, indeed,
a spectacle worth attending to.
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CHAPTER 6:
PREEXISTING MUSIC IN THE FILM ADAPTATION OF STEPHEN KING’S MISERY
Misery (1990; dir., Rob Reiner) is the story of the best-selling but artistically frustrated
novelist Paul Sheldon (James Caan) who, after years of turning out hackneyed romance novels
centered on a character named Misery Chastain, kills his main character in order to free himself
of the artistically suffocating genre. Holed up in an isolated Colorado mountain resort, Sheldon
finishes his first “serious” novel and then sets out, manuscript in hand, on a ride through winding
mountain roads, when a sudden blizzard strikes. Sheldon’s car skids off the road and down a
large embankment, leaving him badly injured. As we will soon learn, this is only the start of his
problems.
Rescued by his “number one fan,” Annie Wilkes (Kathy Bates), Sheldon is taken to her
isolated mountain farmhouse, where he is kept to convalesce, while the outside world thinks he’s
dead. When Annie discovers that her literary heroine has been destroyed by her patient, she flies
into a rage and forces him to burn his new manuscript and to begin a new “Misery” novel, which
will resurrect both the character and the franchise.
As Annie falls deeper and deeper into psychosis, Sheldon becomes aware that she has no
intention of allowing him to leave alive. He realizes that he can only escape if he can contact the
outside world and by the destruction of Annie. The film vacillates between Sheldon’s and
Annie’s psychological chess match and a series of violent, disturbing conflicts between them,
and culminates with Sheldon’s eventual triumph over Annie.
A more-or-less faithful adaptation of the King novel, the film is a metaphor for the
struggle that artists endure to create authentic and personally fulfilling art. In the words of
director Rob Reiner, “the question is: what price do you pay in order to change your way in
creating art? How much pain do you have to go through in order to go away from what has been
successful for you and forge a new path?”208 If the novel and corresponding film are any
indication, the answer to this question is: a great deal.
Rob Reiner, “Director’s Commentary” Misery (Collector’s Edition), DVD. Directed by Rob Reiner.
Hollywood, California: Columbia Pictures, 2007.
208
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Music in Misery
Misery makes ample use of a traditional, classical-Hollywood style score by Marc
Shaiman. Additionally, conspicuous uses of preexisting popular and art music accompany many
important scenes within the film. The first movement of Tchaikovsky’s Piano Concerto No. 1 in
B-flat minor, Op. 23, is prominently heard during a montage in which Sheldon is seen working
through large sections of his new “Misery” novel. Beethoven’s “Moonlight” Sonata, Op. 27, No.
2, occupies a prominent place during one of the most important (and infamous) scenes in the
film, and the popular song “I’ll Be Seeing You” works both to misdirect the audience and to
problematize the film’s generic classification. Additionally, the first movement of Mozart’s
Clarinet Quintet in A major, K. 581, differentiates the world of the “true” artist from the failed
one.
The use of these works in and of itself invites introspection and commentary. But it is
their particular performances that most allow for ironic readings, commentary, and narrative
points to be made. Both the Tchaikovsky and Beethoven are rendered in arranged, altered
performances by Liberace, and it is precisely this point that invites rich and multifaceted
commentary among several conceptual discourses, including the role of art and the artist,
personal and artistic authenticity, social responsibility, celebrity obsession, politics, power,
religiosity, suppression, and obsessive love.
Liberace Motif in Misery
The importance of the person (and persona) of Liberace is a vital aspect of the film, and
one that has never been discussed. To understand Liberace’s place in culture is key to
understanding a significant subtext in the film, one that encapsulates the meaning of both the
novel and the film.
Throughout the first half of Misery the music adheres to the conventional, classicalHollywood archetype. But contained within the visual narrative are subtle hints pointing to a
secondary, underlying narrative, which will be made clear and brought to fruition by the use of
preexisting music.
In a particularly suspenseful scene Sheldon escapes from his room while Annie runs into
town to take care of errands. This is the first time he (and with him, the audience) is out of the
85
suffocating and claustrophobic confines of the bedroom. While exploring the house, he attempts
to use the telephone to try to reach the outside world. Tellingly, sitting next to the telephone are
two framed pictures, one of a young boy and one of Liberace. And here the camera provides an
important clue to what is the central, underlying motif and metaphor in Misery. The telephone
doesn’t work. But it’s not as if the line has been cut, a common horror/suspense genre device.
Instead the phone is shown to be hollow. It is only an empty shell; it is the appearance of a
phone, cosmetically similar to a telephone but without substance, without anything that gives it
value. It is false. It is façade (see Figure 6.1).
When the camera reveals the empty shell that should be a telephone, the shot includes the
telephone and the framed picture of Liberace, smiling ironically as if nothing in the world could
be amiss.
Figure 6.1: Screenshot from Misery (1990). Empty phone with Liberace photo.
In this same scene Sheldon also sees two shrines that Annie has erected in her living room: one
to himself and the other to Liberace (see Figure 6.2a and 6.2b).
86
a.
b.
Figure 6.2a and b: Screenshots from Misery (1990): Annie’s two “shrines.” These screen shots
are separated by 11 seconds.
87
In a later scene Annie reads the first chapter of “Misery’s Return” and is overwhelmed
with emotion. Spinning and turning around in the room she exclaims, “Misery’s alive! Misery’s
alive! Oh, it’s so romantic. This whole house is gonna be filled with romance!” She then
suddenly stops, gasps, and says, with almost cartoon-like gravity, “I’m gonna put on my
Liberace records!” After running out the door, presumably to make good on her statement, she
runs back in and asks Sheldon, “You do like Liberace, don’t you?” To which, after pausing only
slightly, he responds, “Whenever he played Radio City who do you think was right there in the
front row?” Annie says, in turn, “I’m gonna play my records all day long, to inspire you. He’s
my all-time favorite.”
In the King novel there is no mention whatsoever of Liberace. This detail was added by
screenwriter William Goldman, and it is a vitally important one. But we must ask why
Liberace’s music and persona are used in this film as a means of conveying Reiner’s and
Goldman’s narrative points. In other words: why are Liberace and his fans targets?
Why Liberace?
A committed, involved, and outspoken political and social liberal, Rob Reiner found the
perfect model for the self-hating, repressed, physically abusive, and mentally unstable Annie in
the closeted performer. Liberace’s biographer Darden Asbury Pyron mentions that, while not
overtly political or outspoken, the pianist was aligned with Republican-style conservatism
throughout his lifetime.209 He spoke of his dislike of big government, unions, homosexuality,
and any tax that would diminish his considerable fortune. 210 Perhaps his ideological alignment
can best been seen through his few political performances. He played for Truman, Eisenhower,
and Nixon, and he was a special guest of the Reagans. 211 Tellingly, he was absent from the
activist- inspired, socially-conscious Kennedy White House as well as Lyndon Johnson’s.
Reiner links Annie to the brand of Republican conservatism that Liberace identified with
and that the director detests. In an important exposition scene in both the novel and film versions
of Misery, Paul again escapes his room while Annie is away and finds a scrapbook titled
209
Darden Asbury Pyron, Liberace: An American Boy, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 296.
Pyron, 297.
211
Ibid.
210
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“Memory Lane.” Contained within this book are all the details of Annie’s murderous past.
Newspaper clippings populate the book, and we learn that Annie is responsible for the death of
her father and countless newborns that were under her care as a maternity nurse. But unlike the
novel, the film’s “Memory Lane” contains a single conspicuously placed political banner which
identifies Annie as both a Republican and a Nixon supporter (see Figure 6.3).
Figure 6.3: Screenshot from Misery. Page in Annie’s scrapbook identifying her as a Republican.
The repeated blocks of text are common in filmic renderings of newspapers, as the image
appears on screen for less than two seconds.
A product of Midwest American values and a strong adherent of Catholicism, the pianist
achieved fame during a time when homosexuality was deeply disparaged. Homosexuality, open
or otherwise, was akin to career suicide for an entertainer, and especially for one whose audience
primarily comprised middle-aged, Midwestern, conservative women.
As evidenced by the infamous “Cassandra” trial of 1956, when the performer
successfully sued the London newspaper The Daily Mirror for $22,000, Liberace went to great
lengths to keep his sexual proclivities secret. The tabloid article famously label him “the summit
of sex—the pinnacle of masculine, feminine, and neuter. Everything that he, she, and it can ever
want … a deadly, winking, sniggering, snuggling, chromium-plated, scent-impregnated,
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luminous, quivering, giggling, fruit- flavoured, mincing, ice-covered heap of mother love…"212
A similar article in the sensational and highly successful Hollywood gossip magazine Hollywood
Confidential from 1957 shouted a headline which stated that Liberace’s “… Theme Song Should
Be ‘Mad About The Boy.’” This too was met with the swift and effective threat of litigation. 213
The gay liberation movement that began with the Stonewall riots in New York City in the
summer of 1969 did little to ease the performer’s mind about acknowledging his sexuality. In
fact, the push from gay activist for homosexuals to “come out” further alienated Liberace from
the gay community. Pryon notes that “conservative or moderate homosexual men … lost
standing, even legitimacy, among their [the liberation movement’s] followers.”214 Liberace
chose not to be a model for the newly energized and highly activated gay community. He never
did admit his sexuality publicly. The silence and misdirection that had served his career so well
in the 1940s and 1950s had to be accounted for in the new political realities of the 1960s and
beyond. As a result, the political and artistic tastemakers of the counterculture rejected him and
his art.
Moreover, Liberace became, to those within the activist gay community and their allies
on the political left, the embodiment of social irresponsibility. He was gay, had many lovers and
boyfriends, and privately acknowledged this within his close circle of friends. But he never dared
even once to speak publicly, to challenge the common, bigoted misperceptions that dogged the
homosexual community. As the nation’s homosexual community began to come out of the
closet in the days after the Stonewall riots, Liberace remained deceitful about his sexual
orientation, becoming the gay equivalent of the African-American community’s “Uncle Tom,”
the “Closet Queen.” Former lover Scott Thorson wrote that, during the shifting cultural climate
of the post-Stonewall generation, Liberace insisted that “I can’t admit a thing … unless I want to
be known as the world’s biggest liar.”215 Liberace’s silence was viewed as a slap in the face to
the gay-rights effort. For gay-rights activists and their allies Liberace “became a model for
212
Quoted in Pyron, 194.
Ibid., 221.
214
Ibid., 304.
215
Scott Thorson and Alex Thorleifson, Behind the Candelabra: My Life with Liberace (New York: E. P.
Dutton, 1988), 42.
213
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everything gay men should not be –a selfish, self-loathing, hypocritical, closeted, conservativeRepublican, stereotypical sissy.”216
The fact that Liberace hid not only his homosexuality but also his AIDS diagnosis from
the public further angered the activist community. At the same time these facts shocked and
distressed the more conservative members of society, including many of his former fans. By the
late 1980s Liberace had very few sympathizers and even fewer defenders. And for someone of
Reiner’s political temperament, he was a perfect allegorical target.
But what most offended those whose politics were, like Reiner’s, formed in the crucible
of 1960s radicalism, was Liberace’s nearly complete absence from the political sphere.
According to Thorson, “politics, world affairs, local problems, meant nothing to Lee.”217 The
world-famous performer seemed to float through his career, unaware of major political and
social controversies until these were brought directly to his attention by the media. For instance,
during a trip to Johannesburg, South Africa, the performer seemed oblivious to his perceived
tacit endorsement of apartheid. When pressed by a reporter, he did denounce apartheid but then
added, “I don’t think it’s the place of an American piano player to try to change the quality of
life in the Republic of South Africa.”218 As Liberace biographer Pyron succinctly puts it, “by
asserting that art was apolitical, [Liberace] violated one of the fundamental tenets of a
generational prejudice.”219 For a world-famous celebrity and self-proclaimed artist to shirk his
responsibilities to his fellow human beings in this way was, in the eyes of liberal activists of
Reiner’s stripe, a significant moral failure.
Misery, released in 1990, was in production during a time of wall-to-wall, tabloid-style
scandal surrounding Liberace. In 1987, one year after the publication of King’s novel, Scott
Thorson published his tell-all book Behind the Candelabra: My Life with Liberace.220 The book
helped to fan the flames of a media firestorm that was ignited by Liberace’s death in February of
the same year due to complications from AIDS. Media outlets were swamped with stories
containing lurid details about the showman’s life and many lovers, and the tabloids ran a
216
Pyron, 425.
Thorson and Thorleifson, 128.
218
Pyron, 298.
219
Ibid.
220
At the time of this drafting, Thorson’s book has been optioned by director Steven Soderbergh for a
feature-length film scheduled to be broadcast on the cable outlet HBO in 2013, which will star Michael Douglas as
Liberace and Matt Damon as Scott Thorson.
217
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seemingly never-ending series of outrageous tales. A succession of lawsuits contesting the
pianist’s estate were filed in 1987, each one covered meticulously by a scandal-hungry media.
No fewer than two made-for-television movies about the performer aired in 1988. In short,
throughout the late 1980s Liberace was more present in the media than he was during his
lifetime, an impressive accomplishment for someone known throughout his career as “Mr.
Showmanship.” Given that the screenplay for Misery was being constructed during this time of
media saturation, it is completely plausible that Liberace’s life and art was the template for
Goldman’s and Reiner’s tale of celebrity obsession and the dangers of debased art personified in
the character Annie Wilkes. And while Liberace plays an important role in the film as part of
Annie’s characterization, his music plays an equally significant but altogether different one. But
prior to tackling the specifics about how it is used, a case must be made for why it is used.
Liberace’s musical legacy, while still largely undefined and fluid, seems to polarize
around the categories of classical musician or popular entertainer.221 For those who judged him
from a classicist’s perspective, Liberace embodied everything that was corrosive to classical
music and culture.
Since the 1950s reviewers and columnists had derided Liberace as “a failed
artist who degraded good music”222 and as someone who “simply debased his art and corrupted
music, even popular and jazz.”223 Even those critics who attempted, on the surface, to limit their
critique to the technical aspects of his performance wrote in decidedly moralistic prose, like one
who noted that Liberace was a “‘bad pianist’ with ‘technical disabilities’ and a middlebrow
sensitivity who ‘belittl[ed] and bastardy[zed] classical music.’”224
Samuel Lipman argues that Liberace did have considerable musical talent when he says
that “Liberace played rather well. He displayed at all times a large, accurate, and brilliant
technique, even indulging himself from time to time in impressive displays of octaves, scales,
and complicated passagework.”225 For Lipman, Liberace’s musical gifts magnified his artistic
shortcomings. The performer had real talent, but he squandered it by employing a “meretricious
choice of repertory” and encouraging audiences to ignore his performance’s “metaphysical
221
Pyron, 421. Pyron also claims that neither of these perspectives holds fast for musicology; the discipline,
he says, has simply ignored Liberace.
222
Ibid.
223
Ibid.
224
Ibid.
225
Samuel Lipman, “Sad thoughts on Walter Busterkeys, a.k.a. Liberace,” in The New Criterion Reader:
The First Five Years, ed. Hilton Kramer (New York: The Free Press, 1988), 398.
92
deficiencies.”226 In Lipman’s estimation the obituary he wrote for Liberace in 1987 could also
serve as an in memoriam for the piano’s epoch as “the musical instrument par excellence.”227
Liberace signaled the end of a 140-year period of middle-class cultural enrichment via the piano,
and he laughed all the way to the bank, while being complicit in its demise.
Liberace, however, seems to have had no confusion as to his place in the musical
landscape. At the age of 19 the struggling performer shed his aspirations of becoming a classical
musician.228 He seemed to know early in his career that the concert hall was not the place to find
what he truly wanted. Scott Thorson noted that “Lee … realized that he’d never be a truly great
one [pianist] in the classical sense … [and that] this realization was a painful one.”229 As a result
of this recognition, Liberace consciously worked to establish himself as a pop musician. 230
Like
many in the pop-music world, Liberace “began to see music as a path to popularity and
power.”231
Power and popularity are not traditionally within the purview of the “classical” musician
– a logical subcategory of “the artist” according to mainstream, romantically- influenced culture.
In the view of his critics Liberace was an artistic fraud, one who used classical music for ends
usually relegated to the sphere of popular music: material and economic gain, the procurement of
sexual gratification from fans, and a lifestyle not of serious intellectual and artistic struggle but
of conspicuous consumption. Worst of all, the pop musician does all this through the creation of
a larger-than- life persona, one that functions to hide the “real” performer from the audience
instead of engaging them faithfully in a musical/metaphysical catharsis. In this view Liberace
was not a well-compensated artistic genius but instead an imposter playing both to and upon
middle-America yokels too culturally naïve to understand the deception perpetrated upon them
and their unwitting role in its perpetuation. Reiner exploits this portrayal of Liberace throughout
the film.
Directly following the scene where Annie spins with delight over the resumption of the
“Misery” novels, Sheldon asks Annie to have dinner with him, supposedly to celebrate “Misery’s
Return.” His true intention is to drug Annie with the pain medication he’s been hoarding.
226
Pyron, 421.
Ibid.
228
Thorson and Thorleifson, 19.
229
Ibid., 15.
230
Ibid.
231
Ibid.
227
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Annie, who has already confessed to being in love with him, is visibly touched, even
flabbergasted by the offer. As Sheldon and Annie sit down to dinner in Annie’s dining room, the
accompanying music is a presumably diegetic recording of Liberace’s oft-performed song “I’ll
Be Seeing You.” The cat-and-mouse game between Sheldon and Annie unfolds in exact
concordance with the recording, the scene precisely matching the length of the recording. When
Sheldon’s plan to drug Annie is inadvertently ruined by Annie’s wine-spilling clumsiness, he is
visibly devastated. He also knows that he must hide this fact from his captor and carry on. As
the scene and the recording come to a close, Annie takes charge of the proceedings, pours a new
glass of wine and ironically toasts, “To Misery!”
Originally written by Irving Kahal and Sammy Fain in 1938, “I’ll Be Seeing You”
became a kind of musical calling card for Liberace as early as the 1950s. The song was
essentially the theme music for his television series The Liberace Show (1953-1954), and he
subsequently used it to close his live performances. 232 In essence, “I’ll Be Seeing You” served
as a cue for conclusion.
While Sheldon prepares to drug Annie at the dinner table, the recording works to assist in
dramatic misdirection. In listening to this concluding music (the song is used again at the end of
the film), the audience is allowed to hope that Sheldon will succeed in escaping his captor.
When he fails, the disappointment the audience feels in connecting with the protagonist is
heightened by the use of this music, by its false promise that his suffering is almost over. The
key here, however, is that the recording is diegetic; it is under Annie’s control and it works for
her, not against her.
More than this, however, the use of the song offers insights into our understanding of
Sheldon’s relationship with his captor. Biographer Pyron notes that, when he used the song in
performance, Liberace was “giving back a portion of what his admirers were giving him … It
reaffirms, then, his oldest motives in performance … the ambition to redefine the relationship
between the artist and the audience in terms of personal affection.”233 Here we see a dramatic
connection between Paul’s power and the film’s plot. By flattering Annie with an invitation to
dinner, Sheldon knows that he is exploiting Annie’s obsession with him. Paul has not yet shed
his associations with false art.
232
233
Pyron, 274.
Ibid.
94
Additionally, the song’s lyrics are important to an understanding of Annie’s mental state
and her obsession with Sheldon. On the surface, the song is a simple, sentimental poem about
lost love and a parting of ways. But when the piece is used in the specific context of Annie and
Sheldon, or the larger one of artist and admirer, there is much to be mined:
I'll be seeing you in all the old familiar places
That this heart of mine embraces all day through.
In that small cafe; the park across the way;
The children's carousel; the chestnut trees; the wishing well.
I'll be seeing you in every lovely summer's day;
In everything that's light and gay.
I'll always think of you that way.
I'll find you in the morning sun
And when the night is new.
I'll be looking at the moon, but I'll be seeing you.
Pyron notes the following:
[The] poetry involves illusion, optical illusion, or even selfconscious delusion; the song is about looking at one thing and
seeing something else. It introduces, then, the mind’s eye or an
inner vision. It is about the conjuring of the absent or the unseen,
about the reconstructing of the natural world, the refiguring of the
scene to include objects of fancy or imagination. The lyrics
celebrate, then, not mere things but images of things, and
imagination itself. It chronicles the mental reconstruction of the
world … the love then is essentially an object of fancy or a
creation of the imagination.234
In this scene, the lyrics can be read for both Sheldon’s and Annie’s perspectives. We
may read the lyrics literally, instead of metaphorically, from Annie’s obsessed perspective. She
cannot think of or see anything except for Sheldon, and it is in part this repressed and unrequited
love that drives Annie to madness. From another perceptive, Sheldon is, on the surface, giving
back to his admirer, but his real intention is to use his power for personal gain. His power,
234
Pyron, 274.
95
however, is gained through his schlock romance novels, a debased art akin to Liberace’s. In this
light then, Sheldon’s failure is inevitable.
Directly following the dinner scene begins a montage accompanied by Tchaikovsky’s
Piano Concerto No. 1 in B-flat minor. But discerning listeners can immediately tell there is
something amiss with this version. Instead of the original Tchaikovsky composition with its
enormous, lush orchestra, the audience hears instead a rather small, thin-sounding orchestra
accompanied by suspended cymbal crashes. The combination of recording quality and
suspended cymbal are clues that this is not the authentic Tchaikovsky but instead the composer’s
art distorted through Liberace’s lens.
The montage accelerates several plot lines. First, it details Sheldon’s success writing
“Misery’s Return,” as the many shots of him sitting at the typewriter indicate. Close-ups of the
face of the typewriter alternate with long shots of him framed by a bay window, outside of which
day becomes night and snow turns to rain, thereby accelerating the timeline of the film. We also
see Sheldon becoming healthier, strengthening himself by using the heavy, old typewriter as a
kind of make-shift barbell. Finally, we see a local police officer reading through copies of
Sheldon’s “Misery” novels, in order to try to gather some insight into the cold case. The
montage only once allows for dialogue to interrupt its course, when Annie stands next to
Sheldon, presumably reading the latest chapter of “Misery’s Return” and says, rather ironically,
“Oh, Paul, this is positively the best ‘Misery’ you’ve ever written.”
In this montage the editing corresponds exactly and overtly with the music’s phrase
structure. Here we see Sheldon effortlessly jumping back into the debased art that he was trying
to escape, working in absolute tandem with Liberace. Indeed, the close-ups of Sheldon’s fingers
flying over the typewriter are a less-than-subtle allusion to a pianist’s hands at the keyboard.
Liberace’s condensed, tinny, and meek arrangement of the Tchaikovsky is portrayed as artistic
treason, and Sheldon is, by virtue of the montage’s precise correspondence with the music,
complicit in an equal crime against literary art.
The most gruesome scene in Misery is without doubt the so-called “hobbling scene,”
where Annie, in an attempt to keep Sheldon from either escaping or trying to destroy her, breaks
the author’s ankles with a sledgehammer. The hobbling scene is the emotional highpoint of the
film, and the music in this scene is vitally important to the construction of the film’s deeper
contextual layers.
96
After Annie has sunk into a deep, almost-suicidal depression, she leaves the house
unattended for a lengthy period. During this time Sheldon escapes his room again, and he learns
of Annie’s murderous past (and Republican leanings) in her “Memory Lane” scrapbook.
Additionally, he brings a large kitchen knife back to his room and hides it in his sling. The plan,
presumably, is to surprise Annie the next time she brings him food or medicine and to finally
destroy her. Sheldon makes his way back to his bed, but when Annie returns to the house she
does not visit his room. Paul then stows the knife between the mattress and box spring and says
to himself (and the audience), “see you in the morning.” But the next morning does not play out
as expected.
During the night Annie visits Sheldon’s room and administers an injection via a
hypodermic needle. He struggles against this but loses consciousness as the scene fades to black.
The visual narrative reenters the following morning, with bucolic images of freshly fallen snow
atop rugged Colorado hillsides, accompanied by the sounds of birdcalls. But the sounds of
nature are quickly overtaken by the surreal sounds of applause that are quickly followed by
Liberace’s voice.
Sheldon, who is suffering dissociative effects from the injection, slowly comes to, when
Annie, who is seen fussing with something outside the shot, says to him “I know you’ve been
out.” A confused Sheldon, shown in close-up, looks down at his out-of-frame body in an attempt
to understand his current situation. At this point, a wide shot exposes what Annie has been doing
outside of the camera’s view: she has been tying him down to the bed with thick ropes and
leather straps. At the very moment when Paul and the audience realize the gravity of the
situation, the first brooding sounds of Liberace’s arrangement of the “Moonlight” Sonata
emanate from Annie’s phonograph playing in another room (see Figure 6.4).
97
Figure 6.4: Screenshot from Misery. Sheldon becomes aware of his dire situation just as
Liberace’s version of the “Moonlight” Sonata begins to play.
As the music plays, Annie explains to Sheldon how she’s figured out that he has been
escaping his room. While she’s speaking, Sheldon attempts to recover the knife from under his
mattress, only to have Annie interrupt him, show the knife, and ask: “Is this what you’re looking
for?” Annie then explains that she’s had a moment of clarity concerning his unwillingness to
stay with her, and gives a supposedly historical account of the practice of “hobbling,” where
diamond-mine workers were punished for trying to escape but still needed to be well enough to
mine. Tellingly, Annie describes this practice as “an operation.” She then places a large wooden
block between Paul’s ankles and hoists a sledge hammer over her shoulder. At this point both
Sheldon and the audience are made aware of the gruesome scene that is to unfold. This torture
and physical abuse is Annie’s way of trying to ensure that she won’t lose him. Disturbingly,
after Annie has broken both of Paul’s ankles, the camera closes in tightly on her face (all the
while Paul is screaming in agony), and she says to him, “God, I love you.”
The “Moonlight” Sonata, which accompanies this scene, immediately portends not a
pathetic beauty but instead an inevitable, unspeakable evil. One of the most recognizable works
of the Western musical canon, its use in this context draws viewers into a Kubrick-esque
98
dialogue about the role of art music within society. Like Kubrick’s and Burgess’s Droog-King
Alex in A Clockwork Orange (1971), Annie Wilkes is seen as a deeply cruel individual, who
revels in Beethoven (a particular version of it, at least) for her own ends. As in Kubrick’s film,
Beethoven’s music is not a civilizing, soothing agent of societal betterment but instead one that
is appropriated by the most brutal individuals in society. Indeed, Annie uses this music to
sacralize her inhumaneness.
Liberace’s disembodied voice-over that begins the scene (the only time when we hear his
spoken voice) states, “I’m supposed to lead into the finale of my show right now, but I’m having
such a wonderful time, and I have no other place to go, so if you’d like me to stay and play some
more for you, I’d love to.” When the “Moonlight” Sonata begins over the wide shot of Sheldon
helplessly strapped to the bed, Annie begins a recitative- like speech set against the saccharinesweet Beethoven arrangement by Liberace. Just as in operatic recitative, Annie advances the
plot, describing how she discovered Paul’s extra-bedroom excursions and her plan to keep Paul
in her care.
This recitative continues until the moment where Annie prepares for the “operation.”
Beyond this, all we are left with is mounting dread accompanied by the diegetic sounds of the
woodblock and sledgehammer scraping across the floor, Sheldon’s feeble pleas for mercy, and
Liberace’s “Moonlight.” When the sledgehammer finally connects with Paul’s ankle, the
stomach-turning sound combined with Sheldon’s scream is distinctly at odds with the
contemplative music. The music continues as Annie moves onto the second ankle, an act that is
not shown on screen but conveyed only through sound. Throughout the scene Annie’s
movement and demeanor match the soundtrack, effortless and calm, without even a hint of
anxiety, while Sheldon struggles, pleads, screams, and writhes his way through it. This
exaggerated musical indifference to the drama is one of the major invitations for ironic readings.
And once an exploration of possible readings is undertaken, the depth and complexity of the
commentary begin to surface.
Annie’s love and admiration for “false art” is laid bare by her both fondness for
Sheldon’s “Misery” series and her obsession with Liberace. Her lack of sophistication, already
hinted at by her remoteness, conservatism, religiosity, décor, and her choice of literature and
music, is made all the more obvious when she mispronounces “Dom Perignon” and also refers to
Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel as “that ceiling that dago painted.” These faux pas are, as Reiner
99
would have us see them, the kind expected from someone who would align herself with
Liberace’s brand of art, a person who believes she knows and appreciates art music but is instead
only familiar with a candy-coated facsimile of it. The accompaniment of Sheldon’s torture with
the Liberace-Beethoven stresses the dangers of false art, the steep price to pay for exploiting
audiences with it, and the very real and (literally, here) painful struggle one must undertake to rid
themselves of it.
The foregrounding of Liberace’s presence, via his voice-over at the onset of the scene,
provides both ideological motivation as well as personal motivation for Annie’s ghastly act. We
see Annie as a devotee of Liberace. She is deluded into loving the façade of a popular performer
masquerading as artist.
Moreover, Annie’s relationship with Sheldon mirrors Liberace’s relationship with Scott
Thorson in many aspects. Liberace engaged in relationships with much-younger men (and
sometimes boys) as a way to make good his lost relationship with his failure of a father. Pyron
states that Liberace “nursed a resentment against his parent [father] for years. If his bitterness,
even, was love gone bad, the appearance of the boy, in some weird way, gave him a chance to do
it right again, to take it from the top…”235
Liberace also chose his romantic conquests because he saw in them inferiority, a trait that
enabled easy control and that would assuage his ego. As Pyron succinctly states: “[t]he
performer needed neediness; he did not need success.”236 Thorson puts it more sinisterly,
describing Liberace as “a Dracula who never wearied of the taste of youth.”237
While neediness is clearly important to Annie, her exercise of power and control is
central to her relationship with Sheldon. Liberace was the pursuer of young men and was
sexually aggressive. He was, according to Thorson, a “top,” the party who actively penetrated his
lovers. Pyron notes that Liberace “was the aggressor; he called the shots; he determined the
length and duration of the act. His sissy persona not withstanding, he was the pursuer, the
hunter, the initiator –the ‘man’ as traditionally defined –in the relationship.”238
Scott Thorson wrote at length about his suffocating relationship with Liberace in his 1987
publication. Referring to himself as “a prisoner in paradise,” he wrote at length about his own
235
Pyron., 335.
Pyron, 321.
237
Thorson and Thorleifson, 38.
238
Pyron, 319.
236
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sequestration at Liberace’s demand.239 Annie kept a false phone and worked tirelessly to
eliminate any hint of Paul’s existence to the outside world. Liberace was likewise protective of
his relationship with Thorson, going to great lengths so as not to “share him or their world with
others.”240 Thorson wrote that Liberace “didn’t like me to have large blocks of free time. He
wanted to know where I was and who I was with every minute.”241 Like Annie, Liberace’s
personality radically shifted without warning. Thorson notes that Liberace was “a man who
could swiftly change from indulgent parent to ardent lover to outraged tyrant.”242 Most
curiously, Thorson links Liberace’s destructive neediness to his life of lying and to his
inauthentic existence. Thorson wrote concerning Liberace’s decision to keep his sexuality
closeted that “[k]eeping the secret placed an almost intolerable burden on him and our
relationship. It explained his need for seclusion, his almost paranoid desire to hold the entire
world at arm’s length.”243
During the hobbling scene, Annie literally becomes Liberace. When Annie is confronted
with the possibility of Sheldon’s departure, she hobbles him or, as she puts it, performs an
operation. The goal of this operation is to keep him with Annie, and it involves an unspeakable
act of physical brutality, disfigurement, and moral depravity motivated by insecurity, loneliness
and the desperation of losing a loved one. This is in direct correlation with Liberace’s muchpublicized insistence upon, and financing of, Scott Thorson’s facial reconstruction, a surgery
with the explicit goal of having the younger lover resemble the older performer.
About one year into their relationship, Liberace insisted that the twenty-year-old Thorson
undergo the surgical procedure. Thorson wrote that he went to the doctor “like a lamb to the
slaughter.”244 After two surgeries, he required months of painful recovery, during which time
Thorson claims he became addicted to pain killers, a condition that would haunt him for years
after the relationship ended. Liberace’s control of Thorson was nearly complete after the
surgery. The young lover thought of himself as “Lee’s creature. He’d been my Pygmalion…
I’d begun to think of myself as an extension of Liberace, a part of him rather than a full-fledged
239
Thorson and Thorleifson, 178.
Pyron, 338.
241
Thorson and Thorleifson, 146.
242
Ibid., 134.
243
Thorson and Thorleifson, 122.
244
Ibid., 150.
240
101
individual.”245 Annie’s actions and motivations during the hobbling scene are analogous with
this shocking and highly-publicized event between the two lovers.
The hobbling scene is the dramatic and emotional highpoint of the film not simply
because of its naked brutality but also due to confluence of multivalent dramatic and narrative
layers that occurs here, and these deeper contextual layers are brought to the surface through the
use of Liberace’s arrangement of the “Moonlight” Sonata.
The film’s time in Colorado ends with Sheldon’s destruction of Annie. He burns the
manuscript of “Misery’s Return” before Annie can read the final chapter, and in her desperation
to find out what happens to her heroine, she rushes to save the manuscript. Sheldon uses this
chance to crush Annie’s skull with his typewriter.
In the final scene of Misery Sheldon is safely back in New York City and meeting with
his agent (Lauren Bacall) at a fine restaurant. In the background, very quietly, plays Mozart’s
Quintet for Clarinet in A major. The music is very likely diegetically placed, either in an unseen
performance in the restaurant or piped in over discreet speakers at a volume level below that of
conversation. The use of this music, in its unaltered form (unlike the Liberace arrangements),
reinforces the ideas of realness and safety, while it also confers upon Sheldon the blessings of an
Authentic Artist. The music in the safe, intellectual, and cosmopolitan world of New York City
set us at ease, bringing a sense of reality to what had been Sheldon’s surreal experience in the
wilds of Colorado. He has escaped both Annie and his involvement with debased art.
The theme of forging new artistic paths is more important in the film than in King’s
novel. In the film Sheldon ultimately triumphs over Annie by burning his manuscript of
“Misery’s Return,” whereas in the novel he only burns the title page and escapes with the rest of
the manuscript intact. In the novel Sheldon’s meeting with the agent is to discuss the wildlysuccessful sales of “Misery’s Return.” In the film he is meeting to discuss his new, serious novel
that has earned the author renewed credibility with critics and could even land him a literary
prize. When Sheldon’s reaction to the news of his newly acquired respectability doesn’t meet his
agent’s expectations, she comments, “I thought you’d be thrilled. You’re being taken seriously.”
To which he replies, “I’m delighted the critics are liking it, and I hope the people like it, too.
But, I wrote it for me.” Here, encapsulated in this brief dialogue, is the evidence of Sheldon’s
245
Ibid., 154.
102
conversion from hack to artist. Moreover, he admits that his experience with Annie Wilkes has
been helpful to him as an artist.
To stress the point, when his agent broaches with him the idea of writing a non-fiction
account of his time with Annie, suggesting it would make him very wealthy, he declines this
offer of easy money, saying “I don’t want to dredge up the worst horror of my life just to make a
few bucks.” At this point in the scene, the music suddenly changes from diegetic Mozart to nondiegetic, dissonant chords enlivened by taut trills, as we see Annie rounding the corner of the
restaurant, dressed in a waitress’s uniform and pushing a dessert tray. And Annie approaches the
table, she lifts a large knife. “It’s weird,” says Sheldon while staring at this unthinkable
apparition, “even though I know she’s dead, I still think about her once in a while.” When Annie
finally comes to the table, we see that it is not Annie but instead a waitress who has recognized
the famous author. “I just want to tell you,” the waitress says to Sheldon, “I’m your number-one
fan.”
When Paul thanks her for her kindness, we hear Liberace’s “I’ll Be Seeing You” drift in
from the auditory background and eventually become foregrounded as the credits begin to roll.
This is one of the most interesting uses of music in the film because it links Misery with postmodern horror films like those of the so-called “slasher” genre. According to James Buhler,
horror films ends on one of two ways: 1) “coherently,” where the monster is defeated and
normality returns to the world, or 2) “incoherently,” where the monster is not fully vanquished
and thus does not permit the film dramatic closure.246 For instance, the films in the Friday the
13th franchise, a template for modern slasher films, end incoherently. We know that the killer has
not been (or cannot be) destroyed. Unlike the traditional, “coherent” horror film where the girl
victim is saved from the monster by her male lover, the incoherent slasher template
problematizes this scheme. As Gary Heba notes:
While coherent versions of horror depend on humanity being able
to control and vanquish external sources of horror, incoherent
movies focus on humanity’s limited abilities to control the horrors
–or worse, on humanity’s capacity to create its own horrors that
cannot be contained by the coherent master narrative. 247
246
James Buhler, “Music and the Adult Ideal,” in Music in the Horror Film: Listening to Fear, ed. Neil
Lerner (New York: Routledge, 2010), 169.
247
Gary Heba, “Everyday Nightmares: The Rhetoric of Social Horror in the Nightmare on Elm Street
Series,” Journal of Popular Film and Television 23 (1995), 108.
103
By using Liberace’s “I’ll Be Seeing You,” Reiner shifts the narrative into the realm of the
incoherent, instead of allowing for a clean, buttoned-up coherent master narrative. Liberace,
through his voice and music, and Annie are literally telling Sheldon and the audience that
“they’ll be seeing us.” They are not vanquished, they are not controlled, and so long as debased
art exists and false artists continue to profit from and corrupt their audiences, they will,
metaphorically at least, continue to haunt, damage, and hobble us as individuals and as a society.
104
CHAPTER 7:
WAGNER, EROTICISM, AND EVIL IN APT PUPIL
When the All-American teenager Todd Bowden (Brad Renfro) discovers aging Nazi Kurt
Dussander (Sir Ian McKellen) hiding in his suburban California neighborhood, Todd proposes a
deal: he will keep quiet about his knowledge of the criminal, if, in turn, Dussander will recount
the grisly details of the holocaust, leaving out nothing that would otherwise be censored.
Dussander’s recounting of these stories begins to have an effect on both him and the boy. For
Dussander, they slowly reawaken a smoldering blood-lust. For Todd, they plant the seeds of
evil.
Apt Pupil (1998; dir., Bryan Singer) is a study of the nature of evil and unfolds as a
psychological power struggle between the two characters. Soon after Todd uses his leverage to
extract the ghastly stories from Dussander, he becomes infatuated with the Nazis and their
unbridled power. Todd begins to aspire to this kind of power and presses Dussander into his
service, going so far as to make the old man don an S.S. uniform and literally march to his
commands. But soon this obsession begins to affect Todd’s personal and academic life. The top
student’s grades slip precipitously (which risks parental discovery of the true nature of his
relationship with the old man), and his social and dating life become a humiliating sea of
dysfunction. By the time Todd realizes the dangers of his involvement with Dussander, it is too
late.
When Todd attempts to cut ties with Dussander, the old man pretends that he has written
a detailed account of the boy’s interaction with and knowledge of the criminal, which he claims
is stored in a safe deposit box. Should anything happen to Dussander, this fictional account
would become public and destroy Todd’s life and that of those he loves. Dussander says to the
boy, “Oh, you’re going to be infamous, boy, take my word for it. And you know what such a
scandal can do. It never goes away. Not for you, not for your parents.” Trapped and angered,
Todd says to the old man, “I think you should fuck yourself.” To which, Dussander responds,
“Don’t you see? We are fucking each other.”
Dussander further entangles himself in Todd’s life when he poses as the boy’s
grandfather to a school guidance counselor (David Schwimmer) in order to keep news of Todd’s
poor academic performance from reaching his parents. Dussander’s assistance with the
105
academic snafu allows Todd to resume a normal teenage existence, that is until Dussander
murders a vagrant (Elias Kotas) in his home but suffers a heart attack before he can dispose of
the (not-dead) body. Dussander calls on Todd to dispose of the body and then locks the boy in
the basement, where he must finish Dussander’s handiwork.
While recovering in the hospital, Dussander is recognized by another patient, who was a
prisoner of Dussander’s. Before Dussander can be apprehended, he commits suicide. Todd is
questioned by the police but ultimately dismissed. At the end of the film the guidance counselor
recognizes Dussander’s picture in the paper and confronts Todd about his deception. Todd
lashes out at the counselor, intimating that he’ll claim the counselor was attempting to seduce
him. Todd echoes Dussander’s words when he tells the counselor, “A scandal like that will
never go away … Think about your job, think about your kids.” When the counselor tries to call
the boy’s bluff, Todd barks back, “You have no idea what I can do.”
The Music of Apt Pupil
In an early scene in the film Todd is daydreaming and doodling in his high school
classroom, paying no attention to the teacher, who is criticizing his class’s performance on a
recent test. Todd’s facial expression indicates that his mind is clearly elsewhere, and that
elsewhere is somewhat pleasing. As the camera reveals the object of Todd’s attention, we notice
that he earned an “A” on the exam that perplexed his classmates, a device that obviously brings
Todd’s intelligence to the fore. But when the camera pans away from the large, red-ink encircled
“A” to where his pen is, we see that Todd has been drawing a series of swastikas on his paper.
As the field of swastikas migrates toward the center of the frame, the “Love Duet” from Act II of
Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde begins to play (see Figure 7.1 and Example 7.1).
106
Figure 7.1: Screenshot from Apt Pupil (1998). Todd doodling on his test as Wagner’s “Love
Duet” from Tristan und Isolde enters.
Example 7.1: Wagner, Tristan und Isolde, Act II, “Love Duet,” mm. 9-12.
The “Love Duet” sonically bridges the classroom scene with a brief inter-title reading
“one month later,” which then fades to the image of an old-time record player belonging to
Dussander, presumably the source of the music. This music works to individuate Dussander in
two ways. First, and more generally, his enjoyment of opera speaks to his intelligence and level
of culture. Secondly, and more specifically, his choice of Wagner is an indication of his Nazi
past.
As used in this scene, the music serves as the underscore for Dussander’s grisly stories
about how gassing was carried out and the horrible effects of the poison on the victims. Here
107
Todd is listening attentively, a far cry from his dispassionate classroom behavior of the prior
scene. The beautiful music is distinctly at odds with the horrific and detailed description of the
mass murders, and this incongruity invites the audience to read this use of music ironically. This
alternative reading will lead to a discovery of the film’s deeper contextual layers.
That fact that Wagner and his music were held in high esteem by Hitler is used by Singer
to cement Dussander with his Nazi past. But the use of Tristan und Isolde goes further than
simply classifying Dussander as a Nazi, a fact that has already been well established. A closer
inspection of the precise music employed, its text, and its original context shows that there are
indeed deeper layers to be mined.
The text of the particular section of the “Love Duet” that sounds during the scene where
Dussander is recalling the gassing of prisoners occurs at the moment in the opera where Tristan
and Isolde promise themselves to one another, making a ‘til-death-do-us-part pledge:
So starben wir,
um ungetrennt,
ewig einig
ohne End',
ohn' Erwachen,
ohn' Erbangen,
namenlos
in Lieb' umfangen,
ganz uns selbst gegeben,
der Liebe nur zu leben!
Thus we would die,
undivided,
eternally one,
without end,
without awaking,
without fearing,
namelessly,
in love embracing,
completely to ourselves given,
for love only to live!248
248
Nico Castel, Three Wagner Opera Libretti (New York: Leyerle Publications, 2006), 358.
108
In the context of the film the text of the duet is itself an ironic, prescient commentary on
the dangerous, unbreakable bond that is created between Todd and Dussander in this scene; the
music’s grotesque synthesis adds weight to Dussander’s claim that he and Todd “are fucking
each other.”249 Later in the film there will be a significant dramatic analogue with this scene.
After Dussander has helped Todd escape academic disaster, the boy removes himself
from Dussander’s life and enjoys the life of a highly-successful and popular high school student.
A montage, accompanied ironically by the 1938 popular German song “Das ist Berlin,” shows
Todd pitching the final out of a big baseball game, performing well at basketball practice, acing a
test well ahead of his classmates, and enjoying the company of an attractive girl at the movies.
When the montage ends, Dussander is shown exiting a liquor store and boarding a bus.
While on the bus, Dussander is recognized by a vagrant who often skulks around his home. The
vagrant, credited as “Archie,” although the name is never uttered the film, offers Dussander an
awkward, physical “hello.” Dussander, at first perplexed, eventually remembers where he’d seen
this man: while dressed up in his S.S. uniform, Archie, who was rummaging through the
garbage, spied Dussander through his window in full Nazi regalia. Dussander must again act to
preserve himself.
When Dussander exits the bus, Archie follows him and attempts to make conversation
with the old man. Dussander, annoyed and slightly put off by the vagabond, tries to get away.
Archie then tell Dussander that they are “practically neighbors,” since he sleeps outdoors near
his home. When Archie grabs for the liquor, Dussander becomes visibly upset, and Archie
pleads with the old man not to be rude. He then tells Dussander, “I know something about you.”
Dussander becomes suddenly still after this pronouncement, until Archie finally continues and
says, “I know you’re a nice guy. I’m nice too … Just like the boy.” “I see,” replies Dussander,
knowing now that Archie believes Dussander to be a homosexual pedophile who is paying Todd
for sexual favors. Archie tell Dussander that he would enjoy a drink, but also that he “don’t take
no charity.” After being rebuked by Dussander for “smelling like a toilet,” Archie suggests that
249
Apt Pupil is rife with homoerotic and homophobic subtexts. For an enlightening and detailed account,
see: “Apt Pupil’s misogyny, homoeroticism and homophobia--sadomasochism and the Holocaust film,” by Caroline
Joan (Kay) S. Picart and Jason Grant McKahan in Jump Cut: A Review of Contemporary Cinema, 2002 (45).
http://www.ejumpcut.org.
109
the old man could let him use his shower. “But first, a drink,” continues Archie, “then I’ll do
anything you say.”
After Archie offers his part in the terms, we hear the opening bars of the Prelude to
Tristan und Isolde, complete with the so-called “Tristan chord,” which is visually accompanied
by a tightening close-up of Dussander’s face as he cocks his head and then his eyes toward the
unsuspecting Archie. The film then cuts to a close-up of the record player, just as in the earlier
gas-chamber-story scene between Todd and Dussander. Moreover, the recording Dussander has
chosen is not the love duet but instead, tellingly, a scratchy rendering of the “Liebestod;”250 the
music elides seamlessly between the prelude’s “Tristan chord” and the opening bars of the love
duet (see Example 7.2a and b).
The title “Liebestod” has become a common name for Isolde’s final apostrophe in Tristan und Isolde.
Wagner preferred to call the scene “Verklärung,” literally “transfiguration,” and used the term “Liebestod” to refer
to the prelude of the opera. Recordings generally use the term “Liebestod” to refer to both the final scene and to the
orchestral coupling of the Prelude with the final scene. Scholars use the term interchangibly . For instance, John
Deathridge, in his Wagner: Beyond Good and Evil (Berkley: University of California Press, 2008), uses the term
“Liebestod,” while Lawrence Kramer, in his Music as Cultural Practice (Berkley: University of California Press,
1993), refers to the section as the “Verklärung.” The soundtrack for the film lists the title as “Prelude and
Liebestod,” and this will be the term used throughout the text to refer to the music from the final scene of the opera.
Importantly, though, it is the idea of transfiguration which is central to the reading of “Liebestod” as used in this
film.
250
110
Example 7.2a: Wagner, Tristan und Isolde, Prelude, mm. 1-2
Example 7.2b: Wagner, Tristan und Isolde, Act III, “Liebestod,” mm.1-2. Measure 2 of the
Prelude elides with the beginning of the “Liebestod.”
This scene is remarkable for its length (over four minutes of nearly uninterrupted,
unedited Liebestod), for its sound editing, which calls into question the assumed diegetic
existence of the music, and, not least of all, for its dramatic, visual, and musical parallel with the
earlier scene between Todd and Dussander. To stress this dramatic symmetry, the same
leitmotiv sounds when the record player is shown in both scenes (see Example 7.3). The
leitmotiv, sung first by both Tristan and then by Isolde, extols the virtues of a union in death.
111
Example 7.3: Wagner, Tristan und Isolde, Act II, “Love Duet,” mm. 9-12.
As the scene begins, the pair are seated at the kitchen table, drinking. Archie, who is
obviously mentally incapacitated, rambles incoherently, while Dussander attempts to follow his
disjointed conversation. When going to retrieve another bottle of booze, Dussander walks over
to the sink, supposedly to find a bottle opener. At this point, the “Liebestod” becomes more than
just diegetic background music, it is now a motivator and an active participant in the drama.
Throughout the scene thus far, the volume level of the “Liebestod” has roughly
corresponded to the implied distance from the record player. When the record player was shown
in extreme close-up, the music was foregrounded. When the camera placement was near the
table, the “Liebestod” was barely audible, overshadowed by the conversation and even the
falling rain. But when Dussander leaves the table to find a bottle opener, the levels begin to
change and no longer conform to our perception of the music’s physical placement within the
house.
As Dussander is at the sink, we see a shot of him through a window from outside the
house. Instead of the rain being the dominant sound, the “Liebestod” moves to the fore, as
Dussander stares ominously out the window. Here the music is no longer linked with the
diegetic “reality” of the house. Instead, it is linked with Dussander’s psyche and acts to
influence and motivate him. The ghastly rhapsody speaks to both the homoerotic (love) and
psychopathic (death) elements of the scene in the film. When Dussander returns to the table, the
level of the “Liebestod” again bends to the rules of reality, becoming overshadowed by the
conversation and other diegetic sounds. Here the music itself becomes the monster. We have
been shown that the music can rise to the foreground on its own accord, as it if has its own
consciousness. The audience has been shown a glimpse of the monster, and we know it is real,
112
alive, and inside the house. The slipping of the Liebestod into the aural background works to
create dramatic tension. The audience knows the monster is there, lurking in the (auditory)
shadows while the victim is totally unaware.
As Archie prattles on, Dussander is mentally elsewhere. He stares at the vagrant, as if
transported by the music. Dussander then reaches for Archie’s face with his left hand while
asking if Archie minds. “No. Not at all,” replies Archie. Dussander then stands up and moves
directly behind him, caressing his head. Archie then makes totally clear the arrangement when
he says to Dussander, “You know, maybe in the morning … if everything goes ok you could let
me have ten dollars.” “Perhaps,” replies Dussander, still looming over Archie from behind.
Bringing his right hand into the frame and placing it onto Archie’s head, Dussander reveals a
long kitchen knife. “Maybe twenty,” Archie continues, totally unaware of the imminent danger.
“Perhaps,” repeats Dussander, “we shall see.” The “Liebestod” moves increasingly to the
foreground, the dramatic tension carefully coordinated with the aria’s increasing musical tension.
“You can relax, you know. I’ve done this before,” says Archie. To which Dussander replies
ironically, “That’s all right. So have I.” As the aria approaches its apex, its volume dramatically
increases, and Archie has only a moment before Dussander plunges the knife into his back (see
Figure 7.2 and Example 7.4).
Figure 7.2: Screenshot from Apt Pupil. Dussander (Sir Ian McKellan) above Archie (Elias
Kotas) as the “Liebestod” gains intensity.
113
Example 7.4: Wagner, Tristan und Isolde, Act III, “Liebestod,” mm. 38-42.
At this exact moment, where we anticipate the arrival of the aria’s apex with the plunging
knife, the music suddenly falls silent. Instead we are left watching a stunned Archie and hearing
only the diegetic sounds of the chair being pushed back, the rain falling, and Dussander’s soft,
clumsy footfalls as he backpedals away from his victim. For a full four seconds, a cinematic
eternity, there is almost no sound and no movement, only the stunned expressions of both the
victim and perpetrator, accompanied by the soft-falling rain. And then, suddenly, Archie
screams and pushes the table over. With his outburst, the music returns as if uninterrupted. The
missing four seconds of music happened, but were unheard by us and perhaps by Archie and
Dussander as well; the missing measure calls into question our belief that the music was actually
occurring diegetically during the scene (see Example 7.5). With the music’s return, its rhythmic
activity and undulating dynamic profile parallel a macabre pantomime with Archie’s desperate
flailing, rapid turning, and frantic reaching for the knife lodged in his back. We also notice here
that the recording is no longer scratchy, but it now seems to be a crystal clear, digital-quality
recording. As Archie engages in this grotesque ballet, Dussander takes the opportunity to strike
Archie with a skillet, before taking hold of the beggar and tossing him down the basement stairs.
114
Example 7.5: Wagner, Tristan und Isolde, Act III, “Liebestod,” mm. 44-47.
Could this music, which we believed so strongly to be emanating from the record player
(reinforced by the audio-realism of the volume levels and the recording quality in the first half of
the scene) have been just the psychic soundtrack of the murderer all along? Were we made privy
to the inner workings of Dussander’s mind but made to believe they were real?
To help answer these questions, we must look at the clues in the scene and examine the
music’s original operatic context. First, the text of the Liebestod is useful. During this portion
of the opera Isolde sees before her not the corpse of her beloved Tristan but instead his
transfiguration. The text of this aria details Isolde’s private, psychic reality:
Mild und leise
wie er lächelt,
wie das Auge
hold er öffnet –
seht ihr's Freunde?
Seht ihr's nicht?
Immer lichter
wie er leuchtet,
stern-umstrahlet
Gently and quietly
How he smiles;
How his eye(s)
Fondly he opens…
See you Friends?
See you it not?
Always brighter,
How he shines,
Sparkling star-surrounded
115
hoch sich hebt?
Seht ihr's nicht?
Wie das Herz ihm
mutig schwillt,
voll und hehr
im Busen ihm quillt?
Wie den Lippen,
wonnig mild,
süßer Atem
sanft entweht --Freunde! Seht!
Fühlt und seht ihr's nicht?
Hör ich nur
diese Weise,
die so wundervoll und leise,
Wonne klagend,
alles sagend
mild versöhnend
aus ihm tönend,
in mich dringet,
auf sich schwinget,
hold erhallend
um mich klinget?
Heller schallend,
mich umwallend,
sind es Wellen
sanfter Lüfte?
…
Highly soaring?
See you not?
How his heart in him
Proudly swells,
Full and brave
In his bosom it pulses?
How from his lips,
Blissfilly, gently
Sweet breath
Softly is wafting?
Friends! Look!
Feel and see you it not?
Do I hear
Alone this melody,
Which so wondrous
And quiet,
In bliss lamenting,
All-revealing,
Gently pardoning,
From him sounding,
Through me pierces,
Upwards soaring,
Sweetly echoing
Around me ringing?
More clearly resounding,
Wafting about me,
Are they waves
Of refreshing breezes?251
…
It is useful to understand how Wagner conceived this final scene. His prose sketches for
Tristan und Isolde indicate the following:
251
Castel, 410-12.
116
Isolde, bent over Tristan, recovers herself and listens with growing
rapture to the ascending melodies of love, which appear to rise up
as if out of Tristan’s soul, swelling up like a sea of blossoms, into
which, in order to drown, she throws herself… 252
Dussander, in this scene, is a warped Isolde undergoing his own transfiguration; the
music, for Dussander, may be emanating from Archie. This reading could account for the
inconsistencies in the volume levels during the scene as well as for the noticeable change in
recording quality. Finally, the missing measure, the moment where Dussander plunges the knife
into Archie’s back, is perhaps the most obvious clue that will lead to our understanding of the
music in this pivotal scene.
When, in the opera, Isolde sings “Heller schallend” (more clearly resounding), Wagner
deliberately recomposed her vocal lines. She no longer sings the main melodic material but
instead begins to sing a descant while the orchestra which continues with the melodic material.
John Deathridge emphasizes the significance of this moment, noting that this is:
when the orchestra begins to engulf Isolde in an ever-increasing
surge of sound – an acoustical allegory of drowning that confronts
violence and the sublime in a way that is provocative even for
Wagner.253
In an opera noted for its ability musically to delay, obscure, or deny closure, this missing
measure would have provided a rare instance of some fulfillment. The measure prior to the
missing measure is a V7 chord that, not unusually for Tristan und Isolde, evades resolution to the
tonic but instead arrives at the subdominant. But what does substitute for an instance of
harmonic fulfillment is the sounding of a series of weak plagal cadences, IV – I6 at measure 44
and repeated in measure 45. These plagal cadences foreshadow the work’s final cadence, the
only instance of true harmonic fulfillment, which occurs the end of the opera.
Singer’s conspicuous elimination of such an occurrence of fulfillment tells us much about
how we are to read Dussander’s psyche in this scene. Here is another example of irony: when
the text for Dussander should be “Heller [schallend]” or “[resounding] more clearly,” it instead
252
253
John Deathridge, Wagner: Beyond Good and Evil (Berkley: University of California Press, 2008), 140.
Deathridge, 142.
117
vanishes. When Dussander should find his greatest fulfillment, Archie denies him this ultimate
pleasure by not reacting. As a result the spell is, temporarily, broken. The music is abruptly
silenced, and the quotidian realities of Dussander’s sonic world rush back in and replace his
psychic rapture. Only when Archie finally reacts, by screaming in pain and by writhing with
fear, does the music return.
But the missing measure also calls to the fore yet another instance of irony, one that is
made clear by an understanding of Schopenhauer’s influence upon Tristan und Isolde. In the
opera, the final scene and the death of the two lovers is the culmination of the denial of the will.
The denial of the will, according to Schopenhauer, is the only true path to freedom and to the
elimination of suffering through the repudiation of the phenomenal world. 254 Only when the will
has been denied, and when human longings, desires, and wants are relinquished, can we truly
find fulfillment. Wagner’s music in Tristan und Isolde is a musical manifestation of
Schopenhauer’s metaphysics, where the will is denied musically through the evasion of
harmonic fulfillment, until the end when both lovers have died and are only then truly united,
both with themselves and the universe.
When Dussander attempts to kill Archie, he is acting upon his wants, desires, and
longings. But by attempting to satiate his will he is, in fact, merely creating for himself an
increase his own suffering. And here we see how the elimination of the music from the scene
works to bring this narrative point to the fore. By indulging in this act of the will, Dussander
becomes deprived of the music of the denial of the will that is embodied in Tristan und Isolde,
particularly in the “Liebestod.”
Lawrence Kramer’s interpretation of this moment in the opera is helpful when reading
elements of Dussander’s personality. He notes that “the moment that Isolde sings ‘Heller
schallend’ … yield[s] a flood of narcissistic pleasure so overwhelming that the ego drowns in
it.”255 For Kramer, this “flood” occurs due to “Tristan’s metamorphosis from a real to an
imaginary object of desire.”256 The same is true for Archie. He is no longer a real object, but
instead an object of Dussander’s murderous desire. The homoerotic overtones in this scene also
reflect the hermeneutic interpretations of the scene in the opera.
254
Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation, vol. 1, ed. Christopher Janaway
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 328.
255
Kramer, 164.
256
Ibid., 163.
118
Kramer notes that “[o]nly in its representation of desire as a tidal force that in large
measure constitutes the personal subject does Tristan und Isolde commit itself unconditionally to
the libidinal model,” and that Tristan und Isolde’s commitment to the libidinal model is what
underwrites the opera’s effect of being a Freudian “end of the world fantasy” where all of reality
is depreciated under the love object, and that this is best seen in the “Love Duet” and the
“Liebestod.”257 Moreover, the “Liebestod” shows “that the end of the world can come, and come
most forcefully, when the totality of desire rushes back in a flood from the object to the
subject.”258
In the film Archie is the object of desire, and his murder is the act that should precipitate
this “end of the world fantasy” for Dussander. Singer has equated the Nazi libido with a
murderous impulse, a less-than-subtle strategy that makes Nazi figures monsters instead of
humans who commit evil acts. But Dussander is unable to complete the murder, and because of
this the totality of desire that he feels for the object (Archie) is not permitted to flood back into
him. Dussander’s libidinal desires remain unfulfilled.
The fact that the “Liebestod” is thwarted before it can be completed parallels the fact that
Dussander is not able to finish destroying Archie. After Dussander throws Archie down the
basement steps, he grabs a large mallet and begins to descend the staircase, when he is suddenly
struck with a heart attack. When Dussander grabs for his chest and begins to collapse, the
Liebestod once again vanishes. Wagner’s rhapsodic music is suddenly replaced by typical,
classical-Hollywood style film score.
Tristan und Isolde is musically characterized more than anything by its denial of
fulfillment; the moments in the opera where musical passages reach melodic cadence occur at the
same time as they default on a full harmonic cadence. This repeated deferral of fulfillment is
what Kramer terms the “Lust-trope,”259 and he notes that, in the opera, “[w]hat counts as a
fulfillment is actually a rapturous occasion of unfulfillment.”260 Dussander’s deferral of pleasure
due to both Archie’s lack of initial reaction to his being stabbed and by the fact of Dussander’s
ultimate inability to kill him parallels the final scene in the opera. Kramer points out that during
257
Ibid., 166.
Ibid.
259
Kramer, 149. “Lust” referring to Isolde’s final word in the opera that can be translated as “bliss” or
“longing.”
260
Ibid.
258
119
the “Liebestod,” “deferral becomes a trope for the consummation of desire.”261 Wagner’s
program notes say that during the Liebestod “the gates of union are thrown open.”262 The “gates
of union” here are opened to Dussander and Todd through Dussander’s deferment of fulfillment
that is eventually completed by Todd. By Todd’s killing of Archie, the totality of desire
expressed by Dussander for the libido object now floods into Todd. The result is Todd’s
metaphysical assumption of Dussander’s murderous libidinal urge, which seals their union. In
this way the two “are fucking each other.”
Whether or not we accept the music as sounding diegetically, the conspicuous
indifference to the horror that we both anticipate and see play out on the screen allows for an
ironic reading of the scene. However, if we recognize this music as exclusively Dussander’s
mental soundtrack, then we witness a scene that parodies the opera via Archie’s grotesque
transfiguration as viewed through Dussander. Irony insists that viewers engage in a rational
process that helps them come to the narrative point on their own. By doing so, viewers will better
comprehend the points made by the director, which in this case characterizes Dussander and, by
extension, the Nazis as fetishizing and eroticizing violence due to their libidinal bloodlust.
The choice of the “Liebestod” to accompany this scene taps into longstanding notions
about Wagner, his music, his politics, and his influence on the Third Reich and Hitler. By using
Wagner’s music to accompany scenes of great import, Singer alludes to these notions concerning
Wagner’s works as being inherently anti-Semitic and pro-racial-purity.
While the reality of the situation has been shown to be far more subtle than this,
nevertheless, the assertions made during and immediately following the war by influential
composers and philosophers living in exile, such as Thomas Mann, Theodor Adorno, and Emil
Ludwig, continue to influence the public’s conception of Wagner’s music. 263 And in the scene
depicting Archie’s murder Singer exploits these ideas. Dussander is under the control of the
music, responding to its subliminal demands in the same way that many imagine Hitler did.
261
Ibid., 154.
Richard Wagner, Prelude and Transfiguration from Tristan and Isolde, ed. Robert Bailey (New York:
Norton, 1985), 47.
263
Pamela M. Potter, “What Is Nazi Music?” The Musical Quarterly 88:3 (Fall 2005), 448.
262
120
Pamela Potter has shown that much of the supposed ideological lineage connecting
Wagner and Hitler is built upon “the large accumulation of rumor.”264 The reality seems to be
that Hitler’s enthusiasm for Wagner was based entirely on his music, and that any anti-Semitism,
nationalism, arrogance, or xenophobia found in Wagner’s works (almost all of these findings
occurred after the war) were either unknown or ignored in Nazi Germany. 265 Clearly, Singer is
not concerned with the realities of Wagner’s influence on Hitler or the Third Reich (indeed, this
is an area that even musicology has been nervous about studying until recently) but is instead
trafficking in the accumulated cultural baggage that has surrounded Wagner and his works
(particularly his operas) since the end of World War II. It must be noted, then, that Apt Pupil is
another text in a long line of films that continue and even intensify the notions of Wagner’s
music as imbued with the ideological seeds of evil. 266
Finally, it is important to note that the art music in this film is chosen by Dussander, just
as Annie chose Liberace’s music in Misery. It is more than a coincidence this music was playing
during the murder or the recounting of gas-chamber tales. This choice of music allows for a
special kind of individuation for an otherwise generic villain. The popular conception of
Wagner’s music and politics and their supposed relationship to the ideology of the Third Reich
are also a part of Dussander’s self-characterization, and they speak to how he views himself: his
Teutonicism, intellect, social stature, and cultural sophistication. 267 In the case of Archie’s
murder, Dussander specifically chose the opera as an accompaniment to the murder of a
“degenerate,” a not-too-subtle reminder of the purported Nazi predilection for playing classical
German music at the death camps.268
Pamela M. Potter, “Wagner and the Third Reich: Myths and Realities ,” in The Cambridge Companion
to Wagner, ed. Thomas S. Grey (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 237.
265
Potter, “Wagner and the Third Reich,” 245.
266
An earlier example of this is the use of “The Ride of the Valkyries” in Apocalypse Now (1979; dir.,
Frances Ford Coppola) with scenes of the indiscriminate destruction of Vietnamese villages. Coppola’s use of
Wagner’s music in that film is so recognizable that a later war film, Jarhead (2005; dir., Sam Mendes), shows
American soldiers in Iraq viewing Apocalypse Now on base, mindlessly and cheerfully singing along with Wagner’s
music to the scenes of the carnage.
267
An excellent article on the use of ironically deployed music, specifically anempathy, and its role in
individuating characters is Stan Link’s “Sympathy with the Devil? Music of the psycho post -Psycho.” Screen 45:1
(Spring 2004), 1-20.
268
Potter, “Wagner and the Third Reich,” 244. Potter notes that, while the claim about Nazis using
Wagner’s music to accompany Jews to their deaths has been in circulation since the end of the war, this has never
been substantiated.
264
121
In the end, Singer’s use of Wagner trades in common misconceptions. Effective though
this may be in helping the audience to ascribe evil traits to a character, a larger issue that is
brought up by the use of this music is the idea of responsibility for these acts. Singer uses the
music as a kind of magic, one that directs the evil that Dussander engages in and, in some way,
alleviates his responsibility for these murderous acts. By casting these horrible offenses and
people as motivated by some supernatural agent, in this case Wagner’s music, Singer denies the
reality that horrendous deeds and policies are perpetrated by everyday people that walk among us
and are products of our own society. As Hannah Arendt noted in her famous book Eichmann in
Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, some of the most despicable acts in history are
carried out by very ordinary people and not demonic, obsessed super-villains. Unfortunately,
Singer misses this opportunity to remind his audience that the potential for this kind evil is very
much alive and well, and that it is capable of being generated again, not by radical ideologues
consumed by hate, but by the most ordinary and mundane of us existing in our very own
supposedly-enlightened society.
The ironic deployment of both the “Love Duet” and the “Liebestod” comments upon
Singer’s notion of the nature of evil; upon its existence as a powerful force of nature using
humans simply as a conduit. The evil that caused a nation of otherwise rational people to
imprison and destroy millions upon millions of people in the name of purity is not easily
conquered. It reaches across time, space, and generations to infect those who are not cautious
and who blindly toy with powers they can neither understand nor control. In short, the
significance of the film’s tagline, “If you don’t believe in the existence of evil, you’ve got a lot to
learn,” is made real largely through the ironic deployment of art music.
122
CHAPTER 8:
DIEGETIC, NONDIEGETIC, AND NARRATIVE POSITIONING IN HE GOT GAME
Both Misery and Apt Pupil make use of ironically deployed art music in order to make
thematic points by fleshing out characterizations that in turn expose deeper contextual layers.
Annie Wilkes is a Liberace fan who champions “inauthentic” art instead the “real thing.” Kurt
Dussander plays Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde during moments of great import, emphasizing his
Teutonicism, cultural sophistication, and intellect. But in both cases, the music is initiated by
characters within the narrative, and these characters have psychologies and biases that we must
read when recognizing their choices in music. Annie is crazy; Dussander is evil. Their music
tells us something about their personalities. It also reveals something about how they view
themselves, for when characters use diegetic music, they are agents and instigators, and their
psychologies act as kind of filter. Just as Annie and Dussander trick Paul and Todd, they are
somewhat able to fool or misdirect us through their choice of music.
As nondiegetic music comes from outside the story space its agent is not a character
within the narrative but instead a kind of omnipotent narrator from whom the narrative flows and
who knows more than both the characters and the audience. While it is not unusual for the
audience to know more than the characters, it is impossible for the audience to know more than
the unseen narrator. In this way, nondiegetic music has a certain kind of independence, a
freedom from the characters’ interiorities, psychologies, and biases that must be dealt with and,
as such, may be perceived as closer to a narrative, or narrator’s, truth.
Reappropriation, Irony, and the Reformation of Cultural Identities
He Got Game (1998; dir., Spike Lee) makes ample use of nondiegetic art music, largely
in place of the traditional Hollywood film score. While not completely without originally
composed music, the sheer quantity of preexisting art music is conspicuous. By drawing the
audience’s attention to nondiegetic music, the director exposes a technical apparatus of
filmmaking. But by briefly sacrificing the totality of suspended disbelief, Lee is able to make the
audience’s own associations with the music serve his narrative aim.
123
The film tells the story of a strained relationship between a father and a son. The father,
Jake Shuttlesworth (Denzel Washington), is imprisoned for, as we will later learn, the accidental
killing of his wife. As a result, the son, Jesus (biblical pronunciation, and not the Hispanic)
Shuttlesworth (Ray Allen), is left to care for his younger sister under the legal guardianship of
his greedy uncle. When Jesus becomes the nation’s top college basketball prospect, Jake is
informed by his prison warden that the Governor is a fanatical alumnus of Big State. If Jake
could convince Jesus to sign a letter of intent to play basketball at Big State, the Governor would
intervene in order to lessen Jake’s prison sentence. Jake is released from prison in the care of
two parole officers for only seven days, during which time he must convince Jesus to sign the
letter.
Spike Lee uses the music of Aaron Copland during his so-called Americana period, from
the late 1930s through the 1940s,269 as the aural backdrop to a gritty, inner-city tale about the
struggle of African-American youth in an environment of drugs, crime, and corruption. Far
removed from the amber-waves-of-grain, idyllic imagery so often associated with Copland’s
music of the Americana period,270 Lee seeks to reinscribe the ideal of authentic Americanness to
center upon modern, urban, poverty-stricken minority culture. In fact, the director seems to have
separated Copland’s music from the rest of the soundtrack in this film. During the opening
credits Lee lists the “music” as being by Aaron Copland, and the “songs” by Public Enemy, a
highly political rap group popular in the 1990s. This bifurcation of the soundtrack into “music”
and “songs” indicates that, for Lee, Copland’s contribution plays an altogether different role
within the narrative from the works by Public Enemy.
Copland’s music in this filmic context “elevate[s] the story of a man to the Story of
Man.”271 According to Eisler and Adorno, “music bears the sociological/psychological value of
269
551.
Howard Pollack, Aaron Copland: The Life and Work of an Uncommon Man (New York: Holt, 1999),
270
Ibid., 528-29; 551. Pollack notes that the appearance of Anglo-American folk melodies in many of
Copland’s works during this period, particularly in the ballets Billy the Kid, Rodeo, and Appalachian Spring, helped
to cement the stylistic traits of this populist music as quintessentially American. He notes that even the musical elite
active in America during the twentieth century conceded that Copland’s music sounded “re cognizably American.”
William Schuman, Samuel Lipman, Leighton Kerner, and Andr Previn agreed that Copland’s popular music of the
Americana period was perceived as the national American sound. Indeed, commentators very often describe
Copland’s style from this period as representative of America. Rob Kapilow, in a short NPR program titled “Aaron
Copland’s Vision of America” from the series What Makes It Great, aired 1 July 2009, notes that the opening of
Appalachian Spring “seems like all of America; it seems like the purest values you could possibly have.”
http://www.npr.org/2009/07/01/ 106146490/aaron-coplands-american-v ision (accessed May 10, 2012).
271
Gorbman, Unheard Melodies, 81.
124
evoking the collective community.”272 Moreover, they also contend that music “preserves
comparably more traits of long bygone, pre-individualistic collectives,” and that “this direct
relationship to a collectivity, intrinsic in the phenomenon itself, is probably connected with the
sensations of spatial depth, inclusiveness, and absorption of individuality.”273
This evocation of a collective community, one that is steeped in Americanness, is a
conscious decision by the director. Lee notes that in this film “[w]e give the same respect to
music, pay the same attention to music, that we pay to the actors, to the costume design, to the
production design. It is an integral part of film making.”274
During one scene early in the film there is a pickup game played on a housing project
basketball court by African-American males, which is accompanied by the “Hoe Down” from
Copland’s Rodeo. For a viewer there is nothing in this scene that would suggest the open prairie,
cowboys, or barn dancing. The gritty urban locale, the distinctly African-American urban style
of dress, the occasional foul language, and the game of basketball are far removed from the
conservative, largely- imaginary notion of the American West and its settlers.
Lee uses Copland’s music to help to harness the power of the collective, mythologized
representation of what is, in the minds of many, pure Americana. Lee’s intentions were laid bare
when he recalled that
When I was writing He Got Game, I was listening to Aaron
Copland. I knew Aaron Copland would be right for the film …
Aaron Copland is one of the American composers and basketball is
an American game. And I just felt that the largeness and scope of
his sound, when you hear it, really, is always … Forget about He
Got Game. When you hear “Appalachian Springs” [sic] or
“Fanfare for the Common Man,” you hear America. It’s the
bigness and vastness, and I thought that the combination of the two
[Copland and Public Enemy] would work.275
Here the director makes clear his intention actively to draw attention to the music of
Copland, violating the invisibility principle of the classical Hollywood film score. He does this
in two ways. First, he presents the music of idealized, mythical America alongside inner city,
272
Eisler and Adorno, Composing for the Films, 42.
Eisler and Adorno, 42.
274
Spike Lee and Cynthia Fuchs, Spike Lee: Interviews (Jackson, Mississippi: University Press of
Mississippi, 2002), 173.
275
Lee and Fuchs,173-74.
273
125
foul-mouthed, poverty-stricken, African-American youth. Secondly, he draws attention to the
music by balancing this with the African-American, highly-politicized hip-hop and rap of Public
Enemy. Both the ears and the eyes have an opportunity to perceive the conspicuous
incongruities, one between image and sound, and the other between the music and the songs. In
short, for Lee, it is important that the audience not miss this incongruity between representation
and the real state of affairs.
The opening sequence of He Got Game, which includes the aforementioned music and
songs credits, at first presents quintessential scenes from the American heartland. Farmhouses
with rusted basketball equipment and rims, paint-stripped backboards affixed to run down barn
houses where the playing surface is dirt and matted grass eventually give way to urban scenes of
broken-bottle strewn, concrete courts surrounded by monolithic, decrepit, high-rise housing
projects. The music that accompanies this is Copland’s setting of the American folk tune “John
Henry.” Within the cinematic space of just a few minutes, Lee juxtaposes the familiar, rural
habitat of Copland’s music to the inner city (see Figures 8.1 and 8.2). With this, the setting of
urban decay is brought on par with the majestic open spaces of the imaginary, pre-settlement
American West.
126
Figure 8.1: Screenshot from He Got Game, opening credits. The game played in rural America
accompanied by Copland’s John Henry.
127
Figure 8.2: Screenshot from He Got Game, opening credits. Copland’s John Henry continues to
accompany scenes of the game, this time in urban, inner-city spaces.
The same process takes place when the narrative proper begins. After the opening credits
have finished, there is a sudden cut to black. When the visual narrative reenters, a crystal-blue
sky, clean horizon line, and the ocean are framed in the lower portion of the screen by a herringbone patterned boardwalk; three benches on the far left, middle, and far right perfectly balance
this American tableau.
As this scene brightens and becomes fully visible, Copland’s Appalachian Spring begins
to sound. When the clarinet enters and rises above the musical texture, the camera begins a long,
uninterrupted tracking shot. Backing away from the boardwalk, we see trees enter the frame.
The camera then gradually turns to our left, away from the wide open spaces of the ocean and
toward the comparatively claustrophobic confines of the Coney Island projects: chain-link
fences, towering but dilapidated high-rise housing projects, and broken-out streetlights. The
camera finally settles upon a tall, African-American youth taking repeated jump-shots from one
128
of the many basketball courts within our view. Here is our first glimpse of Jesus, diligently
honing the tools of his trade.
The film then jump-cuts to an imposing, Gothic-inspired stone building set by a wide lens
and in magnificent symmetry. A brief, tight close-up of the inscription on the façade of the
building, Attica Correctional Facility, reveals the true nature of our American castles. Another
cut shows the all-concrete recreation yard, flanked imposingly by giant walls and the rounded,
central guard tower. Inside this small open space is a man, practicing jump-shots exactly as was
Jesus in the first scene. The film now cuts back to Jesus, in gorgeous slow-motion rising above
the chain-link fence, his shot tracing a perfect parabolic arc with a spinning basketball. As the
ball breaks the plane of the rim, the rim suddenly changes. As the camera pulls away from the
new rim, it reveals the face of the man in the prison yard. This beautiful, elegantly paced,
atmospheric sequence set to the introduction from Appalachian Spring is how the audience first
meets the father and son protagonists.
The two basketball-playing men are shown performing in slow motion, and the camera
treats them interchangeably. Jesus’s perfect release is followed by Jake’s ball sailing through the
air in front of the cobalt sky, the only hint to the ball’s location being the rifle-toting guard
mounted atop the prison wall whose figure we see come into the shot as the ball descends from
its apex and toward the goal.
Lee’s technical and artistic construction of the opening scene firmly ensconces this tale
within the realm of mythic America, and the use of Copland’s music is vital in achieving this
end. The plaintive, quietly profound opening of Appalachian Spring elevates the pedestrian to
the mythic. The music here serves to remind the audience that the heroic overcoming of
adversity is found in every corner of our society, and that honest, true, American values are not a
thing of the distant past. Jesus and Jake are our modern, moral settlers, and Coney Island is our
Appalachia, once again populated by outsiders.
Both the opening credits sequence and the scene of the basketball game set to Rodeo are
constructed in the familiar language of filmic montage. Each scene presents a series of images
that places the film in a gritty, urban setting while, at the same time, Copland’s music works to
infuse these scenes with undeniable Americanness. This strategy is often deployed by Lee in He
Got Game. Moreover, he reserves Copland’s music for the especially important dramatic
moments in the film.
129
During a flashback scene where we see Jake and Jesus at night on the otherwise
abandoned basketball court outside the family’s high-rise tenement, Copland’s Orchestral
Variations serves as film score. This is the only work in the film by Copland that falls outside
the chronology and style of his Americana period. A series of twenty, short variations built
around a dissonant four- note theme, the Orchestral Variations is rich in sharp dissonance,
devoid of lengthy melodies, and unabashedly formalist. Pierre Boulez, not generally thought of
as a champion of Copland’s music, praised the work in a letter to fellow modernist John Cage,
calling it “the best work I know of him,” and admired its “violence.”276
The scene in the film which uses the Orchestral Variations is gut- wrenching scene
where the intensity of Jake’s commitment to Jesus’ basketball training, even as a small child, is
made obvious. Jake pushes Jesus up to and beyond his limits, at one point calling him “a little
bitch” and throwing the ball near his face. Jesus becomes enraged, tosses the basketball over the
fence, and walks away from his father and, potentially, from his future. Later, when Jake and
Jesus are sitting at the dinner table, an oedipal battle takes place between the man and boy.
When Jesus becomes argumentative, Jake pursues him. Jesus’ mother attempts to break the two
apart, and Jake becomes frustrated by her interference and pushes her away, causing her fatal
head-first fall onto the oven.
The scene fills in the narrative blank, explaining why Jake has been in prison, and why
Jesus harbors such resentment toward his father. Here we see a wonderfully inventive variation
on the Holy Family (Jesus’s sister is named Mary). But in this case, the father must sacrifice the
mother and himself in order to save Jesus, and Copland’s dark, agitated music is appropriate for
the difficult scene. But the most compelling use of Copland is reserved for the finale of the film.
Toward the end of the film, Jake is returned to prison, not knowing where Jesus will
chose to attend college. When Jesus announces that he has chosen to attend Big State, the
audience is left to conclude that Jake will be the beneficiary of this decision. However, the
morning edition of the newspaper has reported Jake to be an escaped prisoner who was only
recently recaptured and returned to prison. It seems that, all along, Jake’s offer of a leaner
sentence was simply a ruse. When Jake finally has an opportunity to speak with the warden, he
is informed that, since Jesus technically didn’t actually sign the letter of intent, that there may be
no deal to be had.
276
Pollack, 460.
130
The final scene of the film avoids easy dramatic resolution but instead offers a reluctant,
quasi-tragic reconciliation between Jake and Jesus. From his prison cells Jake is shown speaking
directly into the camera, his soliloquy being a dramatic reading of his letter to Jesus. This is the
first time Jesus reads any of Jake’s many letters that he sent throughout his incarceration. Jake
makes clear he takes responsibility for the unintended consequences of his pushing Jesus too
hard, and that he understands that he must remain removed from Jesus’s life, literally and
figuratively, as the price of his son’s success. The letter concludes: “Your Great-grandfather
used to always tell me that: ‘you keep trying on shoes, sooner or later you’re gonna find a pair
that fit you.’ Well I’m here to testify that I’ve found a pair. They hurt like hell. I love you, son.
Your father, Jake Shuttlesworth.” The words “I love you, son” are shown being read aloud by
Jesus, the first time that a post-adolescent Jesus acknowledges Jake as his father.
The music that accompanies this final scene is Copland’s orchestral suite from the ballet
Billy the Kid, specifically “The Open Prairie” theme that both begins and ends the suite. The
music begins with the reading of Jake’s letter, and the visual narrative that accompanies the
dominant acoustic elements of music and letter narration shows the ancillary characters in the
film resolving the issues.
With the other characters’ stories closed, the final moments of the film are reserved for
the relationship between Jake and Jesus. This ending section is set off musically by the sudden
change in texture, volume, and rhythmic drive in the Billy the Kid suite.
Jake and Jesus are both practicing basketball, Jake in the same prison courtyard where we
first met him at the beginning of the film and Jesus now in the large, professional arena at Big
State. Like the beginning of the film, the scene is initially set in slow motion, and the jump shots
of the two characters are freely interchanged, linking the two together through the game. But the
story has not completely concluded, and a sudden return to normal, lifelike-speed hints that there
is at least one final piece of narrative action to be resolved.
As “The Open Prairie” builds toward its heroic climax, Jake suddenly stops his hitherto
uninterrupted routine of jump shots in the prison yard while Jesus is shown continuing. A series
of cuts between the armed guard atop the prison-yard wall, Jake, and the guards’ imposing rifle,
along with Copland’s unrelenting crescendo portend a tragic ending. An eye-line shot shows
Jake looking directly at the guard, when the camera swings around him 180 degrees to place both
Jake and the guard in the same frame. Jake puts the ball at his side and begins walking beyond
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the confines of the basketball court and toward the area of the prison-yard marked “out of
bounds.” As he heads in this direction, the guard draws his rifle and points it at Jake while
screaming: “Jake, stop! Stop right there!” While Jake continues to walk, Jesus is shown
abruptly halting his practice and looking over his shoulder, as if hearing the guard’s demand.
“Do it now,” the guard is now shown screaming at Jake, “or you’re a dead man!” Jesus is shown
staring pensively, and a quick cut back to the yard shows the guard with the rifle in firing
position, his finger on the trigger. An extremely tight close-up of the trigger shows pressure
being applied by the guard’s twitchy finger. With Jake’s life in the balance, the first section of
Billy the Kid reaches its conclusion, and we are left with a brief silence as we await the outcome
of the dangerous situation. In this silence the guard once again yells at Jake “turn around and
back up!”
The music resumes with the same theme, but now from the final portion of the ballet
suite, titled “The Open Prairie Again.” Jake does not turn around, he does not back up, but
instead he launches the basketball over the prison-yard fence. The camera follows the long flight
of the ball in slow motion beyond the walls of the prison, and a cut back to Jesus shows its
destination is the university arena. Jesus watches the ball arrive seemingly from out of nowhere
and abandons his ball for the new arrival. Jesus holds the ball and smiles, and the camera pans
away from him in a long departing shot that includes the basketball net, Jesus, and his father’s
ball in the same frame. As the final chord sounds, the screen cuts to black.
In both the opening and closing sequences of He Got Game, Spike Lee subverts the
principles of the classical Hollywood film score in order to make his narrative points. He
intentionally goes against “a pool of conventions, of options, whose combination and
recombination constitutes an easily recognizable discursive field” in order to recast Copland’s
music as representative of the world of the young, urban African American. 277
The most obvious departure from the classical Hollywood film score style –indeed, the
violation which sets apart all ironically read music in film – is the principle of “inaudibility.” As
Claudio Gorbman puts it, inaudibility refers to “a set of conventional practices … which result in
the spectator not normally hearing [the music] or attending to it.”278 Instead, Spike Lee not only
allows for Copland’s music to be heard, he virtually demands that we attend to it by balancing
277
278
Gorbman, 71.
Ibid., 76.
132
the musical and visual elements, opposing the traditional subservience of music to the visual
narrative.
The principle of inaudibility, according to Gorbman, suggests that “musical form is
generally determined by and subordinate to narrative form,” and that “the duration of a music
cue is determined by the duration of a visually represented act or sequence.”279 In He Got Game
we get a sense that the opposite is true, that is it the piece of music, or at least large sections of it,
that determine the duration of the visual sequence. Moreover, Lee bucks the industry
proscription against music dominating the narrative or that it must bow to dialogue or narratively
significant sounds.280 Throughout much of the opening and closing sequences of He Got Game,
Copland’s music is the only sound to make it through the editing process. The sound design is
akin to montage but the visual elements conform to the logic of traditional, narrative film.
Gorbman cites Leonid Sabaneev’s analogy of a typical means of arranging a song for the
piano as a way of understanding the principle of inaudibility. According to Sabaneev,
In general, music should understand that in the cinema it should
nearly always remain in the background; it is, so to speak, a tonal
figuration, the “left hand” of the melody on screen, and it is a bad
business when this left hand begins to creep into the foreground and
obscure the melody.281
In keeping with this analogy, the music of Copland as deployed in He Got Game is better
understood not as a galant-style keyboard work, but instead as a fugue, where both the visual and
musical elements of a given scene are of equal importance; one element lacking wholeness of
meaning unless it is perceived in tandem with the other.
The violation of the principle of inaudibility serves, in this case, to bolster or inflate the
principles of “signifying emotion” and “connotative cueing” (see Chapter 3). Gorbman’s third
principle states that “music appears in classical cinema as a signifier of emotion … which brings
a necessary emotional, irrational, romantic, or intuitive dimension.”282 Moreover, she notes that
the appearance of music signifies emotion itself. Specifically, He Got Game trades in the
currency of “epic feeling,” elevating “the individuality of the represented characters to universal
279
Gorbman, 76.
Ibid., 77.
281
Ibid., 76.
282
Gorbman., 79.
280
133
significance, make[ing] them bigger than life, suggest[ing] transcendence, destiny.”283 Lee
achieves this epic feeling with the combination of drama, slow-motion camera work, and
carefully-constructed grand images, all set to Copland’s music. Lee’s appropriation of society’s
conception of Copland as “America’s soundtrack” achieves the goal of elevating this story of
two men to one of universal significance.
Gorbman’s fourth principle, “narrative/connotative cueing,” is also best served by the
conspicuous audibility of Copland’s music in He Got Game. But it does so largely through its
ironic position. Gorbman states that “music, via well-established conventions, contributes to the
narrative’s geographical and temporal setting.”284 In this light, Lee reserves the literal
establishment of time, place, and character for the “songs” by Public Enemy. The music of
Copland, by contrast, is employed for an entirely different, and arguably more important,
establishment of time and place.
Copland’s most familiar music (Appalachian Spring, Billy the Kid) conjures images of
the American heartland, of the frontier, or virtually any iconic, largely- rural American scene.
He Got Game is not set in the wide-open spaces of the heartland, nor is it set in the Wild West.
In this context the locations Copland’s music recalls are not geographical or chronologica l but
instead are mythic. Lee’s use of music eschews literal time and place for the larger, mythic place
of imaginary America. By violating literal geography, Lee invests instead in connotative cueing,
where “music ‘anchors’ the image in meaning. It expresses moods and connotations which, in
conjunction with the images and other sounds, aid in interpreting narrative events and indicating
moral/class/ethnic values of characters.”285 Lee’s characters’ values are, through Copland’s
music, shown to be exactly those of traditional America. The urban, young African-American is
now on par with those of Americans of the frontier past, those romanticized outlaws from the
Wild West, and, paradoxically perhaps, the God-fearing, salt-of-the-earth, rural inhabitants of
America, who were perceived as being partly responsible for the ostracism of the black
community in America.286
But it is the music’s ironic placement that actually serves to normalize and cement the
stories of young African Americans squarely within the context of traditional America. By
283
Ibid., 81.
Ibid., 83.
285
Gorbman, 84.
286
Another possible ironical reading of Appalachian Spring occurs in the opening scene of the film where
the “white tone,” as indicated by Copland in the score, of the clarinet introduces this African -American tale.
284
134
forcing audiences to contend consciously with the quintessentially American music of Copland
in a filmic context, where music is traditionally unheard, the story of Jake and Jesus becomes an
integral part of the American experience. Howard Pollack notes that Lee’s “recontextualizations
support the idea that Copland’s pastoralisms reflect common aspirations for freedom and
dignity.”287 This is not a story about African-Americans for African-Americans or a niche filmic
product, but instead a uniquely American tale about the pitfalls and advantages of community,
struggle, sacrifice, and redemption. By placing Copland’s music in the foreground, the film
forces its way into the center of American culture, an act that mimics the very American tradition
of minority groups fighting for equality by forcing themselves into the mainstream of American
culture, a journey not unlike that which Copland himself undertook during his early years as an
American composer.288
287
Pollack, 498.
Krin Gabbard, “Spike Lee Meets Aaron Copland,” in The Spike Lee Reader ed. Paula J. Massood
(Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2008), 175-95. Gabbard notes the inherent irony that the quintessential
American sound was that of the music of a homosexual, Brooklyn -born Jew. David Edelstein, film critic for Slate
and NPR, also notes this irony. Moreover, during the 1920s and 1930s, fellow composers Roy Harris and Virgil
Thompson, both implicitly and explicitly, suggested that Copland’s ethnicity disqualified him creating authentic
American music. See Allan Kozin, “As American as Copland, Who Forged Our New Sound,” The New York Times,
July 25, 2005, accessed May 10, 2012,
http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9A01EFD8103FF93AA15754C0A 9639C8B63&pagewanted=all
288
135
CHAPTER 9
MUSIC, IRONY, AND THE FORMATION OF PRACTICAL IDENTITIES
Introduction
The following is a partial transcript of a home movie made by Brian Draper and Torey
Adamcik:289
Pocatello, Idaho. September 21, 2006, 8:05 PM *Brian Draper and Torey Adamcik are in a car,
Adamcik is driving and Draper is filming from the passenger seat. The car stereo is playing the
first movement of Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata*
Brian Draper, 16 years old: We’re going for a high death count
Torey Adamcik, 16 years old: Plus, we’re not going to get caught Brian, if
we’re going for guns, we’re just gonna end it. We’re just gonna grab the
guns and get outta there and kill everybody and leave.
BD: We’re going to make history…we’re gonna make history.
TA: For all you FBI agents watching this—
BD: *laughing*
TA: Uh…you weren’t quick enough. *laughing*
BD: You weren’t quick enough, and you weren’t s-s-smart enough. And
we’re going over to [Jane Doe 1’s] house, we-we-we’re going to snoop
around over there and try to see if she’s home alone or not, and if she’s
home alone, SPLAT! . . .She’s dead.
TA: Don’t put your humor into this Brian.
BD: Uh, I’m not putting any humor into it. . . .Yep, people will die, and
m-m-memories will fade.
TA: Memories will fade…Hmmm, I wonder what movie you got that
from, Brian?
September 21, 2006, 8:08 PM *The two boys are still in the car, and the stereo continues to play
Beethoven*
BD: We’re at [Jane Doe 1’s] house. It’s clear out there in the pasture.
We’ve already snooped around her house a couple of times. Uh, and shsh-she’s not at home so we’re gonna go to that church over there and
289
Adamcik v. Idaho. 34639 Idaho 121. Supreme Court of Idaho. 2011. Nov. 29, 2011.
http://www.isc.idaho.gov/opinions/Adamcik%2034639.pdf (accessed December 14, 2011).
136
we’re gonna call a girl and a guy named Cassie and Matt [Beckham,
Cassie’s boyfriend]. They’re our friends, but, we have to make sacrifices.
So, um, I feel tonight i-i-it is the night and I feel really weird…and stuff. I
feel like I want to kill somebody. Uh, I know that’s not normal, but what
the hell.
TA: I feel we need to break away from normal life.
September 21, 2006, 8:36 PM *In the car*
BD: We found our victim and sad as it may be she’s our friend, but, you
know what? We all have to make sacrifices. Out first victim is going to
be Cassie Stoddard and her friends…
TA: *Directed at a passing car* Turn your brights off, asshole!
BD: We’ll let you…*laughs* we’ll find out if she has friends over, if she’s
going to be alone in that big dark house out in the middle of nowhere
*laughs*. How perfect can you get? I, I mean, like, holy shit, dude.
TA: I’m horny just thinking about it.
…
BD: We’re gonna go down in history. We’re gonna be just like Scream 290
expect real life terms.
September 22, 2006, 8:28 AM *Draper walking down Pocatello Senior High School hallway.
Draper is talking to someone walking with him, possibly Adamcik. He then walks by lockers
where Cassie Stoddard is at her locker*
BD: Hey, look, it’s Cassie. Hello, Cassie.
Cassie Stoddard, 16 years old: *smiles* Hello.
BD: *laughs* I’m getting you on tape. Okay, Say “hi,” please.
CS: Hi.
290
This is a reference to the slasher film Scream (1996; dir., Wed Craven). Some of the details of their plan
to murder Cassie and her boyfriend while house-sitting closely mirror the plot of the film, particularly the beginning.
137
September 22, 2006, 12:18 PM *Adamcik and Draper sitting at a cafeteria table with the camera
facing them*
BD: Yeah, if you’re watching this we’re probably deceased.
BD: Hopefully this will go smoothly and we can get our first kill done and
then keep going.
…
BD: As long as you’re patient you know, and we were patient and now
we’re getting paid off, ’cause our victim’s home alone, so we got err, our
plan all worked out now…I’m sorry. I’m sorry, Cassie’s family, but she
had to be the one. We have to stick with the plan and, she’s perfect, so
she’s gonna die *laughs*.
September 22, 2006, 9:53 PM *Dark. Draper and Adamcik are sitting in a car*
BD: We’re here in the car. The time is 9:50, September 22 nd, 2006.
Um…unfortunately we have the grueling task of killing our two friends
and they are right in – in that house just down the street.
TA: We just talked to them. We were there for an hour, but…
BD: We checked out the whole house. We know there’s a lot of doors.
There, there’s lots of places to hide. Um, I unlocked the back doors. It’s
all unlocked. Now, we just got to wait and um…yep, we’re, we’re really
nervous right now but, you know, we’re ready.
September 22, 2006, 11:31 PM *Adamcik and Draper are driving in a car*
BD: Just killed Cassie! We just left her house. This is not a fucking joke!
TA: I’m shaking.
BD: I stabbed her in the throat, and I saw her lifeless body. It just
disappeared. Dude, I just killed Cassie!
TA: Oh my God!
BD: Oh, oh fuck. That felt like it wasn’t even real. I mean it went by so
fast.
TA: Shut the fuck up. We gotta get our act straight.
BD: It’s okay. Okay? We – we’ll just buy movie tickets now.
TA: Okay.
138
BD: *unintelligible*
TA: No.
BD: Okay. Bye.
On September 22, 2006, at approximately 11 p.m., in the sleepy town of Pocatello, Idaho,
Brian Draper and Torey Adamcik fatally stabbed fellow classmate and sixteen-year-old Cassie Jo
Stoddard at least twenty-nine times. Both teenagers were convicted of first degree murder and
conspiracy to commit murder, and were sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of
parole. The most damning piece of evidence against the pair was a video tape the two youth
made, excerpted above, in which they talk explicitly about the planning of the murder and react
to its immediate aftermath. Tried separately, each boy accused the other of the actual murder.
Both of the boys’ defense teams claimed that the video was merely a “mockumentary,” a faux
tale of murder in the spirit of The Blair Witch Project (1999). The video that the teenage murders
prepared was exceptionally detailed.
Torey Adamcik was a movie enthusiast and particularly a fan of the horror genre. 291
According to his parents, he spoke often about making it to Hollywood to work in the industry
and even made a few homemade horror films of his own. 292 Brian Draper held a deep
fascination with the Columbine High School shooters Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold. During
Draper’s trial, a portion of an essay Draper wrote, titled “Columbine,” that was entered into
evidence stated the following:
I am becoming more and more obsessed with Columbine. It seems
now that that’s all I think about. I would give anything to go back
in time, and be a part of Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold’s lives.
They are my heroes. I will follow in their footsteps and maybe I’ll
even meet them.293
This combination of interests, horror films and the Columbine shootings explains a good
bit about the boys’ (likely Adamcik’s, who was driving the car) unusual choice of music for the
291
In Coldest Blood First broadcast 18 July, 2010 by MSNBC.
http://www.livedash.com/transcript/in_coldest_blood/5304/MSNBC/Sunday_July_18_2010/ 375745/ (accessed
November 21, 2011)
292
Ibid.
293
In Coldest Blood.
139
first portion of the alleged “mockumentary.” Why would teenagers choose Beethoven’s
“Moonlight” Sonata as accompaniment for what they both believed would be the scene that
preceded the murder of their classmate? The answer may lie in a film that appealed to both
boys’ obsessions: Elephant (2003; dir. Gus Van Sant). The film is a fictionalized account of the
Columbine school shooting, and the music that is used in the film is the first movement of the
“Moonlight” Sonata.
Elephant (2003)
Directed by Gus Van Sant as part of his so-called “Death Trilogy,”294 Elephant is a
fictionalization of the events surrounding the massacre at Columbine High School in April of
1999 that left 13 people dead and 21 others injured. Created in the spirit and tradition of cinema
vérité,295 the film employs long, uninterrupted shots not unlike the style of documentary
filmmaking in order to enhance a sense of realism and naturalism. Moreover, the film is shot
with real high-school students (not actors over eighteen years of age passing as high-school
students), in a real high school (not a sound stage), without special effects, without the aid of
additional lighting, and without a script.296 The goal of cinema vérité is to represent life “as it
is.” Van Sant’s goal was to represent life as it could have been for both the perpetrators and the
victims.297
The film spends considerable time focusing upon the mundane and the ordinary in each
of the students’ lives. The extremely long shots that follow the students through their daily
routines make up the majority of the film and show each one chatting with friends, playing
sports, walking to class, or just observing others. It is not uncommon for Van Sant to use
continuous shots of five minutes or more. Even the lives of the killers, Alex (Alex Frost) and
Eric (Eric Deulen), and their unspeakable violence were filmed in such a way as to be “detached,
294
The films Gerry (2002) and Last Days (2005) comprise the remainder of the trilogy.
Cinema vérité, roughly translated at “Cinema of the real,” suggests, as Edgar Morin wrote: "There are
two ways to conceive of the cinema of the Real: the first is to pretend that you can present reality to be seen; the
second is to pose the problem of reality. In the same way, there were two ways to conceive cinéma vérité. The first
was to pretend that you brought truth. The second was to pose the problem of truth." Quoted in Peter Lee-Wright,
The Documentary Handbook (New York: Routledge, 2010), 93. Comments recorded at conference on cinema vérité
at the Pompidu Center, 1960.
296
Steve Head, “An Interview with Gus Van Sant,” http://movies.ign.com/articles/456/456118p1.ht ml
(accessed December 3, 2011)
297
Ibid.
295
140
mundane, and … boring” so that the violence portrayed in Elephant would be “uglier than a
movie.”298
While not attempting to re-make the actual events that occurred at Columbine, Van Sant
was trying to make “a dramatic piece that investigated a similar area that … would have been a
fictionalization … that approximated the mind [sic] of the kids that ended up shooting the school
and then killing themselves.”299
But while the film attempts to portray a kind of realism in a fictionalized world, the
characters are deliberately archetypical: “the jock and the girlfriend … the kid with the camera
… the kid with dyed-blonde hair who’s sort of his own entity, the three [popular] girlfriends, the
[nerdy] girl with glasses … they’re sort of icons of high school.”300 Additionally, the killers are
not portrayed as especially menacing or evil, although they are clearly not archetypal “highschool icons.”
The film documents lives of the students in the hour before the shooting, but it also
includes scenes from the lives of the killers the day before the shooting. Each of the major
archetypal characters is shown simply being a high school kid in the moments before the horror
erupts; the jock plays football and then meets his girlfriend, the artsy photographer takes pictures
of punks outside the school and then develops them in his darkroom, the nerdy girl is gently
chided by a gym teacher to wear her shorts instead of sweat pants, and the popular girls talk
about shopping and boys over lunch. Against this backdrop of banality we anticipate, with
mounting dread, the inevitable events to follow.
In one of the opening scenes of the film the camera is outside and static, while groups of
high-school students take part in various outdoor activities; boys play football, students run the
perimeter of the field, and cheerleading takes place in the distance. The camera is fixed, and
scenes of high-school normalcy drift in and out of frame with no discernible person or event
vying for our attention. After nearly a full two minutes a particularly handsome boy from the
football crowd places himself squarely in the center of the shot and dresses himself with a
hooded sweatshirt. It is characteristic of the film that such mundane happenings substitute for a
mainstream Hollywood kind of narrative drive. Uncharacteristically, however, this scene is
Gus Van Sant, “Gus Van Sant interview about Elephant Part 1/2,”
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nyyCOR3kL_g (accessed Dec 3, 2011).
299
Ibid.
300
Gus Van Sant, “Gus Van Sant interview about Elephant Part 1/2.”
298
141
imbued with a musical accompaniment, something almost entirely absent from the rest of the
film. After the boy, who will later be identified as “Nathan,” dresses himself, the camera finally
moves and documents his walk all the way into and then through the school, until he finally
meets his girlfriend. The scene lasts more than six minutes (and uses just one cut), during which
the entirety of the first movement of Beethoven’s “Moonlight” Sonata is heard.
The scene is remarkable, but not because of the extraordinary length of the shots.
Instead, this particular scene is the only one in the film that employs non-diegetic musical
accompaniment.301 The “Moonlight” Sonata in this scene portends the tragedy that will unfold.
Generically tragic associations have been ascribed to this work since its publication in 1802.
A review of Beethoven’s Op. 27 (along with his Op. 26) Sonatas dating from June 20,
1802 in the Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung notes that the work was written in the “terrifying
key of C sharp minor for good reason,”302 although the specific nature of the tragedy supposedly
expressed by it has changed. Over time, the tragic mood was variously ascribed as reflective of
negative elements in Beethoven’s personal life around the time of its composition. The sorrow
of losing Giulietta Guicciardi and the severity of Beethoven’s hearing loss were among the most
popular biographical elements informing the Sonata’s dark mood. 303
Acting in the not-uncommon way that film scoring does, the music knows more than
either the audience or the characters about the events to come. As we meet the students who will
be affected by the approaching, unseen horror, the “Moonlight” Sonata casts a sonic gloom over
the populace of the school. While the “Moonlight” Sonata, in this instance, functions as a
traditional film score, its recurrence later in the film will be infused with a sense of irony.
Midway through the film we see the two shooters hanging out with one another in a scene
that takes place the day before the shooting. The scene begins with a close up of Alex playing
Beethoven’s Für Elise on an upright piano.304 As we have come to expect throughout the film
thus far, the camera lingers on Alex and then slowly begins to turn away from him and toward a
light source. The camera’s slow pan is toward a near-ceiling window that reveals that we are in
his basement bedroom.
While it is true a few other scenes in the film use accompaniment, these works are modernist –without
melody or functional harmony and are better described as “soundscapes,” for instance: Tueren der Wahrnehmung by
Hildegard Westerkamp, Meeting of International Conference of Technological Psychiatry performed and recorded
by William S. Burroughs, and Walk through Resonant Landscape #2 by Frances White, among others.
302
Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung, 4/40 (June 30, 1802), column 652.
303
Michael Broyles, Beethoven in America (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2011), 176.
304
It appears that actor Alex Frost is actually playing the piece and not simply miming to a recording.
301
142
When the camera pans past the window, we hear and see Eric knocking at it. The camera
continues its pan in the same direction and will eventually complete nearly two 360-degree pans
of the basement bedroom. While the camera’s progress is generally steady, there is a noticeable
slowing when the camera passes over Alex’s bed, revealing the accoutrements of the sixteenyear-old’s living space. Here we come to “know” Alex about as well as anyone could in this
sparse film.
The shooter-to-be’s bedroom area is strewn with perfectly average adolescent decorations
and possessions: small barbells, homemade art and drawings, a stereo, a few trophies, a bit of
sports equipment, and a laptop, among other items. Nothing is at all out of the ordinary, nothing
would indicate cause for concern, nor does anything hint at what acts of terror a denizen of such
an ordinary space as this will commit. Van Sant uses this scene, like the other scenes of the
shooters the day before the crime, so that we vainly search for clues as to why these boys would
commit such horrid acts. He offers us nothing of substance, but instead a kind of parade of usual
suspect “causes” for the tragedy:
For instance, there wasn't really information about the kids who
killed their fellow students at Columbine … I guess in the
execution I was trying to insert the sort of greatest hits of theories,
as almost like clues, or tinctures of ideas that would make the
audiences' imagination carry through and think about the event
themselves.305
Following the camera’s inspection of the basement- bedroom, and coordinated with the
dark, agitated middle section of Für Elise, the camera slowly zooms in on Eric, who has since
settled himself on Alex’s bed, fussing with the laptop computer. When the scene cuts to show
the computer’s display, we see that Eric is playing a first-person shooter game. Van Sant is
teasing us with the idea that these shootings were the result of violent video games, a popular
theory immediately following the Columbine killings. But Van Sant complicates his
characterization of the killers precisely by showing Alex’s knowledge of and ability to perform
the cultivated art music of Beethoven.
Briony Hanson, “Gus van Sant.” The Guardian, Friday 16 January, 2009.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2009/jan/19/guardian-interview-gus-van-sant (accessed Dec 6, 2011)
305
143
Before he finishes the performance, the scene cuts forward in time, very briefly, to show
Alex playing the “Moonlight” Sonata. This is a rather striking moment in the film in that it
recalls the opening, and the only, instance of nondiegetic music in the film. The camera lingers
on Alex throughout his clunky, amateur performance of the “Moonlight” Sonata. Alex then joins
Eric on the couch to peruse online firearm sales websites, hinting at yet another of the popular
theories (the easy accessibility of firearms) concerning the motivation for the massacre.
The use of Beethoven in the basement bedroom scene is not, on the surface, at odds with
the visual narrative. There is nothing that would indicate a conspicuous indifference to or a
direct opposition with what we are seeing while the music is being performed. Instead, the
music, and in particular the act of its performance is distinctly at odds with who is performing; at
least the act of performing art music is at odds with what we know Alex will do.
A host of questions, possibilities, and subtexts –both related directly to the film’s
narrative and to the medium of film are raised directly by Van Sant’s characterization of Alex as
an amateur connoisseur of art music. Most obviously, Alex’s command of Beethoven raises
questions about the inner psyche of the killer-to-be. Van Sant demands that the audience
consider Alex not as a one-dimensional, cold-blooded caricature but instead as a complex, multifaceted adolescent whose motivations elude simplistic answers.
It also points to Alex as the psychological focus of the film. Where the other students in
the film are archetypes, Alex is arguably the only character who is fleshed out in any substantial
way. While we recognize the archetypes, Van Sant asks that we identify with, or at least to make
a serious attempt to understand, the killer. The director’s tilting of the narrative through music in
order to have the audience try to understand what would, in mainstream film, be a repulsive
character is reminiscent of the technique of one of Van Sant’s admitted influences, Stanley
Kubrick.
Perhaps one of the most obvious implications made by the use of art music in this film is
the connection to Kurbrick’s A Clockwork Orange, where the main character (Alex, incidentally)
is both a violent, anti-social brute and a Beethoven fanatic. In an interview with IGN Movies
about Elephant, Van Sant admits that “Kubrick’s a big influence.” 306 Like A Clockwork Orange,
Steve Head, “An Interview with Gus Van Sant.” http://movies.ign.com/articles/456/456118p1.ht ml
(accessed, Dec 6, 2011).
306
144
Van Sant’s film avoids easy answers and stock explanations as to why people sometimes do
horrific things.
Alex’s knowledge of Beethoven is important in offsetting the clichés that Van Sant has
planted regarding to the shooters’ motivation. The boys are shown in various scenes playing
violent video games, surfing websites that trade in firearm sales, watching Nazi propaganda
films, complaining about “the jocks,” and being picked on in class. Each one of these activities
could feed into a flat, two-dimensional reading of the murders. But these common-trade theories
are largely offset through Alex’s amateur performance of Beethoven, and through his
performance of Für Elise and “Moonlight” Sonata his character rises above a simple archetype.
Alex’s performance of the “Moonlight” Sonata also plays into the film’s overwhelming
sense of foreboding and anticipation which is largely achieved through a masterful manipulation
of chronology. Throughout the film each of the students’ narratives begins shortly before Alex
and Eric enter the school and begin their carnage. These individual narratives intersect at
different points and use subtle visual or audio markers to cue the audience, such as brief slow
motion or a bit of highly foregrounded dialogue. The warping of linear time keeps the audience
on edge, always wondering if the inevitable horror is just about to begin. It also keeps the
audience engaged in the mental construction of events, slowly piecing together the simultaneities
of the narrative.
When Alex performs the “Moonlight” Sonata in his basement, the audience attempts to
construct the chronology of events, recalling the performance of the work in the beginning of the
film. At first glance, it would seem that Alex and Eric are soon to be on their way to the school
to begin their carnage. But it will later be revealed that Alex’s basement performance occurs the
day before the shooting, although the audience has no way of knowing this while they see it
unfold. Strangely, Alex’s performance occurs later in the real time of the film than it does in the
time line of the dramatic narrative. These unusual chronological constructions are essential to
the film’s creation of a sense of foreboding.
The Beethoven in Elephant has a two-fold function. First, it increases the sense of the
ominous and anticipation in the drama through its slippery chronological placement within the
diegesis. Second, and more importantly, it leads the viewer to engage in a dialectic about the
nature and reliability of their knowledge of characters in filmic narratives and other members of
society.
145
The ironic deployment of the Beethoven exposes two deeper contextual layers. The first
has to do with what we as audience members know about the characters portrayed in our most
common cultural medium, film. The second deals a disruption to our notion that we, as members
of society, are able to identify, predict, and understand the behaviors of those who inhabit it with
us.
Elephant forces its viewers to reflect upon the idea that it knows its own culture and
society. By fictionalizing the events of a suburban, white, middle-class high school, the film
would seem to trade in the most common of American cultures. Additionally, the students in the
film are not characters in the traditional sense but archetypes. They are not individuals, per se,
but kinds of people, those whom we would recognize from our own experiences. The jock is
good-looking, plays football, has an attractive girlfriend with whom he is sexually active, and he
is doted upon by most of the female students at the school. The nerdy girl has glasses, is
bookish, a loner, and uncomfortable with her body and with the normal interactions of highschool life.
Alex is the exception to this rule; he does not fit in to an archetypal role, while his
murderous companion, Eric, more easily does. But this differentiation will wait until much later
in the film. During an early scene in the film, Alex is shown to be picked on by other students.
Additionally, he harbors an interest in firearms, is shown viewing Nazi propaganda films, and
even shares a shower and homoerotic kiss with Eric before he sets off to the school to begin the
rampage. All of these aspects of his life play into a common conception of the “bullied loner”
who eventually snaps and exacts a violent revenge upon his persecutors. This idea was
especially prevalent in the days following the Columbine massacre, although the reality of the
situation has been shown, not surprisingly, to be far more complicated than this.
Alex’s social and home environment seems to be playing right into the popular
conception of school shooters. With these archetypal characterizations, we have projected
practical identities upon the characters in the film. By setting up the audience to believe that
they can easily understand the killers and thus the reason for the shootings, Van Sant has allowed
for an experience of irony.
The occasion for irony arises when our assumptions about practical identities are
disrupted and cause us to become disoriented. As Jonathan Lear writes in A Case for Irony,
“irony breaks open a false world of possibilities by confronting one with a practical necessity.
146
The form of this confrontation is disruption: disruption of … practical identity…”307 Lear goes
on to say that “[t]he experience of irony thus seems to be a particular species of uncanniness –in
the sense that something that has been familiar returns to me as strange and unfamiliar. And in
its return it disrupts my world.”308
Van Sant hints as much when he says in an interview that he wanted
These small amounts of information within their environment [to]
be things that get you thinking about the actual event as a viewer.
If we knew … if we were positive about reasons why we thought
this happened, specifically, then we’d probably have put them in.
But it was always so elusive, exactly why, that it’s almost like it
could be the weather, you know, so we show, like, the clouds, you
know. And it could be, you know, madness, you know, so we
show him holding his head. And it could be all these different, you
know … the video games that their playing, it could be, you know,
things being thrown at him in the classroom. But, to say
specifically it’s one thing, or have a theory about exactly why? I
didn’t think about this while we were making it, but because the
question’s come up from some of the press members, I know that
it’s a very human umm … it’s in our interest to identify the reason
why so that we can feel safe, you know? We can identify the
reason why so that we can feel that we’re not part of it, you know?
That it’s demonized, and that it’s identified and controlled, you
know? So, to not have a reason, specifically, you know, like laid
out for you is against some types of nature, you know? It’s against
the detective, you know, that’s like trying to, like, discover the
reason why.309
Alex, largely through his performance of Beethoven, challenges our conceptions about
who within our society are recognizable as killers. We are shown here that we do not, in fact,
know nor can we predict which members of our society will act out in violent, tragic, and
unpredictable ways. The familiar designations ascribed to the high-school shooter, like those
particularly evident in the months after Columbine, are made radically unfamiliar. And it is in
this way that the ironic deployment of Beethoven forces us to recognize that our notion of
identities is inadequate.
307
Jonathan Lear, A Case for Irony, (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press), 15.
Ibid.
309
Gus Van Sant, An Interview With Gus Van Sant about Elephant 2/2.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hgmh6Ge0tTE&feature=related (accessed December 13, 2011)
308
147
But the ironic possibilities in Elephant go beyond our understanding of the characters in
the drama to the disruption of our perceived understanding of society. Elephant is the rare film
that goes beyond stable irony and allows the audience to experience deep, unstable irony. It
causes what Jonathan Lear terms “a breakdown in practical intelligibility.”310 He describes this
experience as a sudden understanding that the “identity I have hitherto taken as familiar [has]
suddenly become unfamiliar… What is peculiar to irony is that it manifests passion for a certain
direction.”311 We no longer know what to make of Alex or, by extension, the children in our
society who shoot and kill other children. We are lost as to what to do and where to go next.
Lear describes this by noting that while “an experience of standard-issue uncanniness [stable
irony] may give us goose bumps or churn our stomachs; the experience of ironic uncanniness
[unstable irony], by contrast, is more like losing the ground beneath one’s feet: one longs to go in
a certain direction, but one no longer knows where one is standing.”312
As audience members we are forced to reflect upon our prejudices and preconceived
notions of not only who are the children in our society that would perpetrate such a heinous
crime and why this is so, but also the notion that these things are at all knowable. The deep and
unsettling disturbances wrought by Elephant, in no small part brought about by the use of art
music, move the ground from beneath our feet in terms of both the characters in the film and
those very real members of our society. Brian Draper and Torey Adamcik of Pocatello, Idaho,
likely did not see the use of Beethoven in their film as a device that problematized the identity of
“murderer,” but instead saw and used it as a concretizing of this persona, as a practical identity
that, perhaps, they derived from an imitation of Alex in this film. They chose this music to
accompany a macabre home video that would, in their minds, hold the key to their fame long
after their planned killing spree and subsequent suicide was completed. These deeply disturbed
young people, their gruesome act, and their even more horrific intentions give truth to what Van
Sant cautions through Elephant: that we do not and cannot know when these random acts of
savagery will strike or who will commit them.
310
Lear, 18.
Ibid., 19.
312
Ibid., 18.
311
148
CONCLUSION
Irony is an important discursive mode and literary trope. It invites a debate about
meaning and significance, creates a feeling of community among perceivers (even if, on the
surface, it excludes), and draws them into morally- active engagement. Irony can allow for
conceptual points to be perceived more quickly and to be remembered longer than do literal
statements.
Art music has remained relevant to the wider popular culture partly through its use in
films, and ironic deployments of this music constitute one of its most sophisticated uses. It
makes perceivers aware of the surface features of a film, its multiple, deeper contextual layers,
and the complex interplay that takes place among them, which helps directors to make
conceptual and narrative points that transcend their immediate filmic narratives.
There are two basic kinds of irony: stable irony (irony as stimulus) and unstable irony
(irony as terminus). Unstable irony, which deals in infinite negation, seeks to point out the
fundamental incongruities of life. It calls into question values, mores, social norms, and
knowledge, a process that shakes the very foundations upon which we structure our lives and
existences.
Stable irony stimulates thinking, which serves to aid in the recognition of a true meaning
that lurks behind the surface; it allows for positive solutions. Stable irony is especially suited to
making ideological points because it assumes a shared value system between the ironist and the
perceiver. Moreover, through the four-part process of ironic dissembling –1) rejection of a literal
meaning, 2) substitution of possible alternative meanings, 3) decision about author’s values and,
4) decision upon new, true meanings –perceivers are more apt to agree with the author’s points
because, in a very real way, they are forced to engage in a rational process and arrive at an
understanding on their own.
In the so-called “Golden Age” of Hollywood film, circa 1933-1960, the narrative
elements, including and especially music, were standardized in order to create a product with the
clearest possible narrative. Composers during this period employed the stylistic elements of the
Romantic orchestral idiom as the lingua franca of cinema due to its cultural currency and in
particular its pre-ordained emotional connotations. Film scores during this period were
constructed around seven basic principles, as outlined by Claudia Gorbman: Invisibility,
149
Inaudibility, Signifying Emotion, Narrative Cueing, Continuity, Unity, and Violation in the
service of another principle. These principles are important, in that a violation of one or more of
these is a central factor in music’s potential to being read ironically.
With the sound film and the classical- Hollywood film score firmly ensconced as the
industry standard, there was an ideological shift away from the use of preexisting art music,
especially (but not surprisingly) by film composers. Films of the 1930s and 1940s were largely
saturated with original music in lieu of preexisting art music. But this began to change during
the late 1950s, when the baby boom generation stayed closer to home and their TV sets, and
stopped patronizing their local theaters as much as they had done in the past. Throughout the
1960s, as a way to try to regain some of the audiences they had lost, the major Hollywood
studios began to experiment with different filmic products, especially those modeled on
European Auteurism, which placed the control of the film in the hands of a single filmmaker and
not, as was Hollywood practice, in the hands of a committee.
The first major blockbuster success of the auteur approach to the use of preexisting art
music was Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. The entire score was drawn from latenineteenth- through mid-twentieth-century art music. Moreover, the way this music was
employed violated many of the principles of the classical Hollywood film score. The music’s
cultural associations are drawn upon and made an essential part of the film; they are reinforced,
opposed, juxtaposed, altered, and transformed by its use in 2001.
With the success of such a non-traditional film and its even less- traditional score – not to
mention the critical, box-office, and cultural success achieved by Kubrick’s follow-up to 2001, A
Clockwork Orange – the Hollywood establishment was more willing to take chances by placing
the various components of films under the control of individual directors. With the music
choices now in the hands of the auteur, the rules and conventions for music in films changed, and
art music has had a noticeable presence in films from the late 1960s until the present. Moreover,
ironically deployed art music became, if not a staple, a regularly used device by some of
Hollywood’s more sophisticated directors.
Ironically deployed art music in films must make itself known to the viewer. The most
obvious means of achieving this is through an incongruity, usually between the image- and
soundtracks. Once perceivers become aware of this incongruity, they are also made aware that
the film will stray in important and significant ways from standard, classical- Hollywood filmic
150
conventions. Viewers are drawn into active engagement, conscious that the film will in some
way challenge them to perceive the deeper contextual layers of the diegesis. This active
engagement allows filmmakers to make known subtle but important contextual layers within
filmic narratives.
Art music deployed ironically in films may be used in a number of ways. It may work
within the diegesis and engender a richer, more subtle rendering of the narrative and of the
characters that inhabit it, or it may make the audience aware of larger, more profound concepts
that may cause them to reflect upon their own ideas about life and how it should be lived.
In the films 28 Days Later, and Needful Things, the ironically deployed art music calls
into question our notions of religion and the role it supposedly plays within society, asking us to
reconsider our easily accepted notions of religion as a cultural adhesive. Casino also draws upon
the sphere of the religious, but in this case in order to make the tragic story of old Las Vegas a
universal one. The damnation and expulsion that Ace experiences is not so much a paradise lost
as it is an unleashing of Hell into the core of American society.
In both Junebug and The Madness of King George there are reversals of the stature of the
characters. In the latter, the high are brought low, and in the former the low are brought high.
Junebug, however, also sets a kind of trap for viewers, who are first reassured and confirmed in
the presumption of their own cultural superiority, only to have the rug pulled out from under
them in the end. In this way, Junebug has the viewer undergo a similar catharsis to that of the
film’s protagonist.
The Killing Fields and The Sum of All Fears demonstrate how the juxtaposition of images
and music can open audiences to oppositional narrative points. Where The Sum of All Fears
largely confirms the triumph of militaristic ideology, The Killing Fields openly challenges it.
In some cases, however, ironically deployed art music exposes deeper and far-reaching
ideological points that exceed the boundaries of the diegesis and the genre. Misery uses
preexisting art music (and noticeably inauthentic versions of it) to weave a complex dialectic
concerning the ideas of personal and artistic authenticity and the dangers of false art that goes
well beyond the film narrative. Apt Pupil uses Wagner’s music both in its original context and
with all of its accumulated cultural baggage in order to expose the transcendent nature of evil and
to characterize the Nazis as having a libidinal blood-lust.
151
In He Got Game director Spike Lee uses Copland’s music and its connotations as the
soundtrack for American Arcadia in order to place the stories of young African Americans
within the framework of idealized American mythology. By employing Copland’s music in a
conspicuous manner, Lee forces the perceiver to see both the mythologized rural, white America
and the modern, urban African American as pioneers, each having earned a place in the pantheon
of national archetypes by virtue of their values to family, self, and determination to endure
adversity.
In Elephant Gus Van Sant uses Beethoven’s music as a means of creating psychological
depth within the school shooter and as a way to have the audience reflect upon the nature of
horrific crimes and those who commit them. In a film deliberately populated with archetypes,
Elephant uses Beethoven’s music to individuate one of the killers. The archetypes allow the
viewer to assign practical identities to the characters in the film, and when the killer’s practical
identity is disrupted, largely through his knowledge of Beethoven’s music, it causes
disorientation.
This disorientation is a breakdown in practical intelligibility that makes viewers anxious
to discover a direction concerning their understanding of the killer and his reasons for causing
such destruction, but unstable irony does not provide us with a clear insight. The conceptual
ground beneath our feet is shaken, and we are moved by it, but we are not left with any
indication about what path we should take. All we are left with is the knowledge of our not
knowing.
The analysis of these films demonstrates that ironically deployed art music can engender
a deeper, richer, and a more substantial reading of filmic narratives. The recognition of this
irony can unmask deeper contextual layers that reveal or enhance major themes and narrative
points in the films and, in some cases, the ideology of the filmmaker. Moreover, music, through
its association and interaction with film, can reinscribe itself and its perceived meaning within
the wider culture. This means that art music continues to be relevant to our culture; music
acquires renewed meaning through its significant and sophisticated participation in the Western
world’s most popular artistic medium. The Romantic aesthetic, expressed by Schiller, that “The
real and express content that the poet puts in his work remains always finite; the possible content
152
that he allows us to contribute is an infinite quantity,”313 is seen in the meeting of film narrative
and art music.
Perhaps, in the future, scholars may investigate more ways in which the semantic content
of both music and film interact with and affect one another, or in which inroads toward a theory
of preexisting music and film might shed light on how the monuments of the past continue to
inform, transform, and be transformed by modern culture.
Friedrich Schiller, Schillers Sämmtliche Werke, in Zwei Bänden, Vol 2 (Stuggart: J. G. Gotta’chen
Buchhandlung, 1867), 1471. “Der wirkliche und ausdrückliche Gehalt, den des Dichter hineinlegt, bleibt stets eine
endliche; der mögliche Gehalt, den er uns hineinzulegen überlässt, ist eine unendliche Grösse.” Translation found in
Charles Rosen, The Romantic Generation (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1995), 93. Rosen does not
cite his source.
313
153
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FILMOGRAPHY
28 Days Later. DVD. Directed by Danny Boyle. 2003; US: 20th Century Fox Home
Entertainment, 2003.
Apt Pupil. DVD. Directed by Bryan Singer. 1998; Culver City, CA: Columbia TriStar Home
Video, 1999.
Cashback. DVD. Directed by Sean Ellis. 2007; New York: Magnolia Pictures, 2008.
Casino. DVD. Directed by Martin Scorsese. 1995; Universal City, CA: Universal, 2005.
Elephant. DVD. Directed by Gus Van Sant. 2003; Los Angeles, CA: HBO Home Video, 2003.
He Got Game. DVD. Directed by Spike Lee. 1998; Burbank, CA: Touchstone Home Video,
1998.
Junebug. DVD. Directed by Phil Morris. 2005; US: Sony Home Pictures Entertainment, 2006.
The Killing Fields. DVD. Directed by Roland Joffé. 1984; Burbank, CA: Warner Home Video,
2001.
The Madness of King George. DVD. Directed by Nicholas Hynter. 1994; Los Angeles, CA:
Hallmark Home Entertainment, 2001.
Misery (Collector’s Edition). DVD. Directed by Rob Reiner. 1990; Hollywood, CA: Columbia
Pictures, 2007.
Needful Things. DVD. Directed by Fraser C. Heston. 1993; Santa Monica, CA : MGM Home
Entertainment, 2002.
Reiner, Rob. “Director’s Commentary.” Misery (Collector’s Edition), DVD. Directed by Rob
Reiner. Hollywood, California: Columbia Pictures, 2007.
The Sum of All Fears. DVD. Directed by Phil Alden Robinson. 2002; Hollywood, CA:
Paramount, 2002.
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BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH
Matthew McAllister is currently a professor of Humanities at Valencia College in
Orlando, Florida. He earned his undergraduate and Masters’ degrees from West Chester
University of Pennsylvania where he studied under Sterling E. Murray. He produced a thesis and
critical edition of a set of symphonies by Thomas Alexander Erskine, Sixth Earl of Kelly, which
were the first galant-style symphonies to be published in the British Isles during the eighteenth
century. His research interests include the interaction of art music and popular culture and
eighteenth-century instrumental music and music making.
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