Contemporary Traces of the Modern Soundtrack

15	Magnolia	1999 – P.T. Anderson (USA)
	Song form & vocal multiplicity	Song scoring; antiphonal structures and psychological dissonance; performance

Following a surreal 'preface', the introductory character-based movement to Magnolia unfolds. It tells you so much and with such an excess of simultaneity, you loose sense of narrative linkage and progression. Across, Aimee Mann's cover version of Harry Nilsson's One occupies both screen and auditorium in a radical way. The soundtrack ducks and weaves all its elements within and without the architecsonic domain of One in a flagrant disregard for hierarchical logic in sound design: Mann's 'lead vocals' mostly ride atop, 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 orchestrated, following through with a chorus of expressive utterances breathing in a continually morphing sonorum which is, literally, breath-taking. All characters are at some point out of breath, rushing headlong into fatalistic eruption. Magnolia features many show pieces where vocalization and legibility precariously come near to cancelling each other out - consciously so because the flow lines of character energy in Magnolia chart the ways in which characters are running out of time as their connections with each other contract into a net of inescapable embraces and releases.

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. On many occasions, multiple musics occur simultaneously, creating circles of dissonance which radiate the auditorium. Magnolia's characters 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.

Cancer, of course, is the draining life force of Magnolia. Epicentral 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. Just as you could smell death on his breath, you can feel its presence on your own eardrums. All key emotional points performance-wise are similarly 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. 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.

Magnolia's sound design follows this deigned 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 psychoacoustic fight: you strain to hear, you wish for silence, you attempt to focus, you achieve your own noise threshold.

From the BFI book 100 Modern Soundtracks.

See also MAGNOLIA - The Power of Song.