For Hollywood, classical music has become the trademark of villains. On screen, orchestral melodies accompany the meditations of mad geniuses and pouting serial killers. Norman Bates practices the Moonlight sonata in Psycho II. Sociopath Lou Ford relaxes to Richard Strauss throughout The Killer Inside Me. Alex Forrest, in Fatal Attraction, plots her revenge while listening to Madama Butterfly. And on the BBC’s Sherlock, Moriarty waltzes to Rossini’s The Thieving Magpie on his iPod as he steals the Crown Jewels from the Tower of London. Baroque music, in particular, seems to satisfy the cravings of a deranged mind. The very talented Tom Ripley plays Bach between shifts as a symphony-hall bathroom attendant. In Schindler’s List, a Nazi officer pauses to play a bit of Bach on a piano while his troops massacre the Kraków ghetto. Hannibal Lecter waves a bloodied cudgel like a conductor’s baton while brutalizing two security guards to the Goldberg Variations in The Silence of the Lambs, and in the sequel the same piece plays as Lecter cooks Paul Krendler’s brains table-side. In cinema psychographics, mid-murder is the ideal time for musical appreciation.And in The Year of Living Dangerously Guy Hamilton (played by a young Mel Gibson) listens to Richard Strauss Four Last Songs while visiting with his Chinese/Australian photographer and mentor, but hey, let's not mention contrary instances!
The implication is that aesthetic sophistication and psychopathic violence spring from the same mentality, a decadent hyperintelligence that becomes so cultivated that it savors homicide as a refined pleasure like Baroque cello. Slaughtering civilians and appreciating Vivaldi are depicted as two forms of the same psychosis, a connection hammered into the popular imagination in film after film, scene after scene, for the past quarter century.It couldn't possibly have anything to do with the triumph of popular music over classical music in the marketplace, could it? Read the whole article for the author's slightly different conclusion.
Here is my, completely different, theory. It is a cinematic technique to accompany certain images with a soundtrack that is a complete contrast. Here are two really famous examples. The first is a rather tranquil score by Tōru Takemitsu that accompanies a battle scene from Akira Kurosawa's film Ran. The aesthetic energy comes from the contrast.
The second example is even more famous: Stanley Kubrick uses The Blue Danube waltz by Johann Strauss to accompany the docking of a passenger ship with a space station in the film 2001: A Space Odyssey.
There are probably hundreds if not thousands of examples of ominous, threatening music accompanying a scene of ordinary peace and tranquility as a sign to the audience that something is about to happen. Another kind of contrast would be the use of a cheerful, lilting march in a scene set in a prisoner of war camp--but no-one would ever do that, right?
Of course that is diagetic, that is, the music is in the narrative, not in a separate soundtrack. Here is another example of a cheery bit of dance music by Boccherini used to accompany a scene of naval pursuit:
So, the fact that beautiful classical music has been used in a number of famous instances to accompany scenes with horrific mass murderers does NOT mean that classical music is synonymous with villainy as Mr. Gioia would have us believe. It just means that classical music offers a powerful CONTRAST to villainy. Now isn't that a lot more credible? Let me end with a couple of more examples: Samuel Barber's Adagio for strings used to accompany scenes of war in the movie Platoon:
And another example from Kubrick who uses a waltz by Shostakovich to accompany the title sequence in Eyes Wide Shut:
7 comments:
Having read a couple of his books and a number of his articles, Gioia's riff reads more to me like a complaint that in the last forty years classical music, when it finds any path into mainstream cinema and pulp cinema, is assigned to villains and what Marxists would label class enemies. That Silence of the Lambs has a kidnapped women listening to a Tom Petty song is perhaps where the pulp/pop contrast may be salient. Gioia overstates the claim but that seems to be part of his style. Another article he wrote about video game music was running with the idea that the German Romantic symphonic sound is less likely to be heard in concerts these days as it is to be heard in shoot `em up video games and he was expressing reservations about the ways in which classical music has been getting used in mainstream pop/pulp entertainment. He wrote a piece on this with the memorable title of "Music to Shoot You By". It's a gripe he's got about what he feels is the narrow niches into which classical music has been shoved by the entertainment industries in the last twenty years. I think he has a weakness for hyperbolic formulations of his ideas but I've read enough of his work to read "past" that to get some sense of what he's going for.
I liked the soundtrack for Ran a lot more than the soundtrack for Woman in the Dunes but then that was a much earlier soundtrack in Takemitsu's career and, frankly, an obviously deliberately weirder movie.
If I wanted to build a bit more on the alternate uses, even these alternate uses can be cliche. Barber's Adagio is a cliche for tear-jerking moments in cinema, whether Platoon or Elephant Man. Since that's TOO familiar film-makers are using excerpts from Arvo Part's Berliner Mass, particularly the Kyrie. Now I own a recording of that work and went to the trouble of buying the score. I know that work moderately well by now and it's become one of the new "Barber Adagio" cliches in mainstream film in the last twenty years.
Sometimes it can work, like using Ligeti's Lux Aeterna in the 2014 Godzilla movie. That actually was probably the best use of that work since 2001 ... and better for probably having legally gotten permission BEFOREHAND. I think I read in the Guardian years ago that Ligeti ended up suing Kubrick for copyright infringement and, when asked how he felt about his music being used in such an iconic film, replied that he felt much better after he made Kubrick finally pay him!
I think I saw a movie 3 or 4 years ago.... Listened to a lot of music this week, and practiced a few hours on my instruments. I forget television exists until I visit someone who has one. That subject just came up today with my coworkers, some who can't believe I don't have a television. I can't believe they don't have a Kindle.
Yep, intellectuals tend to overthink things, creating out of nothingness a supposed hidden facet of psychopathic violence in a simply beautiful aria by Bach. Extremely implausible on the face of it no matter what a filmmaker chose to do with it. Yes, the Barber has become a cliché hasn't it? Kubrick was always one of the most creative in his use of music.
I avoid most movies too, Will, though I did go see Wonder Woman.
Bryan, I like your "contrast" analysis. It is a more thoughtful approach to the combination of classical masterworks with cinematic villainy. I am sure that the combination of Beethoven and the failed ruffian therapy in A Clockwork Orange has been analysed in more than one musicological thesis. (Kubric again!) I am pretty sure that villains don't have a monopoly on the classics: The second movement of LvB's Seventh Symphony is so closely identified with "The King's Speech", and so effectively used, that it has the status of "gateway music/drug" as I slowly convince my wife of the merits of listening to the classics. The list of cinema-classical music connections approaches infinity (and beyond). Who can hear the opening bars of Strauss' Also Sprach Zarathustra and not think of a certain Kubric film?
Bryan, having posted my contribution to the comments box, I moved to the Over Grown Path, following your Friday Misc link. There, I came across this quotation of Kaspar Holton, a Danish opera director from Living Opera by Joshua Jampol:
“Music is what we use to express ourselves about emotion. We express something that words can’t. We live in a society where we speak a lot, where we talk about emotions, and that’s great. But how can you tell someone what love feels like if they’ve never felt it? How would you express that? You have butterflies in your stomach? Yeah, how many? When is it real love? How do you tell the difference? What is sorrow? Should I feel more sorrow now? Is it enough? Is this the right feeling? All of that you have to find out. I compare it to skiing. You can read all the books in the world about skiing, and it doesn’t help one bit when you’re out there. You have to find out with your body what it’s like. It’s the same with emotions. You can read about it, but once you’re in it, that doesn’t help. That’s what opera can do. It’s an emotional fitness center, where you live through love, being jealous or desperate or losing someone. You train your emotional muscles and your empathy.”
I would say that the emotional power of classical music is what makes it well suited to the exploration of the complexities of emotions brought to the fore by screen villains.
Thanks, David! Also for your further examples.
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