Contemporary Traces of the Modern Soundtrack

2	Goodfellas	1992 - Martin Scorsese (USA)
	Dialogue & editing	Dialogue placement; drama through speech; voice-music mix dynamics; intensity

After its gruesome prologue, Goodfellas holds on an extreme close-up of an eye - a bluff, as the film constructs dense aural architecture across time, charting Henry Hill's (Ray Liotta) changing perception of himself and his social reality. Music - more precisely, its record production - creates exacting memory spaces for the unfolding of the film's scenes. The vitality and brashness of the 60s is grossly framed by the hyper-compressed reverberating rotundity of songs by The Ronettes, The Shangri Las & Bobby Darrin; the blunted and altered perceptions of the 70s are harshly boxed by the fractured multi-tracking and denaturalised mixing of songs by Derek & The Dominos, Brewer & Shippley, & Sid Vicious.

As the film hurtles toward the present, changes in the orientation of Henry's commentary parallels changes in the apparati of stereo production, moving from breathy, lingering valve mics and line-fed echo chambers to overloaded effects-chaining compensating the fetishization of acoustically 'dead' studios. Goodfellas deftly sutures the psychoacoustics of microphone placement into the wavering equilibrium Henry experiences through the narration of his story. Song in Goodfellas is a realm into which the film is imported, in reversal of the standard audiovisual hierarchy which governs much film mixing.

The voice of Henry is also 'de-literated', performing less as a crude literary device so beloved of 'personal cinema' and more as a breathing, sweaty being. Ironically, it is more like hearing some talk from their incarceration than listening to someone read from their memoirs. Not only does Henry's voice govern space, it also controls time. All visual action - and even most musical placement - are cued and contantenated by the very phrasing of his words. At moments, the film even goes into freeze-frame, demonstrating the authorial power with which he is recalling his past. Furthermore, the voice track is a highly processed and compacted assemblage. Rhythm, banter, slang, intonation - all are edited into a sparkling meta-performance which places the voice centre-stage, projecting arcs of hyperactive energy as Henry's voice conveys the effects of thinking too many things at once. This anxious shrinkage evident in both the recording and construction of Henry's vocals characterizes Goodfellas' as a compressed text in both sonic and dramatic terms.

Running perpendicular to this compression is a strangely elasticized relation between Henry's voice-over and the accompanying songs. While they fragrantly cast his mind back to the heady time and space of his narration, their vivid placement fluctuates in its attraction to the 'present' of the film's narration. Songs set earlier lean toward the present more than they perform nostalgically to hold us in their past, as if Henry's edginess is fatally drawing us forward despite the song's retrospective cling. Songs set later are desperately tugged back to the past - to a time prior Henry's gradual demise. Ultimately, when he is younger, Henry is driven to move forward; as he gets older - but not wiser - he is obsessed with delaying, holding, halting his world to prevent its collapse. How utterly apt to close with him mocking us direct to the camera, interred invisibly in the Witness Protection Programme as we hear the orchestra slip into atonality as Sid Vicious whines 'My Way'.

From the BFI book 100 Modern Soundtracks.