I
Stand Alone + Run Lola Run
Yearning for a Return to Terror-Sonic Soundtracks
published in Real Time No.32, Sydney,
1999
In
the infamous shower scene from Alfred Hitchcock's PSYCHO
(1960), the 'stabbing' violins' perform a psycho-musical
function which - if it had not been articulated clearly
enough before - stamped the film soundtrack as a postmodern
plane upon which the multiplicity of the self is repeatedly
decimated, reconstituted and expelled to form a constellation
of disembodied and decentred 'selves'.
Let's
take that again one step at a time. The inherent romanticism
of film music is based on clarity of emotional synchronization
- primarily through a matching of musical codes and references
to character traits and conventions: appearance of sad person
= cause to announce sad music; announcement of sad music
= cause for sad person to appear; etc.. Characters and narrators
- following many a grand literary tradition - act as conductors
and navigators for the placement and intensity of musical
presence, creating a whole catalogue of 'motivational strategies'
for film scoring (when to cue, for how long, etc.). The
shower scene from PSYCHO (as with most of the 20 odd musical
passages which comprise Bernard Herrmann's score) never
adheres to this easy logic. For the shower scene cue is
a depiction (not an illustration or justification) simultaneously
of two liminal characters: Marion (Janet Leigh) and the
shadowy 'mother' figure (Anthony Perkins) - as well as a
conflation of two subliminal figure - Norman Bates and his
dead/mummified mother (both Anthony Perkins in dress and
voice). However, the 'cue' does not simply emote something
about 'people' on the screen. Herrmann's music performs
as a sono-simulacrum which conducts the physiological performance
of the on-screen bodily states.
The
cue in question can be broken down into three parts, each
component not only longer in duration, but also lower in
pitch, and less rhythmically defined:
1.
The high pitched ZGRIK! ZGRIK! ZGRIK! ZGRIK! ZGRIK! ZGRIK!
etc.;
2.
The full frequencied BA-BOOOOMMMMM. (...) BA-BOOOOMMMMM
(...) ; &
3.
The low frequency RRNNNNNNNNNNNNNN which grows longer with
each occurrence,
For
Marion, the cue is her body thus:
1.
Standing: shocked by Norman/mother's attack, her heart beats
at an excessively fast rate, fuelled by an adrenalin rush,
causing her to breathe and scream in a series of short gulps
and gasps as she fends off the knife;
2.
Sliding: her body opened by numerous wounds, blood pours
forth in series of expulsions, as her heart beat slows down
due to the diminishing level of blood circulating through
her body; &
3.
Lying: drained of muscular energy due to the loss of blood
and the heart's inability to further power the body, her
physical presence contracts to breath alone, as she heaves
with increasingly finality until all inhalation ceases.
For
the Norman/mother combine, the cue is their body thus:
1.
Thrusting: stabbing Marion's corpus in series of jolting
penile penetrations;
2.
Spurting: having climaxed, the orgasm peaks in a series
of arrhythmic pulsations; &
3.
Breathing: the trauma of erotic detonation now past, the
body repairs itself, checking itself in a series of deep
breaths, returning oxygen to the blood flow just as the
runner's body recovers after an exhausting marathon.
Not
only is Herrman's work remarkable in its sensitivity to
the biorhythms of drama - marking him perfect for projecting
psychological states through the audibility of on-screen
bodies - but it is also unerring in its fusion of the psychological
states of both killer and victim, of conflating terror and
delight in direct opposition to the classical strictures
which accord them their difference within motivational humanist
drama.
With
such ground-breaking and mind-fucking work done almost 40
years ago by a guy who was 49 at the time, it should comes
as no surprise that I am unimpressed by the soundtrack to
a current 'end-of-the-millennium' film directed and co-composed
by a guy in his 20s: Tom Tykwer's RUN LOLA RUN (1998), playing
in this year's Melbourne International Film Festival. Many
films have effectively employed the clock-tick effect as
a dramatic and thematic tension device: Ralph Nelson's TICK
... TICK ... TICK (1970); Robert Aldrich's TWILIGHT"S LAST
GLEAMING (1976); John Carpenter's ESCAPE FROM NEW YORK (1981);
Phil Joanou's 3 O'CLOCK HIGH (1987); John Badham's NICK
OF TIME (1995). RUN LOLA RUN uses huge dollops of trance-pop
music (a la the use of early 90s tracks by UK rock-dance
combo Underworld in that 'with-it' movie TRAINSPOTTING)
in a way that poorly mimics late-80s/early-90s ads for Nike/Pepsi/Gatorade/etc..
In
fact, RUN LOLA RUN is decidedly un-innovative in its use
of music. Just because some tacky breakbeat samples, the
occasionally fuzzed acid line and swirling analogue synths
throb on a movie soundtrack at the end of 90s is no cause
to celebrate anything new. More importantly, there is an
absence of depth in the linking of such music and cueing
either to the film's 'game' narrative, or to the physiological
performance of the on-screen bodies. I'm being overly harsh
on what is nonetheless a well-crafted and enjoyable film
- but only in proportion to the laziness which allows this
kind of film to float on a presumed hipness. Despite all
the ham-fisted digital effects, pyrotechnic camera tracks,
drug references and Love Parade streetwear, the film tellingly
hits its fundamental pitch when all music abates to leave
us with a triptych of 'Men-Are-From Mars-Women-Are-From-Venus'
bedroom babble worthy of a pathetic Woody Allen flick. RUN
LOLA RUN is desperately about centring the self - a pathologically
gendered one - while its depiction of death is a far cry
from the posthuman paraphilia (the confounding yet arousing
identification with the abject body) unleashed in PSYCHO's
murderous set pieces.
Another
film in the Melbourne International Film Festival has a
similar surface of sallow hipness, yet it manages to generate
a resonant depth LOLA cannot sound. Gaspar Noe's I STAND
ALONE (1998) has existential angst carved into its textuality
- flip arthouse marketing would say RESERVOIR DOGS meets
BENNY'S VIDEO but with one grumpy old man - but its audiovisual
nous saves it from being a protracted exercise in stylish
bleakness. The film exudes a stagnant aura of inertia: unsited
voice-over narration spits across numerous still images
of violently ugly and banal domestic environs (the MIFF
catalogue embarrassingly likens these images to the baroque
excesses of Joel Peter Witkin!), creating an intense claustrophobia
as we remain trapped in the Euro-macho head of a 50 year
old loser (played by Phillipe Nahon), fucked over by life
and clinging to his limp cock with one hand and French patriotism
with the other. Little moves on the grainy pornographic
screen - especially the lead actor's eyes which resemble
those of a fish in the supermarket freezer - but the soundtrack
energizes and even terrifies the blank world depicted. Music
appears at the beginning and the close of the film like
mouldy red velvet curtains as a corny old anthem played
by a dying brass band. Elsewhere, a single orchestral note
is struck sparsely - maybe 10 times; no other music occurs.
Yet repeatedly, the loud sound of a compressed, fat gunshot
is synced to sudden lurches in the digital editing (hyper-speed
jump-tracks which reposition a mid-shot frame into a close-up
across 12 frames).
These
sonic moments initially appear gratuitous, again recalling
the in-your-face basket ball pounds of late-80s/early-90s
Nike/Pepsi/Gatorade/etc. ads. (The subtext of the sound
of basketball on the contemporary film soundtrack is another
story altogether.) What becomes apparent is the tension
created in the spaces between these highly stylized POWs
which violently rupture the polished naturalism of the film's
16mm grain: before long, one is psycho-acoustically primed
to anticipate a bang, or to actually witness rather than
audit a horrific act (which you will in the film's final
15 minutes). True to this logic, when the pounds occur while
on screen violence is most manifest, the mix pushes the
gun shot effects into the background; the vision becomes
deafening. Just as an extreme tension is maintained by opposing
non-natural sound design to naturalistic visuals and performances,
so too does a consonant tension hum throughout the film,
representing the sexual and emotional constipation of the
film's lead psychopath. In fact at the film's climax, an
audible vocal humming rains uncontrollably from his mouth,
as if he is trying to block out the chorus of aberrant voices
which articulate his turmoil as he falls prey to the ultimate
transgression of incest.
The
sonic punches which periodically and perniciously drill
holes into the STAND ALONE's soundtrack function as shocks
which gradually destabilize the lead character's head-set.
It's like the sonic version of the famous image of George
Sanders' thinking of a brick wall in Wolf Rilla's VILLAGE
OF THE DAMNED (1960) as the children try to penetrate his
thoughts and control his mind. Eventually, the wall inside
Sanders' head crumbles; he dies as the bomb he has been
hiding from the children explodes. In I STAND ALONE, the
gun shots are not merely sonicons of violence, but a string
of detonations which reduce social conditioning to the state
of postwar rubble - the definitive picture of the modern
European landscape. With all psycho-familial architecture
blown apart, the film's 50 year old loser stands alone as
a repositioned self, ready to act out his own Marco Ferrari-style
narrative (a la THEMROC, 1971, etc.). This is the male core
at so much Euro angst: dumb, blank, unforgiving, unremitting.
Not liberated but unleashed; not resolved but evoked. A
common social core, traumatized by shocks as symbolized
by the soundtrack's percussive violence, yet revealed as
an unavoidably natural and dramatically inevitable figure
- like the bare location sound of a street at the outer
ring of Paris' industrial zones which closes the film. No
operatic catharsis as in the glorified finale(s) of RUN
LOLA RUN; merely the respite from noise which hollows out
the head of the psychologically scarred and the socially
dispossessed. I STAND ALONE is a thankful return to the
incisive violence which gave life to Herrmann's score to
PSYCHO, and which - if things turn out well - the next millennium
will neither avoid nor smother with stylish excess.
