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Home , Avi Arad, Black Marvel, Brandon Routh, Holding Out for a Hero, Iron Man (soundtrack), Iron Man 2 (soundtrack)

Strings, Brass, and Spandex: The Musical Mythopoesis of ’s Renaissance

By Mark Richardson 10847839

Candidate for Master of Arts and Culture: Musicology

26th June 2015 Thesis Supervisor: Dr. Maarten Beirens

‘Wheels up, let’s rock ‘n’ roll!’ - Tony Stark/ (Robert Downey Jr.)

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Contents

Introduction 4 Hollywood’s superhero renaissance 5 Reasons behind the success 7 Tone and music in the twentieth century 10 What should Hollywood’s superhero renaissance sound like? 15

Five case studies 17 1. ‘Creating a more convincing atmosphere of time and place’ in Iron Man (2008) and The (2012) 18 2. ‘Underlining psychological refinements’ in X-Men: The Last Stand (2006) 25 3. ‘Serving as a kind of neutral background filler’ in Spider-Man (2002) 31 4. ‘Building a sense of ’ in The Dark Knight (2008) 36 5. ‘Underpinning the theatrical build-up of a scene, and rounding it off with a sense of finality’ in Returns (2006) 41

Conclusion 47

Bibliography 53

Filmography 55

Word count (excl. footnotes, bibliography, and filmography): 18,793

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Introduction Henry John Pratt has written that ‘comics [are] more suited than any other medium for adaptation into film’ due to the fact that ‘each medium requires us to make sense of a sequence of images.’1 It is perhaps for this reason that adaptations of characters have been around for nearly as long as the comic books themselves. Even so, the recent spate of superhero films is unprecedented. In the fifteen years since the turn of the twenty-first century, the number of adaptations made in America has been more than double the number made during the entire twentieth century, and their average box office gross more than triple. Unadjusted for inflation, the so-called Marvel Cinematic Universe series of films is now the highest-growing film franchise in history, beating such stalwarts as the saga, the James Bond series, and a certain Harry Potter. 2 The appetite for these films seems to be unwavering, and every year at least three blockbuster productions come to fruition. The “” has not just come of age, it is now perhaps the most reliably bankable weapon in Hollywood’s . In the last seven years in particular, the two dominant comic book publishers, Marvel and DC (wholly owned by Disney and TimeWarner respectively), have even been able to map out their release schedules up to the early 2020s, such is the guaranteed demand for their films. 3 This has also enabled them to situate individual films within constructed mythical universes that their characters share, not only creating a larger, richer sandbox to play in, but also rather cleverly making every film, however good, unmissable.

These films are not just bound together by shared characters or financial success: shared socio- political and moral standpoints, as well as a now-established aesthetic framework have given Hollywood’s superhero renaissance a common - even homogenised - “tone” or “feel” that is continuously reinforced with every release. In a sense, the “superhero movie” has arguably become a in its own right, with its own set of rules and conventions that usually must be adhered to in order to achieve (financial) success.

1 Pratt, Henry John, ‘Making Comics into Film,’ in The Art of Comics: A Philosophical Approach, ed. Aaron Meskin and Roy T. Cook (Oxford: Blackwell, 2012), p.147. 2 A franchise is often defined as consisting of a film and all its subsequent and/or prequels. It may also refer to a group of films that belong to a shared fictional universe but are not strictly narratively linked, such as the James Bond series. The Marvel Cinematic Universe is the highest-grossing film franchise as measured by worldwide box office receipts. See http://www.the-numbers.com/movies/franchises/sort/World, accessed 20/05/2015. 3 See Marvel’s official website for their current predicted output slate until 2020. At the time of writing, this was http://marvel.com/news/movies/24065/marvel_studios_schedules_new_release_dates_for_4_films and http://batman- news.com/2014/10/15/warner-bros-dc-movies-revealed-wonder-woman-justice-league-2017-justice-league-2-2019- plus-lots/, both accessed 20/05/2015.

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In this thesis, I will explore the special role music plays in establishing the “tone” and “feel” in the films of Hollywood’s superhero renaissance, and the mechanisms through which this is achieved. Through a series of case studies, I will investigate how music functions alongside other elements in a film’s mise en scène, contributing to its overarching mythopoesis – that is, the production of a character-specific mythology, played out over the course of a film’s narrative. While this thesis will, at times, need to reach back to the comic books themselves, it will primarily try and treat the new era of superhero films as standalone works of art in their own right. However, as we shall see, some of these characters are over seventy years old and have accumulated considerable cultural baggage over the intervening years. Therefore, some contextualisation can be important when understanding why specific aesthetic choices, including the type and use of music, are made.

I will start by defining exactly what I mean by the term ‘Hollywood’s superhero renaissance’ and then examining the genre conventions that govern it. I will then perform a preliminary survey of the literature regarding the adaptation of comic books into films, before examining five case study in detail (’s score for Iron Man [2008], John Powell’s X-Men: The Last Stand [2006], ’s Spiderman [2002], ’s and ’s The Dark Knight [2008], and ’s [2006]). To conclude, I will explore what these scores have in common and the implications of superhero music on contemporary Hollywood scoring practices more generally.

Hollywood’s superhero renaissance In this thesis, Hollywood’s “superhero renaissance” refers to the body of films made in the twenty- first century, based on established superhero characters, and produced by one of the major American studios. Defining what exactly constitutes a superhero film can be problematic, as Dan Hassler-Forest has noted that characters from action films such as James Bond and Jason Bourne often demonstrate what could be considered superhuman characteristics.4 To avoid this confusion, Hassler-Forest uses Rick Altman’s three levels of genre signification as outlined in Film/Genre and specifically relates them to the superhero franchises: ‘semantically (by the appearance of costumes, superhuman powers, etc.), syntactically (narratives in which heroes save cities/worlds/communities from destruction by evil), and pragmatically (texts that are written and talked about as part of an

4 Hassler-Forest, D.A., Supeheroes and the Bush doctrine: narrative and politics in post-9/11 discourse (PhD Diss., Universiteit van Amsterdam, 2011).

5 existing superhero genre).’5 From this, he’s able to simply define ‘the term “superhero movie” as a genre that is recognized as such by general audiences.’6

This definition allows quite a distinct - albeit it varied – group of films to emerge, although it is not without its problems. The ‘pragmatic’ clause, while essential to separate out superhero films from action films that feature characters with above human powers, also seems to limit the inclusion of films that do not have a well-known, pre-existing comic book based mythology. For example, Peter Berg’s Hancock (2008) and ’s (2004) have no print media precursor at all, the latter instead serving as a loving of the genre as a whole, while the characters from Disney’s Big 6 (2014) only appear in two comic book miniseries, a total of eight issues. Yet these films both ostensibly featured superhero characters, had large budgets, were produced and released by major Hollywood studios, and performed well at the box office. Whether these films are considered “fully-fledged” superhero flicks is still up for debate, but one might posit that animated films (as the latter two both are) and those of a parodic nature (of which all three are to some extent) do not fit as comfortably into the genre, or to return to Hassler-Forest, would cause genre confusion ‘by general audiences.’

The definition also represents a syntactical simplification between good and evil/hero and that belies the often complicated relationships between these dichotomies that are played out in the films themselves. Not only is the movement of characters between these different “ base camps” of morality often absolutely critical to the narrative, but also the definitions of right and wrong rarely have much stability. In particular, those comics with a dark viewpoint, such as , make these boundaries incredibly blurred.

Defining where the current superhero renaissance began is equally problematic. ’s (1998) and ’s X-Men (2000) were the first films licensed by , a new division of the company specifically set up to make film adaptations of its library of famous characters. Ten years prior to this, Warner Brothers merged with Time Inc., the then parent company of DC Comics, bringing their intellectual property under the direct control of a for the first time. This buyout led to the production of ’s (1989), which was an unqualified success, becoming the first film in history to gross $100 million in ten

5 Hassler-Forest, p.17. 6 Ibid.

6 days and eventually making $411 million (from a $48 million budget).7 From a corporate point of view, the release of Batman and Blade therefore mark a new period in the relationship between the two major comic book publishers and Hollywood studios, DC with Warner Brothers, and Marvel with 20th Century respectively. However, much like ’s Superman, Burton’s Batman can be viewed foremost as a successful , rather than heralding the arrival of a new superhero genre proper. As Sharon L. Cohen has put it, ‘these movies were a teaser for what was to come in the new century.’8 Indeed, even though both spawned multiple sequels, none of these achieved the same financial success as their predecessors or inspired commercially viable adaptations of other characters. This contrasts with the current franchises based on the characters of Iron Man, , and , for example, where each successive has made more money than the film preceding it.9

Hollywood’s superhero renaissance proper really takes off after ’s Spiderman (2002). While Singer’s X-Men had, according to James Smith, ‘arguably created the modern form of the genre,’10 salvaging it from the burning ashes of the critically savaged Batman and (1997), it was the and -slinger that realized the true box office potential of the superhero movie and laid the groundwork for a decade of rich financial rewards. Spiderman grossed over $820 million, at the time the highest-grossing superhero film of all time by a considerable margin (now only the 6th!), and in 2008 Disney bought out Marvel in its entirety, the $4 billion price tag a clear reflection of the earning potential of its stable of well-known characters.

Reasons behind the success The success of Hollywood’s superhero renaissance is, in one sense, unsurprising. Big budget fantasy action films – a broad heading under which any superhero movie could easily sit – have always performed well at the box office. Star Wars, E.T., and Jurassic Park, for example, each successively became the highest grossing film of all time over a period that spanned from 1978 to

7 Worldwide box office revenue as recorded by Box Office , http://www.boxofficemojo.com/movies/?id=batman.htm , accessed 21/05/2015. 8 Cohen, Sharon L., ‘History of Comic Book Superheroes’, Mania.com (2014), http://www.mania.com/history-comic- book-superheroes_article_116423.html, accessed 05/05/2015. 9 domestic box office revenue as recorded by Box Office Mojo, http://www.boxofficemojo.com/genres/chart/?id=superhero.htm, accessed 14/06/2015. 10 Smith, James, ‘The Art of the Superhero Movie,’ The Daily Lounge, http://dailylounge.com/the-daily/entry/the-art-of- the-superhero-movie, accessed 20/05/2015.

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1998.11 Coinciding with this is the fact that special effects are now photorealistic, and relatively much cheaper and accessible than ever before. However, the sheer volume of superhero films produced in the last fifteen years and the eye-popping amount of money generated has left scholars wondering what other factors might be at play.

Some, such as Shaun Treat, have linked the superhero renaissance to the wider geo-political situation of the United States by using the phrase ‘post 9/11 superhero zeitgeist,’12 while Jason Dittmer has written explicitly that ‘superheroism resonates with the post-9/11 foreign policy of the United States and that this has enabled the genre to flourish at the box office.’ 13 Other commentators in the mainstream media have noted that ‘post-9/11, the traditional notion of superheroes rung hollow. They had to be reinvented so that they more realistically reflected the fears and concerns of a new, post-attack, America,’14 while Jeffrey Brown acknowledged in newspaper that ‘the metaphorical saving of major cities, be they New York, or Gotham, is a comforting tale in a post-9/11 world.’15

9/11 therefore seems like a watershed moment in the life of the superhero film, in the same way it has been across many other streams of American media. It is also true that comfort has often been sought (and found) in superheroes at times when the world (played by America) is in a period of difficulty, and that their fictional worlds intersect with the real one. Ian Gordon has described how The was depicted burning off a Japanese soldier’s arm in a 1943 edition of the eponymous comic to prevent him from torturing a woman with a sword, and noted that soldiers wrote letters to DC Comics during the War to request an intervention by Superman.16

The post-9/11 landscape has also brought about new moral and political frameworks that favour the cinematic depiction of superhero characters. On one hand, terrorists have made a convenient villain both in terms of a stereotyped visual representation and a supposed clear separation between right

11 Timeline of highest grossing films of all time according to Six Degrees of Film (2013), http://sixdegreesoffilm.com/2013/08/05/336/, accessed 14/06/2015. 12 Treat, Shaun, ‘How America Leaned to Stop Worrying and Cynically ENJOY! The Post-9/11 Supehero Zeitgeist,’ Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies, Vol. 6, No. 1 (Routledge, 2009), pp.103-109. 13 Dittmer, Jason, ‘American exceptionalism, visual effects, and the post-9/11 cinematic super boom,’ Environment and Planning D:Society and Space, Vol. 29 (2010), p.114. 14 Hagley, Annika and Michael Harrison, ‘The amazing renaissance of the superhero post 9/11,’The Conversation (2014), http://theconversation.com/the-amazing-renaissance-of-the-superhero-post-9-11-25733, accessed 05/05/2015. 15 Brown, Jeffrey A., ‘How Marvel’s superheroes found the magic to make us all true believers,’ The Guardian (2013) http://www.theguardian.com/film/2013/aug/31/marvel-superheroes-true-believers, accessed 05/05/2015. 16 Gordon, Ian, ‘The moral world of Superman and the American war in Vietnam,’ Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics Online (Taylor and Francis, 2015), pp.1-10.

8 and wrong (see my discussion on Iron Man). On the other, the Bush administration’s perceived mishandling of the Iraq War in the eyes of a critical public makes the idea of a operating outside of government control, guided purely by his own (correct) moral code, even more appealing. The separation of superheroes and their government is not new, for example Mike Dubose has shown that in the Captain America comics of the 1980s, the hero ‘is not just setting himself apart from the system here, he is setting himself above the system. Even though he is often at odds with the government, Rogers [Steve Rogers/Captain America] still follows his morals and sense of justice.’17 In another passage, Dubose writes how ‘true heroship did not occur without defining oneself as an entity separate from the powers that be and transcending traditional notions of law, order, and justice.’18 In Hollywood’s superhero renaissance we see these ideas occurring time and again, particularly in ’s Dark Knight trilogy, in which Batman is often seen as working outside the law, but still undoubtedly motivated by “good” intentions. A lack of trust in the government and those who keep law and order only fuels the popularity of these storylines.

Recent comic book adaptations have also reflected – and, arguably, contributed to - a growing mainstream awareness of civil rights issues, such as racism, feminism, and gay emancipation. In the 1960s, when movements against the oppression of minorities were in full swing, publishers introduced characters such as the X-Men and Spiderman as atypical “others” who were different, genetically or otherwise, and therefore cast out from “normal” society. While their differences were often the cause of social problems, they were also usually the source of their power, through which they could help society as a whole, and thus promote acceptance of their differences. In this vein, Ramzi Fawaz has written that ‘the seemingly impossible character of popular fantasies signals the continued “otherness” of the potential social relations they seek to describe, while making that otherness desirable as an alternative to normative social aspirations.’19 Comic books contribute to a continuing process of viewing otherness in a positive light, as can be seen in the recent outing and subsequent gay marriage of the Marvel character , as well as DC revealing that the character Alysia Yeoh is transgender.

17 DuBose, Mike S., ‘Holding Out for a Hero: Reaganism, Comic Book Vigilantes, and Captain America,’ The Journal of Popular Culture, Vol. 40, No. 6 (Blackwell, 2007), p.933. 18 Ibid, p.916. 19 Fawaz, Ramzi, ‘”Where No X-Man Has Gone Before!” Superheroes and the Cultural Politics of Popular Fantasy in Postwar America,’ American Literature, Vol. 83, No. 2 (Duke University Press, 2011), p.359.

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In a wider sense, dichotomies of good and evil, patriotism and heresy, sameness and otherness, are all played out in the superhero’s identity itself: they are the personification of a post-9/11, (partially) socially emancipated society. Dittmer, with reference to the American two party political system, writes that ‘the Manichean nature of many superhero narratives dovetails nicely with the influence of the voting system on political discourse: both tend towards two polarized subjectivities,’20 while Clare Pitkethly has shown that ‘the repetitive shift in the form of the Other suggests something of a dialectical pattern; a spiralling outward as each subsequent excess is subsumed within a greater American whole.’21 Pitkethly’s point is that Superman’s classic slogan of ‘truth, justice, and the American way’ is, bit by bit, being chipped away to demonstrate a “universal” way instead. This is clearer in Hollywood’s superhero renaissance as it is in current comic books, which are largely sold and marketed to American audiences, compared with films that regularly make more than 60% of their box office revenue from cinemas outside of the United States.22

Tone and music in the twentieth century If we accept that the events of 9/11 were in some way influential to Hollywood’s superhero renaissance, a look back across the previous century demonstrates that this recent movement follows a historical pattern of flip-flopping between “serious” and “camp” representations of superhero characters, and that these changes in tone often correspond with the predominant political and social climates in play at the time. If this was observable in comic books, it was even more pronounced in the television, film, and radio adaptations that followed them. And for every example of these, music was required.

Julian Chambliss and William Svitavsky have written that ‘Superman is – by most standards, at least – the first superhero, though the character was far from unprecedented.’23 He emerged in #1, June 30th 1938, the successor of dime novels that became popular with soldiers during the American and the pulp adventure stories carried by newspapers in the early

20 Dittmer, Jason, ‘Captain America in the news: changing mediascapes and the appropriation of a superhero,’ Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics, Vol. 3, No. 2 (Routledge, 2012), p.144. 21 Pitkethly, Clare, ‘The pursuit of identity in the of paradox: indeterminacy, structure and repetition in Superman, Batman and ,’ Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics, Vol. 3, No. 2 (Routledge, 2012), p.219. 22 Percentage of box office gross divided by U.S. and the rest of the world can be found at Box Office Mojo, http://www.boxofficemojo.com/alltime/world/, accessed 14/06/2015. 23 Chambliss, Julian C. and William L. Svitavsky, ‘The Origin of the Superhero: Culture, Race, and Identity in US Popular Culture, 1890-1940,’ in Ages of Heroes, Eras of Men: Superheroes and the American Experience, eds. Chambliss, Svitavsky, and Donaldson (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2013), p.18.

10 twentieth century.24 Superman and other early superheroes, most notably Batman, emerged from a wartime environment and generally held textbook wartime mentalities: a clear distinction between good and evil, unquestioning patriotism, and a belief in the collective will of the American people such that their powers were always used in the service of the populace and not for personal profit. This manifests itself in stories where the hero acts in the service of “the people” to fight collectively established wrongs, rather than supersede them altogether. For example, in , Batman () captures crime boss Carmine Falcone (Tom Wilkinson) through unsanctioned, -legal activities, but ultimately leaves him outside the police station so that he can be brought to justice through the standard judicial process.

In 1941 the first Superman adaptation – an animated – was completed. The opening title music, which plays under the famous exclamations ‘is it a bird? Is it a plane? No… it’s Superman!' is stylistically similar to the wartime propaganda films emerging at the same time. Composed by Sammy Timberg, who scored as many as 200 cartoon shorts in the 1930s and 40s,25 the ‘Superman March’ is a quasi-military marching piece for full orchestra. The piece can be looked at as an example par excellence of the prevalent tone of and their adaptations at the time. The two largest comic book publishers, and Detective Comics (now Marvel and DC respectively) both produced explicitly propagandist material. For example, in 1941 Captain America was introduced with a front cover that showed him punching Adolf Hitler. And these storylines were clearly effective, as Lance Eaton has estimated that ‘during World War II, comic books were read by over 40 percent of the armed forces and significantly outsold magazines such as Reader’s Digest and Life.’26 Similarly, Batman’s first adaptation in a , in 1943, saw him acting as a US government agent going up against the sinister Japanese Prince Daka during World War II. Lee Zahler provided the theme tune and the almost continuous underscore, which borrowed heavily from the composers of Hollywood’s Golden era, such as Korngold and Steiner. Despite the fact that Superman was animated and Batman was , both adaptations were either serious in tone or made a serious point, in so much as the battles they undertook paralleled the threats faced by the world by Nazi . Comics of this era relied upon engaging with issues that resonated with their readership, rather than simply exploiting the limitless fantastical possibilities inherent in a fictional, illustrative medium.

24 Ibid, p.17. 25 Eder, Bruce, ‘Sammy Timberg artist biography,’ All Music, http://www.allmusic.com/artist/sammy-timberg- mn0002002166/biography, accessed 14/06/2015. 26 Eaton, Lance, ‘A Superhero for the Times: Superman’s Fight against Oppression and Injustice in the 1930s,’ in Ages of Heroes, Eras of Men: Superheroes and the American Experience, ed. Chambliss, Svitavsky, and Donaldson (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2013), p.34.

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Detective Comics never opted to picture Superman leaving America to fight in the war, choosing instead to keep him at . Ian Gordon has pointed out that this not only allowed Superman’s ‘faith in American democracy to triumph,’ but that it also gave the character significant staying power after the war where other Superheroes who were explicitly drawn killing Nazis, such as The Human Torch and Captain America, struggled to find a new post-war purpose. Even so, Gordon points out that ‘the cover of the September 1945 issue of Superman showed Superman ineffectually trying to help defrost her well-stocked fridge.’ For a man who can fly and lift above his head, it’s quite a step down. By the late 1940s, superhero tales were in sharp decline and crime comics, or those that were more humorous in nature, became popular. In 1954, the Comic Code was introduced to help maintain the moral standards of comic books that had been established in what was an essentially propagandist environment. This included rules such as: ‘Inclusion of stories dealing with evil shall be used or shall be published only where the intent is to illustrate a moral issue and in no case shall evil be presented alluringly nor as to injure the sensibilities of the reader.’ In other words, the social influence of comic books had been recognized, and with it the need to protect and promote American values became clear.

By the 1950s and 1960s, and with the meteoric rise of home television sets, the tone had changed to an even greater extent. Batman, particularly with regard to the 1960s TV series with in the title role, became increasingly “camp.” Will Brooker summarises the criticism of the adaptation, citing its ‘burned-out celebrities in tacky, overblown costumes, “outrageous” dialogue, absurd situations treated with ludicrous gravity, “slumming” actors, corny jokes.’27 Unlike Zahler’s sinister underscoring, Batman of the 1960s was given a theme tune that reflected his new “pop” appeal. The now (in)famous track by Neal Hefti features a twelve bar blues structure with a James Bond-esque electric guitar riff and choral interjections of ‘Batman.’ It emerged around the same time as other superhero characters were given their own shows and their own theme songs. Notable examples of this trend includes The Superman/ Hour (1967), Marvel Superheroes (1966), and Spiderman (1967), all of which open with songs that explicitly list the featured superheroes’ powers in a semi-parodic vaudeville/cabaret style. This can also be seen as a reflection of the fact that superhero characters were becoming increasingly mainstream and these television shows were designed to appeal to non-comic book readers who might not be familiar with a particular character’s abilities. In any case, the stuffy military marches and sinister atonal sploshes of

27 Brooker, Will, Batman Unmasked: Analyzing a Cultural Icon (New York: Continuum, 2000), p.174.

12 the 1940s were not in keeping with an America that was leaning away from the conservatism and conformity that had previously been dominant.

Even the , which brought about the reintroduction of Captain America and the creation of Iron Man (his suit built initially a means of escape while being held captive by communist Vietnamese forces) 28 didn’t mark an immediate sea change in the prevailing tone of comics. Superman was once again relegated to the side lines, eventually joining the conflict as it neared its conclusion.29 But Vietnam was fraught with moral pitfalls, not least because the separation of good and evil that dominated the superhero mind set in the Second World War now seemed outdated and inadequate. Gordon concludes his article by writing that ‘the Vietnam War showed [that] the world had shifted and DC needed to find a new basis for Superman’s morality; and it did so eventually by having him and other superheroes play out dramas about the nature of power.’30

This began in earnest in the early 1970s, when superheroes were given storylines that involved a great degree of self-doubt about their abilities, and featured real-world problems such as drug abuse, alcoholism, and poverty. The music accompanying the television and film adaptations of these stories can be divided into two different styles. The first, as can be heard in the theme tunes to The Amazing Spiderman (1977) and The New (1978), abandoned the explanatory songs of the 1960s and replaced it with a more modern and upbeat sound, often featuring a blend of orchestral, , and synth elements. The second is exemplified by 's score to Superman (1978) that, like many of his scores, harks back to the Golden era of Hollywood. As a march, it is also reminiscent of the Superman cartoons of the 1940s and 50s.

The 1980s ushered in the so-called ‘Modern Age of Comics,’ sometimes called the ‘Dark Age of Comics’ such was the bleaker tone that prevailed over publications like The Dark Knight and Watchmen. In the former, Batman re-emerged with spirit that had been lost over the previous two decades of campy cartoon television adaptations. In the latter, writer Alan Moore noted that he ‘was consciously trying to do something that would make people feel uneasy.’31 Film adaptations were few and far between, and generally both commercially and critically

28 Gordon, p.4. 29 Ibid, p.10. 30 Gordon, p.10. 31 Moore, Alan, and Neil Gaiman, ‘A Portal to Another Dimension,’ The Comics Journal #116 (1987), http://www.tcj.com/a-portal-to-another-dimension-alan-moore-dave-gibbons-and-neil-gaiman/ , accessed 13/06/2015.

13 disappointing. Superman III made a mere $60 million at the U.S. domestic box office, 32 while “bombed” to an even greater extent, recouping less than half of its $35 million budget.33 The difference between comic book and film adaptations of superhero characters had never been more pronounced, with Superman III heavily criticised for its comedic tone. It wasn’t until Tim Burton’s Batman arrived that the films began to be taken more seriously again. Danny Elfman’s score was praised – the driving strings in compound time were reminiscent of Williams’s Superman a decade earlier, but the gothic overtones were decidedly Elfman.

The 1990s saw an explosion of live action and cartoon superhero television programmes, including Batman: The , Teenage Mutant Turtles, X-Men Evolution, Iron Man: The Animated Series, The Fantastic Four, Lois & Clark: The New Adventures of Superman, and Spiderman Unlimited to name but a few. The connections between film and television also became stronger, with Batman: The Animated Series using Elfman’s theme from the Tim Burton film of 1989 and carrying a much darker visual aesthetic to . The New Adventures of Superman was a big-budget live-action show that ran for four seasons on ABC and was given a heroic, John Williams-esque fanfare opening. Synth became the order of the day in cartoon adaptations, particularly the themes to X-Men and Spiderman Unlimited, which both also have a sinister edge to them. Songs were not out of vogue altogether though, as exemplified by the popularity of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and its catchy title music.

At the same time that television superhero adaptations were numerous, film adaptations struggled to find significant traction and were invariably critically or commercially disappointing. Captain America and The Rocketeer both performed poorly at the box office. Others, such as the sequels and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles II did well, but didn’t make nearly as much money as their predecessors. And almost all of them, Burton’s Batman Returns aside, were panned by the critics.34

In the second half of the 1990s Batman was the only true superhero to continue in film, but once again he began to drift towards the “camp” in ’s and Batman and

32 Superman III box office data according to BoxOfficeMojo.com, http://www.boxofficemojo.com/movies/?id=superman3.htm, accessed 14/06/2015. 33 Supergirl box office data according to BoxOfficeMojo.com, http://www.boxofficemojo.com/movies/?id=supergirl.htm, accessed 14/06/2015. Estimated budget according to IMDB, http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0088206/, accessed 14/06/2015. 34 See list of aggregated critical ratings of Superhero films made between 1990-1999 at McKenzie, B., ‘The Best and Worse Superhero Movies, According to ,’ Superhero Nation (2011), http://www.superheronation.com/2011/08/22/rotten-tomatoes-ratings-for-superhero-movies/, accessed 15/06/2015.

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Robin. Other comic book adaptations such as ’s The Crow, Danny Cannon’s Judge Dredd, and Mark Dippe’s Spawn took a darker route – the latter two criticised for being overly violent – however, the most successful comic book adaptation of the 1990s was Charles Russell’s deliberately campy and children-friendly The Mask. For this, veteran composer Randy Edelman produced a sweeping, full orchestral score that still maintained a humorous feel.

But in the mid-1990s the comic book market crashed. Marvel’s sales dropped 70% and the BBC reported that ‘shares that had been worth $35.75 in 1993 dropped to $2.38 in just three years.’35 Marvel ended up merging with ToyBiz whose boss, Avi Arad, took the helm of Marvel’s film division. They established a new way of licensing their characters, with the X-Men going to Fox, Spider-Man to Sony, and Blade to . This is arguably when the renaissance started, with DC essentially playing catch up until Christopher Nolan entered the fray with Batman Begins.

What should Hollywood’s superhero renaissance “sound” like? For a composer working at the beginning of Hollywood’s superhero renaissance, then, there was almost no precedence at all for the type of music they should compose, given the massive range of and instrumentation that have been employed over sixty years of prior adaptations. That said, as most superhero films fall into a subcategory of the action movie genre, there are certain musical expectations that audiences will likely want to be met.

The “sound” of the action movie was principally established in the 1930s when a number of Jewish composers emigrated to Hollywood to avoid the dangers posed by Nazi Germany, most notably Max Steiner and Erich Wolfgang Korngold. They brought with them the lush European orchestral sound that was predominant at the end of the 19th century, as well as the knowledge of how to musically underscore drama from their experiences of the German operatic tradition.

As James Buhler has commented, ‘Music’s role was to convince the audience that a continuity of thought, a narrative line, existed in the film, and that the audience could also discern this line.’36 One of the ways in which the composers of Hollywood’s early sound era tried to do this was by using leitmotifs to represent different characters or emotions in the score, for example in

35 Savage, Mark, ‘Marvel Avenged: From financial ruin to the biggest film franchise in history,’ BBC News (2015) http://www.bbc.com/news/entertainment-arts-32379661, accessed 15/06/2015. 36 Buhler, James and David Neumeyer, ‘Music and the Ontology of the : The Classical Hollywood System,’ in The Oxford Handbook of Film Music Studies, ed. Neumeyer (Oxford: OUP, 2014), p.20.

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Korngold’s The Adventures of Robin Hood. 37 As in a Wagnerian music drama, these motifs provided a means to “look” - or better, “listen” - forwards and backwards through the narrative, hinting at future character developments, or providing a depth of nuanced detail to events taking place in the present. Adorno was famously scathing of the application of the to film, writing that ‘here [in film] the function of the leitmotif has been reduced to the level of musical lackey, who announces his master with an important air even through the eminent personage is clearly recognizable to everyone.’ 38 Despite his criticism, relating a theme to a character or a location became commonplace, particularly in the large orchestral scores used for action films. Two more recent examples of complex leitmotif association can be found in John Williams’s scores to the Star Wars films, of which all six share common themes across almost twelve hours of music, and Howard Shore’s trilogy, which supposedly features more than eighty individual leitmotifs.39

In the 1970s and 80s the introduction of synthesized elements became commonplace, and in the late 1980s and early 1990s Hans Zimmer pioneered the combination of acoustic and electronic elements to form highly successful scores for films such as Rain Man and The Lion King. More recently, the rise of tech-savvy composers who work directly with digital audio workstations (DAWs) has led to an even greater manipulation of the sonic elements of a score, and increased integration between the roles of composer, sound designer, and sound editor. An example of this can be seen with Stephen Price’s music for Gravity, which used the setting of soundless outer space to construct a unique score inspired by the noise of vibrations transmitted through the main characters’ spacesuits.

A modern superhero score would be expected to include aspects of these modern scoring techniques while also reflecting on the musical heritage of the hero’s previous screen adaptations. As well as this, the importance of the principal character (or characters) in a given superhero film means that representational motifs are highly likely to be utilized. It can also be assumed that given the preoccupation with the (often literal) “fight” between good and evil, musical elements associated with conflict and the military, such as arpeggiated brass fanfares and snare drum patterns, will be present somewhere in the score.

37 Winters, Ben, Erich Wolfgang Korngold's The adventures of Robin Hood : a guide, (Lanham, Md: Scarecrow Press, 2007). 38 Adorno, Theodor and Hanns Eisler, Composing for the Films (New York: OUP, 1947). New edition (London: Continuum, 2007), p.3. 39 Handy, Bruce, 'Lord of the Rings' Composer Howard Shore Talks Hobbits, His Start on 'SNL' and Working With Martin Scorsese,’ Billboard.com (2014), http://www.billboard.com/articles/6304248/the-hobbit-howard-shore-the- battle-of-five-armies-score-lord-of-the-rings-music, accessed 14/06/2015.

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Five case studies In the five case studies that follow, each film score will be examined with specific reference to one of the five ‘ways in which music serves the screen,’ as outlined by Aaron Copland in his essay Film Music (1940). These are as follows:

‘1. Creating a more convincing atmosphere of time and place. Not all Hollywood composers bother about this nicety. Too often, their scores are interchangeable: a thirteenth- century Gothic drama and a hardboiled modern battle of the sexes get similar treatment. The lush symphonic texture of late nineteenth-century music remains the dominating influence. But there are exceptions. Recently, the higher-grade horse opera has begun to have its own musical flavor, mostly a folksong derivative.

2. Underlining psychological refinements—the unspoken thoughts of a character or the unseen implications of a situation. Music can play upon the emotions of the spectator, sometimes counterpointing the thing seen with an aural image that implies the contrary of the thing seen. This is not as subtle as it sounds. A well-placed dissonant chord can stop an audience cold in the middle of a sentimental scene, or a calculated woodwind passage can turn what appears to be a solemn moment into a belly laugh.

3. Serving as a kind of neutral background filler. This is really the music one isn't supposed to hear, the sort that helps to fill the empty spots, such as pauses in a conversation. It's the movie composer's most ungrateful task. But at times, though else may notice, he will get private satisfaction from the thought that music of little intrinsic value, through professional manipulation, has enlivened and made more human the deathly pallor of a screen shadow. This is hardest to do, as any film composer will attest, when the neutral filler type of music must weave its way underneath dialogue.

4. Building a sense of continuity. The picture editor knows better than anyone how serviceable music can be in tying together a visual medium which is, by its very nature, continually in danger of falling apart. One sees this most obviously in montage scenes where the use of a unifying musical idea may save the quick flashes of disconnected scenes from seeming merely chaotic.

5. Underpinning the theatrical build-up of a scene, and rounding it off with a sense of finality. The first instance that comes to mind is the music that blares out at the end of a film. Certain producers have boasted their picture's lack of a musical score, but I never saw or heard of a picture that ended in silence.’40

Although it dates from 1940, it coincides with the emergence of the superhero character proper and reflects the cultural sensibilities prevalent at the time. This concept will act as the glue holding these separate close readings together, enabling wider conclusions to be drawn on the ways in which music might serve the superhero specifically. That said, it must be noted that looking at

40 Copland, Aaron, Film Music (1940), http://puffin.creighton.edu/fapa/Bruce/0New%20Film%20as%20Art%20webfiles/all%20texts%20and%20articles/film_ music_by__aaron_copeland.htm, accessed 14/06/2015.

17 each ‘way’ individually will result in their artificial separation from each other, when in reality, as shall be seen, they are deeply intertwined. This is a necessary reduction if we are to explore fully how Copland’s ideas can be applied to the genre in question.

To aid these close readings, other ideas and concepts will also be employed as and when they are needed to enable an understanding of the musical mechanisms that contribute to Copland’s overarching theory.

1. ‘Creating a more convincing atmosphere of time and place’ in Iron Man (2008)41 and The Avengers (2012)42 Iron Man is officially the first film in the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) and was hugely successful at the box office at the time of its release, quadrupling its budget 43 and finding significant critical acclaim.44 Directed by , principally an indie director and actor (he appears in the film as Hogan, Stark’s bodyguard), the film follows the of the titular character. The music was scored by Ramin Djawadi, at the time a relative newcomer to blockbuster film scoring, but who had cut his teeth at Hans Zimmer’s Remote Control Productions company providing and additional music for films including Blade and Batman Begins; he was certainly familiar with the modern superhero aesthetic.

Favreau and Djawadi set out at the beginning of production to bring the electric guitar to the fore, an instrument they felt could more appropriately portray a character born of industry and rendered in metal. According to Djawadi, ‘Jon was very involved. He kept mentioning the idea of rock guitars. I loved the idea as it would give us a different tone than other super hero movies.’45 That said, the score also makes heavy use of orchestral elements, while the composed score as a whole sits alongside existing pop and rock music, forming a hybrid . It is this hybridity of

41 In Iron Man (Dir. Jon Favreau, 2008), Tony Stark (Robert Downey Jr.), the genius billionaire owner of a weapons company, is kidnapped by terrorists in Afghanistan. Forced to make weapons for his captors, he chooses instead to build a powerful suit of armour as a means of escape: Iron Man is born. Once back in the United States, he refines his design and uses it to fight crime and terrorism. But his second in command, Obadiah Stane (), wants to use the technology for other, more sinister, means. 42 The Avengers (Dir. Joss Wheden, 2012) follows the story of a group of superheroes brought together by (Samuel L. Jackson) in order to stop (Tom Hiddleston) using the power of the tesseract (a vessel containing unlimited energy) to take over the world. 43 For a breakdown of budget vs. worldwide gross see: http://www.boxofficemojo.com/movies/?id=ironman.htm 44 Both Rotten Tomatoes and Metacritic, film review aggregating websites, show that, on average, critics rated Iron Man very highly. See http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/iron_man/ and http://www.metacritic.com/movie/iron-man 45 Brennan, Mike and Ramin Djawadi, ‘Breaking Out and Scoring with Ramin Djawadi (Interview)’, Soundtrack.net, http://www.soundtrack.net/content/article/?id=253, accessed on 25/05/2015.

18 elements and the different ways they are used that allows the score to align with Copland’s first ‘ways in which film music works,’ namely, that of ‘creating a more convincing atmosphere of time and place.’

In one of the opening scenes of the film, Tony Stark (Robert Downey Jr.) is being driven through the Afghan desert by the United States military. The scene begins with a shot of a convoy of Humvees on the move, over which we hear a non-diegetic rendition of AC/DC’s ‘’ high in the mix. As we cut to a viewpoint inside the vehicle containing Stark, the music becomes diegetic; we see that it is emanating from a CD player and the volume and sound quality adjust accordingly. Moments later everything goes wrong when his convoy is attacked by terrorists using the very weapons he’d designed to keep Americans safe. As the first missile hits the Humvee at the front of the convoy, the music stops and the soundtrack then consists purely of dialogue and the sound effects of weapons being fired.

This opening passage of the film sets up a familiar superhero narrative whereby the American people and their values come under attack and must be saved. In this instance, freedom (in the form of rock ‘n’ roll), democracy (the American soldiers), and capitalism (Tony Stark) – three key tenets of America – are silenced, literally, in the face of evil (terrorism). Jerrod MacFarlane has commented that films such as Iron Man ‘serve as a crutch for American identity, shielding Americans from an unwelcoming world and newly revealed fragility.’46 Tony Stark’s Humvee and the people within it are the manifestation of that: a slice of American identity adrift in a stormy, Middle-Eastern sea.47 The attack reveals the fragility MacFarlane talks about, and after this the rest of the film then reads as America’s attempt to rediscover its voice, a process that is expressed musically as well as through other aspects of the mise en scène.

One of the ways in which this happens is by allowing the morally “good” characters, such as Colonel James Rhodes (Terrence Howard), access to music, while denying access to those who are perceived of as “bad.” When Rhodes is flying in Stark’s private jet at the very beginning of the film we hear the R ‘n’ B track ‘Slept on Tony,’ specifically written for the film by Ghostface Killah, a member of the Wu Tang Clan. A few scenes before this we Stark gambling at Caesar’s

46 MacFarlane, Jerrod S., ‘Desperate times and desperate measures: false-representation and distortion of terrorism in post-9/11 superhero films,’ Critical Studies on Terrorism, Vol. 7, No. 3 (Routledge, 2014), p.448. 47 The military equipment used in the film was actually supplied through an agreement with the U.S. Department of Defense. See Mirrlees, Tanner, ‘How to read Iron Man: The Economics, Geopolitics, and Ideology of an Film Commodity,’ Cineaction (2014), p.4-11.

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Palace in Las Vegas, while in the background we can hear a big band of the old Iron Man cartoon theme.

As with ‘Back in Black,’ both this old theme and ‘Slept on Tony’ are heard diegetically. In the case of the latter two we don’t actually see the source of the music, but the audio mixing and the way that the characters talk to each other (for example, raising their voices so they can be heard over the hi-fi in the private jet) imply that the music is audible “in” the scene and is therefore not ascribed to the unseen filmmaker/narrator. In contrast to the terrorists, who are accompanied with no diegetic music and indeed very limited non-diegetic music, Stark and Rhodes have privileged access to - and could be said to represent or protect - “culture” in the form of this music. While this might seem far-fetched, the Taliban’s banning of music upon their accession to power in 1996 was regularly held up by the West as a symbol of their barbarism and control. As John Street has noted, ‘one of the most vivid images used to illustrate their overthrow was a picture of Afghan citizens joyously waving their radios and cassette players.’48 To this end, when Tony Stark begins to his suit in the darkness of the cave where he is being held captive, the mechanical noises are slowly combined with the pulse of percussion and later the sound of the electric guitar and orchestra. In a sense, then, the music confirms that Stark is not only forming a suit of armour, but also his freedom.

The fact this music appears to emerge from the forging process also exemplifies the proximity of diegetic and non-diegetic music throughout Iron Man. As well as the aforementioned popular music that is obviously present “in” the scene, there are also moments when the composed, predominantly non-diegetic score is pulled towards the diegesis by employing a relatively similar sound set as that used by the sound effects department. For example, the sound of forging becomes the rhythmic underpinning of the music in the scenes depicting the suit’s creation. The link between diegetic sound and non-diegetic score is made even stronger when the former directly interacts with the latter. This is most obvious on two occasions. In the first, Stark blasts away from the terrorist camp in his Mark I suit only to have his flight propulsion fail, causing him to crash into the desert sand. His take off and emergence from a huge explosion bring about the first rendition of Djawadi’s heroic Iron Man theme, but the moment his suit fails the music stops, like the needle being pulled from a record. The second example is similar, where Stark’s flight in the Mark II suit, again accompanied by Djawadi’s theme, is cut short when he’s hit by a tank shell. This also results in the immediate cessation of the music.

48 Street, John, ‘Breaking the Silence: Music’s Role in Political Thought and Action,’ Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy, Vol. 10, No. 3 (Routledge, 2007), p.324.

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It is for these reasons that Daniel Percheron’s term ‘extra-diegetic’ may be the most appropriate way of describing the music if, as Ben Winter’s has written, ‘it is understood as something added, rather than something external to the world.’49 This definition seems particularly apt when applied to the unique camera position: a close-up of Downey Jr. inside the Iron Man helmet (figure 1). While we may not be “inside” the head of Tony Stark, we are very much “inside” the character of Iron Man. The movement from the external shot of Iron Man flying, being chased by two F-22 Raptor aircraft, to one inside his helmet when he telephones Rhodes, for example, does not invoke a change in the music and thus has the effect of pushing the score closer to the diegesis. After all, we are “inside” Iron Man’s head and yet we can still hear the music. But this is also problematic, as Winters later writes that ‘the extra-diegetic might be understood as music or sound whose logic is not dictated by events within the narrative space’ and that this music ‘seems distanced from the narrative space.’50 This would, in theory, have the opposite effect of pushing the standardly non- diegetic score away from events that take place on screen.

Figure 1: The view of Tony Stark’s face from “inside” the Iron Man suit.

To reconcile this, Winters proposes the term ‘intra-diegetic’ and it is this that is perhaps most useful in the case of Iron Man. This music

49 Winters, Ben, ‘The Non-Diegetic Fallacy: Film, Music, and Narrative Space,’ Music & Letters, Vol. 91, No. 2 (OUP, 2010), p.232. 50 Ibid, p.233.

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‘exists in the film’s everyday narrative space and time, and is thus properly thought of as part of the film’s fabula: it may be considered to be produced by the characters themselves (either as a result of their physical movements, as with mickey-mousing, as an expression of their emotion state, or as a musical calling-card), or by the geographical space of the film.’51

In this respect, then, the second moment when Iron Man’s flight is thwarted seems to occur on the edge of intra-diegetic space, where the non-diegetic composed score is stopped by the diegetic mechanical “THWACK” of the tank shell. This isn’t problematic, as ‘the music can easily cross these boundaries’ and, indeed, it could be argued that throughout Iron Man it often does.

Regardless of exactly where we decide the music is located, it is clear that Tony Stark has privileged access to it, and indeed a measure of control over it. When we finally hear a full rendition of Iron Man’s theme (‘Driving with the Top Down’ on the soundtrack album) it really is a fusion of orchestral and rock elements: The tune is primarily carried by the strings, while a band rhythm section (guitar, bass, kit) plays underneath. This allows the score to allude to ‘Back in Black’ while simultaneous fulfilling action film expectations.

In contrast to Tony Stark’s proximity to the score, the terrorists are given hardly any music at all, and throughout the film there is a clear separation between the musical depiction of the “good” characters and the “bad” ones. Indeed, to MacFarlane’s statement that ‘nothing identifies them [the terrorists] besides their dialogue in Arabic and their generic desert locale’52 we could add the lack of musical accompaniment.

The idea of privileging music-as-culture can also be reversed to favour the villain, as can be seen in the superhero film The Avengers. Here, Loki, the film’s villain, descends upon Stuttgart in order to steal a block of iridium, the element that is required in order to stabilize the wormhole created by the tesseract. Dressed in his finery, he infiltrates an evening drinks party in order to rather gruesomely obtain the eye - needed for a retinal scan – of the man with access to the vault where this element is stored. The whole scene is accompanied by Schubert’s String Quartet No. 13 “Rosamunde,” which is played by the string quartet present at the party (figure 2). What starts as diegetic music quickly becomes non-diegetic as the camera moves away from the players, yet Loki’s eventual entrance and his attack are very consciously synched with the musical score.

51 Ibid, p.237. 52 MacFarlane, p.450.

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Figure 2: Schubert’s String Quartet No. 13, “Rosamunde”.

In the build up to this moment, Loki descends a staircase before incapacitating the man by hitting him with his staff. In the final bar shown above, the forte A minor chord is synchronised with this act of violence, and the subsequent E major chord with when he falls to the ground. Here, then, Loki appears to control the music directly – his staff a makeshift conductor’s baton - despite the fact that it is pointedly non-diegetic by this point; at least, as everyone else flees from the maleficent demi-god it seems highly unlikely the string quartet would sit and continue playing.

In contrast to the terrorists in Iron Man, who are excluded from participating in the music, Loki appears to be in charge of it. In part, this may be due to Loki’s character who, along with his brother Thor, speaks in an eloquent, albeit it archaic, manner – what Tony Stark/Iron Man jokingly describes as ‘Shakespeare in the woods.’ 53 They are from the supposedly highly civilized and advanced planet of , and these lofty ideals are easily represented with the long-established intellectual tropes of classical music and Elizabethan English. This is further emphasized by the fact that the well-spoken English actor Tom Hiddleston was chosen to play him, a former pupil of Eton and Oxford University.

Setting the scene in Germany also offers up other allegorical readings of this moment, particularly since The Avengers follows chronologically from Captain America: The First Avenger film in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Indeed, in The Avengers it is Captain America who points out the Nazi

53 Wheden, Joss (dir.), The Avengers (Marvel/Paramount, 2012).

23 comparison when he says ‘the last time I was in Germany and saw a man standing above everybody else, we ended up disagreeing.’54 Such a comparison may be writer and director Joss Wheden’s purpose, since there is no other narrative reason for the film to take place in Stuttgart, and particularly given that the actual filming location was Cleveland, Ohio.55

Loki represents ‘the elegant European aesthete [that was] a stock villain type of the 1940s,’56 a type of baddie that has pedigree in form of Hans Grüber from Die Hard. Robyn Stilwell has written about how composer Michael Kamen integrated the ‘Ode to Joy’ tune from Beethoven’s Ninth into the theme given to the villain. The introduction of this music plays out in a remarkably similar way to that of The Avengers, with Stilwell writing that

‘The 'Ode' is first heard being played innocently enough by the string quartet at the Nakatomi party in a simple, straightforward arrangement similar to the section around bar 140 in the last movement of the symphony, but transposed to E flat and with a rhythmicized dominant pedal. However, Hans wrests control from the string quartet even before his appearance on screen.’57

In this way, the character of Hans Grüber is set up, musically and otherwise, as the antithesis to that of John McClane, the film’s hero, whom she describes as ‘distinctly proletarian.’ 58 While The Avengers differs in that its heroes are numerous and of mixed background and abilities, none of them is similar to Loki. Even Thor, his brother, is depicted in his own eponymous film as being reckless, while Tony Stark and Bruce Banner, though intellectual, are not portrayed as being interested in the “high” arts.

Like Grüber, Loki controls the music, and as he stands above the humans, so too his music ascends beyond Schubert’s original scoring with the introduction of brass and woodwind elements. Clearly by this point any semblance of musical diegesis garnered from the string quartet’s presence at the beginning of the scene has dissipated, but Loki’s fuller orchestration of the music demonstrates that the reach of his power extends to the intra-diegetic - even non-diegetic - space. This is reinforced when the music continues to play even when the camera cuts away several times to catch up with the narrative progress of other characters.

54 Ibid 55 See The Avengers filming locations page at IMDB: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0848228/locations, accessed 05/05/2015. 56 Stilwell, Robynn J., ‘“I Just Put a Drone under Him…”: Collage and Subversion in the Score of ‘Die Hard,’ Music & Letters, Vol. 78, No. 4 (OUP, 1997), p.558. 57 Ibid, p.563. 58 Stilwell, p.563.

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In the case of both Iron Man and The Avengers, pre-existing music is used to contrast with the composed score, particularly as a means of scene setting. By playing rock ‘n’ roll in their vehicle, Tony Stark and the soldiers he’s with are transported in a microcosm of America. This is shown to generate an atmosphere of freedom, exemplified by Stark’s abandonment of formal VIP conventions, and to produce a narrative whereby the attack on Stark and the soldiers is an attack on America itself. In The Avengers, using Schubert provides a simple means of placing Loki in Germany, at the heart of artistic culture yet also the scene of one of its darkest hours, and showing that culture to be under threat. These two films also demonstrate how privileged access to music can be given successfully to either the hero or the villain, depending on the nature of those characters. In the case of the former, he or she can be seen as a protector of culture, while when the latter has control, particularly of Western Art Music, American anti-intellectual tropes come into : a suspicion of the “high” arts as elitist, distanced from the ordinary blue collar worker who represents a form of idealised national stereotype.

2. ‘Underlining psychological refinements’ in X-Men: The Last Stand (2006) 59 The second of Copland’s ‘ways in which the music serves the screen,’ that of ‘underlining psychological refinement’ seems best exploited in films featuring superheroes who undergo a personal, internal struggle.

This is perhaps most common in those characters who fit into the third of Dittmer’s branches of American exceptionalism in the superhero genre, namely ‘the accommodation of difference.’60 This distinctive group of characters is primarily made up of human beings who, having been born with some sort of mutation or after going through a process that causes one, display superhuman characteristics. Amongst these individuals are some of the most iconic superheroes in the , including Spider-Man, The X-Men, and The Incredible . Emerging from the backdrop of the civil rights and gay emancipation movements of the 1960s, their differences, and the process of getting the “normal” human population as a whole to accept them, is often the basis for their

59 In X-Men: The Last Stand (Dir. , 2006), Professor Xavier () is the telepathic leader of the X-Men: a group of “good” mutants whose aim is to live in harmony with the human population. Working against them are the “bad” mutants, led by Xavier’s former friend, the metal-manipulating (Ian McKellen), who believes mutants are superior to regular humans. At the beginning of The Last Stand, scientists have produced a cure for the so- called mutant ‘x’ gene, which Magneto sees as a step towards the elimination of his kind. He attempts to use the power of another mutant, Dark Phoenix (Famke Janssen), to destroy the source of the cure but underestimates her sheer destructive power. 60 Dittmer 2010, p.114.

25 storylines. Central to many of these narratives are the personal psychological struggles of individuals coming to terms with, and eventually overcoming, their differences – a process that could be seen as a sort of superhero “coming out,” at least to themselves if not to society as a whole. In some of the films that make up Hollywood’s superhero renaissance, composers have tried to portray this struggle musically.

Brett Ratner’s X-Men: The Last Stand (20th Century Fox, 2006) features the binary character of /Phoenix (Famke Janssen) as its main protagonist. She was one of the five original X-Men from the eponymous comic books, appearing under the name Marvel Girl in issue #1, 1963. In the 1980s she underwent a transformation to become the Phoenix: ‘her origin was altered and she became the vessel for the cosmic Phoenix Force making one of the weakest members of the X-Men arguably the strongest entity in the entire .’61 In the film adaptations, the maniacal Phoenix side of her personality is described as having been contained and controlled via the construction of psychic barriers by Professor Charles Xavier, put in place when she was a child. She emerges in The Last Stand with the Phoenix no longer caged after being assumed dead at the end of the proceeding film, X2. Without the ability to control her powers, she becomes the Dark Phoenix, a massively destructive, god-like force.

In a score that was widely praised62 – much more so than the film itself63 - composer John Powell created a theme for Jean Grey/Phoenix that displays the two conflicting sides of her personality. This is no mean feat given that her character doesn’t easily comply with action movie stereotyping, namely, a woman who is both evil and virtuous. In the opening scene of the film – a flashback to twenty years earlier – we see Professor Xavier and Eric Lehnsherr/Magneto meeting a young Jean Grey at her parents' home. A solo violin outlines the X-Men theme as they arrive but when Jean is introduced it shrinks away to a high, almost inaudible semi-tonal oscillation between the upper harmonics of C and B. When the girl shows off her immense power by telekinetically lifting all the cars in her road, this music assumes a more ominous feel by association. Although the Dark Phoenix theme isn’t played in full at this point, the music still signals that there is something dark lurking inside her character that is yet to manifest itself fully.

61 ‘Jean Grey,’ ComicVine (2015), http://www.comicvine.com/jean-grey/4005-3552/, accessed 15/06/2015. 62 See Brennan, Mike, ‘X-Men: The Last Stand,’ Soundtrack.net (2006), http://www.soundtrack.net/album/x-men-the- last-stand/, accessed 15/06/2015. Also Coleman, Christopher, ‘X-Men: The Last Stand,’ Tracksounds, http://www.tracksounds.com/reviews/xmen_last_stand.htm, accessed 15/06/2015. 63 See ‘X-Men: The Last Stand,’Rotten Tomatoes, http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/x_men_3_the_last_stand/, accessed 15/06/2015.

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In the present day, when Scott Summers/ (her boyfriend and, later, in the comic books, her husband) goes to the lake where she was last seen, we hear the theme emerge in full. This is interesting in that it represents a reversal of the standard Hollywood gender stereotyping with film scoring that is ‘most rudimentarily… the typical doubling of the love theme with the theme for the heroine, suggesting that the heroine existed in the film primarily to be the love object of the hero.’64 In this case, Summers/Cyclops isn’t given a theme at all but rather his movements and actions are accompanied by her theme intermingled with her telepathic whispering, which drives Summers/Cyclops mad as he believes her to be dead. The flexibility of Powell’s theme allows it to be used here, highly embellished with high violin ostinati and widely spaced brass chords, to produce an epic love theme. This surges up in the mix, Casablanca-esque, as they embrace, with a chorus introduced when they begin to kiss. However, after a single, full rendition of the theme in this orchestration, the chorus and brass crescendo, rising in to a massive, terrifying dissonance – a cluster chord around Fdim7 – that is interjected by several loud percussion crashes. As this happens, the camera pans around the couple to reveal Jean’s eyes, which are now open and completely jet black, and Summers’s face, which is growing pale and gaunt: she’s killing him.

Figure 3:The Dark Phoenix theme, final rendition.

Pauline MacRory has written about musical accompaniments to female violence in film. In her discussion of the music used in depictions of female violence in the films Nikita and Point of No Return, she writes that

‘both films clearly separate the violence that the characters perform of their own volition from that which they are instructed to do… In Nikita the eponymous heroine's early violence (the murder of the policeman, the stabbing and the fight in the courtroom) is either totally free from music or underscored with odd synthesizer sounds. But the restaurant mission and the bathroom scene are underscored with a regular percussive beat and, in the

64 Buhler, James, ‘Gender, Sexuality, and the Soundtrack’, The Oxford Handbook of Film Music Studies, ed. David Neumeyer (Oxford: OUP, 2014), p.367.

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latter case, a military snare… This military sound is identifying her as a soldier, and thereby reducing her culpability for the killings that are about to happen.’65

In John Powell’s music in The Last Stand, there is no such separation. Instead, he utilizes a single theme (figure 3), which is corrupted and altered depending on which side of the character it is accompanying, implying that violence is undertaken by her own volition and as such stems from a part of her personality. Indeed, a backup feature from Phoenix: The Untold Story shows a discussion between the writers and artists working on the character as to whether they think she is possessed by an external force or whether her evil is an inherent part of her personality; even they didn’t reach consensus on the issue. 66 Powell’s music seems to suggest, as John Byrne (the penciller) did, that Jean Grey and Dark Phoenix essentially play out a Jekyll and Hyde dichotomy. This also ties in with the character myth as established by the films - different from the comics – where Jean is seen with these dangerous traits even as a child. There is no narrative showing her possession by the Phoenix force, or indeed any implication that this happened at all.

The contrast in the two sides of her character also exemplifies the contrasts present in the two warring faction of mutants. Heather J. Hicks has shown how in the first X-Men film, directed by Bryan Singer, the “good” mutants are shown to have evolved, while the “bad” mutants seem to have devolved, often taking on animalistic characteristics, such as in the characters of and .67 Singer makes this difference more explicit by selecting characters with essentially human features from the huge corpus of possible X-Men, as established over many years in the comic books.

In the first and second films of the franchise, Jean Grey is shown to be a doctor, caring, virtuous, and capable of restraint with both her mutant powers and her emotions, exemplified by her rejection of the advances made by the über-masculine (). As the Dark Phoenix in The Last Stand, however, she is the complete opposite. Her actions become more animalistic and she abandons self-control, both sexually (in the scene where she aggressively seduces Wolverine, drawing blood with her nails) and in terms of her immense power (seen when she easily destroys the door to her room). As well as this, physical and visual effects are applied to actress Famke Janssen, such as making her eyes completely black, her face gaunt, and by backlighting her red hair, which darkens her face and creates a sort of halo around her head.

65 MacRory, Pauline, ‘Excusing the violence of Hollywood women: music in Nikita and Point of No Return’, Screen, Vol. 40, No. 1 (Oxford: OUP, 1999), p.59. 66 Claremont, Chris et al., ‘The Dark Phoenix Tapes,’ Phoenix: The Untold Story #1 (Marvel, 1984). 67 Hicks, Heather J., ‘Impalement: Race and Gender in Bryan Singer’s X-Men’, Cineaction, No.85 (2011), p. 55.

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Musically, the choral elements, often disparate and with incomprehensible words, point to an other- worldly, animalistic power that is out of control. As well as her destruction of Scott Summers, there are two subsequent moments where her full power is unleashed. The first occurs when Professor Xavier goes to find her in the childhood home she grew up. As she becomes angry, the room starts to shake and, in a sequence lasting around three minutes, she destroys the house and Professor Xavier himself. Her theme is heard here, but again it is altered. This time, the fully realized diatonic harmony that had underpinned its previous incarnation as a love theme is gone. In its place a militaristic snare drum and brass interjection passage form the accompaniment, above which the melody soars high on the violins, seemingly disconnected. When the theme is repeated, horns provide another layer of texture, holding long notes, and the chorus enters once again. The brass becomes loud and higher, moving upwards towards the strings and playing increasingly agitated rhythms. This continues until, in the moments just before Professor Xavier’s , everything stops apart from the chorus, who sing an eerie, unaccompanied chorale. This chorale does not contain the Phoenix theme, but it is used in conjunction with slow-motion effects to give the impression of time standing still. At the same time, Professor Xavier talks at normal speed, suggesting that this slowing is caused by one of the characters themselves. The chorale could therefore be seen to represent the psychological space between them.

In the final battle of the film, the Dark Phoenix begins to lose control once again, destroying everything around her and threatening the city of . Her powers move the matter around her, lifting and suspending the water in the bay, casting dark, swirling clouds above her, and obliterating any humans or mutants who stand in her way. Wolverine knows that his ability to heal means that he is the only one that can stop her, but to do so he will have to kill her, the woman he loves. As he starts the slow walk towards her, repeatedly being wounded and repairing himself, the Phoenix theme plays in a rendition similar to that which accompanied Professor Xavier’s destruction. Conversely, the X-Men theme isn’t heard at all, demonstrating how little power he has over her.

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Figure 4: Wolverine approaches Jean Grey/Phoenix during the final battle in order to kill her.

When he finally reaches her and kills her the theme is silenced, and is replaced with a four chord pattern that was previously heard at Professor Xavier’s funeral, bringing with it associations of mourning. This signals the end of the Phoenix, and the pain Wolverine feels at having killed the woman he loves: Jean Grey. The music here pre-empts the final scene, where we see the graves of Jean Grey next to those of Scott Summers and the Professor. She has been relieved of her guilt and returned to the ground as one of the X-Men. The psychological battle is over.

Throughout The Last Stand a musical power struggle occurs as to which is the ‘main theme,’ that of the Phoenix, or that of the X-Men. The prominence of her music signals an unconventional approach to the character in a similar vein to how Michael Furlong has described the comic book The Spirit, writing that

‘traditional comic book and pulp narratives featured a restrained heroine a la Lady… often being rescued by a hero, and the antagonist who captured the heroine. The neo-Eisner covers remove this triangular power and replace it with a simpler two-part power structure of distressed hero and femme fatale, reversing the traditional power structure of male hegemony.’68

In many ways, Jean Grey/Phoenix is the femme fatale character par excellence, seducing both Scott Summers and Wolverine and ultimately destroying the former. Her psychological battle between the two warring sides of her personality is captured in Powell’s flexible theme, which is deployed in

68 Furlong, Michael, ‘Gendered Power: Comics, Film, and Sexuality in the United States,’ in Ages of Heroes, Eras of Men: Superheroes and the American Experience, ed. Julian Chambliss, William Svitavsky, & Thomas Donaldson (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2013), p.93.

30 considerably versatile ways, leading to a nuanced reading of the character’s actions. Crucially, through its use as a love theme as well as underscoring violence, the music encourages sympathy for the character of Jean Grey/Phoenix, whose affliction ultimately results in her death. Indeed, during the end credits we hear a rendition of the Dark Phoenix theme underpinned by a very similar four chord progression as that heard during Professor Xavier’s funeral (figure 3), bringing the two together and generating a feeling of closure.

3. ‘Serving as a kind of neutral background filler’ in Spider-Man (2002) 69 Copland’s third principle of film music, ‘serving as a kind of neutral background filler,’ is the most problematic. To demonstrate why, it is useful to bring in James Buhler’s notion of ‘false clarity.’70 In a similar vein to Marxist notions of false consciousness,71 Buhler describes how the music that accompanies the words and actions of characters can affect the way in which they are then perceived by the audience. In other words, a villain may perform a task that, although fairly innocuous, is coloured as “bad” by being given a sinister underscore. From the point of view of the audience, this isn’t necessarily an issue, since all filmic events are clearly mediated by the , what Jerrold Levinson refers to as a ‘constant guidance.’72 But as Buhler has noted, ‘what is lost is any sense of why the evil argument might have been compelling in the first place.’ In other words, each member of the audience is deprived of the ability to make an autonomous moral judgement regarding a character’s action, since the persuasive power of music pulls them towards a certain position. This leads to the automatic assignation of “good” and “bad” labels to characters, simplifying the moral landscape of the film and ultimately presenting a bias version of events. For example, in the Second World Saving Private Ryan, visual and musical elements confer the American soldiers with a sense of memorandum and dignity not afforded to their German counterparts. The term ‘false clarity’ is used by virtue of the fact that many audience members are not consciously aware of this process of musical persuasion and thus believe they have made an informed moral judgement based on an assessment of the facts.

69 In Spider-Man (Dir. Sam Raimi, 2002), Peter Parker () is an average high-school student who obtains super powers after being bitten by a genetically engineered . He has to use his new talents to defeat /The Green Goblin (), a scientist whose human enhancement serum has given him amazing intelligence and physical strength, but has also rendered him insane. His quest is complicated by his friendship with Norman’s son, Harry (James Franco), and his love for his neighbour and classmate, Mary-Jane Watson (Kirsten Dunst). 70 Buhler, James, “Analytical and Interpretive Approaches to Film Music (II): Analysing Interactions of Music and Film”, Film Music: Critical Approaches, ed. K.J. Donnelly (Edinburgh University Press, 2001), p.50. 71 Engels, Freidrich, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels Correspondence 1846-1895, trans. Dona Torr (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1936), p.511. 72 Levinson, Jerold, “Film Music and Narrative Agency”, Post-Theory: Reconstructing Film Studies, ed. David Bordwell and Noël Carroll (London: University of Wisconsin Press, 1996), p.253.

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Copland’s third principle is therefore problematic because the existence of ‘neutral background filler’ music is itself called into question, for can any music be considered truly neutral? This is worth exploring with relation to Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man (2002), particularly in the dialogue scenes featuring Mary-Jane (Kirsten Dunst), Peter Parker/Spider-Man (Tobey Maguire), and Norman Osborn/The Green Goblin (Willem Dafoe).

Copland asserted that background music ‘is really the music one isn't supposed to hear, the sort that helps to fill the empty spots, such as pauses in a conversation.’73 In Raimi’s Spider-Man, these pauses are plentiful and long, representing the characters’ inability to effectively communicate their feelings, or as a deliberate means of hiding them. Danny Elfman’s music is therefore frequently called upon to play the part of what might be best described as ‘the “other” participant’ of the conversation. With Buhler’s ideas about musical persuasion and ‘false clarity’ in mind, this music comes to hold significant sway on the audience’s perception of these conversations and the characters that partake in them.

Figure 5: Peter Parker and Mary-Jane Watson speak over the fence between their houses.

Elfman’s music does not pervade every dialogue scene, and even in those when it is present it often does not enter (or at least, is not immediately audible) until a moment when the conversation begins to break down or becomes visibly awkward. For example, when the characters find it easy to

73 Copland

32 convey their feelings, there is often no music whatsoever, such as when and speak fluently with each other near the beginning of the film. In multiple scenes involving Peter and Mary-Jane, when they talk over the fence (figure 5), outside the burger joint, and after her soap opera audition, their conversations begin with no music and, as they trip themselves up trying to hide their feelings from each other, the music enters like a narrator, telling us what is being left unsaid. In the case of Peter and Mary-Jane, this often takes the form of a short woodwind motif, carried by the flute or clarinet, and underscored with soft strings and broken chords on the harp.

The same idea is also used to convey the impending insanity of Norman Osborn/The Green Goblin, even before he has transformed into the villain proper. During a conversation with a military General who has come for an update on the work Osborn’s company Oscorp is doing for them, he is told that if he does not have successful human trials for his soldier enhancement program in the next two weeks then his funding will be pulled. Rather than replying to the General, Osborn just stands and looks at him, while a sinister, chromatic bassoon line plays a short motif instead. Again, the same thing happens later in a board meeting when he is told that he is being forced to resign from the company he founded. After a member of the board tells him ‘You’re out Norman,’ he replies ‘Am I?’, before cutting a wry smile that is accompanied by a low string tremolo motif. As with Peter and Mary-Jane, the music here speaks for the character, outlining his feelings and ultimately saying, quite clearly, what is being left unsaid.

While it might be a step too far to imply that false clarity is at work here, it is not difficult to see how persuasive musical bias is impacting the audience’s assessment of the character, particularly with regard to the first scene as it takes place before Norman has undergone the transformation into the Green Goblin. At this point, from the audience’s perspective, our only interaction with the character has been a couple of fleeting conversations between himself and his son Harry, as well as an additional one with Peter present. In other words, before the musical motif spells it out, there’s no concrete reason to suspect that Norman is the villain. Pre-empting character developments that are yet to occur is quite common in “traditional,” non-diegetic scores, but to do it so explicitly is much rarer. For example, in Star Wars: Menace (1999), John Williams created a new theme for Anakin Skywalker, but included within it was a quote from ‘The Imperial March’ theme as heard in Star Wars (1977), hinting at the process of character transformation that had yet to

33 occur.74 However, because the Star Wars saga was not filmed sequentially (Episodes IV, V, and VI between 1977 – 1983, and I, II, and III between 1999 – 2006) the audience would likely already be aware of Anakin’s eventual turn to the Dark Side, therefore relating the themes created a feeling of identification but not revelation. Moreover, Elfman’s scoring of Norman’s thoughts makes use of long-established and widely understood musical tropes, conveying emotional information by instrumentation and character alone, rather than the specific association of a theme. As far back as Rimsky-Korsakov’s and Berlioz’s respective publications on orchestration, the bassoon is cited as sounding ‘sinister’75 and ‘grotesque’76 when in the lower register, with the former even noting it can conjure an ‘atmosphere of senile mockery’77 – exactly what Elfman achieves in this instance.78

His score also demonstrates a way of musically interpreting the concepts of masks and secret identities. For example, when Spider-Man rescues Mary-Jane and places her safely on a rooftop she asks him ‘who are you?’ to which he replies ‘you know… your friendly neighbourhood Spider- Man!’ In this way, he hints at the dual nature of his identity – the pause after ‘you know…’ deliberating causing Mary-Jane confusion as, of course, she does know – and this is also reflected in the music. Underscoring this conversation is a rendition of the main Spider-Man theme, but now with the woodwind and harp orchestration we associate with the Peter/Mary-Jane love theme, what before musically conveyed their unsaid emotions. In this instance, it is the identity of the masked Peter Parker that finds expression.

Spider-Man also features the famous line ‘with great power, comes great responsibility,’ spoken by Uncle Ben to Peter Parker in the car after giving him a lift to the library (only for Peter to subsequently go to the wrestling arena in order to earn $3000). The line is arguably the crucial line in the film, originally appearing in the first comic book featuring Spider-Man, Amazing Fantasy

74 Krerowicz, Aaron, ‘Foreshadowing "The Imperial March" in "Anakin's Theme",’ Aaron Krerowicz, Beatles Scholar and Author (2014), http://www.aaronkrerowicz.com/star-wars-blog/foreshadowing-the-imperial-march-in-anakins- theme, accessed 15/06/2015. 75 Rimsky-Korsakov, Nikolai, Principles of Orchestration, ed. Maksimilian Steinberg, trans. Edward Agate (Berlin: Editions Russes de Musique, 1922), Re-print (New York: Dover, 1964), p.20. 76 Berlioz, Hector and Richard Strauss, Treatise on Instrumentation, trans. Theodore Front (New York: Kalmus, 1948). Re-print (New York: Dover, 1991), p.190. 77 Rimsky-Korsakov, p.20. 78 Of course, this interpretation relies on treating the films as an entity separate from the comic books that inspired them. An individual knowledgeable about the comics books would know that this transformation would take place. However, given the best-selling comic of May 2002, the month of Spider-Man’s release, sold approximately 124,000 copies (see http://www.comichron.com/monthlycomicssales/2002/2002-05.html ) while the film sold over 69,000,000 tickets (see http://www.the-numbers.com/market/ ) suggests that a majority of film-goers were not comic book readers and thus were probably unfamiliar with the storyline.

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#15 (1962).79 On its first hearing in the film it is given no musical accompaniment. However, it returns twice, first in a flashback mid-way through the film, and second in a Peter/Spider-Man voiceover at the very end. In both of these instances it is underscored with a deliberate narrative purpose, instigating full renditions of the Spider-Man theme and thus conflating the phrase with the character’s inner-motivation and solidifying his righteous moral foundation.

This voiceover is directly preceded by a final conversation between Peter and Mary-Jane, during which she manages to finally tell him her true feelings – that she loves him. But Peter can’t reciprocate, as in true superhero fashion, he has to sacrifice his love in order to be a hero. His true feelings are spoken by the music, which play out the love theme as they share a kiss. As he walks away, Mary-Jane, who has previously only kissed Spider-Man, touches her lips and makes the connection. As she realizes who Peter really is the love theme morphs into the Spider-Man theme. His is no longer secret.

Peter’s reliance on music as a means of expressing himself could be seen as sharing similarities with Heidi Wilkin’s concept of ‘the alienated male.’ Although she is concerned principally with the Western genre’s strong, silent male stereotype, as exemplified in the films Easy Rider and Bonnie and Clyde, Wilkin’s insight that ‘music is used semantically to evoke meaning about the characters, whilst maintaining a sense of the alienated male through silencing the film’s diegesis’ seems relevant to the character of Peter Parker, but not necessarily Spider-Man. In the opening scenes when he is on a school trip, he is seen being bullied by other members of the class but not saying anything in retaliation. Yet when Spider-Man faces the Green Goblin in the offices of the , he quips to the fast-talking editor ‘be quiet for a moment and let mum and dad talk,’ demonstrating a quick-thinking, wise-cracking side to that character that is not present (or at least, not exercised) when he is Peter. In a sense, then, Peter is not just alienated from society as a whole, but also from the “other” aspect of his character. This impacts on his relationship with Mary-Jane because he is, as Robert and Mary Voekler-Morris would put it, ‘masked from a full realization of intimacy because of being “masked” via his public persona.’ 80 In Raimi’s Spider-Man, music appears to be the only medium that can penetrate his masked identity, at least until the final moments of the film.

79 Lee, Stan and Steve Ditko, Amazing Fantasy #15 (Marvel, 1962). 80 Voelker-Morris, Robert and Julie Voelker-Morris, ‘Stuck in tights: mainstream superhero comics’ habitual limitations on social constructions of male superheroes,’ Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics, Vol. 5, No. 1 (Routledge, 2014), p.102.

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Elfman’s Spider-Man score certainly fulfils Copland’s notion of background music in that it ‘helps to fill the empty spots, such as pauses in a conversation,’ but it is far from neutral. Indeed, across the entire duration of the film, the music plays an important narrative role in communicating the emotions of the characters when they cannot do so themselves. Even if a composer was aiming at neutrality, as Copland’s essay suggests, it would likely be impossible to achieve given the fact that the combination of music and image in film will always be interpreted by an audience, who may find meaning where none was intended. This reflects Roland Barthes’s statement that ‘the reader is the space on which all the quotations that make up a writing are inscribed without any of them being lost; a text’s unity lies not in its origin but in its destination.’81

To take this a step further, it is clear from this close reading that Copland’s second and third ‘ways’ overlap somewhat, since any music, however supposedly insignificant, can provide a glimpse into a particular character’s interiority.

4. ‘Building a sense of continuity’ in The Dark Knight (2008)82 Christopher Nolan’s Dark Knight trilogy is largely based on Alan Moore’s graphic novels of the same name, which appeared in the mid-1980s. Moore’s work was an attempt to return character to the serious vigilante he was in the early comics of the 1940s, rejecting the increasingly comedic camp style that had become pervasive thanks to the Adam West fronted television series of the 1960s and which consequently had fed back into the comics themselves.83 Nolan’s mission was similar in that he attempted a darker portrayal of the character than had prevailed during the 1990s in films like Batman and Robin, and Batman Forever.

As the middle section of a planned trilogy, much of The Dark Knight’s score builds upon the sound world created for the preceding film, Batman Begins, but with the introduction of a new set of sounds to accompany the villain, The , and other new characters. Key to the story and the development of the central character is the concept of fear and the power that can be gained by overcoming, manipulating, and eventually exploiting it. To this end, in Batman Begins both Batman himself and The Scarecrow (the villain) deploy fear as a method of control, the former through

81 Barthes, Roland, ‘The Death of the Author,’ Image Music Text, trans. Stephen Heath (London: Fontana, 1977), p.148. 82 The Dark Knight (Dir. Christopher Nolan, 2008) follows Batman’s (Christian Bale) continuing quest to rid Gotham of crime. With the help of the new attorney general Harvey Dent (Aaron Eckhart) and Lt. Jim Gordon () he must help defeat the anarchic ambitions of The Joker (). 83 Brooker, p.181-194.

36 imagery, misdirection, and speed (most obviously displayed in scene where Batman intercepts a drug transaction at the dock yard), the latter through the use of a psychoactive, air-born chemical, released upon his victims, causing their minds to hallucinate their greatest fears.

In his use of fear, Batman’s character emerges as a vigilante whose morals are complex and do not necessarily align with the prevailing Western/Christian viewpoint. In Batman Begins, the ruthless attitude of Ra’s al Ghul, the leader of a group called The League of Shadows, initially appeals to Bruce Wayne as he strives to avenge the murder of his parents. However, when he is commanded to execute a criminal in order to complete his training, he refuses, demonstrating a great strength of character and laying the core foundations which underpin Batman’s moral framework: should be turned over to the justice system which will punish them according to its rules. It is from this that the idea of Batman as “good” emerges.

Musically, the idea of fear and overcoming it is cleverly portrayed using the chords of D minor and its relative major, B♭(see figure 6). A semi-quaver oscillating string ostinato on the notes of D and F serves as a backdrop, beneath which the interval of a rising minor third is heard (D to F) on the brass. When Bruce Wayne faces his fears this interval is played with the F arriving on a D minor chord. When he conquers these fears, such as when he first stands in the Bat Cave, the bats circling around him, this interval arrives instead on a triumphant B♭major chord. This chord represents Batman as a character, with F portraying fear that is ever-present (D minor), but that can be overcome and utilised (B♭major). This association is reinforced throughout The Dark Knight and most memorably used in the last moments as, under Commissioner Gordon’s narration, “a silent , a watchful protector, a dark ,” 84 we hear D minor break into B♭major more emphatically than ever. By making use of an ostinato on D and F - notes that belong in both D minor and B♭major - Zimmer and Newton Howard have found a way of musically representing both the dark and the light sides of fear that make up Batman’s character.

Figure 6: The Bat motif in “Normal” and “Heroic” formats with string ostinato above.

84 Nolan, Christopher (dir.) and Jonathan Nolan, The Dark Knight (Legendary/Syncopy/Warner Bros., 2008)

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In The Dark Knight this music also provides a means of showing the difference between the characters of Batman and The Joker. Although Batman’s music is marked by a shifting between relative major and minor, structurally and rhythmically it is largely consistent. This is completely abandoned in the Joker’s music, in which Hans Zimmer attempted to catch ‘the idea of anarchy’ and see if he could ‘define a character in one note.’ What he came up with was, in fact, two notes that ‘clash beautifully with each other,’85 made by playing a cello with a razor blade and then introducing affected guitar and other string effects. Interestingly, although these clashing notes are subjected to a slow glissando upwards, the first identifiable tone is a D, which provides a link with Batman’s brass chords. The way the notes move away from this tonal centre conveys a sense of escalating madness and also helps portray the moral differences between the characters of Batman and The Joker - characters which, in some ways, share similar traits (costumes, vigilantism, showmanship, etc.). Utilizing music that is somehow “outside” of the realm of normality to accompany a sociopathic character is an idea that dates back to Bernard Hermann’s famous music written for the shower scene in Psycho. As Stan Link writes, this sort of music can ‘become congruent with horrific actions, emotional extremes and deranged interiorities.’86 Indeed, the Joker is revealed in the same way. As he removes his joker mask to show his face, scarred and painted underneath, the music is both ugly on the surface, and anarchically mad on the inside.

The different musical styles given to Batman and the Joker but with a shared tonal centre demonstrate a musical playing-out of the construction of superhero identities. For Pitkethly, superheroes construct their identity ‘through difference,’ that is to say that it emerges in the ‘binary structure’ of the ‘antagonism between hero/villain.’ Therefore the superhero ‘finds a stable identity in the negation of an antithesis.’87 In this way, Batman’s triumphant B♭ major chord negates The Joker, whose music rises microtonally such that it would never find consonance with this chord, or indeed the whole Western tuning system, for more than a fleeting moment. It also asserts a stable identity for Batman himself, whose base chord of D minor was, if we look back to figure 6, often heard unstably in a second inversion position over F. This assertion is made stronger still by the fact that Lt. Gordon explicitly coins Batman’s identity in the final words of the film, “a silent guardian, a watchful protector, a dark knight,” over the sounding of B♭ major.

85 See ‘The Sound of Anarchy’ extra-feature on the DVD release of The Dark Knight. The music is by Hans Zimmer. 86 Link, Stan, ‘Sympathy with the devil? Music of the psycho post-Psycho,’ Screen, Vol. 45, No. 1 (OUP, 2004), p.2. 87 Pitkethly, p.219.

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Structurally, the score of The Dark Knight might be best thought of as an example of what Bart Walus calls ‘modular film scoring,’ 88 and it is through this model that we can examine the mechanism by which Hans Zimmer and James Newton Howard achieve Copland’s fourth ‘way,’ namely ‘building a sense of continuity.’ Although the music makes use of multiple themes (or, in the Joker’s case, sounds), these are rarely used subtly, interwoven, or significantly developed. Instead, the composers place these recognisable musical characters strategically across the film as marker points. These moments are then joined together with an almost constant backdrop of percussion that varies in instrumentation and volume but usually maintains a quaver pulse throughout. This quaver pulse is reinforced in the F-D ostinato that accompanies the bat motive and is scored under the Joker’s theme in the opening bank heist scene.

Walus asserts that the use of modular film scoring began primarily as a means of dealing with soundtrack synchronization issues. In the era of digital film editing, this had become increasingly problematic for the film composer as multiple versions of scenes and last minute changes to cuts meant that musical cues needed to be more flexible, facilitating rapid cuts, extensions, and modulations “on the fly.” In the case of The Dark Knight, the percussion serves as a base musical fabric into which more elaborate themes and motifs can be sewn. Such a process also leaves natural “gaps” – bars of simple unpitched percussion rhythms of single sustained notes - that can act as the expansion and constriction points should a cue need to be edited to a different length. This is helped by keeping the music in close proximity to the home key of D minor. As Walus has noted, the further you move away the longer it takes to get back, meaning that developmental or modulatory passages are required that cannot easily be shortened or cut.

This modular method of scoring has enabled the score of The Dark Knight to maintain continuity across its duration, and indeed across Nolan’s trilogy as a whole. It also reflects a more modern approach to scoring, where the score ‘always competes for its place… with other sonic elements’89 of the soundtrack. An action film mixed in surround sound, which the Dark Knight is, contains many sonic elements including a wide range of sound effects. A modular structure provides space for all these ‘sonic elements’ to come to the fore at key points. It also allows for the divide between

88 Walus, Bartlomeij P., ‘Modular Structures in Film Music: The Answer to Synchronization Problems?’, Journal of Film Music, Vol. 4, No. 2 (International Film Music Society, 2011), pp.125-154. 89 Brown, Julie, ‘Music in film and television,’ An Introduction to Music Studies, ed. J.P.E. Harper-Scott and Jim Samson (Cambridge: CUP, 2009), p.201.

39 music and sound effects to be reduced, further increasing the overall continuity of the soundtrack. Walus summarises this in his conclusion, writing that

‘the flexible structure of the modular cue, which may be rearranged and adjusted more comprehensively than stems of standard linear cues (i.e., premixed stereo audio files including all instruments or sounds of a certain type), facilitates appropriate balancing with other soundtrack elements. At the same time, in accordance with current trends in the cinema, wherein the border between the roles of the individual soundtrack components is frequently blurred, modular components of a cue may be processed and used as elements of a film’s sound design, thus enhancing the role of the soundtrack.’90

The idea of processing elements of a score in order to enhance the soundtrack and film design is commonly used by Hans Zimmer, particularly with his scores in the 21st century. This stems from simple “musical painting”, like his use of xylophones to create the sound of skeletons in Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End,91 to full blown digital manipulation, such as the distorted horn sound taken from “Non, je ne regrette rein” and used extensively in Inception and many subsequent film trailers.92 In The Dark Knight, the Joker’s “theme” is distorted and affected to the point that it falls somewhere between sound and music (if, for argument’s sake, we assume such a distinction can be made). This emphasises the anarchic nature of the character by aligning him with a sound that cannot be conventionally notated by - and therefore doesn’t fit in with - the Western system of notation. The Joker is therefore both morally and musically “outside” of the system, yet thanks to the almost continuous internal rhythm that simmers under the surface of the score and the prevalence of D as a tonal centre, the music none-the-less fits with the mythical filmic universe Nolan has created.

90 Walus, p.150. 91 See track ‘Up is Down,’ from Zimmer, Hans (comp.), Pirates of the Caribbean: The World’s End Soundtrack, (Disney, 2007). CD. 92 Beaumont-Thomas, Ben, ‘Inception brings the trend for slow music to the big screen,’ The Guardian (2010), http://www.theguardian.com/music/musicblog/2010/jul/29/inception-slow-music, accessed 13/06/2015.

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5. ‘Underpinning the theatrical build-up of a scene, and rounding it off with a sense of finality’ in Superman Returns (2006)93 Musically, Superman Returns is unique amongst the films of Hollywood’s superhero renaissance as it makes use of themes from an existing film adaptation: Richard Donner’s Superman (1978), with a score by John Williams. While Spider-Man and Iron Man respectively feature their old cartoons themes, these do not form part of the non-diegetic, composed score and are instead used either in jest, or as to provide a so-called “Easter egg,” that is, a knowing wink to a reference only certain fans will understand. 94 In Superman Returns, however, composer John Ottman uses the themes practically verbatim, particularly during the opening credits, which are visually almost identical to those of its 1970s cousin.

The main theme is essentially a march, in 12/8 time and the key of C major; it is quasi-militaristic, but also very fantastical. Its use in accompanying the character of Superman harks back to the march like music of the original 1940s cartoon adaptations, which in turn reflects scoring techniques established during the early sound era of the 1920s and 30s. Mariana Whitmer has written, for example, that ‘in Musical Accompaniment of Moving Pictures, the 1920 volume by Edith Lang and George West, the instruction on how to accompany galloping horses stipulates that anything with a triplet rhythm be utilized, and they offer Suppé’s “Light Cavalry” Overture as an example.’95 If we consider that Donner’s Superman film emerged from a post-Vietnam America, portraying the titular character as humanoid-alien-air cavalry and aligning him with the melodramatic Americana of the Western is less of a leap than might be imagined.

However, it is a large-scale set-piece scene from the first act of the film that provides a platform for examining the final one of Copland’s ‘five ways music serves the screen,’ namely ‘underpinning the theatrical build-up of a scene, and rounding it off with a sense of finality.’ In this scene, our titular superhero comes to the rescue during the botched launch of an experimental spacecraft. The craft, reminiscent of the Space Shuttle Orbiter, is being carried, “piggy-backed” on top of an airliner, which is supposed to carry it up to 40,000 feet and release it, after which it will its own rocket motors to take it the rest of the way into orbit. Thanks to a power outage caused by villain

93 Superman Returns (Dir. Bryan Singer, 2006) follows /Superman’s () return to Earth after visiting the ruins of his home planet, . He must try and find his place in a world that has changed radically in his absence: love interest Lois Lane () is now engaged to be married, while the sociopathic Lex Luther () seeks to use advanced crystal growing technology from Krypton to gain immense wealth and power. 94 See Looker, Matt, ‘The 50 Greatest Marvel Easter Eggs,’ Games Radar, http://www.gamesradar.com/50-greatest- marvel-easter-eggs/, accessed 15/05/2015. 95 Whitmer, Mariana, ‘Melodramatic Music in the Western’, Journal of Film Music, Vol. 5, No.1-2 (International Film Music Society, 2013), p.112.

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Lex Luther’s manipulation of Krypton crystals, the orbiter fails to release from the airliner and the pilots are unable to stop the ignition sequence. When its engines ignite, both crafts are sent hurtling into orbit. What follows is a five-minute spectacle set-piece where Superman must come to the rescue of the stricken aircrafts.

Figure 7: Superman attempts to stop the airliner from spinning out of control.

To accompany the scene, John Ottman has created an exciting action cue, which is marked by the movement towards and away from John Williams’s original Superman theme. It is written in what Frank Lehman would describe as ‘a fastidiously synchronized manner,’96 that is to say that the music takes its form by closely following the events on screen, rather than from an overarching tonal structure that strives for classical resolution. In a sense, this approach to synchronisation is unsurprising given that John Ottman fulfilled the roles of both film editor and composer for the film, something he has often done for director Bryan Singer but which is very rare in Hollywood more generally.

Figure 8 shows a brief outline for this cue. The time codes along the top relate to the progression through the cue as heard on the third track of the official soundtrack CD, appropriately named ‘Rough Flight.’ The notes on the stave below indicate the major tonal centres that the music moves through. These are not given as major or minor keys due to the fact that in many cases these ‘tonics’ operate by themselves or as an open fifths, meaning that the mode of the key can be indeterminable. Below the stave, the initials S.M.T. stand for ‘Superman Theme,’ indicating when this can be heard.

96 Lehman, Frank, ‘Hollywood Cadences: Music and the Structure of Cinematic Expectation,’ MTO: Music Theory Online, Vol. 19, No. 4 (2013), http://www.mtosmt.org/issues/mto.13.19.4/mto.13.19.4.lehman.html, accessed 16/05/2015.

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Figure 8: The tonal scheme of the cue “Rough Flight.”

As can be seen, the whole of figure 8 is split into two distinct halves, each beginning with a rendition of the Superman theme (S.M.T.) in the key of C major, which functions as our “home” – or “safety” – key. These points of stability are quickly left behind as the music “climbs” away, often sequentially, through distant tonal centres, musically portraying the peril of the passengers as they move upwards, out of Earth’s atmosphere and away from safety. Coupled with a prevailingly quick tempo, this process significantly adds to the tension of the scene and allows a backdrop to which contrasting moments of stasis can be interspersed.

Across the cue, there are particular instances that require further examination here. For example, there are three sections where a motif is introduced and subsequently repeated, being transposed upwards at every repetition. The most obvious of these occurs near the end of the cue (at 4.00”) when a violin tune is played first in E minor, then G minor, then A minor. By keeping the orchestration fairly constant, Ottman gives this sequential climbing a feeling of unity despite the moving tonic. On arriving at E minor he also slows the tempo slightly from the preceding material, giving the string tune and low brass accompaniment a more “epic” quality, producing a feeling of inevitably to both the music and the narrative progression of the scene. Similar moments of upwards transposition occur at 1.38” – 1.53” and 3.14” – 3.47”.

These motivic sequences create fleeting moments of unity, but equally common in the cue are abrupt shifts in both pitch and rhythm. For example, Superman's theme at the beginning is quickly superseded by a low string ostinato on G# (1.05”), while 1.28” signals the arrival of A and a brand new time signature and rhythmic device. Taken as a whole, this cue can be looked at in the context of Lehman’s notion of ‘transformation’ as outlined by the following four criteria:

1. Fast but steady harmonic rhythm, often with sequential or oscillating progressions; 2. Ample chromaticism without retention of a single tonic; 3. Motor rhythms and ostinato accompaniment figures to suggest an ongoing process;

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4. Pliable melody and instrumentation to fit (or imply) quickly changing dramatic situations.97

Lehman uses this framework to help identify the inadequacies of looking for conventional Western Art Music structures in film scores. This is not to say that they don’t ever exist, rather that they are not adhered to as rigidly given the compelling need to relate the music, in some way, to the images. If we return to figure 8, it’s clear that the movement of these tonal centres doesn’t follow a conventional pattern of harmonic progression but does have an overarching tonal scheme of some kind.

At the very beginning of the scene, the initial burst of the Superman theme accompanies the iconic Clark Kent to Superman transition, as he rips open his shirt to display the on his outfit underneath. When it returns at the beginning of the second section, it is preceded by an interesting preparatory passage of music that seems to stand apart from the rest of the scene. The moment begins when Lois Lane, his love interest and a passenger on the fated airliner, is desperately reaching for an oxygen mask after falling to the back of the cabin. As she does so, she catches a glimpse of a blue and red object flying past her window: Superman is here.

Figure 9: Expansion of x brackets from figure 8.

Figure 9 shows an expanded version of the bracketed x material in figure 8. You can see how this section is underpinned by the harmonic progression E♭ – Gm – Cm - A♭ – E♭ - D♭before we arrive back on C at 2.15 for a rendition of the Superman theme, coinciding with when he lands on the roof of the plane. The shift from C minor to A♭ major is of particular note here as the latter signals the moment when Superman is sighted by Lois through the plane window. If we look at this in the context of figure 8 as a whole, we can see how this harmonic progression contributes to a dissipation of tension in the scene, tracing a tonal arc back to C major. While figure 8 is clearly

97 Lehman, Frank, ‘Music Theory through the Lens of Film,’ Journal of Film Music, Vol. 5, No. 1-2 (International Film Music Society, 2012), p.182.

44 reductive, the rise and fall of the tension in the scene are eminently audible and follow the curve mapped out by the tonal centres.

The final shift of this progression, from D♭ to C, almost functions like a Neapolitan sixth chord, albeit in root position rather than first inversion. But its movement directly to C rather than passing through some form of G - which would act as the dominant - means that it could be thought of as functioning as the ♭VII chord of E♭ major, which is then interrupted by C major. That said, the A♭ major also functions as a point of emphasis given it marks Superman’s appearance - indeed, it is the first time another character has seen him in the film. If we consider that we are in C major (or at least heading there), then this A♭ forms an interrupted cadence with Aeolian modality, acting as the ♭VI chord of the C tonic.

Lehman has proposed that many of these sort of unconventional, filmic cadences find their roots in the “Hollywood cadences” of the 1940s. 98 Using his terminology, this cadence might be best described as a modified ‘elided flat-mediant cadence.’ The flat mediant cadence refers to the presence of a predominant ♭III chord (in this case E♭ major), which is then modified by utilizing a ♭II (D♭ major) instead of a dominant proper. Referring to this as an ‘elided’ cadence is in response to the fact that the end of the cadence is also the beginning of a new section, in this case the Superman theme in C. Such is the variety of cadences present in film music, working out which is which and offering constructive labelling is very difficult. Nonetheless these difficulties point out the most compelling aspects of Lehman’s idea of ‘transformation’: film allows a space in which music can rapidly change and yet still retain comprehension and feel “right” to the viewing audience. This particular sequence of chords, whether it is truly an ‘elided flat-mediant cadence’ at all, is a good example of how a musical transition can be both surprising and expected, a process that is of course aided by synchronisation with the visuals.

The cue also contains passages where the music is much more static, for example at 2.41” the airliner reaches its maximum altitude and the passengers briefly experience weightlessness. Prior to this, Superman had finally managed to use his heat- to sever the couplings binding the spacecraft to the airliner, resulting in a blast of the Superman theme beginning at 2.15” in the home key of C major. This signalled the safety of those on-board the spacecraft, who can now either successfully make it into orbit or abort to a runway. As he watches the spacecraft fly away, we cut

98 Lehman, 2013.

45 back to the airliner cabin where C major is replaced by a dream-like F# minor as weightlessness takes hold. This has almost faded to silence when suddenly the tension is brought back again loudly at 3.00”. A high, rhythmic string ostinato appears when the passengers once again feel the effects of gravity and Superman, having released the spacecraft and helped push it into orbit, turns back to see the plane, in flames, streaking into the atmosphere below.

In the scene’s , Superman flies to the front of the plane and pushes against it, trying to slow its descent (figure 10). For the final forty seconds the music stays on E minor - the longest sustained harmony in the entire cue. A high, rhythmic, string ostinato remains constant, while brass chords and interjections play underneath. At 4.41” a choir enters, holding an E minor chord until, at 5.01”, just before the end of the scene, the choir shifts this chord to a Fdim7 above the accompanying instruments which remain on E minor, creating a clashing, bi-tonal feel.

Figure 10: Superman pushes against the front of the plane, preventing it from crashing.

The sustained E minor acts as the musical equivalent of holding your breath. For the first time the camera pitches around to show the view from the crowds below (the plane is coming down over a baseball stadium) who stand up, awestruck and afraid (figure 10). Maintaining E minor here helps emphasise this shift in perspective. It is also reminiscent of the held pedal notes used in Western Art Music that prepare a modulation or a return to the tonic; the listener is being told to expect something. In this case, the music actually stops “mid-air” as soon as the plane is safely on the ground.

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The use of a choral accompaniment to Superman’s god-like actions point to a strand of American exceptionalism that Dittmer refers to as ‘divine providence.’99 Indeed, the final bi-tonal effect of the choir shifting upwards to Fdim7/E gives a sense of the superhuman effort required by Superman in order to save the plane passengers: the E minor chord is physically “pushed” into Fdim7. This is made more explicit still when, after the cheers of the crowd have subsided, Ottman includes a quick quote of Williams’s ‘’ theme. This tune relates to Superman’s outpost in the arctic. Supposedly built from crystals, this is Superman’s other-worldly home, and it is here, more than anywhere else, that he is most alone, one alien amidst billions of humans. Ottman’s music for the end of this scene therefore reinforces Superman’s god-like credentials.

For this spectacular set piece, then, Ottman creates an exciting musical cue that ‘round[s] off the scene with a sense of finality.’ He achieves this by building tension through the use of shifting tonal centres, giving the music a feeling of uncertainty that mirrors the action on screen. But this tension and turbulence can only be achieved because he also includes passages of Williams’s Superman theme, always heard in C, providing an anchor point from which he can subsequently move away.

Conclusion The close readings of these films have demonstrated that music is a powerful tool in the cinematic arsenal, shaping an audience’s perception of the events they witness, providing “unseen” information on the characters themselves, and increasing both the excitement and cohesion of the film as a whole. In the context of Hollywood’s superhero renaissance, these effects are often utilised for the benefit of creating a believable and compelling filmic universe, or mythopoesis, in which the heroes themselves are the key constituent part. This is a universe that allegorically relates to the “real” world, and indeed tries to appear as “real” as possible. To this end, music can be a means of accomplishing a feeling of realism in the mythopoesis, delineating the boundaries of morality in play and strengthening the hero/villain antagonism that underpins the majority of superhero narratives.

Across the five case studies, we’ve seen many musical mechanisms that contribute to this mythopoesis. Iron Man, for example, privileges access to the music for those who are morally “good,” while Danny Elfman’s score to Spider-Man pre-empts later character developments, drawing out the future antagonism between the titular character and the Green Goblin. In Superman

99 Dittmer 2010, p.114.

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Returns and X-Men: The Last Stand, recognisable musical themes – the Superman and Phoenix themes respectively - are manipulated and re-worked with other material to accompany polarised -points of morality: Superman’s successful rescue of the people aboard the airliner, and the Dark Phoenix’s destruction of Professor Xavier.

While Copland’s concept of ‘five ways in which music serves the screen’ provided a lens through which a range of scores could be examined, it also created an artificial separation between the different musical mechanisms at work in them. In truth, taking all the case studies into consideration, it seems that all the music shares one fundamental ambition: to sonically define the identity of the superhero character. Not only does the process of doing this provide a space in which kernels of musical material can coalesce to form recognisable motifs, but once established, these motifs can be simultaneously nuanced through alteration, and held up as a sounding board against which other musical material, such as that depicting the villain, can be contrasted.

Wilson Koh has noted that ‘there is a trend towards such textually privileged assertions of superheroic identity occurring during the climactic moments of superhero origin movies.’100 This can be seen in Spider-Man, where the character’s final line of ‘Who am I? I’m Spider-Man’ is delivered by the eponymous character in voiceover, at the end of The Dark Knight, when Lt. Gordon exclaims ‘he’s a silent guardian, a watchful protector, a Dark Knight,’ and in Iron Man, when Tony Stark deviates from the government approved cards in the closing press conference to proclaim ‘the truth is, I am Iron Man.’ As well as being vocalized, these assertions are always underlined by a prominent musical phrase representing the main character and, consequently, also usually constitute the main theme of the entire film. And in all of these cases, the protagonist whose identity is being asserted has undergone a process of doubt and realization with regard to his or her character’s abilities and responsibilities, something that has been reflected in the music. These assertions of identity therefore function as fundamental indicators of heroism, since they can only be achieved once the character has accepted who they really are, and the demands such a realization makes of them. But they are only reached after an entire film’s worth of negotiations of identity that take place across all spectrums of the mise en scène.

If we treat an individual superhero as an object, then Andrew R. Spieldenner’s comments, after Roland Barthes, give us an interesting insight. He writes that

100 Koh, Wilson, ‘“I am Iron Man”: The Marvel Cinematic Universe and celeactor labour,’ Celebrity Studies, Vol. 5, No. 4 (Routledge, 2014), p.485.

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‘rather than a literal unit, the object is constituted by a syntagm – an assemblage of images, cultural mores, personal experience, and background and foreground information. Through these confluences, the person ‘reads’ not just the object, but a system of fragmented signs that add up to meaning.’101

In the case of Spider-Man, for example, we have seen how many of the background - and arguably foreground - information comes in the form of ‘fragmented signs’ present in the music. This music provides meaning by allowing an insight into the character’s emotions and feelings, which in turn contribute to the audience’s perception of that superhero’s identity. Taking this a step further, one can posit that identity forms an important constituent in the larger picture of the superheroic myth: a collection of fictitious filmic assets – story, script, character development, costumes, music, etc. – that creates a universe that doesn’t just require any superhero to save it, but that one in particular. In other words, a superhero discovers its identity not only through a process of personal discovery, but also by the acquisition of recognizable tropes and symbols that are interrelated with the mythical universes in which they operate.

In the case of Nolan’s The Dark Knight trilogy, the music of Hans Zimmer and James Newton Howard works in conjunction with other filmic elements to deliver a believable mythopoesis. When Bruce Wayne stands in the bat cave in the first film, the use of the resounding B♭ major chord signifies that, psychologically, this is the moment that he has overcome his fear and become Batman. However, it is through the accumulation of a range of other elements that he becomes the character proper – the bat logo, the suit, the cape, his manner of speech, his relationships with Rachel Dawes, Lt. Gordon, and Alfred the butler, to name just a few. The unique aspect of music is the flexibility with which it can be deployed. It has the ability to reinforce all the other signs: it can be present anywhere, in any situation, even extending the narrative space by starting during the production company logos before the start of the film proper and lingering on well into the end credits.

Given the importance of the superheroic identity, it is perhaps striking that the music of Hollywood’s superhero renaissance has largely failed to extend beyond the edges of the screen. For example, while musical themes for other big budget action films have been instantly memorable and entered public consciousness, such as Jurassic Park, The Great Escape, The Magnificent Seven, The Lord of the Rings to name but a few, no superhero theme (with the exception of John

101 Spieldenner, Andrew R., ‘Altered egos: gay men reading across gender difference in Wonder Woman,’ Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics, Vol. 4, No. 2 (Routledge, 2012), p.238.

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Williams’s original Superman one, although that was written in 1977) has achieved a wide level of recognition. Indeed, nearly fifteen years of Hollywood’s superhero renaissance has yet to yield a single Oscar nomination in the Best Original Score category. And for the recent ensemble superhero film The Avengers, none of the characters brought their musical themes from their individual films with them.

One of the difficulties in creating a unique and memorable theme that depicts the identity of a superhero may stem from the fact that to do so is essentially akin to hitting a moving target. Nowadays, superhero characters don’t just develop in the films they feature in, but are continually developing across a range of interrelated media. On top of this, most characters that are well-known enough to warrant a film all to themselves have already been subjected to decades of character exposition in comic books, television series, and video games. They have been killed, re-born, altered, reimagined, and killed again many times over.

In the case of Hollywood’s superhero renaissance, franchises of multiple films around a central character have rarely retained the same composer throughout. In an article for Variety, Jon Burlingame asks composer about how he is approaching the scoring process for given that he didn’t write the music for either of the previous instalments.

‘Earlier “Iron Man” scores added electric guitar to suggest the brashness of Tony Stark, but “he’s now come into his own. He has a lot on his shoulders, especially after The Avengers; there is a heroism in him. But he also has this personality, like a little boy; he’s a wisecracker. It was a tall order,” Tyler says.’102

Tyler’s answer demonstrates the difficulty of creating and maintaining a memorable theme; the Tony Stark in this film is not the Tony Stark in the original Iron Man. However, it may also point to the tension between aesthetics and box office revenue that is in play on every big budget movie. Marvel has created its own Cinematic Universe to populate with its famous stable of characters, but in doing so have forced individuals with vastly different moral codes and powers to cohabitate. This surely risks homogenising these characters such that while the “superhero genre” as a whole continues its domination of the box office, so too the personality and nuance of the individual characters are diminished. In contrast, DC has released far fewer films and made use of far fewer of its characters than Marvel (so far). Its Batman trilogy kept the same director and composers

102 Burlingame, Jon, ‘With the Man of Steel, Iron Man and Wolverine waiting in the wings, composers stray from tradition while maintaining the genre’s spirit,’ Variety (2013), http://variety.com/2013/film/news/superhero- 1200338699/ , accessed 15/06/2015.

50 throughout, forming a very cohesive set of films with a strong visual and musical identity. Not only were the films successful at the box office, the second and third films making over one billion dollars each, but they were highly critically acclaimed, with The Dark Knight receiving eight Oscar nominations, winning two.

Criticism of Marvel (and its parent company, Disney) has grown over recent years, particularly in its treatment of the superhero characters themselves. Red Stewart writes that

‘Thor was diminished from a character rich with Norse mythology to a Shakespearean archetype, Captain America’s history in the golden age of World War II-themed comic books was reduced to an underdog story cliché, and Iron Man’s character development was deferred in favor of giving Nick Fury and Black Widow added screentime.’103

Therefore, it seems the failure to provide these characters with unique and memorable scores may be symptomatic of a failure of Hollywood’s superhero renaissance to portray unique and memorable characters full stop. In other words, the superheroes are distilled down to their basic physical and moral traits, with little regard shown to anything that might problematize the hero narrative. This leads to the repetitive narrative structure of good vs. evil, which the film can get away with depicting in largely black and white terms, forcing the music to do the same. The success of these movies at the box office demonstrates that these ideals resonate with the American public and indeed the good vs. evil narrative is one that has been increasingly stoked by Western media following the events of 9/11. Here, hugely complex geopolitical issues are often described with child-like simplicity in an attempt to make ‘The War on Terror’ seem as morally clear-cut as the fight against the Nazis was seventy years earlier. Hagley and Harrison’s assertion that superhero characters ‘had to be reinvented so that they more realistically reflected the fears and concerns of a new, post-attack, America’ is only partially true. In reality, they have been stripped-back to bastions of 1940s conservatism, aggressively defending and promoting American values as if Vietnam and the Cold War never happened. Dittmer’s comment that ‘superheroism resonates with the post-9/11 foreign policy of the United States’ seems quite correct , with both essentially depicting themselves as morally righteous campaigns to eradicate evil. If this is at the heart of Hollywood’s superhero renaissance then it is perhaps unsurprising that many film composers working in the genre have ended up producing music that is more concerned with portraying a generalised good vs. evil antagonism, than furnishing specific characters with unique and memorable themes.

103 Stewart, Red, ‘10 Problems With The Marvel Cinematic Universe Nobody Seems To Acknowledge,’ What Culture (2014), http://whatculture.com/film/10-problems-marvel-cinematic-universe-nobody-seems-acknowledge.php, accessed 15/06/2015.

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Aside from the music, Hollywood’s inability to depict complex, nuanced superheroes is exemplified by its constant return to origin storylines, rather than continuing what might become an increasingly messy, yet potentially very interesting, process of character development. For example, Spider-Man is currently undergoing his third in fifteen years, with a new film due out in 2017 coinciding with the character’s addition to The Avengers team, while Batman has also been re-cast and re-modelled for 2016’s Batman vs. Superman: Dawn of Justice.

Most other popular film franchises, including the James Bond, Harry Potter, and Star Wars series, have all allowed character developments to continue through the course of many films without returning to an origin story, even through a succession of different actors, directors, and composers. This has allowed a consistent myth, complete with a specific musical identity, to be established and repeatedly reinforced. In Hollywood’s superhero renaissance, the rich character history provided by the comic books means that each interpretation has had to choose to promote certain traits above others, as there simply isn’t the room in a single film, or even a trilogy, to convey them all. What is gained is a reliable cycle of box office smashing movies. What is lost is a full, nuanced exploration of these characters’ identities, and with it, a musical theme to match.

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Filmography * denotes film belonging to the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU).

Superman, Dir. Richard Donner (Warner Bros., 1978).

Superman II, Dir. Richard Lester (Warner Bros., 1980).

Superman III, Dir. Richard Lester (Warner Bros., 1983).

Superman Returns, Dir. Bryan Singer (Legendary/DC/Warner Bros., 2006).

Man of Steel, Dir. (Legendary/DC/Warner Bros., 2013).

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Batman, Dir. Tim Burton (PolyGram/Warner Bros., 1989).

Batman Returns, Dir. Tim Burton (PolyGram/Warner Bros., 1992).

Batman Forever, Dir. Joel Schumacher (PolyGram/Warner Bros., 1995).

Batman and Robin, Dir. Joel Schumacher (PolyGram/Warner Bros., 1997).

Batman Begins, Dir. Christopher Nolan (Legendary/DC/Warner Bros., 2005).

The Dark Knight, Dir. Christopher Nolan (Legendary/DC/Warner Bros., 2008).

The Dark Knight Rises, Dir. Christopher Nolan (Legendary/DC/Warner Bros., 2012).

X-Men, Dir. Bryan Singer (Marvel/20th Century Fox, 2000).

X2: X-Men United, Dir. Bryan Singer (Marvel/20th Century Fox, 2003).

X-Men: The Last Stand, Dir. Brett Ratner (Marvel/20th Century Fox, 2006).

X-Men: First Class, Dir. (Marvel/20th Century Fox, 2011).

X-Men: , Dir. Bryan Singer (Marvel/20th Century Fox, 2014).

Spider-Man, Dir. Sam Raimi (Marvel/Columbia, 2002).

Spider-Man 2, Dir. Sam Raimi (Marvel/Columbia, 2004).

Spider-Man 3, Dir. Sam Raimi (Marvel/Columbia, 2007).

The Amazing Spider-Man, Dir. (Marvel/Columbia, 2012).

The Amazing Spider-Man 2, Dir. Marc Webb (Marvel/Columbia, 2014).

Hulk, Dir. Ang Lee (Marvel/Universal, 2003).

The Incredible Hulk, Dir. Louis Leterrier (Marvel/Universal, 2008).*

Iron Man, Dir. Jon Favreau (Marvel/Paramount, 2008).*

Iron Man 2, Dir. Jon Favreau (Marvel/Paramount, 2010).*

Iron Man 3, Dir. Shane Black (Marvel/Disney, 2013).*

Captain America; The First Avenger, Dir. (Marvel/Paramount, 2011).*

Captain America: The Winter Soldier, Dir. Anthony & Joe Russo (Marvel/Disney, 2014).*

Thor, Dir. (Marvel/Paramount, 2011).*

Thor: The Dark World, Dir. Alan Taylor (Marvel/Disney, 2014).*

Marvel’s The Avengers, Dir. Joss Wheden (Marvel/Disney, 2012).*

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