Magnolia
The Power of Song
published in two parts in Real Time
No.36/7, Sydney, 2000
I
have no idea why Paul Thomas' Anderson's film is called
Magnolia (1999). Nor do I particularly care why it
is called Magnolia. This is but one of near-countless incidental
beauties of the film. I have a lot to say about this film
- but maybe you've already heard all that needs to be said
about such a film. Pompous. Pretentious. Preposterous. Long-winded.
Cold-hearted. An ensemble cast like Robert Altman. Tracking
shots like Scorsese. Three goddamn hours long.
Simply,
what you've heard is wrong.
Scorcese's
Good Fellas (1992) is undoubtedly a masterpiece, whether
I wish it to be or not. It is a carbon-compacted diamond
of modern film narrative, compressing a century of story-telling
into an adrenaline vocal stream of violent drama, not unlike
the steaming spittle direct from Scorcese's own bearded
mouth. It is the end of a genetic line of narrative that
draws with incredible skill on just about every key mechanism
that safe critical orthodoxy deems integral to the cinematic
apparatus. Robert Altman's Short Cuts (1993) is not a masterpiece
as such because the grand mantle of modernist narrative
is not the spectacular crown it seeks. If Scorcese is the
talker, Altman is the listener: he takes in all and allows
all to be said. As a 'good ear', he stands in stark contrast
to Scorsese who flits like a caffinated psychologist playing
back his patients' taped neuroses in fast-forward. Short
Cuts is an attempt to listen to the noise of social dysfunction
while retaining the integrity of its pain. When that ringing
sound overcomes Christopher Penn in a moment of murderous
rage, Altman does not merely tape: he induces feedback as
a profound statement on the looping inevitability of actions
which decimate all that we - as subjects and writers of
our own fiction - wish to control.
Scorsese
is about voice; about the pace of its delivery, the heightened
points of its enunciation and all the tragi-comic collapses
which follow its peppered emissions. Altman is about time-and-space;
about the way in which a zone is fixed, locked and delineated
to ensnare and entrap all within its resonating psychological
perimeters. His camera work is the tracing of flow lines
between radio-miced performers improvizing in real time.
It is a televisual effect and actually shares little with
the relentless scopic 'proscenia' of cinema's fractured
denouement - which Scorsese both destroys and regales in
the operatic shock waves that define his giddy camera work.
And in case you're missing the point here: the tracking
shot of the opening to The Player is not the tracking shot
of the rear-entrance nightclub scene in Good Fellas. Nor
is it the tracking shots at the poolside party of Boogie
Nights (1997) or in the TV station of Magnolia P.T. Anderson's
tracking shots are dictated not by location value, character
insight, plot machination or wannabe auteurism, but by music.
I contend that P.T. Anderson is about song - and as such
is virtually a new species of narrative when compared to
the likes of Scorsese and Altman.
Lili
Zanuck's Rush (1991), Ulu Grosbard's Georgia (1995), Spike
Lee's Clockers (1995) & Girl 6 (1996), Alison Anders
& Kurt Voss' Grace Of My Heart (1996) & Sugartown
(1998), The Coen Brothers' The Big Lebowski (1998), Todd
Haynes' Velvet Goldmine (1998) - all critically declaimed
films of the 90s; all films which aspire to the condition
of music generally, song especially. Equally significant
is the way these films employ songs, many of which would
have yielded me decidedly less pleasure beyond their cinematic
placement. Waging a critical battle against my sense of
'taste' in music, these films uncomfortably inhabit my mental
space despite my measures to reduce them into a wobbly chimera
of what my cinematic mind imagines them to be. From Lee's
fundamental reliance on the r'n'b/soul ballad, to Zanuck
& Grosbard's retrieval of the 'singer-songwriter' stigma
free of the dogma which stifles its historicist rock journo
flatulence, to the Coen's uncompromising eclecticism, to
Haynes, Anders & Voss' sincerity in re-evaluating the
lost repositories of the neo-decadent lines between Glam
and New Romanticism - these directors (and their composers
and music supervisors) innately and personally know the
power of song. And they have accordingly allowed song primacy
of place in their radiophonic narratives. In an era where
directors have proven themselves to be absolute retards
when it comes to pop music, their cinema is sonically intelligent
and musically literate.
Only
a fool would still refute that the most ungainly and septic
pop song is incongruously capable of sublime and transcendental
expressions of irrational emotional fluxes and states. You
can import every post-Adorno treatise on the bankruptcy
of the pop machine to fend off the power of the song, but
it will be to no avail. And to surrender to this is a lesson
not only in how the significance and persuasiveness of the
pop song can embody one in its aural aura, but also how
its signage and effects result from dense, modular and multi-layered
striations which literature will never shape in the span
of two-and-a-half minutes. For the pop song is dimensional:
it engulfs one in the fantasy terrain of its own imagined
social space; sometimes courting you, other times repelling
you, always affecting you.
A
bar scene in Magnolia. Ex-quiz kid Donnie Smith (William
H. Macy) bursts through the padded door into its red leather
interior. One of those clean, dark-but-bright, oppressive
bars like in Cheers. He sits down and orders Diet Pepsi.
The music is Supertramp's Goodbye Stranger. The song is
one of a few hits from their successful Breakfast In America
LP from 1979 - a melodious monstrosity of corporate rock
from a dinosaurian era. It harbours something more than
'bad taste'. Like all corporate radiophonic diaspora, it
recalls every social environment it has stained. The aura
is deafening: a flood of all public space where that song
played comes back to haunt one as you sit there overwhelmed
by memories of every tiled surface, sticky carpet, flocked-wallpaper
and buzzing fluoro light which has shaped your phenomenological
make-up. It's personal because of its ability to jettison
you back to those dimensions all at once. Stomaching this
song is meant to be emotionally visceral. It is not about
deftly choosing an emotional state and sound to synchronize
dramatic energy (as is the case with Scorsese's canny use
of Nilsson's 1973 song Jump Into The Fire as a coked-up
Johnny [Ray Liotta] does a drug run near the climax of Good
Fellas). P.T. Anderson's use of Supertramp's Goodbye Stranger
is meant to create a psycho-sonic space wherein we become
ensnared by both the song and the cruel tragedy which unfurls
around Donnie as the song reaches its own gaudy epiphany.
Donnie is of course oblivious to the song, yet we share
his trauma by having it amplified for us by a song to which
he is indifferent.
That
is what P.T. Anderson can do with songs. It is a device
- an art, even - which he has been doggedly honing since
Hard Eight (1997) and Boogie Nights. Don't take my word
for it. In the liner notes to the Magnolia CD he writes:
"Like one would adapt a book for the screen, I had the concept
of adapting Aimee (Mann's) songs into a screenplay." I picked
this up the first time I saw Magnolia. It became even more
apparent on second viewing, so reading this quote afterwards
was gratifying and inspiring. This guy knows song. If you
think you 'know' cinema, then you probably will not like
Magnolia It is working beyond your ontological schema of
conditional cinema; it is working in the dense fibrous sonorum
of pop music, record production, and the strikingly ambivalent
evocation specific to lyric writing. And if you don't know
song - its flirtatious socio-cultural pomp and circumstance
- then you will likely have difficulty in comprehending
the grain of Magnolia's narrational voice and how it speaks
the evaporative dance of sound waves and song lines which
define its story. Magnolia reaches new heights of 'vertical
narration', where everything is told - as songs do - 'all
at once'. Despite all the claims to its liberating play
with the imagination, literature is comparatively burdened
by its own linearity, so when P.T. Anderson choses to not
adapt a book for the screen and choses a set of songs by
Aimee Mann instead, his resulting mode of narration will
only laterally connect to those narrative forms we expect
from cinema. Magnolia is thus a timbrel text which must
be listened to in order for it to be read.
People
who reductively and programmatically think film making is
about 'telling stories' really should just role over and
die. They say they want story telling as if it is some universal
essential act, when what they invariably seek is a bourgeois
mish-mash of classical Greek theatrical dogma, countless
Judeo-Christian hang-ups about authorship, stains left over
from Joseph Campbell's limp leaking dick, and a PDF file
downloaded from a Sid Fields fanboy site. All this fretting
over plot, character, motivation, structure, truth, honesty,
meaning - all dished out in mean-spirited, narrow-minded
terms of condition. Territorialized, categorized, rationalized,
franchised; all in the name of a cheap mimetic humanism
which even dogs would find suspicious and unconvincing.
Notably, Magnolia fails abysmally under such strictures.
Following the surreal 'preface' to the film, the introductory
character-based movement to Magnolia unfolds. It fucks with
your aural consciousness so deeply it's like being shot
at close-range and not feeling the pain until the paramedics
shove a needle into you. It tells you so much and with such
an excess of simultaneity you loose sense of narrative linkage
and progression. Deliberately so. Magnolia is not about
biblical resonances, chance occurrences, fatalistic arcs
and other linear logic which it sardonically quotes. It
is about the dissolution of narrativity in the confluence
of multitudinous potentiality which vibrates like a chorus
of narrational pulsars in harmony with the songs on its
soundtrack. This is how one can start to classify Magnolia
as a 'new species of narrative'.
Across
that opening survey of all the film's characters, Aimee
Mann's cover version of Harry Nilsson's One occupies both
screen and auditorium in a radical way. It is the nearest
American cinema has come to the work of Jean Luc Godard
and his sound designer Francois Musy in films like Detective
(1982), Hail Mary (1985), Soigne Ta Droite (1986) &
Nouvelle Vague (1990). Yet whereas the Godard/Musy sono-musical
collages take on a fractal complexity in their horizontality
via their dramatic cut-and-splicing, P.T. Anderson's mix
of Aimee Mann's cover version (produced and performed by
the film's composer Jon Brion) throws us into an equally
complex verticality. In concert with the like-minded mind-boggling
sound design by Richard King, the One sequence ducks and
weaves all its soundtrack elements within and without the
architecsonic domain of the song One. What is most amazing
is the flagrant disregard for formal hierarchical logic
in the sound design: Aimee Mann's 'lead vocals' ride atop
for most of the time (panned hard right in the mix to leave
dialogue in the centre), yet at times even her voice is
clouded by the film's dialogue and the song's own baroque
vocal arrangements.
A
vocal schizophrenia is thus orchestrated, typical of the
pleasurably perplexing arrangements of Brian Wilson and
Van Dyke Parks to which Jon Brion stylistically bows. This
chorus of expressive utterances breathes in a continually
morphing sonorum which is, literally, breath-taking. All
the characters are at some point out of breath, running
and rushing headlong into a story of fatalistic eruption.
As with Orson Welles' mix of vocal layers in Citizen Kane
(1941) and Altman's peak in overlapping dialogue in California
Split (1977), Magnolia features many show pieces where vocalization
and legibility precariously come near to cancelling each
other out. Because the film attempts too much? Because P.T.
Anderson is grandiose? No: because the flow lines of character
energy in Magnolia chart the ways in which those characters
are running out of time as their connections with each other
contract into a net of inescapable embraces and releases.
Every nano second of the film's editing, cross-fading and
mixing volumetrically gauges this momentum with vibrancy
and urgency.
The
Brian Wilson/Van Dyke Parks connection is not accidental.
These two artists - along with others like Phil Spector
and Jack Nitzsche - constitute a white rock/pop sensibility
integral to the post-60s history of West Coast record production.
Running parallel and counter to the obvious and comparatively
shallow 'mind expanding' gestures which coloured the Haight-Ashbury
adventures in poor studio experimentation, Wilson, Parks,
Spector and Nitzsche used the recording studio not as a
stage for the spectacular breaking of taboos, bit rather
as a dark closet of manic-depressive, schizophrenic and
psychotic fissions which they aurally and musically workshopped.
Wilson and Spector in particular led quite tragic lives
as child prodigies which blossomed in radiophonic glory
and slowly withered through a series of non-commercial catastrophes
which are now appreciated as uncompromising excavations
of personal grief. Both Donnie Smith and young Stanley (X)
in Magnolia are personality amalgams of these figures, with
Stanley standing in for the celebration of youth and Donny
being a sad visage of being trapped by that youth.
Schizophrenia
here is not a term to be taken lightly, and the mix of Magnolia
is crucial to the film's habitation of one's aural consciousness.
Many characters in the film quote "You may be done with
the past, but the past is not done with you", and the film
accordingly lives simultaneously in its past and in its
present. Its characters contend with guilt, grief and anguish
not for the vainglorious sake of literary exposition and
contemplation, but more so to construct a therapeutic realm
within which one can experience those sensations through
being incapable of escaping them. The characters of Magnolia
are not 'vessels': they are amplifiers, speakers and transmitters
of a psycho-space. They voice the noisy ward within which
you are interred for the duration of the film's gathering.
Listen to The Beach Boys' Good Vibrations (1966, or just
about any track from the Wilson/Parks productions of Pet
Sounds, 1966 & Smiley Smile, 1967). The key changes
and cascading harmonies are like the Swingle Singers attempting
to lip-sync to themselves in front of fun parlour crazy
mirrors. The sensation is like having too many people talking
to you at once, and the fact that they harmonize in a series
of rounds suggests that they have a cohesion and logic which
further intimidates the isolation of your own voice. Throughout
Magnolia Aimee Mann's songs fuse, blend and curdle the score
by Jon Brion. On many occasions - and this, for me, is bliss
- multiple musics occur simultaneously. The effect is so
unsettling one realizes why cinema desperately avoids it,
especially when pools of dissonance spill into the auditorium.
The
skill and craft with which P.T. Anderson and Richard King
have landscaped pools of dissonance and waterfalls of consonance
over the undulating emotional field of Magnolia will prove
a seminal text for the 'de-operization' of the cinema in
years to come. A lofty claim on my part, but Magnolia is
a sign of how one can collapse the architectural fascism
which has rendered cinema as monolithic, monoglotic and
monogrammatic - as a form predicated on constructing heroic
edifices, elevated plains and panoramic vistas of enlightenment.
Even though the film appears to have been targeted by many
as being all these things and more, I would argue that Magnolia
eschews the operatic by incisively strewing its high art
baggage like the scorched remains at a plane crash site.
Magnolia is not registered in the hyper-monodical heights
of art cinema which tackily imports opera onto its soundtrack
with all the subtlety of a drag queen from the 60s. When
Magnolia employs the most saturated aria - yes, from Puccinni's
Madame Butterfly - it does so with a clinical, scrutineering
ear. It plays out unedited against a scene of Jim Guerney
(John C. Reilly) and Claudia Gator (Melora Walters) engaged
in a tragi-comic first meeting at her flat. The scene is
banal, flat, pregnant, empty; all the melodic drama of Puccinni
eventually withers and seeps into the walls, spent and exhausted.
No, Magnolia is about as 'operatic' as Diva is subtle.
Maybe
it is a drained diva that sails along the emotional waves
of Magnolia. The voice of Aimee Mann is clearly a sono-lyrical
love object for Anderson throughout the film. He enshrines
it and allows it to mix freely with his film. Her voice
is itself ingrained with characteristics which allow her
to vocalize a line enriched by a tradition that embraces
other singer-songwriters like Joni Mitchell and Carole King
- each icons of West Coast 70s music, the latter the fictionalized
subject of Alison Anders' Grace Of My Heart. While I don't
buy into the rock journo rhetoric which mythologizes the
singer-songwriter, the maturity and sensitivity conveyed
by Aimee Mann's songs deserve the aural fawning Magnolia
accords them, and the production by her, Jon Brion and others
is far more eclectic and far less prosaic than the 'naturalism'
which made West Coast rock the aural equivalent of a smelly
crocheted vest. The polyglottic instrumentation of her songs
adds much to Magnolia's aural palette, and are measured
carefully against her grain: a mix of ennui, insouciance
and world-weariness.
This
contrast of abject vocal grain against elaborate ornamental
instrumentation is signposted very early in the film in
two important instances. First is when Aimee Mann's voice
first sounds with vamped piano chords and a full black screen.
Who is she? Where is she? What is her purpose? She is the
voice from a nowhere that will map the somewhere of the
film. Second - and as equally epicentral to the film's oral
centrality - is the bizarre audiovisual zoom into the decaying
throat of Earl Partridge (Jason Robards) as he hoarsely
whispers through the frenetic cellular activity which signals
his body's surrender to cancer. He rasps in the mix the
way a tuba or trombone emits a gritty pink noise in digitally-clear
orchestral recordings: the grain is unbearably tactile.
Just as you could smell death on his breath, you can feel
its presence on your own eardrums.
Cancer,
of course, is the draining life force of Magnolia. The film
profoundly addresses this in a series of terse refutations,
negations and denials which never let up. Just as Partridge
is himself a cancerous cell in the glandular familial spread
of all the film's characters, so too does each and every
person expel and repeat his infected breath one remove from
their own emotional death. In fact all the key emotional
points performance-wise are presented through debilitating
inversions of vocal power: Mrs. Partridge (Julianna Moore)
provides numerous black holes of gasping and gnashing as
she deals with Earl's demise; Frank Mackie (Tom Cruise)
breathlessly vomits years of hatred over Earl on his death
bed; Claudia vents a volcanic ocean of steaming rage when
her father Jimmy Gator (Philip Baker Hall) intrudes upon
her frail sanctity.
Richard
King's sound design for Magnolia follows what could be deigned
a cancerous spread: voices and music leak through thin walls;
TVs crackle indifferently, indignantly and incessantly,
oxidizing the most private domains; car sound systems carry
their passengers within their darkened subsonic wombs; music
cues well up and spill over into scenes for which they were
destined as well as those poised innocently adjacent; and
radio playlists infect public spaces like a cold in an air
conditioned office. Sound in Magnolia is thus mostly about
that which you wish to suppress, engaging you in a wearing
psycho-acoustic fight with the film's soundtrack: you strain
to hear, you wish for silence, you attempt to focus, you
achieve your own noise threshold. And just as the film is
structured around song's ability to be 'all at once', its
score around a 'complex verticality', its narrative around
an 'excess of simultaneity, so is its soundtrack an overload
of all that impedes the act of listening. The end result
is a story about exhaustion, drainage, and the fulsome quiet
which comes only after trauma with substance.
For
what it's worth as far as image goes. The poster for Magnolia
features a clear blue sky out of which fall some frogs.
That may be one way of explaining the plot of the film.
Or as Stanley the child brain says after exhaustive research
in his school library about inexplicable phenomenae: "It's
just something that happens." The CD cover for Magnolia
features the eponymous flower with all the film's characters
softly super-imposed on its erotic petals. A strange orb
of flora vibrates at its centre, resembling a strange planet
around which the characters orbit. That may be one way of
illustrating how we connect uncontrollably to others. Thankfully,
I still do not know why the film is called Magnolia.
