Tag: Movie Soundtracks

Tanya Tagaq Voices Inuit Womanhood in ‘Nanook of the North’

Director Robert Flaherty not only framed Inuit womanhood according to his fantasies of casual sensuality, but according to Euro-American patriarchal fantasy. His portrait of Inuit life is neatly divided between the woman’s role, limited to cleaning igloos and nursing infants, apparently immune to the frustrations of Euro-American women in that role, and the man’s role, leading the band, educating older children, and hunting.

nanook-of-the-north

This post written by staff writer Brigit McCone originally appeared at Bitch Flicks and is reposted here as part of our theme week on Indigenous Women.

Nanook of the North is an iconic 1922 drama that recreates traditional Inuit lifeways through the representative struggles of Nanook (“Polar Bear,” played by Allakariallak), his wife Nyla (“The Smiling One,” played by Maggie Nujarluktuk), another woman identified only as “Cunayou,” Nanook’s young son “Allee,” and baby “Rainbow.” However, we are shown older boys, described as “some of Nanook’s children,” eating sea-biscuits and lard at the trading post, adding to the film’s casual, hand-waving vagueness about Nanook’s family relationships. Male helpers pop up for group hunts, as though from nowhere, but Nanook’s family is never placed in a wider community context. Despite describing Nanook as band leader, he is never depicted leading, and is frequently infantilized by director Robert Flaherty. By framing his drama as “documentary,” Flaherty converts Allakariallak and Nujarluktuk from active collaborators into passive subjects.

Flaherty erased the fact that both Maggie Nujarluktuk and, reportedly, the woman playing Cunayou, were his own wives (or “mistresses,” from Flaherty’s cultural perspective). The “morning” scene, in which Nanook, his two women and his son awake naked inside the igloo, therefore closely resembles Flaherty’s own polyamorous living arrangement, exoticized into a symptom of Nanook’s cultural Otherness. The domestic warmth that Flaherty captured in Nanook of the North, through his access to both women, is key to his “documentary’s” charm, but his pretended objectivity converts this intensely personal intimacy into an image of the women’s indiscriminate availability to outsiders. Maggie Nujarluktuk smiles self-consciously and playfully flirts with the camera, because the camera is being operated by her husband, but that husband disowns her smiles and essentializes them as a permanent characteristic of “Nyla the smiling one.”

In her thesis, “Neither Indian Princesses Nor Squaw Drudges,” Janice Acoose examines the pervasive stereotype of the “loose squaw” in literature about Indigenous women, which constructs the Indigenous woman as a disposable sexual convenience. Flaherty’s own concept of Inuit disposability was demonstrated when he abandoned Nujarluktuk after filming, who then bore him a son, Josephie, that he never saw, acknowledged, or materially supported. This adds sinister resonance to Nanook of the North‘s description of Nyla’s baby Rainbow as “her young husky,” jokingly implying that Inuit women view their own children as equivalent to animals. In Acoose’s view, “loose squaw” images “foster cultural attitudes that legitimize rape and other similar kinds of violence against Indigenous women,” whose disappearances often go uninvestigated in Canada, particularly if they are also sex workers.

[youtube_sc url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dCEzGouiy2Q”]

Josephie Flaherty’s family was caught up in the “High Arctic Relocation,” the forced transfer of a community of Inuit to the High Arctic, as “human flagpoles” to support Canada’s territorial claim to the Northwest Passage. It was masterminded by the Department of Northern Affairs, who wished to remove the Inuit from white civilization to free them from “a toxic culture of dependence.” In other words, like Nanook of the North, the “High Arctic Relocation” was an artificially staged, Euro-American vision of uncorrupted Inuit innocence. It is impossible to draw a neat line between Flaherty’s fictional vision and the Department of Northern Affairs’ imposed reality; each was inspired by a toxic culture, not of dependence but of colonial entitlement and the romanticizing of “noble savages”; the Department’s resident romantics may even have been directly inspired by Nanook of the North. The High Arctic Exiles were denied material support from the Canadian government, though that same government intervened to prevent them from hunting on its designated “wildlife preserve.” The Inuit, identified by numbered tags, were taken from a community with a school and nursing station, and transported on a boat with infectious tuberculosis patients. Tuberculosis was also the disease that had previously claimed the life of Flaherty’s star, Allakariallak, a fact that Flaherty covered up by telling audiences that “Nanook” had “starved to death” while hunting deer, yet again erasing Euro-American influence. Several of the High Arctic Exiles’ children were taken from their parents for medical treatment and “misplaced for several years” by bureaucrats, a chilling indifference that echoes Flaherty’s casual attitude to Nanook’s fluctuating number of “young huskies.” For his monument symbolizing victims of the “Relocation,” Inuk sculptor Looty Pijamini chose a life-size Inuk woman and child, carved from a block of granite tinted red like blood.

looty-pijamini-statue

Her international recording career has made “Inuk punk” Tanya Tagaq into one of the most recognizable cultural ambassadors of the Inuit people. Tagaq’s own mother hailed from Nanook of the North‘s Quebec location before falling victim to the High Arctic “relocation,” informing Tagaq’s complex response to the film’s mixture of colonial ideology and preserved history. In 2012, the Toronto International Film Festival commissioned Tagaq to provide an original soundtrack to the film, drawing from the Inuit art of throat-singing, katajjaq. Discussing the film, Tagaq spotlights Flaherty’s staged scene of Nanook biting a gramophone record, as though unaware of what it is. “Inuit are running the cameras a lot of the time,” Tagaq laughs. Watching this scene closely is revealing. As the gramophone starts up, neither Nanook nor Nyla appears surprised by it, while Nyla rocks her baby to the music. There is an awkward jump cut, Nyla has been removed from the shot, and Nanook is laughing and biting the record. In such scenes, Allakariallak demonstrates the comic ability which gives the film its charm, but is harnessed to create a demeaning image of Inuit childishness, which Flaherty frames as generally representative of “the fearless, lovable, happy-go-lucky Eskimo,” rather than individually representative of the talented comedian, Allakariallak. However, Tanya Tagaq’s soundtrack rejects Flaherty’s impulse to isolate, essentialize, and fossilize Inuit culture into artificial purity. As a confident inheritor of her own culture, she engages with the musical traditions of other nations, harnessing non-Native technology and instruments to enrich her evolving practice of katajjaq.

When the show came to the 2014 Dublin Fringe Festival, I eagerly checked it out, having experienced the masculine tradition of Tuvan khöömei throat-singing in Siberia. Unlike khöömei, katajjaq evolved as a female tradition. Two women, facing each other, would improvise rhythmic motifs, the loser being the first to laugh or run out of breath. These throat-singing games tended to last between one and three minutes. Tagaq’s live performance to Nanook of the North lasts over an hour, an extraordinarily demanding tour-de-force of physical strength and passion.

Katajjaq blends mood, rhythm and the imitation of natural sounds, from wind to howling dogs to crying birds, weaving them into a spiritual whole. By blending the sounds of the natural world with the mind’s vibrations, katajjaq reflects the worldview of animism, the traditional Inuit conception that all objects and beings are endowed with spirit. From the 1930s to the 1960s, Christian missionaries banned throat-singing as a demonic and sexual act. Certainly, Tagaq’s version of katajjaq is strikingly sexual. Her hyperventilations build in intensity and peak with shrieking cries, inducing ecstatic trance. Where “Nyla the smiling one” was crafted as a submissive image of availability, the throat-singer powerfully (perhaps threateningly) voices her own desire. Nina Segalowitz, a survivor of coerced adoption and forced assimilation, found katajjaq an empowering tool for reconnecting to her heritage. Her story recalls the Australian Aboriginal experience of forced assimilation portrayed in Rabbit Proof Fence: “My father thought he was signing hospital admission forms. The next day, he came to take me back, but I was gone. They told him that he had signed release papers and couldn’t get me back.” Evie Mark, raised Inuk but with a white father, also describes the craving for something that will make your identity stronger as a major motivator for katajjaq revival, indicating its importance to national self-esteem. Placed against the imagery of Nanook of the North, katajjaq collapses the distance between spectator and subject, dismantling the subject’s perceived quaintness and giving voice to Inuit experience and perception, from the shrieking killing of a walrus to the grunting effort of igloo construction.

[youtube_sc url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iV-YQSQ1_FE”]

Tanya Tagaq’s reclaiming of Nanook of the North, with music that fuses tradition and modernity, may be compared with the work of A Tribe Called Red, a collective of First Nations DJs who have collaborated with Tagaq, that remix traditional chanting and drumming with electronica, dubstep, and spoken word, rejecting the impulse to isolate, essentialize, and fossilize. A Tribe Called Red’s visuals (start two minutes in) remix stereotypes of “Red Indians” from pop culture, with witty juxtapositions that subvert their original associations and assert A Tribe Called Red’s authorship. Genocidal policies of forced assimilation, from prohibitions by Christian missionaries to coerced adoptions and residential schools (whose painful legacy is depicted in Cree director Georgina Lightning’s Older Than America, among other Indigenous filmmakers), interrupt the line of cultural transmission in oral cultures, so that the imperial culture’s anthropological records can become the only source of preserved heritage. In reframing a colonial record of Inuit life into an expression of Inuit experience, Tagaq’s voicing of Nanook of the North can be compared to the art of Jane Ash Poitras (Cree), which reframes anthropological photographs by symbolically visualizing the subject’s own perspective. One of her Inuit artworks, “In My Parka You Will Find My Spirit,” offers multiple symbolic frames for her young Inuk subject. First, he is surrounded with the syllabic writing of his own language, inuktitut, whose flowing edges are contained by a rigid frame bearing the imposed Euro-American label “Copper Eskimo.” The outer frame is looped with blood, suggesting interior flesh, while the Arctic exterior, with ghostly inukshuk, is placed inside this flesh, the body experiencing the environment rather than the environment defining the body. On the lower left, an elder represents connection to cultural tradition through role models, an experience stolen from the victims (and survivors) of Canada’s policy of coerced adoption, as recently as the 1960s and 1970s.

jane-ash-poitras-parka-spirit

Robert Flaherty not only framed Inuit womanhood according to his fantasies of casual sensuality, but according to Euro-American patriarchal fantasy. His portrait of Inuit life is neatly divided between the woman’s role, limited to cleaning igloos and nursing infants, apparently immune to the frustrations of Euro-American women in that role, and the man’s role, leading the band, educating older children, and hunting. In reality, Inuit women were hunters, including polar bear hunters, and played strong roles as educators and storytellers, while today’s Inuit women are also lawyers, government ministers, and activists.

Nanook of the North established the Inuk man as the sole icon of Inuit life. It was followed by 1934’s Wedding of Palo, a portrait of Greenland Inuit by Danish filmmakers, in which the Inuk woman is a love object fought over by two rivals. Though brilliantly filmed, and preserving authentic Inuit traditions, the film reinforces perceptions of Indigenous women as natural spoils of war, submissively accepting their role as the victor’s rightful property. The Inuit-made Atanarjuat: The Fast Runner (2001) does portray the frustration of its heroine, Atuat, at being promised to villain Oki rather than her beloved Atanarjuat. Nevertheless, the story centers Atanarjuat’s experiences, and it is he must find a way to marry the heroine. The short film Kajutaijuq, co-written and produced by Nyla Innuksuk, also centers a male hunter but, hopefully, the rise of promising female filmmakers like Innuksuk will lead to more representations of Inuit women’s perspectives in future. In the meantime, Tanya Tagaq’s voicing of Nanook of the North is a powerful start.

[youtube_sc url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m4kOIzMqso0″]

Brigit McCone is still decolonizing her mind. She writes and directs short films, radio dramas, and “The Erotic Adventures of Vivica” (as Voluptua von Temptitillatrix). Her hobbies include doodling and telling people to check out the carvings of Susan Point.

Tanya Tagaq Voices Inuit Womanhood In ‘Nanook of the North’

Robert Flaherty not only framed Inuit womanhood according to his fantasies of casual sensuality, but according to Euro-American patriarchal fantasy. His portrait of Inuit life is neatly divided between the woman’s role, limited to cleaning igloos and nursing infants, apparently immune to the frustrations of Euro-American women in that role, and the man’s role, leading the band, educating older children, and hunting.

Maggie Nujarluktuk as "Nyla the Smiling One" with "Rainbow"
Maggie Nujarluktuk as “Nyla the Smiling One” with “Rainbow”

 

Written by Brigit McCone.

Nanook of the North is an iconic 1922 drama that recreates traditional Inuit lifeways through the representative struggles of Nanook (“Polar Bear,” played by Allakariallak), his wife Nyla (“the Smiling One,” played by Maggie Nujarluktuk), another woman identified only as “Cunayou,” Nanook’s young son “Allee,” and baby “Rainbow.” However, we are shown older boys, described as “some of Nanook’s children,” eating sea-biscuits and lard at the trading post, adding to the film’s casual, hand-waving vagueness about Nanook’s family relationships. Male helpers pop up for group hunts, as though from nowhere, but Nanook’s family is never placed in a wider community context. Despite describing Nanook as band leader, he is never depicted leading, and is frequently infantilized by director Robert Flaherty. By framing his drama as “documentary,” Flaherty converts Allakariallak and Nujarluktuk from active collaborators into passive subjects.

Flaherty erased the fact that both Maggie Nujarluktuk and, reportedly, the woman playing Cunayou, were his own wives (or “mistresses,” from Flaherty’s cultural perspective). The “morning” scene, in which Nanook, his two women and his son awake naked inside the igloo, therefore closely resembles Flaherty’s own polyamorous living arrangement, exoticized into a symptom of Nanook’s cultural Otherness. The domestic warmth that Flaherty captured in Nanook of the North, through his access to both women, is key to his “documentary’s” charm, but his pretended objectivity converts this intensely personal intimacy into an image of the women’s indiscriminate availability to outsiders. Maggie Nujarluktuk smiles self-consciously and playfully flirts with the camera, because the camera is being operated by her husband, but that husband disowns her smiles and essentializes them as a permanent characteristic of “Nyla the smiling one.”

In her thesis, Neither Indian Princesses Nor Squaw Drudges, Janice Acoose examines the pervasive stereotype of the “loose squaw” in literature about Indigenous women, which constructs the Indigenous woman as a disposable sexual convenience. Flaherty’s own concept of Inuit disposability was demonstrated when he abandoned Nujarluktuk after filming, who then bore him a son, Josephie, that he never saw, acknowledged or materially supported. This adds sinister resonance to Nanook of the North‘s description of Nyla’s baby Rainbow as “her young husky,” jokingly implying that Inuit women view their own children as equivalent to animals. In Acoose’s view, “loose squaw” images “foster cultural attitudes that legitimize rape and other similar kinds of violence against Indigenous women,” whose disappearances often go uninvestigated in Canada, particularly if they are also sex workers.

[youtube_sc url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dCEzGouiy2Q”]

“I stuck with the seals” – Tanya Tagaq

Josephie Flaherty’s family was caught up in the “High Arctic Relocation,” the forced transfer of a community of Inuit to the High Arctic, as “human flagpoles” to support Canada’s territorial claim to the Northwest Passage. It was masterminded by the Department of Northern Affairs, who wished to remove the Inuit from white civilization to free them from “a toxic culture of dependence.” In other words, like Nanook of the North, the “High Arctic Relocation” was an artificially staged, Euro-American vision of uncorrupted Inuit innocence. It is impossible to draw a neat line between Flaherty’s fictional vision and the Department of Northern Affairs’ imposed reality; each was inspired by a toxic culture, not of dependence but of colonial entitlement and the romanticizing of “noble savages”; the Department’s resident romantics may even have been directly inspired by Nanook of the North. The High Arctic Exiles were denied material support from the Canadian government, though that same government intervened to prevent them from hunting on its designated “wildlife preserve.” The Inuit, identified by numbered tags, were taken from a community with a school and nursing station, and transported on a boat with infectious tuberculosis patients. Tuberculosis was also the disease that had previously claimed the life of Flaherty’s star, Allakariallak, a fact that Flaherty covered up by telling audiences that “Nanook” had “starved to death” while hunting deer, yet again erasing Euro-American influence. Several of the High Arctic Exiles’ children were taken from their parents for medical treatment and “misplaced for several years” by bureaucrats, a chilling indifference that echoes Flaherty’s casual attitude to Nanook’s fluctuating number of “young huskies.” For his monument symbolizing victims of the “Relocation,” Inuk sculptor Looty Pijamini chose a life-size Inuk woman and child, carved from a block of granite tinted red like blood.

Looty Pijamini's monument to the "relocation"
Looty Pijamini’s monument to the “relocation”

Her international recording career has made “Inuk punk” Tanya Tagaq into one of the most recognizable cultural ambassadors of the Inuit people. Tagaq’s own mother hailed from Nanook of the North‘s Quebec location before falling victim to the High Arctic “relocation,” informing Tagaq’s complex response to the film’s mixture of colonial ideology and preserved history. In 2012, the Toronto International Film Festival commissioned Tagaq to provide an original soundtrack to the film, drawing from the Inuit art of throat-singing, katajjaq. Discussing the film, Tagaq spotlights Flaherty’s staged scene of Nanook biting a gramophone record, as though unaware of what it is. “Inuit are running the cameras a lot of the time,” Tagaq laughs. Watching this scene closely is revealing. As the gramophone starts up, neither Nanook nor Nyla appears surprised by it, while Nyla rocks her baby to the music. There is an awkward jump cut, Nyla has been removed from the shot, and Nanook is laughing and biting the record. In such scenes, Allakariallak demonstrates the comic ability which gives the film its charm, but is harnessed to create a demeaning image of Inuit childishness, which Flaherty frames as generally representative of “the fearless, lovable, happy-go-lucky Eskimo,” rather than individually representative of the talented comedian, Allakariallak. However, Tanya Tagaq’s soundtrack rejects Flaherty’s impulse to isolate, essentialize and fossilize Inuit culture into artificial purity. As a confident inheritor of her own culture, she engages with the musical traditions of other nations, harnessing non-native technology and instruments to enrich her evolving practice of katajjaq. When the show came to the 2014 Dublin Fringe Festival, I eagerly checked it out, having experienced the masculine tradition of Tuvan khöömei throat-singing in Siberia. Unlike khöömei, katajjaq evolved as a female tradition. Two women, facing each other, would improvise rhythmic motifs, the loser being the first to laugh or run out of breath. These throat-singing games tended to last between one and three minutes. Tagaq’s live performance to Nanook of the North lasts over an hour, an extraordinarily demanding tour-de-force of physical strength and passion.

Indigenous Siberian artist Konstantin Pankov blends nature with rhythmic vibrations
Indigenous Siberian artist Konstantin Pankov blends nature with rhythmic vibrations

 

Katajjaq blends mood, rhythm and the imitation of natural sounds, from wind to howling dogs to crying birds, weaving them into a spiritual whole. By blending the sounds of the natural world with the mind’s vibrations, katajjaq reflects the worldview of animism, the traditional Inuit conception that all objects and beings are endowed with spirit. From the 1930s to the 1960s, Christian missionaries banned throat-singing as a demonic and sexual act. Certainly, Tagaq’s version of katajjaq is strikingly sexual. Her hyperventilations build in intensity and peak with shrieking cries, inducing ecstatic trance. Where “Nyla the smiling one” was crafted as a submissive image of availability, the throat-singer powerfully (perhaps threateningly) voices her own desire. Nina Segalowitz, a survivor of coerced adoption and forced assimilation, found katajjaq an empowering tool for reconnecting to her heritage. Her story recalls the Australian Aboriginal experience of forced assimilation portrayed in Rabbit Proof Fence: “my father thought he was signing hospital admission forms. The next day, he came to take me back, but I was gone. They told him that he had signed release papers and couldn’t get me back.” Evie Mark, raised Inuk but with a white father, also describes the craving for something that will make your identity stronger as a major motivator for katajjaq revival, indicating its importance to national self-esteem. Placed against the imagery of Nanook of the North, katajjaq collapses the distance between spectator and subject, dismantling the subject’s perceived quaintness and giving voice to Inuit experience and perception, from the shrieking killing of a walrus to the grunting effort of igloo construction.

[youtube_sc url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iV-YQSQ1_FE”]

Tagaq in concert with Nanook of the North (sample)

Tanya Tagaq’s reclaiming of Nanook of the North, with music that fuses tradition and modernity, may be compared with the work of A Tribe Called Red, a collective of First Nations DJs who have collaborated with Tagaq, that remix traditional chanting and drumming with electronica, dubstep and spoken word, rejecting the impulse to isolate, essentialize and fossilize. A Tribe Called Red‘s visuals (start two minutes in) remix stereotypes of “Red Indians” from pop culture, with witty juxtapositions that subvert their original associations and assert A Tribe Called Red‘s authorship. Genocidal policies of forced assimilation, from prohibitions by Christian missionaries to coerced adoptions and residential schools (whose painful legacy is depicted in Cree director Georgina Lightning’s Older Than America, among other Indigenous filmmakers), interrupt the line of cultural transmission in oral cultures, so that the imperial culture’s anthropological records can become the only source of preserved heritage. In reframing a colonial record of Inuit life into an expression of Inuit experience, Tagaq’s voicing of Nanook of the North can be compared to the art of Jane Ash Poitras (Cree), which reframes anthropological photographs by symbolically visualizing the subject’s own perspective. One of her Inuit artworks, “In My Parka You Will Find My Spirit,” offers multiple symbolic frames for her young Inuk subject. First, he is surrounded with the syllabic writing of his own language, inuktitut, whose flowing edges are contained by a rigid frame bearing the imposed Euro-American label “Copper Eskimo.” The outer frame is looped with blood, suggesting interior flesh, while the Arctic exterior, with ghostly inukshuk, is placed inside this flesh, the body experiencing the environment rather than the environment defining the body. On the lower left, an elder represents connection to cultural tradition through role models, an experience stolen from the victims (and survivors) of Canada’s policy of coerced adoption, as recently as the 1960s and 1970s.

Jane Ash Poitras' "In My Parka You Will Find My Spirit"
Jane Ash Poitras’ “In My Parka You Will Find My Spirit”

Robert Flaherty not only framed Inuit womanhood according to his fantasies of casual sensuality, but according to Euro-American patriarchal fantasy. His portrait of Inuit life is neatly divided between the woman’s role, limited to cleaning igloos and nursing infants, apparently immune to the frustrations of Euro-American women in that role, and the man’s role, leading the band, educating older children, and hunting. In reality, Inuit women were hunters, including polar bear hunters, and played strong roles as educators and storytellers, while today’s Inuit women are also lawyers, government ministers, and activists. Nanook of the North established the Inuk man as the sole icon of Inuit life. It was followed by 1934’s Wedding of Palo, a portrait of Greenland Inuit by Danish filmmakers, in which the Inuk woman is a love object fought over by two rivals. Though brilliantly filmed, and preserving authentic Inuit traditions, the film reinforces perceptions of Indigenous women as natural spoils of war, submissively accepting their role as the victor’s rightful property. The Inuit-made Atanarjuat: The Fast Runner (2001) does portray the frustration of its heroine, Atuat, at being promised to villain Oki rather than her beloved Atanarjuat. Nevertheless, the story centers Atanarjuat’s experiences, and it is he must find a way to marry the heroine. The short film Kajutaijuq, co-written and produced by Nyla Innuksuk, also centers a male hunter but, hopefully, the rise of promising female filmmakers like Innuksuk will lead to more representations of Inuit women’s perspectives in future. In the meantime, Tanya Tagaq’s voicing of Nanook of the North is a powerful start.

[youtube_sc url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m4kOIzMqso0″]

Mute the sentimental soundtrack and slap this on for a flavor.

Brigit McCone is still decolonizing her mind. She writes and directs short films and radio dramas. Her hobbies include doodling and telling people to check out the carvings of Susan Point.

Movie Soundtracks: The Roundup

Check out all of the posts for our Movie Soundtracks Theme Week here.

Take Away This Lonely Man: (500) Days of Summer And Musical Storytelling by Victoria Edel

We hear the song one more time in a moment that mimics the first, after Tom’s illusion is shattered. Instead of listing what he loves about Summer, Tom lists the things he hates about her, concluding with “It’s Like The Wind,” and yelling, “I hate this song!” The romantic illusions are finally cracked. This isn’t the movie he thought it was.

Creating the Mythology of Beatrix Kiddo Through Music by Rhianna Shaheen

Tarantino’s vast knowledge of music is clear from the very beginning with Reservoir Dogs. However, it isn’t until the Kill Bill series when his soundtracks begin to drift away from pop and instead embrace more orchestral sounds like that of Ennio Morricone. Viewers need no knowledge of the genre to instantly recognize that spaghetti western feel. It’s that famous mix of Spanish guitar, orchestra, whistles, cracking whips, trumpet, flute and sometimes chorus that recalls images of Clint Eastwood clad in a green poncho and cowboy hat as the iconic Man with No Name.

Running Away With The Runaways: Sex, Rock ‘n Roll, and the Female Experience by Angelina Rodriguez

The music throughout the film deals with the lost and rebellious feelings during coming of age for young women. The movie tells the story of these two individuals and how their lives were affected by fame, but underneath that is the coming of age experience for young girls realizing their power and sexuality within a culture that seeks to suppress them.

The Siren Song of Cartoon Catgirls by Robert V. Aldrich

As evocative as the scene of the Puma Sisters doing their thing might be, and as culturally-charged a time as the release of Dominion Tank Police might have been, much of the success of this scene is owed to the music. “Hey Boy,” by Riko Ejima, is a haunting song that, while seemingly chaste in that it seems to be singing about dancing, captures something deep, deep in the soul.

Love It or Hate It, Emotions Served Raw in the Music of Les Misérables by Katherine Murray

Ugly singing; ugly make-up. ‘Les Misérables’ is deservedly known as the film that tried too hard to bum us out, and Anne Hathaway is known as the actress who tries too hard to be liked. But, isn’t it nice, sometimes, when somebody makes an effort?

The Sounds of Change and Confusion in The Graduate by Caroline Madden

Mike Nichol’s The Graduate has one of the most popular soundtracks of all-time. The songs reveal the dynamics of a character, theme, and a moment without the use of dialogue or a backstory, but simply through the lyrics of a Simon and Garfunkel song.

Love Jones: The Soundtrack of the Neo-Soul Generation by Inda Lauryn

Love Jones does more than captures a moment in time in the late 90s. It creates the point when neo-soul established itself as the music of all of us with artistic inclinations, those of us leaving fantasies of teenage love affairs behind for a more realistic image of making a relationship work. And, yes, for some of us it brought about a sexual awakening that helped us accept that sex could exist outside a relationship if it’s truly wanted that way.

Whale Rider: Women and Children First by Ren Jender

Lisa Gerrard of Dead Can Dance, one of the few successful women musicians who made the transition to film composer (she won a Golden Globe for her work on Gladiator), wrote and performed the music for 2002’s Whale Rider–and she didn’t have to date writer-director Niki Caro to do so. Gerrard might seem an unlikely choice: when I briefly worked in a women’s sex shop in the 90s, the store owner told me not to play Dead Can Dance on the sound system because they scared away customers. But Gerrard’s score for Rider does what the best movie music is supposed to do: reinforcing the drama of the film without calling unnecessary attention to itself.

What’s in a Soundtrack? The Sweet Sounds of Romeo + Juliet by Leigh Kolb

Zeffirelli’s Romeo and Juliet is a tale told by the older generation. Luhrmann’s Romeo + Juliet is one told by “unfaded” youth. When Des’ree was singing “Kissing You” as Romeo and Juliet kiss (and oh, how they kiss), she is singing with deep longing and pain. When Glen Weston sings “What is a Youth?” he sings at Romeo and Juliet, about how youth–and female virginity–fades.

The Soundtrack for That Thing You Do! Withstands the Test of Time by Lisa Anderson

That Thing You Do! with its sly humor, strong performances and ultimately heartwarming romance makes for satisfying viewing. It’s a meditation on the tension between art and commerce that manages to acknowledge what can be good about temporary fame. It’s also a squeaky-clean antidote to sordid, drug-filled “Behind-the Music”-type stories both fictional and real.

Watch Me Shine: Legally Blonde and My Path to Girl Power by Kathryn Diaz

My attachment wasn’t about Elle Woods or embracing hallmarks of traditional femininity that get belittled by western mainstream society (that would come later). I was all about lyrics like, “That’s not the way/ Nice girls behave/ Oh yeah I know/ You told me/ It’s not your choice/ I have a voice/ I guess you just don’t hear me.” It spoke to me on a spiritual level.

Girls Just Wanna … Take Control of Their Own Lives by Shay Revolver

I’m a lot older now and I still squeal with excitement when Girls Just Want to Have Fun comes on. When it showed up on Netflix my daughter and I watched the movie over a dozen times. We would take “supreme silly” dance breaks whenever the music would play and when the Netflix purge occurred we found a DVD copy (OK we got two in case one got scratched or lost) of our very own on Amazon so that we could continue this tradition at will.

Death by Stereo: Innocence Lost in The Lost Boys by Bethany Ainsworth-Coles

The Lost Boys is a classic 1980s vampire flick directed by Joel Schumacher. It is as famous for its soundtrack as it is for its content. The entire film in fact is exemplified in its main theme–“Cry Little Sister,” by G Tom Mac–from the typical horror themed sections to its classic 80s rock moments down to its choral moments. These sections sum up the film almost perfectly.

 

The Soundtrack for ‘That Thing You Do!’ Withstands the Test of Time

‘That Thing You Do!’ with its sly humor, strong performances and ultimately heartwarming romance makes for satisfying viewing. It’s a meditation on the tension between art and commerce that manages to acknowledge what can be good about temporary fame. It’s also a squeaky-clean antidote to sordid, drug-filled “Behind-the Music”-type stories, both fictional and real.

That Thing You Do movie poster
That Thing You Do! movie poster

 

This guest post by Lisa Anderson appears as part of our theme week on Movie Soundtracks.

What makes a film’s soundtrack memorable? Some beloved films, such as Pulp Fiction, pull together varying songs to capture the essence of a film, while others, like O Brother Where Art Thou? have artists covering existing songs specifically for the movie in question. That Thing You Do! (1996) took a novel approach somewhere in the middle. Writer/director Tom Hanks collaborated with others to create original songs in the style of various musical genres of the time and record them under the name of fictional musical acts from the movie. Despite its initial popularity and the success of the movie, the resulting album has fallen into relative obscurity, but I believe it still holds up.

The movie itself tells the story of a fictional “One-Hit Wonder” band from 1960s Eerie, Pennsylvania. Young Guy Patterson, played by Tom Everett Scott, is asked to sit in with a band for a local contest after their usual drummer (Giovanni Ribisi in a bit role) breaks his arm. Guy brings a new tempo to the band’s signature song, “That Thing You Do!” and also gives them their new name: The Oneders, which is pronounced “Wonders” but hilariously mispronounced “Oh-nee-ders” on multiple occasions.

Guy
Guy Patterson: drummer extraordinaire

 

The pepped-up version of “That Thing You Do!” becomes a hit, and the Oneders go from local radio play to the state fair circuit to the Billboard charts and national TV. Along the way, they have help from Andrew White (Tom Hanks), their manager with the fictional Play-Tone records, and Faye (Liv Tyler), the lead singer’s mistreated girlfriend, after whom Guy pines. Success turns sour, as it inevitably must (at least in the movies), but not before the audience is treated to many great songs that sound like they’re lifted straight from the 60s.

[youtube_sc url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wPMLG8mnCRM”]

As the film opens, we hear “Lovin’ You Lots and Lots,” by the Norm Wooster Singers — a shout-out to the tame, almost muzak-like sound that’s about to be supplanted by rock ‘n’ roll. As the Oneders play gigs, we hear them perform not only “That Thing You Do!” (of course), but also “Little Wid One,” “Dance With Me Tonight,” and “All My Lonely Dreams.” The first two are up-tempo 1960s rock, while the latter is a slow ballad of the sort that the lead singer, Jimmy, apparently has a proclivity for. His post-Oneders band, the Heardsmen, also has two songs on the soundtrack: “She Knows It” and “I Need You (That Thing you Do),” although the latter is also attributed to the Oneders.

It’s when the Oneders go on a state fair tour with other Play-Tone artists that the music gets even more varied. “Hold my Hand, Hold my Heart” by the Chantrellines captures the sound of Black all-girl groups such as the Supremes. “Mr Downtown,” by Freddy Fredrickson, combines a lounge-lizard sound with the feel of a James Bond title song and a dash of Raymond Chandler. Diane Dane sings in the tradition of female soloist torch singers on “My World is Over.” The Vicksburgs, a rock band much like the Oneders, alludes to the era’s fascination with the automobile in “Drive Faster.”

The world of the Oneders is full of instrumental music, too. “Voyage Around the Moon,” by The Saturn 5, is a spot-on homage to surf music. Cap’n Geech and the Shrimp Shack Shooters provide the sound for the Beach-movie phenomenon in “Shrimp Shack,” and are portrayed by the Oneders in a metafictional movie. Not least of all, Del Paxton, Guy’s favorite jazz musician, performs “Time to Blow.” My only regret is that “I am Spartacus,” Del’s Jam session with Guy, didn’t make the cut.

The movie presents some interesting challenges to those interested in social justice analysis, and it’s hard to say whether that’s a weakness of the script or due to the restrictive cultural environment in which the story takes place. The only named Black characters are somewhat stereotyped — the sage Jazz musician Del and Lamar, the cheerful hotel concierge. But Guy expresses a deep respect for specific Black musicians on several occasions, and the movie seems very conscious of how much American music owes to Black musicians.

[youtube_sc url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JJZQzUuN7Eo”]

The movie does less, in my opinion, to redeem its depiction of women. Most of the female characters seem shallow and hyper-focused on their romantic relationships, with the exception of Faye, who is also very relationship-focused, but is given more substance and seems more genuinely interested in music. Unfortunately, this sets her up as an Exceptional Woman — the kind who you know is better than the rest because her friends are all men — and the movie only passes the Bechdel test by a brief early exchange between her and Guy’s girlfriend. She could have more agency in terms of her relationships, too, but the movie does a nice job of contrasting how Jimmy treats her with how Guy treats her. (On a more subversive note, “Little Wild One” is basically all about the sexual double-standard.)

Liv Tyler as Faye in That Thing You Do!
Liv Tyler as Faye in That Thing You Do!

 

In the end, Guy must reconnect with his his love of making music in order to decide what to do with his life after the Oneders. That Thing You Do! is not the least predictable movie ever, but with its sly humor, strong performances and ultimately heartwarming romance makes for satisfying viewing. It’s a meditation on the tension between art and commerce that manages to acknowledge what can be good about temporary fame. It’s also a squeaky-clean antidote to sordid, drug-filled “Behind-the Music”-type stories, both fictional and real.

The soundtrack to That Thing You Do! was released by Epic Records under the name of the label from the movie, Play-Tone Records. Hanks later spun off Play-Tone as his own label, to release other movie and television soundtracks, including Bring It On and the soundtrack to The Sopranos. Almost 20 years later, I remain impressed by the quality of the songs and how closely they imitated the genres of the era, and I heartily recommend both the movie and its music.

Death by Stereo: Innocence Lost in ‘The Lost Boys’

‘The Lost Boys’ is a classic 1980s vampire flick directed by Joel Schumacher. It is as famous for its soundtrack as it is for its content. The entire film in fact is exemplified in its main theme–“Cry Little Sister,” by G Tom Mac–from the typical horror themed sections to its classic 80s rock moments down to its choral moments. These sections sum up the film almost perfectly.

This guest post by Bethany Ainsworth-Coles appears as part of our theme week on Movie Soundtracks.

Spoilers Ahead

The Lost Boys is a classic 1980s vampire flick directed by Joel Schumacher. It is as famous for its soundtrack as it is for its content. The entire film in fact is exemplified in its main theme–“Cry Little Sister,” by G Tom Mac–from the typical horror themed sections to its classic 80s rock moments down to its choral moments. These sections sum up the film almost perfectly.

The film itself seems pretty simple; Lucy (and her two sons Michael [Jason Patric] and Sam [Corey Haim] move to Santa Carla to live with Lucy’s dad in Santa Carla. However, Michael falls in with a bad crowd and is seduced into being a vampire by David (Keifer Sutherland), the pack’s leader. There is of course more to it than this (a pair of vampire hunters, a small child, and a generic love interest), but that’s the main gist.

The vampire teens
The vampire teens

 

“Cry Little Sister” links to this film perfectly, the way only the best movie themes do. I’m organizing this article in three subtitled sections, which employ quotes from “Cry Little Sister” in relation to parts in the film.

“Love Is With Your Brother”–Homoeroticism and Forgotten Women

In an article about The Lost Boys it would be a travesty to dare forget the amounts of male bonding and homoerotic tension. The vampires and their culture in particular is shown in this light with the androgynous (and gorgeous) David, the supposed leader of the gang as they steal and kill people to feed. He also seduces Michael into drinking the blood, thus beginning his transformation into a vampire.  This is an interesting twist on the female seductress trope as seen in most vampire movies. This twist is best summed up Jeff Allard in his review: “Typically (especially today in our Twilight world), either Michael or David would’ve been written as a girl but in The Lost Boys you’ve got a male bringing another male into the fold.”

This is certainly true if we look at typical vampire stories–e.g. Edward turns Bella in Twilight, Dracula turns Lucy Westernra in Dracula, etc. The victim is often the woman and is seen as weak and inferior; by subverting this, Schumacher includes not only an equal playing field but also huge amounts of sexual tension. Especially as in most vampire novels, films etc. the transformation into vampire is often treated incredibly sexually. While this isn’t the first time a man has turned a man into vampire (Anne Rice’s Interview With a Vampire, which is also homoerotic) it is a very interesting occurrence that should not be avoided. David even takes him to his first feed on human blood.

Michael (Jason Patric) looking lovely
Michael (Jason Patric) looking lovely

 

The women throughout this are mainly forgotten and depicted in two major roles: the sister or the mother. All the boys share a bond shown throughout the film. Through the vampires themselves, who are the “sons” of Max (Edward Hermann), to the actual brothers of The Frogs (Corey Feldman and Jamison Newlander) and of course are main brothers Sam and Michael. Most of the story revolves around Michael’s betrayal of Sam from trying to attack him when the first gets too great. Sam chooses to help him and save him from the Frogs’ vampire killing obsession.  This is shown equally in the song “Cry Little Sister” with “love is with your brother,” which repeated several times throughout the song, reinforcing its importance in the piece.

“The Masquerade, Strangers Will Come”–Broken Families

Whilst brotherhood may be a strong point in the film, families themselves are not shown to be as sturdy.  Lucy has had a messy divorce, which is the reason she and her boys have moved to Santa Carla. They themselves despite their non-functional new lives get along well and cracks only appear when Lucy dates Max and Michael becomes half vampire.  However, this family is not the most interesting of the families. It’s not even the Frog family, who we only see very briefly as a whole unit.

Lucy and her family at the end
Lucy and her family at the end

 

It has to be Max and the boys. Max is the head vampire but has lost control of his boys and is longing to find them a mother, a role he thinks Lucy would be just perfect for. He does genuinely love his boys though, especially when as he walks into the house the final time he sees David’s body.

However, this twisted family image also encapsulates the portrayal of women. During this film, both Star and Lucy take on maternal roles. Lucy, of course, is already a mother, and Star looks after Laddy (the child half vampire). They are both shown to be manipulated by the vampires into becoming family members and helping the group.

“Thou Shall Not Fall”–Innocence Lost

“Cry Little Sister” features a large section of choral vocals repeating religious-type phrases sung by what sounds like children. These are used to great effect during the final scene, where David is impaled and killed by Michael. During this section, once he is impaled, his face slowly regresses back to a child and how he was before he was turned into a vampire thus showing him as an innocent young boy rather than a dead monster.  David’s death accompanied by “Cry Little Sister’s” faded choral section singing “thou shall not die” gives the audience just a glimpse of who he was before Max transformed him, probably like Michael against his will. The audience is presented with the horrible truth that David and all the vampires were just missing children shunned by their leader. In death for both David and Marko (Alex Winter, who is the first to be killed and youngest of the boys) they are taken back to being lost children.

David looks noticeably younger
David looks noticeably younger

 

“Cry Little Sister” is the perfect song for a fantastic horror movie. Whilst the movie certainly isn’t flawless, it really is an excellent take on the vampire genre (plus who in their right mind doesn’t like teen vampire with cool hair, leather jackets and motorbikes who lives in an abandoned hotel?). They are living the twisted teenage dream and the soundtrack portrays that perfectly.

Recommended reading: Boomer Beefcake and Bonding’s analysis of subtext in The Lost Boys

Bethany Ainsworth-Coles is a young writer from England who enjoys overanalyzing things and watching films. She tweets over at https://twitter.com/wierdbuthatsok.

 

 

Girls Just Wanna … Take Control of Their Own Lives

I’m a lot older now and I still squeal with excitement when this film comes on. When it showed up on Netflix my daughter and I watched the movie over a dozen times. We would take “supreme silly” dance breaks whenever the music would play and when the Netflix purge occurred we found a DVD copy (OK we got two in case one got scratched or lost) of our very own on Amazon so that we could continue this tradition at will.

Janey and Lynne bond over Dance TV
Janey and Lynne bond over Dance TV

This guest post by Shay Revolver appears as part of our theme week on Movie Soundtracks. 

The year was 1985. A very young and impressionable Shay had grown quite fond of the moving picture shows. She watched anything and everything. Some of them only once, others she recorded and watched over and over again. She was particularly fond of movies with a great soundtrack.  Her older sister’s old bootleg copy of Rock ‘n’ Roll High School with the defiant, audacious and energetic PJ Soles was at the top of her list.

Then one day she came upon a new girl-powered (and probably more age-appropriate) film to love. This film would seal her belief that music and moving images go together like PB and J. It would imprint on her that the tone of a film could be realized through music and create a process by which the older Shay would write every script and edit every frame to a song.  It wasn’t the first film that helped her see this beautiful pattern and it wouldn’t be the last, but it would definitely be the most fun. It would be a movie watched over and over again by a feisty little girl after school almost every day for a month in her Catholic school uniform and triple laced LA Gears. She would down all of the Fun Dip, eat all of the popcorn, and drink all the iced tea in the fridge while hanging out on the couch staring up at the big screen TV watching Girls Just Want to Have Fun.

 

Girls Just Want to Have Fun poster
Girls Just Want to Have Fun poster

 

For those of you that haven’t had the awesome pleasure of seeing this film I’m going to break it down for you: Army brat Janey Glenn (played by a very young Sarah Jessica Parker) gets transferred to Chicago with her family. She meets Lynne Stone (Helen Hunt) at her new Catholic all girls school. They become instant friends over their love of Dance TV, a nationwide TV show. When the opportunity presents itself for them to audition to become dancers on  the show they couldn’t be happier; that is, until Janey’s super strict military dad puts his foot down and says NO. The story could end there, but Lynne convinces Janey to do it anyway. A majority of the movie is spent with Janey going behind her father’s back to practice with her partner, thwarting (and retaliating against) the evil plots of her rich girl nemesis, Natalie , falling in love with her “wrong side of the tracks” partner Jeff, and finally standing up to her dad, doing things her way and  making her dreams come true.

 

Janey wishing she could be on Dance TV
Janey, wishing she could be on Dance TV

 

I’m a lot older now and I still squeal with excitement when this film comes on. When it showed up on Netflix my daughter and I watched the movie over a dozen times. We would take “supreme silly” dance breaks whenever the music would play and when the Netflix purge occurred we found a DVD copy (OK we got two in case one got scratched or lost) of our very own on Amazon so that we could continue this tradition at will.

 

Striking back against Natalie
Striking back against Natalie

 

The thing about Girls Just Want to Have Fun is that it isn’t just about the girl power, female friendships, choosing your own destiny, standing up for what you believe in story line, it’s also about the music. In fact it’s so much about the music that it’s one of the few feature films whose soundtracks have their very own Wikipedia page. The music in the film isn’t just a soundtrack, it’s the story of their lives. It provides a freedom and excitement that is needed to propel the story (and in some ways the girls’ lives) along.

 

[youtube_sc url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ILXC6S6UZf4&index=3&list=PL8B90EF1762DB0144″]

 

Each song plays at the perfect time in the story and the music gets more and more intense as Janey breaks out of her shell, pulls away from who her father and society expect her to be and becomes the person she wants to be, or has always been but, not had a chance to discover.

 

[youtube_sc url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TBVfBFhLYnw”]

 

The music is Janey in some ways and follows her path  throughout the film from the innocent pop music in the beginning as a naive and sheltered Janey begins to explore the world, to the woeful soul music as she faces disappointment, hopelessness, and obstacles on her way to accomplishing her goals, to the “punk” music that plays when she breaks out and begins to express and stand up for herself.

 

[youtube_sc url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QRRKmh6mTpI&list=PL8B90EF1762DB0144&index=8″]

 

Each note, lyric, and melody seems carefully curated to what’s happening on screen. The soundtrack plays in the background like an extra character in the film. It goes so smoothly with the images on the screen that it seamlessly integrates with the film becoming way more than background audio.

 

Janey and Jeff go for the win
Janey and Jeff go for the win

 

One of the things that makes this film and its soundtrack so memorable is that you feel every note. When the music plays you feel compelled to get up and dance along, which for the record is why it’s good that this film can be viewed in the comfort of your own home. The music even creates a freeing emotional release in the end when Janey’s father shows up to stop her from doing the final dance off to secure her spot on the show against her monied rival Natalie. As the song plays in the background you know before her dad does or even Janey does that despite seeing her dad, she isn’t going to be that good little girl she had always been. She’d grown up a bit and the defiance in the music shows that.

 

[youtube_sc url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TASGl0_jnjU”]

 

You could just feel through the music that she was going to acknowledge her father’s presence and do what she felt was right in her heart. She was going to dance, despite the consequences or incurring her father’s disapproval, disappointment, or wrath.  When it was all said and done Janey grew up to the music and we all cheered and danced along with her. Even her hard-nosed father came around. He was proud of her and she had gained his respect.

 

Janey breaks free and literally flies at the finals
Janey breaks free and flies at the finals

 

As an avid film (and music)  lover, this was one of the films that inspired me. It was all about being bold, blazing your own path and figuring out who you are for you. The music didn’t overshadow the film or try to be hip by using the music of the “kids” and coming off as messy or chaotic. It helped tell the story in such a way that it became a part of the story and it taught me that sometimes you’ve just got to dance, a lesson that I gladly share with my little mouseling whether we’re watching this movie or just baking cookies in the kitchen. It also taught a nation of little girls that sometimes it’s OK to be different, to fight the system, to follow your heart, and let it lead you to your dreams. And in a world where girls are still often taught to be seen and not heard, to be obedient without question and to play nice, everything about Girls Just Want to Have Fun was a welcome wake-up call.

 

Shay Revolver is a vegan, feminist, cinephile, insomniac, recovering NYU student and former roller derby player currently working as a New York-based microcinema filmmaker, web series creator, and writer. She’s obsessed with most books, especially the Pop Culture and Philosophy series and loves movies and TV shows from low brow to high class. As long as the image is moving she’s all in and believes that everything is worth a watch. She still believes that movies make the best bedtime stories because books are a daytime activity to rev up your engine and once you flip that first page, you have to keep going until you finish it and that is beautiful in its own right. She enjoys talking about the feminist perspective in comic book and gaming culture and the lack of gender equality in mainstream cinema and television productions. Twitter: @socialslumber13.

 

Watch Me Shine: ‘Legally Blonde’ and My Path to Girl Power

My attachment wasn’t about Elle Woods or embracing hallmarks of traditional femininity that get belittled by western mainstream society (that would come later). I was all about lyrics like, “That’s not the way/ Nice girls behave/ Oh yeah I know/ You told me/ It’s not your choice/ I have a voice/ I guess you just don’t hear me.” It spoke to me on a spiritual level.

Legally-Blonde-legally-blonde-31597227-400-292

This guest post by Kathryn Diaz appears as part of our theme week on Movie Soundtracks.

I was 9 when Legally Blonde first sparkled in movie theaters. I didn’t understand what the Bend-and-Snap was all about, half the jokes went over my head, and I was only mostly sure that a sorority was some kind of real thing. What I did know was that “Watch Me Shine” by Joanna Pacitti was my new favorite song, like, ever.

Here was a song that felt commanding and fun, something that was opening a gate to me that my Mary-Kate and Ashley makeup set never did. I played “Watch Me Shine” in the car while my mom drove me to school every morning. I stumbled over the rapid-fire lyrics at the top of my lungs and whipped my pony tail back and forth with shameless enjoyment no matter how sleepy or cranky I’d woken up. At school, I replayed the montage over and over in my head. If I just thought about the song long enough, I was sure I would become as confident and fearless as Elle. When I met my challenges, I would march through them with determined glares and that song. If this was what the rest of Girl Power sounded like, I wanted to listen non-stop.

[youtube_sc url=”http://youtu.be/u5XRYBLfjhI”]

Studying never looked so fierce.

My love for the Legally Blonde soundtrack eventually expanded to include Hoku’s defiantly happy-go-lucky tune “Perfect Day,” “One Girl Revolution” by Superchick, and “We Could Still Belong Together” by Lisa Loeb. “We Could Still Belong Together” was, and still is, an unexpected win. Legally Blonde plays the song as Elle makes the trek from home to Harvard to kick off her quest to win back Warner, but the whole song is something of a give-away about the film’s real philosophy on love: couples that belong together are ones that let the partners be their imperfect, interrupting, complicated human selves without any fuss.

[youtube_sc url=”http://youtu.be/mdU40HDmkbg”]

Why yes, women can be in a relationship without walking on a perfection tightrope.

 

As I hit that sweet spot between anger and anxiety with the rest of puberty, “Can’t Get Me Down” by Lo-Ball climbed to the top of my favorites from the soundtrack. By this time, my life looked even less like the positive friendship-driven fairy tale Legally Blonde existed in, but my CD had transcended its origins. My attachment wasn’t about Elle Woods or embracing hallmarks of traditional femininity that get belittled by western mainstream society (that would come later). I was all about lyrics like, “That’s not the way/ Nice girls behave/ Oh yeah I know/ You told me/ It’s not your choice/ I have a voice/ I guess you just don’t hear me.” It spoke to me on a spiritual level.

[youtube_sc url=”http://youtu.be/Fzo1uqFS-jU”]

Much angst was set to this song.

 

One day some of my friends and I ended up pulling out our overstuffed CD collections and taking safety pins and paper clips to their surfaces. Scratching CDs, especially ones we’d had for a long time, was a common pastime whenever we felt “bored,” that heavy catch-all for everything we didn’t want to name or didn’t know how to. I didn’t have a lot of CDs in the first place, so my fun was usually in carving swirls and rain clouds over the discs everyone else had finished with, but that day I couldn’t get out of contributing something. I’d already pretended to complain about how much I hated my pink CDs. Surprisingly, my friends didn’t believe I had any, that they weren’t “me” and I was clearly making something up. This was true, but I was not about to correct them. My love for my pink CDs would stay a deeply guarded secret for a long, long time. Through the maze of 12-year-old peer pressure logic, I decided I had no choice but to show them something and dismantle the hell out of it.

I sacrificed my Princess Diaries soundtrack. It was pinker than pink and, more importantly, it was not Legally Blonde. Legally Blonde was hidden under my Evanescence album where no one would question my cool. I wanted to hold onto it more than I wanted to be approved of. My Legally Blonde soundtrack was important, even if that idea seemed ridiculous and bizarre.

I held onto it for as long as I could. When no one was around to listen, I made the CD the big mainstay in my Walkman. My favorite song circled through the tracks and my emotions fluctuated as much as the genres from track to track. It was my big, bolstering secret. But eventually I found other movies, other albums, and inevitably other means of listening to music. My head filled up with more ideas, more role models and anthems. I stopped worrying about having too many sparkles or not enough. By the time I lost my Legally Blonde soundtrack, I was more put out than crushed.

I was in college when I resolved to track it down again. I had finished my first Women’s Studies class, I had just bought a new iPod, and I wanted to party like it was 2001, or at least have a nostalgic dance session to commemorate my gateway ticket to feminism. I blasted all the old songs on YouTube and made my friends dance to “Perfect Day” with me.

[youtube_sc url=”http://youtu.be/84odSvKFrkY”]

This song still nails that “last day of term” feeling for me.

 

We were young women starting our lives for ourselves, and when I rocked out to cotton-candy light pop, I was going to do it without being ashamed of sparkles or silliness. I knew the Bend-and-Snap was a little problematic, at least one of the stereotypes employed for the side characters was unfriendly at best, and the movie that had lead me to my gateway ticket to feminism wasn’t perfect. But Legally Blonde was still about finding strength in yourself and female friendship and defying the patriarchy with style, and the sparkle-covered soundtrack was still bursting with a shameless power that made me feel like I could conquer the world. That was plenty of reason to shout, “watch me shine” just a few more times for me.

What started it all
What started it all

 

Kathryn Diaz is a writer living in Houston, Texas. You can follow her at The Telescope for more of her work.

‘Love Jones’: The Soundtrack of the Neo-Soul Generation

‘Love Jones’ does more than captures a moment in time in the late 90s. It creates the point when neo-soul established itself as the music of all of us with artistic inclinations, those of us leaving fantasies of teenage love affairs behind for a more realistic image of making a relationship work. And, yes, for some of us it brought about a sexual awakening that helped us accept that sex could exist outside a relationship if it’s truly wanted that way.

Love Jones movie poster
Love Jones movie poster

This guest post by Inda Lauryn appears as part of our theme week on Movie Soundtracks.

The summer of 2000. I share my extensive music collection with my friends. In this collection: a three-year-old soundtrack to a film I never saw in the theaters but caught on video in the dorm on a night that turned into a communal viewing. I and my summer buddies listen to this soundtrack so much that we even know the background noise to a spoken word poetry performance taken directly from the film, so when we watch the film on a bus trip to an amusement park, we not only recite the poem, but also the audience reactions. We have a great time and I have a personal memory associated with one of the best film soundtracks of the late 90s.

That film: Love Jones. The 1997 film has the distinction of providing the neo-soul generation with its soundtrack. Juxtaposing Lauryn Hill and Maxwell with The Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra and the combination of Duke Ellington and John Coltrane practically captures the essence of the burgeoning “neo-soul movement” during the mid-1990s. As the unofficial neo-soul soundtrack, Love Jones also shares an honor with the classic Super Fly soundtrack by Curtis Mayfield: many who know the film and the soundtrack agree that the soundtrack is decidedly superior to the film. (A snippet of Mayfield’s “Give Me Your Love” even appears in the film set in his hometown of Chicago.) However, seeing the film again with nearly 20 years between its release and the present day gives me more appreciation for the film, what it captured during its time, and the soundtrack.

Soundtracks to Black-cast films have always been as important as the films themselves and often attracted some of the most popular acts of the day, much like the soundtracks for Jason’s Lyric, Panther, Waiting to Exhale, and The Best Man. In some cases, they are extensions of the story on film, letting the audience relive a moment in which the song plays a crucial part. In some ways, they are a form of fan fiction with tracks not found in the film still somehow becoming relevant to the story being told. Dionne Farris’ “Hopeless” playing over the opening montage of black-and-white photos depicting Black life in Chicago brings as much nostalgia to the listener as it does to Nia Long’s Nina Mosley as she laments the end of her engagement. It represents the state of Nina’s relationship with ex-fiance Marvin (portrayed by Khalil Kain) as well as her role as a photographer. The dialogue that introduces Larenz Tate’s Darius Lovehall and his friends (two of whom are portrayed by Bill Bellamy and Isaiah Washington) definitely draws its inspiration from the burgeoning spoken word scene that colored the Black coffeehouse scene before it was co-opted by the mainstream.

Date
Nina and Darius on a date in Love Jones

 

Mellow and smooth, the Love Jones soundtrack creates that Black boho ambiance that permeated the flawed but still believable and enjoyable film. As a Black college student at an HBCU, seeing Black artists onscreen making a living as artists held a certain appeal even though my life was taking a drastically different trajectory at the time. But for me, the depiction of that lifestyle remains the most romantic aspect of it. The images of Nina and Darius heading off on their first date on his motorcycle (or scooter) is definitely a romantic image reminiscent of films such as Roman Holiday－only I’m seeing it with people who look like me. I’m seeing a Black woman wooed, looked at as if she could launch 1,000 ships and start a war between nations. I’m seeing a Black woman change a man’s life with the power of her existence.

Of course, in the romance genre, miscommunication drives the film, but it becomes irritating quite quickly. Seriously, the entire premise of the film relies on the understanding that Nina and Darius deny they are in a relationship, but rather they’re just kicking it. Interestingly, this uncertainty that things will work out in the end is actually one of the things I appreciate most in this film now that I’m in my mid-30s. But at least while watching Nina and Darius fumble around like teenagers for an hour and a half when I was in my early 20s, I got a depiction of a lifestyle few would achieve and a soundtrack that made it all worthwhile.

Furthermore, I saw Nina and Darius bond over music. Darius’ first meeting with Nina at The Sanctuary prompts him to rename his poem in honor of his newfound pursuit of the beautiful Nina. They meet again when Nina decides she needs an Isley Brothers CD and Darius tips her to a Charlie Parker track she’s never heard before. They go to a reggae club, The Wild Hair, on their first date, growing closer. The extradiegetic music works just as well. How many of us immediately think of the beautifully shot sex scene when we hear Maxwell’s “Sumthin Sumthin (Mellow Smooth)”? The jazz underscoring many scenes adds to the neo-soul, spoken word vibe permeating the film. The jazz score does more than create the background music all films use. It indicates sophistication, a film made for grown folks in an era when many Black films focused on coming of age or the second coming of Blaxploitation films.

Nina takes photos in Love Jones
Nina takes photos in Love Jones

 

In fact, the very essence of neo-soul comes together quite nicely in one collection. Lauryn Hill’s “The Sweetest Thing” gave us all that romance we wanted in our 20s: feeling the sensation of the kiss upon the collarbone and fingertips on the small of the back. Hill and the others in the neo-soul bracket gave us most of our music memories in our 20s. We were between enjoying our parents’ music that music such as Hill’s harkened back to and we were outgrowing the pop-radio oriented R&B of our adolescence that did not quite grow up when we did. Many of us first heard Duke Ellington’s and John Coltrane’s timeless duet “In a Sentimental Mood” on The Cosby Show, but the film brought it back to us in a new context, the rekindling of a romance between two young adults when Nina decides sex would cheapen a date that had been so perfect. (She was wrong by the way.) Cassandra Wilson’s incredible vocals on “You Move Me” evokes memories for the characters of what they lost and what they could have had if only they tried harder to make it work. Out of context for those of us revisiting the soundtrack, the sensuality of the track provides a perfect backdrop for one of those evenings.

Like many soundtracks of the time, Love Jones also includes songs not used in the film, usually to showcase new talent or to add more to the mood of the film. Trina Broussard puts a new spin on an old R&B staple and amazingly does not muck it up considering she covers a Minnie Riperton classic, “Inside My Love.” Admittedly, I heard her version before Riperton’s, but her version does the lyrics justice. The 20-somethings even got a taste of our adolescence with the Xscape cover of “In the Rain,” both because many of us first heard Keith Sweat’s version in our youth rather than The Dramatics and also because we grew up with Xscape (or Xscape grew up with us). While not used in the film, the song reminds us of the ways the rain itself added to the film at key moments, making Chicago an essential part of the film’s overall charm. In Chicago, we see Darius futilely running after the train to tell Nina goodbye as she heads for New York to pursue a career opportunity. In Chicago, we see Black communities going through their trials and tribulations in love and life.

Of course, the overarching theme of the Love Jones soundtrack is romance. But it is an adult romance differing from the lyrics we often heard in hook-up, club culture songs that still bang today. To borrow from George Michael’s assessment of his hit song “I Want Your Sex,” “It’s not about fucking. It’s about fucking within a relationship.” This is what Amel Laurieux sings about in Groove Theory’s smooth “Never Enough.” This is what Meshell Ndegeocello gets at with that below the belt bass line in “Rush Over” with Marcus Miller. It’s definitely what Cassandra Wilson croons about in her orgasmically magical “You Move Me.”

A shirtless Darius in Love Jones
A shirtless Darius in Love Jones

Love Jones does more than captures a moment in time in the late 90s. It creates the point when neo-soul established itself as the music of all of us with artistic inclinations, those of us leaving fantasies of teenage love affairs behind for a more realistic image of making a relationship work. And, yes, for some of us it brought about a sexual awakening that helped us accept that sex could exist outside a relationship if it’s truly wanted that way. Of course, in the trajectory of a romance film, the relationship has to prevail. But there’s no judgment of Nina and Darius when they both tell themselves the other is just a temporary situation.

For me, the Love Jones soundtrack represents a trip back to my college days in New Orleans as much as it does a time when Black-cast films showed me images of my aspirations as well as an escape. It was my coming of age into adulthood and that awkward territory called relationships. It was the time when The Brand New Heavies began to speak to me more than Boyz II Men and other acts with hit machines behind them. The soundtrack represented the moment I entered the grown folks club.

Inda Lauryn has been previously published in Interfictions, Afropunk and Blackberry, A Magazine. She is currently working on a few fiction projects and blogs about women in music at cornerstorepress.wordpress.com.

Love It or Hate It, Emotions Served Raw in the Music of ‘Les Misérables’

Pitchy, breathy, raspy, screamy – all the notes are there as A-list Hollywood actors hurl themselves at the camera, relishing the chance to look and sound as ugly as their quasi-operatic characters feel. The soundtrack is probably not going to go on your iPod.

That said, there’s something amazing about the pitchiness / raspiness / screaminess / ugliness that serves to draw us in.

This repost by Katherine Murray appears as part of our theme week on Movie Soundtracks.

Ugly singing; ugly make-up. Les Misérables is deservedly known as the film that tried too hard to bum us out, and Anne Hathaway is known as the actress who tries too hard to be liked. But isn’t it nice, sometimes, when somebody makes an effort?

Anne Hathaway stars in Les Miserables
Anne Hathaway screams a dream in Les Mis

 

Tom Hooper’s 2012 film adaptation of Les Misérables is either an exercise in profoundly committed, sincere expressions of raw emotion, or a hammy, emotionally manipulative attempt to win Oscars. In fact, it’s probably both of those things at different times, but it stands out due to Hooper’s unusual choice to record the actors singing live.

Pitchy, breathy, raspy, screamy – all the notes are there as A-list Hollywood actors hurl themselves at the camera, relishing the chance to look and sound as ugly as their quasi-operatic characters feel. The soundtrack is probably not going to go on your iPod.

That said, there’s something amazing about the pitchiness / raspiness / screaminess / ugliness that serves to draw us in. When the cast list was announced, it seemed strange, because many of the actors were not really known as great singers, but the movie isn’t about singing an ear-pleasing song. It’s about letting the actors emote in the moment, having their voices sync up with the other acting choices they make in the scene – the result is something that seems so authentic and raw that it starts to go the other way and seem manipulative again.

The standout number in the film, and the one you would cite, were you trying to convince someone it’s awesome, is, of course, Anne Hathaway sobbing her way through “I Dreamed a Dream.” She won an armful of awards for it, including an Oscar, and deservedly so. There’s something beautiful and unselfconscious about the way she just lets herself go in that scene – a kind of emotional nakedness, where we believe the despair that she’s feeling. We can see that she’s let herself disappear inside the character, and invited us to see her in this dark, vulnerable moment, without any fear that she’s going to look stupid. That’s rare, and it displays a type of courage and skill as a performer that should be rewarded.

It’s also reminiscent of Jennifer Hudson’s standout performance of “And I am Telling You I’m Not Going” in Dreamgirls. That performance similarly made the whole movie, and led to an Oscar win for the woman screaming her pain to the camera.

Jennifer Hudson stars in Dreamgirls
Jennifer Hudson brings down the house in Dreamgirls

 

Hudson doesn’t go to the ugly place in Dreamgirls. The studio-recorded track sounds beautiful, and the makeup department isn’t trying to make her look diseased. What makes the scene stand out, though, is still the amount of raw emotion she pours into it. A more gifted vocalist than Hathaway, she uses her voice to convey a torrent of rage, despair, and desperation, which she then telegraphs through her body language and facial expressions on screen.

We’re drawn into her performance, and it conveys the most important emotional truth of the scene – that, even though her character’s words sound powerful, they’re being shouted from a place of total loss. She says, “I am telling you,” but there’s no one to tell. She’s lost her partner and her friends — she stands alone on a darkened stage without even the audience she hungered for. And, into the darkness, she orders, “You’re gonna love me, yes you are!”

It’s a powerful moment, and Hathaway’s performance in Les Misérables is like that, with the additional layer that Les Mis is so proud of her suffering.

Whereas Dreamgirls is a pretty standard and standardly-shot movie musical – enlivened by outstanding vocals from Hudson and co-star Beyoncé — Les Misérables  is really reaching for the brass ring. It has a take-no-prisoner’s approach to engaging with the story’s pathos, and an awkward kind of delight in making everyone seem plague-ridden and miserable.

Anne Hathaway stars in Les Miserables
Her bed is a coffin — get it?

 

Don’t get me wrong – I love Les Misérables. I had low expectations, but I was less than ten minutes in before I felt that special shiver of delight that tells you you’re watching a kick-ass movie. I would much rather watch a film where everyone really goes for it, even if their reach sometimes exceeds their grasp.

At the same time, I completely understand why some people found it annoying.

The annoyance comes in part because you’re watching people who do not live in poverty pat themselves on the back for how poor they’re willing to make themselves look, and how deeply they’re willing to crawl inside the suffering of others. The ugly singing and the ugly makeup can be read as self-congratulatory – “Look how much I’m willing to debase myself for art! I don’t care if I look pretty; I just care if I’m authentic.” After a certain point, it comes across as trying too hard – of actually being inauthentic, since the attempt at authenticity feels so calculated.

It’s the same criticism that’s followed Anne Hathaway, herself. Whereas Jennifer Hudson came across to us as a spirited American Idol reject, who made good on her big dreams of stardom by signing her heart out in Dreamgirls, Anne Hathaway has been criticized for coming across as fake during public appearances. In fact, the backlash against Hathaway reached a fever pitch just as she was accepting her slew of awards for Les Mis.

No doubt, there’s a sharp contrast between the vulnerability she shows in “I Dreamed a Dream,” and the polished, eager-to-please persona she throws on in public. (Though I hasten to add that a lot of celebrities seem self-conscious in managing their public personas; for people who want to be liked, there’s nothing better or worse than having millions of people stare at you).

The general reaction to Les Misérables seems to fall along similar lines. The raw, ugly, emotionally intense performance is either touching because it seems authentic, or it’s disgusting because it seems crass and manipulative. We all agree that the emotions, like the vocals, weren’t cooked and seasoned before they were served, but we don’t agree about whether that’s fresh and exciting, or lazy and self-involved.

Like Anne Hathaway, the movie is trying hard. Like Jennifer Hudson, it’s screaming, “You’re gonna love me,” into the darkness. One cannot dare to be loved without risking rejection, and Les Misérables invites both love and rejection from its audience – but, isn’t it beautiful to see – and to hear – someone try?

Katherine Murray is a Toronto-based writer who yells about movies and TV on her blog.

What’s in a Soundtrack? The Sweet Sounds of ‘Romeo + Juliet’

Zeffirelli’s ‘Romeo and Juliet’ is one told by the older generation. Luhrmann’s ‘Romeo + Juliet’ is one told by “unfaded” youth. When Des’ree was singing “Kissing You” as Romeo and Juliet kiss (and oh, how they kiss), she is singing with deep longing and pain. When Glen Weston sings “What is a Youth?” he sings at Romeo and Juliet, about how youth–and female virginity–fades.

William Shakespeare's Romeo + Juliet: Music From the Motion Picture (this CD was--OK is--one of my greatest treasures)
William Shakespeare’s Romeo + Juliet: Music From the Motion Picture

 

Written by Leigh Kolb as part of our theme week on Movie Soundtracks.

When you are 14, your senses are heightened–music permeates every part of you, a brush of a hand sends shock waves through your body, and the smell of someone’s shampoo and chewing gum is enough to evoke lust. It’s no surprise that for adolescents, music is a powerful, integral part of their self-identity and emotional expression.

I’m thankful that I was 14 in the mid-90s. I know it’s easy to be nostalgic and believe that the moment we came of age was the best moment in the history of the world (“When I was that age…”), but I’m confident in saying that 1996 was really an epic year for being 14.

Riot grrrl was hanging in the air. Female musicians were featured on the airwaves, many male rockers were feminist, and teen films featured complex female protagonists. I was saturated in feminist media. We were riding an idealistic wave of feminism–a new generation of daughters whose mothers had lived through the women’s movement, who lived in a world where Title IX and Roe v. Wade always existed.

When I was 14, Baz Luhrmann’s William Shakespeare’s Romeo + Juliet was released, and the play that has been speaking to and about teens for 400 years awakened my already heightened senses. As someone who identified more with Wuthering Heights than Pride and Prejudice as a teenager, this intense angst really spoke to me. And the music that accompanied the film was woven into the fiber of my life–I imagined it as my soundtrack, not just the film’s soundtrack.

I’ve written before about how I see the film (and Shakespeare‘s text) as challenging patriarchal social orders and revealing the toxicity of masculinity. Luhrmann’s version highlights this, certainly more so than Franco Zeffirelli’s 1968 version.

Zeffirelli’s soundtrack featured a score by Nino Rota and its “Love Theme” is known in two versions–“What is Youth?” and “A Time for Us.” “What is a Youth?” is included in the score, and features the lyrics that are sung on screen during the Capulet party when Romeo and Juliet meet. The lyrics to this version focus on how “cupid rules us all,” and that “youth” and the “fairest maid” all fade. In contrast, the lyrics to “A Time for Us” are more hopeful: “…some day there’ll be a new world / a world of shining hope for you and me.” Romeo and Juliet as a text can be read in both ways, of course. It’s important to think about Zeffirelli’s version in the context of the “youth” movement of the 1960s–anti-war rebellion, women’s rights activism, rising counterculture–and what Romeo and Juliet tells us about the utter ignorance and destruction of adults’ decisions.

[youtube_sc url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zCQMlyXMRJE”]

Luhrmann also pulls Romeo and Juliet into the context of an era dominated by youth culture (see aforementioned links and 1,000 Buzzfeed posts about how rad the 90s were). However, this Romeo + Juliet is marked with much more poignant commentary on gender and culture. The “Love Theme” from Romeo + Juliet is sung by Des’ree, a Black woman (she performs on screen at the Capulet party, a nod to the Zeffirelli version). “Kissing You” is a more abstract look at love: “Pride can stand a thousand trials / The strong will never fall / But watching stars without you / My soul cries… Touch me deep, pure and true.” The entire scene, and the song itself, is a more intimate and moving addition to the party scene.

[youtube_sc url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p7eH9qnH8TM”]

Luhrmann’s soundtrack (he is, after all, known not only for his showy films but also for his curated soundtracks) was the soundtrack to my teen years. If I want to really feel those 14-year-old feelings, I just need to listen to Romeo + Juliet. The choices of popular musical artists of the time (Des’ree, Garbage, The Cardigans, Radiohead, Butthole Surfers, Everclear, etc.) related the story of Romeo and Juliet through their own eyes, not those of a stodgy old narrator. And the diversity of the artists–male, female, Black, white–also reflects the progressive nature of youth culture.

Zeffirelli’s Romeo and Juliet is one told by the older generation. When Glen Weston sings “What is a Youth?” he sings at Romeo and Juliet, about how youth–and female virginity (eye roll)–fades. Luhrmann’s Romeo + Juliet is one told by “unfaded” youth. When Des’ree sings “Kissing You” as Romeo and Juliet kiss (and oh, how they kiss), she is singing with deep longing and pain.

Luhrmann’s soundtrack, then, does what we imagine Shakespeare aimed to do with this play–forces us to look critically at love and life through the eyes of youth to critique the patriarchal social orders that cause the tragedy.

Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet is often read in school when students are freshmen in high school. I would imagine the framers of this curricular choice were thinking that Romeo and Juliet is a cautionary tale against rebellion and teen lust. Instead, Romeo and Juliet really is about the absurdity and destructive nature of society’s bullshit norms and rules.

The songs in Romeo + Juliet aren’t just for backdrop; instead, these songs are characters–edgy, angry, beautiful, and poppy representations of the sweeping emotions of youth, love, anger, and rebellion.

Just listen, and be transported to a youth that won’t fade:

[youtube_sc url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V4xPXlneCGs”]

[youtube_sc url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dJbXjIEP6rM”]

[youtube_sc url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xkXdeUjM1pc”]

[youtube_sc url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_JNb93N3-ek”]

[youtube_sc url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GU6i_JhbVsc”]

[youtube_sc url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IIbiG04X3ws”]

 

See also at Bitch Flicks: The Tragedy of Masculinity in Romeo + Juliet

Recommended reading: Here is what I learned from Baz Luhrmann’s Romeo and Juliet at That’s Normal

 

___________________________

Leigh Kolb is a composition, literature, and journalism instructor at a community college in rural Missouri.

The Sounds of Change and Confusion in ‘The Graduate’

Mike Nichol’s ‘The Graduate’ has one of the most popular soundtracks of all-time. The songs reveal the dynamics of a character, theme, and a moment without the use of dialogue or a backstory, but simply through the lyrics of a Simon and Garfunkel song.

This guest post by Caroline Madden appears as part of our theme week on Movie Soundtracks.

The marriage of two different art forms- the sounds in our ears and the image on screen- can take a scene far beyond what was written on paper. With a well-placed song, a moment in film can be experienced on all levels, staying in our head long after the credits roll. Lyrics to a song can provide an insight into a character’s mind on a deeper level than just dialogue. Mike Nichols’s The Graduate has one of the most popular soundtracks of all time. The songs reveal the dynamics of a character, theme, and a moment without the use of dialogue or a backstory, but simply through the lyrics of a Simon and Garfunkel song.

1

The most renowned song used in the film is “The Sound of Silence,” which acts as the soliloquy of film’s protagonist, Benjamin Braddock. Inspired by the Kennedy assassination, the song became a popular hit associated with the 1960s counterculture and antiwar protests. “The Sound of Silence” holds what is the ongoing and overarching theme of the film–youths rebelling against the middle-class values of their parents’ generation. It also most representative of the inner turmoil Benjamin finds himself on upon graduating college and embarking on his new journey to “the real world.”

The first time the song plays is during the opening scene. The song kicks in after Benjamin’s plane has landed in Los Angeles. The pace of the song follows the speed of Ben’s monotonous progress through the airport. It peaks as he rides an escalator to meet his family and then fades out as the scene dissolves into a close-up shot of Ben at home, sitting unhappily in front of his fish tank, ready for his new life.

2

The next few scenes play out the lyrics we have just heard in the opening.

And in the naked light I saw

Ten thousand people, maybe more

People talking without speaking, people hearing without listening

People writing songs that voices never share

And no one dared disturb the sound of silence.

“Fools,” said I, “You do not know –Silence like a cancer grows.

Hear my words that I might teach you.

Take my arms that I might reach you.”

But my words like silent raindrops fell

and echoed in the wells of silence.

These lyrics echo the graduation party, where Benjamin is surrounded by a stifling crowd of his parents’ friends, all talking and asking him about his future without bothering to hear his answer.  No one listens to his concerns or apprehensions. Benjamin wants to make sense of his world first before worrying about his future, but adults want him to have a plan. In the film’s most famous line, a family friend suggests Benjamin goes plastics.

The older generation wants the younger generation to follow in their footsteps, to conform for the sake of safety and tradition. This is the reasoning for all of Benjamin’s aimlessness and disaffectedness, seeing that his only option seems to be unhappily working in a sterile corporate setting until middle-age. His zombie-like drone in the airport opening reflects the future Benjamin pictures if he follows in his elders’ lead.

“The Sound of Silence” is also featured in a second montage. The song plays right after Benjamin has shut the hotel door to have sex with Mrs. Robinson, his first time. The montage begins with brilliant dissolves and intercuts as Benjamin monotonously (just like the airport opening) goes through the motions of his days at home with his parents over his shoulder and nights alone with Mrs. Robinson. The affair is not the answer he is looking for, though. He still suffers through “the sounds of silence” with no one around to understand or hear him. The song is played again because Benjamin is still as confused as he was at the beginning of the story.

Although “The Sound of Silence” has been told through Benjamin’s point of view, the lyrics can also reflect Mrs. Robinson’s state of being. We learn that she got pregnant before marriage, and that is why she is with Mr. Robinson. Mrs. Robinson was raised in the 30s, 40s, and 50s, and the mindset of that upbringing gave her no other choice. The consequences of her actions were that she had to live her life being with a man she did not want to truly be with.

Not only was she stuck in a marriage she did not want, she also makes it clear throughout the movie that she regrets letting her education go to waste. It is a sore spot for Mrs. Robinson, she goes from “I don’t like art” to “I studied art in college” in a matter of minutes.

“Hear my words that I might teach you.

Take my arms that I might reach you.”

But my words like silent raindrops fell

and echoed in the wells of silence.

Mrs. Robinson must have felt the truth of these words throughout the course of her life. Wanting to express to her parents how she did not love Mr. Robinson and did not want to be with him, how she wanted to continue her education. She was, and is, a woman in an unhappy marriage trying to make herself heard. But gender roles in the 1950s meant women were silenced, only expected to do their duties as a housewife, to serve their homes and husbands’ wills.

Mrs. Robinson’s unhappiness manifests itself within her actions in film. These changes in her actions were due to her increasing unhappiness in her mandated role as a housewife. These new ideals and changes of the 1960s led her to understand that women have just as many rights as men do, negating her ingrained mindset of the 1950s that women are supposed to bow to their superiors (men).

3

“The Sound of Silence” song ends, and “April Come She Will” quickly picks up as Benjamin lays in the hotel bed, cutting to him bored in his room and then leaving for the pool. The song ends with a clever match cut as Benjamin jumps off of a pool raft and into bed with Mrs. Robinson.

“April Come She Will” is a simple and bittersweet song that represents the seasons of Benjamin’s relationship with Mrs. Robinson.

April, comes she will,

When streams are ripe and swelled with rain

May, she will stay,

Resting in my arms again.

These lyrics represent how smitten Benjamin was with Mrs. Robinson at the beginning of their affair. Mrs. Robinson continues to stay, and their affair goes on for some time.

June, she’ll change her tune.

In restless walks she’ll prowl the night.

July, she will fly,

And give no warning to her flight.

However, their relationship is beginning to change after Benjamin being pressured by his parents and Mr. Robinson to go on a date with their daughter, Elaine.

August, die she must.

The autumn winds blow chilly and cold.

September, I’ll remember.

A love once new has now grown old.

Their relationship is coming to an end, and though the affair was exciting and new at first, it cannot go on forever it will soon dissolve.

The third song in the film is “Scarborough Fair,” and is played several times. It first plays as Benjamin is driving to Berkeley to find Elaine, who he is now newly smitten with.

Are you going to Scarborough Fair?

Parsley, sage, rosemary and thyme

Remember me to one who lives there

She once was a true love of mine.

This can be read as representative of his journey, Benjamin is searching for what he believes to be is his love, the answer to all of his uncertainty and meandering and questions of what to do with his life.

Between the salt water and the sea strands

(A soldier cleans and polishes a gun)

Then she’ll be a true love of mine

The war references represent the battle within him, the questions Benjamin is facing with his love life and whether or not he is going to do something about it. He is here in Berkeley to find Elaine and to convince her to be with him.

Are you going to Scarborough Fair?

These lyrics play as the film pans on Elaine, the first time we see her at Berkeley. The lyrics question if Benjamin is going to make the choice fight for what he believes he wants in his life? Is he going to go for it?

4

An early version of the chart-topping hit “Mrs. Robinson” is another highlight of the film’s soundtrack. Originally written about Mrs. Roosevelt, the title and character of the lyrics was changed to fit the film. The song plays several times throughout the film, most notably throughout the chase scenes as Benjamin heads to Elaine’s wedding.

The lyrics do not directly comment on what is happening on screen, but is instead a further reflection on Mrs. Robinson’s character. It is also a song that again reflects the theme of the film, the old generation vs. the new generation, and the ideals of the 50s vs. the changes of the 60s.

Hide it in the hiding place where no one ever goes.

Put it in your pantry with your cupcackes.

It’s a little secret just the Robinson affair.

Most of all you’ve got to hide it from the kids.

The entire older generation of the 60s was desperately trying to maintain an unmaintainable false image that they’ve been trying to hold up for years. Hide it from the kids, they’ll rip off the covers and expose everything that’s wrong with their generation’s ideals, which were forcing you to hide your true self or submit to a forced gender role. Work at a job you hate. Give up your education to get married because you are pregnant.

Where have you gone, Joe DiMaggio?

Our nation turns its lonely eyes to you.

Joe DiMaggio represents the heroes of the past, the traditional American values that were so highly honored in that time. But the ideals the past have given way to the upcoming changes, the defiance of gender roles and roles in society.

The Graduate begins and ends with the same song, “The Sound of Silence.” Elaine and Benjamin’s rebellion against their elders culminates here. Benjamin has stopped Elaine’s wedding and they leave together. They run onto the bus, their smiles and glee slowly turning to lost and forlorn looks as the music starts to play.

5

“The Sound of Silence” also speaks to Elaine’s character. Elaine has surely felt the “sounds of silence” as Benjamin has. She is also struggling with the idea of not wanting to spend her life being dictated and controlled by the ideas of her parent’s generations. Elaine must have felt pressure from her father and mother to marry this man, a perfect man to secure her future. Who needs an education from Berkeley when you can get married? But Elaine is not going to be doomed to repeat her mother’s mistake of being in a loveless marriage. What better way to out rightly and outrageously defy her parents than running away on her wedding day?

Although Benjamin and Elaine have succeeded in doing everything to defy their parents, now they ask “What are we left with?” What do they do now? Are they going to repeat the mistakes of the past and stay together without really loving or knowing each other? Benjamin’s questioning of what to do with his life is no different now than at the beginning of the film. He is just as confused and directionless as ever. The film ends as it began, book-ended with the famous Simon and Garfunkel tune.

The Graduate changed the world when it became one of the first films to reuse popular music for a film, as well as one of the first representations of counterculture youth. It proved that music could be used to comment and highlight themes and characters of a film. The songs impeccably fit with a film that first represented the future changes that would rock the country.

 

Caroline Madden is a recent graduate with a BFA in Acting from Shenandoah Conservatory. She writes about film at GeekJuice, Screenqueens, and her blog. You can usually find her watching movies or listening to Bruce Springsteen.

The Siren Song of Cartoon Catgirls

As evocative as the scene of the Puma Sisters doing their thing might be, and as culturally-charged a time as the release of ‘Dominion Tank Police’ might have been, much of the success of this scene is owed to the music. “Hey Boy,” by Riko Ejima, is a haunting song that, while seemingly chaste in that it seems to be singing about dancing, captures something deep, deep in the soul.

This guest post by Robert V Aldrich appears as part of our theme week on Movie Soundtracks.

As  young teen, I grew up with the unhealthy belief that female sexuality was a subdued and subtle thing.  This was a misinformed viewpoint that had been fostered predominantly by growing pretty firmly in the mainstream.  Countless songs on the radio, shows I watched on TV, and movies I rented from video stores, all depicted women in the same way: no matter how assertive or aggressive they may be in their day-to-day lives, when it came to anything even remotely sexual, they turned into timid kittens hiding under the bed, fragile things needing to be gently encouraged and carefully wooed, lest they fold up entirely.

Fortunately, I also grew up an anime fan (or an otaku if you really want to be pretentious about it), so this malarkey was dismissed with all the subtlety of a rocket-powered chainsaw when I first watched 1988’s Dominion Tank Police and saw the Puma Sisters distract a SWAT team with an impromptu strip-tease.

[youtube_sc url=”http://youtu.be/mi5GFuvCIp4″]

So, let’s go ahead and get a few things right out of the way.  Yes, they’re fully formed adult women with cat ears.  Unless you’ve never seen anime ever, that really shouldn’t be anything new.  And yes, they’re stripping out of nurses’ uniforms.  Because, again, it’s anime and why wouldn’t they?  Pretty much all they needed was for one of the Puma Sisters to be holding a riding crop and the scene would have hit some kind of bizarre fetish hat trick.

But here’s the thing: as hot as that scene is, what makes it so remarkable and stand out against so much cheesecake in anime (and entertainment in general) isn’t the sexiness, the fetishistic imagery, or even just the animated near-nudity.  What makes this scene stand out is the way it characterizes the Puma Sisters.  They aren’t timid about their bodies or the affect it has on others (re: men).  They are fully aware of that effect.  And they don’t just know it; they know how to use it.  And they not only know how to use it, and do so, they enjoy it gleefully.

This is a paradigm-challenging depiction of women that would go through me like a shot, and one that would be shared among many of the anime fans during this era.  It wasn’t just “cat-girl strip-tease.”  That would have been fun, but immediately forgettable.  What makes this so remarkable was the manner in which the Puma Sisters conducted themselves, commanded the attention of everyone and everything around them, and used their sexuality as a nigh-literal weapon.

Who could guess a cartoon with a woman in combat armor on the front might not be the usual?
Who could guess a cartoon with a woman in combat armor on the front might not be the usual?

 

To fully understand the impact of this scene – or just to make sense of its zaniness – one must take a step back and understand the whole show–Dominion Tank Police, by the legendary Masamune Shirow (best known for Appleseed and Ghost in the Shell).  In Dominion Tank Police, Newport City (and presumably the world) live under a dangerous pollution cloud, necessitating people to wear gas masks at all times when outdoors.  Tangentially related, crime has gotten so bad in Newport City that a branch of the police employ tanks in their pursuit of law and order (the titular tank police).  Opposite the tank police is Buaku and his gang of criminal mercenaries, who have been hired to steal valuable chemicals from a research hospital.  The mystery of the chemicals’ nature, use, and origin unfolds across the four installments of the series (a follow-up series titled New Tank Police, released in 1993, follows an unrelated story).

Cat-girls on futuristic motorcycles. And thus the future was born.
Cat-girls on futuristic motorcycles. And thus the future was born.

 

Anna and Uni, the Puma Sisters, are Buaku’s primary partners and ostensibly his muscle.  They seem to have little interest in crime aside from it being more entertaining than any of their previous employment (different media portray those previous jobs as everything from stripping to the suggestion that they’re androids built for sexual service).  As a result, they tend not to take their heists very seriously, the police very seriously, or even Buaku very seriously.  This is best demonstrated by the very scene in question where they decide to distract a SWAT team with a striptease simply because the lighting’s really good.

To further understand the significance of this scene, you have to understand when and where it was seen.  Namely, it was seen by teenage nerds in a pre-Internet age.  Nowadays, anybody with a smart phone can find digital images of extreme sexuality, but in 1988, you had to work for it. You had to know what movies to rent from the video store and at what minute-mark to watch up to.  And that was just for live-action stuff.  If you wanted to see a cartoon with anything even passing for erotic, you were almost definitively out of luck (Rule 34 was a long way off).

More than that coming from a pre-Internet age, Dominion Tank Police came out just as the 80s cartoon boom was dying.  Transformers was in its pseudo-fifth season which was just repackaged reruns, while Robotech, She-ra and others had been off the air for a while.  While Dominion Tank Police wasn’t the only anime movie to come out during the Japanimation period, the others were totally different genres and largely devoid of sexuality.  On top of that, it would be another five years or so before the 1990s Anime Invasion would get underway.

This was also a time of cultural upheaval.  The Cold War was ending, with the fall of the Berlin Wall eminent.  There were more channels on TV than there were hours in the day.  “Straight Outta Compton” was redefining music, while “Smells Like a Teen Spirit” had yet to deflate the bloat of rock which dominated the airwaves.  There was magic in the air in those days.  So much change was happening all around us.  And so to go to Blockbuster and see on the new releases shelf a section labeled Japanimation, and to see cartoons unlike anything any of us had ever seen?  It was a transformative experience, to put it mildly.

A once-in-a-lifetime scene that would change a thousand lives for a lifetime
A once-in-a-lifetime scene that would change a thousand lives for a lifetime

 

As evocative as the scene of the Puma Sisters doing their thing might be, and as culturally-charged a time as the release of Dominion Tank Police might have been, much of the success of this scene is owed to the music.  “Hey Boy,” by Riko Ejima, is a haunting song that, while seemingly chaste in that it seems to be singing about dancing, captures something deep, deep in the soul.  Reading the words won’t do the lyrics justice, but they are:

“Hey, let’s dance, to the hot beat

Hey, hey boy

The heated heart, feel it

And look at me

Hey, let’s dance, don’t be so shy

Hey, hey boy

Don’t be so hesitant,

Let’s dance

This dressed-up town…

This running music…

Hey boy

Nothing intricate…

There aren’t any rules tonight.”

We’ve all heard songs about sex.  Some use love as a metaphor for sex, while others use dancing.  And some are straight-up explicit.  But what they all generally have in common is that most are sung by men.  In the rare instance that a song about sex is sung by a woman, it’s almost always passive.  This trend has thankfully started to change recently, but it is a new phenomenon, less than twenty years old.  In the preceding eight decades or so of broadcast music, women have never been depicted as sexually inclined, adventurous, and certainly not aggressive.

Underground music notwithstanding, the music that’s seen radio play (and thus what most people would have access to in a pre-Internet world) has almost always been passive.  Berlin’s “Take My Breath Away” puts the onus upon the partner.  ABBA’s “Voulez-Vous” sings about enticing a partner to buy the drinks.  Janis Joplin sang about wanting to convince the man in “Take Another Piece Of My Heart.”  Even Madonna, who almost invented the modern version of the “sexually-aggressive-woman-in-music” image, had songs like “Papa Don’t Preach” and “Like A Virgin” to her name at this point.  She sang songs about sex, absolutely.  And that was groundbreaking, no argument, but they still took a passive role.

“Hey Boy” is totally different.  “Look at me.” “Don’t be so hesitant.” “There aren’t any rules tonight.” All of this sung with a sultry voice over a shifting tempo.  For an entire generation of anime fan, this was the very first time we’d ever heard a woman sing not that she hoped we would do something for her, not that we could do something together, but that she was going to take us by the hand and teach us something about ourselves.

That sexual aggression, combined with the cultural blindsiding that took place by seeing sexually charged cartoons, would burn this scene – and its song – into so many minds.  That haunting score invokes a magical time in our lives when animation became more than just cartoons, when women could take the lead, and when life in the world started to get real interesting.

 

Robert V Aldrich is a writer and geek chic commentator.  When not writing at various websites and periodicals, he writes serials and other stuff for his own website, TeachTheSky.com.  He has a new novel out, Rhest for the Wicked, that he’d reeeeally love for you to check out.