How Does It Feel? Scorsese Contemplates Art Through Music and Sound in Life Lessons
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Stonehill College From the SelectedWorks of Ron Leone 2017 How does it feel? Scorsese contemplates art through music and sound in Life Lessons. Ron Leone, Stonehill College Gabrielle Jaques Available at: https://works.bepress.com/ron-leone/1/ MSMI 11:2 Autumn 17 https://doi.org/10.3828/msmi.2017.11 How Does it Feel? Scorsese Contemplates Art Through Music and Sound in Life Lessons RON LEONE with GAbriEllE R. JAQUES How Does it Feel? Life Lessons, Martin Scorsese’s contribution to 1989’s New York Stories, tells the story of painter Lionel Dobie (Nick Nolte), and his young ingénue, Paulette (Rosanna Arquette). In the film, Scorsese ruminates on the life of the genius artist, whose personal relationships suffer for the sake of his art. He does this primarily through the film’s soundtrack, relying on pre-recorded rock music, and to a lesser degree, sound effects, to convey the chaos that surrounds and fuels Dobie’s art. Scorsese uses works from Italian composer Giacomo Puccini (‘Nessun Dorma’ from Turandot), British rock band Procol Harum (‘Conquistador’ and ‘A Whiter Shade of Pale’), and, most importantly, a live version of iconic American songwriter Bob Dylan’s ‘Like a Rolling Stone’ to speak for, and through, his characters. In doing so, the director provides viewers with his most personal work on the life of the artist and the connection between personal suffering and artistic creation. Overlooked and autobiographical, Life Lessons predicts Scorsese’s use of sound and music in his masterpiece, GoodFellas. At the opening ceremony for the 2011 Tribeca Film Festival, Martin Scorsese explained that, ‘For me, movies and music have been inseparable. They always have been and they always will be’ (CBS News, 2011). Thelma Schoonmacher, the editor who has cut all his feature films since Raging Bull in 1980 (18 as of this writing, plus various shorts, documentaries, and other projects), discussed how Scorsese uses pre-existing music as score, and makes surprising choices no one else would ever think of: ‘[He’s] a genius for putting music to film […] because he weaves the music into [it] in such an expert way’ (Ehrlich, 2013). On the Raging Bull DVD commentary track, Schoonmacher goes into greater detail about the director’s acumen for remembering, and using, music in his films, noting Scorsese’s [I]ncredible memory for pieces of music that he’s heard throughout his life […]. He never forgets where he heard that piece of music for 188 11:2 Autumn 17 MSMI Ron Leone with Gabrielle R. Jaques ♦ How Does it Feel? the first time […]. These first moments when he hears these pieces of music seem to burn into his consciousness and he carries them around with him, sometimes for 20 or 30 years, and then, suddenly, the right place for them, in a film, occurs to him. (Raging Bull, 2011, from 00:11:14) But for Schoonmacher, (Scorsese’s) genius comes at a price: ‘People expect artists to be too normal […]. I’ve been around enough of them now to see that they’re very extraordinary human beings who behave differently than ordinary human beings […]. They are not the same as us. People should just learn to accept that’ (Pevere, 2007). Among Scorsese and Schoonmacher’s collaborations is Life Lessons, part of the 1989 film New York Stories. As a follow-up to his most controversial film, The Last Temptation of Christ, and a precursor to his 1990 masterpiece, GoodFellas, Scorsese joined Woody Allen and Francis Ford Coppola to make New York Stories for Disney’s Buena Vista Pictures. Each director told his own ‘New York’ story and Scorsese’s entry, Life Lessons, introduced viewers to painter Lionel Dobie (Nick Nolte) and his young protégé, Paulette (Rosanna Arquette),1 chronicling their combustible personal and 1 Unlike the male professional relationships. Based (very) loosely on Alexei and Polina in characters in the film, who are identified by their Dostoevsky’s The Gambler, and featuring the actual paintings of tempestuous given name and surname, artist Chuck Connelly, Life Lessons is one of a small number of projects Paulette remains – like The Last Temptation of Christ (1988), Gangs of New York (2002), and mononymous – ‘just Silence (2016) – that Scorsese long intended to bring to the screen. Unlike Paulette’ – throughout the film. those works, epic in both scope and running time, the production of this 45-minute film presented Scorsese with a formidable challenge: two weeks of pre-production, four weeks of principal photography, followed by a truncated editing schedule with Schoonmacher (Keyser, 1992). New York Stories was neither a critical nor commercial success, receiving middling reviews and, according to IMDb.com, grossing just under $11M domestically on an estimated $15M budget (Internet Movie Database, 2014). It was even dismissed by Connelly, the ‘burgeoning artist and functioning alcoholic’ on whom Scorsese chose to model Dobie, as ‘clichéd, mundane, and no Raging Bull’ (O’Hare, 2015). Like Dobie, the fictional artist in the film who lays waste to human relationships, Connelly’s comments (along with others aimed at various New York gallery owners, buyers, etc.) sabotaged his career at a moment when it was poised to take off (ibid.). So, how is it that Life Lessons may very well stand as the director’s most significant filmic meditation on the nature of creation and the toll it takes on both the artist and those around him? Lester Keyser notes that Scorsese ‘told interviewers that he wanted to make “an enjoyable movie” that simultaneously dealt “with a serious issue – what’s the equation of MSMI 11:2 Autumn 17 189 Ron Leone with Gabrielle R. Jaques ♦ How Does it Feel? pain in our lives to the work that we do”?’ (1992, pp.189–190). Scorsese investigated this ‘serious issue’ through the film’s soundtrack, which features an array of pre-existing music selections ranging from ‘Nessun Dorma’ (from Puccini’s Turandot) to, most notably, songs from Procol Harum, a prominent British rock band of the late 1960s and 1970s. But, above all, it is one song by another enigmatic American artist, Bob Dylan, that stands as the apogee of the film’s, and subsequently Scorsese’s, most trenchant commentary on the life of the artist and the casualties that surround it: ‘Like a Rolling Stone’, Dylan’s 1965 composition that critics hail as revolutionary, and the songwriter himself acknowledges as being transformative in his career (Cott, 2006). In an insightful essay on Scorsese’s use of music in GoodFellas, Julie Hubbert locates the gangster epic as the ‘turning point in Scorsese’s musical aesthetic and the evolution of his soundtrack practice’, that speaks to ‘a new and additional imperative for visual “movement”’ (2013, p.33). Life Lessons, with its short running time and almost guerilla-like production schedule, not only exemplifies this ‘new imperative’, but it anticipates aspects of Scorsese’s more challenging, unconventional, and complex use of music in his masterpiece. Hubbert rightfully acknowledges the ways Scorsese ‘privileges’ music in his compiled soundtracks, solidifying him as ‘one of cinema’s most musical auteurs’ (p.33), yet, despite discussing (in the text and endnotes) more than a dozen of his feature films spanning 30 years of his career, his cross-platform musical documentary work ranging from Woodstock in 1970 through George Harrison: Living in the Material World in 2011, and his work on Michael Jackson’s ‘Bad’ music video, Life Lessons is never mentioned. What Scorsese perfected in GoodFellas finds its foundation in Life Lessons. With this film Scorsese tells viewers that, for the artist, only the work matters, and the casualties of this singular devotion to craft are people and relationships. Like Scorsese, Dobie uses music to inspire artistic creation. Through Dobie, Scorsese uses diegetic music to assault and silence others, to challenge and provoke rivals, and, ultimately, to speak for himself in lieu of dialogue, epitomizing what Jay Beck calls the director’s ability to establish a ‘double articulation of meaning’ (2016, p.130) that he began developing in his early feature work. What we are left with, then, is Scorsese’s least obvious autobiographical film, featuring his most overlooked compilation score. Scorsese and the Compilation Score In The Sounds of Commerce: Marketing Popular Film Music, Jeff Smith discusses the emergence and development of the compilation score as both a 190 11:2 Autumn 17 MSMI Ron Leone with Gabrielle R. Jaques ♦ How Does it Feel? challenge to classical Hollywood scoring practice and as a parallel to the rise of the ‘New Hollywood’ directors of the late 1960s. Smith acknowledges that compilation scores serve similar functions to the classical score in terms of underscoring the emotional arc of scenes or in providing structural unity to montages, and identifies unique advantages offered through effectively weaving pop songs into a filmic text. However, he notes that ‘well-known music of any kind […] [may] carry associational baggage for the spectator’ that could be distracting or conflict with the narrative (1998, p.164). While the potential to be a distraction exists, as we will see in Life Lessons, pop songs can serve multiple functions such as speaking for characters or commenting on a film’s action. Smith posits that the use of a familiar hit can be so powerful that ‘one need not have a thorough understanding of the song’s lyrics, but simply the minimal information supplied by the song’s title and chorus’ (p.167). The result is a two-tiered system of meaning, one that can be regarded by the less informed listener simply as background music, and by the more informed listener who possesses greater knowledge of the title, lyrics, artist, or any of its concomitant production or performance history as a far more expressive directorial device (ibid.).