Monday, June 19, 2017

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 19th 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.