War is noise. Tactical land warfare reconfigures space
as an amplified terrain of threatening sonic occurrences
whose indistinction and multiplicity confer sound as noise
- as a complete collapse of decipherable sound. From faint
rustles in the bush to simulated bird calls in the jungle
to rebounding echoic gunfire on mountains, the key signifiers
of sound - its origin, source, perspective, orientation,
content and purpose - are rendered invisible and hidden;
disguised and undisclosed. Ducking and diving, you experience
an excess of the sonic with next to no visual correlation.
In its life-threatening and death-affirming din, war thus
becomes the penultimate dislocation of sound from image.
It is no surprise, then, that so many survivors of the battlefield
suffer a variety of forms of shock. Their psyches still
reverberate, wrack, shudder and flinch with psychoacoustic
replays of military 'noisefare' encoded into their being
and looped into uncontrollable and unpredictable cycles
of playback and feedback. That bomb blast you survived haunts
you with every loud slam of a car door; that rocket launch
whoosh you dodged taunts you with every buffet of wind through
overhead power lines. From the actual sonic event in the
past, to its acoustic resemblance in the present, to its
imaginary recall in your mind, all sounds can trigger the
same disorienting asynchronism advanced by the audiovisual
dislocation in war.
The postwar body & endash; from the aged veteran to the
youthful discharge - experiences the sonic landscape of
peaceful territories in a way deeply removed from our non-militarized
comprehension of urban, suburban and rural space. We may
be familiar with 'images of war' embodying the potential
to trigger, erase and reconfigure perspectives of the past
(in the form of sculpted memorials, videoed testimonials
and cinematized stories), but we have extremely little collective
understanding of how the sound of what one has experienced
on the battlefield can transform one's inhabitation of space
beyond the battlefield. We have no idea whether a buzzing
earth hum could be soothing to a Korean War vet, a distant
spluttering generator could be terrifying to a Vietnam vet,
or a droning air conditioner could be numbing to a UN peace-keeper
who spent time in Kosovo. Shallow understanding of the relation
between sound and psyche irresponsibly verges on ignorance
in the hands of so many healing sciences of the mind. Unmitigated
dismissal of the importance of the sonic and the psychoacoustic
in audiovisual media plays its part in painting a landscape
of deafness in which psychology maintains its scopic mandates
of inquiry.
When Francis Ford Coppola embarked on the making of Apocalypse
Now (1979) he outlined a swelling body of documentary footage
from the era as a field from which to paint an intentionally
accurate picture of the American intervention of Vietnam
which escalated between 1964 and 1973. One key documentary
cited was Eugene S. Jones' observation of US Marine field
combat with the Viet Cong in 1966, A Face Of War (1968).
Coppola went as far as to request a print of the film to
screen to his actors on location in the Philippines back
in 1975. His contacts with Jones during this period prompted
Jones to provide what was to be a revealing document which
precisely described what it was like to hear the sounds
of war. Jones submitted a 26 page letter to Coppola's film
company which included 16 pages of detailed sono-spatial
notes on just about every piece and component of weaponry
and ammunition used in the Viet Cong field and jungle conflicts.
This information undoubtedly formed a valuable aural topology
for both Coppola and sound designer Walter Murch. It has
taken decades for their collaborative work on this landmark
cinesonic film to be openly acknowledged as a major force
in the shaping of American modern film sound - but little
has been noted on how important Jones' sound documentary
was in providing the clear and experienced perspectives
for guiding Coppola and Murch's work. The Vietnam era has
been historically mediarized as a McLuhanesque rupture of
the domestic by the electronic image (televised images with
little location sound and maximal voice-over reportage),
leaving us to presume that the sonic, the acoustic, the
spatial and the psychoacoustic had no role to play in 'Nam
and interventionist conflicts around the globe since.
If we are deaf to how the post-war terrain betrays a deafening
silence wherein sonic memories, vocal traces and aural scars
operate beyond our emotional and psychological listening
range, we are just as likely deaf to the importation and
exportation of music and song in the shattered shuttling
between zones of war and spaces of peace. Heddy Honigmann's
Crazy (2000) somehow has grasped this in an intuitive and
explorative way. Soldiers, aid-workers and counselors who
have spent military duty and/or peace-keeping time in places
like Seoul, Saigon, Phnom Penh, Lebanon, Kosovo and Rwanda
are interviewed about what songs they cherished from their
time spent in those places, and what memories the songs
bring back. Then, in a recall of the camera gaze shared
by Warhol and Ackerman, we watch their faces as they listen
to the songs. The beauty of the film is not in what many
will probably misinterpret as a humanist celebration of
the will to survive beyond the ravages of such hellish experiences,
but in its foregrounding of how song - in its most consumerist
guise and outright commodification - can transcend just
about every damning critique of pop music ever written by
stodgy old farts who think Bob Dylan and Van Morrison define
the pantheon of modern song form. (Please take that personally.)
The film opens with the phased churning of a chopper intermingling
with strains of The Three Tenors singing Nessun Dorma (from
the Puccini opera Turandot). Of course, Apocalypses Now
is loosely evoked by this clash of beauty with death. Despite
the oft-ignored fact that opera is about the clash of beauty
with death (and hence a grand template for all modernist
audiovisual destructo-narrative), Coppola's use of The Ride
of The Valkyries from Wagner's Ring Cycle is specifically
about the bombardment of death with beauty. The music is
blasted at the Viet Cong from the choppers, freaking them
with European bombast to disorient their aural landscape.
But in Crazy, it is revealed that Nessun Dorma is less a
musical projectile and more an aural impression which maps
the face that listens to it. As we watch the ex-soldier
listen to one of the 80s' most kitsch grotesqueries of High
Art super-group bellowing, it is as if the pores of his
skin exude with all the space between the laser-burnt pits
of the CD recording. In other words, the surface of his
face shows only the slightest quivering in response to the
sound waves of the music as it fulfills his being. Eyes
open, occasionally blinking, audibly breathing, he - like
most of Crazy's subjects - does not fit the desired romanticized
semi-religious icon of the ecstatic listener, enthralled
by harmonic rapture with eyes wide shut. His face is removed,
ungiving, transported. The effect is undeniable: we bear
witness to the phonological materiality of the song as inscription;
as that which is listened to rather than that which is encoded,
recorded, produced or performed. The transparent psycho-sonic
skin which wavers between objectivity (the song as music)
and subjectivity (the song as experience) shimmers and fluctuates.
How can I say this? Because all the songs played in the
film hold no particular significance or pleasure for me,
yet I am moved by their presence in the film. Plus, I am
clear that I am not pathetically responding to an overtly
emotionally loaded situation. (Dumb humanist identification
is predicated on the puerile Pavlovian response to only
the grossest displays of emotion.) More pertinent to this
discussion of the grey borders of song's phenomenological
status, I can actually hear the architecsonic impact of
the song as it guides its listener (simultaneously the film's
on-screen subject and me) in a way that transports me beyond
my taste in music. The songs, then, are possessed by an
ownership far greater and more powerful than my relation
to the music. Not one example in Crazy provided me with
a song I could 'share' via my taste - though even if there
were such a song, my relation to the song would most likely
feel trivial and flighty compared to the clinging lifeline
the song undoubtedly has provided to these people.
Is this axial shift in identifying music possible with
anyone? And with any song or music? Is it an event of experiential
revelation or a linkage in a developed sensibility? For
as long as I can remember, 60s recordings of slow-paced
cabaret crooning with reverberant voices cooing in a manner
reminiscent of 50s doo-wop have always struck me as achingly
empty in their echoic rendering and stylistic somnambulism.
To many (especially film people) such songs are camp, tacky,
kitsch and great to use in send-up situations. As I hear
those swooping violins, that muted 'lounge' rhythm and the
self-mockingly maudlin voice, I associate the songs with
Korean vets and their metal implants, withered penises,
dysfunctional marriages and psychosexual cracks, alone at
a bar and gripped in a sodden existential stasis. Powerful
songs can be those within which you can sense the navigational
path for someone's potential empathy with the song, irrespective
of your preferences or reading of the song's importance.
Cinema is a wonderful machine for generating this effect.
The laying of music 'on top of' someone's face on a screen
can not only project an emotional reading of the character's
state of mind, but it can also externalize the interiority
of the imagined person. Crazy outrightly documents this.
Each song states: I am what is inside this head, behind
this face, within this listener. Crazy also proves absolutely
that any narrative can embrace any song for any purpose.
In fact, it is in such a rare documentary instance like
Crazy that song and music raises these issues, while virtually
all fictional film dramas engineer the film score as if
music and song has to control, shape and dictate the emotional
energy maps of its characters. This notion of film music
is typical of the authorial delusion which governs the act
of writing in general and cinema in particular - that all
elements in the fictional scenario are there to reinforce
the power of authorial voice which places them there. Film
scoring - the act of laying a particular piece of music
'on top of' a face - is a desperate claim for the selective
power of music and how it can be used as a controlling force
within narrative. Crazy evidences music - in the receptacle
of songs - as an uncontrollable force, both from the song-writer/singer's
intention and in the film subjects' reception of the song.
The ex-soldiers all fix their songs to precise incidents
and moments which did not call for the songs that fused
themselves to their listeners. Such music - as one guy puts
it in the film - is "weird stuff". In the end, all the songs
perform as a talisman against the craziness in which they
found themselves gradually sinking. Crazy is a testament
not merely to the human spirit, but to the power of song.
When Tom Logan (played by Jack Nicholson) slits the throat
of Lee Clayton (played by Marlon Brando) in Arthur Penn's
Missouri Breaks (1976) , Logan invokes and externalizes
Clayton's own crazy (psychotic) disposition. Leaning over
him and breathing into his nostrils, he says "You know what
woke you up? Lee, you just had your throat cut". Face to
face, they mirror each other not with symmetrical precision,
but through a resonant balance. Nicholson lives out the
impulse to bear witness to the death of his nemesis less
as a classical gesture of narrative closure, and more as
a will to discern whether the aural bears any witness to
its visual encoding on the face. It doesn't. Sound exists
in the much deeper recesses of the mind. The face is but
an iced-over veneer of still pools whose traumas operate
at frequencies beyond registering of troubled waters. The
blank face of the traumatized is not an impassive countenance;
it is an impassable terrain, saying "If you could only hear
how I hear".
