Film Music: Hitchcock's Psycho Transcript Date: Wednesday, 15 October 2008 - 12:00AM FILM MUSIC: HITCHCOCK'S PSYCHO Professor Roger Parker At the end of the last lecture, my first in this series about film music, we were in the early 1930s, in the company of an exuberantly screaming Fay Wray as she heralded the appearance of her exceptionally tall and exceptionally dark leading man. The musical accompaniment was an equally exuberant symphonic score by Max Steiner, one of the great composers of the period. As I said then, there are plenty of ways in whichKing Kong now looks dated in both visual and musical terms; but there are equally striking ways in which Steiner's score marks the appearance of a set of codes about how music was to interact with the visual element of films: codes that to some extent remain with us to this very day. One of the most obvious of these codes was in Steiner's use of what we in the music trade call leitmotifs: prominent themes that become attached to aspects of the unfolding drama and that then recur, sometimes with significant development, when those aspects recur in the narrative. And so, in King Kong, the gentle string theme that accompanied the heroine's onboard love scene comes back, played by the full orchestra and horribly distorted, as the camera settles on her, struggling to escape becoming the next sacrificial victim to the monster of Skull Island. This was, of course, an old trick borrowed (as were so many film-music devices) from opera: the obvious point of reference is the leitmotif system elaborated at huge length in Wagner's operas, but the technique goes back a good deal further. And of course we can hear it in a certain kind of film today: in particular ones that strive for an "epic" quality. The most obvious recent example is Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings trilogy, in which Howard Shore's musical score includes leitmotifs for a host of people and places, in the process helping us (perhaps too eagerly on some occasions) to identify with and emote about the principal strands of the story. Another of Steiner's codes, though, is more exclusive to film music. Films are necessarily full of cuts, of sudden transitions between one camera shot and another. There are all sorts of visual ways of minimizing the inevitable sense of disorientation that such cuts will engender in the viewer, and I'm sure you can think of several: the screen goes wavy for trips back and forward in time; the picture reduces in size or goes gradually darker to mark a transition; or, of course, the camera simply follows or precedes the character in a tracking shot, obviating the need for any "cut". What is less often noticed, though, is the way in which the musical score will habitually smooth over this tendency towards fragmentation. Film-music composers very soon realised that having music continue across a prominent cut in the visual narrative served to bind the whole experience together, making viewers less aware of the sudden change and thus less aware of the film world's essential artificiality. Film theorists refer to this technique of binding together cuts in the film as "suture", and the word's medical associations (of the stitching that binds together a wound) are perhaps useful. The "suture" devices, after all, bind us into the filmic narrative, making whole what could otherwise be thought of as wounding or distressing or alienating. Steiner's score for King Kong was written in the early 1930s, very close to the time of various technological advances that allowed film music to become, as it had been in the silent movie era, an enormously important part of the film experience. Crucial among these developments, as I mentioned last time, was the discovery of how to record the sound track and the music track separately from the visual material. There was no more need to hang microphones on trees or hide them in vases of flowers; if the shot was at all complex, the sound could be recorded later. And this was what almost always happened, in particular to film music. Although there are exceptions, the musical score to a film tends to be added at a comparatively late date, certainly once its narrative is fixed, and usually once its sequence of scenes has been decided upon, shot and edited. In that sense, we could regard film music as a kind of commentary on what has already been created. We should not, though, take this belatedness to mean lack of importance. Most films are created with the full expectation that music will accompany many of its scenes-theexpectation for music is, in other words, typically embedded in the basic structure of the film from its first inception; it is only the realisation that comes later. It was partly because of these technological advances that the period immediately after King Kong, which was released in 1933, proved in many ways to be a golden age for Hollywood film, and in particular for the kind of symphonic score pioneered by Steiner. The twenty years that followed were the era of the great Hollywood studios (MGM, Warner Brothers, etc.), organizations that could command elaborate musical resources and that caused a general migration of musicians to the West Coast, particularly in the wake of the severe downturn in live music on the East Coast caused by the Great Depression. Steiner himself continued his activity, making some of the grandest and most innovative scores of the period, not least the epic to end all epics that was Gone with the Wind(1939). During this period, many of the most prominent film composers came from the same background as Steiner-they were émigrés from central Europe; and so it is no surprise that the dominant idiom was very much of that place, with the late-Romantic idiom of post-Wagnerian composers, early Richard Strauss the most successful and most often-imitated. Indeed some of these musicians had even started life in Europe as classical composers, and had been obliged to ply their trade in Hollywood merely through force of political and economic circumstance. One of the most successful was Erich Wolfgang Korngold, who had a respectable career as an orchestral and operatic composer, praised by Mahler and Strauss, before moving to Hollywood in 1934 and completing such seminal scores as The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938, starring Errol Flynn). After the war Korngold returned to concert composition, although works such as the Violin Concerto (1947) were, at least for modernist tastes of the time, judged to contain rather more of the korn and rather less of the gold. This tendency for Golden-Age Hollywood scores to sound belated stylistically, as if their music could have been written by classic composers of decades past, was surely an important part of their success, and also displays-not for the first or last time- that film has always had a complex relationship with elite culture, and that unashamedly modernist music made little headway, at least so far as Hollywood was concerned. However, there was a moment in the late 1950s and early 1960s when it seemed as though this might change: when, for a brief time, some genuinely mass-audience films began to experiment with alternative narrative conventions and, at more-or-less the same time, also experiment with a different kind of musical underpinning, one a lot nearer to the type of product that could then be heard in the concert hall. A prime example of that trend-indeed, probably its most famous representative-is the film I want to concentrate on this week. The year was 1960, the director was Alfred Hitchcock, and the film was, of course,Psycho. There are probably more books written about Alfred Hitchcock than about any other film maker; my own shelves groan with them, from the frankly popular to the severely academic, and I will have to resist the temptation to get caught up in the latter's ruminations, to which I am sometimes professionally drawn. Why this interpretative industry? One modern commentator, the formidable Slovenian cultural critic, philosopher, political pundit and so much more, Slavoj Zizek, has discussed this phenomenon at some length. He suggests that there is something about Hitchcock's best films that seems to appeal simultaneously to interpreters of otherwise very different persuasions. On one level, the films can be taken as simple, realist narratives-as part of the Hollywood mainstream. On another level they can be seen as contributing to a more austere modernist tradition: they are often difficult, are clearly driven by an iron, controlling will (the so-called auteur), and often obsessed with Freudian and other subtexts. And on yet another level Hitchcock has been embraced by and claimed for the postmodernists: as someone who is playful about high cultural pretentions and is liable constantly to undercut his most serious artistic effects. An iconic example of all this might be Hitchcock's habit of making a cameo appearance in each of his films, a gesture that is simultaneously comic and sinister and controlling. No wonder academics write about him obsessively; Hitchcock's peculiar brand of self-consciousness, as Zizek says, tends to encourage us to think that everything in his films must have meaning. This is some achievement, one might think, for a person born in the London of Queen Victoria, in Leytonstone in 1899, the son of a greengrocer. He died in Bel Air, Los Angeles in 1980, and so had come a considerable distance by any standards.