Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Pamela Robertson Wojcik is Associate Professor of Film, TV, and Theatre at the University of Notre Dame and the author of Guilty Pleasures: Feminist Camp from Mae West to Madonna, also published by Duke University Press.

Arthur Knight is Associate Professor of American Studies and English at the College of William and Mary and the author of Dis/Integrating the Musical: African American Musical Performance and American Musical Film, 1927-1959, forthcoming from Duke.

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"From Bollywood to Hollywood, Wim Wenders to Wong Kar-Wai, popular music permeates movies. Rigorous scholarship has finally begun to catch up with this phenomenon to make sense of its rich and varied cultural meanings. Wocjik's and Knight's first-rate collection is muscular, theoretically informed, historically textured, and full of exciting discoveries for all interested in the confluence of pop music, film, and identity."--Claudia Gorbman, University of Washington

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Contents

List of Illustrations..................................................................................................................................................viiAcknowledgments........................................................................................................................................................ixOverture ARTHUR KNIGHT AND PAMELA ROBERTSON WOJCIK....................................................................................................................1Cinema and Popular Song: The Lost Tradition RICK ALTMAN...............................................................................................................19Surreal Symphonies: L'Age d'or and the Discreet Charms of Classical Music PRISCILLA BARLOW............................................................................31"The Future's Not Ours to See": Song, Singer, Labryinth in Hitchcock's The Man Who Knew Too Much MURRAY POMERANCE.....................................................53"You Think They Call Us Plastic Now ...": The Monkees and Head PAUL B. RAMAEKER.......................................................................................74Real Men Don't Sing Ballads: The Radio Crooner in Hollywood, 1929-1933 ALLISON MCCRACKEN..............................................................................105Flower of the Asphalt: The Chanteuse Raliste in 1930s French Cinema KELLEY CONWAY....................................................................................134The Embodied Voice: Song Sequences and Stardom in Popular Hindi Cinema NEEPA MAJUMDAR.................................................................................161Music as Ethnic Marker in Film: The "Jewish" Case ANDREW P. KILLICK...................................................................................................185Sounding the American Heart: Cultural Politics, Country Music, and Contemporary American Film BARBARA CHING...........................................................202Crossing Musical Borders: The Soundtrack for Touch of Evil JILL LEEPER................................................................................................226Documented/Documentary Asians: Gurinder Chadha's I'm British But ... and the Musical Mediation of Sonic and Visual Identities NABEEL ZUBERI...........................244Class Swings: Music, Race, and Social Mobility in Broken Strings ADAM KNEE............................................................................................269Borrowing Black Masculinity: The Role of Johnny Hartman in The Bridges of Madison County KRIN GABBARD.................................................................295"It Ain't Necessarily So That It Ain't Necessarily So": African American Recordings of Porgy and Bess as Film andCultural Criticism ARTHUR KNIGHT.....................319"Hollywood Has Taken on a New Color": The Yiddish Blackface of Samuel Goldwyn's Porgy and Bess JONATHAN GILL..........................................................347Picturizing American Cinema: Hindi Film Songs and the Last Days of Genre COREY K. CREEKMUR............................................................................375Popular Songs and Comic Allusion in Contemporary Cinema JEFF SMITH....................................................................................................407The Girl and the Phonograph; or the Vamp and the Machine Revisited PAMELA ROBERTSON WOJCIK............................................................................433Bibliography...........................................................................................................................................................455Contributors...........................................................................................................................................................475Index..................................................................................................................................................................479

Chapter One

ARTHUR KNIGHT & PAMELA ROBERTSON WOJCIK

I think we are starting to think in soundtracks.-Alan Rudolph

Increasingly, it seems, we think in soundtracks. Popular music, in particular, governs our thoughts. Filmmakers, whether due to their own inclinations or market demands, conceptualize scenes in relation to popular song, and the mixing board becomes a storyboard. As viewers, we recall movies through song. Who can any longer hear "Stuck in the Middle with You" without seeing Mr. Blonde's chilling dance of torture in Reservoir Dogs (1991)? Songs used in films recall us to our past, or they conjure up a past we never experienced and, through the familiar language of popular music, make it ours. Witness the spate of seventies pop soundtracks, whether for films set in the seventies-such as Dazed and Confused (1993), Boogie Nights (1997), and Dick (1999)-or for films set in the present but with nostalgic or deliberately outdated camp soundtracks-as in Reservoir Dogs (1994), Muriel's Wedding (1994), or The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of The Desert (1994). In the worst cases, the songs are inserted cynically and clumsily, booming over montage sequences and credits as if they are Pavlovian advertisements for synergy. In the best cases, the soundtrack is a product of thought, and, more than mere triggers for soundtrack sales, the songs become essential components of the film experience.

Consider the soundtrack for Wayne's World (1992). The film includes thirty different songs, ranging from Tchaikovsky's "Romeo and Juliet: Fantasy Overture" to the theme from Mission Impossible, and including music by Jimi Hendrix, Eric Clapton, the Red Hot Chili Peppers, and Alice Cooper. Song cues move seamlessly between diegetic and nondiegetic, subjective and objective. Often, songs cue us to characters' subjectivity, as when we hear Tchaikovsky as an internal diegetic soundover for Garth's fantasy girl, Donna Dixon. In a similar moment, "Dream Weaver" subjectively marks Wayne's experience of love at first sight. The theme from Mission Impossible plays nondiegetically as ironic commentary on Garth's self-perception as he prepares to avenge a bully by strapping on a high-powered stun gun.

The characters in Wayne's World frequently perform with the music in what could be seen as a reinvention of the musical. For instance, Garth lip-synchs "Foxy Lady" in a subjective fantasy when he imagines himself seducing his fantasy girl rather than just dreaming about her. Wayne sings "Happy Birthday to You" in a parody of Marilyn Monroe's famous Madison Square Garden birthday serenade for JFK, and Garth whistles the theme from Star Trek as he and Wayne watch airplanes taking off. In a moment of pure postmodern referentiality, the film launches Wayne and Garth into a full-blown imitation of the opening credit sequence for Laverne and Shirley when they see a road sign for Milwaukee. And, in one of the film's most memorable moments, Wayne, Garth, and friends sing-a-long with head-banging abandon to Queen's "Bohemian Rhapsody" as it plays on their AMC Pacer's 8-track tape deck.

Both by virtue of its postmodern credentials and the phenomenal sales of its soundtrack, Wayne's World may be a particularly privileged example of the successful soundtrack. It is, however, by no means...