The Music of Fantasy Cinema
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Introduction Finding Fantasy Janet K. Halfyard Over the past two years during which I have worked on this project, I have repeatedly found myself debating whether this volume of essays on music in fantasy cinema is timely or premature. The argument could be made for either case. The timeliness stems from the fact that there was a significant upsurge of interest in fantasy cinema from film-makers and audiences in the late 1990s that persisted throughout the first decade of the twenty-first century, and it was probably predictable that there would be corresponding interest from academics. Much of this, so far, has centred on Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings (2001–3), with edited collections of essays from Brennan Croft (2004), Mathijs (2006), Mathijs and Pomerance (2006), Margolis et al. (2008) and Barker and Mathijs (2008), and monographs on fantasy film from Bellin (2005) and Thompson (2007). This interest in fantasy cinema builds on an existing body of work on fantasy literature, with studies of J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter, in both book and cinema manifestations (for example, Whited, 2002; Heilman, 2003, 2009), and the beginnings of an academic literature looking at fantasy cinema as a whole (Worley, 2005; Butler, 2009; Fowkes, 2010). The prematureness stems from the perennial problem of musicologists, our preference for looking at a ‘complete’ opus. Most of the work on individual composers tends to be done once the composer has died and his (or her) body of work can therefore be considered complete: film musicology is not immune from this, with much more academic writing dedicated to Bernard Herrmann than to John Williams, for example, although they have clearly been equally important in the shaping of film music over similarly extended periods of time.1 This is not a problem we share with others involved in studying temporal arts and artefacts such as cinema and television, and the result is that music is generally under-represented in such studies. Three of the four edited collections on The Lord of the Rings contain one essay on music: ‘Musical Middle Earth’ (Donnelly, 2006), ‘Enchantments of Lord of the Rings: soundtrack, myth, language and modernity’ (Buhler, 2008) and ‘Howard Shore’s Ring Cycle: the film score and operatic strategy’ (Bernanke, 2008); but there is a strong 2 The Music of Fantasy Cinema sense that the film industry is going to continue to make large numbers of fantasy films over the next decade and this alone makes me, as a musicologist, a little cautious. At the time of writing, Christmas 2010, the top three films at the UK box office are all fantasy films of one form or another: Tron: Legacy (Joseph Kosinski, 2010); The Chronicles of Narnia: The Voyage of the Dawn Treader (Michael Apted, 2010); and Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Part 1 (David Yates, 2010). The Harry Potter series (Chris Columbus et al., 2001–11) is not due to finish until the end of 2011; the Lord of the Rings trilogy is set to be extended by a two-part prequel, The Hobbit, with the first film due for release in 2012. In 2011 a host of fantasy offerings are promised, including Season of the Witch (Dominic Sena), Thor (Kenneth Branagh), Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides (Rob Marshall), Your Highness (David Gordon Green), The Tree of Life (Terrence Malick), Sucker Punch (Zack Snyder), The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn, Part 1 (Bill Condon) and a remake of Conan the Barbarian (Marcus Nispel). Fantasy film is in no sense a finished opus but an energetic and lively ongoing saga that currently inhabits our cinemas, and this leaves any statement one might make on the nature of fantasy film music uncomfortably provisional and potentially unstable. Nonetheless, there is an existing body of fantasy film and its music and so, ultimately, the argument for timeliness wins out – because, although work on the fantasy genre continues apace, not only is music under-represented in other collections of essays but the monographs tend to ignore the presence of music altogether. Both Worley and Fowkes make only the very briefest mentions of music in passing, even though Fowkes’s opening chapter is on the musical The Wizard of Oz; and neither of them includes it as a term in the index, so little importance does it have for them in the construction of the fantasy narrative. Fantasy as film genre It need hardly be said that genre is a contested area in film studies. As Jane Feuer notes, “genres are made, not born … a genre is ultimately an [analyst’s] abstract conception rather than something that exists empirically in the real world” (1992: 144), while both Bordwell (1989) and Stam (2000) question the process by which genres are classified and defined. Bordwell lists some of the existing categories of genre used in relation to film to show how inconsistent the criteria for establishing a genre can be: by period or country (American films of the 1930s), by director or star or producer or writer or studio, by technical process (CinemaScope films), by cycle (the ‘fallen women’ films), by series (the 007 movies), by style (German Expressionism), by structure (narrative), by ideology (Reaganite cinema), by venue (‘drive-in Introduction 3 movies’), by purpose (home movies), by audience (‘teenpix’), by subject or theme (family film, paranoid-politics movies). (Bordwell, 1989: 148) Stam makes a similar point, noting that “some genres are based on story content (the war film), others are borrowed from literature (comedy, melodrama) or from other media (the musical)” (2000: 14) – and one need only look at this Equinox series to see that genre is defined differently in the construction of different volumes, with animation (technique) standing alongside pornography (content) and horror (theme). One could, in theory, have a pornographic animated horror film, happily demonstrating that, as Stam identifies, the boundaries of genre are very flexible and are not monolithic (ibid.: 128). No single film is likely to belong to a single genre: King Kong is as much a part of fantasy as he is of horror. The film industry itself, unlike film studies, takes a slightly more pragmatic approach to genre: in this context, it is a marketing rather than an analytical tool, and genre normally identifies narrative theme (action, drama, adventure, Western, horror, etc.) as an indicator of what the film is ‘about’, in order to guide (and entice) the potential viewer. Theme, however, seems to the theorists to be a particularly weak way of defining genre: “any theme may appear in any genre” (Bordwell, 1989: 147); and this is certainly true of fantasy, which seems to be one of the more difficult genres to pin down due to the diversity of the films that have this generic label thrust upon them. Both Worley and Fowkes devote their introductory chapters to a discussion on the nature, typology and problem of the fantasy film genre. For Worley, the problem is presented by fantasy’s relationship with science fiction on the one hand and supernatural horror on the other, and he concludes that as a result it “feels poorly defined as a film genre, and often acts as a dumping ground for movies that fail the more recognizable dress code of sci-fi and horror” (2005: 8). The waters are further muddied by the extent to which theory itself elides these three genres: in their discussion of film genre Sobchack and Sobchack group fantasy, horror and science fiction together as the “fantastic genres” (1980: 258); while Lucy Armitt includes in her discussion of fantasy literature “Utopia, allegory, fable, myth, science fiction, the ghost story, space opera, travelogue, the Gothic, cyberpunk [and] magic realism” (2005: 1). In attempting to define fantasy as a film genre distinct from science fiction, in particular, Worley and Fowkes reach similar conclusions. For Worley, the key ingredient is magic and magical events which defy explanation by scientific or rational means: they require a high degree of willingness on the part of the audience to suspend our disbelief and to trust that what we see is simultaneously fantastic and real rather than real because it is explicable (Worley, 2005: 10). For Fowkes, the key idea is that the audience must perceive a “fundamental break with our sense of reality … an ‘ontological rupture’” 4 The Music of Fantasy Cinema (2010: 2), and again she emphasizes the importance of magic as opposed to science as the source of events that create that sense of rupture: The word ‘rupture’ distinguishes the fantastic elements in fantasy from those in science fiction, where fantastic phenomena are ostensibly extrapolations or extensions of rational, scientific principles. Thus in science fiction, the ability to instantly transport oneself to a distant location will be justified by extrapolating from scientific or quasi-scientific principles (“beam me up, Scotty”), while in fantasy it may be attributed to magic, as in the Harry Potter movies, where characters skilled in magic can use an old boot to ‘disapparate’ from one place to another. (ibid.: 5) Another issue both writers identify is that fantasy elements occur in many films that might not immediately be thought of as fantasy films. The classic idea of a fantasy film is located somewhere quasi-medieval or exotic, involves swords, sorcery and quests and finds its paradigm in The Lord of the Rings. However, as they also both indicate, there are a great many other films that are also incontestably fantastic in their concept but do not bear any obvious resemblance to the high-fantasy model, such as Big (Penny Marshall, 1988), Groundhog Day (Harold Ramis, 1993) or any one of the comic-book superhero films from Superman (Richard Donner, 1978) and Batman (Tim Burton, 1989) to the enormous number of such films made in the last decade.