Die Hard' Author(S): Robynn J
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'I Just Put a Drone under Him...': Collage and Subversion in the Score of 'Die Hard' Author(s): Robynn J. Stilwell Source: Music & Letters, Vol. 78, No. 4 (Nov., 1997), pp. 551-580 Published by: Oxford University Press Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/737639 Accessed: 21-10-2018 21:08 UTC JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at https://about.jstor.org/terms Oxford University Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Music & Letters This content downloaded from 146.57.3.25 on Sun, 21 Oct 2018 21:08:02 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 'I JUST PUT A DRONE UNDER HIM...': COLLAGE AND SUBVERSION IN THE SCORE OF 'DIE HARD' BY ROBYNN J. STILWELL WHEN IT WAS released in 1988, Die Hard was regarded as just another action film, albeit a whopping good one. Time has proved that it was something more significant: Die Hard was not the first great blockbuster action film, but it swiftly emerged as a virtual template for those that followed. As with Singin' in the Rain (1952) for the musical, however, there was enough history behind Die Hard for the film both to epitomize and to comment upon the genre. Action films tend to be based on simple juxtapositions of hero and villain. As in musicals, so much of the film's running time is taken up with set pieces-songs and dances, chases and demolitions-that a fairly schematic plot, individualized only by local detail, is essential for narrative clarity. But while the identities of the key players in Die Hard are clear, just who is antagonist and who protagonist is not so clear, and music is one of the primary elements undercutting the nominal hero and elevating the 'villain' to anti-hero. Yet, as has been pointed out time and time again, approaches to film have traditionally been very visually orientated.' Even though film-makers have often compared their work to music,2 scholarly analogies have been to photography, painting and sculpture. This approach tends to negate music, not only because music is aural rather than visual but also because it evolves through time. In the past ten to fifteen years, more attention has been given to sound, but largely concerning the voice and usually in highly theoretical terms, drawing heavily on the formulations of Freud and Lacan.3 Although these psychoanalytical methods have shattered the hegemony of the auteur-based theories of early film studies and have focused attention on the receiver-subject, they are based on highly contentious theories that are at the very least deeply ingrained with patriarchal tendencies. Even within the study of 'sound', sound effects are generally ignored, and music tends to be separated from sound altogether. While protesting against the visual bias of film studies, many scholars of film music make the same mistake in reverse and examine only the music. In the past decade or so, there have been some attempts to deal with the interaction of sound and vision, I would like to thank Nicholas Cook, Peter Franklin and Claudia Gorbman for their thoughtful comments on drafts of this essay, Philip Tagg for his encouragement in its early stages, Victoria Vaughan for tipping me off about the Nick Hansted article in The Guardian, and the anonymous reader for Music & Letters who provided the Kamen interview in Musiscfrom the Movies. Various versions of this essay have been read as papers at the joint meeting of Screen and IASPM in Glasgow on 2 July 1995, at the 'British Musicology' conference at King's College London on 20 April 1996 and at the conference on 'Cross(over) Relations: Scholarship, Popular Music and the Canon' at the Eastman School of Music, Rochester, NY, on 27 September 1996. ' A concise critique of the visual bias of film studies may be found in Rick Altman, 'Introduction: Cinema Sound', rale French Studies, xl (1980), 3-15. 2 For a historical overview, see Chapter 3, 'Musik des Lichts', of Helga de la Motte-Haber & Hans Emons, Filmmusik: Eine systematische Beschreibung, Munich & Vienna, 1980; for a more philosophical approach, see David Bordwell, 'The Musical Analogy', rale French Studies, xl (1980), 141-56. 3 Representative works include Mary Anne Doane, 'The Voice in the Cinema: the Articulation of Body and Space', rale French Studies, xl (1980), 33-50; Kaja Silverman, The Acoustic Mirror: the Female Voice in Psychoanalysis and Cinema, Bloomington, 1988; and Amy Lawrence, Echo and Narcissus: Women's Voices in Classical Hollywood Cinema, Oxford, 1991. 551 This content downloaded from 146.57.3.25 on Sun, 21 Oct 2018 21:08:02 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms although these have been somewhat general in scope and isolated in detail, and in any case they have rarely been very much concerned with music. Two of the best such studies are Elisabeth Weis's The Silent Scream: Alfred Hitchcock's Sound Track and Michel Chion's Audio- Vision: Sound on Screen.4 Weis's study is bounded by the auteur theory, as can be seen in its subtitle, and it is musically rather naYve, but this was an admirable early attempt at integration; Chion's work is more sophisticated in theoretical terms, but it deals very little with music and concentrates on single events rather than on large-scale structures over time. In contrast, Claudia Widgery provides a detailed analysis of the kinetic, rhythmic interaction of music and film, but since she is examining documentaries with a particular political outlook, she touches only upon musical and film-musical rhetoric and not narrative.5 It seems that many of the methodological pieces of the analytical puzzle are present but are hardly ever brought together. Although integrated analyses of film with music are still rare, there has been something of a revolution in this area in the past decade, particularly by way of the work of Claudia Gorbman and Kathryn Kalinak,6 who have combined music analysis with film analysis, explicating in some detail how musical and narrative-cinematic processes interact in classical film practice (roughly in the period 1930-60 and predominantly in Hollywood). Discussion of the interaction of film and music has traditionally been conditioned by the theories of Sergey Eisenstein,7 polarizing music that is parallel to (in agreement with) the image and that which is in counterpoint to it (contradicting the evident meaning of the scene). Although scholars have frequently noted the unsatisfactory nature of this duality, it has persisted with only slight modification since the dawn of the sound era. The theoretical weakness of this duality is in some respects a result of the modernist, auteur-based approach of film studies (and musicology) given that it focuses on the point of creation rather than reception. The receiver gets all the codes-audio and visual-at once, and the impact of the composite is more complex than a simple additive function: it involves the dynamic interaction of both sound and image, wherein lies the slipperiness of the parallel/counterpoint duality. How can one distinguish 'parallel' from 'counterpoint' when the music is one of the determinants of the meaning of the scene? But at least at one point in the film-making process, the duality of parallel and counterpoint, however slippery, does indeed come into play: at the stage of scoring the music (I use 'scoring' in the broad sense of everything required to provide a film with its musical score). Composers are in an intriguing position in the creation of a film; most of the time, they see the film as a complete or nearly complete visual statement, if often lacking sound effects and special photo- graphic processes. They then have to decide whether to reinforce or to contradict what they see on the screen. Their perceptions, and the way they respond to a film, stand between the visual-dramatic text and the audience, at least as a filter or a lens. Die Hard is an excellent example: like any film score, Michael Kamen's for Die Hard is both an interpretation of the film and a part of the complete text. As I shall show, an The Silnt Screen: Alfred Hitchcock's Sound Track, Rutherford, NJ, 1982; Audio-Vision: Sound on Screen, ed. & trans. Claudia Gorbman, New York, 1994. 5 The Kinetic and Temporal Interaction of Music and Film: Three Documentaries of 1930's America (unpublished dissertation), University of Maryland, 1990. 6 Claudia Gorbman, Unheard Melodies: Narrative Film Music, Bloomington, 1987; Kathryn Kalinak, Settling the Score: Music and the Classical Hollywood Film, Madison & London, 1992. 7 See '[Rhythm}' and 'Vertical Montage' in Sergey M. Eisenstein, Selected Works, ii: Towards a Theory of Montage, ed. Michael Glenny & Richard Taylor, trans. Michael Glenny, London, 1991, pp. 227-48. 552 This content downloaded from 146.57.3.25 on Sun, 21 Oct 2018 21:08:02 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms examination of the scoring strategies in the film reveals an unusual emphasis on the nominal villain, assisting in a subversion of the dominant narrative laid in the text by the film-makers themselves. The music also highlights a network of issues in and of the film centred on class but complicated by national identity, gender constructions and film history.