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October 23, 2003
TT: Good intentions
I've become an avid fan of the pseudonymous Cinetrix, who blogs at Pullquote, so I was pleased to get the following e-mail from her. It starts with a pullquote from my recent posting on Kind of Blue:It's the record Clint Eastwood (who knows a lot about jazz) puts on when he comes home from a hard day of assassin-hunting in In the Line of Fire. A whole book has been written about its history and cultural significance. Now it's Muzak--yet it remains as vital and listenable as ever. By what strange alchemy was this transformation effected?
Somebody (me, I guess) ought to write an essay about how jazz has come to be used as a cultural signifier in films, TV shows, and ads, an infallible indicator of upper-middle-class hipness.
Yes, please. You could do worse than use Clint as a jumping-off point. Especially because he (and his son) composed the music for the extra-blue-collar "Mystic River," which some viewers have found distracting. Is his score perhaps supposed to signify (to the members of the Academy?) that this working-class tale is tasteful and well-done and designed to be understood and appreciated by discerning, upper-middle-class hipsters like themselves? The credits cite the BSO and the Tanglewood Festival Orchestra, impeccable cultural signifiers indeed.
Alas, this isn't the essay I sort of promised--I've got to write for money today, so I can't be that discursive--but I, too, was intrigued by the fact that Clint Eastwood scored Mystic River himself. (Lennie Niehaus transcribed the music from Eastwood's piano sketch and did the orchestrations, but the actual music is reportedly all Eastwood, except for a couple of snippets by son Kyle.) This, mind you, in spite of the fact that he didn't do a very good job of it. "Distracting" isn't the word. Whatever made him think those slick, inflated symphonic sounds were even remotely appropriate to a film about working-class life in Boston?
On the other hand, I suspect Eastwood's motives, insofar as he understood them, were pure. His interest in music, after all, is both long-standing and considerable (among many other things, he does his own cocktail piano playing--very competently, too--in In the Line of Fire). What's more, it's clear that he's wanted to score one of his own films for some time now. You may not remember this, but Eastwood composed the main-title themes for several of his earlier films, most notably "Claudia's Theme" from Unforgiven, which is actually quite a nice little tune.
I have no doubt that a lot of other directors would score their own films if they could, and some might even do a good job...if they could. Stanley Kubrick, lest we forget, dumped Alex North's marvelous score for 2001: A Space Odyssey and replaced it with his own "score" made up of pre-existing pieces of classical music, some of which worked extremely well in context. His use of György Ligeti's Atmosphères, for example, was unforgettably apposite. And as more than one bonafide film composer has observed, the rock-and-roll song score for GoodFellas was hugely effective (and hugely influential to boot), even though Martin Scorsese didn't write a note of it himself.
The exasperating paradox of film music is that it doesn't have to be original, or even good music qua music, in order to fulfill its near-indispensible function, which was deftly summed up by the greatest of all film composers, Bernard Herrmann:
I feel that music on the screen can seek out and intensify the inner thoughts of the characters. It can invest a scene with terror, grandeur, gaiety or misery. It can propel narrative swiftly forward, or slow it down. It often lifts mere dialogue into the realm of poetry. Finally, it is the communicating link between the screen and the audience, reaching out and enveloping all into one single experience.
That "single experience," as has often been observed, aspires to the condition of the totally unified Gesamtkunstwerk of which Richard Wagner and Serge Diaghilev dreamed. Yet film is by definition a collaborative medium, an undeniable fact that nonetheless frustrates many filmmakers who would prefer to do the whole thing themselves, or at least control the whole process. Instead, they have to call in experts to do the specialized jobs they can't do, foremost among which is almost always the writing of the score.
For this reason, I don't blame Clint Eastwood a bit for having wanted to be one of the very few directors of importance to have scored one of his own films (has anyone else done it other than Charlie Chaplin?). Even if the results weren't especially impressive, I admire him for trying. And I can't imagine that he purposefully chose the idiom in which he worked--the glossy "symphonic score" beloved of film composers of the Thirties and Forties--in order to make Mystic River seem like an upper-middle-class cultural artifact. My guess is that he scored it that way simply because that's the kind of film music with which he grew up, and with which he's most comfortable.
That the results ended up being wholly inappropriate to the film in question is, of course, another matter, and ultimately a far more important one. I think Mystic River is a flawed but compelling film whose total effect is sharply diminished by an inadequate score. But, then, it wouldn't be the first time a smart director did something dumb to a good movie, would it?
Posted October 23, 2003 10:57 AM
