The Island Of Dr. Moreau
The Sonic Destruction of a Novel
published in Real Time No.18, Sydney,
1997
A
good formula for studying/experiencing contemporary sound
design in the cinema: (a) if there's lots of loud sounds;
& (b) realism isn't that important; & (c) the soundtrack
was produced & mixed using hi-tech Dolby applications;
& (d) the film is played in a theatre installed with
a THX playback system - go hear it.
Sounds
like it might be a blunt formula. For an engineer focused
on fidelity and state-of-the-art technology, issues of aural
narratology and plain content may hold no interest. A cultural
studies analyst observing the socio-political ramifications
of imaging in the public domain may find the hyper-material
audio-visual core of cinema invisible and indistinct. The
film composer trading in the craft of musical composition
may perceive the chaotic cacophony of the film soundtrack
too threatening and oppressive to a score. A sound artist
contemplating poetic and philosophical tangents of acoustic
phenomenae may be aesthetically repulsed by the ungainly
mix of ocular titillation and sheer sonic sensationalism
in blockbuster cinema.
But
film sound is all of the above perceptual streams and more.
Practice any one of the above modes exclusively and you'll
promulgate a limited reading of the essential materiality
of sound. Consider: film sound is no single aspect of sound
alone; it is multiple in every conceivable way. Film sound
crazily manifests itself in a series of dimensional slashes
across industrial concerns, star systems, monetary perimeters,
symbolic histories, cliche terrains and experimental spikes.
Every film presents its own one-off rule book on how sound
might occur, for its soundtrack is uncontrolled and uncontrollable.
Film sound is where the sonic grows moist in the darkness
of consciously privileged images.
There's
one THE ISLAND OF DOCTOR MOREAU. It's a book. By H. G. Wells,
no less. The kind of 'horror/sci-fi/fantasy' it's OK to
talk about over a learned dinner gathering. And there's
another one. It's a movie. Made last year. Hollywood stars,
big budget, a department of scriptwriters and one fired
director. Obviously, the book is so much better. How could
the film be better?
This
is how.
The
themes of the book and its three films (THE ISLAND OF LOST
SOULS, 1933; THE ISLAND OF DOCTOR MOREAU, 1976 & 1996)
are consistent, clear and obvious. God, man, animals, science,
behaviour, humanity, morality, drugs, ethics and so on.
For many, 'grand' literary themes like these are clutched
to their bosom like a child's snow dome: whenever they wish
to see those themes articulated in life or art, they shake
the dome for instant gratification, then look through the
cascading flakes. But films are overpowering, overwhelming:
when watching a film of literary origin, they sit in the
audience and try to perceptually shake the film, to make
it magically cough up a floating cloud of ... well, literary-ness.
Conversely
and perversely, the recent ISLAND perceptually shakes its
audience. It cinematically destroys its literary origin,
doing so on two levels: the body and sound. Explorations
and applications of both the body and sound are physically
embedded in the film's audio-visual texture, creating forms,
shapes, presences and spaces bent on disorienting the auditor/viewer.
And this is perfectly in keeping with a psycho-dramatic
line which runs strong within Wells' story: how do man and
animal perceive each other. The plain freakishness of the
film's exploitation of every actors' body will have to be
discussed elsewhere. Here, let's talk about the sound design
and its fluid construction of presences and spaces within
which are situated the film's key disorienting devices.
As
Edward (David Thewlis) recovers on a boat after being saved by
Montgomery (Brad Pitt), he is vaguely aware of drugs careening through
his body. He attempts to talk with Y; their voices clash
in a Trans-Atlantic dialogue. Accent, grammar, timbre, sense,
delivery and breath all perform solos on the other as Edward's
disjointed scramble for explanation splutters a sonic sheen
across Montgomery's racy non-sequitur's. All of it is close-miked.
Spital, air and labials sprinkle our ear drums in detail.
Their actual dialogue is a gasping collapse of meaning;
in its place is an abundance of aural detail. This is the
physicality of cinema sound design - foregrounding a moist
vocal presence against crisp vocal projection. The spoken
versus the written; the guttural versus the oratorical;
the sound versus the word.
The
dialogue editing of this scene is worthy of Glenn Gould's
ruminations on the innate musicality of meandering talk.
Yet this dialogue is framed by noise. Sprawled in the lower
deck of the creaking, leaking boat, Edward & Montgomery's dialogue
swirls within a sonorum of wood and water. Unseen liquid
laps and booms at all sides; planks and breaches of wood
groan and crack throughout the darkened space. In this druggy
blur of ill communicated speech, the material world bends
across the multi-channel sound field. Arcs of noise follow
the contracting/expanding of wood and the shifting volume
of water. The air in the cinema is alive with movement -
shut your eyes and the theatre is dimensionally warping.
The spatialization is heady, erotic, sensational. More like
the musique concrete of Bernard Parmagiani than the final
mix of a big budget Hollywood movie. And it's more than
a mere hi-etch gimmick: it is actively dedicated to destroying
the verisimility of the screen's photographic images by
rendering the soundtrack more dimensionally encompassing
than the screen's illusionary scope for containment. Which
is what film sound does every waking electro-acoustic moment.
This
scene - about ten minutes into the film - aurally signposts
the purpose behind many scenes' sound design: the jungle
surrounding Moreau's house; the underground chamber in the
beast's domain; the nocturnal mutants inhabiting the moored
boat; the tense atmosphere of the vivisection laboratory.
Detailed movement is layered not to create 'background atmospheres'
like some string of adjectives hanging limply at the start
of a paragraph, but to cup and amplify the 'cinesconic'
stage within which drama unfolds. Instead of existing as
a flat scrim comprised of amorphous sonic textures, crystalline
sonic events simultaneously occur and shift to form a multi-dimensional
construct as sounds move across space. ISLAND consistently
does this and especially utilizes the alienating precision
afforded by the discrete digital track (DDS) and its clarity
in field placement within a mix intent on demonstrating
these effects. In a sensitive Hal Hartley film about personal
relationships, it might be out of place - too much aural
competition with the 'meaningful' dialogue of actors endlessly
warbling about their relationships. In a hedonistic, bombastic
film staring Marlon Brando with a bunch of real and unreal
freaks who speak more through their bodies, such a sensationally
unsettling sound design is poetically apt and viscerally
appropriate.
On
many levels, the film de-cinematizes its photographic effects.
That is to say, it confuses the degrees to which it subsumes
the real within the image. Specifically, this destabilizes
our external perception of what we might consider genetically
normal or plausible. Take one ex-Adonis Marlon Brando, one
hormonally spunky Val Kilmar, numerous genuine 'freaks',
dress them all in freaky make-up, and one is left wondering
who are the real freaks in this film? All in all, the visuality
of ISLAND conveys the effect of staring at your own reflection
in someone else's cataracts: your self image is milky, distorted,
alien. The film's sound design is as perfectly keyed to
this opacity of its visualization as it is to its collapse
of articulate dialogue, its liquefaction of literary foundation,
and its evaporation of grand themes. If ISLAND is a story
of physical transmogrification and virtual morphology -
from the human to the inhuman and back - what better means
to manipulate and maintain this perceptual confusion than
by inverting the visual screen with the aural space.
Consequently,
the film charts two lines of transformation: humans becoming
animals, and animals who were once humans 're-becoming'
humans. It then cross-modulates these 're-becomings' with
effects modes (optical, digital, chemical, make-up) and
performative devices (vocal characterization, facial expression,
body stance). Again, this wavering visual status of the
screen image is too complex to detail here - yet it's worth
noting that this is the most fertile ocular terrain which
allows the sonic to grow moist within. Particularly, how
the humans and 'humanimals' hear each other and mark the
other's auditory presence is recreated at key moments on
the soundtrack. Herein lies the root of the sound design's
symbolic logic: we in the audience are subjected to the
acoustic perspective of animals.
Remember
that in the bulk of the animal kingdom, sound defines the
visuals that follow. This is most so in the jungle: a realm
of invisibility, camouflage, ariel vantage points and bodily
stillness. Making sound renders one seen; being seen means
death through visibility. Therefore most sound in the jungle
is a complex signage system for obliterating one's visual
presence - throwing one off-guard, signaling to mates approaching
danger. (The Brando connection reminds one that the only
other film which actively incorporated this into its sound
design was APOCALYPSE NOW with its numerous jungle settings
and its pioneering 'quadrophonic' sound mix constructed
by Walter Murch.) Many jungle scenes in ISLAND feature space
being activated through sound aimed at the audience. This
effectively creates a virtual jungle within which we are
disoriented, trapped, frightened. Our pathetic sense of
personal visual space is strategically attacked by the sound
mix: we are the dummy point of reference for all panning
and tracking.
THE
ISLAND OF DR. MOREAU is a messy, confused, aggressive,
hysterical film. In accordance with the most basic of postmodern
precepts, this makes it textually rich and materially ripe.
This is not to say it's a 'rollercoaster ride', nor a lascivious
call to celebrate imperception and presumption. Films like
ISLAND - there are many - are knowledgable and informed
constructs of audio-visual form, and as such are possibly
more inventive and experimental than many examples of the
cinema which stake those claims for themselves.
