Here are my thoughts on music in the rest of the Academy Award-nominated movies I've seen. Don't look too hard for a thesis, since these are just free-flowing reflections.
Hybrids: The Great Gatsby, 12 Years a Slave
I've called these two hybrids for the lack of a better word: both of them take a variety of musical approaches, none in particular being dominant. 12 Years a Slave has a score by Hans Zimmer and Gatsby has one by Craig Armstrong, but the scores of these two films are the least important aspects of their varied music.
Gatsby's compendium of music has been commented on by many since the film's release, with most critics falling into one of two camps: either the use of current African-American music is a very astute method to help the modern audience understand the excess of the 1920s, or it is a terrible symptom of the dumbing-down of the audience, implying that they would find authentic 1920s jazz so repugnant that they would stay away from the cinema. Scoring the movie with Jay-Z (who also produced) and a host of other contemporary rap, hip-hop, and R&B singers is a good way to make a link between the 20s and the present, but there is actually more at stake here than Luhrmann has been given credit for. It is easy to overlook the most interesting musical connection between the 1920s and now, which is the fact that in the 1920s as in the 2010s the most popular music among white listeners was coded as Black. This is something that Baz Luhrmann captures very well in the film, though it may have been a happy accident: even though we hear quite a lot of so-called 'Black' music we very rarely see Blacks on the screen, and when they are present they only appear in quick vignettes in bit parts. This demonstrates the fetishisation of black-ness among Whites: in the '20s, and probably in the present as well, one could argue that the popularity of African-American music among Whites was a smokescreen to hide oppression. White listeners use their approval of black music as a synecdoche for their approval of Blacks in general, assuming that because they say the music is so good they can get away with forcing Blacks to be subalterns (happy to have them perform on stage, but if they want to listen they'd better sit in the balcony). (My use of 'Black' rather than 'African-American' in regard to the 1920s is to avoid anachronism, though of course Whites in the 1920s were more likely to use 'Negro'.) At the same time, it probably would have been nice to hear more non-anachronistic music in the film, but if it had all been 'authentic' it wouldn't really have been a 'Baz Luhrmann' film. I'm a fan of Luhrmann and I think he manages to bring all of the music together with the images, providing a compelling case against historical authenticity. After all, you can't repeat the past. It will be interesting to see how well the film will have held up twenty years from now, when the current trendy music will be old-fashioned; using Bert Bacharach in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid was cutting-edge at the time but now seems extremely silly. On an unrelated note, Luhrmann also provides Leonardo DiCaprio with the most exciting 'star entrance' since John Ford's introduction of John Wayne in Stagecoach.
I struggled mightily with the music of 12 Years a Slave; the score came very close to ruining the film for me. In addition to being nearly identical to Zimmer's score for The Thin Red Line, the score here is very intrusive, my pet peeve when it comes to film music. To put it succinctly, every time I heard the main theme I felt resentment for being told what to think about what I was seeing on screen. The other aspects of the film, including its sonic ones, are such a great achievement that having this pushy score frequently barge in is shockingly inept on the part of a director as gifted as Steve McQueen seems to be. This score exists out of fear, fear that the audience won't be able to 'handle' the tough questions the film asks, and fear that the screenplay and acting can't carry the audience through them. Without the music to direct our emotions in a conventional way (using culturally-ingrained tropes of musicalised sadness like downward motion, long slow tones, string instruments in harmony: the model is clearly the Barber 'Adagio') McQueen and Zimmer imply that the scenes of emotional suffering in the film would be more difficult to watch. That difficulty, however, should be the point! The score in this film is a balm, and I agree with Bertolt Brecht in feeling that music should not be used as such. Music is too powerful a medium to be used in such a simplistic way, the way that TW Adorno disdainfully called emotional listening. Because of its simplistic use of those emotional tropes, Zimmer's music encourages this type of listening. McQueen's professed desire is to make his audience think, but the poor use of music allows us to stop thinking and start merely feeling. There is a rather interesting paradox here: McQueen's goal is Brechtian: he wants to make the audience angry and inspire social change. But his directorial technique is grounded in Stanislavsky, not Brecht: emotional identification versus enforced alienation. The score, though, evoked in me a Brechtian response: in addition to the anger felt at being manipulated, it took me out of the film. For a viewer who doesn't care a fig for Brecht or Adorno the score would intensify the emotional identification because of the tropes to which it makes recourse, but at the same time it focusses attention away from what is happening on screen by acting as a balm. So does McQueen want us to identify or not? Can you be involved and alienated at the same time? Did McQueen hire Zimmer on purpose to annoy people like me? It's all especially annoying because the best single musical scene out of all of these films appears in this one. When Solomon, sold into slavery, attends the funeral of a fellow slave and the others start singing the spiritual 'Roll, Jordan, Roll', McQueen and actor Chiwetel Ejiofor do an extraordinary job of showing the divide between Solomon and the other slaves: Solomon, having grown up in the North, doesn't know the spiritual, and as he slowly begins to sing along, the tension he feels between his desire to regain his family and his feelings for his fellow slaves is palpable in Ejiofor's performance. McQueen shows this all in one long take, allowing us to see the character's entire emotional trajectory. It's an amazing tour-de-force of acting and directing.
Musicals: Inside Llewyn Davis, Frozen
By 'musical' here I simply mean a movie in which the characters break into song. Frozen is a traditional musical in that it employs what musicologist Raymond Knapp calls MERM (musically-enhanced reality mode), while Inside Llewyn Davis is about a musician whom we often see perform, alone and with others. The music of ILD was produced by T Bone Burnett, who also coordinated the music for the Coen brothers' two other musically-inspired films O Brother Where Art Thou and The Ladykillers. O Brother foregrounds musicking and sparked a major revival in 'roots' music in the United States, while The Ladykillers intelligently plays with classical/folk divide (though this is the only way in which the remake improves upon the British original). In ILD, however, the focus is squarely on the music. It is almost a work of musicology-as-film: it is a well-researched treatise on the 1960s folk music movement, the artist's place in society, shifting musical cultures and styles, and the music industry. It also highlights the need for an Oscar (or any award, for that matter) for music supervision: T Bone Burnett's work here and Randall Poster's for The Wolf of Wall Street, among other supervisors' work for other films, have not been given their due, though they contribute to the films just as much as editing, sound design, sets, or costumes. There used to be an award for Adaptation Score that could be transformed into such an award. (It was used mostly for musicals that were adapted from the stage; for example, André Previn won it for his work on My Fair Lady. Marvin Hamlisch won it for his adaptation of Scott Joplin for The Sting.) Burnett's work on ILD definitely fits into this category, as he took folk songs from the 1960s and worked with the actors to create idiomatic performances. The use of music in the film doesn't need much exegesis since it provides its own with astonishing perspicacity. Can a work of art be a doctoral thesis on itself?
The music and lyrics for Frozen aren't all that good (though I do quite like the 'frozen fractals all around'), but they work very well within the film and unlike the other recent Disney musicals like The Princess and the Frog and Tangled they sometimes develop plot rather than being merely parenthetical. 'Do You Wanna Build a Snowman' does this particularly well through careful orchestration and vocal arrangements to display the disintegrating relationship between the two sisters across their childhood. The influence of Wicked is everywhere, and that influence is usually negative, entailing songs that depend on simple modulations and high belted notes rather than intelligent lyrics and interesting harmonic development, as well of course as the plot that was lifted bodily from the musical to the movie. Even more interesting from a musicological perspective is the way in which people have taken ownership of the score, especially 'Let It Go', making their own YouTube videos singing the original lyrics and adapted ones. What's most surprising is that Disney not only has allowed this to happen without lawsuits, but has even encouraged it by including backing tracks on the soundtrack album for singing along. Perhaps this litigious company is opening up? Or do they just want people to buy the album so they can get the backing tracks? The iTunes version also has karaoke versions of the other songs, but they haven't caught on as well (my favourite is 'Love Is an Open Door' but I can't find anyone to sing it with me). A word here should also be said about the 'pop' version of 'Let It Go' that plays over the end credits. The editing of the vocal line on this track is extraordinarily bad; it sounds like each syllable was spliced together from different takes, the pitch correction settings went haywire at the end of phrases, the melismas at the end were performed by a vocoder, and some door creaks were added in at random. It's all very strange indeed, and if spread around a room could pass for a cubist sound installation. Perhaps Demi Lovato is a Braque fan and it was all done on purpose.
I could go on even longer about all of these films, especially if I saw them all a second time, but that's more than enough for now. If anyone is still reading, feel free to add comments. Let's get some arguments going.
Friday 28 February 2014
Tuesday 25 February 2014
Academy Award Nominees and Their Music
I thought it might be interesting to have a look at the way music is used across the various films nominated for Academy Awards this year (only the ones I've seen, which unfortunately isn't as many as I would like). I'll be looking at and listening to the following eleven films in this post, the list including the awards for which they are nominated and a quick description of the way music is used.
1. 12 Years a Slave (Picture, Director, Actor, Supporting Actor, Supporting Actress, Adapted Screenplay, Production Design, Costume Design, Editing)
Score by Hans Zimmer, with a great deal of diegetic music (music within the world of the film, usually onscreen) from the 19th century.
2. 20 Feet from Stardom (Documentary)
A music documentary, so lots of music onscreen.
3. American Hustle (Picture, Director, Actor, Actress, Supporting Actor, Supporting Actress, Original Screenplay, Production Design, Costume Design, Editing)
Mostly a compilation score (by which I mean pre-existing music used nondiegetically, that is as underscore/background music that the characters in the movie don't hear or for which the source isn't seen on screen), alternating with a new score by Danny Elfman.
4. Blue Jasmine (Actress, Supporting Actress, Original Screenplay)
Compilation score.
5. Frozen (Animated Feature, Song)
A musical, so obviously a lot of music: songs by Robert Lopez and Kristen Anderson-Lopez, score by Christophe Beck.
6. The Great Gatsby (Production Design, Costume Design)
Everything, including the kitchen sink.
7. The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug (Sound Editing, Sound Mixing, Visual Effects)
Score by Howard Shore.
8. Inside Llewyn Davis (Sound Mixing, Cinematography)
A film about musicians, so lots of music onscreen and off.
9. The Lone Ranger (Makeup and Hairstyling, Visual Effects)
Score by Hans Zimmer, with various quotations of other music.
10. Philomena (Picture, Actress, Adapted Screenplay, Score)
Score by Alexandre Desplat, with occasional diegetic music.
11. The Wolf of Wall Street (Picture, Actor, Supporting Actor, Adapted Screenplay)
Compilation score.
These are only a few of the hundreds of films released over the past year, so they can hardly be considered a representative sample, but what's striking is the heterogeneity of the way music is used in this group. The symphonic score is alive and well, and the busiest composers at the moment are all represented here (Desplat seems to be writing music for half of the films that come out these days). No John Williams, but he's nominated for The Book Thief, which I haven't seen. There is also a lot of music happening onscreen as well, though my being a musicologist is obviously going to lead me to those types of films.
I'm going to go through each one, but let's get the question of taste out of the way first: my favourites of these are The Wolf of Wall Street and Inside Llewyn Davis. I didn't despise any of these eleven, but The Hobbit was a great disappointment and The Lone Ranger was a mess, albeit a frequently amusing one. My vote for Best Picture would be The Wolf of Wall Street, though had Llewyn Davis been nominated it would have been a very tough decision between them. I'm more interested in narrative film, so 20 Feet from Stardom, a documentary, doesn't really fit within this discussion. That said, however, the film, which concerns the lives of the backup singers who worked for big-name groups from the 1960s to the present, is one of the best documentaries I've seen. The director Morgan Neville alternates interviews with the singers with concert footage, both recent and archival, and gives the audience a well-rounded view of these signers and why they do what they do. So see it if you haven't yet.
Compilation Scores: American Hustle, Blue Jasmine, The Wolf of Wall Street
These three are brought together by the fact that they are scored predominantly with pre-existing music. The previous post on The Wolf of Wall Street described some of the clever ways in which Martin Scorsese used music to convey a wide variety of affects to the audience (that's affect as in Affektenlehre). David O. Russell is after something similar in American Hustle, though his movie has more in common musically with Scorsese's earlier work, where the music used to score the film is drawn from the lives of the characters. The film takes place in the 1970s, and the music dates from that time. Russell isn't as adept at Scorsese in this, however (is anyone?). Where Scorsese was careful to use music the characters would have actually listened to in order to draw them together into an aurally-constructed community, Russell's goal is simple scene- and mood-setting. Mostly we've got rock and disco to tell us that we're in the 70s, in case the hair wasn't enough, though Duke Ellington does play a role in the plot. There is also some new underscore by Danny Elfman, but I can't remember anything about it. In all I was a bit disappointed with the music in American Hustle, since even though it sets the stage well it doesn't really go much beyond that to actually comment on what we're seeing. Russell's previous film, Silver Linings Playbook, was rather more interesting musically, as the final dance sequence could be seen as summing up musically the various aspects of the relationship of the two main characters and their neuroses. But that's for a future post. Blue Jasmine shows off Woody Allen's taste in music as do all of his other films, and his choices are just as successful here. One would never think that the best way to score a drama that mixes Tennessee Williams with Bernie Madoff would be to use early jazz and blues, but it works beautifully. Anyone other than Allen wouldn't be able to do it, but Allen is probably the only person who would want to. The song lyrics or titles often comment on the scene (A Good Man is Hard to Find, indeed) and 'Blue Moon' is a recurring motive within the diegesis. I thought this was a very fine film with consistent and clever use of music, but it doesn't have anything in it as wonderful as the murder scene in Match Point set to Verdi's Otello, the opening Gershwin-scored montage that opens Manhattan, or the motivic use of 'September Song' in Radio Days. Still, competence and intelligence in the use of music is pretty rare these days, so all praise to Allen for doing it.
New Scores: The Hobbit, The Lone Ranger, Philomena
Howard Shore's score for the second Hobbit movie was more of the same stuff we've had so much of already in the first Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. Step one: write some dramatic choral music in Elvish; Step two: find a funny instrument (like cimbalom or hardingfele); Step three: use low instruments when underground and high instruments when flying; etc. It's all very well if you like that stuff, which I did when LOTR was first coming out, but I don't find it very interesting anymore. Shore is at least a very competent composer; very few would be able to write so much music without too much repetition. Zimmer and his composing collective's score for The Lone Ranger was quite unmemorable, just Pirates of the Caribbean with some nods to Jerome Moross. The only exciting musical moment was during the finale when the music bursts into the William Tell Overture with a cheekily extended trumpet fanfare that plays with our expectations of when the theme proper is going to start, then continues to play with increasingly grandiose variations and modulations that get deliciously absurd. I wish the rest of the score had had that much wit. That also might have helped the film get a better reception than it did; much of the criticism was about inconsistency of tone, and a more consistently lighthearted score could have mitigated that. Alexandre Desplat's Philomena score, though nominated for the Best Score Oscar, was of the type that would have Adorno and Eisler rolling in their graves. It mostly keeps a low profile and could just as well have been done without. It may seem a funny thing for a musicologist to say, but my view of film scoring is that if a scene doesn't need music it shouldn't have any. Most of The Hobbit does need music because it goes with the epic territory and enhances the excitement being created by the editing, and the music also gives temporal continuity to complex sequences. The final sequence of The Lone Ranger needs music because you can't have the Lone Ranger without his theme tune. But a small-scale melodrama about a woman trying to find her long-lost son doesn't need much underscoring, at least not as shot by Stephen Frears and acted by Steve Coogan and Judi Dench. A film score often becomes a crutch on which to hang unconfident directing, editing, and acting, but Judi Dench certainly does not need such a crutch. Philomena would have been a much braver film if her performance could have had its effect on its own terms, without saccharine music telling the audience what they already know.
The other four films will be discussed in the next post. Look out, Adorno fans: he'll be making an appearance in relation to 12 Years a Slave.
1. 12 Years a Slave (Picture, Director, Actor, Supporting Actor, Supporting Actress, Adapted Screenplay, Production Design, Costume Design, Editing)
Score by Hans Zimmer, with a great deal of diegetic music (music within the world of the film, usually onscreen) from the 19th century.
2. 20 Feet from Stardom (Documentary)
A music documentary, so lots of music onscreen.
3. American Hustle (Picture, Director, Actor, Actress, Supporting Actor, Supporting Actress, Original Screenplay, Production Design, Costume Design, Editing)
Mostly a compilation score (by which I mean pre-existing music used nondiegetically, that is as underscore/background music that the characters in the movie don't hear or for which the source isn't seen on screen), alternating with a new score by Danny Elfman.
4. Blue Jasmine (Actress, Supporting Actress, Original Screenplay)
Compilation score.
5. Frozen (Animated Feature, Song)
A musical, so obviously a lot of music: songs by Robert Lopez and Kristen Anderson-Lopez, score by Christophe Beck.
6. The Great Gatsby (Production Design, Costume Design)
Everything, including the kitchen sink.
7. The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug (Sound Editing, Sound Mixing, Visual Effects)
Score by Howard Shore.
8. Inside Llewyn Davis (Sound Mixing, Cinematography)
A film about musicians, so lots of music onscreen and off.
9. The Lone Ranger (Makeup and Hairstyling, Visual Effects)
Score by Hans Zimmer, with various quotations of other music.
10. Philomena (Picture, Actress, Adapted Screenplay, Score)
Score by Alexandre Desplat, with occasional diegetic music.
11. The Wolf of Wall Street (Picture, Actor, Supporting Actor, Adapted Screenplay)
Compilation score.
These are only a few of the hundreds of films released over the past year, so they can hardly be considered a representative sample, but what's striking is the heterogeneity of the way music is used in this group. The symphonic score is alive and well, and the busiest composers at the moment are all represented here (Desplat seems to be writing music for half of the films that come out these days). No John Williams, but he's nominated for The Book Thief, which I haven't seen. There is also a lot of music happening onscreen as well, though my being a musicologist is obviously going to lead me to those types of films.
I'm going to go through each one, but let's get the question of taste out of the way first: my favourites of these are The Wolf of Wall Street and Inside Llewyn Davis. I didn't despise any of these eleven, but The Hobbit was a great disappointment and The Lone Ranger was a mess, albeit a frequently amusing one. My vote for Best Picture would be The Wolf of Wall Street, though had Llewyn Davis been nominated it would have been a very tough decision between them. I'm more interested in narrative film, so 20 Feet from Stardom, a documentary, doesn't really fit within this discussion. That said, however, the film, which concerns the lives of the backup singers who worked for big-name groups from the 1960s to the present, is one of the best documentaries I've seen. The director Morgan Neville alternates interviews with the singers with concert footage, both recent and archival, and gives the audience a well-rounded view of these signers and why they do what they do. So see it if you haven't yet.
Compilation Scores: American Hustle, Blue Jasmine, The Wolf of Wall Street
These three are brought together by the fact that they are scored predominantly with pre-existing music. The previous post on The Wolf of Wall Street described some of the clever ways in which Martin Scorsese used music to convey a wide variety of affects to the audience (that's affect as in Affektenlehre). David O. Russell is after something similar in American Hustle, though his movie has more in common musically with Scorsese's earlier work, where the music used to score the film is drawn from the lives of the characters. The film takes place in the 1970s, and the music dates from that time. Russell isn't as adept at Scorsese in this, however (is anyone?). Where Scorsese was careful to use music the characters would have actually listened to in order to draw them together into an aurally-constructed community, Russell's goal is simple scene- and mood-setting. Mostly we've got rock and disco to tell us that we're in the 70s, in case the hair wasn't enough, though Duke Ellington does play a role in the plot. There is also some new underscore by Danny Elfman, but I can't remember anything about it. In all I was a bit disappointed with the music in American Hustle, since even though it sets the stage well it doesn't really go much beyond that to actually comment on what we're seeing. Russell's previous film, Silver Linings Playbook, was rather more interesting musically, as the final dance sequence could be seen as summing up musically the various aspects of the relationship of the two main characters and their neuroses. But that's for a future post. Blue Jasmine shows off Woody Allen's taste in music as do all of his other films, and his choices are just as successful here. One would never think that the best way to score a drama that mixes Tennessee Williams with Bernie Madoff would be to use early jazz and blues, but it works beautifully. Anyone other than Allen wouldn't be able to do it, but Allen is probably the only person who would want to. The song lyrics or titles often comment on the scene (A Good Man is Hard to Find, indeed) and 'Blue Moon' is a recurring motive within the diegesis. I thought this was a very fine film with consistent and clever use of music, but it doesn't have anything in it as wonderful as the murder scene in Match Point set to Verdi's Otello, the opening Gershwin-scored montage that opens Manhattan, or the motivic use of 'September Song' in Radio Days. Still, competence and intelligence in the use of music is pretty rare these days, so all praise to Allen for doing it.
New Scores: The Hobbit, The Lone Ranger, Philomena
Howard Shore's score for the second Hobbit movie was more of the same stuff we've had so much of already in the first Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. Step one: write some dramatic choral music in Elvish; Step two: find a funny instrument (like cimbalom or hardingfele); Step three: use low instruments when underground and high instruments when flying; etc. It's all very well if you like that stuff, which I did when LOTR was first coming out, but I don't find it very interesting anymore. Shore is at least a very competent composer; very few would be able to write so much music without too much repetition. Zimmer and his composing collective's score for The Lone Ranger was quite unmemorable, just Pirates of the Caribbean with some nods to Jerome Moross. The only exciting musical moment was during the finale when the music bursts into the William Tell Overture with a cheekily extended trumpet fanfare that plays with our expectations of when the theme proper is going to start, then continues to play with increasingly grandiose variations and modulations that get deliciously absurd. I wish the rest of the score had had that much wit. That also might have helped the film get a better reception than it did; much of the criticism was about inconsistency of tone, and a more consistently lighthearted score could have mitigated that. Alexandre Desplat's Philomena score, though nominated for the Best Score Oscar, was of the type that would have Adorno and Eisler rolling in their graves. It mostly keeps a low profile and could just as well have been done without. It may seem a funny thing for a musicologist to say, but my view of film scoring is that if a scene doesn't need music it shouldn't have any. Most of The Hobbit does need music because it goes with the epic territory and enhances the excitement being created by the editing, and the music also gives temporal continuity to complex sequences. The final sequence of The Lone Ranger needs music because you can't have the Lone Ranger without his theme tune. But a small-scale melodrama about a woman trying to find her long-lost son doesn't need much underscoring, at least not as shot by Stephen Frears and acted by Steve Coogan and Judi Dench. A film score often becomes a crutch on which to hang unconfident directing, editing, and acting, but Judi Dench certainly does not need such a crutch. Philomena would have been a much braver film if her performance could have had its effect on its own terms, without saccharine music telling the audience what they already know.
The other four films will be discussed in the next post. Look out, Adorno fans: he'll be making an appearance in relation to 12 Years a Slave.
Sunday 16 February 2014
Some Thoughts on Music in The Wolf of Wall Street
Yesterday I went to see The Wolf of Wall Street for the second time in the cinema. After the first viewing I thought that it was one of Scorsese's best films, up there with Taxi Driver and Goodfellas. It is certainly his wittiest, more so than After Hours, his so-called comedy that is very interesting but not very funny. The film is an explosion of the ironic vein present in Scorsese's other large-canvas life story movies (especially Goodfellas and Casino), but while those films attain much of their power from the juxtaposition of light and dark, WoWS stays light almost all the way through. Before I get to the music more specifically, a musical example can illustrate the difference. In Casino Scorsese uses the final chorus of Bach's Matthew Passion to serve as a marker of seriousness and sorrow, the piece having this signification not only because of its specific source but because it is the only piece of 'Classical' music among an omnivorous pop tunestack. WoWS's only 'Classical' piece is the Cold Genius's aria from Purcell's King Arthur, which accompanies the mind slowing effect of quaaludes on Donnie Azoff (Jonah Hill) in a Stratton Oakmont board meeting. The audio-viewer who is unfamiliar with Purcell won't get the joke, but will still note the irony of having an opera aria accompany a comic scene in extreme slow motion.
The second viewing confirmed all of this, but also intensified the frustration I feel at the commentators who insist on seeing the film as glorifying the excesses of Jordan Belfort and his colleagues and who either label the film as morally irresponsible or want to follow it as a role model. Such viewers are clearly not really watching the film, or are seeing only what they want to see. Even though the film is comic, it shows that the consequences of the characters' actions are not at all positive. The question should be asked, however, whose fault this is. Is Scorsese to be blamed for not making his message clearer, or is the audience to be blamed for philistinism? This is meant to be an essay on music in the film, so there isn't space to get into the rights of the author and the rights of the interpreter: you can read Umberto Eco for that. But the problem is certainly not unique to this film; Fight Club is another famous example of a film that has been read as condoning the kind of behaviour it roundly critiques. In case anyone agrees that Scorsese is approving of the behaviour in the film, look again at its last shot: a sea of zombie-like faces (supposedly in Auckland, but the accents are wrong) waiting for Jordan Belfort's wisdom to rain down upon them. Could this be Scorsese's satirical representation of his movie's audience, taken in by Belfort's posturing?
Leaving morality aside for another time, let's get to the music. As with many of Scorsese's films, WoWS is scored entirely with pre-existing music, much of it used non-diegetically (meaning that the characters don't hear the music: it isn't coming from live musicians or a radio or CD player). Scorsese is the great master of this kind of scoring, as he and his music supervisors and producers (here Randall Poster and Robbie Robertson) choose music that perfectly fits a scene musically, lyrically, affectively, and narratively without ever distracting from the acting or cinematography (Wes Anderson is the other expert at this). WoWS uses about fifty pieces of music, listed here: http://blogs.indiewire.com/theplaylist/all-the-songs-in-the-wolf-of-wall-street-including-devo-cypress-hill-foo-fighters-more-20131227. But this film is a musical departure from Scorsese's other films that use this kind of scoring. Starting with his first feature, Who's That Knocking at My Door (1969), and taking its full form in Mean Streets, the music has nearly always been representative of what the characters in the film would listen to, and has been carefully matched for time and place: lots of Motown and '60s rock in Mean Streets, Italian music for the early part of Raging Bull, Tony Bennett in Goodfellas, etc. Using this kind of music as underscore brings the characters together into a community: scoring the scenes with music from the characters' experience articulates their interrelationships in a deeper way than dialogue alone, or a newly composed score, would do. (At some point in the near future I'll write a book chapter about this use of music.) WoWS, however, uses a much wider variety of music, and it doesn't really have the same characterising function. In addition to the Purcell mentioned above, WoWS is scored with jazz, rock, funk, ska, disco, blues, etc. We never get a sense of what kind of music the characters would actually listen to. Instead, the smorgasbord of music contributes to the film's sense of excess; literally anything could come next. But that doesn't mean that the music is arbitrary, as Scorsese is playing with the connotations all of this music has. This is a well-theorised aspect of film music (see this collection: http://www.amazon.com/Changing-Tunes-Pre-existing-Ashgate-Popular/dp/0754651371/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1392595893&sr=8-1&keywords=Changing+Tunes+Stilwell), but I don't know of any other film where this connotative aspect is engaged with such consistency and vigour. Quentin Tarantino is a definite influence, having been influenced himself by Scorsese's earlier films, though Tarantino's choice of music is narrower than Scorsese's in WoWS. I'll need to see the film again with the ability to pause it and reflect before giving too many examples or coming up with a stronger theoretical position, but here are some more instances of Scorsese's rich musical sense.
While Belfort is wooing Naomi, Ahmad Jamal's bop version of 'The Surrey with the Fringe on Top' is playing in the background: the use of bop implies speed, and the song is itself a a wooing song.
The scene on Belfort's yacht in Portofino, when he is trying balance the need to go to Switzerland for his shady banking, to London for Aunt Emma's funeral, and to New York for the FBI investigation, is accompanied with Lambert, Hendricks, and Ross's 'Cloudburst'. The manic vocalese emphasises the sense of everything flying out of Jordan's control. This is also another wooing song (if you can follow the lyrics!), but because of the speed it seems more desperate; Jordan is trying to keep hold of his wife and all of his other luxuries.
'Goldfinger' is being sung at Jordan and Naomi's wedding, a rather poor choice on Jordan's part, but such is the character that he would probably like being thought of as a Bond villain.
Jimmy Castor's 'Hey Leroy, Your Mama's Callin' You' is playing over one of the tracking shots through the Stratton Oakmont office. In addition to the upbeat latin jazz feel, if we were to replace 'mama' with 'papa' the song would fit Jordan's relationship with his father (who is angry about his son's excesses but is fairly happy to go along for the ride). This reminds me very much of a scene in Who's That Knocking at My Door where Ray Barretto's similar 'Watusi' accompanies a party in one of the young men's apartments. The scene starts happily enough, but as the camera cranks faster (resulting in slow motion) through a series of progressive tracking shots across the apartment the party gets more sinister, all while the song's ostinato continues unabated.
Those are only a few examples of the musical craft that went into this film, but there are many more. Each audience member will react differently to the compilation score, depending on his/her own knowledge of the music used and the particular connotations it has, but the ability to be productively re-read is a mark of a good work of art.
How does this fit into my developing theory of film music? It wouldn't fit into my chapter on Scorsese and characterisation because the music in WoWS is more to do with affect and narrative. It therefore has more in common structurally with traditional Hollywood film scoring of the type Adorno and Eisler excoriated in Composing for the Films, with the obvious difference that pre-existing music is being used (so it's actually more like silent film scoring!). But unlike, say, a Dimitri Tiomkin score, the music here doesn't tell us what we already know, nor does it tell us what to think, nor does it hide poorly-executed editing or bad acting (this is the villain's theme! this music mickey-mouses the gunshots! this is cowboy music, and look there's a cowboy on the screen! that house is dangerous! this must be an exciting scene because the music is exciting!). It gives us more information than the visuals, dialogue, and sound effects do on their own, and it allows us as audience members to bring our own connotations of musical meaning to it. Scorsese has always used music as part of his filmmaking toolkit, instead of seeing it simply as something to be added on in post-production for some gloss. Music is as integral for Scorsese as any other aspect of filmmaking, which makes his work an ideal test case for theorising about film music. WoWS is the first of his films to use quite so heterogenous a collection of music, and can therefore join other work by him as a model for the many different uses to which music can be put in film. Already he has shown expertise in using pre-existing music to articulate character (Mean Streets), using newly-composed scores to emphasise the film's themes (Taxi Driver), using new scores to read against the film (The Last Temptation of Christ), making musicianship part of a film's narrative (New York, New York), compiling pre-existing music to destabilise a film from the inside out (Shutter Island), and making films about music (The Last Waltz). Perhaps there's a monograph somewhere down the line (but I have to get the one I'm working on about music and character underway first)!
The second viewing confirmed all of this, but also intensified the frustration I feel at the commentators who insist on seeing the film as glorifying the excesses of Jordan Belfort and his colleagues and who either label the film as morally irresponsible or want to follow it as a role model. Such viewers are clearly not really watching the film, or are seeing only what they want to see. Even though the film is comic, it shows that the consequences of the characters' actions are not at all positive. The question should be asked, however, whose fault this is. Is Scorsese to be blamed for not making his message clearer, or is the audience to be blamed for philistinism? This is meant to be an essay on music in the film, so there isn't space to get into the rights of the author and the rights of the interpreter: you can read Umberto Eco for that. But the problem is certainly not unique to this film; Fight Club is another famous example of a film that has been read as condoning the kind of behaviour it roundly critiques. In case anyone agrees that Scorsese is approving of the behaviour in the film, look again at its last shot: a sea of zombie-like faces (supposedly in Auckland, but the accents are wrong) waiting for Jordan Belfort's wisdom to rain down upon them. Could this be Scorsese's satirical representation of his movie's audience, taken in by Belfort's posturing?
Leaving morality aside for another time, let's get to the music. As with many of Scorsese's films, WoWS is scored entirely with pre-existing music, much of it used non-diegetically (meaning that the characters don't hear the music: it isn't coming from live musicians or a radio or CD player). Scorsese is the great master of this kind of scoring, as he and his music supervisors and producers (here Randall Poster and Robbie Robertson) choose music that perfectly fits a scene musically, lyrically, affectively, and narratively without ever distracting from the acting or cinematography (Wes Anderson is the other expert at this). WoWS uses about fifty pieces of music, listed here: http://blogs.indiewire.com/theplaylist/all-the-songs-in-the-wolf-of-wall-street-including-devo-cypress-hill-foo-fighters-more-20131227. But this film is a musical departure from Scorsese's other films that use this kind of scoring. Starting with his first feature, Who's That Knocking at My Door (1969), and taking its full form in Mean Streets, the music has nearly always been representative of what the characters in the film would listen to, and has been carefully matched for time and place: lots of Motown and '60s rock in Mean Streets, Italian music for the early part of Raging Bull, Tony Bennett in Goodfellas, etc. Using this kind of music as underscore brings the characters together into a community: scoring the scenes with music from the characters' experience articulates their interrelationships in a deeper way than dialogue alone, or a newly composed score, would do. (At some point in the near future I'll write a book chapter about this use of music.) WoWS, however, uses a much wider variety of music, and it doesn't really have the same characterising function. In addition to the Purcell mentioned above, WoWS is scored with jazz, rock, funk, ska, disco, blues, etc. We never get a sense of what kind of music the characters would actually listen to. Instead, the smorgasbord of music contributes to the film's sense of excess; literally anything could come next. But that doesn't mean that the music is arbitrary, as Scorsese is playing with the connotations all of this music has. This is a well-theorised aspect of film music (see this collection: http://www.amazon.com/Changing-Tunes-Pre-existing-Ashgate-Popular/dp/0754651371/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1392595893&sr=8-1&keywords=Changing+Tunes+Stilwell), but I don't know of any other film where this connotative aspect is engaged with such consistency and vigour. Quentin Tarantino is a definite influence, having been influenced himself by Scorsese's earlier films, though Tarantino's choice of music is narrower than Scorsese's in WoWS. I'll need to see the film again with the ability to pause it and reflect before giving too many examples or coming up with a stronger theoretical position, but here are some more instances of Scorsese's rich musical sense.
While Belfort is wooing Naomi, Ahmad Jamal's bop version of 'The Surrey with the Fringe on Top' is playing in the background: the use of bop implies speed, and the song is itself a a wooing song.
The scene on Belfort's yacht in Portofino, when he is trying balance the need to go to Switzerland for his shady banking, to London for Aunt Emma's funeral, and to New York for the FBI investigation, is accompanied with Lambert, Hendricks, and Ross's 'Cloudburst'. The manic vocalese emphasises the sense of everything flying out of Jordan's control. This is also another wooing song (if you can follow the lyrics!), but because of the speed it seems more desperate; Jordan is trying to keep hold of his wife and all of his other luxuries.
'Goldfinger' is being sung at Jordan and Naomi's wedding, a rather poor choice on Jordan's part, but such is the character that he would probably like being thought of as a Bond villain.
Jimmy Castor's 'Hey Leroy, Your Mama's Callin' You' is playing over one of the tracking shots through the Stratton Oakmont office. In addition to the upbeat latin jazz feel, if we were to replace 'mama' with 'papa' the song would fit Jordan's relationship with his father (who is angry about his son's excesses but is fairly happy to go along for the ride). This reminds me very much of a scene in Who's That Knocking at My Door where Ray Barretto's similar 'Watusi' accompanies a party in one of the young men's apartments. The scene starts happily enough, but as the camera cranks faster (resulting in slow motion) through a series of progressive tracking shots across the apartment the party gets more sinister, all while the song's ostinato continues unabated.
Those are only a few examples of the musical craft that went into this film, but there are many more. Each audience member will react differently to the compilation score, depending on his/her own knowledge of the music used and the particular connotations it has, but the ability to be productively re-read is a mark of a good work of art.
How does this fit into my developing theory of film music? It wouldn't fit into my chapter on Scorsese and characterisation because the music in WoWS is more to do with affect and narrative. It therefore has more in common structurally with traditional Hollywood film scoring of the type Adorno and Eisler excoriated in Composing for the Films, with the obvious difference that pre-existing music is being used (so it's actually more like silent film scoring!). But unlike, say, a Dimitri Tiomkin score, the music here doesn't tell us what we already know, nor does it tell us what to think, nor does it hide poorly-executed editing or bad acting (this is the villain's theme! this music mickey-mouses the gunshots! this is cowboy music, and look there's a cowboy on the screen! that house is dangerous! this must be an exciting scene because the music is exciting!). It gives us more information than the visuals, dialogue, and sound effects do on their own, and it allows us as audience members to bring our own connotations of musical meaning to it. Scorsese has always used music as part of his filmmaking toolkit, instead of seeing it simply as something to be added on in post-production for some gloss. Music is as integral for Scorsese as any other aspect of filmmaking, which makes his work an ideal test case for theorising about film music. WoWS is the first of his films to use quite so heterogenous a collection of music, and can therefore join other work by him as a model for the many different uses to which music can be put in film. Already he has shown expertise in using pre-existing music to articulate character (Mean Streets), using newly-composed scores to emphasise the film's themes (Taxi Driver), using new scores to read against the film (The Last Temptation of Christ), making musicianship part of a film's narrative (New York, New York), compiling pre-existing music to destabilise a film from the inside out (Shutter Island), and making films about music (The Last Waltz). Perhaps there's a monograph somewhere down the line (but I have to get the one I'm working on about music and character underway first)!
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