On the second-last day of
school this year, I showed my grade six class American Graffiti. Pop
music and film already exert some influence on most of my 29 kids, though
clearly not as much as television, the Internet, or Digimons. My hope was that
this would be the first time they'd experience pop music used expressively in a
film (as opposed to merely decoratively or cross-promotionally, i.e., the Nine
Inch Nails/Red Hot Chili Peppers/Busta Rhymes kind of soundtrack with which
they're familiar), and that a few might be as permanently affected as I was at
their age when I sat through American Graffiti twice one summer
afternoon in 1974. If such an awakening did take place, those affected were
pretty quiet about it; some fidgeted, most looked bored, and the only time they
got into the spirit of things was when Paul LeMat barreled into the parking lot
to save Charles Martin Smith from a beating. For those 30 seconds, my guess was
that they were responding to what seemed a little like a Jackie Chan film.
American Graffiti appeared more or less simultaneously with Mean
Streets in 1973, and even though the style and sensibility of their
directors are worlds removed from each other, the two films are closer than you
might think in the way their characters relate to pop music. The music in American
Graffiti and Mean Streets primarily belongs to George Lucas and
Martin Scorsese; characters make occasional reference to what they're
hearing--David Proval's insistence on "only oldies tonight" in Mean
Streets, LeMat's dismissive preference for Buddy Holly over the Beach Boys
in American Graffiti--but for all intents and purposes, the soundtracks
express the tastes, personalities, and autobiographies of Lucas and Scorsese
much more than that of their characters.
In Mean Streets,
this seems especially obvious. When De Niro makes his flashy entrance into a
bar accompanied by "Jumpin' Jack Flash," the effect is virtuosic, but
it's highly likely that Johnny Boy has only the dimmest awareness of who the
Rolling Stones are. Even Charlie (Harvey Keitel), through whose ambivalent eyes
we're seeing Johnny Boy, is more a product of the soundtrack's Italian
standards than he is of Beggars Banquet. And the one time that Johnny
Boy responds directly to what we're hearing--when he does his little spastic
dance outside the getaway car to the Miracles' "Mickey's
Monkey"--you're again aware that he's not someone who'd ever actually own
a Smokey Robinson record, much less think, talk, or develop any kind of an
opinion whatsoever about Smokey Robinson. The Miracles, the Rolling Stones, and
to a lesser degree the doo-wop and girl-group music that takes up the bulk of Mean
Streets' soundtrack, are there because Scorsese wants them to be there. The
decision of whether to use "Jumpin' Jack Flash" or "Street
Fighting Man," for instance, is one of infinite meaning and nuance for
Scorsese, the difference between the "everyday inferno" (Pauline
Kael's words) he's after, and the easy period-identification that would be
enough for a lesser director. For his characters, though, such distinctions are
nonexistent: it's all just amorphous background din.
American Graffiti, where the music would seem to be of paramount
importance to Lucas' cross-section of seven California teenagers, is somewhat
trickier. Every kid listens to Wolfman Jack's radio show incessantly, they go
to their school homecoming and dance to "At the Hop" and "The
Stroll," and their dress, mannerisms, and talk reflect the teenage worlds
vividly mapped out in songs by Chuck Berry, Eddie Cochran, and Dion DiMucci.
For all of that, however, pop music often doesn't have any more of an emotional
pull on Lucas' nascent surfers and hippies than it does on Scorsese's low-rent
hoods--less, actually. Do Richard Dreyfuss' Curt and Ronnie Howard's Steve seem
like pop obsessives, the kind of characters who'd mark the events of their
lives by specific songs heard in specific situations, who'd look to pop music
for a deeper understanding of themselves, who'd maybe even romantically (and
foolishly) weigh a life decision against a line from a favourite song? To me,
no, they're too level-headed, and so is Cindy Williams' Laurie. (LeMat, Smith,
and Candy Clark, maybe; Mackenzie Phillips, definitely.) The music drives the
narrative forward--the Monotones' "Book of Love" when Phillips flees
LeMat's car, Booker T.'s "Green Onions" as an omen of disaster--and
it routinely mirrors what characters are feeling, but again, it's first and
foremost a directorial device. You're hearing what's inside George Lucas' head,
not what's in Curt's or Steve's.
I've singled out American
Graffiti and Mean Streets because together they set a framework
within which most of the worthwhile pop-driven films of the past 25 years can
be located: a director visualizes a particular scene or sequence through the
filter of some favourite piece of music, and the music in turn is used to shape
and choreograph the scene in a way that is meant to resonate deeply. Generally,
the song has only the most incidental, historical, or casual connections to the
characters on hand, and sometimes not even that. This holds true for Creedence
Clearwater Revival's "Fortunate Son" in Jonathan Demme's Melvin
and Howard (Paul LeMat's Melvin Dumar is the very definition of who John
Fogerty was trying to find a voice for, but, for that very reason, Dumar
himself wouldn't know the first thing about CCR); the Byrds and the Turtles in
Jonathan Kaplan's excellent Heart Like a Wheel (housewife-with-kids
Shirley Muldowney's sole connection to music is the country & western her
dad used to sing for her; the Byrds and the Turtles come out of Kaplan's life);
and GoodFellas (the slow-motion shot of De Niro underneath Cream's
"Sunshine of Your Love" gets to the core of Jimmy Conway's spiritual
rot like nothing else in the film, even though Jimmy himself couldn't possibly
be any more removed from the world inhabited by Cream). The same dynamic is
evident in the more recent mastery of Boogie Nights (where Paul Thomas
Anderson's porn-happy ensemble essentially has the same relationship to disco
that American Graffiti's teenagers have to rock 'n' roll: music's a
plaything, an ever-present ambience that fills the space around them and gives
them something to dance to, but it's far from the central fact of anybody's
life) and Rushmore (Jason Schwartzman's Max Fischer is like one of Pete
Townshend's misfit heroes come to life, but Max's own tastes are better
represented by the cheesy seduction tape he plays for Ms. Cross than the Who,
Kinks, and Creation songs Wes Anderson chose for Rushmore).
In each case, there's a
disconnect between the film's characters and its soundtrack, a pattern that
reaches its logical conclusion, at once comical and hypnotic, in Lars von
Trier's Breaking the Waves. Here, the narrative is literally stopped at
various points for a series of static landscape shots underneath a progression
of 1970s art-glam songs (David Bowie, Jethro Tull, Roxy Music). I suppose
someone could develop a reasonable case for how these songs are intricately
linked to the psyches of von Trier's characters, but to me their inclusion is
much more easily explained: they're the director's favourite songs, and he was
going to get them into his film no matter what. If von Trier had instead been
directing The First Wives Club, I'm almost willing to bet that the same
soundtrack would have been part of the package.
There are exceptions in
these films and others--stray moments when a character reveals a deeper
attachment to whatever music's playing in the background, when ownership of the
soundtrack passes from director to character. Towards the end of Boogie
Nights, in the celebrated firecracker/"Sister Christian"
sequence, there's a close-up of Mark Wahlberg's Dirk Diggler as his attention
shifts from the surrounding mayhem to the lyrics of Rick Springfield's
"Jessie's Girl" from one of Rahad Jackson's "awesome mix
tapes." Dirk loses himself in the song, gets caught up in the way
Springfield tells the story of Dirk's own feelings for Julianne Moore's Amber
Waves, and the trace of a smile starts to cross his face. It's a profound pop-music
moment, the best cinematic translation I've ever encountered of an old Steely
Dan lyric: "All night long, we sang that stupid song/And every word we
sang I knew was true." Anderson went on to give his characters an even
greater emotional stake in Magnolia's soundtrack during the great
"Wise Up" montage.
Three recent films have
appeared that may or may not signal a new kind of pop-music movie, one in which
the soundtrack is less in service of a director's personality and is more
intimately connected with the thoughts, actions, and aspirations of the film's
characters--in short, where characters either talk directly about the music we
hear, ruminating on its place in their lives or using it as a sounding board
for their theories about the world, or, in one extraordinary instance,
consciously choosing soundtrack music that is going to speak for them. The
Virgin Suicides, High Fidelity, and American Psycho are very
different films in terms of tone and genre, yet their soundtracks all feel like
clear departures from the Scorsese/Lucas-influenced style of the past
quarter-century.
Mary Harron's American
Psycho is the weakest of the three, a heavy-handed art-splatter film whose
one idea, that the materialistic excesses of the Reagan era produced monsters
in our midst (with Reagan himself, predictably enough, dangled out there as the
biggest monster of them all), was handled with more wit and economy in TV's Family
Ties. That aside, Harron sticks close to the digressions and detours of
Bret Easton Ellis's novel, preserving for us the bizarre juxtaposition of
Christian Bale's Patrick Bateman expounding earnestly on the significance of
Huey Lewis, Robert Palmer, and Phil Collins just before putting his victims out
of their misery in more ways than one. Speaking as someone who worked at a
record store during the summer of 1986, Ellis's intuitive grasp of the music
which came to define that precise moment in pop history is flawless. Lewis,
Palmer, and Collins, along with maybe Lionel Richie and Billy Ocean, are locked
into place as surely as Bateman himself--weird, immaculate, anonymous spaces
that still linger. Mary Harron's musical voice can be found in I Shot Andy
Warhol and old issues of Punk magazine; American Psycho's
soundtrack is meticulously and presciently programmed by Bateman, as precise a
pop critic as he is serial killer.
Bateman's Top-40
monologues are an opportune time to bring up Quentin Tarantino, whose most
famous musical set piece, the Stealer's Wheel scene from Reservoir Dogs,
would fit comfortably into American Psycho. Tarantino is something of a
bridge between the Scorsese/Lucas tradition and the recent blip of
character-driven soundtracks. Unlike Scorsese's hoods, Tarantino's characters
reveal an intellectual, if not always emotional, attachment to pop music: observe
the Madonna roundtable and Chris Penn's close analysis of "The Night the
Lights Went Out in Georgia" in Reservoir Dogs, or Sam Jackson
trading thoughts on the Delfonics with Robert Forster in Jackie Brown.
In the first two cases, it's hard to hear the talk that accompanies the music
as coming from anyone other than Tarantino himself. When Mr. Brown and Mr. Blue
start dissecting "Like a Virgin," it's like a great in-joke on the
gulf between Jimmy Conway and Cream in GoodFellas--the words are
Tarantino's, not Mr. Brown's, and they carry about as much spiritual weight as
Homer Simpson wistfully pining for the bygone days of Supertramp. But in Jackie
Brown, you really do hear the Delfonics through the ears of Forster and Pam
Grier, signalling a move from Tarantino to his characters as the controlling
sensibility.
There's probably more talk
about pop music in High Fidelity than in any narrative film ever made,
much of it lifted verbatim from Nick Hornby's novel. Too much talk,
sometimes--after a thrillingly resonant opening, "You're Gonna Miss
Me" blaring over a close-up of a spinning 45, the music drops out and John
Cusack needlessly starts explaining what the Thirteenth Floor Elevators'
monument to spite and self-pity has already made perfectly clear. Far from
channeling its characters and its music onto two separate tracks--with the
narrative looking after the former and the director in charge of the latter--High
Fidelity immerses Cusack and his record-store buddies in the daily rituals,
idiosyncrasies, and private enthusiasms that grow out of a full-fledged pop
obsession. Sometimes the surfeit of detail works fine: You could see High
Fidelity six times and still have fun scanning the frame for familiar album
covers, and the one time when the record store's busy and we hop from fragment
to fragment of overheard conversation--Stiff Little Fingers, Blonde on
Blonde, Psychocandy, the Beta Band--director Stephen Frears lowers
the volume on Cusack a bit and lets the film find its own rhythm. In the end,
however, the movie has all the surface noise of Hornby's novel without the
underlying melancholy.
Sofia Coppola's The
Virgin Suicides is pitched far away from High Fidelity's esoteric
clutter, but its austerity and restraint are deceptive: no matter how
encyclopedic Cusack's pop-music I.Q. is in High Fidelity, or how much
his record collection dwarfs the solitary milk crate owned by Kirsten Dunst's
Lux in The Virgin Suicides, it's Coppola's film that comes closer to
capturing from the inside the experience of what it's like to give part of your
life over to pop music--closer, maybe, than any film ever has. In Dazed and
Confused, an earlier version of growing up in the '70s, Richard Linklater's
teenagers seemed barely cognizant of the Foghat and Edgar Winter that played
non-stop on the radio as they drove around town. Linklater had the songs down
cold, but I only rarely sensed that any of them meant anything to the
kids--whatever feeling of kinship I took away were for Linklater, who clearly
shares some biography with me, not for his characters. The Virgin Suicides
uses about one-seventh the amount of music heard in Dazed and Confused,
but every second registers. Sometimes, like with the incredible introduction of
Trip Fontane to Heart's "Magic Man," Coppola sticks close to
Scorsese: pick the right song, play it loud and let it play, and let the music
do the rest. Even there, though, "Magic Man" pointedly speaks for all
the girls hanging off their lockers and swooning as Trip walks down the hall,
so when "Crazy on You" accompanies Lux's and Trip's seismic first
kiss soon after, it's as if Heart has been officially designated as a talisman
to the kids, something that closes off their world to outsiders. From there
it's a short step to the homecoming dance, where Electric Light Orchestra's
"Strange Magic," 10cc's "I'm Not in Love," and Styx's
"Come Sail Away" speak a secret language of longing and desire
understood immediately by anyone who went to high school at the time. Which
would not, significantly, include Sofia Coppola--I haven't read the source
novel for The Virgin Suicides, from which I take it some of the songs
are lifted intact, but in any case the music is wholly an extension of the
characters, not Coppola (who was five years old at the time).
All of this serves as
prelude to the fallout from the dance. First, Mrs. Lisbon's record-burning
edict, the first time in the movie one of the daughters is forced to articulate
the role that pop music plays in her life. It's important that Mrs. Lisbon's ultimate
punishment should target Lux's record collection: as Lux clings to her milk
crate to the point of being dragged down the stairs behind it, the same music
that has already been established as a binding force among the film's teenagers
is now moved into the realm of the purely personal, the realm of the pop
obsessive. The sight of a record (any record) going up in flames might not
resonate like the sled in Citizen Kane, but to anybody who collects
vinyl it's a disturbing image nonetheless. (For a whole gallery of traumatized
record collectors, see Alan Zweig's recent documentary Vinyl.)
Finally, there's what I've
come to think of as the playing-records-over-the-phone sequence. I'd place it
alongside the Copa entrance in GoodFellas (to the Crystals' "Then
He Kissed Me"), the pool party in Boogie Nights (Eric Burdon's
"Spill the Wine"), and Max's extracurricular resume in Rushmore
(the Creation's "Making Time") as the scene against which all pop
cinema should be measured. For no apparent reason other than the simple truth
that there's nothing one can say that hasn't been said with perfect eloquence
somewhere in a pop song, the Lisbon girls and their worshipful chorus of boy
admirers renew contact by playing records to each other over the phone. The
songs are carefully chosen and a story emerges. The boys lead with Todd
Rundgren's "Hello It's Me," a smile and a new beginning; the girls
respond with Gilbert O'Sullivan's "Alone Again, Naturally," which
talks of suicide. The boys come back with the Bee Gees' "Run to Me,"
an intimation of safety and acceptance; the girls promptly cut them off with
Carole King's "So Far Away," leaving only distance and resignation. I
might have extended the scene to find room for Badfinger's "Day After
Day" and Harry Nilsson's "Without You," but otherwise,
perfection. Coppola takes one of the most basic instincts of pop fandom, the
desire to share your obsessions with the world--"Hey, you've got to hear
this"--and retells the film in miniature.
Coppola, who like most
directors her age has been influenced to one degree or another by music videos,
suggests a new kind of synthesis for pop cinema: a combination of Scorsese's
dazzle, Lucas' command of period, a complex and carefully developed affinity
between character and soundtrack, and something more elusive--an intuitive feel
for the kind of atmospherics needed to sustain the best music videos across
minutes of wordless narrative. Music and image are melded in The Virgin
Suicides in a manner that gives resonance not just to the dynamic high
points (where Scorsese and Lucas operate), but also to the quieter, Air-scored
passages that give the movie an enigmatic dreaminess befitting the five Lisbon
sisters. The scene where the boys read from Cecilia's diary, triggering a
fantasy of Lux frolicking in sun-drenched fields underneath Air's "Ce
matin la," is video-influenced in the best sense, the sensual elevation of
mood and gesture above all else. Coppola's husband, Spike Jonze, is probably
the most celebrated video director of the past decade, and her brother Roman
directed Green Day's "Walking Contradiction," on the short-list of my
favourite videos ever. Clearly Coppola has benefited from some helpful familial
ties in terms of drawing on the conventions of video, and she uses them
exceedingly well. In doing so, she opens up new possibilities for the pop-music
soundtrack.
(Originally published in Cinemascope.)
