The
Haunting
Terror in a Room
published in Real Time No.33, Sydney,
1999
Sound.
The very mention of the word shifts the gears of the unconscious:
you know I'm talking about something to which you pay neither
heed nor attention. So circumscribed is sound by our desire
to mute its neumonic life, we do not realize how much we
curtail its occupancy of our conscious experiential terrain.
In psychoacoustics, 'perceptual masking' refers to our ability
to filter unwanted frequencies so as to focus on those we
wish to selectively register (say, ignoring the din of restaurant
chatter while we listen to the single voice of a friend).
The unaccounted reflex of this phenomenon is that we may
be now less engaged in active listening and more committed
to suppressing the sound around us. This is the crux of
why sound is so ignored - not because the visual is so dominant
an incursion of the mind, but because we spend so much neural
energy trying to become unconscious of unwanted sound.
But
why the desire to silence? We were never silent. We were
never in silence. The world rings, hums, intones, vibrates
- not in any para-mystical way (as proposed by so much voguish
scientific wondering by sound artists, composers and architects
alike), but in a swirling and shifting sono-synoptic chart
which documents less the cosmos and more our banal existence.
To rephrase Alvin Lucier, a room is sitting in me: the low
hum of a fridge on wooden floorboards; the soft chorale
of blow wave heaters; the high climb of a distant septic
tank. I'm doing nothing; I think I'm being quiet, but my
externalised extemporized self is cooling food, getting
warm, emptying body wastes. I am my environment in the most
subliminal way, and I do everything in my power to pretend
I am neither present nor actively producing sound.
In
fact the modern age is one of terrible ambience where acoustic
mass is deafening not in volume but in its very diffusion.
Those who have consciously criticized noise - music in shops,
unattended car alarms, truck routes near houses, etc. -
have focussed (far too obviously) on rupturing sonic incidents,
yet no one is venting rage against air conditioning, hard
drives, exhaust fans or numerous other layerings of pink
noise which we tune-out as background texture to our urban
toil. Ironically, just as sound art installations veer toward
the amorphous and the immersive as a tactic to make one
'aware' of the pleasure of sound, so does art culture contribute
to the same creeping engulfment of beds, sheets and curtains
of noise which decorously coat the architecture of our domesticity.
Wake up, people. Sound no longer bombards us with detonated
bursts and shards: it slowly infects us with its acoustic
patina of unassuming nothingness.
In
this sense, the domus need not be rendered Gothic, baroque
or ornate to conjure a sense of dread. Spooky movies about
haunted mansions essentially invert the somnambulistic state
in which we habituate our personal spaces. If we were suddenly
made aware of all the tones and tunings which comprise the
residue of our everyday activities, we would find our tremulous
homes as terrifying as Hill House in Jan du Bont's THE HAUNTING
(1999). Here is another nightmarishly over-designed special-effects
movie which should keep digital nerds and interior decorators
moist for 28 days and audiences distracted for 28 seconds,
but the role of the sound in this film amplifies much about
the way we perceive and/or ignore the insignificance of
acoustic auras. For as baroque as the visual design in the
film is (and believe me, it makes Disneyland's Haunted Mansion
look like a shopping trolley at K-Mart), its ocular loudness
is no match for the way the sound design forces its way
through our optical algae and pierces our carefully guarded
aural consciousness.
An
early moment in THE HAUNTING touches this taut gauze stretched
between sound and image. Eleanor (Lili Taylor) is wakened
by three soft off-screen thumps, which she dozily presumes
to be her now-departed ill mother banging the wall for aid.
Three more bangs, which we audit as unreal and unearthly.
Then three more bangs which shake the cinema auditorium
to the point of collapse: both Eleanor and us know something
exists beyond the sonic. Those three layers of big bangs
illustrate what could be posited as three levels of aural
consciousness: the displaced referential (all the sound
we don't listen to); the forced ethereal (that same corpus
of sound rendered noticeable); and the inverted inescapable
(the realization that we might not be able to ever unlisten
to sound). Illogically vacillating between a fear of silence
or a dread of deafness: that is truly spooky. Time and again,
I pictured myself in THE HAUNTING, quivering inside Hill
House's labyrinth of colonic chambers as monstrously invisible
presences resonate its EC comic architecture and rattle
its Escher-like architraves. Time and again, I imagined
myself trapped in that state of being unable to not listen
to everything which I selectively filter so as to focus,
concentrate, be at ease, remain sane.
When
the evil Ukraine (who possesses the house) first marks his
presence, the off-screen pounding I swear rattled the light
fittings and air-conditioning ducts of the cinema. Granted
that Gary Rydstrom's sound design went for the now-prerequisite
subsonic rumbles, his orchestration of sound effects was
nonetheless masterly in its precision of frequency and its
intent to make the sound bigger than either screen or auditorium
might handle. This hyper-fantastic aesthetic to the sound
design is ultimately ironic, in that on numerous occasions,
characters in the film query each other - "Didn't you hear
that noise?" - which occurred at deafening decibels in the
very next room. All rhetoric of plausibility fades as the
sonic purpose of the film is not to describe a reality or
portray a psychological state, but to unnerve the audience
- to go beyond the screen and into us. To transgress the
sanctity of our own deliberated nerve deafness.
More
importantly, the complexity by which a film these days must
achieve such results has little to do with earlier constructs
and paradigms of sound design. From the searing silence
of Jack Clayton's THE INNOCENTS (1960) to the claustrophobic
quietness of William Friedkin's THE EXORCIST (1971), spooky
sound design has hitherto been based on drastic binaries
of silence/noise. THE INNOCENTS is an unapproached landmark
in this regard, where the most disquieting moments occur
in a silence which replicates a disequilibrium of the senses,
creating the sense of hearing nothing as one verges on the
brink of trauma. Conversely, THE EXORCIST uses harsh sound
editing to render the domestic environment as a potential
hell before any satanic forces become manifest, demonstrating
great skill in foregrounding aural manipulation to prepare
the way for the visual outrage to follow. But in a contemporary
climate where a million pink noises colour the world a fleshy
body of heaving ambience, the on-off tricks of sound editing
fast loose their power in the cinematic realm. THE HAUNTING
signposts the paths to be taken in order to reinvest the
cinema with the power to psycho-acoustically make us cogniscent
of the comforts we find in own aural purgatory.
