If Music Be The Food
of Emotion…?

When you think about a favourite film, what do you think about? Some memorable, quotable piece of dialogue? A poignant atmosphere or texture? Even a piece of music? What tends to remain, as a kind of half-life in the mind - even from films we have seen many times - is a handful of separate images that somehow embody the pleasure of the whole.

Film theories of a psychoanalytic bent suggest that what we are responding to is a deep-seated and universal desire for omnipotence that stems from our childhood when we are, paradoxically, relatively helpless and dependent. Even in this state, most of us learn pretty quickly that by crying for help, a source of relief will miraculously appear and suddenly we are back in control of our environment.

As adults we never give up this yearning for control over our world, even if we spend most of our waking moments struggling to achieve a very temporary state of equilibrium. We do this by conforming to the expectations of the social world that, in return, provides pay-offs in the form of rewards for our good behaviour. This frustrating rigorism drives us to consume forms of entertainment which place us firmly on the throne as masters of our own domain, whether it’s the flaccid voyeurism of reality television which promises us total knowledge of someone else’s life, or a dive into the virtual world of electronic games which ports us into being role-playing despots with the simple moral imperative to squish or be squished by our opponents. Film fuses both these states of desire and, at the same time, shuffles meanings and themes within a story about characters living for just two hours against whose brief span we gain a kind immortality by proxy.

Creating those iconic images is what every scriptwriter struggles to do, but words on a page are at best blunt instruments which can only vaguely suggest the full visual power of film as a medium. If the act of dramatic writing is, like watching drama, a symptom of a desire to attain control over a symbolic universe, then the only way that this control can be fully realised is by also directing the film.

Adding music in the form of an underscore to a film could threaten the director´s creative vision, since it (usually) represents the artistic input of a second person in a key creative role which can profoundly influence the film’s emotional impact.

Film music is a highly coded form of emotional message. Its tones and cadences seem to appeal to something ‘wired in’ to us, triggering the appropriate emotional response at the appropriate moment. The film-music conventions established in the first quarter-century of cinema are still largely intact today, whether heard in a symphonic score or in a more eclectic arrangement.

CONT. in Issue 1.

© Russell Lack 2001

Russell Lack is the author of Twenty Four Frames Under – a buried history of film music (Quartet Books, ISBN 0-7043-8045-5). He is also a television and new media producer and sometime scriptwriter.