PORNOGRAPHIC MUSIC: Part 1
The Sound of Erotica
published in The Wire No. 174, August, 1998,
London
Muffled
grunts from the room next door. Metal springs squeak; wood bangs
against a wall. A woman's vocalizations flitter incomprehensibly
between pleasure and pain. The sounds of sex as heard by the acoustic
voyeur. But they could just as likely be the sounds in any gymnasium,
chiropractic clinic or medical centre. The body sonic is a blunt
instrument when engaged in physical extremities. It heaves, spits,
sighs, coughs, thumps and humps in an animalistic sonorum whose
baseness excites the pornographic imagination.
Music
is a different case all together. That couple next door will screw
to any music imaginable. From Oasis to Minnie Ripperton. From
The Mamas & The Papas to The Allan Parson Project. From FSOL
to Roy Wood's Wizard. No causal logic. No selective order. No
reasonable matching. Just the atmospheric noise of music to cover
and envelop the bodily noise of sex. Any music can accompany anyone's
sex. Any music can be rendered sexual when captured in the synaesthetic
realm of erogenous stimulation.
The
cinema subsequently has been affected by a perverse audio-visual
dilemma: what music should formally occupy the soundtrack in accompaniment
to the sounds and images of bodies having sex? Obviously, this
is a modern problem. Cinema (that is, the cinema which excludes
pornography) has only had to deal with this for the past three
to four decades. Prior to the 60s, sex was connoted by the mysterious
fade to black or the rapid shuttle to the lurid symbolism of fireworks
and crashing waves. The visualization of the sexual act thus necessitated
previously unimagined aural accompaniment. The resulting musical
scores have generated perplexing conventions that highlight the
fissures between the image track's conscious narration and the
soundtrack's liminal operation.
This
audio-visual dilemma of scoring the hitherto unseen is twofold.
Firstly, film music - being at the service of cinema's innate
conservatism - had to moralise the brute animalism of sex. While
the camera lens coldly captured the sexual act and caged it on
screen like a titillating, barbaric aberration, the music score
transmuted the physical, the tangible, the visceral, the sensual
into a narrow stream of humanist contemplation. Legitimate cinema
employs music - scored or as song selection - to provide commentary
and orient the act, providing justification for its very depiction.
That which appears pornographic is thereby naturalised under the
guise of beauty, nature, romance. In short, if there were no music,
we would be left with the vulgar soundtrack of the sonic body
operating at its base level.
Secondly,
film music has had to perform differently from the overall music
score which already would be humanising the film's drama. In other
words, if the score is already being high and mighty about people,
feelings, emotions, motivations, etc., then how does one signpost
a specific morality while showing images that clearly are privileged
as psycho-sexual stimuli - a nipple, some pubes, a tongue? Two
tendencies have been employed in the modern cinema to address
this issue: one is to highly poeticise the erotics of the sexual
act as sensual rather than aggressive; the other is to blatantly
ignore the sexual aura unleashed by sexually charged imagery.
We'll take these two tendencies separately.
The
poetic approach is marked by a general softening of musical style.
A good example is Francis Lai's score to Claude Lelouch's A MAN
AND A WOMAN (1966). Plenty of love-making with sub-Nouvelle Vague
visual affections is combined with the sensual bossa nova passages
by Lai as filtered through that semi-detached pop ballad style
in which the French excel. There is nothing overtly erotic in
the score, but its leanings toward 'cool' separate it from the
brassy arrangements whose origins lie in burlesque and vaudeville
stripper routines. The consequent feel of the music is somewhat
drained - like a post-coital ennui which alludes to sexual activity
without syncing to its more physical convulsions. The same musical
intonation is heard throughout much European cinema (home of the
infamous euphemism of 'adult/foreign' movie), reaching an apotheosis
with Gato Barbieri's theme for Bernado Bertolucci's LAST TANGO
IN PARIS (1973). There the saxophone of Gianni Oddi is as exhausted
as Brando himself: both breathe and heave in an aimless dance
of chromatic chord changes, circling round and lost in the heady
meaningless of life which finds comfort in anonymous sex.
Russ
Meyer's VIXEN (1968) - held as an instance of the pornographic
crossing into the mainstream with a large measure of strategic
success - features a score by Bill Loose that illustrates the
latter tendency of scoring. The music sounds like the archetypal
dentist's waiting room muzak. It contains no sexually symbolic
musical traits and even appears indifferent to the erotic scenes
themselves, which sit somewhere between camp and hysterical. The
effect is strange - watching bovine breasted women in showers,
lakes, fields and trucks while hearing music that seems to deny
the manifest sexuality bursting out on screen. The precise origins
of this indifference are hard to place - even harder to qualify.
It's almost as if the soundtrack is in denial of its imagery.
In a sense, film music is often engaged in such denial - trumpeting
hollow cliched heroics, orchestrating lush landscapes of blandness,
softly silencing graphic violence. Ignoring images of naked bodies
continues along similar lines.
Porn
film scores slip and slide between these two tendencies. Sometimes
their blatant disregard for combining appropriate music with their
ocular gynaecological pursuits renders their music surreal and
unsettling. Other times, their mock-Euro attributes characterize
them as desperate and deluded in their pretence to sensitivity
while hammering sexual gyrations with a cinematic sledge hammer.
Bizarrely, their scores co-opt legitimate cinema's humanising
and naturalising musical strategies - while clearly delivering
a type of content which legitimate cinema bars at all costs. One
wonders why porn doesn't go further and sono-musically shape its
narratives as violently and potently as it does visually. Furthermore,
one wonders why in fact music used to accompany sex scenes is
not ... sexy. Why it doesn't have a heady, vertiginous, dizzying
sense of being out of control and lost in the act. In the face
of a plethora of musics and songs which reek of hormonal chaos
and libidinal overload, one realizes that film music falls well
short of the mark when it come to providing sonically evocative
and musically inducing substance for the sexual act.
Searching
the history of film music for such possible moments, an unlikely
artefact is unearthed: Michel Legrand's theme for Robert Mulligan's
(check director) THE SUMMER OF '42. Superficially, it marries
the two tendencies of poetics and denial mentioned above. However
with skilful cine-music crafting, it perfectly narrates a material
sense of sexual arousal through its orchestration. The theme starts
with a blurred wavering of disembodied strings. No melody, not
even a key. This is flesh: pure, abstract, a field without boundaries.
Then a piano and harp tinkle the core melody - lightly, like the
first touch upon that expanse of horripilated flesh. Fuller orchestration
with violas and oboes as the flesh becomes body, and skin warms
to the touch, falling into tactile sympathy with the moving hand.
Only then does rhythm unfold - a light combo of softly played
drums and electric bass. The rhythm engorges the body and a contra
melody played by French horns signals a triumphant union. As cheeks
flush and blood courses through veins to erogenous centres, strings
soar high and the grand piano hysterically moves up and down the
keys like Liberace mimicking those crashing waves. A final climactic
peak of volume and pitch, and there you have your Easy Listening
cum shot.
Michel
Legrand certainly typifies the European para-porno-poetic approach.
His landmark work in musically narrating a series of sexual euphemisms
in Jacques Demy's THE UMBRELLAS OF CHERBOURG (1968) is a distinctive
reversal of the late 60s attempt to reveal and manifest sexuality.
Legrand always chose to sublimate overt sexuality within the harmonic
structuring of his melodies and their erotic orchestrations, thereby
aligning himself less with brash symphonic romanticism and more
with the quietened and diffused erotics of muzak. There isn't
any sex as such in THE SUMMER OF '42, but - as a movie about the
memory of first time sex - it exhibits an interesting technique
in averting and displacing sexual aura around the on screen images.
Throughout the 80s and 90s there have been many movies about sex.
Defiant, up front, taboo breaking. But hardly any have anything
interesting to say musically short of reverting to bump &
grind table-top hi-tech rock (which is actually a return to the
brassy burlesque arrangements that 60s and 70s cinema attempted
to break away from). That is, apart from Howard Shore's score
to David Cronenberg's CRASH (1996).
CRASH
is a complex film in its choice to depict polysexual states and
sensibilities. Counter to most options picked up in both legitimate
and porn cinema, CRASH is concerned with moving past the body,
beyond its organic states and conditions into the uncharted realm
of paraphilia: that state, literally, 'beyond love', where the
erotic is displaced and the sexual reconfigured by the most unlikely
of triggers and stimuli. This means that traditional images of
the body on screen are placed there primarily for the purpose
of moving through them. Shore's score is similarly deceptive:
it appears to have a slight modern tonality on its shimmering,
amplified surface, what with electric guitars combined with harp
and prepared piano. But Shore is more concerned with composing
appropriately for the polysexual condition of CRASH's story -
of transcending the obviousness of 'radical' tonalities. He splits
the orchestration into two sections: the guitars and the woodwinds.
Throughout the film, the central theme literally morphs between
the two, so that the woodwinds remind one of the guitars no longer
present and vice versa. This absenting of musical texture dryly
complements the emptying of meaning in the conventional sexual
act. As the innocent James Spader wafts into a new terrain of
sexuality, bodies appear to be as they were before, but they now
contain a distinct otherness. They shine like chrome; smell like
vinyl; feel like leather; sound like an engine. For just as the
history of film scoring for the sexual act is a history of covering
bodily noise and creating a surfeit of unnecessary narration to
compensate for the embarrassing images shown, Howard Shore's score
to CRASH is a genteel acceptance of the aural fading of that same
musical cloaking.
