Something
About Mary, Velvet Goldmine, The Boys, Vampires + Boogie
Nights
Songs in Film:
Death to the Film Score
published in Real Time No.29, Sydney,
1999
Having
just listened to the new FOR FILMS Vol.3 (1998), I am overcome
by a familiar wave of nausea - the same pasty acrid ambience
that irritates the soft hairs of my inner ear when I hear
attempts to compose/produce "music for films". Twenty years
after Brian Eno released an LP of the same name (which rehashed
pleasing atmospheric doodles developed in Cologne and Dusseldorf
by the likes of Cluster, Harmonia and Neu at least five
years earlier), the film and recording industries worldwide
still think that what has since been termed 'ambient' emits
a 'soundtrack-like quality'. To my ear, I've heard nothing
but two decades of what at best evokes some of the better
moments of Eno's ANOTHER GREEN WORLD (1975) and at worst
sounds like instrumental versions of John Denver's ROCKY
MOUNTAIN HIGH (the ideal theme music for American indie
Sundance-friendly thirtysomething relationship flicks).
Granted,
there have been many attempts to side-step the orchestra
- but the reasons for doing so are usually suspect. Rather
than rejecting the orchestra as a universal/neutral/qualitative
norm for sounding the film score, most indie/new-ager/Europhile/personal-cinema/arthouse
movies eschew the symphonic as a stance against sonic bombast,
favouring instead cheesy string synthesizers (a contradiction
in terms), acoustic guitars (oh-so-natural) and solo violins
(so frail, so feminine, so fuckable). And if you want to
go ethnic, throw in a piano accordion (instant pre-fab gipsy/peasant
connotations) or a pan pipe (for that 'soaring of the human
spirit' effect audiences love so much).
Technology
has a lot to answer for, also. The abject lack of imagination
and technological nous in the FOR FILMS series of CDs is
grounds to ban home MIDI studios worldwide. Factory samples,
pre-set effects, and ambient/trip-hop/d&b textbook compositional
structures are perfectly logged and tabulated across the
three CDs in the series. Their pallid contents also reflect
the kind of luridly beautiful coating that serves the lazy
knee-jerk humanism which 'short films' (especially animated
shorts) now seem to uniformly express. Are all short filmmakers
Scientoligists? Are their 'composer friends' bass players
in Christian Soft Rock bands? Do they really have to use
those CDR libraries and SYSEX data dumps leftover from the
music they did for a series of EST/Forum/Amway motivational
tapes? Does what I'm saying make any sense to you reading
this? Maybe not. Most people - especially the intelligentsia
- are happy with music on the grounds of its soulful/mystical/emotional/natural
evocation (which marks them intellectually below the mythical
housewife who weeps during THE BOLD AND THE BEAUTIFUL).
Film directors and producers are probably even dumber than
the dumb masses in this regard: they actually think that
those CDs they play at dinner parties (BETTY BLUE, THE MISSION,
CINEMA PARADISO, PARIS TEXAS, PROOF, anything by Enya, Dead
Can Dance or Deep Forrest) are signs of their sophisticated
taste in music.
Enough
cheap swipes at aesthetic retardation. Playing FOR FILMS
urged me to remember that 1998 was in fact a very healthy
year for the use of songs in movies. There were of course
also some good examples of the most cliched use of songs:
THE ACID HOUSE and LOCKED STOCK & TWO SMOKIN' BARRELS
best exemplifying a dated trend at being hip (go, UK!) which
should provide an unhealthy influence on present and past
VCA/AFTRS graduates for the next five years. The inventive,
interesting and imaginative examples of song selection of
1998 avoided the pitfalls of regurgitating ambient stylings
(eg. KISSED), affecting a sallow, hip demeanour (eg. ¹ aka
PI), or bothering to consult with A&R people in major
recording/distribution companies (eg. GODZILLA).
P.
T. Anderson's BOOGIE NIGHTS set the agenda for how songs
can be used to culturally locate a story rather than perfunctorily
slot it into a radiophonic histogram. While the film charts
the messy ejaculation of the porn industry at the end of
the 70s (read Bill Landis & Jim McDonough's tracts in
the now-defunct early 80s SLEAZOID EXPRESS for key source
material which this film relates to), the music peels back
the scab of collective forgetfulness to prod the fetid sono-semiotics
of songs like Apollo 100's "Joy", Nina's "99 Red Luft Balloons"
and our own Rick Springfield's "Jesse's Girl". But not a
smidgen of camp is to found, so forget Sontag when journeying
through the wood-grained multi-track mixing consoles which
blanket the texture of the film's soundtrack with the grain
of late-70s/early-80s pop/rock. P. T. Anderson deftly employs
songs like aural production design, matching ARP synths
to wallpaper, Ibanez fuzz-wahs to the lightning in convenience
stores, and compressed snare thuds to ritzy cowboy boots.
Most fascinating - and the modus operandi behind the film's
weaving of genuine emotional warmth amidst the its decidedly
retro iconography - is Anderson's placement of songs in
mismatched settings. He does so often by starting a song
in one scene and then allowing it time and space to flow
into the next scene. The resultant effect imbues the song
with a disturbing ambivalence that simultaneously drains
the song of an 'event' status and displaces it into the
amorphous backgrounding of the film's psychological ambience.
Meanwhile
in Australia, we think it's 'hip' to make fun of Barry White
and the theme from SHAFT. Suprisingly, one Australian film
(and I do emphasise the 'one' as in, like, 'one a decade')
opted to absolutely ignore the last quarter of a century
of tizzy, queeny, Whitlamesque, theatre-company-funded,
PC, subtle-as-sledge-hammer mockery of the working class
(which is still alive and kicking today as back then). Rowan
Woods decision to get The Necks to provide a score for THE
BOYS shows that Australians can think beyond Baz Luhrmann
excesses, Jenny Kee cockatoos and John Singleton mimicry.
Arty but not alienating, the distinctive brooding tone of
THE BOYS is enriched by the pregnant spatialization of The
Necks' slowed-down lounge music. 'Lounge' as in Ken Bruce
has gone mad decor: all chipboard, glue guns and leather
with a thirty day guarantee. The oppressive outer-suburbanism
screams through the empty inner-spaces created by The Necks
(and some occasional passages of Alan Lamb's telegraph wire
drones). Hopefully it won't be a decade before the next
Australian feature film does something interesting with
its soundtrack.
One
thing rarely mentioned when discussing the Farrelly Brothers'
THERE'S SOMETHING ABOUT MARY was the use of Jonathan Richmond
to provide the meta-narrative voice for the gag-mystery
central to the film's enigmatic central figure, Mary. The
pure and simple playfulness of visually including Richmond
as the nerd troubadour replete with retardo drummer imbued
the film with a charm that evokes the more complex strains
of humanism to found in the 80s cycle of teen movies. The
complexity is to be found in the modulation of the narrative
irony - mostly a neurotic reflex to wise-acre anything within
shot - with an awkward suppression of positivity. The Farrelly
Brothers are masters of this, exhibiting a strange duality
in their savage lambasting of human inadequacy while celebrating
the centrality of hopelessness which many people learn to
accept in order to save themselves from going around the
bend. We're all losers in one or another, and films like
THERE'S SOMETHING ABOUT MARY provide a manual on how to
deal with it - in preference to hugging Richard Simmons
or watching FAMILY CIRCLE TV. Jonathan Richmond - the loser
supreme before nerd became a clinical term for people who
think the internet is 'cool' - has for over twenty years
dealt with emotional fissures and social shortcomings with
verve, conviction, fluidity and ambiguity all at once. No
one else could have been so appropriately layered into THERE'S
SOMETHING ABOUT MARY.
Cool
cineastes - who listen to exciting youth radio stations
like JJJ - thought John Carpenter's VAMPIRES was not 'in
your face'. Such naive comments from wannabe critics who've
probably never seen LAST HOUSE ON THE LEFT, SUSPIRIA, I
SPIT ON YOUR GRAVE or SHOCKING ASIA but think Tarrantino
is 'edgy'. VAMPIRES is certainly not a redefinition of the
cine-vampire mythology, but it is a breath of fresh air
to watch and hear a film that is committed to its generic
underpinning instead of frigging around with being smart-arse
(and misinformed) about the genre's conventions. Best of
all, the score by John Carpenter (list the director's who
score their own films) cruises down a highway well away
from the concert hall, tuned to crackling radio broadcasts
of Stax singles. For VAMPIRES, Carpenter plays guitar alongside
Donald "Duck" Dunn and Steve Cropper - legendary hard-nosed
bassist and guitarist of Booker T & The MGs and innumerable
Stax recordings from the mid-60s through to the mid-70s.
Once again, grain comes to the front, as the studio performance
of non-cinematic musicians is grafted onto the soundtrack
when they play song-structured cues in place of script-dictated
'music cues'. The Carpenter/Dunn/Cropper jams exude a laidback
haze of heat which slowly sizzles and perfectly complements
the terror-beneath-the-surface that erupts in the film's
violent showcases. Just the alcohol-soaked antidote one
needs to wash out Wender's angst-ridden corruption of Ry
Cooder's gentle slide guitar washes in PARIS TEXAS.
There
are two Enos. One puts out portentous diaries, behaves like
a technological sage, fawns over well-designed objects,
loves Fellini and espouses the most ignorant altruisms about
film music I've ever heard. The other was with Roxy Music
for their first two LPs, then released two solo LPs: HERE
COME THE WARM JETS (1973) and TAKING TIGER MOUNTAIN BY STRATEGY
(1974). After that, I'm certain aliens took him away and
genetically altered him into a pompous bourgeois Brit style-git
who lost all sense of fashion. When the opening credits
to VELVET GOLDMINE burst with the atonal postmodern melee
of a time-warped Phil Spector which defines Eno's first
LP, I remember once again that cinema hasn't even begun
to tap into all the remarkable recordings of pop music which
could invigorate the film soundtrack and jettison it into
transhistorical metasonic realms of audiovisuality. The
song in question - "Needle In The Camel's Eye" - is as weird
today as it was back then. The colour of hair and the sound
of song drive VELVET GOLDMINE. It rings with the nasal whistle
that breathes the aural aura of Glam, combining not only
crucial anthems but also obscure tracks by Cockney Rebel
and early Roxy Music (and only Bowie fans will know the
reference behind the film's title). The strength of Eno
and Bowie - sometimes dormant, sometimes irrationally exposed
- lies in the gorgeous fakeness of their artsy gestures.
A heady, gaudy form of pop gout which consumes their artistry
and transforms it into a spectacle of devalued sentimentality
and violent theatricality - anti-matter versions of Dylan,
Morrison, et al. Todd Haynes knows Glam well enough to embrace
this, and to consciously pervert its hyperbolic hyper-bucolic
history into a cris-crossed qualudian reverse-history that
pinpoints Queer before it became politique, Bi before is
became unacceptable.
