On account of being blown away by Aronofsky’s film “The Whale”, and especially the score, which is probably my new favorite, I wanted to say a few things, and give my best score picks (below), which also happen to be some of my favorite musical pieces period. I often prefer silence when I am writing, but other times music is the key to tapping into the soul of what I want to express. A good portion of the book I am currently working on has been written to these soundtracks.
Gilles Deleuze, a philosopher with no small interest in film, once called philosophy: “music with content”, but that is obviously true of any film with a great score. I would like to think that the best music of the era captures something at the most abstract spiritual level working in the culture, and writing philosophy to these scores helps tap into the spiritual zeitgeist.
The hope being that philosophy might approach something like its highest possibility as healer of collective trauma. That by returning to the abstract Dionysian rhythm beating at the heart of collective wounding, after descending into the drama, the wounded soul can emerge from life and art with poetic content and concepts to fructify the void of Dionysian terror, filling out the lonely abyss of the impersonal rhythms of existence with the fullness of Apollonian conscious forms, now fused into a supersaturated continuity.
The idea of course being that ultimately, through art and its creative contemplation in philosophy, we can return to the fullness of life and spirit, beyond all the tragic bickering over what art should or should not be. Art can be and do many things, but it often seems that at its most ambitious, and potentially transcendent, contemporary audiences often cannot handle it. This is illustrated well by Darren Aronfsky, certainly one of the most ambitious filmmakers, whose best films are his most divisive, if not the most divisive in recent cinema.
His most spiritual films “The Fountain” and “The Whale”, much like the films of another divisive filmmaker, Terrence Malick, cannot be approached without reverence, without the suspension of judgement. They use their powerful scores to beckon us to climb with their characters to the face of death, affirmatively fusing death with the essence of life extracted, sewing together thought and feeling, personal and impersonal, Dionysus and Apollo, not in a melodramatic transcendence of any one side of these divides, but in a musical affirmation of life’s eternally morphing motifs, migrating across every divide in endless alterations.
The score of “The Whale” uses a subtle wave-like effect to give a sense of the way the daily rhythm of life–and our repetitive habits and addictions which shelter us from the greater life of the spirit–are slowly broken down by the approaching waves of our eventual end, potential opening us up to a greater life in spirit. It is this greater life of things beneath the surface that is the film’s real subject, not really the whale of a man that is the protagonist Charlie. Charlie is not actually the titular whale, which refers to the whale of Moby Dick.
The white whale Charlie seeks in his dying days is some feeling that his life has meant something, something he hopes to find in his estranged daughter. The score highlights the feeling that he is at sea, like Ahab, adrift and enclosed in his obsession, which for Charlie is his need to see the good in things and people to make up for the pain of the bad which he has a hard time bearing.
But unlike Ahab, Charlie is redeemed, whether you read the end as taking place in reality or his mind–for the point is that the good is what is real, what is beneath the surface of cruelty and suffering of this world. Charlie’s faith in the good redeems him, even if in life he had a hard time reconciling his optimism with reality.
Some of my other favorites:
In no particular order:
Yann Tiersen: Amelie
Ludwig Goransson: Oppenheimer
Zbignew Preisner: Double Life of Veronique, Three Colors: Blue, (and his Lacrimosa which Malick used in Tree of Life)
Max Richter: The Leftovers, Arrival
Rob Simonsen: The Whale
Nicholas Britell: Andor
Clint Mansell: The Fountain, Moon
Hanz Zimmer: The Thin Red Line (which inspired a great homage in Steve McQueen’s movie “Shame”), Interstellar, Inception, Batman Begins (with James Newton Howard)
here are a few great excerpts:
