Wonder Woman

So then, Wonder Woman. Where do I start? Well let’s start by saying alleluia, and see where we go from there.

Somewhere around 2008 I wrote the first version of what ended up in 2013 as Cue the Big Theme? The Sound of the Superhero, essentially a little requiem for the demise of thematically-driven superhero scoring in the era of CGI. I contrasted how the two big superhero scores of the pre-CGI era, Williams’ Superman (1978) and Elfman’s Batman (1989) used their themes to construct their hero’s identity, Williams’ Great Big Optimist and Elfman’s complex, troubled Gadget Man. I have a particular love of Elfman’s approach, where he only really composes one five note motif for Batman and then constantly reinvents and varies it to provide the music for all aspects of Our Hero, whether that is the action hero, the genius detective, the terrifyingly powerful horror-film figure, the troubled soul, the bereft child or the man in love (which I wrote about at some length here). And then along come a) CGI and b) Hans Zimmer and the musical landscape changed. The music no longer had to work so hard to convince us that the polystyrene boulders that Superman was hauling around were heavy, or that Batman’s car was going really fast, and so it shifted away from action and toward psychology, and in doing so rather abandoned all those marvelous themes. Sing me the theme from Batman Begins, anyone? And while I have always been an advocate of the ‘different does not actually mean worse, it just means different’ school of thought, I missed the themes, and I especially missed the cleverness with which a composer like Elfman could take one musical idea and make it mean so many things.

And so, alleluia, Wonder Woman, scored by Rupert Gregson-Williams, younger brother of the better-known Harry. RGW is mostly known, until very recently, for scoring comedy and the lighter end of film (highlights include the 2014 Postman Pat: The Movie). I do so like it when you get a composer basically new to a genre, who therefore has not become what Elfman was by the end of the 1990s, namely was Sick to Death of Superheroes. Anyway, RGW writes an absolute blinder for Wonder Woman; and he does my favourite thing, which is have one musical idea that he uses to generate all his musical ideas about her. I am going to resist the temptation to sit here and throw musical examples at you, so some of this you are going to have to take my word for.

On the face if it, it looks like she has two distinct themes: a lyrical, extended anthem (which I will come back to) and the one we already knew from Batman v. Superman (and therefore written by Hans Zimmer/ Junkie XL). This one has driving drums, wailing electric cello (which could easily be mistaken for an electric guitar), both the instrumentation and the whole shape of the theme breaking every expectation of what ‘female’ music sounds like. My good friend (actually, never met him, but love his work) Phillip Tagg would point to the fact that both the ascending melodic line and the use of the electric guitaresque cello and drums point to masculine musical codes – the ladies are properly scored with nice flutes and pianos, yes with cellos, but nice tuneful cellos; and with gently curved melodies (up and back down; or down and back up). WW’s big theme does not do this. Oh my word, no it does not (nor does Ms Buffy Summers’ theme tune, of course).

OK, music: the theme goes rapidly up a broken chord (E – G – B, so outlining the triad and rising up from the tonic to the great heroic interval, the perfect fifth) and then it wails; it undulates from the B to the B flat a semitone below and then back to the B again (want a score example? Go here). So, strip away the banshee ululation, and the basic shape is B – B flat – B. We are in the key of E minor, so the B is our heroic perfect fifth; the B flat, meanwhile, is the tritone, the diabolus in musica, the interval associated most often with evil, danger and dysfunction. What the heck is it doing here? Well,  Batman’s scoring (1989) also uses lots of tritones – that’s part of how Elfman makes him complex and ‘dark’ in comparison to Williams’ sunny Superman. But Diana is not dark – she is much more like Superman in many respects. And she clearly is not evil - but oh, the number of bad women in film music history with tritones in their (usually jazzy) scoring to symbolize how very naughty they are, from the tritones all over the place in Franz Waxman’s 1941 score for the sexy, threatening and entirely absent eponymous anti-heroine in Rebecca to those in both Bellatrix Lestrange and Dolores Umbridge’s themes in the Harry Potter scores (links are to youtube examples)…. So why the tritone here, given that Diana is clearly not one of those women?

Well, let’s think of this tritone as the equivalent of the word ‘bitch’, a word we so often find applied to women of power from Hillary Clinton to any woman on social media who has taken a stand against mysongynistic attitudes; a word that would also describe all those bad, bad women in film who deceive and betray good men, because that is what bad women in film are normally guilty of. This tritone, used here for Diana, is an appropriation, a reclamation, a rehabilitation of a term of musical abuse used to score women who would dare to be powerful. It traditionally constructs such women as evil. Here, it constructs Diana as a goddess. This makes me very happy.

In the already familiar form of that strident (Harpy! Banshee! Bitch!) wailing electronic guitarish cello that is clearly taking no prisoners, this is the theme that RGW uses for Diana in some of her most obviously powerful moments of pure action. We get it, very understated, near the start of the film as she stands on the clifftop contemplating her wrists after that first extraordinary moment when her divine power was suddenly unleashed (here at 1:03); we then have to wait until after she has crossed No Man’s Land and descends upon the German’s in the town of Veld like – well, like an avenging god (here at 3:24); and again in her showdown with Ludendorf; but it is missing from her battle with Ares and we don’t hear it again until the closing seconds of the film where it confirms her power rather than scoring any specific action on screen.

To understand why her theme of godly power is missing from the battle with Ares, we need to look at her second theme, the heroic anthem. Right at the start of the film, still in the production credits (here from the start to 0:35), we hear first a muted, distant version of the Power theme and then, shortly afterwards, a four note rising theme (E – F sharp – G – G) . This four note theme then develops later both in the opening scene and throughout the film to give us a much more traditionally heroic theme in the Batman/ Superman mold. It is characterized by sequences of short phrases – phrases that keep on rising, taking us higher: this is a classic heroic musical gesture, the idea of ascent, of the hero’s power in the ascendant. [This theme also tends to do some lovely mediant shifts in the harmony that, along with these ascending melodies, point to restlessness, the quest, the impetus and momentum of the hero’s journey, but I shall leave that for another occasionThere’s an additional element to this theme which is a motif that is clearly part of it but used less frequently and has in it some really emotive minor sixth leaps and falls (big intervals tend to give us big emotions) – we hear this part of the theme at the point that Diana looks at the photo of Steve when she opens the ‘gift’ from Bruce Wayne at the start of the film. Again, an important musical element for scenes that need just a bit more of an emotional kick, but too much for today].

So: the rising ‘anthem’ theme. It is actually derived from the Power theme, which is revealed in its second phrase: sorry, I said I wouldn’t throw musical examples at you, I lied. This is done using some of the basic techniques of thematic transformation (which include intervallic or rhythmic diminution and augmentation, transposition, inversion, retrograding and other fun things)

So, remember the power theme:

E – G – B – B flat – B. Let’s divide this into two parts

Motif 1: E – G – B [the broken chord on E minor]

Motif 2: B – B flat – B

So the first two phrases of the ‘anthem’ (here at 2:20) go:

E – F sharp – G - G ----------

G – B – D - D ----------- [ a broken chord starting on G]

The first phrase is therefore a melodic compression of motif 1 (the intervals made smaller); the second phrase restores the original intervals but are a transposition of motif 1 (the intervals made larger again, but all shifted up a third, whilst staying in the key E minor). So there we have the reinvention of the first motif. Later in this ‘new’ theme, the music shifts into a new key (here at 2:42) and brings in another idea that comes back a lot in later cues:

F – C – B flat – C

This is an augmentation and transposition of motif 2: the semitone ‘bend’ from B to B flat and back again (a semitone) becomes a more lyrical bend of a slightly larger interval (a whole tone). So, this second theme is the musical child of the first: much more lyrical, much more varied and developed, but with its musical material derived from the Power theme.

The No Man’s Land Scene uses this second theme for Diana’s crossing – it starts out with just the underlying harmony, no obvious melody (but you can actually sing the melody of the theme along to it if you want!) but the melody comes in later on. This, to me, is the theme of Diana’s heroic compassion, the theme of Diana as Amazon, pursuing the Amazon mission to save humankind. The Power theme is Diana as God: and this is why it is the Heroic theme rather than the Power theme that we hear in her final battle with Ares. She does not battle him as Diana the goddess, a war between gods for pre-eminence, but as Diana the champion of humanity; and so, just as when her compassion leads her to cross No Man’s Land to liberate the people of Veld we hear her Heroic theme, so too we hear it as she finally employs the full scope of her power to liberate the world from Ares – same mission on a larger scale. It is her compassion, not her innate power, that makes her the superhero that I now love most in the whole universe of superheroes.

And it is a brilliant, brilliant score that never compromises her power. She has a lovely love theme that is an inversion of her heroic theme (Batman’s love theme was also a variation of his hero theme), which casts her love for Steve as something connected with and embedded in her heroic identity – not in conflict with it, but an aspect of her as a fully rounded person that (quite literally, in musical terms) just allows it to go in another direction – the only time that her scoring has a predominantly descending shape rather than an ascending one (here at 4:00).

Two other characters get themes: Ludendorf has a fabulous (oh joy!) octatonic theme that musically means he is operating in a completely different musical territory to everyone else - if you are unfamiliar with the octatonic, it’s a strange scale/ mode that was ‘invented’ in the late 19^th century and has some very odd properties, one of which is that it is full of my much love little tritones; and likewise, Ares’ music is octatonic. He has a nasty little three mote motif F – A flat – E and an octatonic ostinato/ repeating figure (F – G – A flat – F – B  - A flat - E) that places him and Ludendorf in the same musical territory – but it’s the octatonic character of the music rather than the tritones as such that group them as the bad guys, leaving the tritone itself simply as a carrier of power in this score, one can be used for good or evil.

However, the Zimmer/ Junkie XL theme from the earlier film was a potential problem: it’s a very odd theme, and I recognize that they were trying to write something which sounded different from the darkly brooding, strangely restrained themes that have been written for most superheroes over the last decade or so; but it is so un-restrained and all that electronica is so timbrally at odds with the classic superhero orchestral sound that it could have resulted in a score that was big on quirky and unusual, with its crazy-woman Banshee wail (I have discovered in the course of writing this that they were genuinely trying to evoke a Banshee wail) and not so hot on superheroic. RGW gets it absolute right: he reinvents the key elements of the Power theme for his heroic orchestral music, uses the Power theme in muted versions in the first hour or so of the film, and saves the Power theme for a tiny number of key moments in the second half of the film where the scale of the action is such that its introduction just raise the stakes a few notches even higher than they already were. And in this underused form, the timbral difference works constructively: we are thrown out of the familiar orchestral textures into this musically other place of electronica and pounding drums – we hear her other nature as God, her awesome Otherness in these moments. So we get it all: the big compassionately heroic score that humanizes her, allows us to identify with her; and we get the theme of her unutterable difference and power that can leave no one in any doubt that this woman is truly a hero. I shall go and have a little weep now, I’m all overcome. 

La La Land

So, then: La La Land. I liked it, I didn’t love it, I confess to having got a bit bored in places – I do think that sometimes people get so thrilled just by the fact that something is a musical that they lose a portion of their critical judgement (e.g. the Xena: Warrior Princess musical is really very patchy at a musical level but the fans just adored it simply because it was ooo, a musical). Nonetheless, I forgave La La Land its moments of ‘oh get on with it’ and its rather dubious privileging of the white boy over the black boy as the authentic exponent of jazz because of the first and last seven minutes of the film, two sequences which frame it as a musical in a way that seem to refer back in a very self-conscious way to everything the classical Hollywood musical of the 1930s and ‘40s was; and in the act of doing this position the film both as a classic film musical and as a commentary on the nature of such musicals in relation to what life is really like.

OK, I am going to do theory in a blog, something I generally avoid, but here goes. When I was writing my chapter on TV musicals for Sounds of Fear andWonder, I came across a really useful idea from Richard Dyer about the way that the classical musical provides a Utopian solution to the social tensions within our day to day lives, which I present below in a wee table:

‘Real Life’	Utopian	Dystopian
Scarcity (poverty, unequal distribution of wealth)	Abundance	Excess
Exhaustion (work, labour, pressures of life)	Energy (work = play)	Over-exuberance; inappropriate playfulness or cheerfulness
Dreariness (monotony, predictability)	Intensity (excitement, drama)	Danger, anxiety, crisis
Manipulation (advertising, bourgeois democracy, sex roles)	Transparency (open, spontaneous and honest communication and relationships)	Excessive honesty, involuntary spontaneity, incomprehensibility
Fragmentation (job mobility, high rise flats, legislation against collective activity)	Community (togetherness, collective activity)	Isolation, illusion of community, insincerity

Adapted from: Richard Dyer, (1981). ‘Entertainment and Utopia’. In Rick Altman (ed) Genre, The Musical: A Reader. London and Boston: Routledge and Kegan Paul. 175–89.

In my chapter, I extended this to look at how TV musicals tend to explore dystopian solutions (the third column); and actually if you look at Chicago, the most successful film musical of recent times before La La Land, that too offers a dystopian solution to social tensions in its celebration of murder, awash with inappropriate playfulness, a great deal of excessive honesty and the illusion of community in the prison among the merry murderesses (something I have been having enormous fun exploring recently with one of my final year undergrads in her project on Chicago and Assassins).

But La La Land does not go down that route, and instead balances itself quite finally between ideas of real life and their possible Utopian solutions, right from the word go. In many ways, this is absolutely a classic ‘backstage’ musical in the model of 42^nd Street and Singin’ in the Rain: the central characters are performers desperate for success, persuing their drams of becoming stars; and after various set backs, they succeed. But the twist in La La Land is the compromised happy ending – the Utopian solution of the classic musical would dictate that the lovers must both achieve their dreams and end up together, but La La Land denies us this resolution and instead presents us with the much more realistic ending, that they have both achieved their dreams but only by accepting that scarcity sometimes prevails over abundance: we rarely get to ‘have it all’ and some things (in this case, the relationship) must be sacrificed in order to have others.

The film frames itself with two fantastic (meant in both senses of the word) sequences that present us with a specific and overt movement between the real world and the Utopian version of the musical. The opening sequence starts out completely rooted in the real: cars stationary in blazing heat on the freeway. We pan past different cars – each occupant is listening to their own music, each one isolated from the others. This is social fragmentation; this is exhaustion and dreariness. And then we linger on one woman who starts to sing along to her radio, and then gets out of her car and starts dancing as well as singing. In the real world, everyone would think she had gone a little crazy in the heat and would either start filming her on their phone or desperately try not to catch her eye in case she’s about turn dangerous. But no, we have made a move into the Utopian world of the musical, and the music instead acts to turn these strangers into a community of energetic performers, their cars into a set on and around which they dance in perfect coordination – this is the perfect musical moment in which we actually witness the moment that our own real, dreary and uncomfortable world is transformed into an exuberant theatre of playfulness in which all occasions conspire to support the abundance of performative energy, perhaps at its most intense in the moment that a truck door is raised to reveal a band inside, already playing along (rather than dead from heat stroke).

At the end of the song, everyone returns to their cars, life returns to normal and indeed nothing has changed – the couple who we know (because we’ve seen the trailers, the publicity, the TV interviews) are going to be the stars of this show have an annoyed altercation with each other: no one has come out of the fantastic moment any less isolated than they went in, but the alternative mode of existence possible in this narrative has been very clearly established.

To some extent, the rest of the film proceeds by exploring the balancing act between the Utopian and the real, with the real increasingly winning through toward the end of the film: the lovers want Utopia, but it cannot be sustained and in the end they part – we see the moment before the decision is made and then cut several years to the end of the film, the point where Mia is now a star and Sebastian has his jazz club, but they have not seen each other in the intervening time. And here, the film closes the frame with a second fantastic sequence in which the entire film is replayed as a music and dance sequence in which the purely Utopian version of the story (very An American in Paris) is played out before our eyes from their first encounter to the happy ending where they are married and have a child; every real-life decision and event which conspired to pull them apart is reworked with the happier outcome to produce the ending the musical should have had. And we are seduced, because that is what we want from musicals – we want happy endings. I sat there in the cinema, and started crying in this sequence because I knew it wasn’t true, and that knowledge kind of broke my heart because I really wanted them to get the happy ending a musical should have given them. And although, as I have said, I liked rather than loved this film, I cannot help but respect what it did in taking the genre of the musical, understanding what a Hollywood film musical is to its very core, and then denying us the ultimate Utopian pleasure that we want from it, reminding us that life just isn’t like that. I shall go and have a little weep now.