Musical Appropriation and Cultural Memory in Contemporary American Cinema

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MUSICAL APPROPRIATION AND CULTURAL MEMORY IN CONTEMPORARY AMERICAN CINEMA

KATHERINE M. REED

A DISSERTATION PRESENTED TO THE GRADUATE SCHOOL OF THE UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY

UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA

2015

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This dissertation would not have been possible without the support of the faculty at the University of Florida and my dissertation committee in particular. From my first semesters in the musicology program, Silvio dos Santos has been supportive (and still critical) of my work, encouraging me to explore areas that interested me and to constantly search for new approaches to the musicological problems I ran into. Jennifer

Thomas’s courses pushed me beyond my comfort zone in music history, helping me to think through concepts that underlie this dissertation, though in vastly different repertoires. In Alex Reed’s theory courses, I relished the opportunity to explore yet more musicological approaches, particularly the semiotic theory that forms a foundation for this project.

Outside the music department, too, UF’s faculty have been open, helpful, and challenging, especially in my interdisciplinary cognate work in the English department.

In Robert Ray’s film courses, many of the ideas in this dissertation began to coalesce.

Throughout those courses and this dissertation process, I have appreciated not only his vast knowledge and thoughtful critiques, but also his patience with a musicologist whose interest in film outweighed her knowledge.

In the long journey of the dissertation from vague idea to finished document, I owe a great debt of gratitude to my family and friends. First, to my parents, Bill and

Michele Reed, who are always willing to take a phone call and listen to my frustrated venting. My father has been patient throughout this whole process, providing emotional, financial, and automotive support – that last one more frequently than he should have needed to, unfortunately. Special and unending thanks go to my mother, editor extraordinaire. Her professional expertise helped turn my ramblings into a much

sharper, more coherent whole, despite our stylistic differences (long live the Oxford comma). My brother, Michael, too, has listened to more than his fair share of my rambling musings and existential crises with no complaint. I also thank Gregory Brown who, in nightly phone calls, frequent Skype sessions, and more than a few panicked breakdowns, has supported me (and somehow stayed with me) through this often stressful degree.

I would also like to thank my musicology cohort, Sarah Bushey and Morgan Rich.

As sounding boards, both ladies have been invaluable throughout our six years at UF.

More importantly, though, we have supported each other through the long days of seminars, grueling exams, and frustrating dissertation writer’s block. Without them, this whole process would have been torturous if not impossible.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

page

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ...... 3

LIST OF FIGURES ...... 7

LIST OF EXAMPLES ...... 9

ABSTRACT ...... 10

CHAPTER

1 INTRODUCTION ...... 12

Recent Approaches to Film Musicology ...... 17 Methodology: Semiotics and Musical Appropriation ...... 22 A Note on Terminology ...... 32 Chapter Organization ...... 34

2 THE CHANGING TIDE OF MUSICAL APPROPRIATION IN HOLLYWOOD, 1963-69 ...... 41

Musical Reuse Pre-1968: Casablanca ...... 44 Post-1968: New Hollywood’s New Sound ...... 48 Kenneth Anger and the Development of Musical Appropriation ...... 56 Film, Semiotics, and Musical Appropriation ...... 61 Conclusion ...... 65

3 “OUR IMAGES TOOK ON AN ALMOST MUSICAL RHYTHM”: MUSIC AS STRUCTURAL ELEMENT IN THE FILMS OF TERRENCE MALICK ...... 70

“A Sense of Things” Through Sound: Musical Shorthand in Early Malick Films ..... 78 Between Grace and Nature: Music and Filmic Form in The Tree of Life...... 90 Conclusion ...... 124

4 MUSICAL PERFORMANCE, AUDIENCE INTERACTION, AND NOSTALGIA IN THE FILMS OF DAVID LYNCH ...... 128

Nostalgia Reaffirmed and Challenged: Blue Velvet and “In Dreams” ...... 136 “No hay banda!”: Illusion and Narrative Structure in “Crying”/“Llorando” ...... 159 Wild at Heart: Allusion, Nostalgia, and an “Aesthetics of Phoniness and Fakery” 175 Conclusion ...... 196

5 REMAKE/REMODEL: MUSICAL APPROPRIATION AS REINVENTION IN THE FILMS OF TODD HAYNES ...... 199

Haynes as “New Queer Cinema” Auteur ...... 201 The Voice, Physicality, and Mediated Identity in Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story ...... 208 “The Ability to Escape a Fixed Self”: The Star Image through Performance in I’m Not There ...... 218 Singing the Alien: Velvet Goldmine’s Glam Rock as a Tool to Rewrite History ..... 228 Conclusion ...... 252

6 CONCLUSIONS ON MUSICAL APPROPRIATION IN FILM ...... 255

Velvet Goldmine and the Ongoing Fan Experience ...... 257 New Institutions in New Media ...... 262 Conclusion ...... 264

REFERENCES ...... 266

BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH ...... 277

LIST OF FIGURES

Figure page

2-1 Scorpio Rising’s popular iconography...... 57

3-2 Comparison of overtones in A) Schulwerk and B) Spacek voiceover ...... 83

3-3 The Tree of Life’s appropriated music...... 102

3-4 Typical lighting in A) a “grace” sequence and B) a “nature” sequence...... 111

4-1 Unlimited semiosis’s chaining effect (adapted from Roland Barthes, Mythologies, trans. Annette Lavers [New York: Hill and Wang, 1972], 115). .... 137

4-2 Ben performs “In Dreams”...... 143

4-3 Frank and Jeffrey in the spotlight...... 145

4-4 Betty and Rita solve a mystery...... 160

4-5 Roy Orbison, “Crying” lyrics, first iteration of form...... 164

4-6 “Crying”/ “Llorando” visual framing...... 165

4-7 “Crying”/“Llorando” visual form...... 165

4-8 Diane and Camilla at the fateful Mulholland Drive party...... 169

4-9 Lula and Sailor in “Love Me,” with an unaffected audience behind...... 181

4-10 Sailor and Lula, “Love Me Tender”...... 187

5-1 Rufus Wainwright, “Going to a Town,” directed by Sophie Muller (2007: Geffen Records)...... 206

5-2 Example of Superstar’s current state of decay, from YouTube upload by user Outcasting Tube...... 217

5-3 I’m Not There’s Bob Dylans (clockwise from top left): Woody (Marcus Carl Franklin), Jude (Cate Blanchett), Arthur (Ben Whishaw), Billy (Richard Gere), Robbie (Heath Ledger), and Jack (Christian Bale) (I’m Not There, directed by Todd Haynes [2007; Los Angeles: Weinstein Company, 2008], DVD)...... 220

5-4 Costume similarities between A) Brian Slade as Maxwell Demon, singing “Baby’s on Fire” and B.) David Bowie as Ziggy Stardust, singing “Changes” at the Hammersmith Odeon, July 3, 1973...... 239

5-5 Slade and Wild in Velvet Goldmine mirroring Bowie and Ronson on Ziggy Stardust tour...... 245

5-6 Wild and Slade through the eyes of their fans...... 249

6-1 Arthur’s fan response to Brian Slade’s bisexuality...... 258

LIST OF EXAMPLES

Example page

3-1 Mahler, Symphony No. 1 (The Tree of Life arrangement), mm. 1-10 (author’s transcription)...... 103

3-2 Mahler, Symphony No. 1, measure 10 – 12 (Gustav Mahler, Symphony No. 1 [Vienna: Universal Edition, 1906])...... 104

3-3 J.S. Bach, Toccata and Fugue in D minor, mm. 41-46. (Johann Sebastian Bach, Toccata and Fugue in D Minor [Leipzig: Breitkopf and Härtel, 1867])...... 109

4-1 Rebekah del Rio, “Llorando,” mm. 1-4 (author’s transcription)...... 162

4-2 Elvis Presley vocal line for “Love Me Tender” (written by Presley, George R. Poulton, and Virginia Matson [1956: RCA Records), verse (author’s transcription)...... 189

4-3 Nicolas Cage vocal line for “Love Me Tender” (1990 Wild At Heart recording), verse (author’s transcription)...... 189

4-4 Elvis Presley vocal line for “Love Me Tender” (1956 recording), refrain (author’s transcription)...... 189

4-5 Nicolas Cage vocal line for “Love Me Tender” (1990 recording), refrain (author’s transcription)...... 189

Abstract of Dissertation Presented to the Graduate School of the University of Florida in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy

MUSICAL APPROPRIATION AND CULTURAL MEMORY IN CONTEMPORARY AMERICAN CINEMA

Katherine M. Reed

May 2015

Chair: Silvio dos Santos Major: Music

Film audiences cannot escape the power of music. Beyond the ubiquitous inclusion of newly composed underscoring, common since the early days of cinema, the borrowing of pre-existing popular and orchestral music is increasingly widespread in

American film. The appropriation of a musical work in a compilation soundtrack operates differently than would an original film score: as a pre-existing cultural artifact, borrowed music brings to a film its own attendant meanings, as well as audiences’ memories, which are altered in the new context of a film. With the growing popularity of the compilation soundtrack, this process has become yet more integral in the structure and communicative power of contemporary film. Despite the recent expansion in studies of music and the moving image, this conflation and complication of memory, history, and meaning through musical appropriation has received little scholarly attention.

This study explores the way that musical appropriation alters the relationship between a film and its audience. Using Umberto Eco’s theory of semiotics, I examine the process by which musical reuse creates and changes meaning. Case studies drawn from the films of directors Terrence Malick, David Lynch, and Todd Haynes illustrate a new trend in musical appropriation, one which creates a space for greater audience

interpretation and which draws on viewers’ memories and experience. I argue that musical appropriation plays an integral role in the development of this new, dialogic mode of reception in which audiences are forced to take a more active role in the creation of meaning. Haynes’ films in particular show the power of such appropriation when used to focus on the spectator and his or her agency; this focus encourages extensive, uncommon, and documentable participation with the text. By showing the interpretive potential of these moments of appropriation, this dissertation offers a new avenue of inquiry in the growing study of musical appropriation in film, providing one new and fruitful methodology for understanding our relationships with the media that surround us.

CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION

In the spring of 2010, I wrote a paper for an introductory musicology seminar. I decided to approach one scene in a favorite film, analyzing the ways that the movie’s music made the whole scene intelligible. I chose the Club Silencio scene of David

Lynch’s Mulholland Drive.

In this first attempt to make sense of the film, I addressed Angelo Badalamenti’s score. This seminar paper ended up serving its purpose, but did not satisfy my questions about the scene and how its music operated, why it stuck with me and troubled me. The more time I spent with the subject, the more clear it became that my niggling questions about the scene came not from the newly composed score but from the other music in the Club Silencio: Roy Orbison’s “Crying.” Why was this song here, and what purpose did it serve? I understood that somehow this scene held a key to the experience of the whole film, but I wasn’t sure how, or why, this appropriation of

Orbison’s hit communicated so much. I tried to understand its meaning, exploring the gender roles it questioned, the relationship of the song’s lyrics to the film’s plot, and even the significance of the history surrounding Orbison’s song. The scene continued to fascinate me as it seemed to require this type of engagement. The sequence only functioned in the whole of the film if the spectator was willing and able to follow Lynch down a rabbit hole of chaining meanings. As a viewer, I found this active engagement frustrating, enthralling, and very different from a typical movie-watching experience.

This use of “Crying” shows, in microcosm, the problems that prompted this project: how does the appropriation of a musical work into a film change both media?

Apart from this change, what of the implicit alteration of all that surrounds the original

song: memory, history, context? In the hands of Lynch, this song attains a rich second life through Mulholland Drive, creating a snowballing chain of meaning that builds upon

Orbison’s original. How can this change be theorized and understood? Perhaps most importantly, how does this musical appropriation fundamentally alter the way an audience apprehends and relates to a film?

In order to address these and other questions, this dissertation analyzes a variety of instances of musical appropriation in contemporary American films, concentrating on the semiotic process involved. The chain of meanings prompted by the pre-existing song, hinted at above, operates as what Umberto Eco calls unlimited semiosis. In this process, the expression and content of a sign becomes the expression of a new content, a procedure which continues, drawing the audience ever further into an understanding of that original sign.1 Eco’s theory sees interpretation as bounded by codes, which guide the interpreter into a deeper understanding of the original sign.

Though any sign could prompt such a chain of signifieds, certain filmmaking decisions amplify and make use of this semiotic function. By incorporating music and images with strong associations in a new context that does not provide extensive explanation, a film can in effect force its audience to actively create a new meaning.

Contemporary American filmmakers have embraced this semiotic openness, exploiting it to create a new, more active mode of reception in which the audience is given greater authorial control. It is for this reason that the majority of my case studies concentrate on works from directors David Lynch, Terrence Malick, and Todd Haynes, all of whom foster unlimited semiosis in their musical appropriation. This group is chosen for the way

1 Umberto Eco, Theory of Semiotics (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1976), 126.

the directors engage with their audiences: not operating as a closed text separated from its audience, each example depends upon a shared social treasury of knowledge and memory, the nexus of which is music. Lynch, Haynes, and Malick are not unique, of course, in their recourse to familiar music. Many other contemporary directors (for example, Baz Luhrman, Quentin Tarantino, and countless more) incorporate popular music in their films. The directors on whom I focus, though, use this music as a means to open active engagement with the audience, rather than incorporating music as a static marker of place, time, or culture. In these musical moments of connection, the films I analyze foster a specific brand of chaining meaning, altering both the music and the film and, in the process, changing the way that audiences consume and interact with these films. These directors and their works show a development in the use of music in film, if not an organized “movement” or “school.” Still, thanks to common cultural forebears, these three directors – Malick, Lynch, and Haynes – all show the possibilities for a more experimental sort of musical appropriation. Through these case studies, my dissertation addresses an important trend in film music: namely, this new and more authorial mode of reception.

Like the above scene from Mulholland Drive, each of the scenes analyzed in this dissertation presents a well-known song in a new context within a film and, through this appropriation, effects a change in the song. Theorist David Neumeyer refers to this relationship as “flipping” the accepted view of music’s role as “added value” in film.2 The term “added value,” originally coined in this context by Michel Chion, refers here to the

2 “Panel Discussion of Film Sound/Film Music,” Velvet Light Trap 51 (March 2003), 80.

way that music can change the image against which it is juxtaposed.3 This added value explains the way in which different music tracks – for example, using Brahms’ Lullaby in the place of Bernard Herrmann’s score for Psycho – can substantially alter the perceived meaning of a scene. As Neumeyer points out, the relationship is much less commonly viewed as operating equally well in the reverse, with the film substantially altering its music. I propose that we view the relationship between music and film as symbiotic, not as two separate registers of influence: “added value” implicitly prioritizes the image track, an unspoken imbalance to which Neumeyer seems to be responding. I view these scenes more holistically and address the addition and chaining of meaning through the nature of the interaction between the film and its audience, which then allows me to investigate the way that both media are changed in their operation together. Finally, I consider the actual effects of such appropriation on the audience’s experience of and interaction with both the film and the reused musical text, exploring the altered relationship between text and consumer which is fostered through the use of pre-existing music.

Appropriation of music acts differently here than would a quotation from another film, a poem, or a play. Indeed, many of the films I discuss incorporate these types of references, too, but their musical usage stands apart as operating in a different way.

This may be attributable to music’s more immediate meaning and memorative qualities.

Noël Carroll has written of music as the adverbs and adjectives to film image’s noun, acting as modifiers that expand our experience of the film.4 While this analogy is not the

3 Michel Chion, Audio-Vision: Sound on Screen, trans. Claudia Gorbman (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 21.

4 Noël Carroll, Theorizing the Moving Image (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 141.

clearest or most scientific way of addressing the phenomenon, it nonetheless points to the power of music to immediately and concretely change an audience’s comprehension of a film. In this way, musical appropriation differentiates itself for the kind of visual or plot quotations also present in these films. Though those quotations can expand one’s understanding of a movie, verbal and visual references tend not to act with the same immediacy and link to memory that music can.

I present a variety of case studies with a central goal: to clarify the process of meaning creation that transforms both music and film in instances of musical appropriation. I begin with a close reading of each scene before delving into potential interpretations. Viewing each case as an example of Umberto Eco’s unlimited semiosis,

I do not aim to assign an absolute truth or single correct interpretation, but instead explore reading contexts. Stopping short of assigning a meaning was intentional as, in

Barthes’s words, “to interpret a text is not to give it a (more or less justified, more or less free) meaning, but on the contrary to appreciate what plural constitutes it.”5 These case studies are meant to show the variety of ways that each film guides interpretation and encourages the audience to take an active, creative role: in each, I seek to identify the codes, frames, and social encyclopedia of knowledge that inform acts of interpretation.

By following each chaining instance of unlimited semiosis, this project expands our understanding of the relationship among audience, text, and creator.

As an investigation of the viewer’s creation of meaning, these case studies are necessarily, as Robynn Stilwell states, a form of performance, incorporating some form of “analytical fantasia, rooted in the material of the subject text, but also bearing the

5 Roland Barthes, S/Z, trans. Richard Miller (New York: Hill and Wang, 1972), 5.

distinct fingerprints of the interpreter.”6 Stilwell discusses the importance of case studies to the field of film musicology, identifying this form as the building block of the discipline, without which “expansive theory can be a little like putting on the roof before the foundation is laid.”7 My case studies, then, serve as the foundation for a new understanding of the spectators’ mode of reception of a film and its music. If Ludwig

Wittgenstein’s proposed goal for Philosophical Investigations was to “teach you differences,” my aim here is similar.8 My study seeks to deepen our understanding of musical appropriation’s efficacy by presenting a variety of case studies that approach a similar phenomenon from different angles, rather than presenting a single overarching theory that might explain all instances. Through these examples, I examine a new sort of film-spectator relationship, one fostered by musical appropriation.

Recent Approaches to Film Musicology

My project will expand on the growing field of critical studies of pre-existing music in film. Despite the prevalence of the practice in filmmaking, it has, until recently, received relatively little serious scholarly attention. In fact, many film music scholars tend to concentrate on the practice of composing for films (particularly those films of the silent and Classical Hollywood eras), rather than the reuse of existing works. Film scoring offers the researcher a greater wealth of archival material in cue sheets, countless memos between composers and producers, and other bits of detritus of the

Hollywood system, while the practice of musical appropriation in film is often poorly

6 Robynn Stilwell, “Case Studies: Introduction,” in Oxford Handbook of Film Music Studies, ed. David Neumeyer (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014), 418.

7 Ibid., 419.

8 For this attribution, see, for example, Ray Monk, Ludwig Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius (New York: Free Press, 1990), 536-37.

documented.9 Authors like Nathan Platte have increased our understanding of music in the studio system through archival study.10 Long studies on the film work of single composers abound, as do shorter close readings of single films.

As a hybrid field of study existing within and between at least two disciplines (film studies and musicology), film musicology has grown to include a wide variety of topics, methodologies, and materials. In some of the original film musicology monographs of the 1980s and ’90s, scholars like Claudia Gorbman and Kathryn Kalinak were concerned with defining the field. Their Unheard Melodies11 and Settling the Score,12 respectively, helped to codify our understanding of scoring practices and traditional

Hollywood musical usage. Similarly, composer and theorist Michel Chion’s Audio-Vision provided a sound studies grounding from which to discuss film music, borrowing from his training with Pierre Schafer.13 These earlier works gave film musicology a common terminology and way of understanding the tradition of film scoring. From this established common base, work on music in film has expanded to encompass a very wide variety of topics.

9 See, for example, in studies of reused music, Katherine Spring, Saying It With Songs: Popular Music and the Coming of Sound to Hollywood Cinema (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013); and Jeff Smith, The Sounds of Commerce: Marketing Popular Film Music (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998). Most documents pertaining to musical reuse are copyright billings or short notes from music editors and are available in industry collections like the Warner Bros. Archive at the University of Southern California; these are far less common and far fewer than are, for example, sketches and scores for film music. 10 Nathan Platte and David Neumeyer, Franz Waxman’s Rebecca: A Film Score Guide (New York: Scarecrow Press, 2012).

11 Claudia Gorbman, Unheard Melodies: Narrative Film Music (London: BFI Publishing, 1987).

12 Kathryn Kalinak, Settling the Score: Music and Classical Hollywood Film (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1992). See also Kalinak, A Very Short Introduction to Film Music (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010).

13 Michel Chion Audio-Vision: Sound on Screen, trans. Claudia Gorbman (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994).

We might see contemporary film musicology as dividing broadly into two fields: first, studies of canonical single films, composers, or scoring techniques; and second, works dealing with theoretical and reception-based issues. Studies of pre-existing music in film tend to fall into this second category, as scholars are typically less concerned with tracing the conditions that led to the inclusion of a certain composition so much as understanding its effect. In spite of the general lack of extrafilmic materials, the study of musical appropriation is attracting more critical attention, though sometimes not of the same rigor with which others study scoring. As Robynn Stilwell observed, there has existed a bias against the study of this area, consisting, as it frequently does, of popular music within a popular, commercial medium.14 Since the 1990s, musicology as a whole and film musicology in particular have become much more open to the study of these popular forms.

In the years since Stilwell’s survey of the field, scholarship has expanded to include this significant subset of film music: pre-existing popular music, not works that are composed and recorded to accompany film. In essay collections such as Changing

Tunes: The Use of Pre-Existing Music in Film and Beyond the Soundtrack:

Representing Music in Film, as well as many more monographs and articles, scholars are now addressing the myriad theoretical issues related to the use of pre-existing music in film. Many concentrate on canonical examples of reuse, such as Brief

Encounter and Raging Bull. This growing literature on pre-existing music takes a variety of forms, sometimes documenting the decision-making process which brought a particular work into the final version of a film, or perhaps including a close reading of

14 Robynn Stilwell, “Music in Films: A Critical Review of the Literature, 1980-1996,” Journal of Film Music 1, no. 1 (2002): 19-61.

one such usage. In the collection Pop Fiction, for example, each chapter investigates a single case study of musical reuse to come to a clearer picture of the practice as a whole.15 Many of these studies use semiotics to show how a musical quotation conveys a clear and consistent meaning. In doing so, though, studies like Mike Cormack’s on

Raging Bull ignore a larger issue: how do these films use familiar music to open an evolving dialogue with their audiences? My study does propose some interpretations for instances of musical appropriation, but I intervene in the existing scholarship by bringing the focus not to these specific, stable meanings, but instead to the process by which new meanings are created.

In addition to studying the meaning of music in specific movies, recent research seeks approaches to a comprehensive understanding of the act of listening in film spectatorship and in some cases incorporates theories from cultural studies with great success. Anahid Kassabian’s work in particular has expanded this field. From her early monograph Hearing Film, Kassabian has approached film music through the spectator’s relationship to a movie and its music.16 While Gorbman, Chion, Kalinak, and other scholars in the first wave of film musicology concentrated specifically on the relationship between music and image, Kassabian and other contemporaries explore audience reactions as a way to better understand the efficacy of music in film, and the role that music plays in this hybrid medium. Some, like Philip Tagg, study audience reactions

15 Pop Fiction: The Song in Cinema, edited by Steve Lannin and Matthew Caley (Bristol, UK: Intellect Books, 2005).

16 Anahid Kassabian, Hearing Film: Tracking Identifications in Contemporary Hollywood Film Music (New York: Routledge, 2000).

through experiments with a pool of respondents.17 In Kassabian’s case, this means turning to feminist and gender theory to explore the role of music; she does not address the semiotic issues that complicate these lines of communication, but does tacitly invoke the idea of a social encyclopedia of knowledge, which Eco posits as an important part of semiosis.

Like Kassabian, Annette Davison also incorporates theoretical approaches from cultural studies in order to better understand music’s function in mainstream and art cinema, most notably in her Hollywood Theory, Non-Hollywood Practice. Here Davison theorizes Hollywood scoring techniques as a baseline against which avant-garde cinemas can define themselves musically and create new meanings.18 Davison takes as one of her case studies Lynch’s Wild at Heart, analyzing its treatment of sound as a break from Hollywood tradition which allows the film to create meaning in a different way. My work is indebted to Davison’s in two ways: her identification of genre’s importance in Lynch’s work, and her concentration on subversive technique in the director’s use of sound. I also address Lynch’s works as breaking from industry norms in terms of sound considerations, but I locate its power in his appropriation rather than his sound design. Davison is chief among commentators who locate the subversion of

Lynchian works as an effect of his close relationship to classic Hollywood practices; I, too, see this relationship to cinema history as deeply important in Lynch’s films, though I analyze it semiotically as one of the shared frames that allows for audience comprehension.

17 See, for example, Philip Tagg, “Musical Meanings, Classical and Popular: The Case of Anguish,” 3, last edited 2004, http://tagg.org/articles/xpdfs/musemeuse.pdf.

18 Annette Davison, Hollywood Theory, Non-Hollywood Practice: Cinema Soundtracks in the 1980s and 1990s (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004), 185-6.

My study intervenes in a field which typically addresses musical appropriation in order to pinpoint a specific meaning for each instance, proposing instead an investigation of the process by which such appropriation alters the film-spectator relationship. Sharing with these authors a theoretical and hermeneutic basis, my study expands this area to include a broader semiotics of musical appropriation. Using similar tools, my project expands upon these studies of musical meaning and the audience’s role to more fully understand the altered mode of reception and audience interaction through unlimited semiosis.

Methodology: Semiotics and Musical Appropriation

In the following chapters, I present a variety of case studies with a central goal: to clarify the process of meaning creation that transforms both music and film in instances of musical appropriation. I begin with a close reading of each scene before delving into potential interpretations. Viewing each case as an example of Umberto Eco’s unlimited semiosis, I do not posit an absolute truth in these interpretations, but instead explore reading contexts. These readings are meant to show the way that each text guides interpretation: in each, I seek to identify the codes, frames, and social encyclopedia of knowledge that inform acts of interpretation. By following each chaining instance of unlimited semiosis, this project expands our understanding of the relationship between audience, text, and creator.

The scenes I analyze in this study highlight show how appropriation adds new meanings to the already-existing common cultural understanding of a song: in this way, the scenes are comparable to Umberto Eco’s concept of unlimited semiosis. As Eco explains in his Theory of Semiotics, unlimited semiosis is the process by which a sign, both in expression and content, becomes the expression of a new content in a chain of

meaning which continues to spiral out in this way.19 For example, in the Mulholland

Drive “Crying” scene, the meaning and sound of “Crying” becomes the expression of a new meaning (the unrequited love between Betty and Rita), which then become the expression of yet another meaning. Using Eco’s theory as the ground for my methodology also brings to bear many of his related concepts, particularly the idea of coding and of the open work, both of which are problematic in part because of Eco’s own evolving positions on each. Through the various examples, I will clarify the relationship of each of these semiotic aspects to the problem of musical appropriation in film. Rather than relying on a pool of respondents for data about the semiotic effect of these sequences, I instead incorporate public responses to the films from scholars, popular critics, and fans. Examining these reactions, I add my own reading of the moments of musical appropriation to arrive at a deeper understanding of the way these moments change the relationship between a film and its audience. These responses betray the effects of unlimited semiosis and offer a window into the film-spectator relationship through which to frame my investigation.

Umberto Eco’s theories of semiotics are most fitting for my project in part because of Eco’s enduring focus on popular culture as a worthy and important area of study, and his emphasis on meaning as a cultural unit.20 For Eco, construction of meaning occurs among the audience, text, and author, and, most importantly, is culturally situated. As Peter Bondanella has noted, Eco’s theories navigate the ground between existing frameworks, dealing with the object or text within its cultural milieu

19 Umberto Eco, A Theory of Semiotics (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1974), 126.

20 Eco, Theory of Semiotics, 62.

and, perhaps most importantly, giving weight to popular culture at a time when such studies were viewed as frivolous.21 Eco framed his approach as a balance between the

“apocalyptic intellectuals” of the Frankfurt school, who viewed popular culture as a sign of cultural degradation and the “integrated intellectualism” of Marshall McLuhan, whom

Eco saw as too closely entwined within the popular culture system.22 Eco saw both these poles as problematic: the apocalyptic intellectuals dismissed popular culture, while the integrated intellectuals were too ingrained in the system to effectively critique it. For Eco, popular culture criticism was not only important from a scholarly vantage point, but also for the public as a whole. In his approach to comics, film, music, and literature, Eco blends semiotics with a focus on the audience as a way to understand the role of the creator, text, and audience in the creation of meaning from a cultural object.

Eco’s 1974 A Theory of Semiotics codified this approach.23 His earlier work also dealt with issues of meaning-making and conveyance, but typically not through a strict and solely semiotic lens. Early Eco owes much to structuralism, but in the development of his position from A Theory of Semiotics onwards, Eco shows a more fluid methodology. Here Eco outlines the foundations of his semiotic theory, with debt to

Ferdinand de Saussure and important twentieth-century semioticians like Hjemslev and

Roman Jakobson, and introduces the idea of an unlimited semiotics: a chaining of meaning whereby the sign-function (expression and meaning together) becomes the

21 Peter Bondanella, “Cultural Theory and Popular Culture: From Structuralism to Semiotics,” in Umberto Eco’s Alternative: The Politics of Culture and the Ambiguities of Interpretation, ed. Norma Bouchard and Veronica Pravadelli (New York: Peter Lang, 1998), 210.

22 Bondanella, 212.

23 Umberto Eco, Theory of Semiotics (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1974).

expression of a new meaning, and this new sign-function undergoes the same transformation.24 This chaining structure, first posited by Charles Sanders Peirce and made famous in a related form by Roland Barthes in his Mythologies,25 operates slightly differently in Eco’s formulation. For Barthes and others following him, the chaining process showed the way in which connotation operates: one sign can start the interpretive process and potentially lead to connections to a widely varied array of topics. For example, Barthes reads wrestling as a theater of the human condition, allowing him to see explorations of suffering, the concept of justice, and even political underpinnings in the artifice of a professional wrestling match.26 For Eco, though, this sort of snowballing is not unlimited semiosis, but hermetic drift, a freer and less restricted process. Eco differentiates unlimited semiosis from hermetic drift by virtue of their end points: the first leads the reader to know something more about the original sign, not to know something else.27 The linking of continuous substitutions of this sort does not merely lead the reader to a different interpretation, but brings him or her asymptotically closer to a final reading. Thus the unlimited semiosis in my examples brings the spectator closer to the heart of each film, not further afield through a series of expanding associations.

Though Eco, following Peirce, names the process “unlimited,” he argues that such snowballing is not without end, but is guided by shared codes and expectations.

The author and ideal reader will share a cultural codex, allowing reasonable meanings

24 Umberto Eco, Theory, 126.

25 Roland Barthes, Mythologies, trans. Annette Lavers (New York: Wang and Hill, 1972), 112.

26 Barthes, Mythologies, 7-12.

27 Umberto Eco, Limits of Interpretation (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990), 28.

to be created: because both author and reader share an understanding of the codes of a text, certain interpretations can be dismissed as unfitting, giving the first real limitation on “unlimited semiosis.”28 In this way, Eco explains the process by which an individualized interpretation is reached, while still grounding such interpretation in a shared cultural setting. Throughout a series of studies stretching from the 1970s through the 1990s, Eco crafts a more nuanced approach that is applicable to a broad variety of media and concentrates specifically on the way the audience relates to a given text. In Eco’s semiotics, monolithic, static meaning is not conveyed by the sign or created text; rather, meaning is collaborative, a changing form created by the interaction of creator, text, and audience in a particular cultural environment. As Eco states, “the transcendental meaning is not there and cannot be grasped by an eidetic intuition . . . but if the sign does not reveal the thing itself, the process of semiosis produces in the long run a socially shared notion of the thing that the community is engaged to take as if it were in itself true.”29 Thus the interpretations I forward in the following chapters are not expressions of a fixed “transcendental meaning,” but rather one interpretation, guided by cultural codes and intertexual frames.

Even before A Theory of Semiotics, Eco explored meaning in myriad cultural forms, including music, literature, and other composite media, like comics and films, specifically through the films of Antonioni. His semiotics of film evolved much as his general semiotics, and through his film work, Eco expanded upon important concepts like that of the idea of a social treasury of knowledge, a concept inherent even in his

28 Eco, Interpretation and Overinterpretation, 41-3.

29 Eco, Limits, 41.

early iterations of semiotic theory.30 In relation to many media, Eco theorizes that texts are comprehensible to certain readers because they share a basis of cultural knowledge that makes the text’s signs intelligible. In his later work, he expanded upon the idea of this “global encyclopedia,” and its inherent power structures.31 This idea is of central importance to my case studies, where meaning depends on the ability to twist and alter this powerful shared archive. Through concepts like the global encyclopedia, Eco explores, across his career, the way that a text prompts a certain interpretation and, with it, a broader habit of interpretation in the audience.

Also in A Theory of Semiotics, Eco first broaches the topic of codes, or the shared knowledge that provides a guideline for interpretation.32 Eco calls these codes

“rules of competence” that allow for understanding, stating that situations which are uncoded, or where the interpreter lacks these rules of competence, truly show their necessity.33 Imagine, for example, a first-time attendee at a drag show: though familiar

English words like “shade,” “reading,” and “queen” might be used, they would not be comprehensible in that situation for our hypothetical observer, who lacks the coded cultural knowledge to understand. This same sort of shared cultural knowledge allows musical appropriation to operate in each of my case studies; without that assumed cultural treasury, musical meaning is too loosely defined to be functional in these contexts. Through his understanding of codes, frames, and the idea of the Model

30 See, for example, Eco, Theory, 111-113.

31 Francesco Casetti and Barbara Grespi, “Cinema and the Question of Reception,” Eco’s Alternative, 270.

32 Eco, Theory, 129.

33 Ibid.

Reader,34 Eco’s semiotics offers a way to look at a distinctly American form within its cultural milieu and to explain its meaning creation in a culturally situated way. The

Model Reader, according to Eco, is one “able to deal interpretively with the expressions in the same way the author deals with them generatively,”35 pairing an appropriate interpretation with each text by grounding that interpretation in a similar social treasury or encyclopedia. In each of my case studies, then, I forward an interpretation as the

Model Reader posited by each text.

It is, in part, this culturally situated focus of Eco’s theories that draws the most criticism: his concept of codes continues to be a sticking point for many commentators.

Since A Theory of Semiotics, Eco has continued to explore and expand upon what is meant by “code” in his theory. For Eco, a code is the common cultural grounding that allows the reader to make sense of a text. While this seems unproblematic on the surface, commentators have taken issue with the way that codes seem to indicate that there is some sort of higher truth to be unlocked by the cracking of said code. Richard

Rorty, one of the most prominent critics of Eco’s approach, takes issue with the implication that cultural codes and textual frameworks forward a single “correct” interpretation of a text. For Rorty, who voices a concern shared by many of Eco’s critics, the hermeneutic circle would dictate that a text does not exist in and of itself, but only in its most recent interpretation or “turn of the [hermeneutic] wheel.”36 For Rorty, there are

34 The Model Reader is a construct that comes from the text itself: the text posits its model reader, who shares the appropriate cultural encyclopedia to read and interpret the text.

35 Eco, Role, 7.

36 Richard Rorty, “Pragmatist’s Progress,” in Interpretation and Overinterpretation, ed. Stefan Collini (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 95.

not incorrect readings of text, but “uses by different people for different purposes.”37

This criticism is in direct response to Eco’s differentiation between use of a text, wherein a reader makes a text do something or match a pre-existing framework, and interpretation of a text, wherein the meaning a reader creates from the work should match the internal logic of the work itself.38 In fact, Eco only states that certain interpretations may be more appropriate or more in line with the text than other uses; he does not propose that any meaning should be stable or correct. As Eco states, “The possibilities which the work openness makes available always works within a given field of relations . . . we can say that the work in movement [open work] is the possibility of numerous different personal interventions, but it is not an amorphous invitation to indiscriminate participation.”39 Eco’s theory of interpretive openness as tempered by common cultural understanding mirrors the structured ambiguity of musical appropriation in film.

Although Eco’s semiotic theory is also a natural fit for the study of music, in the burgeoning field of musical semiotics, his approach has not yet been taken up with the same rigor as have the theories of Peirce, Greimas, and Jakobson.40 Eco’s theory of semiotics opens a largely unexplored avenue in the analysis of music in film.41 Though

37 Rorty, “Pragmatist,” 106.

38 Rorty, “Pragmatist,” 95.

39 Eco, Role of the Reader, 62. Original emphasis.

40 See Jean-Jacques Nattiez, Music and Discourse: Towards a Semiology of Music, trans. Carolyn Abbate (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990); Eero Tarasti, A Theory of Musical Semiotics (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994); and V. Kofi Agawu, Playing With Signs: A Semiotic Interpretation of Classic Music (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991); respectively.

41 Eco has been used by some musicologists, most notably Robert Samuels, though Samuels concentrates on Eco’s discussion of codes, not delving into unlimited semiosis. See Robert Samuels, Mahler’s Sixth Symphony: a Study in Musical Semiotics (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995).

originally a tool for linguistic study, semiotics has found adapted applications in musicology since the 1980s. Musicologists like Philip Tagg have enumerated the ways that application of purely linguistic procedure can be a misleading fit for music, highlighting the unfixed and culturally specific nature of musical signifieds, in contrast to the greater stability of language.42 Indeed, as Tagg states, the focus on syntax over semantics that has marked musicological semiotic study does not effectively deal with the myriad issues of musical signification.43 Because of this difficulty, I apply a theory of semiotics that is not strictly structuralist, but culturally situated and designed to be applied to a variety of different media.

In the work of Kofi Agawu, Jean Jacques Nattiez, and Eero Tarasti, musical semiotics expanded quickly and found many applications, especially within the framework of the Classical canon.44 Philip Tagg’s semiotic work bears some similarities to mine, especially in his semantic rather than syntactic focus. Tagg, however, deals more with large empirical pools of data in order to understand the workings of smaller musical-semiotic units, or musemes. Like the lexeme, the museme carries with it a semi-stable meaning; in his experimentation, Tagg identifies these musemes and the respondents’ comprehension of them in a variety of musical contexts. Though I am concerned with musical meaning in similarly shifting landscapes, my research does not

42 Tagg, “Musical Meanings,” 3.

43 Tagg, “Musical Meanings,” 4.

44 See, for example, Kofi Agawu, Playing with Signs: A Semiotic Interpretation of Classic Music (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991); Jean-Jacques Nattiez, Music and Discourse: Toward a Semiology of Music, trans. by Carolyn Abbate (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990); Eero Tarasti, A Theory of Musical Semiotics (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994).

seek to identify these small units of meaning, but instead to examine the way the musical object as a whole is transformed.

The concept of codes is the definitive difference between earlier theories of musical semiotics and my application of Eco. For example, Agawu’s sign system is one that is based in strictly conventional meanings: his semiotics of Classic music understands meaning in this repertoire as operating through the common understanding of topics, musical figures that convey a set meaning. Rather than acting as the social encyclopedia described by Eco, Agawu views Classic compositions as forming more static and direct connections, in the manner of a dictionary. Though Agawu studies the notion of play in these works, it is (in his formulation) play that is made possible by the rigidity of expectation, not the openness fostered by each work.

In the opposite direction, Nattiez, in his Music and Discourse, finds untenable

Eco’s insistence on codes as guides for semiosis. Here I disagree with Nattiez: the idea of a truly unlimited semiosis, not bounded by codes or frames as Eco suggests, makes little sense and, indeed, is not very useful. Nattiez was writing prior to Interpretation and

Overinterpretation as well as Limits of Interpretation, both of which clarify and hone

Eco’s terminology and concepts. In a broad sense, though, Nattiez’s issue with the concept of codes seems to be not with Eco’s formulation so much as with the concentration on communication as a central aspect of a semiotics. For me, this is one of the more important and convincing aspects of Eco’s theory, as it allows me to analyze the way that these moments of musical appropriation actually operate and how they alter the film-spectator relationship.

A Note on Terminology

In formulating this project, terminology proved to be one of my greatest stumbling blocks. Though many scholars discuss the use of pre-existing music in film, a clear and consistent terminology has not yet been established to delineate between different kinds of reuse or even concisely label this technique. “Borrowing” brings with it, as Peter

Burkholder’s database shows, centuries of connotation in relation to music, many of which are not appropriate to my study.45 For my purposes, I have chosen to label earlier, more strictly codified tradition as “musical reuse,” and the more semiotically open variety shown in my extended case studies as “musical appropriation.” As Chapter

2 explores, these two strands of a similar tradition are different enough in effect and practice to justify separate labels. Both are also distinct from borrowing, quotation, and the myriad other terms which are close in colloquial meaning to my chosen terminology.

Because each of these terms has its own history in the discourse surrounding music, some additional explanation is required.

Appropriation is more active than reuse and implies an agent acting upon an object. In the case of the appropriation I discuss, this agent may be understood as either the director or a character on screen. In either case, their action is important, as it provides the grounding for the audience interaction I identify in these scenes. It also implies that this action fundamentally changes the object in question, usual transforming it into the property of the person appropriating. This fundamental transformation is key to the cases I examine. Indeed, many ownership and copyright disputes surrounding these films stem from the fact that the instance of appropriation has somehow acted

45 See J.Peter Burkholder, general editor, Musical Borrowing: An Annotated Bibliography, accessed August 23, 2012, http://www.chmtl.indiana.edu/borrowing/index.html.

upon the original object to change it. In addition, “appropriation” has long been used by art critics and historians to discuss the wholesale importation of an artistic object into a new context in order to invoke a reconsideration of the original; the Oxford English

Dictionary cites one such usage dating from 1895. My usage of the term does not completely align with this art historical appropriation, as the instances I analyze frequently have goals other than commentary on the original text.

I employ the term “appropriation” in order to avoid unintended meanings associated with the term “borrowing” and to highlight specifics of the semiotic process in these cases (the invocation of works and their indexical meanings, that is, those acquired through experience). The concept of borrowing has acquired specific meanings over centuries of musicological discourse and, in many cases, it means something quite different from my usage.46 In works dating back to the Quem dicunt homines parody Masses47 and even earlier, composers have often reused musical materials, but the meanings of those borrowed works are not always intended to be invoked. J. Peter Burkholder outlines a taxonomy of borrowing that concentrates on the incorporation of any material from pre-existing works in newly composed musical compositions, with meaning serving as a final and subsidiary concern. Though this sort of borrowing does occur in film scores (as, for example, in the Ennio Morricone score for

Days of Heaven), my project focuses instead on the appropriation of complete musical sign-functions (works and their meanings). I refer in this project not to the lifting of

46 See, for example, J. Peter Burkholder, “Borrowing,” Grove Music Online, accessed August 23, 2012 Oxford Music Online.

47 The parody Mass is one modeled on another polyphonic composition, here a motet. In such cases, both melodic material and texture were borrowed (see Lewis Lockwood “A View of the Early Sixteenth-Century Parody Mass,” The Department of Music, Queens College of the City of New York Twenty-Fifth Anniversary Festschrift, ed. by Albert Mell [(Np.): Q.C. Press, 1965]).

certain melodic motives or harmonic progressions, but to the insertion of complete, purposefully recognizable works into a new context. The semiotic process also influences this choice in terminology: these works are appropriated as sign-functions, along with their original meanings, and are transformed in ways that specifically use the meaning conveyed by these signs.

In the films of Lynch, diegetic appropriation48 motivated by characters themselves will be differentiated as “performative appropriation.” This performative appropriation most frequently aides characters’ construction of an identity or persona through the appropriation of pre-existing cultural signs. In these cases, the spectator can understand the use of this song as the action of a character, since the sound emanates within the scene and Lynch typically clearly codes the music as motivated, showing its source. These instances involve little outward change to the musical object itself, closely replicating aural aspects of the original. The main alteration inherent in this musical appropriation is change in meaning, not in sound, as the selected works are intentionally left, in most cases, very close to their original form.

Chapter Organization

Though musical appropriation has a long and varied history in film, the following case studies are drawn exclusively from recent American films. This circumscribed focus is intentional: since successful unlimited semiosis relies on shared cultural codes,

48 The terms diegetic and non-diegetic, in relation to film music, have been debated by scholars like Ben Winters, James Buhler, and Robynn Stilwell for their efficacy and clarity. For my purposes, though, “diegetic” remains relatively unproblematic: I use it to refer to what is also known as “source music,” or music which can be understood as emanating from a source within the scene (for example, from a radio or a band performing). For more on this debate, see Ben Winters, “The Non-Diegetic Fallacy: Film, Music, and Narrative Space,” Music and Letters 91, no. 2: 224-44; Robynn Stilwell, “The Fantastical Gap Between Diegetic and Nondiegetic” in Beyond the Soundtrack, ed. Daniel Goldmark, Lawrence Kramer, and Richard Leppert (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007), 184-202; and David Neumeyer, “Diegetic/Nondiegetic: A Theoretical Model,” Music and the Moving Image 2, no.1.

contemporary American cinema presents the most logical source for my study. I narrow the pool of potential case studies yet further by focusing on unlimited semiosis in the service of a secondary purpose, not mere musical reuse. Each of the case studies is designed to address a specific facet of intentional, meaning-laden musical appropriation. Though the practice of inserting well-known works is widespread, and is also frequently intended as a sort of musical shorthand, I am interested in the cases that are more complicated and are structured in such a way as to open up a wider range of possible interpretations. In these case studies, then, I concentrate on examples of appropriation that are roughly contemporary, highlight the function of unlimited semiosis, and help to understand it, creating a typology of musico-filmic unlimited semiosis. After exploring these varied uses, I then focus on the potential of musical appropriation for changing the mode of reception. My conclusion explores the online afterlives of some of these filmic texts and considers the way musical appropriation can help to form a different relationship between the film and its spectator.

In choosing the examples for this study, I have followed Tagg’s assertion that an investigation of a musical semiotic practice should be determined by cases that are linked intertextually in practice (using the same musical approaches) and paramusically by observers (shown to be similar in the way that they are received).49 The following chapters include a range of case studies, organized to show the breadth of unlimited semiosis in its many facets. All are from mainstream Hollywood films and reuse well- known pre-existing works as more than mere affective underscore. Paramusically, these cases are linked by reviewers and even by the filmmakers themselves; Todd Haynes,

49 Tagg, “Musical Meanings,” 4.

for example, has spoken of the connection between David Lynch’s Blue Velvet and his own films.50 My case studies are organized loosely chronologically and grouped into chapters by director. This chronological ordering shows a progression from more traditional, strictly-coded musical reuse to a complex, much less semiotically restricted appropriation. The final examples are separated not only by their more intimate interaction with the audience, but also by their effect, explained in The Role of the

Reader as a dual response: emotional and energetic.51 The energetic response carries the greatest possibility for analysis. As Eco explains it, a work can cause its audience to feel a reaction (emotional), and also to create some sort of change in habit or action

(energetic). Through the energetic response, we can theorize the power of musical appropriation: when it culminates in unlimited semiosis, appropriation can alter the way an audience perceives, interprets, and responds to a song and a film. Chapters 3 through 5 highlight clear examples of the energetic response.

Chapter 2 draws the boundaries of musical appropriation by exploring the historical and intellectual divide between early reuse and later “appropriation” as I define it. Each of the films discussed reuses well-known works, but these instances do not necessitate the sort of audience engagement that marks instances of unlimited semiosis. Specifically, films like Grand Hotel, Casablanca, and even 2001: A Space

Odyssey do not prompt the energetic response Eco describes. Rather, each of these films appropriates music for other reasons, whether aural or stylistic. They do not necessitate active audience interpretation but instead merely activate a knowledge of a

50 Rob White, Todd Haynes (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2013), 148.

51 Umberto Eco, The Role of the Reader: Explorations in the Semiotics of Texts (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1979), 194.

musical work as a token of a type, standing in for some more complicated form of explanation. By exploring the moments of filmic musical appropriation that show a sort of limited or carefully controlled semiosis, I am able to more clearly define the phenomenon of unlimited musical semiosis in the following chapters, as I examine scenes that epitomize Eco’s concept and show the great variety of its various occurrences.

Chapter 3 consists of examples from Terrence Malick’s films and serves as a turning point in my discussion. Within this study, Malick acts as a transitional figure due to the evolution of his musical reuse. While Days of Heaven shows a fairly straightforward use of music as a static cultural marker, his later films like The New

World and The Tree of Life prompt a much more complex sort of audience engagement, pointing toward the sort of examples that make up the next two chapters. My examples from Malick’s films are marked by the way in which the pre-existing music is almost seamlessly integrated into musical sections composed specifically for each film. In each, the meaning conveyed by music is central to the plot and integral to an understanding of the images shown. Beyond this, Malick’s reuse changes the way we may approach and think about canonical art music: his appropriation comments mainly on the objects at hand in a scene, on the plot, image, and the music itself. The musical appropriation in The Tree of Life is far-reaching, calling upon musical history and

Biblical interpretation in order to articulate its new meaning. Malick’s use of the art music canon shows the way that a common Hollywood practice, when engaging directly with its audience through cultural memory, can result in substantive change through unlimited semiosis.

Chapter 4 takes scenes of musical performance in Lynch’s films as a lens through which to consider the role of nostalgia in the spectator’s mode of reception. A specific nostalgia tinges his films and is often realized through and complicated by musical works. In films like Blue Velvet, Mulholland Drive, Wild at Heart, Lost Highway, and Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me, Lynch presents a recognizable but distorted past, communicated in large part through his re-presentation of pop songs. Because of his consistent, purposeful manipulation through musical appropriation, examples from

Lynch’s oeuvre make up the majority of my case studies. I examine cases like the aforementioned Mulholland Drive scene in which Lynch uses an audience surrogate to more carefully code and direct his own audiences’ mode of reception, as in Blue Velvet and Mulholland Drive. This chapter’s final examples, from Wild at Heart, analyze that film’s self-conscious reuse of cultural objects as a foregrounding of Lynch’s own technique of appropriation.

Chapter 5 uses case studies from Todd Haynes’ films to examine the way that musical appropriation can prompt a new sort of historiography. These Haynes examples explore the possibilities of music as a malleable historical text, rewriting history through the manipulation of its musical artifacts. Both the past and its music are texts to be used, in the hands of Haynes, and their use often serves as purposeful rewriting. Both the meaning and historical facts surrounding musical works are at play for Haynes, making his films unique in their treatment of pre-existing, archived material. His focus on the mutability of the archive (both collective and personal) sets Haynes apart from these other filmmakers. This concentration on history is not only reserved for large, societal narratives, but for individuals as well. In I’m Not There, Superstar, and Velvet Goldmine,

each of Haynes’ characters constructs his or her own history and identity through the cultural artifacts they encounter and produce; the most prominent of these is music.

This theme of personal identity and history allows Haynes to connect with his audience, empowering them through their consumption of his films to curate and newly create their own histories from that cultural product just as his characters have.52

Through these various studies, I will clarify both the concept of unlimited semiosis in relation to musical appropriation in film and the ways we can understand instances of this process. By incorporating many case studies in a sort of typology, I am able to show the breadth and variety of the practice within contemporary filmmaking and, hopefully, differentiate truly meaningful appropriation from the mere insertion of popular song into a narrative. The most important aspect of my central case studies, though, is the effect of each: by reusing well-known music, each of these films is able to comment upon and alter something beyond itself, be it our perception of a musical work or style, the director’s own oeuvre, a moment in history, or our own relationship with cultural products. Especially in the final case studies, this energetic response is central.

Unlimited semiosis is truly unlimited when its effect reaches well beyond the boundaries of the text that spawns it – not only in layering meaning and allusions, but in alteration of an audience’s habits of interpretation. Haynes’ films in particular show the power of such appropriation when used to focus on the spectator and his or her agency; this focus encourages extensive, uncommon, and documentable participation with the text.

By showing the interpretive potential of these moments of appropriation, this

52 For Haynes’ comments on this audience empowerment, see Rob White, Todd Haynes, 150-151.

dissertation serves as an intervention in the growing study of musical appropriation in film, providing one new and fruitful methodology for this field.

40 CHAPTER 2 THE CHANGING TIDE OF MUSICAL APPROPRIATION IN HOLLYWOOD, 1963-69

As Dennis Hopper and Peter Fonda’s apocalyptic road trip begins in Easy Rider

(1969), music draws the audience into a specific cultural moment. Silence accompanies the shots immediately preceding the opening credits, except for the diegetic sound as

Fonda checks his watch, discards it, and revs his engine to “head out on the highway.”1

With a snare drum hit, the film’s credits begin over the Steppenwolf anthem “Born to be

Wild.” In affect, the driving rock beat fits the energy of the moment, while the lyrics align closely with the celebratory freedom we see in the faces of Hopper and Fonda. The action of these opening moments is also loosely linked to the rhythm of the music, as some shots are edited on the beat, to align with the musical phrases in “Born to be

Wild,” most notably on the introduction of Jack Nicholson’s name in the credits and on the entrance of the chorus. In addition to these purely aural musical features,

Steppenwolf’s song accomplishes yet another task: it grounds the film and its characters in a cultural subgroup, tied to the radical moment of the late 1960s. More than the protagonists’ attire or actions, “Born to be Wild” immediately creates a connection with the spectator and his or her historical understanding or experience of the counterculture in 1969. Musical reuse grounds the spectator in a time, place, and milieu. Produced by an independent studio and made to speak to the experience of contemporary youth, Easy Rider clearly communicates its premise through the notes of

“Born to be Wild.”

The musical reuse in Easy Rider distinguishes music in this independent film from that of Classic Hollywood: here pre-existing music is not only used for affective

1 Steppenwolf, “Born to be Wild,” Steppenwolf. RCA Records, 1968.

appropriateness to a particular scene, but is meant to create a personal, real-world connection to the viewer. In contemporary films like The Graduate, music accomplishes a similar task. Earlier Hollywood films did not typically insert popular music as underscoring, with a few notable exceptions.2 Films centered around performers like

Elvis Presley, Bing Crosby, or even the Beatles used contemporary music, but these songs were frequently released in conjunction of the film and meant to boost each others’ sales. New Hollywood films typically appropriated songs which were currently popular outside of the film and, as such, brought with them their own meanings and links to audience memory. As a rule, pre-existing music in Classic Hollywood was reused with rather fixed meaning; when a piece was quoted or inserted in its entirety, the work generally brought with it an accepted interpretation and served as a sort of shorthand for the film, allowing a clear invocation of an affect or idea without necessitating verbal reference. Around 1968, we can observe a shift in the use of pre- existing music: like the above scene from Easy Rider, films now fostered a more open and individualized sort of referentiality in reused music. By surveying typical cases of musical reuse both before and after the turning point of 1968, this chapter will identify the experimental forebears of this New Hollywood approach to musical appropriation and clarify the tradition out of which Terrence Malick, David Lynch, and Todd Haynes developed their own radical appropriation.

Though music of the Western art canon has been repurposed to accompany film almost since cinema’s inception, the appropriation in film of art music and of popular

2 See the examples of “Rock Around the Clock” in Blackboard Jungle, any number of Elvis Presley movies, or the earlier popular songs discussed in Katherine Spring, Saying It With Songs: Popular Music and the Coming of Sound to Hollywood Cinema (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013).

music have rather different histories. Many silent film cues came from well-known art music classics; indeed, the famed cinema orchestras of the period recorded almost exclusively art music, rather than newly composed music for film.3 In the early days of sound synchronization, pre-existing music often played a central role in films. As

Katherine Spring has argued, the film industry of the late 1920s and early 1930s not only incorporated popular music, but was actually set up to promote this synergy.4 Using film studios’ own music publishing arms, movies were able to promote popular music in a way that, Spring says, presaged the development of the compilation score.

Though industry structure changed, jettisoning (for the most part) these music publishing ventures, the stylistic conceit of reused familiar music remained and grew, relying increasingly on well-known art music. This tradition of reusing classical music continued, growing strong in Classic Hollywood films. Grand Hotel (1932), for example, prominently features the Blue Danube Waltz in its opening and closing scenes. In some films, these musical cues are integral to the plot; for example, David Lean’s Brief

Encounter (1945) features Rachmaninoff’s Piano Concerto No. 2 in an almost leitmotivic manner to connote protagonist Laura’s desire and conflicting emotions surrounding her affair.5 Introduced concurrently with moments of tension in Laura’s romantic encounters, the Piano Concerto thus gains a set meaning through the structure of the film and its soundtrack. Even in these more complex early cases, though, the meaning of

3 See Philip Carli, “Sounds of Silents: Recordings of Motion Picture Musicians Made in The Silent Period” (keynote lecture presented at Music and the Moving Image conference, New York, June 2, 2013).

4 Katherine Spring, “Say it with songs: Popular music in Hollywood cinema during the transition to sound, 1927-1931” (PhD diss., University of Wisconsin - Madison, 2007), 7-8.

5 Mike Cormack discusses the implications of this particular instance in “The Pleasures of Ambiguity: Using Classical Music in Film” in Changing Tunes: The Use of Pre-Existing Music in Film, eds. Phil Powrie and Robynn Stilwell (Burlington: Ashgate, 2006), 19-30.

appropriated music is limited. In perhaps the most famous example from this period,

Michael Curtiz’s Casablanca (1942) incorporates “La Marseillaise” and “As Time Goes

By” in a nuanced example of this codified tradition of meaning manipulation through pre- existing music.

Musical Reuse Pre-1968: Casablanca

Max Steiner’s score for Casablanca can be seen as a culmination of a decade of experimentation and adjustment in scoring techniques, realizing the potential of the strategies used in Grand Hotel and others of its time period. The Steiner score is organized around the use of a series of pre-existing leitmotifs, much more so than the films discussed above. After introducing all of the film’s leitmotifs except “As Time Goes

By” in its opening titles, Steiner recombines and manipulates these motives to highlight dramatic tension. The score provides each of these potentially ambiguous motives with a solidified meaning in Casablanca. His use of the already meaning-laden “Marseillaise” melody shows this leitmotivic approach most clearly. Used to signal France, resistance, and freedom in general, the “Marseillaise” theme returns throughout the film in different guises: first with a shot of the Casablanca police headquarters, later in its famous juxtaposition against “Die Wacht am Rhein,” and also in Captain Renault’s symbolic refusal of Vichy water at the film’s close, to name only a few instances.

More important than this organized deployment of leitmotifs, though, is Steiner’s use of the transition between diegetic and non-diegetic scoring as a tool for shifting time and perspective while controlling meaning. The film’s central flashback presents the clearest example: the score not only ushers in the flashback, but accompanies it throughout and facilitates the return to the present time of the film. After Rick orders piano player Sam to “play it,” the song “As Time Goes By,” the sequence travels from

December 1941 in Casablanca to pre-German invasion Paris. This temporal shift is accomplished as much through music as through the film’s visual aspects. As Sam plays the first iteration of the song’s melody, the camera pans to Rick, slowly moving in to a close-up that rhymes with an earlier shot of Ilsa listening to the same tune. The focus on this shot becomes softer as Sam begins the second statement of the tune’s A section and a non-diegetic orchestra joins Sam’s piano. The music creates what

Robynn Stilwell has called a “fantastical gap,”6 carrying the viewer along with Rick’s remembrance of Paris and Ilsa. Within this undefined space between diegetic (or source music) and non-diegetic music, spatially unmoored music is able to imply identification with certain characters and color the viewers’ perception of the scene at hand in ways that more grounded music may not.

This flashback itself is a fine example of the sort of grammatical scoring that became commonplace in the Classic Hollywood film.7 Immediately after the temporal shift, Steiner’s score incorporates the “Marseillaise” theme again, highlighting a shot of the Arc de Triomphe. The underscoring continues through a sequence of shots showing

Rick and Ilsa together in and around Paris. Another shift in diegetic position occurs as the score slips back into the diegesis, this time as a big band to which the couple dances. The score is absent only for select moments throughout the entire sequence,

6 Robynn Stilwell, “Fantastical Gap Between Diegetic and Nondiegetic Film Music,” in Beyond the Soundtrack: Representing Music in Cinema, eds. Daniel Goldmark, Lawrence Kramer, and Richard Leppert (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007), 185.

7 Steiner uses common scoring techniques which, by 1942, had become standard operating procedure in the film industry, using string swells to connote emotional high points, stingers to mark shocking action, and more. For a full explication of this grammatical scoring, see Claudia Gorbman, Unheard Melodies or Kathryn Kalinak, Settling the Score.

serving to highlight particular phrases and moments. These absences point to emotional high points: whereas a strong and dissonant theme accompanies the

Germans into Paris, a marked absence of music highlights Ilsa’s statement that the man in her life has died.8

In its development into a grammatical system, certain musical processes came to be strictly coded elements in the Hollywood film score.9 Following the development of this kind of scoring from its early days in Grand Hotel to its full realization in the Steiner

Casablanca score, one can see the increase not only in strictly coded procedures and meaning, but also in play within these guidelines. Steiner’s successful scoring contrasts the grammatically expected with moments of ambiguity and difference, allowing for greater expressivity throughout the score. In addition to these scoring techniques,

Steiner’s work also highlights Classic Hollywood’s standard approach to pre-existing music: well-known music’s usefulness came from its ability to convey a relatively fixed meaning, allowing Steiner to cue ideas of a French revolutionary spirit quickly and simply.

In addition to this kind of short quotation of pre-existing music, the use of canonical art music as temporary audio tracks also led to the proliferation of appropriation in film. The most famous example of this, of course, is Stanley Kubrick’s

2001: A Space Odyssey, for which the temporary music tracks eventually became the final underscoring. Like Grand Hotel, it also uses the Blue Danube Waltz prominently,

8 Claudia Gorbman calls this technique a “silent stinger,” equating the effect of this silence to the punctuating musical figure. See Claudia Gorbman, Unheard Melodies: Narrative Film Music (London: BFI Publishing, 1987), 89.

9 For more on these techniques, see Claudia Gorbman, Unheard Melodies: Narrative Film Music (London: BFI Publishing, 1987); and Hanns Eisler and Theodor Adorno, Composing for the Films (New York: Oxford University Press, 1947) for a critique of these codified compositional norms.

as well as pieces by Aram Khachaturian, Richard Strauss, and Gyorgi Ligeti. These moments of appropriation open up some of the issues central to my case studies below.10 First, there is the transformation inherent in Kubrick’s use of Strauss’ Also

Sprach Zarathustra: though the tone poem was well-known in its own right, 2001 altered this existing work, linking it forever after with apes and monoliths and even rechristening it as the “Theme from 2001.” This change of a pre-existing musical object presages Roy

Orbison’s stated issues with director Lynch’s fundamental transformation of the singer’s most well known hits, which was accomplished only by placing the original recordings into a new filmic context.

Second, there is the problem of Kubrick’s insertion of Ligeti compositions without the knowledge, consent, or payment of the composer. More than a typical copyright issue, 2001 stands as an example of the complexity of scoring decisions and, to some extent, the question of ownership of an artistic work, as both Ligeti’s compositions and

2001 are intrinsically altered by Kubrick’s reuse, an effect for which copyright law does not have provisions. This conflict between creators (of film and of music) also brings up the issue of ownership and control of existing works. Joanna Demers’ Steal This Music thoroughly details current copyright and intellectual property concerns in music and, to a lesser extent, film.11 As Demers argues, the “moral right” of control that copyright holders wish to secure over existing works can act as a hinderance to creativity, limiting

10 Though it is not pertinent to my discussion here, 2001 forms a fascinating case study for the process behind the use of pre-existing music in film, as these temp tracks were not meant to form the final soundtrack, and we know that composer Alex North in fact scored the film in a version never released in theaters (the score itself is now available, though not synced with the film). For more on this particular aspect of 2001’s genesis, see, for example, Natalie Matias, “Scoring Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey - a Comparative Analysis of Gyorgy Ligeti and Alex North, as Their Music Would Appear in the Film” (paper presented at the Music and the Moving Image conference, New York, May 31, 2013).

11 Joanna Demers, Steal This Music: How Intellectual Property Law Affects Musical Creativity (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2006), 11.

artists’ play with cultural meaning through existing musical works.12 Through the films of

Todd Haynes, and Superstar in particular, I will explore this area yet more deeply.

Concentrating not on legal issues surrounding appropriation, or as Demers and intellectual property law call it, “transformative reuse,”13 I instead address the power of the archive, how these pre-existing works carry a history and cultural legacy of their own, and what it means to control it.

Though this 2001 case is close to our dividing line of 1968, it still shows the hallmarks of earlier Hollywood reuse, particularly in the clarity and stability of meaning in each quotation. In the cases of Blue Danube Waltz and Also Sprach Zarathustra, existing connotations, whether cued by musical tropes or an understanding of the history of each work, are invoked in a straight-forward manner, without being changed or questioned. Shortly after Kubrick’s 2001, though, such static signification in musical reuse would be upended in films typically identified as part of the New Hollywood cohort.

Post-1968: New Hollywood’s New Sound

The birth of New Hollywood cinema was marked by many stylistic changes, but most importantly for my study, it also ushered in a new era of musical use. In contrast to the well-known examples of 2001 and Brief Encounter, filmmakers began to reach for contemporary popular music. Rather than bringing an affect alternately staid and epic, this familiar pop music instead connected to the viewer’s everyday experience. We can see 1967 or ’68 as a pivotal year in respect to this change in tradition in mainstream

12 Demers, Steal, 11.

13 Demers, Steal, 32.

Hollywood film. For my purposes, I mark the change as 1968 – it is the year that separates 2001 and Easy Rider, but it is also musically important as the year that followed the Summer of Love and the Monterey Pop Festival, the year in which these cultural landmarks received wider attention in works like D.A. Pennebaker’s Monterey

Pop (1968). In music, this period also marked the most mainstream success of an appropriation similar to that of music in film. In this sense, I mean to refer to intertextual appropriation of images and plot devices that create connections among various media, not appropriation of purely musical features as in the cover song. First, the Beatles’

1967 Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band album cover provided perhaps the best- known example of icon appropriation. The cover design pillaged images from popular culture, including everyone from Marilyn Monroe to Mahatma Gandhi.14 Second, David

Bowie reached his first commercial success with “Space Oddity.” In a move similar to the appropriation I address, but in the opposite direction, Bowie borrowed the storyline of Kubrick’s 2001 as the basis for the plight of Major Tom in “Space Oddity,”15 showing the efficacy of film/music appropriation in the same era as my film case studies. Both examples show the burgeoning technique of pastiche, accepted as a hallmark of postmodern style and particularly art in the wake of 1968.16

Politically, it was a year of upheaval, marked at home by the assassinations of

Martin Luther King, Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy and the violent clashes at the

14 The Sgt. Pepper cover also includes a nod to contemporary experimental composers in the form of Karheinz Stockhausen.

15 Camille Paglia, “Theater of Gender: David Bowie at the Climax of the Sexual Revolution,” in David Bowie Is, edited by Victoria Broakes and Geoffrey Marsh (London: V&A Publishing, 2013), 78.

16 See, for example, the exhibit “The Turning Point: 1968 in Art and Politics,” a retrospective curated by Nina Castelli Sundell and Marjorie Talalay, mounted in 1988. The exhibition’s catalogue highlights these postmodern features of pastiche and hybridity in works by artists like Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg from 1968.

Democratic National Convention in Chicago. Abroad, student riots in Paris reacted to similar social problems in a different context. 1968 has persisted as a point of fascination in popular culture in large part because of these important and far-reaching political events, many of which were immortalized in countless popular and scholarly books.17 The ramifications of this year’s events, from the Civil Rights movement to the

Vietnam War to the presidential election, would continue to shape American culture in years to come, and these effects were in some cases immediately evident in the art of the era. While I would not argue that this shift in musical reuse occurred because of political upheaval, 1968 can certainly be seen as an important turning point in many aspects of American life and art; this change also reached the film industry.

In American film, it is also an important turning point, as the independent studios and filmmakers who would be central in the experimentation of the New Hollywood generation were finding greater exposure. Films like Easy Rider and others from production company BBS tapped into a youth market that was growing in importance and activism. As Jim Hillier notes, “by the 1970s, the 12-29 age group, only 40 percent of the total population of the United States, accounted for some 75 percent of ticket sales;”18 in a rather mercenary way, we might see filmmakers’ recourse to popular music as pandering to this audience. Indeed, The Graduate, with its low budget and

17 See, for example, Charles Kaiser, 1968 in America: Music, Politics, Chaos, Counterculture, and the Shaping of a Generation (New York: Grove Press, 1988); Irwin and Debi Unger, Turning Point, 1968 (New York: Scribner, 1988); Robert H. Giles and Robert W. Snyder, editors,1968: Year of Media Decision (New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers, 2001); and Mark Kurlansky, 1968: The Year that Rocked the World (New York: Ballantine Books, 2004); to name only a few.

18 Jim Hillier, The New Hollywood (London: Studio Vista, 1992), 38.

popular soundtrack, was the third-highest grossing film at the time of its release.19

Beyond this monetary motivation, though, I argue that popular music began to play such an important role in New Hollywood film thanks to its communicative power. If, as Seth

Cagin and Philip Dray state, we can view New Hollywood films’ style and content as responding to a need for “establishing rapport with their audience,”20 popular music accomplishes this neatly and easily. Indeed, New Hollywood’s musical usage, I argue, paves the way for a much more open and writerly film, creating space for dialogue between a work and its audience.

Beginning with song soundtrack films such as The Graduate (directed by Mike

Nichols, 1967) and Easy Rider (directed by Dennis Hopper, 1969), directors have turned to popular music with greater frequency and more interesting results. Nichols’ use of Simon and Garfunkel’s music is an early mainstream example of this sort of

“compilation score.” Though originally intending to use new compositions from the duo,

Nichols’ film is instead scored mainly with tracks from their already-released albums.

From the opening “The Sound of Silence” sequence to the “April Come She Will” montage, Simon and Garfunkel’s music defined the tone, time period, and subculture of the film, as well as underscoring many of Nichols’ most interesting montage sequences.

One central sequence is the return of “The Sound of Silence.” First used to underscore the opening credits and Benjamin’s (Dustin Hoffman) lonely, affectless return home, the song returns in the midsection of the film, under a montage of

Benjamin’s apathy and continuing affair with Mrs. Robinson. Nichols introduces the

19 Seth Cagin and Philip Dray, Hollywood Films of the Seventies: Sex, Drugs, Violence, Rock’n’Roll, and Politics (New York: Harper &Row, 1984), 32.

20 Cagin and Dray, Hollywood Films of the Seventies, xii.

song over a close-up of glistening water, soon revealed as a pool. The first verse accompanies close shots of Benjamin’s face as he floats alone in the pool. The lyrics and close framing add to a sense of isolation, compounded by the memory of the song’s first appearance in the film.

As the second verse begins, Nichols transitions to wider shots, showing that

Benjamin is not alone, but surrounded by his family around the pool. On a match cut,

Nichols carries us from the pool to a hotel rendezvous with Mrs. Robinson, where the same feeling of isolation pervades. Denying the audience a view of Mrs. Robinson’s face, the camera instead stays on Benjamin, who continuously shows a lack of emotion or relation to the happenings around him. On yet another match cut of Benjamin’s face, we return to his parents’ home, where he now literally shuts out those around him, closing a door on the family dinner in the next room. A final match cut isolates

Benjamin’s face surrounded by darkness before bringing us back to his emotionless face sitting down to watch television. While the sequence serves to show the audience the stagnant and apathetic nature of Benjamin’s current existence, its use of familiar music and repetitive, everyday imagery expands the scope of its commentary, implicating the model viewer (in this case a contemporary youth) in the song’s chaining referents.

This montage sequence, similar in style to many within The Graduate, shows

New Hollywood hallmarks of musical reuse: Nichols uses the song to underscore a montage, foregrounds the music by eliminating all dialogue and diegetic sound in the scene, and cues cultural and personal memory through the use of popular music. “The

Sound of Silence” was already well-known by the time of The Graduate’s release and

would have carried connotations of Simon and Garfunkel’s sensitive troubadour style and reputation. To use such a song under images of Benjamin’s total disengagement from his life and surroundings is doubly jarring. Nichols’ musical choice thus brings added focus to the central aspect of this youth (his apathy) and changes in its meaning from the first appearance of the song in The Graduate. This moment shows the change in musical appropriation that came with the new filmic style of the New Hollywood era.

Acting as a marker of place and period, “The Sound of Silence” is also fluid in its meaning, separating it from the earlier tradition of musical reuse.

Pre-existing music serves a similar purpose in Easy Rider, marking its protagonists as counterculture denizens and underscoring everything from motorcycle rides to a very bad drug trip. Steppenwolf’s music in particular serves as a clear cultural marker for the film, placing Easy Rider and its stars within a very contemporary cultural milieu. Shot during 1968, as tensions rose over the Vietnam War, tanks descended on

Prague, and student protests engulfed Paris, the film and its soundtrack conveys that,

“something was happening, and they thought they knew what it was . . . pop music, pop alienation, a yearning for roots, the last frontier, casual sex, sudden death, crazy kids,

Vietnam.”21 The music of Easy Rider has become one of the most iconic features of the film, commented upon in nearly all reviews, contemporary and retrospective. In fact, this is another instance where the original temp tracks became the final soundtrack. Hopper chose these songs from his record collection and that of fellow star Peter Fonda to accompany his rough cut and the anecdotal account goes that, after showing it to studio

21 J. Hoberman, “One Real Big Place: BBS from Head to Hearts,” Criterion Collection, accessed November 10, 2014, http://www.criterion.com/current/posts/1671-one-big-real-place-bbs-from-head-to- hearts.

executives, it was decided that this particular music was integral to the film and should be left in.22 The same year saw American Graffiti’s musical reuse in the service of defining a very different subgroup: suburban American teens. Radio hits ground the film’s action in a particular era and, for many viewers, serve as a memorative link to their own experience of those years.

The technique of using pre-existing pop music as a temporal, social, and economic marker continued through the next decades as the song or compilation soundtrack continued to grow in popularity. This strategy simplifies a film’s other narrative work in some convenient ways, conveying character demographics, filmic tone, and more in mere moments. With the built-in familiarity of popular songs, films could build mood, nostalgia, or location with only a musical cue. By the time of The Big

Chill (1984) and Dirty Dancing (1987), filmmakers were regularly capitalizing on the shorthand provided by these songs, often employing them simply as markers of an era.

Occasionally, though, filmmakers cultivate more complex meaning through pre-existing songs. Take as an example the opening of Amy Heckerling’s Clueless (1995).

Beginning with The Muff’s cover of “Kids in America,” the film shows its teenaged protagonist and her friends around Los Angeles in situations that, as the protagonist

Cher herself will later admit, probably caused the audience to question what they are watching. As she states, “so you’re probably going, ‘Is this, like, a Noxzema commercial or what?’ But seriously, I actually have a way normal life for a teenage girl.” Cher’s opening lines acknowledge, and attempt to subvert, the implicit meaning that the film’s style and sound convey.

22 Harvey Kubernick, Hollywood Shack Job: Rock Music in Film and on Your Screen (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2006), 84-85.

Heckerling’s favoring of a three-second shot length with handheld camera work immediately points to a 1990s MTV or commercial aesthetic which, along with “Kids in

America,” communicates a style and environment immediately. Before the characters have even spoken, Heckerling has conveyed to her audience a very clear idea of the film’s milieu stylistically, as well as the film’s ironic stance toward the lifestyle it portrays, through dialogue and musical choices. The film’s compilation soundtrack continues this strategy throughout, in its inclusion of a wide variety of contemporary popular music.

Cover versions play an important role in the film, presaging some of the issues I discuss in relation to such re-recordings in Lynch’s and Haynes’ films.

Beyond even reuse like this, however, are examples of filmmakers who have taken the potential of New Hollywood’s musical innovation and exploited it to challenge the traditional relation of film to audience. While postmodern theorists and filmmakers tested this relationship, probing its boundaries and questioning the validity of Classic

Hollywood formulations, the filmmakers whose work I address are instead actively reshaping it through their musical reuse. It is no coincidence that my first case studies are drawn from directors whose first films are frequently aligned with the New

Hollywood rubric. The essential change in type of musical reuse that can be identified as beginning in 1967 or ’68 was a part of the filmic language of directors like Terrence

Malick and David Lynch from the very start of their careers, around the time of the seminal Easy Rider soundtrack. Coming of professional age in this environment of musical experimentation, both directors went on to do yet more complex musical work in their mature films.

Kenneth Anger and the Development of Musical Appropriation

These early examples, especially Easy Rider, show the sort of musical-filmic language developed in Kenneth Anger’s seminal Scorpio Rising (1963). The short film’s soundtrack consists solely of popular music, woven through a deliriously loose plot involving gay Nazi bikers. Unlike most mainstream movies with compilation soundtracks, Anger’s appropriation of cultural artifacts, both aural and visual, is integral to the operation of his film; Scorpio Rising shows the same active engagement with the spectator and with a shared cultural heritage that marks the final, most complex examples in my study. In fact, if there is a clear stylistic precursor of Lynch’s and

Haynes’s use of music in film, it is Anger’s Scorpio. Patrick Brennan describes “its unabashed celebration of American popular culture: Anger’s film exults in Top-40 songs, Sunday comic strips, Hollywood B-movies, and clippings from fan magazines, often juxtaposing these elements in startling ways.”23 See Figure 2-1 for an example of this cultural scrap-booking on screen. It is precisely this juxtaposition that is most clearly translated into the films I analyze here, particularly in Velvet Goldmine. Indeed, both

Lynch and Haynes show the influence of Anger’s pop music-filled short films. Martin

Scorsese refers to Anger’s “sense of rhythm” as a defining characteristic;24 this feature of Anger’s style translates to many younger filmmakers. These contemporary filmmakers facilely manipulate pre-existing popular culture signs in order to comment on something much more far-reaching and, without the early example of Scorpio Rising, may never have found such an approach to be fruitful. Anger’s Scorpio Rising predates

23 Patrick Brennan, “Cutting Through Narcissism: Queer Visibility in Scorpio Rising,” Genders 36 (2002): section 3.

24 Martin Scorsese, quoted in Alice L. Hutchison, Kenneth Anger: A Demonic Visionary (Black Dog Publishing, 2004), 139.

the 1968 divide I propose, but we can see its release as the watershed moment that made possible the mainstream experimentation with popular music in film montage that marks my post-’68 examples.

Figure 2-1. Scorpio Rising’s popular iconography (Scorpio Rising, directed by Kenneth Anger, in Kenneth Anger: The Complete Magick Lantern Cycle [1963; San Francisco, CA: Fantoma Films, 2010], DVD).

Like many of his shorts, Anger’s Scorpio has almost no dialogue or explicitly diegetic sound and is instead accompanied throughout by pop songs. In the absence of dialogue, these songs take on an even more central role. Indeed, as Jim Buhler has stated, “sound tracks alone are generally more coherent than image tracks,”25 and the observation certainly holds in this case. Before the first image is even projected, the opening strains of “Fools Rush In” introduce the film. Among the thirteen songs that make up the film’s soundtrack, there is at least the continuity of style and time period.

Carel Rowe even sees these songs as positioning the film not only in a specific era, but

25 “Panel Discussion of Film Sound/Film Music,” Velvet Light Trap 51 (March 2003), 74.

in a certain time of peak airplay;26 viewed in this way, Anger’s film is a clear predecessor for the sort of musical reuse shown in Easy Rider (that both share a motorcycle focus is more than coincidence, as Scorpio was widely influential). The images seem organized into short montage sequences that match to the songs, with editing sometimes carefully aligning the form of each shot to that of the music. Many authors cite Anger’s film as the progenitor of the modern music video,27 but I see its influence yet more clearly in the moments of musical appropriation discussed in this dissertation. More than do music videos, these scenes take Anger’s approach of appropriation and juxtaposition and exploit it to a yet greater degree, finding in his style the tools to manipulate and comment upon a shared cultural past.

Of particular interest for my purposes is the “Blue Velvet” section of the film.

Featuring the same Bobby Vinton recording that Lynch would later use in the eponymous film’s idealized presentation of Lumberton as a perfect American town,

Anger takes “Blue Velvet” as the background for a very different scene of idealization; he calls it the film’s “dressing adagio.”28 As Vinton intones “She wore blue velvet,” the camera pans slowly up an expanse of fabric: this time, not blue velvet but blue denim.

The sequence shows the slow dressing of three young male bikers as they deck themselves out in denim, leather, and chains. The idealized image here is one of male beauty, as Anger lovingly documents the bikers’ attire and, even more important, their

26 Carel Rowe, The Bauderlairean Cinema (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1983), 8.

27 See, for example, Michael Moon, A Small Boy and Others: Imitation and Initiation in American Culture from Henry James to Andy Warhol (Durham: Duke University Press, 1998); and David R. Shumway, “Rock’n’Roll Sound Tracks and the Production of Nostalgia,” Cinema Journal 38 (Winter 1999): 36-51.

28 Kenneth Anger, quoted in Alice L. Hutchison, Kenneth Anger: A Demonic Visionary (Black Dog Publishing, 2004), 125.

muscular bodies; as Hutchison states, the careful montage creates “a brilliant kaleidoscopic collage that evokes both pleasure and pain responses from the viewer.”29

It is this montage technique that allows Anger and the other filmmakers in this study to create the semiotic openness of their musical sequences.

Apart from its use of “Blue Velvet,” the scene also relates closely to my Haynes and Lynch examples through its dependence on shared cultural symbols and memories.

Indeed, as Brennan argues, this sequence is effective because of its incorporation and flipping of accepted, gendered stereotypes.30 The manly biker, epitomized by the familiar image of Marlon Brando in The Wild One (images from which are also appropriated in Scorpio), is feminized here. Not only does Vinton croon adoringly about a woman as we watch these men preen, but they themselves play into the decidedly un-

“macho” stereotype of the dandy. Anger fetishizes their costuming through extreme close-ups on the details of their dress: belts, chains, and zippers are rendered in painstakingly close detail. As William Wees puts it,

Against black leather and blue jeans, the silver studs, chains, buckles, amulets, and trinkets shine with exceptional brilliance, and in some shots they flash their reflected light directly into the eyes of the audience. . . . camera movement and montage supported by Bobby Vinton's sinuous rendition of "Blue Velvet" meld the slow, studied gestures of the men into a continuous flow. The result is a mood that rises above mere sensuality and self-indulgence.31

The primping of these bikers is shown as a parallel to a lady’s toilette, an important and careful part of the prelude to their night out at the motorcycle race.

29 Hutchison, Anger, 133.

30 Brennan, “Queer Visibility.”

31 William C. Wees, Light Moving in Time: Studies in the Visual Aesthetics of Avant-Garde Film (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), 112.

Brennan sees Anger’s visual and aural devices as operating in much the same way that Symbolist poets utilized metaphor and metonymy.32 Brennan, Hutchison, and others all point to the exploitation of montage practices that allows Anger to bring a variety of texts into conversation.33 Brennan’s reading differs from the unlimited semiosis I find in Haynes and Lynch in some important ways. This alternate reading of the semiotic gambit involved is an interesting one, particularly for its resonances with

Haynes’ own professed interests (shown in his Rimbaud study Assassins, and the naming of one Dylan avatar as “Arthur” in I’m Not There, again a Rimbaud reference) and the very visible influence of Anger’s style in the younger director’s films. However, I view the unlimited semiosis spawned by these instances as even more important than the directors’ shared metonymic approach. Brennan writes of the “vertical and horizontal” axes of meaning at play within Scorpio (borrowing the distinction from

Jakobsen), but more than this two-way expansion, each example also features a much less direct spiral of chaining interpretants, as in the scenes that form my case studies in this dissertation. Anger’s are more strictly coded than some that I analyze, leaving very little open for free interpretation and not prompting hermetic drift or extended semiosis, but particularly for a 21st-century viewer, the possible meanings and allusions expand to a much greater degree than would have been possible in 1963. This opening of formerly-set semiotic relationships is, I would argue, of greater import than is the straightforward substitution on which Brennan concentrates. Ultimately, unlimited

32Brennan, “Queer Visibility.”

33 See, for example, Hutchison, Anger, 129.

semiosis’ alterations in meaning are far more subversive and freeing; they are also identifiable in Anger’s groundbreaking film.

A final point on the semiotics of Anger’s appropriation: Brennan locates this strategy in the formation of gay identity, arguing that the recoding of the familiar allowed

Anger to depict an unfamiliar identity by repurposing and rearranging the familiar. Thus by repositioning Brando, James Dean, and Lil’ Abner comics, Anger queers heteronormative discourse in order to articulate a socially unacceptable identity in the language of the dominant society. Such a strategy certainly echoes in Haynes’ Velvet

Goldmine, and perhaps even in the character of Sailor in Wild at Heart (though his is a heterosexual identity and far more familiar than those depicted in Scorpio). Existing scholarship pinpoints the subversive abilities of appropriation, while I explore music’s unique role in these semiotic shifts.

Film, Semiotics, and Musical Appropriation

It is probably not coincidental that the field of film semiotics was burgeoning at precisely this same span of years around 1970. In the work of Christian Metz, Eco, and many others, theories of film semiotics abounded. Though Eco’s “Articulations of the

Cinematic Code” was earlier (and coincides with the 1967-8 turning point I identify),

Metz’s slightly later Film Language is the more influential.34 Both authors’ works are attempts to think through the way that audiences understand the narrative and structure of film, and how this system is fundamentally different from other forms, particularly film’s near relation, still photography.

34 Christian Metz, Film Language, trans. by Michael Taylor (New York: Oxford University Press, 1974).

Metz’s work deals with the language of film communication, with a foundation in

Saussurian semiology. Wrestling with the task of applying a linguistic system to a form not based in words, Metz concentrates on the “large syntagmatic category” as a way of approaching the complex system of filmic meaning. For Metz, the shot can be approached as the base analyzable unit of film communication; he views it as analogous to the sentence. Though there are smaller units within a shot that connote,

Metz sees the shot as the “smallest unit of the filmic chain.”35 As he states,

“‘cinematographic language’ has no specific units on the level of the image, but only on the level of the ordering of images.”36 While it is true that the cinema has no codified image-specific meaning, for my purposes it is important to consider the meanings carried by these indexical signs from their real-world existence. Thus Metz’ focus on the language system of cinema is somewhat different from my project; though both are concerned with the formation and communication of meaning through the cinema, Metz concentrates more on the system by which films mean rather than cases that play with and subvert this system. His project is similar in some ways to earlier film music scholarship like that of Claudia Gorbman, which sought to clarify a language of sorts, or system of communication, in film scoring.37

In choosing a semiotic framework, then, I have not relied on any of the many filmic templates from the 1970s, nor only the specifically musical semiotics advanced by

35 Metz, Film Language, 106.

36 Metz, Film Language, 87.

37 Claudia Gorbman, Unheard Melodies: Narrative Film Music (London: BFI Publishing, 1987).

Nattiez and Agawu.38 The reasons for this are many, but can be traced to the centrality of music, cultural meaning, and memory to my project. Most of these approaches, particularly Metz’s, do not allow me to situate these chaining meanings culturally. In addition, the variety of filmic approaches tend to ignore or sideline the other media that are incorporated in the totality of a film, concentrating largely on image and dialogue.

This is, in part, why I also avoid David Bordwell’s theories of meaning in film. While I agree with Bordwell’s assertion that meaning is constructed by the spectator, not given by the film, his approach differentiates levels of meaning-making. Rather than viewing meaning as referential, explicit, implicit, or symptomatic, I am instead taking potential interpretations as a whole, without separating out those meanings that come through different channels.

Most importantly, though, I see interpretation as bounded by cultural codes and shared treasuries of knowledge, to borrow two of Eco’s phrases. For Bordwell, it seems, meaning construction is in part dictated by the field of other interpreters. While one could argue that this is a sort of cultural code, it is much more restrictive than Eco’s formulation and seems to concentrate on the idea of interpretation in an exclusive academic audience rather than the public at large. Particularly in the case of Haynes’ films (addressed in Chapter 5), interpretations fall decidedly outside the academy and the sort of strict codes that Bordwell addresses. In fact, these films are important for my study precisely because of their alternative responses – encouraged by the films’ musical appropriation and semiotic openness. It is for these reasons that Eco’s theory of

38 In Chapter 3 on Terrence Malick’s work, I will, however, borrow some of Agawu’s formulation of intrinsic and extrinsic meaning (itself adapted from Jakobson’s semiotics).

semiotics and particularly his concept of unlimited semiosis is most applicable to the phenomena I see in instances of musical appropriation.

Beyond these considerations, though, Bordwell, Metz, and others’ approaches to filmic meaning-making tend to privilege the image above all else. While the visual is of course central to our understanding of film, the aural is equally important and, for my study, perhaps more so. Though each of these theorists propose ways to understand the process of interpretation or the way that film can be seen to communicate, none convincingly give equal weight to the role of audio and thus none fit the focus of my project, with the exception of Eco’s approach. Rooted less in a desire to make sense of the meaning system that is specific to just one medium, Eco’s approach offers the opportunity to fully examine both music and film, as well as the effect of their combination in the unique scenes and films that form the basis of this study.

While it may seem that the heyday of semiotics in film studies and in musicology has passed in the 1970s and ’90s respectively, I turn to this methodology for its ability to most clearly address a phenomenon that has often been overlooked or simplified: the ways in which familiar music can facilitate meaning creation in new, unfamiliar film contexts. This theoretical framework allows me to address the variety of levels on which these scenes of musical appropriation operate, while viewing the sound and image in each as equally integral. With this equality of sound and image, I am able to nuance my readings through the semiotic differences between the ways each medium communicates meaning. Semiotics proves an ideal fit for such an investigation, particularly in Peirce’s semiotics (as opposed to Saussure, whose language-based system is the groundwork for Metz, among others discussed above). Peirce’s taxonomy

delineates clearly the kind of relation of each sign to its actual, real object. This relationship becomes of central importance in many of the more complex instances I discuss. Particularly in the work of Lynch and Haynes, the sound’s relationship to a real and historically situated body is both invoked and troubled.

Conclusion

By viewing 1968 as a dividing line in musical appropriation and in theoretical approaches to film and meaning, we may then more easily place the following case studies within a cultural context. Growing out of the upheaval of the late 1960s, the older filmmakers I study (Lynch and Malick) can be understood as a part of a postmodern filmmaking camp that sought to expand the potential of film. I have positioned these filmmakers in opposition to the Classic Hollywood “hermetically sealed cinema” identified by Mulvey, but Lynch and Malick are certainly not alone in that endeavor. As this chapter’s examples have shown, moves toward a radical reevaluation of spectatorship were present in many other New Hollywood films. What separates Lynch, Malick, and later Haynes, though, is the centrality of music to their new audience relationship. Through their innovative musical appropriation, these filmmakers used the format of the compilation soundtrack, pioneered by New Hollywood landmarks like The Graduate and Easy Rider, to foster a new role for the spectator in relation to their films.

Terrence Malick’s works serve as an entry point to this practice of unlimited semiosis in appropriation. Malick’s early musical reuse tends to follow in a more straightforward tradition, growing out of the sort of reuse in films ranging from Brief

Encounter to 2001: A Space Odyssey rather than in the tradition of compilation soundtracks inaugurated by The Graduate and Easy Rider. In his first films, Badlands

(1973) and Days of Heaven (1978), this reuse is mainly in place of a newly-composed score and offers little in the way of unlimited semiosis. Instead, the pre-existing works seem to operate as a sort of cultural shorthand, evoking through style rather than the specifics of a work (Days of Heaven). Although these films come from the same time period as the first flowering of the compilation soundtrack, music operates differently here. Malick is not inserting pop music hits that are meant to be recognized and related to contemporary experience and memory, in the manner of The Graduate or Easy

Rider. Malick’s music in his early films is a means of transportation, bringing the viewer into the world of the film through historical or stylistic difference from the present. Both of these early Malick films emphasize the contrast between the art music they appropriate and more popular musical idioms (in Badlands, some pop music on the radio, in Days of Heaven, improvised folk music). In his most recent films, though,

Malick has embraced the possibilities of unlimited semiosis as a structural force; his musical appropriation prompts webs of meaning that provide the viewer with the necessary framework to make sense of his more abstract mature work.

Lynch’s films also provide numerous examples of this purposeful and meaning- laden appropriation, in part because of the director’s strong interest in and dedication to music. Though not classically trained in music, Lynch’s interest in the arts certainly encompasses music. All accounts of Lynch’s filmmaking process highlight his participation in the process of scoring or assigning music to specific scenes.39 In addition to his work with music in film, Lynch has also written music (for his films

Mulholland Drive and Inland Empire, and also for his own albums) and acted as a

39 See, for example, Michel Chion, David Lynch, trans. Robert Julian (London: BFI Press, 2006); or David Lynch, Lynch on Lynch, ed. Chris Rodley (Boston: Faber and Faber, 1997).

producer on numerous albums, with recording artists ranging from Roy Orbison to Julee

Cruise. In his own musical contributions and his long-standing working partnership with composer Angelo Badalamenti (first brought in to compose for Blue Velvet), Lynch consistently shows his consideration of music as an central part of his films. More than a backdrop for the visual and narrative action, music in Lynch’s films is frequently integral and sometimes chosen before the project is even fully formed. The Club

Silencio scene described in this chapter’s introduction is a prime example. Lynch had heard del Rio’s cover version of Orbison’s music and was determined to use her work, though he had no project at hand that was well suited to it.40

In his study of Lynch’s films, sound theorist and composer Michel Chion refers to the director’s work in largely musical terms. Lynch’s “romantic” style and sensibility is compared to Liszt and Berlioz, while his films are described as “operatic” or structured as a ballad.41 The musically-trained Chion does not use such terminology without knowledge of its implications; he is fully aware of the history he invokes with this language and the connotations are appropriate. Lynch does indeed structure his works in ways that mirror musical conventions and, particularly in his dynamic shifts in style and tone, embodies much of the Romantic style seen in the various arts of that period.

Musical aspects are present in Lynch’s films in far more ways than Badalamenti’s scores and Lynch’s musical appropriation alone suggest. Thus, music provides an ideal window into Lynch’s modus operandi and the construction of his works as a whole.

40 Peter Lehman, Running Scared: Masculinity and the Representations of the Male Body, (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1993), 63-4.

41 See, for example, Michel Chion, David Lynch, trans. Robert Julian (London: BFI Press, 2006), 119.

Todd Haynes shows a similar musical preoccupation, though it forms only a facet of the filmmaker’s larger concentration on artistic forms of the past. The youngest filmmaker of this group, Haynes is himself a student of semiotics and presents some of the most interesting and complex examples of musical appropriation. Haynes’ style is much less consistent than that of Lynch and Malick, in part because he seems to approach all aspects of his films as possibilities for historical rewriting and interpretation.

His works represent a broad range, from period pieces with straightforward narratives to more experimental approaches to visual and plot elements. His attention to music, though, continues to be a unifying factor in all. One of the original and most prominent filmmakers of the “New Queer Cinema” of the early 1990s, Haynes rose to renown with films like Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story and Poison. Like others in the New

Queer Cinema cohort, he tends to comment upon sexuality, style, and subculture through his works. His earlier films, more subversive and still not distributed widely, show a keen interest in the role played by the various arts in the creation of an identity or legacy and the understanding of a culture. In much of Haynes’ work, the distinctions between reality and fantasy, film and audience, and actor and creator are all questioned through the medium of music. Often foregrounding the act of music-making, Haynes is overt in his manipulation of meaning through music, in films such as Superstar: The

Karen Carpenter Story, I’m Not There, and Velvet Goldmine.

This new relationship is not immediately obvious in Lynch and Malick’s early films. Indeed, these directors’ musical reuse, at the start of their careers, has much in common with their predecessors. In Lynch’s films of the 1980s and Malick’s from the

1990s, though, a new, more actively engaged audience is dictated by their use of

music. In the way that Eco theorized, these filmic texts produce a particular habit in the spectator; rather than requiring the audience member to complete the text, these films instead prompt a way of interpretation that allows for more freedom and more active, individualized interaction with the film and its music. In this way, Malick, Haynes, and

Lynch open the door to unlimited semiosis in their films by expanding on the tradition of musical reuse that developed with New Hollywood filmmakers.

69 CHAPTER 3 “OUR IMAGES TOOK ON AN ALMOST MUSICAL RHYTHM”: MUSIC AS STRUCTURAL ELEMENT IN THE FILMS OF TERRENCE MALICK

Like Charles Ives’ music, Malick’s film places diverse elements side by side, without seeking to answer the question posed by their juxtaposition.

-Michel Chion, The Thin Red Line1

As Chion’s observation about The Thin Red Line (1998) suggests, director

Terrence Malick’s works eschew a typical linear narrative structure in favor of one that resembles a musical form, manifested as a play between themes. For audiences expecting a film similar in form and conventions to other big-budget World War II films,

Malick’s The Thin Red Line came as a shock in its loose, non-linear structure.

Structured as a metaphysical meditation on life, death, and our place in the universe rather than a straightforward war story, the film seems out of place in its genre but fits perfectly within Malick’s oeuvre. As his films show, the director prioritizes aspects other than story in his films, emphasizing themes and formal balance. In fact, I argue that his work is intrinsically linked to music: his films’ juxtaposition of two central themes most closely resembles a musical form which is, to a large extent, articulated and reinforced through the use of pre-existing music.

Examples from The Graduate to Easy Rider could easily make a case for the importance of pre-existing music in New Hollywood cinema, as the previous chapter showed, but it is in the work of Malick that we find the most innovative and integrated reuse of pre-existing music of this generation of filmmakers. Unlike his contemporaries,

Malick does not mine contemporary popular music for his underscoring, turning instead to the Western art music canon. However, as with other New Hollywood films, the music

1 Michel Chion, The Thin Red Line (London: BFI Publishing), 12.

in Malick’s works is recognizable and evocative of meanings beyond the films’ narratives. Malick serves as a kind of turning point in my study, taking the experimentation of the New Hollywood directors in a new direction musically. This new tack manifests itself in radical, history-altering ways in the works of younger directors that followed Malick, like Todd Haynes. Within Malick’s works, though, we can see musical appropriation becoming more central to the structure of his films, culminating in the almost narrative-free The Tree of Life (2011), which relies on music’s communicative power to delineation itself formal structure. It is by cultivating music’s propensity for unlimited semiosis that Malick is able to engage his audience in this new construction of filmic form.

Classic Hollywood’s musical reuse was mostly restricted to music as a shorthand for a single, fixed meaning, and to an extent, Malick’s early films Badlands (1973) and

Days of Heaven (1978) show this same tendency. Using Carl Orff’s Schulwerk and

Camille Saint-Säens’ Carnival of the Animals, respectively, these two films invoke music as a means to a specific and strictly coded end, with music serving a clear and static communication purpose. In Badlands, for instance, Schulwerk serves to convey the naïveté and youth of the films’ protagonists. Days of Heaven invokes Saint-Säens as a marker of class, serving to separate the film’s characters along socio-economic lines.

What marks Malick as different from his contemporaries is the evolution of his musical use throughout his career, a change most prominent after his twenty-year hiatus from filmmaking, beginning with The Thin Red Line and continuing in his more recent features. In these later films, music plays a significant role, helping to structure the film.

In this chapter, I analyze brief sections of Badlands and Days of Heaven, both of which

show Malick’s protean interest in form, before concentrating on The Tree of Life’s fully realized musical formal structure. These studies serve as examples for the theoretical framework I propose, understanding musical appropriation through unlimited semiosis.

Most critical accounts of Malick’s films return to one central feature of the auteur’s biography: his study of philosophy and, in particular, his engagement with the work of Martin Heidegger. A promising young academic, Malick completed his senior thesis at Harvard University on Wittgenstein and Heidegger, studying with Stanley

Cavell. Malick’s Rhodes scholarship took him to Oxford, where he continued his work on the topic though he did not complete his degree. On his return to the US, Malick taught philosophy at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and completed the seminal English translation of Heidegger’s The Essence of Reasons.2 Given his continued engagement with Heidegger, many critics – from Simon Critchley to Robert

Pippin to Kaja Silverman – have viewed Malick’s oeuvre through a distinctly

Heideggerian lens.3 Heideggerian thought certainly permeates Malick’s work, but as

Robert Pippin has alluded, the director’s philosophical underpinnings are not as integral to his films as is the works’ form or structure.

Pippin proposes that, rather than analyzing these films from a narrative standpoint, we would be better served by addressing what he views as an “alternative

2 Martin Heidegger, The Essence of Reasons, trans. Terrence Malick (Evanston: Northwestern University Studies in Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy, 1969).

3 See, for example, Kaja Silverman, “All Things Shining,” in Flesh of My Flesh (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009), which reads The Thin Red Line through Heidegger’s concept of the turning; and Simon Critchley, “Calm – On Terrence Malick’s The Thin Red Line,” Film and Philosophy 6, no. 38 (December 2002), which reads the film as a form of philosophizing.

mode of composition.”4 Pippin concentrates on the visual mode almost exclusively in his study,5 but points to the importance of other aspects, among them music. Following

Pippin, I propose an analysis of Malick’s work that prioritizes the structured formal organization of themes in his films, most notably through recurring images and familiar, pre-existing music. These themes typically take the form of large philosophical concepts that inform what little story each film has; for example, The Tree of Life’s two large themes are “grace” and “nature,” as the two relate to humanity’s experience of the world. In both musical and visual cues, Malick’s films are dialogic in Mikhail Bahtkin’s sense of the term, meaning that these images and sounds are invoked as objects which exist independent of their place in the film; they invoke a broader meaning and context.6

Malick uses his images and musical appropriation as a series of existing utterances which invoke their own history, connecting to debates well beyond the temporal scope of each film. These musical citations serve as touchstones allowing Malick to reference history, philosophy, and more through the mnemonic device of music.

The idea that Malick’s films employ a non-narrative structure that resembles musical form is not new. James Wierzbicki has argued for the musicality of Malick’s work in earlier films. Assessing the aural organization of Days of Heaven, Wierzbicki identifies a correlation between the formal structure of the film’s carefully crafted Dolby sound and the form of excerpts from Saint-Säens’ Carnival of the Animals used as underscoring. Finding a phenomenological parallel between this sound organization and

4 Robert Pippin, “Vernacular Metaphysics: On Terrence Malick’s The Thin Red Line.” Critical Inquiry 39, no. 2 (Winter 2013), 248.

5 Pippin, “Vernacular Metaphysics”, 247-275.

6 Mikhail Bahktin, Speech Genres and Other Late Essays, trans. Vern W. McGee (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1986), 92.

the experience of musical expressivity, he argues for an understanding of sound that operates in a similar way, conveying meaning through its forms.7 Wierzbicki’s work on this more local level lends credence to and provides precedence for my investigation of the large-scale structure, proving the close attention to aural and visual rhythms evident in each of Malick’s films, even those from his early period prior to the twenty-year hiatus between Days of Heaven and The Thin Red Line. Simon Critchley, too, assesses

Malick’s filmic form as musical, though he sees its function differently: Malick’s “use of music in his movies is at times breathtaking, and the structures of his films bear a close relation to musical composition, where leitmotifs function as both punctuation and recapitulation of the action –a technique Malick employed to great effect in Days of

Heaven.”8 Rather than the semiotically closed leitmotif, though, I see music operating here in a less strictly coded way, opening meaning creation rather than signaling its end point clearly. In this way Malick enters the active film-spectator relationship I identify in a group of post-New Hollywood films. Apart from small-scale, immediate relationships that could resemble rhythm, though, I argue for a broader, more structural musical form.9

To return to Chion’s observation in the epigraph above, it is possible to find a structural similarity between Malick’s films and a musical work. Coming from Chion, himself a composer, this musical comparison is not surprising; it is also echoed in a number of reviews and critiques of Malick’s style written by non-musicians, many of

7 James Wierzbicki, “Sound as Music in the Films of Terrence Malick,” The Cinema of Terrence Malick: Poetic Visions of America, ed. Hannah Patterson (London: Wallflower Press, 2007), 113.

8 Critchley, “Calm.”

9 Patricia Hall also reads musical form as realized in film in “Leni Reifenstahl’s ‘Ballet’ Olympia” (paper presented at American Musicological Society annual meeting, Indianapolis, Indiana, November 4, 2010.)

whom highlight the filmmaker’s alternative mode of composition. Each of his films loosely tells a story, but this is not the structuring force of each film and, indeed, is often muddled to the point of incomprehensibility. These works cannot generally be understood as a narrative arc. Instead, each is given its form through Malick’s large- scale thematic structure, which both resembles a musical form and is delineated by the reuse of well-known musical works.

This thematic play coalesces as an intricate form throughout the film. Such a formal structure betrays a level of planning, but the stage at which this occurs in

Malick’s filmmaking process is open to debate. For many of his projects, particularly

Days of Heaven and The Thin Red Line, the shooting script varies greatly from the final, theatrical release of the film. Actors and cinematographers involved in these films all point to the importance of improvisation in Malick’s technique; though each film has a fully realized script, Malick is, on set, open to interpretation and chance in his films, often shooting varying versions of each scene.10 For example, The Thin Red Line features many of the most prominent Hollywood actors of its time in roles that could almost be described as cameos; though many more scenes were shot, much of this film ended up on the cutting room floor as Malick and his team reformed the film into its final state. Morrison and Schur suggest that “Malick is practically unique as a commercial

American filmmaker: a director for whom innovation does not end with the script or pre- production, but continues through shooting and editing in ways that fundamentally alter

10 James Morrison and Thomas Schur, The Films of Terrence Malick (Westport: Praeger, 2003), 132.

initial conceptions.”11 This fundamental alteration, I argue, manifests itself in the new, large-scale form that makes his films intelligible.

For Morrison and Schur, this Malickian form is typically tripartite, beginning in stasis, moving to flight, and finally returning to something resembling stasis.12 Such a structure loosely resembles the narrative structure that Kristin Thompson identifies in her study of New Hollywood narrative techniques which, she argues, are in fact much closer to the strictures of Classic Hollywood storytelling than some have argued.13 This connection is a fair assessment of the plot of the films available to Morrison and Schur in 2003 (eight years before The Tree of Life was released), but I find it more fruitful to concentrate on the thematic play in each, which results in more varied and illuminating structures. In his post-production re-forming of each of these films, Malick and his teams edit them into something intelligible not through a three-part narrative structure, but instead through the interaction of the visual, musical, and thematic.

Acknowledgement of the large-scale non-narrative structure of Malick’s films in their complete form appears obliquely in many reviews and scholarly readings of the director’s oeuvre. From his play with “counterpoint” to the “rhythm” achieved in this editing, myriad authors point to a careful construction of form outside the boundaries of each film’s story. For Hubert Cohen, Malick’s counterpoint is most visible on an immediate, smaller scale in individual images or scenes. While he argues for such thematic juxtaposition as a favorite device of Malick, Cohen does not see it as

11 Morrison and Schur, Films of Malick, 132.

12 Morrison and Schur, Films of Malick, 129.

13 Kristin Thompson, Storytelling in the New Hollywood: Understanding Classical Narrative Techniques (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999), 10.

structuring entire films, but scenes; for him, this counterpoint acts on a phrasal level.14

Michel Chion describes Malick’s mode of composition differently, drawing on terminology from language: in his view, it is a sort of parataxis, or juxtaposition without connections.15 Both authors point to a central aspect of my argument: by creating semiotic openness through his juxtapositions, Malick not only allows for, but demands audience engagement and interpretation. In this way, the contrasts created by his musical choices create environments that prompt unlimited semiosis.

This form not only makes Malick’s films uniquely his in style, but also allows us to more deeply understand them. Through juxtapositions in structure, Malick opens interpretive avenues for his audiences, forcing us to provide the glue that makes his films intelligible through our own engagement with these movies and the works they reference. The Tree of Life is perhaps the clearest example of this, though I see the same tendency as early as Days of Heaven and more recently in 2012’s To the

Wonder. The terminology used by most critics to address this phenomenon is strikingly consistent in its references to music. Such consistency is more than mere coincidence: as in a musical work, Malick uses formal structure to make his themes intelligible and does so through musical references.

The musical appropriation in three of Malick’s films serves to illuminate this alternative formal structure and its relationship to music’s semiotic and memorative potential. Malick’s first two films, Badlands and Days of Heaven, operate as transitions: while music plays a central role in both, the mode of appropriation is still quite similar to

14 Hubert Cohen, “The Genesis of Days of Heaven,” Cinema Journal 42, no. 4 (Summer 2003), 49.

15 Chion, Thin Red Line, 17.

that of other New Hollywood films. However, Badlands and Days of Heaven show

Malickian style traits that will, in his later films, allow for truly unlimited semiosis through musical reuse. Days of Heaven in particular shows the development of Malick’s formal preoccupation which is fully realized in his later films. To illustrate this unlimited semiosis, I examine The Tree of Life, which utilizes semiotic chaining to create a large- scale structure. I argue that this alternative formal composition – organization through the juxtaposition of thematic material – not only resembles a musical form, but is accomplished through the appropriation of musical works rich in cultural meaning and memory.

“A Sense of Things” Through Sound: Musical Shorthand in Early Malick Films

Malick’s first two features, both made in the mid-1970s, offer a clear statement of the personal visual style that permeates all of his work, up to and including his latest feature To the Wonder (2012). While his hallmarks of image are consistent, in Badlands and Days of Heaven, music is used as an aural marker in much the same way that

Malick’s contemporaries Mike Nichols and Dennis Hopper had used familiar music.

Though some moments of appropriation in Badlands and Days of Heaven show a prototypical form of Malick’s later use of music as structuring force, for the most part these soundtracks follow the tradition of reuse described in the previous chapter. Both, though, show the ways that pre-existing music can be fully integrated into a film, encouraging a new understanding of the text as a whole through the relationship of sound and image. Even in these early films, Malick incorporates pre-existing music in ways that relate to the central themes and concerns of each film, not just to the setting or affect of a particular scene. In the case of Badlands, this relationship involves the portrayal of aural, visual, and affective distance. I address the connection of sound and

image through spectral analysis of the film’s music and voiceovers, showing their shared emphasis on space and isolation through aural features. Days of Heaven shows the beginnings of an integrated, coherent musical-filmic formal structure in its treatment of diegetic sound and music as part of a form that unfolds in time. These two early films show a protean realization of Malick’s interest in musically informed form, while still abiding by accepted narrative structures.

Badlands is most notable for the way that its visual and aural style plays against the sensational nature of its plot; musical appropriation is a key to accomplishing this shift in tone. The film follows Holly Sargis (played by Sissy Spacek) and her boyfriend

Kit Carruthers (Martin Sheen) on a murder spree across the Upper Plains. Using as its basis the real-life 1958 killing spree of teenagers Charles Starkweather and Caril Ann

Fugate, Malick gives his audience a sense of much broader things by visually and aurally highlighting the isolation of his characters and the fleeting nature of their presence within the world rather than sensationalizing the story and creating a melodrama. In an early interview, the director commented on his debut film, saying, “It’s not just to tell a story. You hope -- though you really don’t set out to do this -- but you hope that the picture will give the person looking at it a sense of things.... It isn’t as though you’ve been told anything you didn’t already know.”16 The film avoids close-ups and the kind of shot/reverse shot sequences that have become cinematically coded as showing character interaction in a readily legible way. Instead, Holly and Kit are observed in a cold, almost clinical manner as their story unfolds. All six of Malick’s films

16Martha L. Linden, “Directed by Terrence Malick,” White Arrow. Unpaginated text of published interview on file at the Margaret Henrick Library, Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. Quoted in James Morrison and Thomas Schur, The Films of Terrence Malick (Westport.: Praeger, 2003), 89.

share this visual distancing from their human subjects, which manifests itself in different thematic ways. In Badlands, this distancing is also communicated through the aural character and quick decay of sound in Carl Orff’s Schulwerk, conveying a deeper level of characterization for the protagonists. Through his musical appropriation, Malick links the film’s sound, image, and thematic emphasis on distance and isolation in much the same way as in later films, but does not develop a musical formal structure in Badlands.

The title shot is a good introductory example of this visual distancing, which will become of central importance in regard to the film’s aural elements. The film’s title is superimposed in large, simple script over a shot of Kit approaching Holly as she practices baton twirling in her front yard. The distance from the shot’s subjects is considerable and neither Kit nor Holly’s face is visible. Elements of nature and a soft natural light (here dappled as it is filtered through the trees) reflect the director’s emphasis on the relationship between the human and natural worlds in all of his films.

The image of Kit in Figure 3-1 below, from moments before the title screen, emphasizes these traits even more. Though Kit is ostensibly the subject of the shot, it is framed in such a way as to direct our viewing attention not to Martin Sheen, but instead to his surroundings. Kit ambles down the alley, the camera movement not motivated by his progress; Malick keeps the frame consistent and immobile despite its subject’s movement. Such practices continue throughout the film and add to the feeling of removal that permeates Badlands.

As a corollary to this visual distancing, Malick’s film aurally mimics isolation through music and sound treatment. Music’s importance in Badlands is twofold: first, in its aural relationship to the film’s visual and verbal aspects, and secondly, in its

invocation of extranarrative meaning. Silence and distance become important aspects of the film’s voiceovers, which carry over to moments of sound design within the underscoring, particularly evident in Orff and Keetman’s “Gassenhauer” from

Schulwerk’s “Musica Poetica.” Second, it is the history of Schulwerk that adds another layer of significance to Badlands. Originally written as a work for students, the piece’s simplicity invokes an innocence that is at odds with the film’s violent and rebellious narrative.

Figure 3-1: typical distance shot, Badlands opening sequence (Badlands, directed by Terrence Malick [1973; Burbank, CA: Warner Home Video, 2010], DVD).

The portion of Schulwerk used in the opening credits is timbrally distinct in its own right, using only pitched percussion. The xylophones, with their very strong fundamental (shown by the red lines in Figure 3-2 A) and practically invisible overtones

(the green lines show the chord structure, while the much lighter show overtones), provide a clear analogue to Spacek’s voice as presented in her disembodied voiceovers

(Figure 3-2 B). In fact, the simple harmonies Orff composed, which rely heavily on the open intervals of the overtone series, mimic the appearance of Spacek’s speech; both

show a very strong fundamental in the lowest line, with two strong overtones above and only minimal higher overtones. This similarity is borne out by the spectrogram, which shows the same lack of frequencies above 9000, as well as an analogous rapid decay.

Though the decay is not at all surprising given the instrumentation, it is a defining feature of the section used in the title sequence and, as in Holly’s interjections and much of the rest of the film, foregrounds silence.

Many of the strictly musical aspects of Schulwerk direct attention away from such typically important elements as melody and rhythm. The pedagogical work has no real melody, featuring block chords which move through a repeated harmonic progression.

The rhythm, too, remains constant. These attributes combine with the timbral profile to compound the somewhat empty, directionless affect of the sound design and, with it, the film as a whole. Badlands unifies its musical and sound design choices in order to present a consistent whole: in all aspects, the film emphasizes distance and isolation, even against the original signification of the appropriated composition. By aligning the sound profile of his film’s world with that of Schulwerk, Malick shows early signs of the sort of integrated musical-filmic form he will implement in later films. Badlands’s many moments of voiceover necessitate this sort of close aural reading in part because they are so prevalent throughout the film, but also because they are recorded and mixed differently than are similar moments in Malick’s later films. Badlands is unique in its efforts to create a unified aural soundscape, aligning Spacek’s voice with Orff’s composition.

Figure 3-2. Comparison of overtones in A) Schulwerk and B) Spacek voiceover

The specter of silence in these audio examples finds its visual and thematic counterpart in the importance of emptiness within the film, as seen in the opening shots above. From its earliest reviews, this aspect of Badlands has received much critical attention. While some critics, like Stanley Kauffmann, see this focus on distance and isolation as an ineffective gambit deployed by Malick in an effort to mask the actual intellectual emptiness of his film,17 others see the film’s emphasis on decay and emptiness as an existential commentary told through filmmaking decisions rather than

17 Stanley Kauffmann, Living Images (New York: Harper and Row, 1975), 272-3.

through dialogue.18 The short and unsustained life of pitches within the aural world match the emptiness of the film’s main characters and the futility of their attempts at leaving a trace of their existence. Here, then, the actual sound qualities of appropriated musical works create meaning, while the composition’s history and connotations also color the film’s signification by working as anempathetic scoring. Badlands is different from Malick’s other films, though, in that sound quality rather than connotation serves as the main structural force.

With the appropriation of Camille Saint-Säens’s Carnival of the Animals, Days of

Heaven plays on many of the same themes as Badlands, but develops Malick’s musical integration, incorporating pre-existing works into a structure influenced by music. Like the earlier feature, Days of Heaven’s plot is rather sensational, including deceit, more than one murder, a plague of locusts, and raging fire. Despite all this, Malick concentrates more on the relationship between his characters, the young narrator’s philosophical reflections on her situation (possibly omniscient and clearly in retrospect), and the natural environment. Its musical appropriation is also similar to Malick’s first film: like Badlands, it invokes a well-known work (here Carnival of the Animals) as a fairly stable signpost rather than using this work as an opening for greater audience interpretation. Days of Heaven is notably different, however, in its structure. Less a straightforward narrative arc than was its predecessor, this film may borrow its small- scale construction from the musical works it cites.19

18 Morrison and Schur, Films of Malick, 80-1.

19 For a thorough explication of this analysis, see James Wierzbicki, “Sound as Music in the Films of Terrence Malick,” in The Cinema of Terrence Malick: Poetic Visions of America, ed. Hannah Peterson (London: Wallflower Press, 2007), 112-124.

Much as Badlands began with Schulwerk, an aural marker for the excessive simplicity and adolescent naïveté of the main characters and Holly in particular, so does

Days of Heaven open with a musical work meant to prepare and inform our viewing, placing us in a specific time and social class. Playing “The Aquarium” movement from

Saint-Säens’ Carnival of the Animals over a series of photojournalistic images from the early 20th century, both image and sound unite to act as indices of a particular era.

Though Saint-Säens’ composition from 1898 is older than the photographs, both act as markers of a time long past and, indeed, a culture distant from our own and that of the film’s narrator and her family. This narrator, Linda, is introduced in a contemporary photograph inserted into the opening sequence. Tinted to match the authentically antique images, Linda stares out at the audience from a time that is carefully coded as the distant past; since the film codes these aspects as old, we are able to more clearly understand Linda’s voiceover, for example, as also commenting on the past, giving a clear idea of how she could know many of the things she states or what her tone and point of view could be conveying. By successfully coding distance through music, Days of Heaven sets up an interpretive frame for its viewer.

This distance, both from the viewers’ experiences and those of the characters, is emphasized by the film’s sound design immediately following the “Aquarium” excerpt and continuing through the early scenes of the film: as the music’s final chord fades and the film proper begins, the soundscape is dominated by industrial noise that subsumes the chord and obliterates all else. This industrial noise, while far removed from the sonic profile of Saint-Säens’ work, dovetails seamlessly with it. Richard Powers even argues that the whole film, then, should be seen as an extension of “The Aquarium,” a

character piece in film form.20 Powers’s secondary point – that class and economic difference and distance is communicated explicitly through music and its contrasting use – is made clear through the sort of musical formal structure for which I argue.

In sharp contrast to the semiotic content of Carnival of the Animals, the film’s soundtrack then incorporates a more folk-like composition. Leo Kottke’s performance, credited as “Enderlin,” underscores Linda’s train journey with her brother as they flee

Chicago. In most aural qualities, this guitar piece continues to emphasize distance and difference from “The Aquarium,” as the melodic material, rhythmic structures, and instrumentation differ greatly. Gone are the refined strings and obscure glass harmonica, replaced by Kottke’s more folk-like guitar. As Powers argues, this music is emblematic of the way Linda and her family view themselves,21 without the lens of a higher social class observing them, as was the case in the opening still montage.

The use of musical material as an aural marker for distance (figuratively here and literally in the earlier Badlands) continues in the next few moments of the film. Once

Linda, her brother Bill, and his girlfriend – masquerading as a sister, Abby22 – all arrive on the farm, the farmer presides over a religious service opening the harvest season, complete with incense censers, a priest, and full Mass regalia. This scene is wholly different from all that we have previously seen of the characters’ lives, both in Chicago and on the train to Texas. The farmer and his surroundings are marked thematically and

20 Richard Powers, “Listening to the Aquarium: The Symbolic Use of Music in Days of Heaven,” in The Cinema of Terrence Malick: Poetic Visions of America, ed. Hannah Patterson (London: Wallflower Press, 2007), 106.

21 Powers, “Listening to the Aquarium,” 108.

22 This gambit is yet another instance of Malick’s references to Old Testament characters, here through the invocation of Abraham and Sarah in Egypt, as in Genesis 12:10-13.

aurally as different. Underscoring this scene and its foreignness for the central characters is part of Ennio Morricone’s score for the film, credited on the soundtrack CD as “The Harvest.” Interestingly, Morricone borrows the opening flute melody from

Carnival of the Animals’s “The Aquarium,” rearranging it for strings and expanding upon it. Coming so soon after the initial appearance of Saint-Säens’ work, the borrowed material is especially familiar: Powers asserts that some audience members may not even realize it is a different work, as Morricone has so closely aped Saint-Säens.23 In this double appropriation – first of “The Aquarium” as a whole, and then of only its melody – Malick’s film reinforces the static meaning for the work that it has already invoked and solidified, creating a concise aural shorthand for use throughout the film.

This is particularly important as the movie contains little dialogue: most aural information comes from voiceovers, carefully edited diegetic sound, or musical underscoring. In this limited aural environment, each of these factors is exploited in order to create complex and multivalent sources of meaning. Thus musical appropriation is shown to be important to the function of the film, but not as a source for more interpretive freedom, as in Malick’s later films like The Tree of Life. In the case of

Days of Heaven, musical reuse accomplishes the opposite, restricting interpretation in order to function more reliably. As Eco’s concept of unlimited semiosis shows, though, even this openness has limits, as it is through such limitation that everyday communication is typically accomplished.24 If the sound of the word “chair” could reasonably convey literally any meaning, no one could understand any discourse

23 Powers, “Listening to the Aquarium,” 108.

24 See, for example, Umberto Eco, Interpretation and Overinterpretation, 41-3.

regarding chairs. Thus reasonable limits of interpretation make signs functional. In much the same way that words and other complex signs cannot logically be completely open to interpretation and free of restrictions on signification if we are to communicate with them, so too can Malick not afford to foster much interpretive freedom and excessive semiotic chaining in Days of Heaven’s music. By serving a clear purpose and carrying a stable marker of class and distance, Carnival of the Animals becomes useful to the film in a way that it could not be if it were less constricted. Days of Heaven communicates through its musical appropriation, but not in the same way as Malick’s later films. The music serves not as an opening for dialogue, but as a signpost to guide the viewer to a correct interpretation of a particular scene or scenario.

Malick’s first two features show many of the stylistic hallmarks that have become central to his work. Badlands’ and Days of Heaven’s temporal structures are not as abstract as later Malick films, but certain visual and aural elements hint at the development of Malick’s idiosyncratic style and mode of construction. The aforementioned distancing effects are one such stylistic hallmark. The incorporation of images of the natural world, introduced without comment or explicit linking to the narrative, show yet more interpretive possibility. Both tactics will become integral to

Malick’s other films and his authorial voice; indeed, Critchley sees nature as the “frame of the [philosophical] frame” for Malick’s films.25 It is through these visual, aural, and framing tactics that Malick’s musical reuse becomes distinct from that of his contemporaries.

25 Critchley, “Calm.”

Most notably, Badland’s scenes in the couple’s forest home show these developing aspects of Malick’s filmic language. Morrison and Schur call moments such as this “lyrical interludes of nature,”26 and the musical-poetic parallels are apt. Between domestic images of Kit and Holly, the camera lingers on aspects of their natural surroundings: an owl, light filtered through the tree canopy, or the flowing river.

Overlying these visual meditations is the return of Schulwerk, at once recalling the childlike naïveté of Holly as well as the violent beginnings of her journey with Kit.

Juxtaposed with images of the natural world, Malick’s musical reuse asks his audience to reconsider the natural world in conjunction with Holly and Kit: are their impulses depraved, or simply natural, as are those of a predatory owl in its surroundings?

Reintroducing this pedagogical work at the moment when his main characters return to nature, Malick obliquely puts these themes into conversation, not coding a meaning for his audience, but instead forcing a wider interpretation. It is this sort of openness that marks Malick’s later works as different, and which allows him to form a sort of bridge in this study, from the straightforward coding of meaning through music to a more audience-centric, complex process. Though Chion points to the possibility of understanding Malick’s earlier films through the lens of musical form, he does not map the structure of The Thin Red Line (the film on which he focuses) thoroughly enough to explore his assertion.27 This is in part because, I argue, The Thin Red Line shows only a nascent realization of Malick’s musically influenced form, though his incorporation of

26 Morrison and Schur, Films of Malick, 127.

27 Chion, Red Line, 9-14.

unlimited semiosis was already active. For the remainder of this chapter, I concentrate on Malick’s film that uses music in a structural way, The Tree of Life.

Between Grace and Nature: Music and Filmic Form in The Tree of Life

With little dialogue and a narrative that moves among time periods separated by millions of years, The Tree of Life’s music serves as a strong unifying force. In The Tree of Life, appropriation is integral to the film, activating a shared cultural knowledge, a dialogue with the audience, and the chaining semiosis that Umberto Eco describes as

“unlimited.” Perhaps more importantly, though, this unlimited semiosis acts in the service of the film’s large-scale form: rather than taking its structure from a narrative arc,

The Tree of Life shows Malick’s mature tendency to construct his films through the counterpoint of thematic material, forming a cohesive whole that, I argue, resembles a musical structure. Presenting two themes in contrast with each other and finally bringing them into alignment in the conclusion, Malick creates a film whose structure is analogous to sonata form. I analyze TheTree of Life’s use of two iconic works, Gustav

Mahler’s Symphony No. 1 and J.S. Bach’s Toccata and Fugue in D minor, as examples of this formal structuring, arguing that we can understand these works as the sort of multivalent utterances Mikhail Bahtkin labeled “dialogic.”28 Through an examination of musicological approaches to meaning and form, I posit that The Tree of Life most closely aligns with Eco’s unlimited semiosis, pointing to new potential for the use of music in meaning creation between a film and its audience.

If Badlands and Days of Heaven showed an active approach to musical appropriation that integrated its borrowed sounds with image and plot, The Tree of Life

28 Mikhail Bahktin, Speech Genres and Other Late Essays, trans. Vern W. McGee (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1986), 92.

goes even further, separating Malick’s use of music from that of his New Hollywood contemporaries. In The Tree of Life and the more recent To The Wonder (2012), music not only inspires but dictates the films’ form. Both works have been criticized for their sometimes incomprehensible narratives; even The Tree of Life’s star, Sean Penn, has stated that, “a clearer and more conventional narrative would have helped the film without, in my opinion, lessening its beauty and its impact.”29 The constant use of well- known works in the films’ underscoring articulates, through the relationships between these compositions and the themes of Malick’s films, an interplay that allows the films to be understood. Through musical appropriation, Malick has created formal structures that cohesively blend film and music, requiring of his audience an active engagement with the semiotic potential of music in his films.

Malick’s more recent work has been on a grander scale (in length and in scope) than his first two features and has altered its appropriation of music in order to more effectively address larger questions and conflicts. Simon Critchley’s assessment of The

Thin Red Line is equally applicable to Malick’s other work since 1998, and to The Tree of Life in particular; it “is unapologetically epic, the scale is not historical but mythical, and the language is lyrical, even at times metaphysical.”30 Malick confronts these “epic” ideas in The Tree of Life not through a concise and clear narrative, but through thematic exploration and juxtaposition of a central dichotomy: the way of grace versus the way of nature. By incorporating musical works that have a place in this long-standing

29 “Sean Penn, l’indomptable,” Le Figaro, August 20, 2011, http://www.lefigaro.fr/cinema/2011/08/20/03002-20110820ARTFIG00009-sean-penn-l-indomptable.php, quoted in Lindsay Powers, “Sean Penn Let Down By Final Edit of ‘Tree of Life’,” Hollywood Reporter, August 22, 2011, accessed March 20, 2014.

30 Critchley, “Calm.”

conversation, The Tree of Life is able to invoke a wide network of thought without overtly stating it. Through the music’s indexical function, Malick uses these dialogic utterances to structure his film and, eventually, reach a sort of thematic conclusion through his use of sound.

Importantly, I am not arguing that Malick set out to create The Tree of Life as an exemplar of Classical sonata-allegro form, or even that the film and its music follow that form’s accepted traits with total precision. Indeed, the traits of sonata form are so varied that seeking to follow them precisely would be difficult. As Richard Will states of 18th century sonata-allegro symphonic first movements,

the diversity of opening allegros begins with their forms. . . . variables include the presence or absence of repeat signs at the end of the exposition; the relative length of the sections; the extent to which the recapitulation (whether of both key areas or only the second) preserves or rewrites the exposition; and the strength with which cadences, textural changes and other means set the second key area off from the first.31

Though the form itself accepted such variety and has continued to develop, the concept of sonata-allegro form as understood by sonata theory32 is nonetheless a useful means by which listeners can make sense of the music they hear.

I propose that the conceptual framework of musical sonata form can act as a scaffold allowing the audience to understand the film, as well. The Tree of Life’s two

“themes,” the way of grace and that of nature, are each presented in contrast: through music, mood, and filmmaking style, the two are juxtaposed. Malick uses these two poles as the focus of his film instead of following a coherent plot, as we might expect from a

31 Richard Will, “Eighteenth-century Symphonies: an Unfinished Dialogue,” in The Cambridge History of Eighteenth-Century Music, edited by Simon P. Keefe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 623.

32 See, for example, James Hepokoski and Warren Darcy, Elements of Sonata Theory: Norms, Types, and Deformations in the Late Eighteenth-Century Sonata (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006).

Hollywood film. We may view the film’s teleology as consisting of an introduction, first theme (grace), transition, second theme (nature), short development, and recapitulation in which grace and nature are brought into alignment. This alignment is not achieved, as it would be in a musical form, through tonal congruency. In fact, the tonal centers of The

Tree of Life’s appropriated works do not play into this sonata form. In place of tonality, we might see visual style operating in a similar way, at first differentiating the themes and, indeed, bringing them into alignment in the film’s conclusion. Throughout The Tree of Life, then, the film’s structure is analogous to, though not exactly congruent with, a musical sonata-allegro form.

The connection between filmic narrative and musical form appears in some film musicology scholarship, most notably in Robynn Stilwell’s analysis of the Patrick Doyle score for Sense and Sensibility (1995).33 Stilwell finds a close relationship between the form of Doyle’s score, the structure of the narrative, and the content of both. Indeed, she is able to read a clear sonata form in the narrative structure of the source material and well as Doyle’s underscoring.34 Importantly for Stilwell, Doyle’s newly-composed musical structures map clearly onto the (also tightly structured) social interactions in the film, allowing for parallels on both large-scale and local levels. In Stilwell’s analysis,

Doyle constructs an aural analogue to the film’s scenes, so that the music and film share the same form at the same moments. This congruence allows both to be read on a deeper level. Such a musical-narrative structure differs greatly from the tactic I find in

33 Robynn Stilwell, “Sense and Sensibility: Form, Genre, and Function in the Film Score,” Acta Musicologica vol.72, no. 2 (2000): 219-240.

34 This literary form, Stilwell argues, is clearest in the original, three-volume version of Sense and Sensibility, the division of which shows some authorial attention to form. In the now familiar version, though, the sonata-allegro form lives on in plot structure.

Malick’s work, though form is of central importance to both films. In The Tree of Life, there is no readily recognizable narrative form that fits its musical analogue as nicely as does Austen’s plot. Instead, the themes Malick addresses must do the work of a narrative, and they are aided by the use of pre-existing music. This music is, like

Doyle’s Sense score, tailored to fit Tree, but these alterations obscure the music’s own form, instead amplifying its semiotic potential and helping the viewer to make sense of the film’s structure.

In The Tree of Life, the careful organization of sound and image is in the service of one central binary opposition: the way of grace versus the way of nature, first introduced in the opening voiceover. It serves a structural role in the film, acting as the poles around which all the events and characters align. The film centers on the O’Brien family in Waco, Texas; the family and, indeed, the film are defined by this central dichotomy, realized as opposition between the mother and father. For son Jack (Sean

Penn), the childhood death of his brother R.L. continues to haunt him, and it is through the contrasting reactions of his mother and father (played by Jessica Chastain and Brad

Pitt) that we see the pull of two opposing forces upon Jack and in the world more broadly.

The mother and father are, throughout the film, clearly aligned with grace and nature respectively. The ethereal mother first introduces these concepts, in fact, in voiceover (another Malick hallmark). Through her kindness and selflessness, Jack and the audience see the force of grace within the world. In contrast, Pitt plays the father as a controlling man whose own frustrated ambitions as a musician may cause his

harshness toward his children.35 Mr. O’Brien plays the organ and, in his performance, shows all the strictness for which the adult Jack remembers him. This first appearance of music in the film’s plot is contrasted in R.L.’s natural, easy musicianship on the guitar.

Unlike his father’s rigidity, this child’s musicality is portrayed as more free, both aurally and visually. Alone in his room, the boy is surrounded by lightly billowing, floating curtains that seem to caress him. Unlike his father, for whom music is a strict and strictly human construct, the boy, the images tell us, approaches music differently. Thus in musical performances, Malick highlights themes that the film’s musical appropriation will flesh out.

Malick’s construction of this binary opposition as centered on the mother and father is troubled by earlier gender discourse, even in the terms he chooses to label his divide. In her seminal essay, “Is Female to Male as Nature is to Culture?,” Sherry Orten examines the universal devaluation of the female, positing that it stems for the identification of woman with the natural world.36 Orten argues that culture, as a way of controlling nature, is inherently more valued than is the more “passive” role of the woman who is, through her body and its processes, more linked to nature.37 Thus the second-class status of the female is encoded in a somewhat universal system of value.

In laying out this reasoning, Orten hopes to shed light on an unquestioned position,

35 Speaking of his role, Pitt referred to O’Brien as “that oppressive force that will choke another plant out for its own survival.” See “Brad Pitt Plays the American Patriarch in ‘Tree of Life,” NPR May 29, 2011, accessed March 20, 2014, http://www.npr.org/2011/05/29/136690764/pitt-plays-the-american-patriarch- in-tree-of-life.

36 Sherry Orten, “Is Female to Male as Nature is to Culture?” in Woman, Culture, and Society, ed. Michelle Zimbalist Rosaldo and Louise Lamphere (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1974), 67-88.

37 Orten, “Female to Male,” 73-4.

potentially giving the insight to subvert it. The Tree of Life’s central dichotomy, though, operates in opposition to the “universal” system Orten outlines.

While Malick’s project in The Tree of Life is not an inherently feminist one, he seems to advocate for subversion in his “grace versus nature” construct. Malick flips this identification of woman and man, in large part because his definition of “nature” is different than Orten’s. Malick equates “nature” in some ways with the darker aspects of

“human nature” and, in fact, “culture.” As Mr. O’Brien tells his sons, their mother is weak because she lets others control her; he, as the embodiment of grasping, controlling human nature, would never allow such a thing for himself. In the world of The Tree of

Life, culture (as a system of controlling the world around) is not valorized, but painted as problematic. Thus grace, the mother’s attribute, is shown as the more powerful and desirable force in the world. Not fitting comfortably within Orten’s dichotomy (which, as she proves fairly thoroughly, is almost universal), Malick’s binary opposition instead rethinks the relationship of gender identity to power and to the physical world. The director’s view of grace seems to encompass the natural world as well, realigning the power structure of culture versus nature. Within the scope of The Tree of Life, the divine and the natural are both elevated above the forces of human nature and both aligned with the mother and the “grace” side of Tree’s dichotomy, thus elevating the female beyond male. Malick’s affinity for the feminine can be seen in some of his earlier films as well. In his use of female voiceover in particular, Malick consistently gives literal voice to the feminine, frequently in the absence of the male voice.38 This seemingly small shift can be read as radical in its implications, not all of which are worked out

38 For a full analysis of Malick’s use of female voiceovers, see Kaja Silverman, The Acoustic Mirror: The Female Voice in Psychoanalysis and Cinema (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988).

within the space of the film. Through the incorporation of meaning-laden pre-existing music, though, Malick is able to project some of the possibilities of his new binary structure.

Apart from its importance in plot, the opposition of grace and nature through female and male is also realized in other aspects of the film, both visual and aural. In the elemental recurring motifs of fire and water, The Tree of Life continually recalls this basic opposition. In a procedure that resembles musical form, Malick structures his film not around a central linear narrative, but as the interplay between these two poles. This thematic device allows Malick to traverse time periods and locales that range from cosmic creation narratives, to prehistoric dinosaur encounters, to childhoods in Waco, while still creating some semblance of unity and cohesion. Reuse of familiar music allows the thematic interplay to be legible to the audience, thus providing the formal scaffolding for the entire film. I am not trying to map a narrative approach onto musical forms, but am doing what amounts to the opposite: reading a text that should be understood narratively in a non-narrative, formal, almost musical way.

Malick and his team show this binary through composers whose legends loom large. Far from simply acting as aural wallpaper, each of the compositions included in

The Tree of Life carries with it a pre-existing narrative of some sort. That Malick’s appropriation of art music should be so nuanced is perhaps unsurprising. The director’s knowledge of a wide variety of arts is commented upon by many of his collaborators.

Nestor Almendros, cinematographer for Days of Heaven, even comments that it was easy for him to work with Malick because of the director’s cosmopolitanism (emphasis added): “Though Malick is very much an American, his culture is universal, and he is

familiar with European philosophy, literature, painting, and music.”39 This worldliness translates to Malick’s ease of allusion in many arts, both visual and aural; as these are all a part of his lexicon, the director appropriates signs which are familiar and allow him to obliquely reference larger philosophical issues through the tapestry of his film’s environment rather than through dialogue or narrative directly. His erudition in the realm of music is obvious in each of his films and has been substantiated by several authors.40

That this fact in particular is repeatedly documented is worthy of note, given that Malick is generally viewed as a recluse about whom little is known, and even biographical basics like his place of birth are up for debate.

I will concentrate only on two examples of musical appropriation in The Tree of

Life: Mahler’s Symphony No. 1 and J.S. Bach’s Toccata and Fugue in D minor. The film places these works on opposite sides of its central divide, with Mahler and Smetana’s

“The Moldau,” among others, underscoring moments of uncorrupted grace, while Bach and Brahms’ Symphony No. 4 align with man’s striving nature. The most obvious of these thematic connections is in the use of Mahler’s Symphony No. 1, with its programmatic allusions to the natural world and outright mimicry of birdsong, among other features.41 Each of these works, though, connects either musically or extramusically to the ideas that Malick is exploring, contrasting, and occasionally

39 Almendros, A Man with a Camera, 186.

40 See, most notably, Alex Ross, “The Music of The Tree of Life,” The Rest is Noise, accessed 20 March 2014, http://www.therestisnoise.com/2011/05/music-of-the-tree-of-life.html.

41 The relationship of Mahler’s work to nature has been explored, for example, in Barbara Barry, “In Search of and Ending: Reframing Mahler’s Contexts of Closure,” Journal of Musicological Research 26, no.1 (Winter 2007): 55-68; Thomas Bauman, Peter Franklin, and many more.

reconciling. It is through these musical moments that the form of Malick’s film becomes legible.

As with musical form, film form cannot be discussed as divorced from its content.

In this case, it is the interaction of the aural and visual content itself that dictates the form. I import the idea of musical form into the study of this film for two reasons: first, because narrative structure, the prevailing framework for discussing the large-scale form of films, is not as readily applicable to much of Malick’s work, and is particularly inappropriate for assessing The Tree of Life. Secondly, music and its forms are shown to be central to the director’s oeuvre, as shown by Badlands and Days of Heaven, as well as scholarship from Wierzbicki, Critchley, and others.42 Given this ongoing engagement with musical works and the extent to which Malick is experimenting with non-traditional temporal structures, I view musical form as a clear analogue to The Tree of Life’s overall structure.

I will discuss in depth only two musical moments within this large-scale form, touching also on its conclusion. For reference, Figure 3-3 documents the major moments of musical reuse in the film. Even this listing is not exhaustive; The Tree of

Life makes extensive use of familiar musical works. Though its dialogue is sparse, the film’s soundtrack is anything but bare, as the interweaving of music and diegetic sound fill the soundscape throughout. I have chosen to chart, then, only the moments of appropriation that are extended (greater than thirty seconds) and are easily recognizable, including a melodic fragment or distinctive timbre. Even with these

42 Critchley, “Calm.”

restrictions, the list is long. Most but not all relate the grace/nature divide, and a few even facilitate the film’s shift from one to the other.

The Mahler and Bach compositions are my focus because of the ways that they relate to Malick’s formal structure and play with meaning. Though many important works are quoted at length in the film, these two are important structurally. Mahler’s Symphony

No. 1 is used repeatedly and is perhaps the composition most closely linked to the mother due to this repetition, while Bach’s Toccata and Fugue marks the opening of the second thematic section, dealing with the father and the way of nature. I have also chosen to concentrate on these two because they are the clearest and most expedient examples of the dialogic nature of Malick’s appropriation. Both works have complex histories of their own, and extensive scholarly literature pertaining to them. In addition,

Mahler’s Symphony No. 1, also known as the “Titan,” is itself dialogic, in its disputed program 43 and purported reference to Jean Paul’s novel of the same name. Peter

Franklin’s analysis of the Titan reference is most fitting with the idea of the symphony as dialogic utterance, describing it as Mahler “searching around his cultural memory.” 44

Indeed, Franklin argues that we might view Mahler’s programs for his works as,

“prominences of a conceptual iceberg that sinks down through an entire phase of

Western cultural history, which the work itself effectively embraces.”45 If we can see these works as embracing “an entire phase of Western cultural history,” their semiotic expediency becomes clear. In these ways, Mahler’s and Bach’s compositions serve as

43 Constantin Floros, Gustav Mahler: The Symphonies, trans. Vernon Wicker (Portland: Amadeus Press, 1997), 31-32.

44 Peter Franklin, “Funeral Rites: Mahler and Mickiewicz,” Music and Letters 55, no. 2 (April 1974), 205.

45 Peter Franklin, “Funeral Rites,” 204.

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the clearest examples of the role of music in The Tree of Life, though they are certainly not the only examples.

As Figure 3-3 shows, the film’s first hour is dominated by the mother and the way of grace. These musical quotations tend to be more extended and atmospheric (lacking in predictable and regular harmonic movement). The quotation from Mahler’s Symphony

No. 1 is a clear exemplar of music’s role in the nature section. Since the cells below are not sized to reflect duration, the chart can be a bit misleading. The “grace” side of

Malick’s opposition is represented by fewer compositions, but longer quotations. This is in fitting with both the more languid visual style of the nature section and with the idea that the film structurally resembles a musical form; if nature is its first theme, this theme is receiving a full exposition and comes back to dominate The Tree of Life’s ending as well.

The film’s second hour begins to concentrate on the father, symbol of nature.

Here the musical cues are a bit shorter but much more easily recognizable in that they quote predictable, regular melodies and are more clearly delineated in form. My analysis of two scenes below details the visual and thematic differences in these grace and nature sequences. Malick’s musical appropriation follows a course through its first theme, transitioning to its second, developing and intermingling these ideas and finally recapitulating them, with repetition of music from the first “theme” and a final reconciliation of both together in the extended quotation of the Agnus Dei from Berlioz’s

Requiem, Op. 5. The Tree of Life’s form follows a sonata-allegro musical structure fairly closely, complete with this movement of the two themes into congruence with one another and a return, in this case to the film’s opening image and to some of the

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musical cues of the opening thematic section. Taking as my focus the appropriation of

Mahler’s First Symphony and Bach’s Toccata and Fugue in D minor, then, I examine the ways that Malick’s filmmaking choices make this form legible and amplify the thematic play found in his musical appropriation.

Figure 3-3. The Tree of Life’s appropriated music.

The opening of Mahler’s First Symphony underscores the reactions of the mother

(the personification of grace) to moments of death that punctuate The Tree of Life’s plot.

The first of these occurs only minutes into the film, after a telegram announces the death of one of the O’Brien sons. Tolling bells sound as the postman leaves, blending into the droning A across multiple octaves that opens the symphony. As Mrs. O’Brien

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walks through the family home, touching objects that bear the memorative mark of her son, the falling perfect fifths in the flute, oboe, clarinet, and, later, bassoons accompany her. Notably, this opening is not aurally identical to Mahler’s First Symphony as he wrote it. The opening 30 bars of the work are presented with some extension, and without contrasting fanfare material in the trumpet and clarinet, which is of integral importance in the symphony as a whole. By rewriting this section, The Tree of Life not only changes the atmospheric and affective work of the piece in this scene, but also projects implications for the symphony’s closure, for those viewers who are familiar with the composition. Malick also complicates the common interpretation of Mahler’s symphony as an expression of nature, aligning it instead with grace. This difference in terminology belies a similarity in conception. Example 3-1 shows the opening 10 measures of the symphony as it appears in The Tree of Life.

Example 3-1. Mahler, Symphony No. 1 (The Tree of Life arrangement), mm. 1-10 (author’s transcription).

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The new arrangement of the First Symphony extends the atmospheric opening and portrays the mother’s grief (a connection indexically forged with their simultaneous introduction) as static and expansive in the same way the musical underscoring extends beyond its familiar bounds. This is compounded by new fermati on the woodwinds’ descending fourths. After its first entrance, this figure is extended and taken out of time.

Perhaps more importantly than this atmospheric effect, though, are The Tree of Life’s specific edits in this new arrangement, cutting out the figures first scored for clarinets in measure 9 and later, for trumpets beginning in measure 22. See Example 3-2 for measures 10 and 11 of this fanfare as scored for clarinets in the symphony’s most well- known form.

Example 3-2. Mahler, Symphony No. 1, measure 10 – 12 (Gustav Mahler, Symphony No. 1 [Vienna: Universal Edition, 1906]).

This figure eventually allows resolution in the original form of the symphony: it not only pushes the static introductory material into its transition to the Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen melody that follows, but it also reappears in the symphony’s dramatic conclusion, bringing the work to its eventual close in the fourth movement.

Without the fanfare, the symphony lacks the material that prepares closure; the drone and falling fifth motive alone are somewhat static and cannot accomplish a resolution in the way that Mahler’s complete work does. Indeed, without this material, the moment

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Theodor Adorno identifies as a breakthrough, or durchbruch, in the symphony’s final movement would be impossible.46 Thwarting expectations of the music and its best known form so clearly allows the film to create even more complex signification in its musical reuse. This multivalent manipulation of musical structure and audience memory is a clear instance of unlimited semiosis.

The First Symphony fanfare, described by Peter Franklin in its off-stage trumpet iteration as “stress[ing] a physical separation between the platform orchestra as Nature, with its explicitly marked cuckoo calls, and the realm of human activity,”47 also fits closely with the themes around which Malick builds his film. Given the loose program attached to Mahler’s Symphony No. 1, Malick’s appropriation is particularly fitting. From its second performance, the work has been intermittently linked to a narrative that, beginning in a natural idyll, continues through the struggle and eventual death of its protagonist. Though Franklin and indeed Mahler label this idyll as “Nature,”48 I view it as a part of the grace side of Malick’s equation. Indeed, it seems that Mahler’s concept of nature was strikingly similar to Malick’s “grace.” Interpreting Mahler’s relationship to the natural world as described in his letters, Donald Mitchell finds that there is “ample evidence of Mahler’s extraordinarily intense conception of the Earth (all Nature, that is to say) as ‘Universal Mother,’ to whose bosom lonely, forsaken man clings for consolation.”49 Elsewhere Mitchell characterizes the composer’s conception of nature as

46 Theodor W. Adorno, Mahler: A Musical Physiognomy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 41.

47 Peter Franklin, “Mahler, Gustav” Grove Music Online, accessed March 10, 2014, Oxford Music Online.

48 See, for example, the opening descriptors in the score: “wie ein Naturlaut.”

49 Donald Mitchell, Gustav Mahler: The Early Years, revised and edited by Paul Banks and David Matthews (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980), 86.

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“downright religious.”50 The connection between Mahler’s “nature” and Malick’s “grace” seems clear. The corollary to Malick’s nature, then, would be the subjective human experience referenced by Franklin in his description of the off-stage fanfare, which is excised from The Tree of Life’s moment of grace.

Though using different language to make sense of this divide, both seem to speak of an Edenic quality on the side of what Malick terms “grace.” Whether this is viewed as a natural, uncorrupted state or one linked explicitly with God and His grace, the effect is one and the same: it contrasts this peace with the corrupting force of mankind’s grasping nature. This aspect of man can be seen in the symphony as personified by the fanfare figure and off-stage trumpet call. As such, this work is a particularly fitting choice to underscore the first moment of struggle in the O’Brien family, as grace is forced to confront nature in R.L.’s death. Malick’s team chooses Mahler’s most fitting symphony and, through careful musical editing, succeeds in separating grace from nature in this instance of musical appropriation. By editing out the voice of

“nature,” we are left, musically, with an expansive, somewhat static expression of grace.

In fact, in response to a neighbor’s reassurance that her grief will one day pass, Mrs.

O’Brien states baldly that she does not want it to: like this musical stasis, she wishes to maintain and extend her grief as a connection to her lost son.

The long history of Mahler’s use in film adds additional interpretants to The Tree of Life’s quotation. As Jeremy Barham has discussed in detail, the composer’s music has long been filmically associated with certain tropes, one of which is death.51 Though

50 Mitchell, Early Years, 87.

51 Jeremy Barham, “Plundering Cultural Archives and Transcending Diegetics: Mahler’s Music as ‘Overscore.’” Music and the Moving Image vol. 3, No.1 (Spring 2010): 22-47.

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Symphony No. 1 does not bring with it a specific filmic referent in the way that, say, the

Adagietto from Symphony No. 5 would immediately call up Luchino Visconti’s Death in

Venice (1971), the First Symphony is still clearly recognizable and evokes the figure of

Mahler the composer. Indeed, in some ways it may even act as an invocation of such touchstones as this very Death in Venice usage, though the piece used is very different.

Malick’s apparent musical literacy (attested to by collaborators and critics who know him) seems to suggest that he expects his model viewer to comprehend that this invocation of Mahler works not only calls upon associations with the First Symphony

(itself concerned with death in its later movements52), but also on the tradition of

Mahler’s music in film. For such a musically-inclined director, these connections would be a given, but it seems that Malick and his team are more concerned with the structure and form of the specific composition, since this is the area in which the most editing is evident.

As harmonic and motivic stasis are the most notable features of the symphonic section included here, the visual editing, by and large, does not align strictly with the underscoring. Rather than mimicking the rhythmic flow of earlier Malick films like those discussed above, this sequence seems to float, with slow panning shots and little in the way of jarring editing that might be said to follow phrasal or formal division in the music.

This, however, may be the point: Malick’s musical team have altered Mahler’s work to emphasize stasis as opposed to forward motion and development, and here too in the image track we see the same tendency. This musical freedom and flow will continue to

52 In Mahler’s programmatic descriptions of the symphony’s movements, we can see a loose narrative, beginning with the awakening of nature in the first movement, a “love episode” in the later excised “Blumine,” a peasant dance in the scherzo, a death march, and finally, “Dall inferno al paradiso” carries the listener to a redemptive ending.

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be linked to grace throughout the film, as the way of nature receives a very different visual treatment.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, many Tree of Life scenes that prominently feature pre- existing art music are edited to emphasize the music’s form. A prime example of this technique comes in the sequence featuring Bach’s Toccata and Fugue in D minor.

Beginning with measure 31 of the work, the start of the fugue, as nondiegetic underscoring this piece accompanies a montage of scenes between Mr. O’Brien and his sons. Formal divisions match visual ones, as the scene abruptly moves from a church interior to the outdoor yard of the O’Brien home at precisely the moment of shift from the exposition to the sequential episode at measure 41 in Bach’s fugue. Another such visual/aural transition happens shortly thereafter, with the return of the subject in measure 52, where the film cuts immediately to the father rebuking his son for pulling weeds incorrectly. Each formal milepost in the fugue is marked by a cut to a new, strict lesson from the father: with the sequential bridge in measure 54, a treatise on speed and self defense; in the next entrance of the subject, advice on how to avoid being taken advantage of (like the “weak” mother is). This pattern of formal cuts continues as the father warns his sons against doing what he did: giving up on his own dream for the sake of a conventional life and family. See Example 3-3 for a score example of this phrasal editing.

Throughout this filmic sequence, such changes in visual content and atmosphere match musical changes in character. Not “mickey mousing” or matching action to musical sound effect, these cuts appear to be thematic in nature, and similar on a small scale to the thematic interplay I identify on a broader level. This atmospheric and

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thematic connection in editing is not as evident in the sections from Mahler’s First

Symphony. I propose a twofold explanation for this difference: first, it allows for a visual and “rhythmic” distinction between the scenes attached to nature and those connected to grace. Second, the musical selection used to underscore the Mahler section does not lend itself to the same sort of rhythmic editing, particularly in the altered version used in the scene. Even more so than the original, this version eschews easy sectional divides and therefore necessitates the flowing and continuous shots already described.

Example 3-3. J.S. Bach, Toccata and Fugue in D minor, mm. 41-46. (Johann Sebastian Bach, Toccata and Fugue in D Minor [Leipzig: Breitkopf and Härtel, 1867]).

On the level of individual shot construction, this Bach scene is also composed in an entirely different way than are the “mother” or “grace” scenes. Following a short sequence in which the father unceremoniously rousts his sons from bed, Malick cuts to a series of close ups that show the father performing Bach’s organ work. In the

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extremely close framing of Pitt’s face and his hands on the keys, and young Jack’s face in the reaction shots, the camera effectively separates father and son visually in a way that is never mirrored in the mother-son interactions. In addition, the soft natural light that permeates each grace scene is replaced with the dark, stark lighting of the church for this sequence’s beginning. This difference in lighting continues through the sequence, as even the scenes that take place in the same setting as those with the mother appear very different. For example, when the father chastises his son for slamming the door (accompanied by the fragmented sequential episode at measure 45 in the fugue), the natural light that permeates the frame is not that occasionally blinding sunlight associated with the ethereal mother, but something more akin to the “magic hour” photography so prevalent in Days of Heaven.

This attention to the subtleties of quality of light may seem excessive, but accounts of Malick’s filmmaking style concentrate not only on the lighting effects achieved, but also on the production difficulty that such effects entail. Almendros, speaking of his experience on the Days of Heaven set, emphasizes that Malick had a clear conception of the visual and lighting design of the film, though many other aspects of production, including specifics of the narrative, were left to improvisation.53 In fact, the production was frequently forced to limit shooting time to the “magic hour” of warm, golden light, or, for interiors, to times when natural light could be used effectively.54 This careful attention to atmosphere and lighting is evident in each of Malick’s films, and serves to solidify the central binary between grace and nature in The Tree of Life.

53 Almendros, Camera, 183.

54 Morrison and Schur, Films of Malick, 122.

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Figures 3-4 A and B illustrate this difference in lighting and framing along the grace/nature divide.

B Figure 3-4. Typical lighting in A) a “grace” sequence and B) a “nature” sequence (The Tree of Life, directed by Terrence Malick [2011; Beverly Hills: Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation, 2011], DVD).

In content, the father is presented throughout the sequence as the strongest possible proponent of the viewpoint of “nature”; he is the striving, calculating, rational antidote to the caring, ethereal mother. To match this thematic play among characters,

Malick calls upon a composer whose reputation for careful, balanced construction is legendary; indeed, his Well-Tempered Clavier is said to be an instruction manual for his son, and his works are often used as such in counterpoint classes. Bach conveys, then,

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a persona rational and carefully controlled. As an analogous figure for Mr. O’Brien, our historical understanding of Bach shows the composer as a master of his craft who uses his work to school his sons in proper composition as O’Brien, in a voiceover, teaches his sons how to properly navigate the world and its inhabitants. Bach acts here on multiple levels: first and most broadly, the work is an indexical invocation of the composer and his reputation. This aural index leads to semiotic chaining, allowing the viewer to connect this aural sign with the attendant attributes that would link it to the

“nature” side of Malick’s divide.

Malick’s team chose a composer whose own reputation, in the 20th century at least, is wrapped up in the same sort of “grace versus nature” debate. Early biographers of Bach, including Forkel and Spitta, convey an understanding of the composer as a deeply religious man whose belief permeated his work.55 In the research of Friedrich

Blume, Alfred Dürr, and Georg von Dadelsen from the 1950s and 1960s, we can find a changing discourse on Bach: was he a religiously devoted, almost mystical composer, or a workman striving in his very worldly profession?56 Examining the composer’s output with a newly adjusted timeline and exploring his employment throughout his life, the new Bach chronology of the mid-20th century thus paints a very different picture of the venerated composer. By showing a more practical, work-a-day image of J.S. Bach,

Blume, Dadelsen, and Dürr prompt readers to reconsider Bach and his work. Thus the musicological debate fuels Malick’s own, though such specialized knowledge is not

55 See, for example, early biographies like Johann Nikolaus Forkel, Johann Sebastian Bach: His Life, Art, and Work, trans. Charles Sanford Terry (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1920).

56 Friedrich Blume and Stanley Godman, “Outlines of a New Picture of Bach,” Music and Letters 4, no. 3 (July 1963), 214-227; and Gerhard Herz, “Toward a New Image of Bach,” in Essays on J.S. Bach (Ann Arbor, Michigan: UMI Research Press, 1985), 149-181.

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necessary even to relate Bach to the contrasting ways of grace and nature. This detour merely shows the possibilities of unlimited semiosis, depending on the spectator and his or her own treasury of knowledge. It is worth noting, though, that Malick’s formal contrasts continue to operate at this level.

The fugue itself also conveys a strictness and sense of law, rather than of grace.

Separated here from the freedom and lack of restriction in the toccata, Bach’s fugue stands as a realization of the rules and strictures shown in The Well-Tempered Clavier.

United by the performance of the fugue, Bach and Mr. O’Brien then both express the rule of law in opposition to the grace of the mother. Their contrast can be read as a continuation of Malick’s exploratation of the Old Testament God versus the New: particularly in Days of Heaven, the director invokes Biblical stories to explore these roles.

Rather than choosing an obscure, compositionally challenging composer known only to specialists, Malick and his team use the most famous composition by, arguably, one of the most famous composers in the art music canon.57 These connections are obvious to the viewer who shares in Malick’s social treasury of knowledge: the musical signs are meant to be legible, presented in such a way as to influence the reading of the film as a whole. This aural index opens unlimited semiosis, allowing the viewer to make the connections between Bach the composer, this fugue in particular, and the themes that govern Malick’s work. Paired with the Mahler quotation early in the film, this scene enters into a musical conversation that spans the whole of The Tree of Life’s creation

57 In addition, this is a work with its own filmic history. The Toccata and Fugue has been used in a variety of films, often to connote horror (as is typical with the organ), but sometimes flaunting that convention, as, for example, in its humorous usage in Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life, (1983), a musical allusion that would not funtion as well without a common understanding of the composition’s typical filmic role.

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story and meditation on God. Thus the content – visual, aural, and semiotic – fuses to create the overarching form for which I argue.

Though The Tree of Life incorporates compositions fraught with extramusical meaning, Malick’s appropriation is atypical in relation to the previous examples from his films in that here he does not choose works that would close off semiotic chaining. In the cases of Badlands and Days of Heaven, Malick incorporated music in a much less interactive way. Orff’s Schulwerk does not carry the same cultural capital as do the works in The Tree of Life and, as such, is unable to set off the same sort of associative chains. As the previous section discussed, this reuse is instead more like a marker: it carries a fairly codified meaning throughout, as does Carnival of the Animals in Days of

Heaven. As The Tree of Life sound designer Craig Berkey says, “Terry's films give the audience the space to feel things on their own and not just have a nonstop pop score telling them what to feel and invasive picture editing telling them where to look every second."58 These later films do not dictate one precise and stable meaning through their manipulation of music. Instead, through his formal process Malick opens interpretation yet more widely in his later films, bringing the audience into a more active role.

Umberto Eco’s conception of unlimited semiosis helps in understanding this openness, explaining how musical appropriation acts differently here than in Malick’s earlier films and showing the way meaning can be invoked and changed through a particular sign, in this case a musical work. In his formulation, the expression of a sign

(here the sound of a work) carries a content or meaning; through unlimited semiosis, the sign (both expression and content) becomes the expression of a new content based on

58 Blair Jackson, “Sound for Picture: The Tree of Life,” Mix 35, no. 6 (June 2011), 37.

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the audience’s interpretation.59 The “unlimited” aspect comes in the indefinitely chaining process, which could theoretically continue forever. Thus each viewer can experience the same film and, given the same starting point, interpret each instance of musical reuse in a totally different way. How, then, can a director ensure that each viewer does not come away with a wildly different understanding of the film? Through the use of coding and shared cultural knowledge, boundaries are effectively drawn on unlimited semiosis, creating in each case a sort of understood reasonable limit of interpretation. In this way, Malick can prompt active audience involvement while still conveying a somewhat stable meaning.

In the case of The Tree of Life, such coding comes from a variety of frames. One important shared base of knowledge is Malick’s own style and previous work. His frequent invocation of Heideggerian themes, reworking of Old Testament narratives,60 and juxtaposition of man and nature provide his audience with a common grounding from which to understand each new film. In addition, the careful musical construction that Wierzbicki finds in Days of Heaven also informs interpretation here. Armed with a familiarity with Malick’s typical non-narrative structure and the role that sound and music play in it, the viewer is preconditioned to approach The Tree of Life’s music as both significant and structural. The narrative importance attached to music in Badlands and

Days of Heaven also prompts the audience to take into account the history and common meanings of these works, opening a dialogic process and allowing for a deeper and more nuanced understanding of Malick’s appropriation. In these ways,

59 Umberto Eco, A Theory of Semiotics (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1976), 126.

60 For a complete study of this attribute in Malick’s earlier works, see Hubert Cohen, “The Genesis of Days of Heaven,” Cinema Journal 42, no. 4 (Summer 2003): 46-62.

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coding and a shared social treasury of knowledge are integral to the understanding and interpretation of The Tree of Life – more so, I would argue, than in Malick’s other works.

Kofi Agawu’s work on semiosis and generic codes provides a lens through which to understand this appropriation, making sense of meaning through form in relation to a very different repertoire. In his Playing With Signs, Kofi Agawu posits a semiotics of

Classic period music that operates on two levels: the introversive (or structural, creating meaning within a work only) and extroversive (or referential in some way, acting as a sign which points to something outside the music).61 Agawu explains that these two levels are not completely separate, but often intermingle in fruitful ways. Though his system is designed to apply to instrumental music of a specific time period, this idea of introversive and extroversive semiosis can be usefully applied to film music as well.

Rather than assigning introversive meaning to purely structural elements of the score, I will instead approach its introversion as relates to music’s position within the film, or the large-scale structure to which I have referred; conversely, extroversive meaning in film music could be created within the coded expectations of genre. As in Agawu’s original formulation, it is on the blurred boundary of this divide, I argue, that the musical score engages in play (both in relation to its narrative position and its meaning).

Borrowing this formulation from Jakobson, Agawu sees these two levels as showing a different kind of communication, one within the notes themselves and one outside the work. In introversive semiosis, this entails “‘pure signs,’ signs that provide important clues to musical organization through conventional use, but not necessarily by

61 Kofi Agawu, Playing With Signs: A Semiotic Interpretation of Classic Music (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1991), 132-3.

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referential or extramusical association.”62 Agawu deals with relationships in time and structure by using a beginning-middle-end formulation: the different parts of the work mean in relation to this temporal division and affect the understanding of other musical events. In these instances, Agawu states the unique creates meaning more readily than does the commonplace.63

The opposite is true of extroversive semiosis: the meaning of topics is recognized by their relation to a commonly understood exemplar, so it is through their resemblance to this exemplar that they are able to convey anything.64 In invoking a common musical sign, the work thus refers to something outside itself in order to create meaning. This division is not impermeable as, for example, in The Tree of Life’s use of Mahler’s

Symphony No. 1: it includes its own coded meaning that exists outside the context of the film, but its position in relation to other filmic elements allows it to spawn meaning in another way specific to this context.

Like these compositions, contemporary Hollywood film has a strictly codified system of form and meaning, solidified in the years since its inception in order to make these works intelligible. The very narrative structure that we take for granted in

Hollywood film is one such method, and Malick’s play with and against it allows the viewer to understand his films differently in light of their manipulation of this form. His alternative mode of composition is meaningful because it does not match audience’s experience of and expectations for a traditional Hollywood film. As with the Classical works Agawu addresses, it is through both the local, specialized use of musical works

62 Agawu, Playing, 51.

63 Agawu, Playing, 134.

64 Agawu, Playing, 134.

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as signs and through the meaning created through form that the ideas and themes of these films are communicated.65

Making sense of this filmic play with musical signs, then, requires reconciling the genre-based creation of meaning that Agawu explains with the openness described by

Eco’s unlimited semiosis. These musical signs are operating on both the level of film- specific meaning and the broader, more culturally based meaning that requires outside knowledge of the work. By combining the two, the overall structure of Malick’s film can be theorized. As I analyze it, this structure does not follow the stasis-action-stasis format theorized by Morrison and Schur in Malick’s early films, but instead coalesces into something more akin to the thematic play found, for example, in the exposition of a sonata-allegro form. As James Webster describes it, this contrast between themes results in variety, “in phrase rhythm, level of activity, harmonic structure and cadential strength.”66 In the music it uses as underscoring, its visual rhythm, visual tone, and thematic connections, The Tree of Life accomplishes exactly this same variety. Like sonata form, Malick also uses this contrast as a structural, interpretive element, allowing his audience to make sense of the filmic text and its allusions through its internal structure. In the film’s ending, Malick seems to reconcile the two themes to each other, in a way that may be analogous to the transposition of the second theme group to the tonic, if we are to continue the musical parallel.

To be clear, I am not arguing that Malick has consciously constructed a film that, in a planned and purposeful way, follows the guidelines we understand as sonata form.

65 See, for example, Agawu, Playing, 29, for a discussion of this two-part meaning creation and conveyance.

66 James Webster, “Sonata form,” Grove Music Online, accessed September 14, 2014, Oxford Music Online.

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Rather, I contend that the film’s form, which also weaves together contrasting themes, is in many ways similar to such a musical form and, like this tradition, helps its audience to make sense of it by following similar conventions, particularly in the way that The Tree of Life navigates its transitions between contrasting themes and finds common ground.

Importantly, I am also not attempting to map a narrative structure onto musical form. As critics and audiences have noted with much consternation, The Tree of Life does not follow coherent and accepted filmic narrative forms; to use this film as an argument for musical narrativity would be ill advised. I am, however, addressing Malick’s film as similar in structure to some musical works, in the hope that this similarity will allow for a deeper understanding of the ideas at work in both the appropriated music and the film as a whole.

Musically realizing this oppositional form throughout the film, Malick and his team set up a binary between grace and nature as a conflict between the formally strict absolute music of Bach and Brahms and the programmatic, often more formally ambiguous (in their Tree of Life arrangements) works by Smetana and Mahler. These differences in musical form are not coincidental: through visual editing and musical rewriting, the film succeeds in not only emphasizing this difference, but making it yet greater, if we view the aural and visual as an integrated whole in these sequences. This attention to musical distinctions in form betrays a deeper level of aural planning: as the formal differences are exacerbated by their filmic appropriation, it seems clear that these differences were important in the selection and incorporation of these particular compositions. Thus Mahler, Brahms, and Bach are not simply chosen for their atmospheric or affective affinity to a particular scene where they may seem to fit, but are

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more thoroughly integrated on affective, formal, thematic, memorative, and significatory levels. Each work builds on the multivalent meaning Malick uses to structure his film.

These musical allusions work as what Bahktin would term dialogic utterances.67

Malick’s film speaks through these works, or pre-existing utterances, which are part of long-standing discourses. This idea of the dialogic nature of these works is useful in extending Eco’s unlimited semiosis: while the spectator can make a variety of semiotic moves connecting Mahler’s First Symphony to a broader meaning, Bahktin’s concept forces us to think about the meaning already attached to the symphony and the ways that invoking the work can be seen as partaking in an existing conversation. As he states:

The word in language is half someone else’s. It becomes one’s “own” only when the speaker populates it with his own intentions, his own accent, when he appropriates the word, adapting it to his own semantic and expressive intention. Prior to this moment of appropriation, the word does not exist in a neutral and impersonal language... but rather it exists in other people’s mouths, in other people’s contexts, serving other people’s intentions; it is from there that one must take the word, and make it one’s own.68

Such a gambit is immensely useful in the context of The Tree of Life, which seeks to address all aspects not only of human existence, but of life itself from the beginning of time to today. In this incredibly broad scope, Malick strategically uses musical works that can, through their very presence in the film, draw in streams of discourse that have been continuing for centuries. Far from acting as mere shorthand for a stable meaning, as did musical invocation in Days of Heaven, these dialogic utterances instead open a semiotic and memorative door, inviting the spectator to engage with the work and with

67 Mikhail Bahktin, Speech Genres and Other Late Essays, trans. Vern W. McGee (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1986), 92.

68 Mikhail Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1992), 294.

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Malick’s themes on a yet deeper level. The appropriation of each of the musical works discussed above does this, to a greater or lesser extent.

It could be argued that any instance of musical appropriation is, in some respect, dialogic, as each could foster unlimited semiosis. Since the study of semiotics does not aim to prescribe a specific meaning (thus stopping the chain of semiosis and rendering any study useless), I would be unable to prove this definitively inaccurate. I argue, however, that despite the potential for unlimited semiosis or a dialogic utterance that is inherent in any allusion, certain instances foster and indeed depend on this openness more than do others. The Tree of Life is a prime example of one such work, as it does not function well without the semiotic and memorative function played by these compositions.

On a large, temporal scale, the musical and thematic contrasts of the film play off of each other and develop slowly. There are myriad other examples of musical appropriation in this film, which I have not discussed, but which all play roles in the exploration and reconciliation of the film’s central binary opposition. Though all of these moments of reuse bolster the argument for a large-scale formal structure in The Tree of

Life, I have chosen to concentrate on those that incorporate the most complex semiosis.

These other instances, though, are also rife with material for further study. Their complexity is eventually resolved in the film’s final sequence, also underscored by a familiar musical work.

In analyzing The Tree of Life’s form, one can see each instance of musical appropriation as a moment in the reconciliation of the ways of nature and grace. Into

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this binary, S. Brent Plate argues for a third, middle road: the way of the brother.69

Through R.L. (and, notably, his ease, natural musicianship, and general blamelessness), Plate argues that The Tree of Life’s characters find their way. In Plate’s view, these ways are branches of a rather literal “tree of life,” united on a basic level.

While I too see this unity, I argue that the film works its way to this eventual conclusion through its invocation of musical signs, rather than by an inherent and consistent connection. Music, and all its dialogic possibilities, allows for the eventual reconciliation of themes, characters, and ideas in the film’s climax.

Set to the Agnus Dei of Hector Berlioz’s Requiem, this final sequence draws together each of the previous themes in a way that finds common ground, ideologically, visually and musically. Importantly, there is a “transposition” of sorts to bring these ideas together: the scene is clearly dominated by the mother and the way of grace, yet we see the reconciliation of the mother and father as the O’Brien family is brought together again in a space that seems somehow out of time and out of the corrupting influence of man. Through imagery, editing, and musical underscoring, Malick brings his two themes into alignment without recourse to dialogue or explicit plot.

This finale features allusions to a resurrection, an important moment showing the power of grace in reaching a reconciliation of themes. Though it is unclear, either R.L., the brother whose death is shown as the result of a clash between the ways of nature and grace, or Jack literally rises from the grave at the invitation of their mother. These images are foreshadowed early in the film, framed as a vision the adult Jack has during his new, very different adult life. These images come to him in the midst of a glass-and-

69 S. Brent Plate, “Visualizing the Cosmos: Terrence Malick’s Tree of Life and Other Visions of Life in the Universe,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion (2012), 535.

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metal landscape, transporting him to a natural landscape free of development, but desolate. Presented over the Agnus Dei, which repeats how Christ takes away the sins of the world and allows for peace, in this sequence grace, as the mother beckons in much the same way Christ may have called Lazarus70 or, in the Last Judgment, all men, from their graves.71 Bringing together visual and aural allusion, Malick emphasizes the power grace in the first section of the film’s closing sequence.

Within this space of grace, however, images that accompanied nature’s depiction are also present. This is especially notable in the evolving style of editing throughout the sequence. Beginning with long takes that follow the characters’ movements, typical of

Malick’s style and use of Panaglide technology, the shots become progressively shorter and more closely linked to musical phrases. This is in part dictated by changes in phrase length and punctuation throughout the work but also, I argue by the reconciliation and incorporation of both the way of nature and that of grace into the same final sequence. Thus both themes are brought together under the auspices of grace, aligning the two visually and aurally in this dramatic conclusion. It is in many ways a recapitulation of visual and thematic material from throughout the film, as we again see the fire and water imagery that has been a constant since the film’s opening.

Though there is not a literal restatement of the musical themes which delineated the film’s central binary, Malick and his musical team reconcile these themes through the incorporation of Berlioz’s Agnus Dei, which bridges many of the musical divides between the works which signify grace and nature.

70 See, for example, John 11: 38-44.

71 See, for example, Revelation 20:13.

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In this conclusion, then, Malick brings his “sonata form” to its own kind of conclusion. Like that musical structure, The Tree of Life’s filmic form allows it to be comprehensible; by following a familiar structure, Malick gives his model viewer the tools to understand his work. Such an approach may be what Malick had in mind on even earlier projects. Paul Ryan, second unit photographer on Days of Heaven, stated that the director, “was interested in a non-narrative style, the cinematic equivalent of how, say, Beethoven structured his symphonies.”72 While this analogy is not detailed enough to truly understand what either Ryan or Malick could have meant, The Tree of

Life betrays a similar interest in a musical, rather than narrative, filmic form. In this case, the form is yet more interesting in that it is not only related to musical concepts but largely communicated through borrowed musical works. Given this overwhelming reliance on musical meaning, it may be safe to say that, 33 years after his experimentation on Days of Heaven, Malick has indeed committed to “the cinematic equivalent of how Beethoven structured his symphonies.”

Conclusion

Throughout his career, Malick has experimented in the semiotic potential of sound, elevating music’s role beyond the aural signposts it provided in Classic

Hollywood film. Among New Hollywood directors, he is notable for his almost exclusive use of art music rather than popular music.73 For the purposes of this dissertation, though, his evolution in musical use is more interesting than is the genre to which he

72 Michael Nordine, “Hollywood Bigfoot: Terrence Malick and the 20-Year Hiatus that Wasn’t,” LA Review of Books, May 12, 2013, accessed March 21, 2014, https://lareviewofbooks.org/essay/hollywood-bigfoot- terrence-malick-and-the-20-year-hiatus-that-wasnt.

73 An important exception comes in Badlands, when Kit and Holly listen to the radio in their woodland home.

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gravitates: though Malick uses music as aural shorthand in his early films, his more recent work shows a different engagement with the medium. In his work we can see the shift in musical appropriation that began in 1968. In Malick’s later work, the more complex musical signification begun with works like Easy Rider is expanded and explored as a central formal element, rather than an aspect of a stylistic trend. It is this new engagement that opens the door for a more extensive and integral exploration of music’s significatory potential.

In films like The Tree of Life and The Thin Red Line, music acts as a structural force and not as an ancillary to the narrative. Malick’s oeuvre serves as a transition from traditional musical reuse to a new kind of appropriation which requires the audience’s interaction. Unlike even the more complex appropriation of The Graduate and Easy

Rider, seminal New Hollywood films that changed the way music is used cinematically,

Malick’s incorporation of pre-existing music needs to be read by a knowledgeable spectator in order for the film as a whole to be comprehensible. The above Tree of Life examples do not operate without a knowledgeable audience engaging in their interpretation. Equally importantly, the film itself does not operate without this interpretation. Malick’s appropriation, then, shows the way the musical meaning can become integral to the function of a film, even providing its form.

Malick’s complex usage shows that the invocation of pre-existing music can be a powerful tool for the creating and manipulation of meaning. In Malick’s recent films we see the far-reaching possibilities of such appropriation, but in general they refrain from engaging with larger issues of memory. In the following chapters, I analyze the musical appropriation of David Lynch and Todd Haynes, both of whom use music as a way to

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simultaneously invoke and seek to alter the archive of common cultural memory and meaning. Like Malick, these directors rely on the active participation of their viewers in accessing and manipulating this social treasury of knowledge, thus fostering a different film/audience interaction than has been previously theorized.

Where Malick uses familiar musical touchstones to draw his audience deeper into The Tree of Life and to incorporate broader philosophical ideas, for Lynch musical appropriation serves as a way to turn the audience’s attention outward again. While

Lynch’s incorporation of Roy Orbison and Elvis Presley hits certainly brings those songs’ meanings into conversation with the broader significance of Lynch’s films, the music also serves a more important goal. With specific ties to cultural memory, these songs drive the spectator to a reconsideration of their own time period through the lens of Lynch’s grotesque and troubling narratives. Malick’s reuse may have prompted audiences to wrestle with lofty ideas, but Lynch demands audiences take a new view of their own reality. In both cases, it is unlimited semiosis that allows these musical borrowings to spin out meanings and incorporate ideas beyond themselves. Through

Eco’s theory, we can understand how Lynch and Haynes make yet more complex use of familiar music in a new context.

The remainder of my dissertation is devoted to the analysis of such examples from the work of Lynch and of Haynes. These two directors showcase a new potential for musical appropriation: the ability not only to connect with audiences through familiar signs, but to necessitate audience action through this connection. That action may be as simple as a change in the significance attached to a song or as far-reaching as rewriting a historical period, but in each case, it is pre-existing music that prompts

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action. The following case studies reconsider the relationship between a film and its spectator through means not yet addressed by film or music scholars.

127 CHAPTER 4 MUSICAL PERFORMANCE, AUDIENCE INTERACTION, AND NOSTALGIA IN THE FILMS OF DAVID LYNCH

In an early scene in Wild at Heart (1990), Sailor Ripley takes the stage to sing

Elvis Presley’s “Love Me.” Throughout the film, but particularly in his moments on stage,

Sailor presents himself as a swaggering amalgam of the various pop culture landmarks through appearance, performance style, and musical selection. In response to questions about his signature snakeskin jacket or his Elvis performances, Sailor readily states, “for me, it’s a symbol of my individuality.” Although these cultural artifacts hold a place in common cultural memory, they now become central to the expression of his personal identity.

Sailor’s appropriation of well-known Elvis songs accomplishes two distinct purposes in the film. First, the songs refer indexically to the era of their origin, grounding

Lynch’s film temporally through this reference to late 1950s America. Second, the songs act as “memorative signs,”1 which Boym explains as sounds whose significance is a memory specific to the listener. The songs, as cultural artifacts, not only evoke an individual recollection, but also help to build a sort of “ersatz nostalgia”2 among audience members too young to have been familiar with Elvis and Orbison when they topped the charts. Lynch highlights Elvis Presley’s songs, so well-known that most audience members share a common understanding of them, and in the context of Wild at Heart, repurposes them as symbols whose new content often questions the old.

1 Svetlana Boym, Future of Nostalgia (New York: Basic Books, 2001), 4.

2 Boym, Nostalgia, 38.

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In the figure of Sailor, the hallmarks of Lynch’s cinematic style are all present: musical appropriation, a twisted American nostalgia,3 and instances of weirdness that gain their potency through reliance on the mundane; moments McGowan dubs bizarre

“because of the excessiveness of their normality.”4 Invoking this shared (or re-created) common memory, Lynch draws his audience into a closer dialogue with his films through musical appropriation. The use of popular music as both artifacts and parts of collective memory allows Blue Velvet (1986), Wild at Heart, and Mulholland Drive

(2001) to engage with their audiences on multiple registers, rather than simply presenting the film to be passively consumed.

As I have demonstrated in the preceding chapters, the borrowing and re- presentation of pre-existing music in film results in the chaining of interpretants which

Umberto Eco terms “unlimited semiosis.”5 These instances can be categorized in two distinct ways: by the necessity of this chaining mechanism to the narrative of the film, and by the response in which each instance of unlimited semiosis ends. This chapter examines scenes of musical appropriation in director David Lynch’s oeuvre, each of which prompts an “energetic response,”6 a term Eco uses to describe unlimited semiosis ending in a change of habit. The habit in such cases is the accepted, shared interpretant carried by each of the appropriated songs. In this way, Lynch’s

3 See Svetlana Boym, The Future of Nostalgia (New York, Basic Books, 2001). Here I refer to nostalgia in the sense that Boym describes as “reflective” (49). More specifically, this nostalgia is not only longing for a lost home (the literal translation of the term), but also an often ironic consideration of the shared past. Boym’s conception of nostalgia as mediating among the past, present, and future aligns with the sense of nostalgia I analyze in Lynch’s films.

4 Todd McGowan, The Impossible David Lynch (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007), 12.

5 Umberto Eco, A Theory of Semiotics (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1976), 126.

6 Umberto Eco, The Role of the Reader: Explorations in the Semiotics of Texts (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1979), 195.

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appropriation is substantively different from that addressed in earlier chapters: not only do these films use music to create new interpretations, they also manipulate music to question existing cultural memory.

These scenes of appropriation question the way we frame film’s relation to its audience. While Laura Mulvey asserted that Classic Hollywood cinema “portray[s] a hermetically sealed world ... an illusion of looking in on a private world,”7 the moments of performance analyzed below show the opposite. In performance, characters are presenting themselves (both within the narrative and to the film’s audience) and inviting interaction, creating a situation that is not analogous to the “peeping tom” moments

Mulvey describes, but instead overtly engages its audience. Mulvey acknowledges that all cinema is, in fact, being presented to be viewed (and therefore on some level acknowledges its viewer), but in her formulation, the audience gains pleasure from their watching and fetishizing of the film, a narrative which occurs in a world apart from their own and resolutely maintains that distance and separation.

In stark contrast, the films discussed in this chapter only operate successfully with audience participation: they reach out to the spectator and ask her to engage directly with the text. It is of central importance to Mulvey’s argument that the gaze, in situations of normal mainstream filmmaking, is decidedly one-sided and coded as male.

While I would not argue that Lynch’s films are explicitly feminist or antipatriarchal, many of the scenes discussed below invite readings which question norms of gender and sexuality, in particular in the case of “In Dreams.” Indeed, these moments of musical

7 Laura Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” in Film Theory and Criticism: Introductory Readings, 5th Edition, ed. Leo Braudy and Marshall Cohen (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 835.

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performance seem to point to the possibilities proposed by Mulvey: to overcome this phallocentric cinematic norm by reconfiguring the gaze in cinema, not only through musical performance (though each of this chapter’s examples includes this) but more importantly through the engagement of common cultural memory.

This phenomenon has been noted in other studies of Lynch’s work–most importantly in McGowan’s The Impossible David Lynch8 –but has been analyzed and explained from a psychoanalytic perspective, rather than the semiotic way I propose.

Through Eco’s theory, I am able to explore, on a very localized, scene-specific level, the process through which Lynch’s unique relationship to his audience is achieved, and the mechanisms by which it operates. This focus on instances of direct dialogue with the audience reveals an important characteristic common to each: their incorporation of music as a means to semiotic openness. McGowan does not locate the power of

Lynch’s films in their musical appropriation, but instead in their intermingling of fantasy and desire. Likewise, Roger Cook points to Lynch’s engagement with his audience in order to question Hollywood filmmaking norms, particularly through these films’ atypical narrative structures.9

Martha Nochimson obliquely addresses this audience-filmmaker relationship in her first monograph on Lynch, The Passion of David Lynch, but comes much closer to the phenomenon in her latest, David Lynch Swerves.10 The first study addresses Lynch

8 Todd McGowan, The Impossible David Lynch (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007).

9 Roger Cook, “Hollywood Narrative and the Play of Fantasy: David Lynch's Mulholland Drive,” Quarterly Review of Film and Video 28, no. 5 (2011), 369-381.

10 Martha P. Nochimson, The Passion of David Lynch: Wild at Heart in Hollywood (Austin: University of Texas, 1998) and Nochimson, David Lynch Swerves: Uncertainty from Lost Highway to Inland Empire (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2013).

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films up to Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me through an essentially Jungian lens, while the second finds an essential turning point in Lynch’s oeuvre that makes such an approach untenable for films after and including Lost Highway (1997). In reading these later films, Nochimson turns to physics and, specifically, the idea that the physical world is truly only an illusion of stability, as an analytical key.11 She states that “a full and rich reading of Lynch must not only take into account the many levels of human interiority, but also Lynch’s images that reference the many possibilities offered by the multiple levels of the external world of matter,”12 and criticizes the ubiquity of psychoanalytic readings of Lynch’s films.13 Like many others (including those mentioned above who rely on Lacan or Freud for their framework), Nochimson pinpoints the idea of uncertainty and openness as essentially Lynchian, but does not address the specific aspects that allow for this openness, nor does she allow for the centrality of not only images, but also, importantly, sound in this creation of uncertainty. I argue that Lynch’s use of music is central to this gambit, and that it extends across the divide that Nochimson identifies in Lynch’s works. While he has evolved as a director, Lynch has retained this form of musical appropriation and its attendant unlimited semiosis from his early work through his most recent films.

These studies are representative of research on Lynch: all acknowledge that

Lynch’s films relate to their audiences in an abnormal way, but though they locate this

11 Nochimson, Swerves, x-xi.

12 Nochimson, Swerves, xii.

13 Nochimson takes issue with McGowan in particular for choosing only scenes which bolster his Lacanian reading. I disagree with Nochimson on this account –McGowan’s analysis is thorough and comprehensive –but I agree that, by limiting the analytical tools used for the study of Lynch’s entire oeuvre to only psychoanalysis, many film scholars are missing bigger aspects of Lynchian style and meaning, aspects which are better illuminated by, for example, semiotic analyses.

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ability in a variety of ways, none addresses music and memory as the center of this relationship. Nochimson and McGowan both provide clear explanations for readings of, for example, Mulholland Drive as a whole, but neither analyzes what specific, small- scale filmmaking decisions accomplish this effect, apart from plot and visual style broadly speaking. Annette Davison is an important exception, as she too contrasts

Lynch’s use of sound in Wild at Heart (through new scoring, compilation soundtracks, and sound editing) to traditional Hollywood practices.14 In her analysis of other non-

Hollywood directors’ sound use, in fact, Davison finds their “filmmaking techniques refer to, conflict with and critique the screen-spectator relationship encouraged by classical

Hollywood in order to reveal, and thus undermine, its ideological underpinning.”15 My semiotic analyses explore Lynch’s filmmaking decisions in relation to this strategy.

Mulholland Drive’s “Crying” scene and “In Dreams” from Blue Velvet serve as my first two case studies and come close to this sort of direct appeal to the audience, but

Lynch includes an intermediary between the film and its audience in each case: namely, characters who serve as an audience within the frame of the film. In Mulholland Drive,

Betty and Rita, in the audience onscreen, serve as surrogates for the film’s audience, inviting us to engage with the performance as the characters do. In contrast, the final musical moment in this chapter, from Wild at Heart, serves to break open its film, inviting the audience to not simply watch and identify with the characters’ reactions, but instead enter into dialogue with the filmmaker as present themselves as performers. All three case studies in this chapter accomplish this move in different ways, though each

14 Annette Davison, Hollywood Theory, Non-Hollywood Practice: Cinema Soundtracks in the 1980s and 1990s (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004), 185-6.

15 Davison, Hollywood Theory, 84.

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uses music to do so. Rather than using desire as a “radical weapon,”16 as Mulvey suggests, these films instead empower the viewer in different ways through their use of music.

Wild at Heart, Blue Velvet, and Mulholland Drive each open up the “hermetically sealed” nature of Hollywood film, most often through staged musical performances.

Rather than keeping the films’ worlds separate, these moments invite the movies’ audiences to react to and interact with the performance within Lynch’s films. Beyond this participation, the sequences also draw the audience in yet more deeply, engaging with shared memory and the outside world through musical appropriation. More than in the case of, for example, a traditional film musical, the instances discussed below connect to musical texts and reality outside of the films themselves through the act of performance and the inclusion of well-known works. Similarly, the unlimited semiosis spawned by these performances of appropriated music draws the audience yet further into the film’s world: without a clearly defined message, these sequences require audience participation to convey anything. As Chion writes of the performances in

Lynch’s films, “we cannot content ourselves with remaining spectators. Sooner or later, we have to go up there [on stage] ourselves.”17 Through the central role played by musical performances in Lynch’s works, the audience is drawn into an active dialogue with the film.

Sailor’s musical performances reach out to the film’s audience, breaking the typical, assumed barrier between viewer and film. David Foster Wallace comments on

16 Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure,” 836.

17 Michel Chion, David Lynch, trans. Robert Julian (London: BFI Press, 2006), 183.

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this aspect of Lynch’s filmmaking style in his essay “David Lynch Keeps His Head”:

“You don’t feel you’re entering into any of the standard unspoken/unconscious contracts you normally enter into with other kinds of movies . . . [Lynch] enters your head in a different way.”18 Wallace goes on to detail the power of Lynch’s films, seeing them as deeply affective because they do not dictate the appropriate response to the audience.

Though he does not identify musical appropriation as the catalyst for this unique audience interaction, Wallace still obliquely refers to the thread that ties this chapter’s case studies together. These films relate to their audiences differently, not merely presenting something for the viewer, but requiring a thoughtful, sometimes uncomfortable reaction and interaction. I argue that the unspoken contract of Mulvey’s

“hermetically sealed cinema” does not hold in Lynch’s films because of the scenes of musical performance I discuss below. My first two case studies are concerned with identity in a more work-specific, circumscribed manner. In contrast, Wild at Heart seems somewhat less ambitious in its scope, but in fact Sailor’s performances have repercussions for Lynch’s oeuvre as a whole and, indeed, many of the other cases I discuss.

These three case studies each show a different aspect of Lynch’s use of pre- existing music and, together, give a complete view of the memorative and historical potential of musical appropriation. First, I analyze the uses of “Blue Velvet” and “In

Dreams” in Blue Velvet to show the difference between reuse that which uses music as a static memorative sign, and that necessitates the chaining of signs inherent in unlimited semiosis. Through the “Llorando (Crying)” scene in Mulholland Drive, I show

18 David Foster Wallace, “David Lynch Keeps His Head,” in A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again: Essays and Arguments (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1997), 170.

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how this appropriation, in its engagement with history and memory, can serve as a key structural moment in the narrative of a film as a whole. Finally, Wild at Heart’s Elvis performances serve as examples for the far-reaching power of Lynch’s appropriation, laying bare the means by which media can shape our conception of a shared history.

Nostalgia Reaffirmed and Challenged: Blue Velvet and “In Dreams”

Even in a film named after another song, the two scenes featuring Roy Orbison’s

“In Dreams” are the most readily identifiable in Lynch’s Blue Velvet (1986). Both prompted by Frank Booth’s repeated references to the “candy-colored clown” of the song’s opening line, these two performances are evocative, uncomfortable, and strangely beautiful. Through the two “In Dreams” scenes featured in the film, the song’s original interpretants are both invoked and called into question. The Roy Orbison hit epitomizes Lynch’s vision of the film’s setting, Lumberton, and, indeed, life throughout the film: nostalgic and lovely on the surface, its undercurrents are threatening and depraved. Through Blue Velvet’s musical appropriation, Lynch engages the audience in his exploration of the grotesque in the mundane.

Unlike film’s title song, Orbison’s “In Dreams” is transformed through its incorporation in Blue Velvet, a process commented on by both Orbison and Lynch. In fact, Orbison fought against the inclusion of the song in the film on the basis of this transformation. Commenting on this disagreement, Lynch stated:

it is a beautiful song and it was written by Roy ... Those lyrics, that feel, meant something to him And it just so happened that a song in a certain context could mean something else. And the way that Frank Booth used that song in two different places, it is just kind of unbelievable. But I can see why Roy was upset because for him it meant a third thing.19

19 Peter Lehman, Running Scared: Masculinity and the Representations of the Male Body, (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1993), 63-4 (original emphasis).

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Here Lynch describes the phenomenon of unlimited semiosis, though he does not label it as such, in this fluidity of interpretation opened up by the film version of “In Dreams.”

Eco’s concept is shown clearly in this situation: the accepted cultural understanding of

Orbison’s original song is absorbed and changed in the filmed performances, causing a spiraling chain of interpretants that both incorporates and departs from audiences’ previous conceptions of the song and its performer. This chaining is exactly the phenomenon Eco describes as unlimited semiosis, shown in Figure 4-1: the expression

(1) and content (2) of the song together (3) become the expression (I) of an entirely new content (II), and this sign (III) as a whole then expresses another new content. Though I show only one step in this chaining, it can continue almost indefinitely, with each sign becoming the conveyance of yet another new content.

Figure 4-1. unlimited semiosis’s chaining effect (adapted from Roland Barthes, Mythologies, trans. Annette Lavers [New York: Hill and Wang, 1972], 115).

Lynch does not state what, exactly, the song means in each context. Nochimson postulates that the director’s reticence to discuss interpretation in this and others of his films stems from the concretizing power of language: “the unrelieved rationality of language forges a distortion of reality that might make him [Lynch] lose contact with the

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work.”20 Rather, I would argue that a definitive statement of meaning from Lynch would serve as a finalizing frame, halting potential semiosis for his audiences. Thus, instead of concretizing a single, knowable but unspeakable reality, such a statement from the director would serve to preclude the many other possible interpretations or “realities” that the film could prompt. By comparing the uses of “Blue Velvet” and “In Dreams” below, I offer a more clear definition of unlimited semiosis as a concept and in practice, showing the multivalent nature of the process to which Lynch may be responding.

The two most prominent uses of music in Blue Velvet illustrate the difference between musical reuse as a mere shorthand and appropriation that opens new semiotic chains and invites audience interaction and interpretation. Through close readings of each, I explore the filmmaking decisions that allow these “Blue Velvet” and “In Dreams” scenes to operate differently. The popular 1963 Bobby Vinton recording of “Blue Velvet” introduces the film’s setting, Lumberton, showing its idyllic suburban streets, filled with friendly firefighters and beautifully manicured lawns. With languid panning shots and soft focus, Lynch documents this vision of the midcentury American dream. In this situation, the song acts as an aural marker, effectively invoking its original era and attendant values by acting as a token of a type rather than invoking meaning specific to the song. In fact, apart from the opening shot of blue velvet curtains, there is no direct parallel between the song and the scene. While Vinton’s words describe a woman and his love for her, Lynch shows only the town of Lumberton, with no romantic implication at all. “Blue Velvet” acts instead as a general symbol for an era and an ideal.

20 Nochimson, Passion of Lynch, 27.

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This type of musical reuse is quite common, as seen in such films as American

Graffiti and other compilation soundtracks since that era. It has also been widely explored by scholars such as Hilary Lapedis, Jeff Smith, and Katherine Spring, each of whom views musical reuse through a different lens or in a different era. Spring’s monograph concentrates on early sound film’s use of popular music and provides a much-needed historical account of its era; Spring’s work is more historically based than concerned with issues of audience interaction.21 In contrast, Smith does address questions of semiotic function, but he concentrates on ironic or comical uses with straightforward implications.22 Lapedis’s view is somewhat similar, as she argues that such reuse in contemporary film typically operates as a shorthand for controlling the audiences’ reading of a scene: the juxtaposition of a well-known song with a particular image track can encourage the viewer to interpret the film in a very specific way.23

Lapedis comes closest to a reading that acknowledges semiotic openness, but views the function of musical appropriation in a much more limited and strictly coded way. Her analysis is congruent with Lynch’s use of “Blue Velvet.”

“Blue Velvet” encourages an ironic reading of the film’s opening sequence. The song’s clear and expected harmonic progression, clichéd lyrics, and lush backing vocal harmonies mark it as naïve and idealistic, particularly in light of what follows in the film.

In fact, the song is used as a foil for the hidden layer of the grotesque that Lynch finds in

21 Katherine Spring, Saying it With Songs: Popular Music and the Coming of Sound to Hollywood Cinema (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013).

22 Jeff Smith, “Popular Songs and Comic Allusion in Contemporary Cinema,” in Soundtrack Available: Essay on Film and Popular Music, ed. Arthur Knight and Pamela Robertson Wojick (Durham: Duke University Press, 2001).

23 Hilary Lapedis, “Popping the Question: the Function and Effect of Popular Music in Cinema,” Popular Music 18 (Fall 1999), 367-379.

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this ideal and beautiful town: after the idyllic “Blue Velvet” opening, the camera pans to the literal underbelly of this world, moving underground to show bugs feeding and churning the soil. This visual counterpoint is matched by an aural shift, as Angelo

Badalamenti’s score makes its first appearance. Rather than provide any continuity or stylistic nod to the preceding song, Badalamenti underscores the danger and darkness of Lynch’s visuals with thick pads of dissonant, synthesized strings, a marked difference from the Vinton performance. Thus “Blue Velvet” is not changed but called upon as a static marker of an ideal, against which Lynch contrasts the subterranean reality of

Lumberton and its inhabitants. This dichotomy underlies the entire film, and is played out in the use of “In Dreams.” These “In Dreams” scenes operate differently than does the “Blue Velvet” sequence; Orbison’s song is not simply invoked as a token of a type, but is manipulated through changing, chaining signifieds which are not as clearly delineated as the dichotomy of the above scene.

Orbison’s song appears only twice in the film, and never in its entirety. Each time it is used in connection to Lynch’s warped view of the nostalgic, tainting that which seems pure and real. Despite the brevity of these scenes, Lynch has stated that he views at least the first instance as integral to Blue Velvet’s structure.24 Described as a

“necessary prelude to closure but not in the way that the climax is,”25 I argue that the scene’s necessity is a result of its direct interaction with its audience through semiotic openness. In this space of interpretive freedom, Lynch is most able to draw upon the

24 Nochimson, Passion of Lynch, 26.

25 Ibid.

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viewer’s shared and individual memory of “In Dreams,” its performer, and its era, drawing all aspects into his larger commentary in Blue Velvet.

The first such instance is Ben’s (Dean Stockwell) lip-synced performance, shortly after Frank (Dennis Hopper) has kidnapped the young protagonist Jeffrey (Kyle

McLachlan) and brought him there. At Frank’s bidding, Ben mimes Orbison’s “candy- colored clown” using a trouble light as a microphone. Ben’s heavy pancake makeup, thrown into stark relief by the close light, evokes the clown of the song’s lyric, and the rowdy room full of Frank’s hoodlums seems momentarily transfixed. Its affect is altogether different from that of the song in its original context and performance, though its aural aspects remain unchanged. The original 1963 mono recording is used as the audio track, ostensibly from the diegetic source of a cassette player. Although we hear the mechanical click of the device engaging, the following sound is preternaturally full and pure, engulfing the previously noisy room in the sound of Orbison’s eerily present voice.

Ben’s performance is a sort of drag show, in which the performer embodies and enacts on stage a different gendered role, complete with the various trappings of traditional drag. While Ben is not attempting to pass as a woman, he is nonetheless assuming a specific gendered role. Prior to the entrance of Orbison’s song, Ben has been painted as an effete dandy, whose heavy make-up, outlandish dress, and sashaying hospitality earn him Frank’s approval as a “suave fucker.” With the start of his performance, though, this constructed, atypical masculinity is traded for another. Ben invokes Orbison’s rather static, slightly staid performance style, complicated by his own gendered presentation. Much like Orbison himself, Ben embraces and presents an

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unconventional manliness; both foreground a feminine vulnerability, though Orbison’s persona is less straightforward thanks to his rock stardom, a traditionally masculine position. In Ben’s hands, though, the song and performance style become even more complicated in their gendered qualities, as he exaggerates the elements of Orbison’s ambiguity beyond their original boundaries.

The presentation of this moment as a concert performance is also important.

From the opening of the song, it appears that Ben is alone at one end of the room, framed by curtains. Lynch alternates shots of this stage with a reverse shot showing

Jeffrey with Frank’s entourage, staring transfixed by Ben’s performance. Frank is shown alone, in close-up, as he mouths the words to the song. This careful framing seems to separate Frank from the performance, either aligning him with the rest of the “audience” or placing him as the impresario of this theater, until the first wider shot of Ben, showing that the two men are both on this makeshift stage, both participants in this performance, as in Figure 4-2. As Ben begins to include Frank in the drag-like show, Frank becomes obviously uncomfortable, leading to his explosive ending of the song. In Ben’s performance, the tense threat of violence that has hung over the action since Jeffrey’s abduction is momentarily suspended. Frank’s frenetic energy is calmed by this “candy- colored clown,” though not stopped: he cannot allow Ben to finish “In Dreams,” and instead aborts the performance mid-chorus.

This caesura is as notable as the performance itself: after the song’s suspension of action and violence, Frank brusquely ejects the tape of “In Dreams” and shouts “Let’s hit the fuckin’ road!” Frank’s discomfort at his incorporation into such an ambiguous performance is palpable. In this forceful ending, Frank is able not only to regain control

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of the situation, but also to assert his own style of swaggering machismo. It is notable that Frank chooses to stop the song as Orbison’s vocal line begins to enter the falsetto range at the end of the chorus. The bridge that follows is solidly within this range, but is denied in this iteration. Though the voice we hear is Orbison’s and not Ben’s, the performance of a decidedly unmasculine song in an equally unmasculine range seems troubling for Frank, this scene’s impresario and intended audience. Ben’s performance, in all its ambiguity, is clearly appealing to Frank but is also unsettlingly: his abrupt ending of the performance before the falsetto can be read as his forceful denial of Ben’s feminine act.

Figure 4-2. Ben performs “In Dreams” (Blue Velvet, directed by David Lynch [1986; Beverly Hills: Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation, 2004], DVD).

This second scene, like the first, features the original Orbison recording, not a new cover version. Despite this emphasis on the original Orbison version, the idea of performance is again highlighted in this sequence. After leaving Ben, Frank continues his kidnapping “joyride” with Jeffery. Finally stopping the car, Frank inserts the cassette

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of “In Dreams,” pulling Jeffrey out of the car’s back seat and into the spotlight of an accomplice’s flashlight. Having just smeared lipstick across his face, Frank makes a disturbing “candy-colored clown” as he intones Orbison’s lyrics. Not lip-synching the song, Frank instead echoes Orbison, turning the ballad into a threat. The main interaction here, as in Ben’s performance, is between two men, but the subtext is overtly violent rather than suggestively sexual. In this iteration, “In Dreams” is allowed to continue into the bridge and final chorus, both of which feature Orbison’s warbling falsetto range. This audibly vulnerable range is juxtaposed against Frank’s most aggressively violent action, creating an unsettling and seemingly unfitting affect.

Unlike the previous “In Dreams” performance, this one begins with wider shots, establishing the audience and performers first. As the sequence continues, Lynch reverses the progression of the first sequence. From these wider shots, the camera moves progressively closer with each cut, moving inside the crowd of Frank’s accomplices to just frame Jeffrey and Frank in a confrontational two shot. Finally, the camera moves yet tighter, alternating between Jeffrey an Frank. Lynch juxtaposes these two faces, moving quickly between them in the semi-darkness of the scene. Both partially illuminated by the shaky flashlight and covered in smeared lipstick, Lynch’s editing starts to convey the fact that, as Frank has just stated, he and Jeffrey are the same. Frank’s ominous “I’m you” echoes with the film’s audience as, up to this point,

Jeffrey has been our incorruptible hero and, indeed, an audience stand-in or everyman figure. In corrupting Orbison’s ballad, then, Frank and Lynch have also corrupted our view of ourselves.

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Through visual rhymes with Ben’s lip-synch, this moment combines the physical threat of the scene with the performativity and drag characteristics of the song’s earlier appearance, as well as the attendant memories and interpretants attached to the song from its original life outside of the film. This moment is perhaps the most potent example of Eco’s chaining semiosis, incorporating not only the song’s attached connotations in the world at large, but also those developed through Ben’s earlier iteration. Lynch’s appropriation folds back in on itself as Frank mimics Ben: both perform in a sort of spotlight, as Frank positions himself in front of his car’s headlights, and both are heavily made up, though Frank’s messy lipstick, seen in Figure 4-3, more accurately recalls the song’s clown imagery than did Ben’s heavy foundation. These connections allow for a more inclusive development of interpretation, incorporating the film’s own narrative very directly while also alluding to a wide variety of extratextual figures.

Figure 4-3. Frank and Jeffrey in the spotlight (Blue Velvet, directed by David Lynch [1986; Beverly Hills: Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation, 2004], DVD).

As in the opening “Blue Velvet” sequence, the two iterations of “In Dreams” also call upon a variety of cultural symbols, but to vastly different affect. While “Blue Velvet” sought to set the scene for the film by recalling stereotypical images of the past, “In

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Dreams” instead asks its audience to engage more deeply, incorporating common and personal memory in a complicated web of signs. The persona of Roy Orbison is perhaps the most central allusion in these “In Dreams” scenes. An important figure in the years between Elvis’s first popularity in the 1950s and the British Invasion of the

1960s, Orbison is often seen as occupying a liminal space not only in the development of rock, but also with respect to traditional gendered norms. Despite his period of massive popularity and the continuing presence of his greatest his, Orbison has been largely overlooked in popular music scholarship, perhaps because of this liminality, as

Mark Laver posits.26 In fact, he is described as a sort of man of mystery or even, in the words of Peter Lehman, as a sort of tabula rasa, a blank slate for the projections of his audience.27 In this way, Orbison’s work is perhaps the perfect vehicle for Lynch’s appropriation.

In his costume, public persona, lyrics, and musical style, Orbison is a difficult figure to define. This is in part due to his own reticence: at the height of his career at

Monument Records, Orbison did not employ a publicist and had almost no cultural presence outside of his recordings.28 Though a rock star, he did not exhibit the bravado of contemporaries like Elvis and suffered from extreme stage fright. His woodenness on stage was such a defining feature that it prompted satire, as in John Belushi’s 1977

Saturday Night Live sketch impersonation of the rock star, constantly hidden behind his dark glasses and almost immobile in performance. Musician k.d. lang more recently

26 Mark Laver, “Gender, Genius, and Rock and Roll in Roy Orbison and Friends: a Black and White Night,” Popular Music 30, no. 3 (2011), 433-4.

27 Lehman, Orbison, 27.

28 Lehman, Orbison, 18.

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described Orbison as “a tree: passive and beautiful yet extremely solid.”29 The discourse surrounding Orbison the performer thus informs the Blue Velvet audiences’ understanding of the lip-synch performance they see on screen. Wrapped up in Ben’s swaying mime act is the figure of the solid yet vulnerable man in black, Orbison’s anti- rock star image. His persona complicates the spiraling chain of male identities described above in the “In Dreams” scenes. As Lehman argues, Orbison represented a different, more vulnerable maleness in his sentimental lyrics and extensive use of falsetto (which is notably absent from the first segment of “In Dreams” presented in the film), though his rockabilly songs offered a more traditionally swaggering and tough masculinity. 30 This issue of gender performance is complicated even before the film’s additional layers of new significance. This is, of course, a rather reductive reading of gender and sexuality. In much of the literature on Orbison, though, these general tropes are discussed as signs of a larger, more complex whole. His vocal range and song subject matter are, in many ways, viewed as projected an image of troubled masculinity.

Of the characters who literally speak in the voice of Orbison, Frank’s appearance most closely recalls the singer’s image: though he does not dress in head-to-toe black, his clothing is much more subdued than Ben’s. This visual linking of the two figures also reinforces the masochistic aspects of both; in Frank, these tendencies are obvious through his actions, while for Orbison they manifest in song lyrics. Lehman and Laver both describe the lovelorn, masochistic side of Orbison that is visible in songs like

“Crying” and even, Lehman argues, in such seemingly upbeat and positive songs as

29 k.d. lang, “Roy Orbison: the Immortals,” Rolling Stone no. 946 (15 April 2004), 126.

30 Lehman, Orbison, 66.

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“Oh, Pretty Woman.”31 Though “In Dreams” does not explore this aspect in depth, the sequences draw upon it implicitly as an integral part of the Orbison persona.

“In Dreams” itself seems to comment on the dreamlike, otherworldly quality of

Lumberton and its dual nature, both idyllic and hellish. Orbison’s song describes the joy of a man who regains his connection with his lover during his dream, the first large section of the song detailing this reunion (“In dreams I walk with you . . . in dreams you’re mine, all the time”). The narrator’s joy is interrupted, though, as “just before the dawn, [he] awake[s] to find [his love is] gone.” For this painful realization, Orbison moves to his eerie falsetto range, reaching higher and higher as the song approaches its conclusion. There is no denouement, only a painful climax for Orbison’s voice in its extreme high range as the accompanying strings play the song to its conclusion.

Interestingly, this is the section that Frank cannot bear to hear in the song’s first iteration. Whether for its lyrical content, “unnatural” vocal quality, or exit from the dream world over which, he later states, he has control, Frank will not allow this section of the song to be heard, opening myriad avenues of inquiry as to why this might be.

Along with its lyrical allusions to a dream world and uncanny visual presentation, the sound of the song also magnifies this quality. Mark Mazullo argues that the overdubbed, reverberant sound of “In Dreams” acts as a sort of “quadruple removal from reality,”32 as Ben lip-synchs to a recording that is an amalgam and recreation of a variety of performances. Through this falseness, he states, “Lynch asks us to consider pop not ‘as we remember it’ but ‘as it really happened’—shunning the comforts of our

31 Lehman, Orbison, 94.

32 Mark Mazullo, “Remembering Pop: David Lynch and the Sound of the ‘60s,” American Music 23, no. 4 (Winter 2005), 509.

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own nostalgia in favor of a more expansive and ultimately discomforting view of these texts and the culture that produced them.”33 This reconsideration of the past through music is certainly at play in these scenes, but I would argue that rather than “shunning” nostalgia, Lynch forces his audience to engage with it, leading to a yet more troubling reevaluation.

Released in 1963, this song was a part of Orbison’s most popular period. From the late 1950s through 1964, he recorded a string of hits for Monument Records, beginning with “Only the Lonely.” This four-year period encompasses the majority of

Orbison’s most well-known songs, including “Running Scared,” “Oh, Pretty Woman,” and “Crying,” which I discuss at greater length below. These Monument recordings continue to hold an important place in Orbison’s legacy and were re-released to great acclaim in 2011.34 Despite his long career, Orbison’s strongest legacy is linked to this idyllic window of the American past. His reign of the pop charts corresponds closely, though not precisely, to the Kennedys’ time in the White House, making him almost a musical figure of an American “Camelot” between the death and resurrection of a more aggressive, macho rock and roll. We could interpret Lynch’s invocation of this symbol as a commentary on the United States of the 1980s, Blue Velvet’s era. Howard Hampton ties Lynch to the mythology of the Reagan era, stating:

Reagan's presidency made myth into a continuous loop, a movie composed of nothing but flashbacks; Lynch works in those gaps where the celluloid splices don't hold. No one else has caught the true radiance of Reaganite myth, with the supersaturated colors of Blue Velvet (where even the most blinding red roses and blue skies seem like kinky fleshtones), in the rapt self-containment of the town in the best moments

33 Mazullo, “Remembering,” 510-11.

34 Wayne Robins, “A Monumental Talent,” Billboard 123 no. 14 (23 April, 2011): 23-26.

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of the Twin Peaks series, and in parts of Wild at Heart's smashed-up fairy tale (even Hell has the luster of a promised land merely a kiss, score, or contract killing away).35

Lynch thus cites an index for the illusion of the Kennedy era’s innocence, tying it closely to the audience’s own reality and time through cultural memory. “In Dreams” comes chronologically mere months before the shattering of America’s Camelot dream in

November 1963, opening the possibility for audience memory that closely links the two.

Whether it is possible to see the Reagan’s American Dream as analogous to

Kennedy’s Camelot is questionable. While both seemed to reach backward chronologically to grasp at fading cultural norms (Kennedy in the face of the burgeoning

Cold War and coming sexual revolution and Reagan in the midst of the economic and social turmoil of the 1980s and the AIDS epidemic), Kennedy’s vision for America seems decidedly progress-based, while Reagan’s is static or nostalgic. In the Space

Race and goal of technological superiority, Kennedy’s administration pointed to a tomorrow in which America stood as a master of the world through strength and innovation. Reagan, on the other hand, through his faded film star glory and espousal of already outdated values, seemed focused on regaining an imaginary lost America. As such, the Reagan era may have lent itself yet more to the sort of appropriation we see in Blue Velvet: by recalling a bygone era through a song with a constructed sense of loss, Lynch is able to point to this longing for a fabricated past in his own time, holding a mirror to his audiences’ reality.

Rather than being used as a static, unchanging marker for some lost innocence

(as was “Blue Velvet”), “In Dreams” instead unites the disparate elements highlighted by

35 Howard Hampton, “David Lynch’s Secret History of the United States,” Film Comment 29, no. 3 (May 1993): 38.

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the opening sequence. In Orbison’s love song, we see the beautiful facade and grotesque reality of the film’s world. McGowan analyzes these two “worlds” within the town of Lumberton as representing two poles of fantasy: the idyllic and the obscene.36

This dichotomy is again highlighted in the song’s second appearance, as Frank himself

“performs” it. By connecting to the audience and reality so directly, via a well-known song with an established and familiar history, Blue Velvet brings the more disturbing aspects of Lumberton’s obscene underbelly into contact with the viewer’s own memories and reality. Far from serving to lessen the impact of Frank’s violence, the “In

Dreams” performance heightens it and makes it more personal by semiotically connecting to existing memories and meanings. This non-threatening song also works as what Claudia Gorbman calls anempathetic scoring, contrasting the tension on screen with an innocuous melody. McGowan states that, had Frank been accompanied by more traditionally villain-coded musical cues, he would appear more threatening.37

Rather than play upon common film music tropes, though, Lynch strikes even closer to home, incorporating his audience’s shared past to give his villain power. “In Dreams” creates a bridge between the comforting Leave it to Beaver-like world of Lumberton in the daytime and the threatening, dangerous Lumberton inhabited by Frank.

In constructing a reading of these scenes, the emphasis on appearance and performance style in the visual aspects of each of these scenes points in the direction of the performance of sexuality. From Ben’s first introduction, his position as an effete gay man is highlighted repeatedly. By having this figure perform such a staged and dramatic

36 McGowan, David Lynch, 91.

37 McGowan, David Lynch, 104.

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version of Orbison’s song, Lynch could be invoking tropes of drag performance, especially given the prominence of such drag hallmarks as exaggerated costuming, an assumed persona, and lip-synched playacting. The connection between Ben and Frank during the performance only amplifies this reading of the scene as highlighting homoeroticism. The song’s second appearance in the film could also be included in this interpretation. There Frank assumes the role last played by Ben, directing the performance and dragging the unwilling participant Jeffrey into the spotlight with him.

The connection between these two men is less consensual than between Ben and

Frank, but still shows sexual overtones, particularly in light of the violence shown in

Frank’s earlier sex scenes with Dorothy.

Both Frank and Ben participate in a blurring of sexual identities through “In

Dreams.” Michael Moon reads this second scene in such a way, arguing that Frank’s performance of “In Dreams” acts a sort of initiation for Jeffrey into a sadomasochistic relationship no longer mediated by their shared experiences with Dorothy.38 Indeed, many of the markers in both of the lip-sync performances could be seen as pointing to just such an interpretation, especially given Frank’s dialogue. As Moon points out, the original script included a much more sexually explicit interaction between the two men, going so far as to include an actual scene of rape.39 These interpretations may be responding to the residual trace of such an encounter in the version that was filmed or may respond to Lynchian style in his works that followed, as sexuality continues to play an important role in many of the director’s projects.

38 Michael Moon, A Small Boy and Others: Imitation and Initiation in American Culture from Henry James to Andy Warhol (Durham: Duke University Press, 1998), 21.

39 Ibid., 20-21.

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Given all of these potential triggers for semiosis, it would seem that a reading of these sequences as commentary on sexual roles would be fair. Indeed, many scholars have forwarded just such an interpretation, using Ben’s perceived sexuality and his costuming as a jumping off point for this reading. For Kenneth Kaleta, “In Dreams” presents a stage on which the sexual tension and confusion of the male relationships in the film is worked through.40 Since Lynch’s film prompts unlimited semiosis, and open interpretation to some degree, this reading seems valid, drawing as it does on established tropes. I argue, however, that another interpretation of the performances is much more useful in the overall understanding of the film. Unlimited semiosis offers an understanding of how these multiple interpretations can be reached given the same raw materials, as well as the reasoning for the validity of each different reading.

Lynch’s use of “In Dreams” illustrates the hallmarks of unlimited semiosis in action, while also showing the limits inherent in this “unlimited” process. Most importantly, though, the “In Dreams” sequences show the possibility for an alternative audience-film relationship that, I argue, continues throughout Lynch’s work and is even more evident in the examples below from Mulholland Drive and Wild at Heart. I use

Eco’s framework to explain how this relationship is accomplished on the most localized level in each of these scenes.

Though he labels the phenomenon “unlimited,” Eco explains that semiosis is not truly unbounded, but rather governed by cultural codes and a shared understanding among the creator of a work and its audience.41 As such, the above interpretation of

40 Lehman, Orbison, 120.

41 Eco, Theory of Semiotics, 126.

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these scenes may be less convincing than it first seems: an interpretation is not designated explicitly by the film, but with these codes to guide the chaining mechanism, interpretation can be suggested, though not prescribed. Rather than flowing freely like so many marbles without a container, connections in unlimited semiosis are instead guided by shared knowledge that supports reasonable interpretation. In Eco’s words,

“the possibilities which the work’s openness makes available always work within a given field of relations.”42 For viewers of Blue Velvet, this shared knowledge or “field of relations” includes what Eco calls common and intertextual frames.43 These frames act as a sort of loose guideline of expectations: based on previous knowledge, one can assume certain logical connections. Blue Velvet’s frames are many, in large part because of its musical appropriation.

The use of Orbison’s song provides both a common frame and an intertextual one. Genre-related frames, for example, allow for the assumption of a romantic subtext in the lyrics of “In Dreams,” though none is specifically presented: as a ballad, particularly one performed by Orbison, its narrative and sentiment are presumed to be romantic. In addition, Orbison’s vocal timbre and style support a romantic reading. Less abrasive than his contemporaries and almost operatic in his use of head voice,

Orbison’s soaring melody lines align less easily with rock expectations than with ballad or even more classical generic expectations. This common frame supports the reading of the performances as enacting romantic desire. Because of the way the audience understands the original song, the film’s viewer would be prompted to an interpretation

42 Umberto Eco, The Role of the Reader: Explorations in the Semiotics of Texts (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1979), 62.

43 Eco, Role, 20-22.

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that incorporates this understanding of “In Dreams.” While it is possible to approach these scenes in any number of ways, the common frame shared by the film’s audience suggests an avenue of interpretation.

An intertextual frame would be the specific understanding of “In Dreams,” not only as a ballad, but also as an Orbison song situated in it particular time period, with all attendant connotations. This frame can mean differently for each individual, as individual experience and memory will differ. Thus the intertextual frame for a viewer who first heard this song as a teenager in the 1960s would vary widely from the frame of, for example, that viewer’s child. Music figures strongly in the construction of nostalgia both in this directly experiential way and in the creation of an “ersatz nostalgia.”44 Thus the social context of “In Dreams” and its history provide a central, shared frame for interpretation in Blue Velvet.

This idea of an intertextual frame also applies to the film more broadly and its own connections. In its plot, dialogue, and mise en scène, the film frequently invokes the midcentury film noir, bringing with it tropes of gender roles, time period, and specific plot devices. Approaching the film as a viewer familiar with Lynch’s other work, this intertextual framework becomes yet more fraught. Though a viewer at the film’s initial release in 1986 could not have known it, Orbison and Lynch have each played a large role in the other’s oeuvre. Following Blue Velvet, Lynch worked with Orbison on the rerelease of Orbison’s greatest hits from the Monument label. Orbison’s music is also featured in other Lynch films, most prominently in Mulholland Drive, discussed below.

Given this added frame of reference, “In Dreams” means differently now than it ever

44 Boym, Nostalgia, 38.

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could have in 1986. Indeed, this added frame of reference may account for the above misreading: the Mulholland Drive scene revolves around a fraught homosexual relationship, much as the above authors read “In Dreams” in this filmic setting. The psychoanalytic bent of the above interpretations can likewise be traced to the influence of the filmmaker’s other work, since this has been the primary lens through which scholars have approached Lynch’s films.

These frames set interpretation on a variety of paths, but the less likely of these is the homosexual interpretation discussed above. For this reason, forwarding an interpretation of these performances as expressions of repressed homosexual urges is perhaps stepping outside of the narrative. Sex certainly plays an integral role in the plot of the film, but Lynch seems more concerned with the ambiguous boundary between sexual desire and violence which is frequently traversed by Frank, Dorothy, and Jeffrey.

Even the persona of Orbison, described by Lehman as deeply masochistic, aligns with this reading.45 Indeed, McGowan’s interpretation of the film is much closer to that which the intertexual and common frames would suggest. While elements of an interpretation based on sexuality are certainly present in the film, the codes and expectations set up by Lynch’s narrative support a different interpretation much more strongly, as the dual nature of the aforementioned sex scenes indicates.

The “In Dreams” moments concentrate on realizations of the idea of the grotesque, or the dual and irreconcilable nature of the world as Lynch sees it, which is present from Blue Velvet’s very opening sequence. The performances of “In Dreams” are perhaps best understood as powerful illustrations of this phenomenon. Each

45 Lehman, Orbison, 90-91.

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highlights a pure and somewhat naïve nostalgic sentimentality, while at the same time juxtaposing this naïveté with the threatening violence associated with Frank and the darker side of Lumberton. As in the first scene of the film, these performances show the underbelly of the world we construct, but “In Dreams” is set apart by its ability to powerfully call up these associations while at the same time unsettling the viewer with the visual element of each scene in a dynamic, constant process of semiosis.

Through careful control of many elements of the film, Lynch is able to guide the viewer’s understanding of the “In Dreams” scenes. By continuously foregrounding the grotesque, Lynch prepares us to read these Orbison performances as just that: while it is possible to see in Ben’s drag revue a repressed homosexuality, we might also see the pull of nostalgia for a constructed past made to confront a more ambiguous and threatening present. Careful coding of audience expectations and interpretations shapes the way these scenes can be reasonably interpreted, but does not entirely close alternate avenues of interpretation. Thus the semiosis present in the “In Dreams” performances is not straight-forward, but also not as completely unlimited as Eco’s terminology would suggest.

Blue Velvet’s openness to such varying interpretations marks it as being a writerly text, in Barthes’ terms, or an open work (to continue to follow Eco’s terminology). Such a text allows for ambiguity and is continually constructed, or written, by its audience’s reading and interpretation, not solely by its author. Openness like this sets apart films that prompt unlimited semiosis in their use of pre-existing music. While many films reuse familiar music, it is only in these open works that such an invocation functions in the way Eco describes. Thus the reuse of Blue Danube Waltz in Grand

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Hotel discussed in Chapter 2 is an example of musical appropriation, but does not operate in the same semiotic way that Lynch’s reuse does. Grand Hotel is a much more readerly text, clearly delineating its intended significance and leaving little room for free- flowing interpretation. As such, its use of pre-existing music does not spawn unlimited semiosis. The film instead uses the musical work as a point of reference that functions in only one way. The score is a sign with fixed signified which allows no logical alternate interpretations.

Eco highlights this phenomenon of openness through the example of a misreading of a Superman comic book.46 Intended for children, this text is very straightforward and prescribes its meaning clearly. Positing a somewhat ridiculous misreading of the comic, Eco shows the difficulty of finding an alternate message in the comic’s clear presentation. While it may be conceivable that a reader could step so far outside the prescribed narrative of these comics as to read them in an alternative way, the closed nature of the work makes this substantially less likely, or nearly impossible.

In a more ambiguous work, such a misreading is much more likely. Indeed, the structure of an open work seems to call for potential misreadings, leaving itself open to the interpretation of the reader and inviting more variety and active engagement on the part of the audience. The questionable reading of “In Dreams” presented above would not even be possible of the musical appropriation in a more readerly work like The Artist or even Malick’s Tree of Life, for those films lack the requisite openness to foster such audience engagement. In this way, unlimited semiosis marks itself through its ambiguity and incorporation of the audience in a dialogue with the text.

46 Umberto Eco and Natalie Chliton, “The Myth of Superman,” Diacritics 2, no. 1 (Spring 1972): 14-22.

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“No hay banda!”: Illusion and Narrative Structure in “Crying”/“Llorando”

Mulholland Drive, Lynch’s 2001 exploration of Hollywood’s underbelly, shows the director’s continuing fascination with Orbison’s music. If Blue Velvet’s reuse of an

Orbison hit acts as a necessary prelude to the film’s climax, the role of the singer’s music in Mulholland Drive is even more central to the film’s structure and intelligibility.

“In Dreams” provided a stage for the playing out of tension that undergirded all of Blue

Velvet, but the appearance of “Crying” in Mulholland Drive impacts the audience’s interpretation of the entire film’s plot. In one musical moment, Lynch is able to reveal important information about his characters, clue his audience into his narrative gambit, and simultaneously engage common cultural memory.

Much like Lynch’s introduction of Lumberton in Blue Velvet, the Los Angeles of

Mulholland Drive appears as a dream world, at first introduction and throughout the film’s first large narrative section. With a manic jitterbug, complete with dancers in period costume, the opening credits introduce Betty, who we soon learn is a young woman from Canada arriving in L.A. to find her big break as an actress. Her naïveté, skill, and luck all stretch credulity as she lands a successful audition while helping her new amnesiac friend, Rita, solve a mystery and, simultaneously, finding love with Rita, seen in Figure 4-4. The plot sounds like a fantasy because it is: the entire first section of

Mulholland Drive presents the fantasy of one of its main characters. In the film’s central scene in Club Silencio, this fantasy is exposed and our conception of reality questioned.

The sequence features the film’s most extended musical performance, as Rebekah del

Rio sings Orbison’s “Crying.” This moment of musical appropriation opens myriad possibilities for interpretation that allow the rest of the film’s narrative to function somewhat cohesively. Ultimately, the process of unlimited semiosis is integral in the

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interpretation and understanding of this convoluted narrative, as well as in reading

Lynch’s position on gender through his films.

Figure 4-4. Betty and Rita solve a mystery (Mulholland Drive, directed by David Lynch [2001; Universal Studios, 2002], DVD).

From its very introduction, the Club Silencio is presented as both mysterious and centrally important to the film’s mystery. Rita’s sleeping whispers of “Silencio” awaken

Betty and prompt their trip to the club, aurally accompanied by more of Badalimenti’s nebulous low synth sound. The sound ushers the camera through the door and into the club’s interior, a large space draped in red velvet (visually emblematic of both Lynch’s style and feminine, uterine imagery). In this space, an emcee takes the stage to begin the night’s entertainment. His mysterious introduction highlights fakery: he refers to and seems to manipulate the sounds of individual instruments, telling the audience that, “it is all an illusion.” Betty and Rita, still unsure of why they have come to this club, observe skeptically.

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After the emcee’s introduction, del Rio takes the stage. Presented with no accompaniment, her voice, though quiet at first, reverberates through the mostly empty hall. Singing in the same range as does Orbsion on the 1961 Monument recording, del

Rio’s rich alto is almost incongruously low. Even without previous knowledge of the song, it seems an odd choice for a female vocalist, as she mimics Orbsion’s vocal performance fairly faithfully. In addition to the Orbison recording, of course, this work as sung by del Rio also calls up memories of k.d. lang’s cover, among myriad others, but particularly because lang (also an alto) similarly performed it in a rich lower register.

This reference to an earlier constellation of cover versions, especially including lang, by extension, adds a layer of complication for sexuality, given lang’s own outspoken lesbianism and the vocal difference between men’s and women’s voices in these registers. Though there is nothing in the song’s lyrical content to suggest the gender of either the singer or the subject, the mood and meaning of the song is altered dramatically when heard from a female and especially when filtered through this lineage of existing cover versions.

Musically, lang’s versions are much less faithful to the original that is del Rio’s.

When performing alone or with Orbison (as she did on their Grammy-winning 1988 collaboration recorded for the film Hiding Out), lang sings “Crying” in its original key, but alters the melody with a variety of ornaments. Lang frequently adds suspensions and country music influenced inflections, where del Rio tends to stay close to Orbison’s original recording in style and ornamentation. Vocally, these performances sound and feel different from Orbison’s original, since these women are singing first in a low chest

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range and later merely moving to a higher head voice, though not the occasional falsetto, employed by Orbison.

Though Orbison sounds stronger and almost as though his voice is floating in this upper range, the women convey more strain in the song’s final sections, when they enter the upper reaches of the song’s range. For Orbison, these pitches made up his wheelhouse, the timbre and sound for which he was known and which set his voice apart from other rock singers at the time. Neither women tries to replicate Orbison’s otherworldly timbre here, as the grain of their voice betrays them. Del Rio’s version (in

Example 4-1) differs from the original in three central and related ways, all determined by the shift in performer: timbre, language, and rhythm. Rhythm changes are few and only as necessitated by the new lyrics, a fairly close translation from the original.

Example 4-1. Rebekah del Rio, “Llorando,” mm. 1-4 (author’s transcription).

At once familiar and oddly different, del Rio’s performance undermines the illusion of reality which is inherent in cultural memory. How can we remember and be nostalgic for something so foreign to us and far removed from our experiences? Adding to the confusion here is that fact that del Rio is in reality a singer – she is billed here under her own name, as she would be were this an actual performance taking place in contemporary Los Angeles. This effect aligns with Martha Nochimson’s reading of the film as exposing the falseness of constructions of reality. Through del Rio’s performance, Lynch pulls back the curtain on, as Nochimson names it, “the real, hopeful

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boundlessness.”47 Unlimited semiosis, in its openness for each viewer, fosters exactly this sort of boundlessness. What is for Nochimson “boundlessness” and for Hudson the undifferentiated “semiotic chora”48 is made possible by Mulholland Drive’s reuse of

Orbison’s well-known ballad. We are unable to form one monolithic meaning for this scene and, through this experience, are led to question the feasibility of such static symbols in general.

At its opening, the performance is documented at a medium distance; a stationary shot shows del Rio’s approach to the microphone and stays on her, apart from a shot/reverse-shot sequence showing Betty and Rita. This pattern is repeated again before the framing changes: beginning with a three-quarter view close-up of del

Rio, Lynch’s reverse shots then show Betty and Rita separately. Though the camera once pans between the two lovers, in each other instance they are separated by the framing and by reverse shots of del Rio until the return of the “Crying, over you” section.

Betty and Rita are shown huddled together, sharing their intense reaction to the performance. The shot/reverse-shot sequences continue, alternating once between the singer on stage and the shaken couple in the audience, before del Rio collapses, her disembodied voice continuing. From this point on, Betty and Rita are again visually separated. Having been brought to intense emotional response through their shared experience of del Rio’s performance, her collapse has broken the spell and separated them once again.

47 Martha P. Nochimson, David Lynch Swerves: Uncertainty from Lost Highway to Inland Empire (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2013), 91.

48 Hudson, “No hay banda,” 19. Hudson reads the film’s openness through Lacanian psychoanalysis, as do many others, but here she connects to Kristeva’s conception of the subject.

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These shifts in camera perspective mark lyrical changes and formal divisions.

“Crying,” like many Orbison compositions, does not follow the traditional verse-chorus structure that one might expect from a rock song. Instead, Orbison’s melody consists of five sections of uneven lengths which are then repeated, with variation in the final segments. The lyrics in Figure 4-5 reflect this form through the preceding letter, while

Figures 4-6 and 4-7 compare the song’s form to the cuts and changes in camera position described above. Through this juxtaposition, the similarities in the scene’s visual and aural form are made clear. These changes also align with shifts in lyrical affect. Orbison’s lyrics describe a spurned man who meets former lover again, only to realize that he still loves her deeply.

(A) I was alright for a while, I could smile for a while (B) But I saw you last night, you held my hand so tight, as you stopped to say hello Oh you wished me well, you couldn’t tell (C) That I’d been cryin’, over you Cryin’ over you (D) You said so long, left me standing all alone Alone and crying, crying, crying, crying (E) It’s hard to understand, but the touch of your hand Can start me crying (A’) I thought that I was over you But it’s true, so true (B’) I love you even more than I did before But darling, what can I do? For you don’t love me, and I’ll always be (C’) Crying, over you Crying, over you (D’) Yes, now you’re gone, and from this moment on I’ll be crying (E’) Yeah, crying, crying Over you Figure 4-5. Roy Orbison, “Crying” lyrics, first iteration of form.

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Figure 4-6. “Crying”/ “Llorando” visual framing (Mulholland Drive, directed by David Lynch [2001; Universal Studios, 2002], DVD).

Figure 4-7. “Crying”/“Llorando” visual form.

This scenario closely matches a scene in the second half of the film, though the audience could not yet know it. Thus Lynch clues us in to this experience, which is actually a part of the lover’s history at this point in the film since, in the convoluted

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timeline of Mulholland Drive’s “reality,” the Club Silencio scene takes place in a fantasy that follows the characters’ breakup. For the characters, then, “Llorando”/“Crying” prompts a very specific memory, while for the film’s audience it provides an important clue for interpretation of the scenes that follow. By cutting to Rita’s stricken face at the line “you wished me well, you couldn’t tell,” Lynch shows us the breakdown of fantasy in the scene: the characters are reacting to their real past here, revealing important information for our understanding of what is to follow. Likewise, the framing of the couple described above reflects this interpretation, making their relationship the focus of this scene, though it would be difficult for the first-time viewer of Mulholland Drive to make such a connection at this point in the narrative.

Each of these factors – sound, visual framing, and lyrics – influence the scene’s potential interpretation, and each requires a knowledge or memory of the song in order to fully operate. For example, the timbre of del Rio’s voice and her position as a female performer singing a song made famous by a male could have little significance for an audience member unfamiliar with Orbison’s song. Given this foreknowledge, though,

Lynch opens avenues for interpretation pertaining not only to gender distinctions but also to sexuality. Orbison’s masculinity, in “Crying” and countless other hits, is not the typical, bravado-filled rock star manliness we might expect, but a more vulnerable stance that can be coded as feminine. In “Crying” alone we see him reduced to tears by nothing more than his former lover’s touch and the memory of their relationship. Such an open display of weakness and emotional vulnerability was uncommon in male rock stars of Orbison’s day, and as Lehman argues, places Orbison in a liminal gendered space.

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For del Rio’s performance, it is not the lyrics that preclude a clear-cut gender role, but the song’s history and vocal range. She sings “Crying” in the original key which, in its opening at least, requires her to use the very low end of her range. In

Orbison’s version, this opening is the section that falls in the most traditionally male- coded range, while the song’s ending explores a more “feminine” falsetto tessitura. For del Rio, this dichotomy is flipped: it is not until she sings explicitly and repeatedly of crying that she returns to a traditional, expected female vocal range. Combined with the onscreen audience’s new and unfamiliar (for them) lesbian experience that immediately preceded the Silencio scene, “Crying” takes on myriad new significances both for Betty and Rita and for the film’s viewer.

The lyrical congruencies with Lynch’s filmmaking choices would be lost on one who did not know the song well enough to make these connections even in the absence of the original English lyrics. (Of course, knowledge of Spanish could substitute here, providing the viewer with this knowledge by a different route.) For an audience member without the ability to form an interpretation based on these share aspects of cultural knowledge, the Silencio scene becomes little more than a confusing interlude in a convoluted narrative. Thus the codes that guide the interpretation of this scene allow it to be meaningful: without these codes, the film’s very structure becomes difficult to understand, a criticism often leveled at many of Lynch’s films, but Mulholland Drive in particular.49

By the time Betty and Rita have reached the mysterious Club Silencio,

Mulholland Drive has already placed itself solidly in the realm of allusions. In the naming

49 See, for example, Jennifer A. Hudson, “’No Hay Banda, and Yet we Hear a Band’: David Lynch’s Reversal of Coherence in Mulholland Drive,” Journal of Film and Video (March 2004): 17-24.

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of the amnesiac brunette as Rita, after Rita Hayworth, the absurdly convoluted plot reminiscent of film noir, and Mulholland Drive’s filmic grammar, Lynch constructs another of his films’ worlds as an amalgam of pop culture signs and ways of communicating. Such ubiquitous references also peppered Blue Velvet, but as with that movie, in Mulholland Drive it is allusion through musical appropriation that assumes greatest importance for audience engagement with the film as a whole. In the Club

Silencio performance, allusion takes a much more central role and acts as the interpretive key to the narrative thus far.

“Llorando” serves an important purpose in the film’s narrative, acting as a transition between its two large formal sections. Before singer del Rio even takes the stage, both audiences (the film’s and those in the club) are alerted to the illusory nature of the scene before them. The club’s emcee tells us, “No hay banda! There is no band.

It is all … an illusion.” Manipulating the strikingly real-sounding instruments with a wave of his hand, the emcee thus sets the stage for the questioning of the truth of experience that del Rio’s performance will prompt. This questioning relates not only to the performances on stage at the club, but also to the reality of the entire plot to this point: what is real and what is illusion? Up to this point, no one has questioned the relatively straight-forward (albeit not particularly believable) course of events. Here, then, both audiences are invited to rethink what they have accepted as fact.

As we will come to understand in the remainder of the film, the events leading up to the Club Silencio sequence are the all the fantasy of Diane Selwyn. In order to deal with her lover’s rejection, Diane constructs an alternate reality, in which we are immersed in the first part of the film. Diane reimagines herself as “Betty” and her lover,

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actually named Camilla, as the mysterious “Rita.” In this alternate reality, the two women are united in the investigation of a mystery and find satisfying love together. The

Silencio scene marks an important shift: after this sequence, the film leaves Diane’s fantasy to enter a more confusing “reality.” Figure 4-8 shows the commutation of

Betty/Rita to Diane/Camilla. Thus “Llorando” acts a gateway; the performance prompts the breakdown of Diane’s fantasy and provides the audience with an interpretive key to make sense of the disjointed narrative that follows.

Figure 4-8. Diane and Camilla at the fateful Mulholland Drive party (Mulholland Drive, directed by David Lynch [2001; Universal Studios, 2002], DVD).

I argue that this scene operates successfully because of the openness of interpretation it creates through unlimited semiosis. This reading differs from many scholars’ approaches, which typically address the scene and the film as a whole through a Lacanian lens. Even within this framework, many still obliquely acknowledge this openness, though not identifying it through Eco’s concept. Jennifer A. Hudson sees the lack of specificity as almost deconstructivist, aligning Lynch’s departure from a

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straight-forward semiotic system as akin to Derrida’s critiques.50 Though she reads it differently, Hudson responds to the same semiotic phenomenon I analyze here and locates its nexus in the Silencio scene. Thus she describes unlimited semiosis in a manner close to Eco’s, while naming it differently: “he [Lynch] does not provide us with signifieds, so his chain of signifiers, in the words of Lacan, ends up constantly shifting and circulating.”51 Importantly, though, she does not make the crucial connection to

Lynch’s appropriation of music, which forms a connecting thread between this and the other central scenes discussed in this chapter and, indeed, in much of the literature on these films.

This scene does not operate only by virtue of appropriation, but by the specific, directed framing and filmmaking decisions discussed above that prompt unlimited semiosis. This distinction is clearly visible in comparison to a rhyming scene from the first half of the film. In this earlier sequence, director Adam (played by Justin Theroux) hears auditions for his film. This scene also includes a musical performance which is only illusion, but unlike “Llorando,” this falseness is overt and never in question. An assistant calls “roll sound, please,” and Linda Scott’s “I’ve Told Every Little Star” begins to play as the ominous synthesized low strings that underscored the beginning of the scene fade out.

Much as in Club Silencio, Lynch frames this performance with a shot/reverse shot series, beginning first with the audience (here, Adam) and then a medium distance stationary shot of the performer. Here, though, the cuts between shots do not bear the

50 Hudson, “No Hay Banda,” 19.

51 Hudson, “No Hay Banda,” 20.

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same significance as do those in “Llorando.” The audition sequence shifts perspective in order to forward plot –it serves to show Adam’s distress over being forced to cast

Camilla Rhodes as the star of his film (explained in earlier scenes that showed him receiving threats to this effect from the mafia). In “Llorando,” these shifts have an affective purpose rather than a strictly narrative one and, as such, open a space for dialogue with the audience, whereas those in “Every Little Star” simply show plot points to be understood.

In the scene’s sound mix and quality, too, Lynch circumscribes interpretation. By beginning the sequence with the aforementioned string pads, the film aurally cues its viewer to the threatening undertone of the situation. When Linda Scott’s voice enters, the recording is clearly just that: an audibly old recording, mixed for clarity but not reacting (through reverberation or otherwise) to the space it fills, not sounding authentic to its environment. Unlike “Llorando,” “Every Little Star” revels in its falseness. Camilla

Rhodes, in her audition, overacts and exaggerates her lip-synching to the point of farce, readily showing her performance as illusion where Rebekah del Rio, in contrast, eschews large gesture in favor of a more “genuine” performance style. Thus these scenes differ in every aspect that makes “Llorando” both intelligible and important;

“Every Little Star” illustrates clearly the difference between straight-forward musical reuse and unlimited semiosis in musical appropriation. If it were presented differently,

“Llorando” too could serve as little more than a musical reference, but through Lynch’s filmmaking decisions, it is transformed into the interpretive crux of Mulholland Drive.

Among the wide variety of studies on Mulholland Drive, most agree that the Club

Silencio sequence is of central importance, but views vary as to why this is. For

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scholars like Hudson and McGowan, it is Lacanian analysis that makes the film’s structure legible, but approaching the Silencio performance with a view to its semiotic and memorative play provides a much more direct understanding. I argue that it is the scene’s invocation of memory and fluidity of significance that provides its interpretive power and allows it to function as the grounding center of the film. Most scholars concentrate on this scene when discussing the film and its structure, though almost none single out its corresponding scene with “I’ve Told Every Little Star,”52 likely because Silencio opens memorative and signifying play in a way that the earlier scene does not. This critical attention, while not directly addressing the unlimited semiosis I locate within the scene, does point to the importance of “Llorando” in the film’s structure and legibility. By appealing to its audience’s memories, Mulholland Drive continues to use the cultural shorthand it employed through references to Hollywood’s golden age in the first half of the film, but here it serves to makes sense of an otherwise opaque scene, rather than to knowingly wink to its well-informed audience through allusions.

Lynch himself refers to this interpretive necessity as tapping into the viewers’ “intuition and inner knowingness” to create an individual knowledge of each scene.53 He does not openly refer to unlimited semiosis, but the director’s comments touch on the same vital role of ambiguity and the validity of each audience member’s interpretation. Though

“Llorando” does recall shared cultural memory, the chain of semiosis that it spawns is intrinsically personal.

52 A notable exception is Roger Cook, “Hollywood Narrative and the Play of Fantasy: David Lynch's Mulholland Drive,” Quarterly Review of Film and Video 28, no.5, 369-381, which opens with a brief description of the audition scene. Cook does not mention aspects of performance or musical appropriation, though, concentrating instead on the act of viewing within the scene.

53 David Lynch, “David Lynch Explains Ideas and Mulholland Drive,” last modified June 11, 2007, accessed January 19, 2014, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gkIQy0iblQE.

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“Llorando” also actively plays with its gendered content and positioning, which, as Mulvey suggests, plays an integral role in the film’s relation to its audience. On the most obvious level, the act of viewing in Silencio is largely feminine: the performers and observers are all female. More important, though, Lynch structures the scene in a way that aligns with a more feminine viewing and gaze, the “radical weapon” described by

Mulvey. Rather than presenting del Rio as a spectacle for scopophilic pleasure, the scene is shot to embed the audience in the performance. The quick and closely framed shot/reverse shot sequences tie del Rio to Betty and Rita in much the same way that the framing of “In Dreams” in Blue Velvet implicated Frank in Ben’s performance: though they may not be on stage, the on-screen audiences in both cases are intrinsically tied to the performance. The audience is not a safe and separate spectator, but a player in the scene. This close relationship made Frank so deeply uncomfortable in part because it troubled the accepted, phallocentric order in which he was able to maintain distance and control.

In Mulholland Drive, the two protagonists react differently than did Frank, not calling for the performance’s end, but instead investing deeply in it. Whereas Frank was prompted to cut Ben’s performance short, Betty and Rita instead engage with del Rio, responding appropriately and intensely to the performance. Lynch’s editing emphasizes

Betty and Rita’s engaged spectatorship, bringing their images into direct alignment with del Rio’s performance and words; though they are not literally on stage in the way that

Frank was during Ben’s lip-synch in Blue Velvet, the women are perhaps more actively engaged and certainly more openly invested in the performance they witness. Since these two characters serve as an audience surrogate in the Silencio setting, the film’s

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spectators too are implicated in Mulholland Drive’s alternate form of audience interaction.

Lynch has not been seen as a director who is particularly kind in his treatment of female characters, so this somewhat feminine-centric bent is unexpected.54 Most notably, critic Roger Ebert has long criticized Lynch for an almost misogynistic portrayal of women. Ebert’s review of Blue Velvet took issue with Isabella Rossellini’s character

Dorothy, bemoaning the “cruel” things asked of her character and the “humiliation” she was put through.55 Ebert does present an interesting and troubling point about Lynch’s portrayal of violence against women, though his reading is somewhat problematic and certainly more complex than Ebert allows. As his partner Siskel points out in their review, Rossellini was aware of the film’s plot and the demands of her character before accepting the role, so we cannot place the blame solely on Lynch. However, the situation becomes yet more complicated given the fact that Rossellini and Lynch were romantically involved at the time of filming Blue Velvet.

Whether the fact of their relationship or any hint of coercion played a role in the final portrayal of Dorothy is a question beyond the scope of any I hope to address here, but the situation is one that raises this and many more issues. It is also not an isolated incident in Lynch’s films. In relationships from Blue Velvet to Lost Highway and

Mulholland Drive, the issue of misogyny continues to play an important role in Lynch’s narratives. Wild at Heart’s character Lula in particular foregrounds this misogyny. She

54 For more on the feminist reception history of Lynch’s films, see Jana Evans Braziel, “’In Dreams…’: Gender, Sexuality and Violence in the Films of David Lynch,” in The Cinema of David Lynch: American Dreams, Nightmare Visions, ed. by Erica Sheen and Annette Davison (London: Wallflower Press, 2004), 107-118.

55 “Siskel and Ebert: Blue Velvet Review”, last modified July 26, 2009, accessed January 19, 2014, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_uehfL60EA4.

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is, we learn through flashbacks, the victim of sexual abuse as a child. In her relationship with Sailor, too, Lula is presented problematically, seemingly unable to assert her own agency or needs. Most troubling, though is her rape by Bobby Peru, in which she is shown, through coercion, to “ask for it.” Framing the scene as grotesque in nature,

Lynch does not really absolve Bobby Peru, but he does create a situation that is startlingly close to implicating the victim. Beyond film, we can also see such themes manifested in the landmark series Twin Peaks, which involves the sex trafficking of teenage girls as a major plot point. My study does not aim to delve into this rich area of study, but perhaps by addressing the gendered aspect of his films’ interaction with their audiences, we may inch closer to a deeper understanding of these more troubling aspects of Lynch’s oeuvre.

Wild at Heart: Allusion, Nostalgia, and an “Aesthetics of Phoniness and Fakery”

More than any of Lynch’s other works, Wild at Heart is a film structured around allusions. From Wizard of Oz plot elements to its stylized portrayals of character archetypes, the film borrows heavily from popular culture. The film forms its own model audience through its use of what Eco terms a “social treasury”56 of knowledge by invoking common frameworks and codes. In fact, it was largely due to this reliance on references that reaction to the film was mixed on its initial release at Cannes, though it was awarded the Palme d’Or. Described by critics as an “aesthetics of phoniness and fakery”57 Lynch’s pillaging of pop culture exposed him to criticism of “fakery” for his sweeping use of texts created by others, though it also allowed for the moments of

56 Umberto Eco, Interpretation and Overinterpretation, ed. Stefan Collini (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 67-8.

57 Chion, David Lynch, 127.

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unlimited semiosis in the film’s musical performance. By problematizing the idea of authorship and control, Lynch, it seems, may have ceded some of his control over his own film. Wild at Heart’s reliance on shared cultural codes dominates the film and critics’ reactions to it. I argue, though, that it is this play with ideas of authorship that makes Wild at Heart such a convincing example of the power of musical appropriation to communicate with a film’s audience. Indeed, it is through this musical appropriation that the audience gains a new understanding not only of the film’s narrative but also of

Lynch’s aesthetics more generally. If we can, as I argue, see Sailor as a stand-in for director Lynch, Wild at Heart then becomes a filmic text that shows the role of appropriation in the creation of art as well as identity.

Others, most notably Annette Davison and Mike Miley, have also pointed to the importance of Sailor’s musical appropriation. For Davison, this appropriation is integral in that it shows Sailor as an analogue for Lynch as director.58 For Miley, the invocation of Elvis Presley as a star image and as a singer is central to the understanding of Wild at Heart as an “exploration of rock’n’roll’s connection to America’s mythic sense of self.”59 I disagree with neither author’s interpretation of the film, but I argue that both gloss over the mechanism by which these moves are accomplished. Wild at Heart manages to create Sailor as a Lynchian stand-in and as an exemplar for the power of rock’n’roll in the American mythos because of the film’s fostering of semiotic openness through its musical appropriation. As in the two previous Lynch case studies, scenes of

58 Annette Davison, “‘Up in Flames’: Love, Control, and Collaboration in the Soundtrack to Wild at Heart,” in The Cinema of David Lynch: American Dreams, Nightmare Visions, ed. Erica Sheen and Annette Davison (London: Wallflower Press, 2005), 123–24.

59 Mike Miley, “David Lynch at the Crossroads: Deconstructing Rock, Reconstructing Wild at Heart,” Music and the Moving Image 7, no. 3 (Fall 2014), 43.

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musical performance act as sites of audience intervention into the narrative, creating a new film-audience relationship through a web of musical and cultural allusions.

Wild at Heart is based on a novel of the same name by Barry Gifford, but almost all allusions, particularly those to Elvis, are exclusively Lynch’s invention. It is not entirely accurate to call the film an adaptation, as myriad elements from plot points to characterization to settings differ greatly from the novel to the screen. In the novel, neither main character is the clear realization of an archetype as they are in the film.

Sailor is a run-of-the-mill delinquent (with no penchant for stylized Elvis accoutrement or philosophizing on the symbols of his individuality) and Lula, rather than being a gum- popping Marilyn Monroe fantasy, is instead a black-haired, straight talking small town girl. All of these visual references, like the Wizard of Oz plot points, are Lynch’s addition to the text and allow for unlimited semiosis. In the case of the film’s Lula, for example, we see a blonde, somewhat ditzy girl, an archetype that immediately points to Marilyn

Monroe. Indeed, this transformation itself even links to Monroe (in her change from small-town brunette from a troubled home to sex icon). Through the invocation of this star image, the audience is able to make many spiraling connections that are integral to the film: we now link Monroe’s status as a potent sex symbol to Lula, in addition to seeing her as a link to a specific, mid-century American set of cultural landmarks and values. On yet another level, this unlimited semiosis adds a darker layer to the sparse characterization of Lula. Alluding not only to Monroe’s film roles but also the actress herself, the film thus obliquely paints Lula as an emotionally scarred figure with tragic potential. Though Lynch never explicitly names Monroe or includes references to her specific roles in dialogue, we are nonetheless drawn, through his characterization of

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Lula, to think of the actress and all the cultural baggage she carries, as a figure. Thus her untimely death, unhappy younger life, fraught relationships with men, status as an enduring sex symbol, and place within a distinctly American mythos are all tied up in

Lula’s character, too. All this is accomplished with a few visual cues; the unlimited semiosis spawned by the film’s musical performances operates in the same way, but is far more complex.

The music incorporated into the novel is also of a different nature. Rather than highlighting Elvis and heavier rock (as Lynch’s film does), Gifford concentrates on blues music, referencing John Lee Hooker, among other blues artists.60 The aural landscape he creates is entirely different from Lynch’s realization of the novel. Perhaps most importantly, the novel’s version of Sailor never sings, especially not at the story’s end.

Lynch creates a happy ending, complete with Jailhouse Rock-style performance atop a convertible, to replace the original ending that sees the parting of Sailor and Lula.

Though the characters and the broad plot lines are Gifford’s, Lynch has created a new and highly referential narrative in his adaptation, drawing on a wide variety of common cultural codes to completely transform the saga of Sailor and Lula.

The first and most obvious code is the borrowed structure of the Wizard of Oz narrative. Through dialogue quotation, visual references, and even the appearance of the Good Witch at the film’s conclusion, Lynch invokes the 1939 film (much more specifically than the L. Frank Baum novel). The understanding that the travels of Lula and Sailor are meant to be analogous to Dorothy’s magical sojourn in Oz makes the stylized violence, outlandish characters, and striking visuals bear a much more potent

60 Barry Gifford, Wild at Heart: the Story of Sailor and Lula (New York: Grove Weidenfeld, 1990), 83.

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and clear significance than they could otherwise. Interestingly, these Wizard of Oz moments all point to the fantastical aspects of Oz: the only referenced moments from the Oz narrative are those that occur in the land of Oz, not the framing story on the farm in Kansas. The allusions, along with filmmaking decisions discussed below, help to place Sailor’s performances in the realm of fantasy, under his own control. This common understanding is essential for reading the film, and the codes invoked by

Sailor’s songs, though less obvious, are no less integral.

Like many of Lynch’s characters, Sailor himself plays on common tropes of mid- century American pop culture. A misunderstood youth, he is unfairly imprisoned for a crime of passion. Sailor’s first introduction is in flashback to this crime, where his violence is juxtaposed against the musical background of the Glenn Miller standard “In the Mood.” Despite this aural cue, though, the film is more directly referencing rock and roll culture rather than big band swing: apart from the excessively bloody realism with which the crime is depicted, it could almost be the opening of Jailhouse Rock (1957).61

In the openings of both films, the young protagonists are shown fighting to defend a girl’s honor and, inadvertently, killing their opponents. It is also worth noting that the circumstances surrounding Sailor’s crime are added by Lynch. In the novel, Sailor is convicted of manslaughter before the narrative begins, and the situation is never fully explained. Similarities in costuming, styling, and speech patterns abound, drawing

Sailor closer to a stereotypical Elvis character. The parallels between Sailor and Elvis

Presley’s constructed persona begin long before we hear the first strains of “Love Me,” and extend well beyond musical aspects.

61 For more on the cinematic Elvis connection, see Mike Miley, “David Lynch at the Crossroads: Deconstructing Rock, Reconstructing Wild at Heart,” Music and the Moving Image 7, no. 3 (Fall 2014), 45.

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From The Wizard of Oz to the figure of Elvis, the texts Lynch appropriates in Wild at Heart operate outside of their original contexts and mean quite differently than they may have originally. This spiraling change in interpretants of a concrete, unchanging text clearly shows Eco’s unlimited semiosis. “Love Me” may be the film’s most complex example of this process, as the version referenced in Sailor’s performance (that of Elvis

Presley) is in fact a resurrection of an earlier version by Willie and Ruth. This scene shows the layers of semiosis at work in the appropriation and reinscription of a musical work. This semiotic process also shows one of the hallmarks of “Lynchian” cinema: a familiar, mid-century American artifact is transformed into something vaguely unreal and often grotesque. The performance of “Love Me” references the original while challenging the way the audience receives and relates to it. Through his added layers of meaning, Lynch transforms the original Elvis recording of the song.

The performance comes shortly after Sailor and Lula have gone on the run together. They go out to a club, dancing to thrashing heavy metal. In the chaos of the club’s crowd, another man moves in on Lula, dancing against her. With a show of protective machismo, Sailor jumps in to punish the man and, after successfully eliciting an apology, sings his love to Lula. Turning to the band (who stopped playing during the fight), Sailor tells them, “You fellas have a lot of the same power E had. You all know this one?” and grabs the microphone to sing.

From Sailor’s first notes, the scene is completely transformed. Staring down at his feet as he sways his hips, Sailor plays a convincing Elvis and the crowd and band, incongruously, react accordingly. In fact, the moment is so incongruous that it appears to be occurring outside the narrative, or as Sailor’s personal fantasy: the opening shots

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of the sequence focus only on Sailor and the band, eventually expanding to include

Lula. Within this circumscribed focus, the adoring screams of the audience can easily be reconciled as nondiegetic and part of this fantasy, especially since they seem so out of place in the heavy metal club where the scene is set. As the scene continues, though, reaction shots incorporate more of the audience. The girls in the crowd are shown, in one shot, screaming in the way the aural track suggested from the beginning of “Love Me.” This reaction, however, is isolated and does not appear to continue throughout the scene.

Figure 4-9. Lula and Sailor in “Love Me,” with an unaffected audience behind (Wild At Heart, directed by David Lynch [1990; MGM, 2004] DVD).

The single appropriate reaction shot, rather than making the sequence more believable, instead serves to bolster its framing as a projection of Sailor’s own wishes.

When the girls are the focus of a particular shot (or, I argue, the focus of Sailor’s fantasy), their reaction matches the aural track. However, when the audience is shown only as background to the central interaction between Lula and Sailor, Sailor’s fantasy does not extend to include them specifically. The mundanity of this oddness marks it as

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Lynchian: the sequence itself is familiar while at the same time defying logic, as are the individual components, particularly these reactions.

In addition to this confused visual scope, Lynch also presents an odd and limited soundscape. The “Love Me” sequence sounds different from the preceding hard rock performance, incorporating a heavy reverb that will mark each of Sailor’s songs. His singing is even marked as separate from the preceding argument, set apart as existing in a different kind of reality through its sound. Rather than being completely nondiegetic and separate from the action on screen, the sound instead problematizes the reality of the sequence. It matches Sailor’s performance while also showing that this performance cannot be real within the given setting; the sound solidifies the fantastic nature of the scene by falling into the aural “fantastical gap”62 between the real and the imposed in the film’s diegesis. A similarly unclear aural diegetic positioning helps create space for audience involvement in Lynch’s own Mulholland Drive. This can perhaps be ascribed to the power of the “fantastical gap” as described by Stilwell: unmooring the audience from a clear and expected aural environment, this ambiguity provides for more fluid interpretation and, according to Stilwell, is a space for “making strange in order to make sense.”63 In this case, aural ambiguity certainly makes the scene yet more strange, though its sense is perhaps not immediately apparent.

Lynch’s careful and confusing choices here serve to solidify the scene’s status as fantasy. The performance does not make sense in its context and, in most shots, does not seem to be aurally true. This framing of the scene points again to Sailor and his

62 For a full exploration of the aural “fantastical gap,” see Robynn Stilwell, “The Fantastical Gap Between Diegetic and Nondiegetic” in Beyond the Soundtrack: Representing Music in Cinema, ed. Daniel Goldmark, Lawrence Kramer, and Richard Leppert (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007).

63 Stilwell, “Fantastical Gap,”186.

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active role in appropriation: if “Love Me” is not being performed in the reality of the narrative, it is an invention of Sailor, his own personal fantasy. Like his snakeskin jacket,

Sailor’s Elvis-style performance is, for him, a “symbol of his individuality.” He takes

Elvis’s persona and swaggering masculinity as his own, incorporating the screams of adoring fans and his own fawning girlfriend into the fantasy. The appropriation allows him to shape his own persona through a pre-existing musical text and to comment upon both the appropriated musical object and on his own actions through this reuse. Were the scene not presented as a fantasy, its power of commentary would be considerably circumscribed. Knowing that the scene is effectively under the character’s control, we can understand it as a clear representation of Sailor’s own viewpoint; the problematic visual and aural decisions mentioned above make sense if we view the scene as occurring in Sailor’s imagination. In this fantasy, Sailor can curate and perfect his persona, presenting himself in his ideal state.

The symbols he chooses for his “individuality” are immediately evocative, calling upon extensive cultural memory. Though some audience members may not be familiar with Sailor’s song selection “Love Me,” his hip-shaking dancing clearly points indexically to Elvis and, in particular, his landmark 1956 Ed Sullivan Show performance. This performance, in turn, becomes the expression of a new content, Elvis’s reputation as a sexual icon. The censoring of the first segment of this performance (by framing Elvis closely, from the waist up) emphasized what it conspicuously excluded by denying the audience a view of Elvis’s provocative gyration.64 The ambiguity of Lynch’s filmmaking choices in framing the scene also plays into this chain of association. Sailor’s

64 For more on this performance, see, for example, Susan Doll, Understanding Elvis: Southern Roots versus Star Image (New York: Routledge, 1998), 85.

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impromptu performance, implausibly presented as a potentially real part of the film’s narrative, acts in much the same way that performance sequences do in Elvis’Presley’s films, like Love Me Tender or Jailhouse Rock. As in these films, performances are incongruously inserted into the narrative. In fact, Sailor’s performance has a very close analogue in Jailhouse Rock: Elvis’s character, determined to make a name for himself as a performer, takes the stage in a club, though he is not the hired performer for the night. Unlike Sailor’s performance, this one ends poorly; in his fantasy version of this familiar scene, Sailor is thus able to improve upon the template he has chosen for his own “stardom” and individuality. By invoking Elvis through performance style, song, dress, and situation, Sailor’s “Love Me” prompts a chain of unlimited semiosis that reveals more about his character than mere dialogue could.

Importantly, Sailor is not questioning why Elvis functions as a symbol for the sort of masculinity he seeks, but invokes the star without any such commentary. Miley argues that this performance shows the film’s understanding of transcendence through art as “a journey that deconstructs cultural norms.”65 I would argue that Sailor’s performance effects no such deconstruction. Rather, we see the character appropriating

Elvis at face value; it is through the audience’s experience of unlimited semiosis that we may see any deconstruction, if it occurs. For Sailor, common cultural icons are a way to construct his own identity, not necessarily to question any broader understanding.

Sailor’s appropriation creates meaning that attaches to him, rather than reconsidering the world.

65 Miley, “Lynch at Crossroads,” 53.

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Sailor’s agency is important for my argument, as I see him acting as Lynch’s stand-in. Davison has argued something similar, stating that we can see Sailor as a

“faceless but insistent double” for Lynch.66 The complete control that Sailor exerts in this instance of appropriation makes such a commutation much more clear. For this sequence, Sailor acts as director, changing the visual framing, the musical choices, and the audience reactions. The character takes control of his surroundings and of the shaping of his persona through this performance. Sailor’s active role in shaping himself through appropriation is directly analogous to Lynch’s own reuse, and the character’s actions here are Lynch’s own invention, not an original part of the Gifford novel. Beyond

Davison’s comparison of character and director, though, I argue that Lynch has constructed Sailor in order to turn the audience’s attention to Lynch’s own actions in order to consider their effects in great depth. Through Sailor, Lynch presents the audience with the power of musical appropriation, asking us to consider the implications and see these within his own work. Wallace seems to refer to this aspect of the film obliquely when he states that Wild at Heart is perhaps less successful than Lynch’s other films because it is too self-conscious and “winking.”67 Indeed, the director’s commentary on his creation seems to be much more visible in this film than in Lynch’s others.

Lynch is notoriously reticent on the subject of interpretation of his work; in this respect, these scenes with Sailor are a marked break from the director’s typical stance.

66Annette Davison, “‘Up in Flames’: Love, Control, and Collaboration in the Soundtrack to Wild at Heart,” in The Cinema of David Lynch: American Dreams, Nightmare Visions, ed. Erica Sheen and Annette Davison (London: Wallflower Press, 2005), 119.

67 Wallace, “Lynch Keeps his Head,” 199. Wallace also argues that Lynch identifies more with his characters than his audiences, which creates some distance between them. I argue that this merely strengthens the commutation of Sailor for Lynch that I see in this scene.

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In a broader sense, though, Sailor’s musical moments are entirely in keeping with

Lynch’s aesthetic. They reach out to the audience for interpretation and dialogue through the reuse of and reference to a shared past. This time, though, Lynch’s own work is implicated in this shared past. No longer solely dealing with Elvis in the context of Wild at Heart, these scenes are instead about music in Lynch’s hands and, even more broadly, the ways we deal with and relate to our shared past. (I use “we” and “our” to refer to a contemporary American audience; the shared nature of an American past is assumed as Lynch’s films tend to be overtly filled with a specific brand of American nostalgia.) Through Sailor and his performances, the audience gains a rare glimpse into

Lynch’s mode of operation, normally so carefully concealed in interviews and commentary on his work.

Sailor’s final performance in the film is an even more obvious moment of this gambit than is his song at the club. After meeting the Good Witch (in yet another instance of Lynch’s Wizard of Oz appropriation), Sailor runs over cars in a traffic jam to find Lula, finally ready to profess his love to her as deeply as he can. Having saved

“Love Me Tender,” he says, to “sing it to [his] wife,” this performance takes on an extra layer of importance in the narrative. This significance is also helped by the introductory underscoring: Strauss’s “Im Abendrot” accompanies Sailor’s mad dash toward Lula, dissolving into the guitar accompaniment for “Love Me Tender” as Sailor finally takes

Lula in his arms. Strauss’s orchestral introduction serves here as Elvis’s: the opening orchestral cue is included in its entirety and voice’s entrance in mm. 22 is replaced here with “Love Me Tender,” accomplishing a smooth elision between the two. The connection serves to tie back to an earlier scene, while simultaneously elevating the

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Elvis hit; it acts as art music here, connected intimately to Strauss’s lied. Incidentally,

“Im Abendrot” is an oddly appropriate choice for this scene. Though the piece is edited so as not to include the voice’s entrance, the work’s lyrics link closely to the end of

Sailor and Lula’s journey together, as well as hearkening back to a previous scene that included the work. As Sailor and Lula dance to thrashing hard rock during their road trip, that music gradually fades into a recording of Jessye Norman singing “Im Abendrot.”

These connections, while noteworthy, are not immediately recognizable to a viewer without knowledge of the work and its lyrical content, since the same section is not played in both scenes.

Figure 4-10. Sailor and Lula, “Love Me Tender” (Wild At Heart, directed by David Lynch [1990; MGM, 2004] DVD).

The sound of this performance, like “Love Me” before it, serves to mark “Love Me

Tender” as existing outside the strict narrative time of Wild at Heart. When the accompanying guitar enters the underscoring, its reverb is heavy, differentiating it from the original Elvis Presley recording (RCA Records,1956) while clearly marking it as not aurally situated within the open outdoor space of the scene, seen in Figure 4-10.

Interestingly, Lula’s exclamation of “Sailor!” after the song’s first line is treated with the

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same heavy reverb, placing both in this nondiegetic, fantasy performance space through sound.

As in the earlier “Love Me,” the entrance of the song transforms the scene. No longer existing within the semi-realistic narrative world of the film, these moments are marked aurally as being different. Sailor’s “Love Me Tender” cannot sound this way in the environment where he appears to perform it, but somehow Lula and her voice are in the same fantastical aural space with him. This sonic treatment, of course, is analogous to “Love Me” as well as the moments in Blue Velvet and Mulholland Drive discussed above. Unlike those performances, though, Sailor’s Elvis songs are part of a larger tactic on Lynch’s part, showing appropriation at work.

Apart from this treatment, Cage’s performance of “Love Me Tender” is fairly faithful to the original. Adjustments are made for Cage’s vocal range (or perhaps to ease the musical transition from Strauss to Elvis): he sings the song in E rather than the original D. The simple guitar accompaniment is identical (though transposed), as are many of Cage’s inflections on the melody. The examples below juxtapose the 1956

Elvis version (Examples 4-2 and 4-4) with Cage’s 1990 recording (Examples 4-3 and 4-

5). Cage follows the original version closely, but not identically. The similarity of inflections and phrasing links the two, but Cage’s performance is not an exact copy.

Rather, this version of the song is a filtered realization of the original recording: Cage’s

Sailor is simultaneously aping Elvis’s performance and attempting to make it his own, in much the same way that his recontextualization of the song operates.

Though he incorporates the same ornamentation style, Cage inflects the melody in a slightly different way than did Presley. Like all of Sailor’s Elvis references, this

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moment is an inexact reflection of the original; fidelity to the exemplar is not as important as the use to which the allusion is put. The slight variation in ornament differentiates this version as Sailor’s own expression.

Example 4-2. Elvis Presley vocal line for “Love Me Tender” (written by Presley, George R. Poulton, and Virginia Matson [1956: RCA Records]), verse (author’s transcription).

Example 4-3. Nicolas Cage vocal line for “Love Me Tender” (Wild At Heart, directed by David Lynch [1990; MGM, 2004] DVD), verse (author’s transcription).

Example 4-4. Elvis Presley vocal line for “Love Me Tender” (1956 recording), refrain (author’s transcription).

Example 4-5. Nicolas Cage vocal line for “Love Me Tender” (1990 recording), refrain (author’s transcription).

Derrida states that “to write is to produce a mark that will constitute a sort of machine which is productive in turn, and which my future disappearance will not, in principle, hinder,”68 that writing must still be legible in the absence of its original sender

68 Jacques Derrida, “Signature – Event – Context” in Limited Inc (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1988), 8.

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and receiver. This is certainly true of both writing and film, as both survive as documents in the wake of their creators’ passing. Derrida’s notion of a continuously creating machine is a useful one here: even without the author, the text itself can still be a propagator of new signs, particularly through the sort of unlimited semiosis proposed by Eco. In ways unintended by the author, a text can continue to grow and mean in new and different contexts. The alternate readings proposed in response to Blue Velvet’s new contextualization of “In Dreams” are clear examples of this living on, even in the absence of the song’s creator and original context. Without the interference of the original or new author (and Lynch is notoriously loathe to engage with any interpretation of his work), the text continues as an agent of meaning on its own, in collaboration with new and different receivers.

Such meanings can be, and frequently are, created without the involvement and control of the author, but the codes of understanding of both sender and receiver still play an integral part. It is in this way that Lynch’s text continues to need these frames of reference, though it can exist outside of them, for the hermetic drift discussed by both

Derrida and Eco threatens to derail the reading of a text without these codes. A common understanding of all that Elvis signified in mid-century America is necessary for the audience to grasp Sailor’s intent in invoking Elvis. Though the text can continually prompt new interpretation without its author, it prompts confusion without its attendant codes.

In both this instance of appropriation and the aforementioned Blue Velvet moments, performance is of the utmost importance, not simply as pertains to the filmed performance of the song itself, but also the actors’ portrayals of their characters in these

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scenes. The film character is only ever embodied by one actor (with the notable exception of remakes), and the physicality and performance of that actor shapes our understanding and apprehension of the character. As Klevan (following Cavell) states, film characters do not exist outside of their actors, unlike characters on stage.69 Thus without Dennis Hopper, Blue Velvet’s Frank Booth does not exist. The same is surely true for Nicolas Cage and Sailor Ripley, but Sailor’s case is complicated by the ways in which appropriation and performance shape his identity. While Cage’s physicality brings

Sailor to life, his performance of Elvis songs fleshes out the character, giving him depth and a relatable identity. His appropriation is important in the audience’s understanding of Sailor, in large part because it seems integral in the character’s understanding of himself. Each time the film enters Sailor’s fantasies, he presents himself through the lens of a borrowed text (in the aforementioned “Love Me” and “Love Me Tender” scenes). Used in this way, the musical text becomes as much Sailor’s as Elvis’s, at least in the film’s system of meaning. Sailor does not come solely from Cage, but from the integration of Cage’s physicality and a variety of texts. As such, the idea of authorship is deeply complicated in the figure of Sailor.

Judith Butler’s view of performative gender identity supports this reading of

Sailor’s performances. For Butler, gender exists not as a natural dichotomy determined by bodily attributes, but as a fluid and self-defined role that finds expression in our own choices and performances. Thus a biological man can, performatively, assume a female gender identity through mannerisms, dress, and action. Sailor’s performance choices are not so overtly disruptive of a gender binary, but he nonetheless chooses and

69 Andrew Klevan, Film Performance: From Achievement to Appreciation, (London: Wallflower Press, 2006), 6.

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performs a very specific gendered role. In shaping himself as Elvis, Sailor appropriates not only the music and swaggering stage presence, but also the identifiable brand of masculinity that Elvis represents.

Unlike the complicated gender identities of Blue Velvet’s “In Dreams” or

Mulholland Drive’s “Llorando,” Wild At Heart and Sailor use Elvis in a fairly transparent manner. As the character states, for him, Elvis serves as a symbol of himself. This identification with a “cock rock” icon displays exactly the sort of rock masculinity identified by popular music scholars, notably by Simon Frith and Angela McRobbie. 70

Sailor styles himself as Elvis not only because of Elvis’s music, but mostly because of his persona. The swagger, sexuality, and power of Elvis are inherent in his music and communicated through Sailor’s emulation. In fact, Sailor seems to be made entirely of these allusions. According to Butler, “that the gendered body is so performative suggests that it has no ontological status apart from the various acts that constitute its reality.”71 The same can be said of Sailor: performance plays such a vital role is his identity that, without these acts and appropriated signs, he has no real being. Sailor is in effect made up of the signs he chooses to invoke, having no real substance apart from them.

Appropriating the famous heartthrob’s persona and appearance as his own,

Sailor also replicates Elvis’s signature as his own, while making an overt show of his roleplay. It is in this transparency that Sailor’s appropriation becomes most interesting.

As Butler says of drag performance, the artifice of his overtly constructed performance

70 Simon Frith and Angela McRobbie, “Rock and Sexuality,” in On Record: Pop, Rock, and the Written Word, ed. Simon Frith and Andrew Goodwin (New York: Routledge, 1990), 320.

71 Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 1990), 136.

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holds a mirror to the self-conscious nature of Elvis’s persona, not to mention the process of appropriation more broadly.72 By framing itself very clearly as a presentation of consciously chosen and manipulated signifiers, drag shows itself (and the femininity it seeks to replicate) to be entirely window-dressing. Drag queens show the constructed nature of our attitudes about gendered and sexual roles in the same manner that

Sailor’s covers lay bare the way that Lynch constructs new signs out of older, culturally embedded ones. It is through this obvious reuse of interpretant-laden material that we can more clearly view the way Lynch manipulates pre-existing music to create new and far-reaching readings. Acting as Lynch’s stand-in, Sailor invites the viewer to examine his performance as performance, providing a lens through which to examine Lynch’s works.

Sailor’s play reveals Lynch’s, and through that unveiling adds a new layer: we see Lynch as overt manipulator, foregrounding his appropriation and making the audience complicit. This move brings a formerly opaque tactic to the center of the film in these scenes. We as the audience are invited to explore what and how this appropriation means, as Lynch (through Sailor) tells us precisely what he is doing.

Perhaps even more importantly, these sequences ask us to reconsider the significance, operation, and importance of these artifacts in cultural memory.

Given all the instances of appropriation in Lynch’s oeuvre discussed in this chapter, this unveiling is yet more compelling and different. Some of the most scathing reviews of Lynch’s work come from veteran film critic Roger Ebert, and one of his more frequent complaints involves Lynch’s serial appropriation. In his review of Wild at Heart,

72 Butler, Gender Trouble, 137.

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Ebert wonders if the film’s only purpose is to allow us to be in on the myriad allusions; is the film worth nothing more than the pleasure of identifying Lynch’s in-references?73

Certainly, the pleasure of recognition plays some role. As David Greetham argues, the

“contamination” of texts is enjoyable when we understand and recognize its use.74

Identifying a point of reference does more than communicate the reference itself, also acting as a shibboleth of sorts. Thus even before Sailor opens his mouth to sing, the knowledgeable audience can see the physical allusions to Elvis and revel in their in-joke with the director. Such pleasure of contamination undoubtedly serves some purpose, but Ebert is correct in his criticism: if that were all that Lynch’s appropriation had to offer, it would be a paltry ploy around which to center a film. Ebert susses out the important part of these moments: that they are so very obvious. Rather than being a flaw, though, that is their point. By presenting his appropriation to be recognized and joined in, Lynch asks his audience to consider the manipulation at work and what is says about the musical object, the past, and our relationship to both.

Wild at Heart itself shows in these scenes that there is more at play than mere recognition. Lynch, speaking through Sailor, informs us of his project: taking cultural artifacts with common, relatively fixed signifieds and combining them in an expression of a new, somewhat individual meaning. For him, they are a symbol of his individuality, regardless of how unoriginal they may be. As Lynch’s mouthpiece, Sailor could not state any more clearly the thrust of Lynch’s appropriation and, indeed, his portrayals of the past. Through these musical moments in so many of his films, Lynch reshapes not only

73 Roger Ebert, “Wild at Heart,” Chicago Sun-Times, August 17, 1990.

74 David Greetham, Pleasures of Contamination: Evidence, Text, and Voice in Textual Studies (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010), 12.

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the songs, but also the particular brand of common nostalgic recollection that attaches to them, showing that this nostalgia is always already consciously shaped for the consumer.

When addressing this nostalgic, referential bent of Lynch’s films, many critics turn to overtly semiotic language. His use of “populist signs” turns archetypical characters into “mythic shorthand,” normally legible for all.75 The most intense criticism of Wild at Heart centers on the fact that the signs it uses, while identifiable, are not statically and concretely understandable for the audience. This illegibility, while clearly discomfiting for audiences, points to the role of unlimited semiosis in the film. By prompting a unique and potentially sprawling chain of new interpretants for the viewer, this particular sort of appropriation acts not as a one-to-one substitution, but as the first step in a dialogue that, as Wallace writes, “enters your head in a different way.” The very aspects of Wild at Heart that are most widely criticized are those that allow for this unique audience-filmmaker interaction.

Even more importantly, though, this excessive allusion shows something about its subject, as Sailor’s appropriation does for his own character and for the constructed persona of Elvis. Lynch incorporates a wide variety of essentially American signs, playing on the common past he shares with the film’s contemporary American audience.

The commutation of Lynch in the place of Sailor adds a new layer of significance to

Lynch’s musical and cultural appropriation. If Sailor’s allusions showed the essential emptiness of his own persona and that of Presley, Lynch’s go much further, implicating

75 Howard Hampton, “David Lynch’s Secret History of the United States,” Film Comment 29 no. 3 (May 1993), 38.

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his own films and, with them, the vision of an American past that he refracts through a distinctly Lynchian lens.

As many have argued in response to Twin Peaks and Blue Velvet in particular,

Lynch tends to present a grotesque version of middle America. In these projects, the grotesque is most clearly transmitted through plot points: the dual nature of Twin

Peaks’s Laura Palmer as prom queen and drug-addled prostitute, the dichotomy between Blue Velvet’s Lumberton’s perfect appearance and its seedy criminal underbelly, and myriad more. Though Wild at Heart also trades in some of these clichéd dualities, its critique is much more strongly articulated through the appropriation that pervades the work. By holding a mirror to the façade of these common cultural artifacts,

Lynch returns to his trope of the grotesque in a less obvious way. Wild at Heart adds another layer to this aspect in each of the aforementioned works: the film’s appropriation serves to comment not only on itself, but Lynch’s films as a whole.

Through Sailor and his actions, Lynch “enters your head,” asking the audience to reconsider the way many of our shared cultural artifacts function in his films and beyond.

Conclusion

These case studies provide some of the most complex instances of unlimited semiosis in this dissertation. Unlike those discussed in previous chapters, Lynch’s moments of musical appropriation engage with both the audience and the world outside each film in a much more direct way. Music and its manipulation allow for this audience interaction in a way that few other techniques could. Even in the earlier, simpler examples of reuse discussed in this study (those that did not result in unlimited semiosis), filmmakers used music as concise shorthand, conveying meaning more

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directly and quickly than could another medium. The same communicative power of music allows for more complex semiotic moves here: because these songs are able to communicate so directly and immediately, Lynch can successfully build complex new interpretants around these objects in a social treasury.

Aside from acting as prime examples of Eco’s unlimited semiosis, Blue Velvet,

Mulholland Drive, and Wild at Heart show how music can force mainstream Hollywood film beyond the boundaries theorized by Mulvey. In her analysis, the male-coded gaze is privileged by traditional Hollywood style, manipulating desire and the feminine for its own ends. Lynch, however, succeeds in working within the Hollywood system (and, to some extent as in Mulholland Drive and Blue Velvet’s obvious homages, in Hollywood’s traditional style) while still subverting and problematizing this hegemony of the male gaze. In light of this problematizing of the traditional filmic power structure, Lynch’s entire oeuvre could be reevaluated. Rather than viewing him as somehow cruel and degrading toward women, it would be possible to read his films as empowering an historically disenfranchised group. The possibility of musical appropriation empowering the spectator is explored at greater length in the next chapter.

Appropriation of this sort suggests a wide variety of future applications, all of which could continue to break open traditional “hermetically sealed” cinema. Theorizing the phenomenon in this way, we can better understand not only the power of music in creating and altering interpretants, but also the ontological shift that occurs in instances of appropriation. Especially in Wild at Heart, there is a distinct difference between the original versions of these pop songs and the iterations included in the film. Apart from

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obvious alterations in sound, these new versions operate in an entirely different way, one understandable through the lens of unlimited semiosis.

In the following chapter, I explore this change in ontological status to a greater extent through the films of Todd Haynes. Like Lynch, Haynes is interested in the ways that media inform and shape our memories and experiences; similarly, his musical reuse also holds a mirror to our real-world experience, bringing the film’s focus into the spectators’ lives. In Superstar: the Karen Carpenter Story, I’m Not There, and Velvet

Goldmine, Haynes takes as his subject specific, well-known musicians and eras.

Through his appropriation of existing works and musical styles, the director is able to question common cultural memory of, for example, the early 1970s and glam rock, writing a new narrative for these performers and fans. Indeed, this rewriting continues long after the film has run its length; Haynes’s work inspires audience participation beyond the scope of the film, particularly, I would argue, through its effective use of pre- existing music.

Haynes’ concentration on the role of the fans extends to his interaction with his audience. As in Mulholland Drive, active onscreen audiences play important roles in

Haynes’ music-focused films, showing new possibilities for spectator roles in the creation and reception of art. He openly acknowledges that he seeks to work outside of the phallocentric norm identified by Mulvey, even citing her “Visual Pleasure and

Narrative Cinema” in interviews.76 If Lynch is exploring the way common signs operate in our construction of memory and ourselves, Haynes is taking this gambit one step further by not only identifying this role, but actively exploiting it for an specific goal.

76 Todd Haynes, interviewed by Julia Leyda, “‘Something that is Dangerous and Arousing and Transgressive’: An Interview with Todd Haynes,” Bright Lights Film Journal 78 (November 2012).

198 CHAPTER 5 REMAKE/REMODEL: MUSICAL APPROPRIATION AS REINVENTION IN THE FILMS OF TODD HAYNES

You were constantly aware you were in the immediacy of the moment but yet referencing primary, tertiary, and secondary sources – the whole Dewey system was crashing in on me.

-Cate Blanchett on her performance as Jude Quinn in I’m Not There (2007)1

Speaking of her Oscar-nominated performance in Todd Haynes’s convoluted

Bob Dylan biopic, actress Cate Blanchett zeroes in on the defining feature of the director’s historically based films: though the reality they present is often fundamentally different from what we accept as historical fact, these films incorporate a veritable library full of signs that point to the real past as we remember and preserve it. For

Blanchett, playing one of six different iterations of Bob Dylan in I’m Not There meant being styled to match era photographs, mimicking Dylan’s gestures that had been caught on film, and in some cases speaking the words of the musician, recreating interviews from 1965 and ’66. In each of Haynes’ music-centered films – Superstar: The

Karen Carpenter Story (1988), Velvet Goldmine (1998), and I’m Not There – historical signs are manipulated to present a sort of alternate history, solidly grounded in the familiar images and sounds. As Blanchett alludes, this densely woven web of allusions requires an almost encyclopedic treasury of knowledge from its performers and its audience.

Haynes speaks of researching extensively for each film, and provided his actors with intricate dossiers on their characters and the images and events they are meant to reflect. Using these complex references, each of Haynes’ works comments on a point in

1 Quoted in Robert Sullivan, “This is Not a Bob Dylan Movie,” New York Times Magazine, October 7, 2007, 84.

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time using its art as a vessel for semiotic drift. In this chapter, I follow some of these allusions as a way to understand the project and purpose of Haynes’ films: a chaining of signification in musical appropriation that recasts historical moments in a different light, using cultural artifacts as palimpsests for a new historical meaning.

In each of the three films mentioned above, Haynes concentrates on the relationship between the audience and a cultural object. Rather than treating his on- and off-screen audiences as passive receivers, he explicitly codes the spectators’ role as powerful and integral to the construction of meaning from a cultural object, be it a song, film, or news media account. In the case of Superstar, this is manifested in

Karen’s own relationship with her self and her body as a mediated object. I’m Not There shares a similar focus, using the figure of Dylan to explore the ways in which, unlike

Carpenter, we can wrest control of our identities from these mediated sources and instead create and recreate our own meaningful, fluid, “authentic” self. Velvet Goldmine, unlike these other films, expands its scope from the individual to the subculture, using a variety of texts to construct a collective history or sense of self. Each of these relationships is fostered by the semiotic openness inherent in the films’ musical appropriation. Haynes’ reuse differs from that of Lynch and Malick in its very clear focus. By defining his musical signs and his audience with such clarity, Haynes is able to incorporate music as a way to implicate specific historical moments and groups. His use of music, then, contrasts sharply with the wide-ranging references of Malick, whose

The Tree of Life manages to reference everything from the Old Testament, to the creation of the universe, to dinosaurs. Haynes focuses much more directly on his identified audience and their lived experience and memory. By, in effect, forcing his

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audience to take part in an active reformation of meaning, Haynes allows the focus of his films to extend beyond the screen and implicate his audience.

Haynes’ work makes for such a compelling study in this film/spectator relationship in part because the audience response to his work is so readily visible. In the cases of Superstar and Velvet Goldmine in particular, audiences have left quite literal marks on the films. In the most obvious way, then, we can see Haynes’ films as writerly texts: not only do they require the spectator to engage with them, but the texts themselves actually change through this interaction. Because of this, it is impossible to see Superstar today without the imprint of generations of audiences showing on its tangible surface; through 25 years of copying copies of illicit VHS tape recordings, audiences have altered the only surviving versions of the film to show their own interaction with it. Were one to view the latest release of Velvet Goldmine, one would hear Haynes’ commentary on the film, which he readily admits was shaped and informed in large part by audience response.2 Thus more than any other films discussed in this dissertation, these three Haynes films are continually, intrinsically linked to and rewritten by their audiences. This link is fostered by the filmmaking niche into which

Haynes has been put since the very beginning of his career.

Haynes as “New Queer Cinema” Auteur

With the critical success of Superstar and Poison (1991), Haynes became a figurehead for the “New Queer Cinema,” a label first coined by B. Ruby Rich in response to the strong presence and stylistic innovation of many young gay filmmakers

2 Todd Haynes, “Opening Credits,” Velvet Goldmine, directed by Todd Haynes (1998; Los Angeles: Miramax Lionsgate, Blu-ray, 2011).

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at the Sundance Film Festival in 1991.3 A loose conglomerate linked by “novelties at the level of form and style,”4 the effect of this label seems to have been at once limiting and liberating. On the one hand, it pigeonholed Haynes and his work as stereotypically

“gay,” an assessment that easily fits with much of Haynes’ early work but perhaps not as well for projects like I’m Not There and Safe. After the period in the late 1980s and early 1990s that earned him the epithet “Fellini of fellatio,”5 Haynes greatly expanded his artistic focus, even causing some to question the gayness of his work.6 Of course, by this time Rich was heralding the “death” of the New Queer Cinema (whether as a useful label or an artistic movement is not entirely clear). Regardless, Haynes can be seen as having moved beyond the label’s rather ambiguous tenets as early as his 1995 film,

Safe, in subject and style. The New Queer Cinema label does seem to have helped the director, though, allowing Haynes to relate differently to his audience by identifying his model viewer: as in Eco’s formulation of the model reader,7 I see the model viewer as one who has the shared social treasury of knowledge and appropriate cultural codes to be able to make sense of a film and read its many signs. In the case of Haynes, this meant embracing an existing social group as his audience, one that was extremely culturally literate, especially in film styles and stars of the mid- to late- 20th century.

3 B. Ruby Rich, “A Queer Sensation,” Village Voice, March 24, 1992, 41-44.

4 Nick Davis, The Desiring-Image: Gilles Deleuze and Contemporary Queer Cinema (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013), 8.

5 Washington Times, referenced in Todd Haynes, interviewed by Julia Leyda, “‘Something that is Dangerous and Arousing and Transgressive’: An Interview with Todd Haynes,” Bright Lights Film Journal 78 (November 2012).

6 Dennis Lim, “'Velvet Goldmine,' 'Mildred Pierce' capture director's interests,” LA Times, January 8, 2012 accessed July 5, 2014, http://articles.latimes.com/2012/jan/08/entertainment/la-ca-second-look- 20120108.

7 Eco, Role of the Reader, 7.

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David Halperin argues in his monograph How to Be Gay that a shared knowledge makes one “culturally gay.”8 As Halperin suggests, social subculture is in large part defined by the cultural signs it curates, preserves, and reads against type.

From Judy Garland to Mildred Pierce, many of the forms of abject femininity that

Halperin identifies as intrinsically linked to a contemporary male gay identity are found in references throughout Haynes’ work. In being labeled as an auteur of the New Queer

Cinema, Haynes is presented with outside expectations of his own style (that he will continue as a part of this culturally gay heritage) and expectations of his audience (that they will come to his texts familiar with and sharing in this heritage). Armed with a treasury of signs and knowledge shared with his audience, Haynes has been able to manipulate this cultural history in a way not possible without a pre-existing common grounding. In order to forge new connections with his audience and to create alternative histories, Haynes needs to be able to communicate with them on the level of shared cultural signs. In many ways, this identification of a specific audience group allows him to do just that.

Whereas the Lynch films analyzed in the previous chapter traded in the language of nostalgia in order to engage their audiences, Haynes’ films rely more on pastiche. In

Richard Dyer’s formulation, pastiche involves the combination and imitation of texts in order to “represent historicity in terms of feeling.”9 Each of Haynes’ three musical films show these hallmarks: all combine easily recognizable complete texts (typically songs) with a variety of partial or alluded texts, running the gamut from costumes to

8 David Halperin, How to Be Gay (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2012).

9 Richard Dyer, Pastiche (New York: Routledge, 2006), 19.

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documentary films to interviews to hairstyles. In this manner, Superstar: The Karen

Carpenter Story, I’m Not There, and Velvet Goldmine all manage to evoke a very individualized response to commonly recognized music, performers, and other cultural signs. Haynes identifies the efficacy of this approach: “I’ve always felt that when you see material through a frame — and for me that period or that historical setting is a frame — it allows a viewer to make their own connections to why it’s relevant.”10 By providing a distancing temporal frame for his subjects – as each of these films takes place in the past, albeit sometimes the recent past – Haynes gives his audience the distance to reinterpret and reassess the familiar. Importantly for Haynes’ films, these reassessments typically form a sort of reclamation project, bringing disparate past events and creations into alignment with an idea of gay community and heritage.

Haynes himself explicitly links Velvet Goldmine to such an approach, calling it a part of a “long tradition of gay reading(s) of the world.”11

This approach is common in queer narratives from the second half of the twentieth century; Christopher Nealon labels it an “ethnic” construction that marks a change from the earlier “inversion” model of gay identity.12 According to Nealon, these documents do the cultural work of building a community with a shared history and customs. Haynes’ films in general, but his music-focused work in particular, do just such work through the weaving of rich tapestries of allusion. We can see the same approach

10 Todd Haynes, “Interview: Todd Haynes,” Interview , accessed July 5, 2014, http://www.interviewmagazine.com/film/todd-haynes/.

11 Quoted in Petra Dierkres-Thurn, Salome’s Modernity: Oscar Wilde and the Aesthetics of Transgression (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2011), 182.

12 Christopher Nealon, Foundlings: Lesbian and Gay Historical Emotion Before Stonewall (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001), 5.

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of curating subcultural signs from a dominant, hetero-oriented culture in the work of

Kenneth Anger, discussed in Chapter 2. The style Anger originated in works like

Scorpio Rising resonates in Haynes’ montages, which feature the same visual parataxis of signs to create new semiotic freedom. Like Anger, Haynes turns familiar, potentially innocuous mainstream images and songs into expressions of an alternate, subversive history through his appropriation. This strategy, of course, is not confined to gay subculture, but has long flourished within it.

Rufus Wainwright, in his compositions, videos, and live performances, forms a contemporary corollary to Haynes’ deeply referential projects. Wainwright has stated a

“queer history reclamation project” as his goal in many of his works. He accomplishes this not through overt polemics, but rather by means of a complex web of allusions that ties together iconography from a variety of different eras and places in order to argue for a particular view of history. As Paula Higgins has shown, Wainwright’s “Going to a

Town” music video (directed by Sophie Muller) cites referents as far-flung as ancient

Greek sculpture, Christian martyr imagery, Jean Genet’s works, and the American Civil

Rights movement of the 1960s.13 Figure 5-1 illustrates one such referent-laden frame, which references Jean Genet through Wainwright’s positioning and body language,

Greek laurels through the gold crown on the wall, and many imprisoned gay artists, from

D.H. Lawrence to Oscar Wilde, through the bleak setting. Like Wainwright’s video,

Haynes’ films bring together disparate signs, meant to be legible to his community, in order to say something to and about this community.

13 Paula Higgins, “Truth, justice, and the Hellenic way: the Cultural Apotheosis of the ‘Gay Messiah’ in Rufus Wainwright’s ‘Going to a Town’’ (paper presented at Music and Screen Media conference, Liverpool, UK, June 26, 2014).

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In addition to their visual cues, both Haynes and Wainwright appropriate well- known music for their “ethnic” projects. Perhaps most famously, Wainwright built his

“Oh, What a World” on the groundwork of Maurice Ravel’s Bolero, shifting the meter to

4 and subtly altering the work’s relentless crescendo to comment on “oh, what a world we live in.” Wainwright and Haynes both use a distant cultural past to comment on the present, pointing out contemporary concerns or constructing, from a flawed past, a more perfect present and future. The visual iconography employed in these works combines with their abundant musical references to prompt an unlimited semiosis that allows this kind of meaning construction.

Figure 5-1. Rufus Wainwright, “Going to a Town,” directed by Sophie Muller (2007: Geffen Records).

From his earliest mature work, Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story, Haynes has investigated the relationships among cultural artifacts, historical period, and audience. In fact, each of his films highlights the consumption of a star image and the relationship of that mediated image to contemporary fan or a cultural moment. For the most part, this is accomplished through diegetic musical performances which are newly

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recorded in the cases of Velvet Goldmine and I’m Not There, while Superstar uses pre- existing recordings of Karen Carpenter’s own voice. This unauthorized usage resulted in copyright issues and the eventual banning of Superstar. No such problems affected I’m

Not There, though, as Haynes made the choice to rerecord Dylan’s songs though the singer gave permission for his original recordings to be used. Here that decision allows characters to assume the role of Dylan more fully, aligning their actual voices with

Dylan’s. As I demonstrate below, in Velvet Goldmine this aspect is particularly important. These varying approaches invoke each performer’s authorial voice, allowing

Haynes to manipulate familiar songs to comment on their historical surroundings. Thus through Karen Carpenter, Superstar critiques star culture and body obsession as well as gendered expectations, while I’m Not There questions media and technology’s implications for identity. In the case of Velvet Goldmine, Haynes uses musical appropriation more broadly, to reshape a historical moment rather than concentrating solely on an individual history; the film has been described as “mythic” in its scope and ambition, seeking to expand the impact of one cultural moment into a far-reaching narrative. The unlimited semiosis spawned by these performances of appropriated music draws the audience yet further into the film’s world: without a clearly defined meaning, these sequences require audience participation to be effective. Through the central role played by musical performances in these films, the audience is drawn into an active dialogue with the film.

Musical performance is an ideal vehicle for this semiotic openness, in part because of the meaning-laden and intensely personal nature of performance. As Paul

Attinello writes, “performance is in its essence exposure, self-transformation into a sign

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for public examination and judgment.”14 Each of these Haynes films explores the performer as sign, complicating these signs’ meaning and showing the uses to which audiences put the signs. The relationship between “real” and performed identity is purposefully confused in all three films. Attinello argues that, “from behind the makeup, the performer presents as variety of masks, of skills that he or she has learned – which may be a very large collection indeed, and is certain to be more interesting, or at least less dangerously intimate, than the normal persona.”15 Attinello’s division of the stage identity and real identity reflects the issues caused by Karen Carpenter’s stardom in

Superstar; for Dylan in I’m Not There and the Bowie figure in Velvet Goldmine, though, the ability to transform through performance is shown to be something more powerful than a mask for the real self. In these films, performance transforms the self into a self- fashioned idea. David Bowie famously called himself a human Xerox machine and, through the musical appropriation in Haynes’ films, we are able to follow that copying tactic as it trickles down from performer to fan.

The Voice, Physicality, and Mediated Identity in Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story

The first of Haynes’ films on musicians, Superstar shows, in microcosm, many of the recurring themes and problems he addresses in his oeuvre. By choosing Karen

Carpenter as subject, Haynes gives his audience a familiar star whose body is the site of much public attention. In this case, the bodily attention is fueled in part by Carpenter’s anorexia nervosa, but Haynes’ concentration on the star as a public body continues in

I’m Not There (through transformation into new personae) and Velvet Goldmine (in

14 Paul Attinello, “Performance and/or Shame: A Mosaic of Gay (And Other) Perceptions,” repercussions 4, no. 2 (1995), 99.

15 Attinello, “Performance and/or Shame,” 110.

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sexuality as well as persona shifts). Carpenter’s body is represented in the film by a

Barbie doll, another form that, like Carpenter’s own, has become a loaded cultural sign thanks to its body shape and media presence. In addition, the film’s use of original versions of the Carpenters’ songs helps to bring an immediacy and presence of Karen’s physicality, making the commutation of Barbie for Karen yet more vivid. The film centers on Karen’s relationship to her image and her body. Through the figure of Karen, Haynes is able to explore how a culturally mediated existence affects the consumer – a theme that continues throughout his feature films. Here we are confined mostly to the contrast between Karen’s body as it is viewed by others and as she experiences it. Haynes is able to conflate Barbie (as an image of ideal femininity) and Karen, showing Carpenter’s form as a site of female body anxiety and pressure in much the same way Barbie has been theorized since her introduction in 1959.16 This connection is accomplished largely through the use of original Carpenters recordings. Capitalizing on the grain of Karen’s voice, Superstar uses the recordings as powerful indexical invocations of Karen, bringing her identity into close interaction with that of her fans. Here Haynes first explores fandom’s role in the dissemination and creation of new meaning from mediated objects, a recurring thread in his films.

As both Carpenter and Barbie are well-known parts of the American cultural landscape, Haynes starts from a place of familiarity for a wide audience. Unlike his later

16 The secondary literature on the Barbie doll and its socio-cultural significance is extensive and varied. See, for example, Jeannie B. Thomas, Naked Barbies, Warrior Joes, and Other Forms of Visible Gender (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2003); Tanya Lee Stone, The Good, the Bad, and the Barbie: a Doll’s History and Her Impact on Us (New York: Viking, 2010); and Ophira Edut, editor, Adios, Barbie: Young Women Write about Body Image and Identity (Seal Press, 1998). Barbie’s image is so carefully controlled that Mattel, the doll’s maker, sued Seal Press over the publication of Adios, Barbie, claiming that the book misappropriated Barbie’s iconography. For more on the suit, see Christian Berthenson, "Media Talk; Mattel Sues Publisher Over Barbie Essays," New York Times December 6, 1999, accessed November 16, 2014.

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musical films, Superstar does not require any particularly specialized knowledge. The film takes mainstream cultural icons Barbie and Carpenter and begins its exploration of more troubling issues from a familiar, if overdetermined, point. In fact, the preponderance of significance attached to both Barbie and Carpenter’s bodies makes them ideal for Haynes: given their power to convey meaning for the general public, these complex signs are convenient points of engagement for the sort of intense audience interaction which, I argue, marks Haynes’ films as different. As Eco states, here through art, matter is “rendered semiotically interesting.”17 Because of their familiarity, both of these female bodies are able to spawn chains of interpretation for the spectator in a way that a less well-known figure may not. Each audience member enters

Superstar with some association to attach to Barbie or Karen Carpenter and, through these associations, is able to partake in Haynes’ transformation and exploration of each of the cultural signs or figures.

Karen’s recordings with the Carpenters, too, serve as a familiar signs for many audience members, as the film uses the group’s recordings rather than re-recorded cover versions, or “sound-alikes.”18 The original versions sound very physically present, as the microphones in these recordings are closely placed. It was the original recordings, in conjunction with the use of Karen’s story without life rights, that landed

Haynes in legal trouble and ended in the banning of Superstar altogether after its initial successful, though limited, run. Given the trouble that the use of these recordings caused and the director’s assiduous avoidance of original recordings in his later work,

17 Umberto Eco, The Open Work, trans. Anna Cancogni (London: Hutchison Radius, 1989), 266.

18 For more on the sound-alike and its current usage, see, for example, Joanna Demers, “Sound-Alikes, Law, and Style” (paper presented at the American Musicological Society annual meeting, Milwaukee, Wisconsin, November 8, 2014).

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we can posit that the inclusion of Karen’s voice was both very troubling for her family and very important for Haynes and the aim of this particular film. What made the voice on these recordings so special and unique, then?

In his study of sentiment in 1970s popular music, Mitchell Morris zeroes in on the

Carpenters’ recordings, regarding them as particularly intimate.19 Though Morris partially addresses Superstar, his analysis is not specific to the film, but to the recordings in general. In their album versions, the Carpenters’ songs feature very physically close recording of Karen’s vocals. In the extreme aural closeness of “We’ve

Only Just Begun” and others, Morris argues, we are granted a more physical connection to the vocalist, since we can hear, in many cases, her breath and the very production of her sound through bodily movement in consonants and other vocal inflections. By foregrounding what Roland Barthes has called “the grain of the voice,”20 the Carpenters’ recordings make Karen preternaturally present. Semiotically, this is a more direct sort of sign. In Peirce’s formulation, these recordings would serve as dicisigns, indices that convey their meaning through the contact and imprint of that which created them. In this way, the recordings convey their relation to Karen Carpenter through the audible imprint of her body on them; they work because we can hear the grain of her voice readily and obviously. A newly recorded version would not offer the same immediacy and connection to Karen’s body, making the Barbie/Karen commutation on which the film’s efficacy hinges yet more difficult to accomplish.21 This is perhaps one reason why the

19 Mitchell Morris, The Persistence of Sentiment: Display and Feeling in Popular Music of the 1970s (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013), 136.

20 Roland Barthes, Image- Music- Text, trans. Stephen Heath (New York: Hill and Wang, 1977), 181.

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inclusion of Karen’s voice proved such a sticking point, both for Haynes and for the

Carpenter estate.

Musical familiarity plays an important role in Superstar’s potency. After signing with A&M Records in 1969, Karen and Richard Carpenter experienced huge success in the early 1970s. Among their best-known hits, “Rainy Days and Mondays,” “Close to

You,” and “Top of the World” all appear in Superstar. Haynes does not choose to incorporate songs that were never released as singles, but instead gravitates toward those with which the audience can sing along. As Morris discusses, the Carpenters’ music is particularly suited to this kind of audience involvement in its physical immediacy and personal connection.22 Morris draws on the “carnal musicology” of

Suzanne Cusick and Elisabeth Le Guin to explain how this active listening allows the audience to slip into the role of Karen Carpenter, in effect seeing this act as “a way of becoming that singer.”23

If we can see, as Morris does, that Karen Carpenter’s voice encourages singing participation and identification with the singer, then part of Superstar’s power and efficacy comes into focus. Haynes’ film not only encourages its viewer to conflate the figure of Barbie with that of Karen, but also, through our communal experience of her music and voice, to identify with Karen herself. Since her death, Karen’s legacy and

21 Of course, in the other Haynes films discussed below, we see that the director manipulates this seemingly direct indexical connection to performers, especially in Velvet Goldmine. By essentially recreating earlier recordings and allowing his actors to speak in the voice of earlier performers, Haynes opens up a rich field of semiotic play. Here, though, that approach is not practical, since the “actor” portraying Karen is a doll. Instead, Haynes seeks to conflate the two through the use of recordings that highlight the grain and physicality of Karen Carpenter’s voice.

22 Morris, The Persistence of Sentiment, 125.

23 Morris, The Persistence of Sentiment, 131.

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body have been inextricably linked with the pathology of anorexia and the societal pressures and stigma that come along with it.

In Superstar’s musical montages, we can see the conflation of a variety of these issues through a common Haynes technique of visual parataxis. Apart from the credit sequence, “We’ve Only Just Begun” is the first extended musical quotation in Superstar and shows many of the hallmarks of Haynes’ style that would be solidified in later films.

The sequence comes after Karen and Richard Carpenter sign a contract with A&M

Records. That scene is ominously shot, cutting quickly between a record executive’s office and a huge, disembodied hand reaching toward the camera, accompanied by mechanical drones and the executive’s artificially slowed speech. From this threatening space, Haynes cuts abruptly to video of a body being pushed into a pit, followed by the text:

As we investigate the story of Karen Carpenter’s life and death we are presented with an extremely graphic picture of the internal experience of contemporary femininity. We will see how Karen’s visibility as a popular singer only intensified certain difficulties many women experience in relation to their bodies.

The sequence that follows can be seen to comment on just that theme. After a few moments of silence, “We’ve Only Just Begun” enters and is accompanied by what is clearly coded as the new, mass-mediated vision of Karen. With an announcer’s introduction, Haynes slowly fades to the Karen doll on what appears to be a television set, accompanied by the album recording “We’ve Only Just Begun.” After establishing this frame, Haynes then takes the viewer to a variety of other expressions of the new, prescribed perfection of the Carpenters’ personae and lives. We see Karen and Richard together, posed almost as a couple. A panning shot shows the Carpenter’s album in a young girl’s bedroom. Perhaps most importantly, Karen is shown with a bevy of women

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offering her new, stylish, more flattering clothing and, finally, a dream-image shows

Karen as a bride, though it is unclear who her groom is meant to be (it may in fact be the Richard doll, though the film’s image has deteriorated beyond recognition at this point).

This sequence shows a strategy Haynes often employs, particularly in Velvet

Goldmine: visual parataxis, or juxtaposition without conjunctions. Nick Davis, in his

Deleuzian reading of Haynes and other contemporary queer filmmakers, reads this parataxis as a system of “hieroglyphics.” Davis rightly connects this disjointed stylistic choice to the sort of filmmaking decisions I noted in Mulholland Drive in the previous chapter. 24 He argues, however, that these hieroglyphic sequences, particularly in

Lynch’s film, are not in fact legible for the audience. I argue the opposite, locating the power and openness of these films in just such sequences; they may not be legible in the sense that they carry a stable, monolithic meaning, but these song sequences do prompt semiosis. By taking into account these scenes’ musical content, the visual parataxis gains its connective threads and can start to mean. Of course, the involvement of the spectator is of paramount importance here, or Davis’ criticism of

Lynch would hold. It is only by approaching the scenes in a holistic way and with a semiotic lens of the sort Eco proposes that they appear as complex as, I argue, they are in practice.

“We’ve Only Just Begun,” though, is of a less sophisticated and more overt sort of parataxis than Lynch’s or even Haynes’ in his mature works. Here the film rather heavy-handedly provides a frame for the viewer, showing that these images should be

24 Davis, The Desiring Image, 48.

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seen under the rubric of media attention and body issues. However, without this text one can easily read the sequence, too. With Karen’s closely miked, very present voice, the audience can make the sort of connective leap described by Morris, identifying closely with Karen and seeing the sequence, in effect, through her eyes. This identification fosters semiotic links among the images and, in particular, with the experience of expectations foisted upon Karen. Along with this hopeful ode to beginnings, we see hints of the painful future that, with the benefit of hindsight, we know awaits Karen. These images and sounds coalesce in a sequence that shows her approaching struggles with body image and, through the music’s encouragement of identification, may allow the spectator to reflect on her own experiences with media- fueled body image debates.

All of this is complicated by the very end of the “We’ve Only Just Begun” sequence: as the song’s strings and Karen’s reverberating voice fade, Superstar cuts to falling bombs, followed by a voiceover about the Vietnam War. This parataxis works a bit more freely because of its lack of interperative frame. We can read the Vietnam references as mere temporal framing, or instead as foreshadowing of the war on women’s bodies that will be made manifest in media commentary on Karen in the following scenes. This last image is perhaps the most indicative of Haynes’ later style, showing the director’s typical strategies in creating semiotic openness and asking the spectator to step in and change the film from its surface signification, becoming integral to Superstar’s efficacy and future life.

Superstar itself is in many ways a living document, and one that shows on its surface the audiences’ engagement with it. Tracing the distribution of the film since its

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banning, Lucas Hilderbrand has argued that the materiality of Superstar has become a part of its living on.25 Unlike films which are transferred to a digital format from a pristine film print, or in other cases are painstakingly restored, Superstar has been in effect distributed through its underground following. From the five original 16 mm prints made during the film’s initial run, most versions in circulation today are generations removed and this distance is shown clearly in the film’s appearance. Grainy and washed out,

Superstar looks its age in many ways. As copies were made of VHS copies, the film has degraded to its current state, visible in any of the many versions available online. See

Figure 5-2 for an example of the film’s current state. As Hilderbrand argues, the film has been fundamentally transformed by the act of watching and distributing it – a fitting analogy for the same kind of transformation that I see thematically in Haynes’ work.26

Indeed, all of Haynes’ work depends on this active spectatorship and is, in more or less obvious ways, transformed by the act of viewing.

Though Superstar shows it directly on its surface, each of the Haynes films in this chapter affords its audience a more direct and active role than does most earlier and mainstream cinema. Rather than theorizing this in the way that many postmodern filmmakers and scholars (including Deleuze and Guattari, Mulvey herself, and others) might, I view this new relationship as an outgrowth of unlimited semiosis. Indeed, many of the above theorists seem to point to the root of this phenomenon as meaning-related.

However, in their larger scope, these theorists reveal biases that make their approaches incompatible with my musical project. Particularly in the case of Deleuze and Guattari,

25 Lucas Hilderbrand, “Grainy Days and Mondays: Superstar and Bootleg Aesthetics” Camera Obscura 57, vol. 19, no. 3 (Fall 2004): 57-91.

26 Hilderbrand, “Grainy Days,” 61.

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whose Cinema books have been influential in the study of Haynes’ work, their very terminology hints at a bias: their time-image addresses many of the features I analyze in

Haynes’ films, but fails to take into account the truly symbiotic relationship between sound and image and, more particularly, meaning-laden pre-exisiting music and image.

Figure 5-2. Example of Superstar’s current state of decay, from YouTube upload by user Outcasting Tube (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rACJWPd3VnI) (Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story, directed by Todd Haynes [1988]).

Apart from this privileging of the visual, I am in part influenced in my recourse to semiotics by the way that Haynes himself speaks of his work. An art and semiotics major during his studies at Brown University, Haynes is not only well-versed in film theory, but willingly discusses his work in such terms. Haynes’ reputation for erudition causes his output to be dubbed “theoretically inflected gay cinema,”27 or a variety of other such limited and often not entirely appropriate epithets. He frequently pits his

27 Peter Biskind, Down and Dirty Pictures: Miramax, Sundance and the Rise of Independent Movies (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2004), 36.

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works against the hermetically sealed cinema Mulvey described28 and, most importantly, sees his work in explicitly semiotic terms. While a director’s own words should not, of course, supersede the content and effect of his or her work, here Haynes is in direct agreement with the observable facts of his films. As he states, Superstar, Velvet

Goldmine, and I’m Not There all invoke and manipulate a variety of signs in order to actively engage their audience in a way not formerly theorized in film studies. The result is an oeuvre of films with the clear and integral imprint of their audiences, though not all in the very literal way that Superstar shows.

“The Ability to Escape a Fixed Self”29: The Star Image through Performance in I’m Not There

On its surface, I’m Not There seems an outlier in this group of three films:

Haynes’ Bob Dylan biopic is not overtly within the bounds of what we might expect

“queer cinema” to be. Unlike Superstar, this film does not deal with an expression of abject femininity30, nor does it deal with overtly gay or bisexual performers as does

Velvet Goldmine. It does, however, connect to these other two films through its focus on the construction of the self through artistic endeavor. The corollary to the artist’s formation of an identity – that of the fan identity through consumption of the artist’s output – is less central in I’m Not There than in Haynes’ other work, as this film centers on different realizations of the same individual. Christine Vachon, producer of I’m Not

28 Todd Haynes, interviewed by Julia Leyda, “‘Something that is Dangerous and Arousing and Transgressive’: An Interview with Todd Haynes,” Bright Lights Film Journal 78 (November 2012).

29 Todd Haynes, interviewed by Greil Marcus, “Bob Dylan Times Six: An Interview with ‘I’m Not There’ director Todd Haynes,” Rolling Stone, accessed July 5, 2014, http://www.rollingstone.com/music/news/bob-dylan-times-six-an-interview-with-im-not-there-director-todd- haynes-20071129.

30 Halperin in How To Be Gay identifies this as a hallmark of gay cultural touchstones and, indeed, we see this in many of Haynes’ projects, among them Superstar, Safe, Far From Heaven, and Mildred Pierce (2012).

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There and all of Haynes’ other films, states that “the more Dylan changed, the more authentic he became,”31 pointing to the idea that, in exerting control over his image,

Dylan became more truly himself, despite the fact that each iteration is markedly different from the last and, increasingly, distant from the “real” Minnesotan, folk-singing

Dylan of his early career.

In Haynes’ vision, each new iteration of Dylan is literally a different person: the six eras of Dylan are given different names and played by separate actors, shown in

Figure 5-3. In order to unify these personae, Haynes turns to the semiotic power of music and the same sort of visual parataxis employed in Superstar. The musical performances throughout the film mark open spaces, areas of play where the shift from one performer to another can be accomplished because each musical cover version is, in its own way, a new person speaking in Dylan’s name anyway. Haynes plays on this inherent ambiguity to allow the conceit of different actors in the same role to work more fluidly.

The casting of six actors in one role has occasioned the majority of the press attention given to I’m Not There, leaving little print devoted to its specific musical choices. In most accounts, Dylan’s blessing of the film has been discussed and a few of the more well-known cover artists mentioned, but rarely do reviewers concentrate on the space of play created by these covers. This is especially notable since reviews do tend to point out the convoluted narrative structure of the film (the LA Times accused it of lacking a “coherent narrative”); in fact, I’m Not There’s music is intimately related to this jumbling of timeframes. In the two examples below, I examine how “Maggie’s Farm”

31 Christine Vachon, A Killer Life: How an Independent Film Producer Survives Deals and Disasters in Hollywood and Beyond, (New York: Limelight Editions, 2007), 193.

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and “Blind Willie McTell” both serve integral functions in the film’s plot and the construction of Dylan’s identity, thanks in large part to the music’s ability to foster unlimited semiosis.

Figure 5-3. I’m Not There’s Bob Dylans (clockwise from top left): Woody (Marcus Carl Franklin), Jude (Cate Blanchett), Arthur (Ben Whishaw), Billy (Richard Gere), Robbie (Heath Ledger), and Jack (Christian Bale) (I’m Not There, directed by Todd Haynes [2007; Los Angeles: Weinstein Company, 2008], DVD).

There are few moments that encapsulate technology’s power in popular music as completely as Dylan’s electric performance at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival. In I’m

Not There, this concert is depicted in two surprising ways: first, Dylan and his band literally attack the audience with machine guns and second, Dylan is transformed into a new persona, an androgynous woman played by Cate Blanchett. While this moment is central to Dylan’s legend, I’m Not There exaggerates the rift even more, transforming him into a completely different performer in gender, affect, and, of course, musical style.

“Going electric” marks a career redefinition, as well as the loss of a particular sense of self. Haynes dramatizes this electric performance of “Maggie’s Farm” in order to comment on artistic and gendered identity through music, but also uses it to facilitate

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the narrative shift to Jude’s story, using music’s semiotic openness to smoothly accomplish the film’s most radical narrative moves.

The performance used in the film is not Dylan’s own from Newport, but a new version by Stephen Malkmus (formerly of the band Pavement) and the Million Dollar

Bashers, the band that backed many of the vocalists in the film’s cover versions. The sound quality of this new performance, though, echoes the distortion of that original performance, as it is pushed through microphones and amplifiers not set up for a raucous electric performance, but instead calibrated for the sort of acoustic folk music one could have expected at Newport. In this instance and many other cover versions in

Haynes films, faithfulness to the original seems to be an important criterion; the director shows an aversion to lip-synched “performances” of original recordings.32

Haynes introduces the scene as strongly rooted in the point of view of Arthur, the

Dylan character inspired by Rimbaud, beginning the sequence with a voiceover from

Arthur. Over a synthesized heartbeat ostinato, Arthur confesses the historical moment that led to his reinvention from folk hero to traitor, embracing rock. Throughout this voiceover, diegetic sound is muffled, privileging the heartbeat and Arthur’s voice. The sequence moves the audience from a point of view shot in the back of a chauffered car to the New England Folk Festival (a stand-in for Newport). Given the audio content, we may assume that we see Arthur’s point of view from the car’s back seat, but as the sequence enters the festival, this assignment of identity becomes more questionable.

Under Arthur’s voiceover, muffled crowd sounds accompany overhead shots of the

32 Todd Haynes, interviewed by Greil Marcus, “Bob Dylan Times Six: An Interview with ‘I’m Not There’ director Todd Haynes,” Rolling Stone, accessed July 5, 2014, http://www.rollingstone.com/music/news/bob-dylan-times-six-an-interview-with-im-not-there-director-todd- haynes-20071129.

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festival audience. Reminiscent of the style of crowd shots in Gimme Shelter (1970, dir.

Albert and David Maysles) which documents the Rolling Stones’ fateful Altamont

Speedway concert,33 Haynes is already communicating a sense of impending danger through visual references and murky treatment of the sound within the diegesis. Other visual references abound, as the closeup of the band’s feet as they run to the stage echoes the famous opening sequence of A Hard Day’s Night (1964, dir. Richard

Lester).34 It is not coincidental, of course, that these allusions draw connections to the biggest rock acts of the 1960s, nor is it unlikely that they were both chosen for the element of threat in both.

In this unsettled soundscape and highly referential visual field, Haynes introduces a new Dylan with a new sound. Preternaturally loud snaps accompany the opening of the band’s instrument cases, after which the audio track is inundated by loud, sustained machine gun fire. Dylan and his band have literally attacked the audience with their sound, and the explosion ends with an abrupt black screen. Sound and image fade up quickly to introduce “Maggie’s Farm,” the first song Dylan performed with an electric guitar at the festival. In quick cuts, the performance is shot as an interplay between the crowd and the band on stage. Their distance, both physical and emotional, is highlighted by stylistic differences; while the band is shown only in stationary medium distance shots (which occasionally allow the band to be obscured by the audience), the crowd is shown in more erratic panning shots that sometimes incorporate rack zoom.

33 The Altamont Speedway performance is best known for devolving into violence and the murder of fan Meredith Hunter, captured in the Maysles’ film.

34 This iconic sequence is mirrored again in Haynes’ Velvet Goldmine; the opening credit sequence follows teenage fans of Maxwell Demon running after their (unseen) idol through the streets of London.

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Haynes also works to evoke the legend of the Newport electric show by incorporating ancillary, questionable aspects of its mythology. A festival organizer tries to abort Dylan’s appearance, taking an axe to the sound system’s cables, as Pete

Seeger is rumored to have done at Newport. Between this incident and the many audience reactions that closely echo both media and public outcry from the 1965 show, it is clear that Haynes is recreating the original in ways that will resonate for his audience. We can hear the crowd’s angry reaction to this change through boos and a long tracking shot following the audience members away from the stage as they express a very personal sense of betrayal. Of course, in typical Haynes fashion, these same talking heads exhibit a raucous and wide variety of references; among heartfelt, hurt responses (“I think he’s evil.”), one fan shouts only “J’accuse!”

After so clearly calling upon a specific historic incident, though, Haynes then takes this historic fact and reshapes it. Rather than documenting Dylan’s performance or faithfully recreating it, the film instead attempts to change our understanding of it. In

I’m Not There, Newport is one of a few defining incidents that changes the central Dylan character in an irrevocable and immediately recognizable way. Chronologically, we understand that he is transformed from Greenwich Village folk legend (played by

Christian Bale) into waif-like, aggressive Jude Quinn (Blanchett) through musical performance alone, as far as the audience can tell. Haynes places the idea of “going electric” at the center of our conception of this character, problematizing common tropes of gender, technology, and identity.

Interestingly, the gendered and bodily aspects of this switch are not what we might expect, given the cultural coding of these musical styles. In his Greenwich Village

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folk crusader iteration, Dylan is portrayed by Haynes’s repeat collaborator, Bale. His segment is told most often through “archival” footage, in which the largely built actor fills the frame. We see him onstage with an acoustic guitar dominating the space physically.

In contrast, Blanchett’s Dylan is lithe and skittish in his movements, not an imposing presence in the way that Bale is. This flips some of the broadly writ physical and gendered norms associated with these musical styles. Indeed, as Phillip Auslander has written of David Bowie’s stylistic mixing, folk and rock styles were so reliably coded by the late 1960s that the singer was able to use them as a sort of shorthand in his songs.35 Using alternating folk and rock styles, Bowie could quickly communicate the change in character that some of his more actorly works necessitated. Rather than relying on this cultural coding, though, Haynes flips it, making the assault of rock music at the New England Folk Festival the announcement of a new androgynous persona played by a woman, not the embodiment of one of the more traditionally male iterations of Dylan seen elsewhere in the film.

At a difficult narrative juncture, then, Haynes is aided by both the many visual references in the scene and the semiotic openness fostered by the well-known song. In this space of swirling associations, the film is able to smooth the transition from one

Dylan to another and, in a way, solidify them all as an expression of the whole. The

“We’ve Only Just Begun” example in Superstar is meant to accomplish a similar conflation; through the intertitle, the viewer is led to conflate Karen’s experiences with anorexia and body image issues with those of a broader female population. In all these cases, Haynes incorporates well-known music, highly referential imagery, and a

35 Philip Auslander, Performing Glam Rock: Gender and Theatricality in Popular Music (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2006), 116.

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signature editing style in order to amplify the semiotic openness of each sequence. In this freer context, the audience is encouraged to conflate meanings which, in a situation of normal signification, would not typically be related. Haynes does not set up monolithic meanings, but establishes codes among his viewers to guide the unlimited semiosis of each musical sequence.

The montage style that proved so effective at the end of Superstar’s “We’ve Only

Just Begun” facilitates one such historical sequence in I’m Not There. This scene, underscored by Dylan’s own recording of “Blind Willie McTell,” accomplishes yet another persona transition, this time from young Woody (played by Marcus Carl

Franklin) to Jack (Christian Bale). Here Haynes abandons the pretexts that his is not depicting the life of the actual Dylan; he incorporates real events and another historical figure, Woody Guthrie, focusing the “Blind Willie McTell” section on the interaction of

Dylan and Guthrie as the latter lay dying. Introduced by a shot of a newspaper recounting the older singer’s sickness, “Woody’s” journey to visit the real Guthrie is presented in long panning shots, most of which begin at phrasal delineations in the song. Single shots then take in panoramic views, switching to new viewpoints in new locations with the shifting of musical phrases. This close, though not obtrusive, linking of image and sound helps the scene to muddle film fantasy and reality. The song choice is important here, too, as Dylan sings of actual historical events while invoking the very real Willie McTell, a bluesman who recorded professionally in the early 20th century and was documented by John and Ruby Lomax for the Library of Congress’s archives.

The first three verses of “Blind Willie McTell” accompany Woody’s journey and his hospital bed vigil at Woody Guthrie’s side. Though the lyrics speak of civil rights

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atrocities, the image track shows us none of this, staying instead with these two figures in the hospital. With the start of the fourth verse, though, Haynes cuts to historical footage of Civil Rights movement protests, including images from the Birmingham,

Alabama, marches and various speeches by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. These images are not wholly unrelated to the lyrical content of the song, as it speaks of oppression in the South and of the legendary bluesman of the song’s title.

Through this conflation of real history and the film’s historical imagining, we are led out archival footage and into a documentary-style talking head with Alice Fabian, the

Joan Baez-like character played by Julianne Moore. Fabian’s voice carries the film out of its historical montage and, after her testimonial, into new footage, shot on older stock to resemble video from the 1960s, replicating an American Civil Liberties Union award dinner held for Jack. As if to add more historical legitimacy and weight, this newly imagined sequence starts with a zoom out from James Baldwin’s nameplate.36 Haynes places his audience within a particular and real timeframe through such references.

Indeed, this one is clearer than most, as the director tends to favor oblique visual allusions over name-dropping. This strategy also appeared at the beginning of the

“Blind Willie McTell” sequence, with the Guthrie newspaper references.

I’m Not There’s style and historical preoccupation are not unique in Haynes’ films. In their shared focus on living rock legends, somewhat elliptical narrative style, and melding of the fantastical and the real, Velvet Goldmine and I’m Not There seem, in some ways, cut from the same cloth. Though some critical accounts argue that I’m Not

36 Here Haynes seems to meld the fight for racial equality with the fight for gay rights; Baldwin was, of course, an outspoken black gay author. Haynes chooses to show Baldwin here, but no other actual historical character. His identity is emphasized with multiple shots focused on the aforementioned nameplate.

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There is the realization of the ideas Haynes tested out in Velvet Goldmine,37 I disagree.

Both films deal with the shifting personas of a rock legend, but in scope and ambition the two vary greatly. I’m Not There rather doggedly sticks to the six Dylan figures, generally not engaging in an extended way with Dylan’s historical moment. There are a few notable exceptions: in the Robbie (Heath Ledger) storyline and some of the documentary talking heads, the Vietnam War is mentioned, while Woody encounters a woman who advises him to “live your own time, child,” and sing of the race riots of 1959 rather than an earlier era.

In contrast, Velvet Goldmine’s broad impact is actually aided by the restrictions placed on the production: unable to use original Bowie material, Haynes was instead forced to invoke the performer and his cultural milieu in different ways. Including a variety of signs that work on visual, aural, and even tactile levels, Haynes creates a much more open and experimental film in Velvet Goldmine. Whereas I’m Not There worked better if the viewer came to it with a deep knowledge of Dylan alone, Velvet

Goldmine activates a wider knowledge base and asks its viewer not only to make these connective leaps, but to explore them outside the initial viewing of the film. This unique audience relationship has been described as Velvet Goldmine’s “insistence on the

(pleasure of the) contact with the viewer.”38 Not only does the film reach out to its audience, it foregrounds this pleasure and at times seems to revel in it. If the film can be viewed as a “valentine to glam rock,”39 it may also be viewed as a valentine to its

37 See, for example, Robert Sullivan, “This is Not a Bob Dylan Movie,” New York Times Magazine, October 7, 2007.

38 Dana Luciano, “Nostalgia for an Age Yet to Come: Velvet Goldmine’s Queer Archive,” in Queer Times, Queer Becomings, ed. E.L. McCallum and Mikko Tuhkanen (Albany: SUNY Press, 2012), 135.

39 Todd Haynes, Velvet Goldmine Press Kit (Los Angeles: Miramax Films, 1998).

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spectators, who are perhaps meant to gain pleasure through “experiencing the film as it plays with itself,”40 in more than one sense of the phrase.

Singing the Alien: Velvet Goldmine’s Glam Rock as a Tool to Rewrite History

In its opening lines, Velvet Goldmine announces its interest in the intertwining of historical reality and fictional reconstruction: “Histories, like ancient ruins, are the fictions of empires.” Centering on the history of a fictional David Bowie-like figure, the film is built around music, both in plot and in performances of pre-existing songs from the

1970s and newly composed works aping that style. A technicolor whirl of glitter, sex, and drugs, Haynes’ film has been criticized as a pastiche more concerned with style than substance.41 Taken as a rewriting of an historical moment rather than a strict retelling, though, Velvet Goldmine’s confusing and densely woven narrative becomes much more meaningful. The many cover song performances act as nexuses of meaning within this rewriting, through which the film casts the glam rock era in a different light through the recasting of these songs. The film exploits film’s indexical nature, making convincing and confusing use of visual references in order to jumble and rewrite the historical events it re-presents. Within this historical reclamation project, Haynes also returns to the theme of identity and cultural consumption: rather than taking the rock star’s perspective as its focus, Velvet Goldmine instead focuses on the audience experience through the character of Arthur Stuart (played by Christian Bale). This fan- centered approach leads Velvet Goldmine into a rich exploration of the role music plays in identity formation, a role emphasized most often through the film’s musical montages.

40 Luciano, “Nostalgia,” 138.

41 See, for example, Ebert’s review, or Roger Harrington of The Washington Post, who wrote, “It looks far better than it plays.” (“Gone Glam Digging,” November 6, 1998).

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Haynes uses music as his palimpsest, rewriting through it in order to fashion a cohesive lineage and identity for glam rock’s innovators. The new meanings created by the film’s musical performances show unlimited semiosis at work in the service of the creation of a new mythology. In particular, the cover version of Brian Eno’s “Baby’s on

Fire” brings together many disparate visual elements, uniting them under the aural umbrella of the song and thereby tying them together. The scene’s visual aspects manipulate memory through the purposeful misuse of a common sign code. It is through this process of changing meaning that Haynes is able to rewrite history, forming glam rock into a moment of intense sexual and artistic importance, with a far-reaching high art legacy and influence in contemporary culture. Perhaps the most important work of the film, though, is the ways in which it explores identity, its construction, and the role of fandom in these same musical sequences.

It seems that even the film’s distribution company missed the point of fluid identities, shown in the film by musicians who put on characters as one would a hat. In

Miramax’s trailer for Velvet Goldmine as well as its original theater posters, the film is billed as a murder mystery, with the tagline: “Who killed pop idol Brian Slade?”42 Of course, no one killed him; Slade himself slipped out of the Maxwell Demon persona in order to move on, we learn, to perform as “Tommy Stone.”43 This confusion in marketing closely mirrors the media uproar surrounding the 1973 “death” of Bowie’s Ziggy

Stardust. Though Bowie had announced for more than a year that he intended to retire

42 Velvet Goldmine Official Trailer #1 (1998), accessed August 24, 2014, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FRY9K78uDRs.

43 Stone, Brian Slade’s persona in 1984, according the film’s timeline, is most closely analogous to Bowie during the days of his Serious Moonlight tour, when he reached his greatest popularity with hits like “Let’s Dance,” “Modern Love,” and “China Girl.”

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Ziggy and had always treated him as merely a character to be embodied on stage, the star’s audience could not grasp the situation. Many believed Bowie himself had actually retired after the London Hammersmith Odeon show that was the last for Ziggy Stardust and his band, the Spiders from Mars.44 Critic Lester Bangs, among others, took issue with the lack of “authenticity” in Bowie’s early career due to just this actorly persona- donning. Haynes’ film still struggles with the same misunderstanding, as shown by the blatant misrepresentation in these promotional materials. It is clear, through the performances that structure the film, that Velvet Goldmine is far less a murder whodunit and much more a study of audience/performer relationships and the importance of mediated culture in identity formation.

Loosely sharing a narrative framework with Citizen Kane, the film follows journalist Arthur Stuart (played by Christian Bale) as he profiles fallen glam rock star

Brian Slade (Jonathan Rhys Meyers). Told through flashbacks and interviews with

Slade’s friends and family, this plot is intercut with a series of seemingly unrelated scenes: moments from the journalist Arthur’s youth, extraterrestrial allusions, unexplained appearances by Slade in the form of his alter ego Maxwell Demon, and the brief appearance of a young Oscar Wilde. Among critics, Roger Ebert saw Goldmine’s storyline as a garbled and unsuccessful replication of David Bowie’s biography.45 J.

Hoberman came closer to the sort of reading I propose, seeing the work as an effort to

“re-mythologize a moment in pop history that was born mythologized,”46 referencing the artifice, costume, and camp of Bowie and his contemporaries in the creation of their

44 Auslander, Performing Glam Rock, 113-14.

45 Roger Ebert, “Velvet Goldmine,” Chicago Sun-Times, November 6, 1998.

46 J. Hoberman, “Drama Queens,” The Village Voice, November 10, 1998.

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own images. In the interweaving of Wilde’s aphorisms, glam rock’s music, and a strong camp aesthetic, Haynes creates a new perspective of the era, which amplifies aspects of its sexual experimentation and artistic lineage.

The film begins with the introduction of Oscar Wilde as an alien foundling delivered to a Dublin doorstep and, from there, only becomes more complex in its allusions. Between Wilde and Bowie, Haynes weaves a history that connects Beau

Brummell, Mahler, the Beatles, British music hall tradition, and explicitly homosexual language like Polari. The inclusion of this slang language which dates from the era of homosexuality’s criminalization47 is one of the clearer ways that Haynes codes all of these art forms as related to the overarching lineage of sexual and artistic experimentation Velvet Goldmine constructs. Nowhere is this lineage more apparent than in the musical performances that punctuate the film. In fact, Haynes himself highlights the importance of the music to his project: “The music was intelligent and humorous and ultimately very moving. It was a true celebratory act in popular culture that innately dealt with questions of identity and performance and gave an affirmative, radical answer to those questions.”48

These performances are of central importance in understanding rock star Brian

Slade, the only character to whom the audience is denied direct access. While the other characters each give their own versions of events through interviews and flashbacks,

Slade only presents himself on stage and is frequently in his Maxwell Demon drag. It is through this lens of artifice that the film gives the clearest view of Slade. He is first

47 For a full exploration of Polari’s history and context, see Paul Baker, Polari: The Lost Language of Gay Men (New York: Routledge, 2002).

48 Todd Haynes, Velvet Goldmine Press Kit (Los Angeles: Miramax Films, 1998).

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introduced performing songs composed for the film, “Hot One,” and “Ballad of Maxwell

Demon.” Though clearly mimicking the style of 1970s glam rock, these works are new and not sung by Jonathan Rhys Meyers, the actor portraying Slade, but instead by

Radiohead frontman Thom Yorke. As the film progresses, pre-existing songs enter

Slade’s repertory, first with works by Roxy Music and Steve Harley, and later with Brian

Eno’s “Baby’s On Fire.” This last example is the most important for a variety of reasons, not least of which are the scene into which it is inserted, the use of Rhys Meyers’s own singing voice, and the cover version’s faithfulness to the original recording.

Velvet Goldmine’s “Baby’s on Fire” begins with screaming fans, a wild shock of brightly colored hair, and a glittery, skintight jumpsuit. If you thought you were seeing

Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars: the Motion Picture, you could be forgiven for the confusion. Panning down to reveal the outline of singer Brian Slade, his face shrouded in shadow and not yet recognizable, Velvet Goldmine’s version of the song thus begins with an allusion to something entirely different: David Bowie. Rather than straightforwardly evoking Brian Eno, the song’s writer and original performer, Haynes’ film instead saturates this scene with imagery that suggests Slade as the avatar for other figures from history. Somewhere between Eno, Bowie, and Oscar Wilde, Haynes’ reshaping of glam rock’s history takes place within “Baby’s on Fire.”

The re-presentation of “Baby’s On Fire” complicates its relationship to the original version in a way not typically addressed in musicological scholarship. Even in recent writing, like that of Sheldon Schiffer and Stuart Lening, cover songs tend to be interpreted through their differences from their prototypes and the ways in which such

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stylistic and generic choices can change a song’s meaning.49 In the case of Velvet

Goldmine’s covers, though, no such alterations are made: the new versions are essentially recreations of the old. In tempo, instrumentation, and even vocal timbre and inflection, the film version apes Eno’s performance very closely. This second version is, more than a typical rock song cover, a performance that emphasizes faithfulness to its composer, as might be expected in the art music idiom. Velvet Goldmine goes to extremes to appropriate the archived, original performance of “Baby’s on Fire” as its own within the context of Slade’s onscreen performance.

Even in aspects that would call into question the framing of this version as a live concert performance, Goldmine accurately recreates the original. Rhys Meyers’ vocal track is recorded twice and presented on different channels, as was Eno’s original, though the effect is somewhat incongruous in the live performance posited by the film’s staging. Similarities between the two versions abound, even on a minute level. Short guitar fills, though not identical, share many melodic and rhythmic features and occur at exactly the same points, while the drum fill before the guitar solo is copied exactly. Most notably though, Rhys Meyers imitates Eno’s vocal inflections very closely. With a more nasal timbre here than in his other performances in the film, Rhys Meyers brings

Slade’s voice into agreement with Eno’s. In fact, the only major differences between the two iterations of the song, apart from audible differences in recording quality and reverb, are the delayed entrance of the guitar in the introduction and the deletion of the final verses in the film. This final alteration does not outweigh the overwhelming similarities

49 Sheldon Schiffer, “The Cover Song as Historiography, Marker of Ideological Transformation,” in Play it Again: Cover Songs in Popular Music, ed. George Plasketes (Burlington, VT: Ashgate Press, 2010), 77- 98.

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between the Slade and Eno iterations, especially since it is necessitated by the addition of dialogue and the shift from diegetic musical performance to nondiegetic soundtrack.

The reverb, in contrast, may be the one musical aspect added in order to validate the image on the screen: Slade is seen performing in a large venue and the addition of reverb seems to reflect the concert experience, distancing this version from the original in the only really compelling aural alteration.

By recreating the original song so closely, Velvet Goldmine complicates issues of memory and history. Without the benefit of direct comparison (which would be impossible during a screening of the film), the aural image presented as Slade’s own performance is easily conflated with one’s memory of the original. The varies greatly from the effect of the Rebekah del Rio “Llorando,” which calls upon the Orbison original withut attempting to replicate it. Mulholland Drive’s version is clearly differentiated from the original in many ways, while Velvet Goldmine seeks to minimize any potential for differentiation, instead conflating the performers. Indeed, this performance is “double- voiced” in multiple ways. As mentioned above and as shown in the original recording, the vocals are overdubbed and presented in both the left and right channels. While this move would seem to break the “reality” of the concert setting in which the song is presented, it instead allows for a closer linking between the original and this cover version. We can all the more easily confuse the two voices of Brian Slade with the two voices of Eno, and it is in this space that the true double-voicing occurs: the overdubbing allows the spectator to memoratively entwine Eno and Slade into one authorial voice, spanning time and place to include this fictionalized version of 1970s

London.

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In this confusion, the real past and the newly constructed alternate past of the film’s narrative are not only linked, but treated as interchangeable. The film plays on the fallibility of memory in order to construct its own version of history. As Ricoeur discusses, the intertwining of imagination and memory greatly complicates the acts of forming and recalling memories50. By deliberately confusing the issue, Haynes aids his pointed rewriting of history: if, through the sound of the song, one cannot easily distinguish the original from the copy, a new layer of feasibility is added to the revision of history that the film and this performance present. Haynes succeeds in taking the malleability of memory as a starting point and, through it, creating a believable and compelling alternate history through Velvet Goldmine’s musical performances.

This manipulation of memory is made possible by the way the film truly makes

Eno’s song its own. Rather than simply using the original recording with Rhys Meyers lip-synching, Haynes instead chose to re-record the song. (In I’m Not There, too,

Haynes continues this practice: he has stated in interviews that, while incorporating the original performer’s voice is important, he is resistant to the idea of impersonation through lip sync in his films.51) This re-presentation allows Haynes to extract an archived event (the recording of the song) from its archiving event (Eno’s performance in recording it) and to attach another plausible origin for the historically real archived event. Within Velvet Goldmine’s version of history, “Baby’s on Fire” is authentic to Brian

Slade, recorded in the concert setting shown; its existence, while dependent on Eno, is

50 Paul Ricoeur, Memory, History, Forgetting, trans. Kathleen Blamey and David Pellauer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 5.

51 See, for example, Greil Marcus, “Bob Dylan Times Six: An Interview with ‘I’m Not There’ director Todd Haynes,” Rolling Stone, accessed July 7, 2014, http://www.rollingstone.com/music/news/bob-dylan-times- six-an-interview-with-im-not-there-director-todd-haynes-20071129.

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now attributed to Slade by virtue of this reinscription. Through this conflation of authorial voice, the film assigns to Slade the historical legitimacy of Eno and the song.

Importantly, this lends to the entire reinscription of the work a close linking to the reality of the era it seeks to recast.

The ontology of the film musical facilitates this shift in voice. While Velvet

Goldmine may not be a traditional film musical, it nonetheless shares many key attributes with the genre: characters frequently perform and these performances often act outside of narrative reality, seeming to comment upon it or step outside of narrative time in the manner of integrated musical numbers. Because of this relation to the genre, we can draw parallels between the ways that Velvet Goldmine and such film musicals deal with the idea of performance and the character as performer. As Andrew Klevan states, “musicals, where characters are performers of song and dance, bare the fact that characters are simultaneously performers on film ... character and performer are intrinsically intertwined.” 52 Rhys Meyers’ physicality, movement, and sound are so closely identified with Slade that their voices are not differentiated. Thus, when Rhys

Meyers’ voice sings “Baby’s on Fire,” the performance seems authentic to Slade, and the replication of the original recording includes Brian Eno in this conflation of authorial voice. When we hear Rhys Meyers speaking in the voice of Slade, both are effectively speaking in the voice of Eno simultaneously. For this reason, it is extremely important that the vocal line for “Baby’s on Fire” was recorded by Rhys Meyers and not by Thom

Yorke: were it not recognizably Rhys Meyers’ voice, this commutation (and the film’s historical reimagining as a whole) would not be successful.

52 Andrew Klevan, Film Performance: From Achievement to Appreciation (London: Wallflower Press, 2006), 2.

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“Baby’s on Fire” is complicated yet more by its saturation of visual allusions, out of which spin many chains of connections. In the moments of near silence before the sequence begins, Curt Wild tells Brian Slade, “the world has changed because you are made of ivory and gold. The curves of your lips rewrite history.” With this quotation from

The Picture of Dorian Gray, the film goes on to do just that: rewrite history, though through a web of visual and musical allusions. From the concert sequence’s opening shot, Slade (though acting as Eno’s stand-in) is dressed to resemble David Bowie, circa

1972-3. In addition to this iconic reference to Bowie’s Ziggy Stardust persona through make-up and physical appearance, Slade’s onstage performance emphasizes the connection even more. During the guitar solo (performed by Ewan MacGregor’s Curt

Wild), Slade mimes fellatio on Wild’s guitar, a stage stunt frequently performed by

Bowie and his long-time guitarist Mick Ronson. Allusions continue throughout the sequence, as the newspaper over which Arthur Stuart pores juxtaposes photos of the

Bowie-like stunt with Oscar Wilde’s words.

This excess of extratextual allusions is intercut with scenes of sexual experimentation in the lives of both Slade and Stuart, linking the song and these acts through a kind of visual parataxis, or juxtaposition without conjunctions.53 Haynes’ other films exhibit this same propensity for parataxis. Velvet Goldmine’s is more powerful, I argue, because of the musical and performative issues outlined above, all of which make Eno’s “Baby’s on Fire” much more ambiguous than, say, the use of Dylan’s own recording of “Blind Willie McTell” could have been in I’m Not There. Haynes credits his editor and co-writer, James Lyons, with creating the “Baby’s on Fire” sequence’s

53 Roland Barthes, The Semiotic Challenge, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 1988), 187.

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power;54 for Haynes, then, it is the visual connection between these disparate ideas, locations, and characters that allows the scene to work.55 As with Superstar and I’m Not

There, though, this film is also littered with examples of such editing in non-musical sequences. It is only in conjunction with the semiotic openness made possible by

“Baby’s on Fire,” though, that the use of montage becomes the powerful whole Haynes speaks of. Through its parataxis, “Baby’s on Fire” takes on new, multivalent meaning.

By conflating real and imagined figures in this scene, Haynes is able to execute his rewriting of history through musical appropriation. Not only is Slade acting as Eno’s stand-in here, but he also points very clearly to David Bowie through costuming and stage attire. Especially in his earliest years of stardom, one of Bowie’s defining features was his stage personae. Theatricality and excess ruled in Bowie’s stagewear for these characters, who ranged from Aladdin Sane to the Thin White Duke. During the period the film portrays, approximately 1972-3, Bowie was performing as his most famous persona: Ziggy Stardust. A rockstar alien come to Earth, Ziggy’s “screwed-up eyes and screwed-down hairdo”56 are immediately recognizable, a useful shorthand for Bowie as a performer and, in this case, for Haynes himself as he invokes and manipulates this sign. As Figure 5-4 shows, Slade’s stage costume clearly mimics the hair and attire of

Ziggy Stardust.

54 Todd Haynes, “Baby’s on Fire,” Velvet Goldmine, directed by Todd Haynes (1998; Los Angeles: Miramax Lionsgate, Blu-ray, 2011).

55 Of course, the costume and sound design are integral to this scene’s functioning as well, since it is through these aspects that the spectator is able to draw connections to real people and events pointed to by the montage.

56 David Bowie, “Ziggy Stardust,” The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars. EMI Records, 1972.

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A B Figure 5-4. Costume similarities between A) Brian Slade as Maxwell Demon, singing “Baby’s on Fire” (Velvet Goldmine, directed by Todd Haynes [1998; Los Angeles: Miramax Lionsgate, 2011], Blu Ray) and B.) David Bowie as Ziggy Stardust, singing “Changes” at the Hammersmith Odeon, July 3, 1973 (from Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars: the Motion Picture, directed by D.A. Pennebaker [1973; London: EMI Records, Ltd., 2003], DVD).

Haynes’ filmmaking decisions are similarly evocative of the scene’s unnamed subject. The camera movements throughout this sequence, as well as the image quality, recall D.A. Pennebaker’s concert film Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars: the Motion Picture (1973). Shot at the Hammersmith Odeon concert shown in Figure 5-

4, Pennebaker’s film documents Bowie, his band, and the crowd in Ziggy’s last hurrah before the persona was retired. In sequences like “Changes,” Pennebaker employs a quick and dramatic zoom to shift the focus from the entire stage to Bowie’s face in close-up, a technique Haynes copies in this “Baby’s On Fire” performance and elsewhere in the film. Similarly, Haynes’s fast panning at Curt Wild’s entrance mimics

Pennebaker’s shifts to Bowie’s guitarist Mick Ronson through the concert. Slade’s band, the Venus in Furs,57 also plays a part in this extended allusion; Slade’s guitarist Trevor

57 The Venus in Furs’ name is at least a double reference: first, to the Velvet Underground song of the same name from The Velvet Underground & Nico (1967), and second, to the Leopold von Sacher- Masoch novel (1870). Venus in Furs, the novel, is a tale of sexual experimentation and sado-masochism (in fact, the term “masochism” comes from the author’s last name).

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is a clear Mick Ronson stand-in, complete with shaggy blond hair and a penchant for gold lamé. Thus in sound, image, and directorial style, Haynes is simultaneously evoking very different glam rock landmarks in Eno and Bowie.

Perhaps even more important, Slade’s movements and performance intentionally invoke Bowie throughout the film. For example, in the film’s first unveiling of Slade in performance singing “Hot One,” we see him, dressed in a one-armed purple Lycra jumpsuit, draping his arm seductively over the shoulders of his guitarist Trevor. This image clearly calls back to the first appearance of Ziggy Stardust on the BBC’s Top of the Pops in July 1972. Singing “Starman,” Bowie (who had recently declared himself bisexual) similarly draped his arm around guitarist Mick Ronson’s shoulders. This move was widely viewed as Bowie’s coming on to a man, a watershed expression of non- normative sexuality on national television.58 Joe Moran describes the moment: “Dressed in a multicoloured lycra jumpsuit, he put his arm languidly round his guitarist Mick

Ronson and looked seductively into his eyes.”59 The same article interviews men who misremember the performance as substantially more sexual than it was, again highlighting the mutability of memory, a central theme throughout Velvet Goldmine. This

“Hot One” sequence in Velvet Goldmine buries the “Starman” image allusion along with many others, including a visual quotation of Bowie’s “Jean Genie” video. Haynes, without needing to state the history he is referencing, brings in an iconic and

58 Artists like Morrissey and Boy George cite this performance as influential for them. In his Autobiography, Morrissey states of Bowie’s “Starman”: “The vision is profound – a sanity heralding the coming of consciousness from someone who – at last! – transcends our gloomy coal-fire existence.” (Morrissey, Autobiography [New York: Putnam and Sons, 2013], 62.) See also Simon Critchley, Bowie (London: OR Books, 2014) for a similar account.

59 Joe Moran, “David Bowie Misremembered: When Ziggy Stardust Played with our Minds.” The Guardian, July 6, 2012, http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2012/jul/06/david-bowie-ziggy- starman.

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groundbreaking television experience, drawing connections to Bowie even though he was denied both life and music rights for the film.60 In fact, the title is the only remaining overt marker of the project’s origin as an explicitly Bowie-centered film.61 Haynes’ myriad other references are essentially a cultural shorthand, evoking Bowie though not directly.

Semiotically, these Bowie-inspired moments operate as signs with, on some level, an undefined referent. For the model viewer of the film, they have a very specific referent in Bowie; the actions themselves, however, once divorced from their original context, are no longer unambiguous. Here Haynes actively plays with the indexical nature of film. The potential of film to convey realness has been a defining feature since the medium’s inception,62 but in this case that potential is used to create an alternate reality. Presenting an image of a “real” thing, in general the filmic image acts as an index for that thing, a “pure assurance of existence”63: it is a sign which, on its most obvious level, conveys that “real” object.

In Velvet Goldmine, however, the real object that the film seeks to communicate is not, in fact, the thing that it shows. The image is in fact an index of Rhys Meyers as

Maxwell Demon, since it has a direct, physical, and causal relationship to the actor and the film. It is, however, also carefully constructed as an icon conveying Bowie. Haynes goes to great lengths to seem to communicate an authenticity to the era through the

60 Harrington, “Gone Glam Digging,” Washington Post, November 6, 1998.

61 The film takes its title from the song “Velvet Goldmine,” originally recorded in the Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars sessions, but not released on the album.

62 See, for example, Mary Ann Doane, The Emergence of Cinematic Time: Modernity, Contingency, the Archive (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2002).

63 Doane, Cinematic Time, 16.

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images of glam rock performers (most often Bowie, though also Jobriath and Bryan

Ferry of Roxy Music), through costume, voice, and gesture. His film is crafted to act as a multilayered sign that conveys “glamness” and frequently “Bowieness.”64 In reality, though, Haynes is manipulating the sign system by intermingling and confusing these two semiotic levels with the intention of reshaping the archive and, with it, collective memory.

On at least one level, a film can act as a record of events, taking its power from the medium’s ability to capture a moment, or the contingency of the modern world. In

Image – Music – Text, Barthes addresses this documentation of the real in film. His examples come from fiction films (specifically Eisenstein’s Ivan the Terrible) and concentrate on what he calls the “third meaning” conveyed by a film – not the meaning explicitly crafted by the filmmaker, but what is conveyed by the image and the reality captured on film.65 Barthes points to, for example, the heavy makeup on characters, the draping of a headscarf, and other details that do not pertain to the plot, but convey realness instead. This infringement of realness in the fictional construct of filmed

“reality” shows clearly the indexical nature of film: in the third meaning, we see the image as an index of an actual person with specific bodily features that move outside the carefully constructed world of the film to encroach on our own reality. This power is specific to the medium of film and frequently occurs as a break in the illusion of a fiction film, disrupting the narrative by reminding the audience that the people on screen are, in fact, real, though the story may not be.

64 In this way, the image acts as a dicisign, in Peirce’s terminology. It is asserting the relationship of its interpretant to something real, though not necessarily grounding this in fact or actual physical relation.

65 Roland Barthes, “The Third Meaning,” in Image – Music – Text, trans. Stephen Heath (New York: Hill and Wang, 1977), 52-68.

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In most of the films I have discussed, this aspect has not been exploited in an attempt to recast the “real” world we know and reside in. Haynes, however, strives to foreground and take advantage of the indexical nature of film. Various sequences are presented in the manner of archival footage: after the title sequence, Brian Slade is introduced in a faux BBC News segment. In addition to the news announcer’s voiceover, this section is delineated from the surrounding footage by a change in image quality (from film to video), meant to root the segment in a different, more realistic style.

In fact, the dialogue itself is gleaned from 1970s news footage about the glam rock phenomenon.66 Curt Wild’s brief interview text comes from interview from Lou Reed during his Transformer-era engagement with glam.67 In this and other sequences in the film, Haynes’ filmmaking decisions bring Velvet Goldmine into a confusing space between fictional film and historical document. These decisions, coupled with the careful recreation of Bowie in the figure of Slade, serve to purposefully manipulate the power of cinema to act as “assurance of existence” by assuring the existence of a fabricated historical “reality.”

Through these references, Haynes yet again problematizes the idea of authorship and ownership: though he is clearly pointing toward a specific glam rock performer, in this case Bowie, the film does so without being explicit. Since the director is unable to overtly invoke Bowie, having been denied usage of the Ziggy Stardust material, Haynes instead turns to visual allusion which, coupled with the historically accurate Roxy Music, Eno, and Steve Harley songs, creates a deeper and more

66 Todd Haynes, “Hot One,” Velvet Goldmine, directed by Todd Haynes (1998; Los Angeles: Miramax Lionsgate, Blu-ray, 2011).

67 Ibid.

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complex sort of historical construction. Legally, Haynes has broken no copyright laws and has not so much as mentioned Bowie’s name, but his signature is present throughout the film. It seems Haynes controls the archive here, even though he is denied explicit access to it.

Haynes’ film succeeds is its rewriting of history by wresting control over an existing, shared archive of cultural signs. In the previous chapter, I discussed the difficulty presented by an unidentified, somehow orphaned quotation in the context of

Mulholland Drive; how can a message, divorced from its sender, continue to mean in any stable or understood way?68 In the case of Velvet Goldmine, the situation is yet more complicated. The quotation is not orphaned but kidnapped, taken against the owner’s wishes and used subversively. Haynes takes advantage of the rich archive through which Bowie and his Ziggy Stardust “live on.” Derrida argues that the archive is a powerful political tool and one for which we yearn – he who controls the archive controls its meaning and its legacy and his able to construct an origin.69 It is by repurposing this archive that Haynes is able to craft his message. In the “Baby’s on

Fire” sequence, Haynes perpetrates his most far-reaching rewriting. Not does the film challenge Eno’s authorial voice, as discussed above, but it is also implicitly pulling

Bowie into this sweeping rewriting of history.

Derrida writes of the way that a signature acts as a perpetual writing machine, continuing in the absence of its sender. In “Signature – Event – Context,” at least, he is

68 In this case, the quotation of Roy Orbison’s “Crying” is orphaned in that it is not identified as belonging to its author, nor is it presented in a clearly recognizable form, since Rebekah del Rio performs a Spanish-language cover version, “Llorando.”

69 Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression, trans. Eric Prenowitz (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996).

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less concerned with who is able to control that signature, but Haynes brings that issue to the forefront. I have no desire to enter a debate on the legality of Haynes’ particular brand of allusion, but instead to discuss the ways in which Haynes is able to question authorship through his reuse. While it seems clear that Bowie is the indisputable author of his songs like “Starman,” is he also the sole author and owner of his stage antics?

When Slade fellates Wild’s guitar during “Baby’s on Fire,” he does not in any explicit way point to Bowie, but the reference, seen in Figure 5-5, is all too clear. Invoking the alien himself, Slade is able to, for the film’s purposes, embody Ziggy Stardust in the moment of “Baby’s on Fire,” conflating scores of different signs in one.

Figure 5-5. Slade and Wild in Velvet Goldmine mirroring Bowie and Ronson on Ziggy Stardust tour (Velvet Goldmine, directed by Todd Haynes [1998; Los Angeles: Miramax Lionsgate, 2011], Blu Ray).

This queering of the archive in Velvet Goldmine has an antecedent: Anger’s

Scorpio Rising, analyzed in the dissertation’s second chapter. Like Anger, Haynes takes control of images and texts with fairly stable cultural meanings and, through juxtaposition and resemblance, alters these artifacts to convey a new, decidedly homosexual identity. Unlike the Anger example, though, Haynes does not appropriate macho hallmarks like Brando and Dean; his material, rather, is already ambiguous.

Through his rewriting, Haynes is able to transform that ambiguity into what he calls a

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“valentine”70 to glam rock music and to the continuum of homosexual artists he sees stretching from Wilde through Bowie to include, one must assume, Haynes himself.71

On yet another level, this foregrounding of character as performer reveals the way the film positions itself in relation to its audience. Mulvey’s assertion of a hermetically sealed cinema cannot hold here: Haynes is acknowledging and playing to his audience in a variety of ways. Most obviously, the film’s focus on a performer emphasizes the ways the film is presented to be seen. Of course, this focus also highlights the fictive nature of so much that is presented to us. By centering on the idea of performance and allowing the audience to question it throughout the film, Velvet

Goldmine not only sets the stage for its rewriting of history, but also forces its audience to consider history itself, its validity, and its creation.

Glam rock is perhaps the ultimate tool for such a critique. More than most other styles or eras, glam’s performers embraced their control over their own images and used it to shape personae, backstories, and styles (both musical and sartorial). Again following in the mold of Bowie, Brian Slade is seen in at least three distinct identities, marked as separate by their styling: Slade’s early performing identity bears his own name, and here he is styled in caftans and flowing hair (in the manner of Man Who Sold the World-era Bowie, who called his own caftans “man dresses”72). Maxwell Demon,

70 Todd Haynes, Velvet Goldmine Press Kit (Los Angeles: Miramax Films, 1998).

71 The assumption here is not that Haynes is gay -- he is vocal about this and has never made an attempt to appear otherwise. Rather, it is that he is extending the chain of pop idols through himself. He has stated in publicity materials for the film that it does, on some level, fulfill a rock star fantasy, and in this way perhaps we can see him taking his place among his idols through his appropriation of their texts.

72 The “man dresses” were designed by Michael Fish and worn throughout 1970, in conjunction with what would be called his “Lauren Bacall” styling: long, flowing hair with a deep side part and the high-waisted trousers typical of 1940s starlets like Bacall and Katharine Hepburn. Though Bowie’s Ziggy character is androgynous, his Man Who Sold the World styling is overtly feminine.

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already discussed, occupies the bulk of the film’s narrative. In the film’s conclusion, reporter Arthur finds that Slade’s faked death has allowed the singer to reinvent himself yet again, seeking stardom a third time as Tommy Stone, a singer in the mold of the

Serious Moonlight-era mid-eighties Bowie. In Bowie, the self-professed “human Xerox machine,” Haynes finds an ideal avatar for the constructible nature of identity.

Apart from mimicking Bowie through these transformations, Haynes is communicating something about the mutability of history and “fact.” Arthur’s editor explains why he has chosen Arthur to write about Slade: “You remember.” Haynes shows us that memory and any attempts at recording it are necessarily constructed and flawed. Yes, Arthur was there, as were all the hangers-on whom he interviewed. Even with this first-hand experience, we are shown that the past, identity, and even seemingly fixed things like a recorded song are open for reinterpretation and reformation, frequently in highly individual ways that are important for a character’s own identity. This is shown most clearly in a scene that uses a Haynes hallmark: the presentation of characters in the form of dolls, manipulated by an unseen hand. Two girls’ voices narrate the scene between the Slade and Curt Wild dolls, making their growing romantic relationship more explicit here than anywhere else in the film. Addressing this scene,

Haynes focuses on the role of the spectator (and specifically the marginalized, female spectator).73 He even pinpoints the film’s challenge to Mulvey’s assertions of a cinema that privileges the male gaze, instead shifting the gaze and power to the feminine.

In Haynes’ film, the spectator holds the power, both as the film’s audience interprets and engages with the myriad signs within the film and as the spectators within

73 Todd Haynes, interviewed by Julia Leyda, “‘Something that is Dangerous and Arousing and Transgressive’: An Interview with Todd Haynes,” Bright Lights Film Journal 78 (November 2012).

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the film engage with the performers and performances. Rather than acting as an isolated object to be viewed, the film engages with the audience directly, offering its viewer an active role in developing meaning. As Haynes states, his film “is conducive to all kinds of voices and all kinds of players pulling the strings.”74 This is, of course, a connecting thread among the three Haynes films discussed in this chapter, but Velvet

Goldmine accomplishes this more than any other, in large part due to the semiotic openness created in its musical performances, and the structure and editing of those performances. Here the audience is given a creative role on screen; through this authorial position, the film’s own audience is given the space and power to take a more active and personal role in their relation to the film.

The film’s shift in control of “the strings” is what allows for the power of its musical unlimited semiosis. Haynes purposefully opens up his film, engaging with a variety of spectators on a multitude of registers. This is all facilitated by music. “Baby’s on Fire” confuses historical fact and creative reimagining, but the doll sequence serves to foreground the agency of the viewer in these transformations, explicitly handing over control of meaning creation. Rather than simply presenting something to be consumed, these musical scenes instead engage the viewer in an interactive relationship with the film. See Figure 5-6 for the moment when the Slade and Wild dolls speak their unspoken bond. This scene of childhood play is set to the T. Rex song “Diamond

Meadows.” Its place within the diegesis is clear at the outset: the song emanates from a record player nearby (though this cannot be the original T. Rex release, as the song is

74 Todd Haynes, interviewed by Julia Leyda, “‘Something that is Dangerous and Arousing and Transgressive’: An Interview with Todd Haynes,” Bright Lights Film Journal 78 (November 2012).

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now shown on the “Bijou” label rather than the appropriate “Fly Records.” Bijou is

Haynes’ fictional analogue to Bowie’s MainMan.75)

Figure 5-6. Wild and Slade through the eyes of their fans (Velvet Goldmine, directed by Todd Haynes [1998; Los Angeles: Miramax Lionsgate, 2011], Blu Ray).

By the time the Slade and Wild dolls are shown, though, the music could conceivably be a nondiegetic addition. The music continues throughout a panning shot across the girls’ room, showing abandoned Barbie dolls and glittery accessories. The image briefly cuts to black before fading in on the interaction between the two rock stars; though this is almost certainly the play the two girls are engaging in, we are shown it as a separate scene, one with a break in style and in continuity. This ambiguity takes on greater significance since the close relation between the song’s lyrics and the scene played out between the dolls seems to betray the influence of an author. T. Rex’s

Marc Bolan sings of self-discovery (“If I could have grown/all up on my own”) and the

75 Though Haynes forces a Bowie connection through this re-labeling, one did in fact exist: Bowie and T. Rex’s Marc Bolan were for a time represented by the same agent and knew each other well. In his VH1 Storytellers session, Bowie relates how he and Bolan met while painting an office for their shared agent; the two compared outfits. Musically, they were also connected by Tony Visconti, the producer and musician who has worked with Bowie for decades (up to and including 2012’s The Next Day) and who also produced the album T. Rex, from which “Diamond Meadows” is taken.

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increasing sharing and intertwining of his life with that of his lover (“If I had a throne/You could call it home/If I cry my tears are yours”). The girls echo the sentiment of “Diamond

Meadows,” rehearsing Slade and Wild’s close professional and personal relationship in the context of Bolan’s love song. The parallelism between lyrics and dialogue is striking and, indeed, almost too direct and overt, not matching the more subtle style of the rest of the film.76

Given the unclear diegetic position of the music in the film’s final cut, the author of this connection could just as easily be the girls as it could Haynes. I read this scene as a performance authored by these unseen girls, in part because of the rather rudimentary connection between musical message and dramatic content. Haynes’ musical appropriation is rarely of the sort of one-to-one correlation that this scene shows, but such clear acting out may fit with the fandom evident in these young girls’ interest in Slade and Wild. The girls act as the audience of Slade and Wild’s performances and, in this sequence, show the great power of the spectator in Haynes’s glam rock universe. They reshape official narratives, as shown in the news footage and interviews included in the film, and re-form it into a more subversive, and in fact more true, representation of these men and their relationships. In fact, the girls are playing with two different cultural products here: they are making explicit the relationship between Slade and Wild, but they are also altering their dolls, turning them into more androgynous, subversive figures.77 As Figure 5-6 shows, the dolls’ sloppy haircuts

76 Indeed, this is more akin to the visual style of another scene controlled by an observer: Mandy Slade’s account of the meeting and romance between Slade and Wild.

77 These dolls are not Barbie and do not carry the same sort of cultural baggage that the Karen Carpenter stand-in did in Superstar, but they may be Mattel dolls, though this is unconfirmed. Most Ken dolls had plastic, molded hair, unlike these two male dolls, but the Wild figure bears a resemblance to 1997’s “Big Brother Ken,” which featured hair that could be styled.

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betray the girls’ handiwork, while the Slade figurine wears a handcrafted miniature version of the purple Lycra jumpsuit seen in the “Hot One” video from earlier in the film.

Drawing on what she is given, the spectator has the power here to make, of the packaged consumer product she is sold, a real and compelling human history.

Whereas the performance in the “Baby’s on Fire” scene relied much more on

Haynes’ typical visual parataxis, this sequence’s performances (and control behind the performances) are more muddled and therefore effective in showing and encouraging audience engagement. The unseen girls, in their anonymity, easily act as audience surrogates. Rather than dictating the viewer’s reaction though, as did Betty and Rita in their surrogate roles in Mulholland Drive’s Club Silencio, these unnamed characters are instead giving the audience greater freedom and agency. We can see the girls’ actions as precedents for our own: they are re-forming the mediated narrative presented to them in much the same way Velvet Goldmine expects and encourages its own viewers to act.

Through these moments, Haynes’ interest in the process of popular culture consumption comes to the fore. His reshaping of history in Velvet Goldmine and exploration of stardom and the body in Superstar both emphasize consumption as an integral part of the cultural object. In Superstar, audience reaction (through media commentary) leads to the reshaping and eventual destruction of the star body, but

Velvet Goldmine shows a more symbiotic relationship. The spectator reshapes and interprets the stars’ images and, in turn, these images help to reshape our world.

Indeed, as one reviewer wrote of Velvet Goldmine, “more than a mash note from a fan,

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it’s a film that powerfully conveys the sensual and imaginative experience of fandom.”78

Velvet Goldmine actively prompts this experience, both showing an engaged audience on screen and asking its own spectators to join in.

In scenes like the “Diamond Meadows” doll play and the “Baby’s on Fire” sequence, Haynes truly problematizes the role of the spectator, giving much more power and engagement to his viewers. In fact, we can see Haynes’ filmmaking style as beginning to accomplish the possibilities Mulvey saw for revolutionizing cinema. By empowering and foregrounding the spectator, Haynes alters the one-way communication of cinema in much the same way that postmodern theory and filmmakers sought to, but accomplishes this with an immediacy particular to the experience of music. Through the specific semiotic processes associated with music’s communicative power, Haynes’ films implicate their audience in new ethnic histories,79 constructing a past, present, and future that all align with a new chronological and artistic understanding put forth by his films’ plots. Through musical appropriation, the film, song, and indeed our shared history are all transformed.

Conclusion

In his radical fostering of semiotic openness, Haynes creates films that encourage a new sort of interpretation. The use of musical montage sequences, though common for many years (particularly in films with compilation soundtracks) is elevated to a new level of interpretive freedom in Haynes’ use of visual parataxis to amplify and

78 Dennis Lim, “'Velvet Goldmine,' 'Mildred Pierce' capture director's interests,” LA Times, January 8, 2012, accessed July 7, 2014, http://articles.latimes.com/2012/jan/08/entertainment/la-ca-second-look- 20120108.

79 “Ethnic histories” in the sense Nealon uses. See Nealon, Foundlings, 4-6.

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complicate musical meaning. “Baby’s on Fire” and all of Velvet Goldmine’s musical sequences are particularly potent examples of such openness.

As with the examples from Lynch and Malick, Haynes’ musical appropriation operates in a way that goes against Hollywood conventions. Typically such well-known pop music would be used to cue a standardized meaning, such as time period, place, or social group. Instead, Haynes follows the more experimental tack visible in Kenneth

Anger’s musical montages; like Anger, Haynes uses montage to open the possibilities for interpretation and ask his audience to consider an alternate meaning for each of his borrowed musical works. Anger’s recasting of “Blue Velvet” succeeded, through careful montage construction, in commuting the loving attention the song’s lyrics give to the feminine object to a different, dandified male object. Through his filmic grammar alone,

Anger calls up and questions the common memory of and signifiers attached to Bobby

Vinton’s familiar recording. In much the same way, Haynes complicates the (admittedly less iconic) memory of Brian Eno’s “Baby’s on Fire,” again through a kind of parataxis.

The comparison between the two filmmakers is apt not only because of their shared queering of common cultural artifacts, but also because of their use of the same specific filmic techniques to prompt a more active audience response. Like Anger some 35 years before him, Haynes induces his audience to greater action through the recasting of familiar, shared cultural objects in a subversive new way.

Beyond his use of visual parataxis, Haynes’ films also interact with their viewers through their focus on fandom. Particularly in Velvet Goldmine, but also in I’m Not There and Superstar, Haynes turns his camera on the experience of receiving and interacting with a cultural product like a record, film, or magazine. Much like Sailor in Lynch’s Wild

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at Heart, Haynes’ characters show the audience the ways that new, individualized meanings and identities are constructed out of the everyday, heavily mediated objects presented for our consumption. It is Haynes’ portraiture of the fan and his or her relationship with their obsession that encourages the exploration of the myriad new meaning that Haynes’ parataxis prompts. By making the fan experience the central aspect of his film, Haynes in some way legitimizes and welcomes the audiences’ response to his own films, which has been enthusiastic and varied. In these audience responses, the true potential of musical appropriation is visible.

254 CHAPTER 6 CONCLUSIONS ON MUSICAL APPROPRIATION IN FILM

As I read what the fans and all of the chroniclers of Velvet Goldmine wrote over the years, they would extrapolate on [details of the film] . . . It became a kind of communal fascination and compulsion that I was able to give back to fan [sic] or introduce fans to as I was myself a fan of this music so it became a kind of ongoing dialogue among fans.

-Todd Haynes on the fan response to Velvet Goldmine1

That is me! That is me that!2 We’re chuffed that Todd mentions us on the commentary. Beaming truly like someone’s Mum. Come up and see me, make me smile:3 http://vardathemessage.livejournal.com/

-Indiewire user Vardathemessage, responding to the above quote4

In a remarkably fitting and circular way, the fans of Velvet Goldmine have come to leave a permanent mark on the film. While preparing the 2011 Blu-ray release,

Haynes was asked to provide an audio commentary to accompany the film. As the previous chapter showed, the film was densely packed with allusions – so much so that

Haynes could not accurately recall all the details after 13 years away from the project, so he turned to those who could: the film’s online community. Mining their exhaustive resources to inform his own commentary, Haynes thus brought the Velvet Goldmine fan experience full circle. Audience members who had engaged with the film as spectators and created their own sites and narratives in response were now a part of the text itself.

For a film whose focus is the fan experience, this seems a particularly appropriate fate.

1 Todd Gilchrist, “Todd Haynes Thanks the Fans for Helping Him Remember the Details and Backstory of ‘Velvet Goldmine,” Indiewire, December 16, 2011, accessed September 3, 2014, http://blogs.indiewire.com/theplaylist/todd-haynes-talks-velvet-goldmine-blu-ray-re-release.

2 Vardathemessage’s response recalls Arthur Stuart’s reaction to a Brian Slade interview in the film, discussed below.

3 Reference to Steve Harley’s “Come Up and See Me (Make Me Smile),” which appears on the Velvet Goldmine soundtrack.

4 Gilchrist, “Todd Haynes Thanks the Fans.”

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While a film’s meaning is necessarily conveyed by what is seen and heard within the movie theater, each of the works addressed in this dissertation has sought to move its experience and dialogue beyond those confines. By so directly invoking personal and memorative meanings, Malick, Haynes, and Lynch are already connecting to their spectators’ real lives. Their movies continue to stress the authorial role of the spectator by promoting freedom of interpretation and showing possibilities for empowering audience members within the films. Haynes, formally trained in film theory, has frequently referred to his desire to empower marginalized groups through the way his films speak to these spectators; in fact, he even refers to Mulvey’s writing on pleasure in the filmic gaze to position his work within (or in some ways against) a Hollywood tradition. In this space, constructed through the targeted appropriation of pre-existing music, audience response to Haynes’ films in particular has flourished. In the fan community’s continuation of Haynes’ ideals and concepts from Velvet Goldmine, the potential for the future of musical appropriation in film is clear.

Perhaps unsurprisingly for a film that so empowers its viewers, Velvet

Goldmine’s internet afterlife is extensive. This fan reaction falls into two general categories, both of which reflect the issues I have analyzed: first, fan sites that seek to unravel the thick tapestry of allusion in the film, and second, examples of “slash fanfic” that expand on the largely unrevealed sexual relationship between Brian Slade and Curt

Wild. While such sites could devolve into little more than adoration of the film and its attractive stars, I argue that they show something far more rich: the very active spectatorship I find in Superstar, I’m Not There, and Velvet Goldmine. By exploring both the historical/referential aspects and the construction of sexuality through the film, these

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fan sites deepen the already rich work of Velvet Goldmine and show the potential for musical appropriation’s development of a new spectator-film relationship.

Velvet Goldmine and the Ongoing Fan Experience

Haynes’ film empowers fans not only through its semiotic play, but also through its depiction of fandom. In particular, “it’s about the Arthur Stewart character, the

Christian Bale character who is basically interpreting and traversing through this history.”5 Haynes himself has frequently stated that fandom and the spectator’s experience are truly the focus of the film,6 and in many of the sequences analyzed above, this is clearly the case. As the young girls play with their Slade and Wild figurines, Haynes show his audience the agency that they themselves have in controlling and shaping the mediated figures presented to them. Especially in the character of Arthur Stuart, Velvet Goldmine shows the potential of star images to empower the fan. As Arthur shouts while watching a televised Slade press conference,

“That’s . . . that is me, that!,” showing his intense identification with Slade. (See figure 6-

1 below for this moment in the film.) For Arthur, Slade’s pronouncements about his bisexuality not only resonate, but provide Arthur with a way to shape and express his own nascent sexual confusion. Arthur continues to connect his developing sexuality with the figure of Slade, particularly in the “Baby’s on Fire” sequence. Similarly, in the scene where Arthur purchases Slade’s album, he seems to tacitly accept the conflation of

Slade’s sexuality and his own that prompts the older boys in the record shop to heckle him for his choice of album. This scene, too, is underlined with pre-existing music (the

5 Gilchrist, “Todd Haynes Thanks the Fans.”

6 Todd Haynes, interviewed by Julia Leyda, “‘Something that is Dangerous and Arousing and Transgressive’: An Interview with Todd Haynes,” Bright Lights Film Journal 78 (November 2012).

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band Slade’s “Coz I Love You”), but here its function is much more strictly bounded to communicate the affective relationship between the consumer and the record.7

An alliance with Slade’s star image gives Arthur the freedom to shape an identity for himself. By manipulating the mediated star image he is given, Arthur expresses himself more fully, in much the same way the Haynes’ film encourages its fans to respond. As Cornel Sandvoss states, “fan consumption thus becomes a generally understood language through which one’s identity is communicated and assessed.”8

Arthur’s engagement with Slade fandom allows him to examine an aspect of his identity with which he is struggling and, through his role as fan, find a similar social group that reflects his new identity. Haynes’ film clearly depicts the power of the fan relationship to develop and express identity; through this focus and its semiotic openness, Velvet

Goldmine encourages a particularly free fandom which has flourished in online forums.

Figure 6-1. Arthur’s fan response to Brian Slade’s bisexuality (Velvet Goldmine, directed by Todd Haynes [1998; Los Angeles: Miramax Lionsgate, 2011], Blu Ray).

7 S.N. do Carmo addresses this relationship in greater depth in “Beyond Good and Evil: Mass Culture Theorzied in Todd Haynes’ Velvet Goldmine.” Journal of American & Comparative Cultures 25, no. 3/4 (Fall 2002): 395-398.

8 Cornel Sandvoss, Fans: The Mirror of Consumption (Malden, MA: Polity Press, 2005), 3.

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Two main threads of online fandom define the Velvet Goldmine fan community.

The slash fanfic groups, like listservs vglist and Gliterrati (both now inactive),9 involve a group of fans invested in making alternative narratives involving the film’s characters.

These narratives are explicitly sexual and, typically, show homosexual pairings hinted at or overtly depicted in Velvet Goldmine. The phenomenon of slash fanfic is widespread, with active communities surrounding the Harry Potter characters, for example, while perhaps the most longstanding tradition is that of Star Trek Kirk/Spock slash writing.10

While these are less interesting for my work on the film’s musical appropriation, the

Velvet Goldmine fan writing still shows the agency the film affords to its spectators: while one could argue that this fanfic was spawned simply because of the film’s sexual nature and the attractiveness of its stars, I view it as another concrete manifestation of the active role demanded of the audience in Velvet Goldmine, both during viewing and after. It is the second type of fan site, though, that more directly connects to the sort of work I see the film’s musical appropriation accomplishing.

In his audio commentary for the recent Blu-ray release of the film, Haynes mentions the allusion sites, naming Varda the Message11 in particular.12 Active from

9 More recent examples of this sort of fan fiction can be found on sites like fanfiction.net, but the Velvet Goldmine dedicated sites are now dormant.

10 For a thorough examination of the Star Trek fanfic, see Henry Jenkins, Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture – Updated Twentieth Anniversary Edition (New York: Routledge, 2013), 185-222.

11 Varda the Message’s name is taken from a small instance of Polari in the film. Polari, a hybrid language, was used among Britian’s gay male population during the early 20th century; during this period, the criminalization of homosexuality was at its peak and, for reasons of both self-preservation and community building, Polari played an important role in queer culture. Though it was introduced into mainstream media in the later 20th century, the inclusion of Polari in Velvet Goldmine can be seen as yet another facet in the “queer history reclamation project” Haynes undertakes with the film. For more on Polari’s antecedents and history, see Paul Baker, Polari: the Lost Language of Gay Men (New York: Routledge, 2002).

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2004 to 2005, this Livejournal site posted daily trivia unpacking the images, words, and sounds of Velvet Goldmine. In fact, the site (now inactive but still searchable) is so exhaustive that Haynes himself used its archives to refresh his memory and prep himself to record this new audio commentary. Entirely fan-run and not affiliated with the film or with Haynes, Varda the Message was one of the most complete fan sites, but certainly not the only one. Created at a time when attention to the glam rock era and its stars was only recently revived, sites like Varda the Message required massive amounts of work in order to cull pertinent information and compile it in a way that made sense and was relevant. Haynes has spoken of the difficulty of finding this material in the research and writing stages of Velvet Goldmine’s development;13 many of the same impediments existing for the film’s fans, yet in sites like Varda the Message, a community did this work with no perceivable reward (unlike Haynes and his crew).

Presumably, a shared interest in constructing a history for their community (in the film, online, and perhaps in their everyday lives) prompted the undertaking of such time- consuming research.

The importance of Velvet Goldmine’s online afterlife through such sites is twofold. First, through meticulous chronicling of the film’s many allusions, it points to the sort of semiotic openness that, I argue, allows for a more active audience engagement.

Second and perhaps more importantly, though, Varda the Message and its contemporaries show the true potential of musical appropriation in film: by fostering a

12 Todd Haynes, “Opening Credits (‘Needle in the Camel’s Eye’),” Velvet Goldmine, directed by Todd Haynes (1998; Los Angeles: Miramax Lionsgate, Blu-ray, 2011). See Varda the Message at http://vardathemessage.livejournal.com.

13 Todd Haynes, interviewed by Owen Moverman, in Velvet Goldmine: a Screenplay by Todd Haynes (New York: Miramax Books, 1998), xvi.

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new film/spectator relationship, these musical moments have the potential to mobilize audiences in the real world, away from the relatively isolated experience of viewing a film. These sites’ authors and visitors are actually building a community, brought together by the ideas Haynes explores in Velvet Goldmine. In this way, Haynes’ films show the greatest possibility for action through musical appropriation; indeed, unlike many of the other films discussed in this dissertation, his work has actually prompted real action, beyond newspaper and blog reviews. A notable exception is Mulholland

Drive which, shortly after its release, spawned a number of sites that attempted to

“decode” it and make sense of its obtuse structure and story.14 Lynch’s other work has sometimes prompted a similar response, as in the online presence of Twin Peaks.

These forums, though, tend to comment on plot ambiguity and restrict themselves to canonical discussions rather than the far-reaching connections that typify the Velvet

Goldmine fandom.

Some recent authors have pegged Varda the Message and its ilk as little more than adoring fandom – Rob White, for example, describes the site as approaching the film “as if with valentine hearts in its field of vision.”15 As Varda the Message’s author has pointed out16, White is mistakenly referring to a later Tumblr site, the purpose of which is image gathering, not analysis of the film, as was the original Livejournal platform. Though White dismisses these sites as overly adoring, noncritical fandoms, he

14 See, for example, http://mulholland-drive.net and http://www.davidlynchworld.com. In an uncharacteristic move, Lynch opened the door for such detective work by including with the DVD release a list of 10 clues to unlocking the film.

15 Rob White, Todd Haynes, 57.

16 “Who Breaks a Butterfly on a Wheel,” accessed July 5, 2014, http://vardathemessage.livejournal.com/116211.html.

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fails to recognize the ways the film’s important work is continued through such forums.

Fan sites do not operate within the same institutional strictures as, say, White’s monograph and for this reason are freer to engage with the filmic text in new and different ways. As with the audience-propelled afterlife and transformation of Superstar,

Varda the Message shows the way that the spectator constantly returns to Velvet

Goldmine as a means to “rewrite history.”

New Institutions in New Media

Music’s role in Velvet Goldmine shows the more radical possibilities of musical appropriation in film. More than a mere marker of place, time, or affect, pre-existing music operates here as a way for the spectator to be empowered to create a new narrative, one that is not prescribed by the film or its director. Through the semiotic openness fostered by Velvet Goldmine’s brand of reuse, its audience is not only free, but encouraged to exercise its own authorial voice. In Goldmine fandom, fewer restrictions of “acceptable” behavior exist, unlike in other, more strictly coded online communities.17 Though the film’s multivalent allusions necessitate some coherent interpretation, it is through Haynes’ construction of a free space for that meaning- making that the audience is able to engage in a new way. When audiences respond on their blogs and in their listservs, they are in many ways stepping beyond the bounds of institutional interpretation and creating their own “schools” of thought and reaction.

If, as David Bordwell’s Making Meaning asserts, “the institution sets the goals” for interpretation, in Velvet Goldmine’s wake we see fewer institutionalized strictures, at

17 See, for example, Lucy Bennet’s research into R.E.M. online communities in “Researching Online Fandoms,” Cinema Journal 52, no. 4 (Summer 2013), 129-134; or Henry Jenkins’ assertion of the “deeply social” norms of meaning-making in fandoms in Textual Poachers, xiv.

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least in the fan response.18 Traditional “institutionalized” critics did follow prescribed avenues of discourse about Haynes’ work, while audience response to the film tended to be much more free-wheeling, associative, and personal. While Ebert sought to ground Haynes’ film in Bowie’s biography, Hoberman looked to its filmic predecessors, and academics spoke of its sexual politics, audiences spun out Haynes’ stories in new directions on their internet platforms. Rather than following sanctioned modes of interpretation, spectators took Haynes’ filmic example and worked through their own ideas through the mediated figures of Slade, Wild, and Stuart.

Fan responses to Velvet Goldmine take criticism in a not institutionally sanctioned direction while still incorporating certain focuses and modes of rhetoric that are widely accepted. Though responses to the film may be freer, they are still typically framed in accepted forms, as slash fanfic or blog posts cataloguing the film’s many allusions. If, following Bordwell, we can see various institutional schools of criticism as forming endless feedback loops, online fan responses to this film have in some ways stepped beyond these boundaries.19 Since fan responses proliferate outside these strictures, they are freer in their language and approach; many, though, still default to the academic language of semiotics and gender discourse that is so frequently applied to Velvet Goldmine, a response likely stimulated by Haynes’ own comments on the film.20 In the freedom of a landscape where reviews, however unpopular or against

18 David Bordwell, Making Meaning: Inference and Rhetoric in the Interpretation of Cinema (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989), 18.

19 Bordwell, Making Meaning, 28-29.

20 A graduate of Brown University’s art and semiotics programs, Haynes tends to speak in the academic jargon of the field – a fact that might support Bordwell’s assertion that the institutions of interpretation feed back into themselves as they train the next generation of filmmakers. Despite this connection to the ivory tower world of film reading, Haynes’ works manage to move his spectator to a different sort of response.

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current trends, can be freely published without needing to find a suitable journal, newspaper, or cadre of other authors to give it a platform, audience responses have become both more personal and more inventive. Rather than following Mulvey’s call to take pleasure out of viewing film, or Bordwell’s to remove pleasure from interpretation

(turning instead to a historical poetics),21 these new responses revel in both.

Conclusion

While Velvet Goldmine’s fan response is striking and somewhat revolutionary, it is already somewhat dated: the platforms chosen by these initial respondents are outdated and somewhat clunky compared to more contemporary options (after all,

Varda the Message began more than ten years ago). In the interim, though, few similar audience communities have taken its place: internet fandoms run rampant, of course, but few are of the same level of sophistication or musical engagement as the Velvet

Goldmine community. While these responses show an exciting new avenue for spectator-film relationships, they are still somewhat isolated occurrences. We might attribute their rarity to Haynes’ still uncommonly sophisticated and complex musical appropriation. Though the three filmmakers addressed in this dissertation do form a sort of small-scale movement, their approach to pre-existing music is still the exception rather than the norm. As all three directors are still active (to a greater or lesser extent22), this trend may yet continue to grow in their work and that of their contemporaries.

21 Bordwell, Making Meaning, 265.

22 While Haynes and Malick both have feature film projects in production at the moment of this writing, Lynch has lately concentrated on smaller projects – long-form commercials for Dior and other brands, music videos (for Nine Inch Nails and Duran Duran), and his work with the David Lynch Foundation for transcendental meditation. It is rumored, though, that he will return to television in 2016 to revive Twin Peaks for a nine-episode run.

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While the compilation soundtrack certainly continues to be popular, it is my hope that the nuanced appropriation shown in the films of Malick, Lynch, and Haynes will continue to gain traction in mainstream Hollywood film. As the preceding case studies have shown, pre-existing music in movies has the potential to mobilize attendant meanings and memories with an immediacy and freedom not accessible to other modes of communication. This openness, however, is not the default setting for musical appropriation, and is certainly not the goal of most filmmakers in including well-known music. In the work of Malick, Lynch, and particularly Haynes, filmmaking decisions amplify the semiotic potential of music and encourage hermetic drift. With this freedom, the audience’s relationship to film is fundamentally changed. Authorial spectatorship is not only encouraged, but frequently required in order to make sense of these films. In this way, musical appropriation can aspire to become the sort of “radical weapon”

Mulvey foresaw, truly capitalizing on the communicative power of music to open new avenues of audience engagement.

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BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH

Katherine Reed earned her Ph.D. in music in the spring of 2015 from the University of

Florida, where she served as a graduate teaching fellow. She is also an active performer and trombone instructor, holding an M.M. in trombone performance from the

University of Missouri - Kansas City. Katherine has presented her research at musicology, cinema studies, and popular music conferences in North America and abroad. Her primary research interest is music in film; her other musicological work investigates meaning and identity in popular music, particularly that of 1970s Britain.

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