Nor the Eye Filled With Seeing - The Sound of Vision in Film

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Nor the Eye Filled with Seeing: The Sound of Vision in Film Author(s): Stan Link Source: American Music, Vol. 22, No. 1 (Spring, 2004), pp. 76-90Published by: University of Illinois PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3592968Accessed: 21-10-2015 01:44 UTC

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STAN LINK

Nor the Eye Filled with Seeing: The Sound of Vision in Film

The increasingly sophisticated use of sound and music in film has not

yet dispelled the notion that cinema is an essentially visual medium. But whether or not film's primary address is to the eye, its visuality has two faces. On the one hand, there is the sense in which film presents images to be seen: it captures objects for display. But on the other, we may also encounter cinema's visuality in its presentation of see-

ing for display: there are clearly ways in which cinema's techniques, signs, and images become place-holders for vision itself. In other words, along with objects, film presents modes of visual attention for

display. The point-of-view shot is perhaps the most obvious. Regard- less of the object observed, the character's vision itself becomes visi- ble. The visuality of film resides in its own looking, as well as in its

being looked at. This active visuality typically functions as a narrative vehicle. See-

ing becomes a nearly transparent part of how filmic characters take in their world and, ironically, vision usually disappears into characters and plots. But what of a film in which a character stares through a peephole, or stands and looks at paintings? In such instances vision becomes a narrative event: seeing has made the leap from style to story. If only for a moment, vision may trump image. Promoted from medium to content, seeing becomes action. As such, seeing becomes a candidate for the most evocative elaboration undergone by any other type of film action-namely, it can become the topic of the

Stan Link is the assistant professor of the Composition, Philosophy, and Anal- ysis of Music at Vanderbilt University's Blair School of Music. He is current- ly completing the "Horror and Science Fiction" chapter for the Cambridge Companion to Film Music. His acoustic and electro-acoustic musical works are performed in the United States, Europe, and Australia.

American Music Spring 2004 ? 2004 by the Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois



The Sound of Vision in Film

soundtrack's characterization of screen activity. Cinema asks a ques- tion worthy of Alice to the Caterpillar: What does seeing sound like?

Theories of how soundtracks comment on particular images will not provide an answer. Vision is not a concrete thing, nor is it an emotional act in and of itself. Typical metaphoric referents such as tem-

po, rhythm and affect can be made to refer to objects and motion on the one hand, and subjective reactions on the other. But to what can sound and music meaningfully refer when vision itself becomes the salient action? Numerous instances may suggest that vision is, liter-

ally, not unheard of. And yet, what is there to encode? What are the referents and how are they invoked? By way of relevant examples and

conceptualization in terms of the body and culture, this essay address- es cinema's aural encounters with vision as action.

Of Sound Mind and Body Nagging realities of artery-clogging popcorn, sticky floors, and five- dollar sodas aside, taking a seat in a movie theater is to take an alternate subjectivity. There may be film-theoretical debate as to the mechanisms, but the notion that cinema places subjectivity into play is

beyond serious dispute. Suturing mechanisms like the point-of-view shot, for example, transform the "eye of the camera" into the constructed (capital) "I" of another identity. Similarly, a musical score's affective strategy is potentially an erosion of the personal definition, location, and source of emotion. Cinematic spectatorship becomes a modulation of identity. By being its audience we can paradoxically cease to be its audience and become its subject.

With subjectivity as a playing field, cognition becomes a necessary model for interpreting many filmic elements. Apart from abstract, technical, or historical viewpoints, we can approach cinema as simu- lations and representations of consciousness. For example, Bernard Herrmann's breakfast sequence in Citizen Kane is not simply a retell-

ing by way of a theme and variations. It becomes a musical incarna- tion of reflection and commentary implying a sensitive and sentient

presence. Similarly, while it may be musically instructive to consider John Williams's Indiana Jones theme as a Wagnerian leitmotif, center-

ing an interpretation on cognition suggests that the thematic strate-

gies of a Williams score develop into the presence of a third-person consciousness possessed of memory and prescience, the ability to ex-

plain, anticipate, and to comment. Our invisible companion whispers: "See, he got away with it again, the lucky bastard."

Along with "film-as-mind," however, we cannot ignore the cinematic body. Of course, the geometry of many visual perspectives as well as the presence of narrative characters offer fairly specific loca-

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tions for our identifications. But the filmic body leaves impressions deeper than the symbolic or representational. The filmic subject is

experienced as though it is embodied. The film body's contact with its world leaves traces that translate as contact with our own world. As Vivian Sobchack so eloquently describes it,

more than any other medium of human communication, the mov-

ing picture makes itself sensuously and sensibly manifest as the

expression of experience by experience. A film is an act of see-

ing that makes itself seen, an act of hearing that makes itself heard, an act of physical and reflective movement that makes itself reflexively felt and understood. Objectively projected, visi-

bly and audibly expressed before us, the film's activity of see-

ing, hearing, and moving signifies in a pervasive, primary, and embodied language that precedes and provides the grounds for the secondary significations of a more discrete, systematic, less "wild" communication.'

Thus we can expect filmic subjectivity to evoke not only cognition, but perception. The intensity of the landing scene in Steven Spiel- berg's Saving Private Ryan (1998), for example, derives in no small part from the fact that its acts of seeing and hearing don't belong simply to an omniscient and disembodied camera and microphone. Instead, this scene references physical embodiment and all its limitations of

perspective and scope-eyes and ears rather than lenses and tape re- corders. The sequence overflows with corporeal moments: the splash of a body submerging in the ocean muffles its ear until it resurfaces; the explosion of a mortar shell causes temporary deafness; the metallic rain of metal shell casings ejecting onto the concrete floor of the German bunker places the machinegun within reach. The soundtrack is on a human scale. The distance is personal. Sound becomes hap- tic, touching at arm's length.

We "experience" these sequences via their circumscription to the most immediate physiological dimension. "Wild" communication is sensed paradoxically through its utter austerity of scope. The sound and image in Saving Private Ryan crystallize Sobchack's idea that "cinema thus transposes, without completely transforming, those modes of being alive and consciously embodied in the world that count for each of us as direct experience: as experience 'centered' in that particular, situated, and solely occupied existence sensed first as 'Here, where the world touches' and then as 'Here, where the world is sen- sible; here, where I am."'2

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The Ear World and the Eye World

Such embodied cinematic senses would naturally seem bound to their real world counterparts. From the soundtrack, of course, we would expect to process information aurally, and from the picture we expect to process information visually-each in accordance with the perceptual implications of that sense. And such implications are described consistently by a diversity of authors. The ear, writes Mar- shall McLuhan,

favors no particular "point of view." We are enveloped by sound. It forms a seamless web around us. We say, "Music shall fill the air." We never say, "Music shall fill a particular segment of the air." We hear sounds from everywhere, without ever having to focus. Sounds come from "above," from "below," from in "front" of us, from "behind" us, from our "right," from our "left." We can't shut out sound automatically. We simply are not equipped with earlids. Where a visual space is an organized continuum of a uniformed connected kind, the ear world is a world of simultaneous relationships.3

A characteristic feature of vision, on the other hand, is its selectivity. As Rudolf Arnheim describes it,

in looking at an object we reach out for it. With an invisible finger we move through the space around us, go out to the distant

places where things are found, touch them, catch them, scan their surfaces, trace their borders, explore their texture. It is an emi-

nently active occupation. Impressed by this experience, early thinkers described the physical process of vision corresponding- ly. For example, Plato, in his Timaeus, asserts that the gentle fire that warms the human body flows out through the eyes in a smooth and dense stream of light.4

McLuhan and Arnheim are affirmed even in the more political and

sociological thrust of Adorno and Eisler's thoughts on the matter. In

Composingfor the Films they observe that

the human ear has not adapted itself to the bourgeois rational and, ultimately, highly industrialized order as readily as the eye, which has become accustomed to conceiving reality as made up of separate things, commodities, objects that can be modified by practical activity. Ordinary listening, as compared to seeing, is "archaic"; it has not kept pace with technological progress. One

might say that to react with the ear, which is fundamentally a

passive organ in contrast to the swift, actively selective eye, is in

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a sense not in keeping with the present advanced industrial age and its cultural anthropology.5

And more recently, Michel Chion describes the distinctions between the ear and eye worlds in a way that resonates the earlier observations. "In the cinema," he writes, "to look is to explore, at once spatially and temporally, in a 'given to see' (field of vision) that has limits contained by the screen. But listening, for its part, explores in a field of audition that is given or even imposed on the ear; this aural field is much less limited or confined, its contours uncertain and

changing."6

The Eye World as the Ear World But even Chion's observations do not necessarily account for filmic perception-a sense that has been artificially, expressively, technical-

ly, and artistically embodied. To be sure, as a self-contained and "self"-

containing auditory world, the soundtrack typically sustains the "all- at-once" characterization of hearing. But as products of technological enhancement and abstraction, the cinematic eye and ear may not nec-

essarily be constrained by the syntax of their more natural modes of

cognition. The cinematic ear, for example, can behave as the eye when

exchanging its all-at-once in favor of the active selection typical of vision. In Sam Raimi's The Quick and the Dead (1995), the gunfight between Kid and the Swedish Champion is preceded by a montage of

preparatory moments and objects: a pocket watch snapping open, bullets removed from holsters, the barrel mechanism of a revolver, cocking mechanisms tested, and so on. Each image is accompanied by diegetic sounds enhanced well beyond any natural acoustic pro- jection or the acuity of embodied hearing. Their hyperamplification suggests essentially zero distance from their visual sources, as though hearing has not been subjected to a mediating remove or acoustic. Even while the technical nature of the sequence is highly objectified, the framing of each shot along with its auditory presence becomes

intensely personal-tactile even. The result is an inversion of auditory syntax. The precisely attenu-

ated sound parallels the hyperselective editing and camera work. The ear mimicks vision's "focus" in the anatomical and psychological senses of the word. In Chion's terms, the aural field here is not "im-

posed" as an entirety in which we must direct our own attention. It becomes confined by the frame: sound with certain, fixed contours and boundaries. Hearing in The Quick and the Dead takes on characteristics of vision that distinguish the eye world from the ear world.

Hearing has reached out, selected an object, excluded others, objec-

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tified them, and sequentialized them. In abandoning its syntax of the all-at-once, the ear has adopted visual syntax. No longer the passive organ, the cinematic ear resonates vision by exchanging "passivity" for active selection. Hearing and seeing have become intertwined not

simply with an image as the nexus, but with the very qualities of visual space as a shared style of perception.

Music presents even more interesting issues in terms of filmic perception and corporeality. Whether diegetic, nondiegetic, intradieget- ic, metadiegetic, and so on, its very presence as music suggests that it is processed like and along with any other aural information. The common designation of "background" music for a nondiegetic score as well as the often mis-en-scene quality of diegetic music are both affir- mations of their place in a larger auditory space-an all-at-once. On the other hand, music's potential independence from narrative and visual causality suggests a disembodiment virtually unique in the construction of filmic subjectivity. Unlike its sights and sounds, a film's nondiegetic music is not part of its stock of enworlded stimuli. Though clearly a component of the cinematic experience, nondiegetic music and sound remain thought of but "unheard," to borrow from Claudia Gorbman. In cartoons or cartoon-like comedies, music can stand in for real sound and thereby overtly address the ear. But beyond animation, music's construction of such things as "mood," "foreshadowing," and "emotion" rarely implies actual perceptual acquisition.

Certainly for nondiegetic music, the implied syntax of cognition may not be limited to that of hearing itself. Though we hear music, music is not necessarily constrained by the space of the "ear world." Or, put in a more familiar way perhaps, since music has been understood to evoke everything from the rather concrete sound of birdsong (i.e., Vivaldi's Four Seasons or Messiaen's Oiseaux Exotiques) to the more abstract and nebulous concept of a "premonition" (Schoenberg's Opus 16 Orchestra Pieces), the notion that music might draw our attention to vision seems far from unprecedented.

Music as Visual Selectivity One of the most familiar examples of this connection can be found in the so-called shock chord, a term Roy Prendergast attributes to Scott Bradley, who scored many of the best Tom and Jerry cartoons.7 Typi- cally a short dissonant burst, the shock chord became a staple effect during such moments as in Kitty Foiled (1947), when Jerry's new ally, a canary, suddenly shoves a pistol in Tom's face. Tom's reaction is one of instant mortification and, as its name suggests, the "shock" chord would seem unproblematically emotional in its reference and effect. Beyond emotion, however, closer consideration suggests that this

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music surrogates vision as well. A concise example of what Gorbman refers to as the "mutual implication" of the soundtrack and image in film, the shock chord cannot be abstracted from the sensory stimulus that produces it-most often a visual source of outrage. Falling at moments in a genre where the punch line to a sequence is typically a

sight gag or image, the shock chord is linked as much to sudden visual revelation as to emotional response. The narrative implication of the shock chord is not just reaction, but stimulus. Along with its affective function, the shock chord is the hearing of seeing.

A more telling example can be found in Bernard Herrmann's score to Hitchcock's Vertigo (1958), in which vision plays a significant narrative role. In spite of the title ailment, Scotty forces himself and Judy to ascend a steep staircase in the mission bell tower. Scotty peers down the tower to the accompaniment of a shock chord musically and

emotionally similar to cartoon eye-popping moments. Vertigo inten- sifies the seeing-hearing relationship, however. Scotty's downward

perspective on the staircase provides one instance among many of the

geometric spiral winding its way throughout Vertigo-a visual mo- tive that is now linked to a musical idea. At each shock Hitchcock's

expressionistic special effect of a downward zoom and upward track-

ing shot simulates the dizziness accompanying Scotty's pathology. Along with the object seen, the camera thus emphasizes the subjective act of seeing. Musically, the dissonant chord engenders Scotty's point of view both objectively as an actively selected "sight" and sub-

jectively in his pathological response to it. The emotive reaction cannot be isolated from the visual perception that prefigures it-the "wild communication" of the eye. Having sought out its view, the "thing it has found," Herrmann's shock chord embodies the selectivity of Scot-

ty's seeing.

Music as Visual Space Herrmann's score for the Mount Rushmore chase in Hitchcock's North

by Northwest (1959) offers another sounding of vision. As in Vertigo, the musical effect goes beyond the simulation of a purely emotional

response. From the point when Eve grabs the figurine to when she and Thornhill reach the back of the monument, their escape has been mu-

sically tracked by an essentially rhythmic accompaniment that encodes such elements as might be expected in cinematic pursuits: the flight, pacing, pounding heartbeats, and so on. Just before Thornhill's line, "This is no good. We're on top of the monument," however, Herr- mann's score abandons its insistent rhythmic ostinato for a harmonic

interjection that breaks rhythmic continuity and inevitability. Both the

image and the soundtrack at this point imply visual astonishment in

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the edit from the characters to an image of the back of Rushmore re-

vealing its intimidating grandeur. As in Vertigo, we confront a moment in which vision is the narrative action. Thornhill and Eve have seem-

ingly reached a dead end. And yet it seems even more difficult to hear the soundtrack as a purely emotional response in this instance than in Vertigo's bell tower. Herrmann's musical commentary resonates see-

ing the monument more deeply than subjective anxiety. This is confirmed a few moments later in the film. As Eve says,

"What do we do?," there is another such harmonic interjection, this time accompanying an objective shot of the iconic faces of Rushmore. The musical emphasis here is on geometric rather than emotional perspective. Elements like size, scope, and distance are briefly fore-

grounded, concepts that composer and music theorist Robert Morgan succinctly identifies as among the metaphoric possibilities of music:

Anyone familiar with the philosophical and theoretical literature

dealing with music must be struck by the persistence with which

spatial terminology and categories appear. Indeed, it would seem to be impossible to talk about music at all without invoking spatial notions of one kind or another. Thus in discussing even the most elementary aspects of pitch organization-and among the musical elements, only pitch, we should remember, is uniquely musical-one finds it necessary to rely upon such spatially oriented oppositions as "up and down," "high and low," "small and

large" (in regard to intervallic "distances"), and so on. Space, then, pace Schopenhauer, apparently forms an inseparable part of the musical experience.8

Morgan's point bears not only on how we "talk about music," but on how we hear it. Musical listening refers to space in ways that tran- scend purely acoustic perceptions of distance, location, and orienta- tion. We listen with reference to many of the same categories in which we see. Spatial constructs are, however, more intimately identifiable with visual data than with aural. While an object can really be, say, small or distant in a visual sense, a "small" or "distant" object in a musical sense may be at a lesser amplitude, "higher" frequency, etc. In other words, while we can speak quite sincerely of space in terms of vision, such categories in music are often metaphors.

The selectivity of visual syntax during these moments on Mount Rushmore arises and becomes emphasized in the tectonic rift between the musically "horizontal," that is, rhythmic, and the musically "vertical," that is, harmonic. This "spatially oriented opposition" evokes

geometric visual space while, as with the shock chord in Vertigo, sudden interjection encodes and reinforces the eye's penchant for divid-

ing and actively selecting within that space. The musical motivic shift

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in the soundtrack of North by Northwest engenders a modulation of reference from feeling to perception, from physical action and anxiety to vision. Herrmann's music accomplishes with some effort and finesse what the eye, camera, and editing appear to do so naturally. In effect, the score notices, focuses on, and captures a stimulus in a way evocative of the visual acquisition so prominent in the film's narrative, and so clearly demanded by the spectacular object of Mount Rushmore itself.

Music as Visual Time

Musically encoded visual syntax can be heard with reference to time as well as space. This becomes quite clear in the gymnasium scene in Sam Mendes' American Beauty (2000), where seeing is connected ex- plicitly to temporality. A middle-aged male character, Lester, becomes visually and erotically fixated on a young woman, Angela, while she performs in a group dance routine during the halftime of a high school basketball game. The scene is a vivid consubstantiation of sex- ual desire, sight, and music. But distinguishing this scene from so many similar gazes in other films is its explicit engagement with the temporal implications of visual fascination and the translation of these implications into musical terms. As Lester fantasizes that Angela is performing for him alone, his seeing is musically underlined by the interruption by-and interjection of-contrasting material into a diegetic "host" tune. Just as Lester's gaze separates Angela from the rest of the girls, Thomas Newman's nondiegetic score suddenly dis- rupts and displaces the diegetic "On Broadway" along with the rest of the soundscape. The pep-band rendition of "On Broadway" con- stitutes a recognizable, forward moving whole-a real-time continuum into which the nondiegetic score insinuates itself as an expansion. As in North by Northwest, visual attentiveness in American Beauty is musically constructed by sudden and profound shifts in material and type of material. More protracted in its effect, however, normal narrative time stops in American Beauty. As in the eighteenth-century opera seria in which real-time action in recitative gives way to the emotional reflection and narrative stasis of an aria, the amount of time taken to depict the moment is far greater than the amount of time actually depicted. Lester's fantasy view of Angela becomes an ex- panded moment of voyeuristic hypnosis. His extreme visual concentration is reconstructed by the image that isolates both Angela and him and by the soundtrack that offsets his moment in time from the rest of the sequence. In short, visual fixation forms the nexus of psychological and real time and becomes enhanced by the scene's musical structure.

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But even apart from other elements of the scene such as the close-

ups of Lester's rapt eyes, the focused lighting, and the sequence's narrative structure, the musical style of the nondiegetic interjection is crucial to creating and sustaining Lester's mesmerized view of

Angela. During his phantasm, the ensuing narrative stasis and visual focus are closely encoded by the static quality of Newman's per- cussive score. Although thoroughly energetic and engaging, the com-

poser's music for this scene goes nowhere. Such a description for this

point in the film should be far from denigrating. On the contrary, the effect of Lester's hypnosis would be ruined by the imposition of any- thing else-of music that imparted an awareness of time's inevitable forward movement. Newman's score is effective not by virtue of its melodic or harmonic writing, but rather in its very lack of tradition-

ally conceived notions of melody, harmonic progression, tension and release, anticipation, climax, and anticlimax. All are elements that have traditionally imbued music with a sense of motion, of develop- ment, and all are elements eschewed by the composer's treatment here. Newman's music for the scene is appropriately nonteleological.

In his work on musical temporality, Jonathan D. Kramer describes music that presents "a single present stretched out into an enormous duration, a potentially infinite 'now' that nonetheless feels like an instant." Kramer refers to this musical temporality as "vertical time." In his view, vertical time appears as part of the expansion of music-

temporal possibilities during the twentieth century. These alternative

temporalities arose in competition with the dominant teleology of western music. Kramer describes the characteristics of vertical music as follows:

A vertical piece does not exhibit cumulative closure: it does not

begin but merely starts, does not build to a climax, does not pur- posefully set up internal expectations, does not seek to fulfill any expectations that might arise accidentally, does not build or release tension, and does not end but simply ceases. It defines its bounded sound world early in its performance, and it stays within the limits it chooses. Respecting the self-imposed boundaries is essential because any move outside these limits would be per- ceived as a temporal articulation of considerable structural im-

port and would therefore destroy the verticality of time.9

Such qualities correspond closely to Newman's score for Lester's

fantasy: sudden onset, lack of formal/dramatic articulation, hasty exit, and immediate circumscription of timbral and rhythmic re- sources. Newman's music does not drive the scene onward, but instead keeps it running in place. It does not track a forward motion that is not there. Instead, it parallels the expansion and suspension

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of time in Lester's gaze. Appropriately, Kramer's metaphor for vertical time derives from vision:

Listening to vertical musical time, then, can be like looking at a

piece of sculpture. When we view sculpture, we determine for ourselves the pacing of our experience: we are free to walk around the piece, view it from many angles, concentrate on some details, see other details in relationship to each other, step back and view the whole, see the relationship between the piece and the space in which we see it, leave the room when we wish close our eyes and remember, and return for further viewings. No one could claim that we have seen less than all of the sculpture (though we may have missed some of its subtleties), despite in- dividual selectivity in the viewing process.10

In the vertical time of Newman's score, hearing becomes attentive and

hypnotically fixated in a manner characteristic of visual perception. The musical stasis of the fantasy gaze is the stasis of visual selection and concentration, especially when contrasted with the traditional

teleology and closure of the framing diegetic tune. "On Broadway" returns as suddenly as it was banished, and the sense of having been in a focused state of suspense is augmented by a return to teleologi- cal time and to typical visual and auditory space. But where the soundtracks to Vertigo and North by Northwest may offer glances, Alan Ball's screenplay and Newman's score stare. The static musical effect is of extreme and prolonged concentration, and the film ear is attentive and fixated in a manner more characteristic of visual cognition than of aural.

Sound and Visual Linearity Beyond its characteristically active "selection," other aspects of visual cognition may also provide foundations for the auditory encoding of seeing. McLuhan's idea of the visual field as an "organized continuum of a uniformed connected kind" versus the "simultaneous

relationships" of the auditory also posits ordering as an element of visual thinking. Emphatic or uniformed ordering in the aural world would tend to parse hearing into the grammar of seeing. An explicit- ly "invented" or "uniformed" organization applied to the aural world

may effectively present sonic events by way of visual syntax. "Lin- ear logic," as McLuhan calls it, is a trait of the eye world that might engender aural strategies.

A wonderful example of overt aural linearity can be seen and heard in the spectacular opening to the Robert Zemeckis's Contact (1997). As with objects in our own night sky, the farther away something is

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the further into the past we see. In Contact, recent history is repre- sented by a sequence of radio broadcasts that began emanating from Earth in the twentieth century. As we journey farther and farther out- ward from present-day Earth into the deepest reaches of space, the backwards passage of time is signified by popular songs and news sound bites that stand as emblems of their times. Beginning in the late 1990s, we travel back on a carpet of sonic snippets such as The

Trammps' "Disco Inferno," Armstrong's "small step" during the moon

landing, big band music, FDR's "all we have to fear .. ." and Hit- ler's speeches. All the while we are treated to a visually stunning pan- oramic tour of the universe beginning with our own planet and so- lar system, moving out to distant nebulae and galaxies and, tellingly, concluding with the full-screen image of a child's eye. The temporally receding sequence of sounds becomes, appropriately, a "synoptic" condensation of time and space-an "overview" of history and cos-

mography moving from present to past-from here to out there. Contact's sound design borrows from visual space an ability to ob-

serve from outside or above and to conceive in terms of discrete ob-

jects. In Contact's synopsis of history, sound becomes ordered and "uniformed" in a way imitating the ordered visual journey. Rather than an "all at once," the soundscape is a "one after the other." Con- tact's prelude spatializes sounds, making separate entities that become

points on its "organized continuum." Here again, the formal aspects of the sound design are part of its effectiveness. As in Vertigo, North

by Northwest, and American Beauty, sudden juxtaposition plays a piv- otal role in establishing the soundtrack's visual reference. Hard edg- es are articulated, and the extreme fragmentation and disjunction of the sounds involved are crucial to their objectification and ordering. Literally and figuratively "spaced out," the auditory panorama of Contact is hearing by way of a visual purification and rearrangement of its subject matter.

Music and Visual Culture Further examining the salient characteristics of visual syntax might yield other devices and metaphors through which hearing suggests seeing. But the soundtrack for vision needn't exclusively derive from

perceptual syntax. There is evidence that the ear can masquerade as the eye by way of references less directly related to the body and perception. Returning to Sobchack's terms, we may hear sight not only in "wild" communication, but in systematic communication as well.

David Lynch's The Elephant Man (1980) provides an example in which the musical construction of seeing derives from a premise bet- ter described as cultural than perceptual. The film is an account of

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John Merrick, a man tremendously disfigured by an ailment that so thickens his skin and enlarges his limbs that he is referred to by way of the animal he is reputed to resemble. Beyond presenting Merrick's

plight, however, the subtext of the film concerns the social and psychological aspects of seeing and being seen. As Chion notes, "the film contains many faces reacting to the sight of Merrick, faces at a loss, excited, illuminated or even ecstatic with fascination."11 As in Ameri- can Beauty, The Elephant Man consistently foregrounds seeing as nar-

ratively significant. Vision, and not just image, is a current on which both films are carried forward. But while American Beauty's soundtrack produces intense, highly localized visuality, The Elephant Man's score engenders something far more subtle and long range. This soundtrack begs to be read in terms of the numerous elements of the film that derive from looking at the elephant man. The systematic sounding of vision unfolds by stages over the course of several scenes. We first encounter the title character in a nineteenth-century amusement fair. With a close-up on a sign reading "FREAK," Treves, a phy- sician, enters the sideshow exhibit in which the elephant man is on

display. The sound of a common-the class associations of that word are important here-circus-type waltz is prominent as part of the fair's mis-en-scene. The carousel-like mechanical instrumentation is the music of exhibition. It is not the tune as much as its orchestration that

culturally encodes an atmosphere of display and curiosity. Merrick is treated as a "monster," and the circus waltz is the music of low

spectacle that reinforces his abject situation as a repulsive object to be stared at. The eye's probing curiosity is sewn into the film with the thread of cultural association.

As the film progresses, the waltz genre emerges most prominently at two further points. The elephant man comes to live in a secluded

hospital room where a sadistic porter capitalizes on his position to run a freak show of his own. During a scene in which the elephant man is put on display in his own room to an invading "audience" of abusive drunks and whores, the soundtrack again strikes up a waltz. The metallic element of the orchestration here is reminiscent of carnival metallophones. However, the now overbearing brass, mock el-

egance of the strings, and hefty dissonances identify this waltz not as the circus variety, but as a kind of "dance macabre." Although sus-

taining no direct thematic connection to Camille Saint-Saens's com-

position with that name, the Morris waltz forthrightly invokes the same category of the grotesque, one of the topoi of romanticism in the nineteenth century common to literature, painting, and music.

Chion calls this waltz "an implacable scherzo reminiscent of Mahl- er." And indeed, Mahler drew frequently from the well of the grotesque as thirstily as did other romantics such as Liszt in his Toten-

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tanz or Berlioz in his Symphonie Fantastique. We can also find the dec- adent, grotesque waltz associated with the pathological in Richard Strauss's Salome and Elektra. Shared in these are not only dance type and style, but an underlying aesthetic of distortion. The nineteenth- century fascination for the misshapen image complemented its ap- preciation of the grotesque: the image of the misshapen. Geared to- ward the production of imagery, as so much of romantic music was, these concepts are, like Morgan's spatial metaphors, natively visual categories. The very nature of the grotesque compels us to look even against our will and seemingly punishes us for doing so. Underlin- ing the cruelty of the situation along with the crude sensibilities of his abusers, the misshapen waltz aggressively reinforces the elephant man's position in the scene as a distortion. Precisely because it is repulsive, the grotesque incites desire for closer inspection. Significantly, the score backs off long enough for the elephant man to be forced to look at his image in a mirror. After his horror at seeing his own face the mocking waltz resumes with conviction. Seeing the elephant man see himself is the pinnacle of his humiliation, a debasement augmented in the score's repulsive fascination.

Further on, however, the cruel voyeurism of the porter's sideshow and the significance of its waltz macabre pave the way for a wholly different sort of amusement and waltz. The penultimate scene in which Dr. Treves invites the elephant man to watch a theater production marks the climactic shift in his status: the film emphasizes the elephant man's own gaze. As the stage production begins, the shot of him being handed an opera glass and invited to look forms the crucial moment. Lynch unleashes a collage of reaction and point-of-view shots now developing the elephant man's act of seeing. For him to watch so publicly instead of being watched so publicly is quite a new experience. Indeed, the theater scene also culminates the musical transformation enacted over the entire film. The waltz genre now re- appears significantly as one of grandness and brilliance. This new topic shines luminously against the dimly lit diversion of carnival tent music and the misshapen imagery of the waltz macabre. The cultural coding of the score modulates from a low style of mechanical in- struments to a high style in which strings and harp predominate. Musically and socially we have gone from amusement to occasion. The theater scene displaces the sound of the opening "freak show" and its one-way gaze with music of more social entertainments, such as a ball, reception, or other large public gathering. There the gaze is mutual and invited rather than unilateral. The musical change is in the status of spectatorship itself and accompanies the elephant man's transformation from passive, curious object to active and attentively gazing subject who is himself now "curious." The grandness of the

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waltz sanctions and magnifies his seeing just as the circus waltz sanc- tioned his being stared at. The visual significance of the waltzes on the soundtrack are an integral part of the character's social transformation from the elephant man into John Merrick, from spectacle to

spectator. Thus, even without invoking the notion of synesthesia, the idea that

the soundtrack can transduce seeing suggests that to use the ear is not necessarily only to hear. Synesthesia may be another means of

exploring that possibility but does not acknowledge the ways in which body and culture play on each other. Some aspects of perception are learned and provide cinematic style and signs, while cultural artifacts like cinema often refer to perception and may ultimately reconfigure it. As such, it would be fairer to suggest that the most effective underscoring of seeing as action takes place when sound and music form an aural theory or description of vision, rather than an alternate means of sensing it. Or perhaps it is a way of experiencing it, as we do with thought itself, without sensing it per se. In any case, if film can thus extend, encode, and simulate vision by way of the ear, then there may be far more seeing going on in cinema than actually meets the eye, so to speak. Even the clear dominance of visuality in film may not be enough for it. Or, in terms of what we might consider an early theory of film's sensory complex, found in Ecclesiastes: "The eye is not satisfied with seeing, nor the ear filled with hearing." This truth is there to be seen, while that seeing itself may ask to be heard.

NOTES

1. Vivian Sobchack, "Phenomenology and the Film Experience" in Viewing Positions, ed. Linda Williams (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1995), 37.

2. Ibid., 37. 3. Marshall McLuhan and Quentin Fiore, The Medium Is the Massage (1967; San Fran-

cisco: Jerome Agel and HardWired, 1996), 111. 4. Rudolf Arnheim, Visual Thinking (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969),

19. 5. Theodor Adorno and Hanns Eisler, Composing for the Films (1947; London: Athlo-

ne Press, 1994), 20. 6. Michel Chion, Audio Vision, ed. and trans. Claudia Gorbman (New York: Colum-

bia University Press, 1994), 33. 7. Roy Prendergast, Film Music: A Neglected Art (New York: Norton, 1977, 1992), 187. 8. Robert Morgan, "Musical Time/Musical Space," Critical Inquiry (Spring 1980): 527. 9. Jonathan D. Kramer, "New Temporalities in Music," Critical Inquiry (Spring 1981):

549. 10. Ibid., 551. 11. Michel Chion, David Lynch (London, British Film Institute, 1995), 60.

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Nor the Eye Filled With Seeing - The Sound of Vision in Film

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