'That's How It's Supposed to Make You Feel': Talking with Audiences About
. Volume 9, Issue 2 November 2012 ‘That’s how it’s supposed to make you feel’: Talking with audiences about ‘Both Sides Now’ and Love Actually Lauren Anderson, Massey University, New Zealand Abstract Exploring patterns of response across four semi-structured individual interviews, this article outlines some of the different ways that people heard and related to Joni Mitchell’s ‘Both Sides Now’ as it appeared in the soundtrack to Richard Curtis’ Love Actually (2003). The interviews were designed to explore how participants’ ways of ‘knowing’ the song connected with their ways of responding to the film, its characters, its structural organisation, and so forth. Analysis focuses on the kinds of knowledge the participants made relevant in their talk, and outlines what participants did with that knowledge as they discussed both the song and the scene from Love Actually, before finally considering what ‘Both Sides Now’ achieves for these participants within this excerpt of film. Both song and scene were variously located within the participants’ understandings of their life-worlds and identities: in this way, I argue, they present themselves as more or less “connected” knowers (Hermes, 1995) who discursively manage their involvement with the film and its soundtrack in complex ways. Keywords: popular music, film, soundtrack, audience, interview. Introduction: the research project and research methods Although audiences routinely hear popular music in cinematic contexts, the processes by which they make sense of the soundtrack are rarely discussed. My doctoral research sought to explore how audiences hear and relate to popular songs in films, and the interviews that form the basis of this article were the second phase of that project (Anderson, 2009).
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