Stop Making Sense

I like things that I don’t fully understand. I think it all started when I read Nova Express as a teenager, a rather oblique tome by William S. Burroughs. Even as I felt the text whooshing over my head, I really enjoyed reading the book. A year later, I decided to read Queer, an earlier novel by the same author, which suffice to say, totally made sense from beginning to end. Bummer. I didn’t encounter a comparable inscrutable literary experience until I attended John Cage’s Norton Lecture Series my first year as a film music composition undergrad. It was delightfully nonsensical. So much so that, to my surprise, I stopped listening for the meaning behind the random words trickling from Cage’s lips. His speech became music. This wasn’t the case for everyone inside Harvard University’s Sanders Theatre, judging by the quiet snickers and annoyance-induced fidgeting that persisted throughout the reading. Clearly not everyone appreciates the incomprehensible, yet somehow filmmakers like Béla Tarr and David Lynch are lauded for their enigmatic work.

Many cinephiles are drawn to films that twist traditional notions of narrative beyond the point of unraveling. I guess you could call these works the new music of cinema. Breakthrough works like Alain Resnais’s L’Année dernière à Marienbad will never hold up under the scrutiny of “making sense,” but that’s what makes the film so fascinating. Oneiric narratives allow filmmakers to remove logical elements like time and the laws of succession. However when it comes to music, even the more out-there auteurs seem to settle for music that reinforces the traditional role film music always seems to play—the powerful reinforcer of narrative (as those spoof trailers of The Shining and When Harry Met Sally circling the internet brilliantly point out.)

As a standalone entity, nobody really understands music, not even composers. However, everyone and their mother seems to have a pretty firm grasp on the inner workings of film music. I think it might be interesting to subvert all of this. With so much experimentation in camera angels, editing, and CGI, where is the progress in the soundtrack? Don’t get me wrong, I loved the obliqueness of the first twenty minutes of Lynch’s Lost Highway. It’s sonically arresting from the crackling embers of a smoking cigarette to the dark, trembling drones. But even Bernard Herrmann’s music-less soundtrack for Hitchcock’s The Birds is radical by today’s standards—and that film was made only a few years after Resnais’s aforementioned brainteaser. So, more than forty years later, where are all the new musical mindfucks that should have surfaced by now? Has anyone seen any whacked-out movies with a soundtrack that defies the film’s own context lately?