music in film

An interesting take on the film industry's Frankenstein approach to adding music to a film in post-production by Will Oldham in an interview (read the interview here):

AVC: You mentioned talking to Richard Linklater and Caveh Zahedi about your ideas on movie music. Can you summarize those ideas?

WO: Well, for a while, it seemed like you were always seeing movies where all the music was determined by the music supervisors and their special relationships with certain record labels. And I just felt like, “Wow, I’ll bet they spent months or years writing this screenplay, and I’ll bet they spent months shooting this, and I’ll bet they spent months editing this, and now they’re spending no time at all picking these completely inappropriate songs with lyrics to put under a scene that has dialogue.” How does that even work? How can you have a song with someone singing lyrics under spoken dialogue and consider that mood-music, or supportive of the storyline? As somebody who likes music, when that happens, I tend to listen to the lyrics, which have nothing to do with the movie. And then I’m lost in the storyline. Not only is that a crime, but it’s a crime not to give people who are good at making music for movies the work. It’s like saying, “We don’t need you, even though you’re so much better at it than I am as a music supervisor.” Like the cancer that is that Darjeeling guy… what’s his name?

AVC: Wes Anderson?

WO: Yeah. His completely cancerous approach to using music is basically, “Here’s my iPod on shuffle, and here’s my movie.” The two are just thrown together. People are constantly contacting me saying, “I’ve been editing my movie, and I’ve been using your song in the editing process. What would it take to license the song?” And for me it’s like, “Regardless of what you’ve been doing, my song doesn’t belong in your movie.” That’s where the conversation should end. Music should be made for movies, you know?

I suppose I can see where Will Oldham is going with this. On the one hand, the music of a film is part of a film's language (yes, film is a language), and it helps set a scene's inflection. When we speak to each other, the inflection in our voices serves the purpose of projecting mood, tone, and feeling. In a movie, however, inflection would be nonexistent in a scene with no dialogue, leaving it up to the viewer to interpret or impose their understanding of feeling onto the movie. This, in and of itself, isn't necessarily a bad tool to use in some cases, at least in my mind. However, what makes a movie successful a lot of the time is how well a movie directs the viewer in terms of the feelings the movie itself is projecting.

It's easy for us to think of using familiar songs as a cop out in a way, but on the other hand, maybe that familiarity is something people like Wes Anderson are using to direct our feelings and perceptions of a movie. I would be hard pressed to find a more appropriate song to put in place of The Beatles, "Hey Jude," when Richie Tenenbaum frees his bird Mordecai in The Royal Tenenbaums. It was comforting and climactic all at the same time because it was so familiar.

I can agree with Will Oldham to a certain extent, but to say Wes Anderson doesn't put enough thought into his films is presumptuous at best.