As with most young fields, there are many more ways to study film music than there are film music scholars. My own particular interest has always been in the processes of subject positioning and identification that take place between a film and its perceiver. My book, Hearing Film [1] took these questions as its central subject. In it, I argue that there are two kinds of identifications conditioned by contemporary Hollywood film music. The first, assimilating identification, depends on narrowing the field of possibilities to locate perceivers quite tightly-as tightly as possible-in one position in a fantasy scenario. I associated this practice most closely with composed scores, i.e. classical Hollywood scoring practices and their late Romantic symphonic musical vocabulary. The connection between Hollywood’s classical scoring practices and assimilating identifications rests on the widespread competence of perceivers internationally to recognize and respond to the musical vocabulary, which has been set over many decades by the seemingly ceaseless repetition of certain musical features with certain visual and narrative ones. So, for example, it is easy to track perceivers into an identification with a particular position in a fantasy scenario simply by evoking the attendant emotion-be it fear, love, or serenity-through recognizable musical conventions.
In contradistinction, other films offer what I call affiliating identifications. Rather than narrowing the field of possibilities, their scores work to hold open many positions within a fantasy scenario. These scores, I noted, are much more likely to rely on compiled scores, compilations of usually pre-existing songs used to put a soundtrack to on-screen lives in much the same way as we score our own lives on an everyday basis. Because the songs pre-exist the films, perceivers can bring their own relationships to the song, the artist, or the genre into their engagement with the filmic text as a whole; this approach to scoring invites social histories in to engagement between film and perceiver.
However, the subtitle of this brief essay, “Rethinking identifications in romantic comedies,” suggests my discomfort with such a simple mapping of identification processes and musical materials. While I still believe Hearing Film to be a good description of the general trends, the connection between scores and psychic processes is, not surprisingly, quite complicated. I’ve become interested in thinking about the cases when the connections I described in Hearing Film don’t hold true. In this essay, I will look at several romantic comedies in which assimilating identifications depend on a wide range of musical materials, both composed and compiled.
Romantic comedies provide a fruitful entry point, relying as they do on slipping identifications, discourses of assimilation, and a wide range of musical materials. Moreover, the particular films discussed below are among the shadow texts of Hearing Film: works I studied extensively that for various reasons did not get included in the final manuscript. I suspect now that I bracketed them precisely for the reason they rise from the ashes here-they trouble the theoretically stilled waters I posited originally. Below, I will describe them one by one, pointing out the problems they suggest, returning after this survey to a reconsideration of the mapping of musical styles and offers of identification.
A good Irish mother’s son
Only the Lonely (Columbus, USA 1991), like many ethnic romantic comedies, equates separation from family with successful romantic involvement. Danny (John Candy) is a stereotypical Irish-American mama’s boy bachelor cop who falls in love with Theresa (Ally Sheedy), a shy young Italian-Polish-American woman who works in her father’s funeral parlor. She begins to overcome her shyness as he courts her in unusual ways; on their first date, for example, he takes her on a picnic to an empty major league baseball stadium, where his friend lights up the scoreboard and plays organ music for them.
The problem they need to overcome is Rose, Danny’s mother (Maureen O’Hara), with whom he lives. She is a narrow-minded, judgmental bigot who routinely insults people around her. When Danny takes her to dinner to meet Theresa, she insults Theresa over her breast size (“like a thirteen-year-old boy”) and her Polish background (“I had a Pollack friend once; she was so stupid…”). Even further, Danny’s mother dictates life in hundreds of ways. She tells him what to eat and when to come home. Danny’s brother, a lawyer whom Danny put through law school, arranges a transfer for Danny to Florida (from Chicago) so that their mother can be in a warmer climate, despite Danny’s burgeoning relationship with Theresa.
Danny finally begins to realize that his whole life has been organized by the needs of the family, and wants to change that. But he can’t. After their wedding rehearsal dinner, he walks Theresa home, and on the way he stops to make sure his mother made it home safely. Theresa gets angry, suggesting that his mother will always be between them. The next day, neither one appears at the wedding. Later, as Danny and Rose are leaving for Florida, he changes his mind, chases after Theresa, who is on a train to New York, catches up with her, and vows to move there with her to forge a new life together.
Two distinct kinds of music tell this story, but neither of them represents an idealized ethnic or family community. Two leitmotivs follow Danny. First, there is a vaguely Irish melancholic melody for the difficult moments in his relationship with Theresa. We hear it during their various disagreements and when we see Theresa home alone in her wedding gown. The second, a joyful major key melody, begins with an upward-sweeping arpeggio and accompanies each of their major romantic scenes-their kiss in Danny’s bedroom, Theresa’s assent to his proposal, and so on. Basically, these themes represent some of the reigning Hollywood sound images of contemporary romance.
The other main kind of music is the ethnic leitmotivs for Rose and for Nick, the Greek next-door neighbor who has been flirting with Rose for years. Rather than giving their strange one-way courtship a theme of its own, the score opts repeatedly-in the scenes where they kiss, in the final sequence on the plane-to meld each of their themes together to present the idea of their connection. Musically speaking, Rose and Nick have neither a joint nor an individual identity, being marked only by their ethnicities; Danny and Theresa’s themes are American and romantic-rather than ethnic.
The ethnic musical stereotypes used for Rose and Nick are tried and true; these melodies would have been recognizable, for example, to film audiences in the 1940s. In fact, Only the Lonely‘s score does not depart significantly from classical Hollywood in either procedure or materials. Its music fully supports a film that draws perceivers into assimilating identifications with Danny. In order for the love between Danny and Theresa to flourish, the score and its film suggest, the couple must leave behind their extended families, with their ethnicities attached, and forge a new, disconnected, assimilated life alone in New York.
Only the Lonely, then, follows a predictable pattern-the interethnic romance leads to both assimilationist musical discourses and assimilating identifications. Against the backdrop of this predictable practice, then, let us turn a romantic comedy with another strategy.
A good Boston Italian father’s daughter?
Once Around (USA 1991), Lasse Hallstrˆm’s first English language film, stars Richard Dreyfuss as an overbearing, Lithuanian-American, hard-sell time share salesman who falls in love with Holly Hunter, one of three children from a close-knit Boston Italian family. The parents, Joe and Marilyn Bella, are played by Danny Aiello and Gena Rowlands, and it is immediately apparent that they are on the one hand devoted to their children and on the other connected too closely to them by traditional Anglo-American standards. While Only the Lonely required radical separation of the couple from their families, Once Around makes the unimaginable move of resolving the narrative in favor of the closed, ethnic, extended-family system.
The music that most strongly marks this direction from the beginning of the film is Aiello’s renditions of Sinatra-style songs. The film opens with Aiello driving around a traffic circle, singing “That’s the story of love.” He eventually drives home to attend his daughter’s wedding and reception there. At the reception, he sings the song to her, accompanying himself on the guitar. The film’s opening thus firmly associates this repertoire with Aiello’s character. (While not immediately apparent, this is a widely used contemporary musical strategy for signifying Italian-American identity. The generation of Italian-American crooners from Perry Como to Frank Sinatra and Dean Martin are routinely used to conjure Italian associations, in settings as disparate as the CDs Audio Environments International [AEI] produced monthly in the 1990s for The Olive Garden, an Italian restaurant chain, and the plethora of Mafia-themed CDs such as Mob hits.)
When Hunter and Dreyfuss meet, their first romantic moment comes when the band plays “Fly me to the moon” and they both sing along. Lest the appropriate identification be left to chance, Hunter points out to Dreyfuss that her father taught her all these songs, and “They just don’t write songs like that anymore.” The song provides the terrain on which a romantic connection is made through her father across both generation and ethnicity.
But as the film proceeds, no music makes a separate world for Hunter and Dreyfuss. They continue to live in her father’s musical world. As the film progresses, the competition between Aiello and Dreyfuss becomes unbearable. In one very difficult scene, Dreyfuss sings a Lithuanian song to a mother after Aiello has offered a heart-wrenching version of “Mama” at his mother’s memorial service. The men, the languages, and the songs all compete, offering no possibility of integration. The tension explodes over Hunter and Dreyfuss’ child’s baptism, and Aiello demands that Dreyfuss never enter his home again. The nuclear and extended families patch up their differences at the baptism, only to have Dreyfuss fall down from a heart attack. He does not die; his recovery is remarkable, and he begins to return to his old overbearing self. Ultimately, the tension begins to build again, and he quietly dies.
This ending is certainly an unusual one, by Hollywood standards. There is no happily ever after for the romantic hero and heroine. The family that appeared to be disrupted in the narrative by this romance is once again restored to its original form. But the music suggests that this disruption never even scratched the family surface. There is neither the manifest narrative assimilation of Lithuanian and Italian, nor the identificatory assimilation of Only the Lonely‘s score.
An even better Italian father’s daughter
Both Once Around and Moonstruck (Jewison, USA, 1987) use 1950s and 60s Frank Sinatra- and Dean Martin-style crooning as a marker of Italian-American identity. Like Once Around, Moonstruck‘s plot focuses on a daughter’s romance, with a sub-plot about her father’s coming to terms with the conditions of his life. Unlike the others, however, Moonstruck‘s romance does not cross ethnic or racial lines; it stays firmly rooted within the Italian-American community in Brooklyn. While some Italian-Americans found its representation of their communities to be degrading and stereotypical, others found it charming and funny. And many bel canto opera fans found its incorporation of Puccini’s La bohème ingenious and satisfying. Moonstruck appears at first to challenge my case about ethnicity in romantic comedies. It seems to celebrate its ethnicity and to move against assimilationist identifications. And yet, a closer look at the deployment of musics suggests a different reading.
Moonstruck begins with Dean Martin’s rendition of “That’s amore.” This opening sequence suggests that the song, the singer, or at least the style will have some significant place in the film. But no other similar song appears in any part of the film, until “That’s amore” returns over the final credits.
Instead, the score creates a juxtaposition between opera and the musical materials of traditional Italian folk music (or at least traditional Italian folk music as it is conceived of in Hollywood). The score is replete with accordions and mandolins; the former cheerful and lighthearted, the latter more serious. They are used primarily to represent events around Johnny (Danny Aiello)-after he proposes to Loretta (Cher), at his mother’s deathbed, and so on. And Loretta’s grandfather (Feodor Chaliapin), alternately known as Bello or Old Man, has a mazurka that is played only for him as he is walking his five dogs. (While the mazurka is originally a Slavic dance form from Poland, it is part of il liscio unificato, a grouping of three dances-mazurka, polka and Viennese waltz-long considered an Italian “patrimonio nazionale,” especially when played on the accordion as it is in Moonstruck.) [2]
The other kind of music is the score of La bohème. While Verdi’s and Puccini’s operas have long been a part of Italian popular culture, opera in Moonstruck does not signify as an Italian music. The establishing sequence of the film begins with a shot of a full moon, then the Brooklyn Bridge, then two different shots of the New York skyline. In the film’s first medium shot, the Metropolitan Opera House fills the screen, in all its night time grandeur. The camera moves in to show someone wheeling a poster, then in tighter to the La bohème poster being mounted in a glass case, then back out to show the whole building again. The next shot is the bridge in morning light, followed by Cher walking down a street. As she turns to cross the street, a Metropolitan Opera Scenic Shop truck crosses in front of her, filling the screen, followed by a shot not of Cher, but of the truck. We see it backing into a building, then cut to the interior where it is being unloaded. We see only the back of the panels coming off the truck, and they are labeled “Metropolitan Opera Scenic Shop, La Bohème, Act One.” Finally, after all of this, we return to Cher walking further down the street. This sequence very firmly establishes opera as belonging to New York, not to Italy or Italian ethnicity, as is the case, for example, in its co-presence with Frank Sinatra on the Olive Garden CDs. Later in the film, opera becomes further overlaid with high culture associations, signaled most firmly in Ronnie’s (Nicolas Cage) and Loretta’s dress when they attend the performance of La bohème at the Metropolitan Opera. But in Moonstruck‘s landscape, opera is always first and foremost a local New York sound.
Each time excerpts from bohème appear, they depend on a marked stylistic distinction between the opera and Italian music as the film conceives it. The opera is very clearly associated with Ronnie, who introduces Loretta to it. This is Ronnie who not only stands distinct in the film for his musical choices, but also for his separation from his mother. While Johnny is still connected to his mother and to Italy (he spends most of the film there), Ronnie has clearly and successfully fulfilled the assimilationist call to individuation. Bohème marks all of the film’s romance, and it serves as a focal point for the idea that romance requires individuation.
In this sense, then, Moonstruck is the converse, at least for our purposes here, of Once Around. Moonstruck avidly encourages psychological separation and assimilation, but it does so using compiled materials, most notably the music of La bohème.
A black man’s family
Malcolm Lee’s The Best Man (USA 1999) takes a significantly different approach. Much of its musical materials is a composed score by Stanley Clarke, the virtuoso jazz/fusion bassist. But Clarke’s score is not used to track assimilating identifications. For example, in an early scene, Harper (Taye Diggs) and Robin (Sanaa Lathan) are laying in a bathtub together, surrounded by candlelight, swimming in red and yellow rose petals. The music enters on a cut from the kitchen to the Chicago skyline and continues over the cut to the tub. The instrumentation is a standard jazz trio-percussion, keyboard, bass-although eventually strings are added.
While it was clear from the opening sequence that Harper is the main character, nothing anywhere in this scene associates the music specifically with him. This is an important musical strategy that ties identifications to particular characters or positions in a fantasy scenario, and the absence of its use here is significant. The cue does not enter or exit in relation to Harper, nor does it express anything about his character more than Robin’s. This, I would argue, is an excellent example of composed materials conditioning affiliating identifications.
In The Best Man, Harper has to separate from his college fantasy of Nia Long and his boy-buddy family in order to find real adult love with Robin. The film turns on the wedding of Lance (Morris Chestnut) and Mia (Monica Calhoun). Harper has jeopardized it first by having slept with Mia in college and then by writing about it in his first novel. This novel was scheduled for release after the wedding date, but the group of friends got an advance copy. At the bachelor party, Lance reads the crucial passage and realizes his best man slept with his fiancée. He calls off the wedding, and it is up to Harper to get Lance to see that the marriage is more important than Harper’s betrayal. (In this way, Lance’s problem is parallel to Harper’s-he has to learn to move beyond his fantasies of a virginal, pure Mia.)
Outside the church, there is a sequence similar to the tub scene described above. Quentin (Terrence Dashon Howard) and Shelby (Melissa DeSousa) are chatting, and Harper comes up behind them. Although the music enters with Harper, neither the music nor the camera angle are particularly associated with him again in the rest of the scene. In other words, this is yet another example of composed materials not being used to track assimilating identifications. And later in this sequence, this direction is pushed even further by the use of the Beyoncé and Marc Nelson duet “All is said and done.”
At a moment when the most obvious choice would be to seal our identifications with Harper, the music enters on a two-shot of Lance and Harper. It swells to the cut to the church, when the vocals begin, as the camera pans across the groomsmen. As the song continues, the camera rests on a medium shot with Lance in the center and Harper to the right. The next cut is not to Harper, but to the flower girls, looking down the aisle from Lance’s perspective. As the lyric of the second verse-“There you are…”-begins, the camera cuts not to Robin, but to Mia looking lovingly at Lance. There is absolutely nothing about this song, nor about the ways it is cued and mixed, nor about the visual editing, that connects it with Harper. And thus, the central scene of the film is not organized around guiding an identification with the main character, but rather with a community in which all the main characters have grown to adulthood. It does that powerfully through its uses of songs and artists, from Stanley Clarke’s composed sections, to “Brick house,” to the wedding scene duet.
Conclusion
In the brief survey of a few romantic comedies from the 1990s, I have attempted to show that the associations I identified in Hearing Film between composed scores and assimilating identifications, on the one hand, and compiled scores and affiliating identifications on the other, are only tendencies. While they correctly predict the musical strategies of Only the Lonely, the other three films discussed above defy the general trend.
Only the Lonely and Once Around suggest that family and community are impulses that block the appropriate accession to adulthood through psychic separation. Moonstruck and The Best Man recompose separation as a matter of balancing it with, rather than against, community and family. In all these cases, however, the films rely on their musical materials, and in particular songs, to express both the struggles and their resolutions.
These films use songs, whether from operas or evergreens or contemporary R&B, to create the psychosocial scenes in which the characters’ trajectories take place. Each considers ethnic community practices through the generic framework of romantic comedy, and each relies on its songs to open or close the possibilities it offers. Once Around defies the usual logic of the romantic comedy genre, instead tracking affiliating identifications through the use of Italian-American standards. Moonstruck, however, deploys excerpts from La bohème to condition assimilating identifications, undercutting the connection of compiled scores with more open identificatory practices. And finally Stanley Clarke’s composed score for The Best Man offers a very open affiliating identification.
In these romantic comedies about ethnicity and separation, songs both block and enable varying kinds of separation and belonging in the characters’ communities and families, thereby conditioning different patterns of identification on the part of the films’ perceivers. Through them, I’ve argued here that the connections between composed scores and assimilating identifications, and between compiled scores and affiliating identifications, are not necessary articulations. Almost any musical materials can, with careful selection, cueing, mixing, and editing, be used in service of any path of identification. Only a careful study of the musical materials and cueing, alongside many other aspects of the film, can reveal its strategies.
Endnotes
[1] Anahid Kassabian, Hearing Film: Tracking Identifications in Contemporary Hollywood Film Music (New York: Routledge, 2001).
[2] See, for example, Superballo: il ballo mondiale in un sito italiano,http://www.superballo.it/lisciounificato/mazurka.html
Created on: Monday, 11 July 2005 | Last Updated: Wednesday, 27 July 2005