Music Makes Everything Better
Even though it’s often overlooked
Movies tell stories. But are movies the best medium to tell stories through? Some might argue that movies can only tell a certain kind of story. Usually, plot-driven tales that leave little or no space for the character’s inner development or exploration. After all, books and other media have the advantage of a character’s inner thoughts, movies might be able to get away with it for a couple of scenes using voice-over narration, but it often feels bland or unnecessary.
That’s a big win for books over movies if you ask me. It’s definitely true that books can make you take a deep dive into a person’s inner sanctum. Reading a proper chain of thought can make you understand what the character in the book is going through, or thinking about a particular situation, it can even make you think like them for a couple of days after finishing the novel! But the thing is, stories are not about thought or information, stories are about emotion.
Stories are “experience simulacrums”; we use them to explain things we can’t convey in mere speech — a technology developed to make you FEEL like the main character in the fiction so you can extract knowledge out of his experience. A good story is an empathy gun. Are books good at communicating emotion? Maybe, but at best they are a translation between two languages that don’t have the same word, at worst they are insincere imitations.
Unfortunately for human beings, emotions don’t come with words. We have to use language to express them, and it is very important for us to express them! Written language and speech are fantastic for communicating information about the physical world, but they stumble when taking on other subjects, such as emotions or the spiritual. That’s why we developed other languages that can express different types of ideas. Music is the language of emotion.
You don’t really have to know what a character is thinking if you know what he is feeling, and an excellent soundtrack conveys just that.
John Williams’s score makes you connect emotionally with Luke — and with the story — You can feel how the music is not addressing your rational mind, but something else inside you. Something that moves and shifts with each section of the melody, it evokes emotion within you and without words. It’s easy to see how music is more effective than a book in that regard. A book takes hundreds, or thousands, of words to make you cry, a good piece of music can do it in seconds.
In film, we’ve distilled the best forms of storytelling into one. The plot keeps our attention, camera angles, movements and lighting give us subconscious information about the scene, music shakes our emotions. They are all beautiful and important art forms on their own, but together they create the most potent empathy device we know.
Sadly, music is often overlooked when discussing a movie. Discussion turns to the plot or the directing, leaving the score of the film in the background of film criticisms. As if the music were just a cute little thing that complements the film, a horrible mistake to make for creators in the industry.
A good film score can elevate a movie into unforeseen sights, complexity, and meaning — and more importantly, to a lot of you — it can save it at the box office.
I argue this is the case of GLADIATOR. You might not know that historical epics were once Hollywood’s blockbusters. Noah, Christ, and Moses were the equivalent of our Spider-man, Wonder Woman, or Captain America, but slowly the genre died down, and it got labeled as UNPROFITABLE.
Then came Ridley Scott, his film should’ve been a complete failure by the conventional wisdom at the time, a historical epic set in Roman times. A certain disaster. But it wasn’t; it became one of the most successful films of the year and a story that will live in the minds of many. Why was this? Yes, the direction was great, the actors played their roles convincingly, and the story was compelling enough, but what truly makes this film work is the extraordinary work of Hans Zimmer. He modernized the score but kept it epic and adventurous. It is part spiritual hymn and part battle march. He changed the face of modern adventure films with one soundtrack.
“I listen to [Zimmer’s] music, and I don’t even have to shut my eyes. I can see the pictures. And that’s why, in many respects, I know I can talk pictures with Hans. He responds to pictures.” — Ridley Scott
Zimmer’s score was so influential that it launched one of the most successful franchises of the recent past. Pirates of the Caribbean was on hold at Disney because Pirate-films, like historical dramas, were labeled as unprofitable. But after the success of Gladiator, Disney decided to launch the franchise. A connection that can be seen, or rather heard, in their soundtracks.
Music is more than just the frosting of a film; it’s one of its main components. The secret tool every director should keep in mind when trying to pull strings in the heart of his audience.
From INTERSTELLAR to THE LION KING, he has composed scores audiences can’t ever forget.
Discover the power of FILM SCORING in Filmarket Hub’s TRAINING with the one and only HANS ZIMMER.
