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)!
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