I’ve been browsing through the Gawker posts backlogged in my Google reader this morning and got caught up in this one musing on soundtrack music in recent wordless (or mostly) movie trailers. I wasn’t so taken with their Battle: Los Angeles pick, but the Radiohead choral cover in The Social Network has indeed stuck in my brain. Thinking back through my own recent trailer viewing, John Adams’ work in the teaser for I Am Love also hits insanely hard for all of the obvious reasons, particularly to the ears of someone with my kind of musical preferences.
Still, the soundtrack that has really been on uncontrollable repeat for me these past few weeks was introduced by this commercial for an HP printer (which I suppose, in ad terms, means it really worked). A little Googling to ID the artist turned up this fabulous video for the same song filmed for a class project in the ’70s.
Just imagine if these kids had had iMovie.
The music trick gets a workout every time a foreign film is marketed in America, but even when the trailer makes full use of the dialog, I love listening for what the filmmakers try to get across in the music bed. With only a couple of minutes to capture a story line, you need to use shorthand, and aural cues are often the most powerful–if not the most subtle–hook. (See a catalog of movie trailer music cliches, among others, as captured here).
I looked at the trailers. Battle Los Angeles fills me with the most thoughts. Hollywood and the military often cooperate in war films. In this one, Marines from an air base in North Carolina flying Osprey tilt rotor aircraft were part of the filming in Baton Rouge for three days. The entire film is shot from the perspective of heroic Marines fighting aliens. The romantic and idealized portrayals, usually starring Broody McFineass, provide massive advantages for recruitment. Culture lubricates the wheels of war.
You ask how many words a song is worth, but given the military’s agenda, we might also ask how many lives a song is worth. We not only use music for torture, we use it to control mass markets, to propagandize, to incite hatred of enemies real or imagined, to create a global hegemony, to promote and reinforce militarism. Even many of Hollywood’s love stories have at least some of these same agendas. These purposes are nowhere more apparent than in trailers that often, in effect, assault and mesmerize our minds with blasts of sound and light. Words are almost always secondary, because they tend to promote a more rational and discerning reaction. For Hollywood, culture is just another form of war. A manipulative coercion is the essence of their art.