Material Ends: Hauntology, Anachrony, and Traces of the Analog in Digital Cinema

Abstract

The “Hans Zimmer-effect” has become shorthand in both popular and academic discourses to describe a dominant mode of composing for Hollywood films that relies on digital tools to produce highly repetitive blockbuster scores. Likewise, pop-inflected soundtracks and hagiographic musical biopics have become ubiquitous to the point of parody, suggesting an overreliance on simple nostalgia and a formulaic approach to musical storytelling. The low cost of digital production tools has led to a drastically condensed production model and a reliance on temp tracks in the editing booth, leading to prognostications about film music’s fading relevance within an increasingly digitized audiovisual culture.In contrast to these concerns and the factors that have engendered them, I submit that Hollywood’s digital era has proven to be more acoustically diverse than was once feared, reveling in the interplay between the sound and music of disparate eras. Through the lens of “hauntology” as coined by Jacques Derrida and developed by Mark Fisher and Simon Reynolds, this dissertation considers how the persistence of analog devices and practices within a digital mediascape invites consideration of cinematic music as something caught between the folds of time itself, reflective of a dynamic and ever-changing relationship to past modes of representation. Reinterpretations of classic film genres make use of the gray area between music and sound design to distort time itself, relaying epistemological confusion through means that transcend the digital-analog binary. Likewise, scores that foreground instrumental timbres usher in a new relationality between the vibrations of material sound and the embodied experiences of character and spectator alike. In auteur-driven cinema, the use of anachronistic music plays an active role in historical revisionism, problematizing the perceived value of “historical fidelity” in Hollywood practice. And finally, the tensions between live and recorded performances staged in music-centric historical films reflects the uneasy conflation of historic recordings and the historical “record.” The diversity and breadth of these examples give way to a paradox: the material foundations of cinematic music were never completely certain, and yet, they remain more powerful than ever.The media texts explored include Moonlight (Barry Jenkins, 2016), Joker (Todd Phillips, 2019), Arrival (Denis Villeneuve, 2016), The Lighthouse (Robert Eggers, 2018), Marie Antoinette (Sofia Coppola, 2016), Inglourious Basters & Django Unchained (Quentin Tarantino, 2009 & 2012), Inside Llewyn Davis (Joel and Ethan Coen, 2014), and Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom (George C. Wolfe, 2020).