I’ve become an avid fan of the pseudonymous Cinetrix, who blogs at Pullquote, so I was pleased to get the following e-mail from her. It starts with a pullquote from my recent posting on Kind of Blue:
It’s the record Clint Eastwood (who knows a lot about jazz) puts on when he comes home from a hard day of assassin-hunting in In the Line of Fire. A whole book has been written about its history and cultural significance. Now it’s Muzak–yet it remains as vital and listenable as ever. By what strange alchemy was this transformation effected?
Somebody (me, I guess) ought to write an essay about how jazz has come to be used as a cultural signifier in films, TV shows, and ads, an infallible indicator of upper-middle-class hipness.
Yes, please. You could do worse than use Clint as a jumping-off point. Especially because he (and his son) composed the music for the extra-blue-collar “Mystic River,” which some viewers have found distracting. Is his score perhaps supposed to signify (to the members of the Academy?) that this working-class tale is tasteful and well-done and designed to be
understood and appreciated by discerning, upper-middle-class hipsters like themselves? The credits cite the BSO and the Tanglewood Festival Orchestra, impeccable cultural signifiers indeed.
Alas, this isn’t the essay I sort of promised–I’ve got to write for money today, so I can’t be that discursive–but I, too, was intrigued by the fact that Clint Eastwood scored Mystic River himself. (Lennie Niehaus transcribed the music from Eastwood’s piano sketch and did the orchestrations, but the actual music is reportedly
all Eastwood, except for a couple of snippets by son Kyle.) This, mind you, in spite of the fact that he didn’t do a very good job of it. “Distracting” isn’t the word. Whatever made him think those slick, inflated symphonic sounds were even remotely appropriate to a film about working-class life in Boston?
On the other hand, I suspect Eastwood’s motives, insofar as he understood them, were pure. His interest in music, after all, is both long-standing and considerable (among many other things, he does his own cocktail piano playing–very competently, too–in In the Line of Fire). What’s more, it’s clear that he’s wanted to score one of his own films for some time now. You may not remember this, but Eastwood composed the main-title themes for several of his earlier films, most notably “Claudia’s Theme” from Unforgiven, which is actually quite a nice little tune.
I have no doubt that a lot of other directors would score their own films if they could, and some might even do a good job…if they could. Stanley Kubrick, lest we forget, dumped Alex North’s marvelous score
for 2001: A Space Odyssey and replaced it with his own “score”
made up of pre-existing pieces of classical music, some of which worked extremely well in context. His use of Gy