Quarterly Review of Film and Video, 22:\]i-\23, 2005Copyright© Taylor & Francis Inc. | « f gISSN: 1050-9208 print/1543-5326 online » * Taylor 5> Francis Croup

DOI; 10.1080/10509200590461828

The Sound of Silence: Film Musicand Lament

RENI CELESTE

This essay argues that contemporary cinema is restoring the primacy of music to thedramatic and challenging the camera-centered nature of modem film theory. IsolatingMike Nichols' The Graduate (1967) as a dividing point between traditional scoring andcontemporary film, this essay makes a case for the use of popular music in film. Using thetheories of Lyotard, Chion, and Nietzsche, alongside several cinematic works, the authorbinds music to primordial loss and suggests that music makes audible the sound of silence.The question of music in film is generally raised near the end of film textbooks, if atall. Likewise in film production, music is adhered to the filmstrip last, in postproduction,and synched to the image.

And yet contemporary theory is bom of tragic thought, a thinking that privilegesbecoming, instability and ecstasis over structure, stasis and being. In The Birth of Tragedy,Nietzsche held up the model of the tragic stage with its privilege of music over image toarticulate the same reversal he sought for modem thought. In this thought, the forces ofthe Dionysian (art) became dominant once again over reason (science). Tragedy is "bornof the spirit of music."' If tragedy is bom of music, music can be understood as a motherwho delivers or permits passage for a creation autonomous from her body. I argue thatmusic is a vehicle that delivers something even greater than itself. This birth could begiven many names, but it is essentially unnamable. I call it silence.

One of the myths quickly dispelled by any serious study of sound cinema is that of asilent cinema. The story is that even in the beginning there was no silent cinema. What iscalled silent film simply refers to an early technological limit: sound recording technologywas not yet synchronized to image technology. Early cinema remained parasitic inmany respects on the theater, and the picture palace staged an alliance not merelyof sound/image but of presence/absence, or life and recording. In these early hybridperformances the film screen often took a subservient role to the live event, serving asaccompaniment for a spectacle sometimes complete with dancers, costumes, and fullpiece bands. Due to the ephemeral nature of live performance, half the event has beenlost, and a once passionate unity appears to us now as a lonely half form, a gray universeof silence bearing little relation to its original, set now simply to the monotonous buzzingof a film projector.

Reni Celeste is a Visiting Assistant Professor at Connecticut College in the Film Studies Department. Shehas recently completed her first book, The Tragic Screen: Cinema at the Limits of Philosophy (forthcoming).She has been a Research Affiliate at Yale University, and is a Visiting Assistant Professor of Film Studies atConnecticut College, where she is teaching a course on action cinema and media.

'Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy, trans. Ronald Speirs (London: Cambridge Uni-versity Press, 1999): 13, 81.

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Another compelling argument of early film theory is the musical analogy.^ Even ifit makes no sound, film is rhythm-based, lyrical, and resembles the musical score in itscomposition. Avant-Garde filmmaker Stan Brakhage, for example, speaks of the abilityof the early masters of silent film to make noise visually. D. W. Griffith, he argues, withhis use of action close-ups, creates the aural as much as the visual sense. "Griffith's battlescenes are alive with the sense of sound, whether the warring of swords as in Intolerance(1916), cut to close-up visual clashings, or the puffs of smoke in Birth of a Nation (1915),cut from close-up to a revelation of entire battlefield with its sense of reverberation."^These arguments reveal how what appears to be silent is actually musical. My motivesare the obverse. I am claiming that music is what makes possible the sound of silence.Its role in the cinema is to make manifest something beyond both sound and vision:primordial loss, or what Lyotard has called the "breath of lament.'"* Robert Bresson hassimilarly argued that sound film is what made silence possible. It was necessary to havesync sound and voices so that their interruption could allow us to probe more deeply intothis mysterious thing called silence.^ My goal is to probe this mystery.

A significant shift has occurred in the past 40 years of modem sound cinema inwhich the musical and sonic dimension of cinema has become increasingly aggressiveand even dominant. This shift corresponds to the rise of high-action sequences, musicvideo, musical interludes, and the emergence of youth culture and rock music. Thereare many reasons for this tum, but one worthy of development is the possibility that ascultural media becomes increasingly defined by the "popular" and "fashion," its link toloss and Dionysian forces increases. Dionysus can be seen as experiencing a rebirth inthe sphere of the popular.

If there is a Greek God of the postmodem, it is the figure of Dionysus. Nietzscheclaims that art consists of a confiict between two forces, the Apollonian and the Dionysian.The Apollonian represents selfhood, image, concept, structure, dream, and form, andthe Dionysian represents the drive towards the dissolution of self, intoxication, music,dance, and ecstasy.^ This can be simplified to the relation between music and image?As Wayne Klein says, "The distinction between music and image can rightly be said tobe the linchpin of Nietzsche's theory of tragedy, which is grounded in a belief in theontoiogical and semiological superiority of music over images, and what is decisive forthis theory, in the possibility of a translation of music into images."* Your neighbor mayappear on the stage wearing the mask of Dionysus, but only through the chorus is thistransfiguration made believable and meaningful.^

Gradually throughout Nietzsche's corpus tragedy, the worldview he is reviving be-comes increasingly aligned with the Dionysian alone. The forces of becoming and art

analogy is articulated by Germaine Dulac in both her work and theory, and also bymany other film theorists including Moussinac, Eisenstein, and Epstein to name only a few. Seefor example Sergei Eisenstein, "The Filmic Fourth Dimension," Film Form, trans. Jay Leyda(New York: Meridian Books, 1949): 64.

^Stan Brakhage, "The Silent Sound Sense," Film Culture 21 (I960): 65.'^Jean-Francois Lyotard, "Music Mutic," Postmodem Fables, trans. Georges Van Denabbelle

(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997): 217-233.^Robert Bresson, Notes on the Cinematographer, trans. Jonathan Griffin (Copenhagen: Green

Integer, 1997): 48.^Nietzsche, 13-18.

Nietzsche says in the middle of section 16, "Or more briefly: how is music related to imageand concept?", 77.

* Wayne Klein, Nietzsche and the Promise of Philosophy (Albany: SUNY Press, 1997): 99-101.Nietzsche, 36.

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rage victorious over the traditional logic of being and truth that has guided modern sci-ence and philosophy. But what is essential to the entire Nietzschean corpus is developedat the very start in Birth of Tragedy in the discussion of the basic hierarchy betweenimage and music. To claim that "tragedy is bom of the spirit of music" is to instigatea reversal of music over image. In this reversal, Nietzsche commenced nothing short ofthe displacement of the entire rational world order of the West.

Modern film theory has a deep bias towards the image and would appear not tohave heeded Nietzsche's call. It is a camera-centered discipline that has defined cinema'sspecificity through the mobile camera lens and the cut. This bias is apparent in the veryterminology that designates the place of music. Sound is described as either on-screenor off-screen, and either diegetic or nondiegetic. In other words, it exists according to itsspatial relation to screen and story. Roland Barthes seeks to remedy this bias by retrievinga noun that will embody the quality of music. He comes up with the compelling conceptof the "grain," a noun that is more than just substantial, one with a texture that youcan almost touch and feel. Specifically he makes a powerful case for "the grain of thevoice."'"

But perhaps the power of music lies exactly in its status as predicate. Music convertsinto a quality, something deeply mysterious. As Claudia Gorbman explains, "Music isless direct than visual perception; to see something is to instantaneously identify thelight rays with the object that refiects them; while in hearing we do not as automaticallyidentify a sound with its source."" Perhaps one reason for this seeming autonomy fromits source is that sound is more interior and invasive. It almost seems to originate fromwithin. Vision presents the world at a distance, as outside your body, whereas soundpenetrates into the body. Cinematic sound stages a double conversion: it converts abstractinternal experience outward, establishing it as spatial territory, and it converts this spatialterritory back into the interior. It tums the inside/out and the outside/in. In this gesture,it creates that elusive thing called atmosphere that stands somewhere between mood andsetting. The bias towards image does not begin and end in the realm of the theoretical.Traditional filmmaking follows the same bias. Film scoring is a highly developed artform that has developed since the era of the silent cinema in a role of subservience andaccompaniment. It conforms perfectly to the language of film theory, it is either sourcemusic or background music. Its main attributes are its invisibility.

The Graduate flouts many of these traditions in one five-minute musical interlude.In this sequence, two pre-recorded pop songs by Simon and Garfunkel ("The Sound ofSilence," and "April Come She Will") play back to back while the visual track seeks tomimic and accompany their power. Originally director Mike Nichols asked Simon andGarfunkel to write a score for the film, but while assembling the film, he used pre-existingtracks as filler. The only song that was ever written for the movie was "Mrs. Robin-son." The "Sound of Silence" will open the film, close the film, and embody the film'stheme.

The Graduate is a story of the coming of age of Ben Braddock (Dustin Hoffman), ayoung recent graduate who has returned home. He is seduced by Mrs. Robinson (AnneBancroft), one of his parents' friends, and inaugurated into adulthood across her body.While Mrs. Robinson will serve as a bridge between childhood and adulthood, she willalso serve as the symbol of a dividing point around which a new generation will rally anddefine itself in opposition. This is the decade of major cultural upheaval and the arrival of

'^Roland Barthes, The Grain of the Voice, trans. Stephen Heath (New York: Hill and Wang,1977).

"Claudia Gorbman, "Narrative Film Music," Yale French Studies 60 (1980), 183.

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new cultural divisions bom of a youth market dominated by music and fashion. The firstdivision that defines this new youth culture is generation, the division between youngand old. Cultural divisions have become infinitely more complex as markets develop andinterbreed, but this film takes place at the dawn of a new era and bears a certain culturalsimplicity.

The Graduate is filled with musical interludes and the pop songs of Simon andGarfunkel, but it is the central interlude that interests me most. This interlude servesimportant narrative functions. The entire malaise of the transition from youth to adulthoodis summarized in this sequence and stands as a microcosm of the entire film. On a literallevel it encapsulates the time between Ben's first sexual encounter with Mrs. Robinsonand the end of a long summer of solitude and growth spent between two spaces, childhoodand adulthood, signified by the family home and the hotel room. The segment commencesat the precise point in which Ben decides to take the leap. Mrs. Robinson and Ben havemade it to the hotel room, but Ben is overcome by fear and doubt.

Mrs. Robinson teases Ben for his virginal inadequacy and prepares to leave. Benresponds by saying "inadequate" in outrage, stepping back to the door and issuing theorder, "don't move." Her inquisitive look of suspense is followed by a reverse shot ofhis hesitant silhouette framed by the hallway light. The sequence is suddenly suspendedin a brief pause, the moment of decision. He swings the door closed, quick reverse toclose-up of her devious smile—blackness fills the frame to the sound of the slammingdoor.

The guitar begins to play over this blackness and mystery of the closed door followedby song, "Hello darkness my old friend, I've come to talk to you again...." Graduallyout of this blackness the image of glistening blue water fades in, spotted by pattems oflight that appear to dance to the music. Then a dissolve of Ben overlaps the waters. Ben isfioating in his parent's swimming pool on a black fioatation device wearing black shades.This interlude will instigate a radical shift between image and sound, where image willseek to duplicate or accompany music rather than vise versa. The visual track will imitatethrough contrast, repetition, and the evocation of time and place.

First, there is the question of contrast. The pop song is a phenomenon of high contrast.Somber lyrics of loss and love are laid over poppy, upbeat riffs and rhythms. The visualcontrast between black and brightness that continues throughout this sequence forms ananalogy with the music. Simon's lyrics sing of a sound that makes silence audible, whilethe visual track contrasts light and black. The visuals will also use repetition in the samemanner as the pop song. The general structure of a pop song is a repeating pattern,intro—verse—chorus—verse—choms, intermpted only by a bridge in some cases. Thevisual structure of the interlude also follows a repeating pattem, tracking Ben's movementfrom home—hotel—home—hotel.

Lastly, the pop song embodies a precise moment in time and space. The ennui andemergence of this one particular summer, its texture, its sensations, its memory, adheresto the song for an individual, community, or an entire generation. This entire film strivesto achieve this poetry. The visual track is trying to imitate the style of rock music inorder to absorb its power directly into the film.

If traditional music is scored to accommodate the visuals. The Graduate sets out tomake a film out of the spirit of music circulating in its time. Even if songs were chosenin late production, the songs were the radio hits of the day and served as the inspirationof the film. If they were found to fit so well, it is only because the film was seekingto duplicate them from the start, even if unconsciously. In the end, the visuals of thisinterlude were cut to conform to the songs that had been selected. If the goal of the songis to portray in music, the very sound of solitude and silence, the goal of the camera

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and the cut is the same. The framing of the shot works to convey silence through itsvacancy and extreme minimalism,'^ and the cut will convey silence through patterns intime and space.

By this, I mean that it creates an atmosphere of vertigo by removing cues thatseparate different times and spaces and by using close-ups against black backgrounds tocreate a continuity of discontinuity between one environment and the other. The barrierbetween Ben's two worlds, childhood home and hotel room, has collapsed. The entiresequence unfolds like a strange dream in which one is doing something inappropriate inthe wrong space. For example, Ben, wearing his white shirt unbuttoned and drinking abeer, closes the door to shut out his parents, who sit at the table in the next room. He sitsdown in front of his family room television against a black background. Cut to close-upof his face framed by black. A body passes in front of this close-up, and the camerazooms out to reveal it to be Mrs. Robinson's body passing by, as Ben sits in the hotelbed in front of the television. Another example is at the end of the prelude. Ben divesinto the pool and jumps onto the black float. Cut to Ben lowering himself onto Mrs.Robinson's body in bed. An ominous sound bridge comes over this shot of his fatherasking sternly, "Ben, what are you doing." Ben turns to look over his shoulder in bedonly to see his father standing over him in the bright sun. Only now, he is back in thepool again.

The music that plays in this interlude qualifies as extradiegetic background music,because it is for the benefit of the audience, and actors within the frame do not hear it.But its mere existence in the foreground puts this designation into question forever. Thisforegrounding is achieved not only through the visual track's effort to mimic the music,but also through the minimalism of the sound track, the elimination of all other sound,including dialogue. If traditional background music strives to lie beneath the dialogue, thissequence has cut the dialogue out altogether in fear that it might distract from the song.One sound other than the music remains, the sound of a door closing as Mrs. Robinsonleaves the hotel room. This one sound will serve through its utter isolation to convey theweight of Ben's solitude and the lament of the whole human race.

When the theme song plays to its summation something very surprising occurs—another song begins. Not only is the music whole rather than partial, but also two wholesongs play back to back. Immediately time extends and the spectator understands thisparticular summer spent in Mrs. Robinson's body, a time that appears to never completelypass, that continues on and on, and yet is fatally condemned to the past even before it hasbeen achieved. The interlude commences with the end of the song and the reintroductionof sound effects as Ben dives into the swimming pool and remerges after the splash. Likewaking from a dream, or emerging after the orgasm, the film continues. In this musicalinterlude, Dionysus is reborn and the cinema of the present begins.

Traditional film's deep privilege of dialogue and plot can be traced back as far asAristotle's first refiection on tragedy, in which he isolates six components of the dramaticand ranks them with plot first and song and spectacle (stage craft) last.'^ Film scores havetended to be instrumental out of concern that the musical lyrics might distract from thefilm's primary role of telling a story through dialogue. Today the prospect of following

'^Susan Knobloch makes much use thematically of the relation of the film's blank space tothe pop music, considering the silence to be a "formal inscription of the idea that the soundtrackstands outside or tells us something 'beyond' the image," in her essay "The Graduate as Rock 'n'Roll Film," Spectator 17 (1997): 61-73.

'^Aristotle, "Poetics," Aristotle's Theory of Poetry and Fine Art, trans. S. H. Butcher (NewYork: Dover, 1951) Section VI: 23-30.

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several strands of cultural discourse simultaneously is no longer a threatening feat, andwith the rise of special effects and rock music (spectacle and song) Aristotle's hierarchyhas lost its ring of truth.

Popular music has become the sound of modem life. It is almost impossible to escapethe repeating circulation of the top 40. It surrounds us and runs through everything. Withthe emergence of rock music in the 1950s, the sound recording industry began to emergeas a force on par with the film industry. Two forces aligned from the start, music andimage, now began to compete on equal footing. The first films to utilize and documentthis new phenomenon were the rock movies and the musicals. The Elvis movies soughtto depict rock musicals with Elvis grabbing his guitar and breaking into song at theslightest provocation in films such as Robert D. Webb's Love Me Tender (1956) andRichard Thorpe's Jailhouse Rock (1957). Rock music in this case was quickly marketedaround its new icons and incorporated into already existing structures. Rock movies ofthe same period sought to thematize this new art, to show it up close and behind thescenes. Richard Lester's Hard Day's Night (1964) informed spectators of the emergenceof a new phenomenon: the rock star and his hysterical audience.

The Graduate introduced something altogether different. It was the first major Holly-wood film to use a rock score''* and one of the first films to reinvent the relation betweenmusic and cinema.'^ It was not attempting to document a new music culture but to ab-sorb its power for the cinema. The development of the pop music interlude introducedan entirely new dimension into film that would separate the cinema forever from anyrealism that remained after the cut and tum it into a highly constructed dream worldof pattems, sensations, moods, and ineffable losses, a forerunner of the music video.The power balance between image and sound took a turn towards the film environmentof today, where music television has completely reversed the dichotomy. Pre-recordedpop music is a norm in films, images are often constructed around pre-existing record-ings, film soundtracks are sometimes as important as film in the marketing process, andsometimes the film is even secondary to the music deal.'^

Not everyone looks favorably upon this scenario. Some argue that pop music is tooeasy a resource, undermines the art of film scoring, is too independent and autonomous,and too steeped in complicity with market forces and the fashions of the moment. In fact,it is almost impossible to find a textbook that does not speak negatively about the useof pre-recorded pop music in contemporary film. I believe that the use of pre-recordedpop music is one of the most expressive and powerful forces in cinema, and that thispower comes precisely from all those objections listed above; specifically the relationshipbetween popular music and fashion. It is this relationship to the ephemeral nature of timeand desire that gives popular music its power and that makes it the form par excellenceof loss. Objects, fads, and clothing all have this power.

But popular music, with its repetitive intemal structure and its mass distribution at acertain point in time, possess this power to an even greater extent. Pop songs are etemityencapsulated into 3-minute nuggets of cultural time. Pop music lives by the charts—hitmentality, the market, and the power of the moment drive it. The only thing that comparesto it in the power to embody cultural memory and to suggest a moment in time is thestickiness of the advertising jingle. In fact, it has been repeatedly noted that the pop

"*Knobloch, 61.'̂ Numerous avant-garde films, such as Kenneth Anger's Scorpio Rising (1963), had already

explored a shift towards the Dionysian.'̂ Dr. Dre's Murder was the Case (1994), for example, spawned a hit soundtrack featuring

some of the top names in hip-hop, but the film was basically an extended music promo.

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song and the music video exist as both the product and the promotion, blurring the linebetween long established broadcast boundaries.'^

Tragedy is tied to loss, and loss requires ascent. The higher the rise, the greater thefall, and the greater the pleasure of the tragic sphere. Popular music functions on thissame axis. More than any other form it lives by numbers and calculations. As it rises onthe top 40 according to sales, its distribution increases, along with its ascent. The popsong not only thematizes loss in its lyrics of love, pain, and pleasure, but it lives lossin its very structure as an emblem of the popular imagination and dreamscape. Modernmemory is driven by the popular. There is hardly a song written upon which one cannotoverlay her own particular passions and love stories.

Pop songs are so concrete as to become the ultimate universals, a precise moment thatbelongs to everyone in a million unique ways. Pop songs are highly absorbent markersof time, or the now. They rise, glow, and then fade away, where they await reinvention.It is precisely their ephemeral nature that ties them to loss and permits them to serveas vehicles of reinvention. They can stand in for entire decades, love affairs, places, andlost people. They can revive the dead. For the cinema, there is no greater resource thanthe pop song. Behind each melancholic lament, raging riff, drumbeat, and guitar solo isthe laughter of Dionysus, the tragic jester of ultimate loss.

Francois Lyotard draws a parallel between music and primordial loss and fear. Musicis the site of deep paradoxes. It struggles to leave a trace of something audible that goesbeyond the audible. Lyotard speaks of a passage from Pascal Quignard entitled "Lan-guage" that describes the sound of a collective fear that renders all language secondary."All the languages of the world seem secondary with regard to this lament of hunger,distress, loneliness, death, and danger."'* Lyotard finds in music the deepest expressionof the bestial lament over immortality. "The breath is a wind of terror: one is going to beno more. We cannot 'hear' it, but it is not mute. It puts 'exactly nothing between yourteeth.' " This is not merely certain kinds of music, but music in general. "No matter howclear the phrases of the clearest music might be, they bellow forth fright in secret."'^ Inthis sense, the work of art can never be reduced to its cultural or empirical context. Heexplains that

If the work of art is, it is because it bears witness to something in excess of whatthe body can sense, of what is sensible and circumscribed by the (biological,cultural) institutions of the body. [...] This excess is already at the very originsof sensation. Sensation is not only the reception of useful contextual information,it is also in its immediacy the reminder of a threat. The body does not belongto you, it is sensible only insofar as it is exposed to the other thing, deprived ofits self-distinction, in danger of annihilation. It is sensible only as lamentable.̂ *^

This makes the aesthetic realm a distinction that is only possible through the figure ofextinction and its lament. As he describes it, "The body is passible because it has doorsand they are open. What enters through the body, sensations, aesthesis, is not just the formof an object, it's the anguish of being full of holes."^' Differences between the various

'^Pat Aufderheide, "Music Videos: the Look of the Sound," Journal of Communication 36:1(1986), 57.

'^Lyotard, "Music Mutic," 223-224.'^Lyotard, 225.20 232-233.

'Lyotard, 23L

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arts, he explains, are only different ways the body has of being threatened with loss."Aesthetics is phobic, it arises from anesthesia, belonging to it, recovering from it."^^

This description of the "breath of lament" puts music at the very core of being. Theseholes in the body that Lyotard describes as the senses threaten the border between insideand outside. Like a character from an Edgar Allan Poe tale suffering from a "heighteningof the senses,"^^ one can imagine being killed by an odor or sound. Music does not fillthe lack opened by the visual. It is the lack itself. That we can distinguish ourselves frommusic is merely a cultural knowledge or function of language.

For example, Fabre d'Olivet, a romantic composer and theorist, describes a boy,deaf and mute since birth, that he miraculously cured of his affliction. Upon first hearingsound, the boy reacted with shame and responsibility because he thought himself to bethe source of the music. '̂* This lack of self-differentiation is not plenitude but a failureto distinguish the self from loss. Though Lacan designates the visual field as the infant'sfirst thrust into object/subject relations and language, sound is our first sense. It is themother's heartbeat that is first heard in the womb, the sound of the interior of being. Thisis not plenitude but the first drum roll of loss.^^ The sound of a silence escaped and yetto come. In this sense, the first loss is the loss of loss itself. Music is this sound.

For Lyotard, breath is affect. He notes Aristotle's description of the human animal interms of affection. Animality is inhabited by pathemata, it is pathic, and it feels. Lyotardsays, "Affective rhythms and nuances, pleasure, suffering, depression, modalize the soundof silence after the fact." And "to modalize affects is already to put this noise to music,to make affection speak in shapes."^^ Music is a source of pleasure because it forges aconnection between the world and our affective emotional experience of being. Tears,moans, suffering, the heaving of the chest in loss and fear evoke a strange harmony orpleasure made audible in music. Loss is the feeling of meaning or value. To suffer is tobe. The sound of this feeling is music. Lyotard describes this link between being andmusic as a "breath." The sound of the human body itself signifies musicality, throughbreath, moans, screams, and dialogue.

It could be argued that the human body can do nothing more expressive than to breathe.When video game technology first advanced to the point of replacing paddles with ac-tual figures and enabling them to negotiate three-dimensional space, the comparison be-tween games and cinema became imaginable. But it was not until these figures beganto breathe, to drown underwater from lack of air, to scurry up hills, grow fatigued, andheave in rhythm, that games truly achieved the cinematic. Ben's loneliness and isola-tion appears early in The Graduate in the guise of a sonic point-of-view shot. The filmhas already developed the motif that compares the perfectly manicured world of the af-fiuent middle-class to the confines of a fish tank. This was established through blockingshots of the tank and Mrs. Robinson's gesture of throwing her keys into the tank for Ben-jamin to fetch. In the scuba scene, this motif is extended to include the swimming poolas a larger tank, a metaphor for an environment that is suffocating its human inhabitants.

232.Allan Poe, "The Tell-Tale Heart," Tell-Tale Heart and Other Writings by Edgar Allan

Poe (New York: Bantam Classics, 1983), 3.^''Fabre d'Olivet, The Secret Lore of Music, trans. Joscelyn Goodwin (Rochester, VT: Inner

Traditions, 1987), 16.^^Gorbman, in her text Unheard Melodies (Indianapolis: Indiana UP, 1987), discusses how

psychoanalysts argue that musical response is related to the desire to retum to the pre-phallic stageprior to differentiation to the body of the mother. My argument is not that music is plentitude, butthat it exposes or gives birth to a lost plentitude.

^^Lyotard, 227.

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Benjamin's parents have given him a wet suit for his birthday, the means to survivein the fish tank. The scene begins with the father coaxing the reluctant son to emergefrom the house in this scuba gear and descend into the pool to test the suit for the benefitof his parent's friends. Ben's resistance is met with his father's insistence, and he emergesfrom the house to the cheers of the adults. This pained walk from the house to the bottomof the pool transpires from what can only be called a sonic point of view, or a pointof experience. The camera reveals Benjamin's point-of-view blocked by his facemask.He sees the hysterical adults waving in support but, because of the gear, all that can beheard is the sound of his internal breath. The distance between him and the adults is animmense canyon seen from the claustrophobic interior of Benjamin's body and subjec-tivity. When he descends into the swimming pool and takes up a position at the verybottom, the camera pans away to a long shot that resembles the first man on the mooninserting his stake in the ground, the victor of infinite space and nothingness. He canbreathe, and the bubbles rise from his body in streams, but can he live in this environment?

This shot and the sound of breathing is held for an uncomfortable length of time,broken only by a sound bridge. Benjamin's voice is heard making his first phone callto Mrs. Robinson during the long shot. The film then cuts to Benjamin fumbling in aphone booth. This sound bridge ties Benjamin's decision to enter the pool (fish tank) tohis decision to accept Mrs. Robinson's sexual offer—a decision that is well understoodto be the product of loneliness, isolation, and fear.

The human voice is a desperate thing. The body implies a fundamental separationbetween self and world that the voice serves to bridge. And what the voice is saying, nomatter how complex the language, is very basic. It is asking a hermeneutical question:can you hear me, do you understand, are you with me or not with me? The human voiceis always a kind of a call or cry to the other. It is sometimes pathetic, sometimes funny,and sometimes tragic. The closing scene of The Graduate elicits all three responses.Ben decides to marry Mrs. Robinson's daughter Elaine (Katherine Ross) even thoughshe is engaged to another man. Mrs. Robinson responds by arranging a sudden weddingbetween Elaine and her fiance. Ben rushes across town to intercept the wedding andarrives at the church just as the vows have been exchanged and the wedding march hasbegun to play. From the organ booth over the crowd, Ben lets out a desperate hollerof lament that rings throughout the church. The reverse shot shows his pathetic figureclutching the glass like a caged animal wailing in grief. The camera cuts to Elaine'spoint-of-view as she sizes up the situation. Everyone is shouting in commotion, but theyappear in a silent comical pantomime. The only sound that Elaine hears is the sound ofBen's lament. The two lovers make a frantic escape with the whole wedding party inpursuit.

In the film's last shot they board a bus, find a seat in the back, suffer the gaze ofthe curious passengers, and the theme song commences one last time. "Hello darknessmy old friend. I've come to talk to you again, because a silence softly creeping, left itsseeds while I was sleeping " They look out the back window at those they have leftin the dust, at each other, and then stare straight ahead awkwardly as they drive intotheir uncertain future. They have been united briefly in their separate solitudes, but theyremain bound to the same internal problems of human life and have only a life of struggleand the loss of youth ahead. Ben has brought the human voice to its limit and asked theprimal question, and Elaine responded, yes, I am with you. But even this harmony islimited by temporality and merely serves to bridge an abyss.

It is irresistible to ask what lies beyond the limit of the human scream. The humanscream is a not merely a gesture that takes dialogue to its limit in its plea for response. Asa limit point it also borders the ineffable and addresses no one and nothing. The cinema

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has capitalized on this limit, producing countless screaming women. Michel Chion noteshowever that it is not merely the scream that opens up this space without territory. Moreprecisely, it is the screaming "point" that plays a structuring role in the shape of cinema.As he explains it.

Let us define the screaming point in a cinematic narrative as something thatgenerally gushes forth from the mouth of a woman, which by the way does nothave to be heard, but which above all must fall at an appointed spot, explode ata precise moment, at the crossroads of converging plot lines, at the end of anoften convoluted trajectory, but calculated to give this point maximum i ^ ^

The scream in this sense serves a narrative function akin to the climax or resolution ofthe plot, but it is not merely reconciliation or end to conflict. It is an eruption, a volcano,a point of upheaval and maddening delight. It is a mystical point towards which pleasureis moving.

The screaming point is a point of the unthinkable inside of thought, of theindeterminate inside the spoken, of unrepresentibility inside of representation.It occupies a point in time, but has not duration within. It suspends the time ofits possible duration; it's a rip in the fabric of time. This scream embodies afantasy of the auditory absolute, it is seen to saturate the soundtrack and deafenthe listener.^*

Chion locates this scream in the voice of the female and compares it to the femaleorgasm. The male, he explains, does not scream, he shouts. The shout marks territory,exercising will and structure. Tarzan shouts. The female scream reaches the infinite, itis a sound or cry at the brink of death. The male shout structures, the female screamopens a black hole to the limitless. The male director seeks to master the scream but hecannot—just as the female cannot herself master the scream. It exceeds control of bothgenders. In the scream speech reaches utter silence.

There are exceptions however to this gender division, and the exceptions are alwaysas important as the rule. Chion uses Marguerite Duras' India Song (1975) to mark thisexception, but I will analyze the male scream in Joel and Ethan Coen's Barton Fink(1991), a film that takes manhood as its theme. Barton Fink is an enfeebled intellectualwho has had a theatrical success in New York and been recruited to Hollywood to writea formula boxing picture. His own interests are theoretical and he lives the "life of themind" despite the deep connection he believes he has with the working man. He takesup residence in a dilapidated hotel next door to Charlie Mundt (John Goodman). Charliedoesn't lead the life of the mind but that of the head, a head that leaks, bleeds, and rages.The entire film is claustrophobic, a series of confined structures or boxes, from heads, torooms, to frames. Within these walls, that are not really home. Barton fails repeatedly towrite his film.

Building, room, and head all stand in for another to designate the fine line betweenstructure and infinity, between the materiality of man and the ineffable. The head perfectlyrepresents this duplicity. It is the ultimate container and also the organ that lives the "lifeof the mind." On the wall is a frame that contains an image of a woman sitting facing

2̂ Michel Chion, The Voice in Cinema, trans. Claudia Gorbman (New York: Columbia Uni-versity Press, 1999), 75.

2 8 n , 77.

The Sound of Silence 123

the sea. The horizon stands in for this same infinity within structure, and its place on thewall stands as confined ideal. Repeatedly the camera zooms into the frame on the walland Barton literally hears the sound of the waves come to life.

This border between frame and wall marks the distinction between feminine and mas-culine. The image in the frame signifies nature, freedom, and open space as opposed tothe dark confines of his urban hovel. But this little piece of freedom is ultimately framedand confined to a wall. At the film's end Barton will enter this frame carrying a box thatmay or may not contain the head of a woman he may or may not have murdered. Theseframes within frames represent cinema itself, the site of woman and man, frame and infinity.

The screaming point of the film comes when Charles Mundt has returned fromhis business trip/mass murder spree. The police are interrogating Barton in his roomwhen they sense Charlie's approach. Heat signifies his nearness. The walls have nearlymelted off from the raging heat and tension that have been made manifest as flameslapping through the corridor. Into this fiery pressure tank, Mundt enters from the elevatorcarrying a suitcase. When the cops tell him to drop it, he puts it down, opens it, andpulls out a machine gun. He stampedes through this inferno shouting, "I'll show you thelife of the mind " When he reaches the end of the corridor, he places his gun to thehead of a cop, and the man emits a scream of absolute terror as he looks his death inthe eyes. This horrible scream ends only with the explosion of the gun. Barton Fink isa film that thematizes the line between genders, but also marks the site of the completedissolution of difference. A place where man and woman are themselves both enframed,contained in structure, albeit in different locations, and both vulnerable to the vortex ofthe scream that signals a place into which all structure and law dissolves.

In Arthur Penn's Bonnie and Clyde (1967), the screaming point also joins the twogenders that the film has spent differentiating. Rather than a scream, the screaming pointin Bonnie and Clyde is the moment in which the outlaws are finally contained by thelaw. It is the moment of their mutual violent death on the roadside. They drive downthe road unknowingly to their ambush. A friend waves them down and Clyde (WarrenBeatty) gets out to offer help. Birds fly from the bushes, the friend jumps under a car,and Clyde knows he has been set up. He tums and exchanges looks with Bonnie (FayeDunaway) before they are both slaughtered with gunfire. They are shot so many timesthat the screaming point seems to never end, as their bodies jerk about in agony. Whenthe firing finally stops, nothing remains except for utter silence and defeat/triumph. Theambushers hesitantly approach the car, looking in utter awe, as if to say, "Wow, is thatreally Bonnie and Clyde, have we really stopped the unstoppable forces of glamourand transgression?" It is a moment of star struck wonder. Beyond this moment, there isnothing. It is nothingness itself. The film titles roll.

It is the exchange of looks between these lovers immediately preceding the screamingpoint of death that interests me. They are an exchange of rapidly cut extreme close-ups.It is merely an exchange of glances, an acknowledgment, perhaps a farewell, but it iseven more powerful than Elaine's response to Ben's cry. It is the moment of absoluteunderstanding before a shared fate. This moment of love exceeds both dialogue andtouch. It emerges in silence prior to the explosion. It is the shared horizon of the humanpredicament realized through silence. This is the same achievement realized betweenstage and spectator in tragedy. It is the deafening silence made audible by music andsound. If Bonnie and Clyde had outlived this moment, they would have merely sufferedmore conflict, more misunderstanding, because such an epiphany can only come as amoment, a lightning shock from the infinite. But because there was no beyond, it wasperfect. In this gaze lay the deepest lament and loss, and yet the very limit of what thehuman animal can possess.