Flipping the Script on Movie Music: Three Lessons from P.T. Anderson
Alan Palomo is a film composer and the musician behind Neon Indian. He is currently composing two film scores, including the music for the forthcoming film “Everything Beautiful Is Far Away.” Neon Indian’s most recent album is Vega Intl. Night School.
There’s nothing more tragic than an amazing film with terrible music. It happens all the time. Back when I was ticket-tearing at a local movie theater in high school, it seemed like every indie feature would clunk through its most potent moments with the same banjo or xylophone cue (mid-2000s era Fox Searchlight Pictures were probably the biggest offenders). Film music should be for the most part utilitarian — it’s there to serve the film and the film alone. Rather than draw attention to itself, music is just one mood-enhancing drug in the cocktail of good storytelling.
But when my obsession with movies was still nascent, it was refreshing — if not downright revelatory — to see a filmmaker flip the script between beats-per-minute and frames-per-second. Paul Thomas Anderson did just that.
Anderson’s filmography reads like a shortlist of some of the most notable scores of the past few decades, and it’s easy to see why: he treats music as an central component, rather than a superficial overlay. Anderson’s seminal 2002 film Punch-Drunk Love, is a prime example. The music for that film was so important that he and composer Jon Brion worked out much of it before the movie was even shot. Similarly, Magnolia (1999) was directly inspired by his friendship with singer-songwriter Aimee Mann. Anderson even went as far as to say he “wanted to…adapt Aimee’s songs, like you would adapt a book or a play.”
One reason Anderson’s work is so potent is that he masterfully employs three distinct modes of film music: traditional, diegetic, and meta (this last one sounds ridiculous but stay with me). These terms might be familiar to anyone who took a Film 101 class, but it’s not always apparent how they can be used effectively in practice. Ahead, I’ve selected a few of my favorite music moments from Anderson’s oeuvre — each illustrating one of the three modes — to better illustrate how each works within the context of a film.
Traditional scores are the oldest and most common mode of film music. In this mode, original music or existing recorded songs are selected to enhance the mood of the scene, and the characters are unaware of its presence. Classic Hollywood scores like Arthur Freed’s Singin’ in the Rain are prime examples of this. They lean hard on orchestral swells and sing-song melodies that spell out DRAMA in capital letters. They also intensify and support the action happening on screen. The desired intent is emotional hypnosis — manipulation, even.
Jon Brion’s traditional score for Punch Drunk Love is a beautiful example of the power of classic Hollywood sensibilities. The character-driven musical motifs imbue the film with the surreal logic one typically finds in musicals. You can hear it in the affectionate use of Conway Twitty’s “Danny (lonely blue boy),” which nods to the blue suit Barry (Adam Sandler) dons in the misplaced hope that it’ll make him more like “other people.” Or in the film’s overture, which he incrementally learns how to play throughout the film on a harmonium that is as broken as his heart.
Consider the scene in which Barry travels to Honolulu unannounced to meet his love interest, Lena (Emily Watson). Borrowing a classic Hollywood theme from Robert Altman’s Popeye, Shelley Duval croons “He Needs Me” as Barry traverses the city attempting to find her. The full sequence — which lasts roughly five minutes — builds momentum at a glacial pace. The music accompanies Barry as he boards a plane, initiates nervous small talk with a fellow passenger, lands in Honolulu, hails a cab, wanders through a clamoring street fair, and has a meltdown at a payphone while trying to surreptitiously discern Lena’s whereabouts from his sister, Elizabeth. All the while, Jon Brion subtly adds flourishes over the original 1980 track, which become increasingly apparent the closer our protagonist draws near his goal.
When Barry finally encounters Lena in the lobby of her hotel, Brion brings in a tidal wave of soaring strings and horns. The effect is something like a hormone grenade. And though the movie is perhaps ironic in its references, it certainly isn’t cynical, and continues to play throughout the rest of the film like a Hollywood fever dream.
Diegetic sound is when the source of the music is visible on the screen or implied by the action in the scene, and the characters are aware of it (e.g. someone puts on a record, drops a quarter in the jukebox, picks up a guitar, etc.). My favorite instance of diegetic music in any film is the climax in Boogie Nights.
In it, our anti-hero, Dirk Diggler (Mark Wahlberg), and his friends try to sell bunk coke to Rahad, a drugged-out millionaire maniac in Beverly Hills (played brilliantly by Alfred Molina). As the deal is going down, a cabana boy in the background lights firecrackers for his own amusement, alternately interrupting and terrifying the already tweaked-out characters. Adding to the madness is a home theater system blasting a cassette Rahad has labeled “My Awesome Mixtape #6.”
The bizarre mashup of sounds instills a sense of unease, a feeling that something is about to go terribly wrong, And then Rick Springfield’s “Jessie’s Girl” comes on. The song plays in the background as we watch Dirk’s world finally bottom out in one long shot of his unblinking, broken expression.
And while the upbeat, New Wave rock tune doesn’t reflect what Dirk is feeling in that moment, the fact that its so out-of-place perfectly reflects his relationship to the situation: he just shouldn’t be there. It’s a brilliant stroke of irony reminiscent of Scorsese’s playbook (like setting savage violence sequences to doo-wop). The song ends in the midst of a gunfight, but the tape continues to spin, following with Nena’s “99 luff balloons.” It’s a subtle technique — allowing the mixtape to play unedited — that adds another acute layer of reality to the scene. (Quentin Tarantino’s Jackie Brown did a similar thing that same year with its use of a whole Delfonics album A-side). After all, when songs end in real life, we don’t suddenly find ourselves somewhere else. We simply perk up to hear what’s next.
It’s an eerie, realist touch: one has such little control over their own life, they can’t even pick what song they’re going to die to.
Meta-music, which is much rarer than the other modes, is when the music source isn’t visible or implied by action, and yet the film and its characters seem to be aware and even interact with it.
Perhaps the most audacious example of this is the iconic sing-along in Magnolia. At its core, the film is essentially an opera. Not only is it unapologetically epic in scope — with nine interconnecting storylines — but its labyrinthian structure and melodramatic tone are constantly reinforced by Jon Brion’s orchestral score. The film even comically jabs at this notion by setting two scenes to “Habanera” from the French opera, Carmen. At times, watching Anderson weave the stories together feels precarious, as if the latticework he’s painstakingly tooling might suddenly rip apart from tension. And in a way, it does: Before a final climax that you could say is both figuratively and literally biblical in scale, the narrative momentarily derails to draw attention to the fact that you’re watching a film. Phillip Seymour Hoffman’s character presages this self-aware turn when he pleads, “This is the scene of the movie where you help me out.”
As if in an actual opera, the characters, all in different physical spaces, somehow share a moment where they sing along to Aimee Mann’s “Wise Up.” This strange and surreal use of meta-music may disrupt the narrative, but it also allows the storylines to stop brushing up against one another and, for a brief moment, fuse together. It is only able to accomplish this by dropping in a song that isn’t coming from anywhere “in” the film. Thus the music is not bound by any particular physical space, allowing every character to hear it simultaneously. Trying to make sense of how they’re all hearing the same song is beside the point. In the film’s epilogue, Anderson excuses himself from having to explain when the film’s narrator, Ricky Jay, says, “And we generally say, ‘well if that was in a movie I wouldn’t believe it’… And it is in the humble opinion of this narrator that strange things happen all the time.”
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