A Spectacle Worth Attending To: the Ironic Use of Preexisting Art Music in Film Matthew J

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Electronic Theses, Treatises and Dissertations The Graduate School

2012 A Spectacle Worth Attending to: The Ironic Use of Preexisting Art Music in Film Matthew J. McAllister

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A SPECTACLE WORTH ATTENDING TO: THE IRONIC USE OF

PREEXISTING ART MUSIC IN FILM

MATTHEW J. MCALLISTER

A Dissertation submitted to the College of Music in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy

Degree Awarded: Summer Semester, 2012

Matthew McAllister defended this dissertation on May 22, 2012.

The members of the supervisory committee were:

Michael Broyles Professor Directing Dissertation

Evan Jones University Representative

Frank Gunderson Committee Member

Douglass Seaton Committee Member

The Graduate School has verified and approved the above-named committee members, and certifies that the dissertation has been approved in accordance with university requirements.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

First and foremost, I would like to thank my dissertation director, Michael Broyles, for his constant encouragement, enthusiasm, and professionalism that he showed throughout the life of this project. Michael’s careful and consistent guidance, along with his endless positivity, made this project less of a chore and much more like a fun, playful investigation. Additionally, I must thank the entire faculty of musicology at The Florida State University. They have built a truly remarkable program that keeps its students positive, curious, and engaged. Among the many outstanding faculty members at FSU, Douglass Seaton deserves special accolades for his tireless efforts to instill a rigorous work ethic and a strong culture of scholarship among the students in the program. I am especially grateful for his keen insights and though-provoking questions while preparing the final stages of this document, but most of all for the models of teacher and scholar that he has provided. I would also like to acknowledge my family, and would like to thank my mother, Linda Hendershot, and my father, Michael McAllister, for their support. Moreover, this project could not have been completed without the help of my friends Carlos Velez, Jason Quattro, Paul Luongo, and Joshua Corum, and I wish to thank them, deeply, for extending to me their time and talents. Finally, I must thank my former professor and mentor, Sterling E. Murray, who has become something closer to a father to me than simply a teacher. Without his support and belief in my abilities, I would never thought to pursue my education and career to this end, and for this I am profoundly grateful.

iii

TABLE OF CONTENTS

List of Figures ...... vi List of Musical Examples ...... viii Abstract ...... ix

PART I

1. WHY IRONY? ...... 1 Elements of Irony...... 7 Confident Unawareness ...... 9 Contrast of Appearance and Reality ...... 9 Comic Element...... 10 Detachment ...... 12 Aesthetic Element ...... 12 Irony as Stimulus or “Stable” Irony ...... 13 How Stable Irony Works...... 14 Types of Stable Irony ...... 17 Irony as Terminus or “Unstable” Irony...... 19

2. MUSICAL PRACTICES IN THE “SILENT” FILM ERA ...... 22 The Rise of the Theater Orchestra and the Blockbuster Film...... 24 The Expansion of the Art Music Repertory and its Dissemination ...... 27 The End of an Era ...... 30 The Transition to Sound...... 32

3. HOLLYWOOD’S “GOLDEN AGE” AND THE CLASSICAL-STYLE FILM ...... 35 The Development of the Early Classical-Style Film Score ...... 36 Influences on the Classical Hollywood Film Score ...... 37 The Wagner Debate ...... 38 Principles of the Classical Hollywood Film Score ...... 40 Invisibility ...... 41 Inaudibility ...... 42 Signifier of Emotion...... 43 Narrative Cueing ...... 43 Continuity and Unity...... 44 Breaking the Rules ...... 45

4. ART MUSIC IN FILM DURING THE SOUND ERA ...... 46

PART II

5. A BRIEF OVERVIEW OF IRONICALLY DEPLOYED ART MUSIC IN FILMS ...... 55 Introduction ...... 55 Analysis of Preexisting Art Music in Films ...... 57

6. PREEXISTING ART MUSIC IN THE FILM ADAPTATION OF STEPHEN KING’S MISERY...... 84 Music in Misery ...... 85 Liberace Motif in Misery ...... 85 Why Liberace? ...... 88

7. WAGNER, EROTICISM, AND EVIL IN APT PUPIL ...... 105 The Music of Apt Pupil ...... 106

8. DIEGETIC, NONDIEGETIC, AND NARRATIVE POSITIONING IN HE GOT GAME ...... 123 Reappropriation, Irony, and the Reformation of Cultural Identities...... 123

9. MUSIC, IRONY, AND THE FORMATION OF PRACTICAL IDENTITIES IN ELEPHANT ...... 136 Introduction ...... 136 Elephant (2003) ...... 140

10. CONCLUSION ...... 149

11. BIBLIOGRAPHY ...... 154

12. FILMOGRAPHY...... 163

13. BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH ...... 164

LIST OF FIGURES

Figure 5.1. Screenshot from Cashback. Screaming girl accompanied by “Casta Diva.” ...... 56

Figure 5.2. Screenshot from Casino. Ace’s body silhouetted against flames and the lights of the Las Vegas casinos ...... 58

Figure 5.3a. Screenshot from Casino. The members of the Midwest Mafia shown during Ace’s opening monologue ...... 59

Figure 5.3b. Carravagio: The Calling of St. Matthew (1600) ...... 59

Figure 5.4. Screenshot from Casino. The new Las Vegas casinos (MGM Grand) and the allusion to Christian iconography while Ace speaks of a paradise lost ...... 61

Figure 5.5. Screenshot from Casino. The new, “Disneyland” crop of Vegas tourists...... 61

Figure 5.6. Screenshot from Junebug. Workers’ inane chatter with scenes of quotidian labor accompanied by an orchestral arrangement of Shubert’s “Gratzer Galop.” ...... 65

Figure 5.7. Screenshot from The Madness of King George. King George is gagged at the moment the choir sings in the dramatic opening of “Zadok the Priest.” ...... 69

Figure 5.8. Screenshot from The Madness of King George. The inverted “Coronation.” ...... 71

Figure 5.9. Screenshot from 28 Days Later. Jim looks out the car window at piles of corpses (reflected in the window) as Ave Maria sounds nondiegetically...... 72

Figure 5.10. Screenshot from 28 Days Later. The survivors approach a completely ablaze Manchester as Fauré’s “In Paradisum” from his Requiem sounds ...... 74

Figure 5.11. Screenshot from Needful Things. Nettie and Wilma lie dead below Wilma’s husband as the final bars to Ellens dritter Gesang sound ...... 78

Figure 5.12. Screenshot from The Killing Fields. Cambodian civilian casualties as the triumphant finale of “Nessun dorma” declares “Vinceró! ...... 80

Figure 6.1. Screenshot from Misery. Empty phone with Liberace photo ...... 86

Figure 6.2a and b. Screenshots from Misery. Annie’s two “shrines.” ...... 87

Figure 6.3. Screenshot from Misery. Page in Annie’s scrapbook identifying her as a Republican ...... 89

Figure 6.4. Screenshot from Misery. Sheldon becomes aware of his dires situation just as Liberace’s version of the “Moonlight” Sonata begins to play ...... 98

Figure 7.1. Screenshot from Apt Pupil. Todd doodling on his test as Wagner’s “Love Duet” from Tristan und Isolde enters ...... 107

Figure 7.2. Screenshot from Apt Pupil. Dussander (Sir Ian McKellan) above Archie (Elias Kotas) as the “Liebestod” gains intensity ...... 113

Figure 8.1. Screenshot from He Got Game. Opening credits. The game played in rural America accompanied by Copland’s John Henry ...... 127

Figure 8.2. Screenshot from He Got Game. Opening credits. Copland’s John Henry continues to accompany scenes of the game, this time in urban, inner-city spaces ...... 128

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LIST OF MUSICAL EXAMPLES

Example 5.1. Handel, Zadok the Priest (HWV 258), mm. 20-21. Vocal score with piano reduction...... 70

Example 7.1. Wagner, Tristan und Isolde, Act II, “Love Duet,” mm. 9-12 ...... 107

Example 7.2a. Wagner, Tristan und Isolde, Prelude, mm. 1-2 ...... 111

Example 7.2b. Wagner, Tristan und Isolde, Act III, “Liebestod,” mm.1-2...... 111

Example 7.3. Wagner, Tristan und Isolde, Act II, “Love Duet,” mm. 9-12 ...... 112

Example 7.4. Wagner, Tristan und Isolde, Act III, “Liebestod,” mm. 38-42...... 114

Example 7.5. Wagner, Tristan und Isolde, Act III, “Liebestod,” mm. 44-47...... 115

viii

ABSTRACT

Irony is an important discursive mode and literary trope. It invites a debate about meaning and significance, creates a feeling of community among perceivers (even if, on the surface, it excludes), and draws them into morally active engagement. Irony can allow for conceptual points to be perceived more quickly and to be remembered longer than do literal statements. Art music has remained relevant to the wider popular culture partly through its use in films, and ironic deployments of this music constitute one of its most sophisticated uses. It makes perceivers aware of the surface features of a film, its multiple, deeper contextual layers, and the complex interplay that takes place among them, which helps directors to make conceptual and narrative points that transcend their immediate filmic narratives. In the so-called “Golden Age” of Hollywood film, circa 1933-60, the narrative elements, including and especially music, were standardized in order to create a product with the clearest possible narrative. Composers during this period employed the stylistic elements of the Romantic orchestral idiom as the lingua franca of cinema due to its cultural currency and in particular its well-established emotional connotations. Throughout the 1960s however, the major Hollywood studios began to experiment with different filmic products, especially those modeled on European auteurism, which placed the control of the film in the hands of a single filmmaker and not, as was Hollywood practice, in the hands of a committee. With the success of such non-traditional films and their even less- traditional scores, the Hollywood establishment became more willing to take chances by placing the various components of films under the control of individual directors. With the music choices now in the hands of the auteur, the rules and conventions for music in films changed, and preexisting art music has had a noticeable presence in films from the late 1960s until the present. Moreover, ironically deployed art music became, if not a staple, a regularly used device by some of Hollywood’s more sophisticated directors. The recognition of this irony can unmask deeper contextual layers that reveal or enhance major themes in the films and, in some cases, the ideology of the filmmaker. Moreover, music, through its association and interaction with film, can reinscribe itself and its perceived meaning within the wider culture. This means that art

ix music continues to be relevant to our culture; music acquires renewed meaning through its significant and sophisticated participation in the Western world’s most popular artistic medium.

CHAPTER 1: WHY IRONY?

The phenomenon of irony is of considerable cultural and literary importance, and it draws one’s attention in a way that no other literary trope or discursive mode seems to match. It is at once admired and suspect, prized and despised, but once perceived it can never be ignored. Art music has remained relevant to the wider popular culture thanks in no small part to its use in modern American films, and ironic deployments of this music invite the audience to contemplate both its importance within culture and its continuing power to comment upon situations, personalities, art, and society at large. Ironically deployed preexisting art music makes the perceiver aware of the surface features of the film, its multiple, deeper conceptual layers, and the complex interplay and dialectic that takes place between and among them, as well as allowing films and the music in them to make historical, narrative, and ideological points that transcend their immediate narrative. The processes that allow for such transcendence are the topic of this investigation.1 Irony forces the perceiver to explore any number of issues that lie beyond the surface of a work. It invites debate about meaning and significance, at the same time it offers a glimpse into the personal attitudes of the ironist.2 By prompting an audience to engage in this debate, irony draws together a community of spectators who each, individually, contemplate and assess the efficacy and cogency of the ironic performance. Irony functions to join perceivers together in a bonded community instead of dividing them. As Wayne C. Booth argues:

Every irony inevitably builds a community of believers even as it excludes … it often builds a larger community, with fewer outsiders, than would have been built by non-ironic statements.3

Moreover, irony achieves this communion with astonishing efficiency. Booth also notes that the process of perceiving irony occurs very quickly, and that this is necessary due to “the

1 Dougles C. Muecke, Irony: The Critical Idiom (London: Meithen, 1970), 51. 2 Wayne C. Booth. A Rhetoric of Irony (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1974), 21. 3 Booth, 28-29.

complex mental operations irony demands of us” and “make[s] possible a density and economy impossible in any literal mode.”4 Additionally, this rapidity accounts for the fun of “getting it”:

Perhaps no other form of human communication does so much with such speed and economy … when it succeeds, [it] reveals in both participants a kind of meeting with other minds that contradicts a great deal that gets said about who we are and whether we can know each other.5

Booth claims that social bonding via irony is achieved through the identification of, and with, likeminded individuals who also “get it.” And while he notes that there certainly are victims of irony (either real or imagined), for the individual perceiving irony the “predominant emotion … is that of joining, of finding and communing with kindred spirits.”6 In addition to drawing together a community of spectators, irony compels communities and the individuals within them to consider important and at times profound issues, no matter how pedestrian or frivolous its context. “Wresting with irony … [is not] only about ‘verbal’ matters … but a debate about how a man should live.”7 For example, a segment titled “Dreaded Bliss” which aired on the January 12th, 2010, edition of the television program The Daily Show with Jon Stewart covered the debate and protests concerning a bill to legalize gay marriage in New Jersey. The satirical “fake-news” program sent out one of its correspondents to interview citizens outside the statehouse, where protesters both for and against the issue had gathered in order to express their opinions publicly. In the segment correspondent Wyatt Cenac interviews two African Americans, one male and one female, who are protesting against gay marriage. The first interview has the male African- American answering Cenac’s question, “How are you like [George] Washington?” The man responds, “You had a group, a minority … and they believed and they fought for the cause … and as it was, centuries ago, so it is today.”8 Anther protestor then remarks:

4 Ibid., 104. 5 Ibid., 13. 6 Ibid., 28. 7 Ibid., 38. 8 The Daily Show with Jon Stewart. First broadcast 12 January, 2010 by Comedy Central. (http://www.thedailyshow.com/watch/tue-january-12-2010/dreaded-bliss), accessed January 21, 2010. “Dreaded Bliss,” produced by Timothy Greenberg and edited by Daniel Schlesselman.

In this land of America, where we live as Americans, as I, myself, being a female, and being an African-American woman, I once upon a time –my forefathers … I didn’t have a right to vote, I didn’t have a right to a say in life, but now, I have a right, we have the voice, and I’m so thankful today that the same-sex issue was rejected.9

The cause, centuries ago, was freedom from oppression and not, as it is today, the relegation of a minority to second-class status. After a cutaway from the interview, which showed a clip from Fox News announcing that the measure had been defeated, Cenac’s voiceover of the slow-motion images of these religious and minority groups summarizes:

It was just as our forefather had envisioned: that one day, people who had been discriminated against for their religion, or the color of their skin, could come together to discriminate against people for their sexual orientation … without the slightest sense of irony.10

The closing scene in the segment is of the famous Emanuel Leutz painting Washington Crossing the Delaware, with superimposed images of the New Jersey protesters inside Washington’s small rowboat and a final voiceover by Cenac intoning, “Let Freedom Ring!” Cenac, by playing the role of detached observer, takes on the role of the Greek Eiron. In Greek comedy the Eiron was a stock character who defeated or brought low his braggart opponent (the Alazon) by pretending to be less than he was or not as smart as he was. In actuality, the Alazon brought himself low, while attempting to educate the Eiron on the supremacy of his position but instead merely revealing himself as the ignorant party. The Alazon would be exposed to the audience as being ignorant of an issue and foolishly unaware of the truth of situation. By allowing the protestors to pontificate, Cenac establishes the situation as being ironic through the obvious incongruity of minority groups who have suffered discrimination protesting the full inclusion of other minority groups. While the segment is clearly comedic, the issues that are brought up by this ironic exposition are both universal and profound. We laugh at the hypocrisy and ignorance of the

9 The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, January 12, 2010. 10 The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, January 12, 2010.

protesters (in the same segment we laugh as well at some of the protesters campaigning for gay marriage), but we also meditate upon the ideas of democracy, majority-allotted civil rights, and the lack of logical thought of those fellow citizens who could grant or deny those rights. As Booth suggests, irony is especially suited to draw the perceiver into “morally active engagement.”11 The ideological points in the segment are made directly, quickly, and in a more memorable fashion than they would have been by means of a literal statement. Research by Raymond W. Gibbs has shown empirically that “ironic utterances do not take longer to comprehend than do literal ones.”12 Additional research by Kreuz, Long, and Church has shown that sarcastic statements –a basic form of irony13 –“are also better remembered than are literal statements.”14 The television show is well known for its scathing parodies and satire, modes of discourse that “use similar aspects” to irony, “but it [irony] is not necessarily of feature of them.”15 The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, a parody of modern cable news, which often uses satirical means to make its points, allows, in this instance, the protesters to satirize themselves unwittingly, thereby drawing attention to the inherent irony. A straightforward parody or literal statement would have been less effective and memorable than the approach taken in this particular segment; this episode is thus a testament to the power and efficacy of irony. Irony is a particularly powerful discursive tool; it implicitly yet effectively conveys the thoughts and values of the ironist, while slyly convincing perceivers to adopt these as their own. While a literal statement would easily express the same sentiment, it would be far less effective at persuading the perceiver to identify with the ironist’s view. Booth points out that in irony, “the author invites the reader [viewer] to reconstruct the meaning of an irony himself, the reader finds the position more plausible than an overt statement, since it is, in a real way, his own.”16 Those viewers of “Dreaded Bliss” who perceive the irony

11 Booth, 66. 12 Raymond W. Gibbs, “Psychological Aspects of Irony Understanding,” Journal of Pragmatics, 16 (1991): 525. 13 Douglass C. Muecke, Irony: The Critical Idiom, 52. 14 Roger Kreuz, Debra L. Long, and Mary B. Church. “On Being Ironic: Pragmatic and Mnemonic Implications,” Metaphor and Symbolic Activity, 6 (1991): 149. 15 Roger Kreuz and Richard Roberts. “On Satire and Parody: The Importance of Being Ironic,” Metaphor and Symbolic Activity, 8/2 (1992): 106. 16 Booth, 41.

reconstruct an unspoken “true intention” of the ironist (either Cenac, the editor, or the producer, although the specific ironist in this case is insignificant), and, due to the complex mental processes involved with that reconstruction, arrive at a conclusion similar to the ironist’s, which they feel is at least partially their own. Booth reinforces his idea when he claims that “irony dramatizes this choice, forces us into hierarchical participation, and hence makes the results more actively our own.”17 By the processes of this mental engagement “[i]rony thus produces a much higher degree of confidence than does a literal statement.”18 On the one hand, dealing in irony clearly has its advantages when positing specific and/or ideological points of view. On the other hand, the risks of communicative failure are greater than would be the use of literal statements, metaphors, or even sarcasm and parody. For an audience who can-not, will not, or does not perceive the irony, the results can be communicatively catastrophic. As Booth flatly states, “[i]rony risks disaster more than any other device.”19 In dealing with irony, there is a high-risk/high-reward relationship. Douglass C. Muecke supports this conclusion when he says that “… irony runs the same risks of failure through being too laboured or too subtle, too brief or too long drawn out, mistimed in the telling or ill-adapted to audience or occasion.”20 For example, The Colbert Report, a satirical send-up of conservative media, has comedian Stephen Colbert playing the part of an angry, know-it-all conservative blowhard who furiously takes on all things “liberal.” For most, the satire is clear cut; Colbert pretends to be an irate conservative, and through this guise he pokes fun at the conservative entertainment industry. But a recent study by Heather L. LaMarre, Kristen D. Landreville, and Michael A. Beam shows that political ideology greatly colored the perception of the satire:

there was no significant difference between the groups [self- identified liberals and conservatives] in thinking Colbert was funny, but conservatives were more likely to report that Colbert only pretends to be joking and genuinely meant what he said while

17 Ibid. 18 Ibid., 51. 19 Ibid., 41. 20 Muecke, The Compass of Irony, 15.

liberals were more likely to report that Colbert used satire and was not serious when offering political statements.21

In short, a significant portion of the viewing audience is not likely to perceive the ironic intent lurking behind the surface. In the particular case of “Dreaded Bliss,” this risk is largely offset by Cenac’s blatant mentioning of the irony (“without the slightest sense of irony”), but this obvious exposition actually serves to lessen the effect of irony for the perceptive audience members. Muecke states that “the very presence of the inquirer would tend to destroy the rather intimate social rapport upon which … irony depend[s].”22 In other words, by laying bare the presence of irony Cenac actually diminishes its impact by thwarting the mental process Muecke calls “ironic dissembling.” Ironic dissembling is the process of seeing through the surface features of a situation or statement to arrive at the true meaning behind it, one that agrees with the ideology of the perceived ironist. This is an important element of irony, as it shifts the balance of responsibility from the poietic maker to the aesthetic receiver. It relies upon an observer or an audience to recognize the ironic elements of a situation. It is important, for the irony to be successful, that ironic dissembling is possible for most but not for all. Those who are unable to see through the irony are some of its victims. Irony is meant to be seen through by the audience but not by the victim(s) of the ironical statement.23 For our purposes, the victim necessary for irony to exist can be virtually anyone, real, imagined, created, or evoked. In the example from The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, the victims include both the protesters being interviewed and any audience members who do not perceive the hypocrisy. Irony allows and even forces perceivers to look beyond the surface of a presented or observed situation and to engage with the meaning and significance of a given issue. By this means, irony creates a tighter community among those who perceive the irony and thus identify with an implied but very real ideology. It achieves this rapidly, and this rapidity of complex mental processes is both pleasurable and effective. By appearing to leave open the interpretation

21 Heather L. LaMarre, Kristen D. Landreville, and Michael A. Beam, “The Irony of Satire: Political Ideology and the Motivation to See What You Want to See in The Colbert Report,” The International Journal of Press/Politics, 14/2 (2009): 212. 22 Muecke, Irony: The Critical Idiom, 2. 23 Muecke, Irony: The Critical Idiom, 2.

of a given situation, ironists lead the perceivers to engage in mental processes that make the conclusions about an issue their own. This high level of mental engagement makes irony more convincing, effective, and better remembered than are literal statements. It has been empirically demonstrated that those with a particular ideological stance concerning a specific issue are more at risk of failing to perceive irony.24 Finally, it is the fact that some perceivers do not perceive irony that, in part, makes irony possible at all. Irony must have a perceived victim in order to be recognized, and thus a victim, whether real or imagined, is an essential component of irony.

Elements of Irony The concept of irony (eironeia) as used in Greek drama and rhetoric would have been almost unrecognizable to Cicero or Shakespeare.25 By the sixteenth century in England the concept appears to have been similar to the modern concept of sarcasm or a “Drie Mock.”26 Only by the end of the eighteenth century was the term applied to the ironic elements in the works of dramatists such as Aeschylus, Shakespeare, and Racine, among others.27 The waters surrounding the concept of irony today are similarly muddy, as Muecke points out when he claims that “[t]oday irony will mean different things to different people” and that the concept of irony in our culture “is still developing.”28 Muecke’s landmark study, The Compass of Irony, concedes that the task of concretely defining irony may be impossible when he says, ironically, that “Since … Erich Heller, in his Ironic German, has already quite adequately not defined irony, there would be little point in not defining it all over again.”29 More to the point, he posits that there is

no brief and simple definition that will include all kinds of irony while excluding all this is not irony, that distinctions from one angle may not be distinctions from another, and that kinds of irony

24 LaMarre, Landerville, and Beam, 212. 25 Muecke, Irony: The Critical Idiom, 15. 26Ibid., 16. Quoting Puttenham’s Arte of English Poesie (ed. G. D. Willcock and A. Walker, London, 1936). 27Muecke, The Compass of Irony, 47. 28Muscke, Irony: The Critical Idiom, 10. 29 Muecke, The Compass of Irony, 14.

theoretically distinguishable will in practice be found merging into one another.30

All of this slipperiness leads to a fundamental problem: How should irony be identified in a study of irony? The Merriam Webster Dictionary defines irony as “the use of words to express something other than and especially the opposite of the literal meaning,” or as an “incongruity between the actual result of a sequence of events and the normal or expected result.”31 Muecke takes the position that

irony, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder…we talk of irony, as we do of beauty, as if it were an objective quality or phenomenon, and generally we may have to rely upon having enough in common, a sufficient intersubjectivity, to be able to talk meaningfully of heavy or subtle, tragic or comic, bitter or playful or striking irony.32

The best we can do, according to Muecke, is to agree that irony has both the qualities of subjectivity and “certain aesthetic qualities, lacking which, it fails to affect us as irony.”33 With the above caution in mind, we may progress toward outlining the essential qualities and elements of irony, since it is clear that no single definition will suffice to cover either the concept or all instances of irony. For the purposes of this study I will use Muecke’s rather open and inclusive definition of irony as “the art of saying something without really saying it … an art closely related to wit … nearer to the mind than to the senses, reflective and self-conscious rather than lyrical and self-absorbed.”34 And while a strict definition of irony may elude us, Muecke posits that there are five basic elements common to all irony: 1) confident unawareness on the part of a “victim” (Muecke’s term) 2) a contrast of appearance and reality 3) a comic element 4) an element of detachment 5) an esthetic element.35

30 Muecke, The Compass of Irony, 14. 31 http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/irony (accessed January 26, 2010) 32 Muecke, The Compass of Irony, 14. 33 Ibid., 15. 34 Ibid., 5-6. 35 Muecke, The Compass of Irony, 15.

Confident Unawareness Confident unawareness refers mainly to a victim of irony, someone who “need only reveal by word or by actions that he doesn’t suspect that things are not even remotely like what he ingenuously supposes them to be.”36 For Muecke, those who exhibit hubris and obliviousness make the best ironical victims. But simply having a victim does not suffice to create irony, for irony is always in the eye of the beholder. The ironic victim needs an audience, someone to perceive both the unawareness as well as the reality of the situation in order for the irony to be properly identified and experienced, even if that audience is the ironist. Irony is, after all, meant to be seen through, and a perceiver must take part in the ironic dissembling to see through the surface situation or presentation in order to access the underlying, the actual. The obvious case of an ironic victim in a film would be a character who is confident of the outcome of a particular situation. As is usual in drama, the audience viewing the film is naturally more aware of the character’s true situation than is the character himself. Less conventionally, the victim could be fellow audience members themselves. There may be a portion of the audience, real or imagined, who do not “get” the irony. This creates a feeling of inclusiveness, a kind of “in-crowd,” who may perceive an irony which excludes others. In this way, there may also be victims within the audience.

Contrast of Appearance and Reality Muecke’s second basic element, the contrast of appearance and reality, is perhaps the one most basic to irony. It arises, very simply, when an ironist says or presents one thing but means something quite different. The ironist, unlike the liar or hoaxer, is not trying to deceive an audience but instead presents an alternate reality in order to make his implicit point more effectively than would be the case with a literal statement. In short, the ironist “pretends, not in order to be believed but … in order to be understood.”37 Muecke ties this element with the first (confident unawareness) when describing a situation in which “the ironist presents an appearance and pretends to be unaware of a reality while the victim is deceived by an appearance and is

36 Ibid., 28. 37 Muecke, Irony and the Ironic, 34.

unaware of the reality.”38 It is important here not to ascribe absolute value to the words “appearance” and “reality.” As Muecke describes, “what is ‘appearance’ and what is ‘reality’ in irony are no more than what the ironist or ironic observer takes them to be, from which it follows that irony is not invulnerable to further irony for a new vantage-ground.”39 We see in the above statements the subjective nature of irony. And while it would be easy to extrapolate this argument into a reductio ad absurdum, it is important to understand that this study will be examining ironies that are meant to be perceived by large and diverse audiences. As such, the contrast of appearance and reality filmmakers must present in order for irony to be detected by a large portion of the audience (if that is their intent) must be fairly conspicuous.

Comic Element Muecke’s third basic feature of irony, the comic element, is perhaps the most questionable. He speculates that the comic element is “inherent in the formal properties of irony: the basic contradiction or incongruity coupled with a real or a pretended confident unawareness. No man wittingly contradicts himself … consequently, the appearance of an intentional contradiction sets up a psychic tension which can only find a resolution in laughter.”40 However, Muecke takes issue with the argument posed by A. R. Thompson that irony must contain both a comic and a painful element.41 Muecke instead suggests that any painful elements stem “from the sympathy we may feel towards the victim.”42 But while Muecke discounts the necessity of a painful element, he does concede that “other things being equal, irony is more effective or more striking if it has a painful as well as comic effect.”43 A good example of this feature can be seen in a headline from the satirical website The Onion. Three weeks after a devastating earthquake rocked the destitute nation of Haiti, The Onion published an article accompanied by a headline reading: “Massive Earthquake Reveals Entire Island Civilization Called ‘Haiti.’” The article reads as if it were published in National Geographic, which both lends it an element of parody

38 Muecke, Irony: The Critical Idiom, 30. 39 Ibid., 31. 40 Muecke, Irony: The Critical Idiom, 34. 41 A. R. Thompson, The Dry Mock, 15. In this he argues that irony must “rouse conflicted feelings.” 42 Muecke, Irony: The Critical Idiom, 34. 43 Ibid., 35.

and establishes the discursive mode that will aid the purveyance of the ironic content. The faux anthropological study is peppered with sentences that make the reader both laugh and wince at the same time: reports now indicate that these people have likely inhabited the impoverished, destitute region—unnoticed by the rest of the world—for more than 300 years … “That an entire civilization has been somehow existing right under our noses for all this time comes as a complete shock,” said University of Florida anthropology professor Dr. Ben Oliver … Researchers also came to the “startling” conclusion that Haiti's inhabitants must have at some point in their history been exposed to the English language, as many seemed capable of uttering such phrases as “Help us,” and “Please don't abandon us again.”44

Doubtless, there is a painful element in this article, which stems from the sympathy we feel for the inhabitants of the beleaguered nation. But there is also a certain comic element that stems from the realization that the article is truly an indictment of the attitude of those in the industrialized world who have largely ignored the plight of this poorest of nations. We largely ignored them until the quake struck and then pounced upon the island when its difficult situation became a profitable news story and as a way to demonstrate our people’s sudden charity. One does experience a pleasant emotion when confronted with irony, even when one is the victim. This pleasantness may be due to a sense of intellectual achievement through recognition of the irony rather than from its being inherently comical. Recognition comes not only from an identification of the irony itself but also from an awareness of one’s being a part of the intended (or unintended) audience, that certain in-crowd identification. It is not an inherent comic element that aids to render these pleasant emotions, but instead recognition, the self- congratulation one feels in perceiving even the most disturbing ironies. In the above example from The Onion, our pleasure is derived from the recognition of the true state of affairs about our national consciousness of the poor as well as the true motivation behind some of the sudden attention to a disaster. Additionally, there is a sense of superiority when we laugh at those who were culpable of such ignorance (even though these people very well could be ourselves).

44 “Massive Earthquake Reveals Entire Island Nation Called ‘Haiti.’” The Onion, 25 January, 2010, (http://www.theonion.com/articles/massive-earthquake-reveals-entire-island-civilizat,2896/). Accessed April 3, 2012.

Detachment While the third of Meucke’s basic elements may be the most tenuous, the fourth – detachment –is more important to the present inquiry. Theater and film are inherently ironic. The viewers are detached, literally seated on high and apart from the diegesis, and they often know more about the situation and people populating the drama than do the characters themselves. “The very theatre itself ... is a sort of ironic convention whereby a spectator occupying a good seat, as it were, in the real world is enabled to look into the world of illusion and so get ‘a view of life from on high.’”45 This distance, a very literal detachment, produces a special potential for the realization of ironical situations.46 The filmgoer is, in his very essence, detached. Muecke, in his Irony and the Ironic concedes that the elements of detachment and the comic are closely linked when he says “[t]he word ‘comic’ suggests a certain ‘distance,’ psychologically speaking, between the amused observer and the comic object ….”47 He concludes that “[t]he ironic observer’s awareness of himself as observer tends to enhance his feeling of freedom and induce a mood of satisfaction, serenity, joyfulness, or even exultation.”48

Aesthetic Element The final basic element to irony, the esthetic element, is concerned with stylistic considerations. Irony, whether intentional or otherwise, must be perceived in order for it to be considered as such (again, even if the only perceiver is the ironist). It must be shaped so that it achieves, as Max Beerbohm notes “the production of supreme effect through means the least extravagant.”49 Beerbohm’s statement suggests that the esthetic element is closely linked with economy, but this is not necessarily the case. The point here is that “[j]ust as a funny story with all the proper ingredients will not amuse us if badly told, so irony, if it is not to be ineffective, has to be ‘shaped.’”50

45 Muecke, Irony: The Critical Idiom, 41. Quoting Sedgewick, Of Irony, Especially in Drama, 32. 46 Ibid., 42. 47 Muecke, Irony and the Ironic, 47. 48 Ibid., 48. 49 Muecke, Irony: The Critical Idiom, 45. 50 Ibid.

The aesthetic element is not, however, solely the responsibility of the ironist. It takes an ironically-developed perceiver to fashion the surface elements of a situation into the ironical contrast of appearance and reality. In dealing with ironies that have no author, so-called “situational ironies,” it is left to the mind and wit of the perceiver to create the aesthetic conditions of a situation. Finally, it is important to think about the elements of recognition or the comic, detachment, and esthetic as not being mutually exclusive. Any of irony’s elements, whenever altered, will have some effect upon all of the others, and the final three seem especially interconnected. As Muecke sates, “… it seems possible that further consideration might find some way of grouping together the element of detachment, and the comic and aesthetic. It is at any rate clear that they overlap.”51

Irony as Stimulus or “Stable Irony” Widely credited with the first systematic examination of the concept of irony, Søren Kierkegaard, in his The Concept of Irony with Continual Reference to Socrates, delineates that irony functions in two basic ways: as a means to an end, and as an end in itself.52 Kierkegaard refers to the kind of irony that stimulates thinking and which aids in a recognition of the true meaning behind a surface as irony as stimulus. According to Kierkegaard, “[t]here is a kind of irony that is only a stimulus for thought, that quickens it when it becomes drowsy, disciplines it when it becomes dissolute.”53 Esti Sheinberg, in her Irony, Satire, Parody, and Grotesque in the Music of Shostakovich, claims that this type of irony is finite and as such allows for positive solutions or a synthesis between the surface and underling features of an ironic statement. Irony as stimulus aims at a ‘true’ meaning that lies somewhere behind the ostensible message of an utterance. Its presupposition is that both the recipient of the message and its sender share the same value systems and communication codes, thus providing a means for the

51 Muecke, Irony: The Critical Idiom , 48. 52 Søren Kierkegaard, The Concept of Irony with Constant Reference to Socrates (Princeton: Princeton University Press, [1841] 1989), 121. 53 Ibid.

reconstruction of the covert, ‘real’ message that is to be preferred.54

According to Sheinberg, the theories that have been presented by various rhetoricians and philosophers over the course of centuries are remarkably similar. From Quintilian’s Institutio Oratoria circa 95 C.E. to Douglass Muecke’s Irony and the Ironic of 1980, she notes that “[t]hey all speak about ‘saying one thing while meaning another,’ and all stress the aesthetic importance of a correct interpretation by discovering the ‘true’ meaning behind the ostensible one.”55 Precisely the ability for the perceiver to find a true or real meaning behind the surface allows irony as stimulus to function so effectively in satire. In seeking these truths, irony as stimulus, or stable irony, assumes a value system, an ethical hierarchy upon which it operates, while at the same time assuming that the perceiver and ironist share these values. As Sheinberg states, “irony as stimulus dissimulates one meaning by openly stating another in order to ridicule and debase. It is a rhetorical device that strives to reach a goal that by definition will include a value-judgment – either ethical or aesthetic.”56

How Stable Irony Works According to Wayne C. Booth, stable ironies require a complex mental reconstruction, that he calls “ironic dissembling,” in four steps: 1) Rejection of the literal meaning 2) Substitution of alternative interpretations 3) Decision about author’s intent/beliefs or the intention of the work within context 4) Decisions upon newer meaning(s) we think correspond to the unspoken belief(s) we attribute to the author.57

A brief analysis of the article from The Onion reveals how each of these steps works and how readers settle on entirely different meanings from that posed by the surface elements.

54 Esti Sheinberg, Irony, Satire, Parody, and the Grotesque in the Music of Shostakovich: A Theory of Musical Incongruities (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2000), 34. 55 Ibid. 56 Ibid., 35. 57 Booth, A Rhetoric of Irony, 10-12.

Step 1 requires that readers reject the literal statements, and only the most naïve readers would be incapable of this portion of the reconstruction. Surely, any mildly- informed reader would know that this article contains obvious incongruities, which then set the reader in search of alternative meanings. As Booth delineates, “[i]f he is reading properly, he is unable to escape recognizing either some incongruity among the words or between the words and something else that he knows.”58 Here the glaring incongruity is the so-called “discovery” by anthropologists of Haitian civilization brought about by the earthquake. Knowledge of the nation’s name –to say nothing of its geography, economic situation, or political history –immediately invalidates the surface statement, setting the reader onto step 2 in the reconstruction process. Step 2 requires the reader to substitute alternative interpretations. These alternatives will themselves be incongruous with, if not contrary to, the literal statements. While this step does not produce a single alternative, it invites many possible substitutions which must now be tested against the knowledge of the author(s) and/or his or her assumed beliefs. A possible alternative occurs if the reader concludes that the author is somehow terribly misinformed, mentally unstable, or is purposely engaging in deceit. If any of these would be the case, what we would have is not irony but instead a lie, a fabrication, or nonsensical rambling. This would be a rare conclusion for the perceptive reader, as Booth points out when he says that “[w]e accept this alternative only when other more plausible ones fail to emerge and satisfy us.”59 In the case of the headline, we assume that the author is not crazy and that he is not trying to intentionally mislead us. But now the reader is left with many possible alternatives, which he must whittle down in steps 3 and 4 in order to arrive at one that is most plausible. Step 3 requires us to think about the author’s knowledge and/or intent as well as the intention/context of the work. This is perhaps the most crucial step among the four in order to arrive at a plausible or accurate reconstruction. In the case of the headline, we must dismiss the idea that the author believes that Haiti is a newly discovered civilization and that he or she also rejects this statement. We are able to do this by examining the context of the work. The Onion is a satirical, fake-news website. It comprises ridiculous, nonsensical, and offbeat stories that usually critique the real news of the day. Anyone writing for The Onion would be likely to employ satire or irony, and would be expected to write sometimes shocking, seemingly-heartless

58 Booth, 10. 59 Booth, A Rhetoric of Irony, 11.

articles.60 The authors are generally highly intelligent and have a keen understanding of national and world events, as well as a highly attuned sense of social criticism. Therefore, it is highly likely that the author has as much, if not more, knowledge about Haiti as would most readers. We may therefore posit that the author expects the reader to reject the literal statements. Booth reinforces this point when he claims that “[n]o matter how firmly I [the reader] am convinced that a statement is absurd or illogical or just plain false, I must somehow determine whether what I reject is also rejected by the author, and whether he has any reason to expect my concurrence.”61 The notion of authorial intent is very important to the perception and reconstruction of stable ironies, and Booth states that:

… dealing with irony shows us the sense in which our court of final appeal is still a conception of the author: when we are pushed about any “obvious interpretation” we finally want to be able to say, “It is inconceivable that the author could have put these words together in this order without having intended this precise ironic stoke.”62

The fourth and final step of ironical reconstruction involves making a decision upon a newer and final meaning of the literal statement based upon our conception of the author’s unspoken beliefs. The reader must choose between the possible alternative meanings from step 2 and reconcile these with what he thinks he knows about the author and his or her values. In this case concerning the article from The Onion, the reader must decide whether the author is actually sympathetic with the plight of the Haitians or else, as the surface statement would portend, coldly indifferent to or even malevolently reveling in the devastation. In rejecting the surface statements, the reader then rejects the latter of these two stances and settles on the former. Once the reader has some fairly stable conceptual ground to stand upon, he or she may then insert the alternative meanings for the literal ones. In this case, the article draws attention to the fact that wealthy, industrialized nations both had a hand in causing and then ignored the glaring problems of Haiti’s poverty and its effect upon infrastructure and its ability to deal with

60 Another example of this type of strategy is seen in an article dated March 26, 2007, just a few weeks after the death of reality-show star and dietary supplement spokesperson Anna Nicole Smith, which, placed next to a photograph of a gravesite, reads “Anna Nicole Smith Finally Reaches Target Weight.” 61 Booth, A Rhetoric of Irony, 11. 62 Ibid., 11-12.

severe crisis. The sudden attention and international response to Haiti’s ordeal is suspiciously devoid of any discussion as to what could have been done by other nations prior to the disaster that may have averted at least some of the devastating effects of the quake. While the media and political figures alike express shock at the severity of the situation, the article pokes fun –albeit very serious, moralizing fun –at the seemingly sudden interest in a nation which was long known to be in desperate need of international aid. By shocking the reader, the article focuses our attention on the fact that we, as a community of wealthy nations, should have been helping Haiti deal with its crushing poverty well before this disaster occurred, and that our sudden interest in helping is somewhat tainted by hypocrisy. The message is at once comical and moralizing, and the irony reaches the readers in a way that is more effective and efficient than would a literal statement. Moreover, by forcing the reader to undertake the process of ironical reconstruction, the reader is more apt to agree with the goal or intimated point lurking behind the ironical statements.

Types of Stable Irony According to Meucke, irony falls into two basic categories, Verbal Irony and Situational Irony. Verbal irony (or “behavioral irony,” since the ironist may use other media such as film) is irony in action. It refers to a kind of irony where there is a present and perceivable ironist, one who is “consciously and intentionally employing a technique” in order to “present … a situation, a sequence of events, a character, a belief, etc. … that exists or is to be thought of as existing independently of presentation.”63 Situational irony, on the other hand, is the “irony of events,” “irony without an ironist,” or “the irony of a state of affairs or an event.”64 An important subcategory of situational irony is cosmic irony, a form of irony in which fate, destiny, or the gods toy with man and his expectations. Muecke postulates that irony always needs a perceived ironist, and that the personification of Fate, or the notion of God-as-novelist, may have opened the door for the perception of this type of unscripted irony.65 Moreover, and seemingly

63Muecke, Irony and the Ironic, 56; Irony: The Critical Idiom, 28. 64Muecke, Irony: The Critical Idiom, 28, 49-51. 65Ibid., 38.

oxymoronically, Muecke say that dramatic irony or what is “pre-eminently the irony of the theater,” is a subcategory of situational irony.66 On the surface this may seem odd, since it is verbal irony that requires an author, a potential ironist, and dramas (and films) clearly have authors. However, dramatic irony plays upon the suspension of disbelief in which we engage when viewing a film or play. We experience these works as if they were entities unto themselves, presumptively unaware of the writer’s and/or director’s omnipresence. We therefore read a given ironic situation as just that and not, as our knowledge of the real world might suggest, as something created, presented, or contrived by an outside being. Take, for instance, the episode “Time Enough at Last” (1959) from the popular television series The Twilight Zone. In this episode we view a nearly blind, ludicrously-bespectacled bookish misanthrope, played by Burgess Meredith, who survives a nuclear holocaust and eventually emerges from the rubble to find himself the sole survivor. The devastation and loss nearly push the man to suicide, but he reconsiders this act at the last minute when he spots the remains of the library and its intact piles of books. For once, this man has enough time to read and there is, presumably, no one left in the world to disturb or torment him. But just as he situates himself among enormous stacks of books meant for his reading pleasure, he stumbles and breaks his glasses. We assume the man must spend the rest of his days alone and virtually sightless, deprived of his greatest and only remaining pleasure. We initially view this as situational or, more specifically, cosmic irony, and not as the work of Lyn Venable (the author of the original short story) or Rod Serling (the author of the teleplay). Perhaps after the immediate viewing we then contemplate the medium of the story and realize that it is, in fact, an irony of the verbal kind, but this is not the instantaneous impression. We suspend our belief or sense of credulity and view plays, television programs, and films as if we were watching life itself. What this example points out is that the author(s) in this case presented, or scripted, a situational irony. Perhaps dramatic irony is best described for the purposes of this study as “verbalized” or “scripted” situational irony. This type of irony is distinctive in that it can be perceived as both verbal and situational irony.

66Muecke, The Compass of Irony, 105.

Irony as Terminus or “Unstable” Irony

Where stable ironies seek a finite goal informed by values (either esthetic or moral), unstable ironies, or a deployment of irony as terminus, seeks to point out the fundamental incongruities of life, those to which we are all victims. Stable irony functions upon shared values, mores, norms, and knowledge, and as such is often employed at the service of satire and parody. Unstable irony, on the other hand, seeks to call into question the very existence of values, mores, norms, and knowledge. It seeks to question the very foundations upon which we live our lives and structure our behaviors. Booth argues that in unstable irony “no stable reconstruction can be made out of the ruins revealed through the irony,” and that “the only sure affirmation is that negation that begins all ironic play.”67 Where stable ironies involve a four-step reconstruction that allows for an arrival upon new meanings, unstable ironies essentially create a “feedback loop,” where all that exists is infinite negation. With unstable ironies, the goal is not to arrive upon solid agreement between author and reader via interpretation, but instead to highlight the interpretive experience itself. There are no right answers in unstable irony, no correct or normative positions upon which to perch; it is the interpretive equivalent of going down the rabbit hole. Muecke points out that unstable irony, or what he terms “general irony”:

… lies in the contradictions, apparently fundamental and irremediable, that confront men when they speculate upon such topics as the origin and purpose of the universe, free will and determinism, reason and instinct, the scientific and the imaginative, ends and means, society and the individual, art and life, knowing and being, self-consciousness (what is conscious of what?), the meaning of meaning, and the value of value.68

For Muecke, these contradictions are not simply those that we encounter in our day to day lives, but are instead the fundamental “predicaments many of which have forced men into a realization of their essential and terrifying loneliness in relation to others or to the universe at

67 Booth, A Rhetoric of Irony, 240. 68 Muecke, The Compass of Irony, 121.

large.”69 This is “the raw material … of Romantic irony.”70 He points out that this type of irony has become increasingly common over the past 250 years as a response to the jettisoning of the closed ideology of pre-enlightenment Christian worldview in favor of an open ideology where God is no longer the sole authority.71 Historically speaking, the open ideology of the enlightenment left two fundamentally different principles to fill the void of the closed ideology, namely objectivity and subjectivity.72 Muecke claims that the polarity that exists between objectivity and subjectivity is a manifestation of an open ideology in that each stance is accepting of revision. For the objective scientist Muecke claims that there is a need for “endless revision and self-correction, for questioning and suspending judgment, and…keeping alive a sense of an infinity of possibilities.”73 He also points out that objectivity is necessarily less inclined to unstable irony than is subjectivity, because the objective scientist “would be in a bad way if his sense of irony persuaded him of the essential futility of an endless series of thesis and antithesis.”74 The unstable ironist sees no way of confirming nor rejecting either the objective of subjective, while at the same time being aware that they are fundamentally irreconcilable. For Muecke, the unstable ironist

dwells, historically, in the densely populated no-man’s land between the old and the new differing from his fellow countrymen in that he knows where he is, knows, that is to say, that there are two sides and that he cannot take either side or bring them into accord.75

Esit Sheinberg similarly discusses the destabilizing effects of unstable irony when she says that “Irony as terminus … deal[s] with the endless process of nullification that brings the ironist (and the ironized) to the edge of an infinite void of consciousness, often resulting in existential dizziness and feelings of vertigo.”76 This chapter has established that irony is a particularly important, memorable, and effective rhetorical trope and has highlighted empirical studies that support these claims.

69 Muecke, The Compass of Irony, 122. 70 Ibid., 159. 71 Ibid.,, 128. 72 Ibid. 73 Ibid., 129. 74 Muecke, The Compass of Irony, 129. 75 Muecke, The Compass of Irony, 130. 76 Sheinberg, Irony, Parody, Satire, and the Grotesque in the Music of Shostakovich, 40.

Additionally, it has outlined the basic elements of stable irony (irony as stimulus) and described the mental processes that occur when someone engages with it. Finally, it has identified a second kind of irony, unstable irony (irony as terminus), and described its processes of infinite negation and its destabilizing effects it achieves by its highlighting of the fundamental ironies of the existence and the human condition. The following three chapters will outline the history and circumstances that surrounded the use of preexisting art music in films, and will show how ironical deployments eventually became a useful aesthetic tool when wielded by sophisticated directors. Part II will show, in detail, how preexisting art music in films is deployed and read ironically, and how that situation unearths deeper contextual layers that enrich the filmic narratives and, in some cases, helps to make the filmmakers’ ideological points.

21 CHAPTER 2: MUSICAL PRACTICES IN THE “SILENT” FILM ERA

Music has been closely, almost inseparably, linked with motion pictures since the dawn of the medium in the 1890s. Examining the role of art music within this earliest period reveals much about the formation of a standard musical vocabulary for narrative films. Art music as film accompaniment formed a basis for the so-called classical Hollywood film score that would come to dominate sound films of the next generation and beyond. The rule rather than the exception, the use of preexisting music – both popular and art music –formed the primary bases for filmic accompaniments during the early stages of film.77 Decisions as to what music was deemed appropriate for film were largely left to individual theater conductors, pianists, and organists. As a consequence, musical accompaniments for film were widely divergent, an aesthetic Wild-West where the whims, fancies, knowledge, and abilities of the in-house musicians determined what music was most appropriate for a scene. By the early 1910s there was a movement afoot within the industry to standardize musical accompaniment practices.78 Industry trade journals such as Moving Picture World, Moving Picture News, Nickelodeon, and Film Index began to include regularly columns aimed at house pianists and theater orchestra conductors on how to choose and sync music for particular scenes tastefully and effectively.79 These “cue sheets” were at first rather general. Descriptions of tempo and/or mood, with terms such as “March,” “Andante,” “Lively,” “Pizzicato,” “Adagio,” “Waltz,” etc., constituted a significant portion of the suggestions in early cue sheets.80 These cue sheets became increasingly detailed over the course of the silent film era, with specific titles and sections of preexisting music being prescribed for filmic accompaniment. From both these trade journals and the publication of cue sheets the earliest standardized film-music repertory can be surmised.

77 James Wierzbicki, Film Music:A History (New York: Routledge, 2009). 32. 78 Rick Altman, Silent Film Sound (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004), 240. Altman’s book is a very detailed study of the standardization of sound in film. He takes great pains to examine closely the earliest experiments with sound in films and carefully traces the musical history of the silent film idiom. 79 Altman, 240. 80 Wierzbicki, 36-40.

22 Rick Altman, in his Silent Film Sound, notes that film music during the early and mid 1910s displayed a balance between well-known popular tunes and preexisting art music. But the repertory of art music was quite limited during this time, as Altman concludes:

… the same titles [were] encountered repeatedly: Gounod’s “Ave Maria,” Mendelssohn’s “Spring Song,” Rubenstein’s “Melody in F,” Schumann’s “Träumerei,” Tosti’s “Goodbye,” Weber’s “The Storm,” and several opera selections, including [the] “Sextette” from Donizetti’s Lucia di Lammermoor, the “Berceuse” from Godard’s Jocelyn, the “Barcarole” from Offenbach’s Tales of Hoffmann, the “Overture” and “Waltz” from Supp ’s The Poet and the Peasant, the “Triumphal March” from Verdi’s Aida, and the “Pilgrim’s Chorus” from Wagner’s Tannhäuser. Outside of traditional wedding and funeral marches by Mendelssohn, Wagner, and Chopin, this is very nearly the totality of the common repertory on which trade press columnists and other musical suggestion compilers felt they could depend.81

Altman notes that these works were chosen because of audiences’ familiarity with them. He writes: “the classical pieces most often used by early-twentieth-century piano teachers were pressed into service early in the teens theaters. Rubenstein’s ‘Melody in F,’ Schumann’s ‘Träumerei,’ and Massenet’s ‘Elegy’ were chosen not just because the musicians knew them well, but because they were well known to audiences[.]”82 There is a curious parallel between the practices of cue-sheet compilers of the 1910s and Theodore Thomas’s touring orchestra of the 1880s. Thomas, like the cue-sheet compilers, used the same well-known works to draw audiences into the concert halls. A significant difference is that Thomas used these familiar works hoping to pack the houses and then to elevate the musical tastes of the audience by exposing them to larger, more serious musical works.83 As the film industry expanded throughout the teens, there was a marked increase in the number of films, and each of them required some kind of musical accompaniment. Cue-sheet compilers, increasingly from a classical background, began seeking out a wider variety of art

81 Altman, 267. 82 Altman, 377. 83 Paul Luongo, “An Unlikely Cornerstone: The Role of Orchestral Transcriptions in the Success of the Thomas Orchestra” (PhD diss., The Florida State University, 2010), 36.

23 music to accompany the growing spate of films.84 By the end of the teens there was a significantly larger body of preexisting art music regularly used for filmic accompaniment. But there was more to art music’s filmic rise than simply a desire for culturally significant music. Altman points out that exhibitors and musicians (among many others) made conscious decisions to promote the use of instrumental art music in order to train audiences into being quiet consumers.85 For them, instrumental art music was unlikely to tempt the audience into singing along with the music (as was common practice during the nickelodeon period), and its use also had the desirable effect of appealing to a more upscale demographic while increasing the prestige of the theater.86 Once again, a variation on Thomas’ scheme is shown to be at work. But whereas Thomas was trying to educate audiences by exposing them to serious instrumental works after luring them into the houses with orchestrations of well-known amateur music, the theater orchestra conductors worked to attract cultured, wealthy audiences to the movies through music. Thomas was trying to elevate musical tastes of his audiences through music. The theater conductors were trying to elevate the status of their theater, and the medium of film, by attracting cultured, wealthy audiences with serious instrumental music. By the middle of the teens there was greater homogeneity among film industry practices. Standardized equipment, distribution, and exhibition and musical practices allowed the motion picture industry to achieve a level of stability and profitability that until then had been sorely lacking. With greater stability came greater confidence among investors, and soon the first large-scale picture houses began to open.

The Rise of the Theater Orchestra and the Blockbuster Film The opening of the 3,000+ seat Strand Theater in New York City in 1914 marked a major turning point in the film industry and in film music practices in particular. The size and opulence of the theater signaled an obvious change in the desired motion picture demographic, but it was the practices of the theater’s music director, Samuel L. “Roxy” Rothapfel (1882-1936), that had the largest impact on film music in the age of silent film.

84 Altman, 269. 85 Altman., 276. 86 Ibid., 246.

24 Rothapfel’s groundbreaking idea was to employ a large orchestra, both to accompany motion pictures and to perform a variety of musical entertainments throughout the course of an evening. “Large orchestra” was a relative term, however; the Strand’s initial orchestra numbered between sixteen and twenty musicians. But soon Rothapfel’s model would be adopted, and exponentially expanded, by movie palaces across the nation.87 At first considered a daring and possibly financially ruinous experiment, Rothapfel’s practice proved successful and eventually became the gold standard for the movie places. As May Johnson reported in 1920,

[Rothapfel] was the first to present motion pictures in conjunction with high class musical program. When the Strand management announced that it contemplated showing motion pictures to the musical accompaniment of a large orchestra with vocal and instrumental soloists between films, it was predicted that the project would be a dismal failure by theatrical experts who claimed to be in a position to know. The news of the Strand’s success quickly spread throughout the country, however, and in less than two years almost every city of any consequence had a large theater orchestra offering entertainments after the pattern created at the Strand in New York.88

It is difficult to imagine that Rothapfel’s grand musical experiment would have achieved such success and longevity had it not been for the major blockbuster films released that coincided with his musical innovations. The confluence of movie-palace construction, larger orchestral accompaniments, and an unprecedented spate of blockbuster films during 1915-1916 helped to cement the practice of art music within the silent film tradition. And of all the major films of the 1910s, none had as much influence upon filmic culture and practice as did D. W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation (1915). Griffith’s epic was shown nationwide to over three million people during its first year.89 To complement the grandeur and sheer length of the film (an astonishing twelve reels), an equally mammoth orchestral accompaniment was deemed necessary by Griffith. The film’s Los

87 Altman, 300. Altman notes that by 1916 the Rialto theater in New York employed an orchestra double the size of the Strand’s, and by 1920 the Capitol theater fielded an orchestra with over seventy concert-level musicians. Rothapfel was hired by each of these theaters to oversee their musical operations at the time of their openings. 88 May Johnson, “Light Opera, Musical Comedy, Picture Houses,” Musical Courier (April 8, 1920). 89 Altman, 294.

25 Angeles premiere in February of 1915 under the original title The Clansmen included a forty- piece orchestra, twelve-member chorus, and vocal soloists.90 The compiled score by Carli Elinor for the twenty-two-week Los Angeles run employed music by Mozart, Rossini, Suppé, Wagner, Bizet, Massenet, and Offenbach, in addition to Beethoven’s First Symphony and Schubert’s “Unfinished” Symphony.91 The film’s score by Joseph Carl Breil for the New York production comprised original music (“special music”), popular and folk tunes, and a significant quantity of preexisting art music. Breil’s score became attached to the film throughout its New York run (nearly a full year), as well as its numerous road-show exhibitions. So successful was Breil’s lavishly orchestrated score for The Birth of a Nation that advertisements took pains to assure the public that the local showings of the film would retain the unusually large orchestral forces.92 Moreover, the score proved to be so popular that conductors of local theater orchestras were being asked, years later, to perform it with other films.93 Largely heralded as a monument in film history, The Birth of a Nation must also be considered as having helped to create a template for standardized musical accompaniment. It is unlikely that any other film of the period reached as many spectators in so many parts of the nation. Moreover, the film’s score was clearly part of its commercial appeal and as such would likely have been reproduced more often and more faithfully than would the scores for other films of the period. As a result, the music Breil chose as accompaniment for The Birth of a Nation left an indelible mark on audiences of the time and was a model for other film composers/compilers of the period. Breil’s score made use of several works that were already common currency within film accompaniment practice: Grieg’s Peer Gynt Suite, Supp ’s Light Calvary Overture, Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture, Wagner’s Rienzi Overture, and Weber’s Freischütz overture. His additions to this repertory include Bellini’s Norma Overture, Beethoven’s Sixth Symphony (fourth movement), H rold’s Zampa Overture, Wagner’s “Ride of the Valkyries,” and the “Gloria” from a Mass previously attributed to Mozart as his Twelfth Mass in G Major.94

90 Ibid., 292. 91 Ibid., 293. 92 Altman., 294. 93 Ibid. 94 Martin Miller Marks, Music in the Silent Film: Contexts and Case Studies, 1895-1924 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 199-207.

26 The deployments of both art and popular music throughout The Birth of a Nation were carefully crafted. Art music was reserved for “relatively impersonal scenes,” whereas popular songs underscored “sentimental, touching, or introspective moments that develop or reveal the characters’ personality.”95 These prescribed roles for popular and art music would become standard industry practice throughout the remainder of silent film era.

The Expansion of the Art Music Repertory and its Dissemination By the end of the teens a number of theaters both in and outside of major population centers began to employ Rothapfel’s musical practices that had proved such a financial success. By 1922 roughly thirty percent of theaters nationwide employed orchestras (although very few were of a size to rival the New York palaces).96 Indeed, movie palaces were significant employers of concert musicians in metropolitan areas throughout the mid 1910s and early 1920s. In some cases the lure of the consistent work had a negative impact on local symphony orchestras. The San Francisco symphony orchestra was forced to “indefinitely postpone” its 1920 season because so many musicians were hired away by movie theaters.97 Some theater orchestras in major cities began to rival the size and talent of the established symphony orchestras. With rosters as large as 110 instrumentalists and now-luminary conductors such as Eugene Ormandy, the largest movie palace orchestras achieved a kind of cultural equivalence with the major orchestras.98 By the 1920s there had developed a standard program among the larger theaters, often mimicked by smaller venues, that provided ample opportunity for a wide variety of music. This standard program consisted of an overture, followed by a newsreel, a musical novelty, educational film or “scenic,” a live vocal solo, and a short, two-reel comedy.99 All this occurred before the feature presentation. Movie palaces with orchestras were apt to show off their resources by playing first-rate, “serious” music, and the practice of beginning an evening’s entertainment with an overture provided a ready-made vehicle for such displays. Of all the music contained in an evening’s

95 Altman, 315. 96 Ibid., 303. 97 Ibid., 302. 98 Ibid., 310. 99 Altman, 380.

27 entertainment, the overtures would be the best advertised. 100 Obviously an important audience draw, the overtures also played a key role in the expansion of the standard film-music repertory. Generally chosen for their variety and brevity, many of these works were drawn from the opera repertory. The additional repertory included orchestral works by Rossini, Suppé, Verdi, Puccini, Mendelssohn, Dvorák, Grieg, Liszt, Rimsky-Korsakov, Saint-Saens, and Tchaikovsky.101 Overtures eventually transferred from solely concert-style performances and became part of feature films’ accompaniment.102 By 1920 there is evidence that this was already standard practice. Edith Lang and George West’s Musical Accompaniment of Moving Pictures (1920), a manual for theater organist and pianists, lists twenty “standard” overtures.103 Tellingly, the authors indicate that “[m]ost of these overtures contain brilliant and lively passages which will fit scenes in the Wild West, hurries, chases, fights, and mob scenes, etc.; many of them also contain slow movements which will prove useful as love themes, etc.”104 The onset of the 1920s also saw an increase in foreign imports. Films from Germany and France were making their way into American theaters, and music directors and conductors responded by casting a wider stylistic net for their choice of accompaniments. Along with the overtures that were being co-opted as film accompaniment, these foreign and avant-garde films represent another significant expansion of cinematic art-music repertory. Two striking examples of this are the accompaniments chosen for German films by Ernst Lubitsch (1892-1947): The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920) and Deception, originally titled Anna Boleyn (1920). For The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari “Roxy” Rothapfel and Erno Rape chose decidedly modernist compositions. Included in the suggestions for the film were Richard Strauss’s Till Eulenspiegel, Debussy’s Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun, and works by Mussorgsky and Prokofiev. Additionally, avant-garde composers Leo Ornstein, Arnold Schoenberg, and Igor Stravinsky, whose music had never before been considered for film accompaniment, found their way into the film.105

100 Ibid. 101 Ibid., 310-11. Altman provides a fairly detailed list of the works by each composer that were commonly employed. 102 Ibid., 313. 103 Edith Lang and George West, Musical Accompaniment of Moving Pictures; A Practical Manual for Pianists and Organists and an Exposition of the Principles Underlying the Musical Interpretation of Moving Pictures (Boston: The Boston Music Co., 1920), 29. 104 Edith Lang and George West, 29. 105 Altman, 315.

28 Hugo Riesenfeld’s orchestra for Deception, a film set in sixteenth-century England, added a harpsichord, oboe di caccia, and viola d’amore in a novel bid for musical authenticity.106 Moreover, his compiled score drew upon music early music by composers such as Handel, Bach, Rameau, Vivaldi, Corelli, Purcell, Mattheson, Couperin, Scarlatti, Lully, and even Anne Boleyn herself via the use of her composition “O Death, Rock Me to Sleep.”107 None of the works in Deception (with the exception of Boleyn’s) existed during Boleyn’s lifetime. But here we can see the beginnings of Hollywood’s use of pre-Romantic styles as an indicator of the generically antiquarian. Under these circumstances, the evocation of “old,” the practice of employing music from outside the Romantic period was soon adopted for some American films.108 The resulting proliferation of art music performed regularly throughout America for middle-class audiences was impressive. And performances of art music by theater orchestras were by no means limited to urban areas. Altman notes that “[d]uring a single week in 1915 … Torpey’s Lorenz Orchestra in Bethlehem (Pa.) played compositions by Bizet, Godard, Grieg, Herbert, Jansen, Lehar, MacDowell, Mascagni, Mozart, Offenbach, Puccini, Rossini, Schubert, Schumann, Smetana, Supp , Thomas, and Tobani.”109 Theater directors were quick to tout the positive impact of their industry on the general public. In the introduction to his 1925 Encyclopedia of Music for Pictures Erno Rapeé, an influential arranger/conductor during the silent film era, credits the film industry with spreading orchestral, professional music making throughout the Unites States. “If you consider,” he writes,

that only ten years ago there were not more than a half-dozen symphony orchestras in this great country of over hundred million inhabitants and that it is just exactly ten years since the first Cinema palace DeLuxe opened its doors to the public it will not be hard to see the connection between the two.110

Moreover, Rapeé noted that, along with the spread of “quality” music, properly trained theater musicians were running out of town “fake music teachers who have ruined untold

106 Ibid. 107 Altman, 315. 108 Ibid., 317. 109 Ibid., 313. 110Erno Rapeé, Encyclopedia of Music for Pictures (New York: Belwin, 1925), 24.

29 promising talent.”111 It is clear that by the middle of the 1920s theater orchestras were responsible for bringing live art music to vast swaths of the general public. Indeed, attendance figures at the largest city theaters could each exceed 80,000 per week.112 Either as direct filmic accompaniment or as cinematic preamble, art music was forging an indissoluble association with cinema.

The End of an Era By the end of the 1920s the body of art music used for film accompaniment would begin to wear out its welcome with the film-going public. Carli Elinor, describing his score for D. W. Griffith’s 1918 epic Hearts of the World, humorously attested to the common use (and perhaps overuse) of particular composers’ music when he wrote that “compositions by the illustrious Rossinitchaikovskysuppegriegchopinwagner supplied the proper atmosphere for the remainder of my score.”113 Preexisting, autonomous art music is, by its very nature, resistant to thematic transformations. Unlike originally composed film music, where musicians were expected to vary themes blatantly to fit the mood or setting, the modification of art music was discouraged.114 This lack of flexibility, along with the common practice of repeating music several times per film, led to what Altman terms “thematic abuse.”115 George M. Beynon, as early as 1918, pointed out not so subtly the drawbacks of such a practice, when he wrote, “As the music continues, the poor little number is dragged in by the heels whenever Mary appears in the foreground, until your soul rebels and you hate that music forever. This innocent little musical piece that has caused you so much irritation is called the THEME.”116 As early as 1921 “Roxy” Rothapfel brought back The Birth of a Nation but now with new music chosen by Roxy and his assistants. Rothapfel defended his decision to remove not only the majority of Breil’s original score but also the entirety of its preexisting art music by claiming that since “[t]he movie going public has since then become familiar through the medium of the

111Rapeé, 24. 112 Ibid., 25. 113 Altman, 315. 114 Ibid., 376. 115 Altman, 315. 116 Ibid.

30 motion picture theater and popular opera with these operas and the stories of these works ... it was thought in better taste to utilize the airs which are contemporaneous with the period of history ….”117 Rothapfel, ever ahead of the industry curve, anticipated the general turn away from the orchestral warhorses in the late 1920s. Detractors applied the same criticism to art music in the 1920s that was leveled against popular tunes in the 1910s: the audience’s knowledge of the works’ original context would interfere with their film experience.118 Art music was not altogether expelled from the movie palaces in the late 1920s, but instead the repertory was expanded to include lesser-known accompaniments, a means of renewing the film music repertory.119 One stark example of how expansive this renewal could be is Erno Rape ’s Encyclopedia of Music for Pictures. Published in 1925, Rape ’s encyclopedia lists hundreds upon hundreds of pieces of art music for use in the cinema. By the end of the 1920s a gradual shift away from silent films toward “talkies” and sound films abbreviated any attempt to widen further the film repertory of art music. With the advent of standardized sound, movie studios exerted greater control over their products, reassigning the task of creating musical accompaniments from individual theaters to hired hands inside the studio walls. Studio orchestras eventually replaced the theater orchestras. And while a greater homogeneity among film music practices in the sound era served to entrench the narrative musical practices of silent films, there was a distinct turn away from the use of preexisting art music. That said, the footprint of the industry’s silent film era practices was nevertheless quite large. Preexisting art music had found a home outside the elite concert halls in the more egalitarian movie palaces, where a consistent, canonical repertory of art music had developed by the end of the silent film era. As a result, a much wider audience was exposed to a large but prescribed body of art music. Moreover, this art music was now laden with filmic, dramatic, and emotional associations that would prove essential to the development of a musical vocabulary for the original film scores that would become the industry standard for generations.

117 Ibid., 318-319. 118 Ibid., 318. 119 Altman, 319.

31 The Transition to Sound Early attempts at sound films were met with a mixture of amusement at the novelty and business skepticism by the major film studios. While there had been sound films that predated 1926’s Don Juan, generally considered a major breakthrough in sound films, these were one-of- a-kind novelties exhibited and promoted by independent inventors with widely divergent technologies. For the established film industry to make the enormous technological investment to retrofit hundreds (if not thousands) of theaters to exhibit an untested product, this was simply too great a risk. This industry-wide resistance to sounds films began to change after Warner Bros. contracted with AT&T’s Western Electric subsidiary Vitaphone in 1925.120 Oxymoronically, it was not actors’ recorded speech that first drew the interests of Max and Harry Warner to the “talkies,” but instead Vitaphone’s ability to synchronize music with images. According to Ron Hutchinson, Harry Warner, upon viewing a Vitaphone exhibition of a jazz band in 1925 exclaimed, “I myself would not go across the street to see or hear a talking picture. But music! That’s another story.”121 Initially, the incorporation of art music, firmly established during the silent film era, held strong within Vitaphone’s productions. The first exhibition of this technology, on April 6, 1926, in New York City, included films of musical performances: Wagner’s Tannhäuser Overture performed by the New York Philharmonic, Dvořák’s Humoresque by violinist Mischa Elman, the aria “Caro nome” from Verdi’s Rigoletto by soprano Marion Talley, a set of variations on a theme from Beethoven’s “Kreutzer Sonata” by Efrem Zimbalist, and “Vesti la giubba” from Leoncavallo’s Il Pagliacci by tenor Giovanni Martinelli.122 Only after this rather long musical introduction, one that maintained the established tradition of performing overtures prior to the feature film, was Don Juan shown to the public. The fact of the matter is, the first-ever “talkie” didn’t actually utter a single word. Only pre-recorded sound effects and an orchestral accompaniment sounded alongside Don Juan’s imagetrack.123 Less than two years after the premiere of Don Juan, the film industry had effectively and en masse made the switch from silent to sound films. On May 15, 1928, three of the leading

120 Wierzbicki, 91. 121 Ron Hutchinson, “The Vitaphone Project: Answering Harry Warner’s Questions: ‘Who the Hell Wants to Hear Actors Talk.’” Film History 14: 1 (2002), 40. 122 Weirzbicki, 91. 123 Ibid.

32 Hollywood studios contracted with AT&T’s subsidiaries for cameras, sound recording devices, and theatrical amplification systems that were already employed by Warner Bros. and Fox.124 The early sound period, roughly between 1928 and1933, was one of instability regarding film music practices. Ironically, the coming of sound films all but eliminated film music accompaniment in the traditional sense. Filmmakers instead focused upon the insertion of diegetic musical “numbers,” which provided a reason for music’s inclusion. Many of these works took the form of backstage musicals, where multiple musical numbers could be logically inserted into the narrative. Between 1929 and 1930 alone over 175 films were musicals.125 Where nondiegetic music did exist, it was generally relegated to the margins of the film, during the opening and closing credits.126 But by the close of this transitional period, the practice of supplying nondiegetic, or “background” music, began to reappear in a number of important films. It seems that at this critical period in film music practices there was a debate about whether originally composed or preexisting art music would be best suited to the task. Both sides made arguments advocating for what they saw to be most appropriate for nondiegetic music. A Los Angeles Times reporter in 1933 noted that,

Mountains of music, rivers of melody, massive tone effects, huge blocks of vibration dissolving into single-voiced melody which lingers in the memory and increases the sentiment and power of emotion, are used in the modern films. Masters of orchestral and vocal sounds, such as Wagner and Tchaikowsky, are now called upon to lend their aid from a bygone generation to clever musical directors of the Hollywood studios. The film scores blend these masters so cleverly and add such good composing of their own that the connecting links are never noticed.127

But not all were convinced that the mine of Romantic orchestral music would yield sound film gold. One of RHO’s executive producers, David O. Selznick, actively lobbied for originally composed music for films. According to legendary film composer Max Steiner, “... Selznick came to the conclusion that any music, whether classical or popular, that is known … is distracting.” More to the point, Steiner reported that “Selznick, who is extremely sensitive

124 Ibid., 105. 125 Ibid., 120. 126 Ibid., 119. 127 Weirzbicki, 129.

33 musically, also said he thought music should fit the precise action, mood and even words in a screen play, and obviously should be especially composed.”128 Composers Max Steiner, Alfred Newman, Erich Korngold, and Dimitri Tiomkin would for decades tilt the balance of power between original scores and preexisting art music as film accompaniments in favor of the former. At a time when any profitable innovation was quickly copied by the whole of the industry, Steiner and his contemporaries provided a successful model that would be emulated by other major Hollywood studios.129 Throughout the transition to sound films, film music practices underwent radical and frequent changes.130 The introduction of widely-adopted sound technologies was initially met with a flurry of experimental sound films.131 In what could be described as an industry overreaction, a second phase, when virtually no nondiegetic music at all was employed (but when musicals and “numbers” films ruled), immediately followed. Finally, as the practice became more common, originally composed, romantically- inspired symphonic music would reign supreme just as the film industry was on the cusp of its most influential and profitable periods in its history. By 1930 the silent film and its in-house musicians were quickly becoming things of the past. In an already dire economic atmosphere for theater musicians the loss of thousands of jobs could not have come at a worse time. But with theater overheads being drastically streamlined and with the tight studio control of production that sound films allowed, the film industry would be one of the rare economic success stories of the Great Depression. During a time of global financial disaster, the Hollywood film industry enjoyed its “Golden Age.”

128 Ibid. 129 Weirzbicki, 114. 130 Ibid. 131 Ibid.,128.

34 CHAPTER 3: HOLLYWOOD’S “GOLDEN AGE” AND THE CLASSICAL-STYLE FILM

The term “Golden Age” denotes a period in Hollywood film production, circa 1933-1960, when the primacy of the narrative elements of film was established and standardized. Building upon the cinematic/narrative conventions practiced during the silent and early sound eras, filmmakers soon settled upon a standardized mode of cinematic storytelling. According to André Bazin, “by 1938 or 1939, the talking film … had reached a level of classical perfection.”132 “Classical-style” is a term that was applied retroactively by film scholars active in the 1970s to describe cinematic storytelling where the technical devices primarily served to lay out a narrative in the clearest possible fashion.133 The goal of the classical-style film was for audiences to focus on the story and not, as was the case with early silent films, marvel at the technical achievement of cinematic technology.134 Every element of the classical-style film serves the narrative: scripts, screenplays, editing, cinematography, lighting, direction, and, of course, music. It is useful to understand that classical-style films are a class of texts produced by mainstream Hollywood during the Golden Age, the conventions of which, by and large, still govern narrative filmmaking and reception. Film music in the Golden Age is a specific type that functions to buttress and clarify the narrative within these films.135 An understanding of classical-style narrative film music is crucial to any analysis of music in modern film, since film music is largely perceived through the lens of classical-style film and is informed by its legacy. To surprise and affect an audience, directors knowingly violate film music’s conventions, and these violations are in and of themselves meaningful; they expand the power the medium. The principles of modern narrative film music are outlined and examined later in this chapter, but first an understanding of the development of classical-style narrative film music will contribute to a better understanding of this body of music.

132 Wierzbicki, 136. 133 David Bordwell, Janet Staiger, and Kristin Thompson, The Classical Hollywood Cinema: Film Style & Mode of Production to 1960 (New York: Routledge, 1985), 145. 134 Peter Larson, Film Music, trans. by John Irons (Reaktion: London, 2007), 86. 135 Larson, 86.

35 The Development of the Early Classical-Style Film Score During the early 1930s advances in audio-mixing technology made possible the practice of “underscoring.” Different from but often confused with the catch-all term “nondiegetic,” underscoring refers specifically to music that accompanies speech.136 Before 1931 the simultaneity of dialogue and music was nearly impossible and resulted in an overall poor audio quality, but by the following year sound technology advanced sufficiently to allow for underscoring. 137 This technological advancement also allowed for a vastly expanded placement of nondiegetic music, as well, which was until that time generally reserved for opening and end credits. As a result, both underscoring and nondiegetic music, that is music that emanated from outside the diegesis, soon became a staple of standard filmic practice. Music in the earliest sound films more or less mirrored the movie-palace model of accompaniment, featuring both standard concert-hall music as well the ubiquitous cue-sheet repertory. 138 But soon industry-wide economic consolidation produced a pronounced shift away from concert-hall- and cue-sheet music in favor of original film scores. Under the burgeoning studio-system mode of production, musical aspects of films were becoming centralized under (literally) one roof. Mervyn Cooke notes that by the mid 1930s “each of the major studios housed a permanent music department, with contracted composers, arrangers, orchestrators, copyists, librarians and music editors, plus a resident orchestra, all working under a senior music director.”139 This assembly-line style of musical production proved to be cost effective and allowed studios to avoid royalty payments for more recent, existing music by creating wholly owned music that was similar. As a result, studios were willing to experiment with original film scores as an economically sound and commercially viable alternative. Often not the individuated vision of a single composer but instead a collaborative effort among several composers, the early classical-style film score was a reflection of the industry’s assembly-line ideology. The pervasiveness of this mode of production is highlighted by the fact that the industry’s official prestige vehicle, the Academy of Motion Picture Art and Sciences,

136 Mervyn Cooke, A History of Film Music (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 76. 137 Wierzbicki, 137-8. 138 Wierzbicki, 140. 139 Cooke, 70.

36 awarded its annual Music Award for Scoring (the Oscar) to music departments instead of individual composers from 1934 until 1937.140 With the studios aiming for obvious, formulaic narratives, the age-old criticism that preexisting music was inherently distracting found a renewed voice among the denizens of the studios’ music departments. But while a jettisoning of preexisting music might eliminate distractions, either real or imagined, studio executives worried that audiences faced with wildly new or avant-garde music would find themselves at sea, struggling to interpret these new musical offerings within the context of film. In short, the music of contemporary art-music composers of the day might be an even greater distraction than preexisting music. Studios and their music departments therefore opted for original music that was like the well-worn Romantic repertoire instead of radically new art music. But before original films scores became de riguer, the market needed to weigh in as to what constituted successful film music. By the mid 1930s a few influential, commercially successful films paved the way for the full-scale adoption of the original film score. The successes of Max Steiner’s King Kong (1933), Of Human Bondage (1934), and The Informer (1935), Rudolph Kopp’s Cleopatra (1934), Alfred Newman and Hugo Friedhofer’s The Call of the Wild (1935), Franz Waxman’s The Bride of Frankenstein (1935), and Dimitri Tiomkin’s Lost Horizon (1937) signaled that the era of the film composer was underway in earnest by the mid 1930s.141 These mid-1930s successes proved that audiences accepted newly composed film music. By the late 1930s original film scores were commercially successful, aesthetically acceptable, and, perhaps most importantly, economically sensible.

Influences on the Classical Hollywood Film Score The Romantic orchestral idiom, specifically modeled on the music of Wagner and Strauss, has been the lingua franca of the cinema since the silent era. Primarily because it is tonal and familiar, with distinct and intelligible connotative values, it creates “a pool of conventions, of options, whose combination and recombination constitutes an easily recognized

140 Cooke, 72. 141 Wierzbicki, 146.

37 discursive field.”142 These conventions are more than stylistic accoutrements decorating narrative films; they are essential signifiers that help to drive the narrative. For Hollywood composers during the sound age, Romanticism’s orchestrations, harmonic vocabulary, and especially its established emotional connotations, continued to serve the classical-style narrative film.143 The musical language that accompanied films would have a significant effect upon the systemization of the narrative film. 144 By virtue of its familiarity and connotative accessibility, Romantic music was a perfect fit for character-centered narrative film.145 It aids the spectator’s identification with the character(s) while simultaneously elevating the character’s struggle to the realm of the universal. As Claudia Gorbman, in her influential book Unheard Melodies, puts it most succinctly, “[t]he appropriate music will elevate the story of a man to the story of Man.”146 One of Romanticism’s most influential figures had prefigured this lofty promise. His music and, more importantly, his ideology concerning music and drama would have a profound effect upon the development of the classical Hollywood film score.

The Wagner Debate If there is one name that dominates the discussions surrounding the influences on the classical Hollywood film score, it is that of Richard Wagner. Claims concerning film music’s indebtedness to Wagner were already appearing in trade journals at the advent of the medium. The Moving Picture World predicted in 1910 that “just as Wagner fitted his music to the emotions, expressed by words in his operas, so in the course of time, no doubt, the same thing will be done with regard to the moving pictures.”147 The following year the same journal

142 Gorbman, Unheard Melodies, 71. 143 Caryl Flinn, Strains of Utopia (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992), 33. Caryl Flinn suggests that far more than just music was drawn from the Romantics. She argues that Romantic ideology was so engrained within film-music composers that it prohibited their ability to profit from their works. By viewing themselves through the lens of Romanticism as transcendent figures who were above or otherwise uninvo lved with contracts, copyright control, and performance rights, she notes that film composers greatly undermined their financial, authorial, and employment standings in relation to that of the studios. 144 Gorbman, 70. 145 Flinn, 26. 146 Gorbman, Unheard Melodies, 81. 147 Stephen Bush, “The Music and the Picture,”The Moving Picture World, 16 April, 1910, p. 59.

38 proclaimed that “every man or woman in charge of the motion picture … is a disciple or follower of Richard Wagner.”148 When analyzing statements made by film critics during the 1930s, when they noted increased sophistication of narrative film music, Caryl Flinn argues that “it reveals … the growing impact of Wagnerian aesthetics on film.”149 Flinn considers Wagner’s foundational concepts of Gesamtkunstwerk (Total Art Work), unendliche Melodie (Unending Melody), and Leitmotiv as central to the style and function of the classical Hollywood film score.150 The Gesamtkunstwerk concept is almost self-evident in sound film; the uniting of dialogue, drama, dance, emotion, and mood form the basis of filmic narrative. Unendliche Melodie, as it relates to film, has roots in the era of the silent picture, when music was played from beginning to end in order to drown out the noise of the projector, the audience, and/or the environment. But this practice continued to be implemented during the early days of the sound film, even when the need for masking, aural wallpaper, no longer existed. Max Steiner’s so-called saturation, where music is played throughout the entirety of the film, is an example of Hollywood’s appropriation of that particular Wagnerian aesthetic.151 Perhaps the most contentious debate surrounds the use of the term “leitmotiv” as employed in film music. Claudia Gorbman, while crediting film music’s liberal use of themes as belonging to the intellectual tradition of the leitmotiv, is more cautious with her assessment of fidelity to the practice. She notes that “in many cases, the theme’s designation is so diffused that to call it leitmotif contradicts Wagner’s intention.”152 In fact, Gorbman is careful not to use the term leitmotiv in the way that Flinn and other film-music scholars have; if one seeks “leitmotiv” in her the index, readers are directed to “See Themes.”153 James Wierzbicki carefully differentiates the purely Wagnerian application of leitmotiv from cinema’s themes, and laments what he feels has become a sloppy interchangeablity. He writes that Bordwell, et al., Gorbman, Flinn, and Kathryn Kalinak “do not question what was clearly a misuse of the German term …” and that “they write as though ‘film-score theme’ and

148 Stephen Bush, “Giving Musical Expression to the Drama,” The Moving Picture World, 12 August, 1911, p. 354. 149 Flinn, 17. 150 Flinn., 17-18. 151 Ibid., 16. 152 Gorbman, 29. 153 Ibid., 188.

39 ‘leitmotiv’ were synonyms.”154 He spells out his differentiation by noting that “Wagner’s technique (which involved fragmentary motifs capable of being not just developed but also intermixed) differs substantially from the basic Hollywood approach (which involved tune-like musical ideas that were for the most part simply reiterated whenever their associated filmic entities entered the narrative).”155 The dust up over terminology is best settled by indentifying it for what it really is: reminiscence motive. In fact, the description of filmic leitmotiv is conspicuously similar, and Bordwell, et al., note that

The Hollywood score, like the classical visual style, seldom includes overt recollections or far-flung anticipations of the action. The music confines itself to a moment-by-moment heightening of the story. Slight anticipations are permitted, but recollections of previous musical material must be motivated by a repetition of situation or character memory.156

The above scholarly debate shows the degree to which devotees of film music give credence to the notion of its indebtedness to Wagner. Whether or not film composers achieved Wagner’s grand synthesis of music and drama is a topic for an altogether different project. What is ultimately more significant is that composers of narrative film music found in Wagner’s work both a stylistic and, perhaps more importantly, a theoretical model.157

Principles of the Classical Hollywood Film Score Around the same time that narrative films’ duration, editing, cinematography, and narrative structure (among other aspects) settled into predictable schemes, musical practices also began to adhere to certain conventions. The most often cited list of these musical conventions is found in Claudia Gorbman’s Unheard Melodies (1987), an influential book concerning narrative film music and is as follows:

154 Wierzbicki, 144. 155 Ibid. 156 Bordwell, et al., 35. 157 Flinn, 17.

40 I. Invisibility: the technical apparatus of nondiegetic music must not be visible. II. “Inaudibility”: Music in not meant to be heard consciously. As such it should subordinate itself to dialogue, to visuals – i.e., to the primary vehicles of the narrative. III. Signifier of Emotion: Soundtrack music may set specific moods and emphasize particular emotions suggested in the narrative (cf. #IV), but first and foremost, it is a signifier of emotion. IV. Narrative Cueing: -referential/narrative: music gives referential and narrative cues, e.g., indicating point of view, supplying formal demarcations, and establishing setting and character. -connotative: music “interprets” and “illustrates” narrative events. V. Continuity: music provides formal and rhythmic continuity –between shots, in transitions between scenes, by filling “gaps.” VI. Unity: via repetition and variation of musical material and instrumentation, music aids in the construction of formal and narrative unity. VII. A given film score may violate any of the principles above, providing the violation is at the service of the other principles.158

Invisibility The first of Gorbman’s seven principles seems almost too obvious to be worth mentioning, but it points to a convention mirrored in the technical aspects of narrative filmmaking. The narrative film must seem natural, as if there is no technical apparatus whatsoever. This technique is used, paradoxically perhaps, to achieve a certain verisimilitude audiences have come to expect from their filmic fantasies. One must not see the camera, lighting equipment, microphones, or any of the myriad technical apparatuses that make film possible, in order to achieve that perfect illusion central to classical-style narrative film. It is important to note that this principle refers mainly to nondiegetic music, as diegetic instances of music are governed quite differently than narrative, nondiegetic music. The invisibility of technical apparatus that Gorbman delineates is so taken for granted that violations of this principle occasionally make for memorable gags in slapstick comedies.

158 Gorbman, 73.

41 For instance, in Mel Brooks’s High Anxiety (1978), a cliché dramatic orchestral stinger punctuates a point of pseudo-drama within the movie. An instant later, the audience sees the Los Angeles Symphony Orchestra, stuffed into a bus that crosses the background of the framing shot, diegetically performing the stinger. The gag, repeated throughout the film, clearly plays upon audiences’ notions of this cinematic convention.

Inaudibility Gorbman’s principle of “inaudibility” is key to understanding the psychological role of nondiegetic narrative film music. While film music is never inaudible, this principle points to the convention that film music’s presence must never compete with or supersede the dramatic elements of the film narrative. 159 This principle was already well established by the early sound era. As the Soviet composer and musicologist Leonid Sabaneev wrote in his 1935 publication Music for the Films: A Handbook for Composers and Conductors,

In general, music should understand that in cinema it should nearly always remain in the background: it is, so to speak, a tonal figuration, the “left hand” of the melody on the screen, and it is a bad business when this left hand begins to creep into the foreground and obscure the melody.160

Sabaneev’s prescription for musical subordination, and what Gorbman calls inaudibility, is generally achieved by adherence to a three basic strategies: 1) musical form should be determined by narrative form, 2) music should not interfere with speech, and 3) the mood of the music should match the mood of the scene. 161 The principle of inaudibility, specifically the violation of it, is essential to the perception of music as ironic within a cinematic context. For music to be read ironically it must in some way be conspicuous; it must draw the attention of the perceiver in a way that is unlike the subordinated classical-style film score. Preexisting music holds special potential to violate the inaudibility principle. First, the musical form is clearly not determined by the narrative form. Secondly, it may indeed “drown

159 Gorbman, 76. 160 Gorbman, Unheard Melodies, 76; Wierzbicki, Film Music: A History, 141. 161 Gorbman, 76-78.

42 out the voice,” by conflicting with the pitch range of the voices on the soundtrack.162 Arguably, violations of these first two strategies may be a bit too subtle to draw the attention of the viewer. But flagrant transgressions of the classical-style convention that music should match the mood of the narrative can elicit a strong sense of the ironic.

Signifier of Emotion Music’s role in eliciting emotion in cinema is largely taken for granted. Anyone who has ever left the television room and hears the swelling sound of an orchestra knows from afar that something important must be occurring. It is a vital part of how we connect with the characters in the story and it reinforces the emotional content of the narrative. Music does not simply mirror the characters’ emotions but instead signifies the true situation or emotional state behind the surface of the narrative. Music brings a subjective truth that makes human the objective, on- screen image track.163 Film music may generate a sense of irony when it is conspicuously detached from the mood of filmic narrative. Gorbman calls these kinds of instances “[c]ounterexamples –music inappropriate to the mood or pace – [that] are usually comedic or self-reflexively modernist.”164 This type of music, termed “anempathetic,” refers specifically to music that differs strongly from the typical narrative film music in that it does not reflect the emotional state of the characters or their actions. According to French film theorist and composer Michel Chion, anempathetic music shows “an ostensible indifference [to the mood of the narrative] by following its own dauntless and mechanical course.” 165 By violating audience expectations, music can evoke a strong sense of irony when paired with an image track indifferent to, or in opposition with, commonly accepted emotional connotations.

Narrative Cueing Gorbman’s fourth principle divides into two distinct categories: “referential/narrative” and “connotative.” The first of these identifies basic contextual elements within a narrative such

162 Gorbman, 78. Gorbman cites Laurence Rosenthal’s advice to other composers and soundmen to “[keep] the orchestra well away from the pitch-range of the speaker – low instruments against high voices, and vice versa.” 163 Ibid., 79. 164 Ibid., 78. 165 Gorbman, 78.

43 as location, time, and character archetypes. 166 The second is of greater interest to this investigation, and will factor into nearly all of the analyses of individual instances of ironically deployed preexisting music. Connotative cuing infuses the image and the narrative with meaning; it aids the spectator in deciphering the true nature of the characters’ values.167 Music has been permeated by social meanings since long before sound film. Instruments (tone colors), rhythms, harmonies, melodies, textures, dynamics, and forms have formed an understandable connotative language within Western culture for centuries.168 Film music composers and directors have been exploiting this fact since the inception of the medium. For instance, a polished, expensively-attired man walking through the halls of an elaborately decorated office suite would likely lead an audience to believe this character was raised near the seats of money, influence, and power. But if the music that accompanies such a scene is that of southern blues played on a steel guitar, it might tell us something vastly different about this man’s personality, geographic background, or his values than could the image track alone.

Continuity and Unity With the fifth and sixth principles, Gorbman delineates film music’s ability to smooth otherwise jarring transitions within the narrative as well as to create unity by use of thematic repetition. The timing of entrances, volume control, and exits of music in film are coded signifiers of transitions, and we as audiences generally accept this despite whatever visual editing techniques are employed. Montage sequences are almost inevitably accompanied by music, and music’s continuity serves to smooth out any harsh cutting of the visual track.169 Conversely, if music is cut too precisely with the scene it may emphasize the inherent disjointedness of the editing process.170

166 Ibid., 83. 167 Ibid., 84. 168 Ibid., 85. 169 Gorbman, 89. 170 Ibid., 90.

44 Breaking the Rules Gorbman’s final principle notes that film music may “break the rules” in the service of any of the other principles. This very “breaking of the rules” is essential to a perception of ironically deployed music, preexisting or otherwise. Ironically deployed music does not function to serve one of the other six principles outlined by Gorbman. Instead, this music deliberately steps outside the classical narrative strictures and invites the audience to engage at perceptual levels that are outside the reach of the typical classical-style Hollywood film. But that is not to say that this music ignores these principles; quite the contrary. These conventions are so well- rooted within the film-going culture, that an explicit violation of any of these will be enough to indicate to the perceptive audience member that there is more here than meets the eye. Violations invite the viewer to engage in the process outlined in Chapter 1 whereby they must make a decision as to whether the author (director) is somehow woefully incompetent or is aiming, through irony, at a deeper level of engagement with his or her audience.

45 CHATPER 4: ART MUSIC IN FILM DURING THE SOUND ERA

The practice of using preexisting art music in films did not end with the coming of sound technology. In fact, this repertory continued to be employed in much the same way as it had been during the silent film era, with the same well-worn pieces being pressed into service again and again. What did begin to change, however, was the perception among film makers and composers that the classics were artistically, or even morally, acceptable filmic accompaniments. The first wave of criticism concerning the use of preexisting art music in films came, not surprisingly, from film composers themselves. In Composing for the Films (1947) Hanns Eisler (with Theodore Adorno) argued that, in the world of film music, “[o]ne of the worst practices is the incessant use of a limited number of worn-out musical pieces that are associated with the given screen situations by reason of their actual or traditional titles.”171 They were pointing to a perceived overuse of orchestral war-horses that had become pervasive film accompaniments: Rossini’s William Tell Overture, Wagner’s “Bridal Chorus” from Lohengrin, Schubert’s “Unfinished” Symphony, and the like.172 But Eisler and Adorno leave some room for specific uses of preexisting art music, when they concede that it “can have a certain charm when, as in animated cartoons, it serves to stress the absurdity of something impossible, for instance, Pluto galloping over the ice to the ride of the Walkyries.”173 By noting specifically the use of art music to accompany absurdities, they were condoning ironic deployments of art music. They also swiped at film composers (likely those in direct competition with Eisler) when they condescendingly stated that “it must be acknowledged that childlike faith in the eternal symbolic force of certain classical wedding or funeral marches occasionally has a redeeming aspect, when these are compared with original scores manufactured to order.”174 There is a clear, two-fold reasoning behind Eisler’s and Adorno’s criticisms. First, it would be advantageous for any film composer to discredit the use of music that was not originally composed for the screen. More preexisting music means less work, and this trajectory eventually leads a film composer to unemployment and oblivion. Eisler was clearly writing with

171 Hanns Eisler and Theodore Adorno, Composing for the Films, (Books for Library Press: Freeport, NY: 1947), 15. 172 Ibid. 173 Ibid., 17. 174 Eisler and Adorno, 16.

46 an agenda, but that is not to say that his criticisms are disingenuous. Their view concerning art music in film had, by the late 1940s, become common currency among filmmakers and, especially, composers. The familiar complaint that art music distracted from the drama was trotted out again by the new generation of composers. Composer Ernest Gold took the more traditional view that classical music “… interferes. If you know the music, it draws more attention to itself than it should …”175 British film historian and preservationist John Huntley, writing in a book published the same year as Eisler and Adorno’s critique, echoed Gold’s caution concerning unwanted associations, when he wrote that:

The associations which individual members of the audience may have in relation to a certain piece of well-known music are quite beyond the control of the director of a film in which it is used; indeed it may produce an effect on the individual entirely different to the one he wants, or it will almost certainly produce a distraction (which may occur at a vital moment in the plot and spoil the whole effect of the film), because of these private reminiscences which are evoked by the music.176

Max Steiner, on the other hand, claimed that art music’s unfamiliarity would in some way inhibit the full force of the dramatic narrative, and noted that “while the American people are more musically minded than any other nation in the world, they are still not entirely familiar with all the old and new masters’ works and would thereby be prone to ‘guessing’ and distraction.”177 It seems that art music, whether familiar or not, was bound to interfere and was therefore undesirable. The notion that audiences had forged associations with music and that these would somehow obstruct the narrative was as old as the medium itself. But the criticisms of the 1940s and 1950s went beyond suspicions about narrative interference and unwanted association. They also came replete with moral overtones. Max Winkler, who made his fortune compiling cue sheets containing suggestions for preexisting music to accompany silent films, was one of the first to recant publicly his own actions concerning the use of art music for films. Writing about his efforts to fulfill the

175 Flinn, Strains of Utopia, 37. 176 Dean Duncan, Charms that Soothe: Classical Music and the Narrative Film (New York: Fordham University Press, 2003), 17. 177 Flinn, Strains of Utopia, 36-37.

47 staggering demand for cue sheet music, he used conspicuously moralistic prose to describe his work. The following oft-cited quote from his 1951 article “The Origins of Film Music” illustrates that Winkler, by this time at least, was well aware that the industry had undergone a paradigm shift concerning the use of art music:

In desperation we turned to crime. We began to dismember the great masters. We began to murder the works of Beethoven, Mozart, Grieg, J.S. Bach, Verdi, Bizet, Tchaikovsky, and Wagner – everything that wasn’t protected by copyright from our pilfering. The immortal chorales of J. S. Bach became an “Adagio Lamentoso for sad scenes.” Extracts from great symphonies and operas were hacked down to emerge again as “Sinister Misterioso” by Beethoven, or “Weird Moderato” by Tchaikovsky. Wagner’s and Mendelssohn’s wedding marches were used for marriages, fights between husbands and wives, and divorce scenes: we just had them played out of tune, a treatment known in the professions as “souring up the aisles.” ... I took shame and awe at the printed copies of these mutilated masterpieces. I hope this belated confession will grant me forgiveness for what I have done.178

This hyperbolic prose (note the words crime, dismember, murder, mutilate) points to both Winkler’s flair for the dramatic and a pronounced ideological shift among those involved with the creation and implementation of film music during the 1940s and 1950s. This type of criticism was more in line with that being espoused from the “elite” worlds of classical music and the Academy. For instance, the 1954 edition of Grove’s Dictionary of Music and Musicians praises film music’s role within society on the one hand, while landing a hard slap in the face with the other when it says that “[t]he silent film thus made millions of people acquainted with classical music, even if in a diluted and degraded form.”179 The point is clear: musical performances in the service of films – even great, canonical music – are of lesser value than are traditional concert performances or recordings of the same music. The conditions that surrounded this marked increase in film-music criticism likely had to do with a general crisis consuming the film industry in post-World War II America. During the

178 Max Winkler, The Origins of Film Music, http://www.tagg.org/teaching/mmi/stumfilmarts1.pdf. Accessed July 9, 2010. See also A Penny from Heaven, (New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1951), 175. 179 Ernest Irving, “History.” In “Film Music,” Grove’s Dictionary of Music and Musicians, 3: 93-8 (London: Macmillan, 1954).

48 period of the First World War and throughout even the Great Depression, Hollywood enjoyed massive box office returns. But the economic and social landscape underwent a significant realignment following World War II. Perhaps the most potent blow to the economic dominance of the studio system was the 1948 Supreme Court decision, known as “The Paramount Case,” that broke the major studios’ longstanding monopoly over distribution and exhibition.180 Additionally, the realities of television (7.3 million sets were sold in 1950), the baby boom (which kept potential filmgoers closer to their children and, by extension, their homes), a weak overseas market, and the stifling, moralistic atmosphere of the Red Scare that greatly impeded Hollywood’s creativity.181 The confluence of these realities conspired to limit significantly Hollywood’s financial stability, cultural import, and its reign as the uncontested international entertainment. Throughout the 1950s and 1960s Hollywood insiders had noticed that low-budget but psychologically rich European films were garnering a growing and loyal American audience.182 With box office receipts significantly lower in the post-war years, some major studios sought to recoup audience share through emulating these low-cost, innovative products. As a result, some filmmakers were freed from the excessively obvious, classical-style products to create films informed by alternative aesthetics. The aesthetic value system that informed these European films pointed the way for American filmmakers. Throughout the 1950s in France, a distinct school of criticism took shape that emphasized the role of the director as the driving artistic force behind the film. Auteurism and auteur theory were imported to America in the early 1960s and were quickly (and forcefully) subscribed to by some influential film journalists and academics.183 The conception of film as the work of an individual (instead of a collaborative effort by technicians) made it possible for critics and the public to view auteur films as different in kind from classical-style filmic products. Different kinds of films naturally called for different conventions, and those within Hollywood who chose to embark on new musical paths co-opted the European aesthetic of using music which, instead of conforming with the on-screen action, actively played against it.184

180 United States v. Paramount Pictures, Inc., 334 U.S. 131 (1948) 181 Wierzbicki, 160-2. 182 Ibid., 170. 183 Shyon Baumann, Hollywood Highbrow: From Entertainment to Art (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007), 82. 184 Wierzbicki, 169.

49 Some influential European directors, to whom their American counterparts turned to for inspiration, had already begun to use preexisting music in enigmatic and iconoclastic ways. Federico Fellini, Luchino Visconti, and Michelangelo Antonioni were just a few important Italian directors whose work during the 1960s paved the way for interesting and ironic uses of preexisting music in films.185 Before long, American films would be employing similar musical approaches. The watershed moment relating to the use of preexisting art music came, rather unexpectedly, in 1968 with the release of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. Not since the silent era had a big-budget, blockbuster film been produced where the entirety of the score was drawn from preexisting art music. Moreover, this was entirely unplanned. Prior to the film’s release, Kubrick discarded a nearly-complete original score by famed composer Alex North. In place of the composed score, Kubrick decided to keep many of the classical “temp tracks,” musical stand-ins used during the film’s production. The borrowed music in 2001 would become one of the film’s defining features, largely due to a number of novel narrative and presentational aspects. First, a good deal of the film (or even the entirety of it, depending on one’s exposure to twentieth-century music) laid bare an obvious anachronism. The music is drawn entirely from the late- nineteenth century through the mid-twentieth century, while the narrative is set either in the prehistoric past or the distant future. Additionally, the music is conspicuously present or, as industry insiders call it, “in the open.” At no point in the film is the music employed as underscore, where it would have to compete with dialogue for the audience’s attention. Instead the music occupies its own exclusive auditory space, where it is elevated to the conceptual level of the image track, if not superseding it. The combination of “in the open,” eminently familiar, Victorian Richard Strauss and Johann Strauss, Jr. (Thus Spoke Zarathustra and On the Beautiful Blue Danube) presented alongside scenes of the primordial past or the space-age future cause the perceiver to notice the music consciously. Instead of passively accepting the musical accompaniment, the perceiver must actively deal with its presence and resolve the obvious chronological, archetypal, and stylistic incongruities with the image track. By foregrounding these obvious incongruities, Kubrick allowed for an ironic reading of the music. Here preexisting music moves beyond the soundtrack, as traditionally delineated, and

185 Ibid., 197.

50 into the realm of active participant within the filmic narrative. The music’s cultural associations, in particular those attached to the better-known works, are toyed with. They are reinforced, opposed, juxtaposed, altered, and at times forever transformed by their participation within the film. Perhaps the best-known example of this kind of alteration via irony comes from Kubrick’s use of Johann Strauss’ On the Beautiful Blue Danube in 2001. Unimpressed by Alex North’s score for the space station docking sequence, Kubrick spent hours with a portable projector, turntable, and his sizable personal record collection in an attempt to find just the right piece for the scene. After an all-night dubbing experiment, Kubrick played the Strauss waltz with the scene for a few trusted friends and, according to anecdotal evidence, all were remarkably pleased with how well the Strauss worked.186 Kubrick, well aware that the work was one of the most famous pieces in the entire Western cannon, remarked that he would be thought of as either “a genius or an idiot” for incorporating it into his futuristic, sci-fi blockbuster.187 The gamble eventually paid off, although neither immediately nor universally. Hollywood film composer Jerry Goldsmith went so far as to complain that “2001:[A Space Odyssey] was ruined by Kubrick’s choice of music.”188 Irwin Bazelon mentioned specifically the Strauss waltz as a kind of Muzak and that he felt that 2001’s “nineteenth-century splashes of musical sentiment … reduce[d] its emotional impact to that of romantic drama.”189 But while the proscription against the use of art music was echoed by many within the film-criticism community, for some forward-thinking insiders found that the film overcame any distracting connotations.190 As film composer John Williams noted,

It’s largely cultural association. But what I think Kubrick has shown so wonderfully well is that the associations can be dispelled. Take a thing like the Strauss waltz in 2001. The whole thing about a waltz is grace, and you can see that the orchestra can achieve this. Kubrick takes what is the essence of courtly grace, the waltz, and uses it to accompany these lumbering but weightless giants out in space during their kind of sexual coupling. And even

186 Paul A. Merkley, FRSC. “‘Stanley Hates This But I Like It!’:North vs. Kubrick on the Music for 2001: A Space Odyssey,” The Journal of Film Music (2:1, Fall 2007), 25. 187 Ibid. 188 Ibid. 189 Irwin Bazelon. Knowing the Score: Notes on Film Music (New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold Co., 1975), 111. 190 Merkley, 25.

51 though the Strauss waltz [is] in my mind … it’s the Danube, it’s Viennese awful chocolate cakes and ghastly Viennese coffee… But Kubrick says to us, “Watch the film for five seconds and forget those associations, and it will stop being nineteenth-century Vienna,” and in the hands of Von Karajan the music becomes a work of art that says “look,” that says “air,” that says “float,” in beautiful orchestral terms, and if you go with this film, the film helps dispel all of these associations, and we’re into a new audio- visual world.191

The critical tide would turn and eventually rest in favor of Kubrick’s musical choices for 2001, but not before rekindling the heated debate concerning the role of art music in films. Bazelon referred to art music in films as “offensive,” as nothing more than emotional saccharine.192 Roy Prendergast said that art music’s use in film represents “the antithesis of film music”193 while Ernst Lindgren asserted more generally that “the use of classical music for sound films is entirely to be deplored.”194 Much of this criticism is charged with the same moralistic and emotional prose as Max Winkler’s mea culpa concerning his “criminal” activity. But there is a notable difference between Winkler’s confession and the criticism coming from those writing in the 1970s. Winkler was “ashamed” of his actions because of what his publishing company did to music, whereas Bazelon, Prendergast, Lindgren, and Goldsmith take issue with art music’s diminishment of films.195 But things had changed with respect to the composer’s place in the creation of filmic products. Auteur theory and practice demanded that musical choices rest largely in the hands of directors and not composers. As a result, composers had far less influence over what kinds of music would be included in films and how it would be deployed. The box-office success of 2001

191 Bazelon, Knowing the Score (Van Nortrand Reinhold Company: New York, 1975), 2000. Transcript of Bazelon interview with Williams. 192 Duncan, 18. 193 Duncan, 17. 194 Ibid. 195 This rhetorical shift speaks to sea change in the public’s conception of the medium. In Hollywood Highbrow (2007) Shyon Baumann makes the case that during the 1960s there was a fundamental shift in the understanding of film as an art form rather than a mere entertainment. According to Baumann, there were three main factors that precipitated this change in perception: 1) changes in American society, 2) changes from within Hollywood that mimicked other art worlds, and 3) a creation of a common discourse of film that allowed for discussion of film as art. Baumann’s book provides a detailed examination of the causes and trajectory of this cultural paradigm shift concerning film as art.

52 (it was the top grossing film of 1968) did little to affect a change in this new creative hierarchy between composer and director. Kubrick’s effort and aesthetic philosophy were ripe to be copied by directors working for other major studios in Hollywood. And with this, gone were the sweeping proscriptions against preexisting art music as filmic accompaniment. This was especially so after Kubrick’s (in)famously ironic use of Beethoven, Rossini, and Purcell in A Clockwork Orange in 1971, only three years after his 2001 broke down the barriers surrounding preexisting art music in films. Kubrick’s masterpiece about human nature, choice, and morality, famously transferred to the screen author Anthony Burgess’s characterization of a guiltless, violent misanthrope who was also a devotee of Beethoven’s music, particularly his Ninth Symphony. The conspicuous indifference between scenes of “the old ultraviolence” and Beethoven’s sacralized symphony extolling the virtues of the brotherhood of man forced viewers to contend with irony in a way that perhaps no other film until that time had. In the film’s most famous scene, the anti-hero, Alex, is strapped to a chair and forced to watch scenes of horrible violence as part of an experimental aversion therapy that will make him physically ill when he sees or contemplates violence. The soundtrack to the therapy, called the Ludovico treatment (an obvious allusion to the composer’s name), is the final movement of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. The result is Alex’s revulsion to the Ninth Symphony as a kind of collateral damage from his treatment. The use of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony in such starkly ironic fashion opens many possible contextual layers that have been the subject of debate since the film’s debut in 1971. Most prominent is the irony of Beethoven’s Ode to Joy as the exaltation the unity of mankind, set against the scenes of violence. A deeper reading questions whether the unity of mankind is at all possible, given the nature of man. Alex is forced to be nonviolent, which is not the same as his becoming moral, since morality demands choice. This raises the question of whether a world where we are not free to choose evil is really a world where the utopian ideal of the brotherhood of man is achieved. Would the elimination of our ability to be violent also eliminate our ability to perceive transcendent beauty, in the same way that Alex is robbed of both of these abilities? Kubrick, following Burgess, offers no easy answers, but the ironic deployment of Beethoven’s music in the film raised questions that were, and still are, impossible to ignore. Perhaps the most effective use of ironically deployed art music in film, Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange remains a monument to the possibilities of music’s role within film narrative.

53 By the time A Clockwork Orange was released, film historians had already begun to notice a change in film music that began in the late 1950s. Gerald Mast, in his A Short History of the Movies (1971) noted, “[g]one is the old principle of studio scoring – to underscore a scene with music that increases the action’s emotional impact without making the viewer aware of the music’s existence. In new films there is little of this kind of background music.”196 In short, by the early 1970s the rules and conventions for music in films had changed radically.

196 Wierzbicki, 194.

CHAPTER 5: A BRIEF OVERVIEW OF IRONICALLY DEPLOYED ART MUSIC IN FILMS

Introduction The screen has gone dark, the trailers having ended just a short time ago followed by the full dimming of the theater lights. A few viewers in the hall get in their last whispers or place their crunching bags of popcorn in the most strategic, soundlessly accessible locations near their chairs. Soon after, there is total silence. In that silence, the first image of the feature appears: “Magnolia Pictures.” The plain image fades away and the blackness returns. A sudden explosion of grey slices the black rectangle in half and then slowly opens to engulf the screen and reads, “Left Turn Productions.” This, too, gradually fades to black; silent still. Finally, in the darkness, there is sound. Muted strings performing arpeggios over a pizzicato bass establish a thoroughly Romantic chord progression, and a lithe flute beautifully sounds a bel-canto style melody. The dark screen, now accompanied by music, shows the usual pre-narrative information – director, producer, production company, and finally the title of the film – intermittently fading to black. As the music arrives at a half cadence, a disembodied narrator speaks in the darkness: “It takes approximately five hundred pounds to crush a human skull, but the human emotion is a much more delicate thing.” When the music begins anew on the tonic, the first images of the diegesis slowly appear on the screen: in slow motion, a young woman is screaming violently, directly at the camera. When the image fully illuminates, a mellifluous soprano begins to sing. Bellini’s “Casta Diva” from Norma elegantly sings out over the image of the furious, emotionally untethered woman. After the aria’s gorgeous opening phrase, the narrator fills us in on the situation: this is Susie, the narrator’s first real girlfriend, and he’s ending the relationship. As the opening scene of Cashback (2006; dir. Sean Ellis) unfolds, the audio track is limited to Bellini’s music and the narrator, both calm and unaffected, beautiful in their own way. But the image track is markedly different. The slow motion captures every twisted snarl, every droplet of flying spittle, and exaggerates the features of Susie’s distorted countenance (See Figure 5.1).

Figure 5.1: Screenshot from Cashback (2005; dir., Sean Ellis). Screaming girl accompanied by “Casta Diva.”

As audience members, we are immediately struck by the incongruity between the image- and soundtracks. This incongruity occasions an internal dialectic, whereby we must wrestle with the possible meanings of such obvious and staged inappropriateness. We contemplate the conventions of filmic narrative and specifically music’s role within them, and we expect that this film will stray from them. This ironic use of “Casta Diva” sets the hermeneutic tone for the film: It will be different from most; it will challenge the viewer in some ways, and, most importantly, it will require that the viewer is active in interpreting the diegesis instead of passively accepting what is presented. This call to active engagement allows filmmakers to communicate subtle but important contextual layers within filmic narratives. This chapter will present examples of ironically deployed preexisting art music in a number of films. Each illustration will demonstrate how music instantiates the four-part process of ironic dissembling – 1) rejection of literal meaning, 2) consideration of alternatives, 3) decision upon new, “true” meaning and, 4) decision upon filmmakers’ unspoken points – and then posit interpretations for each instance. These deeper contextual layers – the new, “true” meanings and the filmmakers’ points –in each of these examples are generally limited to the world of the film itself, the topic of the film, and/or the characters in the film. This chapter will show how ironically deployed music affects our psychical conceptions of the topics and/or characters in these films and how this affects our identification with them, thus affecting the overall impact of the film.

Analysis of Preexisting Art Music in Films “When you love someone, you’ve gotta trust them. There’s no other way. You’ve gotta give them the key to everything that’s yours. Otherwise, what’s the point? And for a while, that’s the kind of love I thought I had.” So says Sam Rothstein’s (Robert De Niro) disembodied voice as we view him exit a posh restaurant and walk toward his early-1980s Cadillac. Sam opens the door, sits down in the driver’s seat, and turns the ignition. The car explodes, ferociously. Suddenly and completely, the screen is filled with flames, as J. S. Bach’s “Wie setzen uns mit Tränen nieder,” the final chorus from his St. Matthew Passion (BWV 244), erupts from the previously nonexistent soundtrack. Casino (1995; dir. Martin Scorsese), an epic tale of greed, betrayal, pride, and trust, set against the backdrop of the mafia-controlled Las Vegas casino industry of the 1970s, has begun. The above, pre-title sequence gives way to the lavish opening credits populated by close- ups of dancing neon lights of the Las Vegas strip, engulfing hellfire, and the silhouette of Sam’s falling body. The entirety of the credits is accompanied by this majestically tragic chorus from one of Bach’s crowning achievements in sacred music. The chorus immediately draws the attention of the viewer, mostly due to an incongruity between the music and the film’s generic expectations. While it is not unusual for mafia films to use preexisting art music (as in The Godfather, The Godfather: Part II, Goodfellas), in general that music is in some way connected with the Italian-American community and often consists of Italian songs and operatic arias. Bach’s music, due to its cultural provenance and severe compositional style, is a marked departure from the norm. But it is Bach’s music that lays the groundwork for the underlying narrative that is about to unfold. When the title sequence ends, the narrative begins in 1973, a decade before the pre-title sequence. Sam’s voice still guides us, leaving us wondering if his narration is coming from the Great Beyond. We are told of the grandeur that was Las Vegas in the 1970s, of how it was “paradise on earth,” and how, in the end, he “fucked it all up.” As the chorus sounds over the title sequence, we see the silhouette of Sam’s body twisting and turning after the attempt on his life. This will mark the end of his reign in Vegas as a street-kid-turned-power-broker. He is, literally, expelled. This imagery is not a happy coincidence, as the screenplay describes this recurring image as “His body twists and turns

throughout the frame like a soul about to tumble into the flames of damnation”197 (see Figure 5.2). This opening title sequence is rife with allusions to religious imagery, and this theme will recur in the closing segment of the film (as will Bach’s music) and will tie the narrative together both chronologically and thematically.

Figure 5.2: Screenshot from Casino (1995; dir., Martin Scorsese). Ace’s body silhouetted against flames and the lights of the Las Vegas casinos.

When Sam’s narration describes a $62-million loan that was procured in order to purchase the casino, he speaks of the benefactors as “the only kind of guys that could actually get you that kind of money.” During this description we are shown a table of older men in a hazy, smoke-filled room. We will eventually learn that these men are the upper echelon of the Midwest mafia. This image is an allusion to the Last Supper and that event’s many artistic incarnations. In particular, this Last Supper alludes to Caravaggio’s celebrated chiaroscuro technique with its striking use of light (see Figures 5.3a and 5.3b).198

197 Annette Wernblad, The Passion of Martin Scorsese: A Critical Study of the Films (Jefferson, North Carloina: McFarland, 2011), 50. 198 Ibid. (Wernblad also notes the similarity to Caravaggio.)

Figure 5.3a: Screenshot from Casino. The members of the Midwest Mafia shown during Ace’s opening monologue.

Figure 5.3b: Carravagio’s The Calling of St. Matthew (1600)

This opening sequence, accompanied by Bach’s music, forces the viewer into an internal dialogue about the nature of the film. As in Cashback, the placement of this music at the very beginning of the film sets ups a series of expectations – or, more accurately, violations – concerning filmic conventions, particularly those within the subset of mafia films. But what, exactly, might those expectations and violations signal? The answer lies in the subject of Bach’s grand Passion setting. Director Martin Scorsese says as much when, speaking about his choice of music:

I guess for me the Bach is essential to the sense of something grand having been lost … there was a sense of an empire being lost, and it needed music worthy of that. It needed music which would be provocative. The destruction of that city has to have the grandeur of Lucifer being expelled from Heaven for being too proud.199

This grand fall from grace is most evident in the film’s final sequence, which reiterates Bach’s magisterial chorus. Tying together the chronology of the film’s narrative, we once again see Ace leaving the posh restaurant, exactly as in the opening, pre-title sequence. He gets in the car, turns the ignition, and the car catches fire. But the initial blast doesn’t harm him, thanks to a steel plate beneath the driver’s seat. He barely escapes the car before it explodes and is torn to pieces. When this second explosion occurs, Bach’s “Wie setzen uns mit Tränen nieder” reenters, followed immediately by scenes of huge Las Vegas casinos undergoing demolition. As in the beginning, Ace’s voiceover guides us through the d nouement, explaining how the mafia-run casinos were pushed out by the big corporations. What was once, in the eyes of Ace and his kind, a paradise has been lost. Ace’s narration is accompanied again by quasi-religious images. When Ace speaks of the new casinos that have taken the place of the old ones, we see a lingering image of the main entrance to the MGM Grand (as it looked in the mid-1990s) and its giant lion-head entrance; the lion, in Christian iconography, has been a symbol for Christ since the Renaissance200 (see Figure 5.4). We are also shown the new Las Vegas tourists. Not gangsters, hustlers, or seasoned gamblers, they are instead frumpy old tourists. They represent a sea of banality and they walk

199 Martin Scorsese, in Scorsese on Scorsese, eds. David Thompson and Ian Christie (London: Faber and Faber, 1996), 206-7. 200 George Ferguson, Signs & Symbols in Christian Art (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1961), 21.

through the doors, shrouded in light from the outside is if they are “crossing over.” They are a manifestation of the walking dead (see Figure 5.5).

Figure 5.4: Screenshot from Casino. The new Las Vegas casinos (MGM Grand) and the allusion to Christian iconography while Ace speaks of a paradise lost.

Figure 5.5: Screenshot from Casino. The new, “Disneyland” crop of Vegas tourists.

The mixing of religiosity with the mafia is not as incongruous as it may appear on the surface. It is a narrative strategy that Scorsese used in his other mafia films. In both Mean Streets (1973) and Goodfellas (1990), the films that complete his so-called “mob trilogy,” Scorsese establishes a Mafia-as-Church structure.201 This earthly ecclesiastic system in Casino functions as follows:

Its sacraments include skims to the mob bosses and payoffs to the right politicians in Nevada. Keeping church stable requires the right gave-and-take among the bosses, the workers, the police, and the politicians. Paradise or heaven on earth, as defined by getting unlimited amounts of money from the suckers who come to the casino to gamble, is lost as the demigods –[Ace] Rothstein and Santoro –become hungrier and hungrier for the forbidden fruit, greedier and greedier for unrestrained power and megalomaniacal control. Inevitably, the greed breeds violence, which once unleashed, spins out of control. In the narrative, Nicky relates that they “fucked it up,” and, ultimately, destroyed their paradise on earth.202

Scorsese’s equating of mafia-controlled casinos with the church and with Christian symbols is aided by Bach’s music. The juxtaposition of these competing, counterintuitive social structures creates a kind of irony in and of itself. And while most of the population might cheer at the idea of the mafia’s being banished from operating with impunity, Scorsese, through this ironic deployment of Bach’s music, openly challenges this notion. Near the end of the destruction montage, Ace laments that the town will never be the same, and that today it “looks like Disneyland.” And then our narrator cautions us about what might be even more sinister than a mob-run casino: one that appeals to the American family. Ace notes: “And while the kids play cardboard pirates, mommy and daddy drop the house payments and Junior’s college money on the poker slots.” With the aid of Bach’s music, we see Scorsese’s theme brought to light. Scorsese noted that the new Vegas is more dangerous than the old one “[b]ecause the old Vegas is being replaced by something that looks seductive, kiddie- friendly, but it’s there to work on the very core of America, the family.”203

201 Maria Miloria. The Scorsese Psyche on Screen (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2004), 63. 202 Ibid. 203 Martin Scorsese, in Scorsese on Scorsese, eds. David Thompson and Ian Christie (London: Faber and Faber, 1996), 207.

Bach’s music laments the loss of innocence for the American family, one that might otherwise steer clear of the potentially devastating gambling industry. As corporations moved in and eliminated all the violent people, they made the destructive habit of gambling all the more acceptable, accessible, and seductive. The music warns of this American tragedy. The fall from grace here is expanded to encompass America herself, and not just Ace and his kind. Bach’s music laments the exposure of the American family to truly terrifying organizations, not the mafia but the legally and politically protected gaming corporations. In stark contrast to the flashy, hyper-violent mob film, Junebug (2005; dir. Phil Morrison) is a quiet and atmospheric film, filled with long, silent shots of empty rooms and rural scenery. While avoiding nearly all instances of traditional underscoring, director Morrison nevertheless assigns music an important role in articulating this narrative theme. When the sophisticated, cosmopolitan, art impresario Madeleine (Elizabeth Davidtz) hurriedly marries the perfect southern beau George (Alessandro Nivola) in Chicago, the pair travel to the new groom’s hometown nestled in rural North Carolina. Madeleine’s objective is to secure the work of an eccentric, bigoted, “primitive,” local artist for her chic gallery, while George uses the trip to reconnect with his family and to introduce them to his new wife. On the surface, the film is a fish-out-of-water tale: the sleek, polished Madeleine, with her worldly upbringing and her European affectations, is confronted by her husband’s stoic, dysfunctional, chain-smoking, Southern family, who resist nearly all of her professional charms. But the film’s deeper narrative questions easy dismissals of bumpkin life. The film uses three kinds of music: original, popular, and preexisting, both folk and art. Each of these serves a particular role within the narrative. The film opens with the sounds and sights of ancient, Southern men yodeling, and this prologue visually emphasizes the film’s rustic setting via the use of grainy 8mm film. Immediately following, the narrative begins in earnest when it cuts to an auction inside a stylish Chicago art gallery, where the film’s two main characters meet. In the aftermath of the auction Madeleine and George are seen passionately kissing in the now-empty gallery. A love-struck Madeleine gazes into George’s eyes and asks, perhaps rhetorically, “Where did you come from?” George then takes a moment and responds, cheekily, “Pfafftown, North Carolina.” At this moment the calypso-esque popular song “Harmour Love” (1977), written by Stevie Wonder and performed by Syreeta Wright, accompanies the opening credits, falsely signaling to the audience that the film is a light-hearted

love story. This catchy tune will return during the closing credits, lifting the audience from the weightier, emotionally charged narrative of the film. Junebug uses popular music as a kind of transport, moving the audience into and out of the fantasy world of the diegesis. In this way, “Harmour Love” functions like the classical Hollywood film overture. But aside from this familiar usage of an unfamiliar song, the remainder of the film’s soundtrack invites careful consideration and helps to establish the director’s points. Throughout the film, but particularly in the first half, Morrison accompanies his visual narrative depicting life in deep-red, rural America with chamber music by Haydn, Vivaldi, Shostakovich, Schubert, and Alois Strohmayer. The very plain people, scenery, and occupations of rustic America are distinctly at odds with this genre that is generally associated with the most discriminating connoisseurs of art music. A scene that illustrates Morrison’s use of art music shows George’s ever-sullen brother, Johnny, interacting with his coworkers while processing orders at Replacements, Ltd., a bulk-order warehouse filled from floor to ceiling with dinnerware and other accessories. This is perhaps the only scene in the film where Johnny is even remotely cheerful, surrounded not by his successful brother or the keenly intellectual Madeleine, but instead by those more of his kind –the real inhabitants of Pfafftown. The scene juxtaposes warehouse drudgery, an elegant orchestral transcription of Schubert’s “Grazer Galop,” and a chatty workers’ expletive-laced monologue concerning the local professional football team, quarreling neighbors, and a story about a friend’s mistaking a tick lodged in his anus for a hemorrhoid. This obvious discrepancy between the visual/dialogic track and the soundtrack invites the audience to interpret possible meanings created by this conspicuously odd combination (see Figure 5.6).

Figure 5.6: Screenshot from Junebug. Workers’ inane chatter with scenes of quotidian labor accompanied by an orchestral arrangement of Schubert’s “Grazer Galop.”

Throughout the first half of the film, audience members may interpret this as a kind of urban, elite snobbery. Here the filmmaker and spectators, in particular those identifying with Madeleine, have a little fun at the expense of the parochial characters. One cannot help but chuckle just a bit at the sight of inarticulate warehouse workers manipulating packing peanuts and describing how they replay last year’s Superbowl on tape, hoping the outcome will somehow miraculously change, while Schubert’s “Galop” works as underscore. The music engenders a sense of cultural superiority in viewers witnessing this quotidian work and sophomoric chatter. But viewers will soon discover that they are also, in part, victims. When Johnny’s high-school-sweetheart-turned-wife, Ashley, goes into labor, Madeleine is forced to choose between an important meeting with the artist and going to the hospital with the family. Madeleine asks George to drop her off at the artist’s isolated home while George meets the family at the hospital. George briefly protests, telling Madeleine that “it means something, you know … family.” Madeleine tries to explain the urgency of her meeting, suggesting that if she doesn’t meet this artist she will “lose him” to a rival art dealer. George acquiesces. While Madeleine is off securing her contract with the local artist, Ashley’s baby is stillborn. When Madeleine reaches George via cell phone late into the night, she immediately

begins relaying her story about how she “got him back.” But before she can launch into the details of the “get,” George interrupts to let her know that “we lost him.” Madeleine is dumbstruck upon hearing this news and is rendered speechless. While George begins to tell her the details of the tragedy, Madeleine says, “I have to come to the hospital.” To which George replies, “well, you could have.” George advises Madeleine to find her own way back to the house and elects to stay the night in the hospital with Ashley. The final scene between George and Ashley reveals much about the latter’s true nature. Ashley shows herself to be not a simple country bumpkin but instead the moral center of the family. She is thoughtful, has emotional depth, and sees people and situations with a clarity that evades the other members of the family, who have until this point in the narrative, been presented as her intellectual and emotional superiors. The contrast between Madeleine’s rather selfish actions and Ashley’s struggle allows us to apprehend the underlying theme informing the film and how the art music has supported this. Throughout the early portion of the film art music is frequently deployed accompanying the scenes and people of the rural South. The discrepancy between the cultural connotations of this music and the visual narrative works to create a kind of dissonance with which the audience must contend. Before the film has fleshed out the characters, the audience is likely to consider this juxtaposition as a tongue-in-cheek, snide commentary about the hidebound, insular South and its inhabitants. But as the film completes its narrative course, we see that the joke, really, is on us. As Madeleine’s abandonment of Ashley unfolds toward the end of the film, we discover that the music was not at all a sarcastic accompaniment, but that it was a genuinely appropriate complement. The use of art music, first to create in the audience a sense of superiority and then ultimately to undermine this conception, mimics Madeleine’s emotional journey in the film. When Madeleine leaves Ashley and the rest of the family in order to secure the contract with the local artist, we see that her cultured background, while good at cocktail parties and appropriate for making money, lacks real value. It is commitment to family, embodied in Ashley and not Madeleine, that deserves our respect and admiration. By inviting us, via ironically situated (or so we thought) art music, to assume a superior stance in relation to the parochial characters, Morrison has set a kind of trap, which helps to ensure that the audience identifies with Madeleine. The goal of this identification is that we, like

her, experience the same kind of humbling that Madeleine does at the end of the film. Morrison hints at this strategy when he says that

The idea was to accept they’re types, and Madeleine—also known as “us”—discovers them as such. And let’s explore what that means. To us. Any effort to make them not types would actually be imposing my idea of what people ought to be like as much as if we were exploiting the fact that they were types. Instead, I thought let’s accept what they are and then try to explore what that means to us.204

Irony is a slippery discourse that risks failure and misinterpretation more than any other discursive trope, and it also requires the existence of a victim, someone who doesn’t “get it.” Morrison seems to have understood the inherent risks of such a strategy, when he notes that “… I knew that what that meant was that some people would just see the caricature. I had to accept the possibility of people seeing this movie and just seeing ‘quirk’ and that was terrifying. But I had no other choice.”205 Finally, we see his strategy for setting his audience up for a paradigm shift laid bare when he tells us that the film “was about creating a modest vehicle for reminding us that what we assume going in to a situation is an illusion, a product of a self-protective outlook.”206 The ironic art music serves a two-fold process in Junebug. First, it creates a sense of superiority in the audience, falsely pointing to the denizens of the rural, American South as victims. Second, it makes the actively engaged audience reflect upon its prejudices, ones that the music helped to point out at the onset of the film. And in this way the music, along with the other narrative elements, provokes a cathartic event within the viewers that is similar to Madeleine’s. While art music highlights the elevation of rural characters in Junebug, it plays an inverted role in The Madness of King George (1994; dir., Nicholas Hytner). Detailing the years 1788-1790, the film surveys the life of King George III during his slide into dementia. Adapted from Alan Bennett’s stage play The Madness of George III (1991), the film incarnation closely

204 Jeannette Catsoulis, “The Insider Outsider: An interview with Phil Morrison, about his new film Junebug.” Reverse Shot Online. http://www.reverseshot.com/legacy/dogdays05/morrison.html (accessed November 9, 2011). 205 Ibid. 206 Ibid.

follows the dialogue and even the musical architecture of its West- End predecessor. The music, adapted by George Fenton, borrows heavily from G. F. Handel and includes diegetic and nondiegetic instances of Music for the Royal Fireworks, Water Music, and, most notably, the coronation anthem Zadok the Priest. As the film begins, we are shown glimpses inside the life of the monarch (played by Nigel Hawthorne), his family, and the political machinations that swirl amongst them and the parliament. As the King’s behavior becomes increasingly erratic and unpredictable, those within parliament and the royal family aligned with the King are forced to take extreme action. In an attempt to alleviate the King’s afflictions, they turn to a country physician, Dr. Willis (Ian Holm), whose life work it is to treat the mentally handicapped in a most puritanical and stern manner. In a dramatic and powerful scene where George III is confronted about his mental illness, Handel’s Zadok the Priest serves in an impressively ironic role. Led into a kind of medical ambush, George III is made aware that his participation at Dr. Willis’s treatment farm is not optional. When the King scoffs at the idea of being in the care of a commoner, Dr. Willis intimates that it would be in the King’s best interest to come willingly. Willis then opens a door to an antechamber revealing a restraint-laden chair that will be used to confine the monarch. When George sees the device, he is visibly shaken by the sight. “When felons were induced to talk,” George says, almost to himself, “they were shown first the instruments of their torture. The King is shown the instrument of His, to induce Him not to talk.” Tears begin to stream from George’s eyes. “Well, I won’t,” he says as he begins to back away from the horrific furniture. At this moment, the introduction to Handel’s Zadok the Priest begins to play. George’s backpedalling becomes an all-out sprint for safety as Dr. Willis’s eighteenth- century orderlies pursue and eventually capture him. As Willis’ orderlies carry the King back to the restraining chair, the King’s guards attempt, half-heartedly, to free him; they are clearly confused by the order to capture the man they have been tasked with defending with their lives. When George is placed, struggling, in the chair, his mouth is covered by an orderly’s hand as the leather restraints are applied. Dr. Willis stands beside the King and addresses the slack-jawed guards, lecture-style, all the while accompanied by the dignified orchestral introduction to Handel’s majestic anthem:

If the King refuses food, He will be restrained. If He claims to have no appetite, He will be restrained. If He swears and indulges in MEANINGLESS DISCOURSE... He will be restrained. If He throws off his bed-clothes, tears away His bandages, scratches at His sores, and if He does not strive EVERY day and ALWAYS towards His OWN RECOVERY... then He must be restrained.

When Willis finishes his proclamation, the King shouts at him: “I AM THE KING OF ENGLAND!” To which, Willis replies: “NO, Sir. You are the PATIENT!” At this moment, the King’s mouth is covered with a stretched-leather gag that is then tied behind the headrest of the chair, completely immobilizing and muting the monarch. The gag is employed at precisely the moment when the choir makes its startling, fortissimo entrance (see Figure 5.7 and Example 5.1).

Figure 5.7: Screenshot from The Madness of King George (1994; dir., Nicholas Hytner). King George is gagged at the moment the choir sings in the dramatic opening of “Zadok the Priest.”

Example 5.1: Handel, Zadok the Priest (HWV 258), mm. 20-21. Vocal score with piano reduction.

As the anthem’s magisterial choral section continues, the camera begins a slow, prolonged pull-back that eventually reveals a surreal “coronation” scene. The King is strapped and gagged to a monstrous throne that is more medieval torture device than medical tool. The orderlies have taken the place of the royal guards, who have themselves become the spectators in the inverted ceremony. Dr. Willis stands before the defeated, humiliated King, his presence ironically akin to that of the Archbishop anointing the monarch (see Figure 5.8). Zadok the Priest in this context emphasizes the humanity and frailty of King George. It provides a means of identification with the King while, at the same time, elevating the very human struggle against mental illness. In short, it is the King’s battle with his illness that is worthy of someone of his station.

Figure 5.8: Screenshot from The Madness of King George. The inverted “Coronation.”

Music of the Anglican tradition, used in The Madness of King George to provide ironic commentary and to add a touch of historical verisimilitude, is also used in the post-apocalyptic film 28 Days Later (2002; dir., Danny Boyle). The film’s soundtrack alternates among original classical-Hollywood film scoring, popular and pop-style original music, and preexisting, choral art music. Set in England in the near future, the film depicts a largely emptied nation that has sustained an outbreak of “rage,” a highly contagious, rapidly afflicting virus that results in murderous zombies that lay waste to the population. The story begins when Jim (Cillian Murphy) wakes to find himself in a completely deserted hospital; his surroundings suggest that the population of the building left in quite a hurry and without regard for what, or who, was left behind. Wandering the totally deserted streets of the City of London, Jim is able to piece together from discarded newspapers that Britain has been evacuated. After drifting through the city, he enters a church, where he discovers the pews piled high with corpses. Among the corpses is, to Jim’s surprise, one still animated. When the zombie chases Jim (these zombies don’t stagger and stammer, they move quickly) from the church, he is saved by a small group of survivors who fill him in on what has

happened in the last twenty eight days: no army, no government, no police, no radio, no television, and very few survivors. When Jim learns the magnitude of the situation, he insists upon finding his parents. The survivors trek, on foot, to Jim’s parents’ house in a nearby suburb. Throughout the scenes of the journey through deserted London and beyond, a solo, a cappella rendering of the Anglican hymn Abide with Me sounds nondiegetically. The hymn, sounding during scenes of empty cityscapes, functions as an elegy for London, Great Britain, and all of civilization. In a later scene the group of survivors is able to obtain a radio transmission from a group of left-behind armed forces that instructs anyone remaining to travel to their compound in the countryside. The group decides to make their way by car, but first they must escape the clogged and dangerous city streets. They hotwire a taxi and begin their journey during a scene that is accompanied by a nondiegetic performance of the Bach/Gounod Ave Maria. The music largely dominates the soundtrack, while the image track shows piles of corpses, stacked like logs on the sidewalks, during scenes that are intentionally reminiscent of holocaust images (see Figure 5.9)

Figure 5.9: Screenshot from 28 Days Later (2002; dir., Danny Boyle). Jim looks out the car window at piles of corpses (reflected in the window) as Ave Maria sounds nondiegetically.

The group must decide whether to try their luck through a tunnel clogged with abandoned cars, corpses, and who- knows- what else. Boyle’s setting of this scene is not tense and suspenseful, as one might expect, but is instead a kind of joyride or roller coaster scene; the car bounces and swerves through the maze of carnage to the delight of everyone inside. The grotesque scenery and the relatively buoyant atmosphere of the characters during the tunnel ride both offer a stark contrast to the musical accompaniment. This draws the viewer into a contemplation of the meaning and usefulness of religion to civilization, even going so far as to mock religion’s musically eloquent assurances of eternal peace. The final use of art music occurs when Jim and the survivors decide to travel afar toward a rumored armed-forces safe zone. As with both of the previous instances of preexisting music, this one accompanies a journey. As the now tight-knit group begins to travel through the idyllic English countryside, Faur ’s “In Paradisum,” from his Requiem, accompanies the drive. The scene is essentially a montage, with the journey passing in less than a minute. During the sequence we see vast, open spaces and witness the serene countenances of the travelers. Of the three journey-scenes in the film, this is the only one that is not fraught with an underlying sense of fear. Instead of being exposed on foot or trapped in a closed space, this journey feels safe. In fact, the only sound we hear during the first half of the journey montage, other than the Fauré, is of a radio broadcast from the safe zone announcing its location and that “Salvation is here! The answer to infection is here!” The music, in this case, fits perfectly well with the notion of safety and protection and, ultimately, a solution to the nightmare scenario. But eventually the bucolic countryside gives way to the large, industrial city of Manchester, which the survivors view from afar on a desolate mega-motorway. In the distance ahead they view the entire city emitting smoke and the occasional explosion. The promise of Paradise has instead become the reality of Hades (see Figure 5.10). The music here offers a commentary on modern, industrial society. Our modern paradise is an illusion, and it will very likely bring about our end.

Figure 5.10: Screenshot from 28 Days Later. The survivors approach a completely ablaze Manchester as Faur ’s “In Paradisum” from his Requiem sounds.

Needful Things (1993; dir., Frasier Clark Heston) deals in the small-town version of Hades and details the machinations of the Devil in the person of Leland Gaunt and his exploitation of greed and grievances. When Leland Gaunt (Max von Sydow) opens an antiques and curiosities shop in sleepy Castle Rock, Maine, he sets in motion a plan to destroy the town and the lives of its inhabitants. Gaunt’s innocuous store-front shop, Needful Things, is a hodgepodge of lamentably used furniture and shoddy second-hand clothing. But, as each of the townspeople finds out individually, the inventory also consists of one item each of them painfully desires. Gaunt’s payment plans are deceptively agreeable: a nominal monetary payment plus the carrying out of a prank to be played, anonymously, on one of the other residents. But Gaunt has carefully arranged that each trick stoke suspicion against a specific individual, especially among those who have a longstanding history of enmity. Before long Gaunt stokes the fires of small-town rivalries, which erupt into large-scale violence that threatens the very existence of the town. One subplot in the film involves two local women, Nettie Cobb (Amanda Plummer) and Wilma Jerzyck (Valri Bromfield), who carry a long-standing grudge. When Gaunt has different townsfolk carry out acts against each of the women, they instinctively blame each other.

Coincidentally, these acts are committed at the same time that Nettie and Wilma are out fulfilling their bargains with Gaunt, carrying out acts against other townsfolk. When Nettie returns home from her mischievous errand, she finds her beloved Rottweiler has been killed and horrifically skinned, the dog left hanging in her hallway like a grotesque piñata. At the same time, Wilma returns from her errand to find the windows of her house have been broken out by apples having been thrown through them. Nettie makes her way to Wilma’s farmhouse to confront her, and all hell breaks loose. Nettie and Wilma settle their differences by way of a drawn-out fight with a meat cleaver and a large kitchen knife. The scene is a full-blown fight sequence, complete with hand-to-hand combat and physical stunts. A scene such as this suggests a particular kind of music, one that has been established by decades of classical Hollywood film scores. But Heston and composer Patrick Doyle instead chose to set this scene to Schubert’s Ellens dritter Gesang, also known as his Ave Maria.207 The music functions on several levels within the sequence. First, it acts to define the timeline of events that occurs leading up to the confrontation. When the music begins, we see Gaunt sitting alone in his store, in front of a fireplace, listening, presumably, to a diegetic recording of the Ave Maria. There is an immediate surface irony here, in that we know that Gaunt is the devil incarnate and that his indulgence in sacred music forms a kind of sacrilege. During the orchestral introduction there is an intensifying close-up of Gaunt physically wrestling with his hands and softly groaning, as if he is mentally using his powers (and perhaps the music?) to ensure that his plans are carried out. The scene then gradually fades to show Nettie doting over her dog while, at the same time being captivated by her purchase from Needful Things, a small curio figure that she has been seeking to collect for years. This scene then slowly fades, revealing a young boy riding his bicycle to Wilma’s farmhouse to fulfill his bargain with Gaunt, which will be to throw apples through Wilma’s windows. With the appearance of the boy, the music changes to nondiegetic film score. Ave Maria will return in order to condense the timeline of the events that are about to unfold and to offer ironic commentary. In the scene that follows the boy’s destruction of Wilma’s windows, we see Nettie carrying out her task; pasting obscenity-laden papers inside the house of a local businessman.

207 The film’s official soundtrack lists this as “Ave Maria [Schubert’s Serenade].”

Interestingly, the music that accompanies this is another instance of preexisting art music, Grieg’s “In the Hall of the Mountain King” from Peer Gynt. But this music is conspicuously appropriate for the scene, and does not contain an occasion for irony. In fact, “In the Hall of the Mountain King” is one of Hollywood’s most enduring musical accompaniments, one that specifically denotes mischief (see Chapters 2 and 3). The setting of these two pieces of preexisting art music back to back strengthens the ironic impact of Ave Maria in the following scene. Here we most clearly see that not all deployments of preexisting art music are created equal. When Nettie arrives back home from her rascally errand, she briefly visits her curio figurine before she’s unsettled by the noticeable absence of her beloved dog. After a short and tension-filled examination of her living area, she’s brought to a closed door. When she opens the door, she discovers the skinned body of her dog hoisted in the air and attached to a swing, its legs tied above it as if processed by an industrial butchery. An orchestral stinger exaggerates the audience’s shock and undergirds the visual grotesqueness. As Nettie falls to the floor, screaming, the scene and the music gradually fades back to Gaunt, still wrestling with his hands but now giggling to himself, listening to end of the first verse of Ave Maria. The use of music here ties together the various events that have taken place in the last few minutes of the film. Using Ave Maria as a kind of stopwatch, we can deduce that the preceding events that have been sandwiched between the two scenes of Gaunt in his armchair have all occurred simultaneously. What took nearly ten minutes to view has all taken place within the time it takes for the first verse of Ave Maria to sound in Gaunt’s drawing room. As Gaunt finally relaxes his hands, he begins to smile and then to laugh, giving the impression that his will has been done and that his plan is now unalterably in motion. As the image track fades from Gaunt to Wilma and her broken windows, we know that we are about to witness the fruits of this unholy labor. But as the image track shifts to the scene of the impending battle, the soundtrack conspicuously lingers on Ave Maria. As Wilma enters her vandalized farmhouse, she takes a moment to survey the damage before cursing Nettie under her breath and then heading straight to retrieve a large meat cleaver hanging from her wall. When Wilma turns around, Nettie is standing directly in front of her, armed with a large kitchen knife. The women verbally accuse each other of the crimes, and Wilma then swipes at Nettie’s head with the meat cleaver. The swat is wide, though, and the

cleaver buries itself in the door frame, leaving Wilma exposed. Nettie takes advantage of her opportunity and drives her knife deep into Wilma’s belly. Wilma responds by using her free hand to grab Nettie, and the protracted fight sequence begins. The women, accompanied by Schubert’s mellifluous music, engage in larger-than-life film violence punctuated by exaggerated diegetic sound design that emphasizes each weapon’s blow. Wilma is able to kick Nettie down the stairs and escape to the upper floor. When Nettie begins her search in the upstairs area, the scene effectively changes from a fight sequence to a taut search. Billowing curtains, plentiful doors and doorways, and tight close-ups provide ample opportunity for the audience to anticipate Wilma’s reemergence at any moment, thus heightening the suspense. When Wilma finally does make herself known, the women stand face to face in front of an upstairs window, ironically unbroken. Nettie charges at Wilma and drives her weapon into the side of Wilma’s neck, but Nettie’s inertia carries them both through the window. The pair tumble, intertwined, across a lower-level roof and then to the ground, where Nettie impales herself with the knife. As the last of the life bleeds out of the two women, in front of Wilma’s husband, who has come running toward the commotion, the final bars of Ave Maria bring this gruesome scene to a close (see Figure 5.11). But before the final chord evaporates, the visual narrative returns to Gaunt’s shop, where we see him checking off the women’s names from a list of townspeople, and rounding off the series of scenes.

Figure 5.11: Screenshot from Needful Things (1993; dir., Frasier Clark Heston). Nettie and Wilma lie dead below Wilma’s husband as the final bars to Ave Maria sound.

Ave Maria functions in a number of ways. First, it allows us to understand the events as being controlled by Gaunt, who initiated both the music and the series of pranks. Second, it serves to establish a chronological framework for the events. But beyond these narrative functions lies the ironical reading, whereby we begin to question issues of religiosity and femininity which the performance, text, and cultural context of the work bring to the fore. The underlying points brought to the surface through the pairing of a bloody, violent knife fight between two women and Ave Maria are rather bluntly exposed. Accompanying the two women is a piece that expresses the power of the sacred feminine to enact peace. The text, sung here by a female soprano, speaks of the protection offered by the Blessed Virgin. Feminine peace and protection are not only absent within the context of the scene, but also openly mocked by the grisly images of the fight, easily the most violent in the film. Any appeal to religiosity is denied here. In this context, religion is literally usurped by evil; a point that plays an important role in the film. When the crime scene at Wilma’s is being combed over by the police, a Catholic priest kneels over the still-intertwined bodies of the two women and begins to pray for what we assume

to be the repose of both their souls. But soon, we notice that the priest is praying, specifically, for Wilma, and makes no mention for the corpse lying right on top of hers. Soon, a Protestant pastor kneels beside the priest and begins to pray for Nettie, his prayer clashing with the priest’s as they both increase the volume and intensity of their supplications. In the finale of the film, the Protestant and Catholic communities of the town will be pitted against one another with violent and deadly consequences. The ironic deployment of Schubert’s music makes the narrative point concerning religion as sectarianism, a point that is foregrounded during the film’s finale when the Catholic and Protestant communities are pitted against one another in an all-out war. The religious and sectarian violence is both mocked and foreshadowed in microcosm during Wilma and Nettie’s deadly confrontation. In the end, neither woman –nor sect, nor any other artificial tribalistic affiliation – is victorious. The notion of “victory” and the questions about the definition and consequences of the term lie at the heart of two films that make use of the same ironically deployed opera aria to make opposite commentaries. As reporter Sydney Schanberg (Sam Waterston) helplessly languishes in his New York apartment, he plays a recording of “Nessun dorma” from the opera Turandot by Puccini. The experiences of the recent past have been, to put it mildly, harrowing for Schanberg. He has spent the past few years as a correspondent in Cambodia, covering the fall of the U.S.-backed government and the subsequent rise of the Khmer Rouge. After narrowly escaping the oppressive and violent communist regime, Schanberg was forced to leave behind his translator and close friend Dith Pran (Haign S. Ngor), a situation that haunts the reporter as he listens to the elegant, triumphant aria in his comfortable apartment thousands of miles away from the unimaginable misery unfolding in Cambodia. The Killing Fields (1984; dir., Roland Joffé) is based on the true account of the relationship between The New York Times Magazine reporter Schanberg and his translator and friend Dith Pran. Set primarily in Cambodia during the fall of the Lon Nol government and the rise of the Khmer Rouge, the film depicts Pran’s struggle to survive the regime’s forced-labor camps and arbitrary mass murder. Once Pran has been captured and imprisoned by the Khmer Rouge, the film also follows Schanberg’s attempts from New York to find any information concerning the whereabouts of his companion. While taking a brief respite from his search for Pran, Schanberg plays “Nessun dorma” and retires to his couch, where he views video tape that outlines the beginning and consequences

of America’s covert involving of Cambodia in the Vietnam conflict beginning in the early 1970s. The video tape informs us about the United States’s military policy of invading and bombing Cambodia in order to engage the North Vietnamese, decisions that were purposefully withheld from the Cambodian people. Soon Schanberg’s videotape cuts to a press conference, where President Nixon baldly tells reporters, “There are no American combat advisors in Cambodia; there will be no American combat troops or advisors in Cambodia. We will aid Cambodia. Cambodia is the Nixon doctrine in its purest form.” This statement was a lie. As the aria closes in on its heroic conclusion, the video shows scenes of the results of the actual, as opposed to the stated, military policy in Cambodia: giant bombers unleashing their deadly payload and the bloody, dismembered bodies of Cambodian civilians. As the most gruesome scenes of the wounded and dead appear on Schanberg’s screen, the famous ending of “Nessun dorma” rings out from his stereo: “Vinceró! Vinceró!” (I shall win! I shall win!). A two-fold discrepancy occurs between the image and the music, but also, and more tellingly, between the text of the aria and the reality of the war in Southeast Asia (see Figure 5.12).

Figure 5.12: Screenshot from The Killing Fields (1984; dir., Roland Joffé). Schanberg watches video footage Cambodian civilian casualties as the triumphant finale of “Nessun dorma” declares “Vinceró!”

The final words of the famous aria assure victory, but what we see on Schanberg’s screen reminds us that victory is actually horrific. The ironic commentary opens us to the director’s point concerning the entire regional conflict: massive military force and carpet bombing innocent civilians is not a path to peace, the ultimate result of victory if our political leaders are to be believed. The entire American doctrine of “peace through strength” is called into question by the ironical juxtaposition of “Vinceró!” against the scenes of horrid and sickening mutilation in the name of, and at the hands of, our nation. In the post-9/11, fictional war film The Sum of All Fears (2002; dir., Phil Alden Robinson) the same aria is used ironically, but for an entirely opposite point. When a low-grade atomic bomb explodes at a football game where the President is in attendance, the CIA immediately suspects that the new Russian leadership is responsible. However, young CIA analyst Jack Ryan (Ben Affleck) suspects otherwise, and he must find out the truth before a full- scale nuclear war erupts between the two atomic powers. By the film’s end Ryan successfully unravels a complex plot that implicates a network of rogue Russian operatives and German neo- fascists who coordinated the bomb attack. The penultimate scene in the film is a revenge montage, where each of the three major ringleaders of the plot are executed one by one, while, at the same time, the Presidents of the United States and the Russian Federation are shown signing peace treaties. The scene begins with the first of the ring-leaders alone in his foreign villa, enjoying a diegetic CD recording of “Nessun dorma.” He thinks his plan has worked, and that the United States and Russia are careening unstoppably toward war. His manner is relaxed and pleased as he sits, eyes closed, gracefully conducting along with the aria. He does not see nor hear the American paramilitary assassin who enters his home to cut his throat with a large bowie knife. As the montage continues, we see one of the two rogue Russian operatives running through a deeply snowed wood. When he finally falls, two Russian officials who have been chasing him assassinate the man by shooting him repeatedly. Finally, the head of the operation is shown leaving his elegant Moscow townhouse. Being cautious of car-bombs, he sends his lackey to start his car. The assistant takes a deep breath before starting the car and is visibly relieved when nothing happens. As the ring-leader enters the car, he places a cigarette in his mouth, just as “Nessun dorma” reaches is climax. When he presses the car’s cigarette lighter,

the car explodes, and the final target is killed. The day is won, and America and her people are safe. These two uses of “Nessun dorma” are useful illustrations concerning the difference between the underlying, narrative points that are made by each director. In the case of The Killing Fields, aggressive military action and policies, and the people who endorse them, are shown to be not a solution to violence, but as an equal part in the evil that is perpetrated upon innocents. America, via her geopolitical actions and policies, is shown to be no better than the enemy. The obvious discrepancy between image and music, in this case, allows an introspection that leads audiences to come to the side of the director without the aid of his literally stated position. The same process, with the same music, leads audiences to an entirely different conclusion in The Sum of All Fears. American military might and her policy of targeted assassination are lauded, not criticized, in the later, post-9-11 film. The irony here is more of a surface feature; it extends to the characters in the film as we witness their participation in the creation and execution of the ironic situation. The villains have initiated the aria, and they are foolishly complacent in thinking that they have succeeded. When the American intelligence community exacts its revenge, we see that the shouts of “Vinceró!” were misplaced: they belong to the Americans and not to the terrorists who instantiated the aria. In this case, the audience is treated to a reaffirmation of American military capacity and policy. These two examples demonstrate how the juxtaposition of images and music open audiences to deeper contextual layers and narratives that help to develop the film’s themes. The thematic stances in both films may challenge or reaffirm the opinion of the culture at large. In the case of The Killing Fields, the argument that the conflict in Vietnam and Southeast Asia was a terrible military, diplomatic, and moral mistake is espoused. The Sum of All Fears, particularly its assassination finale, provides a satisfying, chest- thumping affirmation of American military force. This was especially resonant in the months following 9-11, when the film was released. But just as in The Killing Fields, the point is made emotionally, the (barely) unsaid cajoling the audience into agreement with the director’s point. The aria’s use in The Killing Fields constitutes a more complex ironic commentary, which asks us as viewers to reassess our position on our nation’s policies. The irony reaches beyond the diegesis and into our real world. We are left without the firm, stable ground of our

assumptions and are forced into a dialogue about the role of our nation and its powerful military in the affairs of other nations and peoples. The irony in The Sum of All Fears is more of a surface feature. It plays in the space between the images and sound, causing us to take notice. It does not, however, move much beyond the story space and unsettle our notions about right and wrong within the geopolitical sphere. That said, viewers of today, with the aid of hindsight, may find a particular kind of irony –cosmic irony, or irony without an ironist – as a residual feature of such a naïve ideology as was popular in the early 2000s. Such is the power of ironically deployed music in film. Its legacy is not set in stone but is flexible and changeable according to the times and audience that perceives it. This powerful, effective, efficient, and highly memorable mode of discourse maintains its ability to affect viewers well beyond the time of its creation. Each following chapter will examine, in considerable depth and detail, the underlying and deeper contextual layers that are exposed by the use of ironically deployed preexisting art music in a single film. In each of the examined films are found significant, substantial, and, at times, profound subtexts that help to convey the filmmakers’ points. In these cases, the issues raised via irony transcend their filmic narratives and force the perceiver to contemplate and sometimes openly question long-held assumptions about the nature of life and how it should be lived. In the above instances of ironically deployed preexisting art music, the irony provides an opportunity for an interesting and affecting paradigm shift on the part of the viewer relating to a situation or character within a film. In the following investigations, we will see that entire conceptual ground being shifted beneath the perceivers’ feet, demonstrating that irony is, indeed, a spectacle worth attending to.

CHAPTER 6: PREEXISTING MUSIC IN THE FILM ADAPTATION OF STEPHEN KING’S MISERY

Misery (1990; dir., Rob Reiner) is the story of the best-selling but artistically frustrated novelist Paul Sheldon (James Caan) who, after years of turning out hackneyed romance novels centered on a character named Misery Chastain, kills his main character in order to free himself of the artistically suffocating genre. Holed up in an isolated Colorado mountain resort, Sheldon finishes his first “serious” novel and then sets out, manuscript in hand, on a ride through winding mountain roads, when a sudden blizzard strikes. Sheldon’s car skids off the road and down a large embankment, leaving him badly injured. As we will soon learn, this is only the start of his problems. Rescued by his “number one fan,” Annie Wilkes (Kathy Bates), Sheldon is taken to her isolated mountain farmhouse, where he is kept to convalesce, while the outside world thinks he’s dead. When Annie discovers that her literary heroine has been destroyed by her patient, she flies into a rage and forces him to burn his new manuscript and to begin a new “Misery” novel, which will resurrect both the character and the franchise. As Annie falls deeper and deeper into psychosis, Sheldon becomes aware that she has no intention of allowing him to leave alive. He realizes that he can only escape if he can contact the outside world and by the destruction of Annie. The film vacillates between Sheldon’s and Annie’s psychological chess match and a series of violent, disturbing conflicts between them, and culminates with Sheldon’s eventual triumph over Annie. A more-or-less faithful adaptation of the King novel, the film is a metaphor for the struggle that artists endure to create authentic and personally fulfilling art. In the words of director Rob Reiner, “the question is: what price do you pay in order to change your way in creating art? How much pain do you have to go through in order to go away from what has been successful for you and forge a new path?”208 If the novel and corresponding film are any indication, the answer to this question is: a great deal.

208 Rob Reiner, “Director’s Commentary” Misery (Collector’s Edition), DVD. Directed by Rob Reiner. Hollywood, California: Columbia Pictures, 2007.

Music in Misery Misery makes ample use of a traditional, classical-Hollywood style score by Marc Shaiman. Additionally, conspicuous uses of preexisting popular and art music accompany many important scenes within the film. The first movement of Tchaikovsky’s Piano Concerto No. 1 in B-flat minor, Op. 23, is prominently heard during a montage in which Sheldon is seen working through large sections of his new “Misery” novel. Beethoven’s “Moonlight” Sonata, Op. 27, No. 2, occupies a prominent place during one of the most important (and infamous) scenes in the film, and the popular song “I’ll Be Seeing You” works both to misdirect the audience and to problematize the film’s generic classification. Additionally, the first movement of Mozart’s Clarinet Quintet in A major, K. 581, differentiates the world of the “true” artist from the failed one. The use of these works in and of itself invites introspection and commentary. But it is their particular performances that most allow for ironic readings, commentary, and narrative points to be made. Both the Tchaikovsky and Beethoven are rendered in arranged, altered performances by Liberace, and it is precisely this point that invites rich and multifaceted commentary among several conceptual discourses, including the role of art and the artist, personal and artistic authenticity, social responsibility, celebrity obsession, politics, power, religiosity, suppression, and obsessive love.

Liberace Motif in Misery The importance of the person (and persona) of Liberace is a vital aspect of the film, and one that has never been discussed. To understand Liberace’s place in culture is key to understanding a significant subtext in the film, one that encapsulates the meaning of both the novel and the film. Throughout the first half of Misery the music adheres to the conventional, classical- Hollywood archetype. But contained within the visual narrative are subtle hints pointing to a secondary, underlying narrative, which will be made clear and brought to fruition by the use of preexisting music. In a particularly suspenseful scene Sheldon escapes from his room while Annie runs into town to take care of errands. This is the first time he (and with him, the audience) is out of the

suffocating and claustrophobic confines of the bedroom. While exploring the house, he attempts to use the telephone to try to reach the outside world. Tellingly, sitting next to the telephone are two framed pictures, one of a young boy and one of Liberace. And here the camera provides an important clue to what is the central, underlying motif and metaphor in Misery. The telephone doesn’t work. But it’s not as if the line has been cut, a common horror/suspense genre device. Instead the phone is shown to be hollow. It is only an empty shell; it is the appearance of a phone, cosmetically similar to a telephone but without substance, without anything that gives it value. It is false. It is façade (see Figure 6.1). When the camera reveals the empty shell that should be a telephone, the shot includes the telephone and the framed picture of Liberace, smiling ironically as if nothing in the world could be amiss.

Figure 6.1: Screenshot from Misery (1990). Empty phone with Liberace photo.

In this same scene Sheldon also sees two shrines that Annie has erected in her living room: one to himself and the other to Liberace (see Figure 6.2a and 6.2b).

Figure 6.2a and b: Screenshots from Misery (1990): Annie’s two “shrines.” These screen shots are separated by 11 seconds.

In a later scene Annie reads the first chapter of “Misery’s Return” and is overwhelmed with emotion. Spinning and turning around in the room she exclaims, “Misery’s alive! Misery’s alive! Oh, it’s so romantic. This whole house is gonna be filled with romance!” She then suddenly stops, gasps, and says, with almost cartoon-like gravity, “I’m gonna put on my Liberace records!” After running out the door, presumably to make good on her statement, she runs back in and asks Sheldon, “You do like Liberace, don’t you?” To which, after pausing only slightly, he responds, “Whenever he played Radio City who do you think was right there in the front row?” Annie says, in turn, “I’m gonna play my records all day long, to inspire you. He’s my all-time favorite.” In the King novel there is no mention whatsoever of Liberace. This detail was added by screenwriter William Goldman, and it is a vitally important one. But we must ask why Liberace’s music and persona are used in this film as a means of conveying Reiner’s and Goldman’s narrative points. In other words: why are Liberace and his fans targets?

Why Liberace? A committed, involved, and outspoken political and social liberal, Rob Reiner found the perfect model for the self-hating, repressed, physically abusive, and mentally unstable Annie in the closeted performer. Liberace’s biographer Darden Asbury Pyron mentions that, while not overtly political or outspoken, the pianist was aligned with Republican-style conservatism throughout his lifetime.209 He spoke of his dislike of big government, unions, homosexuality, and any tax that would diminish his considerable fortune.210 Perhaps his ideological alignment can best been seen through his few political performances. He played for Truman, Eisenhower, and Nixon, and he was a special guest of the Reagans.211 Tellingly, he was absent from the activist-inspired, socially-conscious Kennedy White House as well as Lyndon Johnson’s. Reiner links Annie to the brand of Republican conservatism that Liberace identified with and that the director detests. In an important exposition scene in both the novel and film versions of Misery, Paul again escapes his room while Annie is away and finds a scrapbook titled

209 Darden Asbury Pyron, Liberace: An American Boy, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 296. 210 Pyron, 297. 211 Ibid.

“Memory Lane.” Contained within this book are all the details of Annie’s murderous past. Newspaper clippings populate the book, and we learn that Annie is responsible for the death of her father and countless newborns that were under her care as a maternity nurse. But unlike the novel, the film’s “Memory Lane” contains a single conspicuously placed political banner which identifies Annie as both a Republican and a Nixon supporter (see Figure 6.3).

Figure 6.3: Screenshot from Misery. Page in Annie’s scrapbook identifying her as a Republican. The repeated blocks of text are common in filmic renderings of newspapers, as the image appears on screen for less than two seconds.

A product of Midwest American values and a strong adherent of Catholicism, the pianist achieved fame during a time when homosexuality was deeply disparaged. Homosexuality, open or otherwise, was akin to career suicide for an entertainer, and especially for one whose audience primarily comprised middle-aged, Midwestern, conservative women. As evidenced by the infamous “Cassandra” trial of 1956, when the performer successfully sued the London newspaper The Daily Mirror for $22,000, Liberace went to great lengths to keep his sexual proclivities secret. The tabloid article famously label him “the summit of sex—the pinnacle of masculine, feminine, and neuter. Everything that he, she, and it can ever want … a deadly, winking, sniggering, snuggling, chromium-plated, scent-impregnated,

luminous, quivering, giggling, fruit-flavoured, mincing, ice-covered heap of mother love…"212 A similar article in the sensational and highly successful Hollywood gossip magazine Hollywood Confidential from 1957 shouted a headline which stated that Liberace’s “… Theme Song Should Be ‘Mad About The Boy.’” This too was met with the swift and effective threat of litigation.213 The gay liberation movement that began with the Stonewall riots in New York City in the summer of 1969 did little to ease the performer’s mind about acknowledging his sexuality. In fact, the push from gay activist for homosexuals to “come out” further alienated Liberace from the gay community. Pryon notes that “conservative or moderate homosexual men … lost standing, even legitimacy, among their [the liberation movement’s] followers.”214 Liberace chose not to be a model for the newly energized and highly activated gay community. He never did admit his sexuality publicly. The silence and misdirection that had served his career so well in the 1940s and 1950s had to be accounted for in the new political realities of the 1960s and beyond. As a result, the political and artistic tastemakers of the counterculture rejected him and his art. Moreover, Liberace became, to those within the activist gay community and their allies on the political left, the embodiment of social irresponsibility. He was gay, had many lovers and boyfriends, and privately acknowledged this within his close circle of friends. But he never dared even once to speak publicly, to challenge the common, bigoted misperceptions that dogged the homosexual community. As the nation’s homosexual community began to come out of the closet in the days after the Stonewall riots, Liberace remained deceitful about his sexual orientation, becoming the gay equivalent of the African-American community’s “Uncle Tom,” the “Closet Queen.” Former lover Scott Thorson wrote that, during the shifting cultural climate of the post-Stonewall generation, Liberace insisted that “I can’t admit a thing … unless I want to be known as the world’s biggest liar.”215 Liberace’s silence was viewed as a slap in the face to the gay-rights effort. For gay-rights activists and their allies Liberace “became a model for

212 Quoted in Pyron, 194. 213 Ibid., 221. 214 Ibid., 304. 215 Scott Thorson and Alex Thorleifson, Behind the Candelabra: My Life with Liberace (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1988), 42.

everything gay men should not be –a selfish, self-loathing, hypocritical, closeted, conservative- Republican, stereotypical sissy.”216 The fact that Liberace hid not only his homosexuality but also his AIDS diagnosis from the public further angered the activist community. At the same time these facts shocked and distressed the more conservative members of society, including many of his former fans. By the late 1980s Liberace had very few sympathizers and even fewer defenders. And for someone of Reiner’s political temperament, he was a perfect allegorical target. But what most offended those whose politics were, like Reiner’s, formed in the crucible of 1960s radicalism, was Liberace’s nearly complete absence from the political sphere. According to Thorson, “politics, world affairs, local problems, meant nothing to Lee.”217 The world-famous performer seemed to float through his career, unaware of major political and social controversies until these were brought directly to his attention by the media. For instance, during a trip to Johannesburg, South Africa, the performer seemed oblivious to his perceived tacit endorsement of apartheid. When pressed by a reporter, he did denounce apartheid but then added, “I don’t think it’s the place of an American piano player to try to change the quality of life in the Republic of South Africa.”218 As Liberace biographer Pyron succinctly puts it, “by asserting that art was apolitical, [Liberace] violated one of the fundamental tenets of a generational prejudice.”219 For a world-famous celebrity and self-proclaimed artist to shirk his responsibilities to his fellow human beings in this way was, in the eyes of liberal activists of Reiner’s stripe, a significant moral failure. Misery, released in 1990, was in production during a time of wall-to-wall, tabloid-style scandal surrounding Liberace. In 1987, one year after the publication of King’s novel, Scott Thorson published his tell-all book Behind the Candelabra: My Life with Liberace.220 The book helped to fan the flames of a media firestorm that was ignited by Liberace’s death in February of the same year due to complications from AIDS. Media outlets were swamped with stories containing lurid details about the showman’s life and many lovers, and the tabloids ran a

216 Pyron, 425. 217 Thorson and Thorleifson, 128. 218 Pyron, 298. 219 Ibid. 220 At the time of this drafting, Thorson’s book has been optioned by director Steven Soderbergh for a feature-length film scheduled to be broadcast on the cable outlet HBO in 2013, which will star Michael Douglas as Liberace and Matt Damon as Scott Thorson.

seemingly never-ending series of outrageous tales. A succession of lawsuits contesting the pianist’s estate were filed in 1987, each one covered meticulously by a scandal-hungry media. No fewer than two made-for-television movies about the performer aired in 1988. In short, throughout the late 1980s Liberace was more present in the media than he was during his lifetime, an impressive accomplishment for someone known throughout his career as “Mr. Showmanship.” Given that the screenplay for Misery was being constructed during this time of media saturation, it is completely plausible that Liberace’s life and art was the template for Goldman’s and Reiner’s tale of celebrity obsession and the dangers of debased art personified in the character Annie Wilkes. And while Liberace plays an important role in the film as part of Annie’s characterization, his music plays an equally significant but altogether different one. But prior to tackling the specifics about how it is used, a case must be made for why it is used. Liberace’s musical legacy, while still largely undefined and fluid, seems to polarize around the categories of classical musician or popular entertainer.221 For those who judged him from a classicist’s perspective, Liberace embodied everything that was corrosive to classical music and culture. Since the 1950s reviewers and columnists had derided Liberace as “a failed artist who degraded good music”222 and as someone who “simply debased his art and corrupted music, even popular and jazz.”223 Even those critics who attempted, on the surface, to limit their critique to the technical aspects of his performance wrote in decidedly moralistic prose, like one who noted that Liberace was a “‘bad pianist’ with ‘technical disabilities’ and a middlebrow sensitivity who ‘belittl[ed] and bastardy[zed] classical music.’”224 Samuel Lipman argues that Liberace did have considerable musical talent when he says that “Liberace played rather well. He displayed at all times a large, accurate, and brilliant technique, even indulging himself from time to time in impressive displays of octaves, scales, and complicated passagework.”225 For Lipman, Liberace’s musical gifts magnified his artistic shortcomings. The performer had real talent, but he squandered it by employing a “meretricious choice of repertory” and encouraging audiences to ignore his performance’s “metaphysical

221 Pyron, 421. Pyron also claims that neither of these perspectives holds fast for musicology; the discipline, he says, has simply ignored Liberace. 222 Ibid. 223 Ibid. 224 Ibid. 225 Samuel Lipman, “Sad thoughts on Walter Busterkeys, a.k.a. Liberace,” in The New Criterion Reader: The First Five Years, ed. Hilton Kramer (New York: The Free Press, 1988), 398.

deficiencies.”226 In Lipman’s estimation the obituary he wrote for Liberace in 1987 could also serve as an in memoriam for the piano’s epoch as “the musical instrument par excellence.”227 Liberace signaled the end of a 140-year period of middle-class cultural enrichment via the piano, and he laughed all the way to the bank, while being complicit in its demise. Liberace, however, seems to have had no confusion as to his place in the musical landscape. At the age of 19 the struggling performer shed his aspirations of becoming a classical musician.228 He seemed to know early in his career that the concert hall was not the place to find what he truly wanted. Scott Thorson noted that “Lee … realized that he’d never be a truly great one [pianist] in the classical sense … [and that] this realization was a painful one.”229 As a result of this recognition, Liberace consciously worked to establish himself as a pop musician.230 Like many in the pop-music world, Liberace “began to see music as a path to popularity and power.”231 Power and popularity are not traditionally within the purview of the “classical” musician – a logical subcategory of “the artist” according to mainstream, romantically- influenced culture. In the view of his critics Liberace was an artistic fraud, one who used classical music for ends usually relegated to the sphere of popular music: material and economic gain, the procurement of sexual gratification from fans, and a lifestyle not of serious intellectual and artistic struggle but of conspicuous consumption. Worst of all, the pop musician does all this through the creation of a larger-than-life persona, one that functions to hide the “real” performer from the audience instead of engaging them faithfully in a musical/metaphysical catharsis. In this view Liberace was not a well-compensated artistic genius but instead an imposter playing both to and upon middle-America yokels too culturally naïve to understand the deception perpetrated upon them and their unwitting role in its perpetuation. Reiner exploits this portrayal of Liberace throughout the film. Directly following the scene where Annie spins with delight over the resumption of the “Misery” novels, Sheldon asks Annie to have dinner with him, supposedly to celebrate “Misery’s Return.” His true intention is to drug Annie with the pain medication he’s been hoarding.

226 Pyron, 421. 227 Ibid. 228 Thorson and Thorleifson, 19. 229 Ibid., 15. 230 Ibid. 231 Ibid.

Annie, who has already confessed to being in love with him, is visibly touched, even flabbergasted by the offer. As Sheldon and Annie sit down to dinner in Annie’s dining room, the accompanying music is a presumably diegetic recording of Liberace’s oft-performed song “I’ll Be Seeing You.” The cat-and-mouse game between Sheldon and Annie unfolds in exact concordance with the recording, the scene precisely matching the length of the recording. When Sheldon’s plan to drug Annie is inadvertently ruined by Annie’s wine-spilling clumsiness, he is visibly devastated. He also knows that he must hide this fact from his captor and carry on. As the scene and the recording come to a close, Annie takes charge of the proceedings, pours a new glass of wine and ironically toasts, “To Misery!” Originally written by Irving Kahal and Sammy Fain in 1938, “I’ll Be Seeing You” became a kind of musical calling card for Liberace as early as the 1950s. The song was essentially the theme music for his television series The Liberace Show (1953-1954), and he subsequently used it to close his live performances.232 In essence, “I’ll Be Seeing You” served as a cue for conclusion. While Sheldon prepares to drug Annie at the dinner table, the recording works to assist in dramatic misdirection. In listening to this concluding music (the song is used again at the end of the film), the audience is allowed to hope that Sheldon will succeed in escaping his captor. When he fails, the disappointment the audience feels in connecting with the protagonist is heightened by the use of this music, by its false promise that his suffering is almost over. The key here, however, is that the recording is diegetic; it is under Annie’s control and it works for her, not against her. More than this, however, the use of the song offers insights into our understanding of Sheldon’s relationship with his captor. Biographer Pyron notes that, when he used the song in performance, Liberace was “giving back a portion of what his admirers were giving him … It reaffirms, then, his oldest motives in performance … the ambition to redefine the relationship between the artist and the audience in terms of personal affection.”233 Here we see a dramatic connection between Paul’s power and the film’s plot. By flattering Annie with an invitation to dinner, Sheldon knows that he is exploiting Annie’s obsession with him. Paul has not yet shed his associations with false art.

232 Pyron, 274. 233 Ibid.

Additionally, the song’s lyrics are important to an understanding of Annie’s mental state and her obsession with Sheldon. On the surface, the song is a simple, sentimental poem about lost love and a parting of ways. But when the piece is used in the specific context of Annie and Sheldon, or the larger one of artist and admirer, there is much to be mined:

I'll be seeing you in all the old familiar places That this heart of mine embraces all day through. In that small cafe; the park across the way; The children's carousel; the chestnut trees; the wishing well.

I'll be seeing you in every lovely summer's day; In everything that's light and gay. I'll always think of you that way.

I'll find you in the morning sun And when the night is new. I'll be looking at the moon, but I'll be seeing you.

Pyron notes the following:

[The] poetry involves illusion, optical illusion, or even self- conscious delusion; the song is about looking at one thing and seeing something else. It introduces, then, the mind’s eye or an inner vision. It is about the conjuring of the absent or the unseen, about the reconstructing of the natural world, the refiguring of the scene to include objects of fancy or imagination. The lyrics celebrate, then, not mere things but images of things, and imagination itself. It chronicles the mental reconstruction of the world … the love then is essentially an object of fancy or a creation of the imagination.234

In this scene, the lyrics can be read for both Sheldon’s and Annie’s perspectives. We may read the lyrics literally, instead of metaphorically, from Annie’s obsessed perspective. She cannot think of or see anything except for Sheldon, and it is in part this repressed and unrequited love that drives Annie to madness. From another perceptive, Sheldon is, on the surface, giving back to his admirer, but his real intention is to use his power for personal gain. His power,

234 Pyron, 274.

however, is gained through his schlock romance novels, a debased art akin to Liberace’s. In this light then, Sheldon’s failure is inevitable. Directly following the dinner scene begins a montage accompanied by Tchaikovsky’s Piano Concerto No. 1 in B-flat minor. But discerning listeners can immediately tell there is something amiss with this version. Instead of the original Tchaikovsky composition with its enormous, lush orchestra, the audience hears instead a rather small, thin-sounding orchestra accompanied by suspended cymbal crashes. The combination of recording quality and suspended cymbal are clues that this is not the authentic Tchaikovsky but instead the composer’s art distorted through Liberace’s lens. The montage accelerates several plot lines. First, it details Sheldon’s success writing “Misery’s Return,” as the many shots of him sitting at the typewriter indicate. Close-ups of the face of the typewriter alternate with long shots of him framed by a bay window, outside of which day becomes night and snow turns to rain, thereby accelerating the timeline of the film. We also see Sheldon becoming healthier, strengthening himself by using the heavy, old typewriter as a kind of make-shift barbell. Finally, we see a local police officer reading through copies of Sheldon’s “Misery” novels, in order to try to gather some insight into the cold case. The montage only once allows for dialogue to interrupt its course, when Annie stands next to Sheldon, presumably reading the latest chapter of “Misery’s Return” and says, rather ironically, “Oh, Paul, this is positively the best ‘Misery’ you’ve ever written.” In this montage the editing corresponds exactly and overtly with the music’s phrase structure. Here we see Sheldon effortlessly jumping back into the debased art that he was trying to escape, working in absolute tandem with Liberace. Indeed, the close-ups of Sheldon’s fingers flying over the typewriter are a less-than-subtle allusion to a pianist’s hands at the keyboard. Liberace’s condensed, tinny, and meek arrangement of the Tchaikovsky is portrayed as artistic treason, and Sheldon is, by virtue of the montage’s precise correspondence with the music, complicit in an equal crime against literary art. The most gruesome scene in Misery is without doubt the so-called “hobbling scene,” where Annie, in an attempt to keep Sheldon from either escaping or trying to destroy her, breaks the author’s ankles with a sledgehammer. The hobbling scene is the emotional highpoint of the film, and the music in this scene is vitally important to the construction of the film’s deeper contextual layers.

After Annie has sunk into a deep, almost-suicidal depression, she leaves the house unattended for a lengthy period. During this time Sheldon escapes his room again, and he learns of Annie’s murderous past (and Republican leanings) in her “Memory Lane” scrapbook. Additionally, he brings a large kitchen knife back to his room and hides it in his sling. The plan, presumably, is to surprise Annie the next time she brings him food or medicine and to finally destroy her. Sheldon makes his way back to his bed, but when Annie returns to the house she does not visit his room. Paul then stows the knife between the mattress and box spring and says to himself (and the audience), “see you in the morning.” But the next morning does not play out as expected. During the night Annie visits Sheldon’s room and administers an injection via a hypodermic needle. He struggles against this but loses consciousness as the scene fades to black. The visual narrative reenters the following morning, with bucolic images of freshly fallen snow atop rugged Colorado hillsides, accompanied by the sounds of birdcalls. But the sounds of nature are quickly overtaken by the surreal sounds of applause that are quickly followed by Liberace’s voice. Sheldon, who is suffering dissociative effects from the injection, slowly comes to, when Annie, who is seen fussing with something outside the shot, says to him “I know you’ve been out.” A confused Sheldon, shown in close-up, looks down at his out-of-frame body in an attempt to understand his current situation. At this point, a wide shot exposes what Annie has been doing outside of the camera’s view: she has been tying him down to the bed with thick ropes and leather straps. At the very moment when Paul and the audience realize the gravity of the situation, the first brooding sounds of Liberace’s arrangement of the “Moonlight” Sonata emanate from Annie’s phonograph playing in another room (see Figure 6.4).

Figure 6.4: Screenshot from Misery. Sheldon becomes aware of his dire situation just as Liberace’s version of the “Moonlight” Sonata begins to play.

As the music plays, Annie explains to Sheldon how she’s figured out that he has been escaping his room. While she’s speaking, Sheldon attempts to recover the knife from under his mattress, only to have Annie interrupt him, show the knife, and ask: “Is this what you’re looking for?” Annie then explains that she’s had a moment of clarity concerning his unwillingness to stay with her, and gives a supposedly historical account of the practice of “hobbling,” where diamond-mine workers were punished for trying to escape but still needed to be well enough to mine. Tellingly, Annie describes this practice as “an operation.” She then places a large wooden block between Paul’s ankles and hoists a sledge hammer over her shoulder. At this point both Sheldon and the audience are made aware of the gruesome scene that is to unfold. This torture and physical abuse is Annie’s way of trying to ensure that she won’t lose him. Disturbingly, after Annie has broken both of Paul’s ankles, the camera closes in tightly on her face (all the while Paul is screaming in agony), and she says to him, “God, I love you.” The “Moonlight” Sonata, which accompanies this scene, immediately portends not a pathetic beauty but instead an inevitable, unspeakable evil. One of the most recognizable works of the Western musical canon, its use in this context draws viewers into a Kubrick-esque

dialogue about the role of art music within society. Like Kubrick’s and Burgess’s Droog-King Alex in A Clockwork Orange (1971), Annie Wilkes is seen as a deeply cruel individual, who revels in Beethoven (a particular version of it, at least) for her own ends. As in Kubrick’s film, Beethoven’s music is not a civilizing, soothing agent of societal betterment but instead one that is appropriated by the most brutal individuals in society. Indeed, Annie uses this music to sacralize her inhumaneness. Liberace’s disembodied voice-over that begins the scene (the only time when we hear his spoken voice) states, “I’m supposed to lead into the finale of my show right now, but I’m having such a wonderful time, and I have no other place to go, so if you’d like me to stay and play some more for you, I’d love to.” When the “Moonlight” Sonata begins over the wide shot of Sheldon helplessly strapped to the bed, Annie begins a recitative-like speech set against the saccharine- sweet Beethoven arrangement by Liberace. Just as in operatic recitative, Annie advances the plot, describing how she discovered Paul’s extra-bedroom excursions and her plan to keep Paul in her care. This recitative continues until the moment where Annie prepares for the “operation.” Beyond this, all we are left with is mounting dread accompanied by the diegetic sounds of the woodblock and sledgehammer scraping across the floor, Sheldon’s feeble pleas for mercy, and Liberace’s “Moonlight.” When the sledgehammer finally connects with Paul’s ankle, the stomach-turning sound combined with Sheldon’s scream is distinctly at odds with the contemplative music. The music continues as Annie moves onto the second ankle, an act that is not shown on screen but conveyed only through sound. Throughout the scene Annie’s movement and demeanor match the soundtrack, effortless and calm, without even a hint of anxiety, while Sheldon struggles, pleads, screams, and writhes his way through it. This exaggerated musical indifference to the drama is one of the major invitations for ironic readings. And once an exploration of possible readings is undertaken, the depth and complexity of the commentary begin to surface. Annie’s love and admiration for “false art” is laid bare by her both fondness for Sheldon’s “Misery” series and her obsession with Liberace. Her lack of sophistication, already hinted at by her remoteness, conservatism, religiosity, décor, and her choice of literature and music, is made all the more obvious when she mispronounces “Dom Perignon” and also refers to Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel as “that ceiling that dago painted.” These faux pas are, as Reiner

would have us see them, the kind expected from someone who would align herself with Liberace’s brand of art, a person who believes she knows and appreciates art music but is instead only familiar with a candy-coated facsimile of it. The accompaniment of Sheldon’s torture with the Liberace-Beethoven stresses the dangers of false art, the steep price to pay for exploiting audiences with it, and the very real and (literally, here) painful struggle one must undertake to rid themselves of it. The foregrounding of Liberace’s presence, via his voice-over at the onset of the scene, provides both ideological motivation as well as personal motivation for Annie’s ghastly act. We see Annie as a devotee of Liberace. She is deluded into loving the façade of a popular performer masquerading as artist. Moreover, Annie’s relationship with Sheldon mirrors Liberace’s relationship with Scott Thorson in many aspects. Liberace engaged in relationships with much-younger men (and sometimes boys) as a way to make good his lost relationship with his failure of a father. Pyron states that Liberace “nursed a resentment against his parent [father] for years. If his bitterness, even, was love gone bad, the appearance of the boy, in some weird way, gave him a chance to do it right again, to take it from the top…”235 Liberace also chose his romantic conquests because he saw in them inferiority, a trait that enabled easy control and that would assuage his ego. As Pyron succinctly states: “[t]he performer needed neediness; he did not need success.”236 Thorson puts it more sinisterly, describing Liberace as “a Dracula who never wearied of the taste of youth.”237 While neediness is clearly important to Annie, her exercise of power and control is central to her relationship with Sheldon. Liberace was the pursuer of young men and was sexually aggressive. He was, according to Thorson, a “top,” the party who actively penetrated his lovers. Pyron notes that Liberace “was the aggressor; he called the shots; he determined the length and duration of the act. His sissy persona not withstanding, he was the pursuer, the hunter, the initiator –the ‘man’ as traditionally defined –in the relationship.”238 Scott Thorson wrote at length about his suffocating relationship with Liberace in his 1987 publication. Referring to himself as “a prisoner in paradise,” he wrote at length about his own

235 Pyron., 335. 236 Pyron, 321. 237 Thorson and Thorleifson, 38. 238 Pyron, 319.

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sequestration at Liberace’s demand.239 Annie kept a false phone and worked tirelessly to eliminate any hint of Paul’s existence to the outside world. Liberace was likewise protective of his relationship with Thorson, going to great lengths so as not to “share him or their world with others.”240 Thorson wrote that Liberace “didn’t like me to have large blocks of free time. He wanted to know where I was and who I was with every minute.”241 Like Annie, Liberace’s personality radically shifted without warning. Thorson notes that Liberace was “a man who could swiftly change from indulgent parent to ardent lover to outraged tyrant.”242 Most curiously, Thorson links Liberace’s destructive neediness to his life of lying and to his inauthentic existence. Thorson wrote concerning Liberace’s decision to keep his sexuality closeted that “[k]eeping the secret placed an almost intolerable burden on him and our relationship. It explained his need for seclusion, his almost paranoid desire to hold the entire world at arm’s length.”243 During the hobbling scene, Annie literally becomes Liberace. When Annie is confronted with the possibility of Sheldon’s departure, she hobbles him or, as she puts it, performs an operation. The goal of this operation is to keep him with Annie, and it involves an unspeakable act of physical brutality, disfigurement, and moral depravity motivated by insecurity, loneliness and the desperation of losing a loved one. This is in direct correlation with Liberace’s much- publicized insistence upon, and financing of, Scott Thorson’s facial reconstruction, a surgery with the explicit goal of having the younger lover resemble the older performer. About one year into their relationship, Liberace insisted that the twenty-year-old Thorson undergo the surgical procedure. Thorson wrote that he went to the doctor “like a lamb to the slaughter.”244 After two surgeries, he required months of painful recovery, during which time Thorson claims he became addicted to pain killers, a condition that would haunt him for years after the relationship ended. Liberace’s control of Thorson was nearly complete after the surgery. The young lover thought of himself as “Lee’s creature. He’d been my Pygmalion… I’d begun to think of myself as an extension of Liberace, a part of him rather than a full-fledged

239 Thorson and Thorleifson, 178. 240 Pyron, 338. 241 Thorson and Thorleifson, 146. 242 Ibid., 134. 243 Thorson and Thorleifson, 122. 244 Ibid., 150.

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individual.”245 Annie’s actions and motivations during the hobbling scene are analogous with this shocking and highly-publicized event between the two lovers. The hobbling scene is the dramatic and emotional highpoint of the film not simply because of its naked brutality but also due to confluence of multivalent dramatic and narrative layers that occurs here, and these deeper contextual layers are brought to the surface through the use of Liberace’s arrangement of the “Moonlight” Sonata. The film’s time in Colorado ends with Sheldon’s destruction of Annie. He burns the manuscript of “Misery’s Return” before Annie can read the final chapter, and in her desperation to find out what happens to her heroine, she rushes to save the manuscript. Sheldon uses this chance to crush Annie’s skull with his typewriter. In the final scene of Misery Sheldon is safely back in New York City and meeting with his agent (Lauren Bacall) at a fine restaurant. In the background, very quietly, plays Mozart’s Quintet for Clarinet in A major. The music is very likely diegetically placed, either in an unseen performance in the restaurant or piped in over discreet speakers at a volume level below that of conversation. The use of this music, in its unaltered form (unlike the Liberace arrangements), reinforces the ideas of realness and safety, while it also confers upon Sheldon the blessings of an Authentic Artist. The music in the safe, intellectual, and cosmopolitan world of New York City set us at ease, bringing a sense of reality to what had been Sheldon’s surreal experience in the wilds of Colorado. He has escaped both Annie and his involvement with debased art. The theme of forging new artistic paths is more important in the film than in King’s novel. In the film Sheldon ultimately triumphs over Annie by burning his manuscript of “Misery’s Return,” whereas in the novel he only burns the title page and escapes with the rest of the manuscript intact. In the novel Sheldon’s meeting with the agent is to discuss the wildly- successful sales of “Misery’s Return.” In the film he is meeting to discuss his new, serious novel that has earned the author renewed credibility with critics and could even land him a literary prize. When Sheldon’s reaction to the news of his newly acquired respectability doesn’t meet his agent’s expectations, she comments, “I thought you’d be thrilled. You’re being taken seriously.” To which he replies, “I’m delighted the critics are liking it, and I hope the people like it, too. But, I wrote it for me.” Here, encapsulated in this brief dialogue, is the evidence of Sheldon’s

245 Ibid., 154.

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conversion from hack to artist. Moreover, he admits that his experience with Annie Wilkes has been helpful to him as an artist. To stress the point, when his agent broaches with him the idea of writing a non-fiction account of his time with Annie, suggesting it would make him very wealthy, he declines this offer of easy money, saying “I don’t want to dredge up the worst horror of my life just to make a few bucks.” At this point in the scene, the music suddenly changes from diegetic Mozart to nondiegetic, dissonant chords enlivened by taut trills, as we see Annie rounding the corner of the restaurant, dressed in a waitress’s uniform and pushing a dessert tray. And Annie approaches the table, she lifts a large knife. “It’s weird,” says Sheldon while staring at this unthinkable apparition, “even though I know she’s dead, I still think about her once in a while.” When Annie finally comes to the table, we see that it is not Annie but instead a waitress who has recognized the famous author. “I just want to tell you,” the waitress says to Sheldon, “I’m your number-one fan.” When Paul thanks her for her kindness, we hear Liberace’s “I’ll Be Seeing You” drift in from the auditory background and eventually become foregrounded as the credits begin to roll. This is one of the most interesting uses of music in the film because it links Misery with post- modern horror films like those of the so-called “slasher” genre. According to James Buhler, horror films ends on one of two ways: 1) “coherently,” where the monster is defeated and normality returns to the world, or 2) “incoherently,” where the monster is not fully vanquished and thus does not permit the film dramatic closure.246 For instance, the films in the Friday the 13th franchise, a template for modern slasher films, end incoherently. We know that the killer has not been (or cannot be) destroyed. Unlike the traditional, “coherent” horror film where the girl victim is saved from the monster by her male lover, the incoherent slasher template problematizes this scheme. As Gary Heba notes: While coherent versions of horror depend on humanity being able to control and vanquish external sources of horror, incoherent movies focus on humanity’s limited abilities to control the horrors –or worse, on humanity’s capacity to create its own horrors that cannot be contained by the coherent master narrative.247

246 James Buhler, “Music and the Adult Ideal,” in Music in the Horror Film: Listening to Fear, ed. Neil Lerner (New York: Routledge, 2010), 169. 247 Gary Heba, “Everyday Nightmares: The Rhetoric of Social Horror in the Nightmare on Elm Street Series,” Journal of Popular Film and Television 23 (1995), 108.

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By using Liberace’s “I’ll Be Seeing You,” Reiner shifts the narrative into the realm of the incoherent, instead of allowing for a clean, buttoned-up coherent master narrative. Liberace, through his voice and music, and Annie are literally telling Sheldon and the audience that “they’ll be seeing us.” They are not vanquished, they are not controlled, and so long as debased art exists and false artists continue to profit from and corrupt their audiences, they will, metaphorically at least, continue to haunt, damage, and hobble us as individuals and as a society.

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CHAPTER 7: WAGNER, EROTICISM, AND EVIL IN APT PUPIL

When the All-American teenager Todd Bowden (Brad Renfro) discovers aging Nazi Kurt Dussander (Sir Ian McKellen) hiding in his suburban California neighborhood, Todd proposes a deal: he will keep quiet about his knowledge of the criminal, if, in turn, Dussander will recount the grisly details of the holocaust, leaving out nothing that would otherwise be censored. Dussander’s recounting of these stories begins to have an effect on both him and the boy. For Dussander, they slowly reawaken a smoldering blood-lust. For Todd, they plant the seeds of evil. Apt Pupil (1998; dir., Bryan Singer) is a study of the nature of evil and unfolds as a psychological power struggle between the two characters. Soon after Todd uses his leverage to extract the ghastly stories from Dussander, he becomes infatuated with the Nazis and their unbridled power. Todd begins to aspire to this kind of power and presses Dussander into his service, going so far as to make the old man don an S.S. uniform and literally march to his commands. But soon this obsession begins to affect Todd’s personal and academic life. The top student’s grades slip precipitously (which risks parental discovery of the true nature of his relationship with the old man), and his social and dating life become a humiliating sea of dysfunction. By the time Todd realizes the dangers of his involvement with Dussander, it is too late. When Todd attempts to cut ties with Dussander, the old man pretends that he has written a detailed account of the boy’s interaction with and knowledge of the criminal, which he claims is stored in a safe deposit box. Should anything happen to Dussander, this fictional account would become public and destroy Todd’s life and that of those he loves. Dussander says to the boy, “Oh, you’re going to be infamous, boy, take my word for it. And you know what such a scandal can do. It never goes away. Not for you, not for your parents.” Trapped and angered, Todd says to the old man, “I think you should fuck yourself.” To which, Dussander responds, “Don’t you see? We are fucking each other.” Dussander further entangles himself in Todd’s life when he poses as the boy’s grandfather to a school guidance counselor (David Schwimmer) in order to keep news of Todd’s poor academic performance from reaching his parents. Dussander’s assistance with the

105 academic snafu allows Todd to resume a normal teenage existence, that is until Dussander murders a vagrant (Elias Kotas) in his home but suffers a heart attack before he can dispose of the (not-dead) body. Dussander calls on Todd to dispose of the body and then locks the boy in the basement, where he must finish Dussander’s handiwork. While recovering in the hospital, Dussander is recognized by another patient, who was a prisoner of Dussander’s. Before Dussander can be apprehended, he commits suicide. Todd is questioned by the police but ultimately dismissed. At the end of the film the guidance counselor recognizes Dussander’s picture in the paper and confronts Todd about his deception. Todd lashes out at the counselor, intimating that he’ll claim the counselor was attempting to seduce him. Todd echoes Dussander’s words when he tells the counselor, “A scandal like that will never go away … Think about your job, think about your kids.” When the counselor tries to call the boy’s bluff, Todd barks back, “You have no idea what I can do.”

The Music of Apt Pupil In an early scene in the film Todd is daydreaming and doodling in his high school classroom, paying no attention to the teacher, who is criticizing his class’s performance on a recent test. Todd’s facial expression indicates that his mind is clearly elsewhere, and that elsewhere is somewhat pleasing. As the camera reveals the object of Todd’s attention, we notice that he earned an “A” on the exam that perplexed his classmates, a device that obviously brings Todd’s intelligence to the fore. But when the camera pans away from the large, red-ink encircled “A” to where his pen is, we see that Todd has been drawing a series of swastikas on his paper. As the field of swastikas migrates toward the center of the frame, the “Love Duet” from Act II of Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde begins to play (see Figure 7.1 and Example 7.1).

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Figure 7.1: Screenshot from Apt Pupil (1998). Todd doodling on his test as Wagner’s “Love Duet” from Tristan und Isolde enters.

Example 7.1: Wagner, Tristan und Isolde, Act II, “Love Duet,” mm. 9-12.

The “Love Duet” sonically bridges the classroom scene with a brief inter-title reading “one month later,” which then fades to the image of an old-time record player belonging to Dussander, presumably the source of the music. This music works to individuate Dussander in two ways. First, and more generally, his enjoyment of opera speaks to his intelligence and level of culture. Secondly, and more specifically, his choice of Wagner is an indication of his Nazi past. As used in this scene, the music serves as the underscore for Dussander’s grisly stories about how gassing was carried out and the horrible effects of the poison on the victims. Here

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Todd is listening attentively, a far cry from his dispassionate classroom behavior of the prior scene. The beautiful music is distinctly at odds with the horrific and detailed description of the mass murders, and this incongruity invites the audience to read this use of music ironically. This alternative reading will lead to a discovery of the film’s deeper contextual layers. That fact that Wagner and his music were held in high esteem by Hitler is used by Singer to cement Dussander with his Nazi past. But the use of Tristan und Isolde goes further than simply classifying Dussander as a Nazi, a fact that has already been well established. A closer inspection of the precise music employed, its text, and its original context shows that there are indeed deeper layers to be mined. The text of the particular section of the “Love Duet” that sounds during the scene where Dussander is recalling the gassing of prisoners occurs at the moment in the opera where Tristan and Isolde promise themselves to one another, making a ‘til-death-do-us-part pledge:

So starben wir, um ungetrennt, ewig einig ohne End', ohn' Erwachen, ohn' Erbangen, namenlos in Lieb' umfangen, ganz uns selbst gegeben, der Liebe nur zu leben!

Thus we would die, undivided, eternally one, without end, without awaking, without fearing, namelessly, in love embracing, completely to ourselves given, for love only to live!248

248 Nico Castel, Three Wagner Opera Libretti (New York: Leyerle Publications, 2006), 358.

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In the context of the film the text of the duet is itself an ironic, prescient commentary on the dangerous, unbreakable bond that is created between Todd and Dussander in this scene; the music’s grotesque synthesis adds weight to Dussander’s claim that he and Todd “are fucking each other.”249 Later in the film there will be a significant dramatic analogue with this scene. After Dussander has helped Todd escape academic disaster, the boy removes himself from Dussander’s life and enjoys the life of a highly-successful and popular high school student. A montage, accompanied ironically by the 1938 popular German song “Das ist Berlin,” shows Todd pitching the final out of a big baseball game, performing well at basketball practice, acing a test well ahead of his classmates, and enjoying the company of an attractive girl at the movies. When the montage ends, Dussander is shown exiting a liquor store and boarding a bus. While on the bus, Dussander is recognized by a vagrant who often skulks around his home. The vagrant, credited as “Archie,” although the name is never uttered the film, offers Dussander an awkward, physical “hello.” Dussander, at first perplexed, eventually remembers where he’d seen this man: while dressed up in his S.S. uniform, Archie, who was rummaging through the garbage, spied Dussander through his window in full Nazi regalia. Dussander must again act to preserve himself. When Dussander exits the bus, Archie follows him and attempts to make conversation with the old man. Dussander, annoyed and slightly put off by the vagabond, tries to get away. Archie then tell Dussander that they are “practically neighbors,” since he sleeps outdoors near his home. When Archie grabs for the liquor, Dussander becomes visibly upset, and Archie pleads with the old man not to be rude. He then tells Dussander, “I know something about you.” Dussander becomes suddenly still after this pronouncement, until Archie finally continues and says, “I know you’re a nice guy. I’m nice too … Just like the boy.” “I see,” replies Dussander, knowing now that Archie believes Dussander to be a homosexual pedophile who is paying Todd for sexual favors. Archie tell Dussander that he would enjoy a drink, but also that he “don’t take no charity.” After being rebuked by Dussander for “smelling like a toilet,” Archie suggests that

249 Apt Pupil is rife with homoerotic and homophobic subtexts. For an enlightening and detailed account, see: “Apt Pupil’s misogyny, homoeroticism and homophobia--sadomasochism and the Holocaust film,” by Caroline Joan (Kay) S. Picart and Jason Grant McKahan in Jump Cut: A Review of Contemporary Cinema, 2002 (45). http://www.ejumpcut.org.

109 the old man could let him use his shower. “But first, a drink,” continues Archie, “then I’ll do anything you say.” After Archie offers his part in the terms, we hear the opening bars of the Prelude to Tristan und Isolde, complete with the so-called “Tristan chord,” which is visually accompanied by a tightening close-up of Dussander’s face as he cocks his head and then his eyes toward the unsuspecting Archie. The film then cuts to a close-up of the record player, just as in the earlier gas-chamber-story scene between Todd and Dussander. Moreover, the recording Dussander has chosen is not the love duet but instead, tellingly, a scratchy rendering of the “Liebestod;”250 the music elides seamlessly between the prelude’s “Tristan chord” and the opening bars of the love duet (see Example 7.2a and b).

250 The title “Liebestod” has become a common name for Isolde’s final apostrophe in Tristan und Isolde. Wagner preferred to call the scene “Verklärung,” literally “transfiguration,” and used the term “Liebestod” to refer to the prelude of the opera. Recordings generally use the term “Liebestod” to refer to both the final scene and to the orchestral coupling of the Prelude with the final scene. Scholars use the term interchangibly. For instance, John Deathridge, in his Wagner: Beyond Good and Evil (Berkley: University of California Press, 2008), uses the term “Liebestod,” while Lawrence Kramer, in his Music as Cultural Practice (Berkley: University of California Press, 1993), refers to the section as the “Verklärung.” The soundtrack for the film lists the title as “Prelude and Liebestod,” and this will be the term used throughout the text to refer to the music from the final scene of the opera. Importantly, though, it is the idea of transfiguration which is central to the reading of “Liebestod” as used in this film.

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Example 7.2a: Wagner, Tristan und Isolde, Prelude, mm. 1-2

Example 7.2b: Wagner, Tristan und Isolde, Act III, “Liebestod,” mm.1-2. Measure 2 of the Prelude elides with the beginning of the “Liebestod.”

This scene is remarkable for its length (over four minutes of nearly uninterrupted, unedited Liebestod), for its sound editing, which calls into question the assumed diegetic existence of the music, and, not least of all, for its dramatic, visual, and musical parallel with the earlier scene between Todd and Dussander. To stress this dramatic symmetry, the same leitmotiv sounds when the record player is shown in both scenes (see Example 7.3). The leitmotiv, sung first by both Tristan and then by Isolde, extols the virtues of a union in death.

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Example 7.3: Wagner, Tristan und Isolde, Act II, “Love Duet,” mm. 9-12.

As the scene begins, the pair are seated at the kitchen table, drinking. Archie, who is obviously mentally incapacitated, rambles incoherently, while Dussander attempts to follow his disjointed conversation. When going to retrieve another bottle of booze, Dussander walks over to the sink, supposedly to find a bottle opener. At this point, the “Liebestod” becomes more than just diegetic background music, it is now a motivator and an active participant in the drama. Throughout the scene thus far, the volume level of the “Liebestod” has roughly corresponded to the implied distance from the record player. When the record player was shown in extreme close-up, the music was foregrounded. When the camera placement was near the table, the “Liebestod” was barely audible, overshadowed by the conversation and even the falling rain. But when Dussander leaves the table to find a bottle opener, the levels begin to change and no longer conform to our perception of the music’s physical placement within the house. As Dussander is at the sink, we see a shot of him through a window from outside the house. Instead of the rain being the dominant sound, the “Liebestod” moves to the fore, as Dussander stares ominously out the window. Here the music is no longer linked with the diegetic “reality” of the house. Instead, it is linked with Dussander’s psyche and acts to influence and motivate him. The ghastly rhapsody speaks to both the homoerotic (love) and psychopathic (death) elements of the scene in the film. When Dussander returns to the table, the level of the “Liebestod” again bends to the rules of reality, becoming overshadowed by the conversation and other diegetic sounds. Here the music itself becomes the monster. We have been shown that the music can rise to the foreground on its own accord, as it if has its own consciousness. The audience has been shown a glimpse of the monster, and we know it is real,

112 alive, and inside the house. The slipping of the Liebestod into the aural background works to create dramatic tension. The audience knows the monster is there, lurking in the (auditory) shadows while the victim is totally unaware. As Archie prattles on, Dussander is mentally elsewhere. He stares at the vagrant, as if transported by the music. Dussander then reaches for Archie’s face with his left hand while asking if Archie minds. “No. Not at all,” replies Archie. Dussander then stands up and moves directly behind him, caressing his head. Archie then makes totally clear the arrangement when he says to Dussander, “You know, maybe in the morning … if everything goes ok you could let me have ten dollars.” “Perhaps,” replies Dussander, still looming over Archie from behind. Bringing his right hand into the frame and placing it onto Archie’s head, Dussander reveals a long kitchen knife. “Maybe twenty,” Archie continues, totally unaware of the imminent danger. “Perhaps,” repeats Dussander, “we shall see.” The “Liebestod” moves increasingly to the foreground, the dramatic tension carefully coordinated with the aria’s increasing musical tension. “You can relax, you know. I’ve done this before,” says Archie. To which Dussander replies ironically, “That’s all right. So have I.” As the aria approaches its apex, its volume dramatically increases, and Archie has only a moment before Dussander plunges the knife into his back (see Figure 7.2 and Example 7.4).

Figure 7.2: Screenshot from Apt Pupil. Dussander (Sir Ian McKellan) above Archie (Elias Kotas) as the “Liebestod” gains intensity.

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Example 7.4: Wagner, Tristan und Isolde, Act III, “Liebestod,” mm. 38-42.

At this exact moment, where we anticipate the arrival of the aria’s apex with the plunging knife, the music suddenly falls silent. Instead we are left watching a stunned Archie and hearing only the diegetic sounds of the chair being pushed back, the rain falling, and Dussander’s soft, clumsy footfalls as he backpedals away from his victim. For a full four seconds, a cinematic eternity, there is almost no sound and no movement, only the stunned expressions of both the victim and perpetrator, accompanied by the soft-falling rain. And then, suddenly, Archie screams and pushes the table over. With his outburst, the music returns as if uninterrupted. The missing four seconds of music happened, but were unheard by us and perhaps by Archie and Dussander as well; the missing measure calls into question our belief that the music was actually occurring diegetically during the scene (see Example 7.5). With the music’s return, its rhythmic activity and undulating dynamic profile parallel a macabre pantomime with Archie’s desperate flailing, rapid turning, and frantic reaching for the knife lodged in his back. We also notice here that the recording is no longer scratchy, but it now seems to be a crystal clear, digital-quality recording. As Archie engages in this grotesque ballet, Dussander takes the opportunity to strike Archie with a skillet, before taking hold of the beggar and tossing him down the basement stairs.

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Example 7.5: Wagner, Tristan und Isolde, Act III, “Liebestod,” mm. 44-47.

Could this music, which we believed so strongly to be emanating from the record player (reinforced by the audio-realism of the volume levels and the recording quality in the first half of the scene) have been just the psychic soundtrack of the murderer all along? Were we made privy to the inner workings of Dussander’s mind but made to believe they were real? To help answer these questions, we must look at the clues in the scene and examine the music’s original operatic context. First, the text of the Liebestod is useful. During this portion of the opera Isolde sees before her not the corpse of her beloved Tristan but instead his transfiguration. The text of this aria details Isolde’s private, psychic reality:

Mild und leise Gently and quietly wie er lächelt, How he smiles; wie das Auge How his eye(s) hold er öffnet – Fondly he opens… seht ihr's Freunde? See you Friends? Seht ihr's nicht? See you it not? Immer lichter Always brighter, wie er leuchtet, How he shines, stern-umstrahlet Sparkling star-surrounded

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hoch sich hebt? Highly soaring? Seht ihr's nicht? See you not? Wie das Herz ihm How his heart in him mutig schwillt, Proudly swells, voll und hehr Full and brave im Busen ihm quillt? In his bosom it pulses? Wie den Lippen, How from his lips, wonnig mild, Blissfilly, gently süßer Atem Sweet breath sanft entweht --- Softly is wafting? Freunde! Seht! Friends! Look! Fühlt und seht ihr's nicht? Feel and see you it not? Hör ich nur Do I hear diese Weise, Alone this melody, die so wunder- Which so wondrous voll und leise, And quiet, Wonne klagend, In bliss lamenting, alles sagend All-revealing, mild versöhnend Gently pardoning, aus ihm tönend, From him sounding, in mich dringet, Through me pierces, auf sich schwinget, Upwards soaring, hold erhallend Sweetly echoing um mich klinget? Around me ringing? Heller schallend, More clearly resounding, mich umwallend, Wafting about me, sind es Wellen Are they waves sanfter Lüfte? Of refreshing breezes?251 … …

It is useful to understand how Wagner conceived this final scene. His prose sketches for Tristan und Isolde indicate the following:

251 Castel, 410-12.

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Isolde, bent over Tristan, recovers herself and listens with growing rapture to the ascending melodies of love, which appear to rise up as if out of Tristan’s soul, swelling up like a sea of blossoms, into which, in order to drown, she throws herself…252

Dussander, in this scene, is a warped Isolde undergoing his own transfiguration; the music, for Dussander, may be emanating from Archie. This reading could account for the inconsistencies in the volume levels during the scene as well as for the noticeable change in recording quality. Finally, the missing measure, the moment where Dussander plunges the knife into Archie’s back, is perhaps the most obvious clue that will lead to our understanding of the music in this pivotal scene. When, in the opera, Isolde sings “Heller schallend” (more clearly resounding), Wagner deliberately recomposed her vocal lines. She no longer sings the main melodic material but instead begins to sing a descant while the orchestra which continues with the melodic material. John Deathridge emphasizes the significance of this moment, noting that this is:

when the orchestra begins to engulf Isolde in an ever-increasing surge of sound – an acoustical allegory of drowning that confronts violence and the sublime in a way that is provocative even for Wagner.253

In an opera noted for its ability musically to delay, obscure, or deny closure, this missing measure would have provided a rare instance of some fulfillment. The measure prior to the missing measure is a V7 chord that, not unusually for Tristan und Isolde, evades resolution to the tonic but instead arrives at the subdominant. But what does substitute for an instance of harmonic fulfillment is the sounding of a series of weak plagal cadences, IV – I6 at measure 44 and repeated in measure 45. These plagal cadences foreshadow the work’s final cadence, the only instance of true harmonic fulfillment, which occurs the end of the opera. Singer’s conspicuous elimination of such an occurrence of fulfillment tells us much about how we are to read Dussander’s psyche in this scene. Here is another example of irony: when the text for Dussander should be “Heller [schallend]” or “[resounding] more clearly,” it instead

252 John Deathridge, Wagner: Beyond Good and Evil (Berkley: University of California Press, 2008), 140. 253 Deathridge, 142.

117 vanishes. When Dussander should find his greatest fulfillment, Archie denies him this ultimate pleasure by not reacting. As a result the spell is, temporarily, broken. The music is abruptly silenced, and the quotidian realities of Dussander’s sonic world rush back in and replace his psychic rapture. Only when Archie finally reacts, by screaming in pain and by writhing with fear, does the music return. But the missing measure also calls to the fore yet another instance of irony, one that is made clear by an understanding of Schopenhauer’s influence upon Tristan und Isolde. In the opera, the final scene and the death of the two lovers is the culmination of the denial of the will. The denial of the will, according to Schopenhauer, is the only true path to freedom and to the elimination of suffering through the repudiation of the phenomenal world.254 Only when the will has been denied, and when human longings, desires, and wants are relinquished, can we truly find fulfillment. Wagner’s music in Tristan und Isolde is a musical manifestation of Schopenhauer’s metaphysics, where the will is denied musically through the evasion of harmonic fulfillment, until the end when both lovers have died and are only then truly united, both with themselves and the universe. When Dussander attempts to kill Archie, he is acting upon his wants, desires, and longings. But by attempting to satiate his will he is, in fact, merely creating for himself an increase his own suffering. And here we see how the elimination of the music from the scene works to bring this narrative point to the fore. By indulging in this act of the will, Dussander becomes deprived of the music of the denial of the will that is embodied in Tristan und Isolde, particularly in the “Liebestod.” Lawrence Kramer’s interpretation of this moment in the opera is helpful when reading elements of Dussander’s personality. He notes that “the moment that Isolde sings ‘Heller schallend’ … yield[s] a flood of narcissistic pleasure so overwhelming that the ego drowns in it.”255 For Kramer, this “flood” occurs due to “Tristan’s metamorphosis from a real to an imaginary object of desire.”256 The same is true for Archie. He is no longer a real object, but instead an object of Dussander’s murderous desire. The homoerotic overtones in this scene also reflect the hermeneutic interpretations of the scene in the opera.

254 Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation, vol. 1, ed. Christopher Janaway (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 328. 255 Kramer, 164. 256 Ibid., 163.

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Kramer notes that “[o]nly in its representation of desire as a tidal force that in large measure constitutes the personal subject does Tristan und Isolde commit itself unconditionally to the libidinal model,” and that Tristan und Isolde’s commitment to the libidinal model is what underwrites the opera’s effect of being a Freudian “end of the world fantasy” where all of reality is depreciated under the love object, and that this is best seen in the “Love Duet” and the “Liebestod.”257 Moreover, the “Liebestod” shows “that the end of the world can come, and come most forcefully, when the totality of desire rushes back in a flood from the object to the subject.”258 In the film Archie is the object of desire, and his murder is the act that should precipitate this “end of the world fantasy” for Dussander. Singer has equated the Nazi libido with a murderous impulse, a less-than-subtle strategy that makes Nazi figures monsters instead of humans who commit evil acts. But Dussander is unable to complete the murder, and because of this the totality of desire that he feels for the object (Archie) is not permitted to flood back into him. Dussander’s libidinal desires remain unfulfilled. The fact that the “Liebestod” is thwarted before it can be completed parallels the fact that Dussander is not able to finish destroying Archie. After Dussander throws Archie down the basement steps, he grabs a large mallet and begins to descend the staircase, when he is suddenly struck with a heart attack. When Dussander grabs for his chest and begins to collapse, the Liebestod once again vanishes. Wagner’s rhapsodic music is suddenly replaced by typical, classical-Hollywood style film score. Tristan und Isolde is musically characterized more than anything by its denial of fulfillment; the moments in the opera where musical passages reach melodic cadence occur at the same time as they default on a full harmonic cadence. This repeated deferral of fulfillment is what Kramer terms the “Lust-trope,”259 and he notes that, in the opera, “[w]hat counts as a fulfillment is actually a rapturous occasion of unfulfillment.”260 Dussander’s deferral of pleasure due to both Archie’s lack of initial reaction to his being stabbed and by the fact of Dussander’s ultimate inability to kill him parallels the final scene in the opera. Kramer points out that during

257 Ibid., 166. 258 Ibid. 259 Kramer, 149. “Lust” referring to Isolde’s final word in the opera that can be translated as “bliss” or “longing.” 260 Ibid.

119 the “Liebestod,” “deferral becomes a trope for the consummation of desire.”261 Wagner’s program notes say that during the Liebestod “the gates of union are thrown open.”262 The “gates of union” here are opened to Dussander and Todd through Dussander’s deferment of fulfillment that is eventually completed by Todd. By Todd’s killing of Archie, the totality of desire expressed by Dussander for the libido object now floods into Todd. The result is Todd’s metaphysical assumption of Dussander’s murderous libidinal urge, which seals their union. In this way the two “are fucking each other.” Whether or not we accept the music as sounding diegetically, the conspicuous indifference to the horror that we both anticipate and see play out on the screen allows for an ironic reading of the scene. However, if we recognize this music as exclusively Dussander’s mental soundtrack, then we witness a scene that parodies the opera via Archie’s grotesque transfiguration as viewed through Dussander. Irony insists that viewers engage in a rational process that helps them come to the narrative point on their own. By doing so, viewers will better comprehend the points made by the director, which in this case characterizes Dussander and, by extension, the Nazis as fetishizing and eroticizing violence due to their libidinal bloodlust. The choice of the “Liebestod” to accompany this scene taps into longstanding notions about Wagner, his music, his politics, and his influence on the Third Reich and Hitler. By using Wagner’s music to accompany scenes of great import, Singer alludes to these notions concerning Wagner’s works as being inherently anti-Semitic and pro-racial-purity. While the reality of the situation has been shown to be far more subtle than this, nevertheless, the assertions made during and immediately following the war by influential composers and philosophers living in exile, such as Thomas Mann, Theodor Adorno, and Emil Ludwig, continue to influence the public’s conception of Wagner’s music.263 And in the scene depicting Archie’s murder Singer exploits these ideas. Dussander is under the control of the music, responding to its subliminal demands in the same way that many imagine Hitler did.

261 Ibid., 154. 262 Richard Wagner, Prelude and Transfiguration from Tristan and Isolde, ed. Robert Bailey (New York: Norton, 1985), 47. 263 Pamela M. Potter, “What Is Nazi Music?” The Musical Quarterly 88:3 (Fall 2005), 448.

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Pamela Potter has shown that much of the supposed ideological lineage connecting Wagner and Hitler is built upon “the large accumulation of rumor.”264 The reality seems to be that Hitler’s enthusiasm for Wagner was based entirely on his music, and that any anti-Semitism, nationalism, arrogance, or xenophobia found in Wagner’s works (almost all of these findings occurred after the war) were either unknown or ignored in Nazi Germany.265 Clearly, Singer is not concerned with the realities of Wagner’s influence on Hitler or the Third Reich (indeed, this is an area that even musicology has been nervous about studying until recently) but is instead trafficking in the accumulated cultural baggage that has surrounded Wagner and his works (particularly his operas) since the end of World War II. It must be noted, then, that Apt Pupil is another text in a long line of films that continue and even intensify the notions of Wagner’s music as imbued with the ideological seeds of evil.266 Finally, it is important to note that the art music in this film is chosen by Dussander, just as Annie chose Liberace’s music in Misery. It is more than a coincidence this music was playing during the murder or the recounting of gas-chamber tales. This choice of music allows for a special kind of individuation for an otherwise generic villain. The popular conception of Wagner’s music and politics and their supposed relationship to the ideology of the Third Reich are also a part of Dussander’s self-characterization, and they speak to how he views himself: his Teutonicism, intellect, social stature, and cultural sophistication.267 In the case of Archie’s murder, Dussander specifically chose the opera as an accompaniment to the murder of a “degenerate,” a not-too-subtle reminder of the purported Nazi predilection for playing classical German music at the death camps.268

264 Pamela M. Potter, “Wagner and the Third Reich: Myths and Realities ,” in The Cambridge Companion to Wagner, ed. Thomas S. Grey (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 237. 265 Potter, “Wagner and the Third Reich,” 245. 266 An earlier example of this is the use of “The Ride of the Valkyries” in Apocalypse Now (1979; dir., Frances Ford Coppola) with scenes of the indiscriminate destruction of Vietnamese villages. Coppola’s use of Wagner’s music in that film is so recognizable that a later war film, Jarhead (2005; dir., Sam Mendes), shows American soldiers in Iraq viewing Apocalypse Now on base, mindlessly and cheerfully singing along with Wagner’s music to the scenes of the carnage. 267 An excellent article on the use of ironically deployed music, specifically anempathy, and its role in individuating characters is Stan Link’s “Sympathy with the Devil? Music of the psycho post -Psycho.” Screen 45:1 (Spring 2004), 1-20. 268 Potter, “Wagner and the Third Reich,” 244. Potter notes that, while the claim about Nazis using Wagner’s music to accompany Jews to their deaths has been in circulation since the end of the war, this has never been substantiated.

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In the end, Singer’s use of Wagner trades in common misconceptions. Effective though this may be in helping the audience to ascribe evil traits to a character, a larger issue that is brought up by the use of this music is the idea of responsibility for these acts. Singer uses the music as a kind of magic, one that directs the evil that Dussander engages in and, in some way, alleviates his responsibility for these murderous acts. By casting these horrible offenses and people as motivated by some supernatural agent, in this case Wagner’s music, Singer denies the reality that horrendous deeds and policies are perpetrated by everyday people that walk among us and are products of our own society. As Hannah Arendt noted in her famous book Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, some of the most despicable acts in history are carried out by very ordinary people and not demonic, obsessed super-villains. Unfortunately, Singer misses this opportunity to remind his audience that the potential for this kind evil is very much alive and well, and that it is capable of being generated again, not by radical ideologues consumed by hate, but by the most ordinary and mundane of us existing in our very own supposedly-enlightened society. The ironic deployment of both the “Love Duet” and the “Liebestod” comments upon Singer’s notion of the nature of evil; upon its existence as a powerful force of nature using humans simply as a conduit. The evil that caused a nation of otherwise rational people to imprison and destroy millions upon millions of people in the name of purity is not easily conquered. It reaches across time, space, and generations to infect those who are not cautious and who blindly toy with powers they can neither understand nor control. In short, the significance of the film’s tagline, “If you don’t believe in the existence of evil, you’ve got a lot to learn,” is made real largely through the ironic deployment of art music.

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CHAPTER 8: DIEGETIC, NONDIEGETIC, AND NARRATIVE POSITIONING IN HE GOT GAME

Both Misery and Apt Pupil make use of ironically deployed art music in order to make thematic points by fleshing out characterizations that in turn expose deeper contextual layers. Annie Wilkes is a Liberace fan who champions “inauthentic” art instead the “real thing.” Kurt Dussander plays Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde during moments of great import, emphasizing his Teutonicism, cultural sophistication, and intellect. But in both cases, the music is initiated by characters within the narrative, and these characters have psychologies and biases that we must read when recognizing their choices in music. Annie is crazy; Dussander is evil. Their music tells us something about their personalities. It also reveals something about how they view themselves, for when characters use diegetic music, they are agents and instigators, and their psychologies act as kind of filter. Just as Annie and Dussander trick Paul and Todd, they are somewhat able to fool or misdirect us through their choice of music. As nondiegetic music comes from outside the story space its agent is not a character within the narrative but instead a kind of omnipotent narrator from whom the narrative flows and who knows more than both the characters and the audience. While it is not unusual for the audience to know more than the characters, it is impossible for the audience to know more than the unseen narrator. In this way, nondiegetic music has a certain kind of independence, a freedom from the characters’ interiorities, psychologies, and biases that must be dealt with and, as such, may be perceived as closer to a narrative, or narrator’s, truth.

Reappropriation, Irony, and the Reformation of Cultural Identities He Got Game (1998; dir., Spike Lee) makes ample use of nondiegetic art music, largely in place of the traditional Hollywood film score. While not completely without originally composed music, the sheer quantity of preexisting art music is conspicuous. By drawing the audience’s attention to nondiegetic music, the director exposes a technical apparatus of filmmaking. But by briefly sacrificing the totality of suspended disbelief, Lee is able to make the audience’s own associations with the music serve his narrative aim.

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The film tells the story of a strained relationship between a father and a son. The father, Jake Shuttlesworth (Denzel Washington), is imprisoned for, as we will later learn, the accidental killing of his wife. As a result, the son, Jesus (biblical pronunciation, and not the Hispanic) Shuttlesworth (Ray Allen), is left to care for his younger sister under the legal guardianship of his greedy uncle. When Jesus becomes the nation’s top college basketball prospect, Jake is informed by his prison warden that the Governor is a fanatical alumnus of Big State. If Jake could convince Jesus to sign a letter of intent to play basketball at Big State, the Governor would intervene in order to lessen Jake’s prison sentence. Jake is released from prison in the care of two parole officers for only seven days, during which time he must convince Jesus to sign the letter. Spike Lee uses the music of Aaron Copland during his so-called Americana period, from the late 1930s through the 1940s,269 as the aural backdrop to a gritty, inner-city tale about the struggle of African-American youth in an environment of drugs, crime, and corruption. Far removed from the amber-waves-of-grain, idyllic imagery so often associated with Copland’s music of the Americana period,270 Lee seeks to reinscribe the ideal of authentic Americanness to center upon modern, urban, poverty-stricken minority culture. In fact, the director seems to have separated Copland’s music from the rest of the soundtrack in this film. During the opening credits Lee lists the “music” as being by Aaron Copland, and the “songs” by Public Enemy, a highly political rap group popular in the 1990s. This bifurcation of the soundtrack into “music” and “songs” indicates that, for Lee, Copland’s contribution plays an altogether different role within the narrative from the works by Public Enemy. Copland’s music in this filmic context “elevate[s] the story of a man to the Story of Man.”271 According to Eisler and Adorno, “music bears the sociological/psychological value of

269 Howard Pollack, Aaron Copland: The Life and Work of an Uncommon Man (New York: Holt, 1999), 551. 270 Ibid., 528-29; 551. Pollack notes that the appearance of Anglo-American folk melodies in many of Copland’s works during this period, particularly in the ballets Billy the Kid, Rodeo, and Appalachian Spring, helped to cement the stylistic traits of this populist music as quintessentially American. He notes that even the musical elite active in America during the twentieth century conceded that Copland’s music sounded “recognizably American.” William Schuman, Samuel Lipman, Leighton Kerner, and Andr Previn agreed that Copland’s popular music of the Americana period was perceived as the national American sound. Indeed, commentators very often describe Copland’s style from this period as representative of America. Rob Kapilow, in a short NPR program titled “Aaron Copland’s Vision of America” from the series What Makes It Great, aired 1 July 2009, notes that the opening of Appalachian Spring “seems like all of America; it seems like the purest values you could possibly have.” http://www.npr.org/2009/07/01/106146490/aaron-coplands-american-vision (accessed May 10, 2012). 271 Gorbman, Unheard Melodies, 81. 124 evoking the collective community.”272 Moreover, they also contend that music “preserves comparably more traits of long bygone, pre-individualistic collectives,” and that “this direct relationship to a collectivity, intrinsic in the phenomenon itself, is probably connected with the sensations of spatial depth, inclusiveness, and absorption of individuality.”273 This evocation of a collective community, one that is steeped in Americanness, is a conscious decision by the director. Lee notes that in this film “[w]e give the same respect to music, pay the same attention to music, that we pay to the actors, to the costume design, to the production design. It is an integral part of film making.”274 During one scene early in the film there is a pickup game played on a housing project basketball court by African-American males, which is accompanied by the “Hoe Down” from Copland’s Rodeo. For a viewer there is nothing in this scene that would suggest the open prairie, cowboys, or barn dancing. The gritty urban locale, the distinctly African-American urban style of dress, the occasional foul language, and the game of basketball are far removed from the conservative, largely-imaginary notion of the American West and its settlers. Lee uses Copland’s music to help to harness the power of the collective, mythologized representation of what is, in the minds of many, pure Americana. Lee’s intentions were laid bare when he recalled that

When I was writing He Got Game, I was listening to Aaron Copland. I knew Aaron Copland would be right for the film … Aaron Copland is one of the American composers and basketball is an American game. And I just felt that the largeness and scope of his sound, when you hear it, really, is always … Forget about He Got Game. When you hear “Appalachian Springs” [sic] or “Fanfare for the Common Man,” you hear America. It’s the bigness and vastness, and I thought that the combination of the two [Copland and Public Enemy] would work.275

Here the director makes clear his intention actively to draw attention to the music of Copland, violating the invisibility principle of the classical Hollywood film score. He does this in two ways. First, he presents the music of idealized, mythical America alongside inner city,

272 Eisler and Adorno, Composing for the Films, 42. 273 Eisler and Adorno, 42. 274 Spike Lee and Cynthia Fuchs, Spike Lee: Interviews (Jackson, Mississippi: University Press of Mississippi, 2002), 173. 275 Lee and Fuchs,173-74. 125 foul-mouthed, poverty-stricken, African-American youth. Secondly, he draws attention to the music by balancing this with the African-American, highly-politicized hip-hop and rap of Public Enemy. Both the ears and the eyes have an opportunity to perceive the conspicuous incongruities, one between image and sound, and the other between the music and the songs. In short, for Lee, it is important that the audience not miss this incongruity between representation and the real state of affairs. The opening sequence of He Got Game, which includes the aforementioned music and songs credits, at first presents quintessential scenes from the American heartland. Farmhouses with rusted basketball equipment and rims, paint-stripped backboards affixed to run down barn houses where the playing surface is dirt and matted grass eventually give way to urban scenes of broken-bottle strewn, concrete courts surrounded by monolithic, decrepit, high-rise housing projects. The music that accompanies this is Copland’s setting of the American folk tune “John Henry.” Within the cinematic space of just a few minutes, Lee juxtaposes the familiar, rural habitat of Copland’s music to the inner city (see Figures 8.1 and 8.2). With this, the setting of urban decay is brought on par with the majestic open spaces of the imaginary, pre-settlement American West.

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Figure 8.1: Screenshot from He Got Game, opening credits. The game played in rural America accompanied by Copland’s John Henry.

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Figure 8.2: Screenshot from He Got Game, opening credits. Copland’s John Henry continues to accompany scenes of the game, this time in urban, inner-city spaces.

The same process takes place when the narrative proper begins. After the opening credits have finished, there is a sudden cut to black. When the visual narrative reenters, a crystal-blue sky, clean horizon line, and the ocean are framed in the lower portion of the screen by a herring- bone patterned boardwalk; three benches on the far left, middle, and far right perfectly balance this American tableau. As this scene brightens and becomes fully visible, Copland’s Appalachian Spring begins to sound. When the clarinet enters and rises above the musical texture, the camera begins a long, uninterrupted tracking shot. Backing away from the boardwalk, we see trees enter the frame. The camera then gradually turns to our left, away from the wide open spaces of the ocean and toward the comparatively claustrophobic confines of the Coney Island projects: chain-link fences, towering but dilapidated high-rise housing projects, and broken-out streetlights. The camera finally settles upon a tall, African-American youth taking repeated jump-shots from one

128 of the many basketball courts within our view. Here is our first glimpse of Jesus, diligently honing the tools of his trade. The film then jump-cuts to an imposing, Gothic-inspired stone building set by a wide lens and in magnificent symmetry. A brief, tight close-up of the inscription on the façade of the building, Attica Correctional Facility, reveals the true nature of our American castles. Another cut shows the all-concrete recreation yard, flanked imposingly by giant walls and the rounded, central guard tower. Inside this small open space is a man, practicing jump-shots exactly as was Jesus in the first scene. The film now cuts back to Jesus, in gorgeous slow-motion rising above the chain-link fence, his shot tracing a perfect parabolic arc with a spinning basketball. As the ball breaks the plane of the rim, the rim suddenly changes. As the camera pulls away from the new rim, it reveals the face of the man in the prison yard. This beautiful, elegantly paced, atmospheric sequence set to the introduction from Appalachian Spring is how the audience first meets the father and son protagonists. The two basketball-playing men are shown performing in slow motion, and the camera treats them interchangeably. Jesus’s perfect release is followed by Jake’s ball sailing through the air in front of the cobalt sky, the only hint to the ball’s location being the rifle-toting guard mounted atop the prison wall whose figure we see come into the shot as the ball descends from its apex and toward the goal. Lee’s technical and artistic construction of the opening scene firmly ensconces this tale within the realm of mythic America, and the use of Copland’s music is vital in achieving this end. The plaintive, quietly profound opening of Appalachian Spring elevates the pedestrian to the mythic. The music here serves to remind the audience that the heroic overcoming of adversity is found in every corner of our society, and that honest, true, American values are not a thing of the distant past. Jesus and Jake are our modern, moral settlers, and Coney Island is our Appalachia, once again populated by outsiders. Both the opening credits sequence and the scene of the basketball game set to Rodeo are constructed in the familiar language of filmic montage. Each scene presents a series of images that places the film in a gritty, urban setting while, at the same time, Copland’s music works to infuse these scenes with undeniable Americanness. This strategy is often deployed by Lee in He Got Game. Moreover, he reserves Copland’s music for the especially important dramatic moments in the film.

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During a flashback scene where we see Jake and Jesus at night on the otherwise abandoned basketball court outside the family’s high-rise tenement, Copland’s Orchestral Variations serves as film score. This is the only work in the film by Copland that falls outside the chronology and style of his Americana period. A series of twenty, short variations built around a dissonant four- note theme, the Orchestral Variations is rich in sharp dissonance, devoid of lengthy melodies, and unabashedly formalist. Pierre Boulez, not generally thought of as a champion of Copland’s music, praised the work in a letter to fellow modernist John Cage, calling it “the best work I know of him,” and admired its “violence.”276 The scene in the film which uses the Orchestral Variations is gut- wrenching scene where the intensity of Jake’s commitment to Jesus’ basketball training, even as a small child, is made obvious. Jake pushes Jesus up to and beyond his limits, at one point calling him “a little bitch” and throwing the ball near his face. Jesus becomes enraged, tosses the basketball over the fence, and walks away from his father and, potentially, from his future. Later, when Jake and Jesus are sitting at the dinner table, an oedipal battle takes place between the man and boy. When Jesus becomes argumentative, Jake pursues him. Jesus’ mother attempts to break the two apart, and Jake becomes frustrated by her interference and pushes her away, causing her fatal head-first fall onto the oven. The scene fills in the narrative blank, explaining why Jake has been in prison, and why Jesus harbors such resentment toward his father. Here we see a wonderfully inventive variation on the Holy Family (Jesus’s sister is named Mary). But in this case, the father must sacrifice the mother and himself in order to save Jesus, and Copland’s dark, agitated music is appropriate for the difficult scene. But the most compelling use of Copland is reserved for the finale of the film. Toward the end of the film, Jake is returned to prison, not knowing where Jesus will chose to attend college. When Jesus announces that he has chosen to attend Big State, the audience is left to conclude that Jake will be the beneficiary of this decision. However, the morning edition of the newspaper has reported Jake to be an escaped prisoner who was only recently recaptured and returned to prison. It seems that, all along, Jake’s offer of a leaner sentence was simply a ruse. When Jake finally has an opportunity to speak with the warden, he is informed that, since Jesus technically didn’t actually sign the letter of intent, that there may be no deal to be had.

276 Pollack, 460. 130

The final scene of the film avoids easy dramatic resolution but instead offers a reluctant, quasi-tragic reconciliation between Jake and Jesus. From his prison cells Jake is shown speaking directly into the camera, his soliloquy being a dramatic reading of his letter to Jesus. This is the first time Jesus reads any of Jake’s many letters that he sent throughout his incarceration. Jake makes clear he takes responsibility for the unintended consequences of his pushing Jesus too hard, and that he understands that he must remain removed from Jesus’s life, literally and figuratively, as the price of his son’s success. The letter concludes: “Your Great-grandfather used to always tell me that: ‘you keep trying on shoes, sooner or later you’re gonna find a pair that fit you.’ Well I’m here to testify that I’ve found a pair. They hurt like hell. I love you, son. Your father, Jake Shuttlesworth.” The words “I love you, son” are shown being read aloud by Jesus, the first time that a post-adolescent Jesus acknowledges Jake as his father. The music that accompanies this final scene is Copland’s orchestral suite from the ballet Billy the Kid, specifically “The Open Prairie” theme that both begins and ends the suite. The music begins with the reading of Jake’s letter, and the visual narrative that accompanies the dominant acoustic elements of music and letter narration shows the ancillary characters in the film resolving the issues. With the other characters’ stories closed, the final moments of the film are reserved for the relationship between Jake and Jesus. This ending section is set off musically by the sudden change in texture, volume, and rhythmic drive in the Billy the Kid suite. Jake and Jesus are both practicing basketball, Jake in the same prison courtyard where we first met him at the beginning of the film and Jesus now in the large, professional arena at Big State. Like the beginning of the film, the scene is initially set in slow motion, and the jump shots of the two characters are freely interchanged, linking the two together through the game. But the story has not completely concluded, and a sudden return to normal, lifelike-speed hints that there is at least one final piece of narrative action to be resolved. As “The Open Prairie” builds toward its heroic climax, Jake suddenly stops his hitherto uninterrupted routine of jump shots in the prison yard while Jesus is shown continuing. A series of cuts between the armed guard atop the prison-yard wall, Jake, and the guards’ imposing rifle, along with Copland’s unrelenting crescendo portend a tragic ending. An eye-line shot shows Jake looking directly at the guard, when the camera swings around him 180 degrees to place both Jake and the guard in the same frame. Jake puts the ball at his side and begins walking beyond

131 the confines of the basketball court and toward the area of the prison-yard marked “out of bounds.” As he heads in this direction, the guard draws his rifle and points it at Jake while screaming: “Jake, stop! Stop right there!” While Jake continues to walk, Jesus is shown abruptly halting his practice and looking over his shoulder, as if hearing the guard’s demand. “Do it now,” the guard is now shown screaming at Jake, “or you’re a dead man!” Jesus is shown staring pensively, and a quick cut back to the yard shows the guard with the rifle in firing position, his finger on the trigger. An extremely tight close-up of the trigger shows pressure being applied by the guard’s twitchy finger. With Jake’s life in the balance, the first section of Billy the Kid reaches its conclusion, and we are left with a brief silence as we await the outcome of the dangerous situation. In this silence the guard once again yells at Jake “turn around and back up!” The music resumes with the same theme, but now from the final portion of the ballet suite, titled “The Open Prairie Again.” Jake does not turn around, he does not back up, but instead he launches the basketball over the prison-yard fence. The camera follows the long flight of the ball in slow motion beyond the walls of the prison, and a cut back to Jesus shows its destination is the university arena. Jesus watches the ball arrive seemingly from out of nowhere and abandons his ball for the new arrival. Jesus holds the ball and smiles, and the camera pans away from him in a long departing shot that includes the basketball net, Jesus, and his father’s ball in the same frame. As the final chord sounds, the screen cuts to black. In both the opening and closing sequences of He Got Game, Spike Lee subverts the principles of the classical Hollywood film score in order to make his narrative points. He intentionally goes against “a pool of conventions, of options, whose combination and recombination constitutes an easily recognizable discursive field” in order to recast Copland’s music as representative of the world of the young, urban African American.277 The most obvious departure from the classical Hollywood film score style –indeed, the violation which sets apart all ironically read music in film – is the principle of “inaudibility.” As Claudio Gorbman puts it, inaudibility refers to “a set of conventional practices … which result in the spectator not normally hearing [the music] or attending to it.”278 Instead, Spike Lee not only allows for Copland’s music to be heard, he virtually demands that we attend to it by balancing

277 Gorbman, 71. 278 Ibid., 76. 132 the musical and visual elements, opposing the traditional subservience of music to the visual narrative. The principle of inaudibility, according to Gorbman, suggests that “musical form is generally determined by and subordinate to narrative form,” and that “the duration of a music cue is determined by the duration of a visually represented act or sequence.”279 In He Got Game we get a sense that the opposite is true, that is it the piece of music, or at least large sections of it, that determine the duration of the visual sequence. Moreover, Lee bucks the industry proscription against music dominating the narrative or that it must bow to dialogue or narratively significant sounds.280 Throughout much of the opening and closing sequences of He Got Game, Copland’s music is the only sound to make it through the editing process. The sound design is akin to montage but the visual elements conform to the logic of traditional, narrative film. Gorbman cites Leonid Sabaneev’s analogy of a typical means of arranging a song for the piano as a way of understanding the principle of inaudibility. According to Sabaneev,

In general, music should understand that in the cinema it should nearly always remain in the background; it is, so to speak, a tonal figuration, the “left hand” of the melody on screen, and it is a bad business when this left hand begins to creep into the foreground and obscure the melody.281

In keeping with this analogy, the music of Copland as deployed in He Got Game is better understood not as a galant-style keyboard work, but instead as a fugue, where both the visual and musical elements of a given scene are of equal importance; one element lacking wholeness of meaning unless it is perceived in tandem with the other. The violation of the principle of inaudibility serves, in this case, to bolster or inflate the principles of “signifying emotion” and “connotative cueing” (see Chapter 3). Gorbman’s third principle states that “music appears in classical cinema as a signifier of emotion … which brings a necessary emotional, irrational, romantic, or intuitive dimension.”282 Moreover, she notes that the appearance of music signifies emotion itself. Specifically, He Got Game trades in the currency of “epic feeling,” elevating “the individuality of the represented characters to universal

279 Gorbman, 76. 280 Ibid., 77. 281 Ibid., 76. 282 Gorbman., 79. 133 significance, make[ing] them bigger than life, suggest[ing] transcendence, destiny.”283 Lee achieves this epic feeling with the combination of drama, slow-motion camera work, and carefully-constructed grand images, all set to Copland’s music. Lee’s appropriation of society’s conception of Copland as “America’s soundtrack” achieves the goal of elevating this story of two men to one of universal significance. Gorbman’s fourth principle, “narrative/connotative cueing,” is also best served by the conspicuous audibility of Copland’s music in He Got Game. But it does so largely through its ironic position. Gorbman states that “music, via well-established conventions, contributes to the narrative’s geographical and temporal setting.”284 In this light, Lee reserves the literal establishment of time, place, and character for the “songs” by Public Enemy. The music of Copland, by contrast, is employed for an entirely different, and arguably more important, establishment of time and place. Copland’s most familiar music (Appalachian Spring, Billy the Kid) conjures images of the American heartland, of the frontier, or virtually any iconic, largely- rural American scene. He Got Game is not set in the wide-open spaces of the heartland, nor is it set in the Wild West. In this context the locations Copland’s music recalls are not geographical or chronological but instead are mythic. Lee’s use of music eschews literal time and place for the larger, mythic place of imaginary America. By violating literal geography, Lee invests instead in connotative cueing, where “music ‘anchors’ the image in meaning. It expresses moods and connotations which, in conjunction with the images and other sounds, aid in interpreting narrative events and indicating moral/class/ethnic values of characters.”285 Lee’s characters’ values are, through Copland’s music, shown to be exactly those of traditional America. The urban, young African-American is now on par with those of Americans of the frontier past, those romanticized outlaws from the Wild West, and, paradoxically perhaps, the God-fearing, salt-of-the-earth, rural inhabitants of America, who were perceived as being partly responsible for the ostracism of the black community in America.286 But it is the music’s ironic placement that actually serves to normalize and cement the stories of young African Americans squarely within the context of traditional America. By

283 Ibid., 81. 284 Ibid., 83. 285 Gorbman, 84. 286 Another possible ironical reading of Appalachian Spring occurs in the opening scene of the film where the “white tone,” as indicated by Copland in the score, of the clarinet introduces this African-American tale. 134 forcing audiences to contend consciously with the quintessentially American music of Copland in a filmic context, where music is traditionally unheard, the story of Jake and Jesus becomes an integral part of the American experience. Howard Pollack notes that Lee’s “recontextualizations support the idea that Copland’s pastoralisms reflect common aspirations for freedom and dignity.”287 This is not a story about African-Americans for African-Americans or a niche filmic product, but instead a uniquely American tale about the pitfalls and advantages of community, struggle, sacrifice, and redemption. By placing Copland’s music in the foreground, the film forces its way into the center of American culture, an act that mimics the very American tradition of minority groups fighting for equality by forcing themselves into the mainstream of American culture, a journey not unlike that which Copland himself undertook during his early years as an American composer.288

287 Pollack, 498. 288 Krin Gabbard, “Spike Lee Meets Aaron Copland,” in The Spike Lee Reader ed. Paula J. Massood (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2008), 175-95. Gabbard notes the inherent irony that the quintessential American sound was that of the music of a homosexual, Brooklyn-born Jew. David Edelstein, film critic for Slate and NPR, also notes this irony. Moreover, during the 1920s and 1930s, fellow composers Roy Harris and Virgil Thompson, both implicitly and explicitly, suggested that Copland’s ethnicity disqualified him creating authentic American music. See Allan Kozin, “As American as Copland, Who Forged Our New Sound,” The New York Times, July 25, 2005, accessed May 10, 2012, http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9A01EFD8103FF93AA15754C0A9639C8B63&pagewanted=all 135

CHAPTER 9 MUSIC, IRONY, AND THE FORMATION OF PRACTICAL IDENTITIES Introduction The following is a partial transcript of a home movie made by Brian Draper and Torey Adamcik:289

Pocatello, Idaho. September 21, 2006, 8:05 PM *Brian Draper and Torey Adamcik are in a car, Adamcik is driving and Draper is filming from the passenger seat. The car stereo is playing the first movement of Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata*

Brian Draper, 16 years old: We’re going for a high death count

Torey Adamcik, 16 years old: Plus, we’re not going to get caught Brian, if we’re going for guns, we’re just gonna end it. We’re just gonna grab the guns and get outta there and kill everybody and leave.

BD: We’re going to make history…we’re gonna make history.

TA: For all you FBI agents watching this— BD: *laughing*

TA: Uh…you weren’t quick enough. *laughing*

BD: You weren’t quick enough, and you weren’t s-s-smart enough. And we’re going over to [Jane Doe 1’s] house, we-we-we’re going to snoop around over there and try to see if she’s home alone or not, and if she’s home alone, SPLAT! . . .She’s dead.

TA: Don’t put your humor into this Brian.

BD: Uh, I’m not putting any humor into it. . . .Yep, people will die, and m-m-memories will fade.

TA: Memories will fade…Hmmm, I wonder what movie you got that from, Brian?

September 21, 2006, 8:08 PM *The two boys are still in the car, and the stereo continues to play Beethoven*

BD: We’re at [Jane Doe 1’s] house. It’s clear out there in the pasture. We’ve already snooped around her house a couple of times. Uh, and sh- sh-she’s not at home so we’re gonna go to that church over there and

289 Adamcik v. Idaho. 34639 Idaho 121. Supreme Court of Idaho. 2011. Nov. 29, 2011. http://www.isc.idaho.gov/opinions/Adamcik%2034639.pdf (accessed December 14, 2011). 136

we’re gonna call a girl and a guy named Cassie and Matt [Beckham, Cassie’s boyfriend]. They’re our friends, but, we have to make sacrifices. So, um, I feel tonight i-i-it is the night and I feel really weird…and stuff. I feel like I want to kill somebody. Uh, I know that’s not normal, but what the hell. TA: I feel we need to break away from normal life.

September 21, 2006, 8:36 PM *In the car*

BD: We found our victim and sad as it may be she’s our friend, but, you know what? We all have to make sacrifices. Out first victim is going to be Cassie Stoddard and her friends… TA: *Directed at a passing car* Turn your brights off, asshole!

BD: We’ll let you…*laughs* we’ll find out if she has friends over, if she’s going to be alone in that big dark house out in the middle of nowhere *laughs*. How perfect can you get? I, I mean, like, holy shit, dude.

TA: I’m horny just thinking about it. …

BD: We’re gonna go down in history. We’re gonna be just like Scream290 expect real life terms.

September 22, 2006, 8:28 AM *Draper walking down Pocatello Senior High School hallway. Draper is talking to someone walking with him, possibly Adamcik. He then walks by lockers where Cassie Stoddard is at her locker*

BD: Hey, look, it’s Cassie. Hello, Cassie. Cassie Stoddard, 16 years old: *smiles* Hello.

BD: *laughs* I’m getting you on tape. Okay, Say “hi,” please. CS: Hi.

290 This is a reference to the slasher film Scream (1996; dir., Wed Craven). Some of the details of their plan to murder Cassie and her boyfriend while house-sitting closely mirror the plot of the film, particularly the beginning. 137

September 22, 2006, 12:18 PM *Adamcik and Draper sitting at a cafeteria table with the camera facing them*

BD: Yeah, if you’re watching this we’re probably deceased. BD: Hopefully this will go smoothly and we can get our first kill done and then keep going.

…

BD: As long as you’re patient you know, and we were patient and now we’re getting paid off, ’cause our victim’s home alone, so we got err, our plan all worked out now…I’m sorry. I’m sorry, Cassie’s family, but she had to be the one. We have to stick with the plan and, she’s perfect, so she’s gonna die *laughs*.

September 22, 2006, 9:53 PM *Dark. Draper and Adamcik are sitting in a car*

BD: We’re here in the car. The time is 9:50, September 22nd, 2006. Um…unfortunately we have the grueling task of killing our two friends and they are right in – in that house just down the street. TA: We just talked to them. We were there for an hour, but…

BD: We checked out the whole house. We know there’s a lot of doors. There, there’s lots of places to hide. Um, I unlocked the back doors. It’s all unlocked. Now, we just got to wait and um…yep, we’re, we’re really nervous right now but, you know, we’re ready.

September 22, 2006, 11:31 PM *Adamcik and Draper are driving in a car*

BD: Just killed Cassie! We just left her house. This is not a fucking joke!

TA: I’m shaking. BD: I stabbed her in the throat, and I saw her lifeless body. It just disappeared. Dude, I just killed Cassie!

TA: Oh my God!

BD: Oh, oh fuck. That felt like it wasn’t even real. I mean it went by so fast.

TA: Shut the fuck up. We gotta get our act straight.

BD: It’s okay. Okay? We – we’ll just buy movie tickets now. TA: Okay.

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BD: *unintelligible*

TA: No. BD: Okay. Bye.

On September 22, 2006, at approximately 11 p.m., in the sleepy town of Pocatello, Idaho, Brian Draper and Torey Adamcik fatally stabbed fellow classmate and sixteen-year-old Cassie Jo Stoddard at least twenty-nine times. Both teenagers were convicted of first degree murder and conspiracy to commit murder, and were sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole. The most damning piece of evidence against the pair was a video tape the two youth made, excerpted above, in which they talk explicitly about the planning of the murder and react to its immediate aftermath. Tried separately, each boy accused the other of the actual murder. Both of the boys’ defense teams claimed that the video was merely a “mockumentary,” a faux tale of murder in the spirit of The Blair Witch Project (1999). The video that the teenage murders prepared was exceptionally detailed. Torey Adamcik was a movie enthusiast and particularly a fan of the horror genre.291 According to his parents, he spoke often about making it to Hollywood to work in the industry and even made a few homemade horror films of his own.292 Brian Draper held a deep fascination with the Columbine High School shooters Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold. During Draper’s trial, a portion of an essay Draper wrote, titled “Columbine,” that was entered into evidence stated the following:

I am becoming more and more obsessed with Columbine. It seems now that that’s all I think about. I would give anything to go back in time, and be a part of Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold’s lives. They are my heroes. I will follow in their footsteps and maybe I’ll even meet them.293

This combination of interests, horror films and the Columbine shootings explains a good bit about the boys’ (likely Adamcik’s, who was driving the car) unusual choice of music for the

291 In Coldest Blood First broadcast 18 July, 2010 by MSNBC. http://www.livedash.com/transcript/in_coldest_blood/5304/MSNBC/Sunday_July_18_2010/375745/ (accessed November 21, 2011) 292 Ibid. 293 In Coldest Blood. 139 first portion of the alleged “mockumentary.” Why would teenagers choose Beethoven’s “Moonlight” Sonata as accompaniment for what they both believed would be the scene that preceded the murder of their classmate? The answer may lie in a film that appealed to both boys’ obsessions: Elephant (2003; dir. Gus Van Sant). The film is a fictionalized account of the Columbine school shooting, and the music that is used in the film is the first movement of the “Moonlight” Sonata.

Elephant (2003) Directed by Gus Van Sant as part of his so-called “Death Trilogy,”294 Elephant is a fictionalization of the events surrounding the massacre at Columbine High School in April of 1999 that left 13 people dead and 21 others injured. Created in the spirit and tradition of cinema vérité,295 the film employs long, uninterrupted shots not unlike the style of documentary filmmaking in order to enhance a sense of realism and naturalism. Moreover, the film is shot with real high-school students (not actors over eighteen years of age passing as high-school students), in a real high school (not a sound stage), without special effects, without the aid of additional lighting, and without a script.296 The goal of cinema vérité is to represent life “as it is.” Van Sant’s goal was to represent life as it could have been for both the perpetrators and the victims.297 The film spends considerable time focusing upon the mundane and the ordinary in each of the students’ lives. The extremely long shots that follow the students through their daily routines make up the majority of the film and show each one chatting with friends, playing sports, walking to class, or just observing others. It is not uncommon for Van Sant to use continuous shots of five minutes or more. Even the lives of the killers, Alex (Alex Frost) and Eric (Eric Deulen), and their unspeakable violence were filmed in such a way as to be “detached,

294 The films Gerry (2002) and Last Days (2005) comprise the remainder of the trilogy. 295 Cinema vérité, roughly translated at “Cinema of the real,” suggests, as Edgar Morin wrote: "There are two ways to conceive of the cinema of the Real: the first is to pretend that you can present reality to be seen; the second is to pose the problem of reality. In the same way, there were two ways to conceive cinéma vérité. The first was to pretend that you brought truth. The second was to pose the problem of truth." Quoted in Peter Lee-Wright, The Documentary Handbook (New York: Routledge, 2010), 93. Comments recorded at conference on cinema vérité at the Pompidu Center, 1960. 296 Steve Head, “An Interview with Gus Van Sant,” http://movies.ign.com/articles/456/456118p1.html (accessed December 3, 2011) 297 Ibid. 140 mundane, and … boring” so that the violence portrayed in Elephant would be “uglier than a movie.”298 While not attempting to re-make the actual events that occurred at Columbine, Van Sant was trying to make “a dramatic piece that investigated a similar area that … would have been a fictionalization … that approximated the mind [sic] of the kids that ended up shooting the school and then killing themselves.”299 But while the film attempts to portray a kind of realism in a fictionalized world, the characters are deliberately archetypical: “the jock and the girlfriend … the kid with the camera … the kid with dyed-blonde hair who’s sort of his own entity, the three [popular] girlfriends, the [nerdy] girl with glasses … they’re sort of icons of high school.”300 Additionally, the killers are not portrayed as especially menacing or evil, although they are clearly not archetypal “high- school icons.” The film documents lives of the students in the hour before the shooting, but it also includes scenes from the lives of the killers the day before the shooting. Each of the major archetypal characters is shown simply being a high school kid in the moments before the horror erupts; the jock plays football and then meets his girlfriend, the artsy photographer takes pictures of punks outside the school and then develops them in his darkroom, the nerdy girl is gently chided by a gym teacher to wear her shorts instead of sweat pants, and the popular girls talk about shopping and boys over lunch. Against this backdrop of banality we anticipate, with mounting dread, the inevitable events to follow. In one of the opening scenes of the film the camera is outside and static, while groups of high-school students take part in various outdoor activities; boys play football, students run the perimeter of the field, and cheerleading takes place in the distance. The camera is fixed, and scenes of high-school normalcy drift in and out of frame with no discernible person or event vying for our attention. After nearly a full two minutes a particularly handsome boy from the football crowd places himself squarely in the center of the shot and dresses himself with a hooded sweatshirt. It is characteristic of the film that such mundane happenings substitute for a mainstream Hollywood kind of narrative drive. Uncharacteristically, however, this scene is

298 Gus Van Sant, “Gus Van Sant interview about Elephant Part 1/2,” http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nyyCOR3kL_g (accessed Dec 3, 2011). 299 Ibid. 300 Gus Van Sant, “Gus Van Sant interview about Elephant Part 1/2.” 141 imbued with a musical accompaniment, something almost entirely absent from the rest of the film. After the boy, who will later be identified as “Nathan,” dresses himself, the camera finally moves and documents his walk all the way into and then through the school, until he finally meets his girlfriend. The scene lasts more than six minutes (and uses just one cut), during which the entirety of the first movement of Beethoven’s “Moonlight” Sonata is heard. The scene is remarkable, but not because of the extraordinary length of the shots. Instead, this particular scene is the only one in the film that employs non-diegetic musical accompaniment.301 The “Moonlight” Sonata in this scene portends the tragedy that will unfold. Generically tragic associations have been ascribed to this work since its publication in 1802. A review of Beethoven’s Op. 27 (along with his Op. 26) Sonatas dating from June 20, 1802 in the Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung notes that the work was written in the “terrifying key of C sharp minor for good reason,”302 although the specific nature of the tragedy supposedly expressed by it has changed. Over time, the tragic mood was variously ascribed as reflective of negative elements in Beethoven’s personal life around the time of its composition. The sorrow of losing Giulietta Guicciardi and the severity of Beethoven’s hearing loss were among the most popular biographical elements informing the Sonata’s dark mood.303 Acting in the not-uncommon way that film scoring does, the music knows more than either the audience or the characters about the events to come. As we meet the students who will be affected by the approaching, unseen horror, the “Moonlight” Sonata casts a sonic gloom over the populace of the school. While the “Moonlight” Sonata, in this instance, functions as a traditional film score, its recurrence later in the film will be infused with a sense of irony. Midway through the film we see the two shooters hanging out with one another in a scene that takes place the day before the shooting. The scene begins with a close up of Alex playing Beethoven’s Für Elise on an upright piano.304 As we have come to expect throughout the film thus far, the camera lingers on Alex and then slowly begins to turn away from him and toward a light source. The camera’s slow pan is toward a near-ceiling window that reveals that we are in his basement bedroom.

301 While it is true a few other scenes in the film use accompaniment, these works are modernist –without melody or functional harmony and are better described as “soundscapes,” for instance: Tueren der Wahrnehmung by Hildegard Westerkamp, Meeting of International Conference of Technological Psychiatry performed and recorded by William S. Burroughs, and Walk through Resonant Landscape #2 by Frances White, among others. 302 Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung, 4/40 (June 30, 1802), column 652. 303 Michael Broyles, Beethoven in America (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2011), 176. 304 It appears that actor Alex Frost is actually playing the piece and not simply miming to a recording. 142

When the camera pans past the window, we hear and see Eric knocking at it. The camera continues its pan in the same direction and will eventually complete nearly two 360-degree pans of the basement bedroom. While the camera’s progress is generally steady, there is a noticeable slowing when the camera passes over Alex’s bed, revealing the accoutrements of the sixteen- year-old’s living space. Here we come to “know” Alex about as well as anyone could in this sparse film. The shooter-to-be’s bedroom area is strewn with perfectly average adolescent decorations and possessions: small barbells, homemade art and drawings, a stereo, a few trophies, a bit of sports equipment, and a laptop, among other items. Nothing is at all out of the ordinary, nothing would indicate cause for concern, nor does anything hint at what acts of terror a denizen of such an ordinary space as this will commit. Van Sant uses this scene, like the other scenes of the shooters the day before the crime, so that we vainly search for clues as to why these boys would commit such horrid acts. He offers us nothing of substance, but instead a kind of parade of usual suspect “causes” for the tragedy:

For instance, there wasn't really information about the kids who killed their fellow students at Columbine … I guess in the execution I was trying to insert the sort of greatest hits of theories, as almost like clues, or tinctures of ideas that would make the audiences' imagination carry through and think about the event themselves.305

Following the camera’s inspection of the basement- bedroom, and coordinated with the dark, agitated middle section of Für Elise, the camera slowly zooms in on Eric, who has since settled himself on Alex’s bed, fussing with the laptop computer. When the scene cuts to show the computer’s display, we see that Eric is playing a first-person shooter game. Van Sant is teasing us with the idea that these shootings were the result of violent video games, a popular theory immediately following the Columbine killings. But Van Sant complicates his characterization of the killers precisely by showing Alex’s knowledge of and ability to perform the cultivated art music of Beethoven.

305 Briony Hanson, “Gus van Sant.” The Guardian, Friday 16 January, 2009. http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2009/jan/19/guardian-interview-gus-van-sant (accessed Dec 6, 2011) 143

Before he finishes the performance, the scene cuts forward in time, very briefly, to show Alex playing the “Moonlight” Sonata. This is a rather striking moment in the film in that it recalls the opening, and the only, instance of nondiegetic music in the film. The camera lingers on Alex throughout his clunky, amateur performance of the “Moonlight” Sonata. Alex then joins Eric on the couch to peruse online firearm sales websites, hinting at yet another of the popular theories (the easy accessibility of firearms) concerning the motivation for the massacre. The use of Beethoven in the basement bedroom scene is not, on the surface, at odds with the visual narrative. There is nothing that would indicate a conspicuous indifference to or a direct opposition with what we are seeing while the music is being performed. Instead, the music, and in particular the act of its performance is distinctly at odds with who is performing; at least the act of performing art music is at odds with what we know Alex will do. A host of questions, possibilities, and subtexts –both related directly to the film’s narrative and to the medium of film are raised directly by Van Sant’s characterization of Alex as an amateur connoisseur of art music. Most obviously, Alex’s command of Beethoven raises questions about the inner psyche of the killer-to-be. Van Sant demands that the audience consider Alex not as a one-dimensional, cold-blooded caricature but instead as a complex, multifaceted adolescent whose motivations elude simplistic answers. It also points to Alex as the psychological focus of the film. Where the other students in the film are archetypes, Alex is arguably the only character who is fleshed out in any substantial way. While we recognize the archetypes, Van Sant asks that we identify with, or at least to make a serious attempt to understand, the killer. The director’s tilting of the narrative through music in order to have the audience try to understand what would, in mainstream film, be a repulsive character is reminiscent of the technique of one of Van Sant’s admitted influences, Stanley Kubrick. Perhaps one of the most obvious implications made by the use of art music in this film is the connection to Kurbrick’s A Clockwork Orange, where the main character (Alex, incidentally) is both a violent, anti-social brute and a Beethoven fanatic. In an interview with IGN Movies about Elephant, Van Sant admits that “Kubrick’s a big influence.”306 Like A Clockwork Orange,

306 Steve Head, “An Interview with Gus Van Sant.” http://movies.ign.com/articles/456/456118p1.html (accessed, Dec 6, 2011). 144

Van Sant’s film avoids easy answers and stock explanations as to why people sometimes do horrific things. Alex’s knowledge of Beethoven is important in offsetting the clichés that Van Sant has planted regarding to the shooters’ motivation. The boys are shown in various scenes playing violent video games, surfing websites that trade in firearm sales, watching Nazi propaganda films, complaining about “the jocks,” and being picked on in class. Each one of these activities could feed into a flat, two-dimensional reading of the murders. But these common-trade theories are largely offset through Alex’s amateur performance of Beethoven, and through his performance of Für Elise and “Moonlight” Sonata his character rises above a simple archetype. Alex’s performance of the “Moonlight” Sonata also plays into the film’s overwhelming sense of foreboding and anticipation which is largely achieved through a masterful manipulation of chronology. Throughout the film each of the students’ narratives begins shortly before Alex and Eric enter the school and begin their carnage. These individual narratives intersect at different points and use subtle visual or audio markers to cue the audience, such as brief slow motion or a bit of highly foregrounded dialogue. The warping of linear time keeps the audience on edge, always wondering if the inevitable horror is just about to begin. It also keeps the audience engaged in the mental construction of events, slowly piecing together the simultaneities of the narrative. When Alex performs the “Moonlight” Sonata in his basement, the audience attempts to construct the chronology of events, recalling the performance of the work in the beginning of the film. At first glance, it would seem that Alex and Eric are soon to be on their way to the school to begin their carnage. But it will later be revealed that Alex’s basement performance occurs the day before the shooting, although the audience has no way of knowing this while they see it unfold. Strangely, Alex’s performance occurs later in the real time of the film than it does in the time line of the dramatic narrative. These unusual chronological constructions are essential to the film’s creation of a sense of foreboding. The Beethoven in Elephant has a two-fold function. First, it increases the sense of the ominous and anticipation in the drama through its slippery chronological placement within the diegesis. Second, and more importantly, it leads the viewer to engage in a dialectic about the nature and reliability of their knowledge of characters in filmic narratives and other members of society.

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The ironic deployment of the Beethoven exposes two deeper contextual layers. The first has to do with what we as audience members know about the characters portrayed in our most common cultural medium, film. The second deals a disruption to our notion that we, as members of society, are able to identify, predict, and understand the behaviors of those who inhabit it with us. Elephant forces its viewers to reflect upon the idea that it knows its own culture and society. By fictionalizing the events of a suburban, white, middle-class high school, the film would seem to trade in the most common of American cultures. Additionally, the students in the film are not characters in the traditional sense but archetypes. They are not individuals, per se, but kinds of people, those whom we would recognize from our own experiences. The jock is good-looking, plays football, has an attractive girlfriend with whom he is sexually active, and he is doted upon by most of the female students at the school. The nerdy girl has glasses, is bookish, a loner, and uncomfortable with her body and with the normal interactions of high- school life. Alex is the exception to this rule; he does not fit in to an archetypal role, while his murderous companion, Eric, more easily does. But this differentiation will wait until much later in the film. During an early scene in the film, Alex is shown to be picked on by other students. Additionally, he harbors an interest in firearms, is shown viewing Nazi propaganda films, and even shares a shower and homoerotic kiss with Eric before he sets off to the school to begin the rampage. All of these aspects of his life play into a common conception of the “bullied loner” who eventually snaps and exacts a violent revenge upon his persecutors. This idea was especially prevalent in the days following the Columbine massacre, although the reality of the situation has been shown, not surprisingly, to be far more complicated than this. Alex’s social and home environment seems to be playing right into the popular conception of school shooters. With these archetypal characterizations, we have projected practical identities upon the characters in the film. By setting up the audience to believe that they can easily understand the killers and thus the reason for the shootings, Van Sant has allowed for an experience of irony. The occasion for irony arises when our assumptions about practical identities are disrupted and cause us to become disoriented. As Jonathan Lear writes in A Case for Irony, “irony breaks open a false world of possibilities by confronting one with a practical necessity.

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The form of this confrontation is disruption: disruption of … practical identity…”307 Lear goes on to say that “[t]he experience of irony thus seems to be a particular species of uncanniness –in the sense that something that has been familiar returns to me as strange and unfamiliar. And in its return it disrupts my world.”308 Van Sant hints as much when he says in an interview that he wanted

These small amounts of information within their environment [to] be things that get you thinking about the actual event as a viewer. If we knew … if we were positive about reasons why we thought this happened, specifically, then we’d probably have put them in. But it was always so elusive, exactly why, that it’s almost like it could be the weather, you know, so we show, like, the clouds, you know. And it could be, you know, madness, you know, so we show him holding his head. And it could be all these different, you know … the video games that their playing, it could be, you know, things being thrown at him in the classroom. But, to say specifically it’s one thing, or have a theory about exactly why? I didn’t think about this while we were making it, but because the question’s come up from some of the press members, I know that it’s a very human umm … it’s in our interest to identify the reason why so that we can feel safe, you know? We can identify the reason why so that we can feel that we’re not part of it, you know? That it’s demonized, and that it’s identified and controlled, you know? So, to not have a reason, specifically, you know, like laid out for you is against some types of nature, you know? It’s against the detective, you know, that’s like trying to, like, discover the reason why.309

Alex, largely through his performance of Beethoven, challenges our conceptions about who within our society are recognizable as killers. We are shown here that we do not, in fact, know nor can we predict which members of our society will act out in violent, tragic, and unpredictable ways. The familiar designations ascribed to the high-school shooter, like those particularly evident in the months after Columbine, are made radically unfamiliar. And it is in this way that the ironic deployment of Beethoven forces us to recognize that our notion of identities is inadequate.

307 Jonathan Lear, A Case for Irony, (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press), 15. 308 Ibid. 309 Gus Van Sant, An Interview With Gus Van Sant about Elephant 2/2. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hgmh6Ge0tTE&feature=related (accessed December 13, 2011) 147

But the ironic possibilities in Elephant go beyond our understanding of the characters in the drama to the disruption of our perceived understanding of society. Elephant is the rare film that goes beyond stable irony and allows the audience to experience deep, unstable irony. It causes what Jonathan Lear terms “a breakdown in practical intelligibility.”310 He describes this experience as a sudden understanding that the “identity I have hitherto taken as familiar [has] suddenly become unfamiliar… What is peculiar to irony is that it manifests passion for a certain direction.”311 We no longer know what to make of Alex or, by extension, the children in our society who shoot and kill other children. We are lost as to what to do and where to go next. Lear describes this by noting that while “an experience of standard-issue uncanniness [stable irony] may give us goose bumps or churn our stomachs; the experience of ironic uncanniness [unstable irony], by contrast, is more like losing the ground beneath one’s feet: one longs to go in a certain direction, but one no longer knows where one is standing.”312 As audience members we are forced to reflect upon our prejudices and preconceived notions of not only who are the children in our society that would perpetrate such a heinous crime and why this is so, but also the notion that these things are at all knowable. The deep and unsettling disturbances wrought by Elephant, in no small part brought about by the use of art music, move the ground from beneath our feet in terms of both the characters in the film and those very real members of our society. Brian Draper and Torey Adamcik of Pocatello, Idaho, likely did not see the use of Beethoven in their film as a device that problematized the identity of “murderer,” but instead saw and used it as a concretizing of this persona, as a practical identity that, perhaps, they derived from an imitation of Alex in this film. They chose this music to accompany a macabre home video that would, in their minds, hold the key to their fame long after their planned killing spree and subsequent suicide was completed. These deeply disturbed young people, their gruesome act, and their even more horrific intentions give truth to what Van Sant cautions through Elephant: that we do not and cannot know when these random acts of savagery will strike or who will commit them.

310 Lear, 18. 311 Ibid., 19. 312 Ibid., 18. 148

CONCLUSION

Irony is an important discursive mode and literary trope. It invites a debate about meaning and significance, creates a feeling of community among perceivers (even if, on the surface, it excludes), and draws them into morally- active engagement. Irony can allow for conceptual points to be perceived more quickly and to be remembered longer than do literal statements. Art music has remained relevant to the wider popular culture partly through its use in films, and ironic deployments of this music constitute one of its most sophisticated uses. It makes perceivers aware of the surface features of a film, its multiple, deeper contextual layers, and the complex interplay that takes place among them, which helps directors to make conceptual and narrative points that transcend their immediate filmic narratives. There are two basic kinds of irony: stable irony (irony as stimulus) and unstable irony (irony as terminus). Unstable irony, which deals in infinite negation, seeks to point out the fundamental incongruities of life. It calls into question values, mores, social norms, and knowledge, a process that shakes the very foundations upon which we structure our lives and existences. Stable irony stimulates thinking, which serves to aid in the recognition of a true meaning that lurks behind the surface; it allows for positive solutions. Stable irony is especially suited to making ideological points because it assumes a shared value system between the ironist and the perceiver. Moreover, through the four-part process of ironic dissembling –1) rejection of a literal meaning, 2) substitution of possible alternative meanings, 3) decision about author’s values and, 4) decision upon new, true meanings –perceivers are more apt to agree with the author’s points because, in a very real way, they are forced to engage in a rational process and arrive at an understanding on their own. In the so-called “Golden Age” of Hollywood film, circa 1933-1960, the narrative elements, including and especially music, were standardized in order to create a product with the clearest possible narrative. Composers during this period employed the stylistic elements of the Romantic orchestral idiom as the lingua franca of cinema due to its cultural currency and in particular its pre-ordained emotional connotations. Film scores during this period were constructed around seven basic principles, as outlined by Claudia Gorbman: Invisibility,

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Inaudibility, Signifying Emotion, Narrative Cueing, Continuity, Unity, and Violation in the service of another principle. These principles are important, in that a violation of one or more of these is a central factor in music’s potential to being read ironically. With the sound film and the classical- Hollywood film score firmly ensconced as the industry standard, there was an ideological shift away from the use of preexisting art music, especially (but not surprisingly) by film composers. Films of the 1930s and 1940s were largely saturated with original music in lieu of preexisting art music. But this began to change during the late 1950s, when the baby boom generation stayed closer to home and their TV sets, and stopped patronizing their local theaters as much as they had done in the past. Throughout the 1960s, as a way to try to regain some of the audiences they had lost, the major Hollywood studios began to experiment with different filmic products, especially those modeled on European Auteurism, which placed the control of the film in the hands of a single filmmaker and not, as was Hollywood practice, in the hands of a committee. The first major blockbuster success of the auteur approach to the use of preexisting art music was Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. The entire score was drawn from late- nineteenth- through mid-twentieth-century art music. Moreover, the way this music was employed violated many of the principles of the classical Hollywood film score. The music’s cultural associations are drawn upon and made an essential part of the film; they are reinforced, opposed, juxtaposed, altered, and transformed by its use in 2001. With the success of such a non-traditional film and its even less- traditional score – not to mention the critical, box-office, and cultural success achieved by Kubrick’s follow-up to 2001, A Clockwork Orange – the Hollywood establishment was more willing to take chances by placing the various components of films under the control of individual directors. With the music choices now in the hands of the auteur, the rules and conventions for music in films changed, and art music has had a noticeable presence in films from the late 1960s until the present. Moreover, ironically deployed art music became, if not a staple, a regularly used device by some of Hollywood’s more sophisticated directors. Ironically deployed art music in films must make itself known to the viewer. The most obvious means of achieving this is through an incongruity, usually between the image- and soundtracks. Once perceivers become aware of this incongruity, they are also made aware that the film will stray in important and significant ways from standard, classical- Hollywood filmic

150 conventions. Viewers are drawn into active engagement, conscious that the film will in some way challenge them to perceive the deeper contextual layers of the diegesis. This active engagement allows filmmakers to make known subtle but important contextual layers within filmic narratives. Art music deployed ironically in films may be used in a number of ways. It may work within the diegesis and engender a richer, more subtle rendering of the narrative and of the characters that inhabit it, or it may make the audience aware of larger, more profound concepts that may cause them to reflect upon their own ideas about life and how it should be lived. In the films 28 Days Later, and Needful Things, the ironically deployed art music calls into question our notions of religion and the role it supposedly plays within society, asking us to reconsider our easily accepted notions of religion as a cultural adhesive. Casino also draws upon the sphere of the religious, but in this case in order to make the tragic story of old Las Vegas a universal one. The damnation and expulsion that Ace experiences is not so much a paradise lost as it is an unleashing of Hell into the core of American society. In both Junebug and The Madness of King George there are reversals of the stature of the characters. In the latter, the high are brought low, and in the former the low are brought high. Junebug, however, also sets a kind of trap for viewers, who are first reassured and confirmed in the presumption of their own cultural superiority, only to have the rug pulled out from under them in the end. In this way, Junebug has the viewer undergo a similar catharsis to that of the film’s protagonist. The Killing Fields and The Sum of All Fears demonstrate how the juxtaposition of images and music can open audiences to oppositional narrative points. Where The Sum of All Fears largely confirms the triumph of militaristic ideology, The Killing Fields openly challenges it. In some cases, however, ironically deployed art music exposes deeper and far-reaching ideological points that exceed the boundaries of the diegesis and the genre. Misery uses preexisting art music (and noticeably inauthentic versions of it) to weave a complex dialectic concerning the ideas of personal and artistic authenticity and the dangers of false art that goes well beyond the film narrative. Apt Pupil uses Wagner’s music both in its original context and with all of its accumulated cultural baggage in order to expose the transcendent nature of evil and to characterize the Nazis as having a libidinal blood-lust.

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In He Got Game director Spike Lee uses Copland’s music and its connotations as the soundtrack for American Arcadia in order to place the stories of young African Americans within the framework of idealized American mythology. By employing Copland’s music in a conspicuous manner, Lee forces the perceiver to see both the mythologized rural, white America and the modern, urban African American as pioneers, each having earned a place in the pantheon of national archetypes by virtue of their values to family, self, and determination to endure adversity. In Elephant Gus Van Sant uses Beethoven’s music as a means of creating psychological depth within the school shooter and as a way to have the audience reflect upon the nature of horrific crimes and those who commit them. In a film deliberately populated with archetypes, Elephant uses Beethoven’s music to individuate one of the killers. The archetypes allow the viewer to assign practical identities to the characters in the film, and when the killer’s practical identity is disrupted, largely through his knowledge of Beethoven’s music, it causes disorientation. This disorientation is a breakdown in practical intelligibility that makes viewers anxious to discover a direction concerning their understanding of the killer and his reasons for causing such destruction, but unstable irony does not provide us with a clear insight. The conceptual ground beneath our feet is shaken, and we are moved by it, but we are not left with any indication about what path we should take. All we are left with is the knowledge of our not knowing. The analysis of these films demonstrates that ironically deployed art music can engender a deeper, richer, and a more substantial reading of filmic narratives. The recognition of this irony can unmask deeper contextual layers that reveal or enhance major themes and narrative points in the films and, in some cases, the ideology of the filmmaker. Moreover, music, through its association and interaction with film, can reinscribe itself and its perceived meaning within the wider culture. This means that art music continues to be relevant to our culture; music acquires renewed meaning through its significant and sophisticated participation in the Western world’s most popular artistic medium. The Romantic aesthetic, expressed by Schiller, that “The real and express content that the poet puts in his work remains always finite; the possible content

152 that he allows us to contribute is an infinite quantity,”313 is seen in the meeting of film narrative and art music. Perhaps, in the future, scholars may investigate more ways in which the semantic content of both music and film interact with and affect one another, or in which inroads toward a theory of preexisting music and film might shed light on how the monuments of the past continue to inform, transform, and be transformed by modern culture.

313 Friedrich Schiller, Schillers Sämmtliche Werke, in Zwei Bänden, Vol 2 (Stuggart: J. G. Gotta’chen Buchhandlung, 1867), 1471. “Der wirkliche und ausdrückliche Gehalt, den des Dichter hineinlegt, bleibt stets eine endliche; der mögliche Gehalt, den er uns hineinzulegen überlässt, ist eine unendliche Grösse.” Translation found in Charles Rosen, The Romantic Generation (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1995), 93. Rosen does not cite his source. 153

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FILMOGRAPHY

28 Days Later. DVD. Directed by Danny Boyle. 2003; US: 20th Century Fox Home Entertainment, 2003.

Apt Pupil. DVD. Directed by Bryan Singer. 1998; Culver City, CA: Columbia TriStar Home Video, 1999.

Cashback. DVD. Directed by Sean Ellis. 2007; New York: Magnolia Pictures, 2008. Casino. DVD. Directed by Martin Scorsese. 1995; Universal City, CA: Universal, 2005.

Elephant. DVD. Directed by Gus Van Sant. 2003; Los Angeles, CA: HBO Home Video, 2003. He Got Game. DVD. Directed by Spike Lee. 1998; Burbank, CA: Touchstone Home Video, 1998.

Junebug. DVD. Directed by Phil Morris. 2005; US: Sony Home Pictures Entertainment, 2006.

The Killing Fields. DVD. Directed by Roland Joffé. 1984; Burbank, CA: Warner Home Video, 2001.

The Madness of King George. DVD. Directed by Nicholas Hynter. 1994; Los Angeles, CA: Hallmark Home Entertainment, 2001.

Misery (Collector’s Edition). DVD. Directed by Rob Reiner. 1990; Hollywood, CA: Columbia Pictures, 2007.

Needful Things. DVD. Directed by Fraser C. Heston. 1993; Santa Monica, CA : MGM Home Entertainment, 2002.

Reiner, Rob. “Director’s Commentary.” Misery (Collector’s Edition), DVD. Directed by Rob Reiner. Hollywood, California: Columbia Pictures, 2007.

The Sum of All Fears. DVD. Directed by Phil Alden Robinson. 2002; Hollywood, CA: Paramount, 2002.

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BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH

Matthew McAllister is currently a professor of Humanities at Valencia College in Orlando, Florida. He earned his undergraduate and Masters’ degrees from West Chester University of Pennsylvania where he studied under Sterling E. Murray. He produced a thesis and critical edition of a set of symphonies by Thomas Alexander Erskine, Sixth Earl of Kelly, which were the first galant-style symphonies to be published in the British Isles during the eighteenth century. His research interests include the interaction of art music and popular culture and eighteenth-century instrumental music and music making.

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