Emotion and Meaning in Film Music

Amid the burgeoning opportunities of modern life, choices are often assessed in hindsight with mixed feelings. Modifying the tragic "too-late" trope of melodrama (as in La Traviata) movies sometimes deploy bittersweet songs or musical underscoring to express how characters mitigate retrospective regret by alleviating loss with solace, guilt with atonement, or sacrifice with redemption.


Before delving into a case study, I will sketch the anatomy of bittersweet music and its effects, based on ongoing empirical research at the intersection of music and social psychology (including controlled studies of musical stimuli as well as big data analysis of sentiments in online responses to musical selections). Within a semantic field demarcated by nostalgia, wistfulness, and melancholy, music's bittersweet spot can be located in a matrix of modal mixture, modulations with secondary dominants, usage of major and minor seventh chords, soft timbres and dynamics in midtempo, and topical references to genres such as the slow waltz, piano ballad, or farewell song.   


Critics applauded Damien Chazelle's romantic comedy-drama-musical La La Land (2016) mostly for its bittersweet ending to the story of aspiring actress Mia and struggling jazz pianist Sebastian. After helping each other realize their dreams, they part ways to pursue divergent careers. Years later, a famous and happily married Mia chances upon Sebastian in his own jazz club. Accompanied by a valse triste that pairs up with Sebastian's bittersweet theme for Mia, the film closes with a sequence in the style of a classical dream ballet where the former lovers imagine a life they might have had together-a scenario alluding to the heart-tugging ending of Back Street (1932) whose 1941 and 1961 remakes where both scored by Frank Skinner.


Within the history of emotions, bittersweet music has become both a symptom of and remedy for one of modernity's most vexing predicaments: the counterfactual fantasy. Its mixed emotions not only underwrite the persistent premise of melodrama as providing public access to "the unprotectedness of one's feelings" (Thomas Elsaesser), but also lend a voice to the "cruel optimism" (Lauren Berlant) of imagining unattainable outcomes.

Headphones have become a ubiquitous, if disconcerting, means of musical consumption. Isolated listeners continually surround us, ensconced within a sonic world of their own choosing. In effect, headphones turn us all into film composers, selecting the underscore for our lives. This feature of modern musical life has curious implications for film. In movies like _Back to the Future_, _Guardians of the Galaxy_, or _Baby Driver_, the music pumping through the protagonist's headphones provides an inner soundtrack that the audience can somehow hear. Headphones thus traverse the line between non-diegetic and source music, allowing us to eavesdrop on characters' musical psyches even as they deafen themselves to the outer world. This paper draws on both film-music and disability studies to explore this peculiar construction of subjectivity.


Headphones provide the turning point in _The King's Speech_ (2010), in which the future George VI (Bertie) visits a speech therapist to overcome a stammer, the result of trauma inflicted by an overbearing father and sadistic nanny. The breakthrough comes when Lionel Logue covers Bertie's ears with headphones blasting the overture to _The Marriage of Figaro_. The bombastic music drowns out Bertie's inner demons, allowing him to deliver a flawless rendition of Hamlet's soliloquy. Mozart continues to accompany Bertie's sessions as the Clarinet Concerto now moves into the outer, non-diegetic soundtrack. Throughout the film, Lionel appeals to music and the preverbal _choric_ realm to unlock Bertie's speech, having him dance, sway, and sing.


The Viennese classics return at the climax of the film as the king delivers his first wartime address. The Allegretto of Beethoven's Seventh Symphony accompanies Bertie's speech, which grows in confidence as the music swells. Although plausible as BBC source music, the Allegretto is clearly non-diegetic, falling silent during cutaways and pausing obligingly when Bertie hesitates. Classical music has reordered both the inner and outer soundtrack, allowing the king to integrate himself within the world of speaking subjects. The film ends with the serene Adagio of Beethoven's "Emperor" Concerto, aptly by a deaf composer, sealing the therapeutic process begun when Bertie donned the headphones and reclaimed his musical self.

In 2012, the National Rifle Association's Wayne LaPierre inaugurated a now-ubiquitous political slogan that happens to double as the sketch of a thriller plot: "The only way to stop a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun." Such is the premise of _Non-Stop_ (2014), in which Liam Neeson plays an air marshal suspected of being a terrorist. But when the film plays out LaPierre's melodramatic formula, it encounters what philosophers call a skeptical problem (Cavell 1979): in the temporal and spatial experience of contemporary terrorism, in which threat can come suddenly from anywhere, how do you determine (quickly, collectively) whether the "guy with a gun" is good or bad?


The film solves this problem by having Neeson's character deliver a sentimental speech ("I'm not a good man … but I'm not hijacking this plane. I'm trying to save it"). When he begins, the underscore switches from the repertory of horror/suspense--undampened stroked piano strings, a tense background pulse--to a held string tone that gradually replaces the percussive suspense effects with a warm aural cradle for his confession. Within seconds, a once-suspicious passenger immediately hands him a gun, even though the passengers have not conferred, or even looked at each other, before this decision is made. The time of democratic deliberation is replaced by a tone that stands for consensus of feeling.


Traditional approaches to narrative film music emphasize that the underscoring of sentimental confessions--one of music's paradigmatic uses in cinema--is emblematic of commercial film's enduring attachment to the melodramatic mode (Gorbman 1987; Singer 2001). Yet the use of film music in _Non-Stop_ to substitute a feeling of consensus for the time of decision-making suggests that the melodramatic solution proposed by LaPierre is inadequate to the pacing of contemporary panics. By locating the function of film music in an era of what Brian Massumi calls "ambient threat"--since 9/11, the sense that ordinary life is vulnerable to the unpredictability of the terrorist event--this paper argues that _Non-Stop_'s soundtrack, rather than demonstrating the persistence of melodrama, instead marks its wearing out as a symbolic framework that is adequate to contemporary crises.