Soundtrack Available: Essays on Film and Popular Music

by Arthur Knight

Overview

From the silent era to the present day, popular music has been a key component of the film experience. Yet there has been little serious writing on film soundtracks that feature popular music. Soundtrack Available fills this gap, as its contributors provide detailed analyses of individual films as well as historical overviews of genres, styles of music, and approaches to film scoring.
With a cross-cultural emphasis, the contributors focus on movies that use popular songs from a variety of genres, including country, bubble-gum pop, disco, classical, jazz, swing, French cabaret, and showtunes. The films discussed range from silents to musicals, from dramatic and avant-garde films to documentaries in India, France, England, Australia, and the United States. The essays examine both "nondiegetic" music in film-the score playing outside the story space, unheard by the characters, but no less a part of the scene from the perspective of the audience-and "diegetic" music-music incorporated into the shared reality of the story and the audience. They include analyses of music written and performed for films, as well as the now common practice of scoring a film with pre-existing songs. By exploring in detail how musical patterns and structures relate to filmic patterns of narration, character, editing, framing, and mise-en-scene, this volume demonstrates that pop music is a crucial element in the film experience. It also analyzes the life of the soundtrack apart from the film, tracing how popular music circulates and acquires new meanings when it becomes an official soundtrack.

Contributors. Rick Altman, Priscilla Barlow, Barbara Ching, Kelley Conway, Corey Creekmur, Krin Gabbard, Jonathan Gill, Andrew Killick, Arthur Knight, Adam Knee, Jill Leeper, Neepa Majumdar, Allison McCracken, Murray Pomerance, Paul Ramaeker, Jeff Smith, Pamela Robertson Wojcik, Nabeel Zuberi

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780822327974
Publisher:	Duke University Press
Publication date:	12/03/2001
Pages:	504
Product dimensions:	6.12(w) x 9.18(h) x 1.31(d)

About the Author

Pamela Robertson Wojcik is Associate Professor of Film, TV, and Theatre at the University of Notre Dame and the author of Guilty Pleasures: Feminist Camp from Mae West to Madonna, also published by Duke University Press.

Arthur Knight is Associate Professor of American Studies and English at the College of William and Mary and the author of Dis/Integrating the Musical: African American Musical Performance and American Musical Film, 1927-1959, forthcoming from Duke.

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SOUNDTRACK AVAILABLE

Essays on Film and Popular Music

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DUKE UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © 2001 Duke University Press
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8223-2800-1

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Chapter One

Overture

ARTHUR KNIGHT & PAMELA ROBERTSON WOJCIK

I think we are starting to think in soundtracks.-Alan Rudolph

Increasingly, it seems, we think in soundtracks. Popular music, in particular, governs our thoughts. Filmmakers, whether due to their own inclinations or market demands, conceptualize scenes in relation to popular song, and the mixing board becomes a storyboard. As viewers, we recall movies through song. Who can any longer hear "Stuck in the Middle with You" without seeing Mr. Blonde's chilling dance of torture in Reservoir Dogs (1991)? Songs used in films recall us to our past, or they conjure up a past we never experienced and, through the familiar language of popular music, make it ours. Witness the spate of seventies pop soundtracks, whether for films set in the seventies-such as Dazed and Confused (1993), Boogie Nights (1997), and Dick (1999)-or for films set in the present but with nostalgic or deliberately outdated camp soundtracks-as in Reservoir Dogs (1994), Muriel's Wedding (1994), or The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of The Desert (1994). In the worst cases, the songs are inserted cynically and clumsily, booming over montage sequences and credits as if they arePavlovian advertisements for synergy. In the best cases, the soundtrack is a product of thought, and, more than mere triggers for soundtrack sales, the songs become essential components of the film experience.

Consider the soundtrack for Wayne's World (1992). The film includes thirty different songs, ranging from Tchaikovsky's "Romeo and Juliet: Fantasy Overture" to the theme from Mission Impossible, and including music by Jimi Hendrix, Eric Clapton, the Red Hot Chili Peppers, and Alice Cooper. Song cues move seamlessly between diegetic and nondiegetic, subjective and objective. Often, songs cue us to characters' subjectivity, as when we hear Tchaikovsky as an internal diegetic soundover for Garth's fantasy girl, Donna Dixon. In a similar moment, "Dream Weaver" subjectively marks Wayne's experience of love at first sight. The theme from Mission Impossible plays nondiegetically as ironic commentary on Garth's self-perception as he prepares to avenge a bully by strapping on a high-powered stun gun.

The characters in Wayne's World frequently perform with the music in what could be seen as a reinvention of the musical. For instance, Garth lip-synchs "Foxy Lady" in a subjective fantasy when he imagines himself seducing his fantasy girl rather than just dreaming about her. Wayne sings "Happy Birthday to You" in a parody of Marilyn Monroe's famous Madison Square Garden birthday serenade for JFK, and Garth whistles the theme from Star Trek as he and Wayne watch airplanes taking off. In a moment of pure postmodern referentiality, the film launches Wayne and Garth into a full-blown imitation of the opening credit sequence for Laverne and Shirley when they see a road sign for Milwaukee. And, in one of the film's most memorable moments, Wayne, Garth, and friends sing-a-long with head-banging abandon to Queen's "Bohemian Rhapsody" as it plays on their AMC Pacer's 8-track tape deck.

Both by virtue of its postmodern credentials and the phenomenal sales of its soundtrack, Wayne's World may be a particularly privileged example of the successful soundtrack. It is, however, by no means unprecedented. As Jeff Smith's The Sounds of Commerce details, Wayne's World has many varied antecedents, including such notable commercial successes as the soundtracks for A Man and a Woman (1966), A Star Is Born (1976), Saturday Night Fever (1977), Fast Times at Ridgemont High (1982), and Pretty in Pink (1986). In stylistic and aesthetic terms, Wayne's World exists alongside such critically acclaimed compilation scores as Martin Scorsese's Mean Streets (1973) and Goodfellas (1990), Spike Lee's Do the Right Thing (1989), or Quentin Tarantino's Pulp Fiction (1994). These scores have their roots in works of the American avant-garde like Kenneth Anger's Scorpio Rising (1964) or Bruce Connor's Marilyn Times Five (1973). Thinking beyond compilation scores, the popular score can trace its family tree to European directors like Jean-Luc Godard, Wim Wenders, and Rainer Werner Fassbinder who, rather than simply spotting songs for soundtrack sales, create various alienation effects through their use of global popular music.

The popular score is not, as many seem to suggest, exclusively a post-1950s, rock-and-roll-era phenomenon. Popular music of all kinds has been a crucial component of film from the beginning. It reaches back to the silent era, when phonographs, player pianos, or live musicians would accompany films, and early exhibitors would include song slides, "musical illustration" films, live singers, and sing-a-longs as key elements of the film program. The silent film industry even had its own brand of synergy as exhibitors sold sheet music for movie tie-ins. To accompany feature films, live orchestras would play familiar standards in a kind of proto-compilation score. In the case of The Birth of a Nation (1915) D. W. Griffith specified what the musical accompaniment should be and so audiences heard such familiar folk and patriotic songs as "Dixie," "Home Sweet Home," and "Bonnie Blue Flag" along with Wagner's "The Ride of the Valkyries" and, from Grieg's "Peer Gynt" suite, "In the Hall of the Mountain King."

In the classical Hollywood era, of course, the musical synchronized-or in industry parlance, "married"-the sounds of Tin Pan Alley, Broadway, and Harlem to film. While musicals emphasized singing and dancing as key components of the mise-en-scène, other films incorporated musical performance consistently but seemingly transparently. To fully appreciate the expressive weight of such transparent uses of popular music in Hollywood film, imagine Casablanca (1942) without Dooley Wilson's repeated performances of "As Time Goes By." Or consider what a Marlene Dietrich or Mae West film would be if they didn't include song. Beyond these specialty numbers by musical performers, nonsingers too were somehow always called upon to sing in Hollywood. Recall Jimmy Stewart's drunken crooning in It's a Wonderful Life (1946) or Katherine Hepburn and Cary Grant singing "I Can't Give You Anything But Love" to a leopard in Bringing Up Baby (1938).

Popular music becomes a key aural component of the mise-en-scène in genre films. The western, for instance, seamlessly integrates scenes of country dances and cowboys strumming guitars. In a John Ford western like My Darling Clementine (1946), for instance, the dance takes on ritualistic significance. In a different vein, film noir seems to take any excuse it can to enter a jazz joint or a nightclub, giving rise to such musical moments as the wild orgiastic drum solos of Elisha Cook Jr. in Phantom Lady (1946). A screwball comedy might include a song for comedic effect, as in The Awful Truth (1937) when Ralph Bellamy bellows "Home on the Range" or Irene Dunne, impersonating a tacky southern showgirl, sings the hilariously inappropriate, pseudosexy "My Dreams Are Gone with the Wind." In various genres, the piano bar has provided the setting for romance and, crucially, enabled African American specialty acts to steal into nonmusical films. Remember Humphrey Bogart and Gloria Grahame listening to Hadda Brooks at a chic piano bar in In a Lonely Place (1954), or Rock Hudson and Doris Day singing "Roly Poly" with Perry Blackwell in Pillow Talk (1959).

These examples signal the degree to which film has incorporated popular music and the variety of roles it has assigned this music. In addition to serving as nondiegetic score, popular music enters the soundtrack by way of musical performance, source radios, and record players. In films, people sing, sing-along, lip-synch, dance, and play to popular music. These examples also highlight how wide-ranging and flexible the broad category of popular music is. It includes folk, country, Tin Pan Alley, Broadway, jazz, disco, pop, rock-and-roll, rap, selections and adaptations of "classical" music, and more. We-both film scholars and music scholars-need to think more deeply about soundtracks to consider fully the range and variety of popular musical moments in film. Rather than erect a false barrier between musical and nonmusical films, or between post-1950s compilation soundtracks and diegetic performance in nonmusical film, we need to consider how these various practices are related. Instead of dismissing popular soundtracks as signs of cinema's waning integrity, or the public's being suckered by synergistic marketing practices, we need to consider how fundamental popular music is to the cinematic experience and, often, how fabulous.

Soundtrack Available seeks to capture this broader sense of pop music's relationship to film. The impetus for this volume came from a belief that most writing on film music has not adequately described popular music's role in film or people's experience of it (in the theater or outside). We believe, nonetheless, that serious thinking about soundtracks-in their many varied manifestations-is crucial to our understanding and experience of film and music.

Heard Melodies

Until recently, film music criticism has largely ignored popular music in favor of analyzing the classical nondiegetic film score. Film music histories, whether coffee table books for buffs or serious academic works by musicologists, have tended to treat film music history as a series of great works by great composers. Typical in this regard are Mark Evans's, Soundtrack: The Music of the Movies, and Roy M. Prendergrast's Film Music: A Neglected Art. Emphasizing Hollywood's debt to Romantic traditions, these works, for the most part, quarantine film music away from film and focus on presumably pure musical patterns and structures without any consideration of how those patterns and structures are placed in film or how they relate to filmic patterns of narration, character, editing, framing, or mise-en-scène.

Since the late 1980s, film theorists and critics have increasingly turned their attention to the film score, thus avoiding some of the pitfalls musicologists face by emphasizing the nondiegetic score's importance for film narrative. The major texts in this vein are Claudia Gorbman's groundbreaking Unheard Melodies: Narrative Film Music, Caryl Flinn's Strains of Utopia: Gender, Nostalgia, and Hollywood Film Music, Kathryn Kalinak's Settling the Score: Music and the Classical Hollywood Film, and Royal S. Brown's Overtones and Undertones: Reading Film Music. Approaching film music from within a film studies perspective, these theorists have written about the semiotics and ideology of film music, stressing its power to simultaneously be "invisible" or "unheard," produce spectacle, and enhance the narrative in its utopian or affective dimension. This approach, however, still tends to laud the work of a coterie of great composers, like Bernard Hermann, Max Steiner, and David Raksin, and to have an auteurist bias in its selection of films. In addition, most work on classical nondiegetic scores ignores the nondiegetic soundtrack's existence outside the cinema-its circulation through phonograph recordings, sheet music sales, Academy Awards, and so forth. Overall, then, rather than simply electing to discuss the Romantic tradition in film scoring instead of popular traditions, this work privileges the Romantic nondiegetic film score over popular traditions in a familiar high/low split.

In part, this work on the classical nondiegetic score, especially in its early manifestations, needs to be understood as a response to the effusive fan discourse that grew up around the Hollywood musical, a genre dedicated to ensuring-to invert Claudia Gorbman's famous and influential formulation-that its melodies were emphatically heard. The problems with the musical, from the perspectives of many of its critics, were that it was too clearly tied to its theatrical forebears and that it did not respect the apparent "natural" primacy of the visual over the acoustic experience of cinema. In Gorbman's more subtle analysis, "songs require narrative to cede to spectacle, for it seems that lyrics and action compete for attention." What Gorbman doesn't say is that for many critics the problem of the musical spectacle is that it is either not spectacular enough (a singing head) or it is too spectacular (Busby Berkeley) when considered against the classical-and classically scored-narrative cinema.

Roughly congruent with the rise of film scholarly work on the classical score, which was one flavor of reaction to "low" Hollywood, came a wave of serious film scholarship on the musical genre, which worked to complicate fan discourse while still taking the musical seriously. The key works in this wave were Rick Altman's edited collection, Genre: The Musical, Jane Feuer's The Hollywood Musical, Altman's The American Film Musical, and Gerald Mast's Can't Help Singin': The American Musical on Stage and Screen. Together these books are the first works of film criticism to examine popular music in film, and in important regards they are a cornerstone of Soundtrack Available. They opened the door for many of us to finally hear the movies we cared about.

At the same time, this work on the musical developed across the 1980s and is limited, from our present vantage, by being produced as the musical was becoming the music video and by having to do the hard, ground-clearing work of, in Feuer's formulation, "peel[ing] away the tinsel ... [to] find the real tinsel underneath" the genre. With the partial exception of Mast's book, the work on the musical focuses on the genre's structuring tension between narrative and musicalized spectacle and it skirts specific, extended analyses of music. Because of this focus, musicals that at least tend toward formal "integration" are favored objects of analysis, displacing more fragmented, less narrative-driven films like the extraordinarily popular This Is the Army (1943) and less fully musicalized films like She Done Him Wrong (1933). In the paradoxical critical archeology of the musical, many of the cultural (and scholarly) values, like coherence and inflexible hierarchies, that the genre seems to abjure, sneak in the back way. For instance, Mast's book does spend considerable time with the popular music of the musicals and with the notion of popular music's portability and multiple media, but opts to tame pop's profusion through recourse to a familiar "masterworks" schema organized around composers and lyricists.

A pair of more recent works, Jonathan Romney and Adrian Wootton's collection, Celluloid Jukebox: Popular Music and the Movies since the 50s, and our contributor Jeff Smith's The Sound of Commerce: Marketing Popular Film Music, both served as inspirations for Soundtrack Available, and this book may be profitably read and used in the classroom with one or both. Both books extend the work on both the classical narrative score and the musical by focusing on the nondiegetic popular music score. For its part, Celluloid Jukebox displays the virtues and limits of the program catalog, which was its original function. On the one hand, it contains accessible overviews of a number of pop-rock film subgenres, an interesting filmography, and helpful interviews with film directors about how they conceptualize their uses of popular music. On the other hand, it is still entirely focused on the United States and England, on rock and roll, and on the near-present. By contrast, Smith's excellent study offers a much broader sense of the popular in popular music, a useful history of the film and music industry nexus in the United States, and particularly detailed and sensitive close readings of three crucial pop scores. Nonetheless, a single volume cannot cover the panoply of popular music's wedding with popular cinema, especially in that relationship's full historical scope and international reach.

(Continues...)

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Table of Contents

List of Illustrations

Acknowledgments

Overture / Arthur Knight and Pamela Robertson Wojcik

I. Popular vs. “Serious”

Cinema and Popular Song: The Lost Tradition / Rick Altman

Surreal Symphonies: “L’Age d’or and the Discreet Charms of Classical Music / Priscilla Barlow

“The Future’s Not Ours to See”: Song, Singer, and Labryinth in Hitchcock’s The Man Who Knew Too Much / Murray Pomerance

“You Think They Call Us Plastic Now . . . “: The Monkees and Head / Paul B. Ramaeker

II. Singing Stars

Real Men Don’t Sing Ballads: The Radio Crooner in Hollywood, 1929–1933 / Allison McCracken

Flower of the Asphalt: The Chanteuse Realiste in 1930s French Cinema / Kelley Conway

The Embodied Voice: Song Sequences and Stardom in Popular Hindi Cinema / Neepa Majumdar

III. Music as Ethnic Marker

Music as Ethnic Marker in Film: The “Jewish” Case / Andrew P. Killick

Sounding the American Heart: Cultural Politics, Country Music, and Contemporary American Film / Barbara Ching

Crossing Musical Borders: The Soundtrack for Touch of Evil / Jill Leeper

Documented/Documentary Asians: Gurinder Chadha’s I’m British But . . . and the Musical Mediation of Sonic and Visual Identities / Nabeel Zuberi

IV. African American Identities

Class Swings: Music, Race, and Social Mobility in Broken Strings / Adam Knee

Borrowing Black Masculinity: The Role of Johnny Hartman in The Bridges of Madison County / Krin Gabbard

V. Case Study: Porgy and Bess

It Ain’t Necessarily So That It Ain’t Necessarily So: African American Recordings of Porgy and Bess as Film and Cultural Criticism / Arthur Knight

“Hollywood Has Taken On a New Color”: The Yiddish Blackface of Samuel Goldwyn’s Porgy and Bess / Jonathan Gill

VI. Contemporary Compilations

Picturizing American Cinema: Hindi Film Songs and the Last Days of Genre / Corey K. Creekmur

Popular Songs and Comic Allusion in Contemporary Cinema / Jeff Smith

VII. Gender and Technology

The Girl and the Phonograph; or the Vamp and the Machine Revisited / Pamela Robertson Wojcik

Bibliography

Contributors

Index

Editorial Reviews

"Soundtrack Available represents a great leap forward in the analysis of film soundtracks. It is a smart, lively book that moves nicely between the detailed analysis of individual cases and broader, theoretical issues. The editors are to be commended for a collection which covers so many historical periods and national cinemas, and for staking out exciting new directions for scholarship. At the same time, this is a compelling, refreshingly jargon-free read for the non-specialist interested in film, music, or media."--Will Straw, McGill University

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