MUSICAL AESTHETICS IN ALEX NORTH’S SCORE FOR THE BAD SEED

A THESIS SUBMITTED TO THE GRADUATE DIVISION OF THE UNIVERSITY OF HAWAIʻI AT MĀNOA IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF

MASTER OF ARTS

IN

MUSIC

DECEMBER 2020

By

Johnette Makamaeakahaioʻkahoʻoponoponookapunahelekupuʻokaaina Martin

Thesis Committee:

Kate McQuiston, Chairperson Elina Hamilton, Committee Member Maya Hoover, Committee Member Takuma Itoh, Committee Member

Keywords: Alex North, film score, Bad Seed, musical aesthetics

Acknowledgments

Throughout the research and writing of this thesis I have received a great deal of support and assistance.

I would first like to thank the expert on this thesis, my mentor and advisor, Dr. Kate McQuiston, whose expertise was invaluable in formulating the research questions and methodology. Your insightful feedback pushed me to sharpen my skills and thinking and brought my work to higher level to best prepare me for the future. Your patience and understanding was always appreciated.

I would like to thank my current defense committee, Dr. Elina Hamilton, Dr. Maya Hoover, and

Dr. Takuma Itoh and former member, Dr. Thomas Osborne for their patience and understanding.

This project was quite a lengthy process and I am grateful for any and all feedback and support.

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Abstract

The Bad Seed is an American, female-centered psychological thriller that aestheticizes attitudes toward 1950s gender roles. Director, Meryn Leroy, and composer, Alex North, tap into a fear of the young character, Rhoda as a threat, but more so, a fear for the character, Christine as a person and a mother. My work demonstrates how North contributes to female-centered film aesthetics by offering sympathetic consideration for female characters through his original music. Through critical analysis of genre-specific film and its music in the example of Mervyn

Leroy’s The Bad Seed, I demonstrate aesthetic connections between Alex North’s The Bad Seed score and the psychological thriller genre.

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CONTENTS

Abstract…………………………………………………………………………………………. ii

Acknowledgements…………………………………………………………………………….. iii

Table of Illustrations…………………………………………………………………………... vi

Introduction………………….…………………………………...………………………………1

1.1 Statement of the Thesis….………………………………...……...………….………..1

1.2 Significance of the Study………………...……………………………………………2

1.3 Genre.……………………………………...... ………..………………………………6

1.4 Aesthetics……………………..…………………………………………………….…7

1.5 The Classical Hollywood model and film score………………………………………8

1.6 Music and Cultural Codes………………..….……………………………………….11

1.7 Juxtaposition…………………………………………………..……………………..13

1.8 Literature Review………………………………………...... ………….……………..14

1.9 Overview of Chapters………………………………………………………………..24

Chapter 1: Film Music in the Psychological Thriller and Antecedent Genres………….….26

2.1 Film Music…………………………………………………………………..……….26

2.2 Horror in Music………………………………………………………...……………27

2.3 The Organ……………...…………………………………………………………….29

2.4 Horror as Film……………………………………………………...……………..….31

2.5 1930s and 1940s Horror and the Classical Hollywood Score………….……….…....33

2.6 Woman’s Film and Film Noir………………………………………………….….…36

2.7 The Psychological Thriller…………………………………………………..……....40

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2.8 1950s Horror……………………….……………………………………………..…43

2.9 Woman and the Horror Film…………………………….……………...…....…...…45

2.10 Film Music of the Psychological Thriller and Antecedent Genres……..…....…...…47

2.11 1960s Feminism and Film……………….……………………………………….…55

Chapter 2: Anempathetic Music and Musical Characterization in The Bad Seed……..…..58

Chapter 3: Conclusion…………………………………………….………………..……..……88

Appendix………………………………………………………………………………..…….…94

Bibliography…………………..……………………………………………………..…..…...…95

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TABLE OF ILLUSTRATIONS

Example 2.1 “Basket of Kisses” embodies Christine’s hopes and desires……………………....75

Figure 2.1 Christine protects Rhoda as well as herself by giving her a dangerous amount of sleeping pills. The Bad Seed, Warner Bros. Pictures……………………………..……….……..78

Example 2.2 “Au Clair de la Lune” represents Rhoda’s mask of deception….…..…….…….…80

Example 2.3 “Confession” represents the circular games Rhoda plays in attempt to avoid the truth……………………………………………………………………………………………....81

Figure 2.2 Christine still hears “the man screaming” and asks Monica to make Rhoda stop playing that tune, while Monica dismissively talks over her. The Bad Seed, Warner Bros. Pictures, 1956……………………………………….……………………………..………….…82

Figure 2.3 The truth about Rhoda comes to a head when Christine witnesses the aftermath of Rhoda’s nature during Leroy’s fiery death. The Bad Seed, Warner Bros. Pictures, 1956….....…84

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Musical Aesthetics in Alex North’s Score for The Bad Seed

Music as part of the classical Hollywood film characterization reinforces in aesthetic form the gender assumptions and expectations of female characters in 1950s American films.

Composer Alex North relies on classical Hollywood conventions such as emphasizing narrative or dramatic elements through coordination of music and image. North departs from classical

Hollywood conventions by connecting the listener to the cinematic universe through the appeal to emotion in his work. North also deviates from the classical Hollywood score with unexpected placement and style choices of music for scenes of emotional importance. North’s choice of musical style demonstrates his compassion and understanding of the female character, in contrast to approaches that use music to direct interpretations by establishing mood, atmosphere, time, and location according to conventions in the classical Hollywood score. North invites the listener to expand their interpretive possibilities. The unexpected gentleness of his musical style in the context of the protagonist’s revelation and the threat’s exposure helps thematize a moral dilemma of the main character, and contributes to an aesthetic tension, both of which are defining characteristics of the psychological thriller. North’s The Bad Seed score is particularly significant because his music initially presents classical Hollywood score conventions, but these gradually transform over time and variations, conveying Christine’s gradual realizations and

Rhoda’s increased capacity for evil. The themes change as character experiences change, signaling a shift in the character’s perception. The audience experiences their own gradual changes as they observe and question the changes of the characters over time.

The purpose of this thesis is to illuminate the aesthetics of music in the female-centered psychological thriller genre in the 1950s, and Alex North’s contribution to a particular approach in the example of The Bad Seed. I focus on American films in this category because of their

1 production context under the patriarchal cultural mores of the 1950s.1 My analysis of Mervyn

Leroy’s The Bad Seed (1956) will show how historical context influences the female-centered psychological thriller film. Leroy’s social commentary of 1950s American societal expectations of women is a large factor in female character vulnerability and victimhood. The female-centered

The Bad Seed and its score fit within the classical Hollywood style overall, however, this very style and the familiarity of its principles allows for the contrasting with Michel Chion’s anempathetic effect as aesthetic. There are several scenes featuring horrific drama accompanied by gentle music. The anempathetic effect is a distinguishing characteristic of the psychological thriller soundtrack in contrast to the horror soundtrack. My analysis demonstrates how North’s score addresses contemporary gender expectations with respect to female characters in American psychological thriller films in this decade. I demonstrate how musical thematic material and style serve aural representations of female character’s emotions and experiences in psychological thriller films. I apply 1950s American social gender expectations of women as mothers to the character of Christine Penmark from the work of feminist, Betty Friedan, and feminist film theorists, Laura Mulvey and Mary Ann Doane. In 1950s American culture, women were expected to assume roles as satisfied and contented wives and mothers. Alex North maximizes his skill for music placements and characterization by musically questioning these societal expectations in a narrative in which the domestic is deadly.

The main questions that drive this thesis are: What are the predominant qualities and techniques of psychological thriller film music? How do film characters elicit music qualities?

How did societal issues effect instrumentation and style choices? Chapter one presents historical

1 1950s American female centered psychological thriller films include David Miller’s Sudden Fear (1952), Roy Ward Baker’s Don’t Bother Knocking (1952), Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window (1954), and Vertigo (1958).

2 background on music in film and music in the psychological thriller and its antecedent genres.

Chapter two presents an analytical case study of The Bad Seed to qualify female representation in psychological thriller films. The result will be a finer understanding of psychological thriller film music, especially its effects and importance in capturing attitudes and experiences of mid- century American women, even in light of the patriarchal framework. It is important to note that

The Bad Seed exemplifies male contributions that were sympathetic to women, including those of Alex North. Alex North’s projects, especially after 1948, demonstrate film choices, favoring the outsider characters. This thesis contributes to the growing vibrant field of film-music studies, from which I draw for analytical methods of scene analysis and musical analysis for both psychological thriller films and music. The current study furthers an understanding of the female-centered psychological thriller, its social significance, and the importance of their musical representation of female characters.

The Bad Seed into a successful stage melodrama in 1955 by Maxwell Anderson. In turn,

The Bad Seed became a masterpiece of psychological thriller cinema in 1956, under the direction of Mervyn LeRoy, a veteran Hollywood director with a background in vaudeville. The main subjects of dialogue in The Bad Seed include repressed memories, Freudian techniques, and individual psychological revelations. The Bad Seed plot centers on the story of housewife and mother, Christine Penmark. Christine lives in seemingly domestic bliss with a loving husband and the perfect daughter, Rhoda. Rhoda appears to have the life that every little girl would want as a learned young pianist with loving parents and the admiration of most of the adults she encounters, with the exception of Ms. Fern at her school and Leroy, the maintenance man of their family home. Rhoda is the only child to Christine and husband, Colonel Kenneth Penmark.

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Kenneth is a loving husband and father that is absent in the home frequently as he works to provide for his family.

Free association suggested by Christine’s landlord, Monica Breedlove, during a luncheon with their personal social circle is an example of the included Freudian techniques in the dialogue and narrative. The goal is to find the root of Christine’s anxiety using free association through Reggie Tasker’s (a family friend) account of a news story about murder. Free association is also introduced as a solution to Christine’s repressed memory associated with the subject of murder. The free association scene also serves as an avenue for exposing events in

Christine’s childhood leading up to her adoption. In a subsequent scene, “Not A Dream,”

Christine’s memory is liberated due to her recollection of a recurring dream when seeking comfort from her adopted father, Richard Bravo. The recollection reveals that Rhoda’s maternal grandmother was a notorious serial killer. Christine’s adopted father, Richard, dotes on her, characterizing her as “the best thing to happen to him” and “the best little girl.” Richard also belittles Christine by deflecting and dismissing her desire to know the identities of her biological parents. Christine experiences a breakthrough by realizing her dream was actually a memory.

The memory reveals Christine’s mother through the recollection of her birth name. This genealogical discovery validates her repressed memories associated with murder and her suspicion that she is responsible for Rhoda’s behavior.

Rhoda kills her classmate, Claude Daigle, by hitting him with her tap shoes as she later admits and manages to get away with it. Leroy sees Rhoda skipping to the park merely hours after she murdered Claude. Her demeanor confirms for Leroy and the audience Rhoda’s true nature. Christine believes she has passed on a murderous gene from her own mother, but it seems to have skipped Christine’s generation. Christine struggles with the idea that her daughter is

4 innately a murderess (nature) because of Rhoda’s loving and supportive surrounding environment (nurture) would discourage it. Although the revelation gives her mental anguish,

Christine resolves to confront the situation after visually and musically spinning out of control to

Rhoda’s manic playing of “Au Clair de la Lune.” The film trajectory follows Christine’s realization about Rhoda’s actual sociopathic personality and its origin, Christine’s unanswered pleas for help of a dismissive husband and an oblivious landlord, and the final outcome.

Christine’s attempted murder-suicide fails with the final outcomes being the elimination of the threat when Rhoda is struck by lightning and dies.

A hallmark of the psychological thriller is the narrative basis in a seemingly normal reality that hides a darker truth. Psychological thrillers center on dread and deception that threaten social and personal identity. The aesthetic experience of the psychological thriller is the awakening or change in perspective and inquisitiveness brought on by ambiguity. Both the psychological thriller and its music capitalize on dichotomy and ambiguity in comparison to other film genres; for example, in narratives that oppose antagonist and victim, the psychological thriller may complicate the audience’s ability to tell antagonist from victim, as in Alfred

Hitchcock’s Rear Window and Dial M for Murder (both 1954). In the analyzed example, The

Bad Seed, this juxtaposition affects the credibility of the protagonist as a heroine. The credibility of women is important to this project as it is a direct reflection of the position of women relative to men in 1950s American society. American patriarchal ideologies painted women as inferior to men, which is apparent in The Bad Seed in the husband and step-father, who dismiss Christine, and the oblivious landlord that belittles her when she voices her concerns about Rhoda.

I build on the support of scholarly findings about genre, aesthetics, classic Hollywood film music, woman’s film music, film noir music, and horror-film music to position Alex North’s

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The Bad Seed with psychological thriller aesthetics. The psychological thriller film genre depends heavily on music and sound for its effects. This study adds to the growing scholarship on the horror film and its music. A large proportion of scholarship on the horror film emphasizes the tropes of the male threat and the female victim. As horror is a sister genre to the psychological thriller and both include the threat and victim in narratives, the scholarship on the horror film provides foundation for research with respect to the main concerns of psychological thrillers. This thesis illuminates how music and sound operates in the female-centered psychological thriller film genre in the context of the United States’ film industry and societal norms of the 1950s.

Genre

The classical Hollywood style favors specific topics, character types, and narrative shapes. According to visual semiotician, Daniel Chandler, a genre, “in literary, film, and aesthetic theory, is a type of text recognized by particular conventions of form and content which are shared by other texts of that type, e.g., westerns, thrillers, historical romances.”2 Film scholar,

Murray Leeder, states that “a single convention may exist in multiple genres, but have different significance in each genre.”3 All Hollywood narrative films presume a linear timeline, with possible exceptions for flashbacks or speculations about the future.4 Genres, however, may differ regarding how time plays into character or audience experience. The psychological thriller prioritizes time to reveal information and experiences of the characters, favoring flashbacks and gradual realizations in the interest of testing a suspicion or hypothesis. In the horror film, the

2 Daniel Chandler and Rod Munday, “Genre,” Oxford Dictionary of Media and Communication (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011). 3 Murray Leeder, Horror Film: A Critical Introduction (New York: Bloomsbury, 2018), 92. 4 Jack Conway and Robert Leonard’s A Tale of Two Cities (1935) and Frank Capra’s It’s a Wonderful Life (1946) are violations of linearity, an area of creative storytelling with respect to time.

6 momentary pace sets the drama. The protagonist’s experience in form of revelations, realizations, and rationalizations are an important condition for the character and audience to simultaneously share in the psychological thriller, unlike the localized expectations of many moments in the horror film.

Conventions permit the audience members to identify the genre and expect particular aesthetic experiences. Shared conventions or expectations likewise apply to the film music of each film genre. The formulaic nature of Hollywood genres provides expectation generating scenarios in its films and occasions for film music, whether that means following rules or breaking them. The psychological thriller conventions lend to the genre’s potential to signal, and to provoke inquisitive intrigue.

Aesthetics

Psychological thrillers value the aesthetic experience of ambiguity, unease from moral dilemma, and inquisitive intrigue. Aesthetics are going to be judged according to genre, genre expectations, and women’s experience. Aesthetics is an area of philosophy dedicated to conceptual and theoretical inquiry into art and experience through numerous academic disciplines and cultural traditions. Philosopher, Jerrod Levinson, allocates aesthetics as “a certain kind of property, feature or aspect of things such as grace or beauty or dynamism.”5 According to philosopher, Alan Goldman, the aesthetic attitude is necessary or typical in perceiving the properties or generating experiences.6 I apply the conceptual inquiry of art and experience of aesthetics to the 1950s psychological thriller, The Bad Seed and its music with respect to gender.

I select and analyze scenes from The Bad Seed film that exemplify the expectations in

5 Jerrod Levinson, “Philosophical Aesthetics: An Overview,” The Oxford Handbook of Aesthetics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 3-4. 6 Alan Goldman, “The Aesthetic,” The Routledge Companion to Aesthetics (New York: Routledge, 2001), 181.

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1950s America of the female role of wife and mother. The selected scenes of The Bad Seed illustrate both visually and musically the contemporary societal expectations of women as mothers and provoke the psychological thriller aesthetic experience. The subtopic of aesthetics is important to this work because it establishes the audience member’s expected experience of the film as it relates to its given genre. Through the genre’s conventions, the audience member interprets the familiar signals throughout the film leading up to the expected effects and experience. In the case of the psychological thriller and The Bad Seed, the audience expects the aesthetic experience to include misdirection, intrigue, unease, and a particular emphasis on the unfolding of information over time and moment of discovery. The music of the selected scenes of The Bad Seed signal a mother-child relationships and inform the drama onscreen regarding moral dilemma from a mother’s point of experience. North’s sympathetic consideration of

Christine’s character provides a process of inquiry and experience for the audience through

Christine’s experience.

Classical Hollywood Film

In order to show the significant departures of genre conventions and compassionate aesthetic experience of The Bad Seed film as a psychological thriller, I make comparisons between the psychological thriller and the classical Hollywood film, woman’s film, film noir, and horror film. These comparisons help illuminate origin and commonalities as well as departures. “The classical Hollywood film, a product of the classical Hollywood era from 1915 to 1960, aims for continuity and the idea of absorbing the spectator into the fictive world by hiding the apparatus of storytelling.”7 The classical Hollywood film appeals to emotion, and offers unambiguous narratives. The narrative trajectory of the classical Hollywood film along

7 David Bordwell, “An excessively obvious cinema,” The Classical Hollywood Cinema: Film Style & Mode of Production to 1960 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985), 3.

8 with many other aspects of this style persists in filmmaking and other media forms. The combined work of David Bordwell, Janet Staiger, and Kristin Thompson in the study, The

Classical Hollywood Cinema: Film Style & Mode of Production to 1960 first coins the term,

“classical Hollywood.” Bordwell links the term to “decorum, proportion, formal harmony, respect for tradition, mimesis, self-effacing craftsmanship, and cool control of the viewer’s response.”8 Narrative trajectory refers to the series of events or the sequence of the plot that creates highs and lows and engages the audience. Bordwell also establishes that the “classical

Hollywood film purports to be ‘realistic.’”9 Classical Hollywood films created an illusion of realism through the manipulation of temporal linearity and spatial continuity.

The classical Hollywood film model assumes that the protagonist and antagonist are obviously characterized by stereotypes of good and evil, which later develop into character tropes. The Bad Seed questions and criticizes the perfect daughter trope and the contented wife and mother trope, initially portraying the female characters as ideal candidates, living up to patriarchal gender expectations. The patriarchal standards of the classical Hollywood film influence the trajectory to be interpreted as Oedipal trajectory. According to Daniel Chandler’s entry in the Oxford Dictionary of Media and Communication, Oedipal trajectory is:

A simplistic psychoanalytical interpretation of classical narrative structure in mainstream cinema, in which (as in many action films) a male protagonist has to face a crisis, usually resolving it, winning a woman, gaining the approval of a senior male, and achieving closure. This pattern is argued to enact the Freudian Oedipus complex in which a boy struggles to detach himself from his mother in order to attain a heterosexual masculine identity.10

8 Bordwell, The Classical Hollywood Cinema, 3. 9 Bordwell, The Classical Hollywood Cinema, 3. 10 Daniel Chandler, “Oedipal trajectory,” Oxford Dictionary of Media and Communication (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011).

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This definition only applies to the male protagonist, ignoring the possibility of a female protagonist and the hope for her triumph. The woman’s film challenges this with female protagonists, but the patriarchal ideologies controlling the trajectory allowed only women that concluded with marriage and children for a happy ending. Classical Hollywood films depicted single mothers, career women of the woman’s film or women celebrating sexual freedom as unsatisfied and unfeminine.11 The Bad Seed’s Christine exemplifies this standard and lives through her suicide ordeal. The film ends with no consideration of Christine’s life after her suicide attempt and the death of her daughter, Rhoda. Her child dies after being struck by lightning and she is expected to return to her “happy and satisfied” life. Even after the last scene and the end credits, Leroy adds a comical scene to ease the audience’s anxiety; however, this reinforces the “happy and satisfied” ending, the classical Hollywood presumption of contented motherhood.

Like the classical Hollywood film, the classical Hollywood film score has its own conventions, the employment of nondigetic original and pre-existing music chief among them.

Film scholar, Kathryn Kalinak, states the conventions of the classical Hollywood film score include, “the use of music to sustain structural unity; music to illustrate narrative content, both implicit and explicit, including a high degree of direct synchronization between music and narrative action, and the privilege of dialogue over other elements of the soundtrack.”12 The classical Hollywood film score is predominantly symphonic and based on techniques that originate in art music in the Romantic era. The leitmotif is a theme that adds to the unity of the

11 Single mothers such as Joan Crawford’s character in Michael Curtiz’s Mildred Pierce (1945) and career women such as Katherine Hepburn’s character in George Steven’s Woman of the Year (1941). 12 Kathryn Kalinak, Settling the Score: Music and the Classical Hollywood Film (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1992), 79.

10 classical Hollywood film and score.13 The primary function of the leitmotif in the classical

Hollywood film is to communicate a character’s personality, mentality, and morals and suggests connections with other characters. Kalinak explains, “Composers created musical identifications for characters, places, and even abstract ideas in a film.”14 Characters in the classical Hollywood style possess salient traits that they confirm through their speech and behavior. Music reflects particular traits such as in the leitmotif, whether that character or incident happens once or multiple times, without necessitating the appearance of the character. Connections unifying characters and musical themes are successfully accomplished in The Bad Seed through leitmotifs for Christine and Rhoda. The “Au Clair de La Lune” melody auspiciously signals to Rhoda’s character even in moments of variation, no matter how much of the melody North includes.

Unity in the classical Hollywood film synchronized the image with music, sound, and action.

Music and Cultural Codes

Classical Hollywood film scores are effective in large part due to cultural associations or conditioned responses established by cultural beliefs. These cultural connections found in

Hollywood genres create aesthetic experiences through the melody, instrumentation, and style of music employed, firmly directing the audience’s interpretation of the narrative and characters.

Film-music scholar, Claudia Gorbman, describes cultural associations as “cultural musical codes that elicit enculturated reactions.”15 Interpretation differs for each listener depending on cultural perspective and historical context. An acquaintance with the psychological thriller score

13 According to Arnold Whittall, leitmotif is a theme, or other coherent musical idea, clearly defined so as to retain its identity if modified on subsequent appearances, whose purpose is to represent or symbolize a person, object, place, idea, state of mind, supernatural force or any other ingredient in a dramatic work. Arnold Whittall, Leitmotif, https://doiorg.eres.library.manoa.hawaii.edu/10.1093/gmo/9781561592630.article.16360, 20 January 2001. 14 Kalinak, Settling the Score, 105. 15 Claudia Gorbman, Unheard Melodies: Narrative Film Music (Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1987), 13.

11 characteristics is a factor in their effectiveness for the informed audience member, in order to achieve the aesthetic experience of inquisitive intrigue and changed perspective.

Cultural codes appear in the classical Hollywood film score styles of original and pre- existing music. Kathryn Kalinak remarks on the effect of musical style with respect to the main character of Otto Preminger’s Laura (1944). Kalinak explains that director, Otto Preminger, suggested either “Summertime” by George and Ira Gershwin or “Sophisticated Lady” by Duke

Ellington for Laura’s theme song. Film composer, David Raksin, however, objected to

“Sophisticated Lady,” as Kalinak puts it “precisely because it embodied what he has called, ‘the usual Hollywood approach to a woman of relatively easy virtue,’ and because he wished to compose an original theme.16 Kalinak clarifies that, “the classical Hollywood score frequently encoded otherness through the common denominator of jazz. The classical score used jazz as a musical trope for otherness, whether sexual or racial. Difference could thus be encoded into a text not only by visual representation but by music as well.”17 Kalinak even quotes a disagreement between Preminger and Raskin, where Preminger makes assumptions with respect to Laura’s sexual experiences and freedom, to which Raskin questions him. Kalinak’s example of the main theme in Laura demonstrates musical style functioning as characterization. Her example also shows that female characters were approached simplistically, and according to their sexuality.

Alex North creates music that accommodates the trajectory of character experiences and emotions through musical style and technique. North takes on projects that consider the experience of outsider characters. Films made after the Paramount decrees gave soundtracks

16 Kalinak, Settling the Score, 166-167. 17 Kalinak, Settling the Score, 167.

12 more freedom to deploy music without justification through dialogue. The Paramount decrees of

1948 changed how films were distributed and they dismantled the hold the eight film studios had on the Hollywood film industry.18 The Paramount decrees provided creative freedom, for example, to directors, producers, writers, composers, and other personnel to choose the projects they work on, no matter the studio. The classical Hollywood film model dominated film structure until 1960. French New Wave soon influenced the classical Hollywood model and influenced

New Hollywood in the mid-1960s. New Hollywood brings in fresh production and marketing approaches, while critics styled the director as an auteur. The creative freedom from the

Paramount decrees gives Leroy and North the opportunity to work together on The Bad Seed through Warner Brothers Studios, but also for North to be particular with respect to the projects he worked on.

Juxtaposition

Juxtaposition occurs when two things are compared side by side to demonstrate how they contrast in literature, film, and film music. A popular example in film is the shower scene montage in Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960). Juxtaposition contributes to music’s ability to affect the audience through aesthetics as both listeners and viewers. Michel Chion’s concept,

“anempathetic effect,” and film and music scholar, Claudia Gorbman’s “mutual implication” both pertain to relationships of juxtaposition.19 Gorbman states that instances of juxtaposition

“testify to the power of music which blissfully lacks awareness or empathy,” with respect to the narrative. Some examples of juxtaposition involve music playing against cultural codes. The Bad

Seed (1956) and Rosemary’s Baby (1968) contain familiar types of children’s music placed in

18 US Department of Justice, “The Paramount Decrees,” February 6, 2020, https://www.justice.gov/atr/paramount- decree-review. 19 Gorbman, Unheard Melodies, 159; Michel Chion, Audio-Vision: Sound on Screen (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 38.

13 moments of horror and violence to create a musical mood that appears indifferent to the predominant affect. In the context of horror or psychological thriller music, the genres of children’s songs and lullabies do not fit cultural codes; these genres typically denote innocence, but a musical choice alone cannot determine whether the context fits into the category of juxtaposition, anempathetic music or both. The combination of music and drama onscreen creates juxtaposition and leads to interpretation.

When the audience experiences emotions disparate of the action, the music becomes anempathetic because of the juxtaposition of visual and music. In Rosemary’s Baby (1968), the title character is an innocent young lady who births the spawn of Satan and becomes terrified at the sight of her newborn. She later hums the lullaby from the opening credits and creates an aesthetic experience of unease because of her maternal acceptance and love demonstrated through the lullaby juxtaposed with Rosemary holding the devil’s child. In The Bad Seed, Rhoda

Penmark initially appears to be an innocent child. She is eventually revealed to master playing a child’s folk song on the piano as an accompaniment to murderous behavior. The folk song initially plays in its original form, but North gradually alters and adapts it with dissonance and virtuosity to reveal the true nature of the murderer. Juxtaposition affects the horror of The Bad

Seed and Rosemary’s Baby, because the point of experiences for each film is the horror of the respective mother characters, Christine and Rosemary, which eventually becomes acceptance and love.

Literature Review

Film music literature has developed into studies according to composer, genre, time period, and other criteria. The following literature review focuses upon research in film studies, musicology, and horror film music scholarship because it is the area most closely related to the

14 psychological thriller. In order for my study to successfully examine the musical aesthetics of the psychological thriller and composer, Alex North’s diatonic melodies as anempathetic music, my discussion addresses scholarship on a variety of areas throughout the thesis. Scholarly studies that furnish my discussion cover anemapathetic music, Michel Chion’s anempathetic effect, silent film and music, classical Hollywood film and music, genre-centered musicological and film research, extensive research of Alex North’s original film scores, music and ambiguity, music in film’s possibilities in emotion and interpretation, and female characterization in 1940s woman’s film scores.

In 1982, film-music scholar, Royal S. Brown examined the music of composer, Bernard

Herrmann in the films of director, Alfred Hitchcock. Brown demonstrates parallels between the

“tension of mythic irrationality and artisan rationality”20 in Greek tragedy and Hitchcock films with the solidifying factor being music. Brown comments on Herrmann’s skill in film scores after The Trouble with Harry (1955) for making “musical standards work against their normalcy” as common in Western diatonic harmonies would return to the tonic or tonal center melodically.21 Brown next focuses on Herrmann’s preference to end on a seventh note of a melody or a triad in the harmony. This dissonant treatment highlights the moment because of the relationship of the pitch, triad, or tritone with the surrounding music, causing returning unease and ambiguity with its repetitive nature. These psychological thriller score aestheticized these musical elements, as well as leitmotif and the short phrase and melody functioning as a coherency factor in the film score. Brown’s study demonstrates music in film’s possibilities in

20 Royal S. Brown, “Herrmann, Hitchcock, and the Music of the Irrational,” Cinema Journal 21, No. 2 (Spring 1982): 15. 21 Brown, “Herrmann, Hitchcock, and the Music of the Irrational,” 19.

15 emotion and interpretation, along with the established musical aesthetics of the psychological thriller film score and the psychological thriller theme of departing from normalcy.

In 1987, film-music scholar, Claudia Gorbman’s groundbreaking work brought the attention of cultural criticism to the field of film music with Unheard Melodies.22 Gorbman’s theoretical principals became a standard of film music theoretical study. For the purpose of this literature review, Gorbman’s most important claim concerns the psychoanalytical concept of suture, which demonstrates the relationship of pleasure and music and identification and subjectivity in the spectator and music. Gorbman establishes music’s ability to provoke emotion through its indifference. The concepts of juxtaposition and anempathetic music are at the center of my study of psychological thriller film music and the analysis of Alex North’s The Bad Seed film score.

After Gorbman’s work, it would be a few years until the next landmark study from film- music scholar, Kathryn Kalinak. Kalinak’s 1992 book, Settling the Score: Music and the

Classical Hollywood Film establishes film music as a signifier of affect and spectator identification and harbinger of expression, important to filmmaking and film study. Kalinak’s work covers music in the silent film era, music in the classical Hollywood era, comparisons of the silent era musical accompaniment practices and the classical Hollywood scoring practices, musical characterization, and analysis of musical styles in selected scores. Kalinak’s chapter covering musical characterization and musical style proves particularly helpful to my study as foundation for my discussion as her work substantially adds to the film-music scholarship on silent-era film music and music of the classical Hollywood era.

22 Claudia Gorbman, Unheard Melodies: Narrative Film Music (Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1987).

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In 1994, Chion’s Audio-Vision established another understanding of how sound relates to the image onscreen with his argument that sound in film provides a new point of experience and a vast possibility for emotion.23 In his argument, he presents his concept of “anempathetic effect,” which substantiates the presentation of sound and image’s ability to create potentiality in boundless affective exegesis. Chion’s term and argument proves useful for analysis of all film music in any Hollywood and non-Hollywood genre.

After the work of film-music scholar, Kathryn Kalinak, the silent film era musical accompaniment practices gains a spotlight with musicologist, Martin Miller Marks’s work.

Mraks details aspects of the silent film era’s musical accompaniment practices with analysis of the music and the drama onscreen. Musicologist, Martin Miller Marks’s extensive analytical work, Music and the Silent Film: Contexts & Case Studies, 1895-1924, enriches film music scholarship with respect to the silent film.24 Marks details the deceptive nature of the term, silent film, as even the earliest motion pictures featured live musical accompaniment. This is a reworking of his 1990 dissertation, Film Music of the Silent Period, 1895-1924. Marks also points out the somewhat elusive documentation of the Silent Film era with respect to the earliest twentieth century film music scores and practices.

Film-music scholar, Robynn Stilwell’s critique of literature written about music in film provides a helpful reference and meticulous reviews. Stilwell’s “Music in Films: A Critical

Review of Literature, 1980-1996,” is divided into sections including “The Silent Film Era,

General Reference Sources, Surveys, Biographies and Interviews, Film Music Society

23 Michel Chion, Audio-Vision: Sound on Screen (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994). 24 Martin Miller Marks, Music and the Silent Film: Contexts & Case Studies, 1895-1924 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997).

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Newsletters, Magazines, and the Internet, Historical Aspects, Theory, Aesthetics, and Analysis,

Pedagogy, Sociology and Cultural Studies.”25 Stilwell’s work addresses milestones and problems within the film-music scholarship, starting even before the time span given in her article’s title.

Film studies scholar, Heather Laing’s examination with respect to gender and classical

Hollywood film scoring practices provides a benchmark for my study and any research focusing on gender and musical characterization. Laing’s The Gendered Score: Music in 1940s

Melodrama and the Woman’s Film examines film music as a signifier for emotion, specifically as it applies to the gender of characters through three stages: “cultural-historical precedents, the generic parameters of melodrama and the woman’s film through diegetic performance and the presence of musicians as characters.”26 Laing analyzes the text and music of specific films of the classical Hollywood era through the narrative lens of music, emotion, and women. Laing’s work informs my study of female characters and musical depiction by providing a foundation for gendered study of film music.

Genre-centered musicological research and collections popularized with works like

Kathryn Kalinak’s How the West was Sung: Music in the Westerns of John Ford (2007) and Neil

Lerner’s Music in the Horror Film: Listening to Fear (2009).27 Musicologist, Neil Lerner’s collection of essays, Music in the Horror Film: Listening to Fear presents textual studies of genre-specific film music with the purpose if investigating “the effects of music and its ability to provoke or intensify fear.”28 The authors in Lerner’s collection offer ways of finding the

25 Robynn Stilwell, “Music in Films: A Critical Review of Literature, 1980-1996,” The Journal of Film Music 1, No. 1 (2002): 21. 26 Heather Laing, The Gendered Score: Music in 1940s Melodrama and the Woman’s Film (Burlington: Ashgate, 2007). 27 Kathryn Kalinak, How the West was Sung: Music in the Westerns of John Ford (Berkley: University of California Press, 2007). 28 Neil Lerner, Music in the Horror Film: Listening to Fear (New York: Routledge, 2008), i.

18 meaning in film and music, particularly horror film, and its potential effects. The genre specific film-music analysis of The Bad Seed adopts strategies from the studies in Lerner’s collection.

Composer focused musicological research continues with an extensive examination of composer, Alex North’s film score work. Musicologist, Annette Davison, details Alex North’s predilection for scoring the outsider character, and she illuminates North’s expansive musical language through sensitive and exacting description and notated music examples in her book,

Alex North’s A Streetcar Named Desire: A Film Score Guide. Davison includes quotations from primary sources like letters, which support a richer understanding of North’s motivation.29

Tennessee William’s play, A Streetcar Named Desire, was one of North’s first film scores and features anti-heroes, sexual violence, and death that furnish organizing topics in Davison’s analysis. Davison gives the historical and critical context of the play and investigates the play’s soundscape to pinpoint the design and effects of North’s music.30

Film scholar, Peter Hutchings, attempts the monumental project of characterizing music in the horror film genre. Hutchings succeeds in locating four characteristics that appear in film music of the horror film genre. Peter Hutchings’ four characteristics of horror film music are: “1.

The musical stinger; 2. Loud volume; 3. Dissonant/atonal music and its opposite; 4. Innocent forms of music.”31 While the items he names are clearly parts of the style, they are not systematically organized nor do his characteristics seem equivalent. The technique and effect of loud volume are simple and depend more on physiological shock than aesthetics or style, which

29 Annette Davison, Alex North’s A Streetcar Named Desire: A Film Score Guide (Lanham: Scarecrow Press, 2009). 30 Tennesse Williams’s A Streetcar Named Desire takes place in New Orleans with the soundscape being blues piano from the club across the street and polka for themes, characterization, and atmosphere. 31 Peter Hutching, “Horror. Music of the Night: Horror’s Soundtracks,” ed. Graeme Harper, Ruth Doughty, Jochen Eisentraut, Sound and Music in Film and Visual Media: An Overview (New York, Bloomsbury 2009), 219-230.

19 have cultural implications. Hutchings’ use of the term, “innocent music” registers as a trend in horror music, but I will use the term, “children’s music,” and leave any questions of innocence and guilt up to context-based analysis.32 The characteristic of “innocent music” relates to cultural codes with respect to children, mother-child relationships, and assumptions of innocence, which fosters the opportunity for juxtaposition and music of indifferent mood, creating anempathetic music.

Hutchings points out that the genre comes with a variety of musical styles of original and pre-existing music including orchestral art music, jazz, rock, and avant-garde experimental music. Hutchings also argues in his article, “Music of the Night: Horror’s Soundtracks,” that the music of horror films is distinguished by, “moods, characters and effects that often exhibit a generic specificity that seems to require not just particular types of music but also particular deployments of that music within the films.”33 The music has served similar functions as trajectory, plot setting, and character development in other film genres. Hutchings concludes that it is too difficult to identify any essential qualities or functions within horror due to the genre being too varied and changeable. As a musicologist, I agree with Hutchings’ conclusion.

Hutchings’ point suggests that a study focused on a horror subgenre like psychological thriller would be more effective and practical than a genre-wide study. A focus on a subgenre allows for the identification of subgenre specific aesthetics. I also hope to identify the musical qualities of psychological thriller film scores with a focus on the style, history, and function for aesthetic purposes. While Hutchings describes familiar elements of horror soundtracks, I will situate the

32 Hutchings, “Horror. Music of the Night,” 219-230. 33 Hutchings, “Horror. Music of the Night,” 219-230.

20 music and sounds of psychological thrillers with respect to their function in their respective films and cultural context.

By the 2010s, genre-based musicological research was also focusing on musical style for effectiveness and canon elements. Musicologist, Julia Heimerdinger, argues for the influence of avant-garde art music style on horror film scores in her work, “Music and sound in the horror film & why some modern and avant-garde music lends itself to it so well.” 34 Heimerdinger also analyzes noise and sound and acknowledges the interchangeability and effectiveness of silence, noise, and music in the horror film soundtrack. Heimerdinger’s categories are: “Suspense techniques and startle effects, Silence/Noise and Noises/Sound/Music.” Heimerdinger explains in the category, “Suspense technique and startle effects,” that Suspense or “tension is created with different means, like the use of a sustained high tone, a deep drone (or the combination of both elements), an annoying repetitive motive (ostinati), or specific noises like the howling wind.”35 Heimerdinger also describes the use of silence as a way to build suspense. Silence is often combined with darkness, loneliness, and as any annoying noise. Her category, “Suspense techniques and startle effects” applies to this study’s examination of the film noir style, horror genre, and psychological horror subgenre as suspense, startle effect, and dramatic effect appear frequently.

Heimerdinger reinforces a historical point made by musicologist, Kevin Donnelly, in his earlier work on horror film music, that many contemporary suspense techniques draw on extended techniques from the Romantic Era and that these techniques have carried on through

34 Julia Heimerdinger, “Music and sound in the horror film & why some modern and avant-garde music lends itself to it so well,” Seiltanz, Beiträgezur Musik der Gegenwart 4 (April 2012): 4-16, https://www.academia.edu/1510776/Music_and_sound_in_the_horror_film_and_why_some_modern_and_avant_ga rde_music_lends_itself_to_it_so_well. 35 Heimerdinger, “Music and sound in the horror film,” 4-16.

21 contemporary music. Heimerdinger chooses Twentieth-century modernist and avant-garde musical examples to list characteristics found in both modern and avant-garde music and horror film music, dissonance, dynamics, unusual or unrecognizable timbres or sounds.36 Heimerdinger outlines similar characteristics and discusses sound/music/silence to prove that modern and avant-garde music lends to horror music and sound. She gives a general description of each scene and follows with a detailed description of the music and how it fits into the designated categories. Heimerdinger points out the aesthetics of horror film music through style and technique to prove their place as conventions, such as associations with hell, and effectiveness.

Like Heimerdinger, I establish how musical style in Alex North’s The Bad Seed film score functions as characterization and as a means of achieving the aesthetic experience of inquisitive intrigue and changed perception that define the psychological thriller genre.

The quality of ambiguity plays a significant part in distinguishing the genre of a film, especially the horror film and the psychological thriller. The psychological thriller film soundtrack emphasizes ambiguity, venturing away from the Classical Hollywood model. Some of the music composed for horrific moments in the narrative deploy instruments in ways that verge on the unrecognizable, blurring the territory between traditional sound and music.

Musicologist, Kevin Donnelly, explores this blurring with the example of the human heartbeat.

Whether presented as a sound effect or in the film music in ostinati, the human heartbeat creates suspense. Donnelly argues that music regularly imitates diegetic sounds and he credits this to the tradition of programmatic music. Donnelly also claims that film scores traditionally have mimicked and bolstered sound effects, but increasingly, sound effects have become film music.37

36 Heimerdinger, “Music and sound in the horror film,” 4-16. 37 Kevin Donnelly, Occult Aesthetics: Synchronization in Sound Film (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014), 166-198.

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His analysis of Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining (1980) and Ridley Scott’s Alien (1979) demonstrate how the music blurs with everyday sounds, and how instruments contribute to unidentifiable sounds.

Musicologist, Kate McQuiston, discusses the blurring of music and sound with respect to the source of music: diegetic, nondiegetic or both. Diegetic form is sound or music that is made to appear as belonging to the scene onscreen and heard by the characters onscreen. “Non- diegetic” pertains to music and sound whose source does not issue from the dramatic world depicted onscreen. In McQuiston’s work, which examines the sounds and music of Stanley

Kubrick films, she observes that, “the cinematic convention of diegetic music that happens to also function in a nondiegetic fashion serves Kubrick’s sense of cruel fate in these films and helps mark areas of relative tension and rest.”38 McQuiston demonstrates the power of music and sound and the importance of ambiguity in films that aestheticize the feeling of dread and suspense. Blurring the identities of sound and music occurs in many different genres of film music, including horror and psychological thriller film scores. An early example of blurring of sound and music occurs in Josef von Sternberg’s Shanghai Express (1932) in the combinations of timbres and polyphony of the characters’ voices and the rhythmic tolling of the bell, which creates ambiguity. My discussion in Chapter Two shows how North blurs music and sound to create ambiguity and embody the psychological thriller theme of normalcy veiling a hidden threat.

Musicologist, Alexis Luko’s examination of Ingmar Bergman’s films exudes a deeply personal and extensive approach to the director, to whom Luko refers as the “aural auteur.” Luko

38 Kate McQuiston, We’ll Meet Again: Musical Design in the Films of Stanley Kubrick (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013), 47.

23 details Bergman’s unique admiration of, and conflicted approach to, music, with respect to

Bergman’s biography and in relation to his films. Luko insightfully presents Bergman’s conflicting understandings of music; “Music could be both joy and suffering, both beauty and danger, both relief and pain, and both transcendence and despair.”39 Luko identifies music’s connections to Bergman’s films such as music and spirituality, family, loss, and joy in To Joy

(1950), music during times of war and the use of counterpoint in an orchestra as utopian order in response to violence in Shame (1968), and music as torture for a family in Saraband (2003).

Bergman’s filmmaking exemplifies music’s vast possibilities in emotion and interpretation.

Among these possibilities is what Michel Chion calls the anempathetic effect. Chion’s anempathetic effect is sound or music that is usually diegetic and exhibits an indifferent mood to the drama onscreen.

Overview of Chapters

Chapter One discusses music in early horror films, including both pre-existing and original music through the 1940s. I present ways in which music in film, horror in music, the organ, horror as film, 1930s and 1940s horror, woman’s film and film noir, the psychological thriller, 1950s horror, the film music of the psychological thriller and antecedent genres, women and the horror film, and 1960s feminism and film lead to Mervyn Leroy’s The Bad Seed (1956) to situate conventions and options for music that were available in the 1950s, and how North makes musical decisions with respect to this context. My analysis compares the musical characteristics of horror film to the musical traits of classical Hollywood films, woman’s films,

39 Alexis Luko, Sonatas, Screams, and Silence: Music and Sound in the films of Ingmar Bergman (New York: Routledge, 2016), 98.

24 film noir, and psychological thriller films to determine origin and aesthetics of the female- centered psychological thriller.

Chapter Two offers an interpretative film and music analysis of excerpts from the chosen film, The Bad Seed and history of the composer, Alex North and his contributions to film music.

I will explain how North creates the anempathetic effect, and why this supports the film’s particular view of Christine as a woman and a mother. In the conclusion, I will emphasize my findings in Leroy’s The Bad Seed film and North’s score of the anempathetic effect, along with psychological thriller film aesthetics and film music aesthetics with respect to gender expectations in 1950s America.

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Chapter One: Film Music in the Psychological Thriller and Antecedent Genres

Film music

Music has an established status as a significant aspect of filmmaking and a distinguishing element of film genre. 40 During a decade and a half, from mid-1890s to 1910, motion pictures emerged as a form of public entertainment. Wierzbicki, describes the great variability of the different venues such as music halls, vaudeville, and burlesques:

Music was extremely varied, in location and source as well as type. Some theaters retained the older custom of exterior ballyhoo music, others moved their phonograph or automatic piano inside. Live accompaniment was featured only during peak traffic hours, focusing on illustrated songs, leaving the film to unreel in silence.41 Accompanists used pre-existing art music pieces, popular music, and improvisational freedom where they deemed appropriate, depending on skill level and the venue that could also feature dancers and jugglers. Pre-existing music was a common choice in venues with live accompaniment; music came from a wide variety of styles and genres, including popular and art music. Silent films favored continuous musical accompaniment and the musical decisions were left up to the musicians. Continuous music was musical accompaniment that played before, during, and sometimes after or between showings. The musical accompaniment of the silent film reformed the music hall connection between music and film, into more of a theatrical relationship with respect to music’s significant role to the on screen content.42 In 1908, the first original orchestral film score was composed by Saint-Saëns for the film, The Assassination of the

Duke of Guise. Musicologist, James Wierzbicki, asserts with respect to early silent film

40 Histories of music in film source: James Wierzbicki, Film Music: A History (London: Taylor & Francis Group, 2008). 41 James Wierzbicki, Film Music: A History (London: Taylor & Francis Group, 2008), 33. 42 Tim Anderson, “Reforming “Jackass Music”: The Problematic Aesthetics of Early American Film Music Accompaniment,” Cinema Journal 37, no. 1 (Autumn 1997): 3-22.

26 examples, “All that seems safe to say, however, is that there probably was music.”43 Wierzbicki speculates here with respect to musical accompaniment of early silent films because original scores written for films before 1910 existed; however, “documents are lacking and extant scores are few.”44 By 1920, film studios published cue sheets that included cue titles, length of cue, character themes, and other information. Cue sheets suggested music, which at times, were switched out by musicians for pieces already learned or owned. The practice of musical accompaniment left room for the solo musician’s improvisation and the ensemble’s preferences until the advent of the sound era from 1928 to 1933 developed more standardized music.

Horror in Music

In the nineteenth century, horror in music appears in opera with examples relevant to this project of Goethe’s Faust. Hector Berlioz’s La Damnation de Faust (1845), Charles Gounod’s

Faust (1859), and Arrigo Boito’s opera, Mefistofele (1867), are examples of operas based on the horror literature. Goethe’s Faust exemplifies Gothic drama because of its inclusion of some supernatural elements and inspired important predecessors of horror in music. Goethe’s Faust is a play broken into two parts, both centered on the protagonist, who sells his soul to the devil in exchange for enlightenment and pleasure. He reaches far beyond his circumstances through the aid of demonic means.45 The appeal of demonic forces to overcome human limitations returns in many forms as the Faust narrative becomes popular on and off stage, especially for violin virtuoso, Niccoló Paganini. Musicologist, Maiko Kawabata, details how Paganini’s playing abilities were associated with the devil and the supernatural. Popular belief about Paganini

43 Wierzbicki, Film Music, 27. 44 Martin Miller Marks, Music and the Silent Film: Contexts and Case Studies, 1895 – 1924 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997). 45 Maiko Kawabata, “Virtuosity, the Violin, the Devil… What Really Made Paganini ‘Demonic’?” Current Musicology, no. 83 (Spring 2007): 87-92.

27 ranged from him being the devil to being possessed by a demon, to selling his soul. The demonic was a popular topic among audiences, critics, and his violin contemporaries, and Kawabata notes that “to supernatural sources,” were credited for Paganini’s virtuosic violin mastery.46 This demonic virtuoso sentiment among classical music audiences continued throughout nineteenth- century Western Europe and is an example of a particular type of reaction to the unexplainable and the unknown, the influence of the Faust narrative, and the Catholic Church.

Programmatic music is later also influenced by horror literature. Faust is the subject of works by composers, Wagner’s Faust Overture (1839) and Liszt’s Faust Symphony (1854).

Wagner’s overture and Liszt’s symphony contain dynamic extremes, circular and running chromatic motives, and long note durations paired with sparse orchestration moving in step-wise motion that lend dynamism to programmatic music and later horror and psychological thriller film music aesthetics. The recurrence of the technical characteristics mentioned above across a large body of programmatic music contributes to associations made between musical style and programmatic subjects. The association between musical style and programmatic subjects and other traits of nineteenth-century art music informed original film-score composition in the early sound era. Many of the composers came from Europe or were trained in European art music to begin with. The associations between musical style and programmatic subjects also inform the score of The Bad Seed in that Alex North uses musical style to depict Christine’s hopes and

Rhoda’s musical virtuosity to demonstrate her skills of music and murder.

46 Kawabata, “Virtuosity, the Violin, the Devil,” 87-92.

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The organ

While the orchestral literature offered models for early original scores, the organ has proved an important signifier for film characterization for its bombastic sound and grandiose size. The organ serves as a plot element with cultural associations that span across different

Hollywood film genres.47 The sounds of the organ in the horror film connote the male virtuoso and male sexuality. The organ proves to be an important and lasting instrument in the horror genre in early Gothic and horror films and it eventually becomes a well-known horror element.

The assumed associations of the male virtuoso and the supernatural such as Faust and Paganini apply to these horror film male musicians and their reception. The organ’s sheer volume and size provokes an expectation, usually of the male virtuoso. Orchestras were employed by silent film venues that could afford them, while pianists and organists, who cost less and could rely on improvisation, accompanied with popular music or well-known excerpts, and original music. The organ emerges in horror films for two reasons: practicality of budget and cultural associations.

Musicologist, Julie Brown, reasons that the choice of the organ owes to the, "function of the instrument's suitability to the genre's recurring, often Gothic themes and clear religious associations that serve as a musical sign of religious ponderings."48 The cultural associations connected to the organ characterize the male organist character as a Byronic hero as seen in

Gothic literature. The Byronic hero is an anti-hero who is an educated outcast with self- destructive tendencies, a dark secretive past, and a mysterious magnetism and attraction for the heroine in Gothic literature, the horror film, and any other Hollywood genre film he appears in.

47 Film examples include: Edgar Ulmer’s horror film, The Black Cat (1934) to Harry Lachman’s mystery film, Castle in the Desert (1942), and George Sidney’s comedy film, Bathing Beauty (1944). 48 Julie Brown, Carnival of Souls and the Organs of Horror (New York & London: Routledge, 2010).

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The male organist outcast appears in Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886) and The Phantom of the Opera (1925). These two films contain elements that inspired both the horror and psychological thriller genres. In The Phantom of the Opera (1925, re-released as a sound film in

1929), the organ is the accompanying instrument and used for diegetic music as the phantom or

Erik. Christine believes the Phantom, in truth a mere man, to be “the spirit of music”, due to his virtuosic musicality as an organist, along with his uncanny ability to suddenly appear, and she falls in love with him. The organ music featured in horror films includes characteristics of virtuosity with minor tonality, block chords, and scale runs. In Rouben Mamoulian’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1931), this horror film opens with Bach’s “Toccata and Fugue in D Minor” nondiegetically performed by an orchestra and later, diegetically by Dr. Hyde on the organ. The film’s setting also recommends the organ with its usual Gothic locations in churches, cathedrals, and crypts and the Gothic associations of power and the supernatural to the dynamic range of the instrument and its size.

The organ became a trope of male anti-hero or antagonist characterization visually and sonically that it appeared in other Hollywood genres like comedies such as Blake Edward’s The

Great Race (1965) when introducing the character of Professor Fate.49 This organ and player centered scene opens with the character playing Bach’s “Toccata and Fugue in D Minor” perfectly at the organ in his home. The audience soon learns that Professor Fate was mimicking the performance and it was a self-playing organ all along, resulting in a comedic moment that

49 The organ was also incorporated into films with non-horror elements such as Sergei Eisenstein's 1938 film, Alexander Nevsky. Eisenstein and Prokofiev’s collaboration exemplifies the synchronicity or the relationship of image and music based on the action onscreen that becomes a staple in the classical Hollywood model and exists in Hollywood genre models today. Alexander Nevsky embodies the word, collaboration as Eisenstein filmed portions of the film based on Prokofiev’s music and Prokofiev composed music based on portions of Eisenstein’s film. Kia Afra, “Vertical Montage and Synaesthesia,” Music, Sound, and the Moving Image 9, no. 1 (2015): 33-61.

30 forecasts the personality of this character as posturing villainous stereotypes. Brown notes several films in which an organ-playing character justifies the use of organ: The Bride of

Frankenstein (1935), The Black Cat (1934), and The Gorgon (1964). The film examples of Cat

People (1942) described below and The Gorgon attest to the enduring association of the organ with the horror film genre, even to the point of parody as in Mel Brook’s Young Frankenstein

(1974). The Bad Seed uses a musical instrument as characterization relating to the character of

Rhoda and her perceived image of the perfect innocent child musician.

Horror as Film

The basic strangeness of seeing two-dimensional pictures moving, topics in literature and film around the turn of the twentieth century. Film-music scholar, Kathryn Kalinak, describes the aesthetic effects of American silent films of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century on early audiences, having an entrancing effect. Kalinak notes that, “Film representations are ghostly, an uncomfortable reminder of human mortality, and carry with them a kind of psychological shock.”50 The silent film elicited alienated reactions of moving two dimensional pictures regardless of the genre, but these reactions suggest that the experience also offered an appealing element. The first film with horror elements is Le Manoir du Diable (The Devil’s

Castle) in 1896, directed by Georges Méliès. The storyline includes bats, cauldrons, witches, and devils that enter and exit with a puff of smoke – an effect that Méliès developed in his previous work as a magician and for which he became well known. It is fair to say that among the supernatural elements of this film, the puff of smoke presents an element of surprise and when coupled with the supernatural, result into the reaction of horror.

50 Kalinak, Settling the Score, 44-45.

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Horror offers an intensification of the alienating and ambiguous aesthetic qualities of being scared or disgusted, while also refusing the closure of a happy ending or the elimination of the threat. The horror genre is one of only a handful of film types to enjoy proliferating series, as attested by their popularity in cinemas and streaming services. Examples of some of the most successful horror film franchises: John Carpenter’s Halloween (1978), which grossed $308. 5 million over ten films, Ridley Scott’s Alien (1979), which grossed $515.9 million over seven film, Sam Raimi’s The Evil Dead (1981), which grossed $74.1 million over four films, and Wes

Craven’s Scream (1996), which grossed $331.7 million over four films.51 Horror owes its success to distinct antecedents including Gothic drama and fantasy, and became an established genre.

Many of the films of importance for my case study capitalize on the theories and concepts of Sigmund Freud. An early film that introduces Freudian themes: The Cabinet of Dr.

Caligari. The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920) introduced the themes of psychoanalysis, sanity, and psychology from the works of Sigmund Freud. Freud’s The Uncanny (1919) describes the topic of the “uncanny” as “a province undoubtedly belonging to all that is terrible – to all that arouses dread and creeping horror… it tends to coincide with whatever excites dread.” He concludes that the unknown and unfamiliar is the source of what is “uncanny.”52 Freud argues that the uncanny effect creates an uncertain mood because of ambiguity with respect to what is terrible and arousing dread. Freud’s uncanny is a precedent for the dark visual styles of German

Expressionism in the fantasy/horror/mystery, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari with its obstruction of sight by darkness and shadows and the inclusion of silence. Freud’s uncanny effect recommends

51 IMDb editors, “26 Most Successful Horror Film Franchises,” https://m.imdb.com/list/ls063226860/mediaviewer/rm3366525184, October 25, 2020. 52 Sigmund Freud, The Uncanny (London: Penguin Books, 2003), 1.

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German Expressionist film style and The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari as foundation for horror as a genre. German film scholar, Anton Kaes, describes German Expressionism as “The style that allowed the filmmakers to experiment with filmic technology and special effects and to explore the twisted realm of Freudian repressed desires, unconscious fears, and deranged fixations.”53

This style emerged during 1910s when music was not yet standardized in film exhibition, so the music necessarily differed from one screening location or venue to another. Visual aspects of

The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari reflect a popular interest in Freud’s theory of psychoanalysis; for example, the topics of distorted perception, nightmares, and insanity. This case study traces

Freud’s theory of psychoanalysis in cinema in Chapter One and Two. This project also applies

Freud’s theory to the Hollywood genres of the woman’s film, film noir, horror, and psychological thriller.

The 1930s and 1940s Horror and the Classical Hollywood Score

The characters of 1920 horror films, for example Nosferatu, differ from the monster depicted in the horror films of the 1930s and 1940s. The monsters of 1920s horror films die at the conclusion of their films; however, this was not always the case for the horror film of the

1930s and the 1940s. The term “horror” was first coined in the 1930s, and specifically in connection with Frankenstein.54 1930s and 1940s horror films humanized monster characters that created relatability through human emotion, including the gorilla of adventure/fantasy film,

King Kong.

53 Anton Kaes, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari: Expressionism and Cinema, ed. Ted Perry (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006), 41. 54 Roy Kinnard, “Introduction,” Horror in Silent Films: A Filmography, 1896-1929 (Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland, 1995).

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King Kong (1933), directed by Merian C. Cooper, Ernest B. Schoedsack, offers a famous example of a classical Hollywood film that exemplifies suspending disbelief. The music in King

Kong is nondiegetic and has the ability to suspend disbelief.55 Suspending of disbelief is important in all genres and successful through music. King Kong is categorized as a fantasy/adventure film, but it has horror elements. Horror films of the 1930s were considered part of the classical Hollywood era.56 These symphonic scores accompanied the films and often featured a theme song. King Kong features an original orchestral score by Max Steiner. This is a famous early example of film scoring practices used in the classical Hollywood era, a time when film scores offered social commentary of the film’s narrative. This is the end of the sound era and the beginning of the classical Hollywood era, where new technologies represented “new achievements in engineering skills” and King Kong’s “impact was magnified by the since perfected qualities of sound.”57 Steiner’s original non-diegetic music supported and enhanced the special visual effects and narrative with the incorporation of classical Hollywood techniques.

These classical Hollywood techniques include Mickey Mousing, for example the descending scale that accompanies and imitates the chief’s descending steps in an early scene and supporting the mood with the use of dissonance in the form of tri-tones as the islanders anticipate Kong receiving his gift. Both techniques were common even for more realistic fictional dramas.

Composers could prompt fear and illustrate visible or invisible narrative events with sounds and music. In King Kong, Steiner’s placements of musical elements with images of King

Kong qualify them as horror elements. Steiner includes a descending three note motif that is

55 Claudia Gorbman, Unheard Melodies: Narrative Film Music (Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1987), 74- 75. 56 James Wierzbicki, Film Music: A History (New York: Routledge, 2012), 149. 57 Wierzbicki, Film Music, 133.

34 heard throughout the film to inspire a feeling of horror in the listener, but also the fear and terror

King Kong feels. This fear and terror eases at the last moment when Steiner reprises the love theme. The love theme that implies romance between King Kong and Ann. King Kong is made to appear enormous and out of human control in this retelling of the fairytale of The Beauty and the Beast. The categorization of this film is fantasy and horror due to the erotic undertones of the relationship between Ann and King Kong, which relates to Freud’s theory of psychoanalysis.

King Kong’s emotions make him more relatable for audiences and make ambiguous the question of who is the actual threat. Steiner provided a model, in King Kong as in other film scores, for many composers who followed him. North would also prompt fear and sympathy in his score for

The Bad Seed in the musical portrayals of Rhoda and Christine in ways that both overlap with

Steiner’s musical vocabulary and placement, and in ways that subvert conventions two decades later.

In this way, King Kong and its music, along with later horror and psychological thriller films provide social commentary and provoke the audience to question. The opening music features harp glissandos as it introduces Skull Island. Steiner combines non-diegetic harp music with diegetic drums. The dialogue confirms that the music is “coming from the island,” and foreshadows the music of the ceremony, building suspense and dread. The character of King

Kong proves relatable, being capable of human emotions, but portrayed as other. A path breaking example of character otherness is in Cat People (1942).

Jacques Tourneur’s Cat People (1942), demonstrates elements of German

Expressionism.58 Its narrative includes specific Freudian elements more than previously included

58 Universal Pictures made monster movies featuring the Universal Classical Monsters beginning in the late 1930s including Dracula, The Wolfman, The Mummy, and more.

35 in film narratives, such as Freud’s theory of sex involving fear of castration and penetration. This film introduces the sexual fear of penetration, castration, and phallic size into the horror narrative. The orchestral score by Roy Webb features a street organ played in a zoo. Diegetic organ music takes the form of a street instrument rather than a Gothic or religious instrument.

The typically colossal, intimidating organ appears here in a condensed form and in a high register, reflecting the narrative theme of gender reversal in musical sound.59 By this time, the organ’s establishment in the horror film genre granted the instrument great familiarity among audiences that its transformation in Cat People is discernible, similar to the future parodies of the formulae of horror. In the film Cat People, the organ as a street instrument embodies fear, much like the piano in the family’s den of The Bad Seed. This fear is best demonstrated in Leroy’s death scene, analyzed in the next chapter.

Woman’s films and Film Noir

During the 1940s, the woman’s film and film noir were popular genres, along with traditional masculine genres such as Westerns and action films. The Western offered a heroic representation of the white American male in entertainment at the time. American thought and language scholar, Edward Recchia, summarizes the masculine centrality of Western films; “In the process, social order is affirmed. The Western’s hero has an indefatigable sense of optimism.”60 The popularity of the Western centered on a male protagonist with a gun in a land full of possibility. His role is to serve justice and restore order to the narrative. The Western was viewed as a worthy genre by the Hollywood film industry; while the woman’s film is met with

59 During the remainder of the 40s, Universal Pictures continued to make monster movies featuring the Universal Classical Monsters, particularly sequels or continuations such as Son of Dracula (1943), House of Frankenstein (1944), and The Spider Woman Strikes Back (1946). 60 Edward Recchia, “Film Noir and the Western,” The Centennial Review 30, no. 3 (Fall 1996): 602.

36 sexist assumptions. The woman’s film characterizes women based on patriarchal assumptions.61

The woman’s film carries the narrative theme of female moral dilemma and separation anxiety, whether of the single young woman, wife, mother or mistress. Female-centered films after the

1940s, including horror and film noir, take on these narrative traits. The woman’s film provides social and historical context for American society during the 1940s.

The woman’s film of the 1940s developed from traditions in the nineteenth century

Gothic novel and in the radio soap opera of the twentieth century. The woman’s film tends to avoid supernatural elements, unlike the Gothic tradition before it and is an umbrella term for female-centered films. The woman’s film aims to present female-centered narrative with the restrictions of 1940s classical Hollywood and American patriarchal society such as lesbianism and resolutions of femininity. Proto-feminist themes in classical Hollywood films hide beneath the veil of comedy. Woman’s films were a collaborative effort by both men and women with a female source authors.

In the woman’s film, the classic (male) realist narrative often depicts female characters as constrained in a conservative patriarchal circumstance, although the female characters retain a sense of choice in their destinies. Woman’s film subjects include maternal dramas, the career woman character type, films of suspicion and distrust, and even interior details such as winding staircase visually presented in unnerving manners to symbolize female terror and entrapment.62

The woman’s film and film noir provide the origins of women in film characterized having agency, in the tropes of superwoman (mother with a job), single mother, career woman, and femme fatale characters. These character types serve as precursors and points of comparison for

61 Alison McKee, The Woman’s Film of The 1940s: Gender, Narrative, and History (New York: Routledge, 2014), 14. 62 Andrea S. Walsh, Women’s Film and Female Experience 1940-1950 (New York: Praeger, 1984), 29.

37 the present study of psychological thriller and its film music, especially in the evaluation of

Hitchcock films later in this chapter and the detailed analysis of The Bad Seed in Chapter Two.

Historical sociologist, Andrea S. Walsh, details the style of film noir that results into what she calls, “noir women’s film” as:

Strongly influenced by popular mid- to late 1940s film noir style, the sense of visual order is turned on its head. Lighting becomes shadowy and low key, contrasting light to dark, security to fear, good to evil. Noir cinematography, by its eerie and unsettling contrasts, spells paranoia and menace. In addition, twisted camera angles and unbalanced frame composition combine to create an anti- traditional mise-en-scène.63

Walsh’s explanation only addresses style, but directly applies to the female-centered psychological thriller and The Bad Seed. I address below the blurring of the genres of woman’s film, horror, and film noir and their music.

The term, “film noir,” refers to from the inaccessibility of American films from the point of view of French critics during the early 1940s and the significant difference French critics noticed in comparing former and contemporary American thematic and visual aesthetics.64 Film noir established as a genre in the 1940s as a reaction to life in the U.S. Film noir depicts a dark and rough life as opposed to the heroic illustrations of other film genres after both World Wars and the Great Depression. Like the woman’s film, film noir refers to the social and historical contexts of contemporary American society. The crime drama film style of film noir from the

French “dark film,” characteristics include a general dark, pessimistic mood, high contrast lighting inspired by the German Expressionist style, frequent use of flashbacks, noir male heroes, and femme fatales. American film scholar, William Luhr, connects film noir closely to horror, stating, “Film noir abuts many genres, none more so than horror. It can be described as a genre

63 Walsh, Women’s Film and Female Experience 1940-1950, 29. 64 William Luhr, Film Noir (Hoboken: John Wiley & Sons, 2012), 20.

38 about how everyday, contemporary life, without supernatural intervention, can become as terrifying as any monster movie.”65 The darkness in film noir reflects the disenchantment of

American society during the Great Depression of the 1930s and World War II (1939-1945). Film noir depicts femme fatale characters as ruthless, while also victimizing these female characters and characterizing them by their sexuality as in the classical Hollywood film framework.

Both the woman’s film and film noir offers points of reference for women’s social position in 1930s and 1940s America. Both depict women in relatively powerful positions, within a patriarchal system. Film noir captures the emasculation of male characters by femme fatales, creating a disruption of power balance. The women’s suffrage movement greatly affected social history and female characterization in film. The image of Rosie the Riveter offers an alternative to femininity, borrowing from masculine tropes. Women’s empowerment in performing manual labor well caused male anxiety as soldiers returned from war to the workplace. The assumption of male superiority began to deteriorate after women displayed their capabilities. Some of the male characters in film experience this emasculation; feeling fear and dread that they are “losing their power over women and their own destinies, a power that they had once considered their birthright.”66 The femme fatales of film noir provoke sexual desire, along with horror in the male characters because of her assertiveness and sexual freedom.

Feminist film theorist, Barbara Creed, explains that the horror film genre reveals “the unconscious fears and desires of both the human subject (pain, bodily attack, disintegration, death) and the gendered subject (male fears of woman’s reproductive role and of castration and

65 Luhr, Film Noir, 29. 66 Luhr, Film Noir, 29.

39 woman’s fears of phallic aggressivity and rape).”67 Evidence for Creed’s assertion proliferates in both the film noir style and the horror film genre with a focus on male fears.

Psychological Thriller

The psychological thriller subgenre began in the 1930s and depicts the mental and emotional states of characters to generate an unsettled response from the audience. Dichotomy and ambiguity influence commonalities in the psychological thriller film such as the unreliable narrator and the inclusion of delusions, altered perception or questions of insanity in the narratives. Like horror, the psychological thriller is an offspring of the Gothic fiction literary genre. Jerrold Hogle comments in The Cambridge Companion to Gothic Fiction, on the trait that both Gothic fiction and its clades (horror and psychological thriller) share; “the longevity and power of Gothic fiction unquestionably stem from the way it helps us address and disguise some of the most important desires, quandaries, and sources of anxiety, from the most internal and mental to the widely social and cultural, throughout the history of western culture since the eighteenth century.”68 Hogle’s description of Gothic fiction also applies to woman’s film, film noir, and horror with societal issues as points of desire and anxiety. Psychological thrillers center on dread and deception that threaten social and personal identity.

The dread of insidious secrets is reminiscent of Gothic literary narratives. The psychological thriller presents modern anxieties of superstition versus rationality, rooted from works of Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849) and Henry James (1843-1916), incorporating psychoanalysis. An early example of the female-centered psychological thriller novels is Daphne

67 Barbara Creed, The Monstrous-Feminine: Film, Feminism, Psychoanalysis (New York: Routledge, 1993), 156. 68 Jerrod Hogle, “Introduction: The Gothic in Western Culture,” The Cambridge Companion of Gothic Fiction, ed. Jerrod Hogle (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 1-20.

40 du Maurier’s Rebecca (1938). Film and literature scholar, Kristopher Mecholsky, suggests common characteristics for the psychological thriller narrative:

Psychotic killers as antagonist or protagonist, often beyond the reach of the law and often prompting obsessive investigation; in many cases, the antagonist is a family member, Children in danger, Revenge for psychological trauma, often perpetrated by a family member, Unreliable narrators whose unreliability usually comes from some kind of psychosis, sometimes in the form of found documents, Prominent citizens, close family relations, or presumed innocents who turn out to be psychotic, Severe psychological illness, trauma, or memory loss in a main character that often haunts and threatens long past the traumatic event, often caused by a family member69 Melcholsky’s list demonstrates commonalities with maternal woman’s films and film noir. The female-centered psychological thriller began in the 1930s with films like Richard

Thorpe’s Night Must Fall (1937) and Alfred Hitchcock’s The Lady Vanishes (1938). The psychological thriller aesthetics combine a selection of traits from horror, woman’s film and the film noir style. While the horror genre favors violent gore, sudden jolts, and supernatural elements, psychological thrillers focus on gradual and subtle revelations, delusions, and suspicions of insanity.70 A hallmark of the horror and the psychological thriller is the narrative basis in a seemingly normal reality that hides a darker truth. Audiences derive pleasure and diversion from the dichotomy of hyperrealism and fiction found in Hollywood films. The horror film and the psychological thriller attract the audience’s terror and fascination with darkness, danger, and death. Horror films and psychological thrillers allow the audience to experience

Schadenfreude, an enjoyment of the misfortune of others, from a privileged point of experience

69 Kristopher Mecholsky, “The Psychological Thriller: An Overview,” Critical Insight: The American Thriller, (Salem: Salem Press, 2014), 16-18. 70 Mecholsky, “The Psychological Thriller,” 16-18.

41 without being in immediate danger themselves.71 The aesthetic experience of the psychological thriller is the awakening or change in perspective and inquisitiveness brought on by ambiguity.

Music may become more important as a source of information for the audience because of its ability to signal danger, suddenly in the horror film and gradually in the psychological thriller, without necessitating the threat’s image. The horror film and its music aesthetics, for example, include extremes of volume like a subito forte. In contrast, the psychological thriller and its music aesthetics incorporate gradual and subtle movement with circular melodies and crescendos in dramatic moments. Musicologist, Julia Heimerdinger, observes that “the extreme, uncommon, remote, unpredictable and the aggressive are some essential aspects or features

(though not exclusive to this genre) of horror.”72 Horror film music includes extreme dynamics and range, unusual timbres, dissonance, a variety of musical styles, and the use of the stinger to surprise the audience. While these musical characteristics might appear in any Hollywood film genre and, indeed, all Hollywood scores draw from a common set of techniques and characteristics, the difference between Hollywood genres lies in both the amount and degree of the musical characteristics, and how they operate in the context of the drama. The psychological thriller exceeds the horror score in character theme and variations, omits sudden dynamic changes and stingers, and uses comparatively less dissonance.

The character theme, for example, can appear in the horror film score and psychological thriller soundtrack, but in the horror film such as John Carpenter’s Halloween (1978), a character

71 "Schadenfreude, n," OED Online, September 2020, Oxford University Press, https://www.oed.com/view/Entry/172271?redirectedFrom=schadenfreude, Accessed October 28, 2020). 72 Julia Heimerdinger, “Music and sound in the horror film & why some modern and avant-garde music lends itself to it so well,” Seiltanz, Beiträgezur Musik der Gegenwart 4 (April 2012): 4-16, https://www.academia.edu/1510776/Music_and_sound_in_the_horror_film_and_why_some_modern_and_avant_ga rde_music_lends_itself_to_it_so_well.

42 theme goes unchanged and signals the presence of the threat, while in the psychological thriller, the character theme goes through variations in accordance to the character’s experience and conveys a character’s desire like Rhoda’s manipulation of her mother. The horror film displays repressed desires through acts of physical violence and gore and a convention of the horror film aesthetic experience. In contrast, the psychological thriller prioritizes conveying the mental state and hidden desires of characters through its music and revelations through the use of flashbacks.

North’s The Bad Seed score embodies the normalcy and geniality veiling a hidden threat aesthetic unique to the psychological thriller genre.

American psychological thriller film narratives associate horror with the family and the familiar, particularly women’s relationships with men in the home in Hitchcock films and

George Cukor’s Gaslight (1944) seen in films discussed in this case study. Mecholsky lists characteristics that also apply to female centered psychological thrillers including Hitchcock’s

Rebecca (1940), Suspicion (1941), Shadow of a Doubt (1943), Vertigo (1958), George Cukor’s

Gaslight (1944), and the analyzed example of Mervyn Leroy’s The Bad Seed (1956).

1950s

Horror films depend on the depiction of otherness on screen and in the 1950s, unknown otherness in the film score signaled the subject’s call to general experimentation, including instrumentation. Although the theremin and electronic music are best known for their presence in science fiction films such as Bernard Herrmann’s score for Robert Wise’s The Day the Earth

Stood Still (1951) and Bebe and Louis Barrons’ completely electronic score for Forbidden

Planet (1956), it made its debut in the horror film genre through Dimitri Tiomkin’s score for The

Thing (1951). Until this time, unusual timbres existed in the film score through extended technique, imitation of sound or sound mimicking music. The 1950s proved to be a time of

43 expansion for what defined otherness in horror and eventually, psychological thriller. The commonality between these film examples and their horror predecessors is the theme that female roles are only those of either human victims tortured by inhuman villains or as supernatural, otherworldly monsters.

During the 1950s, the topic of horror within the American home and family emerged in film. These films, with human villains, such as in The Bad Seed (1956) establish the psychological thriller genre. The genre introduced audiences to anxieties that influenced psychological thrillers of the ‘50s, ‘60s, and ‘70s. The woman’s films of the classical Hollywood

Era, popular during the 1940s, manifests in the maternal narrative of The Bad Seed. The Bad

Seed initially presents a seemingly perfect nuclear family: a hard working husband, content and satisfied wife, and well behaved daughter. The more time the audience spends with the characters onscreen, the more the façade of normalcy or perfection begins to crack and disappear. The behaviors of the husband and daughter effect a major narrative problem and female moral dilemma. In the case of Christine, her supposed community fails to recognize and help her to put a stop to the situation with Rhoda. Christine’s isolation leaves her open to the threat of Rhoda. The maternal moral dilemma arises when Christine must answer the question of giving up maternal instinct of protecting one’s offspring in favor of defense against one’s offspring. The maternal character, Christine, must become her own hero and does what she thinks is best for her family. Unfortunately, she feels she has no other choice than murder-suicide with the 1950s societal pressures and expectations of the “successful” mother figure.

The woman’s film rose in status after an initial period of sexist criticism. Film scholar,

Linda Williams, categorizes the woman’s film as melodrama and includes sexist criticism to

44 demonstrate the assumptions associated with the woman’s film as having, “a visible generic existence that could offer neither the thematic and evolutionary coherence exhibited by say, the

Western, nor sufficient cultural prestige to appeal to the cognoscenti.”73 The woman’s film finally establishes as a genre through 1970s film scholarship and studies of Douglas Sirk’s works: Magnificent Obsession (1954), All That Heaven Allows (1956), Written on the Wind

(1957), and Imitation of Life (1959).74 Film noir of the 1950s appeared to end of the decade with films like Robert Aldrich’s Kiss Me Deadly (1955) and Orson Welles’s Touch of Evil (1958).

Women and the Horror Film

The horror film has grown into a flexible and even prestigious form, at times rife with abject depictions of sexual and violent themes and imagery. Julia Kristeva’s description of the abject speaks to the delicate foundation upon which social order stands: “disturbs identity, system, order. What does not respect borders, positions, rules. The in-between, the ambiguous, the composite.”75 The abject, like the horror genre and psychological thriller, depends on ambiguity. Kristeva connects the abject to ideas of pollution and purity that further consociates victimization and villainization of female characters in film and American society.

73 Linda Williams, “Melodrama Revisited,” Refiguring American Film Genres: History and Theory, ed. Nick Browne (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 43. 74 Williams, Refiguring American Film Genres, 43. 75 According to Julia Kristeva in the Powers of Horror, the abject also refers to the human reaction (horror, vomit) to a threatened breakdown in meaning caused by the loss of the distinction between subject and object or between self and other. Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982), 2-3.

45

This project focuses on the 1950s because it is the era that sees the development of psychoanalysis in film narratives and in which new female anxieties emerge with respect to being a wife and mother. A new approach casts fears and monsters as no longer being spectral, supernatural, mutant, unknown or predominantly male, while it also reveals societal truths and anxieties. Feminist film theorist, Barbara Creed elucidates in her book, The Monstrous-

Feminine: Film, Feminism, Psychoanalysis, that the horror film genre reveals “the unconscious fears and desires of both the human subject (pain, bodily attack, disintegration, death) and the gendered subject (male fears of woman’s reproductive role and of castration and woman’s fears of phallic aggressivity and rape).”76 They are real, familiar, and familial. Films could now blend these more familiar threats with the film noir theme of male emasculation rooted in patriarchal fears.

Women were once portrayed as the victim, helpless to the “monster” are being portrayed as empowered and self-reliant. Women as the monster are strong but evil, and flaunt their sexual freedom. This characterization applies to women, not young girls like Rhoda in The Bad Seed. It is important to note that a sexualized female character is only one form of the female villain in

Hollywood film genres. These characters are everyday women in familiar surroundings as mothers, daughters, sisters, wives, and coworkers. Henri-Georges Clouzot’s Les Diaboliques

(1955) provides two archetypes of female characters to emerge during this time: the powerful wife and the villainous mistress. Conventional horror female characters include the female victim and male monster to the problem child, the unfit mother, and the final girl of horror film, which are female anxiety representations and fantastical interpretations. The term, “final girl,”

76 Barbara Creed, The Monstrous-Feminine: Film, Feminism, Psychoanalysis (New York: Routledge, 1993), p. 156.

46 was coined by Carol J. Clover in her 1992 book, Men, Women, and Chainsaws: Gender in the

Modern Horror Film to refer to the last female survivor at the end of slasher films beginning in the 1970s. This project heavily focuses on the female character as a mother. Whether being the creator of evil (connecting female with Eve and the original sin) or being the surrogate of an evil offspring, the mother character is represented and interpreted in many different ways throughout the horror genre whether in the act of coitus or birthing and rearing of children, satanic or not.

No matter the manner in which the woman conceived the ‘child,’ whether intercourse was consensual or rape, the female is responsible for teaching the child to socialize and to be human, not evil. The evil womb is a recurring theme in the woman’s film genre as well.

Christian imagery associated and normalized evil and the womb. Margaret Miles explains, “The most concentrated sense of grotesque because of the womb and associations with sex and birth. The womb/uterus is depicted in Christian art as hell: a lurid, rotting uterus where sinners are tortured.”77 The womb is associated with the ability to derive evil from the woman. In

Genesis, Eve is created from Adam’s Rib to be the perfect wife, but because of the original sin, women are at fault for creating evil. In the mid-1950s, the absent or useless father figures or the host of seedy male characters start appearing with the downfalls and shortcomings of the male overlooked. The aesthetic of the film noir style entails the dismissive behavior of male characters toward female characters, a relevant subject for exploration in Chapter Two.

Film Music of the Psychological Thriller and Antecedent Genres

In analyzing the film music of Hollywood genres, the classical Hollywood score practice is the baseline for comparison because music in Hollywood genres follow patterns

77 Margaret R. Miles, Carnal Knowing (Eugene: Wipf & Stock Publishers, 1989), 155-156.

47 and general styles of the classical Hollywood score. The horror score incorporates musical techniques including the stinger, drones, ostinato, and tremolos to contribute to a multitude of effects, chief among them, suspense and fear. The techniques of the drone, ostinato and tremolo provide suspense by aurally leading the audience. The stinger or startle is a horror music element that can appear in any Hollywood film genre at a moment of drama. In the horror film, the stinger or startle is sudden and loud, while in the psychological thriller, the startle is gradual like in The Bad Seed.

Music in film noir scores is relatively sparse, and for small ensembles with predominantly low range instrumentation and emphasis on the lower registers of the strings. The use of popular music, along with original score in a wide range of styles is characteristic of film noir scores.

Jazz appears in film noir of the 1940s to the mid-1950s just as much as any other musical style.78

Jazz-inflected scores of the mid to late 1950s and crime jazz of late 1950s and 1960s television episodes prompted assumptions connecting jazz with film noir.79 Film noir places significance on voice-over narration and the use of diegetic sounds to reinforce cityscape locations such as nature, sirens, cars, and trains. The city plot setting is important to the genre to convey the seedy context of these crime dramas.

The term “woman’s film” refers to female-centered films that can belong to any

Hollywood film genre. The woman’s films of the 1930s and 1940s followed the classical

Hollywood film score model with respect to a gendered characterization and using the Romantic style to signal most of all, an emotional female experience. Romantic style and romanticism capitalized on the subjective, emotional, “feminine” experience; however, patriarchal ideologies

78 David Butler, “Jazz in 1950s Film Noir,” Jazz Noir (Westport: Praeger Publishers, 2002), 96. 79 Butler, Jazz Noir, 96.

48 prioritized the male artist with assumed superiority.80 Laing credits scholar of classic literature,

Charles Segal, with detailing the problematic relationship of women and music because of patriarchal society as Segal dates it back, “to ancient Greek mythology, where female characters are divided according to archetypal polarities of physicality, sexuality, the voice, music, social positioning and agency within such a society.”81 Just as commentators on Liszt and Paganini attributed these musicians with supernatural abilities, female musicians met criticism of supernatural, sexually seducing power behind their musicianship. Laing explains the power of the female musician and seduction as, “the female musician’s embodiment of the most powerful sensual partnership of femaleness and music may be too physically exciting, seducing the man into corrupt thoughts and conduct.”82 Critics assumed that the intent of female musician was sexual seduction. This assumed intention placed social limitations on female propriety.

Musicologist, Linda Austern, observes the societal connection of female propriety and musicality, that, “the socially acceptable and desirable woman should not threaten the apparently vulnerable self-control of masculinity. Therefore, she was required to exercise a demure and

‘proper’ use of music.”83 The associations of the female musician with the feminine experience and seduction are in Puccini’s Tosca (1899), and later in the melodrama, and classical

Hollywood films.

Romanticism becomes connected with excessive emotion, the assumed female experience of love, relationships, and men, instead of the Romanticism aesthetics of human transcendence

80 Laing, The Gendered Score, 9. 81 Charles Segal, “The Gorgon and the Nightingale: The Voice of Female Lament and Pindar’s twelfth Pythian Ode,” in Embodied Voices: Representing Female Vocality in Western Culture, ed. Leslie C. Dunn and Nancy A. Jones (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 17-34. 82 Laing, The Gendered Score, 12. 83 Linda Austern, “Sing Againe Syren: The Female Musician and Sexual Enchantment in Elizabethan Life and Literature,” Renaissance Quarterly 42, No. 3 (Autumn 1989): 420-448.

49 and universalism.84 Women’s emotions as depicted in music recommends “the transcendent nature of women’s interiority.”85 The association of excessive emotion and female experience is how the ideas of overly emotional female characters are displayed in classical Hollywood film, giving permission to portrayals of the socially accepted dismissive husband trope such as in The

Bad Seed. Laing describes the transcendent nature with respect to female emotions in film and film music; “As the emotional becomes degraded and more specifically associated with perceived female realms such as love and motherhood, so the idea of female emotions as transcendent adopts a more specific meaning. Rather than transcending human, i.e., male, experience, the representation of female emotions allows women to transcend the more specific restrictions and propriety of the social/emotional role allowed them within patriarchy.”86 The music, sounds, and silences of the woman’s film allow the listener a privileged seat, privy to the thoughts and emotions of the female protagonist. In The Bad Seed, Alex North musically illustrates Christine’s hopes, dreams, and revelation. With a good deal of non-diegetic music, the listener gets a special point of experience, while characters of the cinematic world of The Bad

Seed either wrongfully assume or dismiss Rhoda’s true nature and Christine’s emotions and thoughts.

The female protagonist communicates her emotions through silences because patriarchal limitations restrict her from blatantly speaking upon them without being seen as excessive, hysterical or outright dismissed. With respect to the woman’s film and female-centered

84 Scholarly detailed work with respect to Romanticism and the aesthetics of human transcendence and universalism, Charles Rosen, The Romantic Generation (Massachusetts: Harvard University Press: 1995). 85 Laing, The Gendered Score, 10. 86 Laing, The Gendered Score, 21.

50 narratives, an audience member must become a listener because of the importance placed on the female protagonist’s silences and the music accompanying these moments.

Music of psychological thrillers

Rebecca marks Hitchcock’s first access to a Hollywood film score budget, no longer prohibited by the budget of the 1930s British cinema industry.87 Rebecca also granted composer,

Franz Waxman so much artistic freedom due to his agreement in musical vision with Hitchcock and most of his original music used in the final film score.88 Franz Waxman’s Rebecca score builds suspense until it is revealed that Max actually heated Rebecca. In Rebecca, waltzes, such as the hotel lobby cue, provide a grandiose background for Max and the second Mrs. De

Winter’s whirlwind romance. Later Hitchcock films, Suspicion and Shadow of a Doubt, feature distorted waltzes functioning as suspense music. The circular gesture of the waltz in ¾ time signature and the dance movement lends well to the spirals of suspense or a whirlwind romance.

Musicologist, Sevin Yaraman, explains the social context of the waltz and cultural codes for audience interpretation:

With respect to its social text, the audience could be expected to recognize its social meaning and its associations with women, love, joy, and seduction. That the waltz conveys apparently paradoxical meanings of individual pleasure and social disapproval, that it can be expressive of female vitality and, at the same time, of woman’s downfall.

In the waltz choreography, each dancer performs semi-circles, which translates into psychological thriller film music as deception or dancing around the issue or partner. Hitchcock inserts a scene of dancers in his film, Shadow of a Doubt, using the waltz as a metaphor for deception. Hitchcock films aestheticize deception in the narrative as well as the music.

87 Jack Sullivan, “Rebecca: Music to Raise the Dead,” Hitchcock’s Music (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006), 59. 88 Sullivan, Hitchcock’s Music, 59.

51

Waxman’s music creates suitable moods for Rebecca to the extent that film scholar, Jack

Sullivan suggests, “Waxman’s complex tapestry of moods and character sketches envelopes the movie from beginning to end in a sonic dreamscape, carried along by anxieties and impulses powered by Waxman’s sensual harmonies.”89 Waxman’s cues depict the emotions of the characters. For example, the vulnerability at the window scene, Mrs. De Winter goes to the large open windows of Rebecca’s bedroom as Mrs. Danvers encourages her. By this moment in the film, Mrs. De Winter discovered a great deal in regards to Rebecca and feels noticeably vulnerable. Mrs. Danvers begins to verbally push Mrs. De Winter to leave and later to jump, whispering in her ear. The harp glissando synchronizes with the opening of the curtains and the window, the entrance of a flute solo in the lower register, and Rebecca’s theme in the violins.

This encouragement in Mrs. Danvers’s speech and in the circular three note motif in the music linger, ending with the disruption of an explosion outside.

Franz Waxman’s music informs the drama of each scene, for example, the “Confession scene” cue that accompanies Maxim describing Rebecca’s accident and in “Rebecca’s Room” scene and cue in which the second Mrs. De Winter feels helpless in comparison to Rebecca. At the Manderley Ball, the orchestra plays music before the guests arrive. The music is anempathetic because it is the same waltz in both scenes, but juxtaposed with images of differing affects. The first scene conveys the second Mrs. De Winter’s excitement that contradicts Max’s nervousness in the later scene, creating indifference and unease as the waltz continues on.

Hitchcock includes the conventional psychological thriller theme of domestic horror in Rebecca, and reinforces it with Waxman’s theme for Manderley. A major contributing factor to Rebecca’s narrative is the manipulative behavior of Mrs. Danvers. The ambiguity of the hidden threat, a

89 Sullivan, Hitchcock’s Music, 60.

52 psychological thriller aesthetic, strengthens the suspense of Rebecca, while introducing a manipulative behavior that will become known as “gaslighting” derived from the 1938 play, Gas

Light (Angel Street in the U.S.) by Patrick Hamilton, and popularized in several remakes.

“Gaslighting” and the film, George Cukor’s Gaslight (1944) deserves particular attention for its relevance to my study of The Bad Seed and the societal problem of women being dismissed.

Hitchcock’s films frequently feature waltzes or triple meter music, for example in

Rebecca, Suspicion, Shadow of a Doubt, and Vertigo. Waxman’s Suspicion score is a recomposition of Strauss’s “Wiener Blut” to a sinister version associated with Cary Grant’s character, Johnnie. When Johnnie first meets Lina, Waxman’s variation is seductive, attractive, and mysterious. Waxman deploys the theme into a sinister version for the scene with the suspect glass of milk. “Wiener Blut” represents Johnnie’s allure and glamour; it is often heard seconds before Lina wonders whether he is a fraud. Once again, the waltz style conveys to the audience of whirlwind romance feelings and a dreamlike state of mind. The waltz initially clouding Lina’s judgement later dissipates, leaving suspicion. Waxman’s themes demonstrate conflicts between characters and psychological conflicts through nondiegetic deployment. The recurrences of the waltz represents Lina’s returning to the question of whether he can be trusted. She is restricted from feasibly speaking this concern aloud because like Christine in The Bad Seed, who will listen and believe her? The soundtrack needs to do this work of signifying her doubt during moments of her silence, an aesthetic experience perpetuated from the woman’s film. “The Merry

Widow Waltz” haunts the heroine in Shadow of a Doubt. Both the narrative and the film music present geniality and normality as a veil of menace. The employment of a waltz and variations manipulates the audience with dramatic irony. In some of its presentations, the waltz functions as

53 anempathetic music. Hitchcock’s use of waltzes precedes choices of anempathetic music in later

American thriller sound.90

Vertigo is a psychological thriller, but is unique in that “Hitchcock wished for Herrmann to create a musical dream world in Vertigo” even after John Ferguson finds out the truth, he attempts to recreate the fraudulent woman.91 John accepts the truth by the end of the film, after chasing his dream girl throughout the film.92 The theme of circles appears throughout the film and the music has repetitive gestures in the melody and repetitive progressions in the harmony that appears throughout the entire score. Bernard Herrmann’s Vertigo score famously displays the different narrative aspects of the film including locations, love scenes, and character emotions. Herrmann’s music is heavily influenced by the highly chromatic language and orchestral style of Richard Wagner. Herrmann uses what musicologist, Royal S. Brown calls,

“his aural trademark,” of hinting at or ending on a seventh-chord.93 The “Scene D’Amour” cue features a two chord harmonic progression consistently with non-chord tones.

The two heroines have themes that undergo numerous variations, while the music illustrates the longing of the hero. The love theme of Vertigo exemplifies the ability of a theme to represent the character’s emotion rather than reality. The love theme’s appearance at the first tower fall presents a fantasy, while the second tower fall presents the truth. Vertigo highlights the ambiguity of motivations, desires and humanity’s inner darkness.

1960s Feminism and film

90 Sullivan, Hitchcock’s Music, 92. 91 Sullivan, Hitchcock’s Music, 223. 92 Vertigo holds a place at the top of BFI’s Sight and Sound list if best films of all time, August 2, 2012. 93 Royal S. Brown, “Herrmann, Hitchcock, and the Music of the Irrational,” Cinema Journal 21, No. 2 (Spring 1982): 18.

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Second wave feminism (1960s – 1980s) concerned equality and discrimination issues in culture and politics, such as reproductive rights, employment, and pay.94 Feminist views have enriched a range of scholarly discourses, for example the findings by film scholars, Laura

Mulvey and Mary Ann Doane. In her essay, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” (1975),

Mulvey justifies using psychoanalysis for studying film; “Psychoanalytic theory is thus appropriated here as a political weapon, demonstrating the way the unconscious of patriarchal society has structured film form.”95 Mulvey parallels liberalism’s proceduralism and society’s production by presenting the male gaze ‘s sexualization and objectification of the female body and the female body as spectacle narrative film structure, for example, gratuitous naked female body scenes or sex scenes that disrupts the action or drama onscreen. Film scholar, Mary Ann

Doane expands upon Mulvey’s work by focusing on subjectivity and gender in The Desire to

Desire (1987).96 Doane observes that time is marked by waiting and a lack of progression for a woman in the woman’s film; Doane’s point calls attention to the irreversibility of time and the phenomenon of women wasting time as they await unmet goals.97 Doane concludes the female subject of the woman’s film genre is always out of sync with her own full subjectivity, that it can never be from her own perspective or experience because of the patriarchal structure of film and that the genre exploits this circumstance. Doane, like Mulvey, incorporates psychoanalysis as a means of anatomizing a patriarchal system of representation in classical Hollywood. Mulvey uses a woman’s film and psychological thriller film examples: Howard Hawks’ To Have And

94 Laura Brunell, Elinor Burkett, “Feminism,” Encyclopedia Britannica, https://www.britannica.com/topic/feminism, Accessed Sept. 02, 2020). 95 Laura Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” Screen 16, No. 3 (Autumn 1975): 6. 96Mary Ann Doane, The Desire to Desire: The Woman’s Film of the 1940s (Theories of Representation and Difference) (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987), 4. 97 Doane, The Desire to Desire, 106.

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Have Not (1944), Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window (1954) and Vertigo (1958). The Bad Seed offers a rare exception, even if it still must operate within patriarchal ideology; The Bad Seed film, along with the film music, communicates a consciousness of 1950s American patriarchy and critiques it, prior to Mulvey and Doane’s arguments concerning psychoanalysis and the classical Hollywood film.

Whether the woman’s film, the film noir, or the Western, all Hollywood film genres operate within capitalist, patriarchal discourses. The woman’s film and film noir serve as historical and social reference points in their respective times of American patriarchal society with women as single mothers, career women, or the femme fatales. The psychological thriller portrays female characters according to patriarchal attitudes, fears and desires as well.

Composers of the music of female centered psychological thrillers eternalize musical elements from preceding genres of horror, woman’s film, and film noir.

The psychological thriller privileges a variety of musical styles, dissonance, non- traditional orchestral sounds, pre-existing and original music, diegetic sounds, and music functioning as characterization. Gradual and subtle elements supplement the psychological thriller aesthetic experience such as dynamics and variations or transformations. The use of variations illustrates a character’s experiences, depicting changes in feelings, instead of the drama onscreen. Through the unique theme of geniality and normalcy that veils the threat, the indifference and ambiguity of the psychological thriller film and score inform the sense of imbalance and unease in the female character and the audience. These traits found in the psychological thriller film and score provide ample opportunities for the success of anempathetic

56 music and musical points of experience as examined in the next chapter. The psychological thriller and its music depend on the aesthetics of inquisitive intrigue and changed perspective.

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Chapter Two: Anempathetic Music and Musical Characterization in The Bad Seed

This chapter concerns the musical treatment of female characters in a 1950s mother- centered horror film score. The classical Hollywood film score practices affected film scores composed from 1930 to the 1960s. Directors and composers of the classical Hollywood era scored according to musical images or dialogue about music. Film scholar, Kathryn Kalinak, describes classical Hollywood film score technique in her book, Settling the Score: Music and the Classical Hollywood Film; and enumerates causes of the appearance of music in film:

“dialogue cues (‘Just listen to that music’) or visual reference (the appearance of on-screen musicians, for instance, or the presence of radios or phonographs).” 98 The rationale for adding music appeared limited to these scenarios with the music necessitating legible motivation; however, films such as King Kong, scored by Max Steiner and The Adventures of Robin Hood, scored by Erich Wolfgang Korngold are wall-to-wall music with gratuitous Mickey Mousing without diegetic motivation.

Classical Hollywood films and film scores of the 1930s to the 1950s characterized women in accordance to patriarchal expectation. Regarding these portrayals, Kathryn Kalinak raises an important point:

Like the Hollywood film itself, which created an image of woman as the projection of its own (male) fear and desire, the classical Hollywood score collaborated in the dominant ideology, which punished women for their sexuality. Visual displays of female sexuality were accompanied by a nucleus of musical practices which carried implications of indecency and promiscuity through their association with so-called decadent forms such as jazz, the blues, and ragtime.99

98 Kathryn Kalinak. Settling the Score: Music and the Classical Hollywood Film (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1992), 67. 99 Kalinak. Settling the Score, 120.

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In her study, Kalinak includes how the classical Hollywood score established women in binary and sexualized terms as either “the virtuous wife” or “the fallen woman.”100 Kalinak notes that musical practices such as scoring for woodwind and brass instrumentation, chromaticism and dissonance, syncopation, blues notes (shifting intonation of lowered third and seventh scale degrees), and portamento (sliding between notes) imply the sexual indecency of female characters.101 A musical element that appeared in classical Hollywood as well as psychological thrillers today is a motive or character theme. The deployment of a musical motive or character theme in the psychological thriller provides an aural reference to a character or character’s mental state. It is important to note that in the psychological thriller, the narrative, narrator, and music have the ability to prove unreliable because of the psychological thriller aesthetic of deception. Unlike the classical Hollywood model, psychological thrillers aestheticize ambiguity and exposing the truth through layers of musical variation and narrative. The horror aesthetic experience differs from the psychological thriller aesthetic experience in that the psychological thriller demands more inquiry and explanation, while the horror film depends on gore and violence.

In the maternal drama of The Bad Seed, a musical motive illustrates Christine’s hope for possibilities of the future. Alex North considers the experiences and feelings of outsider characters and musically portrays their personal desires. In The Bad Seed, the “My Baby Sleep

Well” scene materializes hopeful possibility through North’s gentle music that embodies

Christine’s hope and desire for the endurance of her daughter’s angelic reputation. Christine shields her capricious child from consequences of pernicious criminal behavior by giving her a

100 Kathryn Kalinak, “The fallen woman and the virtuous wife: musical stereotypes in The Informer, Gone with the Wind, and Laura,” Film Reader 5 (1982): 78. 101 Kalinak. Settling the Score, 120.

59 dangerous amount of sleeping pills. Another psychological thriller aesthetic appears in Leroy’s death scene, the aesthetic of deception. While Christine and the audience realize that Leroy’s death is Rhoda’s doing, Monica the landlord is deceived by Rhoda’s charade. The deception in the scene informs the deception of Rhoda’s piano playing, further hiding Rhoda’s true nature from Monica and Rhoda’s father. Leroy’s death scene is the climax of Rhoda’s musical and murderous virtuosity, which increases throughout the film in sync with the progress of the narrative. These elements of deception contribute to the psychological thriller aesthetic experience of awakening or changed perspective and inquisitiveness. The scenes above are detailed later in this chapter.

Some of the questions that drive this chapter are: What do new musical styles and techniques convey about women in 1950s American patriarchal society? What new insights do the answers bring to the scholarship on music and sound in the horror film? In this chapter, I examine Alex North’s skill for the characterization of female characters through musical styles that signal mother-child relationships in selected scenes of Mervyn Leroy’s mother- centered psychological thriller, The Bad Seed (1956). Through musical analysis of North’s treatment of Christine and Rhoda Penmark in The Bad Seed, I make a case that North expresses salient aspects of the 1950s American maternal experience. The power of North’s music depends largely upon what film scholar, Michel Chion, calls “anempathetic effect.” Christine’s character initially is a docile wife and mother, but eventually bears the full responsibility for her daughter after the dismissiveness of her husband and oblivious neighbors. Christine, as a 1950s American housewife and mother, resolves that the best antidote is to murder her daughter with sleeping pills and shoot herself. Her decision responds to the pressures and limitations of the wife and mother resulting from the 1950s patriarchal ideologies. Christine feels that she has no other

60 choice than to take both her and her daughter’s lives in respect to her and Rhoda’s reputations of angelic daughter and successful wife and mother, according to societal expectations. Christine survives her suicide attempt, while Rhoda meets her end when she is struck by lightning. The end credits include a playful scene between onscreen mother and daughter to lighten the mood after the drama’s end; however, Christine’s life after the fact is left unresolved. The unease and inquisitive intrigue continues even after the drama has ended, satisfying the psychological thriller aesthetics of ambiguity and inquisitive intrigue.

. The anempathetic music and sounds throughout The Bad Seed track Christine’s increasing horror of her daughter’s disposition, the origins of that disposition, and her own initial obedience and disregard. Rhoda initially appears to be the perfect child, but Christine later verifies her to actually be a sociopathic murderer. Christine’s musical depiction illustrates her mentalities throughout the film and ultimately, her revelation with respect to Rhoda’s true nature.

My focus is on North’s musical depictions of the female characters’ conflicts and journeys that instantiate Claudia Gorbman’s “mutual implication” and Michel Chion’s anempathetic effect as they relate to Christine’s revelation and Rhoda’s true disposition. I study these concepts to argue the effectiveness of the horrific drama through psychological thriller aesthetics in The Bad Seed film. The incorporation of anempathetic music and sounds and the use of musical variation and virtuosity to musically portray deceit in North’s cues qualify the score as psychological thriller.

Anempathetic sound, usually diegetic music, exhibits conspicuous indifference to what is going on in the film's plot, creating a strong sense of the tragic. Chion explains that the anempathetic effect provides numerous possibilities through its intensification of emotion: “a scene with indifferent music has the effect not of freezing the emotion but rather of intensifying

61 it on a cosmic background.”102 Some sonic process continues as if nothing had happened, such as the noise of a machine, the hum of a fan, or a shower running. This sonic process also applies to music that conveys a character’s feelings or state of mind instead of the behavior onscreen.

Diegetic sounds of thunder and of an ice cream truck participate in examples of anempathetic sound in The Bad Seed. The anempathetic effect applies to sound as well as music. These sounds occur in the moments of the film before Christine reaches her full realization. The sound of the ice cream truck represents the assumed innocence of Rhoda’s character, serving as a reminder of

Rhoda’s image initially in the film, while the sound of the thunder represents the impending doom, foreshadowing the form of eliminating the threat in end. Both sounds supply differing affects of ambiguity and resolution with the ice cream truck signaling the ambiguous nature of

Rhoda’s innocence to Christine and the audience, and the thunder as the end for Rhoda’s torment and violence.

Gorbman situates the concept of anempathetic effect among other relationships of music to narrative: mutual implication, parallelism and counterpoint in her 1987 book, Unheard

Melodies: Narrative Film Music.103 Gorbman states that adding music to an image always adds an effect by the means of image interpretation through emotion and cultural reference. She calls this concept mutual implication.104 Parallelism involves music that follows or reinforces the action onscreen such as common classical Hollywood film scoring practices; parallelism abides by the tradition of music supporting the image and drama. Counterpoint includes music and sounds that oppose and are impervious to the action or mood onscreen. The term “counterpoint”

102 Michel Chion, Audio-Vision: Sound on Screen (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994). 103 Claudia Gorbman, Unheard Melodies: Narrative Film Music (Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1987), 15. 104 Gorbman, Unheard Melodies, 15.

62 proves problematic because it implies that music must be one thing or another, parallel or counter. This, in fact, restricts the music and inaccurately describes the capabilities of the music on emotion and interpretation, which are vast or cosmic. The term also implies that the action or mood is impervious to the music and sounds, unlike Michel Chion’s amempathetic effect and

Claudia Gorbman’s mutual implication prove otherwise. With North’s cue, “My Baby Sleep

Well,” in mind, this study demonstrates music’s ability to accurately depict a character’s mental state while intensifying multiple emotions with the drama onscreen. North’s cue also prompts identification with the long-range emotional trajectory of a woman with a dilemma. Christine faces the moral dilemma of protecting her daughter from dangers of the outside world or protecting herself from the dangers of her daughter. North’s cue of Christine’s hopeful future after her decision of murder suicide accompanies Christine’s dialogue, reminiscing about being pregnant. North’s music depicts Christine’s imagined future without fear, while Christine’s words convey the joy of pregnancy and child expectancy as Christine makes peace with her decided action. The visual of the pills taking effect on Rhoda, who is lying on the couch paired with North’s gentle music makes it difficult to see the situation as merely black and white as a

1950s housewife and mother decides what is best for herself and her daughter given their circumstances.

Anxieties of the Day

The fears and anxieties of patriarchal society influence every film genre of classical

Hollywood cinema and shape the female-centered films in particular. While classical Hollywood horror narratives present patriarchal fears and anxieties, woman’s films of the 1940s (see Chapter one) set out to portray women’s experiences and subjectivity of these elements. In the 1940s, the main demographic of cinema audience was female, which changed in the 1950s when men

63 returned to the theater and the workforce. I start with the 1950s in order to demonstrate how

American cinema reacted to the end of World War II and to trace Alex North’s career as a film composer from its beginning during this time. American cinema narratives changed in response to the return of male audience members from service. Women of this time experienced new freedoms such as job markets hiring more women and the audience mainly being made up of female spectators, so target demographic focused more on women. Cinema of the 1950s loses some of the female subjectivity and identification established in the 1940s. Women’s empowerment suffers setbacks until the second wave of feminism in the 1960s and its arrival in cultural studies of cinema in the 1970s and 1980s (see Chapter one).

Women’s studies scholarship, particularly with the work of Betty Friedan in 1963, illuminated the challenges the modern woman faced in everyday life, which began in previous decades. The term, “Feminism,” refers to political, cultural, and economic movements that target equal rights and legal protection for women. The first wave of feminism (early twentieth century) focused on women’s equal contract and property, primarily the right to vote, including the Women’s Suffrage movement. Women’s studies scholar, Stephanie Coontz states that in the

1950s, “most Americans believed that the ‘normal’ life for a modern woman was to become a homemaker in a male-breadwinner family and live according to the cultural stereotypes about womanhood that Friedan described as the feminine mystique.”105 Women in 1950s American society were expected to experience desire and find fulfillment in marriage and motherhood. A woman was allowed a job that also allowed her to be a good housekeeper and mother. American

105 Stephanie Coontz, A Strange Stirring the Feminine Mystique and American Women at the Dawn of the 1960s (New York: Basic Books,2011), 64.

64 media and entertainment demonstrates the restrictions placed upon 1950s women through publications, as history and family studies scholar, Stephanie Coontz, observes:

Popular culture encouraged wives and mothers who worked for pay in the 1950s to lead what film critic Brandon French has called a “double life” rather than a “full” one. To the extent women were willing to do this, society was happy to have them fill lower rungs of the occupational ladder, freeing up men for more important and remunerative jobs. The October 16, 1956 issue of Look magazine assured its readers that working women “gracefully conceded” the upper levels of the work world to men. 106 The public image of an American wife and mother in 1950s publications illustrated a woman that was only satisfied with the needs of her husband and children, sacrificing her own needs and dreams outside of family and home. Women were encouraged to disassociate from their jobs and define themselves through their role of wife and mother. Postwar era films portrayed supposed tensions between the female professional and her ability to fulfill the gender expectation of domestication. The depiction of women as marginalized in professional roles reinforced the impression that women were expected to remain in the realms of monogamous love, marriage, and child rearing. Television programming and films of the 1950s conveyed a message of conformity and safety through images of the perfect nuclear family, which American government and media executives tied to capitalism. The message of women being perfectly beautiful and domestic created a dependency on capitalism. As Betty Friedan outlines in The

Feminine Mystique, the refusal of, or failure in, such a role raised suspicions of a woman being unfeminine, and therefore undesirable.107 In a study done in 1991 by gender studies scholars,

Melody Miller, Phyllis Moen, and Donna Dempster, the 1950s housewife and mother’s overall satisfaction depended on factors of the number of roles she held outside of the home, her social

106 Coontz, A Strange Stirring, 62. 107 Betty Friedan, The Feminine Mystique (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1963).

65 class as determined by her husband’s occupation, employment status that effected self-esteem and feelings of maternal inadequacy, detachment, and discontent. The study’s data showed that the higher the socio-economic status of the family and the more positions she held outside of home, the higher self-esteem and overall satisfaction rating she gave for her life. American 1950s society considered motherhood as the most important role for women.108

The character of Christine in The Bad Seed initially appears to embody the 1950s ideal of an American housewife. She is compliant with society’s expectations and the patriarchal belief that a woman’s devotion to being wife and mother keeps them safe. Film scholar, Bonnie

Noonan points out that the 1950s patriarchal representation of women, “relies on a strict Jungian analysis that designates woman’s role in the individuation process of the universal ego self to one that is secondary to the individuation of a well-respected male ego self.”109 The film, however, pointedly challenges this viewpoint by depicting a self-sufficient and self-aware complex female character that takes initiative as the film progresses. Christine at first never questions her role and she seems to assume it with pleasure. Christine accepts her role whole- heartedly and eventually takes full responsibility for Rhoda’s nature. This blind faith intensifies her horror when realizing Rhoda’s true character and her maternal line as the origin. The realization shatters Christine’s perfect self- image, along with her image of her “perfect angel” child. Christine’s revelation results in her break from this compliance as the danger she faces is in her own home. Her revelation is all the more frightening because her concerns with respect to

Rhoda are dismissed by her husband. Christine reaches out twice for help from her husband. The

108 Melody Miller, Phyllis Moen, Donna Dempster-McClain, “Motherhood, Multiple Roles, and Maternal Well- Beings: Women of the 1950s,” Gender & Society 5, No. 4 (December 1991): 565-582. 109 Bonnie Noonan, Women Scientists in Fifties Science Fiction Films (Jefferson: McFarland & Company, Inc., 2005), 49.

66 first time, he is loving, but utterly dismissive and distracted by his work (his priority). The second time, she picks up the receiver to call her husband, but decides it is, as she says to herself out loud, “best not to trouble him with it because what would I even say to him?” Christine’s husband, step-father, and landlord either dismiss or discredit through dialogue Christine’s concerns with respect to Rhoda’s atrocious acts.

Second wave feminism (1960s – 1980s) concerned equality and discrimination issues surrounding women’s cultural and political inequalities, such as reproductive rights, employment, and pay.110 Feminist views have enriched a range of scholarly discourses, and findings by film scholars, Laura Mulvey and Mary Ann Doane are relevant here. In Laura

Mulvey’s essay, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” (1975), she qualifies her deployment of psychoanalysis, by stating, “Psychoanalytic theory is thus appropriated here as a political weapon, demonstrating the way the unconscious of patriarchal society has structured film form.”111 Film scholar, Mary Ann Doane, expanded upon Mulvey’s work with a magnification on subjectivity and gender in The Desire to Desire (1987). 112 Doane, like Mulvey, incorporates psychoanalysis as a means of anatomizing a patriarchal system of representation in classical

Hollywood. The Bad Seed offers a rare example of contradiction, even if it still must operate within patriarchal ideology. The Bad Seed film, along with the film music, communicates a consciousness of 1950s American patriarchy and critiques it, prior to Mulvey and Doane’s arguments concerning psychoanalysis and the classical Hollywood film.

110 Laura Brunell, Elinor Burkett, “Feminism,” Encyclopedia Britannica, https://www.britannica.com/topic/feminism (Sept. 02, 2020). 111 Laura Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” Screen 16, No. 3 (Autumn 1975): 6. 112 Mary Ann Doane, The Desire to Desire: The Woman’s Film of the 1940s (Theories of Representation and Difference) (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987), 4.

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Christine and Rhoda are complex characters. They both undergo important changes as the plot unfolds and they each have a variety of traits, and different sides to their personalities, respectively. The characters of Christine and Rhoda both grow into the horrific aspects of their respective roles, and those roles share little in common with those of those for domestic female characters of the 1930s. In horror films, the dichotomy of good and evil may translate directly into the protagonist and antagonist. For Christine’s character, however, it is more complicated; she is the film’s protagonist, although she increasingly behaves as an antagonist. Christine attempts to rid the evil that is her child, while also coming to terms with the fact that she is the reason for her daughter’s disposition.

While The Bad Seed avoids sexualizing the female characters, the film includes judgement and criticism of Christine as a mother by her landlord, Monica Breedlove. Rhoda’s actions set the trajectory in motion when she pushes her classmate, Claude, into some pilings and bludgeons him to death with the heel of her tap shoe. Christine’s realization and recognition of her daughter’s actions later in the film propels the story forward and provides a scenario for

North’s unusual approach to music. Christine believes Rhoda’s inherited demeanor to be a betrayal of herself and Rhoda. Rhoda’s murderous ways are a result of her genetic maternal line, which compromises Christine’s potential of playing a conventional heroic role by attempting to eliminate the evil that is Rhoda. Christine goes against her maternal instinct and supplies the narrative with an unusual form of heroism because of her own longer arc understanding of the consequences if she doesn’t kill her. She serves the greater good by attempting to eliminate

Rhoda. Christine’s believed betrayal of her daughter and failure as a mother leads to her failed suicide attempt (in the novel, Christine actually dies) and her daughter’s demise. Rhoda’s end is met by lightning that eases the blame on Christine and allows for more sympathy in the end. The

68 music accompanying Christine and Rhoda throughout the film consists of diatonic string passages ¾ meter and a French children’s song, “Au Clair de la Lune.” “Au Clair de la Lune” is a folk song about someone not finding the help he needs. It appears in its original form and in variations. The 2014 soundtrack The Bad Seed and the 2004 DVD of The Bad Seed film names the cue and scene as “My Baby Sleep Well.” This title will appear accordingly in my analysis of the diatonic ¾ meter string music.

Mervyn LeRoy’s The Bad Seed (1956)

The Bad Seed exhibits a variety of sounds and musical techniques familiar in classical

Hollywood film score. North’s main goal appears to be accommodating the complexity of the female characters and their respective experiences as demonstrated in my analysis below.

Christine Penmark is the wife and mother of once unquestionable belief in her role and Rhoda

Penmark is the seemingly perfect child. Rhoda plays “Au Clair de la Lune” during Leroy’s death scene; my analysis examines the virtuosity, musical ambiguity, and deception of North’s musical placements with respect to psychological thriller musical aesthetics. Rhoda plays the piano as if nothing has happened, a moment that displays Michel Chion’s concept of anempathetic effect.

“Au Clair de Lune” is a staple in the beginner’s stage of instrumental music education, which coincides with Rhoda’s growing skill in sociopathic murders. Her skills in music and murder progress across the film; initially Rhoda plays the tune on the piano with a few mistakes and at a slow tempo. During Leroy’s death scene, Rhoda plays the tune with greater accuracy and with a gradual accelerando. In this memorable scene, the audience is unable to identify when the music is diegetic or non-diegetic because Christine in this moment becomes unreliable.

Christine remarks to Monica Lovebreed, her landlord, that she could still hear the man screaming and to tell Rhoda to stop playing that song. The man’s screaming is absent diegetically and

69 nondiegetically; the listener is only made aware of it by the dialogue. Rhoda’s playing is presumably diegetic, although the listener receives no confirmation. Monica talks over Christine as she visibly, mentally, and musically spirals and falls apart.

Alex North and The Bad Seed Film Score

Alex North (1910-1991), was a prolific film composer with over forty film scores to his name. He won an honorary Academy Award in 1986. 113 In her study of Alex North’s career and work, musicologist, Annette Davison, acknowledges the importance of North’s early-career experience writing music for theater and dance:

[Alex North’s] knowledge of, and eclectic interest in a wide variety of musical languages and forms provided him with invaluable technical skills in composition and contributed to his success as a film composer in Hollywood, where his abilities as both a craftsman and innovator were recognized. 114 After studying at the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia, the Juilliard School in

New York (1929), and the Moscow Conservatory (1933), North became the first American member of the Union of Soviet Composers, worked as music director for the Latvian State

Theatre, and studied with Aaron Copland and Ernst Toch in 1935. “He composed ballet scores for Martha Graham and others and later studied and conducted in Mexico City” before serving in

113 Sanya Shoilevska Henderson, Alex North, Film Composer (Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers, 2003), 42. 114 Annette Davison, Alex North’s A Streetcar Named Desire: A Film Score Guide (Lanham: Scarecrow Press, 2009), 5.

70 the U.S. Army in 1947.115 North arrived at film composing well equipped by diverse training, initially wanting a concert-music career and reputation.116

Salient components of North’s compositional style include integration of jazz and concert idioms, simplicity and modesty of structure and melody complemented by dissonance, and interest in rhythm exploration.117 North identified his music as functional and accessible.

Musicologist, Elizabeth Crist, explains that the accessible idiom composers cultivated in the

1930s that moved away from experimentalism to an “aesthetic orientation and a compositional attitude that focused on accessibility and conceived of the musical work as a functional as well as artistic creation.”118 In North’s diverse training, he became acquainted with many different

American folk music styles. Davison cites an interview North did with the Hartford Times with respect to his desire for an inclusive American musical language: “We, song-writers, should make use of our own culture, particularly folk music and jazz. We must lose our highbrow attitude toward jazz, take what is good in it and put it to work writing American music as vital, democratic and dynamic as our land.”119 North’s familiarity with jazz, as well as other regional folk music, is evident in his works particularly in his outsider characterizations that locate characters and depend on cultural codes.

North’s film scores exhibits his extensive understanding of jazz and modernism, through his use of complex textures, independent contrapuntal lines, dynamic melodic contours, dense

115 Virginia Gorlinski, “Alex North,” Encyclopædia Britannica, November 30, 2020, https://www.britannica.com/biography/Alex-North. 116 Davison, Alex North’s A Streetcar Named Desire, 5. 117 Davison, Alex North’s A Streetcar Named Desire, 12. 118 Elizabeth Crist, “Aaron Copland and the Popular Front,” Journal of the American Musicological Society 56, No. 2 (Summer 2003): 410. 119 Davison, Alex North’s A Streetcar Named Desire, 13; Alex North, “Composer Sends Message from Camp,” Hartford Times, April 12, 1943.

71 music and instrumentation, and the use of tone clusters. The 2017 The Bad Seed soundtrack recording features the cue, “Confession,” a heterophonic and improvised sounding cue with high woodwind, trumpet, and piano entrances. Davison notes that North’s approach to instrumentation as including:

Sparse, chamber-like orchestration, while those for epics typically involve enormous orchestral forces, particularly in terms of the range of percussion instruments used. Yet even with the extended resources available for these films, North often scored intimate scenes for a small number of musicians, much to the chagrin of some studio Music Department heads.120 North excels at musically capturing a character and their struggles. Davison attributes to

North’s talent for characterization by creating, “cues of intense lyricism to underscore the personal conflicts and sacrifices of individual characters and their relationships.”121 North’s film scores show his mastery of musically conveying emotion in relationships in a way that conforms to classical Hollywood conventions. The relationship of Martha and George in Mile Nichols’s

Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1966), for example, carries an underlying love beneath the overwhelming surface of verbal and mental abuse. North describes his approach to the music for

Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolfe was to, “try and establish a sort of musical statement that was partly melancholy – simple and sort of quasi-baroque.”122 North treats The Bad Seed score in a similar fashion by harmonizing simple, diatonic musical statements with dissonance. A mother- daughter relationship example is the cue for the ending scene of Elia Kazan’s Streetcar Named

Desire (1951), in which the major tonality of the music depicts Stella’s hope for the future as she

120 Davison, Alex North’s A Streetcar Named Desire, 30. 121 Davison, Alex North’s A Streetcar Named Desire, 19. 122 Davison, Alex North’s A Streetcar Named Desire, 45; New York Times, March 27, 1949.

72 climbs the stair to Eunice, her daughter. North’s film music generally portrays the experiences of the ostracized characters he sought out when choosing which projects to work on.

North favors characterizing with particular regional folk styles, even before the audience sees any character. North transitions from each musical part of the character’s experience to another smoothly, even when musical style and musical technique originate from different sources, for example, jazz or regional folk styles combined with dissonance, asymmetrical meters, and unusual timbres. Among North’s film music that incorporates these musical elements is Fred Zinneman’s Member of the Wedding (1952). Musical style prepares the viewer for the particular region of America represented and as an element for the character to interact with. In his film score for The Member of the Wedding, North’s opening title cue stylistically points to the American South. From the opening credits to the scene of Frankie, John Henry, and Bernice singing “His Eye is on the Sparrow,” the Southern Gospel musical style characterizes Frankie.

North varies the music’s style and instrumentation to demonstrate transformations of the female character, Frankie, from a tomboy to a young woman. Frankie has little experience of the world outside her home. She reacts in anger and selfishness to being excluded first by the girls’ club and later, by her newly married brother and his wife. Frankie transitions into womanhood after her experience of leaving home alone, being violated by a solider, and the death of her cousin,

John Henry West. The music becomes especially panicked and heavily staccato when she runs away from the solider to home. Jazz instrumentation and style exemplifies the world outside of

Frankie’s home. Frankie’s feeling of otherness as she experiences it. North depicts different sides of the American South through the styles of jazz, Southern gospel, and chamber music. Jazz portrays the new South of a sexually knowing adulthood personified by the character of Honey.

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Southern gospel conveys Frankie’s childhood and the American working class, and chamber music is the timbre for Frankie’s journey to American, middle class, female adulthood.

By the end of Member of the Wedding, Frankie’s transformation is complete and she displays a compliance with society's expectations of her gender and color, belittling and dismissing Bernice, the African American family maid. The bass clarinet represents Bernice's mentality and character, while the Southern gospel hymn, “His Eye is on the Sparrow,” symbolizes Frankie’s childhood. Before Frankie leaves home, we see her and John Henry sing

"His Eye is on the Sparrow," a hymn made popular by Ethel Waters who plays Bernice. A whimsical melody in the clarinet reminiscent of a bird song marks the change in

Frankie. Frankie's music becomes that of an attractive young woman with a lyrical violin melody that is later played by the flutes. The dreamy orchestral accompaniment plays broken chords in the high woodwinds, while Frankie talks about Rachmaninoff, referring to Romantic musical style replacing the original Southern gospel style. Just like in The Bad Seed, the use of folk song is for characterization and change.

Analysis of Alex North’s The Bad Seed cues in the anempathetic effect and in characterization The Bad Seed runs to two hours and nine minutes with North’s eleven cues in the score together play for a total score 44 minutes and 38 seconds. North’s score for The Bad Seed centers on two main simple diatonic melodies, which he subjects to dissonant variations. Specific cues present North’s fascination with musical styles for characterization in The Bad Seed film score, for example, with non-diegetic chamber-like orchestration for the characterization of Christine’s maternal love.

Basket of Kisses

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Diegetic sounds in The Bad Seed, including music, revolves around Rhoda’s actions and

Christine’s feelings, especially registered in mother-daughter conversations and Rhoda’s manipulative games with the phrases, “I have the most beautiful mother” and “What will you give me for a bucket of hugs?” A simple triple-metered musical statement depicts Christine’s hope and desire with respect to Rhoda’s angelic innocence, while it highlights Rhoda’s manipulative nature during these conversations. Usually reserved to portray female attractiveness or desire in the classical Hollywood film score, violin passages romanticize an ideal state for

Christine’s character because the audience knows Rhoda is a killer. The emotional consequences of this knowledge provides ease and acceptance for Christine when she decides to kill her daughter with sleeping pills, creating Chion’s anempathetic effect with the juxtaposition of the music and drama onscreen. The anempathetic nature of the music accompanying Christine’s murder-suicide moves the audience to the affect result of terror and discomfort. The image and the music make it simple to identify with Christine’s character in this scene of moral dilemma, but her ability to accept the consequences of these actions without a second thought is very disturbing. The same traits heighten the horror factor by tapping into the anempathetic effect, especially when this melody is heard after Christine’s revelation. The simple triple-metered violin melody played by a chamber ensemble glosses over Rhoda’s murderous behavior and focuses on Christine’s (and Rhoda’s) desire of “the perfect daughter.”

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EXAMPLE 2.1 “Basket of Kisses” embodies Christine’s hopes and desires. The woman’s film genre is a ready source for the use of instrumental Romantic style to illustrate the female character’s act of fantasization. A string section featuring a solo violin plays this cue; a rubato moment midway is quintessential of classical Hollywood’s neoromantic tradition. The cue, “Basket of Kisses,” (see Example 2.1) plays while Rhoda verbally manipulates Christine; by contrast, there is no musical accompaniment when Rhoda turns her games on her father. This contrast demonstrates the difference between Rhoda’s mother and her father. “Basket of Kisses” is North’s musical characterization of Christine’s maternal love and hope for a happy future. This gentle musical style that North applies to Christine’s maternal love is common in classical Hollywood scoring practices as the music captures the patriarchal assumption of women as mothers having a happy, loving, and fulfilling relationship with their children. The diatonic melody of the “Basket of Kisses” cue appears in several other cues including, “The Truth,” “Confession,” and “My Baby Sleep Well.” The return of this melody throughout the film represents Christine’s emotional world and her experience combating the horrible possibility about Rhoda’s sociopathetic behavior before having her realization and accepting the truth.

“My Baby Sleep Well / The Medal and Rhoda’s Death”

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The final instance of “My Baby Sleep Well / The Medal and Rhoda’s Death” is heard from the murder / suicide scene until the end of the film. This final cue starts during the sleeping pills scene with pizzicato in the harp, staccato in the high woodwinds, and sustained notes in the vibraphone, low strings, and the low brass. The instrumentation aurally creates the dream like atmosphere accommodating Christine’s desire of a happy ending, while she lulls Rhoda to sleep with sleeping pills. The heinous act of Christine giving Rhoda a lethal amount of sleeping pills is musically portrayed with the return of the melody from the “Basket of Kisses” cue, illustrating

Christine’s mental state of yearning for innocence and the belief that she is doing right by herself, her husband, and her daughter. In this decision, Christine displays the thought process and decision making of the 1950s American housewife and mother. She thoroughly believes that to be the only logical solution as no others are presented. This scene suggests that 1950s

American mothers felt that if they failed as a wife and mother, the logical solution or sole punishment was death.

The high strings play a version of the “Au Clair de la Lune” melody. The melody’s presence emphasizes Christine’s need to reassure herself of her daughter’s innocence, even if it is a delusion. The melody contours downwards in a descending arrangement of pitches with a

‘falling’ quality reiterating falling asleep and high strings play in mid to high range in a call and response. The melody from the “Basket of Kisses” cue appears to signal Christine’s mental state of longing for Rhoda’s innocence and Christine’s acceptance in killing Rhoda to eliminate the threat. After the melody plays in its entirety, North transitions back to the dissonant musical environment from the beginning of the cue. The high strings ascend in pitch, while creating dissonant harmonies with an accompaniment of suspended low strings, muted brass, and broken chords in the piano, harp, and vibraphone moving upwards as well. The range continues into

77 harmonic territory until the violins hit a G7 and the harp, vibraphone, and high strings play a tritone chord, depriving the listener of a final cadence’s comfort and leaving the end of phrase ambiguous.

North achieves the anempathetic effect by placing the melody from the cue “Basket of

Kisses” into the scene, “My Baby Sleep Well” (see Figure 2.1). This scene demonstrates the importance of musical placement in regard to depicting a character’s mental state that conflicts with the drama or mood of the scene. North’s deployment of a gentle music played on the violin during a scene featuring a murder-suicide intensifies multiple emotions, affording possibilities in reception. Most of all, The Bad Seed score exemplifies Claudia Gorbman’s mutual implication.

FIGURE 2.1 Christine protects Rhoda as well as herself after giving her a dangerous amount of sleeping pills. The Bad Seed, Warner Bros. Pictures, 1956. Musically, the dream-like atmosphere transcends into heavenly tropes with the introduction of a women’s chorus vocalizing on “Ah.” The women’s chorus is accompanied by harp and vibraphone to high sustained strings. The use of a women’s chorus instead of a

78 children’s chorus signals Christine’s comfort and hope that she will finally find peace in a future without Rhoda after killing her. The chorus continues, doubled by the high strings, and North employs call and response between the chorus and the high strings that resolves in a cadence, ending the portion featuring the women’s chorus.

In “the medal” cue, the attentive listener will recognize the return of “Au Clair de la

Lune” piano version from Leroy’s death scene in its entirety, identical with the rising and falling scales in the left hand. The “Au Clair de la Lune” melody plays as Rhoda dresses to go out into the stormy night with her mother in the hospital and her father oblivious to her true nature, his lack of supervision of Rhoda allowing her to do as she pleases. This moment in the film, “The

Medal/Rhoda’s death,” non-diegetic music plays in the open without the competition of dialogue, demonstrating the power of North’s music and placement of the “Au Clair de la Lune” melody to aurally depict Rhoda’s emotions. After “Au Clair de la Lune” plays in its entirety, the melody is played by the orchestra in the brass and later, the piccolo and the upper woodwinds.

The melody line in the xylophone and the marimba leads into a chaotic whirl of instrumental entrances at fortissimo, all while leading up to Rhoda’s death scene. The action becomes more frenetic as Rhoda rushes to retrieve the coveted metal from the pilings. Her frantic quick step musically portrayed by the combination of instrumental frenzy and the “Au Clair de La Lune” melody. The score concludes with the return of the opening music featuring the timpani followed by a major final cadence in the orchestra. North finally relieves the tension for the listener that he built from the very beginning of the film.

Maxwell Anderson’s original play includes “Au Clair de la Lune” in the stage directions, as follows: “Scene 4: A few days later, in the same apartment. The living room is empty, Rhoda

79 can be seen practicing ‘Au Clair de la Lune’ on the piano in the den.” 123 Scene 4 is the only mention of Rhoda practicing “Au Clair de la Lune.” Words and actions reveal Rhoda’s dual nature in the novel and play, while the film capitalizes on the folk song’s melody. “Au Clair de la Lune” appears in its original form a total of four times and in variations in the film.

This eighteenth century French folk song, “Au Clair de la Lune,” aids in the fantasy of eight year old Rhoda with its simple melody and major tonality, it is the type of song one might imagine a sweet, innocent child play. North captures her true nature musically in the main title and in Rhoda’s death scene. North presents the child’s folk melody in different versions to demonstrate the different aspects throughout the film of Rhoda’s manipulative personality. The cues containing the folk tune employ a range of sounds including a vocalizing choir, virtuosic orchestral techniques, dissonance with the use of minor scales and whole tone scales, and high pitches in the strings. Every encounter of the “Au Clair de la Lune” melody appears in distinct and original variation throughout the film score. Each “Au Clair de la Lune” appearance functions as her character theme and serves as a barometer of Rhoda’s character and temperament. Rhoda’s deceitful and manipulative characteristics encourage an anxious response to the story of The Bad Seed.

123 Maxwell Anderson, Bad Seed: A Play in Two Acts (New York: Dodd, Mead & Company, 1955), 30.

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EXAMPLE 2.2 “Au Clair de la Lune” represents Rhoda’s mask of deception. “Au Clair de la Lune” (see Example 2.2) appears as variations throughout the film according to the character’s “evil” deeds in accordance with Maxwell Anderson’s play. North inserts the folk tune to the film in diegetic and non-diegetic form. North initially uses “Au Clair de la Lune” as purely diegetic music. It is important to note that “Au Clair de la Lune” is the only music that is diegetic. As the storyline progresses, the music’s quality of diegetic or non- diegetic is indeterminable.

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EXAMPLE 2.3 “Confession” represents the circular games Rhoda plays in attempts to avoid the truth.

In the main title of The Bad Seed, North musically characterizes Rhoda with modernistic orchestral hyperactivity of rapidly ascending and descending scales accompanying the manic playing of “Au Clair de la Lune.” Most of North’s score exhibits modernism incorporating dissonant harmonies and repetitive chord progressions. In the cue, “Confession” (see Example

2.3) North centers the melody and accompaniment around (in order as sounds) F, G, G-sharp, A,

B, and B-flat creating a circular motion and dissonant sound. The staggered entrances of the melody against the harmony invokes the feeling of slowly moving forward and building toward perhaps a resolution, which North deprives the listener of because the pitches always tend to circle back around either chromatically or step-wise, giving the feeling of going around in circle or being given the run around. In this scene, “Confession,” Christine suspects Rhoda of being the cause of Claude’s accident, but Rhoda plays her manipulative games and attempts to distract her mother from her suspicions. North’s score is quite complex and matches Rhoda’s precocious villainy as well as psychological thriller musical aesthetics. Repetitive chord progressions, emphasis on lower voiced instruments, ostinati, use of musical style for deception, and musical source ambiguity are some of the psychological thriller musical aesthetics found in North’s The

Bad Seed score.

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FIGURE 2.2 The truth about Rhoda comes to a head when Christine witnesses the aftermath of Rhoda’s nature during Leroy’s fiery death. The Bad Seed, Warner Bros. Pictures, 1956. The blurring of sound and music in The Bad Seed occurs in the identification of the source: diegetic, nondiegetic or both. This source ambiguity effects the listener without definite answers from the dialogue or action onscreen. In Leroy’s death scene (see Figure 2.2), Rhoda goes into the room with the piano and closes the door to presumably practice. As Leroy starts screaming, burning to death, Rhoda plays “Au Clair de la Lune,” increasing in virtuosity with each run through. The psychological thriller music aesthetic of circular or spiraling gestures as heard in Hitchcock’s films appears here in the excessive repetitions of the French folk song.

Christine mentally spirals, overwhelmed by the factual revelation of Rhoda’s murderous ways.

Rhoda’s playing improves significantly, demonstrating virtuosity in the minutes she has played in this scene. When “Au Clair de la Lune” plays diegetically and non-diegetically, the focus automatically shifts solely to Rhoda for the audience and the characters. Christine remarks on how Monica needs to stop her from playing because “the man is still screaming.” The man’s

83 screaming is an acousmêtre,124 which Michel Chion defines as an off-screen diegetic sound. The listener assumes that “Au Clair de la Lune” is diegetic, however, Christine’s comment supplies ambiguousness of the true source and suggests that Christine cannot ignore Rhoda’s murderous behavior and deception.

The echoes reiterate the horror of Rhoda’s real nature, which prompts Christine, in a later scene, to suddenly remember her murderous mother – a fact that remains unknown until that point. For an attentive audience, the anempathetic nature of the music (continuing on after the murder act) intensifies the horror of the scene. Rhoda’s playing of “Au Clair de la Lune” is to also employ the song as a type of distraction method. Rhoda plays “Au Clair de la Lune” to cope with the heinous activities she has participated in. This type of distraction also serves as a coping mechanism for Christine and the audience as it activates the anempathetic effect. The juxtaposition of folk song and violent murder triggers the anempathetic effect and concludes with mutual implication. While the music and the image oppose the mood onscreen, the audience experiences the horror of indifference. The horror is amplified by Rhoda’s virtuosity combined with manic playing of the folk song, which demands attention both as sheer sound and as a non- sequitur in the narrative. On the surface, the virtuosity of her playing combined with Christine’s reaction refreshes the reaction discussed earlier of the audience reactions to Paganini. In this moment, North musically translates Christine’s horror at Rhoda’s sociopathic indifference. The indifference successfully establishes the effectiveness of The Bad Seed as a psychological thriller film.

124 Michel Chion, The Voice in Cinema, edited and translated by Claudia Gorbman (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999), 21.

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FIGURE 2.3 Christine still hears “the man screaming” and asks Monica to make Rhoda stop playing that tune, while Monica dismissively talks over her. The Bad Seed, Warner Bros. Pictures, 1956. In the entire film of The Bad Seed, Leroy is the only other character that acknowledges

Rhoda’s theme of “Au Clair de la Lune”; he whistles it, but not in Rhoda’s presence. This connection in the digesis connects the evil ways of the characters. Leroy even states at one point that they are the same, referring to their manipulative, sociopathic nature. North represents Leroy musically with whole tone scales played in the low woodwinds. The whole tone scale typically indicates dreams or dream sequences in the classical Hollywood film score. Examples of films with whole-tone passages include Rebecca (1940) and Spellbound (1945). Music theorist, Frank

Lehman, credits the popularity of Romantic style and modernism in classical Hollywood scores to the works of Russian composers of the Romantic era and early Twentieth century composers like Rimsky-Korsakov and Claude Debussy. 125 The character of Leroy is treated as other and is

125 Frank Lehman. Hollywood Harmony: Musical Wonder and the Sound of Cinema (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018), 52.

85 also musically represented as such. The connection between Leroy and Rhoda is one of otherness that places the two characters outside of patriarchal standards. The evil that makes Rhoda obviously destructive shapes her as a threat, while the mental disability in Leroy’s character disqualifies him as a heroic character, but not a threat to Christine.

The next cue “The Dream” exhibits atonality, ostinato in the string bass, and an emphasis on the lower voiced instruments, particularly the bass clarinet and bassoon. The muted trumpet echoes in the background, while a wood block plays a militant rhythm. Faint tremolos in the strings enter and most of the ensemble plays a descending scale chromatically once again reiterating falling. “The Dream” cue coincides with Christine having a flashback of her mother.

The audience then learns of the murderous nature of Christine’s mother through her recalled memory. Christine acknowledges her mother as a possible source of Rhoda’s disposition to her own horror. In “The Truth” scene, a variation of “Au Clair de la Lune” is presented after the audience and Christine have experienced the horror (music) gambit in Leroy’s death scene. “Au

Clair de la Lune” appears as a variation in the cue, “The Truth” which accompanies the scene of

Rhoda throwing her shoes into the incinerator which is musically depicted in the pizzicato of the strings and staccato in the woodwinds as tiptoeing and the return of the first few bars of the opening title music. Here, when “Au Clair de la Lune” returns, a glockenspiel plays the tune over a violin’s pizzicatos, preceded by high pitches in the upper strings. Muted strings and harp as underscore to suggest deception or Christine’s fantasy of Rhoda’s innocence. North effectively deploys “Au Clair de la Lune” confirming Rhoda’s deceptive and manipulative. The music suggests Christine’s fantasy, but more so, Rhoda’s deceit and performative manner of playing

“Au Clair de la Lune” on the piano to portray the perfect daughter prior to Christine’s revelation.

North uses “Au Clair de la Lune” melody to imply Rhoda’s control of the situation.

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Conclusion

Alex North’s The Bad Seed score works as psychological thriller film score through the aesthetic effects of character themes, the use of variations to portray a character’s changing mental states, music’s participation in the anempathetic effects, and ambiguity. The psychological thriller and horror film share an aesthetic of ambiguity with other Hollywood film genres, however, the difference lies in North’s placement of simple diatonic melodies that characterize Rhoda and Christine, tracing particularly Rhoda’s virtuosity of music and murder and Christine’s realization of her murderous maternal genes passed down to Rhoda. Horror and psychological thrillers both emphasize instruments of relatively low range and extremes of instrumental range. The Bad Seed soundtrack consists of music fitting of a horror film or a psychological thriller with dissonant melodic variations, sparse orchestration, staggered entrances, and dissonant harmonies. Ambiguity affects music in different ways in the horror film and the psychological thriller, as does its diegetic or non-diegetic function. Music appears as either diegetic or non-diegetic as “Au Clair de la Lune” in Leroy’s death scene in The Bad Seed, but dialogue may raise doubts about the status. The psychological thriller also borrows some aesthetics from the classical Hollywood score, such as the use of harp and vibraphone instrumentation for a dream-like atmosphere, the whole tone scale to depict a dream state of mind, and the use of the whole tone scale to characterize as other.

The repetitive motion aestheticized by the psychological thriller appears in North’s score in the form of repetitive melodies, chord progressions, and melodic motion of Christine’s musical theme in ¾ meter with a similar dizzying effect as the use of waltzes in Hitchcock films.

In the “Confession” cue, North revisits the same pitches, F, G, G-sharp, A, B, B-flat (in sounding

87 order) repeatedly in the melody creating dissonance and increasing unease with each return.

Musical passages such as the “Confession” cue aurally reinforce Christine’s emotions with respect to Rhoda’s murderous temperament, leading up to the audience and Christine’s realization. The ¾ meter simple diatonic melody placed in moments of horrific drama and realization is an aesthetic of psychological thrillers demonstrating Michel Chion’s anempathetic effect because of the music’s indifference to the drama. Furthermore, Christine’s emotionally affective theme aids in the reading of the film’s text and succeeds in Claudia Gorbman’s mutual implication because Christine’s musical statement coupled with the visual horrific drama provokes a multitude of emotions, along with questions. North’s contributions of gentle musical style depicting Christine’s maternal love and hope for a happy ending adds to the maternal drama and dilemma of protecting one’s self versus protecting one’s child. North shows careful consideration with respect to the portrayal of Christine’s complex character. North and the narrative present the listener with multiple perspectives in the “My Baby Sleep Well” scene because Christine’s dilemma is multi-dimensional and should be considered as such. This scene, in particular, serves as social commentary and challenges the audience to investigate Christine’s actions and decisions in the social and historical context of 1950s America. North’s predilection for portraying outsider characters and extensive musical language shines through in his project, however, North composes a score that depicts a mother’s dilemma without a particular region of

America signaled stylistically. This inclusivity suggests that this maternal dilemma spoke to the concerns of, and limitations, on American mothers of the 1950s.

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Conclusion

Music is part of classical Hollywood film characterization; it encodes female characters in a way that reinforces in aesthetic form the gender expectations and assumptions in American films of the 1950s. Together, visual image and music aestheticize attitudes toward gender roles.

The female centered psychological thriller and its music questions this classical Hollywood model practice and critiques it. Music in classical Hollywood presents female characters through a lens of vulnerability, while sexualizing the female character, however, some Hollywood genres, such as the woman’s film, film noir, and the psychological thriller question this representation through female tropes and musical scores serving as social commentary. This thesis shows by way of genre and case study how the classical Hollywood model, rather than a limiter of musical style or expression of drama, incorporated familiar techniques and strategic placement to position female characters in said commentary. Film-music scholarship has studied the representation of women in the classical Hollywood model, film noir, and the woman’s film; the current study adds to an understanding of music in the psychological thriller.

Composer Alex North’s The Bad Seed score accommodates the character’s feelings and experiences with music incorporating gentle violin melodies, chromaticism, virtuosity, and most of all, musical techniques that appeal to the aesthetics of 1950s psychological thriller soundtracks and classical Hollywood film scoring practices. North’s music amplifies the psychological thriller narrative theme of normalcy veiling the hidden threat into his film score. His film score is a source of information and affect in the film. North’s mastery of musically portraying the experiences of the characters complements Rhoda’s nefariousness and precociousness and, in other moments, invites the audience to be empathetic and sympathetic of Christine’s situation, no matter how heinous her action. The film’s argument is that a woman as a mother is someone expected to make sacrifices and should deserve to kill her own child to protect her own life, and

89 perhaps the extreme proposition of this film is meant to symbolize the viewpoint that women have sacrificed too much. The musical representation of female experience by North mesmerizes the audience with its musical style with respect to mother-child relationships, yearning for innocence coupled with murderous and suicidal acts. North captures in rich contrast musical portrayals of the main mother-daughter relationship in The Bad Seed. North’s cues place the audience in the emotional world of Christine, and her journey toward revelation and grim resolution through musical style as demonstrated in the scores of The Bad Seed. North’s musical placement and sympathy applies to Rhoda’s reveal in The Bad Seed and Frankie’s transition into womanhood in Member of the Wedding. North also exhibits interpretative consideration to the female character of Stella at the cue at the end of the film in Elia Kazan’s Streetcar Named

Desire (1951) where the music’s major tonality reflects Stella’s hopeful mental disposition for the future for herself and Eunice.

North’s musical consideration and sympathy of complex outsider characters informs the effectiveness of juxtaposing image and music, thereby, creating anempathetic music. North displays his vast musical language in these scores through his familiarity with a variety of

American regional musical styles. North’s music mirrors the female character’s personal feelings and thoughts with respect to their realities. North appropriately crafts musical style in accordance with the female character’s origins, socio-economic status, personal growth or other relevant factors. North’s music provides indifference in some measure, whether from the drama or the terror of the narrative. The indifference to a female character’s personal growth mirrored in

North’s music is clear in the example of Frankie and Bernice at the end of Member of the

Wedding. In the opening credits through to the scene featuring “His Eye is on the Sparrow,”

Southern Gospel musical style represents Frankie’s childhood. After her introduction to the

90 outside world, musically captured through diegetic jazz, Frankie transitions into womanhood.

The change to Romantic style string melody musically signals her experience, along with physically, mentally, and emotionally leaving behind Bernice and the Southern Gospel style.

In The Bad Seed, the indifference of the music with respect to Leroy’s death, is extremely haunting as Rhoda’s virtuosity increases, a chaotic effect mirroring Christine’s overwhelmed state. The diegetic and non-diegetic music and sounds work together to create an aural characterization in the film, The Bad Seed and securing the anempathetic music aesthetic.

Rhoda’s piano playing could be understood as a form of her displaying good daughterly behavior and love for her mother, but her playing proves treacherous after Christine’s revelation, revealing the anempathetic nature of the music. Christine struggles with the fact that her daughter is innately a murderess (nature) because of Rhoda’s loving and supportive surrounding environment (nurture). Although the situation gives her mental anguish, Christine arrives at the realization that she needs to resolve it after visually and musically spinning out of control to

Rhoda’s manic playing of “Au Clair de la Lune.” Christine realizes that she is the only one who will do anything about her Rhoda. Others, including her husband and Rhoda’s father, are dismissive and dazzled by Rhoda’s charade. They are blinded by Rhoda’s act as Christine once was. Christine decides to take action in the form of murder-suicide.

In the “My Baby Sleep Well” scene analyzed in Chapter Two, Christine comes to the conclusion that the best solution is to give Rhoda a dangerous amount of sleeping pills and to shoot herself. Christine believes she has betrayed her daughter and husband by passing on a murderous gene to Rhoda. Christine’s attempts to reach out to her husband for help demonstrate patriarchal attitudes of the dismissive husband in 1950s American society as realistic and unproblematic. This factor contributes to Christine’s spiraling and final decision of murder

91 suicide. Alex North’s portrayals of women were sympathetic and nuanced, offering alternatives to classical Hollywood’s more limited stereotyping and musical placement. North sympathizes with the outsider characters by considering their inner thoughts and feelings. His major output of music expresses his extensive musical language. The sophistication of North’s portrayals of women was an important antecedent for later composers in film.

Unique to the psychological thriller genre is the theme of things not being entirely as they seem. The Bad Seed invites the audience to consider mothers in this light. The representation of the mother in film comes in two forms: the vulnerable mother seen in Christine’s character and the monstrous mother in Frank Perry’s Mommie Dearest (1981). In Mommie Dearest, the mother character seems to be loving her high-profile public life, however, this contradicts her private behavior. Joan Crawford’s abusive behavior comes to light. Crawford feels betrayed because of the failure of an attempted romance and her dismissal from her MGM contract, and she takes it out publicly on her adopted children. Henry Mancini portrays different affects just as Joan does, whether her character is feeling or merely acting. This film is considered to be a biography/drama, but it is also a psychological thriller because of its nonlinear narrative, dramatic scenarios, theme of geniality and normalcy veiling a hidden threat, and use of music to mirror the Joan Crawford character.

The vengeful female character type who becomes monstrous appears in films starting in the 1970s in films such as Carrie (1976). The revenge theme with respect to female characters endures in Jennifer’s Body (2009). The protagonists of Carrie and Jennifer’s Body meet

Kristeva’s descriptions of the abject and the unstable nature of society. Both Carrie and Jennifer experience victimization and vilification by the hands of patriarchal society that judge them as women according to stereotypes. These films are labelled as horror films, however, with the

92 application of the “gaslighting” aspect of psychological thrillers, the use of music to victimize or villainize the female lead characters, and an overall theme of deceit in the narrative and music, these films suggest a blurring of the horror and psychological thriller genres. The female character of Carrie in the film of the same name suffers mistreatment at every turn. The musical treatment of Carrie in the dance scene, where she is set up to be the victim of a cruel prank, portrays Carrie as desiring kindness and love, mistaking kindness (genuine or not) for love, and prone to fall apart and turn murderous upon her disappointment.

Jennifer of Jennifer’s Body (2009) becomes a demon that eats the souls of boys after a failed sacrifice to Satan. This is when the supposed horror begins. The horror begins after

Jennifer’s mistreatment in the bar scene where Nicolai Wolf and his band members choose

Jennifer based on their assumptions of her sexuality. Wolf and his band prove they have zero remorse and only want the fame they believe their band will receive with this sacrifice of

Jennifer. Jennifer’s Body proves progressive because of its realistic representations of toxic relationships amongst teen girls and the use of a final girl or the last survivor. The same theme from Carrie returns: when the male threat denies the main female character her desire of kindness and love, musically represented in these films by pop songs, otherwise, betrays her in some way, the narratives turn these female characters monstrous by demonizing them and transforming these female characters into actual demons or supernatural beings. This theme of deceit emphasized with the use of Tommy Tutone’s “Jenny (867-5309)” (1981) resonates with

Rhoda’s playing “Au Clair de la Lune” in The Bad Seed.

The psychological thriller stands as a metaphorical record of women’s challenges in

American society. From the psychological thriller’s ancestor genres of horror, woman’s film, and film noir, the psychological thriller continues to register patriarchal ideologies in play in

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American society. The American psychological thriller exposes limitations and normative expectations relating to gender, race, and sexuality in a historical and social context. Horror historian and author, Tananarive Due, states that, “Horror is like any other film genre, in the sense that representation matters. Whether it is race or gender, it matters.”126 Contemporary horror films force the audience to look inward with respect to the loss of humanity and the idea of monsters. The act of self-reflection can create ambiguity between antagonist, victim, anti- hero, and threat, but also new perspective because audience members consider themselves safe and far from the drama onscreen, but close enough to witness it as to be innocent of any evil or wrong doing. The work in this thesis provides a starting point and methods of analysis for investigating the psychological thriller, and suggest methods for analysis for horror films, broadly.

126 Tananarive Due, Buzzfeed, “Film Historian reviews Black people in Horror movies,” Youtube, 12:03, February 20, 2020.

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Appendix

The Bad Seed (1956 Film Score) Alex North, conductor Warner Bros. Studio Orchestra Released by La-La Land Records (LLLCD 1437) 2017

1. “The Bad Seed”

2. “The Dream”

3. “No More Children”

4. “The Truth”

5. “Basket of Kisses”

6. “Confession”

7. “The Princess”

8. “The Locket”

9. “Identity”

10. “My Baby Sleep Well”

11. “The Medal and Rhoda’s Death”

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