Suburbia
CD notes to MALLBOY soundtrack
release on Silvertone Records, 2001
In
the movies, suburbia is still laced with traces of its
utopian origins. It's an American image, really: faux
wood grain station wagons slowly cruising down densely
foliated tree-lined thoroughfares. Birds chirp peacefully
in a soft quietude signifying a somnambulistic inertia,
as if the suburbs were a deadly calm where straight people
retire.
Every
time I hear that kind of quiet on a soundtrack, I cringe.
The suburbs are full of sonic irritation and aural aggravation.
Far from settling in the suburbs, you would be nesting
in noise. Cheap housing with badly sprung floors work
as lo-fi boom boxes to amplify the hollow wooden din
of TVs, radios and cassette players - usually all at
once and coming from competing territories in the family
war zone. Absurdly narrow streets with speed bumps extend
the low rumble and pitch bends of hot gear changes as
hoons come home for mum's dinner, bellowing their car
sound systems like warrior emblems of taste. Dogs snap
at every move, triggered like neurotic Pavlovian beings,
barking out a sample of their own imprisonment.
While
the city and inner urbania construct drones - flattened
soundscapes of dense, low frequencies and endless cycles
of pink noise - the suburbs emit a non-stop series of
distinct occurrences. It starts with the tolling crash
and boom of trucks picking up recycled glass bottles,
and does not end until the first Minah birds pierce the
reverberant enclaves of corrugated tin carports. It awakes
with the scream of the newborn and withers only after
the last hoarse screech of domestic conflict. Many people
are attracted to the suburbs, believing they will escape
the claustrophobia of housing commission flats or inner-city
apartment blocks. The acoustic reality is that in the
suburbs, the people next store are amplifiers of all
you wish to censor, suppress, silence.
To
go to a shopping mall is a therapeutic respite from the
acoustic terror of suburbia. Bathed inside its binaural
warmth, you can float along its glistening corridors,
carried on the wash of white noise which combines music,
speech and sound into a sonic foam of consumerism. Sound
comes from everywhere all at once: you are constantly
targeted by an array of speakers while you are never
displaced from the bodily throng of bustling shoppers.
The lushness of the mall is the produce of many people
doing many things. Not unlike the electrical feel when
you're in the midst of a crowd at a large outdoor event,
the mall generates a low current massage of calming vibration
as you become one with its air-conditioning, flowing
with its control of the masses. Fight it if you will.
Go to your high street boutiques. Shop over the internet.
Giving in to the mall is a numbing yet nonetheless sensory
experience.
Under
the open-eared acceptance of director Vince Giarrusso
and producer Fiona Eagger, the sound design of MALLBOY
is allowed to capture the complete sonorum of suburbia
and the rich impasto of shopping mall ambience. MALLBOY
is not a noisy film per se, but there certainly are no
idyllic pauses which paint the suburbs as a receptacle
of pastoral calm away from the big bad city. And why
should it? The cinema is not a concert hall: it does
not require the hush of mute respect to follow its stories.
The cinema expels us, projects us and snares us in its
enlivened spaces. More films could sound the noise of
life and immerse us in all that occurs beyond the edge
of the frame. Forget journeying to another planet. Go
to the mall.
