BETWEEN
SONG & SCORE:
Rock Operas Of Violence
published in The Wire No. 170, April, 1998,
London
Rock.
Consider its lumpen weight, its compacted form. One word, so perfectly
describing the granulitic, gravity-bearing power of a music predicated
on volume, mass and density. No wonder it has been granted scant
environmental hold in the shimmering, flickering world of cinema
and its ghostly evocation of wispy imagery. Like the delicate
white sheet which captures the phosphorescent play of light and
shadow on its slight surface, film music is accordingly ethereal,
vaporous, wafting. Historically, cinema is a machine of the phantasmagorical:
a play upon the fantastic evocation of impossible images and imaginable
scenes. When rock music occurs on the film soundtrack, it smashes
that arcana of slide projections and light shows with volcanic
force. The air becomes thick, space is filled with volume, sound
degenerates into noise - all reminding us that hidden behind the
silver screen's porous fabric are speakers.
Vulgar,
brash, obvious, effective - rock music has for over forty years
consistently been used to signpost rebelliousness, albeit a fairly
pale one. Particularly so in the cinema. Little distinguishes
the purpose and effect of a rock presence generated by Elvis Presley
in a 1957 movie and Trent Raznor in a 1997 movie - despite the
plain contrasts in their musical style and aura. As songs in films,
though, they exist as imports, bearing carnets of displacement
and badges of otherness. Polarised so directly against strains
of orchestral beauty, rock tends to suffer a sameness which marks
its identity too sharply, thereby rendering its usage limited
by self-effacing and 'naturalistic' standards of filmmaking. The
problem is that the grandiose narrational aspects of the orchestra
are presumed to somehow come from cinema, to somehow match it,
while the folk-song form of rock music is sited outside of cinema's
higher aspirations, fixing rock songs as vagrants and itinerants.
Yet
a historical sliver of rock film scoring trails across the body
of cinema like a barely visible scar. From fuzzed guitars in American
biker movies of the 60s to wailing organs in European sex movies
of the 70s, the underbelly of cinema's more disreputable genres
belie rock affectations from the gorgeous to the gross. A full
accountability of rock in the cinema cannot be undertaken here,
but some points about the granular peculiarities of 'rockness'
on the film soundtrack - particularly as a transition from imported
songs to texturally composed presences - are worth pondering.
One pinnacle of mixing cinema with rock scoring resides in the
musical networking between Italy's master of violent horror, Dario
Argento, and the many scores supplied to him by symphonic rock
ensemble, Goblin. Therein one can encounter all that is wonderfully
wrong about rock in the cinema: its unnecessary forcefulness,
its disavowal of diminution, its self-centred sensationalism.
The
most distinguishing feature of an Argento film is its Italian
flavour: excessive, hysterical, modish, gaudy, enraptured with
its own stylisation. Some have mistaken Argento as a sycophantic
director caught between Alfred Hitchcock and Brian DePalma. Clearly
forsaking the taut, cerebral mystery structures of his Anglo counterparts,
Argento co-opts European operatic form for the staging of his
corpulent narratives. Environment, scale, plasticity and spectacle
are foregrounded in the pyrotechnics of his films, often so much
so that the story becomes incomprehensible. Relations between
sound and image are deliberately overloaded to disorient one with
an near-abstract audio-visual experience. As coloured lights from
nowhere render the scene garish and Goblin's violently loud music
bears down on the drama, the film itself actively terrorises its
audience, eschewing the mundane mechanics of guided story-telling
for psychological dislocation. The resultant effect is like suddenly
inhabiting the frenzied mental disposition of the film's killer.
Hitchcock and DePalma consistently create voyeuristic states to
implicate us in observing murderous action; Argento jettisons
us into the deranged terrain of the killer, where nothing makes
sense except the engulfing pulsations which drive the moment of
psychosis. And Goblin's music is the neural flow of this dimensional
overload.
In
the first Argento film scored by Goblin - DEEP RED (1975) - the
texture of rock is cannily employed to evoke the abrasive sado-masochistic
pleasure of rock music in all its deafening pain and thrilling
obliteration of aural subtlety. The joy of subjecting oneself
to rock music's unrealistically loud volume is integral to the
thrill of its power, and the pleasure of horror films requires
a similar contract. For the original release of DEEP RED, Argento
stipulated that cinemas be equipped with additional PA speakers
to increase the volume level of the soundtrack. First used for
films like Ken Russell's TOMMY (1971) and most recently with Prince's
SIGN O' THE TIMES (1989), the effect is brutish at best. Nonetheless,
the sight of big, black concert bins and sub-woofers ungainly
framing the picture screen like coup detat sentinels conveys an
exciting sense of rock taking over the cinema. DEEP RED certainly
benefited from this effect as its aim was to attack an audience
with images and sounds of extreme violence. Goblin's unabashed
appropriation of Mike Oldfield's TUBULAR BELLS' irregular-time
riff is corny, cliched, corrupt - but its plain inappropriateness
to the scenes of terror it accompanies in DEEP RED's story of
childhood terror and sexual confusion is aptly unsettling.
SUSPIRIA
(1976) recapitulates the formulaic accoutrements of symphonic
rock (compound time signatures, ornate instrumentation, vainglorious
tone, melodramatic structure, self-aggrandising solos, etc.) yet
in its feverish simulation of the vocabulary, it somehow transcends
the dated conventions of the form. More than DEEP RED (which occasionally
affects jazz-fusion styling), SUSPIRIA salaciously degenerates
into atonal free-form passages which evoke a pap paganism that
creates some chilling moments of terror. The opening sequence
of SUSPIRIA is possibly one of the most wilfully perverse stagings
of apocalyptic violence committed to film. The biting creativity
with which the unseen killer murders one of the nubile dancers
at the Dance Academy nestled deep in Vienna's Black Forrest reflects
the morbid inventiveness with which Argento stages the feculent
event. The sequence - from the film's opening through its first
fifteen minutes - is incredulous, overblown, unremitting, illogical.
But there is a vicious knowingness in its staging, as if each
moment openly asks its audience "what would you feel if I showed
you this? And this? And more?". Argento's murderous gaze and psycho-sexual
camera work is matched by the hedonistic fever with which Goblin
rake over the cliches of symphonic rock, stoking them into an
overblown spectacle of operatic effect. While conservative critics
bemoan both the excessiveness of Italian exploitation cinema and
the numbing bombast of rock scores, Argento and Goblin collaborate
to create a potent, distasteful fusion of the two, blending their
co-existing strains of perversity.
As
producer of George Romero's DAWN OF THE DEAD (1979), Argento enlisted
Goblin to provide a typically pompous but powerful score. In contrast
to Argento's own fretful tempos, Goblin create a plodding, lumbering
main theme which perfectly fits the slow ebbs of massed zombies.
Fat drums, chunky bass, tubular bells, spaced-out synth chords
- the arrangement is a mutation of Black Sabbath's first LP and
Morricone's early spaghetti western scores. Inappropriately overstated
- maybe. Luridly stylish - definitely. Romero apparently preferred
the generic temp cues of which many Argento directed Goblin to
replace, indicating not simply artistic differences but a cultural
clash. Americans (and the English) for decades ridiculed Leone's
eclectic western's and Morricone's electric scores. Certainly,
the music of Goblin is a matter of taste: it is spicy, smelly,
saucy. It draws attention to itself, but when combined with visuals
which equally beg attention, the operatic effect of sensory overload
kicks in and the music's grotesque nature establishes it own dramatic
logic. To some degree, DAWN OF THE DEAD sits as a film in conflict,
due to a primary mismatch in audio-visual coding, but irony gurgles
noisily in Goblin's para-kitsch pseudo-Gothic musicalisation of
the deliriously utopian shopping mall.
Since
DAWN OF THE DEAD - and mostly due to the notoriety and infamy
of the Goblin/Argento collaborations - many volatile rock scores
have been based on similar Euro-Anglo schisms. Argento employed
Keith Emerson to score INFERNO (1980), after which Emerson scored
Lucio Fulci's MURDER ROCK (1984). Rick Wakeman scored Ulli Lommel's
THE BURNING (1980), and even Dino De Laurentis' penchant for rock
spectacularism aided in the selection of Toto to score David Lynch's
DUNE (1984). In reverse flow, Ennio Morricone has adopted Goblin's
stylistics on occasion, from his wildly 'fusion-esque' freak-out
for John Boorman's THE EXORCIST II: THE HERETIC (1977, covered
by Snakefinger on Chewing Hides The Sound, 1979) to the booming,
shuddering throb of Roberto Fainza's ORDER OF DEATH (1983, a rocked-up
reworking of Morricone's own VIOLENT CITY, 1970).
Goblin
and Argento are well overdue acknowledgment of their feisty contribution
to rock in the cinema - not merely as some raunchy dialect but
as an influential redefinition of rock's potential purpose and
consequent role on the film soundtrack. In a current climate where
film scores can be constructed as a polysemous patchwork of songs
from every historiographic niche without short-circuiting narrative
continuity, the often derided later films of Argento which feature
substantial sections composed by various ex-members of Goblin
- TENEBRAE (1982), PHENOMENA (1985), OPERA (1987), TRAUMA (19?)
- are refreshingly perplexing and joyfully disorienting. True
to the mythical outsider sentimentality of rock, Argento and Goblin
have consistently defied convention through an excessive regurgitation
of musical cliches. In doing so, they have collapsed the desperately
defined differences between 'song' and 'score' and placed themselves
outside of expected norms of cinematic composition.
