Innovative scenes that changed how audiences not only see, but listen to, films.
In a scene from Roger and Me, the documentary that made Michael Moore's name, an ex-auto worker from Flint, Michigan, talks about driving home after being laid off, listening to a Beach Boys song on the radio. The cheerful tune, of course, finds its way onto the movie soundtrack. The Beach Boys blissfully croon "Wouldn't it be nice?" as lay-offs, evictions and disillusionment unfold in front of the camera.
Such a contrast is now established as a clever cinematic convention - played upon by Tarantino, for instance, in Reservoir Dogs, where Michael Madsen humming along to "Stuck in the Middle with you" in advance of a memorable scene involving a knife, an ear and lots of blood.
This was not always the case, however. Traditionally, background music in mainstream movies was just that - blended into the background setting. But as movies changed in the later part of the twentieth century, sounds that often contrasted ironically with on-screen sights became a distinctive part of collective cinematic memory.
Apocalypse Now (1979)
Francis Ford Coppola made it requisite for commentators to mention the music - it is pretty much impossible to find anything written about Apocalyspe Now that doesn't make note of the opening scquence scored to The Doors, the soldier water-skiing up the river as the dark jungle looms and the Stones blare on the radio, and, of course, the napalm attack paired with Wagner (youtube). The soundtrack layers poppy American oblivion on top of a pervasive menacing, evil that is itself another kind of savage oblivion, then blends them, a precarious and absurd frivolity that slideseasily into lawlessness and chaos (typical American rock'n'roll?).
Badlands (1973)
One of arthouse auteur Terrence Malick's earlier films, Badlands tells the tale of two lovebirds-cum-murderers who leave a trail of bodies on their way across Middle America. The theme music of the film is a playful instrumental piece from German composer Carl Orff's Musica Poetica (listen). The music is used to reflect a tone of interior emptiness beneath its maniacally gleeful surface. Badlands was a precursor to Oliver Stone's Natural Born Killers, which itself played with a plethora of auditory pop-cultural conventions, from the sitcom laughtrack to the salacious tones of CNN-style news reporting.
A Clockwork Orange (1971)
Kubrick's scores have most often been apt - whether the Wagnerian triumph of Zarathustra in 2001, the evocation of foreboding and hysteria in The Shining or the determined and mournful theme of Barry Lyndon. In A Clockwork Orange he mirrors a key plot point in the original Burgess novel - the callous, sadistic main character's love of Beethoven - by saturating the score with classical music at odds with the futuristic distopian setting of the story, a disjunctive convention that has become typical of an entire subset of stylized action films today. The musical aspect of the film was novel for its time and impossible to miss - though as much contested and controversial as the violence and critical merits of the film as a whole, just as easily earning praise or disdain as "a cute, cheap, dead-end dimension" in a "paranoid right-wing fantasy masquerading as an Orwellian warning."
Undoubtedly the film plays, maybe in a "cheap" way, with paranoia about the contamination of so-called "high culture" with low, the corruption of cherished cultural artifacts - the movie is a mockery of a perceived elitist faith in cultural superiority, a belief that a brutish character such as the one in the film could never really experience the sublime pleasure of a Beethoven. Kubrick goes farther with this in a well-known scene that corrupts another cherished cultural artifact, this one cinematic. The main character launches into an amateur rendition of "Singin' in the Rain," as an accompaniment to a violent scene of rape and torture, belting out "and I'm ready for love" along with a blow to the face.
