Sonic Dreams : February - March Theme
“THIS MUSIC IS THE GLUE OF THE WORLD … WITHOUT THIS, LIFE WOULD BE MEANINGLESS”
Since the early days of vaudeville theater, music has been, and continues to be, a crucial element of the cinematic experience. When deployed in the right setting, the pairing of sound and image can set the mood for a scene, evoke an emotional response, or provide detail where the image could not. We love endlessly repayable scores and musicals hold a special place near and dear to our hearts, but the writing team thinks those music categories are worthy of their own themes down the road. For this month’s theme, we’re focusing on the curation of music through soundtracks.
Like a good mix tape, a soundtrack cherry picks songs from disparate sources and strings them together to create an auditory experience all its own. It’s transcendental, magical even, when a billboard-charting song kicks in at just the right moment and cultivates an acutely specific emotional response to cinematic events. The best films with soundtracks do this over and over again, playing track after track that cultivates a rhythmic liminal state of euphoria where sound and image become greater than the sum of their part. A Sonic Dream so to speak.
There are so many varieties to this that we decided to keep our February-March theme open ended, only excluding specific instances of the aforementioned musical or score from our list. These films are mostly lyrical endeavors, pulling selections from artists in the real world or creating newly minted songs for the film itself, but they can also be compilation of symphonies or even occupying the beloved subgenre of concert films. Featuring toe-tapping pleasantries and auditory delights, these films make us feel what cannot be rendered visually and add to the cinematic experience in ways only music can. So put on some headphones, kick back, relax, and enjoy these Sonic Dreams.
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Marie Antoinette
(Sofia Coppola, 2006)
“Letting everyone down would be my greatest unhappiness.”
Perhaps no other director is better suited for the “Sonic Dreams” theme than Sofia Coppola. For the last two decades, she has been creating films that make use of a contemporary soundtrack like nobody else — so much so that it has become a defining trait of her filmography. In either diegetic or non-diegetic forms, six of her seven films feature this type of scoring, but of the lot, none are as iconic or subversive as her stylish, ‘modern’ period piece about fame, gossip, and social expectations: Marie Antoinette.
Set in the second half of the 18th century, the film follows the titular cake-eating monarch as she leaves Austria at the age of fifteen to marry the Dauphin of France and bridge the relationship between two formerly hostile countries. As a young girl in France who carries the weight of peace on her shoulders, Antoinette is woefully out of place. The freedoms of youth do not extend to her existence, and at every turn, royalty, public perceptions, and gendered norms dictate what she can and can’t do.
What makes Coppola’s soundtrack implementation so profound is how it stands against the decades of period pieces and historical dramas we have become conditioned to. Gone are the of-period scores that feature grand symphonies of string and wind, and in are rock, alternative, and indie songs that convey the rebellious and controversial life of Marie Antoinette. The contrast between pompous French royalty and the sounds of upheaval punk create a tone holistically unique to a film of this genre.
Rock selections make a particular strong showing. The use of “Aphrodisiac” as Marie escapes to a late night masquerade ball ignites a flirtatious stint that evolves into a sexual affair later on tuned with “Kings of the Wild Frontier.” And none could forget the iconic shopping spree of opulence and indulgence set against “All I Want is Candy,” a pivotal point in the film when Marie gives in to her ambitions and lets loose. Moments of melancholy crop up when Windsor for the Derby’s “The Melody of the Fallen Tree” or Apex Twins’ “Avril 14th” underscore the alienation and sadness that comes with being an object of control, and songs from The Radio Department and Squarepusher help color the life of a drifting youth caught in the throws of royalty. In tandem with the notes of rebellion, you have the makings of a soundtrack that reflects the push and pull dynamic of repression and freedom at the heart of Marie Antoinette.
—Greg Arietta
Wild at Heart
(David Lynch, 1990)
“This whole world's wild at heart and weird on top.”
This week’s Valentine’s Day selection goes to none other than David Lynch's Palme d'Or winning romance: Wild at Heart. The film sees Lula (Laura Dern) and Sailor (Nicholas Cage) taking a long over due, parole-breaking road trip in celebration of Sailor’s release from prison. Sailor, a tough guy softie trying to go straight for love, and Lula, an innocent romantic enamored with the sentiment of loving and being loved, are a pair for the ages, but Lula’s mother, Marietta, detests their relationship, going in so far as to hire devious hitman Marcellos Santos to track down the couple and knock off Sailor.
Wild at Heart is red hot, hotter than “Georgia asphalt” hot some would say. But along with searing visual motifs of flames and incendiary matches, Lynch sets his film to the tune of scorching soundtrack that makes use of atmospheric jazz, 1950s rock n’ roll, and rapturous heavy metal to characterize love in a world gone wrong. Long drives across state lines set to “Be-Bop-A-Lula” help give life to an atomic era romance while the infectious big band swing of Glen Miller’s “In the Mood” and Willie Dixon’s “Wrinkles” give Sailor and Lula’s perennial love a nostalgic quality. Powermad’s “Slaughterhouse” becomes a reoccurring leitmotif of aggression and frenzy while Lynch implements tone-setting, operatic and orchestral songs that help cultivate his signature Lynchian dream-like qualities. And no song choice is as endearing or memorable as Nicholas Cage’s swooning renditions of Elvis Presley’s “Love Me” and subsequent follow up “Love Me Tender” that Sailor sings as odes of his blossoming affection for Lula.
Most affectingly though is the use of three Chris Isaak songs deployed in the second half of the film when Sailor and Lula reach the arid hostility of Big Tuna, Texas. With a dismal quality, their use makes Sailor and Lula’s love feel plighted by circumstance, full of skull smashing, ozone degradation, and hired hits designed to keep them apart. Isaak’s somber, echoing heartbreaker “Wicked Game” will poignantly tell us, “The world was on fire and no one could save me but you…This world is only gonna break your heart.” Perhaps a love as true and wild at heart as this is not meant in the seedy world David Lynch imagines, but it is certainly a love worth dying and living for, fatalistic as it may be.
—Greg Arietta
The Graduate
(Mike Nichols, 1967)
“Mrs. Robinson, you're trying to seduce me.”
A film with which we owe a great deal for giving rise to this theme is Mike Nichols’ 1967 New Hollywood watershed monument, The Graduate. Among its many influences, the film's radio play soundtrack is one of its most important. During the edit, Nichols originally dropped in Simon and Garfunkel songs as a way to pace scenes before the score was created. When he found them to be too perfect for what he was trying to achieve tonally, he opted to just use them instead and contracted Paul Simon to create three more songs. Understandably, anyone would be hard pressed to replicate the melancholic sentiments of “The Sounds of Silence” or “Scarborough Fair” so you might as well go for the real thing.
The result was a needle drop soundtrack that succinctly captured the twenty-something drift of Benjamin Braddock and his salacious affairs during his post-grad summer. Scenes were cut to Simon and Garfunkel’s music — most notably observed in the “April She Will Come” scene — which helped further develop the idea of music videos as unique forms separate from band performance recordings (more on that next week), plus the exposure afforded by a widely distributed film propelled Simon and Garfunkel’s songs to the top of the charts in tandem with a windfall in record sales. So here’s to you, Mrs. Robinson, for popularizing movie soundtracks and creating the template for films going forward.
—Greg Arietta
A Hard Day’s Night
(Richard Lester, 1964)
“Are you a mod or a rocker?”
“Um, no. I'm a mocker.”
Look no further than 1964’s A Hard Day’s Night to see the importance of a soundtrack to a film’s edit. Richard Lester’s tongue-in-cheek romp starring the Beatles is a frenzy of playful gags and endearing moments expertly embellished by the band’s album of the same name. From the first signature guitar chord strum, the Fab Four careen through a train station to evade throngs of fans. The cuts are quick as the camera only catches glimpses of the sprinting band members, but most importantly, those cuts are coordinated to the beat of the song—a pioneering concept for the time. Eventually Paul McCartney, John Lennon, George Harrison, and Ringo Starr reach the studio for a television taping but are so rambunctious that they escape their manager to see the surrounding sights. Here they are accompanied by slapstick moments, charming banter, and the occasional breakout into song.
With A Hard Day’s Night, Lester has put the personalities of his subjects first before their music, an engaging perspective to the world’s hottest new band. Each Beatle is so able to carry the comedic scenes that the film might feel comfortable staying in a farcical wheelhouse for its entire runtime, but when the band saddles up their instruments and Lennon/McCartney join in to sing and when the cuts quicken and synch to Ringo’s drums, the resulting cinematic blend displays the forthcoming promise and rise of music videos that would use this film’s secret editing ingredients as their own for decades to come.
—Kevin Conner
Sing Street
(John Carney, 2016)
“This is life, Conor. Drive it like you stole it.”
After Once and Begin Again, John Carney’s most recent musical venture begins with gangly Irish teen Conor (Ferdia Walsh-Peelo) frantically searching for members to join his new band. He himself only strums the guitar half-confidently, but from his new demeanor, it is clear he is dead set on idolizing his favorite acts like Duran Duran and The Cure. So what possesses Conor to start a gawky band full of Irish Catholic school misfits? Quite simply and predictably: a girl.
Sing Street is the bubblegum pop ballad whose melody is so simple and signature that it will occupy your head for days on end. Ultimately, it is a high school boy-meets-girl movie, but the emotional pulse of the film comes from its earnest songs, crafted by many recognizable names including Once alumnus Glen Hansard and bonafide pop star Adam Lambert and striking that perfect happy/sad aesthetic that would even make Robert Smith grin.
Bolstered by a strong supporting cast like the enigmatic aspiring actress Raphina (Lucy Boynton) and heart-of-gold older brother Brendan (Jack Reynor), Sing Street feels like a great mixtape of unfamiliar bands. It doesn’t have the most recognizable faces, but it leaves you toe-tapping down the theater aisle as the credits are still rolling after its crescendo of an ending.
—Kevin Conner
Empire Records
(Allan Moyle, 1995)
“This music is the glue of the world, Mark. It's what holds it all together. Without this, life would be meaningless.”
The teen movie was bound to make an appearance on this list. With quite literally hundreds to choose from, the only problem was finding the right film to choose. Faced with such a monumental task, we felt the best period to pull from was the era where the teen film was at the height of its power: the 90s. Clueless, Cruel Intentions, Dazed and Confused, Varsity Blues, But I’m a Cheerleader, 10 Things I Hate About You, and Wild Things were all hot contenders for this singular spot, but for this, we wanted to assign some due credit to a cult favorite that couldn’t feel more of its time: Empire Records.
Allan Moyle’s 1995 coming of age film sees a band of six teenage employees working at the titular independent music store on the verge of insolvency. When word gets out that the store is about to be acquired by a corporate franchise (and after a good-intentioned but poorly planned squandering of the prior day’s closing total puts them in the red), the group ponders what’s next for them as they not only confront unemployment, but also the harsh realities of life, graduation, sexuality, self-worth, and love.
As a very 90s derivative of The Breakfast Club, Empire Records feels like a natural thematic extension of Moyle’s 1990 film Pump Up the Volume — another teen feature with an incredible soundtrack that almost made the cut. It’s occasionally misguided in subplots and not entirely cohesive moment to moment, but what it lacks in traditional merits, it makes up for with its killer soundtrack. Officially, the soundtrack sold on shelves only contains fifteen songs, but patient viewers will notice the end credits contain a whopping *49* licensed tracks spanning the entire film, rightfully befitting for a film taking place in a record store.
Listening to The Cranberries’ “Liar” or The Martini’s’ “Free” cultivate a distinctly 90s melancholy suitable for every teen’s personal issues. A mid-day dance-capade in the aisles of the store set to The The’s “This Is The Day” is enough to illicit camaraderie only felt in by the universal plights of high school. A heavy dose of alt-rock courses through the narrative with the likes of Sponge’s “Plowed,” Better Than Ezra’s “Circle of Friends,” or Lustre’s “Overalls.” And brevity won’t permit discussion of the varied implementations of power pop, punk, grunge, and new wave. The whole sonic menu of Empire Records is exemplary of a time and a place when soundtracks dominated studio filmmaking, but more importantly, its just a really endearing movie about finding your bearings in the world.
—Greg Arietta
Call Me By Your Name
(Luca Guadagnino, 2017)
“We rip out so much of ourselves to be cured of things faster than we should that we go bankrupt by the age of thirty and have less to offer each time we start with someone new. But to make yourself feel nothing so as not to feel anything - what a waste…”
Though celebrated for the gorgeous original musical contributions from songwriter Sufjan Stevens – whose “Mystery of Love” picked up an Oscar nomination – Call Me By Your Name also boasts an exemplary soundtrack of pre-existing music. The film, which describes the romance between 17-year-old Elio (Timothée Chalamet) and Oliver (Armie Hammer), an American grad student assisting Elio’s father’s research, during one scorching summer in 80s Italy, dispenses with the first-person narration of the André Aciman book it is based on. In its place, we get music – which director Luca Guadagnino has described as the film’s “emotional narrator.”
A large portion of the soundtrack comes from within the world of the film. Elio is a pianist, and performs pieces by Erik Satie and Francis Poulenc; in one fantastic scene he flirtatiously teases Oliver by refusing to play Bach in the manner he originally intended. Elsewhere, the film’s sonic texture is enriched by the Euro disco and synthpop perpetually seeping from televisions and radios – songs like Joe Esposito’s “Lady, Lady, Lady”, Bandolero’s “Paris Latino”, and F.R. David’s sublimely cheesy “Words”, whose chorus (Words don't come easy to me / How can I find a way / To make you see I love you?) anticipates the dilemma Elio later grapples with: “Is it better to speak or to die?”
Fittingly, the film’s use of non-diegetic piano music voices what Elio initially can’t. Snippets of minimalist compositions by Adams and Ryuichi Sakamoto lend a sense of playfulness to Elio’s adolescent inquisitiveness and frustration. Strains of Ravel’s lush, dreamy “Une barque sur l’océan” from the suite Miroirs fade in and out of Elio and Oliver’s hesitant interactions, hinting at the deep romance they can only communicate in euphemism. Ravel returns at a pivotal moment towards the end of the film: “Le jardin féerique” from Ma mère l'Oye accompanies the poignant monologue Elio’s father gives.
Call Me By Your Name’s big needle drop comes during the much-memed outdoor disco scene, in which the DJs drop The Psychedelic Furs’ glorious “Love My Way.” Oliver is immediately lost in the music, ecstatically breaking into what could generously be described as Footloose-inspired. Elio hangs back, then eventually slides over and tests out some self-consciously ‘cool’ moves – but soon he too is hopping to the music like a total dork. In a relationship so far defined by covert signals (a look, a comment, a touch) and restraint, seeing Oliver and Elio let loose on the dancefloor feels like their first moment of real closeness.
Still, there’s a bittersweet sting to the lyrics – the opportunity and confidence to “love my way” is what’s so often denied to queer people, and before long Oliver is preparing to return home, their relationship still a secret. On their last night together in Bergamo, Elio and Oliver again stumble upon the song blaring from the stereo of a parked car. In the context of Oliver’s departure, another aspect of the music emerges – “Love My Way” is a song whose chords never quite resolve, a song with a what we might call a phantom tonic. It’s this eternal deferral of closure that makes the song resonate so painfully with Elio’s predicament – and which makes it such a perfect anthem for the couple.
—Theo Rollason
The Harder They Come
(Perry Henzel, 1972)
“For as sure as the Sun will shine / I'm going to get my share now, what's mine / And the harder they come, the harder they fall / one and all...”
As the first Jamaican-produced film, The Harder They Come is an important milestone in the country’s post-colonial history, but equally important and significant about the film is its contributions to popularizing reggae. With Jimmy Cliff himself in the lead role, the crime drama sees Ivanhoe ‘Ivan’ Martin (Cliff) move from the countryside to the city with the hopes of attaining fame. Early inhospitable interactions get him down, but he gets his first break when he’s given the opportunity to record the titular track with local music kingpin, Mr. Hilton. In spite of its popularity, Ivan only receives $20 for his work, forcing himself into a life of drug dealing to keep himself afloat. After a police interaction goes wrong, a city wide manhunt ensues for Ivan that inadvertently turns him into a pseudo-Western outlaw who is highly regarded by the public.
Within the realist aesthetic of this crime drama, reggae works lyrically to trace the ascent and fall of Ivan. From the onset, Jimmy Cliff’s aspirational “You Can Get It If You Really Want It” sets the wide-eyed wonder of coming to a big city and chasing your dreams, only for that same song to play again late in the film in stark contrast as Ivan’s criminal infamy starts to reap negative consequences. Similarly, the film’s title track, “The Harder They Come,” plays repeatedly as a leitmotif alluding to Ivan’s thematic arc; with dreams as lofty as Ivan’s, the requisite ambition and drive pushes him to new heights that result in (potentially) harder falls. Supported by a bevy of other tracks by Cliff plus songs from The Slickers, Toots & The Maytals, and The Melodians, The Harder They Come soundtrack encapsulated Jamaica’s signature music genre at a time when the genre was little known outside its country of origin. In the wake of its international release in 1973, it helped introduce the slow tempo beats of Jamaica to the world.
—Greg Arietta