In a scene from Roger and Me, the documentary that made Michael Moore's name, an ex-auto worker from Flint, Michigan, talks about driving home after being laid off, listening to a Beach Boys song on the radio. The cheerful tune, of course, finds its way onto the movie soundtrack. The Beach Boys blissfully croon "Wouldn't it be nice?" as lay-offs, evictions and disillusionment unfold in front of the camera.
Such a contrast is now established as a clever cinematic convention - played upon by Tarantino, for instance, in Reservoir Dogs, where Michael Madsen humming along to "Stuck in the Middle with you" in advance of a memorable scene involving a knife, an ear and lots of blood.
This was not always the case, however. Traditionally, background music in mainstream movies was just that - blended into the background setting. But as movies changed in the later part of the twentieth century, sounds that often contrasted ironically with on-screen sights became a distinctive part of collective cinematic memory.
Apocalypse Now (1979)
Francis Ford Coppola made it requisite for commentators to mention the music - it is pretty much impossible to find anything written about Apocalyspe Now that doesn't make note of the opening scquence scored to The Doors, the soldier water-skiing up the river as the dark jungle looms and the Stones blare on the radio, and, of course, the napalm attack paired with Wagner ( youtube). The soundtrack layers poppy American oblivion on top of a pervasive menacing, evil that is itself another kind of savage oblivion, then blends them, a precarious and absurd frivolity that slideseasily into lawlessness and chaos (typical American rock'n'roll?).
Badlands (1973)
One of arthouse auteur Terrence Malick's earlier films, Badlands tells the tale of two lovebirds-cum-murderers who leave a trail of bodies on their way across Middle America. The theme music of the film is a playful instrumental piece from German composer Carl Orff's Musica Poetica ( listen). The music is used to reflect a tone of interior emptiness beneath its maniacally gleeful surface. Badlands was a precursor to Oliver Stone's Natural Born Killers, which itself played with a plethora of auditory pop-cultural conventions, from the sitcom laughtrack to the salacious tones of CNN-style news reporting.
A Clockwork Orange (1971)
Kubrick's scores have most often been apt - whether the Wagnerian triumph of Zarathustra in 2001, the evocation of foreboding and hysteria in The Shining or the determined and mournful theme of Barry Lyndon. In A Clockwork Orange he mirrors a key plot point in the original Burgess novel - the callous, sadistic main character's love of Beethoven - by saturating the score with classical music at odds with the futuristic distopian setting of the story, a disjunctive convention that has become typical of an entire subset of stylized action films today. The musical aspect of the film was novel for its time and impossible to miss - though as much contested and controversial as the violence and critical merits of the film as a whole, just as easily earning praise or disdain as "a cute, cheap, dead-end dimension" in a "paranoid right-wing fantasy masquerading as an Orwellian warning."
Undoubtedly the film plays, maybe in a "cheap" way, with paranoia about the contamination of so-called "high culture" with low, the corruption of cherished cultural artifacts - the movie is a mockery of a perceived elitist faith in cultural superiority, a belief that a brutish character such as the one in the film could never really experience the sublime pleasure of a Beethoven. Kubrick goes farther with this in a well-known scene that corrupts another cherished cultural artifact, this one cinematic. The main character launches into an amateur rendition of "Singin' in the Rain," as an accompaniment to a violent scene of rape and torture, belting out "and I'm ready for love" along with a blow to the face.
Zoe Morawetz - From the lifetime anthology: The most wonderful time of the year. Canadiana: Rock stars nationally-ubiquitous/otherwise-obscure. ...
